Showing results by narrator "Jack Hawkins" in Politics & Social Sciences

Welcome to the world of the Secret Barrister. These are the stories of life inside the courtroom. They are sometimes funny, often moving and ultimately life-changing. How can you defend a child abuser you suspect to be guilty? What do you say to someone sentenced to ten years whom you believe to be innocent? What is the law, and why do we need it? And why do they wear those stupid wigs?

Just how do you become a barrister? And why do only one per cent of those who study law succeed in joining this mysteriously opaque profession? If it’s such a great occupation, how come you work 100-hour weeks for less than minimum wage? And why might a practising barrister come to feel the need to reveal the lies, secrets, failures and crises at the heart of this world of wigs and gowns? Nothing but the Truth charts an outsider’s progress down the winding path towards practising at the Bar,

We live in the age of the individual. We are supposed to be slim, prosperous, happy, extroverted and popular. This is our culture's image of the perfect self. We see this person everywhere: in advertising, in the press, all over social media. We're told that to be this person, you just have to follow your dreams, that our potential is limitless, that we are the source of our own success. But this model of the perfect self can be extremely dangerous. People are suffering under the torture of this impossible fantasy.

Most of us think the law is only relevant to criminals, if we even think of it at all. But the law touches every area of our lives: from intimate family matters to the biggest issues in our society. Our unfamiliarity is dangerous because it makes us vulnerable to media spin, political lies and the kind of misinformation that frequently comes from other loud-mouthed amateurs and those with vested interests. This 'fake law' allows the powerful and the ignorant to corrupt justice without our knowledge - worse, we risk letting them make us complicit.

Jack Urwin's father died just before Jack turned 10. Being male, he never really learned to talk about this with any kind of sincerity. His grief stayed with him through his teens, slowly becoming depression. Now 24 and a journalist whose recent Vice article, A Stiff Upper Lip Is Killing British Men - described as 'fabulous' by Irvine Welsh - became a viral sensation, Urwin explores what it means to be a man now.

What was a Buddhist monk doing at the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos lecturing the world's leaders on mindfulness? Why do many successful corporations have a chief happiness officer? What can the chemical composition of your brain tell a potential employer about you? In the past decade, governments and corporations have become increasingly interested in measuring the way people feel: the Happiness index, Gross National Happiness, well-being and positive psychology have come to dominate the way we live our lives.