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.

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.

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.

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?

Couples therapy is never just two people in conversation.

With Iranian couples, you quickly discover the chairs are already full: qeyrat (masculine honor), namus (family honor tied to women’s bodies), centuries of law, and the voice of a mother-in-law who somehow materializes even across time zones.

They don’t speak directly, but they dictate the script.

“They don’t speak, but they dictate the script.”

What Namus Really Means

Forget the picket fence. Forget Dad in a tie and Mom with Jell-O salad.

In 2025, family values look more like this: Dad squeezing in Instacart runs between shifts, Mom livestreaming about “soft life energy,” and the kids eating cereal for dinner because nobody had time to defrost the chicken.

The American family hasn’t disappeared—it’s just patchworked together, endlessly adapting, and somehow still standing. Call it resilience. Call it survival with a Wi-Fi bill.

Here’s the joke: the people worst at spotting bullshit are the ones most convinced they’re brilliant at it.

That’s not cynicism—it’s cognitive science, confirmed by a 2025 study in Thinking & Reasoning (Čavojová, Šrol, & Brezina, 2025).

What Is Bullshit Detection?

In psychology, bullshit isn’t just a swear word.

It’s communication designed to impress or persuade without concern for truth (Frankfurt, 2005).

Philosopher G.A. Cohen (2002) added that true bullshit is “unclarifiable”—it sounds profound but evaporates when you try to pin it down.

Think of lines like:

• “Imagination is inside exponential space-time events.” (nonsense)

• “A river cuts through rock, not because of its power but its persistence.” (sense)

Spotting the difference is bullshit detection. And it’s harder than it looks.

A fresh slice of bad news, courtesy of Psychology of Women Quarterly: women who spend more time turning themselves into walking billboards—self-objectifying, in the polite academic term—tend to have lower empathy.

Not only the soft kind (emotional warmth), but the cognitive kind too (the ability to imagine someone else’s point of view).

Apparently, it’s hard to see other people’s humanity when you’re busy policing your own thighs.

Researchers Gian Antonio Di Bernardo and colleagues studied hundreds of Italian women and kept finding the same pattern: the more women self-objectified, the more likely they were to self-dehumanize.

Yes, you heard that right—strip themselves of their own humanity. And when you start seeing yourself as a mannequin in need of upkeep, it becomes harder to imagine that other people have thoughts, feelings, or goals that differ from yours.

The Old Testament gave the world a magnificent notion: every human being is made in the image of God.

Not just our own, not just the strong, not just the politically convenient—but everyone. Genesis 1:27 does not hedge or qualify: “So God created humankind in his image.”

If that is true, then the life of a child in Gaza carries the same divine imprint as the life of a child in Tel Aviv, New York, or London. To look away from that truth is to betray it.

The Ten Commandments were not carved on stone tablets to be admired in museums. They were a demand: do not kill, do not steal, honor your family, protect life.

These words became the bedrock of Western law. To destroy neighborhoods where children live and excuse their deaths as “collateral damage” is to burn those commandments in real time.

The prophets sharpened the message. They thundered against kings and priests who forgot their covenant, insisting that justice is measured by how a people treats the vulnerable.

“Seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1:17).

“Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). There is no way to honor these words and remain indifferent to Gaza’s children.

Walk through a typical American airport: fluorescent lights, vinyl floors, anxious crowds. It looks like stress had a baby with laminate.

Now imagine the opposite—a vaulted cathedral, a redwood grove, or just a row house with consistent cornice lines. One scene depletes; the other restores.

The difference isn’t luxury. It’s beauty.

When beauty recedes, cultures don’t collapse spectacularly. They just eventually get bone-tired.

Beauty isn’t frippery. It matters to our nervous systems.

Patients with tree-view windows healed faster than those facing brick walls (Ulrich, 1984). Natural environments, with soft fascination, relieve attention fatigue and calm cortisol levels (Kaplan, 1995).

Neuroscience confirms as much: beauty activates the medial orbitofrontal cortex (a reward hub) and the default-mode network—our brain’s meaning-making machinery (Ishizu & Zeki, 2011; Vessel et al., 2012; Vessel et al., 2019).

In short: beauty steadies the wheel in our brains.

If you’ve ever typed and retyped a message to a difficult ex, wondering if a single word might land you back in court, you’re exactly the audience the Yellow Rock Method was invented for.

Most of us don’t get into relationships thinking we’ll someday need a communication style named after a rock.

And yet, here we are. In high-conflict divorce, narcissistic abuse recovery, or workplace battles with a boss who confuses “feedback” with “character assassination,” the question is always the same: How do I respond without making things worse?

The answer isn’t silence (which can look cold) and it isn’t shouting (which makes everything worse).

The answer is Yellow Rock—a communication strategy that’s equal parts professional email, Sunday-school politeness, and emotional Kevlar.