Meandering Tour

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Random observations about current events, language, science, technology, culture, and life -- with a touch of humor

Meandering Tour

I Get No Respect | 積ん読 | Newsprint | Percussion | Robotic Cuisine

Jan 05, 2026

5) Psycho babble, qu’est-ce que c’est?

A recent article in The Atlantic (“ Why Couples Therapists Are Sick of Therapy-Speak”) describes the counterproductive misuse of clinical terminology in couples therapy. Among the most common infractions: accusing a partner of "gaslighting" when their behavior is nothing more than miscommunication or disagreement.

The term "gaslight," from the play and movie adaptation starring Ingrid Bergman, means to manipulate someone into doubting their own memory, perception, or sanity. Yet, a New York therapist told The Atlantic he saw a couple recently who used the term "gaslighting" to describe nearly every argument. "Let’s say one person forgot to pick up groceries or didn’t accurately recall a conversation; the other would say, ‘Oh, you’re gaslighting me. This is psychological abuse,’" he said. “But they weren’t. They were just having what I would consider pretty normal miscommunication.”

Here are some other examples from the article:

• Some clients proclaim to their therapist that their partner has obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, autism, or ADHD, even though their partner hasn’t been clinically diagnosed with such a condition.
• One therapist had a client who complained that her husband had "avoidant attachment," and he, in turn, accused his wife of having "anxious attachment." The therapist said that "neither of the labels was accurate."
• Another therapist described a client who insisted that his girlfriend had borderline personality disorder, a rare and serious mental illness. When he asked the man why he thought that, the client said, "Well, she gets so emotional when we argue."

"Rather than clarifying a couple’s predicament," the article concludes, this phenomenon "tends to shut down conversation and turn spouses against each other, because people generally get defensive, not collaborative . . . "

. . . unless you do meticulous research beforehand, as I did many years ago when I took our then 8-year-old daughter to see Dr. Mark Riddle. He was head of child psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School, where I served as assistant dean. Katy could be, shall we say, obstreperous in her dealings with my wife and me. Outside our home, with others, she was perfectly delightful. If anyone could solve our mental health puzzle, surely it would be this aptonymic therapist at a world-renowned medical institution.

I was convinced that Katy — now 34, a successful media professional, and a marvelous mother of a 2-year-old daughter (I’m not biased; grandparents usually disapprove of their children’s child-rearing, right?) — suffered from Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD), defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as a persistent pattern of angry, defiant, and argumentative behavior toward authority figures. The DSM requires at least four of eight symptoms to meet the diagnostic threshold for ODD. I was convinced that Katy (who gave me permission to tell this story) had seven, so at the start of our meeting, I handed Dr. Riddle a copy of the DSM ODD list, with my checkmarks.

Katy had three sessions with Dr. Riddle, who, in a final family meeting, pronounced her just fine, if a bit anxious (aren’t we all?). According to his detailed report I recently found in an old file, Dr. Riddle recommended "parent management training to minimize negative interactions/power struggles at home." I guess my scientific due diligence and ODD diagnosis were just as faulty as the gaslighting charges common in couples therapy today.

Dr. Riddle asked Katy to wait outside his office while he spoke with my wife, Julie, and me. He reiterated his untroubling findings about Katy, looked directly at me, and asked, "Mr. Sherman, has anyone ever suggested you might have Tourette syndrome?"

"See, see," shouted Julie, as she swung her arm and slapped me across the chest. "I told you so."

I sat there stunned, as Dr. Riddle continued, "I notice how you twist your neck sometimes when you’re speaking."

“Mr. Sherman, has anyone ever suggested you might have Tourette syndrome?”

No doubt the good doctor was referring to the discomfort I experienced wearing a tie, as my job required in those days. "That’s all it is," I sputtered, referring to my (apparent) Rodney Dangerfield neck tic.

I forget how our conversation ended, so shocked I was by the damning diagnostic declaration of a leading mental health expert. It might have been something feeble like, "But, but, I’m here to talk about Katy. She’s the problem, not me."

