Are human beings naturally empathetic, or does compassion have to be learned? This essay argues that empathy is neither purely innate nor purely cultural. Instead, it emerges from an interaction between biology, upbringing, social norms and conscious practice, revealing both the promise and the limits of human moral concern.
On 25 January 2019 a tailings dam collapsed at Brumadinho, Brazil, killing 272 people. Nearly eight years on, no court has decided whether anyone is guilty. The first article in a ten-part investigation into ecocide asks whether the gravest destruction of nature should be a crime, and how far the law has come.
Toxic masculinity has become a slogan, an insult and a tripwire. This Dossier strips the phrase back to its evidence: which norms harm, who pays, and why condemnation alone cannot compete with the grievance machine.
Christianity commands love, including love of enemies, and forgiveness without limit. Then it says none of this can be done by effort alone. From the Good Samaritan to a Charleston courtroom, an essay on a command that follows a gift
In 1943 a Muslim family in the Albanian mountains hid a Jewish family from the German army, and the whole neighbourhood knew. The code they kept took no interest in what they felt. Judaism and Islam build kindness the same way: as a debt, owed before it is felt, and tested at its edge.
To understand Accra’s ecological metabolism is to trace the flow of water, air, and humanity through a rapidly shifting coastal topography. Positioned on the Gulf of Guinea, Ghana’s capital is a delta city grappling with the intersecting forces of breakneck urbanisation, compound flooding, and a warming equatorial climate.
Adelaide is the driest capital city in the driest inhabited continent on Earth, and it has known this about itself for long enough to have developed some genuinely instructive responses. Its investment in recycled water infrastructure, its early and serious engagement with urban heat as a public health emergency, and its stewardship of one of the great metropolitan parkland systems in the Southern Hemisphere all represent hard-won lessons rather than inherited advantages. Whether those lessons are being applied at the speed and scale that a warming Mediterranean climate demands is a more complicated question — and one the city is still in the process of honestly answering
Buddhism treats kindness as something you practise rather than something that visits you. On mettā as a trainable skill, Buddhaghosa's near enemies, and what happens when the most developed doctrine of loving-kindness in the world is set beside its own record
The satellites have named the mountain — the same massif that destroyed Langtang village in 2015. K.J. Parker sorts a month of evidence into fact, inference, contested and speculation, states the Langtang hypothesis, and sets out how it could actually be tested
Are human beings naturally empathetic, or does compassion have to be learned? This essay argues that empathy is neither purely innate nor purely cultural. Instead, it emerges from an interaction between biology, upbringing, social norms and conscious practice, revealing both the promise and the limits of human moral concern.
On 25 January 2019 a tailings dam collapsed at Brumadinho, Brazil, killing 272 people. Nearly eight years on, no court has decided whether anyone is guilty. The first article in a ten-part investigation into ecocide asks whether the gravest destruction of nature should be a crime, and how far the law has come.
Toxic masculinity has become a slogan, an insult and a tripwire. This Dossier strips the phrase back to its evidence: which norms harm, who pays, and why condemnation alone cannot compete with the grievance machine.
Christianity commands love, including love of enemies, and forgiveness without limit. Then it says none of this can be done by effort alone. From the Good Samaritan to a Charleston courtroom, an essay on a command that follows a gift
In 1943 a Muslim family in the Albanian mountains hid a Jewish family from the German army, and the whole neighbourhood knew. The code they kept took no interest in what they felt. Judaism and Islam build kindness the same way: as a debt, owed before it is felt, and tested at its edge.
To understand Accra’s ecological metabolism is to trace the flow of water, air, and humanity through a rapidly shifting coastal topography. Positioned on the Gulf of Guinea, Ghana’s capital is a delta city grappling with the intersecting forces of breakneck urbanisation, compound flooding, and a warming equatorial climate.
Adelaide is the driest capital city in the driest inhabited continent on Earth, and it has known this about itself for long enough to have developed some genuinely instructive responses. Its investment in recycled water infrastructure, its early and serious engagement with urban heat as a public health emergency, and its stewardship of one of the great metropolitan parkland systems in the Southern Hemisphere all represent hard-won lessons rather than inherited advantages. Whether those lessons are being applied at the speed and scale that a warming Mediterranean climate demands is a more complicated question — and one the city is still in the process of honestly answering
Buddhism treats kindness as something you practise rather than something that visits you. On mettā as a trainable skill, Buddhaghosa's near enemies, and what happens when the most developed doctrine of loving-kindness in the world is set beside its own record
The satellites have named the mountain — the same massif that destroyed Langtang village in 2015. K.J. Parker sorts a month of evidence into fact, inference, contested and speculation, states the Langtang hypothesis, and sets out how it could actually be tested
Melbourne's liveability rankings measure the compact, tram-served inner city. They do not measure Tarneit on a 45-degree day. On 27 January 2026 the western suburbs ran three degrees hotter than the centre — and that gap, not the weather, is the story of a world-class urban forest, a sprawling metropolis, falling reservoirs and two cities under one name.
"Is kindness merely a feeling, or is it a load-bearing structure for society? Kevin J Parker, author of 'The Backbone of Kindness: Restoring Our Oldest Virtue', explores the profound intersection of Theosophy and modern ethics, examining how compassion functions as the 'Law of laws' and the essential backbone of human arrangements."
