Unto every season is given a certain kind of book. When the new year beckons a new you, self-help thrives. Breezy beach reads rule the summer. Cookbook recommendations abound in the lead-up to Thanksgiving. Curiously, publishers told me, Easter is big for picture books (which are easy to stick in a basket next to the chocolate bunny). And Halloween is for horror. Time to bust out some Shirley Jackson (or perhaps some Stephen King or Edgar Allan Poe).
The week has a heartbeat, and its rhythm is changing.
When Neal Caren, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recently dug into data from the American Time Use Survey to look at when people were hanging with their friends over the course of a week, he mapped out a pattern that reminded him of an EKG. He saw steady pulses of friend time every weekday evening after work hours, and then bigger spikes on Friday and Saturday nights—like an arrhythmia caused by having fun.
The only thing anyone can reliably tell you about middle age is that it’s in the middle of life. What’s the middle? Well, it’s after the beginning, and before the end.
Okay, we can do a little better than that: Middle age comes after young adulthood, and before what we used to call “old age” but now might more decorously refer to as “older age” or “late life.” But to get more specific, to figure out when precisely middle age begins and ends, is a daunting challenge.
Are Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce getting married at Madison Square Garden? Will Stevie Nicks be performing? Will the wedding be on July 3, as some reports suggest? Or is that just a red-herring date that Swift gave out to see who would leak it to the media? Is Swift, in fact, planning two weddings—one real, one a decoy? Are Kelce and Swift actually already married—and did they somehow manage to hide the entire event from the public?
The nation’s welcome mats have been doing a lot less welcoming lately. Although Americans have been spending much more time at home in recent years—an hour and 39 minutes more a day in 2022 than in 2003—they aren’t inviting other people in. The percentage of people who hosted or attended a social event on an average day has fallen by 50 percent over the past couple of decades. Socializing of any kind declined over that same period, and isolation rose.
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.
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.
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.
Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with two men who first met while doing national military service in Singapore. They didn’t talk much then. More than a year later, they reconnected online, took a hike together, and found that they clicked really quickly.
Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with two former online adversaries who became friends. They met arguing in the comment section of a Facebook forum dedicated to promoting science, where each thought the other was misguided.
Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with two friends who also happen to study friendship. They met at a conference back when very few relationship scholars were focusing on the topic, and became both friends and professional collaborators.
Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with three women who are part of a group experimenting with “arranged friendship.
Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with two women who forged a friendship in crisis. When Sarah’s husband left her for another woman—while she was pregnant—she turned to her colleague Theresa, who was raising a daughter alone.
Grocery-store scallions repotted on windowsills. Sourdough starters in the fridge. Cooking, knitting, jigsaw puzzles. Hobbies could not cure the coronavirus, but for a moment it seemed like they could cure the anxious stagnation of pandemic life. Time had become unsettlingly abundant, but we tried our best to avoid falling into idleness and despair.
Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with three men whose international group of friends has been having an annual New Year’s Eve reunion party for the past 10 years (except for 2020, when the pandemic prevented it).
Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with three artists and one writer, who all work on titles for DC Comics, about their collaboration on the page and their friendship off of it.
Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with two friends who used to be married. They discuss their amicable—really!—divorce, how they reconnected afterward, what it means to be happy for someone else even if their decision hurts you, and what friendship has given them that marriage did not.
Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with two mother-daughter pairs whose families have been friends for three generations. It started with the grandfathers, who were best friends growing up in India, and raised their children together.
Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with two couples—Jenny and Marisa (parents to Atlas and Blaise), and Lora and Michelle (parents to Finnley and Tegan)—who had their children using the same sperm donor.
Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she speaks with the actors Jessica St. Clair and June Diane Raphael, who co-host The Deep Dive, a podcast that explores their friendship and adult womanhood.
Updated at 1:35 p.m. ET on August 6, 2021Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with Kappa Delta sorority sisters who attended the University of Virginia in the ’70 and ’80s.
Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with two friends who were both diagnosed with the same cancer—acute myeloid leukemia—one right after the other.
Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with two men whose friendship of convenience—Mitchell served as an unofficial guide when Judo moved to his hometown, and vice versa—grew more intimate as they became embedded in each other’s lives.
Updated at 8:24 p.m. ET on May 28, 2021.Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with the founder, a former editor, and several former student journalists of L.A. Youth, an independent nonprofit newspaper for and by teens in the Los Angeles area that ran from 1988 to 2013.
Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with Alyssa and Emily, who met at their first job out of college and then moved in together during the pandemic.
Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with Judie, an introvert, and Kristi, an extrovert, about their opposites-attract friendship, and how Judie leaned on it when her daughter was diagnosed with cancer during the pandemic.
For me, it’s the last time I swam in the ocean. It was a February evening in Florida, and I didn’t know that the people I was there with would be the last new friends I’d make, on a work trip I didn’t know would be the last I’d take.Everyone else seemed content to sit on the sand and look up nearby restaurants on the internet. But I felt like maybe I’d regret it if I didn’t go in.
Each installment of The Friendship Files features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with a group of friends who have been going on monthly hikes for 25 years. They discuss why the hike organizer has absolute authority, how they’ve shown up for one another through tragedies, and why hiking together has bonded them more deeply than other ways of keeping in touch.
Each installment of The Friendship Files features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with Mary Beth Kelly, who wanted to reclaim her family home after her husband passed away, and Jane DeWitt, the stonemason who helped her do that.
Each installment of The Friendship Files features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with Gabe and Andy, two friends who for more than six years have walked 30 minutes once a week to give each other a high five.