Blessed or cursed—who is to say?

RETIRE EARLIER, LIVE LONGER? “The thought is that the hard working late retirees (65) are more than likely putting too much stress on their ageing bodies and minds and due to the stress, they develop a variety of health problems. The associated stress induced health problems lead to them dying within two years of retirement.”

I’m not sure I buy this.

The way to one’s own heaven,” wrote Nietzsche, “always leads through the voluptuousness of one’s own hell.” Could happiness exist without hell?...  Heaven 

“Why the books? Why the babies? Why the essays? Why so many, why so fast?” Jill Lepore reveals her motivation — the memory of a brilliant friend...  Lepore 

Dancing with death: 'Some days you find yourselves on the floor wondering how you'll go on'

The inquest into the deaths of six young people at music festivals has revealed harrowing stories about the impact of MDMA at toxic levels.

Meet the woman tasked with cutting Australia's shocking suicide rate

Christine Morgan plans to take the "village approach" to achieve the government's daunting aim of moving the suicide rate towards zero.

Why so many Germans committed suicide at the end of World War II

Suicidal behaviour in Australian men far higher than previously ...

World-first research backed by the charities Beyond Blue and Movember has found the number of men ...

Tolstoy memorably described boredom as “the desire for desires.” Erich Fromm called it "one of the greatest tortures." But what's lost when we lose the ability to be bored 

Cockatoo choreographs his own dance moves researchers believe

The Trouble with Bohemian Absinthe

When temperance advocates won the ban on absinthe in 1915, many of them saw it as the first step in a broader anti-drinking campaign.

An advertisement for Pernot Liqueur

Public Domain Pictures


“If you’re fond of sand dunes and salty air, quaint little villages here and there …”
These song lyrics, sung by Patti Page in 1957, and sampled by Groove Armada 40 years later, perfectly capture the mood of this idyllic seaside region of Shoalhaven.



BBC – “Experts at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, selected 11 seeds from plants and trees that may be better suited to climate change than other species. Using a scanning electron microscope, artist Rob Kesseler created striking colourised images of the seeds in extraordinary detail. The five experts at Kew in London chose the species based on characteristics such as resilience to drought and diseases, and suitability to increased global temperatures. Eleanor Wilding, a technical officer in the Crop Wild Relatives Project at Kew, chose the Daucus carota, the wild relative of the carrot. Kesseler produced an image of the seed magnified 30 times to reveal a spiky star-like shape, and coloured it with an orange hue…”