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More than a decade after Tinder introduced the swipe, many Americans are sick of dating apps. As I explored in a recent article for The Atlantic, the cracks are starting to show in what looked to be the foundation of modern dating. Now young people are yearning for a version of dating they may have never experienced—and that may have never truly existed, my colleague Faith Hill wrote recently. I spoke with Faith this week about how dating has evolved, and what people misunderstand about the purpose of dating apps.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Columbine-killers fan club Democrats’ unproven plan to close Biden’s enthusiasm gap Taylor Swift is having quality-control issues.

The Mysteries of the Heart

Lora Kelley: In your article, you wrote that young people are longing for serendipitous connections or meet-cutes. Why is that?

Faith Hill: Many young people dating now have never dated without the apps. But we have all these romantic comedies where people are meeting strangers and falling in love, and young people are still hearing stories, sometimes from their parents, about how couples met. We still have a romantic ideal that does not involve dating apps. It’s easy to idealize spontaneous “meet-cutes” both because they’re so romanticized in our culture and because they’re kind of the opposite of online dating.

Apps are quite practical. You go out and you seek something intentionally. That gives you some agency, but it also takes away the appealing mythical element at the heart of the meet-cute: this idea that your relationship was meant to be.

Lora: How does living in a world of apps affect people’s understanding of what dating is?

Faith: For one thing, we’re now used to reducing the risk of rejection. Apps let you confirm someone is interested, to some degree, before you meet up—and that also creates a kind of built-in layer of consent, however imperfect.

Dating apps also give people more options. That’s good and bad. We should expect a lot from our partners and not just feel stuck with the only prospect. But it can also create the feeling that there’s always someone better out there.

Lora: To what extent have shifting norms around flirting with strangers reshaped how people meet and date?

Faith: People do still meet out and about. But it’s not an amazing fit for today’s culture. We have this idea of meeting someone in a grocery store while reaching for the same cantaloupe or whatever. But many of us don’t actually want strangers talking to us in the grocery store—that can feel like an intrusion. And I think it’s a good thing that we are more sensitive now to what might feel pushy or creepy. What seemed normal to characters in TV shows such as Sex and the City probably wouldn’t fly today.

Lora: While I was reporting my article on dating apps, a researcher suggested to me that even if all of the apps were to go bankrupt overnight, something similar would pop up in their place, because people have come to really value having this type of dedicated way to meet. What do you make of this?

Faith: People will keep finding a way to meet romantic interests, and companies will try to innovate. Our society has become more structured and less spontaneous in many areas, including dating. Even though many people are getting frustrated with dating apps, they do like having a structured way to meet people who are eligible and looking to date. You can see that with speed dating and the resurgence of matchmakers.

Lora: A lot of the main dating apps are trying to get users to pay for extra features and subscriptions. But even the most expensive dating-app algorithm or service cannot guarantee that you will meet someone you like. Is the root of the problem just that people are people, and it’s hard to pair individuals who will actually like each other?

Faith: It’s hard to predict whether two people will be compatible, partly because that sort of connection comes about as two people interact. How two people feel about each other can unfold from what they happen to talk about in a conversation, whether they hit on something that they have in common or both find funny. We keep trying to find a way to figure love out, but the truth is that it’s difficult, and it takes luck.

Lora: The mysteries of the human heart are great.

Faith: Yes, and that’s true both on and offline. Honestly, apps are a way to meet people, not a way to date people. Once you have met, your relationship becomes its own thing—and it’s not so different from if you had met in a bar.

The enigma of other people isn’t a bad thing, though. People don’t really want love to be a totally solvable science. Meet-cute nostalgia speaks to that. On the one hand, we like the idea of an algorithm that’ll give us someone who is great for us, but on the other hand, we still have this hunger for love being weird and complicated and hard to pin down.

Related:

America is sick of swiping. “Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had”

Today’s News

Israel launched a strike that hit a major air base near nuclear sites in central Iran. The International Atomic Energy Agency said that Iran’s nuclear sites were not damaged. The House voted to advance a foreign-aid package that would send aid to Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, and includes legislation that could lead to a nationwide ban of TikTok. A man set himself on fire near the New York City courthouse in which Donald Trump is on trial for criminal charges.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Cookbooks are full of hidden wisdom—and some of them are worth reading cover to cover, Emma Sarappo writes. Atlantic Intelligence: The generative-AI boom will look very different for non-English speakers, Matteo Wong recently wrote.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

The Atlantic / Getty

The Problem With Counterfeit People

By Daniel C. Dennett

The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, known for his musings on free will, religion, and evolution, died earlier today. We’re revisiting his 2023 essay on the “immoral act of vandalism” committed by companies that use AI to create fake people.

