Womankind September-November 2021

The expression to ‘make do’ is often seen as a negative. It has a subtle disheartening quality to it as though you would love to do something extraordinary in life, but you are forced to ‘make do’ with reality. To ‘make do’ is almost a resignation, signalled by a resounding sigh. But when interior designers view a home to decorate, they, too, ‘make do’ with the framework of the home, its existing walls, doors, and window frames, its covings and mouldings. The Macmillan dictionary describes the idiom “to make do” as “to succeed in dealing with a situation by using what is available, despite not having something”. Interior designers don’t view a kitchen and think, “If I just whack out this wall here, and add a 100m2 glass atrium, then…

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Antonia Case:  Antonia Case is Editor-in-Chief and Creative Director of Womankind, and Editorial Director of New Philosopher. She was awarded the 2016 AAP Media Professionals’ Award for excellence in the presentation of philosophy in the media. Her forthcoming book Flourish will be published by Bloomsbury Sigma. Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore: Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore is a British journalist who lives in New York. She writes for New Philosopher, The Guardian, The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Statesman, New Internationalist, The Huffington Post, and Time magazine. Jennifer Kunst: Jennifer Kunst is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, working in private practice in California. She is a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of California and an adjunct associate professor at the Fuller Graduate School of Psychology. She is…

It’s the one question that we’d all like to know the answer to, so we could just get on with it - the living part, that is. If we knew what the ‘good life’ entailed then we could shun the rest, and just concentrate on the important bits. But society has a tendency to derail us. We’re repeatedly told that the good life is about making loads of money, having a successful career and buying as much as we can possibly shovel into our houses and garages. Some are convinced that they need to be famous and get their name up in lights for the good life to kick in. It’s worth remembering that the phase of flight for the Kunanyia stephaniae butterfly lasts a mere 14 days, long enough…

It could be called an urge, or a need, and it pesters us. We think we can rid ourselves of it, but before long, it is back, niggling at us. But in a society that values money and prestige, we can’t fathom how such a need as superfluous as this, which has no role in our modern world, has got such a grip on us. Writer and educator Ellen Dissanayake began a quest to investigate why she, and many women like her, had this inexplicable need to make things. This ‘making’ urge could manifest in sewing, cooking, painting, writing, decorating, fashioning new things from the old, gardening, and so forth. It was a need to get off the computer and the screen, to stop ingesting passive entertainment, and to use…

The Asiatic cheetah once roamed the arid landscapes of the Middle East, Central Asia, as well as India, but sadly no longer. Asiatic cheetahs have not been seen in Saudi Arabia since the early 1950s - habitat destruction, hunting, road accidents, and overgrazing being some reasons for their disappearance. Today, fewer than 50 Asiatic cheetahs exist in the world, now exclusively in Iran’s central plateau. It is believed that the Asiatic cheetah split from its African counterpart some 32,000 - 67,000 years ago. The Asiatic cheetah is slightly maller and paler than the African variety, with a longer neck. But apart from small differences in appearance, both species share the title of being the fastest land animal in the world, clocking up running speeds of up to 100km an hour.…