travel
The ultimate test of a compatible relationship is whether you can stand to travel together.
My Mental Health Journey in Map Pins. Runner-Up in Maps of the Self Challenge. Top Story - November 2025.
I’m getting on an airplane tomorrow to go to Thailand. It’s my first time going to a destination wedding. I’m tremendously excited, but the act of undertaking a long journey makes me introspective.
By Leigh Victoria Phan, MS, MFA3 months ago in Humans
When Compassion Replaces Truth
Compassion is a virtue, but compassion without truth becomes corruption. It turns mercy into permissiveness and kindness into cowardice. A healthy society needs both heart and spine. When compassion replaces truth, the heart becomes sentimental and the spine collapses. People begin to value comfort more than correction and feelings more than facts. The result is moral confusion that spreads from personal relationships into every institution.
By Peter Thwing - Host of the FST Podcast3 months ago in Humans
The Asymmetry of Consequence
A society cannot survive when truth applies to one group but not another. Every civilization that endures is built on shared accountability, equal justice, and balanced consequence. When one group is shielded from correction while another carries the full weight of judgment, corruption takes root. Today, that imbalance has become deeply gendered. Men are punished for failure, while women are protected from it. Men are held to the standard of results, while women are measured by intentions. The scales of consequence are no longer even, and the results are visible everywhere.
By Peter Thwing - Host of the FST Podcast3 months ago in Humans
Stanislav Kondrashov on The Art of Candid Travel Photography
Have you ever scrolled through your travel photos and realized that, despite the stunning views, something was missing? That your pictures looked beautiful but felt… empty? That was me, years ago. I had the camera, the passion, and the miles logged across half the world—but not the soul. My albums were filled with sunsets, monuments, and perfectly staged smiles. Yet none of them told the truth about what I’d actually seen.
By Stanislav Kondrashov3 months ago in Humans
Control Without Accountability
Control is not leadership, and leadership is not control. In a healthy relationship, influence is earned through respect, not demanded through manipulation. Yet modern relationships often suffer from a quiet imbalance: one person wants to make the decisions but refuses to bear the responsibility for the outcomes. That imbalance destroys trust faster than any act of betrayal, because it replaces partnership with hierarchy and love with resentment.
By Peter Thwing - Host of the FST Podcast3 months ago in Humans
Waves of Memory
A Love Written by the Sea The evening sky was painted in shades of coral and rose. The sea breathed softly, and the wind carried the scent of salt and jasmine. On that quiet beach, time seemed to move differently. The world felt smaller, and every sound—the breaking waves, the seagulls, the laughter of distant strangers—became part of one endless heartbeat.
By Wings of Time 3 months ago in Humans
The Eternal Sky
When Humanity Builds a Second Heaven For thousands of years, humankind has looked upward not only for answers but for meaning. The sky has always been our first mystery, our silent companion, and our unreachable dream. But what if, one day, the sky itself became our home?
By Wings of Time 3 months ago in Humans
The Truth Reflected Through Another Lens
For more than a century, photographs have stood as the gold standard for what is real, serving as the world’s collective proof of authenticity. A camera was the vessel through which truth was captured, a silent witness to time. Yet the rise of artificial intelligence has disrupted that assumption, not by erasing reality, but by reframing it. When we see an AI-generated image, our instinct is often to dismiss it as fake. We assume that because a camera was not involved, the image cannot be trusted. But that confuses process with meaning. The truth of an image does not depend on the tool that created it. It depends on who or what it represents.
By Peter Thwing - Host of the FST Podcast3 months ago in Humans
The Letter That Arrived 20 Years Late
By Kashif Safi --- The morning began like any other. Margaret sat by her window, a cup of tea in hand, watching the soft drizzle fall over her small garden. At seventy-one, her days had grown quiet, filled with slow walks, old photographs, and the soft hum of the radio that never changed stations.
By Muhammad Kashif 3 months ago in Humans
Tobacco is projected to kill 1 billion people in the next century.. AI-Generated.
The Staggering Projection: Why Tobacco is Poised to Kill One Billion People This Century Imagine a single habit wiping out one billion lives over the next hundred years. That's the grim forecast for tobacco use. Each year, smoking claims about eight million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. If nothing changes, those numbers stack up fast into a century-long nightmare.
By Story silver book 3 months ago in Humans
New Horizons in a strange land
The first few nights in New York City were louder than anything I had ever known. Sirens wailed endlessly, car horns screamed, and the hum of a million lives moving together felt suffocating. Back home, my family’s small town had been quiet, predictable, safe. Here, everything was bright, fast, and unfamiliar.
By Muhammad Kashif 3 months ago in Humans
