Womankind March - May 2022

Reinvent yourself. It has a titillating ring to it. Who could you be? The word reinvention, for most, is spelt out in capital letters. Reinvention occurs when big changes happen. The lawyer turned sailor. The bookseller turned monk. The struggling mother who invents a time-saving device that catapults her into the rich list. They’re the stories of reinvention we hear about - and it’s why we think, “reinvention, well that’s kind of impossible for me”. But if someone told you that a 5mm chip could knock flat a 45-kilogram block, you’d also think, “well, that’s kind of impossible” too. But J. M. J. van Leeuwen, a physicist at Leiden University in The Netherlands, demonstrated how tiny nuggets of energy can trigger chain reactions. The physicist placed 13 planks ranging in…

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Antonia Case:  Antonia Case is Editor-in-Chief and Creative Director of Womankind, and Editorial Director of New Philosopher. She was awarded the 2016 AAP Media Professionals’ Award for excellence in the presentation of philosophy in the media. Her forthcoming book will be published by Bloomsbury Continuum. Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore: Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore is a British journalist who lives in New York. She writes for New Philosopher, The Guardian, The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Statesman, New Internationalist, The Huffington Post, and Time magazine. Niamh Boyce: Niamh Boyce was named Newcomer of the Year at the 2013 Irish Book Awards for The Herbalist, her first novel. She won the 2012 Hennesssy XO New Irish Writer Of The Year Award and Emerging Poetry Award for her poem Kitty. Her…

It’s the one question that we’d all like to know the answer to, so we could just get on with it - the living part, that is. If we knew what the ‘good life’ entailed then we could shun the rest, and just concentrate on the important bits. But society has a tendency to derail us. We’re repeatedly told that the good life is about making loads of money, having a successful career and buying as much as we can possibly shovel into our houses and garages. Some are convinced that they need to be famous and get their name up in lights for the good life to kick in. It’s worth remembering that the phase of flight for the Kunanyia stephaniae butterfly lasts a mere 14 days, long enough…

Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge began a search for silence, and he started his journey in Antarctica. He stepped out alone onto the ice plateau and started to walk. He was inspired by a line from Norwegian poet Jon Fosse - “there is a love no one remembers”. He’d read the line and was perplexed by what the poet meant. “What did he mean by that,” Kagge questioned, “An invisible love that lies dormant?” Kagge wrote an email to the poet to enquire as to what he was referring to in the poem. Silence has a majesty to it, the poet responded, like an ocean or an endless snowy expanse. “And whoever does not stand in wonder at his majesty fears it.” It’s true, we modern folk abhor silence and will…

A woman sits in a park in New York, laughing with a friend in Tokyo using video technology on her smartphone. Her body is in New York, yet her voice is in Japan. The two friends discuss life, loves, and sorrows as though they were sitting in the park together. Computer technology has conquered the whopping 10,871 km distance between New York and Tokyo; it has shrunk it to zero. In the modern world, we have somehow managed to lose space. In her book, How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, Anne Helen Petersen, a millennial herself, describes what she calls “errand paralysis”, or the inability to get basic tasks done. She’d put something on her weekly to-do list, and it’d roll over, one week to the next, haunting her for…