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Follow the latest developments in former President Donald Trump's criminal hush money trial in New York.

Whenever I contemplate whether to have a second child, I inevitably start worrying about housing. For me and my husband to grow our family and stay in our two-bedroom rental in Seattle, our kids would have to share a room. He did it growing up, and it would be more affordable than getting a bigger place. But I struggle to wrap my head around the idea. I grew up in a three-bedroom home near where we live now; I had my own room, as did most of my friends. Even though housing prices have skyrocketed, I still want to give my children this privilege.When I ask my husband what it was like to share a room as a kid, he shrugs. He didn’t consider it that big of a deal. But many parents I’ve talked with who live in metro areas with high costs of living feel the same as I do. Some are stretching their budgets to afford a house with more bedrooms; others are reluctant to grow their families without having more space. As I mull this over, I wonder: Why do so many of us prioritize giving kids their own room?[Read: Americans can’t decide what it means to grow up]Over the past half century or so in the U.S., the practice has become what the University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau calls a “normative ideal”—something that many aspire to, but that not all can attain. It’s gotten more common in recent decades, as houses have gotten bigger and people have been having fewer kids. From 1960 to 2000, the number of bedrooms available for each child in the average household rose from 0.7 to 1.1, according to the Stanford sociologist Michael J. Rosenfeld’s calculations using U.S. census data. It’s held fairly steady since, the University of Washington real-estate professor Arthur Acolin told me. Recently, Acolin analyzed 2022 American Community Survey data and found that more than half of all families with kids had at least enough bedrooms to give each child their own (though it’s not certain that all of them do). Even among parents whose children share rooms, more than 70 percent say they wish they could give everyone their own, according to a 2022 survey from the Sleep Foundation, a research organization I’ve written for.Given this fervor, one might assume that the space, privacy, and freedom solo rooms offer are better for kids. But that’s not necessarily true. Professors who study family life told me they don’t know of any research on how the setup influences children’s development. The importance we put on the issue seems more likely rooted in the broader American culture of individualism and independence, which many adults value in their own life and may want for their children. But the autonomy that kids get when they have their own bedroom is not absolute. And for some kids and teens, spending a lot of time alone in their room could even come at the cost of opportunities for intimacy, compromise, and exploration—all key parts of growing up.Having one’s own room is unusual, historically and in much of the rest of the modern world. Before the 19th century, whole families, including servants and other relatives, often slept in the same area, Siobhan Moroney, a professor at Lake Forest College who has studied the rise of private bedrooms, told me. “One might enjoy real solitude only when away from home,” she wrote in 2019. But starting in the late 19th century, popular American parenting books and childhood-development textbooks began recommending splitting children up. They argued that doing so would give each kid “an independence within the family” that would build character and prepare them for adulthood.That idea has stuck around. Although there’s scant evidence to support the character-building notion, solo rooms do have other things going for them. Being able to spread out is nice. Kids with separate spaces may fight less and, according to the Sleep Foundation survey, get better sleep. Separate spaces make particular sense for siblings with large age gaps. And some time alone in one’s room could help with psychological development. A child might use it to read, journal (which has been associated with improved mental well-being), or simply reflect.More fundamentally, the setup gives children control over their environment. Kids can turn the lights on or off, play music or not, and choose their posters and bedspreads, without consulting a sibling. This is, in a sense, what adults aspire to have for themselves: to buy their own home and do with it what they like. Solo bedrooms are a microcosm of this, where young people can “create their own kingdom,” Aaron Cooper, a licensed clinical psychologist at the Family Institute at Northwestern University, explains.But this power is limited. Kids may be able to arrange things as they choose, but even when they’re older, they’re still likely to rely on their parents’ money and permission to buy furnishings and decor. They can’t easily host people in their space without their parents’ knowledge. Plus, whatever degree of freedom the room does convey exists only within those four walls. Nowadays, children are allowed little unsupervised time outside the house. Many parents don’t feel comfortable allowing their kids to roam freely, because they either fear for their safety or worry about judgment from other parents, Markella B. Rutherford, a sociologist at Wellesley College who has studied parental supervision, told me.[Read: The gravitational pull of supervising kids all the time]A bedroom may now be the only place a child or teen can exist outside the gaze of adults—so of course many young people cling to it. Some kids may spend a lot of time isolated in there, connecting to the outside world largely through social media. While the implications of social-media use for kids’ mental health are complicated, they’re at least a cause for concern—especially when devoting so many hours to those sites can mean missing out on moments to explore, meet new people, and develop a social life in person. “Teenagers feel lonelier than ever,” Michaeleen Doucleff, a global correspondent for NPR’s science desk and the author of Hunt, Gather, Parent, told me, “and yet we’re walling them off in their own space.”We lose out on potential bonding both in and outside the home by living this way. Globally, the norm is for young children to sleep in their parents’ rooms, or for siblings to share, Doucleff explained. Kids in America might protest that sort of arrangement, because they want what their friends have, or brothers and sisters might fight, but that’s how they learn to compromise. “A lot of cultures would say that, actually, sharing the room can help them get along better,” Doucleff told me. And, down the line, cohabitating also prepares them for sharing a bedroom with future partners or even just friends, Cooper says. Joint rooms are still common in college dorms. But, according to Lareau, many administrators must now deal with students who have never had a roommate before and don’t want one.Having a sibling in your room will never completely prepare you for a wider life outside the home, especially if you both zone out on your phones when you’re in the space. And solo bedrooms themselves haven’t been shown to cause real harm. But the broader shifts in American childhood—both toward more privacy and material comfort in families who can afford it, and toward less freedom and, potentially, more social isolation and anxiety—do raise interesting questions about the role solo bedrooms play.Considering all this, I feel more open to the possibility of having kids share. Still, even if we don’t have another child and our daughter always has her own space, I hope that she’ll spend much of her time outside it. Many of the best parts of growing up happen beyond the closed doors of a bedroom, not behind them.

