Los Angeles has spent years pretending that street takeovers are merely an irritating form of automotive enthusiasm.

They are not.

A few young men doing doughnuts in an empty parking lot may be reckless recreation.

Hundreds of people commandeering an intersection, trapping public transportation, brandishing guns, ransacking businesses, setting vehicles on fire, and broadcasting the spectacle for social-media status is something else entirely.

It is organized civic intimidation.

That is why the LAPD’s Operation Street Sweeper matters.

Early yesterday morning, officers from the LAPD, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and California Highway Patrol surrounded a massive street takeover at Figueroa Street and Alondra Boulevard in Harbor Gateway.

Police said the crowd—assembled from four earlier takeovers—numbered more than 700 people.

The operation produced nearly 70 arrests, approximately 200 vehicle impoundments, 570 spectator citations, and the recovery of seven firearms.

Police had anticipated the gathering through intelligence collection and drone surveillance. They arrived with buses for detainees and a fleet of tow trucks for the cars.

This was not an improvised police response.

It was a planned containment operation. This is what professional policing looks like.

Good. It’s about time.

For most of human history, convenience was a luxury.

Food required preparation. Music required musicians.

A letter required writing, folding, addressing, stamping and the bleak uncertainty of whether anyone would answer.

To obtain advice, you had to find someone wise—or at least someone older who had made a sufficiently interesting collection of mistakes.

Now convenience is ordinary.

Artificial intelligence can write the letter, summarize the book, plan the vacation, compose the apology, diagnose the argument and explain why your spouse’s childhood made him behave that way.

It can do this immediately.

It can also make the answer warmer, shorter, funnier, more validating and less likely to contain anything you did not want to hear.

We spent centuries removing friction from human life.

We may soon begin paying to put some of it back.

There was a time when loneliness was considered a private sorrow.

Now it is a market opportunity.

A growing collection of companies will help you eat dinner with strangers, travel with strangers, exercise with strangers, work beside strangers, or confess your private thoughts to carefully selected strangers.

Some offer friendship memberships.

Others organize adult summer camps, communal meals, listening circles, social saunas and professionally facilitated opportunities to “connect authentically.”

Naturally, there is an app.

There is always an app.

The emerging industry has been called the loneliness economy: a marketplace of products and experiences for people who have money, mobility and broadband—but no one to call on a Tuesday night.

The services themselves are not necessarily foolish.

A supper club can introduce people who would never otherwise meet.

Group travel can produce real friendship.

Even an awkward gathering may be better than another evening spent scrolling through photographs of other people pretending not to be lonely.

But the loneliness economy contains a devastating admission:

We dismantled many of the places where belonging once happened naturally.

Now we are selling belonging back to ourselves.

Ted Owens was a difficult man.

That may be the only uncomplicated conclusion available to us.

He was grandiose, combative, theatrical, easily injured by disbelief, and spectacularly offended by neglect.

He called himself “the PK Man”—the Psychokinesis Man.

He wrote to scientists, presidents, intelligence agencies, and government officials.

He claimed extraterrestrial intelligences had modified his brain and were cooperating with him.

When recognition failed to arrive, Owens did not reduce the size of his claims.

He enlarged the demonstration.

Storms. Lightning strikes. Earthquakes. Blackouts. UFO appearances. Hurricanes that changed direction.

Sporting events that turned unexpectedly. Owens described some as predictions.

Others were requests transmitted to beings he called the Space Intelligences.

A few were warnings about what might happen if powerful institutions continued ignoring him.

This makes Owens easy to dismiss.

It also makes him remarkably difficult to explain.

There is a new relationship test circulating online.

Women are asking their boyfriends to hand over their phones—not to inspect their text messages or search for pornography, but to look at their TikTok or Instagram feeds.

Show me your algorithm.

It is an oddly intimate request.

A partner’s feed is no longer merely a record of what they enjoy.

It is a continuously updated psychological portrait: what arrests their attention, confirms their suspicions, provokes their anger, and keeps them watching three seconds longer than they intended.

You may know how your partner votes.

You may know which podcasts he listens to in the car.

But do you know what his algorithm has concluded about him?

More importantly, do you know what it has been teaching him about you?

Every modern relationship now contains at least four participants:

Two people—and two algorithms.

There are fathers who abandon their children by leaving.

And there are fathers who remain psychologically present for years after they are gone—still mocking, still measuring, still occupying the largest room in the child’s mind.

Jecht manages to do both.

In Final Fantasy X, Tidus begins as the radiant young star of the Zanarkand Abes: talented, adored, physically graceful, and apparently made for attention.

He is also still fighting with a father who disappeared ten years earlier.

This is not a contradiction. It may be the most psychologically accurate thing about him.

Children do not stop organizing themselves around a difficult parent merely because that parent is absent.

Sometimes absence makes the organization even more complete. There is no ordinary afternoon in which the feared father becomes merely human.

The father is preserved at full size.

Jecht was everything Tidus feared he was not: muscular, celebrated, commanding, shamelessly confident.

He did not simply succeed. He made success look like a private club his son would never be permitted to enter.

And when Tidus cried, Jecht mocked him.

That small fact explains a remarkable amount of the game.

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.