Two teenage sisters are our guests in our new “Lives Well Lived” episode: Mercedes and Anastasia Korngut. They are Canadians, troubled about how low Canada and the US rank in surveys of how happy people under 30 are. So they started a company, Small Bits of Happiness, to help young people...

Two teenage girls are our guests in the latest “Lives Well Lived” episode. We feature the Canadian sisters Mercedes and Anastasia Korngut, who are 17 and 15 respectively. They have started a remarkable enterprise called Small Bits of Happiness.

In our latest episode of Lives Well Lived, Kasia and I speak with Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, author of the New York Times bestseller Stumbling on Happiness, about why people are so poor at predicting what will bring them joy and why we often fail to learn from our own mistakes.

In our latest episode of Lives Well Lived, Kasia and I speak with Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, author of the New York Times bestseller Stumbling on Happiness, about why people are so poor at predicting what will bring them joy and why we often fail to learn from our own mistakes.

In our conversation, Bishop Mariann Budde, who spoke out so bravely in Trump’s presence, reminded us that courage and love can spread through communities that stand together in solidarity with migrants, in defence of public institutions, and in small daily acts of kindness that keep hope alive.

Most of us have far more power to do good than we realise.

In our latest “Lives Well Lived” episode, Kasia and I speak with Sjir Hoeijmakers, CEO of Giving What We Can, about why small changes in how we give can have extraordinary impact,...

Factory farming isn’t necessary to feed the world. It actually reduces the food available to humans. We feed grain and soy to animals, but much of it is lost keeping their bodies warm or building body parts we don’t eat.

You don’t need to believe in God to think that morality is objective — just as you don’t need to believe in God to think that mathematics or the laws of logic are objective.

Moral truths can stand on their own.

Credit: The Institute of Art and Ideas, 2024

When you do applied ethics, you often end up challenging common-sense morality. That’s part of a long philosophical tradition - Socrates himself asked people about justice, only to show them they didn’t understand it as well as they thought. (1/2)

The worst thing we can do is keep buying products from factory farms just because they’re cheap.

I believe all decent people who want to live ethical lives should stop supporting this system. The suffering it causes to billions of animals each year is immense and entirely avoidable.

If animals lived genuinely good lives with their biological, physical, social, and emotional needs met and were then killed painlessly, I would have far fewer objections than I do to current farming practices. (1/2)