My friend had a name ready for everything that was going wrong in her marriage, and not one of those names saved it. She had read the relationship books, the ones the bookshop piles up by the till, the famous ones people quote at you over brunch. She could give you her attachment style over dinner, his attachment style, the attachment style of the waiter probably, and she did the exercises, the eye-gazing, the soft-startup scripts where you trade “you always” for “I feel”, and her marriage ended anyway, in a meeting room that smelled faintly of every divorce processed there before hers. She had every tool the genre sells. She had run out of nothing except the thing the tools were supposed to hand her. I keep returning to that because the self-help economy sells closeness as a skills deficit. Learn to listen! Reflect before you react! Bring the volume down! As though intimacy were a customer-service exam you could pass with enough rehearsal. And people do get better at the choreography. Some of them get worse at the actual thing while they are at it because now they have a vocabulary for managing each other instead of a reason to be plain. I’ve come to think, and I’m fairly certain of it, having watched the same thing happen to enough people to stop filing it under coincidence, that the trouble is almost never how two people talk. The trouble is which conversations they have never had. Not had badly. Never had. There are, by my reckoning, four of them. And most couples, most long friendships, most of the slow entanglements we round up to love, run on something like one and a half. They have the easy one until it’s threadbare and decline the other three, and the declining becomes the relationship. The silence does the work that should have been done by speech, and it does it badly, and it does it for years. This isn’t a list of tips. You can’t script these. There’s no opening line I can give you that survives contact with your actual kitchen at eleven at night. What I can give you is the map. The four subjects. Why we flinch from each one. What each is secretly for. So that by the end you can hold your own closeness up to the light, whatever shape it takes, romantic or familial or that strange decades-long thing with the friend you’d take a bullet for and never text first and locate the gap. The gap is always somewhere specific. People say “we grew apart” as if it were weather. Sometimes they do. But very often people decline four conversations and call the resulting silence growth. Let me start with the one almost everybody believes they’ve already had. One. What is this, actually. You think you’ve had this conversation because you defined the label. Boyfriend. Partner. Best mate. Exclusive, or open, or whatever the current word is. But the label was the easy part, the part you can do in a text. The actual conversation is about the contents of the word, and the contents are where people privately disagree for years without noticing. Two people say “partner” and mean two different stories about what’s actually happening. One of them means the person I build a life with, the one whose name goes next to mine on the boring forms. The other means the person I’m with for now, who is wonderful, and we’ll see. Both are honourable. Both are saying the same word across the table with total sincerity. And the gap between those two meanings keeps to itself. It sits there, patient, until some ordinary pressure, a job offer in another city, an ageing parent who suddenly needs deciding about, forces the contents into the open, at which point one person discovers they’ve been living in a relationship the other was only visiting. Goffman’s whole point is that we forever agree on the “frame”, the unspoken definition of what’s happening, so that a wink means teasing in one setting and contempt in another, and the social world holds together only because we mostly agree on which frame we stand in. Relationships run on the same trick. And the disagreements that destroy them are rarely about the wink. They are about the frame nobody checked. Why do we avoid it? Because asking risks an answer you can’t unhear. The ambiguity is doing a job. While “what is this” stays vague, you get to keep the version you prefer. You get to assume you’re being built around. The moment you ask the real question, the contents one, not the label one, you might learn that the person you’ve organised your future around thinks of you as a lovely chapter. So, we don’t ask. We protect the fantasy by refusing the sentence that would test it. And we call that not wanting to ruin the mood. The conversation closes the distance between the relationship you think you’re in and the one they think they’re in. That distance is where most heartbreak actually lives. Not in betrayal. In two people who were never, it turns out, in the same room. You have this conversation properly when you stop asking “what are we” and start asking the unglamorous follow-ups.
A prospective cohort study from the RODAM project followed 1,435 Ghanaian adults for about six years, tracking their blood markers and kidney health. The researchers measured ferritin—a protein that stores iron—and C‑reactive protein, a common inflammation marker, at the start and then watched who developed chronic kidney disease (CKD).
They found that higher baseline ferritin levels were linked to a more than three‑and‑a‑half‑fold increase in the risk of CKD, and the association was even stronger for albuminuria, a sign of early kidney damage (adjusted incidence rate ratio around 4.2). C‑reactive protein showed no clear connection to later kidney problems.
