The Amish method of dating makes sense to me.

Ex-Amish social media creator Lovina Hershberger Zook, who has amassed some six million followers sharing Amish recipes and stories, explains the traditions of dating in the community she grew up in, one of the most conservative among the Amish.

The 23-year-old tells @faithsalie… pic.twitter.com/tRylTEwCZm

— CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 (@CBSSunday) August 14, 2026

They get in bed together from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. and talk or sleep. If it goes well they do it again 2 weeks later. This seems more likely to find what you need in a life partner than sitting across a table in a bar or restaurant. More likely to lead to a rewarding and deep or amusing conversation. 

That made me think of this "Modern Love" discussion in the NYT: "Am I Too Anxious for Love? Jenny Singer worried the deep, loving relationship she wanted wasn’t something her brain would let her have" (gift link).

"He does not appear to have suffered much stigma from living at home, and for several months even dated a woman he had met..."

"... at a cafe where he worked part time to burn off anxious energy. 'We ended up bonding really hard — we’re both writers,' said Mr. Balmat, who hopes to publish a novel someday. 'We were both really passionate about what we were doing, struggling to figure out how to turn it into money.' When he invited his girlfriend over to hang out, the attention from his parents was sometimes embarrassing. 'They would both drop in on us if we’re watching a movie on the couch, to be like, "Can I get anybody any snacks?"' But his girlfriend took it in stride. It turned out she had moved back home, too."

From "Moving Back Home After College? All Your Friends Are Doing It. More young adults are living with their parents. The development suggests that they face a weak job market, but also that fewer face stigma in returning to the roost" (NYT gift link).

Parents are only sometimes embarrassing.

Your job in a café is only a way to "burn off anxious energy."

I don't know. Maybe this is the stuff of a worthy novel. Actually it feels like a TV sitcom. A really old-timey one. I'm picturing Balmat's mother as a June Cleaver type. And Balmat is Wally. Gee, Mom.

"We do not become good readers and learners by mastering generalizable skills but rather by acquiring the vocabulary, grammatical knowledge and stock of information..."

"... that allow us to make sense of a text. A child who knows a lot about baseball will do a better job reading and summarizing a passage on baseball than a child with a higher reading level but no knowledge of the subject. From this perspective, it is better to read a classic than a relatable contemporary story not only because one is beautiful and the other is not, but because a classic, by the very fact of its persistence over time, has become part of our shared culture. It thus increases our conversancy with all the texts from that culture. That is why it makes sense for fifth graders in Texas to read 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,' 'The Phantom Tollbooth,' 'Paul Revere’s Ride' and even, speaking of baseball, 'Casey at the Bat.'"

I'm reading "What Blue States Can Learn From the Texas Book List" and "Texas Book List: See What Students Will Be Required to Read/What is essential reading? Texas has an answer: Classics, including the Bible" (NYT gift links).

I liked reading that booklist. Interesting to see various Bible readings pop up amid the poems and storybooks. You know what the first Bible story is? I comes up in Kindergarten: Jonah 1:1-5, 10-17, 2:10. What translation?, I wonder. And what verses are skipped over? Are the little ones going to read...

The water came over me and choked me;

the sea covered me completely,
and seaweed wrapped around my head.
I went down to the very roots of the mountains,
into the land whose gates lock shut forever

"Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th-century Danish philosopher and father of existentialism, saw in the fear of heights a metaphor for all human anxiety."

"Standing at a precipice, Kierkegaard imagined, a person becomes instantly and acutely aware of their power to jump — and with it, the dizzying breadth of human freedom...."

Writes Chris Hippensteel, in "To Confront My Fear of Heights, I Crossed a Chasm on a Cable/A jittery hiker signed up for a via ferrata tour on the cliffs of an Adirondacks gorge. Here’s what he learned on the ledges, rungs and exposed bridges" (NYT gift link).

"Despite their dramatic vertical settings, via ferratas are, in terms of technical difficulty, not that far removed from a playground jungle gym. Climbers are harnessed in along the entire route, keeping at least one carabiner clipped to the safety cable at all times. Though the danger is limited, the exposure is not — exactly the type of challenge I was seeking...."

So it's like a roller coaster or a horror movie — packaged, safe fear. You're not really experiencing what  Kierkegaard was talking about because you've got a harness and are always clipped to the cable. You don't have the freedom to jump.

If he had the chance — did he? — would Kierkegaard ride a roller coaster?

"Plants depend on carbon dioxide to perform photosynthesis — but that doesn’t mean they grow better when there’s more carbon in the air, scientists say."

