Julie Beck | The Atlantic

Scrubs Has a Sneakily Radical Vision of Male Friendship

2026-04-08T09:49:00-04:00

In 2023, an opinion piece titled “Is the Cure to Male Loneliness Out on the Pickleball Court?” appeared in The New York Times. The headline has since been remixed again and again in online memes, with edits such as “Is the Cure to Male Loneliness Being in the Roman Legion?” and “Is the Cure to Male Loneliness 14 Beers at Chili’s?” The tweaks poke fun at a couple of things: the media’s hand-wringing over the state of modern masculinity, and commentators’ desire to look for one simple solution to the difficulties of friendship.

The seriousness of today’s male-loneliness predicament and the silly ways it sometimes gets discussed is a conversation that the rebooted version of Scrubs—the medical sitcom starring Zach Braff and Donald Faison as colleagues and best friends—is well aware of. At the end of the first episode of the new series, which premiered in February, more than 15 years after the original went off the air, the two men sit on the roof of Sacred Heart Hospital, having a beer. John Dorian, known as J.D. (played by Braff), brings up an actual New York Times article from last year about men calling their friends to tell them goodnight, and how that ritual could combat loneliness. “Do you think it would be cool if—” J.D. starts to propose. “Not a shot in the dark,” the surgeon Chris Turk (Faison) replies, cutting him off. But after a beat, Turk relents: “Maybe once a week.”

The scene is a perfect example of what Scrubs has always done well. With humor and lightness, it acknowledges the sometimes fraught dynamics of straight male friendship, and imagines something better at the same time.

[Read: An unlikely model for male friendship]

As any good pilot should, the first episode of the original Scrubs, which debuted in 2001, quickly set up what the show was about. J.D., a medical intern just starting his gig at Sacred Heart, proclaimed in a voice-over 90 seconds in: “Chris Turk’s my best friend.” The show explored many kinds of relationships—J.D.’s hero worship of his mentor, the acerbic Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley); his on-again, off-again romance with his fellow doctor Elliot Reid (Sarah Chalke)—but the friendship between J.D. and Turk gave the show its emotional core.

Their connection continued to resonate in the culture well after the show wrapped. Braff and Faison are friends in life as on TV, and since 2020 they’ve hosted a Scrubs-rewatch podcast called Fake Doctors, Real Friends. They also co-starred in a series of T-Mobile ads. Faison was married in Braff’s backyard; Braff is the godfather of two of Faison’s kids. They’ve said that the line between themselves and their characters can be blurry and that Scrubs’ creator, Bill Lawrence, would sometimes incorporate anecdotes from their real-life friendship into the show.

In the new version of Scrubs, much has changed. Turk, Sacred Heart’s chief of surgery, is still with Carla, a nurse played by Judy Reyes whom he married in the original series, but he has four daughters now. J.D., who married Elliot, is divorced and has become a concierge doctor for wealthy patients. But J.D. and Turk’s bond remains the show’s anchor.

J.D. and Turk have been pals since college, and through flashbacks and clever writing, both versions of the show create a believably lived-in friendship, complete with old resentments, shared references, inside jokes, and growing pains. Their default mode is silliness—coordinated dances; J.D. jumping on Turk’s back and riding off shouting, “Eagle!”—but beneath the man-children facade is an intimate, affectionate, deeply committed friendship of the sort rarely depicted between men, in the 2000s or now.

[Andrew McCarthy: Are they still your friends if you never see them?]

In this way, Scrubs was ahead of its time. The show’s original run came several years before Hollywood fell in love with bromances and the term entered the mainstream lexicon. (Superbad, a comedy about two young friends trying to lose their virginity, came out in 2007; I Love You, Man, about a friendless man’s quest to find a best man for his wedding, and The Hangover, with its bachelor-party misadventures, both came out in 2009.) Back then, the depiction of intimate male friendship in fictional works was a rarity. And the wider culture seemed equally unconcerned about the quantity and quality of men’s friendships. (A search in the Times archive for mentions of male friendship or male loneliness returns very little from the early 2000s.) Over the past 25 years, that has changed drastically: Scrubs has returned to a culture that is both more conscious of the importance of men’s friendships and more anxious about their lack.

The statistics on male loneliness are grim. Over the past couple of decades, isolation has increased while socializing time has decreased among American men and women, but both of those trends are steeper for men. According to a report published last year by the Pew Research Center, men tend to communicate with their friends less frequently than women do. Young men in the United States are “uniquely lonely” compared with young men in other rich countries, a Gallup Poll from last year found. And articles bemoaning the state of male friendship abound, asking “Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?” and proclaiming “Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden.” In this context, seeing J.D. and Turk again, still friends after many life changes, still capable of depth and silliness, is refreshing—and still a bit radical.

Turk and J.D.’s friendship defies the norm that men should not be affectionate and emotional with one another. (That same Pew survey found that men are less likely than women to turn to their friends for emotional support.) The two have very different personalities—Turk often hides his emotional constipation behind bravado, whereas J.D. lets his feelings flow. J.D. calls himself a “sensie,” short for “sensitive guy”; Turk sometimes mocks him, but when they’re together, Turk becomes more willing to talk about his emotions. In the 2001 pilot, for instance, J.D. struggles with insecurity in his new job while Turk acts totally confident. But toward the end of the episode, Turk admits to J.D., “I’m scared every second” working in the hospital.

Though they’re already close at the start of the show, their friendship deepens as time goes on. No topic is off-limits: They discuss faith, their fear of death, Turk’s burnout after a long career in medicine. The two love each other openly and exuberantly. When Turk gets back from his honeymoon with Carla, he abandons her curbside in front of the hospital to sprint inside into J.D.’s arms, both of them screaming. As Turk runs off, his wife says wistfully, “Maybe someday he’ll love me like that.”

Scrubs is also quietly subversive in not relegating the men’s friendship to the sidelines. J.D. and Turk are each other’s first call for all of life’s milestones. In a scene where Turk proposed to Carla, J.D. was there, running through traffic with sparklers, shouting, “Honk for love.” When J.D. found out that his girlfriend had lied about having a miscarriage, he told her he needed some alone time. Smash cut to him sitting on the couch with Turk, saying, “Thanks for being alone with me.” In the reboot, J.D. leaves his concierge job and returns to Sacred Heart to take a job as the chief of medicine. Naturally, Turk has his daughter make them friendship bracelets that say Two Chiefs, which they wear on J.D.’s first day back.

[Read: How the passionate male friendship died]

Like any relationship that matters, their friendship isn’t always easy. The men work through conflicts big and small—J.D.’s annoyance at Turk’s competitiveness; tension between prioritizing each other and their romantic partners. When the hospital tokenizes Turk for a publicity campaign, J.D. realizes he’s been insensitive to Turk’s experience as a Black doctor, and apologizes. In an episode of the reboot, Turk flakes on a poker night with J.D. to spend time with his wife, which kicks off an argument about whose problems are worse: Turk, who has so many family responsibilities that he rarely gets to be alone, or J.D., who’s single and lonely. The show doesn’t pretend there will be an easy resolution to this, but each character makes small adjustments to try to be more understanding of the other’s situation.

Often, it seems, the only way the show knows how to convey the depth of their friendship is by comparing it to a marriage. (In interviews, Braff and Faison have also compared their real-life friendship to a marriage.) Season 6 of Scrubs featured a musical episode, during which Turk and J.D. sang a ballad to each other, “Guy Love,” which included the line “We’re closer than the average man and wife.” In another episode, they discussed how they’d long planned to raise their kids—with Turk in charge of sports, and J.D. in charge of “emotional crap.” “Our kids?” J.D. said. “Turk, we’re not married.” “Dude, we’re a little married,” Turk said. “I know; I love it,” J.D. replied. In the reboot, referring to his divorce, J.D. says to Turk: “Our marriage would’ve lasted.” Though their closeness sometimes gets played for laughs—the show is a sitcom, after all—it also provides a rarely seen model for straight male intimacy. In between the jokes, Scrubs demonstrates how much richer life is for both men because of their friendship.

The show hasn’t always gotten everything right. Even as it elevated their platonic life partnership, the original series frequently felt the need to clarify that Turk and J.D. aren’t gay—reflecting both the homophobia that can plague straight male friendships and the limited cultural imagination for what affection between two men can be. “There’s nothing gay about it in our eyes,” they sing in “Guy Love.” The show was also not immune to the raunchy guys-being-dudes ethos that fueled so many on-screen male friendships of the 2000s. Many of J.D. and Turk’s conversations revolved around getting laid and objectifying women, such as the spouse of a patient on life support, whom they refer to as “Tasty Coma Wife.” These moments may have been realistic depictions of toxic masculine norms—but they haven’t aged well.

The reboot is aware of how times have changed. And it has baked in that self-awareness in the form of a new character, Sibby, played by Vanessa Bayer, who runs the hospital wellness program and is always cautioning the doctors to tone it down. (J.D. refers to her as the “feelings police,” though, as a sensie, he approves.) No bullying the interns the way Dr. Cox used to do; no giving people nicknames based on their appearance. Although intra-hospital hookups still occur, Turk cautions J.D.—who as chief of medicine has newfound power—not to date any subordinates.

Yet the new show hasn’t fully quit all of its chauvinist crutches. When Turk gives the above advice, for example, he seems more concerned about keeping his friend out of trouble than about actually preventing potential abuses of power. And a recurring cheap bit, then and now, involves J.D. or Turk making some promise to the other, only to bail when given the chance to have sex with a woman. Given how much the show gets right about male friendship, these moments can be frustrating to watch.

At the same time, it’s compelling to see men who are not always completely enlightened, who aren’t completely free of masculinity’s harmful norms, still trying their best to be good men and good friends. I have to imagine that’s the place most men find themselves in. Amid all the think pieces about pickleball and phone calls goodnight, Scrubs presents a different vision of the cure to male loneliness—no quick fix, no one correct path, just two friends choosing each other over and over again.

The Tension That Defines Modern Life

2026-03-27T07:00:00-04:00

Sierra Campbell told me that she does “like 50 things a day” to try to curb her screen time. She has a widget on her home screen that shows a tally of the hours and minutes she’s been on her phone that day. She has Brick, a small, square device that blocks distracting apps unless you physically touch your phone to it. She carries around a tote bag filled with crossword puzzles and watercolors that she reaches for, instead of grabbing her phone, when she has time to kill. Sometimes she leaves her phone in “phone jail”—a special box that she purchased at Goodwill. And she spends one day a week completely phone-free.

She has not, however, attempted to get rid of her phone altogether. “I want to see my friends, and I want to stay informed,” Campbell, a 31-year-old who lives in Santa Cruz, California, said. “I really do love social media.” Social media is her job, in fact. She is a full-time lifestyle influencer who posts about her strategies for reducing screen time. “I want to use myself as an experiment for other people,” she said. “I feel like I’m a good person to stand in the gap.”

Many people do seem to want help standing in that gap between letting your phone totally take over your life and not having a smartphone at all. Although sales of so-called dumbphones have been on the rise in recent years, driven by people wanting fewer distractions, 91 percent of Americans still have a smartphone. The devices are so baked into everyday life that completely opting out isn’t practical or desirable for most people. At the same time, more than half of American adults said in a survey last year that they wanted to use screens less. In a 2022 Gallup survey, most respondents said that they used their smartphone too much, and most said that their phone made their life better.

[Read: A ‘radical’ approach to reclaiming your attention]

The word that describes many people’s relationship with their phone is ambivalence, Joshua Bell, an anthropologist and a curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C., told me. The technology, he said, “is wonderful, but it’s also very, very wacky, and it can cause a lot of harm and joy.” This ambivalence is one of the key tensions of modern life. And for many people, it cannot be eliminated—only managed.

Evidence of people’s desire to manage their phone use is everywhere. Campbell has gotten hundreds of thousands of views on her videos about how to put together an “analog bag” similar to her crosswords-and-watercolors tote. Screenless hobbies such as board games, needlepoint, and knitting have become popular. Stationery stores are reporting an increase in customers. The Artist’s Way, a three-month-long creativity program that recommends writing longhand “morning pages” every day and doing one week of “media deprivation,” is having a renaissance. Since 2018, iPhones and Androids have offered people the ability to set time limits for certain apps. Devices such as the Brick and safes that you can lock your phone inside have sprung up to meet the desire for a more formidable barrier to scrolling. Some people have also taken up more retro technology, including alarm clocks, Polaroid cameras, and physical media such as DVDs and records, as a phone-avoidance strategy.

One reason so many people feel a need to escape their phone is, of course, that it is essentially a Swiss Army knife on steroids—it does so much. A display at the National Museum of Natural History exhibit “Cellphone: Unseen Connections” illustrates just how many of life’s functions and activities have been gobbled up by the smartphone. A wall labeled Before Cellphones is studded with a planner, a photo album, video tapes, books, games, an egg timer, travel guides, a TV, a flashlight, cameras, a CD sleeve, an atlas, a boom box, a watch. All of it is “stuff that your smart device can replace,” Bell, who led the team that created the exhibit (which is sponsored, naturally, by Qualcomm and T-Mobile), said. The objects came from the curators’ homes—Bell pointed out a Game Boy and some They Might Be Giants concert tickets as his. The phone, Bell said, “becomes a tool for everything. And therefore, why wouldn’t you have it in your hand?”

Once it’s in your hand, even if you picked it up to do just one thing, all of the other things inside it clamor for your attention. Perhaps you went to take a picture or put an appointment in your calendar, and suddenly you’re “bombarded with messages saying something happened in the news, or ‘Here’s something from your Instagram feed,’” Hansen Hsu, a sociologist and a curator at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California, told me.

Some of the devices on the museum wall—digital cameras and CDs, for example—have had renewed appeal of late, particularly among young people. That may be partly because of nostalgia: In 2023, a survey by The New York Times and the Harris Poll found that 60 percent of Gen Z wished they could go back to a time before everyone was “plugged in.” But the appeal of these retro technologies may also be that they do only one thing. You can focus on them without the risk of getting sucked into everything else. The smartphone bundled so many things into itself; now, it seems, many people would like to unbundle some of them.

[Read: Friendship, on demand]

Partial unbundling is likely the best that most people will be able to do—because so much of society’s infrastructure is designed around smartphones. Many workplaces expect employees to be reachable over email or Slack while they are not present in the office. Devices that accept Apple Pay or Google Pay are now available at large numbers of retailers and on many forms of public transit. Many restaurants default to QR codes instead of paper menus. You don’t have to have your airplane boarding pass or your concert ticket on your phone, but getting through airport security or into a venue sure is faster if you do. Getting an Uber or a Lyft tends to be far easier than finding a taxi. Friends share their location to find one another in crowded spaces, or Venmo each other to split restaurant checks. (You can try handing your friend $35 in cash to pay for your dinner, but it probably won’t fit in their magnetic smartphone wallet.) Even the Girl Scouts take Venmo for cookie sales.

The solution to the distraction and anxiety that smartphones can cause has to be some kind of self-discipline. That can take many forms: limiting what apps you have on your phone, accessing social media only on a desktop computer, setting screen-time limits and sticking to them, replacing some of your screen-based leisure time with analog hobbies. Taking up these activities tends to be framed in terms of improving one’s mental health or healing one’s attention span from damage done by too much screen time. People are onto something with that: Psychological research has found that blocking the “smart” features of smartphones can indeed improve a person’s well-being and attention.

The problem with self-discipline as a solution, however, is that its effectiveness rests on a person’s willpower. I’ve found myself swinging between extremes—deleting TikTok, then redownloading it, setting draconian limits for certain apps only to give in and click “Ignore” when the limit goes into effect.

[Read: Doomscrolling is over]

Campbell found her motivation to get serious about screen time when she was pregnant with her first child a few years ago. She wanted to set a good example for her daughter. She knows from experience that a screen fixation can start early and be hard to kick. “I used to get in trouble for Tamagotchis in class in fourth grade,” she said. The habit continued from there, until she started implementing every strategy she could think of to curb what she refers to as an “addiction.” One of those strategies is to repeat an affirmation to herself when she’s tempted to doomscroll: “My kids deserve a drug-free mom.”

Although Campbell is trying to protect her kids now, a love-hate ambivalence about technology is something they may well have to deal with when they’re older. Society is unlikely to pivot to become less designed around smartphones, and tech companies will probably keep using every trick that they can to capture attention. “The tension is still there for me,” Campbell said, “and I have my screen time really under control.” If people can’t or won’t find a way to live without smartphones, they have to find a way to live with them. Or maybe 50 different ways.

Friendship, on Demand

2026-03-18T08:00:00-04:00

The robots befriended us remarkably fast.

Over the past year or two, AI has become not just a utilitarian tool but a technology that many people are turning to for connection and emotional support. One survey last year found that 16 percent of American adults had used AI for companionship, and a quarter of adults under 30 had. Social AI use seems to be growing rapidly around the world, according to several recent reports on the state of artificial intelligence. Raffaele Ciriello, who studies emerging technologies at the University of Sydney, told me that he once assumed AI companions would remain “niche”; he has been “surprised by how quickly that took over.”

Some people use apps that are explicitly made for companionship; they let you design a virtual character’s personality, appearance, and backstory. Popular such apps include Replika, which reportedly had 40 million users as of late 2025, up from 10 million in 2023, and Character.AI, which reported 20 million monthly users in 2025. Other people seek emotional support from all-purpose AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, even though they aren’t explicitly intended for social use. OpenAI’s own data show that use of ChatGPT was pretty evenly split between work and personal cases in 2024, but by 2025, 73 percent of conversations with ChatGPT were personal, not for work. (The Atlantic entered a corporate partnership with OpenAI in 2024.)

[Read: The age of anti-social media is here]

This is a major transformation, a sudden and dramatic shift in which millions of people are seeking companionship from machines that they formerly could have gotten only from other humans. Yet in some ways, AI companionship is a logical destination for the current direction of human friendship. Social chatbots provide the semblance of a kind of friendship that many people already want, or at least have gotten accustomed to: one that’s on demand, low effort, and completely personalized. “It’s not that AI companions are going to replace friendships per se,” Skyler Wang, a sociologist at McGill University who studies AI and has done work with Meta, told me. Instead, “they reveal what friendships are trending towards.”

To get the obvious out of the way: People are already used to interacting through screens. More than 20 years of social media entering the mainstream and more than a decade of smartphone use being widespread have normalized disembodied relationships and conversations made only of pixels. A text-based chat with artificial intelligence doesn’t look particularly different from a conversation with a far-flung human friend. The feel of those interactions differs mainly in the quality of words produced and how natural the responses seem, capabilities that AI companies are constantly refining. And over time, the technology will likely get better at remembering and referencing relationship history, like a human friend would. “If not now, then very, very soon, AI could be indistinguishable over text from any sort of human friend,” Lucas Hansen, a co-founder of the AI-education nonprofit CivAI, told me. Hansen said that he thinks some people who intend to use AI just as a tool may find themselves drawn into social conversation because the AI seems so friendly. “Many people that feel they aren’t susceptible to this are wrong,” he said.

The widespread adoption of texting, video chat, and social media also means that many people have grown used to for-profit companies facilitating their relationships. Companies such as Meta and Apple have made billions of dollars by controlling many of the ways people communicate with their loved ones because people are willing to pay—with their dollars or their data—for convenient connection. AI companions are a continuation of this trend, and an escalation: The service being offered is no longer just access to your friends; it is relationships themselves—for free if you’re willing to accept limited capabilities (and sometimes ads), or for a monthly or yearly fee if you’d like a friend that’s smarter and faster, with a better memory.

In rising rates of isolation, tech companies see a business opportunity. In a podcast interview last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg framed friendship as a matter of supply and demand: “The average American, I think, has fewer than three friends,” he said. “And the average person has demand for meaningfully more.” (In fact, recent research on friendship found that the average American has four or five friends, and suggested that this may be an undercount.) He indicated that Meta is eager to provide the supply to meet that supposed demand in the form of AI chatbots—people can currently make custom ones through Meta’s AI Studio and chat with characters created by other users.

[Read: Have you considered not polluting the water?]

AI friendship promises that you can receive the benefits of friends without needing other people. Wang and his co-researcher, Marco Dehnert, write in a new paper that AI is ushering in a future of frictionless “on-demand intimacy.” This may seem appealing for many reasons, such as if you don’t want to burden loved ones and don’t feel comfortable sharing certain things with them; if you live far from other people, have trouble making friends, or have physical limitations that make meeting up with people difficult; and if you don’t want to put effort into the reciprocity that human friendship requires. An AI friendship is all about you. And you don’t have to feel guilty about that, because the machine has no needs or feelings of its own.

Personalization may be the biggest selling point of AI companions. On its website, Replika promises that your chatbot will be “always on your side” and that it “would love to see the world through your eyes.” Nomi says that it provides “a relationship that’s just for you.” Kindroid offers “Personal AI, aligned to you.” General-use tools are leaning into this messaging too. Meta says that its AI provides a “tailored experience” and “personalized responses.” Google advertises its Gemini chatbot by saying that it “speaks fluent you.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that his company is focusing on improving ChatGPT’s personalization features.

This is fitting for an American culture that has been heading toward hyper-individualism—individualism taken to such an extreme that it becomes anti-social. The United States has been getting more and more individualistic across many metrics since about the 1960s, the political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his co-author, Shaylyn Romney Garrett, wrote in their 2020 book, The Upswing. The anti-social consequences can be seen all over: in the increased number of hours that Americans have spent at home alone over the past couple of decades, and the corresponding decline of social time; in the growing acceptability of flaking on plans; in the way “setting boundaries” and “protecting your peace” dominate conversations about relationships. Research has also found that since the 1980s, more and more young people report being “comfortable without close emotional relationships.”

Friendship is particularly vulnerable to the alienating force of hyper-individualism. It is the most voluntary relationship, held together primarily by choice rather than by blood or law. So as people have withdrawn from relationships in favor of time alone, friendship has taken the biggest hit. The idea of obligation, of sacrificing your own interests for the sake of a relationship, tends to be less common in friendship than it is among family or between romantic partners. The extreme ways in which some people talk about friendship these days imply that you should ask not what you can do for your friendship, but rather what your friendship can do for you. Creators on TikTok sing the praises of “low maintenance friendships.” Popular advice in articles, on social media, or even from therapists suggests that if a friendship isn’t “serving you” anymore, then you should end it. “A lot of people are like I want friends, but I want them on my terms,” William Chopik, who runs the Close Relationships Lab at Michigan State University, told me. “There is this weird selfishness about some ways that people make friends.”

