There was once a teenage Pope
His name was Pope Benedict IX, and he became pope for the first time around 1032, when he was possibly as young as 11 years old. (Historians argue the exact age—some say early teens, others say no younger than 18—but either way: teenage pope.)
Now, most teen boys are still figuring out deodorant. Benedict IX was running the Catholic Church.
He didn’t exactly treat it like a sacred duty. He was known for being wildly corrupt, politically entangled, and morally… flexible. Accusations against him included bribery, simony (selling church offices), rape, and hosting orgies in the Lateran Palace. He was once described by a church historian as “a disgrace to the chair of St. Peter.”
And then—because apparently being Pope wasn’t chill enough—he sold the papacy.
In 1045, Benedict IX literally resigned and sold the title of Pope to his godfather, who became Pope Gregory VI. Benedict claimed he wanted to get married. (Yes. While Pope.)
But that wasn’t the end. He later came back and reclaimed the papacy, making him one of the only popes in history to serve more than once. Technically, he was pope three separate times, which makes him kind of like the Babe Ruth of Papal Shenanigans.
Eventually, he was excommunicated and faded into historical obscurity. But for a while, he held the keys to the kingdom—and used them like they unlocked a minibar.
Eminem wrote ‘Brain Damage’ about his actual childhood bully, DeAngelo Bailey.
There’s something uniquely American about turning your childhood bully into a footnote on your platinum record—and then watching that same bully try to sue you for defamation. Only in the world of Eminem could justice arrive in a courtroom ruling written in rhyme. And only in Eminem’s world would it feel like both a punchline and a tragedy.
When Eminem released The Slim Shady LP in 1999, it felt like he was showing us a back alley of his soul—graffitied, foul-mouthed, and full of ghosts. On “Brain Damage,” he told the story of a scrawny white kid in Detroit getting his head bashed against the urinal by a bully named DeAngelo Bailey. He didn’t make the name up. DeAngelo was real.
The lyrics are brutal, absurd, cartoonishly violent. Eminem was always part Looney Tunes and part Greek tragedy. He describes being choked until he couldn’t breathe, stomped by a principal, beaten so badly he goes blind and starts bleeding from the ear. These aren’t just gory rhymes—they’re echoes of something truer, something harder to explain.
Because if you peel back the wordplay, the punchlines, the gore and grit, you get something that sounds like a cry for help. A kid learning to make art from trauma. A kid who got slammed into lockers and later weaponized those same lockers as mythology.
In 2001, Bailey sued Eminem for slander, claiming the song exaggerated what really happened. He wanted $1 million in damages. The judge dismissed it in a ruling that rhymed. You couldn’t script it better—unless you were Slim Shady.
There’s a deeper sadness beneath the hilarity of it all. Because DeAngelo wasn’t just a villain in a rap song. He was a memory Eminem couldn’t shake. And when you grow up the way Eminem did—poor, angry, overlooked—you don’t get therapists. You get notebooks. You write things down. You make them rhyme. That’s your only way to be heard.
Eminem’s gift has always been his ability to drag every demon into the daylight and laugh at it—even as it tries to claw back at him through lawsuits, headlines, or his own self-doubt. “Brain Damage” isn’t just a tall tale—it’s a survival anthem for anyone who ever felt small, strange, and invisible. It’s a reminder that our worst days don’t vanish; they just wait for a beat to come back on.
Because sometimes, the most powerful thing you can do to your past is name it. Loudly. In 4/4 time. With a hook so sticky, your bully hears it in the grocery store twenty years later and realizes he’s the punchline now.
Frederick the Great had a physical disgust of women. He once shocked a dinner party with an offensive rant against “ghastly women you smelled ten miles around”. When he saw his wife for the first time in six years, he only told her: “Madame has become more stout” and then left.
Imagine this: You’re at a glittering royal banquet in 18th-century Prussia. The silverware gleams. The candlelight dances. The greatest military mind of the century, the man Voltaire once called the “philosopher king,” rises from his seat—and delivers a tirade so venomous, so deeply personal, that the room reportedly falls silent.
And who’s the target?
Not a rival monarch. Not the Austrians. Not even the Jesuits.
No—women.
Frederick the Great, the man who transformed Prussia into a European powerhouse, who marched armies like chess pieces across the continent, couldn’t stomach the company of women. Not metaphorically. Literally. He once ranted at a stunned dinner party about “ghastly women you smelled ten miles around.” That’s a quote. From a man considered a symbol of Enlightenment rationality.
Let’s sit with that for a moment. Because it’s more than just garden-variety 18th-century sexism. Frederick didn’t just dismiss women—he hated them. Reviled them. Was physically revolted by them. And the million-dollar question is: Why?
Was it trauma? Was it repression? Was it disgust born of an arranged marriage he never wanted?
Historians have long whispered about Frederick’s sexuality—how he preferred the company of his male officers, how his father once caught him trying to escape Prussia with his best friend and had that friend beheaded in front of him. Yeah. That happened. His own father made him watch the execution.
If we believe history is shaped by human beings and not marble statues, then we have to ask: What kind of man emerges from that?
Here’s what we know. Frederick was forced into a political marriage with Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick. After the wedding, he immediately abandoned her at a remote castle. When he saw her again six years later, he looked her up and down and said, “Madame has become more stout.” Then he turned and walked away.
That’s cold. Even by 18th-century standards.
But here’s the paradox: This same man—who scorned intimacy, who loathed women, who operated like a machine—was obsessed with the arts. He played the flute. He wrote treatises on philosophy. He corresponded with Voltaire. He didn’t just want to rule like a Roman emperor—he wanted to think like one.
