Identification Taxi Driver, directed by Martin Scorsese in 1976 and starring Robert De Niro in the role that made lonely men with notebooks a permanent cultural threat, does not ask you to like Travis Bickle. It asks you to sit with him until his isolation starts to feel like moral clarity. The voiceover isn’t insight....

I’m not writing this as an outsider who just discovered the internet and decided to have opinions. I’m writing this as someone who actually joined a garin, which is a small group of young people who commit to building a shared life in Israel. Not as a vibe. As a real, inconvenient life decision. I...

The Pattern of Autonomy If you’ve ever noticed that cults eventually get weird about sex, good for you. You noticed the pattern everyone pretends is accidental. It isn’t. Cults can survive bad predictions, failed prophecies, and leaders who lie constantly. What they cannot tolerate for long is private autonomy. Sex is where autonomy lives. WHY...

People love to think cults only happen to uneducated people. Then they meet someone who read Freud or Jung once and now explains the entire universe with it. Same brain. Better vocabulary. Cults aren’t a failure of intelligence. They’re a failure of humility.1 Freud and Jung both understood how easily thinking turns into believing. Their...

They’re not. Cults are about what happens to perfectly normal brains when certainty starts feeling safer than thinking.1 Which explains a lot of family dinners. WHAT A CULT ACTUALLY IS A cult is not a belief you dislike. That’s just the internet being the internet. A cult is what happens when a group trains your...

I have lost count of how many times someone has asked me,“What do you think about this because you’re a psychiatrist?”1 Or, “Are you analyzing me right now?”2 Or my personal favorite, whispered like I’m scanning their soul with airport security equipment, “You people frighten me.”3 People imagine psychiatrists diagnosing strangers the way botanists identify...

Before You Diagnose Yourself, Diagnose the Country People keep walking into psychiatric offices saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” as if their brain spontaneously malfunctioned. A real issue for most people is not internal. It is environmental. We are living in a country where the emotional climate feels like a smoke alarm that...

If America has a tradition, it isn’t baseball or apple pie. It is ignoring experts until disaster strikes, then swearing we will never do it again… until we do. Most people think medicines magically appear in orange bottles because some CVS elf worked overtime in the stockroom. Behind every pill is centuries of messy trial...