“Difficult patients may be intersubjectively created. We are usually doing something that makes them more difficult. We have our role in this.”
— Glen Gabbard, M.D.
An easy way to get unstuck is to get up and take a walk.
We generate more creative ideas during and after walking outdoors—and even on a treadmill facing a blank wall.
Divergent thinking rarely happens when we're tethered to a desk. Moving our bodies frees our minds.
Few novels have captured the experience of adolescence as powerfully as The Catcher in the Rye.
And its final line has become one of the most quoted in modern literature:
"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
What did Holden mean?
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It’s great to accomplish things in your life.
Finding your passion can help you find happiness.
Having a purpose is a good path to fulfillment.
But you don’t need to have it all done by the age of 30.
Or 40. Or 50. Or any age.
Not having it all figured out is not a failure.
@arthurbrooks I have friendships that stretch back to childhood. It is a rare gift. These relationships carry a shared history/connection that can’t be recreated in later life.
All eyes will be on Cherie DeVaux and Golden Tempo in Saturday's Belmont Stakes.
In May, DeVaux, a Saratoga native, became the first female trainer to win the Kentucky Derby. She now looks to join Jena Antonucci (Arcangelo 2023) as the second female trainer to take the Belmont.
Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas
"When we are fairly observant and overly patient, a vibration of happiness might crop up unwittingly, as we capture the “timelessness” of a lucky moment and a sparkle of a stray instant, unexpectedly, enraptures our life in a blaze of color and splendor."
Some of the worst damage in your life came from people who love you, in the form of a poisonous sentence wrapped in good intentions:
“You're perfect just the way you are.”
The reason it landed as damage rather than kindness is that you didn't believe it. And how could you? Nobody actually believes they’re perfect. So, when we’re told something that contradicts what we know to be true about ourselves, our brains try to resolve that conflict. There are only two ways to resolve this one — and both are bad.
The first resolution goes like this: I feel terrible, and I've been told I'm as good as I can possibly be, so this must be what life amounts to — grim, static, with nothing to fix and therefore nothing to improve. That's despair: the conviction that this is what life is, and that nothing you can do will change it.
The second goes the other way. I've been told I'm perfect and my life still isn't working, so the problem must be out there — in other people, in the system, in the generation that came before me. That's bitterness: the conviction that everything wrong in your life is somebody else's fault, and that there's nothing for you to do but wait for the world to change.
Neither of these is what the well-meaning person had in mind when they told you you're perfect. But these are the two places it ends up.
You can see both play out at scale right now.
Depression has roughly tripled among adolescents and young adults; anxiety has roughly doubled. The angry activism of the last decade — the belief that previous generations robbed me, that the system is rigged, that I'm fine and everything around me is broken — is the second resolution lived out in public.
The world is in fact unjust in many ways; I'm not arguing otherwise. But the resolution that leaves you with no agency over your own life is not the one that lets you live it.
There is a plausible connection between telling kids, in a state of high synaptic plasticity, again and again, that they are perfect just the way they are, and what we are now measuring in those same kids ten years later. We lied to them when they were young. And the lie metastasized.
The truth is you are not perfect, and that is incredibly good news. If you accept the reality of your imperfection, you have somewhere to go.
The kindest thing anyone can say to a child (or to themselves) is not that they are perfect: it’s that they are not — and that in the gap between who they are and who they could be lies the meaning of their lives.
Alzheimer’s symptoms were reversed in mice after just three doses.
In a groundbreaking study co-led by researchers at University College London (UCL), along with collaborators including the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and West China Hospital of Sichuan University, scientists have developed bioactive nanoparticles—termed supramolecular drugs—that successfully reversed key signs of Alzheimer’s disease in mice.
This innovative approach diverges from conventional therapies, which typically aim to target neurons or directly break down plaques. Instead, the nanoparticles focus on repairing and restoring the blood-brain barrier (BBB), the brain’s protective vascular interface that regulates its internal environment and clears waste.
In Alzheimer’s, the BBB becomes dysfunctional, leading to the buildup of toxic amyloid-beta (Aβ) proteins that impair cognitive function. The supramolecular nanoparticles mimic natural ligands of the LRP1 receptor—a key transporter protein on the BBB. By binding to Aβ, they facilitate its transport across the barrier into the bloodstream for elimination, while also triggering a feedback mechanism that resets and normalizes the brain’s own clearance pathways.
Remarkably, after just three doses administered to genetically modified mice that overproduce Aβ and exhibit Alzheimer’s-like cognitive decline, the treatment produced rapid results: Aβ levels in the brain dropped by 50–60% within one hour of injection. Long-term monitoring showed profound behavioral and memory recovery; notably, mice treated at an age equivalent to about 60 years in humans regained full healthy performance in cognitive tests when evaluated six months later (equivalent to age 90 in humans).
These findings highlight a novel, precision-engineered strategy that reboots the brain’s natural waste-removal system without traditional drug payloads, offering a promising proof-of-concept for addressing Alzheimer’s pathology at its vascular root. While far from a human cure, the work opens new avenues for therapies that could halt or reverse disease progression by enhancing the brain’s intrinsic defenses.
["Nanoparticles reverse Alzheimer’s pathology in mice." UCL, 2025]
Happy Mother’s Day to all — bio moms, stepmoms, bonus moms, animal moms, and the women whose hearts carry the love of motherhood in every form. To those longing to be mothers, those navigating loss, and those who nurture, guide, protect, and love without recognition — today is for you too.
Motherhood is not defined by one path. It’s found in compassion, sacrifice, patience, strength, and unconditional love.
@robkhenderson Dunbar’s observation that some splits (or rifts) become all but permanent is sobering because #bereavement does not automatically reconcile. Sometimes loss heals and sometimes it crystallizes splits.