Two-Minute Daily Read
A new short blog published seven days a week, designed for reading and reflection from any stage of life.

25. What we've lost in the loss of art
In the early days of the pandemic in March of 2020, footage captured on smartphones from Italy started doing the rounds online.
As is the way of things on the social networked world of the web, whatever strikes an emotional chord is propelled…

24. The place for individuality within group identity
Group identity is complex. It goes way back, all the way to the origins of humanity, within genetic code we've carried forward through millennia.
These days, we might be the chairperson of the community committee, the goalkeeper for the football…

23. The diverging approaches to getting back to normal
As these words appear on the screen before me, towards the end of April 2021, Covid-19 cases and deaths are soaring in India. The country has registered record daily case numbers for several days in a row now, and the number of deaths attributed…

22. The individual, the collective and the problem with essential
Beneath all the numbers and data points of the pandemic, you'll find some of the human stories that need to be told.
Whether it's the doctors and nurses on the front-line, the nuance and complexity of vaccine trials and roll-outs, or the…

21. The pandemic's numbers and stories
Everywhere since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, we have seen an endless array of numbers and been told an endless series of stories.
Numbers and stories are among the greatest inventions of humankind.
Stories have been…

20. Shay Healy and how the end of life's journey might not be the end of everything
Shay Healy died last week.
For those of you outside Ireland, the name will probably mean little. But for many people within Ireland, especially for those above, say, 45 years of age, Shay Healy will conjure up a variety of thoughts and feelings…

19. The problem of loneliness
Around the world, there are signs that things are beginning to open up. After a year of Covid-19, the virus and attendant disease has not gone away, there have been significant vaccine challenges -- from manufacturing and distribution to potentially…

18. Our private information war: The blurred line between ignorance and informed
In my day job, helping businesses to navigate the often murky waters and choppy seas of communicating and marketing on the Internet, I pay close attention to a gentleman called Avinash Kaushik.
He's worked for Google for a long time and he…

17. The saving grace of plants
A thesis has been developing in my mind this past year or more, first taking shape as time slowed down so much for so many of us in the early stages of the pandemic.
Later, as the external world inevitably started to speed up again, this…

16: Questions of Travel: Journeys of the Body, Journeys of the Mind
One of my favourite writers, Bill Bryson, has a thought-provoking passage near the beginning of his book about Australia, Down Under, published in 2000.
Through the technological miracles of television and commercial travel, Australia seems…

15. Finding ease in our future of unnerving worries and infinite possibilities
Listening to a recent episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast, the extent of the Internet's impact on the way we do everything became a tiny bit clearer.
As all of us who do anything know well by now, the impact of networked technology -- the…

14. Seeing past, or through, the daunting obstacles before us
Obstacles are everywhere. The ways of doing anything -- from making civic change happen, to launching a successful business, to the age-old and private task of knowing oneself -- rarely come without frequent frustrations and occasional furies.
This…

13. Choosing love in a world of fear
In number 12 of this series, I included a line from Camilla Cavenish, the author, Harvard fellow and FT columnist: "When polls show support for continued restrictions, thoughtful MPs should ask themselves how exactly a nation became so fearful."
She…

12. The complex return to the thing we used to call freedom
Two passages I read at the weekend spoke about a similar thing in different ways, from different points in time, and from greatly different points of view.
I've been dipping into The Sovereign Individual, a complex, thought-provoking,…

11. On missing togetherness
Krista Tippett is the founder of On Being, which started out as a radio show inside the American Public Media organisation in 2003, and later morphed into a much wider project that considers, and invites us to consider, questions of being in…