Once upon a time, menopause was whispered about like plumbing repairs — inconvenient, inevitable, and best left to professionals.

But now there’s a new cultural headline: meno-divorce — the midlife uprising where women, somewhere between hot flashes and a second mortgage, decide they’re done managing everyone else’s emotional thermostats.

But the real story isn’t the divorce.

It’s self-sovereignty — the radical act of reclaiming your life at the exact moment society expects you to fade into beige cardigans and volunteer work.

We like to imagine that aging brings independence — no boss, no deadlines, no PTA meetings.

But according to a new study published in Social Indicators Research, emotional independence may be more myth than milestone. Even in later life, your mood still dances to your partner’s tune.

A research team led by Terhi Auvinen at the University of Eastern Finland found that older couples’ well-being is deeply intertwined.

When one partner’s life satisfaction increased by a single point on a ten-point scale, the other’s rose by roughly 0.3 points.

If your spouse starts a new hobby — say, ballroom dancing — your happiness might improve too, even if you’re just home feeding the cat.

He began every morning with a monologue.

At seventy-three, Napoleon Hill still wore a suit that hadn’t been in style since Eisenhower, dictating into a battered Dictaphone as if God were taking notes.

From his scratched oak desk, he delivered the secrets of success between calls from creditors. America had moved on to television; Hill was still peddling faith like it was a growth stock.

Years earlier, he’d claimed to be Franklin Roosevelt’s secret adviser—the invisible hand behind “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He repeated it so often that others began to believe him. Hill never needed convincing.

He didn’t invent self-help. He informed its performative art—the solemn theater of certainty. The first American to turn conviction itself into a product. Confident bullshit, sold at full retail.

A teenage girl sits outside her exam hall, thumb pressed to her sternum, heartbeat rattling like a snare. Her phone buzzes again — another reminder of everything at stake.

Then she remembers something her grandmother once said while shelling peas: “Breathe like you mean it.”

She inhales, exhales, steadies. The test won’t get easier. But she will.

That single breath contains the whole psychology of perseverance. Period.

If you’ve ever stared at a mirage and sworn there was water on the road, you already know what Donald Hoffman is talking about.

Your brain doesn’t show you what’s real. It shows you what’s useful.

That shimmer is an illusion that helps your mind predict heat.

The berry looks red because your ancestors who noticed that color lived longer.

The world you see, Hoffman argues, isn’t a faithful reflection of reality. It’s a survival interface—something more like the icons on your desktop than the circuits inside the machine.

Hoffman, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine, calls this the Interface Theory of Perception.

In his book The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, he proposes a radical idea: evolution didn’t design us to see the truth—it designed us to stay alive.

When people talk about near-death experiences, they talk about the light.
The tunnel. The peace. The sense that everything finally fits.

What they rarely talk about is what happens afterward — when the light fades and you come home with eternity still in your eyes.

A new study from the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, led by Bruce Greyson and Janice Miner Holden (2025), asks that question.

What happens after you’ve been to the edge of everything?
The researchers call it reentry. The participants call it lonely.

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.

If the history of medicine teaches us anything, it’s that most revolutions start as metaphors.

The microbiome, for instance, is our latest stand-in for the soul — invisible, sensitive, and blamed for everything from eczema to executive dysfunction.

The Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) lives in that liminal space between microbial science and moral cleanliness.

Its premise is simple: feed the body only what the gut can handle, and the brain will follow. Its practice, however, is a masterclass in inconvenience.

What we don’t know could fill a fermentation vat.

Let’s start with the obvious: sex is not really always about sex.

It’s also often about managing the unbearable lightness of being you.

It’s about getting a brief vacation from your own consciousness — without having to check luggage or talk about your childhood.

According to a study in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy ( one of my favs), your reasons for having sex say a lot about your emotional competence — or lack thereof.

The Hungarian researchers didn’t call it that, of course.

They called it “emotional regulation.”

But what they meant was: some people have sex to connect, others to cope, and a brave few to avoid thinking about their mothers.

The very first time you’re bullied, you rarely really know for sure.
You just notice the laughter feels wrong — sharp instead of warm — and that somehow you’ve become the entertainment.

Years later, the scenery changes.

Cafeterias become Slack channels; locker rooms turn into group texts. But the choreography remains the same: one person reaches for power by shrinking another.

Bullying isn’t strength — it’s scarcity. Scarcity of empathy, of vocabulary, of self-worth. It’s a cheap illusion of control that predates civilization but now travels faster through Wi-Fi.

The good news? Psychology has studied this play for decades, and the ending can change — the moment you stop auditioning for a part in someone else’s insecurity drama.

Here’s how to stop a bully — without losing your dignity, your job, or your humor.

Some years ago, while I lived there, Rhode Island didn’t legalize sex work. It just sorta forgot to make it illegal.

In 1980, some lawmaker carelessly deleted a clause, and for nearly thirty years no one freaking even noticed.

The state simply drifted along, blissfully unaware that the world’s oldest profession had just become a tax-free side hustle. It wasn’t until 2003 that a court finally said it out loud: yes, indoor sex for money is legal here.

There was no fanfare. No protest. No parade of libertarians in nautical stripes. Just a quiet, bureaucratic shrug—followed by six years of unexpected sanity.

“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.