"'Can we dare to think people are kind, and shape organisations around this view?' That's the question Rutger Bregman examines in his latest book 'Humankind', and it's one that anyone involved in youth and community work like me wrestles with on a daily basis. But is Bregman's optimistic analysis grounded in reality?" More in this piece from OpenDemocracy.

"Are languages then just a collection of words, syntax, and semantics? I'd like to sometimes see them as seeds and sometimes as fields - alive as the minds, tongues, throats, bodies and air they pass through; germinating, growing roots, bearing fruit, evolving like beings. But also holding space, expanding out like a unique land of perception. A non-physical geography hosting human and non-human drama. A living medium, a speech-scape." In this evocative piece, writer and teacher M. Yuvan layers anecdotes that shine a small, bright light on India's linguistic diversity and weaves in similar stories from around the world. What does it mean for the future of the human species to keep the richness of our multiple languages alive? How does language tether the soul to the wisdom of the Earth?

"We have a soul at times. No one's got it non-stop, for keeps." In an article in the New York Times, Edward Hirsch called Wislawa Szymborska "a philosophically inflected poet who investigates large unanswerable questions with terrific delicacy. She pits her dizzying sense of the world's transient splendor against unbearable historical knowledge." Here the Polish Nobel laureate explores the nature of the soul with her characteristic wit, keen observations and attentiveness to the buried implications of the human journey.