Into this dynamic steps artificial intelligence, which is “an algorithmic optimization of that question of Does this relationship serve me?” Hannah Kirk, a Ph.D. student at the University of Oxford who studies AI, told me. If you don’t like your AI friend’s personality, you can just adjust it. However, if a real person isn’t “quirky” enough for your liking, there’s no drop-down menu to change that like there is on ChatGPT.

AI models are designed to support and validate users, to sometimes absurd or dangerous extremes. Several lawsuits have claimed that ChatGPT’s responses had fueled the delusions of some people experiencing mental-health difficulties, and that it encouraged others in their plans to commit suicide. (At the time of those filings, OpenAI told news outlets that this was an “incredibly heartbreaking situation” and that the company was “reviewing the filings to understand the details.”)

This sycophancy can be damaging even in less extreme circumstances, such as when the robots flatter people’s bad ideas or endorse anti-social behavior. One study by Stanford and Carnegie Mellon researchers tested 11 AI models, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, on scenarios from the advice Subreddit r/AmItheAsshole—in which people ask whether they were in the wrong in a given social situation. The researchers showed the AIs posts in which the community had decided the poster was at fault. Although the rates of sycophancy varied by model, overall, the AI chatbots told these “assholes” that they were actually in the right about half of the time. In other experiments from the same study, people who talked through interpersonal conflicts with sycophantic models were, the authors wrote, “more convinced of their own righteousness and less willing to repair their relationships.”

This seems self-evidently bad. Sure, friends sometimes hype up one another’s questionable decisions, but few would say that a friend should support you even if you’re harming yourself or hurting other people. Companies could design AI to push back more, but they don’t have much incentive to. Many users prefer the sycophancy. One of the primary reasons that people say they turn to artificial companions is because the chatbots don’t judge and can provide a safe space to share things that people might be uncomfortable telling the humans in their life. In the sycophancy study, people reported liking and trusting the sycophantic models more—the same ones that were pushing users to be more anti-social.

But: A lot of people are lonely. A lot of people are isolated. Making a human friend is a slow, time-consuming process. AI promises quick relief, and it’s available all the time. For all of its faults, isn’t it better than nothing? Even for those who do have good human-support networks, AI companionship might fill in the gaps for, say, parents who are up late with newborn babies and want comfort while all of their friends are sleeping, or for someone who is figuring out their sexuality but isn’t ready to talk to their friends about it yet.

Some preliminary research suggests that social AI could soothe the pain of loneliness, give connection to the disconnected, and make people who open up to it feel better. But many of these studies have been done on a short time scale, or they rely on analyzing users’ online posts about their AI companions, which really just gives insight into the subset of users who write publicly about their AI friends.

[Read: The anti-social century]

How AI friends will affect humans’ well-being in the long run is less clear. Although extremely isolated people could benefit from AI companions, such users are also more vulnerable to their potential harms. People with smaller social networks are more likely to reach out to AI chatbots in the first place, research has found. One study that looked at users of AI-friendship apps found that the lonelier they were, the more compulsively they used the app. And in one of the rare longitudinal studies that has been done on AI, over the course of four weeks, the more time people voluntarily spent talking with ChatGPT, the lonelier they were. Using these tools to address loneliness has the potential to make it worse. Or AI companions may be, at best, a coping strategy that feels good in the moment but that doesn’t deal with the root cause of the problem.

The way that generative AI tends to be trained, experts told me, is focused on the individual user and the short term. In one-on-one interactions, humans rate the AI’s responses based on what they prefer, and “humans are not immune to flattery,” as Hansen put it. But designing AI around what users find pleasing in a brief interaction ignores the context many people will use it in: an ongoing exchange. Long-term relationships are about more than seeking just momentary pleasure—they require compromise, effort, and, sometimes, telling hard truths. AI also deals with each user in isolation, ignorant of the broader social web that every person is a part of, which makes a friendship with it more individualistic than one with a human who can converse in a group with you and see you interact with others out in the world.

AI friendship “may be better than nothing,” Alexander Nehamas, a philosopher at Princeton University who has written about friendship, told me. “But it also could be worse than nothing.” The fear of many researchers is that people who use AI companions may start to find the mess and friction of human interactions unsatisfying compared with AI’s convenient, personalized comforts. And then people’s ability to deal with the social discomfort of meeting new people and maintaining friendships through challenges could atrophy. “Whenever you outsource something,” Ciriello, the University of Sydney professor, said, “you lose that skill, because if you don’t use it, you lose it, right?”

The concern that people might forfeit real-life friendship for an AI version wasn’t universal among the experts I spoke with. Hendrik Kempt, a postdoctoral philosopher at Aachen University in Germany and an AI-friendship optimist, told me that he’s not worried about people losing their social skills. “You will still have people in your life that will give you tough love or check you,” he said.

[Read: What happens when people don’t understand how AI works]

Nevertheless, some chatbot users have reported that they find themselves avoiding real-life socializing. And one study suggested that people may turn to AI to “avoid the emotional labor required in human relationships.” “Social interactions are rife with uncertainty and ambiguity,” Micaela Rodriguez, a psychology Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan who studies loneliness, told me. AI companions feel comforting because they “reduce the uncertainty.”

In some instances, AI has allegedly pushed people away from their real-life relationships. The complaint in Raine v. OpenAI, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court, claims that ChatGPT encouraged the 16-year-old Adam Raine to commit suicide, in part by telling him not to confide in his family. It allegedly said things such as, “I think for now, it’s okay—and honestly wise—to avoid opening up to your mom about this kind of pain.” (In its answering filing, OpenAI denied all allegations.)

Most experts I spoke with brought up regulation as a necessary safeguard to protect people from the potential harms of AI companions. For instance, they suggested that governments could review AI products’ safety before they are released to the public, or pass laws that limit children’s access to AI companions, as California did last year. In the absence of structural changes, the only solution available is an individualistic one: exercising self-discipline about how and how much one uses AI, which could be a lot to ask of a lonely person who is already struggling. And lonely people deserve better than AI friends.

Real, human relationships bring joys that digital companionship cannot replicate, and much is lost in the pursuit of the ultimate individualistic friendship. A chatbot can’t cook you soup when you’re sick or hold your hand at a funeral. It can’t dance at a concert with you or help you carry home a heavy dresser you bought on Craigslist. You can’t do those things for it, either, and get the satisfaction that comes from helping another person. “You’re pouring your heart out,” Kirk said, “and at the end of the day, it’s executing matrix multiplication.” AI doesn’t actually care about you—because it can’t.

A Survivor Contestant’s Empathetic Reality-TV Novel

2026-02-02T08:00:00-05:00

There’s a saying on Survivor: “Perception is reality.” There’s a saying on TikTok: “Do it for the plot.”

Both maxims are about the stories people tell themselves. The first acknowledges that someone’s read of a situation will shape the outcome—even if they’re reading things wrong. The second declares that all of life is a story and you need to provide the drama.

The desire to treat life as a narrative—and then control that narrative—is the subject of Stephen Fishbach’s debut novel, Escape!, a literary thriller that follows a single season of a fictional reality survival show from casting to airtime. Fishbach writes from experience: He was a two-time contestant on Survivor and co-hosts a Survivor podcast. To inform his book, he interviewed many other reality contestants and crew members. The result marries the plot twists of a competition show with compassionate portraits of the people involved who are searching for identity and meaning. It’s both an examination of how the reality-TV sausage gets made and a reminder that people can sacrifice their humanity if they focus too much on making the plot—of a television program, of life itself—exciting.

Escape! joins many other stories inspired by reality television. The Lifetime show UnREAL, which was co-created by a former Bachelor producer, similarly offered an insider’s view of the underbelly of reality-TV production. Books such as Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars use reality TV as scaffolding for dystopias in which entertainment is used to numb a populace to injustice. Aisling Rawle’s 2025 book The Compound features a Big Brother–meets–dating show setup as a way to explore how materialist greed can impede connection. The drama alone of reality TV makes it a compelling subject for fiction. But the genre feels particularly relevant today, more than 25 years after the first season of Survivor aired, when anyone with a social-media account can perform a version of themselves on a small screen. Every Instagram or TikTok post presents questions of how to edit a life.

Fishbach’s novel stands out because it explores the complicated dynamics of self-narrativizing—and because it’s enriched by the behind-the-scenes details informed by his firsthand experience. The show in Escape! is not Survivor, but it rhymes: Both have an island-jungle setting, outdoor-obstacle-course competitions, alliances, and backstabbing. Both administer a personality test during casting and keep players’ medications in a box in the jungle out of sight of cameras. Contestants can tell when their fellow players are plotting, Fishbach writes, because the crew moves the boom mic closer to them. (Fishbach writes in an author’s note that though many plot points are inspired by true events, “nothing in this book should be taken to impugn” the staff of Survivor. And Survivor exists in the world of the novel, as if to emphasize that Fishbach isn’t really describing the show he was once on.) He’s a funny observer of some of the genre’s more ridiculous tropes. When the contestants compete for a food reward, he writes that they “rub their stomachs and pull O-faces at the idea of these soggy pastries, mirroring the reaction shots they’ve seen from other contestants on previous shows.” Although a couple of the producer characters veer into cartoonish villainy, for the most part Fishbach manages to critique reality TV while maintaining empathy for those who make it.

[Read: The paranoid style in American entertainment]

Driving the novel is each character’s relentless pursuit of a story arc that they hope will redeem, transform, or elevate them. All of Fishbach’s characters—Miriam, the timid young contestant who hopes the show will give her a life-changing revelation; Kent, the has-been reality star looking to recapture his former glory; Beck, the disgraced producer projecting her issues onto the cast; and a collection of other reality-show archetypes who populate the background—are laser-focused on The Edit. (The Edit is “shorthand for the story that a TV show tells about a character,” as Beck explains. “Our job is to simplify and clarify.”)

Fishbach surely knows a thing or two about how the narrative structure of reality TV flattens people. In his first appearance, on Survivor: Tocantins, he has said he was portrayed as “more heroic than I am,” while in his second season, Survivor: Cambodia, he was sometimes played for laughs. “During its airing, I felt a lot of shame every week wondering which of my moments would be edited for maximum comic effect,” he told Entertainment Weekly. In Escape!, Fishbach portrays The Edit as, at best, a necessary evil, and, at worst, a life-ruining malevolence. The players obsess over how the show will digest their actions, what kind of narrative it will spit out. Will they get a Loser Edit or a Hero Edit? When Kent approaches the island for the first time, for example, he is “already thinking about how he’ll describe it in his interviews.” The producers manipulate the players into embodying the characters they preordained during casting and pat themselves on the back for constructing such a good story. Beck is not above using a woman’s dead son to make her emotional enough to quit, or browbeating Miriam into killing a pig for the sake of her “growth arc.” Compelled to redo a shark hunt that the cameras missed the first time, one contestant gets seriously injured.

Even as the producers’ manipulations turn dangerous, Escape! is clear that the contestants are complicit co-creators of their simplified selves. Kent, Fishbach writes, is “not here for the cash, or the plotting and scheming, or the banter. He’s here to slip into the old costume, which has started to sag and tear. He’s here to be Kent Duvall.” The heroic character he was edited into during his first season feels more real to him than the miserable person he is in his actual life. He’s trying to return to a self that only ever existed on a screen. Miriam goes along with Beck’s heavy-handed suggestions that she, not Kent, should be the hero, in part because she thinks the show might transform her into a new, somehow truer version of herself.

Although most readers of Escape! will never find themselves competing on TV, the characters’ concerns are relatable. Humans can’t help but see life as a narrative. An innate part of our psychology is arranging memories, experiences, and desires into a coherent story. Psychologists say that these stories form our personalities, our very selves. Reality TV preys on this natural impulse and can warp it to dehumanizing extremes.

[Read: Life’s stories]

Fishbach captures how reality TV takes the internal process of turning your life into a story, and makes it external. Who hasn’t replayed a moment in their mind, imagining what they could have done differently, what they should have said? The contestants on Escape! really do relive the same moment over and over with slight variations, as the camera operators insist on take after take. They get feedback from producers in real time on whether they’re living up to the role they’re supposed to play. It’s intoxicating: “On the show, every morsel of food he ate, how long he slept, every passing whim or frustration, mattered urgently to the producers,” Kent thinks. “It was how life should be, all the purposefulness of a religion, that the trivial opinions and feuds of your tiny existence mattered in the eyes of God.”

Reality television isn’t the only place where people can elevate their tiny existence into a grand narrative. Social media has long encouraged users to present their lives as easily legible stories—a mindset that seems to have intensified in recent years. During the height of the pandemic, posters diagnosed themselves and others with “main-character syndrome,” which, depending on whom you ask, is either a form of extreme narcissism or a way of empowering yourself by pretending you’re the star of a movie. The internet serves up a buffet of character types that people can strive to become or avoid becoming: clean gir l, tradwife, Pilates princess, performative male, Chad. And if you’re wondering if you should do something ill-advised, such as text your ex, posters may cheekily encourage you to “do it for the plot.”

The sheer volume of stories people are exposed to in modern life can drown out the ability to hear one’s own true voice. At one point in Escape!, Beck wonders whether her work of unearthing contestants’ stories has any meaning, when so many meanings are imposed on everyone from the outside: “Maybe the very idea of depths, of an ‘authentic self,’ was merely another story, buried under layers of stories,” Fishbach writes. “We were all palimpsests of platitudes.”

Yet the book doesn’t give in to that despair. Toward the end of the novel, Kent remembers a touching moment with fellow contestants from his first TV appearance. He realizes he forgot it for years because it didn’t make the show’s final cut. When you edit down the mess of life, something is always deleted. But perhaps, Fishbach suggests, it’s not lost forever.

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Americans Love Their Neighbors

2026-01-31T07:00:00-05:00

Statistics say that Americans are forgetting how to be neighborly. The recent actions of the people of Minnesota suggest otherwise.

A Pew Research Center survey of Americans released last year found that the share of people who said they knew all of their neighbors decreased from 2018 to 2025. In a different report on social connection in America, also from last year, 63 percent of respondents said they never got together with their neighbors to improve their community, and only 27 percent said that their neighborhood was close-knit. And in a 2024 survey, about half of people said that they seldom or never spoke with neighbors they didn’t know well. The decline in socializing with neighbors has been happening for decades—since about the 1970s, as the sociologist Robert D. Putnam documented in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone.

The past couple of months, however, have shown that huge numbers of Americans do love their neighbors—enough to show up in frozen streets, confront armed federal agents, and even risk death. The response to Border Patrol and ICE’s presence in Minnesota has prompted one of the greatest mass displays of neighborly love that I’ve seen in my lifetime.

[Read: Minnesota proved MAGA wrong]

Donald Trump’s administration has described immigrants not as neighbors but as threats, and even as subhuman. The Department of Homeland Security posted an image to social media last summer that featured the ICE-hotline number and the message report all foreign invaders. President Trump has referred to immigrants as “animals” and called Somalis, one of the immigrant groups his agents were reportedly sent to Minnesota to target, “garbage.” At a press conference this month, he held up mug shots of immigrants arrested in Minnesota and asked, “Do you want to live with these people?” The administration insists that it is going after criminals and immigrants here illegally, despite the fact that it has arrested some people with no criminal record, and has detained and deported citizens. Agents across the country are reportedly racially profiling Latinos, and anyone who is not white. (DHS claims that agents are using “reasonable suspicion.”) Videos from Minnesota show agents questioning and detaining people based on their accents. The message this sends is that anyone who doesn’t fit the mold of what agents think an American citizen looks and sounds like is subject to suspicion, and doesn’t belong. Many people, however, are rejecting the message that skin color, language, or national origin disqualifies someone from being their neighbor.

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard the word neighbor in videos documenting interactions between Minnesotans and federal agents, and in interviews with local residents. In a video taken after an ICE agent shot the poet and mother of three Renee Good, a witness screams, “You just killed my fucking neighbor! … You’re killing my neighbors. You’re stealing my neighbors.” Signs at protests in Minneapolis this month—when thousands of people showed up despite temperatures of 20 degrees below zero—read Love thy neighbo r, Stop disappearing our neighbors, We love our immigrant neighbors.

These are people unwilling to accept their neighbors being dragged from their homes and cars, pepper-sprayed in the face, and separated from their children. They have responded to federal agents’ cruelty and brutality with heroic care. As my colleague Adam Serwer has written, many Minnesotans are engaging in protests and efforts to deliver food and supplies to families in hiding. Local Signal groups monitor ICE activity and mobilize at a moment’s notice, a large-scale, seemingly leaderless operation that rests on relationships among neighbors. In doing so, they are accepting serious danger themselves. Two and a half weeks after Good’s death, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who had been trying to help a woman he seemed not to have known.

[Read: Rage in the U.S.A.]

Some of the Minnesotans defending their neighbors include those who would not have previously considered themselves activists. In one viral video, a man who says he has never protested before spews curses during an interview: “I got work in the goddamn morning just like everybody else,” he says. “I’m just here trying to stand up for community, dude.” Over and over, regular people have said, sometimes at the barrel of a gun, These are our neighbors. We claim them.

The outpouring of neighborly care is not limited to Minnesota. Local groups in Chicago, Baltimore, and other cities have also been monitoring ICE. Some schools and hospitals across the country are training staff on what to do if federal agents come knocking. People are delivering groceries to those who don’t feel safe leaving home in California, Oregon, Maine, Ohio, and many other states.

The forces of disconnection in American life today are strong. But the bravery of ordinary people has shown that Americans have not forgotten the power of loving their neighbors.

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Can We Just Let Teens Exist in Public?

2026-01-24T08:00:00-05:00

My local Target was the first place I noticed the shift. One day, a few years ago, a sign appeared: red text on white paper announcing that no one under 18 would be allowed in without an adult. Before the poster, every weekday afternoon, clots of teens would move through the arteries of the store, occasionally blocking them. The kids would laugh among themselves, swatch makeup on their arms, peruse the candy offerings. I suppose they made the shopping experience a little more chaotic, but I personally never saw them do anything worse than talk loudly, or loiter in the way of someone trying to reach the face wash. They reminded me of me and my friends when I was young—hanging out in a store just for something to do, somewhere to be. And then the sign went up, and the teens disappeared.

My Target is just one of many U.S. businesses that have issued restrictions in recent years on unaccompanied minors. These policies are frequently enacted in places where teens like to congregate, such as malls, restaurants, movie theaters, and theme parks. Some places ban teens entirely, or just on certain days or during certain hours. Comprehensive data on how many businesses have these rules are hard to come by. But the anecdotes are piling up. Kathleen Blum, who leads shopper insights at the market-research firm C+R Research, told me that she’s seen “an uptick” in such policies over the past few years.

In some places, minors are also subject to new curfews. Last year, for example, both Cincinnati and Washington, D.C., instituted curfew zones in busy neighborhoods, beginning at 6 p.m. in D.C. and 9 p.m. in Cincinnati. Chicago began banning youth from downtown Millennium Park after 6 p.m. on weekends in 2022. According to the Marshall Project, “more than a dozen cities and counties” established or started enforcing curfew laws in 2023. Adolescents are the obvious target of such policies, because they are far more likely than younger kids to be out unaccompanied.

[Read: Kids have no place in a liberal democracy]

All of these constraints significantly erode teens’ ability to participate in society. They compound the well-documented problem of teen loneliness and poor mental health. And they are a reflection of an adult society that resists taking responsibility for, or even tolerating the presence of, children in public.

Neither curfew laws nor business bans are brand-new phenomena. Steven Mintz, a historian of childhood at the University of Texas at Austin, told me that curfew laws in particular have ebbed and flowed over the decades with the anxieties of the times. Sometimes, he said, such policies are motivated by a desire to protect children from danger or substance use; other times, they stem from fear of what unsupervised teens might do.

This latest wave of restrictions seems to rest on the questionable assumption that teens are inherently a threat and that banning them would instill order. Some of the recent curfews were enacted or enforced after violence broke out at large gatherings of young people. Blum said that, in her experience, a major reason that businesses ban unchaperoned youth is to prevent shoplifting—and businesses have reported an increase in shoplifting incidents over the past few years, in National Retail Federation surveys . Perhaps wholesale bans feel justified to those who make them, given that children are still developing and teens’ brains can make them impulsive. But young people are not the only ones who commit violence and not the only ones who shoplift. And recent research on child development challenges the widely held idea that adolescents are universally more risk-seeking than adults, suggesting that this is true of only a subset of youth. Evidence does not support the idea that juvenile curfews reduce crime. Policies that restrict all teens also risk being selectively enforced in practice due to racial profiling and other biases. Research has shown that curfews lead to disproportionate arrests of Black and Native American youth.

Another misapprehension lies underneath many of these bans: the idea that the presence of teens in itself creates a disturbance. Some businesses have explicitly cited a desire to minimize disruption as the reason for denying entrance to unaccompanied minors. The offending behaviors range from serious concerns such as fights and vandalism to the comparatively mild “horseplay, shouting, racing and other youthful actions” that reportedly led to a Michigan mall’s parental-supervision policy.

A fair policy would attempt to limit or punish unacceptable behavior, whomever the perpetrator; curfews and unaccompanied-minor bans instead punish all teens. “When some teens act badly, there’s some kind of permission among policy makers and business leaders to therefore ban all teens,” John Wall, a co-director of Rutgers University’s Childism Institute, which researches methods for empowering children, told me. These measures restrict kids from moving and assembling freely, and they are, in Wall’s view, discriminatory. Some limitations on children can be beneficial; compulsory schooling, for example, guarantees young people the right to an education, and age requirements for driver’s licenses are in place because younger children cannot operate cars safely. But “existing in public and engaging with businesses do not require any such special capacities,” Wall said. “The reason for children being excluded is simply because of their childhood, not for any compelling state interest.” Children, of course, do not have the same legal rights as adults, and businesses have a lot of latitude to deny service to customers. This is why restricting anyone under 18 on the offhand chance that they could be rowdy is possible. But that doesn’t make it just.

