Sports in astrology connects a natal chart with physical ability, competition, and performance. It looks at how planetary energy shapes strength, speed, discipline, and the drive to win.

An athlete’s chart shows patterns linked with movement, endurance, and reaction. Key factors include Mars, specific houses, and the balance of elements.

What Is Sports Astrology?

Sports astrology studies how birth charts relate to athletic ability and competitive success. It focuses on both physical traits and mental readiness.

It also separates casual activity from professional sports. A strong combination of planets and houses often points to a career path in athletics.

The Role of Planets in Sports Astrology

Mars in Sports Astrology: Energy and Competitive Drive

Mars rules strength, aggression, and action. A strong Mars often appears in charts of athletes with high stamina and strong will.

Its placement shows how a person competes. Hard aspects increase intensity, while supportive ones improve control.

Sun in Sports Astrology: Confidence and Leadership

The Sun reflects self-confidence and the desire to stand out. It connects with leadership and recognition in competitions.

A strong Sun often links with athletes who aim for first place. It also supports visibility and fame.

Mercury in Sports Astrology: Speed and Coordination

Mercury governs reaction time and coordination. Fast decision-making depends on its strength.

It links with sports where timing matters. Examples include tennis, boxing, and strategy-based games.

Saturn in Sports Astrology: Discipline and Endurance

Saturn connects with routine, training, and persistence. Long-term success often depends on its placement.

It shows how a person handles pressure and repetition. Strong Saturn supports structured training habits.

Jupiter in Sports Astrology: Growth and Success

Jupiter links with expansion and achievement. It often appears in charts of well-known athletes.

It can indicate recognition, titles, and progress. Its influence supports growth over time.

Moon in Sports Astrology: Instinct and Emotional Control

The Moon relates to instinct and emotional balance. It affects performance under pressure.

A stable Moon helps maintain focus during competition. It also influences rhythm and flow.

Astrological Houses in Sports Astrology

3rd House in Sports Astrology: Movement and Courage

The 3rd house relates to action, effort, and physical skills. It reflects courage and willingness to take risks.

Strong placements here often appear in active individuals. It supports fast reactions and hands-on activity.

6th House in Sports Astrology: Competition and Discipline

The 6th house connects with training, routine, and competition. It shows how a person handles rivals.

It also reflects daily effort and consistency. Strong influence here supports steady improvement.

10th House in Sports Astrology: Career and Recognition

The 10th house relates to public image and professional success. It shows whether sports can become a career.

Strong placements here link with fame and achievements. It reflects long-term goals.

5th House in Sports Astrology: Passion and Games

The 5th house relates to enjoyment and creative expression. It connects with sports as a form of fun.

It also shows natural talent and enthusiasm. Strong influence here supports early interest in activity.

11th House in Sports Astrology: Teamwork and Achievements

The 11th house connects with group activity and goals. It links with team sports and cooperation.

It also reflects rewards and achievements. Strong placements here support success in group settings.

1st House in Sports Astrology: Physical Body and Strength

The 1st house relates to the body and overall vitality. It shows natural physical ability.

Strong placements often link with visible athletic traits. It reflects stamina and presence.

Also read: The 8 Best Sports for Losing Weight

Zodiac Signs and Sports Astrology

Fire Signs: Aries, Leo, Sagittarius

Fire signs connect with energy and action. They often lean toward intense and competitive sports.

They show strong motivation and desire to win. This group fits combat sports and fast-paced activity.

Earth Signs: Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn

Earth signs relate to stability and endurance. They handle long training cycles and physical strain.

They often succeed in strength-based sports. Consistency defines their approach.

Air Signs: Gemini, Libra, Aquarius

Air signs connect with speed and thinking. They adapt quickly and react fast.

They often fit sports requiring coordination and strategy. Team dynamics also suit them well.

Water Signs: Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces

Water signs relate to flow and rhythm. They move smoothly and rely on instinct.

They often match swimming, dance, and similar activities. Emotional control shapes their performance.

Aspects in Sports Astrology

Planetary aspects describe how energies interact. Strong connections shape athletic ability.

Important patterns include:

• Mars with Sun → strong drive and confidence
• Mars with Saturn → controlled strength and discipline
• Mercury with Mars → fast reactions
• Jupiter with Sun → growth and recognition

Hard aspects increase intensity. Soft aspects support balance and flow.

Ascendant and Physical Strength in Sports Astrology

The Ascendant reflects body type and physical presence. It shows how energy appears externally.

The ruling planet adds detail about strength and stamina. Its placement shapes overall athletic style.

Sports Career in Astrology

Professional sports require a mix of factors. Strong links between the 3rd, 6th, and 10th houses often appear.

Mars and Saturn together support both energy and discipline. The Sun and Jupiter add recognition and success.

Types of Sports Based on Astrology

Different elements match different sports styles. This helps connect personality with activity.

Many astrology-based insights and practical interpretations can also be found on astrozodify.com, where sports astrology topics are explained in a simple and structured way. This helps better understand how planetary patterns connect with real athletic performance.

• Fire → combat sports, sprinting
• Earth → endurance, weight training
• Air → team sports, strategy games
• Water → swimming, rhythmic sports

Each element shows a different approach to movement and competition.

Timing in Sports Astrology

Astrology also looks at timing. Planetary cycles influence performance phases.

Mars cycles often connect with bursts of energy. Jupiter periods link with success, while Saturn reflects hard work phases.

Sports Astrology in Vedic Astrology

Vedic astrology uses planetary periods called dashas. These periods show when certain results appear.

Strong Mars periods often link with athletic growth. The 3rd house also carries strong weight in this system.

Limitations of Sports Astrology

Astrology shows tendencies, not guarantees. Physical ability also depends on training and environment.

Charts highlight potential, not fixed outcomes. Effort and lifestyle still shape results.

Conclusion

Sports in astrology connects physical ability with planetary patterns. It combines Mars energy, key houses, and elements.

A full chart gives a clearer picture than a single factor. When all pieces align, athletic potential becomes easier to recognize.

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This content is brought to you by Phoenix Star

Photos provided by the contributor.

The post Sports in Astrology: Meaning, Houses, Planets, Athletic Potential and Career Indicators appeared first on The Good Men Project.

By Rupert Read

The severity of the risks faced by countries like the UK, combined with the impossibility of agreeing precisely on their nature, demands a fairly fundamental shift in climate discourse and action. The UK, like almost all nations, is profoundly unprepared for crises coming from climate chaos and ecological breakdown and likely from elsewhere too (Step forward, AI…). Whatever their form, such crises appear increasingly likely, as even evidence from the UK security community indicates. Despite the lessons of COVID-19, a serious approach to forward-looking resilience remains absent, and perhaps nowhere more critically than in the face of catastrophic risk of climate and ecological breakdown.

For too long, discourses around systems change in response to ecological breakdown have revolved around debates that will not resolve themselves until it is too late to prepare adequately for the possibilities being discussed. We should move on to formulating and undertaking responses to outcomes that both experts and the population agree are plausible, but which are not necessarily provable. In a world of increasing uncertainty and instability, these are the outcomes that matter.

Interminable debates include the validity of forecasts based on models, scientific interpretations of complex and unclear evidence, the sustainability of our economic systems, and the impact of potential innovations such as nuclear fusion and direct air capture. Resolving these debates within society as a whole, not merely reaching agreement among experts, is not credible for many reasons. Views on the future differ dramatically because of unprovable assumptions about technological ‘wildcards’. Debates are influenced by profound ideological resistance, motivated reasoning, and the inherent indeterminacy of cutting-edge research itself, both on climate science and technology. And unlike other scientific efforts there is no way for models of global environmental catastrophe to prove their predictive validity until it is too late to do anything about those predictions.

This is what our new report is centrally about: How we proceed sensibly, pragmatically, effectively, given the unwinnability of such debates.

We use the debate around degrowth as a case study. Degrowth is gaining traction in academic and activist communities, leading some advocates to conclude that a breakthrough into the social and political mainstream is just around the corner. However we argue that, whatever one’s evaluation of the evidence, the growth/degrowth debate remains in an important sense ‘unwinnable’, for the kind of reasons outlined in the previous paragraph.

Given this, it is a profound and dangerous illusion to believe that the massive, powerful, inertial forces of the growthist ideological status quo, or even the general public, are going to be intellectually convinced that degrowth is certainly correct in time to avoid catastrophe. Though debate must continue, we should not bet the earth on a decisive victory in the degrowth debate (or many other positions like it favoured by many in the climate movement and beyond). This risks leaving us unprepared for disaster(s). Even if these positions do turn out to be correct, it will be nigh on impossible for them to form the basis for massive, consensus-driven transformations in the timeframes we are bound to.

Our ‘unwinnability thesis’ demonstrates that the most productive path forward lies not in endless contention in the hope of honing a decisive winning argument, but in pursuing a more attainable consensus around what an adaptive response to the worst case scenario looks like. This necessitates great focus on creating a “Plan B”: having a strategy of “Strategic Adaptation” (including preparedness for potential societal breakdown) that is politically and culturally attractive. Such a plan should focus on concrete measures, irrespective of differing shades of belief about climate realities, or differing political affiliations. This implies devoting greater time to concretely planning for plausible disaster scenarios, building national and local resilience and building preparedness for disruption into our lives. This approach aligns with a growing expert consensus, which warns against an over-reliance on probability, let alone certainty, in risk planning.

Our report identifies two types of resilience building action which might form part of a plan B. ‘No regret’ actions will provide benefits whichever future comes to pass, while precautionary actions focus primarily on avoiding the worst consequences of potential risks. We discuss the role of each of these, and the potential co-benefits for motivating action and alignment that come from preparedness planning.

We call for action at both community and national government levels to build resilience against catastrophic climate risks.

At the community level, residents should build local resilience through community building and mutual aid, conduct local risk audits and invest in shared supplies, infrastructure and the bases of psychological resilience. This will among other things create salience and potentially shame among those operating at the political level.

At the national level, we call on government to urgently take the following steps:

>Develop a food security strategy that accounts for tipping point risks and prepares contingency measures such as rationing.

>Audit and harden other critical supply chains against climate and geopolitical shocks, with a view to reducing strategic long-supply-line dependency/vulnerability.

>Ensure critical national infrastructure is resilient to both extreme heat and cold, including the underappreciated risks of AMOC collapse.

>Normalise preparedness across the population through public campaigns, a Citizens Adaptation Toolkit, and support for psychological as well as practical resilience.

>Finally, develop and fund a comprehensive National Resilience Plan that goes well beyond the existing ‘National Adaptation Programme’, integrating scenario planning for worst-case outcomes and cascading global risks.

The overarching message is that given deep uncertainty about the scale and nature of coming climate impacts, prudent preparedness is not optional — it is a matter of (national) survival.

Our aspiration with this report is to offer an argument that bypasses unwinnable debates to reach a common ground that the clear majority can agree upon: that such prudence is nothing more or less than common sense. That it is high time we segued into having a back-up plan for things going catastrophically wrong; that the longer we lack such an active plan the more exposed we are. That we should focus much more on agreeing on what we can – and actually need to – agree on than on what divides us. That a sense of collective purpose can come from that kind of deeply pragmatic and mutually protective agreement.

We are intellectuals who have written a report. The point of the report is: to argue in favour of intellectual humility. Let’s rely less on convincing ‘the other side’ that they are wrong; more on common ground, and a new common sense. Let’s drop Enlightenment pretensions that don’t serve us, in a time of emerging crisis that demands thinking in the service of practical action.

Let’s at every level lean into creating a plan B. We hope you’ll read and share our report, and thus help to make it so.

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Previously Published on Resilience and reprinted with permission

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Here is a summary of the transcript from YouTube, slightly edited with AI.

Chasing, Cynicism & Modern Dating: A Candid Conversation

A Different Kind of Episode

Welcome back to the Love Life podcast. We’re doing something different today. We don’t have Audrey. We don’t have Stephen. It’s just me, Matthew Hussey, and you, David Kirk.

David explains that he wanted to shake things up—to bring in comments from the audience, challenge ideas, and ask questions I haven’t seen in advance. I haven’t read a single comment he’s bringing. And I like that. This is a chance not just to talk about what people want to hear, but to be challenged in ways portions of the audience might love.

If you enjoy this format, let us know at podcast@matthewhussey.com.

“You All Agree on Everything”

A comment reads: “This podcast would benefit so much from having a person with a different perspective. The three of them agree on everything.”

I actually think there have been times when that criticism had a point. When you spend so much time focused on women’s challenges, you can naturally become wired to that perspective and lose connection with what men are struggling with at the same time.

So yes—at times, men who’ve leveled that criticism may have had a point.

But I’m curious: What specifically do people feel isn’t being represented? If you think certain opinions aren’t getting airtime, email us and tell us. I enjoy debating ideas. I enjoy playing with them. I’m open to it.

Don’t Chase… Or Should You?

David brings up something interesting: the widespread advice online—“Don’t chase.”

He disagrees.

He describes himself as a tryer. Someone who has chased. Yes, it’s been embarrassing at times. Yes, it’s pushed people away. But he doesn’t regret it. He put himself out there. He survived rejection. And in his current relationship, that persistence mattered.

So have we swung too far toward “Don’t chase” without enough nuance?

Persistence vs. Neediness

I’d shift the word from chasing to persistence.

The key question is: Where is that persistence coming from?

• If it comes from “I need you,” that’s a problem.
• If it comes from “You’re wrong about me—I have something valuable here,” that’s different.

There’s something attractive about confidence-backed persistence. Especially when it’s paired with standards.

If you persist indefinitely without ever drawing a line, you lose attractiveness. But if you persist and have a point where you say, “If you don’t see my value, I stop,” that’s powerful.