"A sweeping survey of changes among 32 compounds in 43 crops found that nearly every plant that humans eat is harmed by rising CO2 levels. 'As a scientist, it’s really interesting,' said Sterre F. ter Haar, an environmental scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead author of the survey, published in November. 'As a person … you don’t want to see such a shift, because it’s so negative.' For the past several years, ter Haar and her colleagues have worked to compile a database of all existing research on nutrient changes linked to rising CO2.... Next the team used their dataset to calculate the nutritional densities of each crop under different carbon dioxide levels — and to predict how their composition could continue to shift in the future. On average, they found, nutrients have already decreased by an average 3.2 percent across all plants since the late 1980s, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 350 parts per million...."

From "Carbon pollution is making food less nutritious" (WaPo). That's a gift link, so you can figure out the science and whether this is a case of lying with statistics.

It occurs to me that percentages of nutrients would change if plants just contain more water, but a plant composed of more water might be more appetizing, so just eat a bit more of it. I'm always suspicious of articles that stir up climate-change anxiety.

"Perhaps you’ve noticed.... Amid all the cars that are parked headfirst, a seemingly increasing number have instead been backed in."

"These dissenters face out, like getaway drivers in a bank robbery ready to make a clean escape. Some people, myself included, find the move annoying. William Van Tassel, the manager of driver training programs for AAA... said that perhaps it was because they were following AAA’s updated guidelines.... My own theory is that reversing into a space is a response to the ambient anxiety in our society, akin to privately noting the exits in a movie theater. In a nation of rampant gun violence, backing in so you can quickly get out provides a sense of security.... [Van Tassel] cited a 2020 study from the journal Transportation Research that found, among other things, that the pull-in, back-out maneuver had a higher crash risk. Since pedestrians are most likely to be found walking in the major lanes, not in a parking space, it’s safer to back into the area with fewer people.... But I can’t bring myself to join in, and I don’t fully accept the safety argument. Since 2018, new vehicles sold in the United States have been federally mandated to have backup cameras, which can assist in reversing out of a spot without plowing into someone...."

I'm reading "Do You Back Into a Parking Spot or Back Out? An exploration of what’s driving a change in America’s parking lots" (NYT).

Those who do back up — is it for safety? Do other people believe it's for safety? As the male author of the NYT article says: "My wife suspects they’re mostly men showing off." Ha ha. That's what I think too. And by the way, I've always been quick to suspect that people are just showing off. I was much worse about that when I was much younger. I can honestly say that when NASA put a man on the moon in 1969, I thought they were showing off. I looked away! The moon landing was a very big thing; backing into a parking space is a very little thing. In things big and small, I am ready to disrespect the achievement as a matter of showing off. A lateral thinker will therefore ask: What's bad about showing off? Where would we be without it?

"After years of inarticulate unease in social situations, they felt freed by the framework of neurodivergence, and embraced by the community that came along with it."

"Since then I’ve heard accounts from people who received midlife diagnoses of binge eating disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety. Nearly all of them said the diagnosis provided relief. Sometimes it led to an effective treatment. But sometimes, simply identifying the problem — putting a name to it — seemed to help...."

From "Autism, A.D.H.D., Anxiety: Can a Diagnosis Make You Better? As our diagnostic categories expand to include ever milder versions of disease, researchers propose that the act of naming a malady can itself bring relief" (NYT).

"A few years ago, critics began to say that this trend had overshot and was beginning to do real harm. Some say that enlargement of the tent has come at a cost to the most severely ill people, who have lost the attention of the medical establishment. Others say it’s not helping people with milder illnesses, either, especially if they are young. Diagnosis, they say, can set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy.... Researchers, digging into the downstream effects of diagnoses, are beginning to see this effect play out over the long term. Diagnoses do lock you in...."

Not mentioned in the article: transgenderism.

Do you picture the desk jobs of others like this?

I think this is, essentially, how Elon Musk pictures 90% of the federal workforce:

"You would have to hike for days to catch the same views they saw travelling through.... She likens a moving train to 'the ultimate dolly'..."

"... the wheeled cart that allows a film camera to capture travelling, panoramic shots. It was 'bonkers' to discover how close the tracks ran to the rivers; on the west coast they were so close to the sea they were practically in it. There’s a snobbery, too, about certain states, which is both political and aesthetic. The central states are often dismissed as the 'flyover states' — miles and miles of cornfields worth seeing only from 35,000ft. But, Edwards says, the 'middle of nowhere' often gave her the most exciting shots. 'You could just see such a long way.... And when you did see something significant, it made it almost more unbelievable that it might be able to exist so far from all other activities.' The emptiness sometimes made her feel anxious.... 'Have I got enough shots? Is this interesting enough? Where is everybody? Where are all the animals?'"

