Lucent

For adults, a better measure of happiness than frequency or intensity of joy is how devastated you'd be if your current baseline declined.

Helen Keller's country was destined to win the AI race since children grow up internalizing her myth of a mind bootstrapped from text alone.

Supporting a kid's lemonade stands means taking a sip big enough to look believable, but not so big you become immunologically entangled.

Our prime number of days in a week really confounds getting into any routine shorter than a week since it shifts days every week.

You can outsmart the stable marriage problem by choosing a mate closer to the attractiveness ceiling than your trade-up threshold.

In the heyday of CrossFit, more people tried to recruit me to their euphoria fellowship than to their actual church, and I'm in Tennessee.

Sorry, I can't come to the protest. My shoulder is bad enough to make the prospect of arrest less a civic indignity and more an injury risk.

A lot of what now gets labeled "anxiety" is your own nervous system warning you a thoughtless action will rightfully cost you reputation.

I bet the floss dance is as enticing to autistics as twerking is to normies.

We have an acronym that tells you to treat uncertain insider status as evidence against inclusion and bias against false positives: IYKYK.

"We just want to be respected." [treats you exactly like a fellow man] "You're treating me differently than someone you're attracted to!"

I just want to get in with enough good ole boys that the cops write up my arrest in the police blotter as a welfare check.

Red expats fleeing blue states learn the hard way there's no such thing as a red city. Even Knoxville and Nashville have blue urban cores.

Trying to hire a sole landscaper over a company is anti-feminist for not wanting to subsidize an administrative staff with a living wage.

I don't want to hear you boast about being a "high decoupler" if you can't eat in the bathroom.

Do some miss the power the '90s monoculture gave them to freeze celebrities' careers until a televised scold could extract a public apology?

Victims of celebrity romance scams seem to think their intense fandom gave them unforgeable proof no outsider could convincingly fake.

It's some consolation that everyone else is getting sick fast enough to push normal lab ranges up faster than my own health declines.

Labeling your vicious dog "reactive" is a clever way to imply the existence of a hypothetical worse dog that attacks thin air for no reason.

In my head, unvisited exurbs are stored as scalars based on how often I hear their names, so I can guess how far, but not what direction.