What this means for public‑health work is that ferritin could serve as an early warning sign for kidney disease in African populations, where CKD rates are high. It suggests we might be able to identify at‑risk individuals before damage becomes obvious and target preventive measures more precisely.
The piece points out that the Catholic Church’s official teaching isn’t a secret conspiracy about Islam at all; it’s right there in the Catechism, paragraph 841. In that short section the Church says the plan of salvation also includes Muslims, that they share Abraham’s faith and worship the same merciful God as Christians. The author highlights the tension this creates with biblical passages that claim exclusive access to God through Christ. By laying out the contrast, the article suggests the real story is about how a billion‑person institution publicly embraces another faith, not about any hidden plot. The deeper dive is behind a paywall.
Right now a man is sitting in a parking lot with the engine off. Phone in his hand. Six months since he opened a Bible. He is ninety seconds of the right video away from his knees. He just doesn’t know it yet. Dead Hidden exists to be that ninety seconds. And I can’t make it alone anymore. I don’t do this often. I hate asking. Asking feels like weakness, and I’ve got no use for weakness. I’m asking anyway. Pride has never built a single thing. This started with one guy, a Bible, and a phone. No team. No studio. No budget. No permission. Just the verses nobody else had the spine to say out loud. 28,000 of you showed up. You didn’t come for the soft stuff. You came for the psalms they skim past on Sunday morning. The chapters that make people uncomfortable, because they are supposed to. The parts of the Book that get filed under “we’ll cover that another time” and never get covered. You came for the truth with the lights off. That is the whole thing. But I’ve carried this as far as one man and a phone can carry it. What comes next needs a team. Real production. Dark. Raw. The kind of three-minute video that stops a man mid-scroll, drops a stone in his chest, and makes him open a Bible he hasn’t touched since Christmas. I can see it. I can’t fund it. Not alone. Here’s the part nobody likes to hear. The truth costs money. It always has. Every prophet still had to eat. Every press still needed ink. Free things die in the dark. And the lie has a marketing budget you would not believe. The truth has you. You pay for it up front, or you pay the tax later, when there is nobody left telling it. For the next 24 hours, Substack is taking 50% off a paid Dead Hidden subscription. That is less than one gas station coffee a month. It keeps the lights on in one of the few places online with no sponsor whispering in its ear. If money is tight right now, I mean this: don’t. Your reading matters more to me than your dollar. But if you can sponsor another reader, Substack lets you do that too. Every cent. Back into this. No sponsors. No ads. No corporation deciding which verses are allowed on the air. Just the work and the Book. When Nehemiah rebuilt the wall, the men did not get to pick between working and fighting. They did both at once. “Every one with one of his hands wrought in the work, and with the other hand held a weapon.” (Nehemiah 4:17) Trowel in one hand. Sword in the other. That is the assignment now. The war is spiritual. The battlefield is your phone. And the truth still doesn’t fund itself. Thank you for reading. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being 28,000 strong who wanted the real thing instead of the comfortable version. Rise up and build something they can’t ignore. Adam P.S. The 50% door closes in 24 hours and it does not reopen. After that the wall still gets built. Just slower, with fewer hands. Pick up a trowel.
The piece argues that South Dakota’s economic‑development strategy leans heavily on companies that receive tax incentives to create low‑pay jobs. Because the wages are below what a single person can live on, the author says the state ends up subsidising those workers through public programs—housing, food assistance, health care—so the cost is passed onto taxpayers.
A second point is that many of the workers are on temporary visas or have limited legal status, which makes it hard for them to change jobs or take extra work. The article describes this as a form of modern indentured servitude, noting that families often arrive with several members, and that children automatically become U.S. citizens, unlocking additional benefits that the author sees as an incentive to have more kids.
The author links these practices to broader wage suppression: when employers can hire labor willing to accept below‑market pay, wages for everyone—including local residents—are dragged down. The resulting “poverty spiral” is said to force higher taxes and more public spending on things like schools, recreation centers, and community services, which the companies partially fund but the taxpayers ultimately cover.
Overall, the article is an opinion piece raising concerns about the ethics and economic impact of this model. It does not cite specific studies or data, so the claims rest on anecdotal observations and moral arguments rather than quantified research.
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