It’s a bloke’s best-kept secret: what he gets up to when he says he’s just popping out to his shed. “Not tidying it, that’s for sure” says my wife – but in fact a Men’s Sheds scheme that has spread across a growing number of countries is encouraging men to spend more time in their sheds for mental health reasons. The programme, in which men get together in workshops or other shared spaces to make things or just spend time together, aims to combat loneliness and depression, which can be a killer, especially among older men.

The chances are that all that woodwork will generate a healthy thirst. A recent newspaper story reported that moderate consumption of beer can be good for your health and even boost your brain. But when they looked into the claims, our scientists warned that even moderate consumption of any alcohol is associated with premature mortality. Any health benefits from beer’s ingredients can be more easily (and healthily) obtained from other foods.

BAME is an acronym referring to Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic and you see it increasingly in use. But does lumping so many people together under this umbrella term do justice to the enormous diversity it encompasses or is it a misleading term which hides more than it reveals?

And from our colleagues in Canada, a review of Crazy Rich Asians, the all-Asian rom-com that celebrates glamorous Singapore, while from the US, a journalism professor tells the story about how as a young newspaper reporter in 1979 he infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan and gave America an early glimpse at the bigot behind the urbane exterior of Klan leader David Duke.

Contact us here to have your event listed.

For sponsorship opportunities, email us here