Editorials

  • Your “Vibration” Was Never the Problem

    ByFederico Malatesta

    Self-help has borrowed from every discipline it could reach, and physics came back the most damaged. In this excerpt from his forthcoming book They Are Lying to You: The Self-Help Delusion, Federico Malatesta traces the Law of Attraction from Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret (2006) back through the New Thought movement and forward into today’s instruction to “raise your vibration.” He sets out the three principles the doctrine rests on; the cognitive machinery that moved thirty million copies (social proof, illusory correlation, the illusion of potential, sequence-as-causation); and what physics means by vibration: a carbon–hydrogen bond oscillates at the same frequency whether you are meditating or furious. No instrument measures the frequency of an emotion. The full citations for this chapter are in the book, out this fall.

  • The Odyssey as a “Resilience Manual”?

    ByFederico Malatesta

    Sam Akbar’s The Odyssey Mindset reads Homer’s poem as a resilience manual: seven lessons for getting through a hard life. Akbar is a serious clinical psychologist with a Classics degree from Oxford, and she gets much of the poem right, which is exactly why the book is worth arguing with. Federico Malatesta examines how the book converts every contradiction Homer refuses to settle into a “resource for growth”; why the “resilient Odysseus” is a Stoic invention returned to us through the therapy the Stoics fathered, a paraphrase of a paraphrase; and why the prophecy of Tiresias undoes any lesson about coming home to yourself. The pattern, self-help borrowing the authority of the humanities and handing back a simplified version of reality, is the subject of his forthcoming book, They Are Lying to You: The Self-Help Delusion.

  • Leave Aristotle Alone

    ByFederico Malatesta

    Editorial · No. 20 Leave Aristotle Alone Happiness, Eudaimonia and the erasure of context. Modern happiness culture loves to cite Aristotle. This essay argues it has him backwards. When figures like Laurie Santos, Arthur Brooks, Martin Seligman, Sonja Lyubomirsky, and Gretchen Rubin invoke eudaimonia, they treat it as a richer feeling or a measurable, optimizable…

  • Numbers and Lies

    ByFederico Malatesta

    Editorial · No. 19 Numbers and Lies How Self-Development Cites What the Author Has Not Read They Are Lying to You The Self-Help Delusion Coming out this fall They Are Lying to You. The Science is wrong.The Advice doesn’t work.That’s the business model. Out Fall 2026 There comes a moment, somewhere in the middle of…

  • The Horse Does Not Care About Your Story

    ByFederico Malatesta

    Editorial · No. 17 The Horse Does Not Care About Your Story Equine Coaching Beyond Mirrors and Mysticism This essay examines equine coaching as a neuroscience-grounded developmental tool while dismantling the mystical interpretive frameworks that dominate the field. Federico Malatesta argues that horses are effective in coaching contexts because they detect somatic incongruence and bypass…

  • The January Illusion

    ByFederico Malatesta

    Editorial · No. 16 The January Illusion On Stories, Desire, and the Architecture of Change. The annual ritual of New Year’s resolutions rests on a flawed premise: that we can identify and execute “right decisions” independent of context and narrative. Most people approach January trying to fix a meaning problem with a purpose tool, expecting…

  • The Long Return

    ByFederico Malatesta

    Editorial · No. 15 The Long Return On identity, home, and a considered holiday recommendation. In this piece, I reflect on identity as something unfinished, layered, and resistant to clean allegiance. Through a paired holiday recommendation, Julia Ioffe’s Motherland and the film An Englishman Abroad, I explore exile, return, and the persistence of what we…

  • Easy Wisdom

    ByFederico Malatesta

    Editorial · No. 14 Easy Wisdom The Circulation of Easy Wisdom and the Collapse of Leadership Thinking. This essay examines how contemporary culture confuses the appearance of wisdom with the practice of judgment. A short video of Slavoj Žižek, in which four contradictory statements all sound equally profound, was the spark for a reflection on…

  • The Happiness Shortcut

    ByFederico Malatesta

    Editorial · No. 13 The Happiness Shortcut When helping others feels good — and why that feeling isn’t the whole story. This essay examines a Washington Post interpretation of a Cornell study claiming that small acts of contribution can significantly increase happiness. While the data is compelling, the cultural enthusiasm around it reveals a deeper…