Money has existed for several thousand years, and from the outset counterfeiting was recognized to be a very serious crime, one that in many cases calls for capital punishment because it undermines the trust on which society depends. Today, for the first time in history, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is possible for anybody to make counterfeit people who can pass for real in many of the new digital environments we have created. These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself. Before it’s too late (it may well be too late already) we must outlaw both the creation of counterfeit people and the “passing along” of counterfeit people. The penalties for either offense should be extremely severe, given that civilization itself is at risk.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Empires and nation-states are remembered for their monuments, but they also leave behind plenty of miniatures. Inside the Egyptian pyramids, within the chamber where the pharaoh’s mummy rests, stand collections of little statues—wooden figurines of mummified servants, clay hippos painted turquoise—to remind the ruler how the world once looked. Academics have complained that miniatures suffer from scholarly neglect. After carrying out the first comprehensive survey of more than 500 miniatures found in excavations along the Nile in 2011, the Italian archeologist Grazia Di Pietro felt compelled to remark in an essay that these were more than “simple toys.”

A miniature is a replica of something bigger, a distortion of scale that makes it wonderful in a way the merely small is not. Miniatures are not the same as models, which are didactic (an anatomical model of the heart to educate students, for example) or utilitarian (a model showing the plan for a skyscraper yet to be built). Miniatures imitate life but have no clear practical purpose. They can be harder to make than their full-size counterparts. But they are portable, like the tiny mannequins the French government commissioned from fashion houses when World War II ended and Parisians couldn’t afford human-size haute couture. The mannequins toured Europe, splendidly dressed ambassadors carrying the message that the French had skill, if not much fabric.

Miniatures seek detail rather than abstraction. They are competitive. Some strive to be ever smaller, like the diminutive books that surged in popularity during the Industrial Revolution, after the printing press had rendered mass production easier. The essayist Susan Stewart writes about this in her book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Maybe, she suggests, the guilds of printers and binders missed the challenges of craftsmanship. (Centuries before the printing press, Arab and Persian calligraphers figured out how to make Qurans smaller than their thumbs.) Other miniatures strive to be ever more perfect—consider the locket portraits once sold in England, each with its own magnifying glass.

[Watch: Forget tiny houses–try miniature sculptures]

“I think a lot about record books, like the Guinness Book of World Records,” Joan Kee, an art historian at the University of Michigan, told me. “There’s always the smallest and the biggest: two extremes of human achievements.” Monuments and miniatures both inspire awe, but the awe each inspires is of a different kind. The pyramids stand as testaments to the glory of great powers, pooled resources, and concerted human effort. They’re formidable. The Egyptian figurines conjure images of a single artisan’s obsession, squinting eyes, and precise fingers. They’re precious.  

Here’s an irony of time and size: Monuments, in their grandness, seem destined to last forever—but the unobtrusive miniature is often what survives the passage of centuries and the onslaughts of natural disasters. Today, museums are full of miniatures, though many institutions don’t seem to know what to do with them. Jack Davy, a British curator, coined the term miniature dissonance to criticize the practice of exhibiting them all together with little context, like souvenirs on a table. Museum collections are a kind of miniature themselves—a whole world made to fit inside a building. One way to tell the history of museums is that they evolved from the rooms in which noble families once displayed trinkets from their trips of conquest—dried butterflies, incense lamps, taxidermic birds, Chinese porcelains. The rooms were called cabinets of curiosities, or wunderkammer in German—“wonder rooms.” The word cabinet then came to mean the piece of furniture that might contain such wonders; the word became its own miniature.

In the 1930s, Narcissa Thorne was a Chicago housewife and socialite, married to a scion of the Montgomery Ward department-store fortune. She mocked her ladylike education: “Knowing how to put on my hat straight was supposed to be enough.” Since childhood, she had relished traveling and collecting small objects, and liked to say that her miniatures were not a hobby but a mania. In 1933, hundreds of thousands of people lined up at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition to see not some futuristic technology but an exhibit of 30 miniature rooms, imagined, commissioned, and furnished by Thorne. There was a Tudor hall, a Victorian drawing room, a Versailles-esque boudoir with a gilded bathtub. Some of the rooms had windows, through which the scenography of an outside landscape was visible and the light of a miniature sun seeped in. The audience found the realism uncanny, Kay Wells, an art historian at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, told me. Some were so shocked by the view of all that intimate domesticity, they felt like voyeurs. Quite a few compared the rooms to peep shows.

