James' World 2

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Few things in life satisfy me as much as canceling social plans.

As a reporter who regularly covers friendship, I am well-versed in the benefits of platonic connection. I know, for instance, that studies show that people with strong social ties live longer and are better protected against stress. And I am familiar with the evidence showing that a truly robust social circle encompasses different types of friendship, including work pals (who can help you feel more engaged and productive throughout the day) and “weak ties” (casual acquaintances who can help you learn new things and improve your daily sense of well being).

But I am who I am: an introvert who delights in alone time. I admit I seldom feel motivated to make new friends, or even to see the small-but-cherished group I already have. For me, the tension between craving camaraderie, connection and all of the wonderful benefits of friendship, and wanting to be left alone is real. And the advice that’s so often given about making friends in adulthood (including that in my own articles) tends to make me shudder: Put yourself out there? No, thank you.

“Every single person has the fundamental need for connection,” said Kasley Killam, a social scientist and the founder and executive director of Social Health Labs, a nonprofit that works to create solutions for isolation and loneliness. “It’s not like introverts don’t need meaningful relationships. But what varies is how much and what kind of connection.”

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It was early days, but Flo was feeling positive about Jack – a man she’d been seeing for three months. The pair met on Hinge, Flo swiping right after Jack’s pithy one-liners made her smile.

Their first date – a couple of drinks after work – had been the most fun she’d had in a while. The pair went on to meet twice a week afterwards: more drinks, dinners, movie nights – Jack even took Flo to a warehouse rave with his best friends. 

They never put a label on it – there didn’t seem to be a need to – but a flush would warm Flo’s cheeks whenever his name lit up her phone. That was until one day, Jack stopped texting. No explanation, no response: Flo had been blocked, with her WhatsApp messages to Jack now punctuated with a lonely grey tick.

“I was upset,” publicist Flo, 24, reflects, a year later. Like every dater in this piece, she’s speaking anonymously to protect her privacy. “But this sort of stuff happens all the time. I’ve been ghosted before and I’ll get ghosted again. But part of me thinks what’s the fucking point? It makes me just not want to bother with dating.”

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Photo: Uwe Krejci / Getty Images

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Sometime during the pandemic lockdowns, I began to nurture a fantasy: What if I were neighbors with all of my friends? Every day, as I took long walks through North Vancouver that were still nowhere near long enough to land me at a single pal’s doorstep, I would reflect on the potential joys of a physically closer network. Wouldn’t it be great to have someone who could join me on a stroll at a moment’s notice? Or to be able to drop by to cook dinner for a friend and her baby? How good would it be to have more spontaneous hangs instead of ones that had to be planned, scheduled, and most likely rescheduled weeks in advance?

This doesn’t have to be just a dream. Friends who already live in the same city could decide to move within walking distance of one another—the same neighborhood, block, or even apartment building—and campaign for others to do the same. Doing so would likely involve a lot of effort on the front end,

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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

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Many people come to therapy confused about how to form new friendships in adulthood. They say things like:

• “I was really good at making friends when I was young. Does everybody lose this ability with age?”
• “I feel like everyone around me already has a solid group of friends. How do I find a group to fit in with? Or is it too late?”
• “I’m either working at my office or taking care of my family. How do I find time for making new friends?

Making friends as an adult can be more complicated than when you were young. The logistical and emotional challenges involved in creating new bonds as an adult sometimes push us to isolate ourselves. Or, they may lead us to believe the false notion that our time to make new friends has passed.

If you struggle to make new friends as an adult, research says you’re not alone. The challenges you’re facing are real, but they can be managed. Here are two practices you can incorporate into your life that can help you create lasting friendships at any life stage.

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Adult friendships may not come easy, but they pay dividends for a long time. Getty

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To transform reality into the mental landscape that occupies out minds, our brain performs a multitude of operations. Some are short-cuts; assumptions that become obvious the moment we attempt to make sense of the conflict presented in an optical illusion.

For individuals with autism, those shortcuts and mental operations could work a little differently, subtly influencing how the brain constructs a picture of everyday life.

With this in mind, scientists have turned to optical illusions to better understand neurodivergence.

A study on the brain activity of 60 children, including 29 diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder ( ASD), suggests differences in the way individuals process illusory shapes could reveal ways autism affects specific processing pathways in the brain.

The research made use of a classic style of illusion popularized by the Italian psychologist, Gaetano Kanizsa, which typically involves simple lines or shapes, such as circles, with sections removed. Arranged in a certain way, the empty spaces align to describe a second shape in their negative space.

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The way our brains perceive shapes could tell us a thing or two about autism. (Evgeny Gromov/Getty Images)

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In many ways, it’s easier to make friends when you’re a child, as kids meet in the classroom, on the playground, or through a recreational sports team—the opportunities seem endless. 

Fast-forward to adulthood, when forging platonic relationships becomes trickier than finding a like-minded pal to play tag with at recess. Sure, there might be your post-grad roommates or close colleagues, but at some point, maintaining friendships takes a backseat. 

