Online dating is the most common way for couples to meet these days, but sometimes it feels like it’s set up to disappoint you. You swipe right and don’t match. You start a chat and the conversation fizzles. You go on a date and there’s no spark. You meet someone you actually like and never hear from them again.I have a suggestion: Try dating a friend instead.
The sites of mass shootings have become instantly recognizable markers of tragedy in the geography of recent American history: There’s Columbine, Parkland, Aurora, the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Sandy Hook, and Virginia Tech, among many others. And now there’s the Tops market in Buffalo, and Uvalde.
If you’ve ever wondered whether a life without work would be blissful, well, Lorie Kloda can confirm that it pretty much is.Kloda really likes her job as a university librarian in Montreal, but she still really liked not doing it for a year. During a paid sabbatical that ended this spring, she deleted the work-communication apps from her phone and regularly forgot what day of the week it was; she read, went to museums, picked up tennis. She stopped getting the Sunday scaries.
In theory, coming up with a fair division of housework should be simple: Take all the tasks and divide them in two.In practice, it’s more complicated. Some people find certain tasks more bearable than their partners do. Some chores are ones that no one wants to do. And, on average, women end up bearing a disproportionate share of their household’s chore burden.
When Americans marry, their finances usually do too: The majority of married couples put all their income into shared accounts.In the 1970s and ’80s, not doing that was sometimes considered a bad omen for a relationship. But that’s no longer the case today.
Growing up, Erin Nelson used to make fun of their dad for spending so much time looking out the window at what the neighbors were up to. “Now I’m that person,” Nelson, a 31-year-old who bought their first house a year ago in Portland, Oregon, told me. “I’m always peeking out the window … That’s like my new TV.
One of the many distressing things about following a crisis like the war in Ukraine from afar is the combination of wishing for people not to suffer and feeling powerless to help them. Even if no single civilian is going to sway the outcome of the war from thousands of miles away, the impulse to reduce others’ suffering is worth listening to.Determining the best way to help with a global problem, particularly a war, is daunting. Any help helps, though—we shouldn’t overthink it.
When someone says that their workplace is “like a family,” they want you to be impressed. We share a special bond, they imply. We look out for one another and are effortlessly in sync. But as a journalist covering work and families, I can’t help but notice another, entirely unintended meaning in this common corporate metaphor: Work is like family—in many unhealthy, manipulative, and toxic ways.
These days, if you hear about the birth of an Olivia or a Liam, you might feel a pang of sympathy—the poor child has been cursed with the most popular name of their time and might be at risk of sharing it with a kindergarten classmate.This wasn’t always considered an undesirable outcome.
Last semester was bad, but this one has been worse. The pandemic—and the United States’ haphazard response to it—has presented parents and teachers with unpleasant choice after unpleasant choice when it comes to kids’ education. But even by pandemic standards, the highly contagious Omicron variant has brought a special level of chaos to schools.
If 5-year-olds could read academic research reports, they might be alarmed by what they’d find in a recent one from the Stanford Center on Longevity.It opened with a bit of promising news: “In the United States, demographers predict that as many as half of today’s 5-year-olds can expect to live to the age of 100.” But that was followed, several pages down, by a haunting prediction: “Over the course of 100-year lives, we can expect to work 60 years or more.
This past spring, if someone told you that they were fully vaccinated, you knew precisely what they meant: At least two weeks before, they’d received two doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, two doses of Pfizer, or one dose of Johnson & Johnson.Now what it means to be vaccinated encompasses much more variety. Some people who have gotten their initial doses haven’t gotten a booster dose, and some people mixed and matched the brands of their first shots and their booster.
Jayson Lusk’s Thanksgiving tradition, if you could call it that, is to talk with reporters about the prices of Americans’ holiday groceries. The media requests “seemed to start even earlier this year than usual,” Lusk, an agricultural economist at Purdue University, told me recently. “But it’s a more interesting story this year.”That’s because the ingredients for Thanksgiving dinner are significantly more expensive than they were 12 months ago.
Days, months, and years all make sense as units of time—they match up, at least roughly, with the revolutions of Earth, the moon, and the sun.Weeks, however, are much weirder and clunkier. A duration of seven days doesn’t align with any natural cycles or fit cleanly into months or years.
American exceptionalism can sometimes be quite bleak: The United States is the only wealthy country in the world without a national program for paid parental leave.The U.S.’s best chance yet of giving up this dismal distinction might be slipping away. The $1.
