Dear Prudence,

I come from a state where people are generally kind and not very confrontational. I’ve also lived in cities where people are far more gruff and are very boisterous when they think someone is trying to take advantage of them. Because of this, I’ve developed a much thicker skin than most people back home. I’ve been confronting people not wearing their masks correctly in stores (masks are mandatory in my city). It stresses me out so much and has me wondering if I’m being a “Karen.” I ask to speak to managers and write strongly worded letters somewhat frequently. It got to the point recently where I realized I act like the world owes me. I’ve never yelled at a manager over store policy, but I’ve always tried to “get stuff” when things haven’t gone my way. I don’t want to be like this, but I can’t shake the very negative feelings I’ve developed when I feel like I’ve been taken advantage of. I saw so many other people letting people know when they made the smallest mistake. Sometimes people seemed genuinely sorry for what they did or were a bit oblivious. Sometimes they got really hostile. Should I always be trying to make sure that people correct their mistakes, or should I let small things go? Is it a Karen move to always ask people to correct their mistakes?

—Always Disgusted in Tunbridge Wells

The two-part assignment was given to seniors in an English class at W.T. White High School, the Dallas Independent School District (ISD) confirmed to CNN.

The first part of the assignment asked students to write a half-page biography for six people, among them 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse.

The others on the list were Mahatma Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, Malcolm X, George Floyd and Joseph Rosenbaum, one of the victims of the Kenosha shooting. The names of Gandhi and Malcolm X were misspelled, according to a photo of the assignment obtained by CNN affiliate KTVT.

In the second part of the assignment, students were then asked to write a one-page essay on which of those six people they believed best demonstrated the concept of a hero.

Let’s imagine we were giving an award for the worst social problem in the world today. Do you have any nominations?

Did I hear someone say international conflict? Racial prejudice maybe? Environmental destruction anyone? Millions of homeless refugees? Exploitation of women? Turns out there’s one problem that connects all of those, and it’s one you hardly ever hear politicians talk about.

Overpopulation may not be root of all evil, but it is indeed at the root of many of the world’s other miseries.

Just do the math. As a minimum, every additional person needs a certain quantity of food to eat and clean water to drink. Extra people could, in theory, live without clothes on their backs or roofs over their heads, but most of us would not wish for a world with more people, if they had to live homeless and naked against the elements. Beyond basic needs for food, water, and shelter, more people need more energy -- to light their homes and cook their food, and if that level is reached, they’ll be in the market for still more -- to power their refrigerators and washing machines. At moderate levels of economic development, people start to desire cell phones, big screen televisions, and cars to drive. And at the highest levels, they want second homes and vacations in far-away destinations, which they reach by flying on gas-guzzling airplanes.

One solution is to simply open our borders, to allow more of the world’s desperate people to come to the United States, England, the Netherlands, and Germany. That is the case Samantha Power made in her painful stories of the desperate people she encountered as a journalist and later as U.N. ambassador, which triggered the earlier open letter. The statistics seem to indicate that most immigrants are not criminals or terrorists, but are, compared to those who grow up in first world countries, actually more eager to work long and hard hours. Cafaro acknowledges the obvious -- that the opportunities in a first world country are substantially greater than those in a third world country. And if you are rich or middle class American, there are benefits from immigrants – cheaper labor and better bottom-lines on stock dividends (as large corporations have used the availability of cheaper immigrant labor to break unions, and drastically cut salaries and benefits for their employees). But Cafaro notes that those economic benefits to middle and upper-class Americans translate into severe costs for the poorest Americans. Middle-class people are generally out of touch with how those economic benefits to them translate into the hefty costs associated with unemployment or underemployment among African-Americans, poor whites, and native Hispanics. Many of these less fortunate groups have lost the union jobs that permitted their parents to live reasonably comfortable lives. This in turn leads to loss of health care benefits, and many other unpleasant downstream consequences.

Vinnie, 55, admitted he has struggled since his wife Tanya, 53, died last year from cancer.

He told the BBC Headliners podcast: “I hate this word mental health because I think it scares blokes — especially around my age because you’re a bit old school.

“I just don’t like, ‘Oh I’ve got mental health problems’.

"People stand back even now — ‘Oh really, what kind?’, ‘Well mine’s grief’, ‘That’s all right then, you’re not an axe murderer’.

"So I think that's quite a hard thing for blokes especially to say, 'I've got mental health problems, I'm seeing a psychologist'."

Many families are plagued by narcissism. I use the word plague because it feels like a disease, running through the veins of the tenuous connections between the various family members. When you're part of a narcissistic family, the effects it has are devastating. In fact, there will be times that you feel as if the life is being sucked out of you.

