A man leaves a dish in the sink. By the end of the night he has been accused of gaslighting, told he lacks emotional intelligence, and sent to sleep on the sofa. Our first feature this week comes from Steve Salerno asks a hard question: has a profession that once taught people to become stronger in the face of pain ended up merely teaching them to describe it?

Citizen Sane, Steve Salerno — The mainstreaming of therapy culture may be driving us all out of our minds.

Almost everyone does it. So why are we so ashamed of it? A new exploration of taboo from bio-anthropologist Robert Lynch.

The Ape in the Basement, Robert Lynch — Why is masturbation so shameful?

Also New

• Our Foreign Aid System Is Broken. Thanks to Trump, We Have a Chance to Rebuild It, Mark McDowell — Thirty years inside the sector, and it got more wasteful and more ideological every year.
• Banning the Horseless Carriage, John Aziz — The risks of advanced AI are real. Bernie Sanders’s proposed ban is still the wrong answer.
• Bad Criticism, Rosalind Arden — Name-calling, guilt-by-association, and other unscrupulous methods of argument are polluting our discourse.
• Israel’s Most Consequential Election, Benny Morris — Israelis go to the polls on 27 October and former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot is in the lead.
• The Real End of the Arab–Israeli Conflict?, Aurele Tobelem — The strategic case for Syria–Israel normalisation.
• ‘This Country Is But One Scene of Massacre’, Greg Koabel — Famine and massacre in the Canadian northwest.

Tech leaders keep talking about how fast the world is changing, but Shalom Lappin is unpersuaded. He offers a useful test: take a person from 1850 and drop them in 1950, then take a person from 1950 and drop them in 2026. Which one is more bewildered? Drawing on the work of economist Robert Gordon, Lappin argues that the digital revolution is not yet as transformative as we might like to think.

Myths and Illusions of the Digital Age, Shalom Lappin — The digital revolution is not remaking the world as the industrial one did.

Watch

A big week for us. A reminder that Quillette is entirely funded by its readers, and we rely on your support to keep doing the work we do. The essays we publish can't be found anywhere else. As always, if you think we've got something wrong, write to us at [email protected], or for membership queries, [email protected].

Until next week,
—Claire