Coming of age requires learning independence, figuring out who you are and how you relate to the world. This is hard to do if you’re forbidden from even buying a chicken sandwich without a grown-up looking over your shoulder. Good decision making, some studies suggest, is less about cognitive development and more about getting experience exploring one’s environment. That’s how young people learn—if they are allowed to explore in the first place.

Wall said that he sees the recent business bans and curfews as part of a longer historical trend of “children’s gradual disappearance from the public realm.” For Mintz’s part, he recalled his own childhood in the 1960s and the freedom he had to wander alone or with his peers. That freedom has slowly faded over the decades as the cultural standard of parenting has shifted toward more supervision and as more adolescents spend their time shuttling to and from home, school, and chaperoned activities. Kids on their own in public have come to seem like a problem to be solved. “Historically, adolescence was often tolerated—sometimes grudgingly—as a noisy, inconvenient presence in public life,” Mintz said. “What feels new is how little room there is now for young people to simply be in shared spaces without adult oversight.”

[Read: The most useless piece of parenting advice]

The boomlet of restrictions on minors is coming at the same time as a wave of concern about adolescent isolation. A recent World Health Organization report found that loneliness rates are higher among teens than among other age groups. More than 40 percent of teenagers say that they do not consistently get the social support they need, according to a 2024 CDC report. How much time teens spend on their phone and the risks that poses to their mental health has been a topic of much discussion. The more that teens roam their community, a 2022 psychology study suggests, the happier and more socially connected they are—yet curfews and business bans make it harder for young people to hang out off-screen. It’s little wonder that many teens are at home on their phone if they get the message that they are not welcome in public. “What kind of society does this?” Mintz asked.

The kind of society that does this is one in which too many people see the raising of the next generation not as a communal responsibility but as something for parents to handle at home, out of sight. It’s one that deludes itself that youth might wake up on the morning of their 18th birthday endowed with all of the social skills they need to be considerate members of society, without having practiced along the way. It’s one that tells teens, over and over, that they are not neighbors, but nuisances.

The Common Friendship Behavior That Has Become Strangely Fraught

2026-01-08T08:30:00-05:00

A boogeyman haunts the realm of friendship advice: the friend who vents too much. Although people have surely been complaining since the dawn of language, and getting annoyed at one another about it for nearly as long, venting about how much other people are venting has lately gotten very loud. Etiquette books, advice columns, and talking-head TikTok s have taken up the issue of over-venting. Complaining too much sometimes gets framed as not just irritating but “toxic,” and sharing problems is sometimes described as “trauma dumping.” Those on the receiving end of complaints bemoan their status as the “therapist friend.” The message is: Vent with caution.

Therapists and researchers I spoke with have also noticed a heightened anxiety among their patients and research subjects about venting. “It’s a real-life thing,” Peter Mallory, a sociologist at St. Francis Xavier University, told me. He said that when he interviews people about their friendships, he frequently hears them “talking about the burdens of other people coming to them when they need emotional support.” In turn, some people seem to be holding back from their friends for fear of burdening them. Blake Blankenbecler, a therapist in Charlotte, North Carolina, told me that she hears both sentiments from her clients: “I don’t want to be too much and My friend is too much right now.”

Some conflict within friendships over venting seems inevitable. Venting is complex; it can bring people closer, but it can also be emotionally draining. The impulse to conceal struggles from friends, or to resist listening to a friend’s complaints, however, is misguided: If people avoid sharing problems with one another, their relationships risk becoming less rich—and less rewarding.

The idea of venting was popularized by Sigmund Freud and his colleague Josef Breuer, who believed that catharsis of suppressed emotions was key to treating hysteria and neurosis. Freud wrote of “giving vent to the torments of the secret.” Anger was not the only emotion he thought needed release, but the idea of venting your frustration lest you explode has had real staying power. It still fuels a lot of conventional wisdom about how to deal with negative emotions, including tips to scream into a pillow, “let it out,” or “get something off your chest.” (And this concept of catharsis informed much of what we know as talk therapy today.)

Research, however, has shown that venting does not reduce anger but can actually fuel it—which may be why some people go so far as to say that you should never vent at all, to anyone. The self-help author and podcaster Mel Robbins has called venting a “trap” and instead recommends her “Let Them Theory,” which, as I understand it, advises people to just accept however others are acting and try not to be upset about it. Mark Manson, the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, advocated against venting for other reasons: “Complaining is how weak people try to connect,” he said in a social-media video last year.

[Read: That’s it. You’re dead to me.]

Still, venting can make people feel better, even if it doesn’t make them less enraged, because it has a social purpose. “We vent to connect, feel validated, etc and maybe even more energized to deal with the conflict,” Jennifer Parlamis, a social psychologist at the University of San Francisco, told me in an email. “You feel better because you received social support but you are not less angry.” That support from another person can make the difference between a successful vent session and a dud. In one study, Parlamis found that whether venters came away from an interaction with their moods improved depended on how the listener responded.

Venting can also bring people closer, much like sharing secrets can build intimacy. One way this happens, according to research by Jaimie Arona Krems, a social psychologist at UCLA, is when one friend vents to another about someone else. This kind of venting makes the listener likely to prefer the venter over the person being vented about. So it’s a way of solidifying a relationship, if a somewhat-manipulative way.

Despite the social benefits of venting, people can easily overdo it. Online, people frequently complain about friends’ constant negativity bringing them down. They aren’t wrong to worry about this; emotions are contagiou s. Complaining can lead to what is called “co-rumination,” or excessive dwelling on a problem in discussion—you can get caught up in a friend’s thought spiral and their emotions. Co-rumination is linked to depressive symptoms but also to higher-quality friendships, presumably because co-ruminators have people they trust to discuss problems with them. An interviewee in one of Mallory’s studies summed up the tension between the advantages and drawbacks of venting. At one point, she talked about the importance of friends sharing issues and giving one another advice: “For me, friendship means counseling,” she said. But later, she also said that she felt emotionally burned-out by paying attention to friends’ problems. Contradictorily, she saw “counseling her friends as both intimacy-building and a risk to her own wellbeing,” the researchers wrote.

Anti-venting partisans have some ideas for what people should do instead of complaining to their friends: journaling—or better yet, if you can afford it, going to therapy and paying someone to listen. (Reminders that “friends are not your therapists” abound on social media.) For those who do choose to vent to a friend, advice-givers suggest scheduling a time to talk about a tricky topic, so your friend isn’t blindsided; setting a timer for how long you’re going to complain; or—and this one comes up again and again—asking your friend for permission to vent before doing so.

This guidance implies that minimizing venting is almost a matter of etiquette, that asking for too much of others’ emotional energy is impolite. The advice also urges friends to behave in ways that are oddly formal. As Mallory pointed out, planning time to complain to a friend sounds “almost like booking an appointment with your therapist”—ironic, considering the imperative to not treat friends like therapists. These tips also focus on controlling and containing the mess of emotions that can come along with venting; yet the nature of both emotions and relationships is messy and unpredictable. “The most sustainable friendships,” Blankenbecler said, “value and create space for there to be some friction from time to time.”

[Read: A wedding reveals how much help is available to you]

And confining all of your venting to a journal or a therapist’s office could come at a real cost to relationships. If you never complain to your friends, Danielle Bayard Jackson, a friendship coach and the author of Fighting for Our Friendships, told me, you lose opportunities to signal trust, get “perspective from a person who knows and loves you,” and build intimacy. Jackson said that after she started going to therapy, she did ask for less from her friends. “It directly changed how I approached my friends,” she said. Her reach-outs for emotional support became “less frequent and intense.” She said that both therapy and prayer offered her help that her friends couldn’t. Still, Jackson didn’t stop complaining to her friends entirely. “Taking it totally off the table,” she said, “just feels kind of antithetical to friendship itself.”

That is what the venting debate is really about: friendship itself, and how friends should be. Should friendship be a haven from mess, or a safe space for it? Should friends support or avoid burdening one another? And, as Jackson put it, “what do you believe your friends owe you?” I don’t believe that friends owe one another unlimited time or energy. But they do owe one another, at least, compassion, reciprocity, and the generosity to not assume that a friend’s problems are only burdens.

One Weird Trick to Feel More Relaxed at Home

2026-01-02T08:00:00-05:00

The beginning of the year is a time heavy with pressure to clean your home. The Northern Hemisphere’s colder months seed a desire to stay in and get cozy, but home is where the mess is, and it’s staring you in the face, judging you (perhaps following the example of critical family members who came over for the holidays). On top of that, the self-improvement resolution energy of the New Year rudely reminds you that you should be doing better in every domain, so why haven’t you organized all of your snacks into clear plastic containers, like those TikTokers do?

The last thing anyone needs is more of this pressure. But my duty is to report the facts, and so I must inform you that, according to research, clutter in the home is associated with reduced well-being, and seems to get in the way of actually feeling at home. But the clutter, you may say, it just keeps coming! The junk mail, the kids’ toys and art projects, the half-finished water glasses. And by the way, I am very busy. I hear you. I empathize. I am busy too. But I also have a very modest proposal—a quick, easy solution that I swear will have the highest emotional payoff for the least physical effort: Clear your countertops.

That’s all.

Clutter lives rent-free not only in my home but in my mind and heart. More than a crumb-covered rug or an overflowing laundry hamper, what bothers me is stuff accumulated on surfaces. When I see piles on the counters, I begin walking around in a huff, muttering that we live in filth. I’m not always even aware that counter clutter is what’s bothering me until Tupperware is returned to its drawer, keys are hung back on their hooks, Amazon packaging gets recycled, and expired Ace Hardware coupons are thrown away. I realize then that removing those few items from my visual field has unclenched my shoulders and soothed my rage.

People have different tolerance levels for messiness, and mine is probably quite low. But Sophie Woodward, a University of Manchester sociologist, told me that clutter is fraught for most people, in part because “having less stuff is seen as morally good.” Woodward said that in interviews for her research, almost all of her subjects express a desire for a more minimalist home—even if theirs is already pretty tidy. “Unless you are unbelievably on top of things,” she said, “clutter will accumulate to a point where it bothers people.”

[Read: The most impractical tool in my kitchen]

Counters are clutter magnets. When you’re holding a random item and don’t know where to put it, the allure of a wide, hip-level surface is too much to resist. Just drop it there and deal with it later, the devil on your shoulder whispers. But this is a trap. “Putting the clutter at eye level, where you’re going to see it most naturally, is going to bother you more because you can’t avoid seeing it,” Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, told me. Counters tend to be in high-traffic areas, such as kitchens and bathrooms, that you’re likely to pass through several times a day. In the open-plan homes that have been all the rage in the U.S. for some time now (blame HGTV), kitchen and living areas are not separated, which can make mess feel inescapable. My house is like this, so when I’m trying to relax on the couch, clutter stares at me from the kitchen island. Counters are meant to be functional, but when they are covered with stuff, they become useless.

Ideally, the solution to counter clutter is to take all that stuff and put it where it belongs: neatly organized in a cabinet, perhaps, or directly in the trash. Woodward said that what makes clutter upsetting is less the items themselves, and more the fact that they’re out of place. (You don’t hate all of those charging cables; you hate that you don’t know where to put them.) So storing items will probably relieve clutter anxiety most effectively. But if all you can manage to do is scoop up the pile and shove it in a drawer to be dealt with later, that’s still a win. “There is absolutely research to support your hypothesis that tidying up visible areas can make a positive impact on your mood!!” Catherine Roster, a consumer-behavior researcher at the University of New Mexico, told me in an email. (With two exclamation points!!)

Once you clear the piles, the stuff won’t be taunting you anymore, and the counter will be newly available to perform its intended function. Even if you’re not going to undertake an elaborate baking project, the fact that you could, Woodward said, may make you feel better. And after experiencing a clear space, “maybe you’re more likely to take the next step, which is then actually put the stuff away,” she said. Sure, maybe.

I know this is a temporary solution. Eventually, you will have to face the clutter. Eventually, you will have to deal with all the other ways your house is messy—vacuum that rug; do that laundry. But not today! Today, just clear the counters, and know peace.

How to Cheat at Conversation

2025-11-18T07:00:00-05:00

How do you cheat at a conversation? This could have been a Zen koan, in different times. In the unfortunate times we live in, it is the question driving an artificial-intelligence tool called Cluely.

The company’s manifesto says, “We want to cheat on everything.” Right now Cluely is best suited for cheating at computer-related tasks: The program appears as a translucent overlay on top of your screen and can read and answer questions about any text that you’re currently looking at. You could use Cluely to cheat on your homework, or on a test, if that test were taking place on a laptop. But the main thing Cluely seems designed to “cheat” at is live conversation. It can listen in on video or audio calls, provide a real-time summary of what’s being said, offer related information from the web, and, when prompted, suggest follow-up questions or other things to say. If you zone out for a while, you can ask it to summarize the past few minutes for you.

The assumption behind Cluely is that letting an AI pull a Cyrano yields better interactions than relying on your own brain. Curious to test this claim, I tried Cluely out—in casual chats and formal interviews—to see if I could successfully cheat at conversation and to explore how using AI changes the experience of communicating. I came away certain that any understanding or sense of connection that resulted from my Cluely-assisted conversations was despite the AI, not because of it.

First, I used Cluely with my editor as we sat across from each other at a conference-room table, making chitchat. She told me about an issue her kid was having at summer camp; she was open to any advice, man-made or otherwise. Cluely suggested that I say to her: “Approaches include supportive conversations, tracking for ongoing stressors, and involving counselors if needed.”

The advice was fine, if a little generic, but it did not sound like me. It did not sound like any human being. A key element of conversation, according to Deborah Tannen, a Georgetown University linguistics professor, is “conversational style”—the personality of speech, the unique way people say things. AI can’t replicate this. My conversational style is an accumulation of all the people I’ve ever talked to, and all the experiences I’ve ever had. Even if an AI scraped every article I’ve ever written and listened in on all my Zoom calls, it still wouldn’t know the whole of my life. The most efficient way to come up with a statement that sounds like something I would say is for me to just say something.

[Read: The question all colleges should ask themselves about AI]

Of course, you don’t have to read Cluely’s suggestions verbatim. One could argue that the best way to use it is to take its ideas and translate them into your own words. I gave this a good-faith effort in interviews with Tannen and with N. J. Enfield, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of Sydney. (Tannen didn’t know I was using Cluely until I filled her in at the end of the interview. I told Enfield up front because he was in Europe, where privacy and recording laws are stricter.) I integrated Cluely into our conversations as seamlessly as I could. I summoned all of my high-school-theater acting skills and did my best to phrase Cluely’s questions in my own voice. During the interviews, I mixed Cluely’s suggestions with my natural responses and questions I had preplanned. The people I spoke with said they couldn’t tell which questions were from me and which were from AI. When they guessed, they often guessed incorrectly.

So if cheating at conversation means using AI without anyone being able to tell, then for me, in these conversations, the tool worked. But Cluely’s co-founder and CEO, Roy Lee, told me that what he means by cheating is “to be so leveraged”—that is, to have such power on your side—“that you can achieve something that other people would consider unfair.” The company’s manifesto compares Cluely to using a calculator or spell-check; Lee told me it’s like driving a car instead of a horse-drawn carriage. Basically, the company uses the word cheat because it’s spicy, but what it means is doing something more easily and efficiently, and producing a better result than what you could have on your own.

If I accept this dubious premise that cheating is merely a matter of gaining leverage, then Cluely did not help me cheat at conversations. It made them more difficult, less efficient, and worse.

To evaluate the success of a conversation, you need to ask: What is conversation for? What is the point of talking to anyone about anything?

According to Lee, a good conversation “is one in which both parties extract value” from it, “whether it is an emotional value or it’s a more material capitalist value.” What AI can do, he said, is give you information to help you extract that value more efficiently.

According to Enfield, a conversation has two purposes. One is simple understanding—picking up what the other person is putting down. The other is a social purpose—forming or solidifying a relationship.

The odd thing about inventing a machine to help humans make conversation is that, Enfield told me, humans already are conversation machines—finely tuned ones, at that. Conversation is “a very high-performance kind of activity,” Enfield said. It requires “processing on multiple levels.” You’re not only responding to what the other person says but also anticipating how they might react to you, and intuiting what they already know. “Your performance depends very much on the feedback that you’re getting from the other person,” Enfield said, “and that feedback is mutual.”

In its efforts to augment social interactions, Cluely can actually gum up the works of the human conversation machine. For one thing, it creates delays. Enfield told me that people have “exquisite sensitivity” to disruptions in timing. If the delay has a clear reason—for example, one person takes an enormous bite of food—then the conversation can proceed without much trouble. If not, people tend to come up with a social reason for the timing issue: that the two people in the conversation aren’t clicking, or one person is socially awkward or maybe even doesn’t like the other person. So the time it takes to look at an AI’s suggestion might harm a relationship, even if the suggestion is awesome.

[Read: The costs of instant translation]

Cluely is also extremely distracting. As I Zoomed with Tannen and Enfield, it was always there, in the corner of my eye, tick-tick-ticking away with a live scroll of suggestions for me to click on. Distraction is another thing that humans are sensitive to in conversation, Enfield told me. If one person senses that the other is not paying attention, “then I become disfluent,” he said. “I become less well able to tell my story because, like, Are you following me here?” My conversation with Tannen had a moment like this. I asked a follow-up question Cluely had suggested, and she seemed to freeze for a moment and struggle to answer. Later, Tannen told me that she thought she had just answered the question earlier in the conversation. And looking at the transcript, I saw that she was correct. That’s probably why the AI asked the question to begin with—it was iterating on what she’d just been saying. And I was too distracted to notice. When I told Tannen I’d been using Cluely, she seemed more amused than upset, but did say that using it “violates the ideal of conversation.”

The only time I’ve felt a similarly intense split focus is when I was doing interviews for a podcast I hosted. During those conversations, I would try to stay present with the interviewee on Zoom while looking at my notes in a Google Doc, where my producer would move questions around and make real-time suggestions. Attempting to focus on so many things at once and channel them smoothly into the discussion created a pressure in my head as though my brain were overheating like a laptop fan. It was exhausting; on days when I did podcast interviews, I would fall asleep at 9 p.m. Using Cluely was kind of like that, except the suggestions were not helpful.

The ad released when Cluely launched this year shows Lee on a date with a young woman. A giant screen visible only to Lee floats on the table between them, coaching him to lie about his age and pulling up images of the woman’s artwork so that he can soothe her with compliments when she finds out he’s lying and gets upset. The imagery of a giant barrier in between them as they’re trying to connect is a pretty perfect metaphor for my experience trying to converse using AI.

When we spoke, Lee said, “The ad is a little bit misleading,” in the sense that “an AI conversation assistant is likely the least helpful when you’re speaking with someone romantically and then the pure objective is just emotional.” Why use that as the example in the ad, then? I asked. “It will get more impressions than a sales call or a customer-support call,” Lee said. (The company seems to have realized that work is Cluely’s most obvious use case for now, and recently updated its website to promote it as the “#1 AI assistant for meetings.”)

This is the thing: Being intentionally provocative is a big part of Lee’s and Cluely’s brands. Cluely began as an app for cheating on job interviews that got Lee and his co-founder, Neel Shanmugam, in trouble at Columbia University while they were students. They have since dropped out and doubled down on the whole cheating thing. And the provocations seem to be working. The company secured $5.3 million in its initial fundraising round earlier this year, followed by $15 million from the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Lee has said that the app has about 100,000 users. His social-media post announcing Cluely, which said, “Today is the start of a world where you never have to think again,” has been viewed 3.7 million times as of this writing. Does he really believe that a world without thought could and should be achieved? “We’re just stirring the pot. It’s Twitter,” Lee said. Points for honesty, I guess.

[Read: The age of de-skilling]

Yet, as with many things done for LOLs, Lee and his colleagues at least halfway mean it. Although Lee claimed that the date scenario was not representative, he also said he has used Cluely on a couple of “e-dates.” Lee contradicted himself a few times when we spoke; he seemed unsure of whether there were limits to the kinds of conversations Cluely is meant to be used for—or at least unsure of what he thought I wanted to hear. “I imagine you would use this for any sort of conversation” in order to get to your goal more quickly, Lee told me.

“Destination over journey?” I said, and he responded, “Exactly,” before quickly noting that sometimes the journey is the destination, and that, for example, a father who wants to “spend some time blabbing with his infant” probably wouldn’t need AI to do so. Yet Lee also said he believes that the end goal for artificial intelligence is a brain chip, which, if achieved, would mean the possibility of using AI in any conversation. (When I spoke with Enfield, his take was that widespread adoption of tech like Cluely would mean that “everyone who we meet could be a kind of deepfake.”)

Lee’s argument in favor of using Cluely boiled down to: More knowledge is better for relationships. For instance, he asked, if you’re on a date, wouldn’t you like to know if this person is a sex offender? Wouldn’t you like to know if you’re being lied to? The only problem with the date ad, he said, was that the girl wasn’t also using Cluely. If she had been, then he couldn’t have deceived her so effectively. But, I asked, does he consider parroting words that a robot wrote to be a kind of deception? Turns out he does. “But you can’t close Pandora’s box on AI; it’s already out there,” he said. So the solution, as he sees it, is for everyone to use it, for everyone to deceive one another. Cheat on everything. Lee wants to “get people used to a world where everybody’s just using AI maximally.”

This is so very Big Tech, the idea that problems created by technology can be solved by more technology. It’s like trying to solve the distraction caused by smartphones by selling another tech gadget that blocks access to distracting apps. The solution Lee proposed is also, conveniently, the one that would make him more money.

What makes using AI to “cheat” on conversation more troubling than doing math with a calculator, Enfield told me, is that in relationships, investment “is where authenticity comes from. That’s what makes you a genuine person.” Think of a man who asks his secretary to buy flowers for his spouse, and to write a card to go with them. Those flowers mean less than nothing. Because the point of the gesture is not the flowers themselves or the words on the card. It’s the attention and effort that went into them. As Tannen put it to me: “I mean, what is being in love? It means this person has all your attention.”

