Emotions and Relationships

I am a contributing editor at Scientific American and write the Brain Waves blog for Psychology Today (you can find those posts here). My work has also appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, Vogue and many other publications. Earlier in my career, I was on staff at Newsweek, and People, among other places and I’ve included a few of my old favorites from those days.

The pandemic tested our friendships. Which ones will survive?

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: BRYAN GEE/THE GLOBE AND MAIL. SOURCE IMAGE: ISTOCK Back at the very beginning of the pandemic, when no one had cancelled anything yet but we were eyeing the headlines with a growing dread, I noticed a detail buried in the news here in New York. Our second case…

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How to end a friendship: Should you address it directly, or simply unsubscribe?

Ghosting/Unsubscribing, concept (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images) I’ve spent years reporting on the emerging science of friendship. Here’s what I’ve learned about ending one Rachel Jones has unsubscribed. I stared at the computer screen—looking at the list of people who had opted out from my author newsletter. I get it. People…

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What Happens When Kids Don’t See Their Peers for Months

Socializing is a crucial part of growing up. The pandemic brought it to a halt.

Had the spring of 2020 gone as planned, a day in the life of an average child would have meant actual classrooms, baseball games, middle-school plays, and birthday parties where kids ate too much cake instead of waving from the back seat as a parent drove them past their friend’s…

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I needed help to sort a lifetime of my mother’s belongings

Moving had been a fraught subject even before my mom got sick. After her diagnosis, we found an organizer-slash-diplomat

I stood in the house where I grew up and considered a stack of moving boxes. All of them bore the same word, scrawled with a Sharpie: HEAVY. They weren’t, really. “Heavy” was a code word, a signal from the woman I had hired to orchestrate my mother’s move from…

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What nature can teach us about friendship in the time of coronavirus

The coronavirus pandemic will push our relationships to the limits, but the animal kingdom can show us how important friendship can be.

Until a few weeks ago, most people had never contemplated, or even heard of, social distancing. But now, thanks to the coronavirus outbreak, it’s everywhere. No gatherings, no getting together with friends, no going out to bars or restaurants or sporting events. This extreme instruction to stay away from each other…

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Friendship Is a Lifesaver

Science is showing us the best remedy for aging is friends.

My mother-in-law, Carol, lives alone. It was her 75th birthday the other day. Normally, I send flowers. Normally, she spends some part of the day with the family members who live nearby and not across the country as my husband, Mark, and I do. And normally, she makes plans to…

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