America is a paradox. For people like me who are from Europe, America seems both appealing and repulsive. It’s the most advanced nation in the world and it’s a gun lover’s paradise. It is one of the richest nations in the world and it has extremely high homelessness rates. It…

Election day in the US is right around the corner. What are the possible future directions of the US? Growing up in a conservative and homogeneous community, America represented the beacon of a multicultural and pluralistic society for me when I was a teenager. However, already in 1985 David Bowie…

They are hugely popular, often seen at TED-Talk events, and revered by armies of fans on social media: personal development gurus. Some famous names are Amy Cuddy (presence), Angela Duckworth (grit), Tony Robbins, and Jordan Peterson. Their ideas have become the new religions. They are given far more attention by…

“The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth.” ― Albert Einstein Recently I have been reading Einstein’s The World As I see It (1934),The Code of the Extraordinary Mind (2016) by Vishen Lakhiani Transcend (2020) by Scott Barry Kaufman and…

It’s a bit ironic that a movie that is about storytelling is weaker at story-telling than its characters. Three Thousand Years of Longing doesn’t always do a good narratological job — even so, it has a couple of great stories packed into it — and I certainly don’t think it…

As someone from Central Europe for whom tertiary education was almost free, I have always been baffled about the costs of US colleges. I got to know several graduates from the US who had teaching jobs in Austria but couldn’t stay, because they had to look for “proper” jobs to…

Are you highly sensitive, smart, complex, creative, intense, curious, and misunderstood? According to Paula Prober (Your Rainforest Mind, 2016), these are the typical signs of a rainforest mind. Prober is a former teacher of gifted children and has coined the term rainforest mind. I have to admit, after having read…

There is certainly timeless beauty, elegance and truth to the yin-yang symbol. I learned about it in my history class in sixth grade and I found it a great metaphor for life but I found it hard to grasp the underlying principle. Are those cosmic (physical) forces? Biological forces (chi)…

Whenever I was on a fun outing with my kids I would always have the very same reaction from my younger son at the end: “When can we do this again?” (but he would be happy to go home) and the very same reaction from my older daughter “What can…