Men, it’s time for a quick intervention.

Yes, dating is a mess. The apps are exhausting, signals are impossible to read, and half the time no one can tell whether they’re dating, “talking,” casually hanging out, or trapped in a six-month emotional study conducted via Instagram Stories.

But it has come to my attention that some of you are attempting to solve this chaos by giving up on showers, and let’s be very clear: that is not the breakthrough you think it is.

The trend is called “pheromone-maxxing,” the newest entry in the internet’s growing catalog of ways men are told they can hack themselves into becoming irresistible. The theory claims that avoiding showers, skipping deodorant, and in some cases rewearing sweaty clothes helps preserve a man’s natural scent — and the supposedly powerful pheromones within it — making him biologically magnetic to women.

At the more extreme end, some versions of the trend reportedly include drinking urine.

Gentlemen.

We have lost the plot.

Of course, if any state was going to understand the impulse to optimize oneself into romantic perfection, it was going to be California.

Here in Los Angeles, we do not simply exist inside our bodies. We manage them like startups.

We monitor our sleep. Track our glucose. Cold plunge. Red-light. Supplement. Strength train. Count protein. Discuss cortisol with people we met 11 minutes ago. There is probably a man in Venice right now wearing a continuous glucose monitor while drinking an $18 smoothie and explaining mitochondrial function to a woman who desperately wishes she had ordered it to go.

Optimization is practically our municipal religion, so I understand how we got here.

Dating is uncertain. Attraction is mysterious. Rejection hurts. Then the internet comes along and says, “Hey, what if there were a system?”

Suddenly you don’t have to wonder whether she likes you. You just have to perfect your jawline, your haircut, your wardrobe, your workout, your text response time, and, apparently, the bacterial ecosystem flourishing beneath your armpits.

Except women are not combination locks, and there isn’t a sequence of inputs that makes us open.

While scent absolutely can be sexy, “natural scent” and “I haven’t showered since Tuesday” are not synonyms.

There is something intoxicating about the way a person you already desire smells. Anyone who has ever buried their face in somebody’s neck knows this. I’m currently obsessed with the way my situationship’s skin smells, and yes, that includes after jiu-jitsu. But then we get in the shower.

Here’s the important part:

I already want him.

I have never encountered a stranger emitting such extraordinary biological signals that I thought, “His shirt appears capable of standing independently, but my ovaries have spoken.”

Human attraction is messier than that.

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It’s a smile. Eye contact. Humor. Kindness. Confidence. The way someone listens when you’re speaking instead of waiting for his opportunity to tell you about crypto. It’s chemistry, timing, and the inexplicable fact that one person’s face does absolutely nothing to you while another person’s makes your brain briefly forget how chairs work.

You cannot maxx that, and I think that’s what makes this trend less disgusting and more sad.

Underneath all these increasingly elaborate strategies for becoming desirable seems to be a generation of men desperately asking the same question humans have always asked:

How do I make someone want me?

I wish there were a hack, but the answer may be horrifyingly analog.

Take a shower.

Put on deodorant.

Wear a clean shirt.

Leave your house. Explore LA. Talk to a woman.

Not as a target. Not as a demographic whose preferences you have reverse-engineered from TikTok. Talk to her like she’s a strange, funny, complicated person you might enjoy knowing.

Ask her something and listen to the answer. Then, and I realize I am proposing something radical here, ask a follow-up question. 

Make her laugh.

Let her make you laugh.

Risk being awkward, risk being rejected, and if you’re lucky, eventually somebody will get close enough to put her face against your neck.

Then you can find out whether she likes how you smell.

Los Angeles already has enough strange aromas. We have hot asphalt, wildfire smoke, ocean air, dog urine on sidewalks, and whatever is happening inside the parking garage at Whole Foods.

We do not need sexually frustrated men adding artisanal body odor to the ecosystem.

You don’t need to pheromone-maxx.

You need to shower and let a woman hug you.

Mary Kay Holmes is a Los Angeles writer covering dating, relationships and the increasingly absurd business of being a person.

