James' World 2

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On a clear, moonless night, you might be able to see thousands of stars sparkling like jewels above. But a keen eye will notice that they don’t all look alike. Some glow brighter than others, and some display warm red hues.

Astronomers have identified several different types of stars in the universe, as diverse as small brown dwarfs and red supergiants. Stars in the prime of their lives, known as main sequence stars, are typically classified by how hot they are. Since most star temperatures can’t be directly measured, explains Natalie Gosnell, an assistant professor in physics at Colorado College, astronomers need to look at another signal: temperature. This is largely inferred by the color of the light a star emits, which is reflected in many names given to star types.  

Each category, however, is connected. A star moves through various designations throughout its lifetime, an evolution shaped by its original mass and the reactions that occur within the roiling stellar body. 

In the beginning…

All stars form from a cloud of dust and gas when turbulence pushes enough of that material together, pressed into one body by gravity. As that clump collapses in on itself, it starts to spin. The material in the middle heats up, forming a dense core known as a protostar. Gravity draws even more material toward the developing star as it spins, making it bigger and bigger. Some of that stuff may eventually form planets, asteroids, and comets in orbit around the new star.

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The Hubble Space Telescope captured this blue star shedding outer layers of gas and dust. NASA, ESA, STScI

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Whether it’s a meetup at a dimly lit bar, an awkward blind date, a speed-dating event, or even an answer to a classified ad in the newspaper, American dating has long been an experiment of throwing strangers together and hoping for the best. In many cases, there was little to connect people except a shared geography or, perhaps, a mutual acquaintance.

For the most part, this dating formula worked. American marriages are full of people who started dating when they were complete strangers. A survey conducted by the Survey Center on American Life, where I’m the director, found that 46% of married Americans reported not knowing their spouse before they started dating.

But that’s changing: Today’s young adults, especially young women, are increasingly finding romance in their friend groups. In our survey, 43% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 said they were in a relationship with someone who was first a friend, including an astonishing 50% of women in that cohort. This is double the 21% of people over 65 who reported having been friends with their partner or spouse before they started dating. Among older couples, 52% said their significant other was a complete stranger to them before they got together, while only 35% of young people said the same. In other words, a lot more older Americans created a relationship out of thin air.

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Instead of relying on dating apps or meeting a stranger, Gen Z is increasingly finding romance in their friend groups. Arif Qazi / Insider

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We are constantly bending and being bent to the will of others—and neurotechnology may be enabling new methods for those seeking to bend others to their will. In 2021, Ahmed Shaheed, during his mandate as the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, presented the first-ever report on freedom of thought, which argued that “freedom of thought” should be interpreted to include the right not to reveal one’s thoughts nor to be penalized for them. He also recommended that freedom of thought include the right not to have our thoughts manipulated. But manipulation is a slippery concept. If ill-defined, an absolute prohibition on it could do more harm to human interactions than good.

About a decade ago, I went down a rabbit hole trying to untangle claims about philosophical and legal free will. The written debate goes back at least two thousand years, but neuroscientists have recently joined the fray by arguing that decision-making is hardwired in our brains. Punishment, they argue, cannot be justified by retributivism—an eye for an eye—because people are not morally culpable for their actions. I disagree and have sought in my own scholarship to explain why freedom of action is a freedom worth defending.

In a well-known 1971 essay titled “Freedom of Will and the Concept of a Person,” the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt describes what he calls a peculiar characteristic of humans—that we can form “second-order desires.” Besides our subconscious preferences, biases, and desires, we can also “want to have (or not to have) certain desires and motives.” Frankfurt calls this capacity for reflective self-evaluation of those biases and desires “higher-order volition.” We don’t have to be fully aware of our unconscious desires to engage in reflective self-evaluation. We might be completely unaware of some desires while being mistaken about others. Free will, he argues, is our capacity to form higher-order volitions, by recognizing certain desires as our own.

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Photo-illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images

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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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