The comedian and actor John Cleese has an interesting take on extremism, arguing that what some people see as extremism in those they perceive as enemies can often be used to justify their own equally extremist reactions to it. “You can be as nasty as you like and feel your behaviour is morally justified”. 

In other words, extremism begets extremism – it’s just that our own certainty that we are right and ‘they’ are wrong risks blinding us to the fact our own behaviour is no less extreme.

Extremist ideology of whatever nature blooms in closed networks of ideological echo chambers (like internet chatrooms, s...

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The world has known its fair share of cult leaders. From Charles Manson and David Koresh and R. Kelly, history is punctuated by the coercive and often deadly activities of individuals who just happened to be in the right place at the right time to tap into extremism’s zeitgeist.

Predominantly male (of the 68 cult leaders deemed worthy of their own page on Wikipedia, only 8 are women – though what they lack in number as leaders they seem to more than make up for in body count of victims), cult leaders trade on charisma, manipulation, and the creation of a strong sense of community and belonging.

It seemed for a while that organised cults that tended to exist in or gravitate toward communes – primarily a phenomenon of the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies and Ei...

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The problem with parenthood is that children don’t come with a handbook or a manual. 

Even though childhood is a lived experience for us adults, it’s not one we remember clearly – and certainly not the very early years. So we begin our journey as parents with no frame of reference.

We have to learn our child’s behaviours from a position of more or less total ignorance, aside from the natural instincts that millions of years of evolution give us.

We have to learn to understand how our child communicates, and it’s a language that is foreign to most of us – even for those of us who might already have a child.

And because it’s often hard for us to interpret this new verba...

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Even those without a Tik Tok or Instagram account can’t have failed to notice the increasing appearance in daily life of the #ThatGirl hashtag that has overrun the lifestyle media online, in print and across television.

For those who have either managed to miss it, or who have seen the phrase but don’t know what means, the #ThatGirl is the hashtag that’s been given to a lifestyle revolution among young, digitally active younger women promoting what can only really be described as a seriously hardcore healthy lifestyle.

We’re talking a daily ritual of unrelenting avocado obsession, high intensity workouts, the consumption of litres of water, gratitude journals & seemingly endless time ...

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