In school, we are taught about different kinds of love. There is brotherly love, romantic love, filial, erotic, and so on. However, we seldom discuss the golden thread that weaves through all these categories. Worse, there's also lust, which masquerades as love. What is the defining characteristic of lust, and when does it transform into love - if ever? This and more in today's newsletter.

I once stood in a long queue. The gentleman behind me started making small talk to pass the time. Among the questions he asked was why we have armpits. This question has never left my mind. As it turns out, there could be something profound in the answer.

Death has inspired the greatest poems and moved us to create art that opens a new world far beyond this one. Yet, we all have an appointment with death and it is in this reckoning that we reflect, not only on our mortality, but on those who came before us. It is in this space, that we receive messages from beyond.

Like Plato's prisoners who only see shadows of reality and yearn for the full experience. We use technology to enhance this experience, but paradoxically it makes us feel overwhelmed. So we turn to religion as an antidote. However, this too invites the problem of disconnecting from reality. This essay explores a possible balance between the two.

Fingers are wagging as companies blame schools for producing low quality candidates. This has resulted in rising youth unemployment. For fear of losing political power, policymakers are desperately looking for solutions. Among their hopes is the report from the World Economic Forum, that promises a new approach to education. But I think it's wrong.

During the early 1900s, there was a problem in the music industry. By and large, people were using gramophones to listen to their favourite songs. But the technology only allowed for approximately four minutes of playback, and the quality was awful: the high notes from flutes and violins, together with the low notes from the tuba or the base were either distorted or barely audible. Incidentally, this gave rise to the four-minute-long pop music that we are familiar with today, where the prominent feature is the human voice.