From "Why I spent 180 hours on a train across America (with my dad)/Katie Edwards travelled 10,000 miles on Amtrak, taking 20,000 photographs on the way. She tells Laura Freeman what she saw out of the window" (London Times).

Edwards grew up in the Lake District in England, which makes me think of William Wordsworth and his dedication to walking. Walking, you can always stop and look at whatever you want. It's easy to take photographs (or, if you must, write a poem in your head, stomping out the meter). But I like Edwards's train photography project. It was easy to catch sight of many more things, but difficult to get the shots at the right time (and to deal with reflections in the window glass). 

I like seeing the outsider's view of America:

"On set, Scorsese made one big stipulation. He ordered Dunne not to have sex for the duration of the shoot."

"I am gobsmacked by this, but the actor was unfazed. 'It made perfect sense to me,' he says. 'I knew what he meant. The character had to be boiling over with this unfulfilled anxiety. You had to see …' He pauses. 'Not to be crude, but you had to see the semen build up to where it’s practically coming out of his eyes.' One Saturday night, though, Dunne cracked and broke the rule. The next day of filming, Scorsese spotted the change and went berserk. 'You’ve fucked up the whole picture,' he shouted. 'I don’t think I can finish it now.' Dunne says that he was probably being directed here, too. 'Because now I’m afraid. I’m terrified. And it turns out that a certain level of fear is the same as not having sex. So [Scorsese’s] second piece of direction is telling me that I’ve ruined his movie. That’s excellent direction. It brought all the old anxiety back.'"

From "I’ll never forgive or forget’ – Griffin Dunne on the darkness that overtook his gilded Hollywood upbringing/Griffin Dunne’s memoir is full of wonderful tales about Martin Scorsese, Carrie Fisher and Madonna. But the killing in 1982 of his 22-year-old sister – and the subsequent trial – overshadows everything" (The Guardian).

If a male director did that to a female....

Anyway... the Scorsese movie in question is "After Hours":

"I never used to talk to myself. Now I do it constantly."

"When I asked my middle-aged friends if they did it, too, the confessions flooded in. One said that when she texts people, she says the message out loud when she’s typing, even in public. 'I just looked in my cabinet and said aloud, "Please, god, let there be vanilla extract,"' said another. Do middle-aged people talk to themselves all day, every day? And is this a problem? I consulted some experts."

Writes Jancee Dunn, in "I’m Middle-Aged, and I Talk to Myself All Day/There, I said it" (NYT).

Unfortunately, the experts — there are experts on what's "called private speech or external self-talk" — hadn't studied the phenomenon of talking to yourself more as you age. So the author didn't get the reassurance she seems to have sought: It's a very common development in middle age.

I see that more than one commenter over there says I talk to myself, but I'm not really talking to myself, I'm talking to my cat/dog. Now, this is one reason I don't want a dog. I'm pretty sure it would cause me to talk to it all the time, and I think that would change my pattern of thoughts into things one says to a dog. 

Actually, I think the practice of speaking aloud would change what I'm thinking. Even if there is no listener to make me ask is this intelligible? is this boring?, putting things into speakable words absorbs my attention. I would imagine a listener. 

But the external self-talk discussed in the article sounds like speaking you would limit to yourself because it would annoy another person: expressing anxiety, encouraging yourself, asking where you put various items, narrating squirrel antics. And it's no wonder such spoken-aloud thoughts make you worry you're slipping into an unwholesome version of old age. You're fussing endlessly over trifles. That's something you can do silently, but when you do it out loud, you get a bit of distance on yourself: you hear that person and you think she's turning into that stereotype of an old person I've always worried I'd become.

"Too much choice is not a good thing. The anxious person is the one who doesn’t know what to do because..."

"... she can do so many things. The neurotic individual is paralysed by the sense that he can’t make the right decision because another one is always available to him. The apparently limitless options afforded to us by dating apps and social media has not made us more content; it has merely intensified our longing."

From "Make coffee. Shower. Clean the loo. In an age of choice, rituals are the key to happiness/Wim Wenders’ film Perfect Days is on to something with its depiction of main character Hirayama’s calm, habitual life" (The Guardian).

From The Guardian review of the movie:

"'Following my therapist’s advice, I’m taking a day off tomorrow to recharge my energies to continue giving the best in my sessions. Can we reschedule?'"