To tell a story is to place a frame around wayward events. The storyteller points to scenes unfolding within the frame and says, This is important. The implication is that what transpires beyond those borders is less consequential, or not so at all. Susan Sontag offered a similar assessment in one of the final speeches she gave before her death: “To tell a story is to say: This is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.”In the United States, many of our recent cultural battles about history are actually conflicts over where to place the frame. Does the American story start with a group of English pilgrims who landed at Plymouth in 1620? Or with the arrival of slaves at the British colony of Virginia a year before? Should we merely admire an ancient artifact we encounter in a museum, or extend our imagination to consider how it came to be there in the first place? In many fields—artistic, historical, political—people find themselves on opposite sides of a widening divide: those who believe that the frames we’ve inherited capture reality effectively, and those who believe that they must be expanded, adjusted, or perhaps jettisoned altogether.Claire Messud’s latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, can be read in the context of this cultural shift. In many ways, it is a traditional tale, a multigenerational narrative that stretches from 1927 to 2010, and takes place across multiple continents, following the life and times of the Cassars. They are a French family from Algeria, part of the large expatriate community that arrived with the colonization of the country starting in 1830 and became known as pieds-noirs. (The novel, as Messud reveals in her author’s note, is based on her own family history.)The pieds-noirs owed their presence to a conflict between France and Algeria tracing back to 1827. As a character in Messud’s novel puts it: “Basically, France owed a good deal of money to Hussein Dey, the Algerian leader, and rather than pay it, especially after he insulted us by hitting our consul with a fly whisk, we invaded the country.” The Indigenous population endured brutal treatment from the French (famously documented by Frantz Fanon in A Dying Colonialism) and eventually instigated a revolution in 1954. The conflict raged until 1962, when Algeria achieved independence.[Read: The patron saint of political violence]This Strange Eventful History is set, at least initially, against this backdrop, and its contours suggest a story that has been told by many artists, such as Graham Greene in The Heart of the Matter and Sydney Pollack in the film adaptation of the memoir Out of Africa: an elaborate narrative about the travails of a relatively privileged colonial family whose members feel both connected to and estranged from the distant metropole. In these stories, the native people, living just beyond the borders of the frame, remain unacknowledged, or appear intermittently as background characters. Yet at the outset of her book, Messud hints at her intention to gently expand the limits of her novel to include perspectives that are not central to her story but nevertheless shape the lives and world of her main characters. Throughout this unfailingly ambitious work, Messud oscillates between modes, from a saga about a family that is defined by the loss of their adopted home to one that, in fits and starts, moves beyond the confines of its frame.Perhaps the most revealing aspect of This Strange Eventful History is Messud’s seeming ambivalence about how to start it. The prologue announces her theory of storytelling through Chloe, the novel’s narrator and the character who serves as Messud’s stand-in. In a formulation that seems to contradict Sontag’s, Chloe says: “A story is not a line; it is a richer thing, one that circles and eddies, rises and falls, repeats upon itself.” She then describes how this perspective complicates her work: “And so this story—the story of my family—has many possible beginnings, or none … all and each a part of the vast and intricate web. Any version only partial.”Messud passes back and forth before several possible doors through which she might enter her novel, all of them entryways to potentially rich and meaningful stories. The door that she spends the most time considering opens to her family’s remorse about its past and origins:I could begin with the secrets and shame, the ineffable shame that in telling their story I would wish at last to heal. The shame of the family history, of the history into which we were born. (How to forget that after attending the birth of his first grandson, my father, elderly then, tripped on the curb and fell in the street, a toppled mountain, and as he lay with the white down of his near-bald head in the gutter’s muck he muttered not “Help me” but “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry”?)It’s an arresting scene; the elderly man, brought low by gravity and maybe guilt as well, seems to be arriving at a kind of end-of-life awareness—if not comprehension of his direct culpability for the history into which he was born, then, perhaps, a flicker of understanding that his relative comfort might have come at the expense of others. Yet Messud-as-Chloe does not elaborate, and quickly moves on. This is emblematic of her approach throughout the novel; she does not focus solely on the story of the colonizers or the colonized, but does something more subtle. During the period of French rule in Algeria, the Indigenous population was subjected to appalling abuse (in A Dying Colonialism, Fanon describes “the overrunning of villages by the [French] troops, the confiscation of property and the raping of women, the pillaging of a country”). Messud’s decision to foreground the struggles and sorrows of the Cassars amid these circumstances doubles as a recognition of how humans metabolize suffering: Our particular experiences assume paramount importance, while political events are often folded into our personal dramas.Messud eventually chooses an entry point—she opens in 1940 with a character named François, who is based on her father, writing a letter to his own father, who lives in Greece. François has recently traveled from Greece to Algeria with his younger sister, Denise; his mother; and his aunt. His father, a French naval officer, sent them away because of the rapidly accelerating conflict between the Allied and Axis powers. The children have never lived in Algeria, though their parents consider it home. As his mother makes clear to a young François, “This was where his family belonged, and where they had been from for a hundred years.” In the next section, the novel dashes ahead several years; François, as a college student in Massachusetts, reminisces about his childhood in Algeria, a place he too now considers home. For the most part, This Strange Eventful History proceeds accordingly, skipping years and darting across the map, charting the stories of its central characters’ lives as they move around the world; as they get married, have children, and contend with life’s various trials.