Womankind December 2021 - February 2022

If you could wake up tomorrow morning with a brand-new skill, what would it be? For example, let’s say you could choose to master anything you wished - the violin, speaking Dutch, playing tennis? Which skill would it be? Having woken up with this new skill in your head, what a revelation it would be. You’d think: “Ah, I can do this perfectly. What joy, what joy.” But after the initial excitement, you may enter a phase of, “What next?” Having mastered this skill, there isn’t a next step because practice won’t make you any better. You’ve reached the pinnacle of the skill, and your journey, in a sense, has ended. Humans seem to be quite fond of progression. Incremental gains make us happy. Improvement gives us a chemical rush.…

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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 Flourish will be published by Bloomsbury Sigma. 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. Jennifer Kunst: Jennifer Kunst is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, working in private practice in California. She is a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of California and an adjunct associate professor at the Fuller Graduate School of Psychology. She is…

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…

When Dutch Baroque artist Johannes Vermeer painted Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid in 1670–1671 from his house in Delft, the Netherlands, little did he know that 300 years later, Rose Dugdale, an English PhD graduate in economics, would cut the painting out of its frame with a screwdriver and lug it back to her rented cottage in rural Ireland. Vermeer is today acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age, even though only 36 paintings survive, one of which is Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, a radiant interior scene, typical of Vermeer who painted most of his works from the front room of his house in Delft using the same furniture and decorations, simply moved about. It is not known why Vermeer’s…

For much of European history, it was presumed that black swans did not exist, only white ones. A ‘black swan’ was an expression to describe an impossibility, because all swans - as far as Europeans were concerned, had white feathers. That was until Dutch explorers led by Willem de Vlamingh spotted black swans in Western Australia, and news of the black swan made its way back to Holland. The expression ‘black swan’ is used today to describe an event that is difficult to predict but has large consequences for humanity, one example being the rise of the internet. Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb expands on this concept in his book, The Black Swan, arguing that we humans spend the bulk of our time fixated on known facts, categorising and simplifying the…