Pride vs. Proactivity

I think of this as a scale between pride and proactivity.

If you go too far toward proactivity, you become someone who gets walked all over. If you go too far toward pride, you become someone who never risks rejection—and never really lives.

I value the word robustness—your ability to meet the world and survive the encounter.

Can you send the text and survive if it fails? Can you ask someone out and survive rejection?

People who obsess over “I would never double text” often betray insecurity. The more confident I’ve become, the more willing I am to put in effort—and also to stop when it’s no longer reciprocated.

Modern Dating & Cynicism

Are we in an unprecedented era of difficulty when it comes to finding love?

Every era had challenges. A hundred years ago, people faced economic hardship and limited freedom of choice. But today’s unique challenge is overstimulation.

We now have what feels like an infinite buffet of options—dating apps, Instagram, endless filtered profiles. We’re not designed to process this many options.

It creates decision paralysis.

We’re also at peak levels of distrust. You don’t know if photos are real. You don’t know if the person wrote their own messages. Add AI to that, and trust drops even further.

“It’s Always About Money”

A commenter writes: “It’s always about money. No matter how sophisticated tales women make it.”

Anyone can arrive at a place of deep frustration and disillusionment. You can find examples to support any belief. Yes, there are women who prioritize money. Just like there are men who prioritize looks.

But when you become convinced that’s the only reality, something deeper is happening.

If money is your biggest trigger, there’s a good chance it’s also your biggest insecurity.

I don’t have to look far in my life to find women who are not making decisions based on who has the most money. If someone truly believes “it’s always about money,” I wonder what social world they’ve embedded themselves in.

Standards Have Changed

Women today are more educated and financially independent than ever. That’s a good thing. But it changes the dating dynamic.

There was a time when being non-abusive and earning a paycheck was enough. It’s not anymore.

When women don’t need you for survival, they’re freer to choose based on deeper compatibility. That’s evolution.

But it also requires growth from both sides.

• Men have to evolve beyond “provider” as their primary value.
• Women have to get clear on what truly matters beyond income parity.

At some point, if everyone you date “only cares about money,” you may have to examine the world you’re choosing to play in.

Other people exist. Other value systems exist.

Where My Perspective Comes From

I was raised by strong women—my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, my aunt. Tough, resilient women who weathered storms.

So when I see women struggling, I don’t have to manufacture empathy. It’s personal. It’s raw. It’s not virtue signaling—it’s lived experience.

That’s where my resonance with women comes from. Not because I’m “a guy who understands men,” but because I’ve seen firsthand what women carry.

The Invitation

If you feel cynical about dating, I get it. I’ve been heartbroken. I’ve been left for someone who looked more the part. I know pain.

But we have a choice.

We can embed ourselves in a worldview that confirms our worst fears—or we can expand our world until we see counterexamples.

Robustness isn’t pretending rejection doesn’t hurt. It’s knowing you can survive it.

Proactivity isn’t chasing endlessly. It’s risking something—with standards.

And love today isn’t impossible. It’s just asking more of us than ever before.

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This post was previously published on YouTube.

Blog → https://www.howtogettheguy.com/blog/ Facebook → https://facebook.com/CoachMatthewHussey Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/thematthewh… Twitter → https://twitter.com/matthewhussey ▼ Connect with Stephen ▼ Youtube → https://bit.ly/StephenHusseyYoutube Instagram → http://bit.ly/StephenHusseyIG

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Following a serious accident, it is incredibly common for victims to feel a strong urge to handle their claims independently. This instinct is often driven by a desire to save on legal fees or avoid the perceived complexity of the legal system. To many, the process seems straightforward—exchange insurance information and wait for a fair settlement to arrive.

While self-representation may appear simpler at first, it can lead to costly mistakes that impact a victim for years. The legal process is governed by strict rules and technical requirements that are not always obvious until it’s too late. What seems like a basic negotiation is actually a high-stakes process where every statement and deadline can influence the outcome.

Navigating this process alone means moving forward without the guidance of an experienced advocate who understands the details of civil litigation. Seasoned attorneys like J.L. King, II recognize how small oversights can affect the strength of a case and work to ensure nothing is missed. Many individuals only realize later that successful personal injury claims depend on technical details that require professional insight. Understanding these risks early is key to protecting both your health and your long-term financial stability.

Statute of Limitations and Fatal Notice Requirements

The “Statute of Limitations” is the most absolute and unforgiving rule in the legal system, dictating the maximum time you have to file a lawsuit. If you miss this deadline by even a single day, your right to seek compensation is permanently barred, regardless of how severe your injuries are. For an unrepresented person, tracking these dates while managing a medical recovery is a high-stress and dangerous task.

Beyond the general statutes, many cases involving government entities require “Notice of Claim” filings within a very short window, sometimes as little as six months. These notice requirements are technical traps that defense attorneys use to dismiss legitimate cases before they ever reach a judge or jury. Failing to use the specific required language in these notices can also result in a total loss of your legal standing.

Professional legal teams use redundant calendaring systems to ensure that every filing deadline is met with total precision from the first day. They understand the different clocks that apply to various types of defendants and locations across the state. Protecting your right to be in court is a fundamental task that requires constant attention to the legal calendar and local procedural rules.

The Dangerous Trap of Unnegotiated Medical Liens

A “Medical Lien” is a legal claim made by your health insurance company or a hospital to be reimbursed from your final settlement. Many self-represented victims are shocked to find that after settling their case, their health provider demands every penny of the award to cover past bills. Without professional negotiation, you could end up with zero dollars in your pocket while still facing ongoing medical needs.

Attorneys are skilled at negotiating these liens down to a fraction of their original value, ensuring that more of the settlement stays with the victim. They use specific statutes and “common fund” doctrines to force insurance carriers to contribute to the legal costs of the recovery. This process requires a deep understanding of both state and federal laws regarding subrogation and healthcare reimbursement rights.

Failing to address these liens before signing a final settlement agreement can lead to a financial disaster for the injured party. The hospital or insurance company can pursue you personally for any unpaid balances if the settlement was not structured correctly. Managing these hidden debts is a critical part of a professional legal strategy that ensures you actually benefit from your recovery.

The True ROI of Professional Legal Advocacy

Summarizing the risks reveals that “saving” the contingency fee often costs the victim tens of thousands of dollars in lost settlement value. The expertise and resources that a lawyer brings to the table consistently result in higher payouts that more than cover the cost of the representation. It is a strategic investment in the quality of your recovery and the security of your family’s future.

Beyond the money, professional advocacy restores the victim’s peace of mind by removing the administrative burden of the legal process. Dealing with adjusters, doctors, and court clerks is a full-time job that no one should have to handle while they are trying to heal. A lawyer manages the stress so that you can focus on what matters most: your health and your family.

Ultimately, seeking justice after a traumatic event requires a disciplined and professional approach to the law and your insurance policy. You deserve to have the same level of expertise on your side as the billion-dollar corporations you are facing in the legal arena. High standards in representation lead to better, more stable, and more successful outcomes for victims seeking to rebuild their lives.

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This content is brought to you by Susan Melony

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By Charles Mpaka

• A new study in Kenya’s Mara conservancies finds lions increasingly avoiding areas used by Maasai livestock, even after the animals have moved on.
• Researchers suggest lions are responding not just to immediate encounters with herders but to past grazing pressure and perceived long-term risk.
• The findings raise questions about how livestock grazing may reshape predator behavior and wildlife use of shared landscapes.
• Experts say any grazing limits must balance conservation goals with Maasai livelihoods that depend heavily on livestock.

Lions, Africa’s largest predators, are a near-universal source of fear for the continent’s wildlife. But in Kenya, it’s the king of the jungle that’s now becoming fearful — of domestic livestock.

In Kenya, most wildlife is found outside formally protected areas. The lions, zebras and elephants that attract tourists mostly live in pastoralist rangeland. For farmers and herders, this can be both a curse — coexistence is hard work where predators sometimes attack livestock and cattle compete with wild herbivores for grass — and a blessing — many community-owned conservancies profitably lease portions of their land to tourism operators for safaris and lodges, generating revenue for their members.

In most conservancies’ grazing plans, herders can make use of the entire landscape. This allows grazing pressure to be more evenly distributed, but it also assumes that when herders and their livestock aren’t present in an area, other herbivores and the predators that hunt them make free use of the space. Niels Mogensen, a biologist with the Mara Predator Conservation Program, a Kenya Wildlife Trust initiative aimed at preserving large carnivores, says no one had actually checked to see if this was true before now.

Between 2015 and 2023, he and his colleagues carried out surveys at seven community-owned wildlife conservancies in the Mara ecosystem. They covered nearly 69,000 kilometers (43,000 miles) in total, collecting data about the presence of lions, and wild and domestic herbivores.

They weren’t surprised to find that lions avoided livestock herders. But they also found that the lions avoided parts of the conservancies where cattle had been herded even after they had moved on.

“Perhaps the most striking result [of the study] was that lions continued to avoid areas with a history of high cattle use even when cattle were not present at the time,” Mogensen says.

Mogesen’s team did not explicitly model how lion sightings related to grazing management practices on the conservancies they studied, but he noted that moves to restrict access to grazing would be sensitive. Livestock are central to Maasai livelihoods and culture: restrictions could be perceived as threatening household security or prioritizing wildlife over people.

“Addressing this requires collaborative approaches rather than top-down enforcement,” Mogensen says.

“This can include spatial zoning that protects key wildlife areas while retaining grazing access elsewhere, seasonal rather than permanent restrictions, and transparent benefit-sharing so that landowners clearly see how conservation outcomes link to economic returns from conservancies.”

Peter Kilani is a herder on the Mosiro Conservancy, to the east of the seven covered by Mogensen’s data. He says only a few Maasai conservancies have taken the approach of reserving parts of their land exclusively for wildlife.

“This only happens in some conservancies like Maasai Mara and Imbikirani, where the community have offered their own pieces of land for wildlife and they are paid in return. It’s big business for them,” he tells Mongabay by phone.

The more common practice is managing access to all available rangeland. “We are doing this comfortably in my community in Mosiro in Kajiado [county]. We have done it since time immemorial,” Kilani says.

But today’s conditions are no more frozen in time than are pastoralists’ lives and livelihoods. Reading back through the results of aerial surveys by the Kenyan government, large-bodied wild herbivores (other than elephants) have declined by 70% since the late 1970s; cattle have also declined, though by just 13%. Sheep and goats have increased by 269%.

To maintaining a healthy balance of their ecosystems, the conservancies of the Maasai Mara will need to account for new data and demands and fashion new approaches to managing their rangeland.

Daniel Sopia, who heads the Mara Wildlife Conservancy Association, which includes the seven that Mogensen surveyed, says rotational grazing systems in place in most conservancies create a circuit where wild herbivores typically follow the cattle — and, says Sopia, seek the safety from predators afforded by the shorter grass left behind.

Counter to the research findings, he says herders in the associations’ conservancies do observe lions in the landscape following antelope or other ungulates, even on the same day that they’ve driven cattle through an area.

“We have not heard conservancies complain about the lack of lions due to grazing or cattle presence,” Sopia tells Mongabay. “Yes, where cattle numbers are too many and don’t rotate too often, [this] might cause herbivores to move due food shortage. Hence lions move to follow prey or start preying on cattle. The fact that lions continue to avoid the area long after grazing is not something we have observed as community.”

Nakedi Maputla, a senior conservation scientist at the Africa Wildlife Foundation, who was not involved in the study, says managing access to grazing in conservancies is a sensitive issue.

“This has human rights implications that warrant careful consideration and serious attention. It may also lead to landowners’ resentment towards wildlife and the authorities responsible for wildlife conservation; that is, unless landowners are central to the decision-making process,” he told Mongabay.

Mogensen’s analysis of data detailing the presence and absence of lions from portions of Mara conservancies is an important contribution to the decisions and management of these rangelands in the future.

“Conservancies therefore represent a complex matrix of overlapping land uses, conservation goals, and socio-economic needs,” Mogensen writes, “posing significant challenges for sustaining large carnivores and managing human-wildlife interactions.”

Dann Okoth in Nairobi contributed to this report.

Citation:

Mogensen, N., Packer, C., Svenning, J. C., Sankan, K., & Buitenwerf, R. (2026). Human-driven landscapes of fear for Africa’s largest terrestrial predator in human-used conservation landscapes. Biological Conservation, 313, 111599. doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2025.111599

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Previously Published on news.mongabay with Creative Commons Attribution

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Specifications Only Create the First Impression

When riders first begin looking at an electric dirt bike, the first details they usually notice are power, speed, and battery range. These are useful because they help create a quick sense of where a bike sits in the category. They also make it easier to spot visible differences between models, especially when buyers are comparing performance-focused options.

But in actual use, specifications are only the starting point. A bike may look strong on paper, yet still feel less convincing once it is ridden across real terrain. That is because riding is never defined by one isolated figure. It is shaped by how the bike starts, accelerates, slows down, turns, responds to changing surfaces, and carries itself through repeated use. Those qualities work together over time, and they are what riders actually feel.

For that reason, buyers who compare an electric dirt bike seriously usually move beyond the first layer of numbers. They still pay attention to specifications, but they also want to know whether the bike feels natural in motion and whether its performance holds up in conditions that are less controlled than a short product summary suggests.

Speed Alone Does Not Create a Complete Riding Experience

Speed is still one of the most visible and appealing performance points in the category. It gives riders an immediate sense of potential and helps explain why some models stand out more quickly than others. For buyers interested in the  , strong speed capability is naturally part of the attraction.

