I once had a client who kept a baseball bat by her bed after reading about a local prowler.

“It’s not that I expect him,” she said, “I just sleep better knowing I could swing.”

When I think about Mattoon, Illinois in 1944, I also thought of her.

The townspeople of Mattoon weren’t battling a prowler, exactly — they were fighting their own uncertainty.

And like my client, they armed themselves with a compelling story.

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.

“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.

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.

Every woman knows her. You’re at a party, scanning the room, when Zoe appears—leaning just a little too close to your date.

You don’t know if you want to throw your drink or ask her where she got her concealer. A new study by Merrie, Krems, and Byrd-Craven (2025) says your instincts aren’t wrong.

Rivalry runs on two key ingredients: intent (flirting with your guy) and capacity (being hot enough to pull it off).

Evolutionary psychologists call this groundbreaking. Women call it Tuesday.

What Makes a Woman a Romantic Rival?

Gaslighting has become the kale of relationship advice—everywhere, overhyped, occasionally misused, and sometimes leaves a bitter aftertaste.

These days, if your partner forgets oat milk, you can call it gaslighting.

If they say, “I never said that,” you might decide it’s gaslighting.

If they forget the plot of Succession—clearly gaslighting.

But here’s the trouble: when everything is gaslighting, nothing is.

And that matters, because gaslighting isn’t just everyday bickering.

It’s a systematic pattern of emotional manipulation and psychological abuse. Misusing the term trivializes what survivors endure.

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?