vox--2020-11-25--Dark matter holds our universe together. No one knows what it is.

Dark matter holds our universe together .
No one knows what it is .
Share All sharing options for : Dark matter holds our universe together .
No one knows what it is .
If you go outside on a dark night , in the darkest places on Earth , you can see as many as 9,000 stars .
They appear as tiny points of light , but they are massive infernos .
And while these stars seem astonishingly numerous to our eyes , they represent just the tiniest fraction of all the stars in our galaxy , let alone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stargazing is keeping this all in mind : Every small thing we see in the night sky is immense , but what ’ s even more immense is the unseen , the unknown .
I ’ ve been thinking about this feeling — the awesome , terrifying feeling of smallness , of the extreme contrast of the big and small — while reporting on one of the greatest mysteries in science for Unexplainable , a new Vox podcast pilot you can listen to below .
It turns out all the stars in all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , barely even begin to account for all the stuff of the universe .
Most of the matter in the universe is actually unseeable , untouchable , and , to this day , undiscovered .
Scientists call this unexplained stuff “ dark matter , ” and they believe there ’ s five times more of it in the universe than normal matter — the stuff that makes up you and me , stars , planets , black holes , and everything we can see in the night sky or touch here on Earth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all that “ normal ” matter , because in the grand scheme of the cosmos , normal matter is the rare stuff .
But to this day , no one knows what dark matter actually is .
“ I think it gives you intellectual and kind of epistemic humility — that we are simultaneously , super insignificant , a tiny , tiny speck of the universe , ” Priya Natarajan , a Yale physicist and dark matter expert , said on a recent phone call .
“ But on the other hand , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are like these tiny , gelatinous cantaloupes , and we have figured all of this out.
” The story of dark matter is a reminder that whatever we know , whatever truth about the universe we have acquired as individuals or as society , is insignificant compared to what we have not yet explained .
It ’ s also a reminder that , often , in order to discover something true , the first thing we need to do is account for what we don ’ t know .
This accounting of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s celebrated in science .
It doesn ’ t win Nobel prizes .
But , at least , we can know the size of our ignorance .
And that ’ s a start .
But how does it end ?
Though physicists have been trying to figure out what dark matter is for decades , the detectors they built to find it have gone silent year after year .
It makes some wonder : Have they been chasing a ghost ?
Dark matter might not be real .
Instead , there could @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ understanding of gravity that would explain it away .
Still , the search , fueled by faith in scientific observations , continues , despite the possibility that dark matter may never be found .
To learn about dark matter is to grapple with , and embrace , the unknown .
The woman who told us how much we don ’ t know Scientists are , to this day , searching for dark matter , because they believe it is there to find .
And they believe so largely because of Vera Rubin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at age 88 .
Growing up in Washington , DC , in the 1930s , like so many young people getting started in science , Rubin fell in love with the night sky .
Rubin shared a bedroom and bed with her sister Ruth .
Ruth was older and got to pick her favorite side of the bed , the one that faced the bedroom windows and the night sky .
“ But the windows captivated Vera ’ s attention , ” Ashley Yeager , a journalist writing a forthcoming biography on Rubin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ constantly crawling over her at night , to be able to open the windows and look out at the night sky and start to track the stars.
” Ruth just wanted to sleep , and “ there Vera was tinkering and trying to take pictures of the stars and trying to track their motions.
” It wasn ’ t that everything we knew about matter was wrong .
It was that everything we knew about normal matter was insignificant .
Not everyone gets to turn their childlike wonder and captivation of the unknown @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Flash-forward to the late 1960s , and she ’ s at the Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson , Arizona , doing exactly what she did in that childhood bedroom : tracking the motion of stars .
This time , though , she has a cutting-edge telescope and is looking at stars in motion at the edge of the Andromeda Galaxy .
Just 40 years prior , Edwin Hubble had determined , for the first time , that Andromeda was a galaxy outside of our own , and that galaxies outside our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Hubble doubled the size of the known universe .
By 1960 , scientists were still asking basic questions in the wake of this discovery .
Like : How do galaxies move ?
Rubin and her colleague Kent Ford were at the observatory doing this basic science , charting how stars are moving at the edge of Andromeda .
“ I guess I wanted to confirm Newton ’ s laws , ” Rubin said in an archival interview with science historian David DeVorkin .
Per Newton ’ s equations , the stars in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ planets in our solar system do .
Mercury , the closest planet to the sun , orbits very quickly , propelled by the sun ’ s gravity to a speed of around 106,000 mph .