Even so, speed does not automatically create a better riding experience. A bike may accelerate harder or carry a higher top-end figure, but that only matters when the rider can use it stably and confidently. If the output feels abrupt, if the bike becomes unsettled over mixed surfaces, or if control begins to feel less predictable as conditions change, then the value of that speed becomes much smaller in practice.

For most riders, the more useful question is not only how fast the bike can go, but whether that performance feels accessible. A capable electric dirt bike should allow the rider to use its speed without making the rest of the riding experience feel harder than it needs to be. When speed is supported by control and stability, it becomes something the rider can enjoy repeatedly instead of simply noticing once.

Control Shapes Whether Riders Want to Keep Using the Bike

Off-road and mixed-surface riding places constant demands on the rider and the machine. Loose gravel, dirt, small elevation changes, uneven ground, and changing grip all require continuous adjustments. In that kind of environment, control becomes one of the most important parts of the riding experience.

For an electric dirt bike, control influences whether the rider feels relaxed or hesitant. A bike that starts smoothly, tracks naturally, and responds clearly through turns and speed changes tends to build trust quickly. A bike that feels abrupt or difficult to settle may still be powerful, but the rider will often spend more energy managing the bike rather than enjoying the ride itself.

This is why control matters so much in long-term use. Riders are not only looking for performance. They are also looking for a machine that feels understandable and dependable once real conditions come into play. A bike that supports natural rhythm across repeated rides often leaves a better overall impression than one that seems impressive only in short comparisons.

Range Affects How Open the Riding Experience Feels

Battery range is often reduced to one simple idea: distance. That is part of the story, but it is not the whole story. In an electric dirt bike, range also influences how much freedom the rider feels during the ride. When battery support feels strong and stable, the rider can focus more on terrain, pace, and overall enjoyment instead of constantly thinking about limits.

This becomes especially important when the riding environment is less predictable. Off-road use places different demands on energy consumption than simple, smooth riding does. Changes in terrain, repeated throttle input, surface resistance, and shifting pace all affect battery use in ways that make range more than a number on a chart.

A bike with a dependable range creates more room for the rider to stay flexible. It becomes easier to extend a ride, take a different route, or keep a steady pace without unnecessary concern. That is why battery support should be understood as part of the real riding experience rather than a side detail. For a good electric dirt bike, range helps define how practical and enjoyable the whole product feels once it is actually being used.

Hardware Setup Gradually Separates Good Bikes from Average Ones

During a quick comparison, it is easy for buyers to focus on output and speed first. But the bigger differences between bikes often come from more basic hardware choices such as tires, suspension, brakes, and frame design. These are the parts the rider actually feels every time the surface changes, the bike slows down, or body position shifts during the ride.

Tires influence traction and confidence on varied ground. Suspension affects whether the bike feels composed or harsh when the terrain becomes uneven. Brakes shape how naturally the rider can manage pace and respond to changing situations. Frame proportions influence how comfortable and readable the bike feels during repeated use. None of these details is as easy to summarize as speed, but together they shape a large part of what makes one bike more satisfying than another.

That is why many buyers eventually pay close attention to whether the basic setup of the bike feels sensible. A bike may have strong numbers, but if its hardware does not support the riding experience well, those numbers become less meaningful. On the other hand, a bike with better underlying balance often earns more appreciation the longer it is ridden.

Repeated Use Shows Whether a Bike Actually Feels Mature

Many bikes can make a positive impression in a short overview, but the real difference usually appears later. An electric dirt bike may seem exciting at first glance, yet repeated use often reveals whether that excitement is supported by a stable, well-resolved ride. Over time, small issues become easier to notice. Throttle response may feel harder to manage than expected. Battery support may feel more limiting than it first appeared. Suspension or braking may begin to affect confidence in ways that were not obvious during early comparison.

A stronger bike, in practical terms, is often the one that becomes easier to trust rather than harder to tolerate. It remains manageable after the first few rides. It stays consistent when conditions change. It continues to feel natural when the rider returns to it again and again. That kind of maturity usually matters more than a dramatic first impression because it is what shapes real ownership satisfaction.

This is why long-term use is such an important part of evaluating any electric dirt bike. The best choice is rarely defined by the first number that stands out. It is usually defined by which bike continues to feel right once the rider starts using it regularly.

A Better-Matched Bike Earns More Long-Term Trust

As buyers become more thoughtful in the way they compare products, more of them are looking at the full riding experience instead of focusing on just one specification. They still care about speed, power, and range, but they also care about control, hardware balance, and whether the bike’s overall behavior makes sense for real use.

That is one reason brands such as   can appear naturally in the comparison process. Riders are increasingly paying attention to whether a bike feels complete rather than whether it simply sounds impressive. In that kind of comparison, long-term trust matters more than surface-level excitement.

For any electric dirt bike, real value is usually found in how the bike feels once the ride begins and continues. A good bike is not only quick or powerful on paper. It is stable, understandable, and rewarding enough that the rider wants to keep coming back to it. That is what turns a strong specification sheet into a product that actually feels right in real riding.

Electric Dirt Bikes

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By LaTina Emerson-Georgia State

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This post was previously published on FUTURITY.ORG and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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By Jo Napolitano, The 74

This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.

Children whose caretakers are detained or deported face not only the loss of their loved ones, but, oftentimes, removal from their homes and schools — abrupt upheavals that can land them in one of many places.

Some, freshly pressed passports in hand, end up in their parents’ country of origin — even when it’s not their own.

Others are sent to live with family or friends while an unlucky number are placed in foster care, their parents’ rights in jeopardy and reunification precarious.

The teenagers among them are sometimes thrust into a parenting role themselves: This overnight push into adulthood can leave them managing mortgages while their peers are picking prom dresses in the first of many sacrifices, immigrant advocates told The 74.

“A lot of these older siblings are forgoing college plans and looking for work, trying to figure out how to be mom and dad for their siblings,” said Wendy D. Cervantes, director of immigration and immigrant families for The Center for Law and Social Policy.

An 18-year-old Texas resident was left without parents or his U.S.-born siblings more than a year ago when his entire family was stopped by federal agents as they were driving to get medical care for his seriously ill sister. All ended up being sent to Mexico. Using the pseudonym Fernando Hernández García, the young man testified before a House and Senate hearing last week that he was forced to give up college in order to work full time to try and keep the family home.

There are measures in place to help families with this unwanted transition. In 2013, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued the Parental Interests Directive, a federal guideline meant to ensure “immigration enforcement activities do not unnecessarily disrupt” parental rights.

It allowed ICE to consider whether it needed to hold these immigrants. And if they were detained, the directive encouraged the agency to house them near their families so they could participate in child placement hearings.

The agency was also advised to arrange transportation to and from court or otherwise allow parents or legal guardians to participate in such proceedings by phone or video.

“It required some sort of cooperation between ICE and local child welfare agencies,” Cervantes said.

But this directive has been under attack for years. It was weakened during the first Trump administration, bolstered in the Biden era and diminished once again when Trump took office for the second time — and launched a mass deportation campaign.

A March 24 investigation by ProPublica found that the parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children were arrested and detained in the first seven months of Trump’s second term. The news site also determined the Trump administration is deporting about four times as many mothers of U.S. citizen children per day as did the Biden administration.

That 11,000 number will have roughly doubled by now, ProPublica reported, if arrests and detentions continued at the same pace in the ensuing months.

The data obtained by ProPublica covers a period up to mid-August 2025. Some of the Trump administration’s most aggressive immigration enforcement sweeps occurred after that in targeted cities, including Chicago, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Minneapolis.  

“I do fear in the months ahead that we could see more instances where kids unnecessarily end up in the child welfare system because of the way ICE has been conducting its raids,” Cervantes said, adding its tactics have been carried out “in a way that really doesn’t give us any assurances they are abiding by their own policy to allow parents to make decisions about what happens to their kids at the time of arrest.”

Families too afraid to reach out

Added to this anxiety, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the execution of these and other directives, is in flux. The DHS is now in the second month of a partial government shutdown as congressional Democrats push to rein in the actions of federal immigrant agents and make them more publicly accountable.

The department is also in the midst of a leadership change: Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin will replace former Secretary Kristi Noem, who was fired from the post March 5 by Trump.

Despite concerns about his temperament — a former cage fighter, Mullin once tried to coax a union leader into a physical altercation during a Senate committee hearing — his nomination was confirmed March 23 by a 54-to-45 Senate vote.

It’s unclear how Mullin, a 2020 election denier, would wield his authority. But he has said he supports the end of birthright citizenship and recently defended the killing of two Minneapolis residents who protested the government’s immigration enforcement efforts, calling victim Alex Pretti “deranged.” He later said he should not have made the comment, but declined to apologize for it.

Parents considering their family’s future in the current environment are sure to wonder what comes next as they contemplate the limited tools available to them, including Standby Guardianship, which allows people subject to immigration enforcement in some states to designate a caretaker for their kids.

It’s a valuable lever, said Julie Babayeva, supervising attorney with the New York Legal Assistance Group: It goes into effect the moment someone is detained. But many families are reluctant to apply for it, she said.

“We have been talking to PTAs, schools and community organizations in heavily immigrant communities,” Babayeva said. “It’s just difficult for people to trust this. They think, ‘What if I tell you my phone number and that leads to ICE coming to my house?’ People don’t understand that we’re not giving this information out to anyone, that it is confidential.”

A 2025 KFF analysis shows 19 million children in the U.S. have at least one immigrant parent and that 1 in 6 — or 9 million school-aged children — live in a household with at least one noncitizen adult. An overwhelming majority of these kids are U.S. citizens.

A Los Angeles teacher, who asked to remain anonymous because of her own citizenship status, recalled the case of two elementary school-aged children — and a toddler — left with their nearly 80-year-old grandmother, who had to return to work to support them after their parents were taken by ICE.

Such disruptions inflict enormous psychological and emotional damage on children, she said.

“They’ve heard the rhetoric of Trump saying he’s going after criminals and though they know that’s not true, they still don’t understand why their parents would be targeted,” she said.

Roughly 500,000 immigrants were deported in Trump’s first year in office and of the 68,000 people in ICE detention as of February, more than 73% had no criminal convictions.

Eric Marquez, a teacher at New York City’s ELLIS Preparatory Academy, which serves older, immigrant students, said that from a classroom perspective, what stands out most is that these newcomers often present as remarkably composed.

“They tend to put on a brave face, adapt quickly on the surface and rarely bring up in conversation the people in their lives who may have been detained or deported,” he said. “There’s often an understatedness to it.”

At the same time, teachers can sometimes see the impact indirectly, including shifts in focus, attendance and energy, he said.

Ellis Prep’s own Dylan Contreras was among the first high school students to be detained by ICE when he was arrested after a May 2025 court appearance. Held in a Pennsylvania detention center for 10 months, he was released March 17 and returned to school for the first time March 24.

Immigrant families are not the only ones puzzled and angry over the administration’s tactics. Residents in Springfield, Ohio, worried their Haitian neighbors will be deported because their Temporary Protective Status is in jeopardy, have stepped up to do something about it — in this case, house their children.

One woman, who asked not to be identified for fear of attracting anti-Haitian animus stirred up by Trump, secured emergency foster care credentials to support kids who might need somewhere safe to stay while they wait for a more permanent placement. The process took eight weeks to complete, she told The 74.

“I am ready for 0 to 18,” she said of the age of children she could take in at a moment’s notice. “I want to keep siblings together.”

A sudden rush of unhoused kids felt imminent earlier this year when Haitians’ protective status was set to expire and word spread that federal immigration agents would soon arrive in Springfield to deport them. After some 600,000 Venezuelans lost their TPS status last year, a lawyer representing the group said “hundreds and potentially thousands of Venezuelan nationals (had) been deported from the U.S.”

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court prohibited the Trump administration from ending Haitian deportation protections and will hear oral arguments in the case in late April.

Separation not easily undone 

Once separated, family reunification can be difficult, notes Gabrielle Oliveira, an associate professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who has studied immigration for years. Bureaucratic hurdles mean it can take months for a U.S. citizen child to get a passport to join their parents in a foreign country.

Oliveira said, too, some of the children who enter foster care have family eager to shelter them but they won’t step forward because they are too afraid to interact with the government.

These new forms of family separation are among many fears undocumented immigrants face. But it’s not the worst of them, Oliveira and other advocates said: Detention is by far the most frightening prospect.

“It’s been harder and harder to get in touch with people who are detained,” Oliveira said. “Sometimes months go by and (federal authorities) don’t even tell you where they are. So, parents are even more worried about that than the actual deportation.”

And, she said, limited communication with family makes it challenging to come to a conclusion on child care.

“You can’t make decisions,” Oliveira said. “You can’t make phone calls. You can’t figure out what the plan is.”

Already, Cervantes said, her office has seen the fallout.

“We’ve heard about 15- and 16-year-olds living by themselves for several weeks because their parents were detained and they had no idea where they were,” she said. “ICE was not checking to make sure they were OK. These are U.S. citizen kids.”

And there are other, practical issues that make it hard to reunite in a foreign country, Oliveira said, recalling one family trying to meet up in South America.

“The dad got deported and the mom was here with the kids, and then she was trying to leave and go back to Brazil — but she was nervous that if she went to the airport, she would be arrested,” Oliveira said.

When children are left with undocumented relatives, it’s nearly impossible for them to leave the United States to deliver the kids to their parents, said Shaina Simenas, co-director for the Young Center’s Technical Assistance Program.

“If you have a young child that is left with another relative who has their own immigration needs, how would you get them to the country of origin?” she said. “We’re working with a lot of families who are from Venezuela, and there are so many challenges even getting Venezuelan passports — or getting flights to Venezuela. And, of course, there is the financial toll of buying international flights and paying for passports and travel documents.”

Simenas believes poor record-keeping on the part of the government means a lack of accountability.

