Peruse the self-help aisle at your local neighborhood bookstore, and you’ll likely find tomes giving you all kinds of advice. Titles that tell us to “let them” or develop “atomic habits” or offer an expletive-laden guide to caring less.  For all the critiques of the multibillion-dollar self-help industry, it sells, launching the high-profile careers of […]

Our society has actively promoted two-parent families for decades, but today we’re in a particularly intense moment. We have books getting published like Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization and The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Social conservatives are talking about […]

Talking about climate change can feel hopeless. Even the good news, on the rare occasion we get some, feels hollow. But for the most part, it’s bad news. The planet keeps heating up. So many of the disasters we were warned about years ago are starting to pile on. Meanwhile, the oil keeps flowing, the […]

As a person firmly ensconced in middle age — 57 percent of the way through life, to be precise, if government actuarial tables hold — I have begun to notice certain things not working quite as well as they used to. Specifically, my eyes and my ears.  You can ask my family: My hearing is […]

There is a deep human impulse to whittle reality down into familiar and self-flattering fairy tales. We all gravitate toward information that validates our preconceptions and vindicates our in-groups. It is cognitively taxing to revise one’s model of the world. And it is emotionally uncomfortable to recognize fault in our allies or merit in our […]