There are moments that stop time.
They hover, soundless, ungoverned by sequence or clock.

I was sitting beside my son when one of those moments arrived.
He had been still for hours.

The machines were steady, counting what was left to count. The hospice nurse whispered on her phone near the door.

His skin had taken on that pale transparency that warns you the body is almost done with its work.

And then, without warning, he shot his arm up, fingers outstretched.

Not a twitch. Not a reflex.
A movement with intention in it.

He raised his arm straight into the air — fingers spread wide, palm open — as if he had just recognized something above him and was trying to touch it before it disappeared.

For a moment, the hand stayed there, trembling slightly. The air changed.
I thought: he sees it.

Then the arm fell back to the bed, and he was gone.

Two thinkers, born half a century apart, stare at the same riddle: why do civilizations lose their nerve?

Carroll Quigley, the Georgetown historian who mentored Bill Clinton, believed societies endure only as long as they can replace their elites without revolt. When institutions stop admitting new blood, decay begins quietly—less a revolution than a slow replication of sameness.

Curtis Yarvin, the Silicon Valley blogger and programmer known online as Mencius Moldbug, looks at the same paralysis and calls democracy the disease.

His cure? A sovereign CEO running the nation like a start-up—decisive, absolute, “optimized.”

Quigley gave presidents a syllabus.
Yarvin gives billionaires bedtime stories.

We like to think of the five-day workweek as if it were handed down from Mount Sinai, carved into stone.

In reality, it was carved out by strikes, lawsuits, and a few industrialists who realized exhausted workers were, in the end, bad for business.

The “standard” week is less natural law than historical accident — and a particularly joyless one at that.

So when someone proposes the four-day week, Americans clutch their pearls.

Won’t the economy collapse? Won’t society disintegrate?

No. What collapses is the illusion that we needed 40 hours in the first place.

Taylor Swift doesn’t just reinvent her albums. She reinvents her accent.

A new study published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America traced the shifts in Swift’s speaking voice across her career, showing how her vowels bent and stretched as she moved from Pennsylvania to Nashville to New York City (Mohamed & Winn, 2025).

In other words, Taylor Swift’s discography has eras—and so does her dialect.

And yes, scientists really did get funding to measure how she pronounces “ride.”

It’s not just your imagination—obituaries are getting sharper, funnier, and far more candid.

Families who once followed the safe script of “beloved parent, devoted spouse” are now publishing tributes that read more like exposés.

It feels less like mourning and more like cultural rebellion. In a world where résumés and Instagram captions are polished to perfection, the radical honest obituary cuts through with startling clarity.

What Are Radical Honest Obituaries?

Most obituaries smooth over flaws. They emphasize kindness, family, and tradition, while quietly ignoring cruelty, neglect, or addiction. Radical honest obituaries break that rule. They highlight what actually happened—sometimes tenderly, more often than not, savagely.

And because they violate the social contract of death—be kind, or be silent—they go viral. These obits aren’t just memorials; they’re also moral reckonings.

“She never met a stranger.” Four words in a small-town obituary that said more than any résumé. Multiply that by 38 million, and you begin to see how Americans really define a life.

A sweeping linguistic analysis of 38 million American obituaries, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that when pressed to define a life, Americans consistently emphasize tradition and benevolence.

Less power and thrills, more casseroles and caretaking.

In other words: no one cares that you were regional manager of the Northeast office—what they remember is that you loved your grandchildren and showed up to every Sunday service.

What Do 38 Million American Obituaries Teach Us About Legacy?

“Unconditional love” has a nice ring at the altar.

It sounds romantic, eternal, and vaguely saintly — as if the mere act of saying I do dissolves all conditions.

But here’s the truth: marital love is not unconditional.

Nor should it be.

The idea of loving a spouse “no matter what” is seductive.

It promises safety, permanence, and a Hollywood ending.

Yet research — and countless divorce filings — tell a different story.

Adult love thrives on reciprocity, trust, and boundaries.

Without those conditions, marriage collapses under the weight of unmet needs and unchecked harm.

“Conditional love” has always been cast as the villain in the love story.

It sounds transactional, cold, and about as sexy as a spreadsheet. People assume it means: I’ll love you only if you vacuum, stay thin, and don’t embarrass me at dinner parties.

But here’s the unromantic truth: conditional love is the only kind of love adults actually manage.

Without conditions, marriages don’t become poetic — they become chaotic.

If unconditional love were real, people would be marrying Labradors.

Loyal, forgiving, never asking questions.

But you can’t argue about the mortgage with a Labrador, and that’s where the fantasy collapses.

This is my unapologetic defense of conditional love.

If you still crave the fairy tale of “love no matter what,” I’ve already written its obituary here: The Myth of Unconditional Love in Marriage.

David Benatar, the South African philosopher behind Better Never to Have Been (Wikipedia), argues that bringing new people into existence is always wrong.

His case is stark: life inevitably contains suffering, nonexistence contains none, therefore the kindest act is not to procreate.

It’s philosophy as prophylaxis: the only foolproof way to prevent human suffering is to prevent humans. In other words, it has all the nuanced thinking of a Trojan condom.

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.

Cummington, Massachusetts, is one of those towns people like to call “tucked away.”

Tucked away from what, exactly, is never clear. Presumably, civilization.

But being tucked away does not protect you from the things that really matter—namely, water, snow, and the sky itself deciding to crush you.

For a town of only 800 people, Cummington has three very promising ways to be destroyed: flood, blizzard, or microburst.

Each has already auditioned in nearby towns, which means it’s really only a matter of scheduling before Cummington gets its turn.

The word dazi (搭子) comes from Shanghai slang for “card-playing buddy.”

Back then, you sat down, slapped cards on the table, and didn’t necessarily exchange birthdays. Now? The same stripped-down logic applies to almost anything: dinner, karaoke, the gym.

By 2024–2025, dazi had gone viral on Chinese platforms like Xiaohongshu and WeChat.

According to Radii China, young people are openly advertising for “meal dazi” or “travel dazi,” and not pretending it means forever friendship. Researchers now call this “precise companionship”—the opposite of the emotional sinkhole so many of us call “friendship” (China Daily).