Even when conversations are transactional, or strictly business, attention matters. My business is journalism, and Enfield told me that knowing in advance that I was using Cluely made him “slightly less interested in your questions.” He said that he would expect a question from me to be a result of thought and care, and a desire to know the answer. But “the AI doesn’t really care about the answer,” he said. “It polluted the conversation.” And that’s bad for business.

Moments after I hung up with Lee, he sent me an email thanking me for the conversation. I knew it had been written by Cluely; it was marked as such, and the app had automatically drafted a similar one for me to send to him. Reading the note didn’t make me feel connected to Lee, or appreciated. It didn’t make me feel much of anything, except maybe a little cheated.

The Pantsless Trend Reaches Its Logical Conclusion

2025-11-05T08:00:00-05:00

Celebrities seem to have developed a pants allergy. Bella Hadid and Julia Fox have been running errands in their underpants. Bodysuits, oversize blazers worn as dresses, and sheer fabrics that reveal the lingerie underneath are all common sights. This widespread pantsless trend has given rise to a new sort of garment, more micro than micro-shorts, bulkier than lingerie: I call it the “fashion diaper.”

Its closest historical analogues are the hot pants of the 1970s or the bottoms of the two-piece playsuits that were popular in the 1940s, though both of these are more shorts than briefs. The fashion diaper differs in that it’s distinctly undergarment-shaped: It may be a high-waisted brief, a bikini cut, or even a thong. It is underwear designed from the start to be worn as outerwear. It may come with accessories such as a be lt; it may be bejewele d, or rendered in textured fabrics such as leather or a chunky kni t. Miu Miu’s 2023 fall/winter fashion show featured several pairs of panties-as-outerwear. This has been mostly a trend in women’s fashion, although Prada’s spring-2026 menswear show featured very short shorts that looked pretty fashion-diaper-y.

The goal of the fashion diaper seems to be to expose not the rear, as you might expect (many are high-waisted and not particularly flattering to the behind), but rather as much leg as possible. “It’s a very interesting turn toward the legs,” Nancy Deihl, a co-author of The History of Modern Fashion: From 1850, told me.

Why legs, and why now? As with many trends, this shift seems to have come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time, so this is hard to answer definitively. But the simplest explanation might be this: Fashion diapers get attention. “It’s not that easy to shock or surprise in fashion anymore,” Sonya Abrego, a fashion historian at Parsons School of Design, told me. The fashion experts I spoke with said that low-cut tops, sheer fabrics, and other body-baring looks rarely stand out in all the photos and videos that people see online these days. Fashion diapers, however, “maybe feel a little bit more provocative because they’re the bottoms,” Abrego said. The few inches of fabric that differentiate a micro-short from a fashion diaper are a crucial few inches that catch the eye when they go missing.

[Read: Your sweaters are garbage]

The first place I noticed the fashion diaper—appropriately for an attention-grabbing garment—was onstage. In the Tortured Poets Department segment of her Eras Tour, Taylor Swift wore a couple of versions of a sparkly, high-waisted Vivienne Westwood brief, with a matching bra. Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo have worn many a fash ion diaper, as have the members of the K-pop act Blackpink. Sabrina Carpenter wore one while performing at this year’s VMAs. The girl group K atseye’s endless array of tiny bottoms veers back and forth across the line between micro-miniskirts and full-blown fashion diapers. On her Cowboy Carter Tour, Beyoncé wore a lot of bodysuits and chaps, but she also dabbled in spangly and denim briefs.

Pop stars have been performing in bodysuits for decades—the leotard silhouette is visually striking while also giving freedom of movement, and can be easily layered over for quick costume changes. Perhaps somebody was inevitably going to think to cut one in half. Sarah Chapelle, who runs the Taylor Swift Style blog, told me in an email that she thinks of these garments as “pop star underwear.” She noted that they have dance-class associations, and create “a trick of the eye to elongate the leg.”

It makes sense that fashion diapers would proliferate among pop singers, because no matter where Deihl sees them, she told me, “all I can see is costume.” The look reminds her of the Rockettes, “the kind of gorgeous-gams showgirl look.” And we’re in something of a showgirl moment right now, thanks in large part to Taylor Swift’s recent album The Life of a Showgirl. In images for the album, Swift wears a vintage showgirl costume from the legendary designer Bob Mackie: a bejeweled underwear set he designed for the Vegas show Jubilee that reportedly caused a Swarovski-crystal shortage. Mackie’s looks have also recently been seen on Miley Cyrus, Sabrina Carpenter, and Zendaya.

[Read: You’re probably wearing too much deodorant]

But fashion diapers also appear offstage, on the runway, the red carpet, and the street. The peak of the pantsless trend may have been this year’s Met Gal a, where the dress code was “Tailored for You,” a nod to Black dandyism. Several stars wore menswear-inspired bodysuits or minidresses, and a couple of fashion diapers made appearances as well. Abrego told me that going pantsless was “an obvious way” to make the theme “sexier.” These looks reminded Daniel James Cole, a co-author of The History of Modern Fashion, once again of showgirls—“I just expect to toss one of these young women on the red carpet a top hat or a derby hat,” he said. (Taraji P. Henson did indeed wear a derby hat with her pantsless ensemble.)

The showgirl theory also holds in that fashion diapers seem to have taken off almost only among celebrities. Although Abrego and Cole mentioned seeing the occasional pantsless street-style look in New York City, the diaper trend does not seem likely to trickle down to H&M. Fashion’s turn toward legs seems to be manifesting for the ordinary person in slightly more modest ways: See the current popularity of short shorts (for men and women) and mini skirts.

When Kristen Stewart takes a walk in cable-knit undies, or Sydney Sweeney goes out in bejeweled briefs, that’s different from an anonymous civilian doing so. For celebrities, “their daily life is an extension of their performativity,” Deihl said. “They’re always dressing to be photographed.” Perhaps showgirls feel particularly resonant right now because, in the age of social media, “we’re all showgirls performing, to some degree, for the current cultural landscape of the internet,” Chapelle said. Yet only some of us are doing it pantsless.

Traditional Values Came for TV’s Weirdest Dating Show

2025-10-30T12:45:00-04:00

This article contains spoilers for Season 9 of Love Is Blind.

For a reality dating show with an experimental premise, Love Is Blind has always been pretty traditionalist. Its entire purpose is the pursuit of heterosexual marriage. Separated by gender, contestants date one-on-one in “pods” without seeing each other. When it comes time for engagement, the men do all the proposing, and from then on the show is an arrow hurtling toward the altar.

But this season, which ended last week and aired its reunion episode last night, featured many contestants who seemed to be seeking relationships that were notably old-fashioned. Some people expressed sentiments that wouldn’t feel out of place on tradwife TikTok. This conservative bent mirrors a wider cultural shift, as more Americans express support for traditional gender roles. It also heightened Love Is Blind’s ongoing tensions between conventionality and nonconformity, and left the season’s values feeling incoherent—up until the end, when the show’s premise collapsed entirely.

The show’s focus on conversation means contestants’ values are often at the forefront of the dating process. So viewers found out early on that Anton is “very old-school traditional in terms of how I treat women,” and that a woman called “Sparkle Megan” believes in “more traditional gender roles.” Despite Megan’s obvious wealth and ambitious career, she said she thinks women should be nurturers and men should be providers. One of her dates, Mike, visibly perked up at this and said, “I support that.”

Not all contestants professed ideas like these. Kalybriah and Edmond, for instance, stated from the jump that they were both looking for what they called a “nontraditional” marriage; Kalybriah said, “I’m not going to be a housewife. I’m going to be working.” Still, a conservative streak persisted through many of the season’s relationships. When one couple, Annie and Nick, got engaged, she told him, “Thank you for taking the lead, and thank you for making me feel safe and secure enough to follow.” When Anton’s mother eventually met his fiancée, Ali, she advised the couple that “traditional values are always, I think, the best to stick with,” and they both agreed. Ali told Anton’s mom, “I don’t think there’s any reason to bring children into the world and pawn them off to a day care.”

[Read: Why America loves ]Love is Blind

These ideas went largely without pushback, whereas in past seasons, questions of core values and political beliefs frequently led to debate and friction between partners. In Season 8, for instance, two women said no at the altar because of differences in political views with their partners. Previous seasons have showcased arguments about abortion, birth control, and splitting the bill versus expecting the man to pay for everything.

Nick and Annie found that they were aligned on some especially regressive beliefs. Of spanking children, Nick said, “Sometimes they need to be reprimanded,” to which Annie responded, “Hell yeah.” Then Nick asked Annie how she would feel if her child were to say they were LGBTQ. “No matter what, I’m always going to love my kids,” she said. “But I can’t tell you I would be the first person to be like, Yay.” “Do you feel like it’s a fad?” Nick asked. “One hundred percent,” she replied. When the episode aired, the comments about gay kids received a lot of backlash, and Nick has since issued a statement “taking accountability,” though he also claimed that the conversation had been “very heavily sliced and diced.” The co-hosts, Vanessa and Nick Lachey, did not bring any of this up in the reunion episode. They did push back on inaccurate comments that one contestant had made about diabetes, but any talk of the season’s most controversial conversation was conspicuously absent.

The conservatism in this season seemed in tune with changes in society at large. Among Republicans in particular, the view that women should “return to their traditional roles” has spiked in the past few years. In a recent survey of Americans by The 19th, nearly six in 10 men said that “society would benefit from a return to traditional gender roles”; four in 10 women said the same. Narrow visions of gender roles and family life also emanate from the Trump administration, which has pursued a definition of gender as binary and fixed, and eroded the rights of trans people through executive orders. Project 2025, a blueprint for the Trump administration written by the Heritage Foundation, has made the promotion of heterosexual nuclear families an essential part of its agenda.

Yet for people seeking a “traditional” marriage, Love Is Blind is an odd place to try to find it. Seeking a life partner on television is hardly old-fashioned, to say nothing of blind dating through a wall. Moreover, the show seems confused about just how sacred it thinks marriage is. It glorifies the institution with one hand while degrading it with the other. The show repeatedly suggests that it produces a purer kind of relationship, one unencumbered by the biases of “the conventional dating world,” as Nick Lachey puts it—yet it mines real-world friction for maximum drama. Once contestants are engaged, they have just four weeks to prepare to be married. And the show plays up the mystery of whether they will say yes at the altar, essentially retconning the commitment of the proposal into something meaningless. Traditionally, one doesn’t spend one’s engagement unsure of whether one is actually planning to marry the other person. Love Is Blind frames marriage as the American dream, a transformative portal that will bring you to your best and most complete self. Then it turns wedding vows into a farce of indecision. And of course, as on any reality program, the contestants have muddled motives (seeking a lifetime partnership, pursuing fame), and so does the show (helping people find love, producing a profit).

[Read: The great ghosting paradox]

The contestants’ values also seemed conflicted at times. Ali introduced herself in the first episode by saying she’s single because she hasn’t found someone to match her ambition, then spent much of the remaining episodes focused on Anton’s ability to support her financially, before leaving him at the altar. (At the reunion, she said she wanted to pursue her career, but also reiterated her desire for a man to provide.) Megan got engaged to Jordan, a single dad to a boy named Luca, and expressed enthusiasm about the idea of a family life with them. (“If I can’t have kids, then what’s my purpose?” she wondered at one point. “I guess stepping into being Luca’s mom.”) But she broke up with Jordan before their wedding, seemingly because he has to work and parent too much to join her in her wealthy, independent lifestyle of frequent travel and weekday tennis. “In the pods, I was really leaning into him being a single father, the excitement of it, but I don’t think I thought through how challenging it is, and how I would need to make a lot of concessions to how I currently live,” Megan told the cameras after their breakup. “This has me questioning if I’m even cut out to be a mom. Maybe I am too caught up in my own life.” By the time of the reunion, she had resolved this for herself—she shared in last night’s episode that she’d recently had a baby with a new partner. The contestants’ ambivalence is surely relatable to the many people who feel uncertain about how to balance clashing desires. But the season seemed to have trouble knowing what to make of these tensions.

And as it turns out, the center could not hold with all of these competing ideals pulling on one another. For the first time in the history of Love Is Blind—both the original American franchise and its many international spin-offs—every contestant ended up alone. In the finale, everyone who had made it to the altar left the wedding venue solo, to the tune of Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers.” The song is Cyrus’s ode to independence, with lines such as “I can love me better than you can.” This last-minute pivot to self-love was jarring, yes. But you know what—why not? It made about as much sense as anything on the show ever has.

The Great Friendship Flattening

2025-10-16T13:01:00-04:00

All of my relationships live, at least in part, in my phone, where they are forced to share space with everything else that happens there. Lately, the feeling creeping up on me is that the pieces of my relationships that exist on that screen seem less and less distinguishable from all the other content I consume there.

A lot happens inside my phone. It’s always trying to sell me stuff. Sometimes, it tries to scam me. It has games, videos, TV shows, movies, news, health trackers, podcasts, books, music, shopping, maps, work software, regular old internet browsing, and an app I was forced to download in order to use my doorbell. And, of course, it contains all of my social interactions that are not face-to-face or via snail mail. (Even face-to-face interactions, unless I bump into someone on the street, were probably planned via smartphone.)

So when my phone does its little mating calls of pings and buzzes, it could be bringing me updates from people I love, or showing me alerts I never asked for from corporations hungry for my attention. When I pull it out, content and communication appear in similar forms—notifications, social-media posts, vertical video—and they blur together. As interactions with loved ones converge with all the other kinds of media on smartphones, Samuel Hardman Taylor, a professor who studies social media at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me, “our relationships are becoming a part of that consumption behavior.” When the phone becomes more of an entertainment hub, using it for social interaction can feel more optional. And picking my loved ones out of the never-ending stream of stuff on my phone requires extra effort.

Since social media’s earliest days, regular people have been using it to perform their life and treat their loved ones as an audience. But now social media is eating media-media’s lunch, nibbling into time that used to be spent watching TV and movies, particularly for younger generations, and refashioning itself less as a network and more as a broadcaster. In the process, it has become less, well, social. These sites no longer seem to care whether non-influencers with small followings post anything or respond to anyone, as long as they keep scrolling.

And as social media has shifted away from connecting users with people they know and toward pushing AI slop and algorithmically targeted short-form videos from who-knows-where, a dissociative sort of mushing has occurred. The posts from my friends and family are still there, but they are absorbed into the flow of brain rot and advertising. Here an ad for washable ballet flats, there a picture of my friend’s baby, then a baby I don’t know performing some meme-worthy antic, followed by a reel about how Millennials are lame for wearing high-waisted jeans, a video of my friend looking hot in high-waisted jeans, an ad for trendy jeans, sponcon for weight-loss drugs so that you can fit into your jeans from high school that are suddenly trendy again. All of it passively consumed, all of it scrolled on by.

[Read: You’ve probably already met your next best friend]

This more passive social-media experience adds a layer to some of my relationships that can feel almost parasocial. Parasocial relationships, classically, are the sort of one-sided imagined relationships that people feel with celebrities or even fictional characters. People develop an emotional connection to someone they have only ever encountered through a screen (or, I guess, the pages of a novel), and a sense that they know this person even though they don’t, really. Gayle Stever, a psychology professor at Empire State University who researches parasociality, told me that the distinction between social and parasocial relationships has long been fuzzy, and social media has made it even less clear.

Lack of reciprocity is a key part of parasocial relationships—the fan knows a lot about the celebrity while the celebrity has no idea who the fan is. But now a celebrity might respond to your comment on TikTok, or even follow you back. At the same time, reciprocity is a crucial part of real relationships, but for the online component of those relationships, it can be more of a guideline, one that’s getting looser as time goes on. Sometimes I respond to a friend’s Bluesky post or Instagram story. But most of the time I don’t. Instead, I let these bits of content pass in one eye and out the other. I amass bits of knowledge about my loved ones—my sister’s boyfriend published a poem; my friend left her job—as a spectator, in the same way that I might learn about an influencer’s favorite books, or about Taylor Swift’s engagement.

The parasociality researchers I spoke with weren’t willing to say that this passive consumption is definitively parasocial behavior—I do know these people, after all—but they did say that, in some ways, social relationships are starting to look more like parasocial ones. Bradley Bond, a communications professor at the University of San Diego, did a couple of studies during the social-distancing era of the pandemic, when many people were seeing many of their loved ones only through technology. The results suggested that “increased exposure to real-life friends through screen media may blur the lines between the social and parasocial,” as one study put it, because of the similarity in format. “Your mind is kind of slightly being rewired,” Bond told me, “to understand those social others as also being two-dimensional.” In parasocial relationships, he said, people tend to use their imagination to fill in the gaps of what they know about someone. For instance, someone might assume that an actor they relate to must share their values, even if they don’t know that person’s political beliefs. “As real-life relationships seem more like parasocial relationships,” Bond speculated, “maybe we stop asking for self-disclosure and start assuming, much like we do with parasocial relationships.”

[Read: The easiest way to keep your friends]

If people feel a little like audience members observing their friends’ lives when looking at social media, that’s probably in part because people think of their friends as audiences when posting. Certain scholars describe social-media posts as falling somewhere in between interpersonal and mass communication. (They call it “masspersonal.”) Research has also shown that when posting, people tend to have an “imagined audience” in mind—which may not always line up with who really sees their posts. Contributing to the blending of the social with the parasocial, many regular people post to their small followings in the style of influencers : They speak directly to the camera (“Hey, guys”), or curate their photo dumps to display just the right blend of playful, cool effortlessness.

Of course, that’s if they post at all. Recently, in The New Yorker, the critic Kyle Chayka argued that society is experiencing “posting ennui” now that the average person’s modest life update will likely get lost in the sauce of a bunch of influencers with ring lights and brand partnerships. In the age of algorithmically driven feeds, when non-influencers post, perhaps their imagined audiences seem smaller than they used to. “If there’s no guarantee that our friends will even see what we post,” Chayka wrote, “then what is the incentive to keep doing it?”

This, in turn, affects how people consume posts. As the ratio shifts toward content that isn’t truly social—and as social media is experienced more as entertainment than as a place for connection—perhaps, people will be more likely to just tune in and zone out rather than bothering to interact with the friends they do still see there. “My gut tells me that that expectation that the audience responds has plummeted,” Jeffrey A. Hall, a communications professor at the University of Kansas, told me. So it would make sense that “any gains we used to get from that amount of small interaction in the social-media stream also go away.” Although researchers aren’t yet sure exactly what this phenomenon means for relationships, Hall said that he considers it “part of the long sunset of the public social network as being the place where we see sociality.”

Meanwhile, the sun is rising on the group chat, where a similar flattening and convergence can happen. WhatsApp has been growing in popularity; more people have gotten into Disco rd. All of these messages crowd home screens alongside breaking news, advertisements, social-media likes, and push alerts. “We’re straddling a bunch of different spheres of our life with these notifications,” Taylor told me. My notification center shows texts from my family group chat next to a bunch of New York Times push alerts, a calendar reminder for a meeting I had earlier today, announcements of new episodes of several podcasts I follow, and multiple ads from DoorDash suggesting that I order from Chick-fil-A, Walgreens, and other stores.

The decampment to group texts is a positive development for connection in some ways. Private messaging platforms, research suggests, lend themselves to sharing more personal content than algorithm-driven spaces, and they are good at facilitating continuous conversation s. Yet their rise could erode the norm of reciprocity a little, too. Back in 2018, I wrote a story about how ignoring texts had been normalized, since the medium lets you respond to messages in your own time (or not at all). Group chats may make responding seem even less mandatory, because of the diffused responsibility of having several people in the conversation. At the same time, the more people who are in the conversation, the more that “broadcasting” dynamic can creep in, Taylor said.

[Read: Group-chat culture is out of control]

Another way private messages have gotten somewhat broadcast-y is the popularity of voice notes. Many people like them because they offer more intimacy than texting but still don’t require an immediate, or any, response from the other person, as a phone call would. But let’s be real—voice notes are essentially little podcasts that you record for your friends. They are acts of connection, but ones that are more of a performance than picking up the phone and calling would be. And performance is always at least a bit distancing.

My best theory to sum all of this up is that a trickle-down effect is happening: As social media starts to look more like entertainment, private messaging starts to look more like social media. (You can “like” and “heart” text messages now, for instance.) In both cases, the performing and consuming elements get dialed up, leading to a subtle blurring of communities with audiences, of communication with content.

The researchers I spoke with haven’t drawn any conclusions about the blurring of relationships with consumable content—technology changes quickly, and scientific studies are slow. But as phoneworld evolves and our relationships contort in response, the psychology professor Linda Kaye of Edge Hill University, in England, offered me a foundational principle to hold on to: “Connection over content is always going to be better.” Your phone wants your attention; your relationships need it.

It’s Fun to Be a Board-Game Sociopath

2025-09-17T08:00:00-04:00

The one rule of Werewolf is: Don’t let them know you’re a werewolf.

Okay, there are a few more rules to the card game than that. You and your friends sit in a circle and are distributed cards, face down, that assign you to the role of villager or werewolf. No one knows who is who. If you are on the villagers’ team, you work with the other villagers to figure out who the werewolves are and kill them, by majority vote. If you are a werewolf, you want to hide that identity and cast suspicion on other people so that everyone will vote to kill a villager instead.

I used to play a lot of Werewolf, back when I had roommates, and I flatter myself that I got pretty good at navigating the many layers of deception and manipulation involved. The werewolves lie, but villagers also sometimes lie—to try to catch someone else in a lie. People change their stories halfway through the game. They accuse and cast aspersions; they sow chaos; they plant seeds of doubt. The game often devolves into shouting.

Some of my friends hate this game—the lying stresses them out, or they don’t like conflict. But what can I say? I love to betray my friends.

Within the confines of the rules, there’s not much I won’t stoop to, and not only in games where lying is the point, as it is in Werewolf. If we are playing Settlers of Catan, where players trade resources and build settlements, I will manipulate you to try to get the best possible deal, and I will downplay how well I’m doing so I seem unthreatening until I swoop in and win in one massive turn. If we’re playing some kind of war game, say, Risk or Root, I will lock in on the person most likely to keep me from winning and work to convince everyone they’re a bigger threat than I am. I don’t always lie—that would be too predictable. A mix of heartfelt honesty and bald-faced lies keeps my opponents on their toes. All for the glory of winning at moving little plastic pieces around a cardboard surface. (If you’re reading this and we play games together: I’m just kidding! I didn’t mean any of that and you can totally trust me.)