“ICE doesn’t consistently and reliably identify whether adults are caregivers for children and so that alone makes it harder to track what might have happened to their children after a parent was taken,” she said.

Many families separated during Trump’s first term have not seen justice, she noted. Nearly 1,000 children were still waiting to reunite with their parents in 2023, according to government records.

“For families being separated now,” she said, “I think there are even fewer ways to track them, to be able to support and ensure they have access to reunify.”

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This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in America.

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Why You’re Drawn to Emotionally Unavailable Partners (And How to Break the Pattern)

Have you ever felt intense chemistry with someone, only to find yourself starving for consistency?

Maybe they were charming, yet they were mysterious. They felt just out of reach.

If you keep finding yourself attracted to emotionally unavailable partners, it’s not random, it’s your attachment system choosing familiarity.

Your Attachment System Is Like Google Maps

Your attachment system is like Google Maps on your phone.  It charts relational routes to connection based on what roads you’ve been on before.

If you grew up with:

• A parent who was emotionally distant
• Love that felt inconsistent or unpredictable
• Chaos or instability
• Pressure to earn affection by being “good”
• Punishment for expressing needs

Your nervous system learned something powerful: Love must be pursued, earned, and consistently managed.

So as an adult?

As an adult, you find yourself unconsciously gravitating toward partners who recreate that same emotional terrain because your nervous system says, “This feels familiar.”

And familiarity feels safe even when it hurts.

The “Unfinished Emotional Business” Trap

We often try to rewrite our childhood story through romantic partners. If you didn’t get consistently attuned love growing up, part of you longs to finally receive it. So when someone is emotionally unavailable, your attachment system whispers:

“This time will be different.”

But instead of closure, you often end up in what feels like a hamster wheel:

• You pursue, they pull back
• You try harder, they give breadcrumbs
• You feel temporary relief
• Then the cycle repeats

This is why it is so important to do our own personal work to understand the ways the unfinished business from our family of origin is impacting our romantic relationships.
This is especially common in the anxious-avoidant dynamic.

Why Breadcrumbing Is So Addictive

Intermittent reinforcement is one of the most powerful psychological hooks. It’s the same mechanism used in slot machines.

You don’t win every time. But unpredictability, you get a payout. In relationships this may look like unpredictable closeness such as:

• A text.
• A compliment.
• A deep conversation.
• A night of closeness.

Just enough to keep you invested.

When dating emotionally unavailable partners, these small moments of connection can feel intoxicating because we want more, just like winning at a slot machine.

The problem is this unpredictability in romantic relationships, while it may feel intense, is not intimacy or chemistry, it’s your attachment system becoming activated and obsessing over this person in hopes to have more connection. That’s not intimacy, that’s insecurity.

If we think of the attachment system like our digestive system. When we are hungry, it sends signals for us to eat. In love, our attachment system sends signals for us to foster closeness. Just like hunger, it’s hard to feel nourished on breadcrumbs. Our bodies need healthy, whole meals to feel nourished and have the energy to focus on other things in meaningful ways.

The Overfunctioning Survival Strategy

Many people caught in these patterns are overfunctioning.

You:

• Text first
• Plan the dates
• Initiate vulnerability
• Carry the emotional labor
• Make excuses for their behavior

Why?

Because overfunctioning once kept you safe.

If you grew up managing other people’s moods or earning love through caretaking, you learned:

“If I do more, I’ll be loved.”

But in adult relationships, this strategy often creates a one-sided dynamic. It also leads to resentment as the “only” one who puts in effort. The goal in healing this attachment wound is for you to not overfunction and foster a mutual relationship were both partners show up.

Why Secure Love Can Feel “Boring”

Here’s something many people don’t expect: Secure relationships don’t always start with fireworks.

Research on attachment shows that secure bonds often deepen gradually over time.

They feel calm. Steady. Predictable. For someone used to emotional roller coasters, that can feel… underwhelming and unexciting.

But on a nervous system level calm is not boring.

Calm is safe.

Calm is secure.

And over time, calm becomes deeply intimate because of that safety when our attachment needs are met.

How to Break the Pattern

If this cycle feels familiar, here’s what you can do:

1. Pause the Dating Cycle

Sometimes a reset is necessary.

Step back from dating. Reflect on the patterns you find yourself in.  Journal about the childhood experiences that influence this.  Explore your patterns with an EFT therapist.

Once you understand the pattern, you are on a path to changing it.

2. Work with an Attachment-Based Therapist

When you’re inside the pattern, it’s hard to see the full picture.

A therapist trained in attachment can help you:

• Identify unfinished emotional wounds
• Recognize your part in the relational dance
• Experiment with new relational strategies

Instead of seeing your partner as the problem, team up against the problem.

3. Run “Behavioral Experiments”

IfIf you tend to overfunction:

• Stop initiating every text
• Let them plan the date
• Set a boundary

Then observe what happens.

Does the relationship strengthen  or collapse? The truth will reveal itself in the data.

4. Trust Outside Feedback

This one is underrated and something I personally learned to use: Ask someone you trust:

“What do you see that I might be missing?”

When we feel chemistry, we can overlook red flags, but secure friends often see clearly what we can’t.

5. Choose Based on Data, Not Fantasy

Notice patterns in the relationship:

• Do they follow through?
• Are they consistent?
• Do they respond to vulnerability with care?

These facts matter and give you information about the quality of the relationship. The goal is for you to get a good assessment of the relationship and determine if this relationship is healthy for you if nothing changes.

Transcript for The Childhood Wound That Causes You to Fall for Unavailable Partners

Kyle:
So today we have Marni back with us. Marni, thank you for joining us again.

Dr. Marni:
You’re welcome. Great to be here again.

Kyle:
Yeah, and I’m so excited. Today we’re going to continue talking about emotionally unavailable partners (and why we get caught in relationships with them) which really comes from Marni’s book, Ghosted and Breadcrumbed. I would highly recommend reading it, especially if you’re dating in today’s world.

What we’re going to focus on today is actually looking at ourselves. Last session we talked about partners and pattern dynamics, but today we want to look in the mirror and ask: What’s going on for me? What within me might be drawing me toward unavailable partners,or keeping me choosing them?

I’ve heard clients say, “It’s like my love picker is broken.” And the truth is… there is something there. That’s what I’m excited to unpack today.

So, Marni, I want to start with someone you talk about in your book, Taylor, who was in a longer-term relationship for a few years.

Dr. Marni: Mm-hmm.

Kyle:
She didn’t feel settled and didn’t really want to stay in the relationship, but she stayed anyway. There was some “unfinished business,” as we might call it, that got in the way of choosing herself and getting serious about finding a secure relationship.

Can we use her story to talk about family-of-origin wounds, things that might lead us to pick unavailable partners or stay in relationships that don’t work?

Dr. Marni:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s really important to look at our family history. I say this in the book (not to blame our parents) but to make sense of things and connect the dots. It’s about putting the puzzle pieces together, because we can all have unfinished emotional business.

This can show up in many different ways. If we grew up where love was inconsistent, or a parent was emotionally distant or unpredictable, or you had to earn attention by being “good” or helpful, or there were consequences for expressing needs, those experiences tend to become patterns in adult romantic relationships. They linger.

And they create this deep longing: to finally get that love, that attunement, that sense of being seen. Unconsciously, we want the story to have a different ending, so we try to “finish” it through our romantic choices.

Sometimes it works. I don’t want to say it never works, because we might be touching on earned security. But for many people, it doesn’t work, and they end up caught like a hamster wheel in the same pattern and the same feelings they experienced growing up.

If we don’t stop and reflect, we’re likely to keep making the same choices. That’s what I mean by unfinished emotional business and family-of-origin wounds.

Kyle:
I love this, because it’s so important. There’s something about unconscious familiarity. If we had a dad who was stoic, or a parent who was emotionally dismissive or unpredictably available, we might find ourselves (even if we hated it) with a partner who has similar behaviors.

Dr. Marni:
And sometimes, it can even be the extreme opposite, too.

Kyle:
Can you say more about the “extreme opposite” part?

Dr. Marni:
Sure. If you had a stoic, cold, emotionally distant parent, let’s say a father… Sometimes you choose someone who’s the polar opposite: hyper, intense, very needy, clingy. The extreme opposite of what you experienced.

And usually anything extreme isn’t healthy either.

Kyle: That’s exactly what you describe with Taylor. She grew up with instability, her mom remarried multiple times, her dad remarried someone much younger, and there were even legal issues. There wasn’t a lot of stability.

So she chose the opposite: a partner who felt safe. But she didn’t really see herself in a long-term future with him.

Can you talk about what her unfinished business was, and what she needed to work through?

Dr. Marni:
Yeah. Taylor grew up in a lot of chaos: unpredictability, inconsistency. One of her parents had several romantic partners, with different people coming in and out of her life.

So she craved stability. But she took it to an extreme.

She was in a relationship that was completely flatlined. There wasn’t much emotional risk. She knew her partner wasn’t going to leave. He told her he loved her. Everything felt neutralized.

It was calm, and it was stable, but she also knew deep down she wasn’t feeling the love or attraction she wanted. She wasn’t willing to take the chance of finding something more balanced: stability and emotional depth, stability and healthy risk.

Because real love always involves some emotional risk.

So she stayed in this “ho-hum” situation, telling herself it was fine. But her emotional needs weren’t being met, and she didn’t believe it was safe to risk something different.

Kyle:
Wow. So if someone is listening and thinking, “That sounds like me…,” what do you recommend if they want to take the risk and do something different?

Dr. Marni:
There are a few things.

One is working with a professional who has attachment-based training. That can help identify what’s really happening and whether these patterns are driving the choices. A therapist can help someone discern:

• What’s going on underneath the surface
• Whether this relationship is enough long-term
• What needs aren’t being fulfilled
• Whether it’s worth taking a risk or a pause

Sometimes that pause might mean taking space from the relationship to figure things out. And yes, there’s risk. If Taylor did that, she might fear she wouldn’t get another chance with that partner.

But if unconscious patterns are running the show behind the scenes, that’s a serious problem. You want to clarify: Is this pattern driving my decision, or is it something else?

Kyle:
I love that. From personal experience, working with a therapist who understands attachment and family-of-origin issues is huge.

It’s like when you’re inside the picture, you can’t see the whole frame.

A good therapist can help point out patterns, like what you do with individuals and couples, so clients can see what’s happening and why. Then you support them in exploring: Are you willing to try something new? Are you willing to risk doing something different that could lead to a more secure and fulfilling relationship?

Dr. Marni:
Exactly. We’re the mirror. We can push and challenge, while exploring patterns that aren’t fully in a person’s conscious awareness yet. Therapy is designed to address these kinds of issues.

Kyle:
Another big issue you talk about in your book is codependency and overfunctioning, especially for anxious individuals.

They might text more, plan the dates, push for connection.

What’s driving that pursuit, especially when they sense their partner isn’t as invested?

Dr. Marni:
Codependency and overfunctioning can be ways people learned to stay safe and connected when emotional security wasn’t guaranteed.

If you grew up learning to manage other people’s moods, keep the peace, or caretaking to earn love, then overfunctioning becomes a survival skill.

It’s not necessarily a weakness.

But in adult relationships, it often creates a one-sided dynamic, and your needs still don’t get met. It doesn’t work out well long-term.

Kyle:
Yes, exactly. It’s a survival strategy.

The strategy that might have helped as a kid can become a prison in adult relationships. It gets in the way of secure functioning and healthier strategies.

So if someone listening says, “That’s me, I overfunction, I caretaking, and I don’t make space for my partner,” what are some practical steps?

Dr. Marni:
People often don’t realize they can create boundaries and communicate directly.

For example: “Hey, I’m not going to do this anymore.”

Or run an experiment: What happens if I stop this behavior? Does the world fall apart, or is everything still okay?

Create tests for yourself:

• If I stop doing XYZ, what happens?
• If I stop carrying the load, what changes?
• If I stop over-giving, what becomes visible?

Sometimes, couples therapy can help too. Overfunctioning can shape the relationship dynamic over time and become habitual, your roles become routine. Therapy can help shift the dance into healthier patterns, if both partners are willing.

Kyle:
I love that. Those “tests” are a form of risk.

If the belief is “I have to overfunction to be loved,” that’s rigid.

Dr. Marni:
And you’re plugging a hole to prevent something scary from happening.

But change doesn’t happen without risk. We know that.

Kyle:
And when one partner changes their part in the dance, the whole dance changes. Those experiments help reveal the truth of the relationship.

So tying this together, what causes an anxiously attached person to chase emotional distance internally?

Dr. Marni:
Someone with anxious attachment craves closeness, but often pursues it with unavailable partners. That dynamic can feel familiar, even if they intellectually dislike it.

It mirrors childhood: trying to win love from someone hard to reach.

So even though they want connection, they get drawn into the tension of almost getting it. That pattern hooks their nervous system.

Kyle:
That makes sense. It’s like a slot machine.

In past anxious-avoidant relationships, there’s this unpredictability: “Will they want me today?” So you gamble. You invest more time, energy, and hope.

Dr. Marni:
And breadcrumbs reinforce it. Intermittent reinforcement is one of the strongest learning schedules, it’s why gambling is so addictive.

Kyle:
So how do we break it when we notice it?

Dr. Marni:
That’s one reason I wrote the book, there’s a lot in there about how to stop this and get unstuck.

It’s not easy, but a complete reset can help: “I’m not going to date for a while. I’m going to learn about myself. I’m going to explore what’s going on with me. I’m going to do personal therapy before making another choice.”

Also, many people aren’t drawn to available partners. They may disregard someone secure because it doesn’t feel intense at first.

So it can help to slow down: take time with people, explore them, and see if there’s potential instead of making quick judgments like, “I didn’t feel it, so I’m out.”

