Learning about illness is unlike learning about other things: it requires children to reason about objects like “germs” that they can’t see or touch.

Although children have some difficulty of...

It’s not often you get to raise a clutch of stick insects that can grow to nearly 60cm long. But I was given the rare privilege of doing so recently when I nursed the batch of eggs laid by the longest Australian phasmid, Ctenomorpha gargantua, nicknamed “Lady Gaga-ntuan”.

Lady Gaga (for short) was discovered and collected in...

Last year, in a very small town with a pretty big university, I wrote a forthcoming book called Internet and Intimacy.

A minor point in my book but one with some happily tangential relevance to a slew of novels I read during that period, is how online dating often connects people whose paths wouldn’t normally cross.

In real life most people...