JASON DALTON began this particular Saturday—February 20, 2016—by doing nothing at all unusual. While his wife of 20 years went out with their 15-year-old son and their 10-year-old daughter, Dalton, 45

Do you think this should fill me with shame? Because it does not. "When I was twenty, I worried what everything thought of me. When I turned forty, I didn’t care what anyone thought of me. And then I made it to sixty, and I realized no one was ever thinking of me."- Bob Hope, as told by Patton…

Updated October 12, 2016 — 11.50am first published October 11, 2016 — 4.30pm , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back t

It is no surprise that a child prefers its mother’s voice to those of strangers. Beginning in the womb, a foetus’s developing auditory pathways sense the sounds and vibrations of its mother. Soon after birth, a child can identify its mother’s voice and will work to hear her voice better over…

This week “The Economist explains” is given over to economics. For each of six days until Saturday this blog will publish a short explainer on a seminal idea. ECONOMISTS can usually explain the past a

Donald Trump spoke about immigration in Phoenix on Wednesday, several hours after a joint press conference with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. Photograph by David Paul Morris / Bloomberg via Ge

Five years ago, I seemed to have it all. I was 28 years old and making $70,000 a year working for the federal government. I had a fancy job title, a nice apartment, health care, generous retirement be

It’s a common sight on Japanese mass transit: Children troop through train cars, singly or in small groups, looking for seats. They wear knee socks, polished patent-leather shoes, and plaid jumpers, w

A weary Bega teacher's most spirited lesson The moment you realise, as a kid, that your teacher is also a human being is a startling one. Like the time my high school teacher sobbed through an entire

Before Rosalind Wiseman's 2002 book Queen Bees and Wannabes was published, her agent asked if she would talk to a woman named Tina Fey. Wiseman, a new mother, "had no idea who she was," but after a sh

Journeying home on the other hand is so often such an utterly surreal experience. Less than 12 hours after leaving Iraq with its bullets, bombs, airstrikes and corpses of so-called Islamic State (IS) fighters, I found myself sitting in my local Glasgow pub having a drink and catch-up chat with…

A handsome man with a thin face—young, unknown Guy Pearce—excitement barely masked by a gung-ho professionalism and ferocity, tells a cop that no one is to walk through the front door of the diner nex

Almost everyone enjoys a bank holiday. A three-day weekend means more time to spend with family and friends, to go out and explore the world, and to relax from the pressures of working life. Imagine i

Companies Media & Marketing Max Mason Senior reporter Aug 14, 2016 – 11.45pm or Subscribe to save article Subscription video on-demand service Stan has put a new original production into development,

Directors have a lot more on their plates than just dealing with actors these days. In fact, maybe the most challenging part of the job now is planning out the big visual-effects scenes with VFX super

by Haseeb Qureshi When the story of how I landed a job at Airbnb went viral, I was surprised at how infatuated people were with my negotiations. Media stories portrayed me as some kind of master negot

Grant Cartwright and Steve Carracher It’s rare that a TV show gives you something to think about long after the final credits have rolled. It’s equally rare that an Australian production can have that impact. Restoration had its free-to-air premiere on Nine Go last month but is now about to screen…

Our interview with "Battle of the Bastards" director Miguel Sapochnik continues below with the director taking our burning questions on Ramsay Bolton's fate. For those who missed it, here's part one o

Warning : Spoilers ahead. Film is dead . You hear that a lot as an independent filmmaker. And of course, when people say that, what they mean is that a certain type of film is dead: mid-range budget, neither franchise nor arthouse — most of my favorite films and the films that started me (and…

For anyone who’s just purchased their first copy of Final Draft, the notion of the spec script still feels like the equivalent of a modern-day gold rush. People move to the West Coast every day in pur

aviannetan.wordpress.com A great sentence makes you want to chew it over slowly in your mouth the first time you read it. A great sentence compels you to rehearse it again in your mind’s ear, and then

City dwellers spend nearly every moment of every day awash in Wi-Fi signals. Homes, streets, businesses, and office buildings are constantly blasting wireless signals every which way for the benefit of nearby phones, tablets, laptops, wearables, and other connected paraphernalia. When those devices…

If you're in need of evidence in support of the idea that life is a sick joke without a punch line, look no further than dementia. Dementia is the umbrella term for cognitive decline, usually due to a

On the morning of August 10, Ahmed Mansoor, a 46-year-old human rights activist from the United Arab Emirates, received a strange text message from a number he did not recognize on his iPhone. "New se

Do you ever go to parties just to look at beautiful people and listen to them chatter about their lovely lives? Lives punctuated only occasionally by some glitch—maybe a death in the family, or a soci

Two years ago, I interviewed director Liv Corfixen on her film My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn , about her husband and the making of Only God Forgives . Refn was there as well, and one of the

How David Fincher really felt about Alien 3 . Director David Fincher ( Se7en , Fight Club , Zodiac ) began his career in the movie business as a matte photographer, working for George Lucas’ Industria

“Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children,” Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man , “whereas no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or

Do you believe that positive thinking can help you achieve your goals? Many people today do. Pop psychology and the $12 billion self-help industry reinforce a widespread belief that positive thinking

“Leadership” is one of those buzzwords — like “curation” — whose meaning has been forcibly squeezed out of them by regurgitative overuse and relentless overapplication to things that increasingly dilu

“Readers who want to become writers should read with a dictionary at hand,” Harvard psycholinguist Steven Pinker asserted in his indispensable guide to the art-science of beautiful writing , adding th

Look at them guns! That's Patrick Stewart in 1996's Star Trek: First Contact , a movie which had a lot of actual guns in it, too, arming the crew of the Starship Enterprise with their own skinny versi

What’s disturbing about this new trend, in which commenters are posting what would previously have been left anonymously, is that these trolls seem not to mind that their real names, and sometimes even their occupations, appear clamped to their vile words. It’s as if a psychological norm is being…

I t's possible to make a case against gay marriage that does not rely on fear or loathing of gay people. That's what was done when civil partnerships were brought in; and there is a surprisingly long

Photo: Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images When Mad Max: Fury Road was released last year, many hailed Charlize Theron’s striking Furiosa as a female action icon in the mode of Aliens lead Ellen Ripley and