Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump operated not as anomalies, not as exceptions, but as men whose psychology found the perfect conditions in which to expand.

Each represents a version of Malevolent Narcissism—the subtype marked not by wounded grandiosity but by a purposeful, almost serene entitlement to take whatever they hell they want.

These are men who feel most themselves when others feel smaller. Their power is not relational; it is extractive. And for a time, the culture let them extract freely.

But American culture begins to shift long before the Feed acknowledges it.

The change arrives in small ways—the jokes that no longer land, the public figures we stop defending, the faint but noticeable discomfort when old narratives are repeated.

Before anyone admits that something has altered, the air has already shifted.

Theory of mind is the quiet miracle you don’t notice until it fails.

It’s the human capacity to understand that other people have minds—full interior landscapes with beliefs, emotions, anxieties, and private meanings that differ from your own.

You’d think this would be the most basic human skill. Somehow it’s the rarest.

The term entered the scientific bloodstream when psychologists asked a now-famous question: “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” The answer, as usual, said more about humans than chimpanzees.

We discovered that even humans misunderstand each other constantly—and with appalling confidence.

Theory of mind is not a child’s milestone. It’s an ongoing moral discipline.

Adults may lose it under stress, under shame, and especially under conflict.

Modern life—with its thin signals, algorithmic outrage, and performative certainty—has placed theory of mind on the endangered-cognition list.

Let’s take it from the top, with the full weight of philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience, trauma studies, and couples therapy behind it.

There are very few things left in society that can still produce genuine surprise.

Yet every few years, a major newspaper rediscovers—often with biblical awe—that women possess not only an inner life but a sexual one as well.

The latest entry in this recurring cycle is Lucy Denyer’s piece in The Telegraph, in which the revelation that a woman watches pornography is presented with the startled tone usually reserved for rare meteorological phenomena.

The entire article reads like someone has just stumbled upon a secret civilization.

Apparently, women have both desire and internet access. Who knew?

Everyone, of course. Except the Feed.

A covenant marriage is a legally reinforced version of marriage available only in Louisiana, Arizona, and Arkansas—three states that, with great confidence, decided they could succeed where the rest of the country and half of Europe have failed: telling adults what to do with their relationships.

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, couples who choose this model voluntarily give up the option of no-fault divorce in exchange for a contract with mandatory counseling and stricter exit criteria.

It’s marriage with the wheels chocked, the emergency brake pulled, and your pastor holding the spare key.

You sign not just a license but a “declaration of intent,” which is the marital equivalent of announcing to your dinner guests that yes, you really mean it this time—you’re going to stop eating sugar. In theory, it restores gravitas.

In practice, it’s America’s attempt to legislate what used to be enforced by tight-knit communities, extended families, and a general fear of public shame.

We’ve traded those for Bluetooth-enabled doorbells and algorithmic loneliness. Of course something like covenant marriage was going to pop up eventually.

Every generation resurrects the same myth: the gifted child who emerges like Athena from Zeus’s skull — brilliant, fully formed, and above all, untainted by the human mess of family dynamics.

It’s a comforting story. It flatters us.

If brilliance is innate, no one has to grapple with the awkward truth that giftedness isn’t an ethereal trait, but a relational product — the slow accumulation of cognitive patterns, parental habits, emotional climates, and, yes, the parent’s own gloriously imperfect wiring.

A recent study, The Role of Parental Education, Intelligence, and Personality on the Cognitive Abilities of Gifted Children, quietly smashes that myth.

It treats giftedness not as a monolith but as a set of discrete cognitive domains rooted in the Cattell–Horn–Carroll model (McGrew, 2005; Schneider & McGrew, 2018), showing that parents influence different cognitive abilities in different ways.

In other words, giftedness is not one thing — and neither is the parental contribution.

The result is a portrait of gifted children that is richer, more complex, and far more human than the tidy narratives we prefer. Let’s walk through it.

Once upon a time, teenage American boys read books.

And there was once a rite of passage in American male adolescence: reading Henry Miller at precisely the wrong time in life.

When you’re young, his sentences feel like license—wild, rapturous, profane, as if emotional chaos were a sacrament.

