Fake Banner
Not Just The Holidays: The Hormonal Shift Of Perimenopause Could Be Causing Weight Gain

You’re in your mid-40s, eating healthy and exercising regularly. It’s the same routine that...

Anxiety For Christmas: How To Cope

Christmas can be hard. For some people, it increases loneliness, grief, hopelessness and family...

The Enceladus Idea In The Search For Life Out There

A small, icy moon of Saturn called Enceladus is one of the prime targets in the search for life...

Deontological Decisions: Your Mother Tongue Never Leaves You

Ιf you asked a multilingual friend which language they find more emotional, the answer would usually...

User picture.
The ConversationRSS Feed of this column.

The Conversation is an independent source of news and views, funded by the academic and research community and delivered direct to the public. The Conversation launched in Australia in March 2011.... Read More »

Blogroll
Despite not actually having a car in production, the firm Faraday Future has headline-writers gushing about its “Tesla-killing supercar” – an all-electric car that looks like the Batmobile.

There is no doubting that the FFZero1 concept car just unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week is eye-catching, but it’s one of a number of new and transformed car brands.

The Kraken is perhaps the largest monster ever imagined by mankind. In Nordic folklore, it was said to haunt the seas from Norway through Iceland and all the way to Greenland.

The Kraken had a knack for harassing ships and many pseudoscientific reports (including official naval ones) said it would attack vessels with its strong arms. If this strategy failed, the beast would start swimming in circles around the ship, creating a fierce maelstrom to drag the vessel down.

It has been a busy year for Solar System exploration – and particularly our galactic neighborhoods small icy bodies. Comets, asteroids, Kuiper Belt Objects and planetary satellites have all been in the news – from stunning images of comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko at the start of the year, to the recent close-up of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, via Ceres and Pluto.

Few events encapsulate our infatuation with a well-told story as much as Christmas. As a culture, we are dependent on stories as a tool with which to negotiate our daily lives and make sense of the world around us. In particular, we love magical ones because they allow us to temporarily suspend our disbelief and revel in the joys of doing so.

Well, it’s that time of year again – and there it is; just four words into an article on Christmas I’ve used the word ‘time.’

Among the hodge-podge of rituals and holidays that survive in the post-Christian West, Christmas might just be the one that tells us the most about how humans relate to and experience temporality.

Christmas,
narrative,

Walk into any public square or shopping mall at this time of year and an encounter with a traditional Christmas carol is well-nigh unavoidable.

We may not sing them ourselves with anything like the frequency or fervor we once did at church but the tunes themselves defy relegation to our past.