What Makes Finland a Happy Country

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A few weeks ago, the World Happiness Report published its yearly global survey results about how people from more than 150 countries worldwide evaluated their lives. The full report can be found here (page 22). What is the methodology for ranking countries based on their happiness? The polling company Gallup conducts interviews with hundreds of thousands of people across the nations included in the report. People assess their own happiness using a scale from 1 to 10, responding to questions such as if they smiled, laughed or experienced …

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How Elden Ring Tests the Player’s Learning Ability

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Note: I wrote this article in collaboration with my husband.  Hidetaka Miyazaki grew up in an impoverished family in Shizuoka, Japan. Although he didn’t fully understand English, he borrowed many English fantasy and science fiction books from his local library. The boy let his imagination fly and fill the language barrier gaps by creating stories from the books’ illustrations, a skill that would prove helpful in a few decades. Later, he would say about his childhood: Unlike most kids in Japan, I didn’t have a dream… I …

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Keeping Sane about Ukraine 

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A close friend told me about the Russia-Ukraine war: “now I ran out of being afraid, I don’t have any resources left to be constantly terrified”. Watching the news for the last two weeks was torture. And this is for the lucky ones who don’t have their houses shelled, children wounded, family fighting. So we started doomscrolling, obsessively checking feeds, starting and ending the days with war news. And the more we scrolled, the more we felt doom and gloom, as media sells fear, …

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What Can We Learn from Sun Tzu on the Art of War

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One of the better discoveries of the last few months was Jonathan Clements’ books. From Wu: The Chinese Empress who schemed, seduced and murdered her way to become a living God to Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy, from An Armchair Traveller’s History of Finland to A Brief History of the Vikings: The Last Pagans or the First Modern Europeans? these books are tremendous efforts of introducing slices of history to laypeople. And the language is often witty:  The Russians were not particularly impressed with Finland. Since they already had trees, lakes and snow of …

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Reliable Information Sources about the Russia-Ukraine War

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Drive for about fours hours from my Romanian hometown, and you are in Chernivtsi, Ukraine. Drive for about three hours, and you are in Chisinau, Moldova (another country I fear might be attacked). I never witnessed such grief beyond belief so close to my birthplace. And so, hypocritically, I admit, I am horrified by this war and its unmeasurable loss of human life, although there were and still are gruesome conflicts spread all across this messed up world. For the last few days, I …

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First Night of War

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Darfur. Iraq. Iran. Yemen. Georgia. Nigeria. Lybia. Syria. And the list goes on and on for wars that began from merely 2003 onwards.  But to see tanks and fights and bombs in the heart of Europe?   William Faulkner said it best in Requiem for a Nun: The past is never dead. In fact, it’s not even past. And this resonates profoundly with a quote from Svetlana Aleksievich’s book The Unwomanly Face of War that described how a Soviet woman soldier during WWII felt decades after the war: what …

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Lillian Gilbreth: When Emancipation Starts In the Kitchen

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I hate housework. You make the beds, you wash the dishes, and six months later, you have to start all over again. Joan Rivers  Wiping, hoovering, polishing, dusting, washing, scrubbing. Shopping, prepping, cooking, cleaning. Repainting, redecorating, decluttering, repairing. Housekeeping is not like other types of work: we can’t put it on our CV, we get no recognition for not letting things fall apart, and it’s a Sisyphean work, as it must be done over and over again.  And yet, our generation has access to some …

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What I Wish I Knew Before Having My Child

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While creating the outline for an article about preventing parenting burnout, I kept thinking about what I wanted to know before I had a child. So, I asked my husband and some of my friends what they wish they knew before their first newborn. In random order, and under the guise of anonymity, here are some ideas:  Breastfeeding  One of the biggest myths about breastfeeding is that it is easy, billions of mothers have done it before us, and it only takes a bit of …

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