Most of us know what we should change. We should sleep better. Move more. Drink enough water. Spend less time scrolling. Protect our attention. Be grateful. Breathe. Make better choices. The strange thing is that knowing all of this does not necessarily make us do any of it. That gap between knowing and doing is where Theresa Cheung's Walk Your Talk begins. Her argument is simple: lasting personal change depends less on what we intend to do and more on what we repeatedly do.

There is something almost absurd about a life being reduced to ten inches. Twenty-two years of pouring tea. Twenty-two years of knowing who wants extra ginger, who will pay tomorrow, who needs a cup on credit, who comes to the cart simply because there is nowhere else to go. Then someone draws a chalk line on the pavement and decides that those ten inches matter more. That is where Shekhar Nerala’s Ten Inches: A Novel of Bada Shehar begins to become interesting. When a Tea Ca

There are some books you finish. And there are some books you escape from. Not Without My Daughter belongs to the second category. Because while reading Betty Mahmoody's account, I kept thinking about one frightening question: What happens when the person you trusted most becomes the person you have to protect your child from? Betty travels from America to Iran with her Iranian-American husband, Moody, and their four-year-old daughter, Mahtob. It is supposed to be a

There are conversations we avoid because we don't know what to say. And then there are conversations we avoid because we know exactly what we want to say. The second kind is often harder. We rehearse the words in our heads. We imagine how the other person might react. We worry about sounding rude, confrontational, insensitive, or simply being misunderstood. So we wait. Tomorrow becomes next week. Next week becomes never. And sometimes silence costs us more than an

I have always found something slightly unsettling about telephone calls. Maybe it is because you cannot see the person on the other end. You hear a voice, but you don't know what the face behind it looks like. You cannot tell whether someone is speaking calmly because they are genuinely calm, or because they are trying very hard not to fall apart. Sometimes there is a pause. Sometimes there is silence. And sometimes, you realise that the person on the other end may

We know how the story ends. That is perhaps the biggest problem with reading about someone like Lionel Messi. We already know the boy from Rosario becomes one of the greatest footballers the world has ever seen. We know about Barcelona. We know the goals, the trophies, the records. We know the heartbreak with Argentina. We know the World Cup finally arrives. We know Paris, and then Miami. We know the images. We know the ending. And when we know the ending, we tend to