Dr. Riddle’s four-page report was supportive of Katy, but a section titled "paternal/family history" referred to an unnamed family member (obviously me!) as someone with obsessive compulsive tendencies and "a co-morbid tic disorder." This was an outrage, especially after I had explained the scratchy, vice-like cause of my condition. But there it was, enshrined in an official hospital record — a mortifying diagnosis at the very medical school where I worked.

Several weeks later, I was buying some dress shirts at Jos. A. Bank, the clothier famous for " Buy One, Get Umpteen Free." The salesman asked, what size? I replied, 15 1/2” x 32”. He said, let me measure you. I said, it’s not necessary; I’ve always been that size. He persisted, slipped the tape measure from his neck to mine, and pronounced me a 16” x 32”.

"Well, that explains it," I called out. "I don’t have Tourette’s; I have dress shirt constriction syndrome!" Julie, ever reassuring, dismissed my self-diagnosis.

Since then, I have routinely checked my neck size before buying new shirts in order to avoid DSCS. Recently, Julie and I were getting ready to attend a fundraiser for a local charity. I bounded down the stairs to show her my suit and tie combination. "See, you’re doing it again," she charged. It turns out I’m up to a 16 1/2 neck size!

Here’s what the CDC has to say about tic disorders. This information should be reliable, unless RFK, Jr. has disbanded the tic research unit. Next time you see me, you make the call.

4) 積ん読

Julie has another concern about my behavior, but this one is legitimate: I buy an inordinate number of books but actually read relatively few, leaving many untouched novels and biographies to pile up on and under my bedside table and on bookshelves around our house.

Several prominent authors and public intellectuals actually praise this habit. The late novelist and literary critic Umberto Eco, for example, owned 30,000 volumes in his private library, many of which he acknowledged he had not read. "It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy," he said, "as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones."

Inspired by Eco’s sentiment, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the statistician, options trader, and author, coined the term " antilibrary" after visiting Eco’s collection. He wrote about it in The Black Swan, his study of highly improbable events:

[Eco] separates visitors into two categories: those who react with "Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?" and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

I don’t agree with either perspective (comparing books to cutlery, read books are far less valuable), but I recently learned a Japanese word — " tsundoku" (積ん読) — that describes my habit and suits me more, I think. It apparently has a playful, affectionate, and sometimes self-deprecating connotation (see " The Pleasures of Tsundoku, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Book Piles").

My behavior does not somehow make me virtuous, as Eco and Taleb would have you believe. I just enjoy being surrounded by books — some of which I’ve read, many not, but might one day, or have consulted or perused from time to time — and, in a few cases, have pulled off the shelf and started reading, although, admittedly, not often finishing. I don’t think the last sentence is grammatically correct, but I’m on deadline, so I don’t have time to consult the reference books in the section of my collection pictured below.

For many years, Julie’s sister, Ellen, a historian and avid reader, has given me a book for my birthday, understanding, I think, that some will go unread. This year, she gave me The History of Sound, an exquisite collection of a dozen intertwined short stories by Ben Shattuck, winner of the 2025 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. I can’t put it down. 1

When I’m finished, The History of Sound will go on our living room shelves along with other books arranged in a manner I now recognize as consistent with at least part of Dr. Riddle’s diagnosis.

3) Newsprint

The very first morning I woke up at college in 1972 (note to younger readers: please don’t unsubscribe), I opened my dorm room door to find a complimentary copy of The New York Times on the threshold. So began my lifelong love of newspapers and other periodicals.

At the time, the Watergate scandal was unfolding quickly, but you had to wait until 6:30 p.m. to watch the CBS Evening News with Walter Conkrite in our common room to catch a glimpse of what was happening (older readers: it makes one yearn for such quaint wrongdoing). The details were difficult to ascertain until the Times and The Washington Post were delivered the next morning. We’d fight over the papers to be the first to devour the news.

Occasionally, President Nixon or his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, would appear on prime time TV to spin what was happening. Alerted by hand-drawn posters in the hallway (younger readers: carrier pigeons had, just a few years earlier, been replaced by such posters), we’d head across the hall to our freshman counselors’ room to watch on a tiny television set with rabbit ears.

I saved this poster in part because of who had drawn it, on April 30, 1973.