So how do you reconcile the tender flautist with the man who could barely stand to speak to his wife? How do you square the humanist with the misogynist?
And more importantly: What does it say about the age that called him great?
Because if history teaches us anything, it’s that brilliance and brokenness often walk hand-in-hand. That cruelty can hide behind powdered wigs and Enlightenment ideals. And that sometimes, the rot at the core of an empire isn’t in its borders, but at the dinner table, in a sneer, in a sentence that cuts sharper than any saber:
“Madame has become more stout.”
This wasn’t just personal bitterness. It was an empire built by a man who could conquer nations but couldn’t share a room with a woman.
And that’s the kind of detail that sticks with you. The kind that makes history feel less like a museum—and more like a haunted house, full of ghosts we still don’t fully understand.
In Japan, more diapers are now sold for elderly people than for babies, reflecting the country’s aging population and shifting demographics.
Here’s a statistic that sounds like a joke until it lands: In Japan, more adult diapers are now sold than baby diapers.
Let’s pause there.
This isn’t just a quirky headline about aging. It’s a signpost. A signal. It’s what a society looks like when the birth rate falls, life expectancy rises, and a country walks headfirst into a demographic transformation unlike anything in human history.
Japan is often described as a “canary in the coal mine” for global aging trends—but that metaphor might underplay the situation. Japan isn’t a canary. It’s a preview. And the trailer is telling us that the story of the 21st century may not be one of youth and growth, but of age and maintenance.
Japan’s fertility rate is about 1.3 children per woman—far below the replacement rate of 2.1. At the same time, the average life expectancy is nearly 85 years. That combination means Japan’s population is shrinking and graying at the same time.
And it’s not just diapers. The workforce is aging. Rural towns are depopulating. Nursing homes are full. In some regions, you’re more likely to see robot caretakers than toddlers. There are entire municipalities with more centenarians than teenagers.
What happens when a society becomes structurally old?
There’s a phrase in political science: “Demographics are destiny.” But that’s not quite right. Demographics are pressure. They bend institutions. They challenge assumptions. And they force choices.
In Japan, those pressures are showing up in everything from immigration policy (long a political third rail) to robotics R&D (Japan leads the world in elder-care automation). There’s even been a surge in what’s called “eldercare crime”—when older citizens, often isolated and impoverished, intentionally commit minor crimes to go to jail where meals and human contact are guaranteed.
These aren’t just Japan’s problems. The United States isn’t far behind. By 2034, for the first time in American history, adults over 65 will outnumber children. Europe is already aging faster than it can replace its workforce. South Korea’s fertility rate is the lowest on Earth.
This is what it means to live in a post-fertility society.
Most of our policies—our taxes, our schools, our cities—were designed for a population pyramid that no longer exists. In Japan, that pyramid is now a column, and soon a mushroom. The same is happening in the U.S.
An aging society forces hard questions:
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Who will take care of the elderly when there are fewer children to do so?
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How will healthcare systems sustain longer life spans with more chronic illness?
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What happens to economic growth when there are fewer young workers?
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And culturally—how does a society reshape its identity when youth is no longer its dominant narrative?
The diaper statistic shocks because it flips our assumptions. It turns time upside-down. We’re used to imagining the future as younger, faster, more dynamic. But the future may be slower, grayer, and more caregiving-focused than we’ve ever dared to picture.
Japan is showing us that reality now. The rest of us would be wise to listen. Not out of fear. But out of the urgent need to rethink what kind of future we’re actually planning for—and whether we’re building institutions ready to support the people who will live in it.
Because if we don’t? We’ll all be playing catch-up in a society designed for a version of humanity that no longer exists.
And by the time we notice, we may be the ones wearing the diapers.
Height surgery is a thing— (mostly) men are enduring months of pain, bone-breaking procedures, and intense rehab just to get a few inches taller.
There’s a certain kind of man—quiet, highly self-aware, maybe a little too online—who will one day find himself staring at a YouTube video of another man in a hospital bed. The guy in the video is post-op. He’s got pins sticking out of his legs, a walker beside him, and a brave, almost euphoric smile. The caption says something like “Day 7 after limb-lengthening. Up 1.4cm so far!”
And that’s how it begins. The click. The search. The rabbit hole. You watch another video. And another. Before you realize it, you’re doing math in your head. “If I gain one millimeter a day, that’s 10 millimeters every 10 days. Which is one centimeter. Which is… okay, so in three months I could be…”
You stop yourself.
But the seed is planted.
Here’s what happens, mechanically: a surgeon slices open your leg—usually the femur, sometimes the tibia—and breaks the bone on purpose. It’s not a shatter. It’s a clean, clinical separation. Then they insert a telescoping rod inside the bone. Every day, either remotely (with magnets) or manually (with an adjustment tool), that rod pushes the two halves of the bone slightly further apart.
One millimeter per day.
That’s it. That’s the whole trick. You stretch the bone. And the body, like a bored teenager playing with putty, fills in the gap. Over time, new bone tissue forms, stabilizing what was once a forced separation. Your muscles, nerves, and skin stretch along with it. They don’t like it. But they adapt. Or at least, they try.
This goes on for months. You don’t just sit around watching your legs grow like magic beans. You’re doing physical therapy every single day. You’re learning how to walk again, while literally being longer than you were before. It hurts. Sometimes a lot. There are men who say the pain made them hallucinate. There are men who say the loneliness hurt more. Imagine watching yourself become a new version of you—one millimeter at a time—and having no one to talk to who actually gets it.
What’s fascinating—and frankly, disturbing—is that none of this is done because these men want to be tall. They just want to stop being short. There’s a difference. It’s the kind of psychological line that looks trivial until you’re the one living under it.
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