Neptune , far from the sun , and less influenced by its gravity , moves much slower , at around 12,000 mph .
The same thing ought to happen in galaxies too : Stars near the dense , gravity-rich centers of galaxies ought to move faster than the stars along the edges .
But that wasn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , they saw that the stars along the edge of Andromeda were going the same speed as the stars in the interior .
“ I think it was kind of like a ‘ what the fuck ’ moment , ” Yeager says .
“ It was just it was just so different than what everyone had expected.
” The data pointed to an enormous problem : The stars couldn ’ t just be moving that fast on their own .
At those speeds , the galaxy should be ripping itself apart like an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
To explain why this wasn ’ t happening , these stars needed some kind of extra gravity out there acting like an engine .
There had to be a source of mass for all that extra gravity .
( For a refresher : Physicists consider gravity to be a consequence of mass .
The more mass in an area , the stronger the gravitational pull . )
The data suggested that there was a staggering amount of mass in the galaxy that astronomers simply couldn ’ t see .
“ As they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just can ’ t seem to find any kind of evidence that it ’ s some normal type of matter , ” Yeager says .
It wasn ’ t black holes ; it wasn ’ t dead stars .
It was something else generating the gravity needed to both hold the galaxy together and propel those outer stars to such fast speeds .
“ I mean , when you first see it , I think you ’ re afraid of being … you ’ re afraid of making a dumb mistake , you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some simple explanation , ” Rubin later recounted .
Other scientists might have immediately announced a dramatic conclusion based on this limited data .
But not Rubin .
She and her collaborators dug in and decided to do a systematic review of the star speeds in galaxies .
Rubin and Ford weren ’ t the first group to make an observation of stars moving fast at the edge of a galaxy .
But what Rubin and her collaborators are famous for is verifying the finding across the universe .
“ She [ studies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and then 60 , and they all show this bizarre behavior of stars out far in the galaxy , moving way , way too fast , ” Yeager explains .
This is why people say Rubin ought to have won a Nobel Prize ( the prizes are only awarded to living recipients , so she will never win one ) .
She didn ’ t “ discover ” dark matter .
But the data she collected over her career made it so the astronomical community had to reckon with the idea that most @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unknown .
By 1985 , Rubin was confident enough in her observations to declare something of an anti-eureka : announcing not a discovery , but a huge absence in our collective knowledge .
“ Nature has played a trick on astronomers , ” she ’ s paraphrased as saying at an International Astronomical Organization conference in 1985 , “ who thought we were studying the Universe .
We now know that we were studying only a small fraction of it.
” To this day , no one has “ discovered ” dark matter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : She told the scientific world about what they were missing .
In the decades since this anti-eureka , other scientists have been trying to fill in the void Rubin pointed to .
Their work isn ’ t complete .
But what they ’ ve been learning about dark matter is that it ’ s incredibly important to the very structure of our universe , and that it ’ s deeply , deeply weird .
Since Rubin ’ s WTF moment in the Arizona desert , more and more evidence has accumulated that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and accounts for most of the mass in the universe .
“ Even though we can ’ t see it , we can still infer that dark matter is there , ” Kathryn Zurek , a Caltech astrophysicist , explains .
“ Even if we couldn ’ t see the moon with our eyes , we would still know that it was there because it pulls the oceans in different directions — and it ’ s really very similar with dark matter.
” Scientists can ’ t see dark matter directly .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the space and light around it .
The biggest piece of indirect evidence : Dark matter , like all matter that accumulates in large quantities , has the ability to warp the very fabric of space .
“ You can visualize dark matter as these lumps of matter that create little potholes in space-time , ” Natarajan says .
“ All the matter in the universe is pockmarked with dark matter.
” When light falls into one of these potholes , it bends like light does in a lens .
In this way @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” dark matter , but we can “ see ” the distortions it produces in astronomers ’ views of the cosmos .
From this , we know dark matter forms a spherical cocoon around galaxies , lending them more mass , which allows their stars to move faster than what Newton ’ s laws would otherwise suggest .
These are indirect observations , but they have also given scientists some clues about the intrinsic nature of dark matter .
It ’ s not called dark matter because of its color .
It has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ dark ” because it neither reflects nor emits light , nor any sort of electromagnetic radiation .
So we can ’ t see it directly even with the most powerful telescopes .
Not only can we not see it , we couldn ’ t touch it if we tried : If some sentient alien tossed a piece of dark matter at you , it would pass right through you .
If it were going fast enough , it would pass right through the entire Earth .
