Taylor Swift has long been the poet laureate of American romance.

She has sung about heartbreak (All Too Well), revenge (Reputation), and dreamy reflection (Folklore). But in 2025, she gave us something refreshingly different.

“Wood”, from The Life of a Showgirl, is her boldest and cheekiest track yet—a song laden with innuendo, humor, and joy.

With its images of black cats, unlucky pennies, redwood trees, and “magic wands,” Wood celebrates the confidence Swift has found in her relationship with Travis Kelce.

It’s playful, raunchy, and surprisingly tender. And, like much of Swift’s best work, it’s also bigger than itself: the song taps into mythology, ritual, and the way Americans create meaning from love stories.

The “East Asian happiness puzzle” isn’t about money or liberty gaps; it’s about different jobs we assign to happiness.

In much of East Asia, joy is calibrated for harmony (quiet, relational, moderate). In the West, it’s optimized for expression (loud, individual, maximized).

Different thermometers, different readings—no one’s broken.

Once upon a time, Harvard was supposed to be the place where bullshit goes to die.

That’s what I believed when I was 17, clutching a number two pencil in 1970, sitting in a lecture hall in Cambridge to take my SATs.

I could have taken them closer to home, but no — I wanted Harvard. I wanted to breathe the air of the place.

This was the Vatican of intellect, the citadel of seriousness. You didn’t cut corners at Harvard. You didn’t lie with data at Harvard. You didn’t serve up sloppy casserole and call it cuisine.

And yet here we are, fifty-five years later, and the dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health has been caught doing just that.

Every couple has them.

The small, persistent irritations that take on mythic weight.

The dishwasher must be loaded like a Rubik’s cube. Towels must be folded with military precision. Phones must be answered within three rings — or the offended party begins composing an obituary for the relationship.

From the outside, these obsessions look ridiculous.

From the inside, they feel non-negotiable. Welcome to the world of micro-obsessions: tiny fixations in intimate life that act as proxies for much larger emotional truths.

You’re busy, so I’ll get to the point.

Middle age is not the wasteland you’ve been warned about.

Sure, your knees creak and your inbox mocks you—but science now insists your cognitive peak age is around 60.

Forget youthful brilliance: your late fifties are when judgment, wisdom, and perspective finally outweigh speed.

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.