Everyone says it: communicate about sex.

In America, It’s the relationship advice equivalent of “drink more water.”

But new research in The Journal of Sex Research makes the obvious a little less obvious: what you say matters as much as the fact that you’re talking at all.

Tell your partner what you like in bed?

Your odds of intimacy and satisfaction go up.

Tell them what you don’t like?

That’s might be a minefield. Unless you do it with tact and responsiveness, you risk making your partner feel like they just flunked Sex Ed 101 (Li & Santtila, 2025).

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).

New sibling rivalry research overturns the old belief that men are naturally more aggressive, showing women often outpace brothers in family conflicts.

Aggression has always been handed out along gendered lines.

Men were assigned the part of the violent instigator—fighters, warriors, brawlers.

Women were cast as nurturers, peacekeepers, and emotional glue. Psychology, too, happily co-signed this story, reporting again and again that men were more aggressive than women, bolstered by reams of statistics from bar fights, playgrounds, and prisons (Archer, 2004; Bettencourt & Miller, 1996).

But stories are not science.

A new global study published in PNAS Nexus brings the myth to its knees. Surveying more than 4,000 people in 24 countries, the researchers found that women were just as aggressive as men toward their siblings—and often more so (Kenrick et al., 2025).

Aggression, it seems, is not simply male turf. Inside families, sisters often sharpen their elbows more than brothers.

Autism has always been defined by differences in communication and social interaction. But one of the subtler signs—often overlooked outside of clinical settings—is the way autistic people move.

The DSM-5-TR even lists an “odd gait” as a supporting diagnostic feature of autism (American Psychiatric Association, 2022). What does that mean in real life? Sometimes it looks like:

• Toe-walking (up on the balls of the feet, ballerina-style)

• In-toeing (pigeon-toed, feet turned inward)

• Out-toeing (feet flaring outward)

But gait differences aren’t always this obvious.

Long-term studies show that autistic gait is often characterized by slower walking, wider steps, and more time in the “stance phase” (when your foot is still planted before lifting off).

Stride length and speed vary more, too (Kindregan et al., 2015). It’s as if the body is improvising a little more than usual—sometimes graceful, sometimes awkward, always distinct.

If you want to know how autistic people actually talk about autism, don’t start with a clinical checklist. Start with Reddit.

That’s exactly what a team of researchers did in a new study published in Autism Research, and the results are fascinating—sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always deeply human.

Traditional medical frameworks love their bullet points: difficulty with social interaction, repetitive behaviors, sensory sensitivities. Useful in a doctor’s office, sure. But they don’t capture what it feels like to live autistic in a world that often demands camouflage.

On Reddit, no one is following a researcher’s script. People vent. They joke. They tell the truth they’ve never said out loud. That’s why analyzing over 700,000 posts from r/autism and 15 related subreddits gives us something richer: autism not as a disorder, but also as a lived culture.

There’s a reason sitcoms have been making in-law jokes since Eisenhower was in office: nothing tests “for better or worse” quite like hearing your spouse’s mother ask why you’re still asleep at 8 a.m.

The American family is drifting back toward togetherness—sometimes heartwarming, often claustrophobic.

A Pew Research Center survey found 64 million Americans now live in multigenerational households, the highest rate since the 1940s.

In other words, your living arrangement might look less like a love nest and more like a season of Big Brother, complete with confessionals whispered into your pillow.

And it’s not because everyone suddenly craves Nana’s wisdom on laundry.

Somewhere between Meg Ryan’s deli scene inWhen Harry Met Sally and the endless “oh God, oh yes” soundtracks of late-night cable, women learned that faking it is part of the sexual toolkit.

And yes—many use it. A lot.

Studies suggest that two thirds of American women have faked an orgasm at least once (Muehlenhard & Shippee, 2010).

That’s not a rare occurrence—that’s practically a rite of passage.

But why? Women aren’t auditioning for an off-Broadway role in Moans of Passion.

They’re negotiating sex, ego, and cultural scripts all at once.

Parenting has always lived somewhere between order and chaos. For decades, the standard approach leaned heavily on “because I said so.”

Lately, though, parents are experimenting with something closer to improv: Yes Day parenting.

The premise is simple. For one day, parents agree to stop saying “no.”

Kids make the decisions (within reason), and adults surrender control.

The idea is framed as a positive parenting strategy—one that builds trust, encourages child autonomy, and gives families a break from the daily grind. Of course, it can also go off the rails in spectacular fashion.

There are many ways to ruin a perfectly decent marriage. You can wage war over the thermostat. You can introduce your in-laws into every minor decision.

Or—you can take the quietest path to utter relational ruin: keep score.

I drove to your cousin’s wedding, so you’d better drive to mine.
I folded the laundry—so you owe me sex.

This is quid pro quo marriage, America’s favorite pastime. We like to call it fairness. But the truth? It feels less like love and more like an audit.

And the evidence is in: marriages run like ledgers don’t just feel brittle—they decline over time.

We’ve all been sold the same relationship fantasy: keep it fresh, keep it fiery, keep it Instagrammable.

Surprise trips to Paris! Elaborate gender reveals! Interplanetary vacations that require a second mortgage!

But ask anyone who’s sat across from me in couples therapy, and they’ll tell you—novelty, while highly valued, can’t hold a marriage together all on it’s own.

What actually saves relationships is something far less flashy and far more human: Nemorinity.

Nemorinity is the “pleasant un-surprise.”

It’s the relief of finding your partner in the exact place you expected them, doing the exact thing you hoped for. It’s the familiar casserole on the table, the Saturday morning coffee handed over without comment, the sarcastic sibling banter that somehow refuses to die.

It’s not boring. It’s oxygen.

Forget the picket fence. Forget Dad in a tie and Mom with Jell-O salad.

In 2025, family values look more like this: Dad squeezing in Instacart runs between shifts, Mom livestreaming about “soft life energy,” and the kids eating cereal for dinner because nobody had time to defrost the chicken.

The American family hasn’t disappeared—it’s just patchworked together, endlessly adapting, and somehow still standing. Call it resilience. Call it survival with a Wi-Fi bill.

For decades, people spoke of marriage the way you talk about a tired shopping mall: once bustling, now half empty, and destined to be bulldozed for condos.

The divorce boom, the rise of cohabitation, the endless reinvention of family life—all pointed toward matrimony as a quaint relic.

And yet, as The Atlantic (2025) points out, the thing refuses to die.

Divorce rates are falling, and more children are growing up in two-parent households.

In an era where trust in institutions is at an all-time low, marriage is the one that keeps limping along, like a stubborn houseplant no one remembered to water—but which somehow thrives anyway.