The “Lizard Brain”

You’ve heard of the so-called “Lizard Brain”, haven’t you? The “Lizard Brain” is the popular term used for the limbic system inside our brains. While this system is just one part of the human brain, and it’s about all a lizard has for brain function. The limbic system basically keeps you alive. It’s the part […]

There is only hope when you accept there is no end game

I have been reading a book called End State: 9 Ways Society Is Broken – And How We Can Fix It by James Plunkett which is hugely enlightening and which has made me think about what is happening today, and which goes some way to explaining why we are where we are. ‘He sets out […]

The fuse is blowing

One thing that’s hard to grasp about the climate crisis is that big changes can happen fast. In 2019, I was aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a 308-foot-long scientific research vessel, cruising in front of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. One day, we were sailing in clear seas in front of the glacier. The next […]

Bringing excitement back to the smartphone

The iPhone 13 gets closest to that kind of emotional payoff of increased satisfaction with its battery life, which is so strong it has banished battery anxiety from my daily routine – even on the now-rare days I bounce between meetings. For iPhone admirers, this new machine will doubtless represent pleasingly crisp continuity. But if […]

‘There’s no moment of silence’

Two Amazon workers from its Bessemer, Alabama facility died last month, one of them suffering a stroke not long after his request to go home was denied, said two of their co-workers. Speaking to workers’ rights organisation More Perfect Union, they claim that work continued as normal despite the deaths… More here. I keep reading […]

Obsessed with driving fast

That came in handy when Kevin Roberts, a talkative, thoughtful third-year cop, steered us onto Connecticut’s Interstate 84 for the day shift. We were heading toward Waterbury, whose interlocking expressways are his to patrol. Roberts was in the left lane going 80, and I had the uncanny experience of surveying the highway from his point […]

A culture of endless blame and zero fallibility

We live in a period when our personal contributions to systemic injustice, many of them unintentional, are becoming increasingly obvious. Our new age of enlightenment has illuminated any number of dark corners that society has long failed (or refused) to notice. Cricket, the sport I love, has just endured a particularly punishing month of reckoning. […]

Keep This to Yourself

I don’t ever talk about my body, not even to my sister or close friends. I can’t. I would lose my balance, my structural integrity. Instead, for years now, I have been trying to write about it. As Richard Rodriquez wrote: “There are things that are so deeply personal that they can be revealed only […]

What our dogs think about love, lust and laughter

Why do dogs get separation anxiety?Strictly speaking, most of them don’t, according to Petrina Firth, director of the company The Pet Coach and a specialist in the condition. She says she has only met one dog in her career with clinical separation anxiety – an over-attachment to one person. What people generally mean by the […]

The Great Escape

There was only one problem: PetSmart. Groomers were pressured to complete as many dogs as possible, through a constant whirlwind of commotion and barking and often verbal abuse and harassment from customers. Without enough staff available, Caroline sometimes worked seven days in a row. Company policy was supposed to prohibit grooming dogs with seizure disorders […]