For the first time in the 21st century, the United States has approved a new sunscreen ingredient. Well, new to us.

It’s called bemotrizinol, also known as BEMT, and it’s been available in Europe and Asia for years. But the peculiar way that sunscreen is regulated in the United States — as an over-the-counter drug rather than a cosmetic — had long prevented it from coming to American store shelves. 

In 2020, however, Congress ordered the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to overhaul its sunscreen approval process, and in 2024, DSM Nutritionals, which manufactures a bemotrizinol-based sunscreen, asked the FDA for approval. After a review of relevant safety and efficacy data, bemotrizinol has become the first new sunscreen ingredient to be approved for sale in the US since the late 1990s. The Environmental Working Group, which has lobbied for bemotrizinol’s approval since 2019, called its approval “a monumental victory for health and wellness.” 

Dr. Adewole Adamson, who is a dermatologist and assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas at Austin, agreed that this is a win for consumers. “We haven’t been able to really have any innovation in US-based sunscreens since last millennium,” he told me. 

Sunscreen use has ticked downward in the US, at the same time that concerns about sunscreen seeping into your body and causing adverse health effects have risen. BEMT’s boosters hope it can change that trend by promising broad protection, a more aesthetically appealing application, and less risk of it permeating your skin.

Sunscreen is already complicated, as Vox’s Allie Volpe covered in her 7 burning questions about sunscreen explainer. Now there’s a new ingredient to consider. Here’s what you should know.

Sunscreen and the sunscreen backlash, briefly explained

The sun emits a spectrum of ultraviolet rays, including two types — UVA and UVB — that can burn your skin if you are exposed for too long without protection. 

That is why experts advise consumers to make sure they are buying “broad spectrum” sunscreen, which means it provides protection against both kinds of UV rays. Those products usually combine several different agents (or “filters”) that protect against different parts of that spectrum. 

“Some filters only cover part of the spectrum, so you have to combine a bunch of them in order to get that broad-based coverage,” Adamson said. 

Sunscreens are either “mineral” or “chemical.” Both types are equally effective if used correctly, assuming they have the same sun protection factor, or SPF, but each come with their own trade-offs. Mineral sunscreens leave unsightly white residue, while chemical sunscreens have faced widespread safety concerns in recent years.

The major shift came in 2019, when the FDA announced an overhaul in its safety assessment of some of the most popular sunscreen ingredients, sparking a backlash against chemical sunscreen in particular. The agency said that the two ingredients primarily used in mineral sunscreens — zinc oxide and titanium dioxide — were generally regarded as safe for human use. Two ingredients (aminobenzoic acid and trolamine salicylate) were said to be unsafe, and more than a half-dozen other ingredients used in chemical sunscreens were left a question mark due to “insufficient data.” New research soon followed that suggested that the ingredients in chemical sunscreens could seep into your blood and body in concerning concentrations, raising the specter of uncertain long-term health effects.

In response to the new findings and the doubts they raised about such a widely used product, anti-sunscreen advocacy spread, bolstered by the broader wellness and MAHA movements. As the Washington Post described, some people online boasted of stopping their sunscreen use — despite its clear effectiveness in preventing skin cancer, which kills thousands of people in the US every year — and promoted DIY formulas featuring, for example, oil and butter. (They do not confer the same protection.) Some influencers have even argued for the health benefits of more sun exposure.

One consumer analysis found that the percentage of Americans who believed sunscreen is toxic grew from 17 percent in 2021 to 24 percent in 2025. And, at the same time, the share of people who reporting using sunscreen at all has slightly declined.

Bemotrizonal is broad spectrum and could be more cosmetically appealing

Into that messy context comes a new sunscreen ingredient. 

A big part of what makes bemotrizinol appealing is that it provides protection against both types of dangerous ultraviolet rays on its own. And not only does it provide that broad level of protection, Adamson said, but it could also be more “cosmetically elegant,” as he put it. It won’t leave those white streaks that mineral sunscreens do, which could encourage more people to actually put it on. 

The shift toward mineral sunscreen in the wake of the chemical sunscreen panic has brought one unfortunate side effect: that white film on the skin of beachgoers and baseball game fans across the country. If you have ever applied zinc-centric sunscreen, you probably know the look (and that heavy feeling of the cream on the skin).

Chemical sunscreens can be annoying for people with sensitive skin, but by and large, people seem to prefer those products because they look better when wearing them. BEMT could make it easier for manufacturers to produce sunscreens that provide that broad level of coverage while being aesthetically more pleasing.

BEMT also comes with fewer safety concerns

The other hope is that bemotrizinol products will ameliorate some of the safety concerns that have driven sunscreen skepticism since 2019, when the one-two punch of the FDA’s announcement that most ingredients had “insufficient” data to judge their safety, followed by a worrying study, damaged the reputation of chemical sunscreens for the better part of a decade.

The study, published in JAMA in May 2019, showed several popular chemical sunscreen ingredients appeared to penetrate a user’s body in volumes sufficient enough that they should trigger new safety studies. The authors noted that some of the ingredients had previously been found in human breast milk and other bodily fluids. The findings raised real concerns, thus the FDA’s policy shift — but those concerns also took on a life of their own in the health and wellness social media ecosystem, stoking doubts about sunscreen overall.

“That freaked everyone out. And everyone was like, ‘I don’t want to do chemical sunscreens. They’re terrible. They’re getting [in] your blood. They’re endocrine disruptors.’ All of that kind of fearmongering,” Adamson said. “This ingredient doesn’t seem to do that.”

He pointed me to preliminary evidence from clinical trials that indicates BEMT does not generally lead to the same kind of concentration in human plasma. The drug has already been in use in other countries for decades and has accrued a strong safety record. But the FDA’s policy of regulating sunscreen as an over-the-counter drug, rather than as a cosmetic, sets a higher standard for approval, which meant that it took more than 25 years for BEMT to finally cross the Atlantic from Europe to the US.

BEMT will be coming soon to stores near you

DSM Nutritionals will have exclusive rights for 18 months to sell their proprietary BEMT formulation Parsol Shield in the United States; after that, other companies will be able to sell sunscreens with it in them too. Going forward, consumers can check for bemotrizinol or BEMT on the ingredients list.