[Read: A redacted past slowly emerges]Yet there are notable moments when Messud widens her frame. In the following chapter, we meet an older Denise, now a law student in Algiers. One day, she writes to François in America about how she and her friends were recently struck by a car as they were gossiping outside a coffee shop. As Messud describes it:The car attacked her from behind like a shark, a blue Deux Chevaux, it mounted the curb and took a bite, as it were, and then slipped back into the ocean, back onto the road—but the car wasn’t going fast—it could really have injured her if it had been going fast, right? It was perfectly calibrated—the speed, the silence, the suddenness—as if the driver had planned the whole thing, maybe a joke, but maybe to terrify, or terrorize her, if you’d rather, to make her afraid just to walk down the street laughing with her friends. To make her afraid to be. Why would someone do that? To Denise, who wouldn’t hurt a fly?Denise is initially unsure whom she sees in the passenger seat of the departing car, but she suspects it is a “Berber girl from the provinces” whose name she cannot remember. By the time she recalls the girl’s name, however, she wonders if she is thinking of the right person: “Zohra, yes, Zohra, the name came back to her even as her certainty evaporated; maybe it hadn’t been her?” Only years later, after Zohra achieves notoriety as a resistance fighter, does Denise “insist that she had definitely seen Zohra Drif in the Deux Chevaux that morning.”Messud’s decision to include this anecdote is essential for many reasons. First, the sudden appearance of the blue car represents a literal incursion into the blithe and serene reality that Denise and her friends inhabit, untroubled by the profound anguish of their Indigenous Algerian neighbors, such as Drif herself (the real Drif, now in her 80s, spoke with The Washington Post in 2021 about her time as a resistance fighter). It also represents a narrative incursion into the story of a pied-noir family that, despite its own desire for freedom and happiness, largely seems unable to recognize the struggles of Indigenous Algerians to achieve the same. And it is notable that Denise remains unsure about Drif’s presence at the scene of the crash until Drif’s fame motivates Denise to become the star of her own personal drama, an innocent who survived an “early salvo of the insurgency” with “only torn stockings and a constellation of bruises.” In her self-mythologizing, Denise narrows the “spread and simultaneity” of narrative possibilities—including the possibility that Drif wasn’t there—until she is the only person staring at us from the frame.Messud’s strange and eventful novel leaps across space and time occasionally and subversively, including episodes that reveal the larger backdrop against which the lives of her characters take shape. Throughout, Messud seems to be transmitting a message to her readers about our contemporary relationship with stories: As our understanding of history becomes more complicated and nuanced, so too must the stories we tell about the past, and the way we tell them.

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When Otis Parrish was a kid in the 1940s, abalone were abundant. Each abalone grows in a single, beautiful opalescent shell, which can get as big as a dinner plate. Parrish’s father showed him how to pry the abalone off the rocky shoreline at low tide with an oak stick or the end of a sharpened leaf spring. Or, best of all, how to take the abalone unawares and grab them with his bare hands before they had time to fasten tight to the rocks. His mother’s village was called Dukašal, or “Abaloneville” in the Kashaya Pomo tribe’s language, notwithstanding its location five miles and two steep ridges inland from Stewarts Point on the California coast. The ocean gave the Kashaya people protein and ceremonial food. “We call [abalone] ‘Champion of the Sea,’” Parrish told me over coffee in nearby Windsor, California, one recent morning.Newcomers to the state started eating abalone in far greater quantities in the mid-1800s. They went into deeper water with skiffs and long poles, and began free diving and subsequently diving from boats with air hoses to harvest the shellfish. Commercial capture passed 1 million pounds a year around 1920. Apart from a dip during World War II, abalone hauls totaled several million pounds a year for decades. When the pink-abalone population crashed in the early 1970s, people fished for more red abalone, whose decline, in turn, was compensated by increased pursuit of the green, white, and black species. They were all flatlining by the mid-1980s. In 1997, California banned commercial abalone fishing.For years, red abalone was the only species sufficiently abundant to support even a limited recreational fishery. Tens of thousands of divers plucked nearly a quarter million abalone a year in Northern California. Then came 2017. Divers would pull abalone off the rocks only to find mostly empty shells. Scientists concluded that the abalone were starving because a record marine heat wave had weakened the kelp forest, and an epidemic, exacerbated by the hot water, killed more than 90 percent of sunflower sea stars from 2013 to 2017. Abalone and sunflower sea stars don’t have anything to do with each other directly, but the latter eat purple sea urchins, which eat kelp, which abalone also eat. When the sea-star population crashed, urchin numbers exploded, and a spiny purple horde clear-cut the remaining kelp. Biologists presumed that the abalone scooted around the rocks looking for their staple seaweed, found none, and perished. California’s last abalone fishery closed.This story doesn’t involve extinction. Both abalone and sea stars still exist on this Earth. If we measure biodiversity as the number of species, nothing has changed. But red abalone, a species at least a few million years old that, during Otis Parrish’s youth and for at least eight millennia prior, required next to zero effort to gather, are now extraordinarily scarce. One California species, the pinto abalone, is “endangered,” according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The remaining six species in the state are “critically endangered.” Sunflower sea stars, kelp forests, and many other species that live in the rocky coves along the California coast are in similar straits. They’ve been displaced by hyperabundant purple urchins, which biologists are desperately trying to persuade humans, the predator of last resort, to eat.