Let’s discuss the emotional burden of becoming a parent’s confidant.

The child knows when to ask.

They can tell from the way a cupboard closes whether this is a good evening for mentioning the school trip.

They know which parent needs reassurance, which subject will reopen the marital argument, and whether their own disappointment can safely enter the room.

Adults call them mature.

Sometimes they are describing a child who has learned to check everyone else’s emotional weather before deciding whether to have any of their own.

In some families, this attentiveness earns a privileged position.

The child becomes the trusted listener, the indispensable companion, the person who understands.

“You’re the only one I can talk to.”

It sounds like intimacy. For a child, it can become an assignment without an end date.

A child can be exquisitely attentive to a parent and almost entirely unknown by that parent.

The child does not need a bedtime story to discover that the world can be frightening.

The child has heard the argument downstairs.

The child has watched a parent’s face change when the telephone rings.

The child has learned which questions make the car go quiet.

By the time a dragon appears in a picture book, it may be the most clearly identified problem the child has encountered all day.

At least someone has admitted there is a dragon.

And someone has bothered to explain what might be done about it.

You wanted to discuss the credit card bill.

Twenty minutes later, you are reassuring your spouse that you respect them, appreciate their contributions, and do not secretly regard them as a disappointing human being.

The bill has not changed. The subject has.

There are marriages in which this happens so regularly that one partner begins rehearsing ordinary requests before making them.

They consider the timing, the wording, whether the other person has eaten, and how much emotional cleanup they can manage before bed.

Eventually, they stop mentioning certain things.

A new meta-analysis on narcissism and emotional regulation offers one useful perspective on this pattern.

It also complicates the familiar picture of the narcissist as a swaggering person who has never doubted himself and would appreciate your help maintaining that record.

Some narcissistic traits arrive looking wounded.

“The Scorpion and the Frog” is a short animal fable about betrayal: a scorpion stings the frog carrying it across a river, causing both to drown.

The frog has a reasonable objection.

If I carry you across the river, you might sting me.

The scorpion has a reasonable answer. If I sting you, we both drown.

The frog accepts this alignment of interests. Halfway across, the scorpion stings it anyway.

As they sink, the frog asks why.

“It’s in my nature.”

The story takes less than a minute to tell. But we can spend years discovering what we think it means.

“The Scorpion and the Frog” has become a portable explanation for betrayal, destructive relationships, political miscalculation, and the gifted person who keeps wrecking the arrangements that make their life possible.

Its cultural history reveals how readily a warning about behavior becomes a verdict about character—and how conveniently that verdict can serve those delivering the sting.

There must have been a moment when somebody proposed putting Amy Acton’s estranged mother in a campaign advertisement.

Other people had to consider it. There were opportunities to examine the history and decide that winning an election did not require doing this.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign went ahead.

The advertisement features Donna Arthur, the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent in Ohio’s governor’s race, calling her daughter a liar.

Acton says she has had no contact with her mother since the 1978 court proceedings involving her stepfather.

Reporting based on court documents shows that he was charged with sexually abusing Acton as a child, that her mother lost custody, and that he fled after posting bond.

The campaign looked at this history and decided the mother’s denunciation belonged in an advertisement.

The first time their youngest daughter asked where they would go if the roads closed, Claire knew she had heard more than Mark intended.

She was nine. She had a flashlight beside her bed and knew where the extra batteries were.

This was sensible.

She also wanted to know whether she should leave school if the power went out, whether the Creamery would still have food, and whether Grandma would be allowed in their house if there wasn't enough for everyone.

Mark had not told her to worry about Grandma.

He had talked about supplies at dinner.

He had watched a video about a prolonged grid failure while their daughter was in the room.

Once, while explaining the family plan, he said that people might become desperate.

Children are excellent at hearing the sentence adults wish they had phrased differently.

Claire wanted the videos off and the emergency talk kept between them.

Mark wanted their daughter to know what to do.

They had each found a way to say, “I'm protecting her,” and each was beginning to wonder whether the other was.

The generator worked.

That was part of the problem.

When the power went out, Mark rolled it into the driveway, ran an extension cord through the garage, and kept the refrigerator cold.

Their daughter charged her phone.

By morning, the neighbors had come over for coffee.

