When I was a kid, I could play this game for hours: staying in front of the mirror, moving my left hand to see whether the person on the wall would move her right hand… And I was incessantly expecting she’d move her left hand, just like myself. I had […]

DOs and DON’Ts. We become familiar with their meaning in childhood. “Do this”, “don’t do that”. It’s a world made up of permitted and forbidden things and it’s usually others that impose the rules on us. If this is so, where is our free will? And if this is what […]

  The mirage of unexpected excellence is something that has been animating the Olympic Games ever since their inception in the 1890s. As the chances of an amateur surpassing the reliable performance of a professionally groomed athlete grow slimmer and slimmer, this mirage becomes more potent than ever. But is […]

On August 5th, the Romanian gymnast Sandra Izbaşa won the Women’s Vault Final at the London Olympics 2012 (Bogdan Maran/BPA Images ) Year in, year out, they train up for to 12 hours a day, they run, they jump, they backflip. And the better they do it, the closer they […]

In the old days Globalization was usually by means of mounted warriors, ships or explorers who roamed continents. At first they were driven by need, afterwards they did it out of greed and to some degree, out of curiosity. Settlers, travelers on mules and camel caravans, followed the warriors. Today we have […]