[Read: How long should a species stay on life support?]Globally, 1.2 million species of organisms have been scientifically identified. Scientists have extrapolated from the number of species and higher-level taxonomic categories (genera, families, etc.) in extensively studied groups, such as birds, to estimate the diversity of under-researched groups, such as fungi. They put the global species total at about 8.7 million, of which roughly 7.7 million are animals. Some 157,000 species have been systematically evaluated by scientists to determine whether they are threatened with extinction; just more than 44,000 have qualified for the IUCN’s three most severe categories of peril. The registry shows only 2,354 confirmed or probable extinctions in modern times, though the actual number is surely far higher. That’s roughly 0.03 percent of species—an enormous number in a very short time, geologically speaking. But it dramatically understates the global crisis of crashing wild populations. That’s because what is happening more or less across the board isn’t extinction but collapse. On average, wild populations monitored by biologists over the past 50 years lost 69 percent of their members, according to the Living Planet Index. North American bird populations have declined by nearly one-third since 1970; in absolute numbers, that’s 3 billion fewer birds. The scientists who delivered that news said, “Population loss is not restricted to rare and threatened species, but includes many widespread and common species that may be disproportionately influential components of food webs and ecosystem function.” Particularly worrying for those food webs: In North America and Europe, terrestrial insects have been shedding about 10 percent of their populations every decade.Our immediate biodiversity crisis isn’t one of species loss; it’s the lost abundance of wild things. The problem has become pervasive and systemic in recent decades because humans have added a new way of subtracting wildlife from our land and waters: pollution. Where once we were limited to hunting and clearing habitat, now we disorient night-traveling birds with light, starve manatees by smothering the sea grass they feed on with sewage and farm runoff, and continue to change the chemical composition of the atmosphere. The impacts cascade through the kelp forests and every other ecosystem on the planet, tipping some wild populations, like those of the 131 species of outrageously costumed harlequin toads, into free fall. Long before they’re entirely gone, these organisms are functionally omitted from their ecosystems and from the human experience.I asked Parrish what the scarcity of abalone has meant for the Kashaya Pomo tribe. “Most families have forgotten the songs and the prayers that go with it,” he said, “and forgotten the taste.” Then, pointing at his head, he said, “It’s a loss of something up here.”Human colonization of land, rivers, and sea, and use of the sky as storage space for soot, methane, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, carbon dioxide, and other excess gases, have corresponded, on paper, to a golden age for the naked ape. More than twice as many people exist now than in 1970, and our average income has more than doubled in inflation-adjusted terms. Many experts and policy makers accept the collateral damage as a cost of doing business on this planet. That’s because their economic scorecards count what’s measurably good for human beings. Something that’s good for two people is twice as good as something that’s good for one person. From this point of view, a world drained of wildlife with a lot of people making increasing amounts of money is heading in the right direction. The losses of joy, wonder, and ethical interspecific relations are real, but, in contrast to our material gains, resist measurement.Economics is nicknamed the “dismal science,” but many of its practitioners are far more optimistic than biologists about our species’ future. They propose that economic growth can continue forever on a planet that is staying the same size, because scarcity isn’t the sad opposite of abundance; it’s the mother of invention. When goods—such as abalone, wood, water, oil, or bison—become scarce, substitutes become valuable. So people produce canned tuna, plastic, flushless urinals, solar power, and beef. If ready substitutes aren’t available, people innovate and tame scarcity. Over and over.Substitution is seen as a remedy both for the shortage of production’s inputs and, nowadays, for the menacing excess of its emissions. But substitution won’t save us indefinitely, and typically leads to another round of unforeseen damage. When fossil fuels supplanted firewood, temperate forests recovered, and we embarked on our global-warming journey. Now green tech is driving a mining boom, including in the Congo rainforest, which is a crucial carbon sink. We’ll face countless other challenges ahead that we can’t now foresee. Events such as forest die-off, drought, deluge, record heat waves, and glacier melt, which have massive ecological and economic costs, are becoming common while remaining unpredictable.[John W. Reid and Thomas E. Lovejoy: Save the forests–especially the five biggest ones]It’s not too late for an abundant Earth. Recovery starts with making wild abundance an explicit objective and letting our economic and social lives coalesce around it. Buried in that paper on bird loss, for instance, is a story of spectacular recovery that made few headlines. Waterfowl populations have risen by 56 percent over the past 50 years, despite including the birds most routinely shot by people. Hunters joined other environmentalists to lobby for wetlands conservation. They recruited farmers to preserve migration pathways with “pop-up” wetlands made by flooding rice fields in California’s Central Valley. This success exemplifies the most important thing people can do for wild populations: Give them space, starting with the spaces that aren’t yet fragmented. Twenty percent of Earth’s forests, for instance, are still big and unfragmented, “intact forest landscapes” (IFLs). According to Peter Potapov, who leads research on IFLs at the University of Maryland’s Global Land Analysis and Discovery lab, only 16 percent of those unfragmented forests is strictly protected. Another 20 percent is within more permissive protected areas, such as our national forests, that allow resource extraction. The remaining 64 percent has no protection at all. Securing these forests now is a bargain compared with the cost of removing roads and industry to regrow them later.The