In the U.S., nearly one in five adults will experience an anxiety disorder this year (National Institute of Mental Health, 2024).

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than 30% of adults have felt anxious or depressed most or all of the time in the past two weeks.

That’s not an individual malfunction—it’s a national work order stamped “URGENT.”

We have meditation apps, employee wellness webinars, and self-help podcasts in every flavor—and still, anxiety rates climb.

Why? Because America has perfected the art of converting structural problems into personal defects, then monetizing the cure.

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.

Here’s the scene: You’re in the middle of a conversation with your spouse.

Maybe the topic is small (“Did you pay the water bill?”) or monumental (“Are we happy?”). And then—without warning—your autistic partner’s voice disappears.

No yelling, no slammed doors. Just… gone. You’re left holding the conversational steering wheel while they’ve quietly climbed into the trunk.

If you’ve never lived with autism, this can look like stonewalling or contempt. It isn’t. It’s neurology pulling the emergency brake.

Office romance is back. The slow migration back to cubicles, open-plan spaces, and conference rooms has revived an ancient workplace tradition: people falling for each other between the coffee machine and the quarterly budget review.

In 2025, nearly half of workers aged 18–44 say they’ve started dating a coworker since returning to in-person work, with Gen Z and millennials leading the way (Business Insider).

They’re less likely than older generations to hide these relationships, less fearful of stigma, and more likely to see work as a legitimate place to meet a long-term partner.

For HR leaders, this means one thing: it’s time to stop pretending workplace romance doesn’t exist, and start managing it more intelligently.

Somewhere in America, a man in rural Missouri is mailing heirloom tomato seeds to a woman in Brooklyn. On paper, they should hate each other.

His yard has a flagpole; hers has a climate march poster. Their political bumper stickers, if parked side by side, could ignite a small brush fire.

And yet, they’ve been swapping seeds for three years.

Every spring, she sends him a sourdough starter; he sends her rare zinnia seeds in return. Neither has mentioned politics once. That’s probably why they still like each other.

This is a quiet revolution — the growth of rural conservatives and urban progressives finding each other in unlikely online spaces, building small, durable friendships around passions that have nothing to do with ballots, yard signs, or cable news.

At the arrivals gate in Frankfurt, a teenage girl waits, scanning the crowd.

Her hoodie says Seoul, her sneakers are from New York, and the book in her hand is in Portuguese.

When her father waves from the baggage claim, she smiles — but she doesn’t switch languages right away.

It’s been two years since she’s seen him, and she’s deciding whether to speak English, the language they always used at home, or his native French, which she picked up during their last posting in Geneva.

It’s not that she doesn’t know which is “right.”
It’s that for her, right depends on which culture she’s in at that exact moment — and she’s in three at once.

Somewhere between the invention of fire and the invention of the photocopier, humans discovered two things:

1. Food tastes better when you know how to make it.

2. People are jerks about giving you that knowledge.

We like to think of recipes as acts of generosity—gifts, heirlooms, love letters in the language of butter and spice.

And yet, across cultures and centuries, there’s a long tradition of handing someone a recipe… and somehow making sure it won’t quite work.

It’s the culinary equivalent of giving someone driving directions that almost get them there.

Why Do Some Folks Sabotage Recipes?

Heterofatalism — the belief that heterosexual relationships are structurally doomed to disappoint — is no longer just an obscure academic term.

For many Gen Z women, it’s a working theory of modern romance. And it’s reshaping the way they approach dating, sex, and consent.

Coined by scholar Asa Seresin, heterofatalism isn’t a tantrum or a manifesto.

It’s a quiet conclusion reached after too many underwhelming dates, too many safety calculations, and too much unpaid emotional labor dressed up as fun.

In this worldview, even the best straight relationships carry a familiar imbalance of risk and reward.

And now, it’s influencing everything from dating app use to the quiet rise of the Gen Z celibacy trend.

“Bad juju” is one of those phrases that slips easily into conversation. You might use it when you get a bad feeling about a deal, when someone messes with a lucky charm, or when a friend starts a risky plan you know won’t end well.

But this small, catchy phrase carries a big story—one that spans West African spirituality, colonial history, crime novels, and even modern video games.

The Original “Juju”

In the early 19th century, British and French traders on the West African coast encountered a wide variety of spiritual practices and protective objects.

In Hausa, a widely spoken language across West Africa, jùjú referred to a fetish or charm believed to contain spiritual power (Oxford English Dictionary, 2025).

Coastal West African French speakers used joujou—meaning “toy” or “plaything”—to describe some of these objects (Harper, n.d.; Encyclopædia Britannica, n.d.).

In both cases, juju meant two things:

1. A physical object—often an amulet, charm, or shrine.

2. The spiritual power the object was believed to carry.

By 1823, juju had entered English in this sense (Oxford English Dictionary, 2025).

You may think your cat loves you. Or at least likes you.

But here’s the sad truth of it: your cat is less like a loyal friend and more like that quiet neighbor who waves politely, notes your every move, and files the information away in a mental folder labeled Useful or Not Useful.

It’s not weighing your moral fiber — it’s weighing whether you’re worth standing up for when the tuna runs out.

Cat owners everywhere have wondered: Do cats judge people the way humans do? Or, more pointedly, does my cat secretly think I’m a terrible person? The answer is more scientific (and more selfish) than you might imagine.

Dog owners have been telling this story forever: “Oh, my dog can tell. He growls at bad people.”

It’s a warm, satisfying belief—our furry sidekick as a moral compass, able to sniff out shady motives faster than a human judge. It’s the kind of thing that makes you feel both safe and smug.

But here’s the disheartening plot twist: when scientists actually tested whether dogs can judge character, the results came back flatter than a day-old tennis ball.

A new study in Animal Cognition suggests that pet dogs don’t reliably prefer generous humans over selfish ones.

In fact, they might be more interested in which side of the yard has shade than in who’s offering the snacks.

There are post-apocalyptic films where the relationship is a subplot, something to fill the quiet moments between chase scenes.

The Road is the opposite — the father and son’s bond is the whole movie.

The world is falling apart, yes, but the plot is really just this: one human being, determined to keep another human being alive, both in body and in spirit.

That’s what makes it useful in couples and family therapy. It’s not about defeating the apocalypse; it’s about refusing to let the apocalypse defeat what’s between you.