Your beacon in the digital sea — articles about psychology, kindness, and personal growth.
28 Sep 2026
Five post offices in Assam, India, have screened nearly 9,000 people and handed out free reading glasses, most of them to first-time wearers. Why the post office works as a clinic, what a trial in Assam's tea gardens found, and what the pilot has not shown yet.
25 Sep 2026
On 23 September 2026 the HALO Trust closed its Kosovo programme after 27 years. Of 585 mine and bomb casualties since 1999, 438 came in the first two years. The clearance that mattered opened an airport, a motorway and mountain trails, and about 6.67 km² of cluster contamination is still Kosovo's to clear.
23 Sep 2026
2,117 corrals in northern Tanzania are fences grown into living trees, and a controlled comparison credits them with stopping 99.9 percent of night attacks. In Kenya, the best predictor of whether a fortified boma got repaired turned out to be the distance to the next one.
23 Sep 2026
More than 450 family health houses put a midwife within walking distance for 82 percent of the women around them. The 1994 paper everyone quotes by its title says distance was only one delay of three.
21 Sep 2026
A yacht club in Galicia has taught adapted sailing free of charge since 2012, at about €150,000 a year. The hardware problem was solved long ago; the sport has still been refused the Paralympics three times.
20 Sep 2026
A decree banned shark fishing across Colombia in 2021 and changed almost nothing on the Wayuu coast. A project that hands fishers a notebook changed seventeen boats out of twenty.
One good deed was meant to license the next bad one. A meta-analysis of 91 studies put it at d = 0.31. A 2024 replication with 932 people got the reverse.
Read →Fifty-four pairs of students wrote to a classmate they had lost touch with. Senders predicted 5.57, recipients said 6.17. What the gap is, and what it is not.
Read →Of 337 bystanders who only de-escalated real street conflicts on CCTV, 12 were hit. No weapons, no head-butts. What that number does and does not mean.
Read →A paragraph explaining why people give more to one named child made them give less to her — and no more to the statistics. $2.83 against $1.26, real money.
Read →People do not hate overhead. They hate paying for it themselves. When another donor covered the identical cost, giving doubled: 855 donors against 475.
Read →Rokia raised twice what the statistics did. Add statistics to Rokia and giving fell. Explain the bias and giving fell again — downward, not up.
Read →Sweden paid people to give blood and female donors nearly halved. America handed out T-shirts and donations rose. Both are right — the difference is the point.
Read →17,303 wallets in 40 countries. Empty ones came back 40% of the time, the ones holding $94 came back 72%. What that shows, and what it does not.
Read →The 38 witnesses to Kitty Genovese never existed. Then 219 CCTV recordings from three cities showed how often bystanders actually intervene.
Read →A meta-analysis said volunteering cut mortality 47 percent. Adjusted, it was 24. Then 617,466 people in Northern Ireland put the number to a harder test.
Read →A 2008 experiment on 46 people became a fact nobody cites. A preregistered replication found nothing on the original measure. What survived, and why.
Read →Across 14,000 strangers, people underestimated their odds of a yes by 48 percent. Why the estimate fails, and what it means for a request sent to a screen.
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