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On a January evening in 1992, I was sitting in our kitchen, reading a comic book. My older sister Claudia went out to run an errand at a nearby minimart, just before it closed. Her keys jingled as she said goodbye and pulled the door shut. Her footsteps rushed down the stairs. A minute later, I heard her slam the garage door after she had pulled out her bicycle. Moments later, I heard a loud thud from down the street. I also thought I heard a muffled scream. I was 10. I couldn’t connect the dots.

A speeding car had hit Claudia while she was crossing the street. She didn’t die on the spot. Her boyfriend rushed my mom to the hospital. They spent the night at the ICU, while I spent the night in my best friend’s apartment. We set up camp on mattresses on his living room floor. He said: ‘I’m sure it’s just a broken leg.’ I said: ‘You’re right, she’ll be fine.’ We prayed. The next day, my mom stood in the doorframe, sobbing. ‘Claudia is dead,’ she said. I hugged her. I knew I had to be strong for her. What I did not know is that my sister’s death would, in some way, end my mom’s life as well.

We cried at the funeral. We cried at the cemetery. We cried at home. After a few months, I stopped crying. My mom never stopped crying. She became obsessed with Claudia’s grave. She would visit it every day, clean the white marble and bring fresh flowers. At the same time, she became frustrated and angry with the world. I spent my entire youth listening to her angry words, but her grief wouldn’t recede the tiniest bit.

Somewhere in my teens, I concluded that she must be suffering from depression. But I was wrong.

It’s no surprise I had it wrong. Back in the day, even professional psychologists lacked an official diagnosis for persisting grief. That changed in March 2022, when the condition my mom most likely suffered from was added as ‘prolonged grief disorder’ to the latest revision of the psychologists’ diagnostic manual, the DSM–5-TR. The diagnosis hinges on two factors. The first is denial: mourners cannot accept the death of the person they lost. This, in turn, causes symptoms like sadness, anger, or guilt that last for more than 12 months.

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Need to know

Do you feel blah? Not exactly suffering, but lacking interest and excitement? Do your days feel like a monotonous toil, akin to toothbrushing, but stretched over the entire day: same routines, same tiny annoyances? Are you unable to find motivation to do the activities that used to give you joy? If this describes your experience, then you may be going through a period of languishing.

People often think of mood as a battle between well-being and illbeing: either you feel good or bad. But if you don’t feel much of either, that’s the territory of languishing. It’s ‘the neglected middle child of mental health’, as Adam Grant put it in The New York Times in 2021. Whereas depression is active illbeing – feeling sad, powerless, and drained – and flourishing is active well-being – feeling engaged, excited, and empowered – languishing sits in between. It is a sense of stagnation where nothing is too wrong or painful but everything feels a bit boring and uninteresting. The world is grey.

A brief taxonomy of well-being states

To further understand languishing, it helps to recognize that an absence of illbeing does not mean the presence of well-being. Psychological research has shown that positive and negative feelings are partly independent processes – even neurologically and biologically. In moments of flourishing, you are high on excitement and joy, and low on negative feelings. In moments of suffering, there is not much joy but only sadness in our life. But there are also bittersweet moments where we feel strong positive and negative emotions simultaneously – such as feeling excited about one’s new job while feeling sad about leaving the old work community. Then there is languishing – moments when we don’t feel much of either. Languishing is thus about feeling low – but low on both positive and negative feelings.

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Katharina Merian, attributed to the 16th-century painter Hans Brosamer. Courtesy the Met Museum, New York

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As a therapist who counsels couples, I have seen many people struggle with tough problems that are difficult to talk about. How do you tell a partner you do not want to move in together? Should you reveal an affair? In almost every relationship, there is an issue where someone is growing increasingly resentful.

It could be significant, like a waning sex life. Or it could be small, such as the partner never replacing the empty toilet paper roll. In each of these examples, one person can be stuck in a decision limbo. They are not happy but they are unsure what to do about it. A decisional impasse ranks high among the reasons people seek marital therapy.

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(Celia Jacobs for The Washington Post)

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Outside St. Mary’s Church in Newport, Rhode Island, on a sunny September morning in 1953, a young woman then known as Jacqueline Bouvier emerged from her town car, ready to marry the recently elected junior senator for Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. The next day, it wasn’t just the minting of a new political dynasty that made headlines, but the new Mrs. Kennedy’s exquisite white wedding dress. The fairy-tale gown captured the imagination of women the world over and sealed her nascent status as a fashion icon whose style would echo through generations. Missing from the day’s coverage, however, was the name of the designer.

In press clippings from the time, including in The New York Times, the maker was referred to only as a “colored designer.” For any bride seeking to emulate the delicate romance of Kennedy’s gown—its elegant portrait neckline, its billowing silk taffeta skirt, its diaphanous lace veil—the trail went cold. It would take years before Ann Lowe, the Black designer behind the dress, would be fully and nationally recognized for her work. Despite the breathless coverage of the wedding down to every last detail, according to author Rosemary E. Reed Miller, only a single Washington Post journalist at the time noted Lowe’s name. Lowe’s remarkable versatility as an artist and couturier would remain overlooked for decades.