Erik and Lyle Menendez are now set to appear before a parole board next year, moving their hearing up by more than a year from the date previously anticipated.

The Menendez brothers, convicted in the Aug. 20, 1989, shotgun killings of their parents, Jose and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez, inside the family’s Beverly Hills mansion, are scheduled for a parole suitability hearing in March 2027 rather than August 2028, Fox News has confirmed.

The earlier hearing date is tied to two provisions under Proposition 9, which permit officials to advance an inmate’s next parole review when new information or changed circumstances suggest the person could be eligible for parole, The Orange County Register reported.

“For almost 40 years, Erik and Lyle have worked to take responsibility for their actions, confront and heal from the unimaginable abuse and trauma they endured, grow as individuals, and dedicate themselves to serving others,” family members said in a statement.

“Through efforts such as helping to establish a hospice program and creating Green Space, they have sought to build an environment that reminds people serving life sentences that their lives still have meaning and that, regardless of their circumstances, they can choose each day to grow, heal, accept accountability, and contribute something of value to the world around them,” they added.

The brothers were handed life sentences without the possibility of parole for the murders, which drew widespread media attention. However, they were resentenced to life in May 2025, making them eligible for parole.

The new sentencing came amid a push by supporters following a Netflix series on the case that resurrected calls for their freedom. They were denied parole last year.

The brothers have said the murders were committed after years of sexual abuse by their father. However, prosecutors have contested the claims, arguing the pair killed their parents out of greed.

“Erik and Lyle were once sentenced to life without the possibility of parole,” the family statement said. “We will always be profoundly grateful that they have been resentenced and that our family can now imagine a future in which they are once again part of our everyday lives… We are incredibly proud of the men they have become and deeply grateful to the Parole Board for recognizing their efforts and allowing them to advance their parole hearing.”

Lyle Menendez, 58, and Erik Menendez, 55, are both incarcerated in the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego.

An unusual formation detected in seafloor mapping data has fuelled speculation that a possible “sunken city” could lie beneath the waters near the Bermuda Triangle.

Scott C Waring, a self-described UFO researcher, said he noticed the shapes in an area near Cuba and Haiti, suggesting they may represent the remains of a settlement built by ancient humans.

Waring said he came across the alleged discovery while examining an online map produced through the Seabed 2030 project, an international effort aiming to chart the entire ocean floor by the end of this decade.

The seabed imagery appears to show a network of faint lines, some roughly parallel and others crossing one another, spread across the ocean floor west of the island.

According to Waring’s estimate, the apparent formation measures about seven or eight miles in one direction and roughly three miles in the other.

‘This new map is extraordinary,’ Waring said in a YouTube video highlighting the area. ‘In this one location, there is an ancient sunken city.

‘There are a lot of geometric shapes, which indicate there is something down here that was intelligently made,’ he added.

However, no archaeologists or marine scientists have examined the site or confirmed that the patterns represent physical, human-made structures.

Waring said the scale and regularity of the shapes convinced him that they were unlikely to have formed naturally.

He considered whether the supposed builders were humans or visitors from another world.

‘Now, is it ancient alien or is it ancient humans?’ Waring asked on his site, UFO Sightings Daily. ‘That’s the big question.’

He ultimately favored a lost human civilization, arguing: ‘I would probably go with ancient humans because the geometric design looks more primitive and less futuristic to me.’

Waring suggested the shapes could mark the remains of a settlement resembling Atlantis, the legendary civilization said to have disappeared beneath the sea.

‘This could be a long-lost city, long ago like Atlantis or something, built on the coral reef of an island area,’ he said.

He speculated that a powerful earthquake may have destabilized the island, causing the reef and everything constructed upon it to collapse into the ocean.

‘An earthquake just could have rattled it so much that coral could have just collapsed on itself and the whole island could have sunk,’ Waring explained.

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However, he acknowledged that the scenario was only his own theory and presented no geological or archaeological evidence showing that an island once existed at the site.

‘This is just my hypothesis, my guess,’ he said.

Waring placed the anomaly in the waters near Cuba and Haiti, close to the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Bahamas.

