Fair warning: If you are looking for an examination of marriage’s benefits or why it’s declining, this piece is not for you.

Please read one of the articles linked at the bottom of the page.

If, however, you’re looking for an uncomfortably honest, completely anecdotal explanation of why the nice young men and women in your life aren’t getting hitched — I’m glad you’re here.

My name is Emily. I’m a twenty-something Christian with a college degree, a personality and the ability to make eye contact in conversation. For a long time, I assumed this would be enough to interest potential life partners. I entered the dating pool without artifice, looking for solid friendships and conversation that could eventually turn into something more.

That’s not how modern dating works. If you want to find a partner, you have to play the game — and the game is shaped by social media, dating apps and casual sex.

I am ill-equipped to play this game, a lesson I began learning in college when a fellow student asked for my Snapchat.

“I don’t have a Snapchat, but you can have my number!” I replied, much to his confusion.

Unbeknownst to me, I’d skipped several steps in a modern courtship ritual. When two people want to get to know each other better, they exchange social media accounts to communicate. Only when a relationship becomes more serious are phone numbers exchanged.

There is something magical about October baseball, perhaps because its seasonal arc seems perfectly positioned and scripted for the drama of life itself.

It was the late Bart Giamatti, the Yale president turned baseball commissioner, who so poignantly observed:

“The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone.”

An extra round of playoffs has shortened the loneliness of fall a bit, but the opening of the World Series this weekend between the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers is something of a nostalgic reunion. The Dodgers and Yankees have previously met 11 times in the Fall Classic, the most of any other franchise match up.

Growing up in New York, my Yankee-fan father waxed poetic about those epic Subway Series of the 1940s and 50s. He’d talk about racing home from school to listen on the radio or standing on the sidewalk in front of a Manhattan television store catching updates through the sets in the window.

My dad’s two favorite Yankees were Hall of Famer’s Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle. He once ran into Joe at the Fountainbleau Hotel in Miami Beach. Joe was predictably debonair and gracious. Sadly, my father’s one Mickey encounter was less idyllic, talking with the intoxicated former star outside his restaurant across from New York City’s Central Park.

In a YouTube video, an X post and his New York Times column, David French opines, “Religious liberty is NOT in danger” (his emphasis) and “the legal protections for religious liberty are stronger than at any time in American history.”

This is a very big flip-flop from his opinion in 2015 when he published an article for National Review, “The Left’s Attack on Religious Liberty Could Break America,” writing:

“Everyone who’s been paying attention knows the Left’s motivation and the Left’s endgame, where Christianity either changes or finds itself consigned to the outer darkness, occupying the same cultural and political space as white supremacists.”

But in his recent post, French wrote:

“It’s been 14 years since there has been a significant religious liberty loss at SCOTUS. Religious liberty is secure in the United States. The American Christian community is the most free, most powerful Christian community in the world.

“Yes, there are some individual injustices, which are dealt with in courts, but American Christians are not ‘persecuted’ by any meaningful historical standard.”

French styles himself an evangelical who has “been relentlessly pushed to the periphery” of American evangelical Christianity.

He says that as part of the “out-group,” he’s gained a new perspective on this and other issues.

A physician and leading transgender activist deliberately withheld a major study finding that puberty-blocking drugs do not help adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria, The New York Times reports.

The study reportedly went unpublished for political reasons and for fear it would undermine so-called gender-affirming care.

The study itself is horrific. It was conducted by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a physician who “specializes in the care of gender non-conforming children and transgender youth.” She is the medical director for the nation’s largest youth gender clinic, The Center for Transyouth Health and Development at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.

Starting in 2015, Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues “recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers, which stave off the permanent physical changes — like breasts or a deepening voice,” the Times reports.

The study was funded by a $9.7 million government grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, then directed by Francis Collins.

It found that “Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements,” the Times reports. According to the researchers, that’s because the children in the study are “in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years.”