Many middle-aged adults are essentially swimming against the tide trying to keep up with caregiving and job responsibilities and find one day that they haven’t prioritized new friendships or nourished old ones. 

“As we approach middle age, we have found ourselves busy,” says Dr. Marc Schulz, coauthor of The Good Life and associate director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. “Some people wake up and realize that they really need to rebuild their friendship connections…a lot of their social connections may revolve just around work, or just around other sorts of activities that their kids do.” 

Older adults may also grieve the loss of past friendships, making them fearful and closed off to new opportunities, says Dr. Nina Vasan, a psychiatrist and the chief medical officer at Real, a mental health support app. 

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If you were to travel back to when dinosaurs walked the Earth, it might take you a little while before realizing that you had slipped into another time. A wandering Tyrannosaurus or a shovel-beaked Edmontosuarus chewing a rotting log would be immediate giveaways, of course, but the forests, floodplains and other landscapes of the time would not be so alien as to immediately arouse your suspicion. We still inhabit the same planet as our favorite saurians, after all, and the world of the dinosaurs was not quite like what we often see in the movies.

The trick almost every dinosaur movie tries to perform is how to bring us in contact with the terrible lizards. Sometimes the creatures live on a lost world—a plateau or island where the Age of Reptiles never ended. Jurassic Park popularized another method: genetic reinvention, returning dinosaurs to the world they supposedly ruled. Time travel is another favorite, either bringing the scaly stars to the present or throwing humans back into the past. The latest prehistoric romp, 65, in theaters this weekend, attempts something a little different, with future humans seeming to drift through both space and time to crash land on Earth just before the Cretaceous come to a fiery close.

First thing’s first—the title 65 is a dino-sized mistake. In 2012 the International Commission for Stratigraphy, or geologists who determine Earth’s timescales, revised the end of the Cretaceous Period to be about 66 million years ago rather than the previous estimate of 65.5. If you were to visit Earth about 65 million years ago, during a time called the Paleocene, you would find thick forests where the descendants of mammals that survived the asteroid impact were starting to get big. Triceratops would have been extinct for a million years.

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Adam Driver stars in the new movie 65. Sony Pictures

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What lies beyond the edges of the observable universe? Is it possible that our universe is just one of many in a much larger multiverse?

Movies can’t get enough of exploring these questions. From Oscar winners like Everything Everywhere All at Once to superhero blockbusters like Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, science fiction stories are full of creative interactions between alternate realities. And depending on which cosmologist you ask, the concept of a multiverse is more than pure fantasy or a handy storytelling device.

Humanity’s ideas about alternate realities are ancient and varied—in 1848 Edgar Allan Poe even wrote a prose poem in which he fancied the existence of “a limitless succession of Universes.” But the multiverse concept really took off when modern scientific theories attempting to explain the properties of our universe predicted the existence of other universes where events take place outside our reality.

“Our understanding of reality is not complete, by far,” says Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde. “Reality exists independently of us.”

If they exist, those universes are separated from ours, unreachable and undetectable by any direct measurement (at least so far). And that makes some experts question whether the search for a multiverse can ever be truly scientific.

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In classical physics, a vacuum is a total void—a true manifestation of nothingness. But quantum physics says that empty space isn’t really empty. Instead, it’s buzzing with “virtual” particles blipping in and out of existence too quickly to be detected. Scientists know that these virtual particles are there because they measurably tweak the qualities of regular particles.

One key property these effervescent particles change is the minuscule magnetic field generated by a single electron, known as its magnetic moment. In theory, if scientists could account for all the types of virtual particles that exist, they could run the math and figure out exactly how skewed the electron’s magnetic moment should be from swimming in this virtual particle pool. With precise enough instruments, they could check their work against reality. Determining this value as accurately as possible would help physicists nail down exactly which virtual particles are toying with the electron’s magnetic moment—some of which might belong to a veiled sector of our universe, where, for example, the ever-elusive dark matter resides.

In February, four researchers at Northwestern University announced they had done just that. Their results, published in Physical Review Letters, report the electron magnetic moment with staggering precision: 14 digits past the decimal point, and more than twice as exact as the previous measurement in 2008. 

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Photograph: Getty Images

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Mucus is not widely considered a topic for polite conversation. It’s something to be discreetly blown into a tissue, folded up, and thrown away.

But the simple truth is that without mucus, you wouldn’t be alive.

“Mucus is essential for the protection of your body,” says Jeffrey Spiegel, an ear, nose, and throat surgeon at Boston University. “It’s a protective barrier and it allows you to breathe comfortably. If you had no mucus, you’d be quite sorry you didn’t.”

Given how important mucus is — and how often colds and allergies cause mucus-related symptoms — it’s worth learning a bit more about it.

1) You produce about 1.5 quarts of mucus a day — and swallow the vast majority

Most of us think of mucus as something that leaks from our nose, but the truth is that it also gets secreted in your trachea and other tubes that carry air through your lungs, where it’s technically called phlegm. Wherever it’s produced, mucus is a mix of water and proteins, and most of it gets pushed to the back of your throat by microscopic hairs called cilia.

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