Gazing up at the faintly smiling Buddha, the Chinese youths kneel, raise smoldering sticks of incense in clasped hands, and silently make their wishes. Then they bow deeply, three times.  Thousands of young people from around the country are making the pilgrimage to Yonghe Temple, a sprawling Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Beijing, to pray for good fortune – especially in finding jobs.  “A lot of young people here are praying to the Buddha to help Top leader Xi Jinping is calling on young people to go labor in rural areas and temper themselves with hardship, as he did back in…

There is an old joke that goes something like this: “Why do Baptists forbid fornication?” “Because it might lead to dancing.” It came to me after a conversation I had with an Australian colleague who has been studying psychoanalytic psychotherapy at an institution in the United States. She was appalled and deeply saddened by her experiences within this institution during the period of the Corona War, because her instructors – seasoned and long-experienced psychoanalysts – were so ‘captured’ by the pro-pandemic pro-jab pro-mask dictates that they brooked no disagreement.  Bear in mind that psychoanalysis, at its inception during fin de siècle Vienna, when Freud…

The American Medical Association found that even as the total number of pediatric emergency room visits declined, mental-health-related visits among children, teenagers, and young adults surged between 2011 and 2020, from 4.8 million to 7.5 million. In that span, psychiatric patients' share of all pediatric and young-adult E.R. visits nearly doubled, from 7.7 to 13.1 percent. While visits related to psychosis, depression, drug and alcohol abuse increased, the New York Times reported that the share of admissions related to suicide nearly quadrupled, from 0.9 to 4.2 percent of all pediatric E.R. visits. This finding dovetails with a study we covered two years ago, which found the…

Just an hour east of the cobblestoned streets and brightly colored Spanish colonial buildings of San Juan, a symphony of bird calls and croaking coquí frogs echoes along the first backpacking trail in a U.S. tropical rainforest. Puerto Rico’s new NorEste (Northeast) Trail takes hikers from the coral reefs and bioluminescent lagoon of Fajardo to the highest peak in El Yunque National Forest—a 28,000-acre tropical rainforest known for its beauty and biodiversity. Only 25 to 50 hikers a day will be allowed to experience the 40-mile, three- to five-day adventure. While the official route is about 90 percent complete, you can already…

Tlthough most famous for her work on another banality, Hannah Arendt wrote forcefully against the use of cliché verbiage. Said Arendt, “clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.” This seems especially true for those of us who work in media, on both the right and the left. Phrases such as “coastal elites” and “the mainstream media,” not to mention the banality that is “making space” for transgender voices, all too often stand in for actual thought. Such clichés do our thinking for us, and when we…