Dark matter is like a ghost @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are confident in that weird fact .
Astronomers have made observations of galaxy clusters that have slammed into one another like a head-on collision between two cars on the highway .
Astronomers deduced that in the collision , much of the normal matter in the galaxy clusters slowed down and mixed together ( like two cars in a head-on collision would stop one another and crumple together ) .
But the dark matter in the cluster didn ’ t slow down in the collision .
It kept going , as if the collision @ @ @ @ @ @ @ event is recreated in this animation .
The red represents normal matter in the galaxy clusters , and the blue represents dark matter .
During the collision , the blue dark matter acts like a ghost , just passing through the normal colliding matter as if it weren ’ t there .
A final big piece of evidence for dark matter is that it helps physicists make sense of how galaxies formed in the early universe .
“ We know that dark matter had to be present to be part of that process @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It ’ s believed dark matter coalesced together in the early universe before normal matter did , creating gravitational wells for normal matter to fall into .
Those gravitational wells formed by dark matter became the seeds of galaxies .
So dark matter not only holds galaxies together , as Rubin ’ s work implied — it ’ s why galaxies are there in the first place .
So : What is it ?
To this day , no one really knows what dark matter is .
Scientists ’ best guess is that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are the smallest building blocks of reality — they ’ re so small , they make up atoms .
It ’ s thought that dark matter is just another one of these building blocks , but one we haven ’ t seen up close for ourselves .
( There are a lot of different proposed particles that may be good dark matter candidates .
Scientists still aren ’ t sure exactly which one it will be . )
You might be wondering : Why can ’ t we find the most common source @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Well , our scientific equipment is made out of normal matter .
So if dark matter passes right through normal matter , trying to find dark matter is like trying to catch a ghost baseball with a normal glove .
Plus , while dark matter is bountiful in the universe , it ’ s really diffuse .
There are just not massive boulders of it passing nearby Earth .
It ’ s more like we ’ re swimming in a fine mist of it .
“ If you add up all the dark @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the planet at any given moment , it ’ s one nanogram , ” Natarajan says — teeny-tiny .
Dark matter may never be “ discovered , ” and that ’ s okay Some physicists favor a different interpretation for what Rubin observed , and for what other scientists have observed since : that it ’ s not that there ’ s some invisible mass of dark matter dominating the universe , but that scientists ’ fundamental understanding of gravity is flawed and needs to be reworked .
While “ that ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , currently , there ’ s a lot more evidence on the side of dark matter being real and not just a mirage based on a misunderstanding of gravity .
“ We would need a new theory [ of gravity ] that can explain everything that we see already , ” she explains .
“ There is no such theory that is currently available.
” It ’ s not hard to believe in something invisible , Mack says , if all the right evidence is there .
We do it all the time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if you ’ re walking down the street , ” she says .
“ And as you ’ re walking , you see that some trees are kind of bending over , and you hear some leaves rustling and maybe you see a plastic bag sort of floating past you and you feel a little cold on one side .
You can pretty much figure out there ’ s wind .
Right ?
And that wind explains all of these different phenomena .
...
There are many , many different pieces of evidence @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of them , you might be able to find some other explanation that works just as well .
But when taken together , it ’ s really good evidence.
” Meanwhile , experiments around the world are trying to directly detect dark matter .
Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider are hoping their particle collisions may one day produce some detectable dark matter .
Astronomers are looking out in space for more clues , hoping one day dark matter will reveal itself through an explosion of gamma rays .
Elsewhere , scientists have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ noise and radiation , hoping that dark matter will one day pass through a detector they ’ ve carefully designed and make itself known .
But it hasn ’ t happened yet .
It may never happen : Scientists hope that dark matter isn ’ t a complete ghost to normal matter .
They hope that every once in a while , when it collides with normal matter , it does something really , really subtle , like shove one single atom to the side , and set off a delicately constructed alarm @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It could be dark matter just never prods normal matter , that it remains a ghost .
“ I really did get into this business because I thought I would be detecting this within five years , ” Prisca Cushman , a University of Minnesota physicist who works on a dark matter detector , says .
She ’ s been trying to find dark matter for 20 years .
She still believes it exists , that it ’ s out there to find .
But maybe it ’ s just not the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ set up to find .
That failure isn ’ t a reason to give up , she says .
“ By not seeing [ dark matter ] yet with a particular detector , we ’ re saying , ‘ Oh , so it ’ s not this particular model that we thought it might be.
’ And that is an extremely interesting statement .