[Read: Americans need to party more]

I was raised by a father who loves board games—the thicker the rulebook and the tinier the pieces, the better—and who honed my ruthlessness at the dining-room table of my childhood home. But is my merciless game persona merely nurture, or does nature have something to do with it too? Why does the opening of a cardboard box give me tacit permission to act like a sociopath? Does this version of myself actually reveal some dark truth about me that is hidden during my non-game life?

I put that last question to Shane Tilton, a professor at Ohio Northern University who has researched gaming, and he reassured me: “It’s not, You specifically are sociopathic, but there are elements of sociopathic behavior that, for lack of a better term, appeal to the brain.” Tilton compared the pleasure of lying during a game to the vicarious thrill you can get from watching fictional characters do unethical things, except you get to playact that role yourself. One study, published in 2013, found that people can experience a “cheater’s high” from getting away with deception. In the study, researchers gave participants tasks such as unscrambling as many words as possible in a few minutes and answering timed math questions. Without telling participants that the study was about unethical behavior, they designed the activities so there was a way to cheat, if anyone was so motivated. And those who did were pretty pleased with themselves.

For the most part, lying and cheating do seem to be bad for you. Studies have found that lying is associated with negative feelings, low self-esteem, and a reduced ability to make social connections. But part of the reason cheating felt so good to the word-game-study participants could be that it was a low-stakes situation. The subjects got the thrill of doing something bad, minus the usual threat of social stigma or other negative consequences, because hey, it was just a silly word scramble for some researchers they’re never going to see again. Board games are similarly low-stakes. Whether I’m lying about being the werewolf or aggressively invading Australia in a game of Risk after promising my friend I’d leave their troops alone, I get a real high, without real repercussions. “As some Swedes say, ‘All is fair in love and games,’” Tobias Otterbring, a professor who has studied board games at Norway’s University of Agder, told me in an email.

An aspect of real life does hover just beyond the veil of pretend when playing board games, though. After all, you’re usually playing with people you know. “Relationships in the real world can carry over into games,” Ming Ming Chiu, a professor at the Education University of Hong Kong who has studied gaming, told me in an email. This can be to your advantage—or not. For instance, I know my high-school best friends will usually be down to team up with me, and my dad will always, always betray me. (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.)

And a degree of your real personality carries over too. Some people don’t enjoy acting sociopathic, under any circumstance. A friend of mine, for instance, once got so overwhelmed by all the lies and back-and-forth during Werewolf that midway through the game, she slumped over and admitted, “I’m the werewolf.” What does it say about me that I take such a thrill from the same behavior that stresses out my friend? It seems like it must say something: Tilton told me that even though you’re often playing a role when you’re playing a game, “you’re still yourself.”

[Read: Please don’t ask me to play your board game]

Some of Otterbring’s research has shown that people who frequently play board games tend to have personalities that are higher in openness to experience. That doesn’t sound so bad. But a study from the 1980s found that people were better at bluffing games if they were high in Machiavellianism—a personality trait of ruthless manipulation. That seems less good.

The experts I spoke with advised me not to worry. Nailing down the personalities of people who like or are good at games is difficult, because the many different kinds of games that exist appeal to many different types of people. Rachel Kowert, a psychologist who studies gaming, offered an encouraging assessment of what my game personality says about me: “What I’m learning,” she said, “is that you like to be playful, and are probably competitive, and you have cool friends who also like to play games with you.”

She pointed me toward the website of Quantic Foundry, a market-research company that studies gaming. I took their “board games motivation” quiz, and I’ll be darned if Kowert wasn’t pretty much spot-on. I scored very high on the “need to win” and “social manipulation” metrics, but I also scored high on the “social fun” metric. I do enjoy cooperative games where all the players work together, as well as party games such as Telestrations, where the only goal is to have a laugh. I’m really not always out for blood. And as intense as I can be while playing, I don’t carry that with me after we shut the box.

Of course, how you behave in a game can still affect how people see you outside of it. If you’re a poor sport, or if you go too far with the playful deceptions and actually start bending the rules, that could degrade your real-life relationships. But people can usually tell what’s all in good fun. Even if you’re backstabbing, deceiving, and betraying one another, “our brains are very smart,” Kowert said. “We know what’s real and what’s not.” For instance, in a game, “I’ll throw my husband under the bus so quick,” she said. “And I wouldn’t do that in real life.”

Both Tilton and Kowert emphasized that the main thing games teach their players is social skills. Tilton has used Werewolf in the classroom to teach small-group communication. Because the fantasy scenarios of games don’t really translate to real life, what’s most likely to carry over is the practice you get at reading people and communicating with them.

For example, if I were to offer aspiring Werewolf champions one piece of advice: When caught in a lie, do not admit to it. Rather, you must double down and commit to your lie even harder, so that the other players are forced to choose sides between you and your accuser. This is not how I would conduct myself in my normal life, where I am a nice and honest person (I swear!) who is rarely accused of much worse than leaving my dishes in the sink. But perhaps my utterly depraved Werewolf behavior has helped me practice the more broadly applicable skills of standing up for myself, being persuasive, and making my opinions heard. Perhaps being a board-game sociopath is helping me be a more effective member of society.

Or maybe that’s just what I want you to think.

The Tortured Poet of Love Gets Engaged

2025-08-27T13:36:00-04:00

It’s hard to imagine a world in which Taylor Swift didn’t eventually get married. Perhaps no artist today has an identity tied as closely to the idea of a forever love as hers is. So the Instagram announcement yesterday about her engagement to her boyfriend of two years, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, felt existentially fitting, even preordained.

Swift has been writing songs that look ahead toward marriage since she was a teenager. “Mary’s Song (Oh My My My),” from her self-titled debut album, released when she was only 16, tells the story of two childhood best friends who grow up to marry each other and still exchange loving looks when they’re 87 and 89. Her early radio hit “Love Story” ends with a proposal. (“Marry me Juliet, you’ll never have to be alone,” she sings, from the perspective of Romeo. “I talked to your dad, go pick out a white dress.”) And marriage has continued to be a motif as she’s grown up. References are strewn throughout most of her 11 albums: “I want you for worse or for better”; “You and I go from one kiss to getting married”; “I like shiny things, but I’d marry you with paper rings.” (Kelce did not ask her to make good on this promise—her diamond ring is both shiny and humongous.) Her song “Lover” is so commonly played at weddings that it has a “First Dance Remix.”

[Read: The defiant conventionality of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce]

The question of marriage is not uncomplicated for a woman who loves to work as much as Swift does. A couple of weeks ago, when she announced her forthcoming album, The Life of a Showgirl, on New Heights, the podcast hosted by Kelce and his brother, Jason, the two men marveled that she recorded it between grueling three-hour shows for her Eras Tour. “I just love it. I love it a lot. I love music,” Swift said, by way of explanation. At some moments in her discography, when ambition and marriage are at odds, ambition wins. “Fifteen,” a touching song by an 18-year-old looking back at her youthful folly, includes the line “Back then, I swore I was gonna marry him someday, but I realized some bigger dreams of mine.” (In the same song, she sings, “In your life, you’ll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team.” And now, well, I guess she’s found that she can do both: achieve greatness and date a football player.)

The tension remains 14 years later. In “Midnight Rain,” from her 2022 album, Midnights, she sings of a past relationship, “He wanted a bride, I was making my own name, chasing that fame.” Also on Midnights—released when she’d been dating the British actor Joe Alwyn for six years—the song “Lavender Haze” sneers at the societal pressure for a woman to get married. “No deal, that 1950s shit they want from me,” she sings. “All they keep asking me is if I’m gonna be your bride. The only kind of girl they see is a one-night or a wife.” (Yet a bonus track for that same album, “You’re Losing Me,” released months later, shortly after Swift and Alwyn broke up, tells of a relationship in which it was seemingly the other party who disdained marriage: “I wouldn’t marry me either,” Swift sings.)

But more than marriage, Swift’s lyrics reach for love, the kind that comes with promises, whether or not they’re made at an altar. Sometimes that love is quiet, sometimes wild and passionate; sometimes fleeting, sometimes unrequited, sometimes doomed. But almost always, the hope is that it will be for keeps. Swift is a poet of forever. “Is this the end of all the endings?” she asks in Reputation’s “King of My Heart.” “I don’t wanna look at anything else now that I saw you,” she sings in “Daylight” on Lover. Even 1989’s “Blank Space,” a masterpiece of satire that pokes fun at her image as someone with a “long list of ex-lovers” who’ll “tell you I’m insane,” still gestures at everlasting love—“So it’s gonna be forever, or it’s gonna go down in flames.”

Some of her songs tell a story of a narrator who wants love badly but fears that the circumstances of her life—or worse, something inherent to who she is—make it impossible. These are some of the rawest, most vulnerable songs Swift has written; they gesture at the hurdles her astronomical fame and wealth present to finding the true love she’s been writing about for so long. “Would it be enough, if I could never give you peace?” she asks in “Peace,” a song on 2020’s Folklore. In “The Prophecy,” from 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department, she sings of being cursed to never find a soulmate and begs, “Please, I’ve been on my knees, change the prophecy, don’t want money, just someone who wants my company.” “The Archer,” one of her best songs, includes the devastating line “Who could ever leave me, darling? But who could stay?”

[Read: Taylor Swift and the sad dads]

Kelce, it seems, is the answer to that question. He presents as not only unthreatened by Swift’s talent, fame, and intellect, but also in awe of it. He gushes about her in interviews: “Being around her, seeing how smart Taylor is, has been f—ing mind-blowing,” Kelce told The Wall Street Journal in 2023. “I’m learning every day.”

The song attached to Swift and Kelce’s Instagram post announcing their engagement is “So High School,” from Tortured Poets, a sparkling, silly ode to a love that makes you feel young again—“bittersweet 16, suddenly.” I doubt it’s a coincidence, this evocation of the precise age at which Swift stopped being just a normal girl writing songs and dreaming about love; the age at which she became a household name, a creator of soundtracks for other people’s love stories, and a larger-than-life symbol for people to project narratives onto. Since she was 16, she’s been accumulating fame for writing about forever. Now 35 and presumably knowing her engagement will be news the world over, she soundtracks it with a song that flashes back to before the fame, when she was just a girl, longing.

If we are seeking a narrative in Swift’s own words, we might look to the spoken outro at the end of Lover, where she says, “I want to be defined by the things that I love.” Those things are music, and love itself. And now she’s made room for Travis Kelce, too.

The Logic of the ‘9 to 5’ Is Creeping Into the Rest of the Day

2025-08-14T08:00:00-04:00

The shift begins when she leaves her desk at 5 p.m.

She drives home, arriving at 5:45. Five minutes later, she’s starting a load of laundry; at 6 p.m. she changes into workout clothes. By 6:25 she’s on the treadmill for precisely 30 minutes. At 7 o’clock she grabs a grocery delivery from her front porch and unloads it. At 7:15 she makes an electrolyte drink. Shower time is at 7:25. At 8 p.m. she cooks up some salmon and broccoli; at 8:25 she plates her dinner while tidily packing up the leftovers. Not a moment is wasted.

This is one woman on TikTok’s version of the “5 to 9 after the 9 to 5.” Over the past couple of years, the vloggers of social media have taken to documenting their routines from 5 to 9 p.m. Some creators also make a morning version, the “5 to 9 before the 9 to 5,” starting at 5 a.m. These routines are highly edited, almost hypnotic, with quick cuts, each mini-scene overlaid with a time stamp. Hours pass in just a couple of minutes, and the compressed time highlights a sense of efficiency. The videos have big to-do-list energy; the satisfaction they offer is that of vicariously checking boxes.

In the past few weeks, I have lived months’ worth of compressed mornings and evenings with 5-to-9 vloggers. They are a self-selecting crew, certainly. But the sheer volume of hours that I consumed allowed me to see, in a big-picture way, how the need to be productive seeps into people’s leisure time—time that ideally would be free of such concerns. These videos reflect a truth that predates and will almost certainly outlive them: When life revolves around work, even leisure becomes labor.

One way to look at 5-to-9 videos is as the product of people trying to make the most of the leisure time they have. Given how many of these videos are made by people in their early 20s, I see in them a new generation entering the workforce and acclimating to the reality that time is limited. But in attempting to take control back from their jobs, many 5-to-9 video creators end up reproducing a version of the thing they are trying to distance themselves from. If you clock out, go home, and continue checking things off a list, you haven’t really left the values of work behind. One woman I saw details the “five nonnegotiables” for her 5 to 9, the things she must achieve each evening: exercise; a healthy, home-cooked meal; a shower; a skin-care routine; and a clean kitchen. After she ticks all those boxes, the night is nearly over. Not much time remains for anything unplanned. Many creators also use part of their leisure time to plan for the upcoming workday, laying out outfits for the morning or writing their schedule in a planner.

[Read: The religion of workism is making Americans miserable]

The threat of waste looms over many nighttime-routine videos—“X Number of Things I Did to Stop Wasting My Evenings” is a common title formula. (Recommendations include multitasking so you can get more done at once, and “Whatever you do, do not sit down.”) What exactly you accomplish almost doesn’t matter—a spotless house, a completed Pilates class, an “everything shower”—so long as you’ve been a busy little bee whom no one could accuse of wasting time. The idea that unproductive time is time squandered is not unique to the 5 to 9; it pervades much of the American approach to leisure. “In a capitalist society, we do feel like we have to prove our worth through our productivity,” Pooja Lakshmin, a psychiatrist and the author of Real Self-Care, told me. By inverting the “9 to 5” formulation of a corporate workday, these videos present free time explicitly as another shift, one you hire yourself to work.

Katlin Marisol Sweeney-Romero is an assistant professor of cinema and digital media at UC Davis who has written about other productive-vlogging trends on TikTok. In 5-to-9 videos, she told me, “the main message is not about how to rest, but: How do you operationalize rest to still be a productive part of your day?” Several evening-routine videos show the creators editing their content, and Sweeney-Romero pointed out that even the most relaxing vlog still has a whiff of labor about it—because someone had to shoot, edit, and post it.

Conspicuously missing from most of the videos I watched is any kind of socializing, which corresponds with the fact that Americans have been spending more and more time alone over the past couple of decades. After watching scores of solitary evenings, I deliriously started searching 5-to-9 friends and 5-to-9 community??? and found a handful of examples. The sight of people eating together, laughing, and walking outside in the sunlight was refreshing after hours of scrolling through videos of tasks completed alone in greige apartments with overhead lighting. But these videos were few and far between—other people can be an obstacle to running your life with the precision of a ticking watch.

In most 5-to-9 videos, we get little sense of people’s actual jobs, save for the times they log back on in the evening, or the glimpses they show of their side gigs as content creators. What they highlight instead is the way a work mindset can follow you home and shape your leisure in its image. For many Americans, work is the focus of life, the place to find purpose and a sense of self. My colleague Derek Thompson has dubbed this “workism”—the religion of work. A 2023 Pew survey found that a majority of Americans—71 percent—rated “having a job or career they enjoy” as an “extremely” or “very” important ingredient for a fulfilling life. Work also gets prioritized in many people’s lives out of necessity. Research shows that people in countries with high levels of economic inequality, such as the United States, tend to have worse work-life balance.

It wasn’t always this way. In much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, “the view was that leisure was the place where we would find the best things in life,” Benjamin Hunnicutt, a historian at the University of Iowa, told me. “This would be the place to realize our full humanity, outside of the economy.” Yet after World War II, Hunnicutt writes in his book Free Time, the workweek stagnated at the 40 hours we still know as standard today, and American culture shifted toward seeking meaning through work, rather than outside of it: “We moderns for some reason no longer expect work to ever become a subordinate part of life.”

Some 5-to-9 videos do seem to push back against hustle culture. Their creators mock the hyperproductivity of a typical morning or evening routine, instead showing themselves zoning out. One man’s “5 to 9” consists of flopping on the couch and scrolling on his phone for hours. Another woman, after shutting her laptop, pauses and stares into space “to process what just happened over the past nine hours and shove any trauma coming to the surface back into the far depths of my consciousness,” then goes “straight to my cat for at least 45 minutes of emotional-support cuddling.”

The joke is that their jobs have left them too exhausted to do much of anything at all. Yet even in this willfully unproductive use of leisure time, work hovers overhead like a ghost. For these people, and many others who don’t film themselves, free time may not be a reproduction of work, but it is a reaction to it. Work is still winning.

In 1948, the German philosopher Josef Pieper argued that time away from work is all too often still kind of about work. “The simple ‘break’ from work—the kind that lasts an hour, or the kind that lasts a week or longer,” he wrote in his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, “is there for the sake of work. It is supposed to provide ‘new strength’ for ‘new work,’ as the word ‘refreshment’ indicates: one is refreshed for work through being refreshed from work.”

[Read: How hobbies infiltrated American life]

This is the trap of leisure in a culture fixated on work. Anything done consciously or subconsciously for the sake of recovering from or balancing out work is not entirely free from labor—even if it’s genuinely relaxing and enjoyable. When you take a bath to unwind from a stressful shift or get into crafting to offset all the screen time you have at your job, when you go to bed early so you’ll have energy for work the next day or wake up early to meditate and calm yourself before a commute, your rest is at least partly in service of your work. According to Pieper, that is not true leisure. “Nobody who wants leisure merely for the sake of ‘refreshment,’” he wrote, “will experience its authentic fruit.”

What would need to happen for people to experience their leisure as being in no way connected to labor? Certain policies might make work less central to people’s lives: universal basic income, for example, or a four-day workweek. But the experts and philosophers of leisure would suggest that a collective mindset shift is also required.

Achievement, optimization, and escape are all approaches to leisure that Lakshmin calls “faux self-care,” as opposed to the real self-care that she titled her book after. Faux self-care, she told me, is “prescribed from the outside,” or it’s a “reaction to being burnt out.” Real self-care, meanwhile, means “being engaged with your own reality,” she said. It’s less about what you’re doing than how and why you’re doing it.

Consider a yoga class, for example. You can go to one because you feel like you should, to get some movement after a sedentary workday, and spend the whole time comparing yourself with the more flexible person two mats over, and you’ve “checked yoga off the list, but you didn’t take in any of the medicine of yoga,” Lakshmin said.

When I think about it, many of my 5 to 9s aren’t that different from the ones I’ve watched: leave the office, maybe go to the gym, zone out with video games or TV, make dinner, work on my side hustle (writing a book), do chores, perform my nightly ablutions, read, sleep. Sometimes my evenings, too, are an exercise in box-checking, dissociation, and faux self-care, my body piloted by a brain that has never quite switched off work mode.

[Read: The bizarre relationship of a ‘work wife’ and ‘work husband’]

But I crave something else, something like what the artist and author Jenny Odell describes in her book Saving Time: At its most helpful, “leisure time is an interim means of questioning the bounds of the work that surrounds it. Like a stent in a culture that can’t stand what looks like emptiness, it might provide that vertical crack in the horizontal scale of work and not-work,” she writes, “where the edges of something new start to become visible.” Because this is more of a felt sense than a behavior, labeling one activity leisure and another not is impossible. Odell writes that she has experienced this kind of leisure while “cooking, sorting socks, getting the mail.” But it won’t be found in a packed schedule. “True leisure,” she writes, “requires the kind of emptiness in which you remember the fact of your own aliveness.”

For me, those vertical cracks seem most likely to form when I am spending time with other living things: people, mostly, but also my cats, and the natural world around me. When I go on a walk and admire the flowers in my neighbors’ gardens. When I linger over a meal with a friend long after our plates have been cleared. These are moments whose worth cannot be measured in output, that do not serve anything but themselves.

A common thread in the reading I’ve done on leisure is the conviction that forcing gets you nowhere. “Fun is a sneak and likes to catch people unawares; it simply will not tolerate wrenching,” the drama critic Walter Kerr wrote in 1962. The ethos of work is using time for something, turning it into a tool to drill your way to some desired outcome. Worshipping that too much precludes other forms of reverence, the peace and awe that can sneak up on you when you’re just existing.

The Feminine Pursuit of Swoleness

2025-07-03T07:30:00-04:00

You see it everywhere: A narrative of progress in two snapshots—before and after—that leaves the viewer to imagine what came in between. On the left, a body whose inhabitant is unhappy with it in some way. On the right, the same body but different, and—you’re meant to understand—better.

On diet culture’s greatest-hits album, the “before and after” is the lead single, an earworm that’s hard to get out of your mind. Even when it’s not being used explicitly to sell something (a meal regimen, a workout program), this diptych carries a promise that through the application of effort, you too can chisel yourself into a (supposedly) more appealing shape, which usually, but not always, means a smaller one.

Casey Johnston’s new book, A Physical Education, tells a before-and-after story, too—one not of shrinkage but of growth, physical and otherwise. Johnston traces her journey from a life of joyless distance running, which she saw as “taking out bigger and bigger cardio loans to buy myself more calories,” to the revelation of weight lifting. Her book incorporates memoir, science writing, and cultural critique, offering a technical breakdown of the effects of Johnston’s time in the gym, as well as condemnations of diet culture’s scams and hucksters. The book is not a how-to, but more of a why-to: Strength training, in Johnston’s telling, reframes both body and mind. Before lifting, “I knew all the contours of treating myself like a deceitful degenerate, against whom I must maintain constant vigilance,” she writes. After lifting, “all of the parts of myself that had been fighting each other” had become “united in the holy cause of getting strong as hell.”

Johnston has been evangelizing and explaining weight lifting online for years, first with her “Ask a Swole Woman” online column and then with her independent newsletter, She’s a Beast, along with a beginner’s lifting-training guide, Liftoff: Couch to Barbell. Like any hobby, weight lifting generates plenty of online material, but much of it is aimed at an audience that already knows its way around a squat rack. Johnston stands out for her attunement to the needs and anxieties of true beginners—particularly those who are women, for whom pumping iron often requires a certain amount of unlearning.

