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Long-form pieces on how people think, feel and change.
The Boy Who Counted Ceiling Tiles: A Case Study in Childhood Anxiety
An eight-year-old who could not stop counting. What looked like obsessive-compulsive disorder turned out to be something quieter, and the difference changed everything about how we worked.
ReadWhy Your Memory Rewrites the Past Every Time You Recall It
Remembering is not reading a file. It is rebuilding something from parts, and the rebuilt version is what gets stored. Here is what that means for testimony, therapy and your own most vivid memories.
ReadAttachment Isn’t Destiny: What Forty Years of Follow-Up Actually Show
Attachment theory is the most popularised idea in developmental psychology and one of the most distorted. The longitudinal data is more hopeful, and more complicated, than the internet version.
ReadA Case of Selective Mutism: Eight Months in a Delhi Classroom
She spoke at home, fluently and constantly. At school she had not spoken a word in fourteen months. This is what the slow work looked like, week by week.
ReadThe Quiet Cost of Emotional Labour
Surface acting — performing an emotion you do not feel — has a measurable cost that deep acting does not. The distinction explains a lot about who burns out and who does not.
ReadWhat Phineas Gage Still Teaches Us — and What We Get Wrong
The most famous case in neuropsychology has been retold so many times that the retellings have replaced the evidence. What the contemporary records actually say is a better story.
ReadScreens, Sleep and the Adolescent Brain: Sorting Signal from Panic
The screen-time debate generates more heat than findings. But one part of it has genuinely solid evidence behind it, and it is not the part that gets the headlines.
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