United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity is the global agreement to protect wild species. In late 2022, its parties ratcheted up the ambition for conserved space to 30 percent of the planet by 2030, which represents a rough doubling for terrestrial protection and more than triple for the oceans. Nearly every country on the planet signed on (or, in the case of the U.S., made its own 30-by-30 commitment). Brazil has already hit its terrestrial target and set aside nearly half of its Amazon lands in parks, reserves, and Indigenous territories. Chile has protected more than 40 percent of its ocean and more than 50 percent of its Patagonian territory, and has kept all of that southern region’s rivers free-flowing. In Canada, cultures are peacefully reoccupying tens of millions of acres of their ancestral lands in Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas, fusing traditional law and “modern” conservation practice.Protected spaces will change as the climate does. That doesn’t make them futile. They are “stages” on which an evolutionary drama unfolds. This has been the case as long as there’s been life, as new species have emerged over incomprehensibly lengthy time spans, thousands of human forevers. Now life forms are being challenged to adapt far too fast. The more we slow climate change, the more evolutionary storylines can reach into the future. In other words, climate policy is biodiversity policy.The current U.S. administration promotes its “all-of-government” approach to biodiversity (and climate) action. These executive-branch programs are encouragingly holistic but can revert quickly to an all-of-government approach to destruction under a future president. The Endangered Species Act, the landmark 1973 law that has succeeded in preventing extinctions, wasn’t built for today’s biggest biodiversity challenge, the loss of abundance. Those hunters who restored abundant game birds took little comfort from a law that guaranteed habitat bubbles in which a few fowl might persist; they wanted enough to catch and eat. They wanted to see the sky darkened by birds. We need laws that go beyond sustaining scarcity and regrow biological plenty—call it an Abundant Life Act. Rather than attempting to codify abundance on a species-by-species basis, as the ESA does for extinction risk, such a law must consider life at the ecosystem level and reduce the causes of wildlife depletion without knowing precisely how much natural abundance will return. Rather than keeping a few abalone in an ESA lifeboat, let’s bring back enough to feed a venerable culture and draw awestruck divers once again into the filtered sunlight of a restored kelp forest. Let’s nurture enough of the Earth so that people once again can know they are part of a wild world disposed—and able—to host abundant life.

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Chris Jackson/Getty ImagesBritain’s most eligible bachelor is off the market.Peter Phillips, 46, the son of Princess Anne (which makes the king his uncle) took a date to a horse show this weekend, just weeks after his split from long term girlfriend Lindsay Wallace was confirmed.His new girlfriend, according to reports in the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, is Harriet Sperling, reportedly a pediatric nurse. One onlooker told the Sun: “They looked completely smitten and he was grinning from ear to ear. He looked like the cat that got the cream and acted without a care in the world.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

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The case in federal court in Manhattan could last well into June. The longtime lawmaker faces 16 felony counts that threaten both his career and freedom.

Social media has made it easier to build more parasocial relationships with celebrities and influencers. What impact are those connections having on our relationships IRL? And how do they shift our understanding and expectations of intimacy and trust?Florida State University assistant professor Arienne Ferchaud defines parasocial relationships and discusses how new technologies are changing the role of entertainment in our lives.Listen and subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket CastsThe following transcript has been edited for clarity:Megan Garber: Andrea, growing up, did you have an imaginary friend?Andrea Valdez: I did. Yeah, I had an imaginary friend whose name I cannot believe I’m gonna tell you. Sorry. I cannot believe—sorry. His name was Barfy.Garber: Ah! Yes![Music.]Valdez: I definitely have questioned if this imaginary-friend thing really happened—with a name like Barfy, it feels like it could be a total false memory that someone planted in my head to mess with me. But when it’s come up over the years in conversation with my mom, she said she thinks maybe I was trying to say Barbie.Garber: Do you have any memory of how he came to be? Or what he looked like?Valdez: No, I don’t remember any of that. I just think I was too young to form any real coherent memories about him. My brother is six years older than me, and so I kind of wonder if I made up a friend because I was lonely when he went off to elementary school. And so Barfy wasn’t “real” but was real company, and I think I needed that type of connection for some real reason.Garber: Yes, definitely. RIP, Barfy.[Music.]Valdez: I’m Andrea Valdez. I’m an editor at The Atlantic.Garber: And I’m Megan Garber, a staff writer at The Atlantic.Valdez: This is How to Know What’s Real.[Music.]Valdez: Megan, I know you’ve been writing about technology and culture for a long time at The Atlantic, but I feel like in these last few years, you’ve really been focused on thinking about truth and fiction.Garber: Uh-huh;yeah.Valdez: I mean, you wrote an article last year called “We’re Already Living in the Metaverse.”Garber: [Laughter.] Welcome.Valdez: Tell me more about what you mean by living in the metaverse.Garber: Yeah. So I’m thinking of the metaverse in part this long-standing dream in the tech world—this hope that, when computers get advanced enough, they can create environments where virtual reality seems less virtual and more reality. And, of course, the tech hasn’t quite caught up to that big vision, but the idea of the metaverse is what we are navigating right now—this idea that one day we’ll be able to immerse ourselves in our entertainment. That’s the world that’s here. It’s just that the immersion isn’t strictly a matter of a single place or platform. Instead, it’s everywhere.