Selfie

The main reason to be nice to your children is the same reason to be nice to the person who runs your local shop,’ he said. ‘You’re going to have to see them a lot.’

Today, some researchers believe social isolation to be so bad for the human machine that it can rival smoking as a mortality risk

The genes we inherit are important in determining how they’re wired up. They also regulate brain chemistry (our serotonin system, for example, is mostly in place at birth), which influences not only how we perceive the world but how we react to it

But one of neoliberalism’s most negative effects is its tendency to concentrate the pain on our most vulnerable. For the game to properly function, it naturally requires winners and losers. The more the winners win, the more powerful they become, and the more able they are to tweak the game’s rules in their favour

It was around this time, as Susan Cain has famously documented, that the provost of Harvard University began instructing admissions officers to reject applications from ‘sensitive’ applicants and instead offer places to ‘healthy, extroverted’ ones

Debts had to be honoured

Even if you don’t consider yourself a perfectionist, it’s likely you have an idea of the person you feel you ought to be and experience at least a pang when you don’t measure up to it.

goes into reverse.

asking after its causes.

Gauging an accurate view on