Whether or not you opt for BEMT, here is the thing to keep in mind about protection when you’re buying this or any sunscreen: SPF, or sun protection factor. Experts say that the ideal is between SPF 30 and SPF 50, which blocks 98 percent of the sun’s rays. Just remember that SPF above 50 adds minimal additional protection, and doesn’t mean you can spend longer in the sun without reapplying.

Advocates hope BEMT can revive people’s faith in sunscreen which, despite the recent controversies, remains a lifesaving product. Skin cancer is still the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the United States, with more than 200,000 new cases expected this year. “American consumers deserve access to the best available sun protection,” Alexa Friedman, senior scientist at EWG, said in a statement. “Today they’re finally getting closer to it.”

Caitlin Squier-Roper, 45, recently discovered an intriguing club on Instagram: Philly Cooks a Book, a monthly meetup where locals prepare and share an assigned recipe from a specified cookbook. She could’ve enrolled through the group’s social media and shown up to a meeting, dish in hand, not knowing a single soul. So she held off on joining.

It wasn’t until Squier-Roper and her husband Anthony Fernandez, 42, attended the Philadelphia Activities Fair that she decided to get involved. Squier-Roper and Fernandez recently moved to Philadelphia after living in Seattle for over a decade and didn’t have a network in their new city beyond their families. When they heard about the Activities Fair, a one-day exhibition of clubs, civic groups, and community organizations enrolling new members, the couple thought it the perfect opportunity to spread their social wings. 

Thousands of other people had the same idea. 

On a Sunday in April, around 2,300 attendees crowded every inch of available space in a historic downtown civic center to discover, and potentially sign up, for a club. Outside, it was the perfect kind of spring day: abundant sunshine, a light breeze, giving way for the serendipitous pop-ins from curious passersby. Inside, spectators shuffled, shoulder to shoulder, in single-file lines up and down the building’s winding staircase and through two rooms of tables representing more than 40 clubs, including a community for Black artists, a book club but for podcasts, and an a cappella group, stopping to chat with organization leaders and join their ranks. It was in one of these glacial plods around the ground floor of the event space when I met Squier-Roper and Fernandez. They’d already signed up for the cookbook club, the a cappella choir, and a cycling group.

The event itself, structured as it was, was novel for the couple and Squier-Roper said she was nervous to attend. “It seems out of the box and vulnerable,” she told me. But, looking around the room, she was in good company. “It’s helpful to see how many other people are here in the same searching situation,” she said. “It’s pretty cool.”

If Squier-Roper and Fernandez have felt socially adrift as of late, they certainly are not alone. The 2025 American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey found that about half of US adults reported feeling isolated, left out, or lacking companionship at least some of the time. According to Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Making Caring Common Project’s 2024 survey, 21 percent of respondents said they were seriously lonely, over two thirds of whom felt like they lacked belonging in meaningful groups. 

Loneliness has become something of a buzzword: The US surgeon general and the World Health Organization have issued warnings about its harms, and brands and startups shill their products as the potential solution. Despite the shallowness of viral marketing campaigns and AI chatbots designed to absorb the role of friends, the problem is serious. Decades of research supports the dangers of chronic loneliness and social isolation: increased cardiovascular health risks; links to personality disorders, suicide, cognitive decline, and depressive symptoms; even a higher likelihood of mortality. 

Although many Americans say they’re lonely, and perhaps have become more aware of its negative impacts, they don’t seem to be prioritizing activities that foster connection. According to the American Time Use Survey, people spent nearly half of their waking time — more than  six-and-a-half-hours — alone in 2024, compared to just under five hours in 2003. Young people spent 45 percent more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2010. What are we doing with all this time in solitude? Watching TV, staring at our phones, gaming, mostly.

Against this backdrop, a crop of community-minded organizers stumbled into a similar train of thought: People are disconnected (perhaps I am one of these people). My city has a treasure trove of hobby clubs and civic organizations. If I lead a horse to water, can I get it to drink? From this seed of an idea, a genre of connectedness events was born — the activity fair, stuff to do fair, joining fair. From Philadelphia to Oakland, a wave of well-attended one-day activity fairs are the latest grassroots efforts to combat loneliness and connect people to their communities. These festivals operate under a simple premise: getting people in a room with club representatives is more effective and less overwhelming than scouring the internet, and it lowers the barrier to entry. 

“If there are things to join, people will join them,” Pete Davis, co-director of the documentary Join or Die, told me. But first they have to find them.

A nation of clubs

From the dawn of civilization, humans have hung out in group settings. The Romans had professional organizations known as collegia, medieval Europe had guilds, Victorian England had (exclusively male) social clubs. In the United States, people formed and joined groups of all kinds, from the Freemasons and abolitionist societies to women’s suffrage clubs and the Elks.

But participation in these groups has declined, as political scientist Robert Putnam famously explained in his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, first published in 2000. Putnam found that enrollment in clubs of all kinds had dropped since the 1960s. Conditions have seemingly not improved. The inaugural Social Connection in America report, released last year, found that two-thirds of participants don’t belong to or never attend a meeting of any sort of organization or club. A 2024 survey from the Survey Center on American Life found that fewer than two in 10 Americans were members of hobby or activity groups, neighborhood associations, sports leagues, or parent groups.

Group membership confers many benefits. Research has shown that joining a community group led to reduced loneliness and increased social support for older adults. A scientific review found that sports team participation improved well-being, reduced stress, and increased social functioning. Being in multiple groups makes people happier. 

The regularity with which you meet makes clubs effective friendship-builders: If you see someone frequently enough, it’s easier to forge a relationship with them. Even if full-fledged friendship isn’t the goal, simply making acquaintances is sufficient to stave off loneliness and foster a sense of belonging. As Putnam wrote in Bowling Alone, “As a rough rule of thumb, if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half.”

