Compassion

Indian-American pianist and composer Vijay Iyer’s three decades of accolades took off when, as a polymathic twentysomething, he was a California physics PhD student – at which point a sideline in classical music training and self-taught jazz piano took him into another world. Physics has always seemed to square with Iyer’s sharp-focused yet poetic musical muse – precisely analytical yet conceptually wide open, searching for fundamentals that can bend to anything from the psychology of music-making, to…

If you believe some commentators, we’re in the midst of a compassion crisis, with a particularly brutal daily news cycle taking its toll on our reserves of sympathy. The more suffering we see, the less we care, as we mentally switch off from others’ pain. The result may even be that we struggle to feel as much concern for people close at hand when they come to us for support; we end up feeling numb to any expression of emotion.“The whole world is at risk for ‘compassion fatigue,’” Time magazine declared recently. And…

We have the solution to Wordle (#767) on July 26, as well as some helpful hints to help you figure out the answer yourself, right here. We’ve placed the answer at the bottom of the page, so we don’t ruin the surprise before you’ve had a chance to work through the clues. So let’s dive in, starting with a reminder of yesterday’s answer. Yesterday’s Wordle answer Let’s start by first reminding ourselves of yesterday’s Wordle answer for those new to the game or who don’t play it daily, which was “wheel.” So we can say…

A decade or so ago, the rumour was that Ken Loach was getting ready to quit. Then began a new parade of Conservative prime ministers in this country, each shiftier and more mediocre than the last; Loach decided he had more to say and do after all. What followed was a blaze of energy, anger and productivity culminating in a remarkable late surge – in fact, a trilogy, of which this might come to be seen as the final episode. Working with his regular collaborator, the screenwriter Paul Laverty, Loach has been taking on…

Glenys Oberg. Credit: Frontiers Glenys Oberg is a Ph.D. student and research assistant at the School of Education of the University of Queensland. A former teacher, she focuses in her research on trauma-informed pedagogy and practice. Recently, Oberg and her colleagues Annemaree Carroll and Stephanie Macmahon published a review…

by Andrea Lawlor, Miranda Goode, Philippe Wodnicki and Tyler Girard, The Conversation Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Most of us would rather not rehash our experiences from the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, for many this worldwide health crisis remains top of mind and continues to factor into everyday decision-making.…

Infosys once again proves to be a great working space for its employees. The IT giant Infosys has become the first company to endorse its workers taking on freelance employment openly. The company’s decision to recognize and permit gig work is a step in the right direction and might create a precedent. It comes as a bigger discussion about moonlighting and employee rights continuing to boil in the information technology (IT) industry and other white-collar job sectors. According to an internal email, “any…

While we’re waiting for Ryan Reynolds’ Wrexham AFC film, here is a lower-league paean to Darlington FC in the shape of a sometimes clunky but disarmingly sincere autobiopic. It’s written by Paul Hodgson, dramatising his own upbringing after a diagnosis of meningococcal meningitis as a 10-month-old; he was predicted to live only a few short years. Yet, though in a wheelchair with speech and motor-coordination issues, he grows up (played by Daniel Watson) to become a hard-drinking Quakers fan with a lively social life. At…

Paul Zacharia's "A Secret History of Compassion" valiantly drags the two disparate worlds of fiction and fact to a busy crossroads without traffic signals and then allows readers to revel in the sheer chaos that ensues. The book's central character, Lord Spider, an extremely famous author of popular fiction has been commissioned by the Communist Party to undertake what appears to be quite a straightforward task: Write an essay on compassion. What seems like a relatively easy assignment for a prolific author…