Eudaemonius posted a photo:

Eudaemonius posted a photo:

Eudaemonius posted a photo:

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.

Eudaemonius posted a photo:

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.” 

Soul Searching is Casper ter Kuile’s new monthly column drawing on ancient wisdom to live a spiritual life in the modern world. Casper is the author of The Power of Ritual, holds master’s degrees in Divinity and Public Policy from Harvard University, and co-founded the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, and Sacred Design Lab.

I wish I could pray.

For religious friends of mine, prayer seems to open a portal to a world that’s beyond my reach. Like there’s some divine VIP area where you can whisper in God’s ear to plead for what you need. Not exactly a holy vending machine that gives you what you want, but certainly a secret language that can lead to ecstatic mystical union and profound peace.

I’ve tried to trick myself into praying. But I don’t believe in a deity that’s listening to my complaints and desires. And many traditional prayers feel too weighed down by patriarchy for my taste. So getting on my knees for God, or swaying back and forth, let alone prostrating myself — it all feels absurd. 

And I’m not alone. A 2020 Gallup survey found that less than half of Americans belong to a church, synagogue, temple, or mosque. And despite recent headlines pointing to religious revival, a 2025 poll from Pew Research Center suggests otherwise: Only 30 percent of young adults born between 1995 and 2002 say they pray every day.

So, it seems, prayer isn’t for me, or for many of us. 

Or is it?

Starting in the 1990s, Dr. Herbert Benson led a decade-long study on the efficacy of prayer. He was an esteemed cardiologist and the founder of the Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. His rigorous study confirmed what nonbelievers might have expected: Praying for someone who was sick had no positive impact on their recovery. But during his many years of research, he also found that there was an impact on the person doing the praying.

Even though I didn’t grow up religious, I got a taste of that positive impact as a child. When I was around 10 or 11 years old, I’d often stay over at a friend’s house because I liked him and loved his PlayStation. When it was time for bed, his mother would tuck us in. Standing at the door of his bedroom, she’d turn out the light and say:

Goodnight, goodnight

Far flies the light

But still God’s love

Shall flame above

Making all things…

And, together, we would respond, “bright!” 

It felt good to hear those words before falling asleep. And it felt good, too, saying them out loud, just now, all these years later. So if we know that prayer can improve our psychological well-being, but we don’t believe in God, what can we do? 

It starts with telling the truth.

Psychoanalysts Ann and Barry Ulanov describe prayer as “primary speech.” By this, they mean that it is a basic and fundamental way we say who we are, and we do it with total honesty. That might involve expressing longing and love, yes, but also fear, anger, bitterness, and jealousy — the good, the bad, and the ugly of our human experience. Dive into a sacred text like the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible and you will find examples of people berating the divine, confessing that they’ve lost all hope, or even pleading for the death of their enemies. Prayer is unsanitary. It’s messy. It’s real-talk.

The 20th-century Russian Orthodox teacher of prayer Anthony Bloom would agree with this. In his book Beginning to Pray, published more than 50 years ago, he wrote (using religious language, of course), “As long as we are truly ourselves, God can be present and do something with us. But the moment we try to be what we are not, there is nothing left to say or have; we become a fictitious personality, an unreal presence, and this unreal presence cannot be approached by God.”

I’ve found the best way of practicing this kind of honesty without bringing God into it is writing in my journal. Especially in the dark. There’s a level of ugly honesty that can flow from my pen when my eyes can hardly make out the words I’m writing on the page. 

But saying those words out loud? That still feels difficult. 

So, I considered advice offered by the Rev. Alba Onofrio, a queer, feminist pastor — and someone who isn’t afraid of speaking the truth. She co-founded the Sexual Liberation Collective and her work focuses on eradicating shame and reclaiming sexual pleasure as a way of connecting to the divine. In an episode of her podcast, Onofrio advises those just beginning to pray to start with words they already know.

Is there a song or quote you already know every word of? A piece of text that your mind goes to when you are stressed or scared? Or is there something you’d want to learn? 

I’ve found myself reciting poems by Marie Howe and Lucille Clifton as a form of prayer. I go someplace where nobody can hear me, and I say them out loud to get the prayer juices flowing. I’ve tried singing, too.

