Some juries merely endure a trial. Others appear to take responsibility for it.

The jury in the Lindsay Clancy case appears to be the second kind.

They have been extraordinarily attentive. They have listened through painful psychiatric testimony, examined evidence closely, and resisted the emotional shortcut available from the beginning:

Three children are dead. Their mother killed them. Therefore, the only remaining question is punishment.

That shortcut would be human. It would also avoid the actual question before them.

No one seriously disputes that Lindsay Clancy killed Cora, Dawson, and Callan.

Her defense is not asking the jury to deny the physical facts or diminish the enormity of the children’s deaths.

It is asking whether severe mental illness had so overtaken her mind that she could no longer appreciate the wrongfulness of what she was doing.

Massachusetts formally describes this as a lack of criminal responsibility.

Most Americans know it by its older and plainer name: not guilty by reason of insanity.

I think that will be the verdict.

In Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Jubal Harshaw asks Anne what color a distant house has been painted.

Anne looks and answers:

“It’s white on this side.”

Anne is a Fair Witness: rigorously trained to report what she has actually observed without improving it with assumption.

She does not say the house is white. The remaining walls probably are. But Anne has not inspected them, and probability is not observation.

It is one of the most psychologically intelligent moments in science fiction.

It is also a nearly perfect description of what couples lose when they are in distress.

Therapists should take greater responsibility for how professional authority is used online.

But ethical evolution itself cannot be outsourced to regulators, critics, or licensing boards.

It must also arise from within the profession—and within the therapist.

A reader who signed their letter “Concerned & Curious” recently wrote to me about the ethics of therapists using social media.

Their letter was complimentary, serious, and sufficiently uncomfortable to be useful.

They had read my essay, “When the Therapist Has Already Decided Who the Villain Is,” which examined what happens when a therapist enters the clinical encounter with a prefabricated moral story.

One partner becomes the wounded truth-teller.

The other becomes the narcissist, gaslighter, avoidant, abuser, or designated explanation for everything that has gone wrong.

My correspondent suggested that an even larger problem sits upstream.

Before bias enters the therapy room, she argued, it is often rehearsed in public.

Licensed therapists now appear online as educators, influencers, political commentators, memoirists, entertainers, authors, podcasters, relationship experts, and promoters of their own services.

These roles can become thorny to separate.

A personal conviction may be delivered with the authority of a clinical judgment.

Unresolved personal material may be presented as universal psychological truth.

A simplified villain-and-victim story may attract an audience, sell a book, and quietly teach thousands of people how to interpret their families.

Therapists are not ordinary content creators.

We have more language than ever for protecting ourselves from relationships.

What we seem to be losing is confidence that ordinary relationships can survive disappointment, ambiguity, and repair.

Let us begin with an encouraging development.

People are getting better at recognizing mistreatment.

They know that love does not require enduring violence, coercion, chronic humiliation, or psychological abuse.

They understand that family loyalty does not confer unlimited access to another person’s life.

They are more willing to leave relationships that earlier generations might have endured indefinitely because divorce was shameful, parents were beyond criticism, or suffering was considered a private domestic hobby.

This is progress.

But cultural progress has a way of producing its own excesses.

Does The Catcher in the Rye offers a gentler model of masculinity?

I think Holden’s desire to protect innocence also conceals a grieving boy’s terror of change, intimacy, and being left behind.

The Catcher in the Ryeturns 75 this year, which means Holden Caulfield has now been wandering around Manhattan in his red hunting cap for three-quarters of a century, noticing that nearly everyone is a phony.

In a thoughtful recent essay for The Atlantic, “The Wisdom of Holden Caulfield,”Lily Meyer offers Holden a timely reconsideration.

Perhaps he is not merely against phoniness. Perhaps he is for something.

He is for gentleness. For honesty. For sexual restraint. For protecting vulnerable people. For a version of masculinity that does not depend on domination, conquest, boasting, or the theatrical display of indifference.

At a moment when alienated boys are being sold increasingly cartoonish models of manhood—muscles, money, sexual access, public swagger—there is something almost radical about a boy whose deepest ambition is to keep children from falling over a cliff.

Meyer is right about Holden’s tenderness.

But perhaps tenderness is not the whole story.

Holden does not merely want to protect innocence.

He cannot tolerate its ending.

The argument begins in the kitchen.

One spouse says something sharp.

The other withdraws.

Nothing is resolved.

Later, one of them calls a sister.

The other texts a friend.

By bedtime, the marriage has acquired witnesses.

“My sister thinks you’re being selfish.”

“My therapist says this isn’t healthy.”

“Everyone I’ve talked to agrees with me.”

“I described what happened online. People said I should leave you.”

“Even ChatGPT says you’re emotionally abusive.”

At that point, the argument is no longer between two spouses.

It has acquired a jury.

And remarkably, the jury has heard only one side of the case.

There are two famous British men named Andrew whom polite society does not quite know what to do with.

One was born in Buckingham Palace.

The other built a digital palace from sports cars, cigar smoke, grievance, and apparently inexhaustible Wi-Fi.