America has appeared to be club-curious as of late. In the years following the Covid-19 lockdowns, many people have yearned for tangible social connection, with the proliferation of supper clubs, run clubs, silent book clubs, and other activity- and identity-focused groups. “What I’m seeing is really in this last year, such a renewed interest in hobbies, hobbies for health,” said Julia Hotz, the author of The Connection Cure: The Prescriptive Power of Movement, Nature, Art, Service, and Belonging.

Participation “on-ramps”

Activity fairs are the natural next step in bridging the gap between the crop of niche and hyper-local clubs and a curious, but overwhelmed, populace. The concept is no different than welcome week activities at college campuses where a quorum of university clubs table and recruit new members. Designed to reach members of the wider community, club fairs operate as a live directory of a city’s offerings, all under one roof. “There’s no shortage of Instagram accounts and apps of things to do, concerts, events,” Brian Adoff, the founder of Join Philly, the group that organized the Philadelphia Activities Fair, told me. “And people still can’t find stuff.”

Adoff has long understood the benefits of clubs. In 2023, he and a friend founded a choir, bringing strangers of all ages to bars for impromptu concerts. Many attendees, he noticed, were attending solo, new to the city, or both, and formed friendships from the group. But it wasn’t until he attended a screening of Join or Die, a 2023 documentary extolling the benefits of joining clubs, compounding on Putnam’s work, that Adoff thought, I want to do this.

When I checked in with Adoff at the Philadelphia Activities Fair, he was standing on a stage overlooking the ground floor of the event, getting a good glimpse of the hundreds of locals learning about the dozens of clubs he’d brought there. 

Join Philly initially began as an online directory of clubs and associations, and the issue wasn’t finding clubs to showcase — there were plenty of those. It was getting people to participate. Sure, locals could scour the internet for a hobby group, but what if they weren’t even sure what to search for? What if they’re a little shy and walking into a room full of people they don’t know makes their stomach turn? Putting the club-curious in the same room as the groups solved some of these issues, a concept Adoff refers to as a participatory “on-ramp.” “That was the first on-ramp,” Adoff said. “How do we make this easier?”

C.C. Tellez, 48, the executive director of Lez Run, an LGBTQ+ running club, found this direct approach effective at quelling prospective members’ concerns. “Online, people like the idea of something, but they’re afraid to take the first step,” Tellez told me over the thrum of the Philadelphia Activities Fair. Tellez was approached in person by people who follow Lez Run on Instagram but were concerned about the pace, about being new. “We let them know we welcome everybody: different paces, different setups, whatever you’ve got going on, we welcome it here,” Tellez said.

“Versions of you”

I first became aware of activity fairs in 2025, when I learned of one happening in Lancaster, a small Pennsylvania city not far from Philadelphia. Hundreds of people crowded into a community center in the middle of winter to learn about a brewing club, rugby team, a mechanical keyboard club. 

The event’s organizer, Sav Thorpe Capizzi, had a lightbulb moment after a friend invited her square dancing a few years ago, something she’d never done before. As she do-si-do-ed with strangers, Capizzi wasn’t worried about how she looked or her skill (or lack thereof). “I just felt so alive in that moment and I was just so grateful to the part of me that just said yes to potentially looking a little foolish,” she told me. “And I was like, ‘Okay, so I need to invite everybody I know to every club I can think of right now.’”

Unaware of any other event geared specifically toward adults, Capizzi sent an email first to the town library, then a guild of crafters, and eventually cobbled together a list of exhibitors. She dubbed her version the Stuff to Do Fair and from that initial event sprung an offshoot in a smaller Pennsylvania town and, also the more robust second-annual Lancaster Stuff to Do Fair. This year, Capizzi doubled the amount of exhibiting clubs to 50 and nearly 600 people attended, she said.

In Capizzi’s estimation, fear of being bad at something is the biggest barrier to entry for any potential new club attendee — feeling like you’re not the kind of person who has the body for roller derby or the wit for improv comedy. Activity fairs give the shy, the uncertain, the hesitant permission to imagine themselves as someone who does. “There’s this air of novelty of all of the versions of you that exist at each of these tables,” she said. “It’s exciting, it’s thrilling, and I think it really gives people the opportunity to see themselves actually becoming the kind of person who enrolls in a class or takes up sketching after so many years.”

An excuse to be social

The Stuff to Do Fair, as well as the Philadelphia Activities Fair and the other club fairs I came across in my reporting, were organized by individuals, and perhaps that’s part of their charm. They’re scrappy and community-driven. But it’s easy to imagine a world in which these events might be sanctioned by local governments to promote public health. Social prescribing, a practice where patients receive a script not for pills but attendance at a community group, has gained momentum around the world, with medical professionals connecting patients to cycling clubs, performing arts groups, or volunteer organizations. Recent research has found social prescribing in the United Kingdom, where it was first developed, has led to improvements in wellbeing, happiness, and life satisfaction.

In place of a medical professional linking individuals to groups and activities that might benefit their mental or physical health, there could be activity fairs. “In other countries where we have more government support for social prescribing programs, what that government support goes to are up-to-date databases of the different activities that exist,” Hotz, the author of The Connection Cure, told me. If online listings and databases are out of date, well-intentioned would-be participants could be easily deterred, however motivated they might be. Solely relying on the internet to disseminate cub information means those with unreliable access or who aren’t tech-savvy are shut out from opportunities, too.

“An activity fair, giving you the information in real time and letting you meet with the people part of it in real time, I think just goes such a long way in making sure that your interest becomes a reality,” Hotz said.

Social prescribing gives people permission to do something meaningful, and to be convivial in the process. And so do activity fairs. “What a joining fair is is answering the question, What are you doing alone that you could be doing together? by having a cooperative recruiting event,” said Pete Davis, one of the directors of Join or Die.

In addition to a traditional screening tour, Davis, and his co-director and sister Rebecca (who was a supervising producer for the second season of Vox’s Netflix show, Explained) helped dozens of community organizers across the country host their own joining fairs in order to promote their film. But even if event planners didn’t work with the Davises directly, their documentary served as a point of inspiration.

Like Adoff in Philadelphia, Jared Joiner watched the Davises’ documentary, and it set the wheels in motion for his own fair in Oakland. That his actual last name is Joiner is not lost on him. “I had not thought about it in this world of joining clubs and joining organizations until the first time that I watched Join or Die and they say ‘joiner’ so many times in it and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, am I destined to do this work?’” he told me. 

