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 Hebrew Bible 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.

Phubbing. It sounds like a minor traffic violation, but it’s what happens when your partner checks their phone while you’re talking about your day.

And it stings—sometimes just a little, sometimes like you’ve been benched from your own relationship.

A new study in the Journal of Personality shows that how badly it stings depends on your attachment style (Carnelley, Hart, Vowels, & Thomas, 2025).

People high in attachment anxiety? They feel it in their bones. Mood sinks, self-esteem craters, and the odds of retaliatory scrolling skyrocket.

Compromise is the glue stick of love. Not sexy, not elegant, but it keeps the whole thing from falling apart.

Without it? You don’t have a relationship. You have two people running competing political campaigns under one roof.

And here’s the bad news: some folks simply can’t do it.

A new study in Sexual and Relationship Therapy shows that folks with insecure attachment styles—the worriers, the avoiders, the ones rehearsing their exit speech—are way less likely to compromise (Mozafari & Xu, 2024).

Instead, they go for one of four classics: yell, sulk, control, or ghost. Conflict resolution, but make it chaos.

“Hopeless” is a word couples sometimes whisper when the lights are off and the silence feels unbearable.

But here’s the quiet truth: most relationships that feel hopeless aren’t dead — they’re kinda exhausted. They’ve been running the same script for years, and the script isn’t working.

This quiz won’t tell you what to do. But it will give you a clearer sense of whether your relationship is really running out of road, or just stuck in a ditch that therapy could help you climb out of.

Count your answers honestly. Because cheating on this quiz makes no sense.

First, let’s discuss what “fondness” actually is in American culture.

“Fondness and admiration” is Gottman’s unsexy name for the glue that keeps long-term love from drying out.

It’s not fireworks; it’s the everyday tone: the warm glance, the easy praise, the “I’m on your side.”

When fondness fades, couples don’t just fight more—they stop seeing each other as worth protecting. That’s the real danger.

Also: signals get scrambled. Depression, grief, ADHD, autistic traits, chronic pain, trauma, meds, shift work, and plain old burnout can all mimic “low fondness.”

Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro are hailed as breakthrough medications for type 2 diabetes and weight loss.

They’ve helped countless people lower blood sugar, shed weight, and reclaim their health. But there’s a new phrase making the rounds: Ozempic teeth.

It sounds like a campfire ghost story, but dentists are taking it seriously.

Patients on GLP-1 drugs are showing up with dry mouth, enamel erosion, gum inflammation, even tooth loss.

The phrase Ozempic teeth may be catchy, but the dental fallout is less amusing.

Can corruption, inequality, and violence shape your personality?

A groundbreaking global study says yes. When societies are marked by injustice and instability, people are more likely to develop dark personality traits—callousness, exploitation, and moral disregard.

The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, come from nearly two million people across 183 countries and all 50 U.S. states.

The message is clear: our environments matter. Where corruption thrives, selfishness does too.

In the spring of 1961, a Buick the size of a small tugboat clipped me in a crosswalk.

No screech of brakes, no horn — just an impossible collision of my knee and chrome.

The impact felt like being kicked by something that didn’t care whether I lived. The sound was worse than the pain: a deep, wet crack that made bystanders look away.

They set the knee twice before they could cut. The plaster cast ran from ankle to hip, itchy and heavy enough to serve as a boat anchor. The hospital air smelled of antiseptic and cigarette smoke — nurses lit up at their desks, then came to check your vitals.

For a month I watched the hallway parade: head bandages, traction rigs, kids staring at ceiling tiles like they’d memorized every crack.

The Buick was gone in seconds, but the fear stayed. It took up residence in the muscles, in the scanning of intersections, in the twitch before stepping off a curb. Fear doesn’t leave when the cast comes off. It left a large moon-shaped scar on my right knee.

Fear is the first emotion to evolve and the last one to leave.

Before there was love, before there was guilt, before there was the very human urge to buy throw pillows you don’t need, there was fear. It’s not a glitch in the system — it is the system.