Psychology

Yaeli Galdamez was a “girly girl,” her mother Abigail Martinez said in a recent interview. As a child growing up in El Salvador and California, she dressed in princess costumes and later had crushes on boys. But after she was bullied for her appearance in middle school, Yaeli began developing symptoms of depression. In eighth grade, she attempted suicide by overdosing on pills. Her mother was desperate to get her the help she needed. So as a sophomore Yaeli began regularly seeing the psychologist at her local high school. But the family says that her counseling for depression was accompanied by a focus Abigail knew nothing about: the school psychologist spent two years encouraging Yaeli in a male identity, Andy (sometimes Andrew).

By now we know that there are creeps and abusers in pretty much any industry that exists today. In the world of podcasts, the question appears to be: are we really going to create an investigatory series detailing the horrors lurking within every single one? Yes — of course — seems like the resounding answer. New York magazine has launched a new podcast, Cover Story: Power Trip, and its first season is devoted to rooting out the predators and boundary-crossers of one extremely minor occupational field: the psychedelic therapeutic community.

The science is in, but don’t expect that to change anything. According to at least 17 recent studies, trigger warnings — those advisories posted ahead of content some readers may find distressing — not only fail to alleviate suffering in the emotionally disturbed but may actually induce greater trauma in those individuals. There are, to date, no studies that indicate trigger warnings work to their intended purpose. They were dreamed up in the 1970s after psychologists began to diagnose a new condition, post-traumatic stress disorder, in Vietnam War vets. But trigger warnings only reached popular consciousness in the 2010s, when feminist blogs used them ahead of content about sexual violence.

In the 2010s, fanfiction had a serious moment in the United States. After nearly 30 years of hiding — first in handmade snail-mail fanzines, then in closed-off fan communities online, then on websites like LiveJournal, Fanfiction and AO3 (An Archive of Our Own) — ‘geek culture’ broke into the mainstream. For a moment, fanfiction was everywhere. Finally, it wasn’t just the diehard fans who wanted to participate: it was everyone or, at least, what felt like everyone. Reporters took notice. Vulture published ‘It’s a Fan-Made World: The Fan Culture Revolution’. VICE commented on the ubiquity of fanfiction about the boy band One Direction and the impact of Fifty Shades, among other things. Jezebel and BuzzFeed both marveled at the Omegaverse, not once, but twice each.

If this Christmas you hear the distant rumble of dusty games’ compendia being brought down out of attics, it’s safe to say you can blame Netflix’s latest smash hit series The Queen’s Gambit, which seems to be convincing everyone that chess can be cool. App stores are reporting a surge of searches for a game first brought to England 10 centuries ago by Vikings. Set in the 1950s, The Queen’s Gambit tells the story of Beth Harmon (played brilliantly by Isla Johnstone and Anya Taylor-Joy). Aged eight, she survives a fatal car crash only to end up in an orphanage.