Designed by Narcissa Thorne. E-14: English Drawing Room of the Victorian Period, 1840-70, 1937. Gift of Mrs. James Ward Thorne.” (The Art Institute of Chicago.)

Miniatures are often said to be all about control: creating tiny utopias by shrinking what is big and intimidating. “You can control your dollhouse,” Leslie Edelman, the owner of the only dedicated dollhouse store left in New York City, told me, as he showed me a miniature fruit basket so exquisite that the bananas inside of it could actually be peeled. “I mean, the outside world these days is insane!” In Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, the character who collects miniatures is a frail mother who falls into depression after the birth of her child. Poor woman, I thought when I read the book, making this little world for herself because she can’t handle the real one.

[Read: Dollhouses weren’t invented for play]

Narcissa Thorne, too, wanted to assert control—over the stubborn passage of time and what she saw as the ugliness of modern fads. Art Deco mixed influences from too many places in a pastiche she didn’t fancy. Instead, she liked the “period rooms” that were being added to museums in Detroit, New York, and Chicago to display the prettier interior design of bygone eras. She donated and volunteered at major institutions, but none big enough to accommodate a collection as comprehensive as she would have wished. By making her own compact period rooms, she could display the chronology of European domesticity at a manageable scale.

But miniatures can do more than provide an illusion of control. And perhaps, despite her intentions, Thorne’s rooms did something of the opposite. Great miniatures create the fantasy that they are part of a world that will never fully reveal itself to the viewer. This is the same fantasy, as Stewart observed in On Longing, that animates The Nutcracker, Pinocchio, and other fairy tales in which toys come alive. A reporter at the Chicago Tribune wrote that looking into the rooms made you feel like a Lilliputian in Gulliver’s Travels.

The Thorne rooms exert a power that preserved historic villas and museum period rooms cannot replicate. If a space can be inhabited, then the people inhabiting it can’t escape the presence of EXIT signs, plexiglass barriers, and one another. You always know you’re trapped in the present. You can’t walk into a miniature room, yet it feels somehow much more immersive. Thorne chose not to populate her rooms with tiny people. Ellenor Alcorn, the curator of Applied Arts of Europe at the Art Institute of Chicago, which holds the biggest collection of Thorne rooms, calls that a “really wise” decision. “The absence of figures means that we, as the visitor, become the human element in the room, and bring them to life,” she told me.

The Thorne rooms at the Art Institute remain something of rarity: miniatures taken very, very seriously by a major American museum. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, is home to the world’s biggest collection of American portrait miniatures—including a locket memento of George Washington and “Beauty Revealed,” a miniaturist’s self-portrait, which shows only her breasts—but only about 3 percent, are on display at the moment. (A spokesperson for the museum told me these paintings are rotated every few months because they’re sensitive to the light.)

American miniature enthusiasts are used to thinking of their fascination as a quirk. Elle Shushan, who collects and sells 19th-century miniature portraits like those at the Met, told me her circle is “niche but passionate.” Carolyn LeGeyt, a Connecticut retiree who made dollhouses for all the girls in her family—10 nieces and two granddaughters—when they turned 9, told me that her favorite week of the year is when she goes to a summer school run by the International Guild of Miniature Artisans at Maine Maritime Academy. For that one week, she doesn’t need to explain her “love for small things.” (That’s also where she learned to paint and then sand down her dollhouses’ door knobs so that they look worn by use.)

It doesn’t help their reputation for quirkiness that, as a group, American miniaturists are drawn to old-fashioned things. Most American dollhouses are Victorian. The miniature railroad at the Brandywine Museum, near Philadelphia, emerged out of nostalgia for disappearing old trains. This needn’t be the case. In Germany, Miniatur Wunderland replicates Hamburg’s warehouse district. Niklas Weissleder, a young man who works for the museum, told me that curators are getting anxious because many of the city’s cars are now electric, and the tiny cars have not yet been updated to reflect this change.