"So messaged my 26-year-old spin instructor. When I expressed mild frustration to a twentysomething colleague that our class had been cancelled, she seemed surprised. 'Have you been therapised?' she asked. No, I haven’t, but Gen Z increasingly have. They know how to gatekeep their time, creating boundaries and promoting self-care and are triggered when their feelings have been invalidated or they aren’t given time to heal from toxic relationships...."

Writes Alice Thompson, in "Gen Z need life lessons more than therapy/A sense of purpose and decent careers advice would help youngsters stressed out by global uncertainty and war" (London Times).

She's reading "Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up," a new book by Abigail Shrier (commission earned).

Yesterday, I blogged an excerpt from that book, and I also listened to the Bari Weiss podcast interview with Shrier and am in the middle of Joe Rogan's new episode with Shrier. Here's a excerpt of that:

Shrier is on the move this week, not exactly trashing therapy, but trying awfully hard to cut it down to size. What is the right size though? How much of a role is appropriate? It's not just a matter of the quality of the therapists, for Shrier. She favors working out your own problems, the old-fashioned way, and only resorting to therapy for substantial mental illness.

"Limerence is a state of overwhelming and unexpected longing for emotional reciprocation from another human, known as a limerent object..."

"... who is often perceived as perfect but unavailable.... The LO is most often a friend, colleague, or stranger met in passing... 'It’s often not romantic or sexual in nature. It is very much about wanting to feel loved and cared for.'... We begin to mistake anxiety for excitement and excitement for joy.... One strategy... to de-idolize their LO is listing reasons the LO is not perfect... [or the] ways in which the LO and the patient are not compatible. Name it to tame it: You can deliberately interrupt the habit by calling it out — 'Hello, limerence' — and paying attention (for example, through journaling) to what it feels like when you’re in that state of longing.... You should also believe you deserve more...."

From "Is It a Crush or Have You Fallen Into Limerence? How an intense longing for a romantic connection can lead to a serious addiction" (NYT).

The article says the word "limerance" was coined by the psychologist Dorothy Tennov, and the OED finds her first use of it in print in 1977. 

That first quote denies any etymology: "I first used the term ‘amorance’ then changed it back to ‘limerence’... It has no roots whatsoever. It looks nice. It works well in French. Take it from me it has no etymology whatsoever."

So if you were seeing a connection to "sublime" or "limn," just forget about it. If you can't forget it, make a list of things that are rootless, nice looking, and well functioning in French.

"After six months or so in the womb of the cave, Flamini succumbed to its rhythms. She stopped trying to track time..."

"... because doing so had only added to her anxiety. She became neither hopeful nor despairing. 'In the cave, the line of time disappears, and everything floats around you,' she told me.  'A while ago I was born. A while ago I was going to visit Mongolia. There is no past, there is no future. Everything is present, everything is a while ago, and it’s all brutal and strange.' One temporal marker remained. After five defecations, she would carry her waste, in plastic pouches, up to the exchange point, and then hurry back down.... There came a moment, she told me, when she thought that she was dying. It felt like an act not of suicide but of release: 'There was no difference between what I was feeling then and what I understand as death.'"

From "The Woman Who Spent Five Hundred Days in a Cave/Beatriz Flamini liked to be alone so much that she decided to live underground—and pursue a world record. The experience was gruelling and surreal" (The New Yorker).

"On the Ballot in Iowa: Fear. Anxiety. Hopelessness."

A NYT article.

I'm linking if only to marvel at the photograph at the top of the page. The faces! Caption: "Vivek Ramaswamy spoke to voters at a town-hall meeting at Wellman’s Pub and Rooftop in Des Moines. Credit... Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times." 

The  article, by Lisa Lerer, is subtitled, "As Monday’s caucuses approach, voters casually throw around the prospect of World War III and civil unrest, anxious of divisions they fear are tearing the country apart."

Key concept: Anxiety.

Four years ago, voters worried about a spiraling pandemic, economic uncertainty and national protests. Now, in the first presidential election since the siege on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, those anxieties have metastasized into a grimmer, more existential dread about the very foundations of the American experiment....

But isn't it this fearful fragility the real threat to democracy? Why do mainstream media stoke despair and anxiety? Why don't they — why don't we — build our resiliency and optimism?

"Like many other Americans struggling to find scraps of calm and slivers of hope in this anxious era..."

"... I resolved a while back not to get overly excited about Donald Trump’s overexcited utterances.... But I can’t shake a grandiose prophecy that he made repeatedly last year as he looked toward the 2024 presidential race. He took to calling it the 'final battle.'... [A]s he continued to rave biblically... my reaction changed, and it surprised me: He just may be right. Not in his cartoonish description of that conflict... but in terms of how profoundly meaningful the 2024 election could be...."

