I’m often asked how I manage to get everything done. Damn if I actually do — I barely get anything done, but I do so many different things — this is perhaps what creates the illusion. People like me, Barbara Sher called “scanners” — those whose curiosity stretches across many things. The problem for scanners…
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…
Why is moving stressful? Regardless of the reasons, relocation is one of the most intense life stressors because it disrupts the familiar structure of life. A person loses their footing, social connections, and a sense of competence and control over their environment. Constant uncertainty, language barriers, culture shock, and loneliness are emotionally and physically draining….