I choose to have people in my life who respect my boundaries. As soon as I'm involved with a narcissist, I find it very hard to defend my boundaries - even when I have a clear idea of what's right and wrong. That's because narcissists have no respect whatsoever for boundaries. They invade. The ignore your right to privacy, activities and opinions which differ from their own. Not being listened to or respected is exhausting.

Narcissists never, ever feel that enough is enough. They always want more attention. They always want to create more chaos between people around them. They want more and more from you. Make friends with a narcissist and they'll want you to be their best friend. Tell them a private secret once and they'll feel upset if you don't share every intimate aspect of your life from then on. You cannot ever satisfy a narcissist's needs - but you can keel over with exhaustion in the process of trying.

For the first time since 2000, the official guidance on relationships and sex education (RSE) in England is changing. From this month, RSE is mandatory in every secondary school, regardless of whether they are state or private (though the Government has said it will make allowances for schools as yet unable to implement the change because of the coronavirus crisis).

Relationships education – which is now compulsory in every primary school – will mainly deal with families and friendships. It will cover the risks of online relationships, digital privacy, physical boundaries and recognising abusive behaviour.

But will the new guidance protect and empower young people for sex and relationships in a modern world?“The curriculum puts the physical health and emotional wellbeing of young people at its core,” Chiquita Henson, headteacher of Cirencester Deer Park School, a secondary school in Gloucestershire, tells i.

A new study led by Ekin Ok at the University of British Columbia has found people who signal virtue and victimhood are more likely to have dark triad personality traits.

The dark triad comprises narcissism (entitled self-importance), Machiavellianism (strategic exploitation and duplicity) and psychopathy (callousness and cynicism). People with dark triad traits can be seductive.

A study led by psychologists at the University of Durham found that women rated the same man as more attractive when he had dark triad traits. The dark triad man was about one standard deviation more attractive than an ordinary man.

In psychologist Justin Lehmiller’s book Tell Me What You Want, he reveals the most fantasized-about superhero among women is Batman. In contrast, gay men preferred Superman and Captain America. One possible reason that women like Batman is because he would score higher on dark triad traits compared with other superheroes.

The couple looked troubled. Everything that they thought they'd figured out, that had been explained by their pastor, no longer made sense. "OK, then, if it's not sex addiction, what is the problem?" A moment passed. Then another. "Well," I said, "for starters, it's worse than you think."

Sex addiction, as a pseudoscientific concept, is so very emotionally appealing. First of all, it definitely labels the objectionable sexual conduct as a disease and nothing but a disease so, really, there's no need to look any further. But the reason I told my clients it's worse than what they thought is because it's not the so-called addict who has a problem. The problem is about them as a couple.

When pressed, many Americans will acknowledge what research has proven to be true: The hiring system is broken, and white people have a historic, systemic advantage over other races when it comes to getting a job.

In a new HuffPost/YouGov poll conducted this August of 1,000 U.S. adults, almost half said that people of color are treated less fairly than white people during the hiring process in the U.S. Seventy-nine percent of Black Americans and 69% of Latinx Americans said that racial employment discrimination was at least somewhat of a serious problem in the United States. (HuffPost/YouGov did not highlight results for Asian respondents due to small sample sizes.)

Hiring discrimination can be especially insidious, because candidates rarely get insight into what recruiters and hiring managers are thinking. A person may never find out why exactly a given company never called them back, but that doesn’t mean discrimination is not occurring.

“I was once told that my long hair and beard had to go and that I must state that I was a Christian.” — multiracial man, 64

A study conducted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation in 2018 ranked India as the world’s most dangerous country for women.

The issues examined included sexual violence and trafficking, gender-based social discrimination, lack of access to and control over contraception and childbirth, health care and maternal mortality rates. Mental and physical abuse, religious and cultural facets such as acid attacks, female infanticide, female genital mutilation, and forced and child marriages were also weighed.

Sexual violence against women is an absolute reality in many cultures around the world. In India, however, it is deeply rooted in patriarchal norms and the belief that men are superior to women and that a man should always be a protector of women.

During her interviews, Kaushal found that none of her nine subjects understood the meaning or necessity of consent from a female partner in a sexual relationship or respected them as individuals with their own unique identities. One of them, a serial gang rapist, even refused to accept the idea of rape.