But this still doesn’t solve the question of who is listening. For that, Onofrio’s advice is simple: “Who do you want to talk to?” Is there someone who’s loved you who has passed away and who you wish was here to listen? A grandparent, a favorite teacher or mentor, even a pet? Onofrio suggests thinking about who you need to hear from. “The point of prayer is just connection…a spiritual digging the mud and silt out of the channel that connects us to the erotic, to God, to creation” she says in her podcast. Perhaps this is why so many religions have saints or lesser deities to pray to; it gives you a phonebook of options to connect with. 

Truth be told, I still struggle with this. When the going gets tough, an imaginary person at the other end of my prayers still feels too abstract to be compelling. 

Not to worry, the Rev. Micah Bucey tells me. We don’t need someone to be listening to benefit from prayer. 

Bucey is the author of the The Book of Tiny Prayer and has been posting his very short prayers on social media since the pandemic began. In an interview, he explained that the only necessary ingredients for his prayers are attention, intention, time, and quiet.

“Every morning, I take a moment to pay attention to my body and then the news,” Bucey told me. “And then, I set an intention for what is mine to do today.” He follows a simple framework to set that intention:

• Naming: Identify the problem, issue, or thing in need of prayer.
• Going in: Reflect on what I might do differently for myself.
• Going out: Look outward to consider what I might change together with others.

I find that the first step — naming — is really where this version of prayer has its impact. Honoring the hurt I feel, or the anger, the shame or the sadness, is what unlocks something deeper than my everyday thinking can reach.  

Do I sometimes wish there was some supreme being that might then make it all okay? Sure, that would be nice. But prayer, for me at least, has been much less about peace and stillness. Prayer is struggle. It’s the discipline of discovering what I really feel. It’s being honest enough to write or say it aloud. And it’s trusting that this practice will help me do what is mine to do in a world with so much pain and suffering.

So, dear reader, will you pray with me? 

Eudaemonius posted a photo:

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!” 

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When I first moved to New York in my mid-20s for a new job, I arrived as a lone wolf. I didn’t have any friends or family members living in the city, just a few phone numbers (my older sister’s friends) to contact in the case of an emergency. So I immediately started to work on addressing this.

I met up with some virtual pals who I knew lived in the city — people I talked to on X, and women from my journalism and reality-TV group chats. I made sure to hang out with my new colleagues outside of work. I even kept in touch with a potential roommate I didn’t end up living with.

Then came a terrifying realization after about a year and a half in. While I had fully mastered the art of putting myself out there, I hadn’t formed that many close bonds. I had no problem initiating hangouts and showing up to whatever gatherings I was invited to. But I realized a lot of these new friends didn’t know me that well — and vice versa. Many of our conversations stayed at a surface level (“How’s work going?” “Did you watch the latest Vanderpump Rules?”). People I hung out with regularly still didn’t know crucial parts of my lore. And I was shy about asking people more about their own history. 

Subconsciously, I was making the same mistake that Jaimie Krems, an associate professor of social psychology at UCLA, says a lot of people make when forging new connections. “We have this error in our heads, this bias in the direction of ‘people don’t like us as much as we want them to,’” Krems tells Vox. “That’s just not true, and it keeps us from being close to people.”

Insecurities aren’t the only thing that can inhibit closeness. In adulthood, we naturally have less time to spend nurturing friendships due to our jobs, families, and other obligations. Relationship psychologist Marisa G. Franco tells Vox that adults are often less vulnerable when making friends compared to when we were children. Studies demonstrate that platonic intimacy is a common, if not growing, problem. A 2023 Pew Research survey found that 8 percent of Americans have no close friends, and 7 percent have only one close friend. For men, the numbers are a bit more concerning. In a 2021 American Perspectives Survey, 15 percent of male participants reported having no close friends, compared to 10 percent of women. That’s a lot of lonely people.

If you’re struggling to build closeness, there are several ways to elevate your current relationships and take yourself out of the casual-friend zone. Experts say it requires intentionality, a little creativity, and, ultimately, not stressing too much about how you’re perceived.

“Repot” your relationships

Franco points to the concept of “repotting,” a technique coined by Ryan Hubbard, a researcher and the founder of the Kitestring Project, which focuses on finding and keeping close friends. Repotting simply means varying the environments where you interact with your casual friends, similar to the way you might transfer overgrown houseplants to a larger vessel. The idea is that friendships can only grow so big in a small context.