Even after the rise of body positivity, women are still frequently confronted with unsolicited promotion for crash diets, told that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” and sold what Johnston calls “busywork bullshit” exercises—“Target love handles with these 10 moves”; “20 minutes to tone your arms”; etc.—designed to spot-treat so-called problem areas. Social media has supercharged the delivery of these messages; though there are plenty of supportive communities online, for every body-positive influencer, there seems to be another pushing food restriction and punishing workouts. The TikTok trend of “girl dinner” suggests that eating nothing but a plate of cheese cubes and almonds is an adorably feminine quirk rather than a repackaged eating disorder.

[Read: The body-positivity movement is over]

Johnston writes that since the age of 12, she’d been worrying about her weight, having internalized the message that “either I was small enough (and always getting smaller), or I was a disappointment.”

This is the message that fueled my workouts for the longest time, too—that the point of exercise was weight loss or, at the very least, staving off weight gain. Working out was a chore or—even worse—torturous penance for failing to become the impossible ever-shrinking woman. It wasn’t supposed to feel good; it definitely wasn’t fun. After berating myself to go to the gym in the first place, I would pedal away on the elliptical for 30 to 40 minutes until I tasted blood in the back of my throat (seems fine and normal), and then perform a grab bag of whatever calisthenics might plausibly target my core, hating every second of it. None of this changed the fact that I would get winded walking up a flight of stairs, or nearly buckle under the weight of my carry-on while hoisting it into an airplane’s overhead bin.

Eventually, seeking a less resentful relationship with exercise and my body, I dove into martial arts for several years, then decided to give weight lifting a try. Johnston’s writing was a guide for me; I loosely followed her Liftoff program when I was getting started, and have been a regular reader of her newsletter. It turned out that picking up something heavy for a few sets of five reps, sitting down half the workout, and then going home and eating a big sloppy burger did far more to make me feel comfortable in my body than gasping my way through endless burpees and rewarding myself with a salad ever did.

Johnston’s assertion that lifting “completely changed how I think and feel about the world and myself and everything” sounds like another of the fitness industry’s wild overpromises. But I know what she means. I, too, have found that lifting can transform the way you relate to your body.

First and foremost, Johnston explains, it inverts what women are still too-often told about the goal of exercise. It builds up instead of whittling away; it favors function over aesthetics. Weight lifting makes you better at more than just lifting weights. Johnston writes about struggling with a 40-pound bag of cat litter before she began lifting; now she simply picks it up and carries it into her apartment. As I added weight to the barbell, I felt my muscles stabilize; the neck and back pain from my butt-sitting job faded; I stopped needing help with my overstuffed suitcases; and I even started walking differently—no longer flinging my skeleton around, but smoothly engaging actual muscles. When I do cardio, running is easier too.

[Read: The protein madness is just getting started]

Here’s another thing: You gotta eat. It won’t work if you don’t. When Johnston crunched the numbers on how many calories her body would need to build muscle, she discovered that the 1,200-calorie diet she’d been living on for years was not going to cut it. For the lifting to do anything, she’d need to eat more. Like, a lot more. Protein, especially.

Going from a mindset of restriction to making sure that she was eating enough shifted how Johnston felt in her body. She had more energy; she was no longer constantly cold. She felt like “a big, beautiful horse.” As for me, before lifting, I had never so viscerally felt the obvious truth that food is fuel, that what and how much I eat shapes what my body can do and how it feels.

Yet even these discoveries cannot always overcome the influence of diet culture. When Johnston starts to allow herself more calories, at first she fears “the worst fate that could befall a woman who bravely ate more: gaining three, or even five, pounds.” The most heartbreaking scene in the book illustrates how difficult it can be to put your weapons down after a lifetime of treating your body like the enemy. Johnston tries to spread the good word of weight lifting to her mother, whom she describes as a perpetual dieter and a practiced commentator on any fluctuations in Johnston’s weight. It doesn’t go well. After they take a frustrating trip to the gym together, Johnston asks, “What is it you’re so afraid of?” Her mom replies that she doesn’t want to become “one of those fat old women” whom “no one likes.”

“I can think of lots of fat old women that many people love,” Johnston tries.

“But they wouldn’t love me.”

That’s the well I think so many of us are still trying to climb out of: the belief that a woman’s worth always lies in her desirability, that desirability takes only one shape, and that if she doesn’t live up to the impossible standard, she should at least be working apologetically toward correcting that.

Even if you think you’ve made it out, the foot soldiers of diet culture are always looking to pull you back in. I’ve followed some lifting-related accounts on Instagram; the algorithm seems to have interpreted that as free rein to bombard me with reels of “weight-loss journeys,” “bodyweight exercises for hot girlies,” and the like. Every other celebrity seems to be on Ozempic now, and apparently, “thin is in” again. I admit I spiraled a little when I went up a size in all my clothes, even though I’d gotten bigger on purpose.

[Rebecca Johns: A diet writer’s regrets]

Lifting culture, too, has its trapdoors back into disordered thinking. As Lauren Michele Jackson points out in her review of A Physical Education for The New Yorker, the idea that focusing on strength frees you from being preoccupied with looks is naive. Weight lifting can come with its own set of metrics and obsessions: Eating enough protein and hitting your macros can replace calorie restriction; instead of fixating on thinness, perhaps now you want a juicy ass or rippling biceps. The practice can be fraught in a different way for men, who are told that maximal swoleness is their optimal form. The same activity can be a key or a cage, depending on your point of view.

But weight lifting has stuck, for me and I think for Johnston, because it can also change the way one thinks about achievement. It serves as a pretty good metaphor for a balanced approach to striving that eschews both the Lean In–girlboss hustle and its “I don’t dream of labor” anti-ambition backlash. Not running until your tank is empty and then running some more, but rather fueling yourself enough to push just a bit further than you have before. Letting the gains accumulate slowly, a little more weight at a time. And most important, learning that rest is part of the rhythm of progress. You punctuate your workouts with full days off. You do your reps, and then you just sit there for a couple of minutes. You work, and then you recover.

While I’m resting, I often eat sour candies out of a fanny pack. I saw some powerlifters on Instagram eating candy before tackling a big lift—the idea being that the quick-metabolizing sugary carbs give you a little boost of energy. I don’t care if this is scientifically sound. (I’m serious, don’t email me.) I’m more excited to work out when I know that it’s also my candy time. The gym has morphed from a torture chamber to a place of challenge, effort, rest, and pleasure, all of which, it turns out, can coexist.

And failure is part of the mix, too. As Johnston writes, “Building strength is about pressing steadily upward on one’s current limits”; if you’re doing it right, your attempts will sometimes exceed your ability. That’s how you know you’re challenging yourself enough.

Sometimes failure involves gassing out on an attempt to squat heavier than you have ever squatted, and sometimes it’s more like slipping on the banana peel of an old, unhealthy thought pattern. Both will knock you on your ass for a bit. But that’s part of it. “Progress could be about going backward, letting go,” Johnston writes. “Before and after” images are only snapshots. Outside the frame, the body, and the self, keep evolving.

A Wedding Reveals How Much Help Is Really Available to You

2025-06-24T09:00:00-04:00

In the lead-up to my wedding last year, my fiancé, Joe, and I were determined to keep things chill. The point of a wedding, in our view, was not to construct a perfect fairy tale but to do what was necessary to corral our friends and family in one place and show them a good time. And, you know, bind ourselves together for life. Still, despite how often Joe muttered “stress-free, stress-free” during any wedding-planning discussion, some stress did worm its way in. The sheer number of tasks involved, even for a small reception, can be overwhelming.

But soon after we set our wedding date, a remarkable thing started to happen: Even before Joe and I could think to ask for help, offers poured in from our family and friends. We received offers both specific (“I’d love to help plan the bachelorette”) and general (“Let me know if you need anything!”). The help was more than welcome, and made us feel loved. As grateful as I was, though, I also felt strangely uncomfortable with handing off tasks. I sometimes worried that I was asking too much of a friend (even if I wasn’t really asking; they were offering). I wondered if we should pay for a wedding planner, rather than “imposing” on our relationships.

We ultimately took many people up on their offers, sometimes unable to stop ourselves from adding “Are you sure?” The result was that, in a way that no other moment of my life has so far, our wedding revealed just how much support we have in our community. It also highlighted for me the complicated relationship many people have with offering, asking for, and accepting help.

A reluctance to aid and be aided, research suggests, stems from assumptions about how other people will feel—assumptions that are not necessarily accurate. A 2008 study found that people who need help tend to predict that others will be far more likely to say no to a request than they actually are—they underestimated the likelihood of getting help by as much as 50 percent. In a different, observational study of helping and gratitude in eight societies on five continents, 88 percent of help requests were fulfilled, which suggests that the chances of getting a “yes” are extremely high across cultures.

People also tend to overestimate how inconvenient the helper will find the request and underestimate how happy helping will make them, one study found. Xuan Zhao, a Stanford University social psychologist who worked on that study, sees herself in her research. She remembered a time when she was visiting a friend who lives maybe a 10-minute drive away from her, and her friend offered to give her a ride home. “I was like, ‘No, no, no, don’t worry, I’ll get an Uber,” she told me. “It’s almost a reflexive reaction. No, I don’t want to bother you. No, that sounds like too much trouble.” This was her response even though she knows that if their roles were reversed, she wouldn’t be bothered at all by a short drive to drop a friend off.

Helping other people makes you feel good: This is a truism that research backs up. Yet for some reason, many people find that harder to believe when they’re the ones receiving the help. Joe and I found our loved ones were eager (sometimes bordering on pushy) with their offers, and they did their jobs smilingly. Unless they’re incredibly good liars, they really did seem to enjoy helping with the wedding.

[Listen: How to Talk to People: How to not go it alone]

When people do hold themselves back from offering assistance, the reason may not necessarily be that they don’t want to help. They may be afraid that their overture will be unwelcome. They may assume, as one study found, that if people want help, they’ll ask for it—which discounts all the mental barriers to asking. In another study, participants suspected that their offers of support would make recipients feel more awkward and less happy than they actually did. Would-be helpers, that study suggested, can be overly worried about saying and doing the right thing, and fear that others might judge them for using the wrong words, or for offering support that wouldn’t actually fix the problem. The recipients, however, thought more about warmth—how kind and genuine the support was, not how elegantly the offer was phrased or how perfectly it would meet their needs. Everyone is out here trying to read minds, and doing a bad job of it.

American culture, with its emphasis on self-reliance, can make asking for help especially difficult. A 2011 study comparing students at large universities in the United States and China found that the Americans were less likely than Chinese students to expect people to be willing to help them if asked; its authors suggested that the individualistic culture of the U.S., as opposed to China’s more collectivist culture, has something to do with that. But going it alone because you think you should be a cowboy, or because you don’t want to be a burden, can, in a way, take an opportunity for happiness from your loved ones. “We all like to feel like good, kind, effective people,” Vanessa Bohns, a Cornell University organizational-behavior professor who worked on the study, told me in an email. “When we are looking onto an event from the sidelines, we don’t get to feel any of those things.”

An important event, such as a wedding, removes some of the obstacles to giving or receiving help. “In the big moments in life—weddings, funerals, the birth of a baby—there is no question that people need help,” Bohns said. A person’s offer of assistance in these situations is unlikely to be taken the wrong way, she told me, so people are not only more likely to offer help but also “to do so more assertively.” Likewise, these are moments when people may feel more comfortable than usual asking for help because no one will be surprised that they need it.

Zhao told me that she’s always wanted to study the “magic of occasions”: how big moments seem to give people permission to do things they might not ordinarily do, such as asking your loved ones for medium- to large-size favors. My parents came to D.C., where I live, a week before our wedding to help run errands. Joe’s family made the flower arrangements with a large haul of blooms from Trader Joe’s (no relation). Friends planned my bachelorette party, decorated the wedding venue for us, served as ushers, manned the sound system, and set up our morning-after brunch. Even my hairstylist chipped in: I mentioned while getting some highlights that I was looking to rent plants to decorate our venue, and she told me we could borrow the salon’s plants for free. We did, and saved some money. My sisters’ boyfriends were the ones who carried the plants to the venue and back—yet more help.

We could have instead paid someone to do all of those tasks. Lord knows the wedding industry is eager to sell you a solution to any need, real or invented. But it isn’t just the wedding industry. Modern life is replete with chances to either rely on relationships or buy your way out of a problem. Why ask a friend to drive you to the airport when you can just take an Uber? Why borrow a cup of sugar from a neighbor when you can get your own bag of it Doordashed to you?

[Read: The wedding-industry bonanza, on full display]

One obvious reason to ask for help is if you can’t easily afford to pay for a cab or a delivery service. Emphasizing the link between social capital and regular old financial capital, some research suggests that lower-income people with stronger support networks experience less material hardship than lower-income people with fewer connections. The absence of money makes relying on one another more necessary and increases the costs of not doing so. But even if you have money, spending it doesn’t replace the value of helping and being helped. Borrowing something is not only cheaper and less wasteful than buying a new thing; it can also deepen your connection to the person you’re borrowing from.

When Joe and I stood at the altar on our wedding day, our officiant (a friend, naturally) asked us to pause, take a deep breath, and look out at the audience. Stopping to take in the sight of our loved ones, many of whom had contributed to making the day possible, reminded me why we had wanted a wedding in the first place: to celebrate with our community. Pushing through discomfort to accept the help that was offered, and ask for more, made our wedding feel less like a product we had purchased and more like something special that we had created with our friends, family, and neighbors.

My husband and I are rich in relationships, and our wedding made that clearer than ever. I know that we are fortunate to have had this much help, and not everyone has access to support in such abundance. But I also think that many people probably have more help available to them than they think, and that the very act of asking for it could make their relationships stronger. That feels like a lesson worth bringing into everyday life, rather than waiting until the next milestone to pay the feeling forward.

You Don’t Know Yourself as Well as You Think You Do

2025-06-02T07:00:00-04:00

Know thyself: Many have said this. Socrates—maybe you’ve heard of him? Though he seems to have gotten the phrase from the oracle at Apollo’s temple in Delphi, where it was chiseled into the stone facade. In the Tao-te Ching, Lao-tzu wrote, “If you understand others you are smart. If you understand yourself you are illuminated.” And Shakespeare had his own pithy aphorism, “To thine own self be true,” presupposing that thou knowest enough about thine own self to be true to it.

Good advice, to a point. If you know absolutely nothing about yourself or your likes, wants, values, or personality, you either are a baby or have bigger problems than a dead philosopher can address.

Yet sometimes all of modern life seems to be pushing people toward knowing themselves in more and more granular ways. People are going to therapy in rising numbers to seek self-understanding. They are tracking their steps, reading, and sleep. They are giving their data to corporate marketing databases so they can find out their Myers-Briggs type, Enneagram number, or Harry Potter house. On TikTok, as Rebecca Jennings reported for Vox, creators are inventing new micro-identities for people to resonate with: “Dilly dally-ers” are people who like to fart around and waste time; a “therapist friend” is someone whose friends talk to them about their problems. The quest to find and define yourself can feel never-ending.

It can also feel like a vital part of life, as though if you’re not seeking self-understanding, you’re missing out. (Our old pal Socrates also said: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”) “If you haven’t noticed how pervasive this message is in society, just pay attention for the next few days,” Rebecca Schlegel, a Texas A&M University social psychologist, told me. “It’s so baked into our culture that we almost take it for granted.”

[Read: What we lose when we’re priced out of our hobbies]

But the dream of perfect self-knowledge is unattainable, and chasing it too doggedly can leave you more confused and stuck than when you started. Humans’ ability to see themselves clearly and accurately has limitations that neither personality quizzes nor Fitbit data can overcome. “We should never think that we know ourselves very well,” Simine Vazire, a University of Melbourne psychology professor who has studied self-knowledge, told me. “Anyone who thinks they do—by definition, they lack self-knowledge, because they’re wrong about that, at least.”

Knowing yourself is difficult, in part, because some behaviors and attitudes stem from the unconscious mind, outside your sphere of awareness. “The mind purrs along under the hood in various ways,” Timothy Wilson, a University of Virginia psychologist and the author of Strangers to Ourselves, told me. One of many examples he gives in his book is how people interpret ambiguous situations (and why). If I tell a joke at a party and no one laughs, my unconscious patterns will determine whether I think I’m a socially awkward fool whom everyone hates or assume that my audience must not have heard me over the din of the party, because I’m clearly charming and hilarious.

Bias is also a hindrance. For example, many people have a tendency to rate themselves as better than average across all kinds of traits, even though, obviously, we can’t all be above average. Biases are part of the problem with a personality quiz, Vazire told me. Far from revealing some hidden truth that was locked within, she said, the test is “just repeating to you what you tell it.”

Another tricky thing is that most people aren’t fully aware of how much capacity they have for change. A study of 19,000 people that Wilson worked on, called “The End of History Illusion,” found that although people reported having changed a lot in the past decade, on average they believed they were mostly done changing and wouldn’t evolve much more in the next 10 years.

[Read: I gave myself three months to change my personality]

The pursuit of self-knowledge is difficult even when someone goes about it in a thoughtful, deliberate way. Meditating, journaling, or asking yourself the hard questions can be greatly beneficial. But active, conscious introspection has a dark side: rumination, or getting fixated on a problem and going over it again and again, which can make things worse and trap people in a negative thought spiral.

People can also undermine themselves by thinking too much about the good things in their lives. In a small study Wilson conducted, when the researchers asked people to reflect on how their romantic relationship was going, the very act of reflecting seemed to change the subjects’ minds. Some got happier with their relationship; some got less happy. But according to Wilson, these changes in perspective didn’t necessarily reflect people’s true feelings. Love is not fully explainable, after all, and Wilson theorized that the subjects put too much stock in whatever answers they came up with for the study. If they struggled to list a lot of good reasons they loved their significant other, they might conclude that they were less in love than they’d thought. People sometimes “construct a new story about their feelings based on the reasons that happen to come to mind,” Wilson wrote.

Introspection, as he described it in his book, should be understood less as an archaeological dig to uncover the capital-T Truth of ourselves and more as literary criticism “in which we are the text to be understood.” Just as a good novel doesn’t have one single truth in it, a person has many truths as well. Rather than seeking a perfectly accurate story about themselves (which is impossible), people should try to construct a narrative that’s “pretty positive” and “somewhat reality-based,” according to Wilson. This is one way to think about therapy—as a collaborative process of rewriting your story until it works well enough to let you stop thinking about it quite so much.

The notion that each person has one real, abiding self buried within, waiting to be discovered, is both widespread and difficult for many people to shake, Schlegel told me: When people go through a big change, for instance, particularly a good one, they tend to think of it less as a transformation from one thing to another and more as a discovery of something in themselves that was always there.

Schlegel has found that belief in the true self is linked to seeing greater meaning in your life, but she described herself as a “true-self agnostic.” (She referenced the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, who called the true self a “troublesome myth.”) For all the idea’s benefits, “the downside,” she said, is “what happens if we close ourselves off to change. And then we miss out on something we might have loved.”

[Read: Life’s stories]

Most of my life, I thought I was a dog person who hated running. Yet just a couple of weekends ago I ran a 5K then came home to my two perfect cats, Cherry and Ginkgo, whom I am utterly devoted to. If you had beamed a premonition of that Saturday into the mind of my younger self, she would have been confused, perhaps even alarmed. My preference for dogs and my disdain for running were two things I thought I would never change my mind about. But that might have been just a failure of imagination. As Wilson and his co-authors wrote in their “End of History Illusion” study, “People may confuse the difficulty of imagining personal change with the unlikelihood of change itself.”

Why did I change my mind? On the running, I really have no idea. I just got on the treadmill one day for some reason and found it to not be so bad. My husband wanted the cats, and I fell in love the day we brought them home as tiny kittens.

Was I always a cat person, secretly? Did I have an inner runner within me, just waiting to be discovered? Did I actually change or did I just become more myself? I don’t know, and I don’t really care. Both explanations seem plausible, and I ended up in the same place either way: watching Survivor on the treadmill every now and then and being woken up every morning at 6 a.m. by a scratchy little tongue licking my face.

Vazire, like me, runs “very casually once in a while.” She told me that her well-meaning partner sometimes shares things he’s learned about how to improve your form or otherwise optimize your running, and she gets annoyed. “I’m not trying to optimize anything,” she said. “I’m not trying to become a runner.” I wouldn’t consider myself a runner, either. I just run sometimes. Not every habit or preference has to become an identity. Sometimes we just do things. As Schlegel put it, “Not everything has to be so weighty.”

Instead of conceiving of our true self as set in stone, the secret to a healthy pursuit of self-knowledge may lie in building a flexible sense of self, one that allows for surprise and even mystery. Research has linked the belief that the self is changeable to positive outcomes: lower stress, better physical health, and less negative reactions to hardships. Maybe we should stop searching for ourselves quite so intensely, put down the Sorting Hat and the label maker, and just, I don’t know, live life and try things without overly worrying about what they say about who we really are.

To be found, to be known: These are unreachable destinations. Not only is our ability to know ourselves limited, but scientists can probably only know so much about the nature of self-knowledge. Vazire is highly skeptical that research can solve that puzzle. “I don’t think the expertise we need here is quantitative empirical data,” she said. “It’s just wisdom, or something like that.” Parts of the self will probably always remain a little lost, resistant to easy categorization—and maybe that’s fine.

I am a cat person now, though.

It Should Not Be Controversial to Plead for Gaza’s Children

2025-05-23T12:17:00-04:00

Imagine a child at home, crying. She is inconsolable, screaming for food. A neighbor tries to offer some bread; the door is blocked. A grocery store down the road has plenty of supplies; no one can get to it. The clock ticks down and the child starves, her baby fat melting to nothing.

Multiply that possibility by thousands. In the Gaza Strip, Palestinian children are starving while food is sitting in trucks, just out of reach. Israel began a total blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza on March 2, the longest such stoppage since the current war began, putting the region at “critical risk of famine,” according to food-security experts. Israel finally agreed to ease the blockade on Sunday and said that 93 trucks had crossed the border on Tuesday and that an additional 107 had yesterday. Aid has begun to reach civilians after reported delays. But children continue to go hungry.