Another subject, a doctor, raped a 12-year-old bedridden patient following an operation, in full awareness of the mental trauma he was causing. The attack left the patient crippled and incapable of talking about the assault for decades out of fear and shock.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband and I are friends with a lovely couple. We have many things in common and enjoy hanging out with them. The problem is their kid. They have a son the same age as our younger son and the boys like hanging out with each other. At first that seemed like a great bonus to this friendship. But the longer we’ve been friends, the clearer it has become that their kid is a horrible person—rude, spoiled, insolent, a liar, and frequently downright mean to our kid (although our kid doesn’t seem to care and still wants to hang out with him). The parents do nothing to address his bad behavior. In fact, they coddle him. I know we need to mind our own business and not make comments on their objectively garbage parenting style, but can we distance our kid from theirs? Is it too weird to hang out with the parents and just never bring our own kid along? As a side note, we could leave our son with his older brother; they don’t have any other kids so we don’t really have an “adults only” option.


—Keeping My Mouth Shut Is Hard

Author Michael Shellenberger, who’s head of the research and policy group Environmental Progress, argues in a Hill.TV interview that climate change is not the most pressing environmental problem.

“There’s every reason to think that we will be able to survive climate change,” Shellenberger said. “In fact, nobody should die from climate change. That may sound shocking, but there is no reason that anybody should die from climate change if we take the right steps.”

Shellenberger, author of “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All,” argued that while climate change is a real concern, the recent panic around the issue is also harmful.

“There is a lot of powerful financial interest behind the alarmism, mostly the renewable energy industry, which is wreaking havoc on natural environments,” said Shellenberger, a nuclear power proponent. “But there's also the scientists themselves who I think get a rush from alarming people, from scaring people, and I think it's unconscionable.”

“If she didn’t say that I wouldn’t have hit her.” “If he didn’t cut me off I would never have chased after him!” “My father is to blame for my problems with anger.”

These are just a few examples of comments I’ve heard over the years, made by individuals who blamed others in order to justify their anger and how they expressed it. In the first, a 32-year-old husband, married for just two years, assaulted his wife while under the influence of alcohol. He hit his wife after she threatened to divorce him and make sure that he would suffer financially. His aggression was a reaction to his anger—rage that masked his feelings of powerlessness, hurt, and anticipated loss. In spite of arguments that had escalated in the previous year, he was unable to honestly acknowledge that he and his wife were incompatible.

In each scenario, these individuals deny their responsibility for their behavior. They portray themselves as powerless in their actions and, often, incapable of change. The details of how they blamed others for their anger is different. However, in each situation, these individuals failed to recognize that their tendency to blame others only strengthened their perceived powerlessness and–in turn– their likelihood of blaming others.

It is one thing to suggest that an event contributed to triggering our anger. It is an entirely different issue to suggest that others are responsible for our feelings, their intensity and how we manage them.

Steps to Reduce Your Tendency to Blame Others

1. Recognize it when it occurs.

2. Reflect on the purpose it serves you. What feelings are you trying to avoid?

3. Cultivate increased self-compassion to recognize that being human involves making mistakes, having flaws and weaknesses.

4 Recognize how your tendency for global thinking contributes to blaming.

5. Look for your contribution to your suffering.

If you’ve ever gone through a difficult time (a breakup, a job loss), you’ve probably heard some of these phrases ad nauseam from friends and family. People who say them no doubt have good intentions; they’re simply trying to put a rosy filter on the tough time you’re having. “It gets better, stay optimistic,” they assure you.

But if statements like this are all you’re hearing from your friends and family, that excess of positivity can be, well, negative.

This kind of encouragement and self-talk is so common that mental health experts have a name for it: toxic positivity.

“Toxic positivity is the idea that we should focus only on positive emotions and the positive aspects of life,” said Heather Monroe, a clinical social worker and director of program development at Newport Institute. “It’s the belief that if we ignore difficult emotions and the parts of our life that aren’t working as well, we’ll be much happier.”

The problem is, toxic positivity oversimplifies the human brain and how we process emotions, and it can actually be detrimental to our mental health, Monroe said.

Last week, our social media feeds were flooded by the image of Dr Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert, telling US senators that the country was “going in the wrong direction”. The image had a vivid, layered power. Not only did it feel like a national death knell, but Fauci’s appearance – in an imperial-red face mask emblazoned with the insignia of baseball’s Washington Nationals – seemed to signal another culture war. Fauci was making a comment about how to maintain one’s masculinity while wearing a face mask.

Fauci apparently isn’t the only one anxious about face masks impeding his masculinity. The shock jock Joe Rogan, known for his massive following of male listeners, recently suggested that only “bitches” wear masks. Donald Trump Jr was photographed at a packed party in the Hamptons, like a baddie from a John Hughes film, conspicuously sans mask.