Only later, usually after age and regret have taken turns sanding you down, do you realize that Miller wasn’t modeling any sort of depth.

He was modeling the kind of emotional immaturity that flourishes when no one demands your presence.

In this post, I’m not undertaking a cultural cancellation. I hope, instead, that it reads more like a commentary on an American saint of defensive self-absorption.

A diagnosis that doesn’t rewrite your life—It only reveals what you’ve already lived through

At 60, you’re supposed to be gliding into the soft-focus years—gardens, grandkids, and grudges you’ve finally outgrown.

Instead, you’re staring at a late-life diagnosis that clarifies more than it disrupts.

A major meta-analysis in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews confirms that ADHD persists into older adulthood far more reliably than mid-century psychiatry ever allowed, and a national CDC report shows that nearly half of adults with ADHD weren’t diagnosed until adulthood.

The shock isn’t that you “have ADHD.”

The shock is that you lived six decades without anyone naming it.

Every generation invents new words for sex—not because desire is changing, but because we’re finally honest enough to name the patterns we used to pretend were accidents.

The old categories weren’t built for actual humans. They were built for forms, surveys, and the kind of public conversations that depend on polite fictions.

The 2020s have no patience for polite fictions. And that’s how almondsexuality entered the room.

Almondsexual didn’t crawl out of academia or a think tank.

It was born in the digital commons—the LGBTQ+ corners of the internet where people do the real labor of naming their inner lives.

These communities have always been ahead of the curve, inventing vocabulary long before institutions realize their glossary is 40 years out of date.

There are moments in a woman’s life when medicine suddenly remembers she exists.

Menopause isn’t usually one of them.

ADHD in women isn’t either. But put the two together and you enter a research vacuum so deep it makes the Grand Canyon look cramped.

Yet here we are—finally—staring at a study that tries to map what really happens when ADHD and menopause occupy the same hormonal real estate.

It’s messy. It’s counterintuitive. And it tells us more about how women interpret their bodies than anything we’ve learned in decades.

The newest work, published in the Journal of Attention Disorders, forces us to climb out of the cultural fog around “women’s issues” and look directly at what’s been hiding in plain sight.

Women with ADHD aren’t just navigating distractibility—they’re navigating an entire history of being overlooked, misdiagnosed, and expected to tough out biological experiences men receive sympathy medals for.

The fact that it took until 2025 for someone to study this intersection says more about medicine than it does about women.

If you want to understand what’s happening to American sexuality, don’t bother with marriage statistics or dating questionnaires.

Look at the “most viewed” section of Pornhub.

That’s where the erotic imagination of the country is being shaped, standardized, and exported in real time.

And according to a new long-range study in The Journal of Sex Research, what people are watching today looks markedly different from what they watched 25 years ago.

Visible physical aggression in mainstream pornography hasn’t crept upward; it has tripled.

Not because all of America suddenly became leather-friendly, but because online porn now runs on an economy of intensity rather than intimacy.

Every generation rediscovers the same truth: you can’t out-desire your own nervous system.

You can try—Americans are nothing if not ambitious—but biology keeps the receipts.

A new Austrian study in Psychoneuroendocrinology, the paper Too stressed for sex? Associations between stress and sex in daily life, confirms what therapists have quietly known for decades.

Stress, that relentless party-crasher, is exceptionally effective at smothering women’s sexual desire in the moment.

Men aren’t immune, either of course.

But women’s bodies tend to treat stress like a flashing red alarm: this is not the moment!

The sound of the dishwasher always struck her as strangely moralistic.

It whirred, clicked, and churned with the same nightly insistence, as if to remind her that predictability had become the head of household.

She held a single wineglass to the light, turning it slowly in her hand as though the angle might reveal something she’d missed.

Her husband wandered in behind her, scrolling his phone with the blank absorption of a man consuming nothing important.

And there in the soft kitchen light, between an appliance humming its mechanical sermon and a glow from a screen that felt more intimate than conversation, she sensed the truth: modern married life rarely collapses in spectacular fashion.

It thins. It dries at the edges. It becomes a room you’ve walked through so many times you no longer see it.