- 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.
- In pictures
- In pictures
From rockets to raves
Find out how hydrogen peroxide has been used to do everything from investigate murders and propel rockets to treat teeth and bleach hair.
- Article
- Article
Silent threat
As Vanessa Peterson recovered from a frighteningly serious illness, she wondered whether it was linked to air quality. For many communities, she found, pollution is a political issue.
- Comic
- Comic
A little too literal
The tendency to take things literally combined with finding it hard to open up can be tough.
- Prose poem
- Prose poem
Intrinsic Evanescence
Will Alexander on the poetry of the rarefied atmosphere of a friendship.
- Article
- Article
Doris Day blows against
Dodie Bellamy remembers a heady summer watching Doris Day grimace and gust in vintage movies, her expressive exhalations changing her onscreen world with a puff.
- Article
- Article
Domestic titans
Feeling trapped by the idea that an impenetrable carapace of space trash could surround the planet, Elvia Wilk turned to thoughts of the new worlds still to be revealed here on Earth.
- Article
- Article
Air of threat
Novelist Chloe Aridjis vividly describes the suffocating atmosphere of Mexico City, as a combination of topography, crowded neighbourhoods, and reckless political diktats create a downward spiral.
- Comic
- Comic
Best laid plans
Sometimes the most chaotic factor in your plan is YOU!
- Article
- Article
Bubbles of history
Since the 1960s, scientists have been able to study the air from past centuries by analysing particles in Arctic ice samples. But as the polar ice melts, the future of this research is changing.
- Article
- Article
Parks and politics in Brixton’s past and present
Gentrification is creeping along Railton Road, but racial inequality still lingers in memories of the 1980s, and in the continuing lack of green-space access.
- In pictures
- In pictures
Telling Scotland about AIDS
Find out how activists and organisations working on AIDS information campaigns in 1980s Scotland used cartoons, kilts, and candid language to convey their message.
- Comic
- Comic
To: Cc: Bcc:
Modern life is overwhelming. Just when you’re finally coping, there’s always a curveball ready to throw you off.
- Article
- Article
The empty bungalow
Grandma’s unsteady piles of stuff have been dismantled and dispersed. From an empty bungalow, Georgie Evans makes a plea for hoarding behaviour to be better understood.
- Article
- Article
Walk, interrupted
By listing all the things that get in her way, Caroline Butterwick wants to create an embodied experience of disability and convince you that inclusion is everyone’s responsibility.
- In pictures
- In pictures
From cacao to chocolate
Discover how chocolate morphed from a prized, spiritually significant commodity to a quasi-medicine, and finally to the sweet treat we eat almost daily.
- Comic
- Comic
Stressful hyperfixation
Sometimes, distraction is the best medicine.
- Article
- Article
Seeking the hoarder in literature
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.
- Article
- Article
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.
- Article
- Article
The healing power of breathing
The healing powers of different breathing methods are said to help with a range of health challenges, from asthma to PTSD. Effie Webb traces their spiritual origins and explores the modern proliferation of breathwork therapies.
- Comic
- Comic
Bad stim
Bex Ollerton explores how depression and ADHD can make you seek out negativity to avoid feeling restless or numb.
- Article
- Article
Where hoarding and dementia meet
As Grandma’s dementia advanced, the things she’d amassed became more important: they consoled her. Clearing safe walkways through the piles became the first – though unwelcome – compromise.
- Article
- Article
The shock of cardiac arrest when you’re young and fit
Footballer Christian Eriksen’s on-pitch collapse in 2020, witnessed by thousands, was shocking. Fellow cardiac-arrest survivor Meg Fozzard explores the risks in the young and fit, and how we can all help.
- In pictures
- In pictures
The cinchona tree, malaria and colonisation
Ever since the discovery of cinchona bark as a treatment for malaria in 17th-century South America, the cinchona tree has accompanied European colonisation around the world. Kim Walker tracks the human and ecological impact of this global commodity.
- Comic
- Comic
Me @ Me
Mental health struggles can make you refuse help, even from yourself.