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Ann Cole Lowe (December 14, 1898 – February 25, 1981) was the first African American to become a noted fashion designer. Lowe’s designs were popular among upper-class women for five decades from the 1920s through the 1960s. She was best known for designing the ivory silk taffeta wedding dress Jacqueline Bouvier wore when she married John F. Kennedy in 1953.

Early life

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Ann Cole Lowe

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“While looking through my parents’ old photo albums, I noticed that they had lots of pictures of friends gathered together. It made me think about the camera roll on my phone, which is full of screenshots and selfies. Why don’t I take pictures with my friends?”

—Say Cheese

Dear Cheese,

All modern technologies bend toward self-referentiality. Long before the birth of the smartphone, the earliest screenshots required actually pointing a camera at a television or computer screen, an act that (for those who can remember it) recalled the repelling force of two like-charged magnets or the nauseating infinite regress of two mirrors facing each other. Part of you half-expected a black hole to swallow you up, punishment for having summoned some elusive paradox in the universe.

We now live full-time in that Escherian fun house, spending more of our lives on phones that serve as both the object and channel of our attention. Some years ago, back when AI lacked its current powers of discernment, my mom got a kick out of sending me the deranged “Memories” that her iPhone culled from her camera roll. As the tinkly, inspirational music crescendoed, the slideshows reliably displayed photos of her friends and grandchildren before concluding with screenshots of confirmation codes and bathroom faucets from Home Depot’s website.

Although it’s little commented on, the screenshot bears a curious symmetry to the selfie—in its eschewal of the rear-facing camera and its memorialization of solitude. A writer for Vice dubbed the screenshot “the faceless selfie … a way to share what happens when we’re alone on the internet.” Perhaps this gets at the note of self-incrimination I sense in your question. The camera roll contains the receipts of our attention, evidence of how we have opted to spend our mortal hours. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” Christ said, a proverb that insists all collections are a synecdoche for one’s soul.

When your private gallery becomes a mirror of your data trail and images of your own face, it’s easy to fear that your life has been whittled down to a pinpoint of frenetic, solipsistic attention—that what you are choosing to look at is yourself in the act of looking.

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Check it out!

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Every organism responds to the world with an intricate cascade of biochemistry. There’s a source of heat here, a faint scent of food there, or the crack of a twig as something moves nearby. Each stimulus can trigger the rise of one set of molecules in an animal’s body and perhaps the fall of others. The effect ramifies, tripping feedback loops and flipping switches, until a bird leaps into the air or a bee alights on a flower. It’s a vision of biology that entranced Andreas Wagner, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Zurich when he was still a young student.

“I thought that was much more fascinating than this idea that biology is about counting the number of things that are out there,” he said. “I realized biology could be about fundamental principles of organization in living systems.”

His career, which has included stints at the Santa Fe Institute and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, has taken him from modeling the regulation of gene transcription in an embryo, where precision timing makes the difference between life and death, to asking how an organism can manage to evolve when any change in its genes could spell disaster. He has used theoretical models to probe difficult questions about what drives evolution, and he has wondered about evolutionary innovations that seem to lead nowhere — until they suddenly become the next big thing. His most recent book, Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture (Oneworld Publications, 2023), is an exploration of this phenomenon.

Quanta spoke to Wagner over the phone recently about his new book, evolution as exploration, and the grand patterns that underlie biology. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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The evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner has made it his life’s work to study “robustness” in evolution — the quality that enables species to survive and adapt in the face of challenges. Thi My Lien Nguyen for Quanta Magazine

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Manipulating the fabric of time usually causes everything to unravel, but that’s a possibility that Sophie (Judy Greer) is more than willing to risk. The past eight months of her life have been defined by suffocating loss: after her husband, Malcolm (Edi Gathegi), was killed by a drunk driver, she’s struggled to stay afloat. Long shifts in hospice care — and an even longer court battle with the man who destroyed her life — have driven her beyond her wits’ end.

Her young daughter Riley (Faithe Herman) isn’t faring much better. She’s skipping classes, starting fights with her mother, and alienating herself from the life she once loved. Malcolm was the glue that held their family together, but Sophie and Riley still have one lifeline in the form of Jabir (Payman Maadi), Malcom’s closest friend.

Jabir is mourning a past life as well: a tumultuous dictatorship in his native country saw the demise of his entire family. Like Malcolm, he’s a talented physicist; his thirst for retribution enables him to put those talents to brilliant use. He’s been quietly building a time machine for years, and though he’s not able to send a person back in time just yet, his machine does have another dubious purpose. Given the proper data, this machine can displace particles in the past — and take someone’s life in the process.

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