Charles Kuralt. The man who spent thirty years on CBS showing us America’s backroads — Sunday mornings with fly-fishing, general stores, and pancake breakfasts that felt like Norman Rockwell illustrations come to life.

He had the voice of your favorite uncle and the looks of a man who would never miss a church supper.

And then, of course, he died. Which is when the other woman walked in.

It turned out Uncle Charles had a second life in Montana, complete with cabins, land deeds, and promises made on stationary no one in New York had ever seen.

His widow learned she had been only half a wife. His lover learned she would have to battle the courts to prove she wasn’t a mistress but an alternate spouse.

And America learned, once again, that the wholesome mask often hides the more interesting face.

Insomnia has always been the punchline of late-night infomercials and sad jokes about 3 a.m. bowls of cereal.

But according to a new study in Neurology, the consequences are more serious than bleary mornings.

Chronic insomnia, it turns out, is linked to faster memory loss, cognitive decline, and brains that age as if they’ve been running a 24-hour diner (Carvalho et al., 2025).

The researchers didn’t just hand out surveys and call it a day.

They pulled from the Mayo Clinic’s long-term Study of Aging, tracking 2,750 adults over 50.

Of these, 443 had chronic insomnia; the rest presumably slept like people who don’t worry about whether their ex secretly hates them.

Everyone got tested — memory, language, problem-solving, spatial skills — and some were lucky enough to be shoved into giant, humming machines for brain scans.

It used to be that parents embarrassed their children by showing baby photos to prom dates. Now they post the entire childhood online before the kid can spell “privacy.”

Welcome to 2025, where setting social media boundaries for married couples with kids is less a lifestyle choice than a survival tactic.

One parent sees a toddler covered in spaghetti and thinks, “Adorable, post immediately.”

The other sees the same photo and thinks, “Future therapy bill.”

Researchers have a word for this—sharenting—and they warn it’s the kind of thing children grow up resenting (Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2023). Translation: your Instagram reel could be your teenager’s lawsuit exhibit.

Every so often in practice, a client will look you dead in the eye and say: “This isn’t my first life.”

For most clinicians trained in the U.S., the reflex is to either change the subject or quietly consider an appropriate DSM code.

But a new Brazilian study in The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion suggests we should pause before pathologizing.

Adults who report past-life memories show higher rates of anxiety, depression, and PTSD than the general population.

At the same time, they often report stronger spirituality and—crucially—higher happiness when forgiveness and spiritual coping come into play.

In other words, whether you think reincarnation is real or not, these memories are clinically meaningful.

“Intentional living” has become one of those phrases you can’t escape.

Coffee, dating, skincare, even the way you spend a Tuesday evening — all of it is now expected to be done with intention.

Wellness culture, social media, and therapy-speak have braided the word into almost every corner of daily life.

On TikTok, one person may show a carefully curated “slowmaxxing”

Sunday: vinyl records, watering plants, lighting soft lamps.

Another shares a sped-up reel of cooking, cleaning, and helping kids with homework — all branded as “intentional.”

Two completely different rhythms, both described the same way.

What is the overall appeal of Intentional Living?

Something odd is happening in America’s job market.

The old order — men at the top, women scrambling to get in — has flipped.

For the first time in living memory, young men with college degrees are having a harder time than women with the same credentials. Women are advancing; men are stalling.

According to Pew Research, women now outnumber men in the college-educated labor force.

Fortune reports that unemployment among college-educated men hovers around 7%, compared to about 4% for women.

The Center for American Progress confirms the pattern:

Gen Z men are less likely than women to be employed, even with the same education. This isn’t a cycle. It looks more like a structural decline.

Drive along the Mohawk Trail in the northern Berkshires and you’ll pass through Florida, Massachusetts — a town so small you might miss it.

Today it’s little more than a library, a scattering of houses, and a wind farm on the ridges.

But Florida once carried the weight of Boston’s ambition.

Beneath its hills lies the Hoosac Tunnel, a five-mile bore blasted through rock in the 19th century, known in its day as both The Great Bore and The Bloody Pit.

Florida raised the tunnel like a difficult child — fed it lives and money, endured its tantrums — and then watched Boston take the credit and move on.

The story still lingers in the hills, and it reads like a parable of marriage, children, and family.

Let’s be honest—most people think dating apps exist for two things: desperate love and casual hookups. Swipe for marriage if you’re lucky, swipe for sex if you’re not.

But humans are not algorithms, and the science shows our reasons for logging on are far more complicated.

A new meta-synthesis published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (McPherson, Luu, Nguyen, Garcia, & Robnett, 2025) analyzed 21 qualitative studies on dating app use worldwide.

When researchers actually listened to people instead of forcing them into multiple-choice boxes, they found motives that range from profound (companionship) to ridiculous (boredom scrolling between laundry loads).

Some researchers claim that having sex has sorta been the engine of human history since forever.

Empires rose and fell, religions flourished, fortunes were made and lost — all circling around who’s having it, who isn’t, and who’s lying about it.

Psychologists politely call sex “central to wellbeing” (Laumann et al., 1994). Translation: without it, most people are restless, irritable, and not fun at parties.

But what about the people who never ever have sex?

A massive new study of nearly half a million adults in the UK and Australia suggests that lifelong sexual inactivity isn’t just about being unlucky on Tinder.

It’s tied to genes, geography, inequality, and — here comes the punchline — higher intelligence (Wesseldijk et al., 2025).

It’s the kind of headline that makes you choke on your lingonberry jam: Swedish teenage girls recruited as assassins, carrying napalm firebombs in gang wars.

Once upon a time, Sweden’s exports were Volvos and ABBA.

Now it’s teenage girls ferrying Molotov cocktails across Stockholm suburbs.

The question we can’t dodge — the one policymakers and parents alike should be asking — is: what’s happening in these girls’ families?

In July of 1789, while Paris still buzzed from the storming of the Bastille, a different kind of insurrection swept rural France.

Villages across the countryside heard whispers of brigands on the march — marauders allegedly hired by nobles to destroy crops, punish rebellious peasants, and starve whole regions into submission.

The rumors spread like wildfire.

Farmers dropped their tools, armed themselves with scythes and muskets, stormed manors, and torched feudal records.

The aristocracy’s centuries-old paperwork — the ledgers of obligation, the lists of dues and rents — went up in flames. The brigands themselves never materialized.

This episode, remembered as the Great Fear of 1789, has long been dismissed as irrational peasant hysteria. But new research published in Nature suggests the panic wasn’t so simple.

These French Revolution rumors spread in ways that look strikingly similar to how viral misinformation moves today.

Cummington, Massachusetts, is one of those towns people like to call “tucked away.”

Tucked away from what, exactly, is never clear. Presumably, civilization.

But being tucked away does not protect you from the things that really matter—namely, water, snow, and the sky itself deciding to crush you.

For a town of only 800 people, Cummington has three very promising ways to be destroyed: flood, blizzard, or microburst.

Each has already auditioned in nearby towns, which means it’s really only a matter of scheduling before Cummington gets its turn.