So, Newcomer turned 2.5, and I decided to update the overview of our toys. As planned, most of the old toys are still in active use. The Montessori toy organization system works perfectly, and the toys don’t get boring for him. I’ve also started teaching Newcomer that every toy has a place, and after playing,…

A friend recently asked me how I manage to maintain a “Montessori style” in the toy world my son and I share. It made me realize that, from his very first toys until now, we’ve actually managed to keep things minimal and orderly. We don’t have the problem of toys being left scattered around —…

The other day I asked my seven-year-old son: what do you call people who hate other races? The correct answer was “racists,” but he asked, “White?” I laughed, because, as they say, “out of the mouths of babes.” His answer captured patterns in the adult world more accurately than we’re comfortable admitting. Racism as a…

People tend to fall into quick-hatred. The anger accumulated in everyday life — at small everyday irritations, at everything that slips beyond our control — seeks an outlet, and the media narrative often offers a target for it. There everything is explained clearly: there is good, there is evil, evil attacks good and must be…

For a university course on intercultural communication, I recently wrote an essay on Hannah Arendt and the controversy surrounding her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Hannah and her concept of the “banality of evil” fascinated me long before I studied her in depth, and later I became captivated by the idea of using this example to…

We use the word “patriarchy” almost automatically, yet rarely pause to ask where it actually came from — because it hasn’t existed always. At no single moment did a man suddenly decide to dominate over a woman, other men, or entire world. Patriarchy is the result of a long, gradual process that unfolded over millennia….

Throughout the past two years, I have thought a lot about what time is and how we experience it. During emigration, relationships and their breakdown, adaptation to a new society, moments of sadness, anger, joy, anxiety, and tension, I felt time differently and reflected on it often. In Alice in Wonderland, time appears as a…

I have always been curious about why we don’t hear each other, why we get into conflicts, and how the very mechanism of communication works. It is fairly obvious that conflicts often arise not from ill intent, but from basic mismatches in communication styles. These differences are subtle, often unconscious, and can lead to growing…

I often tell myself: it’s not that people don’t appreciate you. They simply don’t know you exist. It is said that an average person meets about 10,000 people in their lifetime. Dunbar’s Number theory claims that the human brain has a limit to the number of stable social relationships it can maintain — around 150…

One of the few sources of truth in my childhood was Pippi Longstocking, even though she told quite a few lies. But her lies were nothing like the lies or half-truths adults told, or the poor and unpractical education I received. Besides that, I had access to a whole library of children’s books, which filled…