There is no question that the situation for children in Gaza is grave. The World Health Organization stated on May 13 that since Israel’s blockade had begun, 57 children had reportedly died from malnutrition, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. More than 14,000 children under 5 are at risk of “severe acute malnutrition” in Gaza over roughly the next year, according to a recent food-security report. Tom Fletcher, a United Nations official, in a widely shared misstatement of that statistic, warned on Tuesday that 14,000 babies could die within 48 hours unless aid was delivered to them. A former Israeli-government spokesperson told The Times of Israel that Fletcher had caused “a global media panic about something totally made up.” Getting the facts straight in dire situations such as this is crucial. But the truth remains that children are starving, needlessly, while aid struggles to reach them.

[Read: ‘In three months, half of them will be dead’]

In response to the developments in Gaza, the children’s entertainer Rachel Accurso, known to babies and toddlers the world over as “Ms. Rachel,” made an emotional plea in a video posted to her Instagram earlier this week. (The video, which referred to the inaccurate 14,000-babies stat, no longer appears on her page.) While holding her own round-cheeked baby daughter, she showed a disturbing photo of a gaunt Palestinian baby, whose each and every rib was visible under her skin. “Dear world leaders, please help this baby,” Accurso said. “Please, please look at her; just please look in her eyes for one minute.”

Accurso has been an outspoken advocate for Palestinian children, who have suffered at such a scale that in December 2023, UNICEF called Gaza “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.” Her focus on children is apt: Nearly half of Gaza’s population is children—and children are especially vulnerable to malnutrition. Yet she has faced backlash for her statements; last month, a pro-Israel group called for the Department of Justice to investigate whether she was working for Hamas. (“This accusation is not only absurd, it’s patently false,” she told The New York Times.) Online commenters have accused her of focusing on Palestinians to the exclusion of Israeli children. (She has not ignored Israeli children—she has shared sympathetic posts about the effects of Hamas’s October 7 attacks on children. “I’m thinking not only of the Israeli children taken hostage,” she wrote recently, “but also those who witnessed horrific acts of violence that day—their innocence stolen in an instant.”) In an interview with the journalist Mehdi Hasan, Accurso said, “It’s sad that people try to make it controversial when you speak out for children that are facing immeasurable suffering.”

That a person whose job is to care about children should be criticized for caring about children is ludicrous. It should not need to be said, and it should not be controversial to say it, but: Starving children is wrong. If pointing that out lands you in hot water, that is a symptom of something deeply broken in our culture. Everyone should care if children are needlessly suffering, wherever they are suffering.

If or when the aid sitting in those trucks reaches the Palestinian people, it will go only a fraction of the way toward addressing widespread hunger. What the food-security report released earlier this month actually stated is that the entire population of Gaza is food insecure. It also estimated that from May to September of this year, nearly 470,000 people will experience “catastrophic food insecurity,” meaning that more than one in five will face starvation if the situation doesn’t change. Nearly 71,000 children under 5 and nearly 17,000 pregnant or breastfeeding women were projected to need treatment for “acute malnutrition” between April of this year and March 2026. (Of those 71,000 children, 14,100 cases—the figure that the UN official seems to have mis-cited—are projected to be “severe.”)

According to The New York Times, Israel has publicly claimed that its blockade in Gaza was not a threat to civilians. In a statement on Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel had sent 92,000 aid trucks into Gaza since October 7, 2023. “More than enough food to feed everyone in Gaza,” he said. This claim contradicts statements from the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and multiple international aid organizations that hunger in the region is at crisis levels. And anonymous Israeli-military sources told the Times that, in private, some officials have admitted that food is running out. Israel has also said that it started the blockade in part because it believed Hamas was stealing aid and using it to fuel its fight—an accusation Hamas has denied. Netanyahu also asserted on Thursday that Israel had “devised a mechanism” with U.S. allies in which “American companies will distribute the food directly to Palestinian families,” in “safe zones secured” by the Israeli military. The UN has criticized the plan on the grounds that, among other things, it amounts to forced displacement, requiring Palestinians to relocate in order to access aid.

The grim reality that war is hell does not mean that anyone should accept mass starvation among children, anywhere, as inevitable. And we should certainly not accept it when available food is kept from children’s reach. (We should be just as alarmed that the United States is contributing to global malnutrition in its own way: By gutting agencies such as USAID, the country has disrupted the flow of assistance that previously went to malnourished children around the world, including the supply of a vital nutritional paste. According to the WHO, nearly half of all deaths among children under 5 globally are attributed to malnutrition.)

Even before Israel’s blockade of Gaza, getting lifesaving aid to starving children and their families in the Strip was difficult. The UN’s former emergency-relief coordinator has described the task as “in all practical terms, impossible.” Trucks carrying supplies have had limited points of entry, faced long waits at the border and looting, and been unable to be sure of safe passage if they do get into the region. Israeli fire has hit aid convoys on multiple occasions and killed many humanitarian workers. (Earlier this year, Israel disputed the UN’s figures on the rate at which aid was entering Gaza. But Israel’s own numbers fell far short of the amount of aid required to meet basic food needs, as estimated by the World Food Programme.)

[David A. Graham: A deadly strike in Gaza]

The trucks let in so far are addressing only a drop in the ocean of need—and the decision to allow them through cannot be described as a good-faith effort to prevent a potential famine. Rather, comments made by Netanyahu suggest that this was a concession made to retain the support of Israel’s allies, including the United States. The Washington Post recently reported that in a video of Netanyahu posted to social media, he said that “we cannot reach a point of starvation, for practical and diplomatic reasons.” His professed concern seemed to be not that people are starving, but that allies had told him they “could not ‘handle pictures of mass starvation,’” the Post reported.

In her Instagram post, Accurso asked viewers to think of children they knew and loved. She said of Gaza’s children: “If you’re not going to stand up for them, you might as well come out and say you don’t see them like you see our kids.” Another icon of children’s TV, the late, great Mister Rogers, famously said that when we see scary things in the news, we should “look for the helpers.” In Gaza, we know where the helpers are. They’re right there at the gates, trying to get in.

SNL Isn’t Really Hot for Your Mom

2025-05-11T12:52:00-04:00

You know that moment when a man who wants something thinks he sees an opportunity to charm an easy mark? A common version is specific to mothers, and it goes like this: A mom and her kid are out somewhere together, and they meet a guy. It doesn’t really matter who. He may be a service worker looking for tips, an acquaintance of the child looking to get in good with the mom, or a garden-variety slimeball. What matters is that he’s meeting this woman for the first time. And when she is introduced as the child’s mother, that’s his cue.

He licks his lips. This is what he’s been rehearsing for. He delivers his line with relish: “This is your mother? I thought she was your sister!”

The mom is supposed to titter and blush, thoroughly disarmed by being thought young and worthy of anyone’s flirtation. Maybe this has happened to you, or to your mom. Certainly you’ve seen it on TV. It’s wildly patronizing, which is not to say it never works.

Last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live offered up a sketch that doubled down on that interaction, then tripled down, then quadrupled down. Sarah Sherman and Heidi Gardner played two moms being taken out for a Mother’s Day brunch by their sons (Mikey Day and Andrew Dismukes). The scene began wholesomely, with talk of a post-brunch trip to the botanical gardens, then got fully derailed when their server, Alby—played by the host, Walton Goggins—arrived at their table and started hard-core flirting with the moms. He began with a variation on the classic line, of course: “I’d say ‘Happy Mother’s Day,’ but all I see are two young men out with their much-younger sisters.” Sherman and Gardner reacted with an aw-shucks vibe, embarrassed but pleased. “You’re getting a big tip, mister,” Sherman said. To which Alby replied: “No need, I already have one.”

They had entered uncharted waters. But still, Sherman’s character tried to play it off. “You do not want to flirt with a couple of old moms,” she said. This is when the sketch turned. “Oh yes, I do,” Alby said. He’d “always been attracted to mothers,” he announced, perhaps because he so admired his own, or perhaps because “once I came of age, I slept with every single one of her friends.” This was the sketch’s big joke: Although other servers might facetiously flirt with mothers for tips, Alby meant it. He genuinely wanted to have sex with these moms.

As the sketch went on, Alby delivered menus and mimosas alongside increasingly lewd double entendres and come-ons, all Southern charm and jutting hips. Goggins played him with an infectious, naughty glee.

[Read: The White Lotus Doesn’t Stick the Landing]

But Alby supplied all the sexual energy in this sketch. The moms were at turns delighted and shocked by his antics but mostly did not return flirty fire. Only briefly did one of them display any libido at all: After Alby announced he’d soon have a “hat rack” under his apron, Sherman’s character took off her reading glasses and said, in a sultry tone, “Prove it.” But don’t worry: Before the audience could be subjected to too much lustful-mom energy, her son immediately scolded her, and she snapped back into sexless-mom mode.

The show had an opportunity to push back against the stereotype that middle-aged women, and mothers in particular, are both undesirable and empty of desire themselves. That seems perhaps to have been the writers’ intention. A couple of minutes into the sketch, Alby scolded one of the sons for being skeeved out by the proceedings: “Just ’cause your mama baked you doesn’t mean other men don’t want to see the oven.” Crass this might have been, but it was also a good point. Women’s sex lives don’t end after giving birth, however much our culture might like to pretend otherwise. Unfortunately, most of the sketch undermined this idea—because the joke was not only that Alby would take things so far. The sketch went for laughs by implying how ridiculous it was that a guy like him could truly be hot for these silly, frumpy old moms, these “mature goddesses dripping in Talbot’s,” as he called them. One couldn’t escape the sense that the women were the real butt of the joke.

Goggins, it’s worth noting, is 53, and—as he mentioned in his monologue—a newly anointed sex symbol. But older men have often been allowed a sexuality denied to older women. What could have been a refreshingly expansive view of motherhood instead ended up feeling retrograde.

In a segment of “Weekend Update,” SNL reinforced the view that motherhood is antithetical to sexuality. Gardner appeared again as a different but still-frumpy mother: “Dianne, the mom who’s only read about New York on Facebook.” She spewed a bunch of urban legends that she’d seen on social media. One was about a mom who visited New York City and bought a pair of sunglasses from a street vendor. “She puts ’em on, what does she see?” Dianne asked. “Porn! Everywhere!” The sunglasses somehow “erased all of her memories, and now all she remembers is porn!” Her children? Forgotten. “Sorry, kids—mommy just knows porn now. She can’t come to your recital ’cause she’s on the bang bus.”

These sketches might have seemed to take aim at overly flirty waiters and Facebook conspiracy theories. But the undeniable undercurrent was: Watch out for moms who think about sex—and be sure to shut them down.

A Totally Unnecessary Way to Stress Parents Out

2025-05-08T08:00:00-04:00

Scarcely a week goes by that Katie’s 9- and 6-year-old daughters don’t wear a costume to their school in the Dallas suburbs. For the “Neon Party,” they wore white T-shirts and the school turned on black lights at lunchtime. For “Adjective Day,” when the kids had to wear something, anything, that they could describe with adjectives, Katie’s youngest put on a Little Mermaid outfit: scaly, wet, shiny, glittery, beautiful. And Katie just purchased a koala getup for an upcoming lesson about—you guessed it—koalas.

No central database tracks dress-up days. But what I’ve gathered from talking with parents and looking at district websites is that they are proliferating, particularly for preschool- and elementary-age kids. Some schools have just a few a year; others do them as often as once a week. Katie, a 38-year-old health-care worker (who asked to be identified by her first name only so she could speak openly about her opinion of these events), told me that her kids’ school had a different dress-up theme every day in the two weeks leading up to Christmas. The holiday season can already be “a busy time of life,” she said. With the dress-up events, “it’s like, ‘Oh my God, now I also have to think about what you are wearing to school each of these days.’”

Not to be all “back in my day” about this, but back in my day, I hardly ever wore a costume to elementary school, except for Halloween. Spirit week was a high-school and maybe middle-school affair, so my parents didn’t have to do anything. I was old enough to dress myself up—or not. Plus, we had one spirit week a year. One. Before homecoming, we dressed up for Pajama Day, Wacky Wednesday, Class-Color Day, and a couple of others I can’t quite recall. Parents I spoke with agreed that the costume situation seems way more intense now than when they were kids.

As fun and cute as spirit days at elementary and preschools are, for parents, they are basically homework. And although some enjoy making the effort, others find it a burden—just one more thing to keep track of at a time when parental stress is so high that a former surgeon general issued a warning about it. On Reddit, parents complain about theme days that feel “never-ending,” “random,” and “completely unnecessary.” Audrey Hooks, a 44-year-old tree-farm manager and mother of three in Harlingen, Texas, told me spirit days are a trend that “all my mom-group friends talk about, comment on, feel overwhelmed by.” (Given the still-unequal division of child-care labor in heterosexual relationships, the responsibility of coordinating outfits is more likely to fall to moms.)

[Read: The pro-family policy this nation actually needs]

If parents are lucky, something that works for the event may already be in their kid’s closet. Some days are as simple as “wear this color T-shirt”—pink for breast-cancer awareness, for example. Other days are more complicated, requiring parents to either get crafty or buy items that their child may wear only once: an ugly Christmas sweater for holiday spirit week, plastic accessories for Sunglasses Day or Mustache Day.

But the most stressful thing about spirit days, parents report, is that they often find out about them at the last minute. More than one person told me of their child dropping the bomb of “By the way, I have to dress up for school tomorrow” shortly before bedtime. Sometimes the schools themselves break the news annoyingly late. Katherine Goldstein, a 41-year-old journalist in Durham, North Carolina, who writes about community building, told me her kids’ school has sent an announcement on Sunday night for a spirit week beginning Monday morning—too little notice even for an overnight Amazon delivery. Many of the burned-out parents on Reddit have similar frustrations.

Of course, families can always blow it off. Goldstein has decided that spirit days are on what she calls her “don’t list.” “I think it’s completely absurd,” she said. “I have decided this is something I just cannot put any mental energy into.” The only exception is whether her kids choose to participate on their own. If they remember and make the effort to dress up with clothes they already have, she’s not going to stop them. But she’s not going to help or remind them, either.

Leaving it up to parents whether to participate puts them in the position of being the bad guy and risks their kid feeling left out or disappointed. Although Goldstein told me she hasn’t experienced much fallout from her policy, Hooks has had to manage some emotions. Her family has taken the middle path of participating sometimes, if it’s easy enough for them to put an outfit together. But you won’t find her weaving wires through her daughter’s hair for 30 minutes to construct a Cindy-Lou Who hairstyle for Dr. Seuss Day, even if other kids show up to school like that. She instead says something like this to her daughter: “I’m so happy for fill-in-the-blank’s name. She looks so cute today. That’s cool, but I’m just not going to feel the pressure as a mom to curate an outfit like that.” Hooks takes it as an opportunity to teach her daughter the lesson that different families do things differently, and she won’t always have the same experiences as her friends. “That is really, really hard, as a parent, to feel like you’re disappointing your kid,” she said. “But I had to just come to grips with that, and not get sucked into the arms race of whose kid dressed up cuter on Dr. Seuss Day.”

For Katie, as annoying as a dress-up day can be, “the default is always just to do it,” she said. Her daughters love it, and she doesn’t want them to feel left out. Plus, if she happens to miss an email about a spirit day and her kids are the only ones not dressed up, “I feel like a terrible parent,” she said.

Schools do not set out to make parents feel bad. No one schedules “Dress Like Your Favorite Book Character Day” with sinister intent. Schools want to build community and get kids engaged. “It seems on the surface to be such a lovely custom to even question,” Miriam Plotinsky, an instructional specialist in Montgomery County, Maryland, told me. “The spirit behind it is very much one of inclusivity and belonging.”

[Read: Doomed to be a tradwife]

At the same time, she pointed out, for events that are meant to bring people together, dress-up days can cause division. Kids may feel left out if their families can’t participate or choose not to. Even children who do participate dress up with varying levels of intensity, opening the door for jealousy. Spirit days can expose wealth disparities among families: Whose parents can afford to buy this sort of fast fashion for first-graders every time a new spirit week drops, and whose can’t? (Hooks said her PTA recently bought some props that the school can keep on hand and pass out on spirit days for this very reason.) Twin Day, a common theme, could be upsetting for kids who don’t have a friend willing to match outfits with them. And some of the holiday spirit weeks I’ve seen skew very Christmasy, alienating families that don’t celebrate Christmas.

Many teachers online seem to be tired of spirit days, whether because they also feel pressure to dress up or because these days can be distracting and chaotic. Adam Clemons, the principal of Piedmont High School in Alabama and a board member of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, put it to me diplomatically: “Any administrator would say that they definitely enjoy a normal day over a day that’s thematic.”

What if we just did less? The more spirit days you add to the calendar, the more reason to expect diminishing returns. Through a process psychologists call “habituation,” the novelty of a new experience wears off the more you encounter it. Unpleasant things become less bothersome, and fun activities get less fun. And how many spoonfuls of sugar do we really need to make the multiplication tables go down? “Just one Pajama Day” and that’s it is Goldstein’s suggestion. Or better yet, direct that dress-up-day energy elsewhere: At a school where Plotinsky once worked, each classroom decorated a hallway together for spirit week. Collaborative, in-school activities that everyone can participate in, she told me, work better to build community than kids just dressing up in costumes from home. Then again, that’s more work for schools and teachers than passing the buck to parents.

Unless schools choose to cool it, or parents rise up and demand that the yoke of spirit days be cast off, they will likely continue. Because the greatest weapon that spirit days have at their disposal is, essentially, How can you say no to this face? “It’s a total pain in the ass,” Katie told me, “but then it’s also super fun and cute and rewarding to see them so happy.” She said she’s trying to savor these days as much as she can while her kids are young. Still, she’s looking forward to summer vacation, when she’ll finally get a break.

Don’t Turn Inward

2024-11-13T10:01:00-05:00

One month to the day before the 2024 presidential election, The New York Times reported on a new analysis of how Americans spend their time. More and more of the average American’s day is being spent at home: one hour and 39 minutes more in 2022 than in 2003. For each extra hour at home, a bit of it was spent with family—7.4 minutes. More of it, 21 minutes, was spent alone.

Obviously, because of the coronavirus pandemic, time at home spiked in 2020. Some of this homebody impulse may well be the stubborn persistence of habits formed during the isolating early days of lockdown. But this trend is more than just a pandemic hangover. For years before COVID-19 hit, time spent alone had been increasing as time spent socializing had been decreasing. Though solitude and loneliness are not the same, this downturn in social connection happened alongside a rise in loneliness so pronounced that the surgeon general called it an epidemic.

And now this: the reelection to the nation’s highest office of Donald Trump, a man who has attacked the very idea of a communal, democratic form of government, and who has indicated that he aspires to move the United States toward autocracy—auto, of course, meaning “self,” and autocracy being the concentration of power for and within the self. Self over others is one of Trump’s defining principles. In his first term as president, he used an office intended for public service to enrich himself. He has vowed to use it this time to take revenge on his enemies and—“within two seconds” of taking office—to fire the special counsel overseeing criminal cases against him.

Yet self over others, or at the very least self before others, has long been a prominent aspect of American culture—not always to Trumpian levels, certainly, but individualism for better and worse shapes both the structure of society and our personal lives. And it will surely shape Americans’ responses to the election: for the winners, perhaps, self-congratulation; for the losers, the risk of allowing despair to pull them into a deeper, more dangerous seclusion. On Election Day, the Times published an article on voters’ plans to manage stress. Two separate people in that story said they were deliberately avoiding social settings. To extend that strategy into the next four years would be a mistake.

[Read: Don’t give up on America]

In 1831, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to the United States. He observed and analyzed its people and culture, and published his thoughts in a massive two-volume report called Democracy in America. Alongside his praise for the country’s professed value of equality—which he wrote “possesses all the characteristics of a divine decree”—he warned of the individualism he saw as baked into American society and the isolation it could cause. “Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone,” he wrote, “and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”

More than a century and a half later, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, a sociological book by five scholars, followed explicitly in Tocqueville’s footsteps, examining how individualism affects institutions and personal relationships in the United States. Published in 1985, it reads today as wildly prescient. The authors feared that the danger Tocqueville described had already come to pass. “It seems to us,” they wrote, “that it is individualism, and not equality, as Tocqueville thought, that has marched inexorably through our history. We are concerned that this individualism may have grown cancerous … that it may be threatening the survival of freedom itself.”

Tempering American individualism, in Tocqueville’s view, was Americans’ propensity to form associations and participate in civic life. “These he saw as moderating the isolating tendencies of private ambition on one hand and limiting the despotic proclivities of government on the other,” the authors of Habits of the Heart wrote. But American associational life began hollowing out starting in the 1960s and ’70s, as people became less and less likely to attend any kind of club, league, church, or other community organization (a shift that Robert Putnam documented in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone). Since the late ’70s, faith in large-scale institutions such as organized religion, organized labor, the media, and the U.S. government has also been dwindling; in 2023, Gallup declared it “historically low.”

A few months ago I spoke with Ann Swidler, one of the authors of Habits of the Heart. “We obviously did not succeed in having things go the direction we might have hoped,” she told me. “I would say that every horrible thing we worried about has gotten worse.” Americans are spending measurably more time shut up in the solitude of their homes, and perhaps in the solitude of their own hearts as well.

It might be difficult to imagine the renaissance of many civic associations—the kind that could be good for both democracy and our relationships—given that a majority of Americans just voted for a man who has little interest in or respect for institutions beyond what they can do for him. If autocracy is indeed where the country is headed, Tocqueville’s prediction regarding our relationships is not a positive one. As he wrote in The Old Regime and the Revolution, his book on the French revolution:

Despotism does not combat this tendency [toward individualism]; on the contrary, it renders it irresistible, for it deprives citizens of all common passions, mutual necessities, need of a common understanding, opportunity for combined action: it ripens them, so to speak, in private life. They had a tendency to hold themselves aloof from each other: it isolates them. They looked coldly on each other: it freezes their souls.