Not all American miniatures are quaint idylls. Frances Glessner Lee, a contemporary of Narcissa Thorne, created detailed room boxes too, but hers were murder scenes, with blood stains and decomposing bodies. Glessner Lee liked to read Sherlock Holmes stories, donated money to fund the school of legal medicine at Harvard, and hoped the budding detectives there would use the rooms as puzzles to crack in 90-minute sessions. For her contributions, Glessner Lee earned the title of “godmother of forensic science” and became America’s first female police captain.

A few years ago, the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery, in Washington, D.C., displayed Glessner Lee’s rooms in “Murder Is Her Hobby,” a three-month exhibition. Nora Atkinson, the show’s curator, told me that it had been a tough sell for her bosses: They were “skeptical that anybody would be interested in sort of dollhouses, as they put it.” She felt there was a sense that the miniature rooms were just a feminine hobby, and not particularly “innovative.” In fact, the exhibition was so popular that the museum extended its hours. (A spokesperson for the Smithsonian told me that the exhibition was part of a series “showcasing women artists” and “challenging the marginalization of creative disciplines traditionally considered feminine.”)

Is there a country in the world where miniatures are more than a strange little pastime? I’m talking about a place that could serve as a site of pilgrimage for miniature-lovers, or a first destination in the event that a team of scholars finally sets out to write the Unified Theory of Miniatures as an Important Category of Artistic Expression.

There are probably quite a few candidates, but I’d submit Japan, where a long tradition honors the fascination with all objects mijika (“close to the body”) or te ni ireru (“that fit in the hand”).

Ayako Yoshimura, now a librarian at University of Chicago, told me that she doesn’t understand why collecting miniatures is seen as a bit weird in America; it was quite normal in Japan when she was growing up. When she moved to the United States for college, she brought along the miniatures from her childhood and has since kept a drawer for them in every place she has lived. She has all the makings of a miniature Japanese garden, with a fence and an ornamental water basin, but she rarely shows them to anyone.

Scholars I interviewed about the popularity of miniatures in Japan suggested that it might have to do with Japan itself being so small and dense, or with the nation’s tradition of decorative crafts. Yoshimura thinks her fellow Japanese have a “philosophy of concealment”; they are people who like owning little treasures to enjoy in private.

[From the January/February 2017 issue: Big in Japan–tiny food]

In the 1980s, the Korean professor and politician O-Young Lee wrote The Compact Culture, a best-selling book arguing that Japan’s love for small things, such as haiku and netsuke—tiny ivory sculptures concealed inside a kimono’s folds—led to its innovations in small-but-powerful industrial products such as the mighty microchip, and is by extension key to the nation’s economic success. Sushi, one of Japan’s most famous exports, is arguably a miniature—all the ingredients of a big plate, in a single bite.

Japan is also the master of what I believe to be the canonical miniature: bonsai trees, which are microcosms of nature outside nature. Originally from China, the practice of making miniature landscapes was supposed to teach students how to manipulate the elements. Individual pieces were called silent poems. When the art form spread to Japan, it conserved the meaning of an environment subdued. “A tree that is left growing in its natural state is a crude thing,” reads Utsubo monogatari, a 10th-century story. “It is only when it is kept close to human beings who fashion it with loving care that its shape and style acquire the ability to move one.”

(Srdjan Zivulovic / Reuters / Redux)

There’s something cruel about a desire for control that necessitates trapping a tree with wires, for decades, to stunt its growth and sculpt its shape. Keiichi Fujikawa, a second-generation bonsai artist from Osaka, told me he strives to hide or remove the wires before the trees are exhibited, but that without them the bonsai is not “aesthetically viable.” The wires are the price of beauty. Crucial to the Buddhist belief system, Yukio Lippit, a professor of Japanese art at Harvard, told me, is the idea of “nestedness,” of universes contained infinitely within universes. Miniature trees can remind their beholders of a cosmology in which every small thing holds an entire world.

When I first saw them, in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I understood that bonsais are not small trees but enormous ones—all of the complexity is there, simply at a reduced scale. I struggled to define why this effect is so beautiful, but I met an academic who came close: “Bonsais show the respect the artist has for you as a viewer,” Robert Huey, a professor of Japanese literature at University of Hawaii, told me. The bonsai artist knows that a miniature that simplifies would be an impostor, and bonsais are the opposite of impostors: not just miniature trees but real ones. They take decades to grow; they have leaves that blossom and fall with the seasons, and trunks that get sick and age. Like the trees that grow in the forest, they are fully alive.