Several years ago, I went on a somewhat fanatical quest to find a satisfying version of what I called a “metacookbook”—a book that doesn’t just list out recipe instructions, but also explains the thinking behind them.The food journalist Priya Krishna and David Chang, the founder of the Momofuku family of restaurants, have together written a charming new entry in this subgenre, Cooking at Home: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Recipes (And Love My Microwave).
If you were to look under the roofs of American homes at random, it wouldn’t take long to find someone who lives alone. By the Census Bureau’s latest count, there are about 36 million solo dwellers, and together they make up 28 percent of U.S. households.Even though this percentage has been climbing steadily for decades, these people are still living in a society that is tilted against them.
Throughout the pandemic, media outlets and online dashboards have provided constant updates on the number of people who have died from COVID-19. Far less prominent—but just as striking—are the tallies of those left behind.
You know there’s drama in research circles—or at least what qualifies as drama in research circles—when someone writes an open letter.Earlier this year, that someone was Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland at College Park. His request: that Pew Research Center, the nonpartisan “fact tank,” “do the right thing” and stop using generational labels such as Gen Z and Baby Boomers in its reports.
Over the years, as I’ve interviewed many sociologists about gender divisions in how couples handle chores and child care, I’ve often wondered what happened after we got off the phone. When these researchers returned to their life, how were they splitting up the tasks in their own home? Because gender scholars—they’re just like us: They too have floors to sweep, kids to feed, toilets to clean.But, I learned, they are also decidedly not like us.
Zac Eash had originally planned to be home for two weeks when he became a father. But his daughter was born in early March 2020, and, well, you know. “We both got to spend a lot of time with her the first four months of her life,” Eash, a middle-school teacher living in Ames, Iowa, who finished out the school year remotely, told me.When in-person classes resumed late last summer, Eash was acutely aware of how much less time he had with his wife and baby daughter, and he missed it.
Alexa used to be a name primarily given to human babies. Now it’s mainly for robots.Seven years ago, Amazon released Alexa, its voice assistant, and as the number of devices answering to that name has skyrocketed, its popularity with American parents has plummeted. In fact, it has suffered one of the sharpest declines of any popular name in recent years.
Several years ago, the journalist and author Oliver Burkeman asked some of his friends to guess, off the top of their head, how many weeks make up a typical human lifetime. One threw out an estimate in the six figures, but as Burkeman notes in his new book, “a fairly modest six-figure number of weeks—310,000—is the approximate duration of all human civilization since the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia.
The appeal of the Olympics is that they decide who can claim the title of best in the world. They also, less gloriously, decide who can claim the title of second best in the world.Despite beating out every competitor on Earth but one, silver medalists can feel a special type of disappointment. In a study that analyzed footage from the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, they were consistently judged to look less happy than bronze medalists, both right after competition and atop the medal podium.
Americans aren’t making as many babies as they used to. Last year, 3.6 million were born—the lowest count since 1979. The pandemic “baby bust” could push 2021’s tally down even further; researchers have estimated that the coronavirus and its economic impact could lead to about 300,000 fewer births in the United States this year.News of declining birth rates is not always a bad thing.
Since 2012, most of the humans on Earth have been given a nearly annual reminder that there are entire nations of people who are measurably happier than they are. This uplifting yearly notification is known as the World Happiness Report.With the release of each report, which is published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, the question is not which country will appear at the top of the rankings, but rather which Northern European country will.
A post-pandemic discussion question: You get home from work on a Friday night and change into sweatpants. It’s been an exhausting week. A text message comes in. Your good friend wants to know if you’d like to meet up last minute for a drink, which is something that’s safe to do again. You’d love to catch up, but you’re pretty tired.
At one point in her new book, the NPR journalist Michaeleen Doucleff suggests that parents consider throwing out most of the toys they’ve bought for their kids. It’s an extreme piece of advice, but the way Doucleff frames it, it seems entirely sensible: “Kids spent two hundred thousand years without these items,” she writes.
Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here. The end of the coronavirus pandemic is on the horizon at last, but the timeline for actually getting there feels like it shifts daily, with updates about viral variants, vaccine logistics, and other important variables seeming to push back the finish line or scoot it forward.
“Birds at Home,” 2006 (Julie Blackmon)When you think of messiness, you might think of the unsavory ways it manifests: sweaty socks left on the floor, food-encrusted dishes piled in the sink, crumbs on the counter. Messes themselves are easy to identify, but the patterns of behavior that produce them are a bit more nuanced. Really, messiness has two ingredients: making messes, and then not cleaning them up.