One luxury of our shared humanity is empathy. And by this I mean the knowledge that your neighbour will not hack you into pieces with a chainsaw when your back is turned. Presumably, his conscience would destroy him if he did. I think about the different mental blind spots which…

Think of the last one thousand years. Think of all the leaders of the various nations that you know about from different eras. Would you describe them as leaders or rulers? The contemporary idea of a leader is a person who exercises authority over a group of people who have…

I’ve been fascinated with linguistics since I first read the lord of the rings books when I was nine years old. I’m not sure which came first, my fascination with the world building and its exotic languages and civilizations, or my interest in writing and art. …

My colleagues asked me to write about the Nigerian Japa wave, and the immense burden of making such monumental decisions about the future. We don’t talk enough about the breadth of the human impact. …

The hardest thing to do is stand your ground when everyone is shifting around you. To go against the run of play, is to embark upon a thankless task. If enough people say that black is white, the very definition of black and white changes, and idealists will be left…

It was neither here nor there to you. You just lived your life one day at a time, taking the opportunities as they came. You put it in your tinder bio too. Your frequent job dismissals, your lack of religious conviction, your dissolved marriage, all of them were milestones on…

I’ve always been fascinated by chance, because there simply is no greater force on earth than Lady Luck. The mythical hand of fate in a man’s life. The goddess who squats in the field with men, the soldier, the courtesan, the farmer in the field, the king and the commoner. …

‘It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it’ Most of the problems in society are essentially about incentives. …