The same day that thousands of Philadelphians signed up for clubs at Join Philly, Oakland hosted its first Join-Up at a brewery in the midst of torrential downpours. Although the event had a smaller footprint — about 250 attendees and 22 organizations — many club representatives told Joiner they ran out of sign-up sheets. 

Catalysts for connection

There’s something to be said about the kind of person who attends an activity fair. “There’s definitely a self-selecting group that’s like, ‘I’m going to get off the couch to go to this thing, so I better sign up for stuff once I’m there,’” Joiner says. But there are a myriad of motivating factors getting those people off the couch in the first place: a recent move, a loss, a birth, a new job, a desire to unplug, to learn a new skill. 

The consequence, deliberate or not, is the forging of new social connections. When our worlds shrink to the confines of our homes and our screens, intentionally exposing ourselves to newfound (or newly rediscovered) activities and new people helps broaden them again. Clubs, with their regular, predetermined cadence and specific focus, are the ideal entry points to connection: Striking up a conversation is simple when you already have something in common — the activity itself. 

Toward the end of my afternoon at the Philadelphia Activities Fair, I ran into Deborah Winter and Terry Borden, both 71, as they finished a lap on the first floor of the exhibition. Winter is moving to Philly soon, and although Borden has been a resident for two decades, they both are still on that never-ending path toward community. “It’s hard to find your people,” Borden told me. 

Through clubs they signed up for — a book club, a skill-share — they hope to find both friendships and more casual relationships, something they’re already practicing. As it turns out, the two women are new friends themselves, recently introduced by a mutual. 

Even if they didn’t branch out at any of their new groups, I thought, at least they could reminisce, some day in the future, about this event, about the time they went out on a limb and joined a few clubs. Maybe the groups were boring or not quite the right fit, maybe they weren’t. But they tried something unfamiliar, together, and that’s something.

Forty-one years ago, the late singer, songwriter, and education activist Whitney Houston urged us to teach children and let them lead the way.  

Decades later, some believe that this means instructing kids to use scissors as forks; teaching them that zookeepers can sweep under water; and leading them to believe that magical, mystical, rainbow-hunting unicorns speak like an HR manager delivering a performance review.  

There’s also video after video and post after post claiming that it’s not just easy to write and illustrate a children’s book using AI prompts, but also that you can make thousands of dollars doing so. 

The good news for authors and illustrators — as well as parents who do not want their children to eat salad with office supplies — is that AI in kids’ books is still relatively easy to spot, particularly in illustrations. But the willingness of so many adults to outsource such a foundational and joyful piece of childhood to a computer speaks to a bigger issue: the fundamental misunderstanding of what makes children’s books meaningful and distinctly human. 

Children’s books are about how much we respect children

Books are often the first pieces of art that adults — who were all children at one point in their lives — bestow on the next generation. They’re also the way we teach children about the way the world works, whether that’s the ABCs, shapes and colors, or how to be a good person. 

There’s a misconception that because kids are young, they might not notice or appreciate quality in their literature the way that grown-ups perceive it in work made for adults. That type of thinking not only underestimates how smart kids are, but is also an abdication of the responsibility adults have to nurture and inspire young people. Kids deserve art that was created and chosen for them intentionally, by people who are actively thinking about the way the child will receive it. 

AI “cannot make a conscious choice,” Megan Kearney, an artist who teaches children’s book illustration at a college level, told me. “It’s giving you things that look similar to other things. It’s giving you things that fit into certain trends, but there’s no conscious decision-making happening.” To write or illustrate a book for kids, “you really need to be someone who cares about the development of children, their emotional development, and their intellectual development,” Kearney said. 

Despite how AI appears to make writing and drawing children’s books seem easy, doing it well actually takes an enormous amount of skill. The people who do it professionally are dedicated to understanding how children process information, and know how to connect words and pictures in a way that will resonate with a young reader.

“If you’re willing to take shortcuts, you’re probably not fully engaging with any of those things or those children either,” she added, noting this is exactly what she tells her students. “If people don’t care enough to make a thing — anything — why would anyone care enough to read it?”

The idea that AI could somehow generate a thoughtful story accompanied by beautiful, moving art is not only disrespectful to the artists creating these books, but to the children reading them, Kearney said. “You’re really underestimating the intelligence of your readers,” Kearney said. “You have not spent enough time with this medium to know enough to identify what is good and what is bad, and now you are producing it without that knowledge.” 

It’s fairly easy to avoid AI children’s books (for now)

If you’re motivated to avoid AI-generated books right now, it’s actually pretty achievable. But it requires adults to be conscious, savvy readers. 

“Because kids can’t control their access, they’re not making those purchasing choices; adults are doing that,” Kearney said. “If a parent is the gateway or an adult is the gateway to what kids have access to — that will be what shapes their tastes and that will shape how they develop.”

Essentially, choosing books for kids has to be a conscious decision; if you’re doing it mindlessly, it’s more likely that the books you choose will be a bit mindless too. And further, if books are a way children learn about our world and how to exist in it, do we really want them basing this fundamental knowledge on something a machine spat out?   

The good news is that you probably aren’t going to find AI-generated books in a bookstore at the moment. The experts I spoke to said that these books are usually the product of self-publishing and mostly live on Amazon. That may explain why so many of the ones you see people discussing online were presents from relatives or friends (who might be looking to buy quick gifts online) or show up in dentists’ or doctors’ offices. If you’re not physically paging through a book, it’s harder to spot AI. 

Buyers for bookstores, and especially indie shops, are more discerning, experts say. 

“The thing about independent bookstores is that these people have their finger on the pulse. They all chat with each other,” Rex Ogle, an author who writes children’s and middle grade books as well as comics and graphic novels, told me. “If someone says, This book is AI, they’ll be like, Let’s take this off our shelves. Because independent bookstores, in my opinion, are very much the last refuge supporting writers.” 