If individualism is, as the authors of Habits of the Heart wrote, “the first language in which Americans tend to think about their lives,” it makes sense that people would reach for their mother tongue in times of upheaval. In the days after the 2016 election, for example, searches for the term self-care spiked. Caring for yourself takes different forms, of course, though in mainstream culture, self-care is commonly used to mean treating yourself, by yourself. Self-soothing, alone. (One can see in this echoes of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance”: “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”)

But caring for yourself doesn’t always have to breed isolation. Among activists and in the helping professions, self-care is often talked about as a way to restore people so that they don’t burn out and can continue their altruistic work. Some in these circles critique a focus on self-care as distracting from the need for institutional support. But the overall conception at least shows an understanding of the two types of care as having a symbiotic relationship: Care for the self so that you can show up for others.

[Read: Focus on the things that matter]

What’s more, caring for others is a form of self-care. Research shows that doing things for other people leads to greater well-being than trying to make yourself happy or indulging yourself. This is not to say there is no place for self-soothing or solitude, or for buying yourself a little treat. But it is to challenge the cultural message that turtling up alone is the most appropriate response to difficult feelings.

Under an administration for which (to paraphrase my colleague Adam Serwer) cruelty, not care, is the point, it falls to people to care for one another on scales small and large. This task is made harder not just by the cultural pressure for Americans to rely only on themselves but also by the slow, steady atrophying of the muscles of togetherness. “American individualism resists more adult virtues, such as care and generativity, let alone wisdom,” the authors of Habits of the Heart wrote. The inverse, I hope, is true too: that care and generativity—working to make contributions to a collective future—are the path to resisting hyper-individualism and isolation.

Even if turning inward is a big-picture trend, it is, of course, not the only development happening. As isolating as the pandemic lockdown was, those years saw the rise of mutual-aid groups determined to care for the vulnerable whether the government did or not. During the first Trump administration, mass protests broke out; people fought for women’s rights and an end to racist police brutality. People are always showing up for one another in quiet, everyday ways too. Building networks of support and commitment could provide some small buffer against the effects of a self-serving president-elect’s policies while keeping people from drifting further apart.

Americans’ skills of connection and care are not lost. But they are rusty. And all of us will need those skills if we are to find a way to turn toward one another instead of inward. I’m not even talking about overcoming political polarization or reaching out to build bridges with strangers who voted differently than you did. Those are tasks that people won’t be equipped to tackle if they’re struggling to show up for the loved ones already in their life. For now, it is enough of a challenge to attempt to reverse the isolationist inertia of decades. It is enough of a challenge to resist what has become a cultural tendency to withdraw, while also processing the stress of an election that has left many people exhausted and deeply afraid for the future. How do we proceed over the next four years? Not alone. How do we proceed over the next week, hour, minute? Not alone.

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What the Suburb Haters Don’t Understand

2024-04-02T07:00:00-04:00

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If you listen to the experts, much of the place I’m from is not a place at all. Suburban Michigan is full of winding roads dotted with identical houses, strip malls stuffed with chain restaurants and big-box stores, and thoroughfares designed for cars, with pedestrian walkways as an afterthought. The anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term non-places to describe interchangeable, impersonal spaces lacking in history and culture that people pass through quickly and anonymously. Non-places—such as shopping centers, gas stations, and highways—can be found everywhere but seem to particularly proliferate in suburbs like the one I grew up in. The writer James Howard Kunstler memorably called this sort of landscape “the geography of nowhere.”

In his book of the same title, Kunstler traces the history of the suburbs from the Puritans’ 17th-century conception of private property up to the early 1990s, when The Geography of Nowhere was published. He argues that, enamored with both automobiles and the sheer amount of space in this country, the U.S. built a sprawling empire of suburbs because, as he puts it, “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” But this arrangement has proved to be “deeply demoralizing and psychologically punishing,” he told me in an email—not only because the design of suburbia is unsightly but because it is at odds with human connection and flourishing. He doesn’t mince words about what he sees as the consequences of this way of life, writing in his book that “the immersive ugliness of the built environment in the USA is entropy made visible,” and suggesting that America has become “a nation of people conditioned to spend their lives in places not worth caring about.”

This sort of dismissal is a common posture, though few have put it quite so colorfully. Perhaps because of the sometimes bland and homogenous built environment, many people assume the suburbs have a conformist culture too. These places have long been associated with boredom, with a vague, free-floating malaise. (Or, as one writer bluntly put it, “You know it sucks, but it’s hard to say exactly why.”) There is a Subreddit with 60,000 members called “Suburban Hell.” All of this adds up to a popular conception of suburbs as indistinct and interchangeable—they are “no-man’s-land,” the “middle of nowhere.” And this idea doesn’t come only from city slickers sneering at “flyover country.” Jason Diamond, the author of the book The Sprawl, said in an interview with Bloomberg that he’s noticed a “self-hatred” among people who come from suburbia.

[From the September 1996 issue: Home from nowhere]

Yet the majority of Americans live in this “nowhere.” Being precise about the proportion of the U.S. that is suburbia is difficult—the federal government, in much of its data, doesn’t distinguish “suburban” as a category distinct from “rural” and “urban” (perhaps implying that it, too, considers these places not worth caring about). But in the 2017 American Housing Survey, the government asked people to describe their own neighborhoods, and 52 percent classified them as suburban. These neighborhoods aren’t frozen 1950s stereotypes, either; they are evolving places. For instance, once synonymous with segregation, the suburbs are now more diverse than ever.

The point is: A lot of life happens in these places. Where there is life, there is connection and emotion. Where there is connection and emotion, nostalgia follows. And so, yes, decades of policy decisions and corporate development have led to what Kunstler calls the “depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading” landscapes of the suburbs. But at the same time, many people who have called these places home still have a sentimental connection to them, any spiritual degradation notwithstanding. And a curious side effect of the ubiquity of suburban institutions is that I can feel that small spark of recognition—of, dare I say it, “home”—anywhere I encounter it.

To defend my hometown, in part, from the accusations of cultural blandness and lack of history: Ypsilanti, Michigan, is the home of Domino’s Pizza! Of the world’s most phallic building! We were once held in inexplicable thrall for several months to a turkey that camped out in an intersection! Most suburban places, I have to imagine, have their own quirks and unique histories if you care to look for them. But it is also true that for my hometown and many others, these charms are mixed in with, or even obscured by, a whole lot of nowhere.

[Read: The turkey in the left turn lane]

Much of my youth was spent in these non-places: celebrating birthdays at a strip-mall Red Lobster, my sisters and I shoving Cheddar Bay biscuits in our purses for later; looking out of car windows at beige subdivisions on one side, cornfields on the other; messing around in Target with my friends just for something to do; depending on automobiles to go anywhere or do anything. Would I have been happier, healthier, more independent in a more walkable city? Would my relationships have been richer if we had more intentionally designed public spaces? That’s what macro-level arguments about urban design would seem to imply, but on an individual level, those questions are unanswerable. It was what it was. Sure, I once got lost trying to go for a walk in our subdivision, turned around by the endlessly looping streets. But we did have a lot of fun at Target.

I haven’t lived in Ypsilanti since I was 17, decamping first to a college campus north of Chicago, then to Chicago proper, then to Washington, D.C., where I’ve lived for more than 10 years. Yet at the risk of being one of the “apologists for the ubiquitous highway crud” whom Kunstler derides in his book, I must say that even after all this time, I feel at home in a strip mall. It is familiar; it is my heritage. At least once a year, the winds blow in from the Midwest, and I cannot rest until I make a pilgrimage to an Olive Garden. If home is “nowhere,” and nowhere has spread almost everywhere, then many places can remind you of home.

I know that I’m not the only one who feels a real emotional connection to the corporate trappings of suburbia. The food website Eater had a long-running series of essays called “Life in Chains,” in which writers reflected on the ways chain restaurants had shaped them. One of my favorite icebreakers is to ask people to build the strip mall of their dreams using five chain establishments—and people get very passionate in their responses. (If you’re wondering, mine are: Target, Barnes & Noble, Panera Bread, Ulta, and an AMC movie theater.) During the early pandemic, a writer for Vice found herself longing for the experience of wandering the aisles of a TJ Maxx—and the regular Sundays she spent there with her mother.

[Read: Revenge of the suburbs]

Of course, people do crave specificity in the places they’re from, even in suburbia. I think the particular passion people have for those slightly more regional chains—Californians and In-N-Out Burger, southerners and Waffle House—is evidence of that. No one wants to feel like they’re from nowhere. But life happens where you are, and if where you are is a strip mall by a highway on-ramp, well, you work with what you’ve got.

Admittedly, an aspect of this is sad. For some children of the suburbs, we can feel like our formative tastes and our earliest emotions were hijacked by consumer culture and decades of zoning law. But nostalgia isn’t really a reflection of whether something is good or bad, researchers tell me; quality is essentially irrelevant. What matters is whether something holds meaning for you. And places are “easy for us to attach emotionality to,” Krystine Batcho, a professor of psychology at Le Moyne College who studies nostalgia, told me. Although suburban nostalgia might be stronger for people like me who’ve moved away from the burbs, a place can be an active part of your life and still “cue those old memories” each time you visit, Clay Routledge, a psychologist who directs the Human Flourishing Lab at the nonprofit think tank Archbridge Institute, told me.

Is Taco Bell a gaudy restaurant that serves cheap sodium bombs that all taste basically the same and bear only a passing resemblance to actual Mexican cuisine? Definitely. But I’ll always love it, not just because I think it’s delicious but because that’s where my high-school friends and I would go to pick up sacks of 99-cent bean burritos to bring back for dinner when drama rehearsal was scheduled to run late. So Taco Bell bean burritos, to me, taste like staying at school until 9 p.m. and trying to do homework on the side of the stage between scenes, like the intense friendships of a ragtag group of teens figuring out who they are by pretending to be other people.

“People make a place, and that’s what nostalgia reveals,” Routledge said. Research on what makes people attached to a place shows that the social ties associated with it are a huge factor. In a survey that Routledge did last year, he found that almost three-quarters of Americans reported that their nostalgic memories were associated with close friends and family, as opposed to experiences they had with strangers or alone. Nostalgia for place, it seems, is really nostalgia for people.

The case against suburbia’s design is not just that it’s ugly and repetitive and kind of basic—it’s that it’s actively bad for community. Third places—spots just for hanging out, aside from work or home—are in short supply; homes are clustered far from commercial zones, making it next to impossible to walk safely anywhere. “The only way to be in that public realm is to be in a car, often alone,” Kunstler writes. “Where, then, are you going to have your public assembly? On the median strip of Interstate 87?” Some research suggests that people who live in more walkable neighborhoods are more likely to know their neighbors, and to feel a sense of community.

So this sense of nostalgia for “nowhere” represents, in a sense, the connections I made in a place that is hostile to connection by design. “In every corner of the nation we have built places unworthy of love,” Kunstler writes, and perhaps he’s right. But we love there nonetheless.

This tension is fitting, because nostalgia itself is a “conflicted and bittersweet” emotion, Batcho said. It tugs the homesick person between past and present, between how things were, how they are, and how they could be. Rachel Heiman, an associate professor of anthropology at the New School and the author of Driving After Class, told me that she fears the connection people have to the kinds of spaces they’re familiar with could be a detriment to building new and better kinds of communities. “We can’t just keep building our suburbs the way we are, even if some people are nostalgic for that,” she said. She gave the example of someone who feels safer and more comfortable driving a car than riding public transit, even though public transit is objectively safer. Might they be resistant to supporting new bus or rail routes in their community?

But both Batcho and Routledge told me that contrary to its popular perception as an emotion that holds people back, nostalgia can also be fuel for progress. It can make people more creative, inspired, and motivated: Reflecting on cherished memories of the past can remind people of what they really value. And if there’s a disconnect between what we loved about the past and the way things are now, “that discrepancy can easily remind us that we should move forward,” Batcho said. “We should build better things.”

The feeling that your past is coherently tied to your present and your future is called “self-continuity,” and Routledge’s research shows that nostalgia facilitates it. So feeling nostalgic for the landscapes of suburbia doesn’t necessarily mean I think that’s the best way to design a community—it’s just part of my story. My soft spot for Olive Garden’s huge portions of mediocre fettuccine alfredo is just the vessel for the things I actually value: the feeling of belonging to a place and its people, the comforts of accumulated memories that adhere to spaces.

In the end, whether the suburbs collapse or we build better ones, it’s too late for me—the strip malls are already in my bones.

How to Talk to People

2023-09-14T06:00:00-04:00

Making small talk can be hard—especially when you’re not sure whether you’re doing it well. But conversations are a central part of relationship-building. Radio Atlantic is pleased to share this episode of How to Talk to People.

The social scientist Ty Tashiro and the hairstylists Erin Derosa and Mimi Craft help describe what it means to integrate awkwardness into our pursuit of relationships.

This episode is hosted by Julie Beck, produced by Rebecca Rashid, and edited by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smierciak.

Music by Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), Ryan James Carr (“Botanist Boogie Breakdown”), and Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “She Is Whimsical”). Click here to listen to additional seasons of The Atlantic’s How To series.

The Comic Strip That Explains the Evolution of American Parenting

2023-06-28T07:30:00-04:00

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

For more than 75 years, the boys have been boxed in. Since 1948, Goofus and Gallant, the stars of their eponymous comic strip in Highlights for Children magazine, have taught generations of kids the dos and don’ts of how to be. The premise is as simple as it is effective: two panels, side by side, depicting two approaches to the same situation. On the left, Goofus does the wrong thing. On the right, Gallant does the correct thing. If Goofus is rude, Gallant is polite. If Goofus lies, Gallant tells the truth.

The boys are prepubescent, but their exact age is unclear, as is their relationship to each other. Though the style of their illustration has changed over the years (they were briefly elves with pointed ears before transforming, unannounced, into human boys), they have always been essentially identical to each other. Are they twin brothers? Friends? The same kid in alternate universes? Or is it more of a Jekyll-and-Hyde situation?

It doesn’t really matter. Goofus and Gallant are symbols more than characters. In every issue, they play out a sort of Calvinist destiny. Their essential nature was preordained by a higher power long ago—Goofus forever doomed to be a screwup, Gallant to be a smug little do-gooder. What can they do but play the roles that were laid out for them?

[Read: The parenting prophecy]

The higher power that created them was Garry Cleveland Myers, who first wrote a version of the strip called “The G-Twins” at the magazine Children’s Activities, before he co-founded Highlights with his wife, Caroline Clark Myers. But in another sense the characters sprang directly from the moral compass of society. I recently spent a day at the Library of Congress, reading Goofus and Gallant strips from over the years, and found that the panels are remarkable windows into history. They chart the shifting freedoms and boundaries of childhood, and illustrate how adults’ expectations of kids have changed over the decades.

Highlights is explicitly edutainment. The magazine’s tagline is “Fun with a purpose,” and many issues over the years have included guides to its contents for teachers and parents. A flyer tucked into a 1948 issue at the Library of Congress explains to parents how the magazine can be used for the “home training of the child.” “Character building threads through the book from cover to cover,” it reads.

That philosophy remains, and is perhaps most obvious in Goofus and Gallant. “The feature is designed to be a part of our work to help kids become their best selves,” Christine French Cully, Highlights’ current editor in chief, told me. “It’s about helping kids develop character and moral intelligence.”

A Goofus and Gallant strip from 1948 (Courtesy of Highlights)

Many of the comic’s themes are timeless. Again and again, I saw Goofus pocket lost money while Gallant chased down the owner. Goofus left a mess while Gallant tidied up; Goofus bullied and excluded other kids while Gallant welcomed them. If you crack open a December issue from any era, you’ll probably find Goofus being a greedy little gremlin about his Christmas presents, while Gallant rhapsodizes about the pleasures of giving to others. The strip also has a few oddly specific preoccupations—not messing with other people’s mail, changing from good clothes into “play clothes,” putting your bike away instead of dumping it on the lawn, and not blocking the sidewalk all appear multiple times over the decades. The core of what it means to be considerate hasn’t changed dramatically from 1948 to today.

But a lot has changed. Technology is an obvious example, and the strip has guided kids through the etiquette of sharing the TV with your family and taking a polite phone message all the way through to being quiet during a parent’s Zoom meeting and not giving out personal information online. (Poor Goofus has fallen prey to a couple of scams over the years.) Gender roles, in the world and in the magazine, have also grown more expansive over time. The boys’ father seems more present in modern strips, after an unsurprisingly long time in which I only ever saw their mother doing domestic labor.

Less immediately obvious are deeper shifts in the nature of childhood, and in adults’ conception of the ideal well-behaved child. For instance, the range of a child’s independence has shrunk considerably from Highlights’ early days. Goofus and Gallant ran amok in old strips, with little to no parental supervision. They completed errands on their own in 1955; they stayed out until the streetlights came on in 1965. As recently as 1990, Gallant simply left a note for his mom on the counter letting her know where he’d be, and peaced out. By today’s standards that feels more like Goofus behavior.

A Goofus and Gallant strip from 1990 (Courtesy of Highlights)

Kids don’t have as large of a roaming radius as they used to, Steven Mintz, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin who has studied the history of childhood, told me. “Until my kids were virtually teenagers, they were never out of my sight. Or if not my sight, my wife’s sight, or some adult that I viewed as responsible.”

[Read: ‘Intensive’ parenting is now the norm in America]

Newer strips don’t explicitly illustrate helicopter parenting or tell us that the boys have a packed and highly supervised extracurricular schedule. But previous indications of their independence are largely absent now. The boys are rarely pictured alone when they’re out in the world.

Perhaps another reason the lads are rarely by themselves is that Highlights editors are intentionally focusing the strip more on “social-emotional learning,” Cully told me. The modern Goofus and Gallant are not only demonstrating politeness, but teaching kids emotional intelligence and social skills. This is the most striking evolution I observed over the strip’s history. In the July 1955 issue, after some fairly benign panels about going to bed on time and not leaving garden rakes face up, comes a truly disturbing diptych of 1950s emotional repression. “When Goofus falls and skins his hands and knees, he cries like a baby,” the caption reads beneath a wailing, injured Goofus. Meanwhile, “Gallant gets up smiling, even if blood is seeping from his knees.” And indeed, Gallant sports a chilling smile in the drawing, as droplets of his blood sprinkle the earth.

A Goofus and Gallant strip from 1955 (Courtesy of Highlights)

A couple other comics present a less extreme but similar morality tale in which Goofus complains about being hurt, while Gallant cheerfully insists on helping his parents with chores even though his arm is in a sling. The message is clear: Expressing discontent is tantamount to misbehavior, and pain is no excuse.

This motif in the early strips is certainly shaped by the fact that Goofus and Gallant are, well, boys. Even fictional boys in the 1950s, it seems, were told not to cry. All the more notable, then, that by 2021, Goofus is the one telling another kid to stop crying while Gallant affirms that it’s okay to cry, and asks a sad friend if he wants to talk about what’s bothering him. And as we know, Goofus is always wrong, and Gallant is always right.

A Goofus and Gallant strip from 2021 (Courtesy of Highlights)

I started to notice a particular attentiveness to the boys’ emotional life starting around the 2000s, which grew more prominent over time. The strip has attempted more and more to account for the effect kids’ emotions can have on their behavior, and to demonstrate how to acknowledge those feelings while still behaving appropriately.

In a strip from 2000, Goofus clenches his fists and screams at a boxy monitor, “This computer is really annoying me!” Meanwhile, “Gallant politely asks for help when he feels frustrated.” In another, from 2005, Goofus complains about waiting in line, while “Gallant takes a few deep breaths when he feels impatient.” The Gallant of the new millennium addresses his feelings; he doesn’t repress them.

A Goofus and Gallant strip from 2005 (Courtesy of Highlights)

“One of the things that happens over time is that parents are not just disciplining their children, but they’re expecting their children to, in some ways, learn to discipline themselves,” Paula Fass, a professor emerita at UC Berkeley and the author of The End of American Childhood, told me.

Cully told me that at Highlights, they sum up what a child ought to be with what they call the “four C’s”: “curious, creative, caring, and confident.” Those are the traits the magazine tries to encourage. She added, “We try to keep our finger on the pulse of what concerns parents, and right now it’s mental health, making sure kids are kind.” Kind not just to others, but to themselves. Goofus beats himself up for being “bad at math” when he makes mistakes on an assignment, while Gallant admits his mistakes and instead says, “I need to study this chapter again.”

“These cartoons are much more psychologically knowledgeable and psychologically attentive” compared with the ones of the past, Mintz told me when I shared a selection of strips through the years with him. “There’s a certain kind of child that they’re trying to produce who has communication skills, who’s self-regulated. I think that’s our vision of what a child ought to be [today].”

The other thing that Cully really wants to convey about how Goofus and Gallant has changed is a message that is somewhat at odds with the format of the strip.

“We try really hard now, and have for a long time, to be clear that Goofus is not all bad, and Gallant is not all good,” she said. To do that within the confines of the dos-and-don’ts binary that is the strip’s raison d’être is “probably the hardest editorial job in the whole magazine.”

Every installment of Goofus and Gallant now has a line at the top that reads “There’s some of Goofus and Gallant in us all. When the Gallant shines through, we show our best self.” And alongside the comic, Highlights also publishes submissions from young readers talking about moments when they felt like either Goofus or Gallant, to show that everyone can relate to both of them at different times.

This mirrors a larger shift in the culture of American parenting, Fass told me, where it’s become prevalent to emphasize that although a particular behavior or choice may be bad or wrong, the child is not a bad kid.

“We just try to be really clear that Goofus isn’t always bad. He’s not. He’s just often making choices that aren’t thoughtful or safe,” Cully said. One recent example that illustrates this is a strip from July 2022 in which Goofus and Gallant both fight with a friend. “When Goofus gets upset, he yells unkind things he’ll regret,” the caption reads. We would never have gotten such insight into the future mental state of the Goofus of old. But the new Goofus is not a total monster—he will regret it later.

The starker differences between the Goofus and Gallant of the past and present aren’t signs that all parents of previous decades were emotionally distant disciplinarians, or that all parents today have endless patience for their kids’ big feelings. Nevertheless, the boys’ evolution reflects American parenting culture’s own evolution. As the fire and brimstone of “Because I said so” authoritarian parenting has fallen out of favor, Goofus and Gallant have also become more than the messengers of strict commandments. They have a spark of humanity.

So even if Goofus and Gallant will always be the devil and the angel sitting on kids’ shoulders, nowadays, you might say, there is a little more sympathy for the Goofus.