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Talent, tech and visual art
Jamie Hale finds a combination of talent and technology are crucial when it comes to creating great visual art, but how do you keep working when your circumstances are in constant flux?
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Picturing mental health
Ron Hampshire created artworks while resident at Netherne psychiatric hospital. What can we learn from them?
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Dress and the magic of touch
Fashion, of course, is largely about appearance, but the feeling of clothes on your skin is a complex sensory experience. Shahidha Bari contemplates the human connections in the business of creating and wearing clothes.
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Surviving a flesh-eating disease
Nearly dying from a skin infection gave Scott Neill a chance to start again after an early life marked by grief and depression.
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The soul in the stomach
A 17th-century physician’s controversial theory about the link between the emotions and the stomach reminds us that we shouldn’t ignore our ‘gut feelings’.
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The amateur silversmith
It started as hobby and soon became a passion. Geraldine Holden tells us where the art and science of silver unite.
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Keeping death close
Scattering her father’s ashes, Lauren Entwistle found herself longing for something physical that proved he once was a living, breathing person. Here she reflects on the objects that help us to grieve and remember.
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Why all of us are evil
Science proves that we’re all capable of evil: your secret fantasy about killing someone you hate is surprisingly normal. But the way to better moral choices is to fight emotional instinct.
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How music opens the doors of memory and the mind
People living with dementia can often still listen, perform or move to music. What does this tell us about how memories are formed?
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A graveyard of plants for the people I love
Searching for her own ceremony to acknowledge the passing of her grandmother, Jennifer Neal turned to plants. The ritual she created was personal and loving, and celebrated life as well as acknowledging loss.
- Book extract
- Book extract
My important, ridiculous nose
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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Sacred cows and nutritional purity in India
Apoorva Sripathi explores the complex reasons behind India’s recent boom in all things dairy – beginning with a 1970s Western food-aid programme.
- Book extract
- Book extract
The history of brainwashing
Is it possible to control what other people think? In this abridged extract from his book ‘Brainwashed’, psychoanalyst and historian Daniel Pick offers us a new history of thought control.
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Dying to be in nature
The modern funeral business is one that uses up precious resources and pollutes the planet. But you can make sure it’s only your memory that leaves its mark with these new and natural ways to leave this earth.
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The child whose town rejected vaccines
Gloucester, 1896. Ethel Cromwell is taken ill at the height of Britain’s last great smallpox epidemic.
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Restoring disorder to ‘The Book of Disquiet’
Printer Tim Hopkins explains what making an extraordinary new edition of Fernando Pessoa’s book revealed about both the text and the mind.
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Natural eating in Jamaica and the Caribbean
Riaz Phillips is passionate about the Jamaican food he grew up with and plant-based Caribbean food he came to later, like roti, baiganee and vegan stews and curries. Here he explores the origins and surging popularity of these natural ‘health foods’.
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The food diary and the power of unhealth
Food diaries might appear to present a strictly factual record of dietary choices, but what they don’t include is the more revealing story, as Virginia Hartley suggests.
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The enigma of the medieval folding almanac
With its combination of rich, portable data and high-end style, this folding almanac could have been the medieval equivalent of the latest iPhone.
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The Key to Memory: Follow your nose
Elissavet Ntoulia explores what a pair of pomanders can tell us about how and why we remember.
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How we bury our children
Following her baby daughter’s funeral, Wendy Pratt found that visiting the grave gave her a way to carry out physical acts of caring for her child. Here she considers how parents’ nurturing instincts live on after a child’s death.
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Mixed heritage lesbian couples and fertility treatment
For a lesbian couple who want to share their different cultural heritages with their child, fertility treatment can get very complicated.
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What is air, and how do we know?
Watching bubbles in fermenting beer led 18th-century scientist Joseph Priestley to invent sparkling water – and to discover that different gases make up the air we breathe.
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Seeds for the future
Indigenous groups have a key role as guardians of biodiversity, and their knowledge could help us all preserve our world. To survive, we all need to collaborate, reject prejudice, and share what we know.
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Hands-on healthcare
A young hospital volunteer feared her contribution was a long way from the serious business of real healthcare. But time spent painting patients’ nails proved to be a valuable contribution to life on the ward.