Self-exploration and self-awareness are crucial.

Some people can do it through high-quality self-help resources (from licensed professionals), and for others, therapy is an important option.

Kyle:
That’s so helpful. When something feels familiar, we get pulled toward it. Secure partners can feel boring, because we’re equating chemistry with intensity, and intensity with familiarity.

I look back and there were secure people I pushed away because I didn’t feel the spark. But the spark often came from the anxious-avoidant roller coaster.

Secure relationships can deepen over time. That’s different from immediate intensity.

Dr. Marni:
Exactly. It can feel great to feel the spark, but it becomes dangerous when you disregard factual information: their behavior, their consistency, and how they treat you.

Make decisions based on the data, not just the feeling.

Kyle:
That leads to something you talk about in the book: romantic fantasy and the potential partner trap. Can you share about that?

Dr. Marni:
You have to be careful. We can create a romantic fantasy and project who we hope someone could be, rather than seeing who they actually are.

It can feel comfortable because it repeats old wounds. We want to believe, “If I love hard enough, this time will be different.”

But potential is a future version of someone that may never exist.

Real intimacy starts when we stop chasing potential and respond to reality.

Kyle:
Yes. People say, “If they loved me, they’d do this. I just need to give them time.”

And sometimes that’s compassionate, but if nothing is changing despite vulnerability, directness, assertiveness, then you’re not looking at the facts. You’re staying attached to an idea of who they could be.

Any final advice for someone who sees this pattern and wants to change it?

Dr. Marni:
First, I want to give them a lot of credit. Awareness is the first step.

Also, lean on your support system. If you trust someone (your aunt, your mom, a sibling), ask them:

“What do you think of this person for me? Are you seeing something I’m missing because I’m in it?”

Be open to feedback. Self-awareness is hard. Other people can help reveal blind spots.

And of course, therapy can help too.

Kyle:
That was some of the best advice I got while dating. I had friends who questioned my choices, and I got defensive. I was in the potential trap.

After a relationship ended, learning attachment theory helped me see my familiarity patterns. I needed to rely on friends and family more.

With my current spouse, a close friend met them and said, “That’s a perfect fit for you.” I trusted her because she was honest, direct, and saw what I couldn’t.

Dr. Marni:
Yes. People often get defensive. But if you can pause, calm down, and reflect (if this is someone you trust and they generally give wise guidance), this can be an amazing resource.

It’s underutilized, and I really wish people would use it more.

Kyle:
I 100% agree.

Marni, thank you so much. This is so important for those of us who’ve found ourselves in these relationships, to understand our strategies, why we do what we do, and how to get out of the pattern.

And your book, Ghosted and Breadcrumbed, is such a great resource for that.

Dr. Marni:
Thank you. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q: Why am I drawn to emotionally unavailable partners?
A: Often it’s your attachment system seeking what feels familiar, especially if love was inconsistent, distant, or unpredictable growing up.

Q: Does being attracted to unavailable partners mean I’m “too needy”?
A: No. It usually means your nervous system learned to pursue connection for safety, not that your needs are wrong.

Q: What is “unfinished emotional business,” and how does it affect dating?
A: It’s unresolved childhood longing for attunement or stability that can drive you to “rewrite the ending” through romantic partners.

Q: Why does the anxious-avoidant dynamic feel so intense?
A: It creates a push-pull cycle where you’re almost getting closeness, enough to activate hope and keep your nervous system hooked.

Q: What is breadcrumbing, and why is it so hard to walk away from?
A: Breadcrumbing is inconsistent, minimal connection that triggers intermittent reinforcement (like a slot machine), making it feel addictive.

Q: What does “overfunctioning” look like in relationships?
A: You initiate most contact, plan the dates, carry emotional labor, and make excuses, often to prevent disconnection or rejection.

Q: Is codependency a flaw or a survival strategy?
A: It’s often a survival strategy learned in childhood: caretaking, keeping the peace, or managing others’ moods to stay connected.

Q: Why can secure relationships feel “boring” at first?
A: If your system equates intensity with love, calm consistency can feel unfamiliar, secure love tends to deepen gradually over time.

Q: What is the “potential partner” trap?
A: It’s falling in love with who someone could be instead of responding to who they are now, keeping you stuck in hope over reality.

Q: How do I break the pattern of chasing unavailable partners?
A: Slow down, choose based on consistency (not chemistry), run small “behavioral experiments” like setting boundaries, seek attachment-informed therapy, and get honest feedback from trusted people.

Interview Series: Breaking the Unavailable Partner Pattern with Dr. Marni Feuerman

If this conversation resonated with you, I highly recommend Dr. Marni Feuerman’s book Ghosted and Breadcrumbed. It offers a deeper look at why we get stuck in these patterns, and how to finally break free.

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Previously Published on kylebenson.net and is republished on Medium.

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By Anne Blythe

It’s no longer futuristic or science fiction to think that your trip to the dentist might include robotics and artificial intelligence.

Macon Singletary, a periodontist at North Raleigh Periodontics & Implant Center in Wake County, says it’s already here for him.

Fear not, he says. Humans will still play a key role in your care.

“I’ve been wanting to make sure whatever we do here benefits our patients,” Singletary told NC Health News.

Some of the things that Singletary uses AI for are helping him format clinical notes in real time during an appointment, preparing insurance claims, and helping him size implants and guide him as he drills holes in jawbones for implant placement. He also uses the technology to flag areas in dental X-rays that could be early signs of trouble such as bone loss and where dead bacteria might be.

Still, Singletary said, he has to take a look at the AI-highlighted areas himself.

“It’s going to point out things that may be false positives, so you need to check it,” Singletary said.

Singletary could be ahead of the curve in North Carolina incorporating AI and robotic technology into his practice. It’s a significant financial investment, and not all dentists are in a position to outfit their offices with robotic systems and smart software.

Nonetheless, planning is underway — at least at the national level — for the day when it becomes more routine.

Barriers in rural areas

In February, the American Dental Association submitted a letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in response to a request for information on the adoption of artificial intelligence in clinical care.

ADA President Richard Rosato and Elizabeth Shapiro, an interim executive director at the association, acknowledged the transformative potential of AI in the letter to the assistant secretary for Technology Policy and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

They also highlighted in their seven-page response the challenges that small and rural offices face as use of the technology becomes more widespread in health care. Many are in areas that still have limited technology infrastructure, unlike urban areas on the other side of the digital divide — much more equipped to power up AI platforms and machines.

Some also struggle with workforce readiness gaps and regulatory uncertainty.

“Despite the potential benefits of AI, adoption across dental practices remains uneven, particularly among small and mid-sized practices,” Rosato and Shapiro said in the letter.

Those decisions, they added, are also influenced by privacy and legal risk management — especially when regulatory status is unclear. Practice owners and clinical leadership also weigh malpractice implications and a lack of standardized accountability in industry and performance benchmarks.

The ADA encouraged federal health and technology officials to strengthen vendor accountability so that dentists and oral health teams could rely on them “to deliver secure, compliant systems by default.” They recommended the development of clearer expectations about privacy and security responsibilities.

The dental association also recommended that “gold-standard synthetic datasets and independent validation frameworks” are put in place to help ensure that AI solutions “are reliable, unbiased and compatible with existing dental workflows.”

On the homefront

In 2021, a state Senate bill was enacted into law that establishes guidelines for dental care using “electronic or other digital means” that covers tools used for remote diagnosis and treatment. But the law was developed with the use of teledentistry in mind, before the recent proliferation of AI in health care.

The North Carolina Dental Society has not developed a “comprehensive position on AI as it grows and changes daily,” said Jim Goodman, executive director of the advocacy organization.

Leaders there, he said, “are constantly monitoring various AI innovations and implications to patient care, patient safety, patient privacy, office workflows, efficiency, etc.”

Goodman encouraged federal agencies to work with practitioners as they develop AI policies.

He stressed that any AI tool assessments should be reviewed by a trained dentist who is familiar with a patient’s cases and related treatment protocols.

Singletary has a phrase he repeats about AI technology — “stupid info in, stupid info out.”

“It’s an adjunct,” he said. “If you have inaccurate information in, you’re going to have inaccurate information out.”

The technology can help save time, but it can also add to clinicians’ workload as they check behind the tools.

“A dentist has to evaluate,” Singletary said. “It’s not going to do away with your provider.”

This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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North Carolina Health News is an independent, non-partisan, not-for-profit, statewide news organization dedicated to covering all things health care in North Carolina. Visit NCHN at northcarolinahealthnews.org with Creative Commons License

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Photo Credit: Angela Graves, who grew up in Merrimack, has received preliminary support from the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services for a pilot program using mushrooms to help clean up forever chemicals at the site of the former Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics plant. (Photo by Molly Rains/New Hampshire Bulletin)

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By Jonathan Shorman and Kevin Hardy

As the United States of America marks its 250th anniversary this year, the relationship between the states and the federal government is approaching a breaking point.

Led by a bellicose president, the executive branch has moved to dominate states, resulting in more than a year of escalating confrontations between the two levels of government.

President Donald Trump has worked quickly: In the first year of his second term, he surged thousands of immigration enforcement agents into a resistant Minneapolis and other cities, with fatal results. He seized control of the National Guard in some states against the will of governors.

His administration is trying to force states to turn over sensitive data on millions of voters ahead of the midterms. And it is blocking states from receiving, and distributing to their residents, billions of federal dollars for child care, public health, housing and a host of other congressionally approved programs.

Political parties have swung in and out of power in Washington for centuries, and recent administrations have increasingly clashed with states run by the other party. This time is different, dozens of sources in and around government told Stateline.

Trump and a coterie of loyal aides have set out to remake the nation in the president’s image. Along the way, retribution and raw power have become the administration’s primary tools to bend recalcitrant states to its will. Grants are pulled, armed force deployed, disaster aid withheld.

The states have repeatedly gone to court, asking the federal judiciary to rein in the executive branch. They have also started testing the bounds of their own authority, such as moving to restrict the actions of federal immigration enforcement agents.

The past year has led to a period of sustained state and federal conflict without parallel in modern U.S. history. The consequences for Americans over time will prove enormous, shaping the very nature of our government.

“This kind of battle between the federal government and the states, we’ve just never seen that before and it makes no sense,” said former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who was elected as a Republican but later helped co-found the centrist Forward Party.

Tensions between the states and the central government are as old as the nation itself. Alexander Hamilton famously favored a strong central government, while James Madison offered the Bill of Rights — including what became the 10th Amendment, which reserves for the states and the people those powers not delegated to the federal government.

But current strains are testing the bedrock principles of federalism, the uniquely American system created by the framers of the Constitution of power sharing between Washington, D.C., and the states.

Ahead of the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding on July 4, Stateline is exploring how the Trump era is transforming the relationship between the states and the federal government. This article is the first in an occasional series, The 50 vs. The One, that will examine the current fraught moment and what evolving — and often deteriorating — state-federal ties mean for the country, now and in the future.

In interviews and public remarks, current and former elected officials at all levels of government, as well as experts on American government, have described the country as approaching a pivot point. Trump’s second term could mark a defining moment for American federalism, one that will be studied in history books alongside Reconstruction, the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement.

The United States will either continue to adhere to the principles of federalism, they say, or it will take a significant step toward a more powerful central government that sidelines the states.

“We are in a period of challenged federalism,” said Lisa Parshall, a federalism researcher and political science professor at Daemen University near Buffalo, New York. “The fact that we’re here talking about federalism tells you something about the current state of American politics.”

Dramatic changes in a year

Fears of diminishing state authority have animated state officials over the past year. Republican lawmakers in Utah have invested in federalism education and expanded a group to assess state-federal boundaries, for instance.

In July, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, both Democrats, publicly abandoned the nonpartisan National Governors Association, in part because they said the organization was not doing enough to protect states’ rights.

States are “laboratories of democracy,” Kelly said during an interview in February, using a classic civics textbook description. States have traditionally operated with relative freedom to pursue their own agendas and solutions to the challenges they face. In turn, states learn from one another.

“That’s been the beauty of it,” Kelly said. “If that’s to go away, if the federal government were — and they are, at this point — undermining states’ authority and responsibility, I think you end up slowing down the entire country.”

In the same way the three branches of government — the legislative, the executive and the judicial — provide checks and balances on one another, federalism imposes a state check on federal power. The U.S. Constitution, which went into effect in 1789, ensured states would command broad power over local commerce, policing, elections and other matters within their borders.

But Trump has at times raised doubt about whether he will always follow the Constitution and has claimed that he can ignore some of its requirements.

Last spring, Trump replied “I don’t know” when asked whether he needed to uphold the U.S. Constitution in the context of due process for immigrants. In 2022, he said massive election fraud allows parts of the Constitution to be terminated. And after his 2020 election defeat, he urged then-Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the results, even though the vice president has no constitutional authority to do so.

In February, Trump asserted that “states are just an agent of the federal government” as he called to “nationalize” elections. Under the Constitution, the responsibility of running elections belongs to the states.

Trump’s critics fault the Republican-controlled Congress for failing to challenge his sweeping assertions of executive power. His administration’s efforts to withhold from states billions in dollars appropriated by Congress, for instance, have spurred relatively little outrage among GOP lawmakers.

“What I think we’re seeing now is a whole different system of crushing state and local government,” said U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Missouri Democrat who has been in Congress since 2005. “And bowing down to a new system where we are almost living in a one-person government.”

In response to questions from Stateline, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement: “The Trump Administration faithfully upholds our Constitution and the immortalized American principles of federalism, the rule of law, and the separation of powers.”

Trump and his allies have cast the president as a heroic figure capable of smashing through the machinery of government to achieve results on behalf of his voters and at the expense of his enemies. “For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution,” he said in 2023.