Because all of a sudden an army of theorists go out and say , ‘ Hey , what else could it be ?
’ ” But even if the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that won ’ t discount all science has learned about it .
“ It ’ s like you ’ re on a beach , ” Natarajan explains .
“ You have a lot of sand dunes .
And so we are in a situation where we are able to understand how these sand dunes form , but we don ’ t actually know what a grain of sand is made of.
” Natarajan and the other physicists I spoke to for this story are comfortable with the unknown nature of dark matter .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ want to know more , but they accept it ’ s real .
They accept it because that ’ s the state of the evidence .
And if new evidence comes along to disprove it , they ’ ll have to accept that too .
“ Inherent to the nature of science is the fact that whatever we know is provisional , ” Natarajan says .
“ It is apt to change .
So I think what motivates people like me to continue doing science is the fact that it keeps opening up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ultimately resolved.
” That ’ s true when it comes to the biggest questions , like “ what is the universe made of ?
” It ’ s true in so many other areas of science , too : Despite the endless headlines that proclaim new research findings that get published daily , there are many more unanswered questions than answered .
Scientists don ’ t really understand how bicycles stay upright , or know the root cause of Alzheimer ’ s disease or how to treat it .
Similarly , at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ craved answers : Why do some people get much sicker than others , what does immunity to the virus look like ?
The truth was we couldn ’ t yet know ( and still don ’ t , for sure ) .
But that didn ’ t mean the scientific process was broken .
The truth is , when it comes to a lot of fields of scientific progress , we ’ re in the middle of the story , not the end .
The lesson is that truth and knowledge are hard-won @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it wasn ’ t that everything we knew about matter was wrong .
It was that everything we knew about normal matter was insignificant compared to our ignorance about dark matter .
The story of dark matter fits with a narrative of scientific progress that makes us humans seem smaller and smaller at each turn .
First , we learned that Earth wasn ’ t the center of the universe .
Now dark matter teaches us that the very stuff we ’ re made of — matter — is just a fraction @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is one day discovered , it will only open up more questions .
Dark matter could be more than one particle , more than one thing .
There could be a richness and diversity in dark matter that ’ s a little like the richness and diversity we see in normal matter .
It ’ s possible , and this is speculation , that there ’ s a kind of shadow universe that we don ’ t have access to — scientists label it the “ dark sector ” — that is made @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as a ghost , enveloping our galaxies .
It ’ s a little scary to learn how little we know , to learn we don ’ t even know what most of the universe is made out of .
But there ’ s a sense of optimism in a question , right ?
It makes you feel like we can know the answer to them .
There ’ s so much about our world that ’ s arrogant : from politicians who only believe in what ’ s convenient for them to Silicon @ @ @ @ @ @ @ helping the world while fracturing it , and so many more examples .
If only everyone could see a bit of what Vera Rubin saw — a fundamental truth not just about the universe , but about humanity .
“ In a spiral galaxy , the ratio of dark-to-light matter is about a factor of 10 , ” Rubin said in a 2000 interview .
“ That ’ s probably a good number for the ratio of our ignorance to knowledge .
We ’ re out of kindergarten , but only in about @ @ @ @

Share All sharing options for: Dark matter holds our universe together. No one knows what it is.
If you go outside on a dark night, in the darkest places on Earth, you can see as many as 9,000 stars. They appear as tiny points of light, but they are massive infernos. And while these stars seem astonishingly numerous to our eyes, they represent just the tiniest fraction of all the stars in our galaxy, let alone the universe.
The beautiful challenge of stargazing is keeping this all in mind: Every small thing we see in the night sky is immense, but what’s even more immense is the unseen, the unknown.
I’ve been thinking about this feeling — the awesome, terrifying feeling of smallness, of the extreme contrast of the big and small — while reporting on one of the greatest mysteries in science for Unexplainable, a brand new Vox podcast about unanswered questions in science. You can listen to the episode below (and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!).
It turns out all the stars in all the galaxies, in all the universe, barely even begin to account for all the stuff of the universe. Most of the matter in the universe is actually unseeable, untouchable, and, to this day, undiscovered.
Scientists call this unexplained stuff “dark matter,” and they believe there’s five times more of it in the universe than normal matter — the stuff that makes up you and me, stars, planets, black holes, and everything we can see in the night sky or touch here on Earth. It’s strange even calling all that “normal” matter, because in the grand scheme of the cosmos, normal matter is the rare stuff. But to this day, no one knows what dark matter actually is.
