Articles

Anfisa was always the activist. She was the one who managed to talk our thoroughly apathetic year group into collecting the textbooks at a more convenient hour than our librarians had planned, and to drag most of our fellow students out to a cafe. She talked everyone into joining the student comedy league despite the rumours that it was the shortest road to being expelled, and she was the first to sign up for every optional course, club and field trip going. She was a whirlwind, a chaos packed into one single person.

Toxic people. People it makes sense to avoid. People you would rather not talk to. How do you spot them? What should put us on our guard about someone?

In an interview with the Italian magazine "Chi", Elisabetta Canalis describes her relationship with her former boyfriend George Clooney as "a father-and-daughter relationship". Marriage and children were therefore never discussed. Whether the relationship between the 30-year-old model and the 20-year-old actor broke down because of the age gap is still an open question. Yet the problems Canalis reports are far from untypical for the pairing of young women and older men.

As the song goes, "the great public debate is on... the sacred debate..." About emotions, about feelings. Women often explain to me how important it is to learn to express emotions, to work on emotional intelligence and on emotionality in general. They probably mean something else, because emotionality is simple. Even a stormy infatuation can be produced in yourself and in those around you simply, quickly and by the book. And you can get out of an emotional attachment in two weeks on your own, and faster still with a specialist's