Vanity fascinates me - partly because I’m a victim myself. It’s mostly frowned upon but permeates so many aspects of our everyday life. Recently I brushed up against my own vanity, and it wasn’t completely comfortable. I won a gift certificate for a professional family portrait. I headed along with my son, had the photo taken, and two weeks later...

Human behaviour is intriguing – from understanding what we do and why we do it to the bigger questions of human nature and our quest for meaning. It seems we are all amateur psychologists of sorts. There’s an old gag in psychiatry about answering a taxi driver who asks what you do for a living. If you’re a surgeon, the...