“I think it gives you intellectual and kind of epistemic humility — that we are simultaneously, super insignificant, a tiny, tiny speck of the universe,” Priya Natarajan, a Yale physicist and dark matter expert, said on a recent phone call. “But on the other hand, we have brains in our skulls that are like these tiny, gelatinous cantaloupes, and we have figured all of this out.”
The story of dark matter is a reminder that whatever we know, whatever truth about the universe we have acquired as individuals or as a society, is insignificant compared to what we have not yet explained.
The world needs more wonder The Unexplainable newsletter guides you through the most fascinating, unanswered questions in science — and the mind-bending ways scientists are trying to answer them. Sign up today.
It’s also a reminder that, often, in order to discover something true, the first thing we need to do is account for what we don’t know.
This accounting of the unknown is not often a thing that’s celebrated in science. It doesn’t win Nobel Prizes. But, at least, we can know the size of our ignorance. And that’s a start.
But how does it end? Though physicists have been trying for decades to figure out what dark matter is, the detectors they built to find it have gone silent year after year. It makes some wonder: Have they been chasing a ghost? Dark matter might not be real. Instead, there could be something more deeply flawed in physicists’ understanding of gravity that would explain it away. Still, the search, fueled by faith in scientific observations, continues, despite the possibility that dark matter may never be found.
To learn about dark matter is to grapple with, and embrace, the unknown.
The woman who told us how much we don’t know
Scientists are, to this day, searching for dark matter because they believe it is there to find. And they believe so largely because of Vera Rubin, an astronomer who died in 2016 at age 88.
Growing up in Washington, DC, in the 1930s, like so many young people getting started in science, Rubin fell in love with the night sky.
Rubin shared a bedroom and bed with her sister Ruth. Ruth was older and got to pick her favorite side of the bed, the one that faced the bedroom windows and the night sky.
“But the windows captivated Vera’s attention,” Ashley Yeager, a journalist writing a forthcoming biography on Rubin, says. “Ruth remembers Vera constantly crawling over her at night, to be able to open the windows and look out at the night sky and start to track the stars.” Ruth just wanted to sleep, and “there Vera was tinkering and trying to take pictures of the stars and trying to track their motions.”
It wasn’t that everything we knew about matter was wrong. It was that everything we knew about normal matter was insignificant.
Not everyone gets to turn their childlike wonder and captivation by the unknown into a career, but Rubin did.
Flash-forward to the late 1960s, and she’s at the Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, doing exactly what she did in that childhood bedroom: tracking the motion of stars.
This time, though, she has a cutting-edge telescope and is looking at stars in motion at the edge of the Andromeda Galaxy. Just 40 years prior, Edwin Hubble had determined, for the first time, that Andromeda was a galaxy outside of our own, and that galaxies outside our own even existed. With one observation, Hubble doubled the size of the known universe.
By 1960, scientists were still asking basic questions in the wake of this discovery. Like: How do galaxies move?
Rubin and her colleague Kent Ford were at the observatory doing this basic science, charting how stars are moving at the edge of Andromeda. “I guess I wanted to confirm Newton’s laws,” Rubin said in an archival interview with science historian David DeVorkin.
Per Newton’s equations, the stars in the galaxy ought to move like the planets in our solar system do. Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, orbits very quickly, propelled by the sun’s gravity to a speed of around 106,000 mph. Neptune, far from the sun, and less influenced by its gravity, moves much slower, at around 12,000 mph.
The same thing ought to happen in galaxies too: Stars near the dense, gravity-rich centers of galaxies ought to move faster than the stars along the edges.
But that wasn’t what Rubin and Ford observed. Instead, they saw that the stars along the edge of Andromeda were going the same speed as the stars in the interior. “I think it was kind of like a ‘what the fuck’ moment,” Yeager says. “It was just so different than what everyone had expected.”
The data pointed to an enormous problem: The stars couldn’t just be moving that fast on their own.
At those speeds, the galaxy should be ripping itself apart like an accelerating merry-go-round with the brake turned off. To explain why this wasn’t happening, these stars needed some kind of extra gravity out there acting like an engine. There had to be a source of mass for all that extra gravity. (For a refresher: Physicists consider gravity to be a consequence of mass. The more mass in an area, the stronger the gravitational pull.)
The data suggested that there was a staggering amount of mass in the galaxy that astronomers simply couldn’t see. “As they’re looking out there, they just can’t seem to find any kind of evidence that it’s some normal type of matter,” Yeager says. It wasn’t black holes; it wasn’t dead stars. It was something else generating the gravity needed to both hold the galaxy together and propel those outer stars to such fast speeds.