[Music.]Valdez: That line between reality and fantasy feels really blurry right now.Garber: Yes.Valdez: There’s the really obviously insidious stuff—like, there’s the rise of deepfakes and AI-generated scams. But there are these slightly murkier areas. Like, are content creators on YouTube and social media showing us their authentic selves, or is it really just a performance?Garber: Yes. And in some ways those are age-old questions, right? People have been thinking about the difference between the performed life and real life, such as it is, for centuries—and millennia, even! But exactly then, like you said, the difference feels hazier now than it’s ever been. And so much of that has to do with technology. I think about the line “All the world’s a stage,” and that used to be a metaphor. But it’s becoming ever more literal.[Music.]Garber: Imaginary friends seem so childlike and so kind of fanciful and fantastical, but it does occur to me that we have versions of them even as adults, right?Valdez: Totally.Garber: I’m thinking about, for example, the people on my social media who I follow—and I know in some ways very intimate details about their lives. I know what’s in their medicine cabinets, what they have for breakfast. And of course they know nothing about me. They don’t know even that I exist. Do you have people in your life, Andrea, that you feel connected to in that way?Valdez: Yeah; I mean, of course. There’s like, a lot of folks that are listening. I listen to several podcasts, and I feel really close to the hosts of those podcasts. And it makes me just feel like I really know them. And like, there’s, like, a couple of running influencers that I follow on Instagram, and one of them just finished the Boston Marathon, and I was so proud of her. [Laughter.] And it’s just really strange to say that, even, because she’s a total stranger.Garber: [Laughter.]Valdez: I mean, I guess I can be proud of this relative stranger—but, like, I just knew so much about her ambition and her goals. So yeah; it’s totally weird. And like, with the podcasters—I mean, they’re in my ears every week, so I feel like I have this sort of standing date with them.Garber: Mmm. Yes. And I think a key thing with all those relationships is that the “friends” you’re describing are real and imaginary at the same time.Valdez: Huh.Garber: So they’re relationships, definitely, and they’re giving you a lot of what IRL friendships can. But also the “relation” aspect is so different from what it would be IRL.[Music.]And I wonder: What are those relationships we’re building with these people we don’t really know?Arienne Ferchaud: A parasocial relationship is essentially this sort of simulated relationship.Garber: So, Andrea, I talked with Dr. Arienne Ferchaud. She is an assistant professor of communications at Florida State University, and she’s been studying emerging media and especially the feelings of closeness that so many of us get just by watching strangers on a screen—even with something as commonplace as watching the news.Ferchaud: The news anchor is talking to the screen like they’re talking to you. It sort of simulates a back-and-forth, because they are looking right at you. They might use words like our community, lots of we and us and inclusive language like that. So it simulates kind of a social interaction, but it’s not. It’s actually one-sided.Garber: Dr. Ferchaud, when did your interest in parasocial relationships really begin?Ferchaud: Through a series of kind of weird and unfortunate—not unfortunate, really fortunate—events, I wound up having an on-campus job. And at first I wanted something really easy, that I wouldn’t have to, like, do a lot, but all those were taken. [Laughter.] So I wound up as an undergraduate assistant to a professor there by the name of Dr. Meghan Sanders. And we worked on this study related to this character on the TV show House. The character kind of abruptly committed suicide on the show and was gone off the show. This is not a real person. The actor, of course, is fine. But people were really mourning that character.Garber: Huh.Ferchaud: He was played by Kal Penn.Garber: Oh, that’s right; I remember that.Ferchaud: He left to go work for Obama, and so they killed him off the show. [Laughter.] People actually set up these Facebook pages that were memorial pages. It was virtually indistinguishable from, like, a memorial page you would set up for a friend. Like: “Oh, I’m gonna miss you so much.” Talking directly to the person. But it’s that same sort of idea when that character that we are really fond of is kind of taken away. People really do kind of react like they are just another person that they know.Garber: I’ve certainly felt that, and—for me as a viewer—it’s a little bit hard to process that feeling. I question the validity, because I know this is fiction. This is fake. Why do I care so much? But, it is a loss!Ferchaud: It goes back to sort of evolutionary biology and psychology. Essentially, evolution happens over millions of years, right? It takes a long time. But when we think about the history of television, that hasn’t been around that long in the grand scheme of things. I mean, my parents were, like, there when television started. So you kind of have this situation where, consciously, yes: We know this is not real. This character might be dead, but the actor’s fine. But our lizard brains, in a way, don’t really know the difference.Garber: So do our minds—I mean, like, how do they distinguish even between the sort of factual person and the fictional person? Or is the point that they simply don’t?Ferchaud: Yeah; on some level, they don’t. Based on what I know about parasocial relationships, I think it’s a matter of closeness to some degree. You know, when my father passed away I was—and still am, you know, a couple years later—very grief-stricken about that, right? You feel that loss very intimately all the time, every day, because that person is part of your life all the time, every day. Whereas with media characters, they’re not really a part of your whole life in the same way. We know them in that very specific context, and so that would indicate a lesser degree of closeness. You certainly feel the loss at that time, but you kind of get over it much quicker.Garber: Yeah; that makes sense. It’s almost like the mechanisms of television, which are very, you know, episodic and very kind of in the moment. But then you turn off the TV and go on with your life.