Mark had spent months telling his wife, Claire, that they needed a backup. For once, an argument in their marriage had been settled by an appliance.

Or so he thought.

Claire thanked him for getting the lights on. Then she asked whether he had paid for the generator with their joint credit card. He had.

It cost nearly three thousand dollars. He had bought it six weeks earlier and kept it at his brother’s house because he knew she would object.

“But we needed it,” he said, gesturing toward the humming machine.

She looked at him. “You knew I would object.”

Both statements were true. The refrigerator stayed cold. But their trust took a hit.

The Roman emperor Vitellius reportedly served a dish containing fish livers, peacock brains, lamprey milt, and flamingo tongues.

Suetonius described the meal as evidence of an appetite without restraint. But it was also an achievement of transportation.

Captains brought the ingredients from across the Roman world.

What looked like one man's extravagance depended on the labor of strangers and the ability to move food over great distances. Suetonius, Life of Vitellius, 13.

We notice the flamingo tongues. We should notice the ships.

In Massachusetts, I can buy blueberries in February and decide against them because the raspberries look better.

I can pick up coffee that will be waiting again tomorrow.

The modern food system has placed a kind of imperial reach inside an ordinary errand.

Its most remarkable accomplishment may be that it rarely feels remarkable.

That reach has improved our lives. Trade can help a country through a poor harvest; it allows people to eat a more varied diet than their own climate permits.

It has also taught us to expect the world to answer promptly when we want something. We barely register the winter blueberry. We register its absence.

Lately, I have been thinking less about what I can buy and more about what I should keep.

How long does canned meat last? How much water is enough? What could a well-tended garden actually provide?

Each question has a practical answer.

Together, they suggest that my confidence in the full supermarket shelf has somewhat changed.

There was a time when politics at least pretended to be about building a better future.

The future might be socialist, capitalist, suburban, technological, Christian, multicultural, or suspiciously well supplied with monorails.

But it would be shared.

Even our worst political arguments took place inside a common assumption: there would still be a society when we were finished arguing about it.

That assumption is weakening.

A darker politics has begun to appear—one less interested in preventing catastrophe than in deciding who will be protected from it. It does not ask how we might preserve a livable world. It asks who gets a place in the bunker.

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor call this “end-times fascism.”

Their phrase describes an emerging alliance among religious apocalypticists, technological accelerationists, ethno-nationalists, and extraordinarily wealthy men who appear to have concluded that humanity may not possess a common future—but that they personally might.

The billionaire has a bunker. The fundamentalist has the Rapture. The nationalist has the border. The frightened ordinary person is offered someone to blame.

Their cosmologies differ. Their emotional proposition is the same:

The future is ruined. There will not be enough. Someone must be abandoned. Make sure it is not you.

Creativity has enjoyed excellent public relations.

We associate it with novels, inventions, jazz, and people who have persuaded themselves that a converted barn is an office.

Creativity is assumed to be generous, liberating, and faintly noble.

But originality is morally neutral.

The same mind that can devise a beautiful surprise can also devise a punishment no one sees coming.

A recent study examines malevolent creativity: the use of original thinking to harm, deceive, manipulate, or retaliate.

Researchers found that narcissistic traits and a history of malevolently creative behavior were associated with producing revenge ideas that combined harm with originality.

Some people do not merely hold a grudge.

They give it a research-and-development department.

Something changed.

Your spouse stopped complaining.

No more arguments about the phone at dinner.

No more requests for affection.

No more anguished conversations about sex, drinking, work, spending, your mother, or the manner in which you load a dishwasher—as if you were raised by wolves with unusually poor spatial reasoning.

The marriage is calmer now.

You may believe things have improved.

Your spouse may be preparing to leave.

In Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Anne—the rigorously trained Fair Witness—is asked what color a distant house is.

She looks and answers:

“It’s white on this side.”

She reports only what she can verify. She will not assume that the unseen walls match the visible one merely because that would be reasonable.

It is a beautiful model of disciplined observation.

It can also become a terrible model for marriage if we misunderstand it.

Human relationships are not distant houses. We live inside them.

We remember what happened before.

We react to tone, timing, expression, silence, and pattern.

The meaning of an interaction may reside precisely in what one isolated fact cannot establish.

And sometimes the person demanding “just the facts” is not protecting truth.

They are protecting themselves from accountability.