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16 results
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  • Article

Mark O’Connell’s prescription for writing

| Jennifer Trent Staves

The Wellcome Book Prize shortlisted author of ‘To Be a Machine’ answers five questions on health, inspiration and storytelling.

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Self-obsessing in the age of selfies

| Stevyn Colgan

The tiny, joyful spark of a social media ‘like’ can lead to a damaging obsession. Find out how far people will go when their phone addiction gets the upper hand.

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Sigrid Rausing’s prescription for writing

| Jennifer Trent Staves

The Wellcome Book Prize shortlisted author of ‘Stay With Me’ answers five questions on health, inspiration and storytelling.

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Chillies and the trouble with Scoville

| Danny Birchall

Measuring the heat of these peppers can leave you a little lukewarm.

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Doctors and the English seaside

| Jane Darcy

Fashionable seaside towns in England owe much of their popularity to 18th-century doctors, who advised them to take the 'sea cure'.

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Wonder years

| Chris North

The confusion and secrecy surrounding his condition seriously affected Chris’s mental health, blighting his teenage years. But somehow he began to hope and plan for the future.

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Seeking the hoarder in literature

| Georgie EvansNicole Coffield

As she strives to deepen her understanding of hoarding, Georgie Evans turns to books. But depictions of hoards and hoarders are few and often sparse, except in one surprising place.

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Is shoegaze the loneliest genre of music?

| Christine Ro

Christine Ro explores the connection between shyness and shoegaze.

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When monarchs healed the sick

| Rita YatesSteven Pocock

Our current Queen fortunately doesn’t have to spend hours laying hands on the sick to cure them. But it was a different story for monarchs of the early modern era, whose touch was a sought-after treatment for scrofula.

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Shame and the online free-for-all

| Lucia Osborne-CrowleyEduardo Rubio

Lucia Osborne-Crowley looks at how shame manifests online, where public humiliation is common and second chances all too rare.

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Happy Joy Smile

| Recovery in the BinOlivia Twist

Drawn from real-life experiences, this short story depicts a character negotiating the UK’s current mental health system. Discover what happens as they encounter waiting lists, sketchy healthcare and punitive government bureaucracy.

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Love, longing and tea from the polski sklep

| Kasia TomasiewiczAnna Keville Joyce

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.

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Inside the Cold War mind

| Martin SixsmithSteven Pocock

Martin Sixsmith explores the competing national psyches of Russia and America, and a world divided between their irreconcilable visions of human nature.

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When wounds replace words

| Jules MontagueSteven Pocock

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.

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My important, ridiculous nose

| A L Kennedy

The nose is a much-maligned appendage, but it’s a powerful organ capable of invoking powerful emotions from past memories and sexual attraction.

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Ayurveda: Knowledge for long life

| Aarathi Prasad

The story of medicine in India is rich and complex. Aarathi Prasad investigates how it came to be this way.