Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. is a senior reporter and author of the Optimizer newsletter. She has more than 13 years of experience reporting ...

The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. The AI-powered Friend ...

My friendships exist in silos. Each hangout is a feverish one-on-one where we share fries and eye contact, confessions, rants, gossip, and mutual attempts at amateur therapy. This patchwork of ...

I wanted to be a somewhat funny father—not just humorous outside the home (there are quite a few such fathers around us), but also affectionate and friend-like inside. In reality, I thought I upheld ...

Real friendship doesn’t shout. It just shows up, year after year, in the small, steady ways nobody puts on a postcard — the late-night text after a bad day, the friend who flies across the country to ...

Good friends are hard to find. Research has found that support from friends can provide stronger well-being than support from family relationships. Having a close bond with our peers goes a long way.