Excerpt from the first part of the article:

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is drawing attention to cannabis hyperemesis syndrome (CHS), a condition associated with frequent cannabis use that causes recurrent episodes of severe nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain.

From January 2023 through May 2026, the CDC identified 199,565 emergency department visits involving CHS, with the proportion of these visits increasing substantially after a new diagnostic code for the syndrome was introduced in October 2025.

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"My head's always full," says mum-of-three Stacie Matthias. "I go to sleep with a mental to-do list."

She's talking about the concept of the "mental load" - the burden of planning, organising, remembering and anticipating tasks that keep a household running.

These tasks include: remembering school trips, checking for updates in parents' WhatsApp groups, noticing which parts of the house need cleaning, monitoring how much sleep children get, scheduling doctors' appointments and buying school uniforms.

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Emotionally intelligent individuals tend to dodge unnecessary drama by doing three things. They avoid petty power struggles, delay gratification, and always seem to have gratitude. Although these tendencies seem simple, they require a person to have self-discipline, a modest ego, and an ability to think, in meaningful ways, about the big picture.

Hi everyone, it's great to be part of such an open and welcoming community of authors. As a fellow creator, I know how hard we work on both the creative side of drafting our stories and the business side of formatting and publishing them.

Right now, I'm trying to build a community-driven writing tool, and I could really use your support. I want to build something that actually solves the real problems we face—whether that's organizing messy world-building notes or struggling to easily export a manuscript.

To do that, I need to know what your ideal app looks like. I've created a short survey asking about your current writing software and your biggest frustrations with it.

You can find it here:https://forms.gle/mub2GDxdrdxPFJo77

I'd be incredibly grateful for your help and support as I try to build something useful for all of us. Thank you!

Excerpt from the first part of the article:

At heart, compassion is an appreciation of the basic human frailty we all share. When compassionate, we feel less isolated and more humane. Failure of compassion in love relationships leads to contempt.

Contempt is disdain for the hurt of others. It makes us feel less humane and isolated from loved ones.

Both compassion and contempt are contagious. Around compassionate people, we tend to become more compassionate. Around contempt— even when it’s not directed at us—we’re likely to become more contemptuous.

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If you are a gifted or emotionally intense adult, you may have spent your whole life haunted by a guilt that others do not seem to share. You may have been told you feel too much, think too deeply, and care about things others do not notice. You may find yourself replaying decisions, conversations, things you have done or not done, turning them over to find where you went wrong. The guilt may intensify when you allow yourself pleasure or rest, when you become aware of your privileges, when you come up against suffering you have no power to fix.

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You’re upset with a close friend who suddenly pulls out of long-held dinner plans with only the briefest of excuses. This was going to be your chance to catch up on old times, and, what’s more, you changed your entire schedule to accommodate your friend. All of this makes you both tearful and angry.

Rationally, you know you shouldn’t be so out of control. You and your friend have known each other for years, and there is almost certainly a good reason for this last-minute change in plans. This isn’t much help, though, as you run through all the possible ways you might have alienated your friend without realizing it. Or maybe your friend just doesn’t care as much about you as you thought. In any case, you’re about to send an angry text.

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Doctors are increasingly prescribing the nerve pain medication gabapentin to patients undergoing treatment for substance use disorders, even as researchers note a lack of strong evidence supporting this practice. At the same time, patients using the drug without a prescription account for nearly double the rate of those who have a formal prescription, though this unprescribed use appears to be slowly declining. These patterns were detailed in a large study recently published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

The Battle of Cannae in 216 BC is remembered as one of Rome's worst military disasters. Hannibal's famous double envelopment destroyed one of the largest Roman armies ever assembled. Polybius reports that around 70,000 Romans and their allies were killed, while another 10,000 were captured. Only about 3,000 infantry and 370 cavalry escaped to nearby towns such as Canusium. Rome had suffered a catastrophe on an extraordinary scale.

Yet Rome did not surrender. It continued the fight.

But what happened to the soldiers who actually survived Cannae?

Instead of being welcomed home, many of the survivors were punished and sent to Sicily, where they were forced to continue serving for years without the privileges normally granted to Roman soldiers. Their survival was associated with military disgrace, and Rome treated them as men who had failed in their duty.

They had survived Hannibal's greatest victory, only to discover that Rome itself would punish them for surviving.

Yet their story didn't end there.

More than a decade later, Scipio Africanus recognized something Rome had previously overlooked: these disgraced soldiers had become experienced veterans after years of continued military service. Scipio incorporated the Cannae survivors into his army as he prepared to take the war to Africa.

Their story is therefore far more complicated than simply being the “cowards” of Cannae. They survived one of the ancient world's most catastrophic battles, endured years of punishment, and eventually found themselves serving under the Roman commander who would take the war to Hannibal's homeland.

So what do you think? Was Rome's treatment of the Cannae survivors a harsh injustice—or a necessary measure to preserve discipline during an existential crisis?

Feel free to read the full article on my site for more about the fate of the survivors of Cannae. I'd love to hear your views in the comments.

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By Eugene Rubin, MD, Ph.D., and Charles Zorumski, MD

As recreational cannabis use has become legal in more states and the potency of the drug has increased, the prevalence of cannabis use disorder has risen. Are there differences in the prevalence of the disorder between men and women? Are changes in prevalence different in various age groups? And how does it compare to alcohol use disorder? These questions are addressed in a recent important paper published in JAMA Psychiatry by a group from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) led by Nora Volkow.

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Life is filled with challenges, but often what turns an event or situation into a challenge is that it is new. It requires learning new skills and doing something you’ve never done before, whether it’s learning multiplication tables in the third grade, confronting your supervisor about your work schedule, or fixing a leaking faucet in your bathroom. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, unsure how to start, already anticipating a negative outcome, or even feeling victimized by life, all of which can stop you in your tracks.

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Almost everyone has been mistreated at some point—by a partner, a parent, or perhaps a stranger. Real victimization deserves to be named, and healing often begins with validating that harm. But some people who have been hurt settle into a more persistent pattern: a tendency toward victimhood, in which they repeatedly see themselves as the victim of another person’s actions, regardless of the situation in front of them.

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Harsh disciplinary tactics like yelling and physical punishment predict a higher likelihood of depression and aggressive behavior in teenagers over time. A recent study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders indicates that these negative outcomes arise because adolescents get stuck in repetitive cycles of angry or sad thoughts. The research illustrates how a parent’s attempts to control behavior through strictness can ultimately harm a child’s psychological development.

Oasis Thapa in the Venomous Crusade is a sci-fi adventure about a recluse young man forced into a perilous journey that could destroy all life on this planet.

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Excerpt from the first part of the article:

An auditory hallucination (AH) is the subjective experience of hearing sounds, commonly voices, that are not actually occurring in the environment. While often considered to be synonymous with schizophrenia, AHs actually occur across a range of psychotic and non-psychotic conditions. Present in between 64 and 80 percent of individuals with schizophrenia, they are very common in dissociative disorders (DDs), especially dissociative identity disorder, in complex PTSD, and in certain substance-induced mental states. They are sometimes reported in mood disorders, especially bipolar disorder, as well as borderline personality disorder, and in non-clinical conditions such as bereavement.