Picture this: a couple at the kitchen table, not clinking wine glasses but glaring at a Trader Joe’s receipt.

One of them swears almond butter used to be $5.99; the other insists it was always $7.49. Both are wrong, of course, but accuracy is irrelevant.

The real story is that this isn’t a marriage—it’s a budget committee meeting with unpaid overtime and no snacks.

The American Family Survey just confirmed what that receipt already knew: money stress is now the gravitational center of American family life (Deseret News & Brigham Young University, 2025).

Everyone swears the past doesn’t matter in love.

But sit through a family wedding and watch how Aunt Linda side-eyes Cousin Derek’s fiancée number three, and you’ll see how quickly history gets dragged into the room.

A new cross-cultural study in Scientific Reports confirms this: people judge potential long-term partners less favorably if they’ve racked up a high “body count.”

And here’s the kicker: despite all the cultural noise about double standards, men and women judge each other’s sexual pasts almost identically.

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.

We live in an age that worships efficiency. Groceries arrive with a swipe, the rent pays itself, and a cheerful kiosk replaces the receptionist. Faster, cheaper, tidier.

But as ad man Rory Sutherland likes to point out, efficiency often blinds us to meaning.

He calls it the Doorman Fallacy: the belief that a doorman’s only job is to open a door.

By that logic, you can replace him with an automatic sliding door and call it progress.

Except the sliding door doesn’t greet you, reassure you, or lend the building its sense of dignity. The doorman wasn’t just functional—he was symbolic.

Couples fall into the same trap at home. They reduce each other to jobs: provider, scheduler, housekeeper, sexual partner. Then they wonder why the marriage feels more like an airport concourse than a relationship.

Amsterdam: city of canals, tulips, and recently a thousand folks explaining how to monetize their genitals in the gig economy.

Europe’s largest pornography conference took over a riverside hotel, which is ordinarily the sort of place where German capitalists meet to discuss their supply chains.

Last week, however, it was flooded with roller skates, sequined bras, and the relentless optimism of people who believe burnout can be solved with branding.

Out in the lobby, two buses of American retirees clutched their tickets for the cheese-and-windmill tour.

They looked on in horror as women in diamanté heels rolled past with ring lights. The retirees will, most likely, never recover.

Imagine this: you’ve spent years convinced you’re lazy, weak, or simply “bad at life.”

Then one afternoon in a beige office, a clinician leans back in their swivel chair and says: “You have ADHD.”

Suddenly, it all clicks. The shame softens. Your story rearranges itself. You’re not defective—you’re diagnosed.

That emotional pivot has a name of its own: the Rumpelstiltskin effect.

Psychiatrist Awais Aftab and philosopher Alan Levinovitz coined the term in 2025, comparing the relief of diagnosis to the fairy tale where learning Rumpelstiltskin’s name breaks the spell.

Across cultures, the power of naming—of turning the mysterious into the knowable—has always been the first step toward control, healing, or escape.

But like most good fairy tales, there’s a darker counter-narrative. In American mental health culture, many argue that psychiatric labels don’t free us—they trap us. For some, diagnosis feels less like a flashlight in the dark and more like a branding iron.

So who’s right? Let’s dig in.

When people hear the word hoarding, they often imagine a reality-TV spectacle: stacks of newspapers, narrow walkways, and a kitchen buried under clutter.

But in everyday life, hoarding is more complex—especially when we consider how it connects to neurodiversity.

Hoarding isn’t just about keeping “too much stuff.”

For many neurodivergent souls, it’s tied to the way their brains handle memory, attachment, and uncertainty. What looks like disorganization from the outside can be a coping strategy on the inside.

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.

"Thinking in Speech" (TiS) isn’t just another autism therapy—it’s an intentional way of learning to talk to oneself with purpose, clarity, and calm.

Developed by Janice Nathan, an autistic speech-language pathologist, TiS teaches children to build an inner voice that supports planning, emotional steadiness, and self-soothing—not through worksheets or routines, but by activating inner strength.

In 2025, researchers published a pilot randomized-controlled trial in Autism Research. Twenty-two autistic children received the TiS therapy—sixteen 30-minute sessions delivered remotely by nine trained speech-language pathologists.

Compared to a waitlist group, children in the TiS group showed statistically significant improvement in emotional distress (measured by the Emotion Dysregulation Inventory (EDI)) and a marginal trend toward improved reactivity.

Most people know the word serendipity—a lucky accident, a happy surprise. But have you heard of its darker twin, zemblanity?

Coined by novelist William Boyd in Armadillo (1998), zemblanity describes the inevitable, unhappy discovery you saw coming all along. It’s sorta the opposite of serendipity.

In love and marriage, zemblanity shows up when couples keep circling back to the same arguments: money, sex, in-laws, or who left the lights on.

If you’ve ever thought “Here we go again” in your relationship, you’ve met zemblanity.

And that’s when a couples therapist like me earns their keep.