Family estrangement isn’t new, and sometimes, especially in cases of abuse, it’s tragically warranted. Like a healthy immune system, we need the capacity to identify and expel what threatens us. But the rising phenomenon of no contact is more like an autoimmune disease in which the body’s defenses mistake what belongs to it for a threat. Those swept up in this phenomenon can lose the ability to distinguish the dangerous from the difficult; they end up attacking indiscriminately what is in fact vital.

Young men today are demoralized. That’s the conclusion from the Institute for Family Studies’ new report on the state of young men, based on a survey that actually talked to them. Society isn’t offering young men the pathways to success they once had, but what it is offering — easy access to sports betting, addictive video games, and porn — is leading them from one modern-day hellish environment straight into another one.

The increase in men’s screen time during the smartphone era has mostly displaced time with friends and other forms of leisure, impacting marriage rates.

Prenuptial agreements used to be the domain of celebrities and the superwealthy. That may be changing: a new Harris poll suggests more than half of engaged or married couples under the age of 45 have negotiated the terms of their divorce before they reach the altar. That’s roughly a fivefold increase in prenups since the 1990s.

A couple who flew to Las Vegas expecting to get married welcomed a premature baby girl when the bride unexpectedly went into labor before the ceremony.

These days, the trope of the miserable housewife is pretty much ubiquitous. Betty Friedan famously termed the lack of fulfillment among traditional mothers as “the problem that has no name,” but in more recent decades there’s been no shortage of people willing to name it; indeed, our media landscape never seems to shut up about it. Nearly everyone seems to take it for granted that traditional housewives and stay-at-home moms are as depicted in endless movies and television shows: bored, wretched, anxious, and often relying on some form of “mother’s little helper” — prescription or otherwise.