Health

Valentine’s Day performs romance very well. Restaurants fill with dodgy service and inflated prices. Florists thrive. Social media becomes an exhibition of curated devotion. Even the chronically indifferent develop an opinion about love. However, Valentine’s Day does not create loneliness. It exposes it. For most of the year we can …

“[…] Consider slavery. The transatlantic slave trade was not opposed by scripture—it was justified by it. Genesis 9:25–27 legitimised enslavement of Africans. Ephesians 6:5 instructed slaves to obey masters. Leviticus 25:44–46 explicitly permits buying slaves and passing them as inheritance. “[…] The sexual abuse crisis represents the starkest contemporary failure. …

Disclaimer: I don’t work for Tribe Carnival. I am not a fan of the waste-generating, classist, exclusionary commercialization of Carnival. As a former Minshall and 3Canal player and fan, if I were to resume playing mas myself, it would most likely be with a mas band like Berkley Mas or …

There is a troubling pattern in our public life: moral leaders who sound their trumpets loudly, yet hollowly choosing the easiest battles while leaving the hardest untouched. Their sermons bloom like roses, but without thorns: ornamental, perfumed and harmless. They raise their voices against costumes, symbols and sensuality but fall …

Birthdays are strange things for doctors. For most people, a birthday is cake, candles and messages that arrive in cheerful bursts. For doctors, especially those who have spent years watching bodies fail and time run out, a birthday is also a reckoning. Not dramatic. Not morbid. Just quietly unavoidable. As …

“[…] The midbrain doesn’t know the difference between a hit of cocaine and the ‘win’ of a social spotlight or a piece of band merch. It simply flags the object as a vital resource. “When that happens, the brain’s priority-sorting software gets a bug. It starts assigning a ‘survival score’ …

Carnival is supposed to be joy. It is colour and music and rhythm and release. It is sweat on skin, feathers in motion and the collective permission to forget who we are for a moment. Carnival, we say, is culture. Carnival is freedom. Carnival is who we are. And yet, …

January arrives quietly. After the noise of Christmas and the forced optimism of New Year’s resolutions, the world exhales. The decorations come down. Life resumes. Carnival beckons. It is in this quieter month—often overlooked, rarely celebrated—that we mark Cervical Cancer Awareness. There is something painfully appropriate about that. Cervical cancer …

We can’t pretend that this society, our society, has not become ugly and hateful. The place has been practically reduced to internecine warfare, spewing venom-like mud volcanoes. Try as you might to avert your eyes and focus on the little sparks of decency and beauty that still refuse to be …

“[…] There is also something profoundly human about the evil eye that modern medicine struggles to acknowledge: the role of envy and comparison in illness. “We live in an age of social media, where admiration is constant and unfiltered. Eyes everywhere. Watching. Liking. Measuring. “If the ancients were worried about …

Have you ever noticed that some people never get ill? They seem to be so perfectly constructed that no matter what dreadful ailments are soaring about the countryside, they remain untouched. Some years ago, I had written about how I had been plagued by chronic headaches since I was about …

“[…] Economists call it ‘presenteeism’. This means being physically at work but mentally checked out due to untreated mental health problems. In a small island economy, this is a productivity killer—difficult to quantify with hard data. “[…] Mental health budgets cannot be viewed as charity. That would be the wrong …