Ogle also said that major publishers currently have no-AI clauses in their contracts with authors and illustrators. For now, he says, the feeling among him and his cohort is cautious but not quite paranoid. What worries him is a future in which publishers loosen those restrictions because they see AI as a way to cut costs. 

“Books do not pay very well, so I need to write a lot to pay my bills,” he said, noting that he’s published 17 books in six years. “What happens when someone sits down at their laptop and has AI write an entire 240-page graphic novel that takes me weeks, sometimes months to write, and they can do it in an afternoon?” 

The impact could be even more devastating, he says, on artists, because illustrations usually take more time than text does, which might incentivize publishers (and even writers) to use AI instead. Ogle also said that some of his writer colleagues have, in private conversations, told him they’ve used AI to help generate an outline or the start of a story — a use he feels strongly against. 

“I think there are writers who are like, I would never use AI except for the outline, or helping me put the script together and then I go back through and clean it up and again, to me, that’s cheating,” Ogle said. “That’s like having a robot run the football field, and then at the last minute you step in for the touchdown.” 

Kearney, the illustrator, is slightly more hopeful. 

She believes that kids will genuinely want to read things that they enjoy. AI, in its current state, can’t deliver that — no matter what self-publishers are telling their followers. Kids aren’t going to have a personal, internal moment with a book that a computer put together for the same reason that adults aren’t. 

To be clear, just because something is human-made doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. Not every book is going to be great, and not every author or illustrator is going to knock it out of the park every single time out. Again, that’s why it’s worth actually looking at the books you’re buying for kids, and making an earnest attempt to choose something you think is worthy, even if you need to buy online. But creating original work, even if it’s awful, is still important to Kearney. 

“We already have a lot of bad books out there,” Kearney added. “We don’t need a bad book machine!” 

If you’ve ever taken a yoga class or gotten a massage, you may have heard that stress is stored in specific parts of the body: Emotion in the hips. Strain in the shoulders. Anxiety in the gut. And, it seems lately, particularly online, trauma in the jaw.

On social media, videos abound of young women lying face up on massage tables with someone’s hands in their mouths. Labeled as a “buccal massage,” “jaw release,” or “intraoral massage,” the videos depict clients weeping after having their cheeks and jaws manipulated from the inside of their mouths. The caption of one recent video read: “A lot of the time when we work on the jaw, we see deep emotional releases from anger to grief and sadness. It’s as if every time we don’t express ourselves, the emotions move up through the body and end at the mouth.” “While other massages work surface-level, buccal massage reaches the deep facial muscles where we store our unspoken words, unexpressed grief, and unprocessed trauma,” said another. Recently, the singer LeAnn Rimes went viral for appearing in such a video herself, crying after a “deep jaw release.”

Experiencing tension in the jaw isn’t a new phenomenon, though, Dan Ginader, a physical therapist in New York, told Vox. Jaw pain is easily identifiable — maybe you’re a lifelong grinder — and once you notice it (or become aware of it through social media), the ache is hard to ignore. The fact that so many people are talking about the jaw’s association with emotional release right now could be rooted in the particularly stressful state of the world.

Our minds and bodies are connected, but do our jaws (or any specific body part) really hold “trauma,” as these practitioners claim? Probably not. People do experience real relief when their jaw muscles are massaged, experts say, but the intense emotional reaction happening on social media is actually fairly uncommon in the real world. 

How your jaw stores tension

Stress impacts nearly every aspect of your body; it’s a well-established cause of muscle tension, shortness of breath, increased heart rate and cortisol production, and gastrointestinal distress. These reactions are your body’s way of fighting off or fleeing from threats. 

Without a signal that the threat has passed, your body can hold onto the stress. “Over time, the brain and body begin treating tension like a baseline instead of a short term reaction,” Cheryl Groskopf, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles, told Vox in an email. “When you hear the phrase ‘our bodies store tension,’ it’s really about the nervous system repeatedly practicing certain survival responses.”

This stress might cause you to activate your shoulders, grind your teeth, and clench your jaw, all of which contribute to jaw pain. “People can store tension or store stress in all different parts of their body, the most common being the head and neck area,” Ginader said. “You hunch up your shoulders and that can create a lot of tension in your upper traps and any sort of tension that drifts into the neck will also drift into the jaw. One of my favorite physical therapy professors said that if you don’t know what to do with a case of jaw pain, just treat the neck and likely the jaw will follow suit.”

The stress can be rooted in something physical, too, according to Robert Kerstein, a retired prosthodontist whose career centered on bite alignment and muscle tension. For example, pain related to your teeth can be incredibly stressful and negatively affect your mental health. In a recent paper, Kerstein and his co-authors found that patients with jaw pain had lower cortisol levels after their teeth were slightly adjusted to reduce the amount of time their teeth were in contact when their jaw was moving. In another study, patients had lower levels of depression after their teeth were adjusted. In other words, “reshaping the teeth so that they have a lot less friction and create a lot less muscle activity” makes people less stressed and depressed, Kerstein said. 

The mental relief people feel after having their teeth adjusted isn’t due to unlocking trauma. “The depression went away, because they were no longer living in chronic pain,” Kerstein said. And, once you feel physically better, you might feel less stressed.

The emotional component of physical therapy

In his physical therapy practice, Ginader has seen patients experience an overwhelming emotional response similar to those he’s observed online, but it’s very rare and people shouldn’t expect to shed tears during a jaw massage, he said. A general sense of relief is much more common. “They oftentimes didn’t even realize how tight and tense and stressed they were until you remove it,” Ginader said. 

People who use their mouth and jaw frequently for work — musicians, actors — may have a bigger rush of feelings because their facial muscles are directly connected to their ability to earn a living, Ginader said. “There’s another layer of emotion, because you can start to become worried that you’re losing the way that you make money and you’re losing the thing that brings you life, and then, all of a sudden, somebody has given you the relief that you felt like you needed to get back to doing that thing,” he said.

Performers — and people who share their lives on social media — are also used to being vulnerable and in touch with their emotions, which may also explain the over-the-top reactions online, Ginader said.

“In some of the cases I think they might be hamming it up for the camera or they are just caught up in the moment,” Ginader said. “There is an emotional release to having longtime tension resolved but a lot of the reactions do seem to be a little over the top.”