He also described it as lying near the Bermuda Triangle, the loosely defined region of the Atlantic associated with decades of stories about vanishing ships, missing aircraft and unexplained compass behavior.

Waring claimed alleged magnetic anomalies in the area could cause vessels to lose their bearings or even suffer engine failures.

However, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says there is no evidence that mysterious disappearances occur more frequently within the Bermuda Triangle than in any other heavily traveled section of ocean.

The agency notes that severe storms, rapid weather changes caused by the Gulf Stream, shallow waters and human error can explain many of the incidents attributed to the supposed phenomenon. 

Waring also questioned why the same patterns were not visible on Google Earth, alleging that the platform had concealed the area beneath a layer of smoothed blue imagery.

‘Google Earth shows nothing there at all,’ he said. ‘They use a smoothing program, cover it in blue and you get to see nothing.’

There is no evidence that Google deliberately concealed anything at the location.

Maps of the ocean floor are assembled from information of varying quality and resolution, including direct sonar measurements, satellite observations and computer-generated estimates used to fill enormous gaps between surveys.

Combining those sources can produce straight lines, grids and other apparently geometric patterns that do not necessarily represent genuine objects on the seabed.

Confirming a lost settlement would require detailed sonar surveys, underwater photographs and physical evidence such as worked stone, pottery, tools or other artifacts.

Until such an investigation is conducted, the ‘city’ remains an interpretation of patterns within mapping data rather than a verified archaeological discovery.

Lindsay Clancy’s defense team is pursuing a long-shot legal maneuver in the aftermath of the mistrial in her high-profile triple-murder case, with legal observers describing the request as extraordinarily unlikely to succeed.

Attorney Kevin Reddington said Friday he plans to ask Massachusetts Judge William Sullivan to override the hung-jury result that ended Clancy’s closely watched six-week trial and instead issue a bench ruling finding that she was not criminally responsible for the fatal strangulation of her three young children.

Such a ruling, if granted, would spare Clancy from the prospect of a second trial and eliminate the risk of a future conviction in the case.

But Boston attorney Peter Elikann, who is not involved in the proceedings, told The Post that this kind of post-mistrial request faces a steep legal climb and would be “rare to the extreme” if successful.

“Kevin Reddington has to be commended for leaving virtually no stone unturned,” Elikann said. “It’s commendable that he’s bringing this motion forward.”

“The granting of [such] a 25(b)(2) motion is rare in the extreme.”

Reddington is expected to argue for the motion at Clancy’s next hearing Sept. 29.

The legal move can only prevail if Reddington can prove that the jury screwed up so badly that a judge has no choice but to set the deadlock result aside, Elikann explained.

“It would be used if it was genuinely believed that the jury got it totally wrong and that their decision was not based on sufficient evidence whatsoever,” the veteran Boston criminal-defense lawyer said.

“However, most judges go through their entire career without even granting one of those once,” Elikann said.

Elikann said he only remembered one such motion winning in the Bay State, when a judge in 1997 reduced the conviction of British au pair Louise Woodward from second-degree murder to manslaughter in the death of 8-month-old Matthew Eappen.

“We don’t undo what juries did. We really respect juries,” Elikann explained of the judicial system.

“It would have to be something that the jury got totally, totally wrong, and I don’t think anybody is accusing the jury of that here.”

The 12-person Clancy panel — made up of nine women and three men — deliberated for more than 38 hours over the course of seven days.

The jury sent out a total of three notes informing Sullivan they were deadlocked — on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.

After the last note Friday, as the jurors were about to brought back into the courtroom, Reddington dramatically asked Sullivan to hold off declaring a mistrial so that he could seek an emergency appeal based on one of the notes.

Sullivan gave Reddington an hour to file an appeal with Massachusetts’ highest court.

The defense’s legal maneuver — which ultimately didn’t succeed — was based on the female foreperson Thursday sending out a note saying that a single holdout juror was refusing to follow the law on reasonable doubt.

Sullivan had questioned each juror individually and under oath and re-read his instructions on reasonable doubt to try to address the foreperson’s concerns.

