Terumi Tanaka remembers everything about what happened in Nagasaki. Here is a human who actually experienced a nuclear bomb exploding. He remembers the flash and fainting afterwards. He recalls waking up to his mother and two sisters crying over him. Days later, they went looking for their extended family, only to find the city had vanished.

Every New Year’s Day, friends host a backyard cocktail competition. Insecure about mixing, I took a conceptual approach—mocktail plus “cock-tales.” My online research on how writers over the centuries have written about male genitalia was surprisingly flaccid but I found some wonderful gems.

Azadah Raz Mohammad is one of four prosecutors fighting the total exclusion of women and girls from public life in Afghanistan.

I interview the brilliant anatomical Cat Irving, a human remains conservator at Surgeon’s Hall in Edinburgh.

Ever since sisters Kit and Renata announced they are closing down their iconic Sydney CBD shoe store, customers have been flooding in, some bereft, some sad but all with stories about the many beautiful pairs of shoes they have bought over the years.

William Clowes was an Elizabethan surgeon who wrote about surgery, bear-baiting fights and fights he had with blood-letters.

The 19th century anatomist, artist and surgeon Joseph Maclise’s anatomical subjects are often very beautiful men.

In 2010, an anatomical study of the body organs of a wax figure at La Specola and worked out how she died.

As exotic tales persist over their origins as war trophies, these shrunken heads at Surfers Paradise are a reminder of the fine line between cultural heritage and controversial exhibit.

What happened to all the dissection poetry and literature?

When researching my book, I was surprised to learn how mysterious and alluring human brain anatomy and brain structure was to anatomists, surgeons and students.

In May 2022, Fraser Holden was given a devastating diagnosis. He was told he had motor neurone disease (MND), a fatal neurological condition where motor nerves in the spine and brain slowly lose function. There is no cure and sufferers eventually can no longer move or speak. It is a cruel condition.

Did you know the reason books have sections is actually because of anatomy? According to the historian Richard Sugg, the idea of cutting up, analysing and methodically dissecting a topic in fact comes from anatomical dissection, first spilling into popular culture around the late 1500s.