Massage is beneficial, of course, but it doesn’t entirely address the underlying cause of the tension, which is either stress- or muscular-related. For Ginader’s patients who work office jobs, stress is typically the root issue, while performers often have tension due to physical overuse. 

If the source is stress, Ginader recommended practices that regulate your nervous system, like breathing exercises, meditation, gentle stretching, or yoga. For physical causes, Ginader suggested looking at your form in the gym to see if you’re overusing your trapezius (the muscle in your shoulder and upper back). If it’s becoming a chronic problem, you may also want to see a doctor, dentist, or both. Regardless of the specific cause, you may benefit from a massage of your jaw muscles, too. Ginader also recommended setting periodic reminders on your phone to check in on your body and posture: Are you clenching your jaw or shrugging your shoulders? If so, “just take a few deep breaths and allow everything to relax,” Ginader said.

Ultimately, the jaw does relate to emotions, since grinding your teeth is a common stress response, Kerstein, the retired prosthodontist, said. And a facial massage feels good in the moment. “There’s an emotional elation of positivity, but the symptoms will come back,” Kerstein said. “They’ll return, which is very well-documented, and none of the external therapies have any true longevity. … So the person will have an emotional relief because they feel better, but then they’ll also have the downside of it getting worse, returning, and having to deal with those emotions as well.” 

Ricky and Royce Marnell, 28-year-old fraternal twins from Orlando, Florida, have seldom done anything apart. Together, they competed on the wrestling team throughout their childhood and adolescence. On weekends, they’d venture to the nearby park to play football. When boredom struck, they’d head to the garage for a friendly game of ping pong. When it came to college, the brothers attended Florida State University (which they swear was merely a coincidence), where they also roomed together. Although they have different careers as adults — Ricky is a data analyst and Royce is a 3D artist — they find time to collaborate on a podcast about their twinness. They also share the majority of their friends.

Although the twins were in separate classes in elementary and middle school, Ricky took the lead on cultivating friendships. Royce was shy and uncomfortable, and he struggled to form social connections. So when Ricky, the extrovert, made plans, Royce tagged along. “It was also just always easier to lean on Ricky and just be friends with his friends because I didn’t have to put in any work,” Royce tells Vox. “They were always there.”

In college, they moved as a unit, picking up friends wherever they went — at orientation, outside of the dorm, in the elevator. At Ricky’s recent bachelor party, almost all of the attendees were mutual friends made during undergrad.

From birth, twins’ lives are inextricably linked. Brought up in the same environment at the same time, these siblings often inhabit similar educational, extracurricular, and social spaces, contributing to the expectation that twins share virtually everything, from interests to abilities. Because of this overlap, it makes sense twins would have overlap in their social circles, too. But as twins age and forge unique identities in young adulthood, they may find themselves making friends independently for the first time — a shift impacting both the sibling and friend relationships.

The unique experience of being a twin influences friendship

Being a twin doesn’t necessarily help or hinder the friend-making process, experts say. But having a constant companion may influence how twins approach friendship. When twins actively want to be more alike, they develop a common social network, according to research. At the same time, they often acknowledge being too dependent on one another, which might hold them back from making more friends. 

“The research has shown that there’s no difference in the numbers of friends, but the closeness piece may be a little bit different,” says Laurie Kramer, a professor of applied psychology at Northeastern University. “If you have someone who knows you so well…that you really trust and feel like you can confide in, you’re probably not going to need that many other friends in your life to have that kind of deep friendship, intimate friendship with.”

When it comes to twin social circles, there is plenty of overlap, but twin type impacts the extent of the commonality. Studies have found that identical twins share a majority of their friends while cross-gender fraternal twins had far less overlap.

“If you think about identical twins, they are genetically the same. Their similar genes predispose them to like similar places, people, and events. So they naturally gravitate towards the same kinds of people,” Nancy Segal, a psychology professor and director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University Fullerton, tells Vox. “Fraternal twins tend to go in different directions. They tend to have separate friends, and this is a trend that seems to remain fairly stable across the life span.”

Having a shared social network is usually a matter of convenience. One twin is usually more outgoing, Segal says, and may take the lead when making friends, especially if they’re in the same class as children. Even if they move in different social contexts and form relationships independently, it’s hard to avoid the other twin during playdates at home. 

Ironically, when kids are younger, they’re more likely to set clear boundaries with their twin, Kramer says: I want to play with Carly by myself today. Or they may hang out at their friend’s house without telling their sibling. It can be helpful to have these same frank conversations as they get older if they want to forge an independent relationship with a mutual friend.

In middle school, Royce Marnell remembers Ricky attempting to set such a boundary with him. Every day before class, Ricky and his friends would wander the halls with Royce tagging along. Ordinarily, it wasn’t a problem, but every once in a while, Ricky would tell his brother to kick rocks. “Ricky would just whisper in my ear, like, ‘Let me have this morning to myself,’ or ‘I want to talk to them about something and I don’t want you to be there,’” Royce says.

“Dang, I don’t remember doing that,” Ricky says. “I don’t really remember isolating Royce from my friend group because there was always guilt associated with that.”

That guilt was often reinforced by others in their lives: their parents and mutual friends asking why the other wasn’t invited. If Ricky wasn’t available to hang with a friend he made independently, the kid might reach out to Royce as backup. Their social lives, at times, felt out of their control. 

When a classmate only wants to befriend one twin, the rejection can send the other into a tailspin — because despite their perceived similarities, someone clearly prefers one to the other. “The existential questions about who we are and our personalities and [which] people like us, it heightens those concerns in a way that I think people with a different-age sibling just don’t [understand],” Kramer says. (As with all relationships, it can be difficult to articulate those unintelligible, intangible qualities that attract you to someone and repel you from others, even if they are a twin.)

As twins pursue independent lives, their friend groups diverge

By high school, twins start to forge their own paths and consider who they are as a unique individual opposed to a unit. Through a process known as deidentification, twins might play up their differences to minimize competition and jealousy, by, say, enrolling in different classes and extracurricular activities. “We see that during that time, there may be much more of an interest in each twin developing their own friendships,” Kramer says.

