How to fail at being middle class
Being middle class is supposed to be a comfy, complacent sort of thing. But there are silent struggles everywhere you look.
Why we love old recipe books
Through the handing down of these familiar companions, our mothers were handing on memories and connecting generations over the love of what is both a daily chore and a source of life.
Racism: stop shouting, try listening
Rights and wrongs in training
I spent last week training a small group of interns, teaching them to use my company’s multimedia tools. It’s a long time since I trained a group of people, in a room, with the luxury of time and a training plan. And I realised again how much I enjoy it. Reflecting on the week, there are some things I did wrong and some things I did right. Perhaps a short list of those would be…
It’s the reader, stupid
There are still very important things that journalists do: they hold the powerful to account, they dig up the dirt, they inform us about the world around us, they make newspapers and websites, they satisfy our deep need for stories. All the things I learnt about journalism over the years still hold true. But now there is one over-riding question for me: does any of this serve the reader?
Vaclav Havel on responsibility
We too can offer something to you: our experience and knowledge that has come from it. The specific experience I am talking about has given me one certainty: consciousness preceded being and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim. For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility.
The Dalai Lama on individual action
As always in fact, the living incarnation of compassion seems never to have lost his hold on humanity. “Sometimes,’ he admits, “I wonder whether my efforts really have any effect; I sometimes feel that unless there is a bigger movement, the bigger issues will not change. But how to start this bigger movement? Originally, it must come from individual initiative.”