“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
— Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

If you want to understand America, begin with the word bitch.
It’s our most compact theology — a single syllable that divides the obedient from the inconvenient.

We use it when women speak too directly, want too much, stay too long, or leave too soon. It isn’t about temperament; it’s about trespass. Bitch is the receipt issued when a woman declines to perform remorse.

In this country, female virtue is calibrated in tone. Be confident but not proud, kind but not naïve, ambitious but self-effacing. Step outside that acoustic range and the culture corrects you with a slur.

There’s a saying from the Deep South I love because it refuses to love me back: The Devil owns the fence.

You can stand on one side, you can stand on the other, but if you sit on that fence—paralyzed by “maybe”—you’re basically doing pro bono work for the underworld.

Not because you’re wicked, but because indecision is.

In couples therapy, I see a lot of conscientious, intelligent people frozen on the planks of I don’t know. They’re not fighting (which looks civilized), but they’re not repairing either (which is deadly).

The cease-fire becomes the slow surrender. Ask them how they are and you’ll hear a museum audio guide: informative, neutral, and somehow lonely.

The Devil doesn’t need you to betray your values. He just needs you to delay them.

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.

If you’re feeling a little self-conscious about how you look at things, that’s because science has now started watching you watch.

A new study in PLOS One found that adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) don’t just think differently — they see differently.

Their brains sample the visual world in distinct rhythms, so consistent that a machine learning algorithm could identify ADHD with 91.8% accuracy, and even tell who takes stimulant medication.

\It’s a finding that blurs the line between neuroscience and surveillance. The machines, apparently, can now recognize your brain by its beat.

No one sets out to raise a narcissist. You don’t cradle your newborn and whisper, “One day you’ll make every dinner conversation about you.”

Yet somehow, it happens.

Narcissism doesn’t bloom in adulthood—it’s cultivated in childhood, usually not through malice but through emotional distortion. It isn’t born of too much love but of love gone lopsided: too indulgent, too conditional, or too absent.

As a couples therapist in Massachusetts, I’ve seen this play out countless times—partners locked in power struggles that began decades before they met. What looks like arrogance is often a fragile self trying to survive.

Autism runs in families. Not in the sense that your Aunt Mildred’s love of alphabetizing the spice rack automatically means her baby will be scripting Finding Nemo monologues at three.

But in the sense that autism is highly heritable. Twin studies have been saying this for decades (Tick et al., 2016).

Now, a massive new study out of Japan adds more detail.

The Japan Environment and Children’s Study (JECS)—a sample so large it makes most developmental research look like a parish bake sale—has found that parents with stronger autistic traits are more likely to have infants who show developmental difficulties.

That’s true for mothers and fathers, though not always in the same way (Hirokawa et al., 2025).

Once upon a time, infidelity required sneaking into a motel.

In 2025, it may only require logging into World of Warcraft.

Couples now show up in therapy not because of lipstick on a collar, but because one spouse whispered “goodnight love” to a digital elf at two in the morning.

On TikTok, the hashtag #AvatarCheating has millions of views, with users debating whether VR hookups, gaming “marriages,” or late-night AI love-chats should count as betrayal.

Over on Reddit’s r/relationship_advice, one thread asks: “My boyfriend married someone in Final Fantasy XIV. Should I be mad?”

The comments sorta split: half say “yes, absolutely,” the other half dismiss it as “delulu.”

Every woman knows her. You’re at a party, scanning the room, when Zoe appears—leaning just a little too close to your date.

You don’t know if you want to throw your drink or ask her where she got her concealer. A new study by Merrie, Krems, and Byrd-Craven (2025) says your instincts aren’t wrong.

Rivalry runs on two key ingredients: intent (flirting with your guy) and capacity (being hot enough to pull it off).

Evolutionary psychologists call this groundbreaking. Women call it Tuesday.

What Makes a Woman a Romantic Rival?

Let’s be honest: hobosexual isn’t an identity—it’s a survival strategy with a rom-com veneer.

It’s dating because the lease is due, devotion that spikes with utility bills, pillow talk that sounds like Zillow.

Some people land in it out of crisis; others practice it like an art.

Either way, it corrodes trust. And after 50—when bodies, budgets, and social safety nets get less elastic—the stakes go up.

A hobosexual makes a home out of you—emotionally, logistically, financially. The attraction isn’t fake, it’s simply… instrumentally timed. You’re not a partner so much as a well-located port in an economic storm.

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.

Forget lingerie. The real aphrodisiac is compromise.

A new study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships shows that when couples share power — yes, even in the boring stuff like deciding who does the laundry or which show to binge — their sex lives get hotter.

Balance the chores, balance the passion. Equality outside the bedroom translates to enthusiasm inside it.

And in 2025, that feels radical.

We live in a world where people Venmo their spouse for rent but won’t talk about desire.

Where TikTok feeds are filled with couples arguing over thermostats while Reddit threads read like divorce prequels.

Against that backdrop, research says the couples who share influence don’t just fight less — they love better.

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.”