“I mean, when you first see it, I think you’re afraid of being … you’re afraid of making a dumb mistake, you know, that there’s just some simple explanation,” Rubin later recounted. Other scientists might have immediately announced a dramatic conclusion based on this limited data. But not Rubin. She and her collaborators dug in and decided to do a systematic review of the star speeds in galaxies.
Rubin and Ford weren’t the first group to make an observation of stars moving fast at the edge of a galaxy. But what Rubin and her collaborators are famous for is verifying the finding across the universe. “She [studied] 20 galaxies, and then 40 and then 60, and they all show this bizarre behavior of stars out far in the galaxy, moving way, way too fast,” Yeager explains.
This is why people say Rubin ought to have won a Nobel Prize (the prizes are only awarded to living recipients, so she will never win one). She didn’t “discover” dark matter. But the data she collected over her career made it so the astronomy community had to reckon with the idea that most of the mass in the universe is unknown.
By 1985, Rubin was confident enough in her observations to declare something of an anti-eureka: announcing not a discovery, but a huge absence in our collective knowledge. “Nature has played a trick on astronomers,” she’s paraphrased as saying at an International Astronomical Union conference in 1985, “who thought we were studying the universe. We now know that we were studying only a small fraction of it.”
To this day, no one has “discovered” dark matter. But Rubin did something incredibly important: She told the scientific world about what they were missing.
In the decades since this anti-eureka, other scientists have been trying to fill in the void Rubin pointed to. Their work isn’t complete. But what they’ve been learning about dark matter is that it’s incredibly important to the very structure of our universe, and that it’s deeply, deeply weird.
Dark matter isn’t just enormous. It’s also strange.
Since Rubin’s WTF moment in the Arizona desert, more and more evidence has accumulated that dark matter is real, and weird, and accounts for most of the mass in the universe.
“Even though we can’t see it, we can still infer that dark matter is there,” Kathryn Zurek, a Caltech astrophysicist, explains. “Even if we couldn’t see the moon with our eyes, we would still know that it was there because it pulls the oceans in different directions — and it’s really very similar with dark matter.”
Scientists can’t see dark matter directly. But they can see its influence on the space and light around it. The biggest piece of indirect evidence: Dark matter, like all matter that accumulates in large quantities, has the ability to warp the very fabric of space.
“You can visualize dark matter as these lumps of matter that create little potholes in space-time,” Natarajan says. “All the matter in the universe is pockmarked with dark matter.”
When light falls into one of these potholes, it bends like light does in a lens. In this way, we can’t “see” dark matter, but we can “see” the distortions it produces in astronomers’ views of the cosmos. From this, we know dark matter forms a spherical cocoon around galaxies, lending them more mass, which allows their stars to move faster than what Newton’s laws would otherwise suggest.
These are indirect observations, but they have given scientists some clues about the intrinsic nature of dark matter. It’s not called dark matter because of its color. It has no color. It’s called “dark” because it neither reflects nor emits light, nor any sort of electromagnetic radiation. So we can’t see it directly even with the most powerful telescopes.
Not only can we not see it, we couldn’t touch it if we tried: If some sentient alien tossed a piece of dark matter at you, it would pass right through you. If it were going fast enough, it would pass right through the entire Earth. Dark matter is like a ghost.
Here’s one reason physicists are confident in that weird fact. Astronomers have made observations of galaxy clusters that have slammed into one another like a head-on collision between two cars on the highway.
Astronomers deduced that in the collision, much of the normal matter in the galaxy clusters slowed down and mixed together (like two cars in a head-on collision would stop one another and crumple together). But the dark matter in the cluster didn’t slow down in the collision. It kept going, as if the collision didn’t even happen.
The event is recreated in this animation. The red represents normal matter in the galaxy clusters, and the blue represents dark matter. During the collision, the blue dark matter acts like a ghost, just passing through the normal colliding matter as if it weren’t there.
(A note: These two weird aspects of dark matter — its invisibility and its untouchability — are connected: Dark matter simply does not interact with the electromagnetic force of nature. The electromagnetic force lights up our universe with light and radiation, but it also makes the world feel solid.)
A final big piece of evidence for dark matter is that it helps physicists make sense of how galaxies formed in the early universe. “We know that dark matter had to be present to be part of that process,” astrophysicist Katie Mack explains. It’s believed dark matter coalesced together in the early universe before normal matter did, creating gravitational wells for normal matter to fall into. Those gravitational wells formed by dark matter became the seeds of galaxies.
