For decades going back at least to World War II, Americans met their wives and husbands through their friends. Since the rise of online dating about a decade ago, that’s no longer the case. This was presented as a good thing by the dating services, Serena Smith writes: “Your dating pool was no longer limited to random acquaintances. . . . It sounded liberating; it was supposed to make it easier for people to find the ‘right’ partner.”

But, she continues,

as most dating app users will know by now, the paradox of choice can be stultifying, especially as these apps hardly allow us to engage meaningfully with the essentially infinite number of strangers we’re presented with.

The result?

Essentially, as a result of the growth of dating apps, rising atomization, and the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, norms have shifted, which has resulted in many young people feeling squeamish about dating friends or friends-of-friends despite this being common practice for older generations.

One 22-year-old woman discussed in the story “explains that she would never swipe right on someone in her social circle” on the grounds that “I don’t know if it’s healthy to have so many friends in common.”

Smith concludes:

Break-ups are always difficult, but break-ups within a friendship group are evidently even more painful. For many Gen Z, it doesn’t even bear thinking about. But by totally writing off people within our social circles, we’re potentially missing out on happy, lengthy, and fulfilling relationships. . . .

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].