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But Reddington called for the holdout, a man, to be grilled further by the judge alone, which Sullivan denied and Clancy’s team used as the basis for its ultimately doomed appeal.

The panel was finally released Friday afternoon, after the appeal judge shot down Clancy’s 11-hour bid to block the declaration of a mistrial.

The names of the panelists are set to be released Sept. 18, and lawyers on both sides are likely to be looking out for any media interviews the jurors may give about what they thought about the case, Elikann said.

“They kind of want to know the thinking of the jury, what impressions the jury had … because you might change your whole strategy,” Elikann said.

Still, Elikann noted, Reddington “said he clobbered the prosecution and would likely do the exact same defense he did this time.”

Plymouth District Attorney Timothy Cruz was meanwhile mum Friday about what his office’s next move would be in the case.

The DA can retry the case on the same charges, downgrade the charges, try to reach a plea deal with Clancy or dismiss the case altogether.

The office is likely to reveal its hand at the hearing later this month, if not before then, Elikann said.

A new trial date could also be set at that hearing.

On Friday, Reddington asked for a second trial to go forward in two weeks, but Sullivan said they could try to aim for a new trial in the late fall, at the earliest.

Elikann noted that even late fall would be an extremely fast turnaround, given retrials usually take place between eight and 12 months after a mistrial.

At trial, Reddington asked the jurors to find the 36-year-old Duxbury, Mass., mom not guilty by reason of temporary insanity on the grounds she was in the throes of severe postpartum psychosis and heard a hallucinatory voice commanding her to carry out the killings and to kill herself.

But prosecutors claimed she was lucid enough to carefully plan the exercise-band stranglings of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3 and Callan, 8 months, on Jan. 24, 2023, before she tried to commit suicide by cutting her wrists and neck, downing prescription meds and throwing herself from a window in her upstairs bedroom.

Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, injured her spine in multiple places after the fall and is now paraplegic and wheelchair-bound.

She is currently being held at Tewksbury Hospital pending her case.

If she were to be found not guilty by reason of insanity at a second trial, she would be indefinitely committed to a mental institution and only freed once doctors and a judge found she was no longer a risk to herself and to others.

If she were convicted on first-degree murder, she would be imprisoned for life without the possibility of parole.

If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this story, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) or text Crisis Text Line at 741741.

If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can dial the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention hotline at 988 or go to SuicidePreventionLifeline.org.

Supporters of an Alabama woman charged in a fatal school bus crash say she was in the midst of a medical emergency when the collision occurred, according to reports.

Theresa McCloud, 75, has been charged with vehicular homicide and criminal negligence in connection with the Nov. 18, 2025, crash in Auburn.

McCloud was behind the wheel of an Auburn City Schools bus when it collided with another vehicle, killing 42-year-old Jennifer Leigh Cooper, a prominent local bakery owner, AL.com reported.

While McCloud’s supporters have argued that a medical crisis played a role in the deadly wreck, a lawsuit filed by Cooper’s husband against McCloud and the Auburn City Schools Board of Education claims McCloud had diabetes and had been prescribed opiates.

On the day of the accident, McCloud told her supervisors that she was not feeling well, the lawsuit states. Two days prior, she had visited a doctor who prescribed opiates to help with her symptoms. Those medications came with a warning label against driving while taking them, according to the suit.

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“Theresa’s blood sugar suddenly dropped to 23 mg/dL while driving, causing confusion and loss of consciousness,” stated a GoFundMe page that has since been removed.

“Theresa had never experienced a low blood sugar episode before, and doctors confirmed that this was a medical crisis,” the page continued. “Even so, Theresa is now facing the overwhelming challenge of defending against charges connected to that emergency. On September 4, 2026, Theresa turned herself in and began facing the legal process head-on.”

While driving, McCloud lost control “based on either her known medical conditions, her use of opiates and/or a mix of both,” the lawsuit alleges.

The suit further said that the opiates and her diabetes “severely impaired her ability to drive any vehicle and made her unable to perform her duties as a bus driver,” according to the newspaper. McCloud’s family reportedly disputes the allegations.

News Media has reached out to the school district.