Relationships, identity and social behaviour, including how institutions and technologies reshape the way people live together.
625 articles · Relationships & Society
When someone in their 60s or 70s quietly stops keeping up with every acquaintance, every old work contact, every group chat and every distant social obligation, it is tempting to read the change as withdrawal.
For many adults, the discomfort of receiving a thoughtful gift has nothing to do with ingratitude. It's the specific exposure of being read accurately by someone who has been paying closer attention than you were braced for.
The people you envied at twenty-five were often the ones best at building a mask the world could read. Two decades later, the mask has usually asked for a bill nobody warned them about — and the quiet gratitude that replaces envy is one of the underrated psychological gifts of middle adulthood.
Book readers in a large American study lived longer than non-readers, and the gap did not close when the researchers stripped out the usual explanations.
A note on what follows: we are writers and editors reading the research, not clinicians or psychologists.
We are writers and editors reading the research, not clinicians or mental health professionals.
We tend to assume the people who light up every room were simply born that way: naturally sunny, effortlessly confident, gifted with a warmth the rest of us can only envy.
An industry-funded study found that people vary in how much urolithin A they produce after pomegranate juice. Separate trials tested purified supplements, so they do not prove an anti-ageing benefit from eating pomegranate.
The Vjosa in southern Albania runs 270 kilometres from the Pindus mountains to the Adriatic without a single dam on its main stem — the last free-flowing wild river in Europe outside Russia, and since March 2023 the continent's first national park built around one.
The population of people who use social media without posting is much larger than most active posters realise.
The Counterclockwise retreat involved eight men in each group and was never reported in a peer-reviewed methods-and-results paper, so its outcomes are not independently established.
A meta-analysis of 308,849 participants linked social relationships with survival. Its comparison with smoking up to 15 cigarettes daily concerned social connection broadly, not chronic loneliness alone.
