Part one of our round-up of women in politics highlighted that sixty-one years after the UN Convention on the Political Rights of Women came into effect, only 21.9% of national parliamentarians worldwide are female. This is an improvement on the recent past but remains less than half of what is required. Some countries perform better…
A roll-call of the political elite in the past fifty years is a depressing document for anyone with a passing interest in gender equality. It has been sixty-one years since the UN Convention on the Political Rights of Women came into effect. This was the first international legislation protecting the equal status of women to…
Leonard Nimoy was most well known for playing Mr. Spock. He was also an accomplished writer, photographer and musician. It was as the Starship Enterprise’s logical science officer that he made his biggest mark on the world. In this role, he inspired people to become scientists, artists and astronauts. He encouraged people to be themselves….
If you are not a writer, you probably have a certain perception of literary life. Hollywood loves to portray the drink and drug addled escapades of wild writers like Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson and Truman Capote. The truth is more mundane. Here are 15 universal truths unearthed from years of banging at keys and gazing…
Often it is not until somebody is gone forever you realize how much you love them. Yesterday we discovered how much we loved Robin Williams. Although we never met him, we grew up with him. We always knew that whenever he appeared on our screens he would make us laugh or cry or think a…
Jack Kerouac is often seen as the father of the Beat Generation. He represents the romance of the open road and the passion of mad wanderings. He is an icon of wanderlust for those who wish to emulate a life of spontaneity and perpetual restlessness. In reality Kerouac was a complicated man filled with contradictions….
The Rolling Stones have released more iconic tracks than any other band in history. They have been together for over half a century and hold the record for the most recorded songs of all time. One of the most iconic of their 439 tracks is “Paint It, Black”. Released in 1966, it was the first…
We are all creative. But what differentiates papier-mâché masks or crocheted undergarments from the Nobel Prize-winning artworks of Ernest Hemingway? Maybe Ernest was just a little stranger than most. New studies show that both creativity and eccentricity may be the result of genetic variations that increase the brain’s ability to filter out useless distractions. Papa…
Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is arguably the greatest chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever written. The novel first appeared as a two-part series in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971 and was printed as a book in 1972. This tale of a long weekend road trip has gone down…
Few writers witnessed a 20th century apocalypse at first hand. Kurt Vonnegut did. His response, Slaughterhouse-Five, is his most memorable work. Published in 1969, it arrived twenty-four years after Vonnegut survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden as a 23 year-old American prisoner of war. This air attack killed 130,000 people and destroyed a city of…