He has at times taken steps that his supporters argue empower states, including effectively gutting the U.S. Department of Education, which Republicans have long accused of federal overreach. His appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court during his first term helped cement a conservative majority that in 2022 returned the issue of abortion access to the states.

In a statement, the Republican Governors Association told Stateline the current administration trusts governors to run their own states.

“By cutting government bureaucracy and unnecessary red-tape, President Trump is empowering governors to make decisions that best serve their individual states,” wrote Kollin Crompton, an RGA spokesperson.

Scrambled identities

The U.S. Constitution has been gradually amended in ways that have limited state power, most importantly through amendments that abolished slavery, required states to treat their citizens equally under the law, and prohibited states from denying suffrage on the basis of race and sex.

The federal government has also expanded its reach through legislation. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s imposed new economic regulations and created a federal social welfare apparatus that touches nearly every American.

Over time, Democrats broadly came to be seen as the party more comfortable with an active federal government and Republicans as the party seeking a more restrained Washington.

But the Trump era has scrambled those identities.

Trump has shown less respect for traditional conservative ideology, such as limited government and a general deference to the authority of states. Instead, he has taken a maximalist approach to executive power.

His actions have placed Democratic state officials in a position of advancing limits on the federal government, whether through lawsuits or legislation. And they have put Republican supporters of the president at odds with decades of conservative rhetoric.

“I do think that progressives are seeing that federalism — there’s a reason it’s in our constitutional order and it isn’t just something that’s left for conservatives,” said Sean Beienburg, an associate professor at Arizona State University who researches federalism and constitutional law.

In Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Oregon, Trump deployed federalized National Guard troops onto city streets before courts held him back and he withdrew. For a time, active-duty Marines also patrolled Los Angeles, an extraordinary use of the military for domestic purposes.

Oregon Democratic Attorney General Dan Rayfield, who challenged the deployment of the National Guard in his state, said the fight underscores why lawsuits matter in checking Trump’s power.

“People should be shocked that Oregon has filed 55 lawsuits,” Rayfield said in an interview earlier this year. “Their mind should be blown. But their mind should be equally blown at how often we’re winning these cases.”

The Trump administration has won seven court decisions — and lost 58 — so far, according to a New York Times litigation tracker.

Democratic state lawmakers have also searched for ways to restrict federal immigration agents. In California, Democratic Assemblymember Alex Lee has proposed prohibiting state tax breaks for Immigration and Customs Enforcement contractors — a move that could carry national implications because of the size of the state’s economy.

“We also, now, are reasserting what the role of the states and the federal government are,” Lee said.

But among Republicans, Trump has successfully maintained his grip. Many conservative state leaders have supported the president’s most controversial moves, even those criticized as federal overreach.

During President Joe Biden’s term, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott was a staunch proponent of state autonomy and repeatedly challenged the federal government on regulatory issues and its deployment of a state’s National Guard. But Abbott has supported Trump’s expansion of federal powers, going so far as to authorize the deployment of the Texas National Guard to aid immigration enforcement in Illinois and Oregon.

Republican U.S. Sen. Jim Justice, the previous governor of West Virginia, said federalism remains “alive and well” under Trump. He said he was worried about the nation’s trajectory before coming to Washington in 2025.

“We’ve had to change things,” he said. “There’s new things that are going on that no question they’re disrupting folks on the other side of the aisle.”

Still, other Republicans have pushed back on the administration’s escalating hostility toward liberal states.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt sharply criticized the deployment of the National Guard, saying “Oklahomans would lose their mind” if a Democratic-controlled state sent troops to his state during Biden’s presidency. He has warned that the expanding power and spending of the federal government is dangerous no matter which party controls Washington.

“When we have this powerful of a federal government, it should be frightening for everyone,” Stitt said during a February event at The Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington, D.C.

‘States created the Constitution’

As the reach of the federal government ballooned over generations, Democratic and Republican presidents have used federal funding to wield more influence over state and local governments.

Federal dollars account for an increasingly large percentage of state revenues, rising from 22% in 1989 to 36% in 2023, according to Pew, which analyzed census and federal economic data. States received more than $1 trillion in federal grants that year.

Over the years, that largesse has encouraged states to pursue policy agendas favored by the current party in power at the federal level.

But Trump has weaponized federal funds in unprecedented ways, experts say. Bypassing Congress and despite numerous court losses, the White House has held up funding for higher education, transit, housing and infrastructure — particularly for states that displease him.

The administration’s attempts to terminate funding for the $16 billion Gateway rail tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey remain entangled in a lawsuit. New Jersey Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill said the White House has caused millions in cost overruns and delays, in what she characterized as the most urgent and consequential infrastructure project in the country.

In February, Politico reported Trump told congressional leaders he would release funding for the project in exchange for renaming Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia and Penn Station in New York City in his honor.

Parshall, of Daemen University, noted that more state leaders of both parties are pushing to reassert state-federal boundaries — whether in the areas of agriculture or the future of artificial intelligence.

“Federalism scholars are seeing this as a potentially pivotal moment in federal-state relationships,” she said.

Last August, elected leaders gathered at the National Conference of State Legislatures in Boston, where in 1773 colonists hurled chests of tea into the Boston Harbor in protest of Great Britain’s King George III. At the conference, lawmakers grumbled about a federal government increasingly sidelining states. That organization, representing more than 7,000 state and territory legislators, has consistently urged the Trump administration to respect states’ inherent authority.

In December, a bipartisan group of more than 40 lawmakers from 30 states gathered to discuss federalism issues, unanimously approving a declaration on the importance of states’ ability to legislate independently. That document noted that the Constitution did not create the states, “but rather the states created the Constitution, ratifying a framework in which we would both govern collectively and independently.”

New Hampshire state House Speaker Sherman Packard, a Republican, said state-federal tensions have been mounting for decades. He noted that the major tax and spending law the president signed last summer — often called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — both cut federal funding to states and saddled them with new costs and administrative work. But it’s just the latest example of what he views as a federal government overstepping its bounds.

“And it’s getting more and more prolific that they’re taking on and doing things that most of us feel is inappropriate,” Packard said. “If we don’t fix this, we’re going to lose state sovereignty altogether. And that’s just not the way it was set up.”

Reporter David Lightman contributed to this story. Stateline reporters Jonathan Shorman and Kevin Hardy can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org and khardy@stateline.org.

Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com.

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Republished with permission from Nevada Current

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By Richard Barrington for Freedom Debt Relief

Looking to cut costs? Why not start at the top?

In the typical American household, nothing takes a bigger bite out of the budget than housing costs. While that’s a burden, it also means that housing expenses are where cost-cutting has the biggest potential to help make ends meet.

Experts say you should spend no more than 25% to 30% of your income on housing—rent or mortgage payments plus utilities—for financial stability.

If you do that, you’ll have a head start on an affordable lifestyle, Freedom Debt Relief reports.

Key Takeaways:

• The 25-30% rule is a guideline for how much of your income to spend on housing expenses.
• Since housing is probably your biggest expense, limiting housing costs can have a significant impact on the rest of your budget.
• Calculating whether your housing expenses fit into the 25-30% rule can help you make other budgeting decisions.

What Does the 25-30% Rule Mean?

The 25-30% rule means your regular housing expenses shouldn’t exceed that percentage of your income. This rule of thumb is based on your gross income—your pay before taxes and other deductions are taken out.

The U.S. government defines “affordable housing” as housing that costs no more than 30% of your income. This includes rent or mortgage payments, homeowner association fees, and basic utility costs, such as electricity, gas, water, and internet.

There’s no magic to the 30% number. It’s just a broad rule of thumb, but it makes sense. American households pay an average of about 14% in income taxes. Add in 30% for housing, and that means 44% of your budget taken up by bills you have no choice but to pay.

If you can keep housing costs to 30% or less, you still have over half your budget left over to pay for other things.

Why Is It Important to Follow the 25-30% Housing Expense Rule?

The 25-30% housing rule is important because it offers financial flexibility.

Many expenses are unpredictable. You need some wriggle room in your budget to pay for those unexpected expenses. It might be back-to-school clothes one month, a car repair the next month, and a medical bill the month after that.

To leave yourself flexibility, you need to limit the amount of your budget that’s eaten up by fixed expenses. These are costs like rent, mortgages, and taxes that you’re locked into paying.

Those fixed expenses are far from the only essential costs most households have. It’s just that they are typically more predictable than many other expenses.

The following chart shows how much of the average household’s budget these essentials eat up annually:

These essential expenses total just over 80% of the typical household’s income. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for things like entertainment and savings, let alone handling a loss of income or other financial emergency. If you let housing expenses creep up past 30%, it quickly eats into any budget space you have for those other spending categories.

Does Spending 25-30% of Your Income on Housing Work for Everyone?

No, not everyone can limit housing costs to 25-30%. The practicality of this rule of thumb depends on your lifestyle and financial circumstances.

For example, it’s much tougher for lower-income households to limit housing expenses to 30% of their income. Households making between $40,000 and $49,999 spend an average of 42% on housing. In contrast, households earning over $200,000 spend an average of just 15% on housing.

It also depends on where you live. Some housing markets are much more expensive than others. To some extent, incomes also tend to be higher in those markets, but not for everybody. Some people in costly areas like New York City or San Francisco may have to pay a higher percentage for housing.

Whatever your lifestyle and financial circumstances, the 25-30% rule is a good guideline. If your situation is such that you have to pay more than 30% for housing, you’ll have less money for other things.

How to Calculate Your Housing Budget Using the 25–30% Rule

Start with the total amount of money you make per year, before taxes and other deductions.

To get your annual total (if you work full-time), take your hourly rate and multiply it by 40. Multiply the result by 52.

If you earn $25 per hour, your annual income is $52,000.

25 x 40 = 1,000

1,000 x 52 = 52,000

Now multiply that amount by 0.3. The result is a dollar figure that represents 30% of your gross income.

52,000 X 0.3 = 15,600

In this example, you should try to keep your housing costs under $15,600 per year.

That works out to $1,300 per month.

If you want to shoot for a tighter housing budget, multiply your income by 0.25 instead.

Ideally, the resulting amount should cover your rent or mortgage payment, plus your utilities, and if possible, renter’s insurance. Your mortgage payment should already include property taxes, homeowners insurance, and homeowners association dues. If it doesn’t, add them. Research all of these expenses for any property you’re considering buying or renting, and compare them to your income.

What if You Spend More Than 30% of Your Income on Housing?

By choice or necessity, you might spend more than 30% of your income on housing. The more you spend on housing, the less you’ll have to spend on other aspects of your life.

Everybody has unexpected expenses sometimes. Being locked into paying more than 30% of your income for housing gives you less flexibility to cope with them.

Spending more than 30% of income on housing is less of a problem in some situations than others. For example, if you’re just starting your career, you might expect your income to rise over time. In that case, the percentage of income you’re spending on housing is likely to come down—as long as your housing costs rise more slowly than your income.

It also matters whether you buy or rent your living space. If you buy a home with a fixed-rate mortgage, you can expect your housing expenses to be fairly stable (the mortgage payment won’t change, but your utility costs could). In the long run, housing costs should fall sharply when you pay off your mortgage.

If you rent, your rent is likely to go up over time. If you don’t expect your income to rise at the same rate, it’ll be important to keep your housing expenses down. Still, whether you rent or own, 30% is a good maximum to shoot for to make sure your payments remain affordable.

The lower you keep your housing expenses, the more money you have to pursue other financial goals, such as:

• Buying a home, if you don’t already own one
• Paying for children’s education
• Big-ticket purchases such as a new car
• Travel
• Wedding
• Saving for retirement

One benefit of the 25-30% rule is that it reminds people to leave some room in the budget for future goals.

Is the 25–30% Housing Rule Still a Good Guideline?

Changing economic conditions can affect how easy it is to live by the 25-30% rule. For example, rising home prices can make it more difficult to limit housing costs to 30% of income.

Fortunately, when home prices rise, wages often adjust to some extent. For example, during the five years preceding the end of 2023, the average American home price rose by around 52%. Over the same five years, average income rose by about 30%. That means that a 30% housing cost five years earlier became a 35% housing cost. Housing is, on average, a little harder to afford, but not impossible.

In any case, the reality is that housing expenses have to fit into a limited budget. The more of that budget you use on housing, the less you have for other things. So doing what you can to keep housing costs low benefits other aspects of your lifestyle.

One alternative to the 25-30% rule is the 50/30/20 rule. This is a guideline that says you should devote 50% of your budget to needs, 30% to wants, and 20% to savings.

None of these guidelines is an absolute.

In any budget, if one expense rises, other expenses have to fall, or else you go into debt, and debt can be tough to handle. Since housing is likely to be your biggest budget expense, you’ll find that keeping those costs under control has the potential for the most impact on your overall budget.

This story was produced by Freedom Debt Relief and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.

—

Previously Published on hub.stackernewswire

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‘Greenland 2 Migration’ Is out now on 4K Ultra HD

It can be nice to watch a science fiction film sometimes. They can tell some amazing stories and take viewers on an out of this world adventure. I didn’t see Greenland, but it sounded like it might be a good film. When I first heard about Greenland 2 Migration I will admit I didn’t know much about it. I was able to get a review copy of this movie and here is my thoughts on it.

(c) Lionsgate

You can read the plot for this sequel here:

In the aftermath of a comet strike that devastates most of the Earth, this film follows devoted family man John Garrity (Gerard Butler) and his wife and son (Morena Baccarin, Roman Griffin Davis) after they’re forced to leave the safety of their bunker in Greenland to search for a new home in a shattered world. John leads the family on a dangerous journey, guided by his burning hope in a rumored safe haven. It’s a journey against the odds that will test the family’s deepest sense of love, sacrifice, and instinct to survive.

