There are moments that stop time.
They hover, soundless, ungoverned by sequence or clock.

I was sitting beside my son when one of those moments arrived.
He had been still for hours.

The machines were steady, counting what was left to count. The hospice nurse whispered on her phone near the door.

His skin had taken on that pale transparency that warns you the body is almost done with its work.

And then, without warning, he shot his arm up, fingers outstretched.

Not a twitch. Not a reflex.
A movement with intention in it.

He raised his arm straight into the air — fingers spread wide, palm open — as if he had just recognized something above him and was trying to touch it before it disappeared.

For a moment, the hand stayed there, trembling slightly. The air changed.
I thought: he sees it.

Then the arm fell back to the bed, and he was gone.

If the history of medicine teaches us anything, it’s that most revolutions start as metaphors.

The microbiome, for instance, is our latest stand-in for the soul — invisible, sensitive, and blamed for everything from eczema to executive dysfunction.

The Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) lives in that liminal space between microbial science and moral cleanliness.

Its premise is simple: feed the body only what the gut can handle, and the brain will follow. Its practice, however, is a masterclass in inconvenience.

What we don’t know could fill a fermentation vat.

Let’s start with the obvious: sex is not really always about sex.

It’s also often about managing the unbearable lightness of being you.

It’s about getting a brief vacation from your own consciousness — without having to check luggage or talk about your childhood.

According to a study in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy ( one of my favs), your reasons for having sex say a lot about your emotional competence — or lack thereof.

The Hungarian researchers didn’t call it that, of course.

They called it “emotional regulation.”

But what they meant was: some people have sex to connect, others to cope, and a brave few to avoid thinking about their mothers.

The very first time you’re bullied, you rarely really know for sure.
You just notice the laughter feels wrong — sharp instead of warm — and that somehow you’ve become the entertainment.

Years later, the scenery changes.

Cafeterias become Slack channels; locker rooms turn into group texts. But the choreography remains the same: one person reaches for power by shrinking another.

Bullying isn’t strength — it’s scarcity. Scarcity of empathy, of vocabulary, of self-worth. It’s a cheap illusion of control that predates civilization but now travels faster through Wi-Fi.

The good news? Psychology has studied this play for decades, and the ending can change — the moment you stop auditioning for a part in someone else’s insecurity drama.

Here’s how to stop a bully — without losing your dignity, your job, or your humor.

Some years ago, while I lived there, Rhode Island didn’t legalize sex work. It just sorta forgot to make it illegal.

In 1980, some lawmaker carelessly deleted a clause, and for nearly thirty years no one freaking even noticed.

The state simply drifted along, blissfully unaware that the world’s oldest profession had just become a tax-free side hustle. It wasn’t until 2003 that a court finally said it out loud: yes, indoor sex for money is legal here.

There was no fanfare. No protest. No parade of libertarians in nautical stripes. Just a quiet, bureaucratic shrug—followed by six years of unexpected sanity.

“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
— Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

If you want to understand America, begin with the word bitch.
It’s our most compact theology — a single syllable that divides the obedient from the inconvenient.

We use it when women speak too directly, want too much, stay too long, or leave too soon. It isn’t about temperament; it’s about trespass. Bitch is the receipt issued when a woman declines to perform remorse.

In this country, female virtue is calibrated in tone. Be confident but not proud, kind but not naïve, ambitious but self-effacing. Step outside that acoustic range and the culture corrects you with a slur.

There’s a saying from the Deep South I love because it refuses to love me back: The Devil owns the fence.

You can stand on one side, you can stand on the other, but if you sit on that fence—paralyzed by “maybe”—you’re basically doing pro bono work for the underworld.

Not because you’re wicked, but because indecision is.

In couples therapy, I see a lot of conscientious, intelligent people frozen on the planks of I don’t know. They’re not fighting (which looks civilized), but they’re not repairing either (which is deadly).

The cease-fire becomes the slow surrender. Ask them how they are and you’ll hear a museum audio guide: informative, neutral, and somehow lonely.

The Devil doesn’t need you to betray your values. He just needs you to delay them.

Two thinkers, born half a century apart, stare at the same riddle: why do civilizations lose their nerve?

Carroll Quigley, the Georgetown historian who mentored Bill Clinton, believed societies endure only as long as they can replace their elites without revolt. When institutions stop admitting new blood, decay begins quietly—less a revolution than a slow replication of sameness.

Curtis Yarvin, the Silicon Valley blogger and programmer known online as Mencius Moldbug, looks at the same paralysis and calls democracy the disease.

His cure? A sovereign CEO running the nation like a start-up—decisive, absolute, “optimized.”

Quigley gave presidents a syllabus.
Yarvin gives billionaires bedtime stories.

If you’re feeling a little self-conscious about how you look at things, that’s because science has now started watching you watch.

A new study in PLOS One found that adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) don’t just think differently — they see differently.

Their brains sample the visual world in distinct rhythms, so consistent that a machine learning algorithm could identify ADHD with 91.8% accuracy, and even tell who takes stimulant medication.

\It’s a finding that blurs the line between neuroscience and surveillance. The machines, apparently, can now recognize your brain by its beat.

No one sets out to raise a narcissist. You don’t cradle your newborn and whisper, “One day you’ll make every dinner conversation about you.”

Yet somehow, it happens.

Narcissism doesn’t bloom in adulthood—it’s cultivated in childhood, usually not through malice but through emotional distortion. It isn’t born of too much love but of love gone lopsided: too indulgent, too conditional, or too absent.

As a couples therapist in Massachusetts, I’ve seen this play out countless times—partners locked in power struggles that began decades before they met. What looks like arrogance is often a fragile self trying to survive.

Autism runs in families. Not in the sense that your Aunt Mildred’s love of alphabetizing the spice rack automatically means her baby will be scripting Finding Nemo monologues at three.

But in the sense that autism is highly heritable. Twin studies have been saying this for decades (Tick et al., 2016).

Now, a massive new study out of Japan adds more detail.

The Japan Environment and Children’s Study (JECS)—a sample so large it makes most developmental research look like a parish bake sale—has found that parents with stronger autistic traits are more likely to have infants who show developmental difficulties.

That’s true for mothers and fathers, though not always in the same way (Hirokawa et al., 2025).

Once upon a time, infidelity required sneaking into a motel.

In 2025, it may only require logging into World of Warcraft.

Couples now show up in therapy not because of lipstick on a collar, but because one spouse whispered “goodnight love” to a digital elf at two in the morning.

On TikTok, the hashtag #AvatarCheating has millions of views, with users debating whether VR hookups, gaming “marriages,” or late-night AI love-chats should count as betrayal.

Over on Reddit’s r/relationship_advice, one thread asks: “My boyfriend married someone in Final Fantasy XIV. Should I be mad?”

The comments sorta split: half say “yes, absolutely,” the other half dismiss it as “delulu.”