[Music.]Valdez: I don’t know, Megan, but is that still the world we live in? Where you just turn off your TV and you can reenter reality?Garber: Yeah; it is complicated. I use the phrase “IRL”—so “in real life”—all the time to talk about in-person interactions. And really to talk about the physical world as a general environment. But also the idea of “real life” as a distinctly physical thing can be a little misleading. Because some stuff on the web, just as we’ve been talking about, is real. The people we interact with on it, the topics we might be learning about or debating, are often real. So the screens are part of our realities. And really importantly, they mediate real relationships.Valdez: Yeah; I mean, I justify a lot of my screen time by a version of what you just said—that these are real, meaningful relationships, and they’re relationships that I need to be spending time with.Garber: For many of us, the screens are unavoidable. I’m looking down at my littlewatch right now. They’re just around these screens. Which makes me think about Marshall McLuhan, who did so much to shape the way people talk about media today. He talked about screens, and really media in general—whether they help us to see each other, or hear each other, or just know each other—how those mediums become “extensions of man.” And I think what we’re seeing right now is what it really means to have our devices in a very direct and often literal way be extensions of us.Valdez: And we’re not really even just experiencing screens more as a part of our lives; we’re bringing more parts of our lives into our screens.Garber: Yes. It’s no longer just fictional stories or, you know, the straight-ahead news from the streets. Instead, we’re just witnessing other people’s lives as they choose to share them. We’re invited to their living rooms, into their kitchens, medicine cabinets. [Laughter.] And it’s just creating all these new ways of seeing each other—whether in a literal sense or just in a broader way of awareness and connection to other people’s lives.Valdez: We’re physically looking at other people so much more than we ever probably have. There’s a study by this psychologist named Gayle Stever that discusses how we’re hardwired to become connected to faces and voices: things that are familiar to us. And her findings suggest that parasocial connections, like we’re talking about, might just be natural extensions of this evolutionary instinct that exists in us. So, if we’re constantly being presented with people on our screens, maybe there’s something just simply innate in us that leads us to form these attachments.[Music.]Garber: Dr. Ferchaud, you’ve studied what people connect with when they watch other people on screen, and I’d love to know what your research found. Is it authenticity that we’re seeking?Ferchaud: I would say it’s primarily the perception of authenticity. In which case, how authentic it actually is doesn’t matter, really.Garber: Oh, interesting.Ferchaud: I do have a study where we looked at YouTubers and parasocial attributes—like, what they were doing in their videos to sort of cultivate a parasocial relationship. And so if we think about, for example, a YouTuber: A lot of those people start off—if we go back to like 2005, 2006, when YouTube was really just starting—those people are starting off in their bedrooms with, like, a janky camera. And it gives this idea like, Okay, I’m just a regular person. You’re just a regular person. We’re all just regular people together. [Laughter.] That industry has changed quite a bit.Garber: Yep.Ferchaud: YouTubers are professionals now. And so authenticity is still that perception like, Oh, this is just a regular person like me. Because if you’re an influencer, your whole career is based on your ability to create parasocial relationships. Right?Garber: Yeah.Ferchaud: So, what we found is that it was a lot of self-disclosure, and we were pretty broad with that. So it didn’t have to be, like, a deep, dark. It could be something very small. And what we found there was: It didn’t really matter the type of self-disclosure. So it could be positive things: “I had a good day. I did some fun stuff with my friends.” You know, it could be neutral things: “I woke up late today.” It could be negative things. It didn’t really matter. It still built those feelings of authenticity. That maps social relationships. Generally speaking, if you’ve got a friend, you know some positive things, some negative things, some neutral things about them.Garber: I wonder, too, about the lines, then, between sort of the parasocial relationship of today and the celebrity. You know, the “celebrity” is such an old idea, and I think many viewers and many audiences felt some kind of ownership over celebrities—at least their images, their, you know, PR realities. All that kind of stuff. So what are some of the differences between the modern parasocial relationship and the long-standing celebrity relationship?Ferchaud: So if we think about it, we go back to the golden age of cinema. If you look into it, it’s really wild what the movie studios of the time, how much control they had over stars’ lives.Garber: Yes.Ferchaud: And they would do things like arrange marriages. So they had this crazy control; so the images were very, very curated. Now, there’s just so much more access—and part of it, you know, when you think about an influencer, they are inviting people into their lives in a certain way. And there is that feeling of This is authentic, this is real—in a way that, you know, 1920s Hollywood doesn’t feel, because it was so carefully constructed. And I think that that authenticity kind of builds these parasocial relationships in a way that is interesting and unique. This idea of celebrity—that is also a parasocial relationship, but it is a little bit different. Because unlike our traditional understanding of influencers, a celebrity is sort of on a pedestal. Like, it’s hard to imagine Beyoncé shopping at Publix. [Laughter.] I don’t know. That would kind of break your brain a little bit.Garber: It really would, yes.Ferchaud: In a way, that’s not true with influencers, because of that sort of perception of authenticity a little bit more.Garber: That totally makes sense. And it makes me wonder, too, if parasocial relationships and influencers, as they are having more influence over everything, if that will change our ideas about celebrity, too. I mean: Maybe the celebrities of the future—even the Beyoncé levels of celebrity in the future—you know, will be shopping at Publix. And will actually make a point of showing us that they shop at Publix, you know, to perform authenticity in that way.Ferchaud: Well, I mean, I remember when Leo Messi moved to play at Inter Miami, somebody posted a video of him at Publix, and everybody was like, “Oh my gosh, how cool. He’s at Publix, you know, one of the most famous people in the world. And they shop at Publix.” I think people actually really respond to stuff like, “This is a real person. He shops at Publix.” Social media has changed the amount of access we get with celebrities.