(c) Lionsgate

This was an okay film, but I can’t say it was great either. The story moved at a rather slow pace, and wasn’t always a joy to watch unfold. There are a few twists and turns here and there, but they don’t help the movie much. The ending was alright and did a fine enough job bringing this story to a close. Some people may enjoy this film but it won’t be for everyone.

(c) Lionsgate

Greenland 2 Migration is available now on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-Ray and Digital. You can follow this film on Facebook and Instagram.

The post ‘Greenland 2 Migration’ Is Available Now on 4K Ultra HD appeared first on The Good Men Project.

I used to believe that love was about finding the right person.

You know the type of story – meet someone, feel the spark, and hope this is finally it. And when it ends? You try again. And again. And again.

I’ve seen people jump from one relationship to another like they’re just changing outfits. New person, new beginning, same ending. They say they’re just “looking for the right one.”

I used to be like that too.

After my first breakup, my friends told me, “Go out there. Date. You’ll find someone better.”

So I did. I met new people. I gave chances. I tried to move on the “right” way.

But instead of finding love, I found myself stuck in a cycle – getting attached, getting hurt, hurting others, and slowly losing pieces of myself along the way.

At some point, I had to ask myself:

“What if the problem isn’t that I haven’t found the right person yet?”

When I Stopped Looking

It wasn’t a smooth realization. It came after losing someone I truly cared about.

That kind of loss hits differently. It forces you to sit with yourself – no distractions, no rebounds, no shortcuts.

That’s when a line I once read finally made sense to me:

“You repeat what you don’t repair.”

And I realized… I had been repeating a lot.

Instead of blaming my ex for everything that went wrong, I started looking inward. Not in a self-destructive way – but in an honest one.

Because the truth is, I can’t control how someone loves me.

But I can control how I show up in love.

So I stopped searching for the “perfect match.”

And started asking:

“Am I becoming the kind of person I’m looking for?”

Why I Chose to Turn Inward

1. We don’t attract what we want – we attract who we are

I used to say I wanted someone loyal, secure, and emotionally available.

But was I those things too?

Love isn’t just about standards – it’s about alignment.

If I want a healthy relationship with someone who is honest, kind, and consistent, then I need to be those things first. Not perfectly, but intentionally.

Because at the end of the day, people don’t just meet us – they experience us.

2. Some of my pain didn’t start in my relationships

This one was hard to admit.

After my breakup, I realized that some of my insecurities didn’t come from my ex – they were already there long before him.

I grew up craving attention, validation, and reassurance in ways I didn’t fully understand back then. And without realizing it, I carried those needs into my relationships.

I expected someone else to fill gaps that weren’t theirs to fill.

And that’s heavy.

Healing those parts of myself became necessary – not just for future relationships, but for my own peace.

Because love shouldn’t feel like constantly asking,

“Am I enough?”

3. Being single isn’t a punishment – it’s a reset

I used to fear being alone.

Now, I see it differently.

Singlehood is where you meet yourself without distractions. It’s where you learn the difference between needing love and being ready for it.

It’s uncomfortable at first. Quiet. Sometimes lonely.

But it’s also where growth happens.

Where you rebuild your self-worth.

Where you learn to give yourself the love you used to beg from others.

Where you become whole – on your own.

Becoming, Instead of Chasing

They say the best revenge is self-improvement.

But for me, it’s not even about revenge anymore.

It’s about choosing to grow, even after being hurt.

It’s about staying soft in a world that can make you hard.

It’s about not letting heartbreak turn you into someone you’re not.

I’ve been hurt. I’ve been left. I’ve questioned my worth more times than I’d like to admit.

But still –

I choose to be loyal.

I choose to be kind.

I choose to love fully.

Not because someone else deserves it.

But because that’s who I want to be.

Maybe the Right Love Comes Later

I don’t know when I’ll meet the right person.

But I do know this:

When that time comes, I won’t be the same person who kept searching and searching, hoping someone would finally choose me.

I’ll be someone who already chose herself.

And maybe that’s the real point of it all.

Not just finding the right person –

but becoming the right one, first.

—

This post was previously published on medium.com.

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In the early ’80s, the air around my preschool smelled of dry grass and wild pine. I was only four years old. At that age, you don’t think about where you’re going. You just notice the way the ground feels under your feet and how big the sky looks. It was a rustic place that felt more like a clearing in the woods than a school, where the line between the playground and the forest was thin.

I remember walking by myself. I don’t know why I was alone or where the teachers were, but I can still feel my small shoes crunching on the path. I was walking along a western-style fence with thick vertical posts and two horizontal logs connecting them. On the other side was an open field. A group of boys were there, wrestling in the dirt. As they grappled and threw each other down, thick clouds of dust rose up into the sunlit air.

They were large boys who seemed to know how to move through the world with noise and force. I watched the chaos and the swirling dust with a mix of awe and a primal kind of dread. Then, the group broke apart. One of the more muscular boys looked up and saw me standing there on the safe side of the logs. He pointed. There was a boy standing next to him who was smaller than the rest, maybe closer to my size. “Hey!” the big boy called out. “Come and wrestle him. You’re his size.”

It wasn’t a friendly invitation. It was a challenge. It was a summons to step through the wooden rails, leave my quiet place on the side, and enter that cloud of dust and struggle. I froze. I didn’t know these boys and I didn’t know the rules. Most importantly, I didn’t know if I had whatever stuff they had, that courage that let them throw themselves into the dirt and come up laughing. I felt the weight of their eyes on me.

I stayed silent. I didn’t even shake my head. I just turned my eyes back to the worn trail and kept moving. I walked away from the fence, the field, and the boys. I don’t remember what they said as I left. They might have snickered, or they might have forgotten me the second I passed the next fence post. But I remember what happened inside of me. A heaviness settled in my chest. It was the first time I ever felt shame.

At four, I didn’t know anything about masculinity or social expectations. I didn’t have the words for it. I just knew I had been called to participate in the world, and I had chosen to stay a spectator. I felt like I had failed a test I didn’t even know I was taking.

Now that I’m in my fifties, I still think about that boy on the path. I realize that the shame I felt wasn’t really about wrestling. It wasn’t about whether I would have won or lost. It was about the act of turning away.

That memory followed me for decades, pointing to the empty space where I thought my grit should have been. Where I grew up, fighting was an unavoidable part of life. While I know now that physical conflict is never the true measure of a man, not knowing if I could face it felt like a ghost haunting my character.

By the time I reached my forties, I realized I had never been in a fight. I had lived a good life, raising a family and building a career, but I still wondered if I would crumble when the world pushed back. So, I called my best friend. We’ve been close since we were on a tee-ball team together at age four, the same age I was when I stood at that fence. He’s much bigger and stronger than me, a man who’s seen real combat. I trusted him enough to ask for a strange favor: “Will you spar with me? I just need to know what it feels like.”

We met in his backyard on a Saturday morning with boxing gloves on. The air was still and the neighborhood was quiet. We began to circle each other. I was nervous, that old familiar urge to retreat pulling at my heels. Then he hit me. I felt the thud of leather on my face, and instinctively, I swung back. I landed a punch, feeling the vibration travel up my arm and settle into my bones.

We sparred in flurries for about five serious minutes until we were both out of breath. Neither of us was hurt, but that morning, the forty-year-old man finally stepped through those wooden logs. I learned that I could give and take a punch if I had to. The deeper insight was that growth doesn’t always require a victory. Sometimes it’s just about facing an old fear.

By choosing to step into that backyard, I wasn’t saying that fighting is the only way to grow. I was acknowledging that I no longer needed to protect myself from the possibility of conflict. I found peace in knowing I could stand my ground. It answered the question the four-year-old boy couldn’t. I did have the stuff after all.

It’s amazing how a moment from fifty years ago can still shape the person I am today. I used to think that shame was a scar or a sign of weakness. But now I see it differently. That shame was the birth of my conscience. It was the first time I realized I had a choice in who I wanted to be.

The real insight wasn’t that I was scared. It was that I cared about being brave. The fact that it hurt to walk away proved that, deep down, I wanted to be in the fight. I wasn’t someone content to stay on the sidelines. I understand now that I wasn’t just afraid of their strength or how hard they could hit, I was also afraid of my own power and what I was capable of doing back.

I’ve spent the last several decades trying to make up for that walk away from the field. In a way, it made me a better man. It made me the person who stays when things get difficult, the person who accepts the challenges even when I’m feeling fear.

I still feel that four-year-old inside me sometimes. He’s there, standing by the wooden fence, watching the dust rise as the big boys wrestle. But I don’t look at him with judgment anymore. I look at him with compassion. I want to go back to that path, kneel down, and tell him, “It’s okay that you walked away today. Because you’re going to spend the rest of your life answering the call. That shame you feel is just your courage waking up.”

The preschool is long gone, and those boys are probably grandfathers by now. But the lesson remains. Life keeps inviting us to wrestle with our fears, our responsibilities, and our definitions of what it means to be strong. I walked away once, but every day since has been an opportunity to turn back toward the field and get a little dust on my clothes.

—

iStock image

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Is it a personal issue or a systemic problem?

I recently read a New York Times editorial about Google’s policy of referring employees to mental health counseling when they complained about discrimination and harassment. “I hated the way the company treated me like I was sick,” one former employee is quoted as saying.

Unfortunately, this is all too often a systemic response to someone raising an issue in all sorts of groups, whether it is in a corporate setting, a religious congregation, family or friends, etc. Rather than examining what’s wrong with us, the common response is “what’s wrong with you?“

This is, of course, a handy tactic for those organizations and systems uninterested in change. If the issue can be framed as a lack of personal strength and resilience, then the system does not need to examine itself. In his powerful book, Dying for a Paycheck, Stanford Business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer shares many stories about toxic cultures, including one from a young woman who worked at Amazon. The clear message, she says, is that if you can’t take the punishing pace, you are flawed and not “Amazon material.”

All too often the recipients of this sort of message take it to heart, wondering why they themselves are not stronger and more resilient. They may turn themselves inside out in an attempt to use this as an opportunity to grow. But honestly, the brain and human system can only take so much. No matter how resilient a person is, constant criticism, harassment, devaluation, and other abuse will wear you down.

I also want to point out that toxic cultures don’t spring up out of nowhere. Sometimes the way this is spoken about gives the impression that (as U.S. law denotes) corporations are “people,” with their own wills and goals. Rather, corporations, organizations, and other systems are created and shaped by the toxic people who run them and those who collude and support this (in the vocabulary of narcissism, they are known as “flying monkeys”).

It is well known in organizational development that leaders shape culture. A toxic system doesn’t spring up on its own like a mushroom. People put policies into place. People show how these are enforced. People model behavior, etc. It honestly rubs me the wrong way that cultures are spoken about as if they were an entity in and of themselves and everyone is standing around wringing their hands wondering how things got so bad. One word: people. Remove the toxic people and see what happens. Just saying.

And so, what to do? Well, I am encouraged by what my friend Lindsay Boccardo, a sought after generational expert, is telling me. Apparently, the younger generations aren’t interested in personalizing toxic cultures. They just “nope out of there” and pursue other opportunities, or make their own. As the saying goes, they vote with their feet. And perhaps, if enough of us of all generations do this, the systems and the people who run them will be forced to pay attention. Well, a girl can dream….

Previously Published on But Now I Know Your Name

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On my last visit to Nashville, Tennessee, I took a detour to Columbia, Tennessee, to see the Maury County Courthouse. The building would have become famous for its appearance in a Jason Aldean music video, “Try that in a small town,” had it not already been famous as the site of multiple lynchings where Black men were taken from the courthouse by mobs and killed. I wrote about the history of the courthouse, little knowing that a couple of the lynchings weren’t officially lynchings after all.

Cordie Cheek was a 17-year-old Black youth from Glendale, Tennessee, who I thought was lynched by a white mob in Maury County on December 15, 1933, after being falsely accused of assaulting a white girl. Despite being exonerated by a grand jury, he was abducted, tortured, and murdered in one of the most brutal and racially charged lynchings in Tennessee’s history.

In late 1933, Cheek was accused of attempting to rape a young white girl in Maury County. Once the purported honor of a Southern belle was tarnished, it was never going to turn out well for the accused. Cheek was taken to a grand jury in Nashville, Davidson County, instead of Maury County, because local officials feared that the white girl who accused him might tell the truth, undermining their case. They sought to avoid scrutiny and potential backlash by shifting jurisdiction. Cheek was accused of assaulting a white girl in Maury County, but the evidence was weak, and the girl reportedly could not confirm his identity.

Maury County officials transferred the case to Davidson County, where Cheek was held in jail near Fisk University, likely to avoid a local grand jury that might dismiss the case. The Davidson County grand jury declined to indict Cheek, citing insufficient evidence. This legal outcome should have protected him from further retaliation. Despite the exoneration, racial tensions remained high.

After the grand jury refused to indict, Maury County magistrate Bert Erwin and two other men abducted Cheek from Nashville, violating legal protocol. They returned him to Maury County and delivered him to a lynch mob, which tortured and murdered him on December 15, 1933, according to official statistics. Cordie Cheek wasn’t lynched because the case fell into a gray zone of documentation. The keeper of these records, the NAACP and Tuskegee Institute, didn’t include Cheek because they wanted all their findings of a lynching to be unassailable.

The NAACP database, which is most commonly used, counts 4,743 official lynchings, including both Black and white victims, between 1882 and 1968. Before the Civil War ended, there were different names for lynchings. They were called summary justice, vigilance committee actions, mob rule, slave discipline, regulator killings, or mob justice. After the Civil War, lynchings existed, but weren’t considered part of the total because the stats were unreliable. The newspapers couldn’t be trusted, the police couldn’t be trusted, and courts couldn’t be trusted to accurately reflect the lynchings taking place across not only the South, but America.