Writes Frank Bruni, in the NYT.

What I hear him saying in those opening lines to his column is: I'm not going to let Trump play me... and yet I just can't resist.

Bruni resolved not to get overly excited, so he's got his loophole. He's sticking with his resolve, but he still can get excited... whenever excitement is appropriate. He's not overly excited. Just the right amount of excited. 

Me, I am far more deeply resolved not to let Trump rhetoric excite me. I am a cool and distant observer. To me, the things he says are merely bloggable or not bloggable. I listen to Trump and to the people he plays — one way or another. I'm not one of the many Americans "struggling to find scraps of calm and slivers of hope in this anxious era." How can you struggle to find calm? To struggle is to be uncalm. How can calmness come in scraps?

Back to Bruni and skipping into the middle of things:

If the people on the losing side of an election believe that those on the winning side are digging the country’s graveyard, how do they accept and respect the results? The final battle we may be witnessing is between a governable and an ungovernable America, a faintly civil and a floridly uncivil one....

Ha ha, I skimmed over the context and, for an instant, I couldn't tell which side was which. Either side, losing, will go nuts looking for some way out, won't they? I lived through the Wisconsin uprising of 2011. 

But, of course, I know what I'm reading, what side Bruni is on, and that the general rule in politics is — as we say in Wisconsin — "All the assholes are over on the other side."

"Psychedelic medicine-assisted therapy also can support a patient in exploring the enormous and complex feelings associated with eco-anxiety and climate grief...."

"In my clinical practice, patients using oral ketamine plus psychotherapy have experienced breakthroughs and new insights when working with the intention of navigating eco-anxiety. Many patients said they felt connected to a sense of oceanic oneness, reminding them of the meaningful interconnectedness of their lives with others and offering context for their personal narrative.... Psychedelics can also teach us how to experience and hold intense emotions that feel too much to bear, allowing for the ability to observe our suffering in a new way...."

Writes Emily Willow, "a board certified psychiatrist, researcher, educator and advocate for psychedelic medicine," in "How psychedelic therapy may help with climate change anxiety/Eco-anxiety and climate grief are unlike other issues in psychiatry because the feelings extend to something greater than ourselves and our personal narrative" (WaPo).

So we've worried our young people into a state of high anxiety and the next stage is to offer them psychedelic drugs.

I'm having a flashback.

"[Ryan] Carson was also a published poet – who once penned a poem called 'Anxiety' about fears over his own death – namely about the 'inconvenience' his passing would cause others."

"'That it could come while someone waits for me, that I couldn’t call to let them know I was held up,' he wrote in the poem."

From "NYC man, 32, fatally stabbed by unhinged suspect was do-gooder activist and poet" (NY Post)("'He’s really… like the epicenter of an entire community that he created, that he brought together'... the roommate said. 'He was the guy that bent over backward time and time again to be there with his friends'").

See also, "Disturbing video shows moment beloved activist, poet is randomly stabbed to death in front of girlfriend on NYC street" (NY Post)("Suddenly, the unhinged man turns to Carson and seethes: 'What the f–k are you looking at?' The beloved community activist – who replied that he wasn’t looking at anything – then stepped between his girlfriend and the irate stranger....'").

From the comments at the second link, the kind of victim-blaming that is, at its core, self-soothing: "Who sits on a bench on a street in Bed Stuy at 4:00 am."

"This being a classical virtual-reality school, Optima’s environments include settings in ancient Greece and Rome...."

"We teleported past a Roman official’s house, decked out with red-clay roof tiling, up some stairs to an open patio of black-and-white-checkered marble floors, surrounded by Ionic columns and an ivy-covered railing. Here, a teacher might spawn a set of bleachers for students to sit during a lecture on a subject such as history or Latin.... Toward the end of the school year, I joined a sixth-grade science class on a field trip to an Everest base camp. The scene was elaborately staged: our group was surrounded by gray tents held up by bright orange poles.... A whiteboard stood to our left in the snow, covered with colorful Post-its bearing scientific terms. The teacher had taken a selfie of his avatar wearing an orange mountain-explorer jumpsuit and put it on the board. Wind whistled quietly somewhere in the background of my headset....

I'm reading "Virtual-Reality School Is the Next Frontier of the School-Choice Movement/The conservative education activist Erika Donalds envisions a world where parents can opt out of traditional public school by putting their kids in a headset" (The New Yorker).