So dark matter not only holds galaxies together, as Rubin’s work implied — it’s why galaxies are there in the first place.
So: What is it?
To this day, no one really knows what dark matter is.
Scientists’ best guess is that it’s a particle. Particles are the smallest building blocks of reality — they’re so small, they make up atoms. It’s thought that dark matter is just another one of these building blocks, but one we haven’t seen up close for ourselves. (There are a lot of different proposed particles that may be good dark matter candidates. Scientists still aren’t sure exactly which one it will be.)
You might be wondering: Why can’t we find the most common source of matter in all the universe? Well, our scientific equipment is made out of normal matter. So if dark matter passes right through normal matter, trying to find dark matter is like trying to catch a ghost baseball with a normal glove.
Plus, while dark matter is bountiful in the universe, it’s really diffuse. There are just not massive boulders of it passing nearby Earth. It’s more like we’re swimming in a fine mist of it. “If you add up all the dark matter inside humans, all humans on the planet at any given moment, it’s one nanogram,” Natarajan says — teeny-tiny.
Dark matter may never be “discovered,” and that’s okay
Some physicists favor a different interpretation for what Rubin observed, and for what other scientists have observed since: that it’s not that there’s some invisible mass of dark matter dominating the universe, but that scientists’ fundamental understanding of gravity is flawed and needs to be reworked.
While “that’s a definite possibility,” Natarajan says; currently, there’s a lot more evidence on the side of dark matter being real and not just a mirage based on a misunderstanding of gravity. “We would need a new theory [of gravity] that can explain everything that we see already,” she explains. “There is no such theory that is currently available.”
It’s not hard to believe in something invisible, Mack says, if all the right evidence is there. We do it all the time.
“It’s similar to if you’re walking down the street,” she says. “And as you’re walking, you see that some trees are kind of bending over, and you hear some leaves rustling and maybe you see a plastic bag sort of floating past you and you feel a little cold on one side. You can pretty much figure out there’s wind. Right? And that wind explains all of these different phenomena. ... There are many, many different pieces of evidence for dark matter. And for each of them, you might be able to find some other explanation that works just as well. But when taken together, it’s really good evidence.”
Meanwhile, experiments around the world are trying to directly detect dark matter. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider are hoping their particle collisions may one day produce some detectable dark matter. Astronomers are looking out in space for more clues, hoping one day dark matter will reveal itself through an explosion of gamma rays. Elsewhere, scientists have burrowed deep underground, shielding labs from noise and radiation, hoping that dark matter will one day pass through a detector they’ve carefully designed and make itself known.
But it hasn’t happened yet. It may never happen: Scientists hope that dark matter isn’t a complete ghost to normal matter. They hope that every once in a while, when it collides with normal matter, it does something really, really subtle, like shove one single atom to the side, and set off a delicately constructed alarm.
But that day may never come. It could be dark matter just never prods normal matter, that it remains a ghost.
“I really did get into this business because I thought I would be detecting this within five years,” Prisca Cushman, a University of Minnesota physicist who works on a dark matter detector, says. She’s been trying to find dark matter for 20 years. She still believes it exists, that it’s out there to be discovered. But maybe it’s just not the particular candidate particle her detector was initially set up to find.
That failure isn’t a reason to give up, she says. “By not seeing [dark matter] yet with a particular detector, we’re saying, ‘Oh, so it’s not this particular model that we thought it might be.’ And that is an extremely interesting statement. Because all of a sudden an army of theorists go out and say, ‘Hey, what else could it be?’”
But even if the dark matter particle is never found, that won’t discount all science has learned about it. “It’s like you’re on a beach,” Natarajan explains. “You have a lot of sand dunes. And so we are in a situation where we are able to understand how these sand dunes form, but we don’t actually know what a grain of sand is made of.”
Embracing the unknown
Natarajan and the other physicists I spoke to for this story are comfortable with the unknown nature of dark matter. They’re not satisfied, they want to know more, but they accept it’s real. They accept it because that’s the state of the evidence. And if new evidence comes along to disprove it, they’ll have to accept that too.
“Inherent to the nature of science is the fact that whatever we know is provisional,” Natarajan says. “It is apt to change. So I think what motivates people like me to continue doing science is the fact that it keeps opening up more and more questions. Nothing is ultimately resolved.”
That’s true when it comes to the biggest questions, like, “What is the universe made of?”