Our official lynching statistics don’t include the first seventeen years of activity of the Ku Klux Klan, and the 246 years that occurred since the first Black people arrived in Jamestown. There were another 106 years before that, when Black people accompanied Ponce de Leon in 1513.

How many lynchings took place between 1619 and 1892? Was it hundreds, even thousands? And how many were discounted afterward? Who else besides Cordie Cheek was excluded because of a technicality?

What was behind the conspiracy? I can’t think of a better word to describe the standard, which kept the number of lynching victims limited when it was clearly much higher, perhaps double the artificially low figure of 4,743. I can appreciate the rationale of the NAACP and the Tuskegee Institute to accept lower figures to get Congress, along with state and local governments, to acknowledge that lynchings were taking place at all.

Some members of Congress explicitly denied that lynchings were happening at all, or a big enough problem for Congress to get involved.

Other members of Congress didn’t deny lynching existed, just that it was a federal problem.

Southern members of Congress repeatedly argued that lynchings were “exaggerated,” lynchings were “local matters,” lynchings were “responses to crime,” and the federal government had “no authority” to intervene.

In 1916, the NAACP began the legislative push for what would become known as the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, after two years of mobilization and political groundwork. Rep. Leonidas C. Dyer introduced his Bill in 1918. At the same time, the Suffragettes were working toward the passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment, which would give women the right to vote. Black women like Ida B. Wells worked tirelessly alongside the white suffragettes in hopes that the white women would support anti-lynching legislation.

On May 21, 1919, the House passed the 19th Amendment. On June 4, 1919, the Senate did so as well. Ratifications began a week later in Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Texas became the first Southern state to ratify on June 28, 1919. On August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify, providing the required three-fourths majority of the states. Women could vote in the 1920 Presidential Election for the first time. The white women got what they wanted and deserted Black women who hoped for their assistance with anti-lynching. The Dyer Bill failed. The first anti-lynching bill passed by Congress was the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act. It became federal law on March 29, 2022, making lynching a federal hate crime for the first time in U.S. history.

Lynchings have never been treated with the seriousness they deserve. Not by Congress, not by the states, and not by the institutions that claimed to stand guard over American justice. For more than a century, the country responded to racial terror with denial, delay, and deliberate undercounting. Even the official definition of “lynching” was narrowed until thousands of killings slipped through the cracks, not because they were any less brutal, but because acknowledging them would have forced the nation to confront the scale of its own violence.

The NAACP chose a strict definition because it had to. Southern lawmakers denied lynching existed at all, and Congress refused to act unless the evidence was airtight. But that defensive posture came with a cost: the historical record is smaller than the reality. The numbers are conservative, not because the violence was rare, but because the truth was politically inconvenient.

And that is the final indictment. Lynchings were never important enough for America to count honestly. The country debated definitions, jurisdiction, and states’ rights while Black families buried their dead. It took until 2022, more than a century after the first anti-lynching bill, for the United States to finally pass a federal law naming the crime for what it was.

The record we have is incomplete because the nation chose incompleteness. The numbers are low because the country needed them to be low. And the gap between what happened and what was counted is not a historical footnote; it is the clearest evidence of how little Black life was valued in the eyes of the law. Lynching wasn’t just a crime. It was a message. And the refusal to count it honestly was a message too.

—

This post was previously published on Momentum.

***

You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:

Escape the Act Like a Man Box

What We Talk About When We Talk About Men

Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race

The First Myth of the Patriarchy: The Acorn on the Pillow

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There are unspoken rules of being in public and taking public transportation. Make no eye contact. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t have loud conversations on the phone on a crowded train car. Don’t be too trusting.

Above all, most of it can be boiled down to one rule: mind your own business.

In the past half year, my daily commute to and from work has changed from driving to work every day to taking the train for almost three hours and 20 minutes total every day. I try to get as much done as possible during this time period, but it is tough. It was a challenging commute at first, but I have gotten used to it, and the consolation is that I only go in three days a week.

There are multiple occasions where strangers have saved me from near catastrophe, as I rushed and got used to my new commute.

. . .

I went to the train station, like usual, on a Wednesday morning. The train was running late, so I was standing on the platform. A woman approached me and asked if I drove the type of SUV I drive. I said yes, and then she told me that she saw me leave my car and that I had left my car running without turning it off. She said that while I might miss the train I was on, I might be able to make the next one.

I thanked her, and then I walked briskly back to the car and saw that I had, in fact, not turned off the car. I turned off the engine and then went back to the train platform, and went about my day, catching that train. I have seen this woman on my usual train and still need to go about thanking her.

It was one of those situations that could have ended really badly in a million ways, but did not due to the intervention for a stranger. Between that and leaving my wallet on the train on one of the first days of my commute, followed by another train rider finding me on LinkedIn and coordinating to return it to me, I have been very lucky to be helped by quite a few strangers.

Of course, the goal is not to end up in these situations at all, but it has happened, especially when the commute was new and I was just getting used to it. But I endeavored to always be the kind stranger myself to pay it forward.

. . .

It took a while, but I was able to pay it forward on three occasions — usually when someone leaves an item on the train or when waiting for the train.

On one occasion, a woman left her earmuffs. I noticed this on one of those days, there was a lot of snow and ice and we were slowly let off the train to make sure no one slipped and fell. It was also around 20 degrees Fahrenheit. When I saw her earmuffs on the seat, I had some hesitation on whether to get involved. Someone might think I was stealing them, or it also might be more trouble than it was worth to try to get it back to her.

She was about five people in line in front of me, so, again, there was a chance the person I was trying to return the earmuffs to wasn’t her. It took a while to get off the train, and then I had to walk fast enough to catch up to this woman. I had no plan if the earmuffs were not actually hers, other than to give them to an employee on the train. I caught up to her eventually and gave her her earmuffs, and she was very thankful. I never learned her name or exchanged another word, but I knew it was the right thing to do.

Another time, I was sitting in the waiting room for my commuter train and I saw that someone had left his gloves in the seat. I saw the person sitting in front of me in the train waiting room leave his gloves on the seat. I got up and caught up to him, and told him he left his gloves on his seat. He turned around and thanked me for telling him. I still never learned his name or anything like that.

This week, I was on the Amtrak from Baltimore to New York for a work trip. An older lady not familiar with the area was trying to get off at Penn Station. There are quite a few Penn Stations in the northeast — Newark, New Jersey, Baltimore, Maryland, and Manhattan, New York. She heard the train conductor say we were arriving in Penn Station, Newark, and asked someone next to her “is this Penn Station?” The other person nodded.

I knew for sure this woman was not familiar with the area, because when most people on the Amtrak mention Penn Station, they are going to New York. I did not want to assume and I also, of course, wanted to mind my own business. But as she got her suitcase and got in line to get off at Newark, I interjected.

“Ma’am, are you trying to go to New York?”
“Yes,” she said.
“There’s a Penn Station in New York, too,” I said.
“Oh wow, thank you! Is that Moynihan Hall?”
“Yes,” the guy in front of her replied.

She put her suitcase back and got back in her seat, then got off at the right station. The worst that would have happened if she had gotten off at Newark is wasting an hour of her day for the next Amtrak, and likely having to pay for another train ticket. It would have been very inconvenient, but not catastrophic. Still, my desire to help her out was instinctual when I realized that hour could have been saved by just saying something.

. . .

I learned that in psychology, this is called prosocial reciprocity. When other people do nice things for us, we feel inclined to pay it forward. I have felt this prosocial reciprocity for quite some time, but situations like this with strangers do give me more hope. There were multiple times in the past, like when my car battery died and someone helped jump my car, that I have been lucky and saved by the kindness of others.

To pay it forward and continue the kindness and grace I have received means quite a bit. I don’t know if I think of it at that high of a level in the moment, but it does just feel like an instinctual response. It comforts me knowing that even in moments of hesitation, I’ll usually go out of my way to do the right thing, even if there is no self-interest involved. The unspoken rules of being in public mean it’s not likely the other person and I will be best friends or anything, or that we’ll even learn each other’s names. I think this can change if I see the same people on my commute every day, but I haven’t gotten around to that yet.

I think we’re all human and prone to these types of errors. Having ADHD, I am a bit more prone to these errors. My mistakes, like leaving my car turned on or losing a wallet, are likely a lot worse than forgetting gloves or earmuffs.

As a Christian, helping strangers means loving my neighbor as myself and not seeking recognition for good deeds. I go to train stations every day and see the same homeless people asking for money, with hundreds of commuters like myself walking past them and not making eye contact. I used to have stronger feelings about this, but now I realize I’m just like everyone else. Once in a while, someone will go out of their way to give them money. If I have cash, I will sometimes do the same.

I commute for an hour and 40 minutes both ways, so with that long of a commute, times like these are bound to happen from time to time. Helping out strangers in times of need like this only takes a minute or so on my end, but it could save someone else a huge headache.

I am happy I eventually did the right thing in each of these occasions rather than continuing to mind my own business. Next time, however, I endeavor not to hesitate to do so.

—

This post was previously published on Ryan Fan’s blog.

***

You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:

Escape the Act Like a Man Box

What We Talk About When We Talk About Men

Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race

The First Myth of the Patriarchy: The Acorn on the Pillow

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We’ve been asking the wrong question about AI. It’s not whether it will destroy millions of jobs or save us from work altogether. Those are convenient myths — one sells fear, the other sells software. The real shift is subtler and far more consequential: AI is quietly restructuring power in the workplace. And that restructuring moves in only one direction and means more control, more pressure, more dependency and less room to negotiate on the part of the workforce.

There are important psychological and cultural factors at play here. The corporate narrative promises liberation: “delegating routine tasks” to focus on higher-value work. However, as a growing body of evidence shows, the opposite tends to happen. When somebody incorporates AI tools into their day-to-day work, the organization sees it not as an opportunity to reduce their workload, but to increase their productivity. If you do what used to take four hours in two hours, you don’t get two hours off: you are assigned more work; the bar is raised: your increased productivity simply becomes a new baseline. The result is an intensification of work: more tasks, tighter deadlines, longer days, the same old feeling of always having to run to catch up.

Added to the pressure of human overclocking is another, less visible dimension: anxiety. Not only because of the fear of replacement, but because of the uncertainty about how performance will be evaluated in an environment where AI increases output. If work is measured by quantity (of emails, tickets, deliverables, reports, etc.) AI simply speeds up the metrics. And if evaluation is also automated, the circle closes: tools that produce more, metrics that demand more and systems that monitor employees more.

Another aspect to all this, and one that is hardly debated, is the growth of shadow AI; the use of AI tools not approved by the company, off the IT department’s radar and thus not subject to any security or regulatory compliance. I’m not talking about four geeks trying out a chatbot; this is a practice that spreads because it is useful, fast and, above all, because official channels tend to arrive late, with restrictions and without understanding the real needs of the job. The employee has a task to perform, a deadline to meet… and a free tool that miraculously solves problems. The temptation is obvious.

The hitch is that this convenience comes at a huge cost: sensitive data that travels where it shouldn’t, contract templates, business information, strategy drafts, internal reports, code, customer data, conversations… All of this can end up being copied and pasted into services that do not offer meaningful guarantees of privacy. There are already a number of high-profile cases of accidental leaks precisely for this reason, and it is not difficult to understand why: the stressed out employee is not thinking about intellectual property or business secrets; their focus is meeting the latest tight deadline. The perverse thing is that the company, by not providing safe alternatives, indirectly encourages the use of shadow AI.

And here comes the twist: it’s not just about using AI; it’s about how it’s trained. More and more employees are building their own assistants: a bot that perfectly mimics the department’s style, complete with a knowledge base with internal documentation, a system that summarizes past incidents, a co-pilot fed with emails, presentations or reports. They do it because it works. But what they are doing, de facto, is converting the company’s knowledge based into a model with reusable data. And that raises an explosive question: whose knowledge is it when it becomes a chatbot? Does it belong to the employee who structured it, the company that generated it, the customer whose data appears in the documents, or the provider of the tool that makes the system possible?

The legal answer is clear: much of the work an employee produces in their working day belongs to the company, and internal information can constitute a trade secret. In Europe, the protection of know-how and undisclosed information has a specific legal framework. But the real problem is not what the rule says, but how it is managed in practice when thousands of people are “distilling” that knowledge into systems that can end up out of control, duplicated, shared or simply poorly protected. At best, the company is exposed to leakage and compliance issues. At worst, it is unknowingly financing the construction of tools that make part of human labor dispensable… with data generated by that work itself.

In this context, the promise of the augmented worker is simply the worker as an involuntary trainer of their substitute, because the knowledge that made them valuable becomes an automatable and scalable asset. And, in the meantime, the day-to-day becomes more intense: more tasks, more urgency, more expectations, less respite.

The conclusion is that we need an honest conversation about AI. If the discussion is limited to how many jobs are destroyed, we miss the core question of power. AI, as it is currently being deployed, tends to favor employers, those who control the objectives, metrics, tools and data.

If we want everybody to benefit, then we’re going to need serious internal rules, real governance, safe alternatives to shadow AI and, above all, negotiation: what is automated, with what limits, with what guarantees and how productivity gains are shared. Otherwise, the AI revolution will not bring greater well-being. It will be, simply, another turn of the corporate screw.

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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans’ blog.

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The post AI Isn’t Replacing You. It’s Rewriting the Rules You Work Under appeared first on The Good Men Project.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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The post Bad News: You’re Not Perfect. But That’s Also the Good News appeared first on The Good Men Project.