[Music.]Valdez: Megan, there’s sort of this inversion happening in which, maybe, influencers who gained followers by being quote-unquote “authentic” and letting you into their lives are now curating their lives more similarly to how the studios and the actors have traditionally done. And celebrities—who have historically been very curated and manicured—are showing us parts of their lives that are more authentic.Garber: Yes, definitely. I think that’s such a good point. And I also wonder whether the inversion you’re describing is also just a matter of technological logistics—just a function, basically, of the way we now interact with each other through screens. This is something else that Marshall McLuhan talked about. You know, we may think about technology as gadgets that we build and use and, most importantly, that we control. But he said that tech also controls us.Valdez: Oh yeah.Garber: Yeah. Like, technology basically has an ideology baked into it in some way, where, you know, each new piece of technology—whether it’s a newspaper or a radio or a TV or a smartphone—has assumptions basically baked into it about how the human should interact with it.Valdez: Yes.Garber: And when we interact with those devices over time, that kind of conditions us to live according to those assumptions: according to the way that the technology, you know, guides us to live. So print mediums encourage us to think in ways that are basically, you know, printy—linear, logical. Valdez: Right.Garber: And screen mediums are much more visceral and immediate.Valdez: Yeah. And what about AI? Where is that going to fit into all of this? Right now there is just a lot of discussion around how AI is learning about us through large-language models, but how is it going to impact the way we think and how we look for connection?Garber: Yes, yes, yes.Valdez: We’re in this moment where it’s actually becoming quite hard for people to be able to discern instantly if something is even AI or not.Garber: Yeah. Yup.Valdez: So what do we call that relationship?Garber: Mmm. I asked Dr. Ferchaud about that. I wanted to know, especially, if the relationships that people are building with AI could still be considered parasocial. Or if—as the bots learn how to imitate human connection—we should think differently about our relationships with AI.[Music.]Ferchaud: It is parasocial insomuch as that it’s one-sided, which is part of the definition of what parasocial is. But because the illusion of it being two-sided is so much deeper than, like, you’re watching somebody on TV, right?Garber: Yeah. Yeah.Ferchaud: So if we think about, like, a chatbot talking to you and you talking to it—it certainly seems more social in one sense, because you’re talking and getting a response. But generally speaking, they don’t have memory in the same way that humans do. And they don’t build relationships the same way humans do. As of right now, I’m sure, you know, I’m not—[Laughter.]—an AI person who’s designing and developing AI. And so they might listen to this and be like, “Just you wait.”Garber: [Laughter.] Yeah, that’s right. There’s a bot that’s remembering you right now.Ferchaud: I’m gonna train my bot right now.Garber: Promise I’m not a bot.[Laughter.][Music.]Valdez: AI definitely feels like another evolution of the technology and the tools that we’ve seen. And, just like with those other tools, and with those other technologies and that other evolution, it’s really a bit incumbent on us—as people who are using those tools and technologies—to make sure that we’re not forming any sort of, you know, bad relationship to it. Like, we’ve got to check ourselves. Just like, you know: Anybody could have a potentially bad relationship in a parasocial relationship where they take it too far. With AI, we’re going to have to do the same thing.Garber: Oh, I love that comparison. You know, we learn in adulthood to build boundaries in those relationships to protect ourselves, often, and to manage our vulnerabilities. Yeah, and our intimacies. And protect other people, too.Valdez: Right.Garber: And maybe we are in the kind of preteen phase of figuring out the relationship that we have with AI.Valdez: Mmm. The preteen phase, the most fun phase to go through. [Laughter.]Garber: And maybe the hardest, too; yeah.Valdez: Interestingly, it’s also a phase where we are shifting our relationships to be more personal in nature. Researchers have found that this is the time you’re sharing more intimate thoughts with people outside your families. You’re letting people into your inner life. So actually, maybe describing this time with our devices as a sort of adolescence is really appropriate.Garber: Yeah. And adolescence is also so, like, future-oriented, right? So much of that phase of life isn’t just about the relationships you’re forging, but about looking ahead and sort of figuring out how you want to be, who you want to become. And I think that’s useful, here, too—thinking about what kind of digital adulthood we want to create together, and especially what types of relationships we want to be building with each other.Valdez: I actually think it’s really important that we’re not too quick to demonize this behavior. Like, what’s clear to me is that parasocial relationships are actually fine and normal to have. I mean, for some people, yes, there is a small risk of these relationships turning dysfunctional. But largely, parasocial relationships fulfill some sort of need we have in our lives.Garber: Yes, and a really profound need too, I think. I’ve been thinking:We tend to talk about social media and bots and the web in general as things that are totally new and, you know, unprecedented. And therefore so hard to figure out. But the machines are really just new tools for doing this very ancient thing: which, like you said, is connecting with each other. Humans are social animals. And we’ll find ways to be social, whether it’s on a Zoom call, in person, or on a podcast.Valdez: Well, it’s been really nice connecting with you, Megan.Garber: Nice connecting with you too, Andrea![Music.]Garber: That’s all for this episode of How to Know What’s Real. This episode was hosted by Andrea Valdez and me, Megan Garber. Our producer is Natalie Brennan. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.[Music.]Valdez: Next time on How to Know What’s Real:danah boyd: When we go online, you know, there’s joy in interacting with the people we know. But there’s also pleasure to, you know, what I think of as that, you know, the digital street, right? The ability to just see other people living their lives in ways that you’re just like, Wow, that’s different, and I’m intrigued. Garber: What we can learn from urbanization about how to live in a crowded, bustling digital world.We’ll be back with you on Monday.

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