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In the aftermath of violent tragedies like the recent mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., a common panic-fueled and grief-stricken reaction is to rush to simple, tidy explanations. Mental illness, for example, is often used to make sense of what appears to be senseless. The explanation is appealing because mass shootings feel shocking and sudden, and mental illness offers a way to wrestle with them and try to understand. But the reality is that although mental illness sometimes plays a role in violence, it’s rarely the most important factor.

Thousands of people were killed by Iranian security forces in days of protests in January 2026. Meanwhile, in the same month, the killing of two protesters in Minneapolis shone a light on the use of fatal force by American law enforcement — a phenomenon that in 2025 saw the deaths of more than 1,300 people in the U.S., according to data tracking such incidents. But should one of those two sets of killings be classified as a government-involved “atrocity” and the other not? The answer may not be as simple as you think, and it revolves around how you classify atrocities.

The Moon is getting 1½ inches (3.8 centimeters) farther away from the Earth every year. The motions of the Earth and Moon have many interesting consequences, and studying how they move over time can help researchers better understand how each has changed over the 4½ billion years since the Earth and Moon formed.

Introduced by Gary Chapman, an American Baptist pastor, author and marriage counsellor, in his 1992 book The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts, the idea is now a dominant framework in modern relationship advice. While incredibly popular and often used as a “go-to” tool on first dates, recent research suggests that the idea lacks strong scientific evidence for its central claims. Love languages function like a culturally appealing system that individualizes relational strain, obscures power and substitutes a checklist for the harder work of understanding how relationships actually function over time.

When Czech political dissident, playwright and poet Václav Havel wrote The Power of the Powerless in October 1978, he set out to analyse a distinctive form of domination that did not rely primarily on terror, spectacle or charismatic authority, but on routine compliance and the internalisation of untruth. His central claim was disarmingly simple. Systems of coercive power endure not only because of police power or elite control, but because ordinary people participate in them by acting as if they believe what they know to be false. They live, as Havel put it, “within a lie”.