Six years ago, I woke up shaking in a hotel room with my sense of reality shattered. Colours were distorted, the walls seemed to breathe and shadows felt like threats. I thought I was going to die. This marked the beginning of a year-long mental breakdown. Nothing worked - not antidepressants, not therapy, not yoga. I was too far gone... until I wasn't.

This is the story of my journey from the brink of suicide to a semblance of stability, purpose and, crucially, hope. I only got here...

The Republic is a Socratic dialogue written by Plato around 380 BC concerning the definition of justice and the order and character of the just city-state and the just man. The dramatic date of the dialogue has been much debated and though it must take place some time during the Peloponnesian War, "there would be jarring anachronisms if any of the candidate specific dates between 432 and 404 were assigned".

The state

Papirus Oxyrhynchus, with fragment of Plato's Republic

Plato's philosophical...

Clint Emerson writes the essential guide for surviving today’s emergencies—from navigating in the wild to staying alive in any disaster.

"The Americans" by Hugo Munsterberg stands alongside Alexis de Tocqueville's American Democracy as one of the great works on the New World written by a scholar deeply familiar with the Old World. When originally published, it gave the German public a sense of American life, and was described as "a book which deals in a detailed way with the political, economic, intellectual, and social aspects of American culture." Munsterberg, a world-renowned psychologist at the turn of the twentieth centur...

In 'Humanity is Not a Plague', Cees Buisman argues that it is possible for 10 billion people to exist together on this Earth – as predicted for the year 2100 – provided that the richer part of the world no longer merely focuses on its own health, prosperity and happiness, and instead starts working seriously on developing a higher consciousness.

In this essay, Buisman sharply analyzes some of the problems facing mankind, such as fresh water shortages, whilst overturning several clichés a...

Among the notable books of later times-we may say, without exaggeration, of all time--must be reckoned The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau. It deals with leading personages and transactions of a momentous epoch, when absolutism and feudalism were rallying for their last struggle against the modern spirit, chiefly represented by Voltaire, the Encyclopedists, and Rousseau himself--a struggle to which, after many fierce intestine quarrels and sanguinary wars throughout Europe and America, h...