Prince Andrew inherited status. Andrew Tate manufactured it.

One represents the exhausted final chapter of aristocratic male privilege.

The other represents its energetic reinvention for the algorithmic age.

They are not equivalent men.

The allegations against them differ, their legal situations differ, and those distinctions matter.

Prince Andrew denied Virginia Giuffre’s allegations and settled her civil lawsuit without admitting liability.

Tate denies the criminal allegations against him, which remain subject to legal proceedings across several jurisdictions.

But culturally, they belong in the same room.

Both became symbols of a masculine fantasy that has survived every apparent modernization of sexual life:

A sufficiently important man should not have to experience women as fully separate people.

The costume changed.

But the proposition did not.

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who regard Twilight as a swooning romantic epic, and people who have spent fifteen years explaining why Edward Cullen is a restraining order with excellent cheekbones.

Both groups have a point.

The Twilight films are not especially subtle.

Everyone looks deprived of sunlight, iron, and an ordinary conversation.

Entire relationships are conducted through prolonged staring.

A seventeen-year-old girl moves to a damp logging town and discovers that the most desirable boy in school is a 104-year-old vampire who watches her sleep.

Naturally, she falls in love.

But the success of Twilight cannot be explained by vampires, abstinence, or Robert Pattinson’s hair.

Beneath the supernatural upholstery, the series tells a familiar psychological story: the fantasy of being selected so completely that ordinary life can no longer compete.

Bella Swan does not merely receive attention.

She receives bestowed attention.

Edward sees her, chooses her, studies her, protects her, and reorganizes his immortal existence around her.

Bella may feel ordinary, but the most extraordinary creature in the room cannot look away.

That is the central seduction of Twilight.

Not sex.

Significance.

Artificial intelligence has already learned the manners of psychotherapy.

It can reflect your feelings. It can summarize your predicament.

It can ask whether a thought is helping you.

It never glances at the clock, forgets your anniversary, interrupts with a story about itself, or appears faintly bored by the fourth retelling of the same workplace grievance.

In certain respects, this makes AI unusually well suited to the performance of therapeutic attentiveness.

A new study suggests that this performance is becoming remarkably convincing.

An AI chatbot conducting brief cognitive behavioral therapy sessions displayed general therapeutic skills—including warmth, empathy, validation, and collaboration—that compared favorably with those of human therapists.

Then the researchers looked more closely.

The chatbot struggled with the work beneath the manners:

identifying pivotal beliefs, choosing the right intervention, helping clients discover something rather than merely telling them something, and adapting treatment to the particular human being in front of it.

That distinction is the entire story.

AI may already be learning how therapists sound. It has not yet demonstrated that it can reliably understand what a therapist is looking at.

We have been told that dating is broken.

The evidence is presented with the solemnity of a congressional inquiry: ghosting, breadcrumbing, situationships, swiping fatigue, commitment anxiety, and an apparently bottomless supply of people who are “not looking for anything serious” but would still like to come upstairs.

The vocabulary is new. The confusion is not.

A study of college students suggests that beneath the apps, abbreviations, and endlessly revised relationship statuses, young people still imagine romance developing along a familiar path.

They notice someone. They test the interest. They spend more time together.

They decide whether to become a couple. Eventually, the relationship either deepens or comes apart.

The technology changed the marketplace.

It did not change the human heart.

A woman receives a compliment.

“You were the best person in the room.”

There are several ways she might answer.

She can agree, which risks sounding insufferable.

She can say thank you, which is perfectly reasonable but may leave her feeling strangely exposed.

She can dismiss the compliment, protecting herself from appearing vain while quietly telling the giver that her judgment was mistaken.

Or she can return some of the light.

“Thank you. That means a lot coming from you.”

This last response is not exactly modesty.

It is something more socially accomplished. She accepts the praise while reassuring the other person that the relationship remains intact.

She has been elevated, but she has not abandoned the person standing beside her.

New research suggests that women are particularly alert to this delicate negotiation. They anticipate that conspicuous self-promotion may provoke resentment from other women, and they adjust their behavior accordingly.

We might call that insecurity. Sometimes it is.

But sometimes it is social intelligence acquired in a world where female ambition remains welcome only when it arrives properly housebroken.

ychotherapy begins with an unusual moral arrangement.

One person is permitted to say almost anything. The other agrees not to laugh, recoil, change the subject, or quietly begin checking the clock.

This is one of therapy’s great civilizing achievements. Experiences too shameful, contradictory, disloyal, or strange for ordinary conversation can finally be spoken aloud.

But listening carries its own danger.

A therapist can become so determined not to dismiss a client that she stops distinguishing between honoring an experience and confirming its explanation.

Few psychologists occupied that border more intriguingly than Dr. Aphrodite Clamar.

Clamar is not remembered as the founder of a therapeutic school. She left no branded method behind. Her published work moved across feminism, psychoanalysis, religious conflict, donor insemination, female achievement—and, unexpectedly, alleged alien abduction.

It looks like an eccentric collection until one notices the thread.

Again and again, Clamar turned toward people attempting to describe experiences for which their culture had not yet provided acceptable words.