I find it ironic that “Rhinestone Cowboy” sounds like a victory song.

It is not.

It is a song about the humiliating distance between wanting to be seen and actually being seen.

It is about rejection, compromise, and the private negotiations required to keep believing in yourself when the world has become noticeably less interested.

That is why Glen Campbell could sing it as though it had been written from inside his own life.

In a sense, it had.

Just not by him.

When folks cannot confront the institutions governing their lives, they often turn on the people standing beside them.

That is the deeper argument waiting inside George Packer’s Atlantic essay, “The College-Educated Working Class.”

Packer calls this “an age of mutinies.”

The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the anti-lockdown protests, January 6, anti-ICE demonstrations, and MAGA itself have all presented themselves as rebellions against a corrupt establishment.

These movements differ enormously in their aims, methods, and moral claims.

But they share a conviction that legitimate authority has failed and ordinary people are being governed by institutions they can neither trust nor control.

Packer considers the decade before the Civil War as one possible precedent. But his deeper historical comparison is with the beginning of the 20th century: another period of concentrated wealth, mass immigration, technological upheaval, political paralysis, and labor unrest.

His most important observation is that the fundamental conflict may not be between red and blue.

It may be between power and powerlessness.

Your husband has written you a beautiful apology.

It is specific without becoming defensive. It acknowledges impact without quibbling over intention. It contains none of his usual little trapdoors through which responsibility quietly escapes.

He understands that his dismissiveness left you feeling alone.

He recognizes that your anger was not the original problem but a response to having your experience minimized.

He does not ask you to forgive him immediately.

He even describes what he intends to do differently.

It is, by any reasonable standard, an excellent apology.

You are moved.

Then you discover that he produced it in thirty seconds by typing:

Write an apology to my wife. Make it emotionally intelligent but not too long.

The apology remains accurate.

It simply no longer feels like evidence of what you thought had happened inside him.

We edit everything now.

We edit the email to the boss.

We edit the text after an argument.

We delete the sentence that sounds needy, put it back, stare at it for another three minutes, and eventually replace the entire thing with:

Sounds good.

We edit photographs of lunch.

Apparently, we are considerably less fastidious about love letters.

Recently, Enzo Falvo, creator of LovePaper, wrote to me after reading something I'd written about gratitude letters.

LovePaper is a remarkably simple idea.

You write a letter to someone you love, choose how you want it presented, and get a private link you can send to that person.

But Enzo's note contained a number I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

According to data he shared with me, 19,485 of 21,489 letters had never been reopened for editing.

That's about 91%.

Partners wrote the letter.

Finished it.

And apparently decided:

That's what I meant.

A new relationship test is circulating on TikTok.

Women place their boyfriends in front of a camera and ask them to pronounce words such as epitome, hyperbole, challah, fuchsia, and hors d’oeuvres.

The men stumble. The women stare. Millions of strangers grade the relationship.

It is being called the “Illiterate Boyfriend Test,” although literacy has remarkably little to do with it.

A man can read perfectly well and still mispronounce a word he first encountered on the page.

This is one of English’s little cruelties: sometimes mispronunciation is evidence that someone reads.

But TikTok is not known for allowing an interesting ambiguity to survive.

In one widely viewed example, a boyfriend correctly pronounced only five of 17 words.

The couple laughed. The audience was less charitable.

Some viewers suggested that his performance was grounds for breaking up. Another wondered why his vote should count as much as hers.

The test appears to measure vocabulary.

What it actually measures is belonging.