The historic importance of the moment was palpable, but the pace and rhythm somehow were manageable. I don’t recall any of us feeling frenzied or mentally overwhelmed, as we are today with the minute-by-minute bombardment of digital news. I now often find myself, for example, flitting back and forth on my iPhone among, say, a feature in The New Yorker, breaking news from the Times and CNN, and countless texts and emails. The enjoyment and comprehension of an uninterrupted, top-to-bottom read are utterly lost.

So, two weeks ago, I tried an analog reboot (oxymoron?) by having the Times — the actual newspaper that smudges your hands — delivered to our home.

It’s been wonderful. I start my day now, before opening email, by reading newsprint — no hotlinks, no beeping distractions, no pop-ups. Not only is it more relaxing than the phone, but, in turning the pages, I stumble across articles, photos, obituaries, and cultural events I would never see online due to the format and various digital distractions. I even started doing the crossword puzzle on paper again, a far more satisfying, and seemingly successful, experience than squinting at tiny clues and boxes on a screen.

I’m sold. Give it a try.

That’s copy.

2) Sidetracks

• Reader Mail: Ben Leigh, a Brooklyn-based graphic designer, admonished me for making fun of the triangle (the percussion instrument) in my previous column. He referred me to the beginning of this video to prove his point. Fair enough.

Prove It All Night (Phoenix, 78) (from Thrill Hill Vault 1976-1978) - YouTube

Prove It All Night (Phoenix, 78) (from Thrill Hill Vault 1976-1978)

• TripusTikus: Check out this high-resolution dataset of roads of the Roman Empire, published in Nature magazine in November. The analysis nearly doubles the length of known Roman roads. According to the article, the maps were created by "identifying roads from archaeological and historical sources, locating them using modern and historical topographic maps and remote sensing, and digitizing them with road segment-level metadata . . . . This resource is transformative for understanding how mobility shaped connectivity, administration, and even disease transmission in the ancient world." The authors were puzzled, though, by the lingering scent of cinnamon and baked pretzel dough in the remains of an ancient rest stop in Durocortorum, now the city of Reims, in northeastern France.

• Eggsacting: Robots have become so adept and precise that they can peel and perform simulated surgery and suturing on a hard-boiled egg without ruining it (h/t News Items). Watch this 18-second video demonstration, and consider the implications.

1) A Byte to Eat

Speaking of robots and food, Botinkit, a Shenzhen-based start-up company, sells an AI-powered cooking appliance that can autonomously stir-fry or stew ingredients, mixing in sauces and seasonings at precise times and temperatures. In addition to refining recipes developed by human cooks and "encoding" them exactly, the product, known as Omni, can free up chefs to focus on other tasks and enable less skilled kitchen staff to prepare meals with the touch of a few buttons.

Omni is available worldwide, including, I recently learned, in my hometown of Baltimore, at a restaurant called Mahjong, located near the campus of Johns Hopkins University. Your dutiful Substack reporter just ate lunch there and got a behind-the scenes tour of the kitchen, including the Botinkit machines, sitting opposite traditional woks used by the head chef for dishes that are not yet robot-ready.

The food cost only a few dollars per dish and was quite good, although I am not a reliable judge because I tend to love all Chinese food, no matter what. Still, based on my own travels in China, the cuisine seemed quite genuine. The amiable owner, Arthur Dai, a Hopkins graduate who grew up in China, was keen to point out that the aim of the technology is not just to save money on labor and offer lower prices but to perfect recipes, replicate menu items to consistently satisfy customer tastes, and facilitate the opening of additional restaurants based on the same offerings.

The robotic food preparation industry is on the rise. A Munich-based company called Circus SE installs fully autonomous kitchens, which prepare fresh meals in supermarkets without a human cook.

London-based Moley Robotics boasts automated kitchens for the luxury residential market. According to Mansion Global, which I do not ordinarily read, the company offers "an AI-powered kitchen robot that memorizes recipes, grabs ingredients from a customized Moley countertop, and cooks to precision. From your mobile device, you can control the robot and access recipes created by Spain’s SHA Wellness Clinic. For £80,000 (about US$102,000), the X-AiR robot may cost less than a private chef, but doesn’t serve or plate food . . . yet."

My culinary needs are more pedestrian. Open the refrigerator door, HAL.