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Need to Dust Off Your Social Skills?
As we move through the spring of The Great Vaccination, many of us are feeling cautious optimism, and also its flip side: creeping dread. Maybe you have a sense of ambivalence about how to interact with
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You’re Gonna Miss Zoom When It’s Gone
If there’s a villain of the pandemic, other than COVID-19, it’s probably Zoom. The videochatting platform is making people tired, it’s making people awkward, and it’s making people sick of their own faces. Zoom is such a shoddy substitute for
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Are We Heading for a Post-Pandemic ‘Roaring 2020s,’ With Parties and Excess?
This has been a year of extreme social deprivation. But the pandemic — like all pandemics before it — eventually will end. Then what? Will we easily transition from isolation back into the real world?
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When Should You End a Conversation? Probably Sooner Than You Think
While studying for his master’s degree at the University of Oxford, Adam Mastroianni confronted a fear common to many party goers: Would he get stuck in a conversation with no polite way out? Then, Mastroianni
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The Pandemic Has Erased Entire Categories of Friendship
… American culture does not have many words to describe different levels or types of friendship, but for our purposes, sociology does provide a useful concept: weak ties. The term was coined in 1973 by the Stanford
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Five Things Worth Knowing About Empathy
A tortoise lies on its back, legs waving in distress, until a second tortoise crawls up to turn it over. Millions have watched this scene on YouTube, with many leaving heartfelt comments. “Great sense of solidarity,”