My children are now old enough to read The Economist. So they notice when I recycle lines I have previously used on them, such as this one from a story in 2022: “Trying to learn about sex from Hollywood is like watching James Bond for tips on a career as a British civil servant.”

It may seem that sex is everywhere in modern culture, but frank, realistic discussion of it is still too rare. And this matters because sexual dysfunction is widespread. It makes people miserable, wrecks marriages and is frequently a predictor of other health problems, such as diabetes. It is often cheap and simple to treat, yet remains untreated because people—even doctors—are embarrassed to talk about it. So here’s a selection of evidence-based writing about one of life’s greatest sources of joy and angst. It includes a story I wrote about data, and why researchers know surprisingly little about a subject that so many people spend so much time thinking about.