In college, this separation intensifies if the siblings attend different schools. On their own for the first time — not as one half of a pair, but as just another student — they embark on a potentially new experience of making friends solo. In her research, Kramer says fraternal twins are more eager to break free from their sibling, as opposed to identical twins who understand the inevitability of independence, but want to delay it.

This interdependence might hold twins back from expanding their social networks. In Kramer’s research, identical twins who attended the same college reported relying on their twin in moments of loneliness, perhaps to their detriment. “Some of them did say that they felt a little bit too comfortable with this arrangement because their sibling was always there and available,” Kramer says. “It didn’t put as much of a pressure on them to go out to be a little more extroverted than they might ordinarily prefer.”

Because the reality is, twins will have to live independently, even if they continue to live near (or with) their sibling. Employers and significant others typically don’t look for pairs. Having the social skills and confidence to forge new relationships without their twin as backup is valuable in the long term.  

It took until college for Jaclyn and Nick Lore-Edwards, 26, to transition from being known as “the twins” to simply “Jaclyn” and “Nick.” Growing up, the siblings had mutual friends; Jaclyn initially formed the relationships in elementary school, and those kids eagerly welcomed Nick. They both had the same interests — theater, books, dance, piano — and genuinely enjoyed being around each other, so they never had a reason to hang out with separate people. Being a twin meant strength in numbers.

“If I’m joining a new club and I don’t know if I’m going to know anyone, at least my brother is there and I can talk to him so I’m not just sitting by myself,” Jaclyn, a video editor and comedian, says. “I feel like that was definitely a big anxiety relief for me to always have him there.”

In addition to going to different colleges, their interests eventually diverged, and Jaclyn and Nick started meeting new people. Nick got involved with campus politics and model UN, while Jaclyn leaned into film and art, and each formed friendships with similarly minded people. Still, the act of making friends on their own was a relatively new experience. Having a twin, they say, was good practice for how to be a friend, not necessarily how to make them. “That was probably the first time I felt I have to do this alone,” Nick, a data scientist, says. “I can’t just rely on my sister to start talking to someone.”

While Jaclyn was the initiator in childhood, Nick thrived on his own in college: He came out as gay and gained confidence in himself. The friends he made knew exactly who he was and loved him for it. Jaclyn sensed that their high school friends, and by some extension her, had lost their luster, that the conversation really wasn’t that deep. “I could feel, when he would come home, maybe a little less interested in being with our friend group,” Jaclyn says. “That hurt my feelings. Me and you are best friends. But it wasn’t about me and our friends. He finally felt, I think, good at college.” Meanwhile, Jaclyn’s social circle was more intimate than Nick’s wide-ranging cohort, she says; her preferred friendship style mirrors that of a twin relationship. “I like having one really close friend or one person to go do stuff with,” she says.

Although they both live in New York City, they’ve still maintained their independent college friend groups. They represent the unique, individual adults they are now, not the packaged duo they once were.

While college was a period of mutual friend-making for Ricky and Royce Marnell, the twins from Orlando, their social lives did eventually split once they entered long-term relationships; their partners brokered their new adult friendships. After spending the first two decades of their lives under one roof, the Marnells now live with their significant others and with that comes responsibilities and obligations beyond their twin. Ricky’s planning a wedding; Royce just moved.

As a result of their progressing romantic lives, their shared experienced one has seemed to fracture. They don’t spend as much time with their mutual friends — if they do, it’s when college pals come to town — and instead most of their socializing is done with their respective partners’ friends. Before Ricky’s recent bachelor party, their group hadn’t gotten together in a handful of years. 

“I wouldn’t say it’s harder to make friends now without Ricky,” Royce says, “but I would say it feels more lonely.”

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.

Nick Sadler and his wife had different ideas of what a chill Saturday looked like. He considered the weekend a blank slate — no set plans, the family’s moment to reset and chill. She was under the impression that time was up for grabs and put a short hangout on their calendar, which Sadler saw as his wife not taking his schedule into account. To settle the argument, he opened up ChatGPT, specifically the group chat function, which allows more than one human to interact with the technology. Sadler prompted the chatbot to act as a neutral mediator and to instruct them on their next moves. Sadler tells Vox that ChatGPT acted as a trusted friend, or even a therapist, suggesting both of them consider different perspectives. It attempted to pinpoint where the conversation broke down (“Both of you then behaved logically according to your own understanding. That means this is not primarily a respect problem. It’s a classification problem.”) and offered guidelines for future scheduling (“A simple question can prevent most of these arguments: ‘Is this an idea, or are we locking this in?’”)

“It was like, ‘Well, next time just consider this’ and ‘maybe try saying this’ and ‘maybe try doing that,’” Sadler, a film producer, says. “We got some sort of advice to follow, but ultimately we’ve still got to do the work and we’ve still got to actually take the actions.”

Sadler, a 48-year-old self-proclaimed AI enthusiast, is no stranger to utilizing ChatGPT in his marriage. He’s used it to uncover the weaknesses in his arguments and to craft apology texts to his wife. “I put in purpose mistakes so she wouldn’t think I was just using ChatGPT,” he says.

But the pressures of parenting two young kids was kindling for their periodic annoying marital spats. Sadler and his wife considered couples counseling, but once he discovered ChatGPT could guide them through difficult conversations, they no longer felt they needed the help of a professional. One night, while sitting on the couch with his wife, Sadler launched ChatGPT and told his wife to talk to it as if it was a therapist. “In a way, it’s having a therapist on tap,” he says.

That people are turning to large language models to navigate their love lives isn’t entirely surprising. Relationships have peaks and valleys and, many times, exist in an emotional gray area. Chatbots, on the other hand, are authoritative in tone and confident, even when they’re wrong. 

Some people are going a step beyond asking Claude to draft an apology text, and inviting AI into the most intimate moments of their lives: fights with their significant others. In other words, they are treating technology like an on-demand couples therapist. The tech, which could be ambiently listening or addressed directly via voice or text, might suggest someone use more “I” statements or prompt couples to ask questions like “Where did you feel unsupported?” 

