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Words of hope and anger

Author and spoken word poet Penny Pepper remembers her childhood dreams, and speaks out against the barriers society uses to prevent disabled people from fulfilling their potential.

How writing helps me manage schizophrenia

The art of scientific glassblowing

Exciting things happen when art, craft, engineering and science collide. Glassblower Gayle Price is proof of that.

How depression ruined my relationship with sleep

One reaction to depression is a craving for sleep, creating a dependence that can provoke guilt and anxiety. Emerging from “five blurry years”, one writer tracks her steps to better health.

Living with less for spiritual gain

Today, a minimalist lifestyle is trumpeted as a route to happiness. Find out what religious ascetics from history and modern proponents of the spartan-looking home can teach us.

Performance art, frozen in time

For over a year, live performance art with an audience present has been largely impossible. But still images continue to allow artists in this sphere to inspire audiences at home.

Vivid nights, dream-filled days

Each night, intense and memorable dreams create another life for Katie da Cunha Lewin. Find out how her waking and dreaming selves have become enmeshed, allowing her powerful self-knowledge.

When you can’t return home

Migrants and refugees cannot choose to return home, so homesickness becomes a profound and long-lasting feeling. This powerful force infuses migrant cultures, and is rarely given the serious attention it warrants.

The blight of the ballooning blood vessels

In 1817 an emergency operation on a London porter was hailed a ‘success’ despite the patient’s swift demise. Find out how this case became a landmark in vascular surgery.

Father of the house

Stuart Evers thought he’d shaken off his family’s rigid definition of masculinity. But when he became a dad, those buried patriarchal ideas made an unexpected return.

Having children as a fat woman

When she sought fertility advice, and at antenatal appointments, Ellie Levenson found that medics were openly anti-fat. Only years later can she evaluate the true repercussions of their words and actions.

Ways appear

While his sense of body shame meant the personal side of his life was unfulfilled, Chris’s career was rewarding. His own childhood experiences gave him profound empathy for the children he worked with.

This is a MOOD

Adults might sometimes dismiss teenagers’ ‘moodiness’, but adolescence is a time of complex shifts in brain and body, which are intricately bound up with fluctuating feelings.

Manipulating the evidence with deepfake technology

How can you be sure that the person speaking on the screen is genuine? Find out how sophisticated digital manipulation is blurring the boundaries between real and ‘deepfake’.

Homes for the hives of industry

By building workers’ villages, industry titans demonstrated both philanthropy and control. Employees’ health improved, while rulebooks told them how to live ideal lives.

Can our sexual desires be transformed?

In the 1950s, many psychiatrists thought that homosexuality could be reformed. One found that it couldn’t – and his discoveries led to a change in the law.

Love, longing and tea from the polski sklep

For people of Polish origin in the UK, herbal tea is closely tied to health and shared history. Kasia Tomasiewicz explores her changing relationship to these tea-related cultural habits.

Active pensioners, blooming gardens

To reach your 70s with over 300,000 Twitter followers or running a music festival is not the stereotypical image of retirement. But does this energetic engagement with life equal happiness?

The cook who became a pariah

New York, 1907. Mary Mallon spreads infection, unaware that her name will one day become synonymous with typhoid.

Renaissance women and their killer cosmetics

In this extract from ‘How to be a Renaissance Woman’, Jill Burke delves into a complex world of beauty products, poison and patriarchy – and reveals the impossible contradictions of femininity faced by 16th-century women.

A dispatch from the frontiers of man and machine

Harry Parker’s life changed overnight when he stepped on a bomb and lost his legs. He argues that being an amputee doesn’t make him an outlier; we are all hybrid.

When wounds replace words

For the many thousands of refugees waiting in Greece, the process to establish the truth of their tragic personal histories is often extremely upsetting. But a group of medics and legal workers is working together to make the system more humane.

Rehab centres and the ‘cure’ for addiction

Guy Stagg takes us on a brief history of rehab centres and their approaches to addiction and recovery.

Transitioning and the family album

“It’s really hard to describe to people how you know you’re a man when those ways of describing masculinity to me aren’t true. You need to find your own.”

Primodos, paternalism and the fight to be heard

Journalist Florence Wildblood examines the case of Primodos – a conveniently quick but risky hormone pregnancy test that was prescribed in the 1960s and ’70s – and profiles two women at the story’s shocking heart.