Tag: 2026
Solitude psychology: what being alone actually does to the brain
Solitude psychology is one of the most misunderstood fields in modern mental health research. We have spent decades studying loneliness, its harms, its causes, its epidemic spread through wealthy societies with more screens and fewer third places. Loneliness research is abundant, urgent, and well-funded. The research on solitude, on chosen aloneness, on the specific and…
The Sniper by Liam O’Flaherty: the last line that changes everything
The Sniper by Liam O’Flaherty is not a long story. You can read it in eight minutes. Maybe ten if you pause at the ending, which you will. Most people do. You were probably fourteen or fifteen when you first met it. A classroom. A textbook. A teacher asking about themes and literary devices. You…
Five good things that happened in march 2026 that nobody told you about
There is good news March 2026. There is actually a lot of it. The problem is where you have been looking. It is not a rhythm designed to make you feel good about the world. It is a rhythm designed to keep you watching. Alarm. Outrage. Dread. Refresh. Repeat. What gets lost in that rhythm…
What we inherit from our parents (it is more than you think)
What we inherit from our parents is not just their eyes or their temper. It is their unfinished business. The anxiety that arrives before anything has gone wrong. The specific way certain silences feel threatening. The flinch at raised voices in another room. The need to achieve that does not feel like ambition but like…
Tagore’s The Postmaster: a story about being left behind
The Postmaster by Rabindranath Tagore is twelve pages long. Twelve pages. Written in 1891. And yet here you are, years after Class 9, still thinking about Ratan standing in a doorway. Still thinking about a lamp being lit in the dark. Still thinking about a girl who refused the money. That is not an accident.…
Dire Wolf: the resurrection that is not quite what it seems
Dire wolf is no longer extinct. That sentence is both true and, depending on who you ask, deeply misleading. On April 7, 2025, Colossal Biosciences announced that three wolf pups named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi were alive and growing in a secret 2,000-acre preserve somewhere in the United States. The company called them the world’s…
Why the 90s Feel More Real Than Yesterday
What were you like in the 90s? The question is everywhere right now. On social media. In comment sections. In the particular glow that comes over someone’s face when a certain song starts playing. But here is what nobody asking the question has told you. The reason the 90s feel the way they feel has…
Who are you when everything changes?
The psychology of identity tells us that the self is not fixed. But nobody warns you what it actually feels like when it starts to shift. It is not a breakdown. It is not a crisis in the clinical sense. It is the quiet, persistent unsettledness of a person who no longer quite recognises the…
What marketing actually is (it is not what most people think)
What marketing actually is tends to get lost very early in the conversation. The textbooks arrive first. Segmentation. Targeting. Positioning. Brand equity. Consumer behaviour models arranged into frameworks with arrows pointing in tidy directions. And somewhere between the first framework and the fifth, the person trying to understand marketing loses the thread of the thing…
The drug that works like magic mushrooms but keeps you in the room
Psilocybin without hallucinations has been the goal of psychedelic medicine for most of the last decade. This week, for the first time, something that looks credibly like an answer arrived. On March 7, researchers published a study in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry describing a chemically modified version of psilocin, the active compound your body…