Research has suggested publicly available AI, like ChatGPT, is an effective intermediary in a dispute, with human subjects feeling less divided when AI was mediating. But AI platforms lack the emotional intelligence to adequately read a couple’s body language and tone, understand cultural context and power dynamics, and incorporate a couple’s past into the fight at hand.

The desire for an authoritative, always-available guide in the midst of conflict is certainly seductive, but emotional matters are best reserved for human-to-human conversation. “The answer is typically not that you need some type of content strategy on how you should approach your next steps,” Amelia Miller, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, tells Vox. “But it’s much more that you need emotional support, which comes from asking other people that you care about what you should do in the situation, not asking a machine.”

Drawing from a shared reality

In her Bay Area therapy practice, Courtney Quattrini has seen her fair share of couples who leverage AI chatbots in their relationships, including using it as a practice conversation partner and to ghostwrite texts to their significant other. While none of her clients have let ChatGPT or Claude mediate a fight, some do bring in AI summaries of arguments from one person’s perspective to their sessions with her. “They’re ruminating or they’re thinking about their side of the fight: What am I going to come back and say, how am I going to prove that I’m right or wrong?” Quattrini tells Vox. “They’re summarizing the fight from their perspective, and then they’ll bring in the summary and present it almost like it’s objective, but of course it’s not objective.”

But much of the work in couples therapy centers on the idea that two things can be true at once, and is about getting both individuals to understand that their partner’s emotional reality is important. “When you’re coming in and you want to summarize who won a fight, that really doesn’t align with the work that we’re actually doing,” Quattrini says. Feeding AI your narrative doesn’t help you see the things you could have done differently. 

But when both people in a relationship invite AI into the discussion, leveling the playing field, the technology draws from a version of the story that may be more closely aligned with reality. A few months into dating, Khalid Tawohid and his partner discovered they’d both been discussing their relationship with their respective AI chatbots. “How can we get our AIs to just talk to each other?” Tawohid tells Vox.

Earlier this year, the 25-year-old software engineer designed a workaround where both his and his partner’s Claude agents — drawing from each individual’s full chat history — could facilitate difficult conversations. The app, called Bridge, claims to provide scaffolding for the discussions and package disorderly thoughts in a more coherent manner. Instead of looking to a machine to validate your point of view, the machine, ideally, would hold your hand as you attempt that same conversation with a human. “This helps your AI have a real sense of identity of who this [other] person is because it’s two different AIs, one knows one person, one knows the other person, and they’re both vehemently going to defend their own person,” Tawohid says. “But together it gets you to a more shared sense of truth.”

Still, Tawohid isn’t convinced his AI chatbot mediation tool, Bridge, is even a good idea. He has shared Bridge with about 10 couples, all of whom have given him the feedback that they’d use it again, he says, but it isn’t widely available for use. Perhaps, he says, it could be a supplement to traditional couples counseling, a way to practice communication outside of the therapy room.

Ironically, though, Tawohid has come down on the side of mild AI skepticism. “It’s a combination of a journal and a therapist and a friend, but it is also not real. It’s also just a computer code,” he says. When he discovered he’d lost his ability to craft a sentence without help, he stopped writing with AI. Now he fears people could lose their relationships to chatbots, too. 

Gateway to introspection or outsourcing sincerity?

After a few months of using Bridge, Tawohid says he and his partner spend much less time talking to AI. They’ve had enough machine-facilitated conversations that they better understand each other’s thought patterns and triggers. Sadler, the AI-curious film producer, and his wife have similarly come to rely on AI less frequently because, he says, ChatGPT has taught them to be better communicators. “It just taught me to understand that she’s got a different perspective on things. If I’m not understanding where [she’s] coming from, just asking questions to say, well, what do you mean? And not jumping to conclusions,” he says.

Using AI as a therapeutic outlet can be instructive for people who aren’t in the habit of introspection, says Miller, the Harvard fellow. These chatbots can, in theory, be a tool for reflecting on an argument and for rehearsing what to say next. But sometimes the language the chatbot suggests is so far out of the realm of what your partner would actually say that its assistance is counterproductive. 

For Josh Elledge and his wife, the stupid fight began over a haircut — or lack thereof. Elledge, a 54-year-old podcast consultant, was refusing to clean up his look (“I didn’t like something my barber said, and so I stopped going to him,” Elledge says) and his wife was not pleased. So she turned to an AI chatbot for assistance on how to break it to him. What she ended up saying to Elledge didn’t land. “It just made her opinion stronger in a way that wasn’t really helpful,” he says. “She’s conveying this stuff and I’m like, wow, you really think that? And she’s like, well, no, not really.” He says they “thankfully had the good sense” to distinguish between what she believed and what was the AI. 

Once you relinquish enough of your critical thinking to AI, you run the risk of undermining the relationship you sought to fix. Therapists are trained to identify when a fight needs to be slowed, rerouted, or ditched altogether. But because chatbots never tire of hearing about your problems, you can get caught in a loop of rumination, perpetually mulling over the same frustrations and workshopping language on how to tell your husband you hate his haircut. At that point, who are you in a relationship with — a large language model, or a human? “That was an instance where maybe this isn’t a miracle process. You still have to just be really careful about not showing up as someone who you are not just simply because you defaulted to this AI being this authority in all things,” Elledge says.

AI chatbots are programmed to keep you engaged, but endless mediation and reflection isn’t exactly helpful. If you feel compelled to use one to navigate a squabble, give the technology guardrails. For example, Miller has created custom prompts that don’t exceed 10 or so exchanges with the AI and are meant to illuminate your own biases and shortcomings. But, ultimately, Quattrini, the therapist, says it’s important to remember that true counsel comes from a human who possesses the ability to read nonverbal cues, affect, and changes in body language. “Right now I think AI is a pretty dangerous mediator because it doesn’t have a nervous system,” she says. 

The joy of being a person in a relationship with another person is getting through the hard parts together, even imperfectly. “We’re complicated people and no one really knows everything going on in everyone’s mind,” Tawohid says. “But humans are awesome, truly.”