The 19th-Century etiquette of keeping up appearances has given way to being seen, and understood, on our own unvarnished terms. There is much to be gained by this new norm. But what do we lose? — I have been watching the second season of The Newsreader, a sensationally good Australian television drama starring Anna Torv and Sam Reid, which explores the personal and professional lives of people working in a 1980s Australian newsroom.

Cars, wine, paintings, fountain pens, postage stamps, sculpture, Victorian eggs — the impulse to acquire, and accumulate knowledge about, beautiful objects is deeply human — I have always written with a fountain pen. Well, since university days at least. There’s something about the scratch of a fountain pen nib on lined parchment paper which helps me unlock what it is I’m trying to say. But it’s only relatively recently that I discovered the fun of…

Forging meaningful connections is one of life’s great joys, but the capacity to enjoy being alone is also an expression of psychological maturity — “The current emphasis upon intimate personal relationships as the touchstone of health and happiness is a comparatively recent phenomenon,” the psychiatrist Anthony Storr wrote in his text, Solitude: A Return to the Self. This aspect of our culture hasn’t changed all that much since Storr wrote that 35 years ago…

Is there a formula for breaking into the big time? — “There’s no rhyme nor reason to it,” the theatrical dynamo, entrepreneur and film producer Michael White concluded. Which is quite the statement from a man who clocked up 101 stage productions and 27 films. He struck gold many times. O, Calcutta (1970), Sleuth (1971), The Rocky Horror Show (1973), Joseph…

Despite their terrible toll, breakups are an inevitable part of modern-day relationships. — People don’t stay together like they used to. Divorce is commonplace, as are multiple marriages. …

Endlessly talking about your tough times may actually be bad for you, a growing number of scientists are starting to believe — I have had more than my fair share of therapy. I’ve had numerous therapists, I’ve tried all the main therapeutic models, and still to this day I periodically kick myself for not starting sooner. So I’m firmly pro-therapy. I heartily recommend it. It’s a glorious and effective thing.

Psychiatric disorders like clinical depression rob us of our ability to experience the terrible pain and trauma of a life lived well. How deliciously ironic that a lot of people now believe those emotional experiences are themselves the manifestations of mental illness! — This is the final installment of a Wise & Well Special Report: The United States of Depression. Recently I attended an event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival at which the author and Princeton academic Yiyun Li was being interviewed about her latest novel, The Book of Goose (2023). The…

Some of the darkest stories ever created are the ones we read to our children at bedtime. — One of life’s great pleasures, for me, is reading stories with my little nephew, and recently we moved onto fairy tales, and usually we read them at bedtime. These, in turn, were read to me in my childhood (all the best pleasures have that glorious sense of coming full circle…

Seeking out the new within the structures of our past — How sordidly often our lives feature unwelcome hard resets — the sort of gut-wrenching change no one saw coming and even fewer people wanted — and that’s why I place such emphasis in my own life on routines and habits and time-honoured conventions. It is, I feel, a version of…