“If you meet someone in one setting, like work, ask them to hang out outside of work — go to dinner or go to an event,” says Franco, who wrote the book Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make — and Keep — Friends. “That’s going to make the relationship more resilient for when, let’s say, you’re no longer in a shared work setting.”

Creating new memories outside of the same old environments can be “really powerful,” Franco adds. You could propose a more adventurous activity, like a ceramics class or an experiential restaurant, to create a more memorable experience. (Research has found that engaging in novel activities has a positive impact on couples.) But a simple coffee date or trip to the movies works too.

Be there for them during crucial life moments

Franco encourages people to show up for their trivia buddies or friendly colleagues during what she calls “diagnostic moments,” which are “moments of high or low emotion.” These joyous or tough time periods — and the people who were present for them — tend to stick out in our memory, she says. 

“How people show up when we’re going through the best and worst experience of our lives really disproportionately predicts how we view the relationship overall.” Franco says. “If you really want to get close to someone, when they’re going through a hard time, that’s your time to check in.” 

This doesn’t require making grand gestures, either. For example, if your neighbor mentions they are going through a breakup, you could drop off cookies at their door. If your friend gets a promotion at work, take them out for a drink to celebrate. If they mention something they are excited or worried about, make a point to ask them how it went. These low-effort acts of kindness are a huge way to let others know we want to be a part of their lives.  

Don’t be scared to ask for favors

On a similar note, letting your casual friends know when you need help can be impactful as well. So don’t be afraid to ask for the occasional favor. 

Krems says that, across small-scale societies, “feelings of closeness that are characteristic of friendship get ratcheted up over time through giving gifts and favors.” This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the “Ben Franklin effect,” because the Founding Father claimed that asking his political rivals for help with small requests was an effective way to soften their feelings toward him. “The bottom line is that when we do a favor for somebody, we often end up liking them better,” Krems says. 

So if you have a friend who you don’t feel cool enough with to ask for help, you may want to do it anyway. If you’re visiting a place they’re familiar with, ask them for restaurant recommendations. If you need someone to water your plants while you’re out of town, don’t be scared to ask if they’d swing by. Or, like Franklin famously did, you can just ask to borrow a specific book.  

If you’re feeling anxious about asking for help, Krems suggests recalling how good it feels whenever you’re able to be a resource to a friend. 

Actually tell your friends that you like them — and don’t worry about being seen as “cringe”

Sometimes we expect people to know exactly how we feel about them based on our mere presence. My new friend must know I enjoy our coffee dates if I’m setting aside time to hang out with her. If I come to a co-worker’s birthday party, he must know I appreciated the invite? Right? Not always. 

Franco says that voicing how much you value and enjoy spending time with your friends can help take those connections to the next level. In fact, it’s one of the biggest predictors of depth in a relationship. 

“There’s this study that tracked friendship pairs over time and saw which one of them deepened, which one of them maintained, and which one of them fell away,” she says. “And one of the biggest predictors was how much affection was shared between the two of them.” 

She adds that showing affection is a powerful tool because of something called risk regulation theory. Essentially, human beings decide which relationships to invest in based, in part, on how likely we feel we are to get rejected. So finding casual ways to make it clear that you’re into the friendship goes a long way.

In practice, this might look like texting a friend ahead of your planned hangout to let them know you’re excited to see them. Or, if you vented to someone about a problem you’re having, let them know that you appreciated them listening to you. 

And don’t be afraid that being emotionally honest is going to mean you come across as “cringe.” The fear of being perceived as too earnest, eager, or sentimental has apparently spawned a social epidemic of young people who are scared to put themselves out there online and in-person because they are afraid of being mocked or rejected. In a 2026 Yahoo/YouGov poll, 55 percent of Gen Z respondents said that the fear of looking cringe has prevented them from opening up emotionally compared to 37 percent of millennials. 

Franco says this culture of nonchalance and inexpressiveness goes hand in hand with the struggle to build close friendships nowadays.

“I feel like people veered toward…not wanting to show any interest in anyone, but that’s really wrong if you want to connect with people,” Franco says. “Anything that you do to show someone you like and value them is going to bring you closer to them.”