It’s true in so many other areas of science, too: Despite the endless headlines that proclaim new research findings that get published daily, there are many more unanswered questions than answered. Scientists don’t really understand how bicycles stay upright, or know the root cause of Alzheimer’s disease or how to treat it. Similarly, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, we craved answers: Why do some people get much sicker than others, what does immunity to the virus look like? The truth was we couldn’t yet know (and still don’t, for sure). But that didn’t mean the scientific process was broken.
The truth is, when it comes to a lot of fields of scientific progress, we’re in the middle of the story, not the end. The lesson is that truth and knowledge are hard-won.
In the case of dark matter, it wasn’t that everything we knew about matter was wrong. It was that everything we knew about normal matter was insignificant compared to our ignorance about dark matter. The story of dark matter fits with a narrative of scientific progress that makes us humans seem smaller and smaller at each turn. First, we learned that Earth wasn’t the center of the universe. Now dark matter teaches us that the very stuff we’re made of — matter — is just a fraction of all reality.
If dark matter is one day discovered, it will only open up more questions. Dark matter could be more than one particle, more than one thing. There could be a richness and diversity in dark matter that’s a little like the richness and diversity we see in normal matter. It’s possible, and this is speculation, that there’s a kind of shadow universe that we don’t have access to — scientists label it the “dark sector” — that is made up of different components and exists, as a ghost, enveloping our galaxies.
It’s a little scary to learn how little we know, to learn we don’t even know what most of the universe is made out of. But there’s a sense of optimism in a question, right? It makes you feel like we can know the answer to them.
There’s so much about our world that’s arrogant: from politicians who only believe in what’s convenient for them to Silicon Valley companies that claim they’re helping the world while fracturing it, and so many more examples. If only everyone could see a bit of what Vera Rubin saw — a fundamental truth not just about the universe, but about humanity.
“In a spiral galaxy, the ratio of dark-to-light matter is about a factor of 10,” Rubin said in a 2000 interview. “That’s probably a good number for the ratio of our ignorance to knowledge. We’re out of kindergarten, but only in about third grade.”


vox--2020-11-26--11 great ways to pass the time this holiday weekend

If you ’ re living in the United States , there ’ s a good chance you have a long weekend coming up , in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday .
Many people will have Thanksgiving off ; some will even have the whole four-day weekend off .
That leaves plenty of time for rest and relaxation and plenty of time to find new ways to entertain yourself .
In a year when the spike in Covid-19 cases makes gathering with family and friends an especially bad idea , you might be looking for diversions you can enjoy with your @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or even by yourself .
And if that ’ s the case , we have you covered .
Here are 11 terrific entertainments — six to watch and five to play — to help pass the time .
All of them are possible to complete over the long weekend , too , so you can emerge on the other side with something new to recommend to your friends .
Steve James knows Chicago ; in several of his films , from the Oscar-nominated 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams to 2011 ’ s The Interrupters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he ’ s explored the third-largest city in the US through the stories of its residents , often illuminating the complexities of bigger national issues by showing how they actually play out in individual lives .
Any of these works would make for a great weekend marathon watch — they ’ re all highly entertaining and thought-provoking .
But in 2020 , the clear choice is James ’ s docuseries City So Real , for which he focused on the groundbreaking 2019 Chicago mayoral election .
The race featured a crowded field @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gain constituents ’ trust , against the backdrop of protests over the impending Lincoln Yards development project and the trial of police officer Jason Van Dyke , who shot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times .
The winner , Lori Lightfoot , took over the city during a period of immense unrest and has been criticized for her response to everything from protests over police brutality to Covid-19 .
So after City So Real ’ s festival run pre-pandemic , James directed a fifth episode of the series focusing on how Chicago has been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It ’ s an engrossing , enlightening portrait of a city — and a country — at an inflection point , and a love letter to Chicago , too .
( City So Real is streaming on Hulu ; five episodes ) An adaptation of James McBride ’ s National Book Award-winning 2013 novel of the same name , this seven-episode Showtime miniseries is a surprisingly comic romp through the life of abolitionist John Brown , as played by Ethan Hawke .
Brown led the 1859 raid on an armory in Harpers Ferry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his actions would inspire a nationwide rebellion against slavery ; Hawke gives a tremendous performance in the role , both ferocious and funny , and his character ’ s relationship with a young slave named Onion ( Joshua Caleb Johnson ) who ends up traveling with him provides a poignant center for the series .
The central question of The Good Lord Bird ’ s narrative — what is the most effective way to act when you believe your nation is complicit in evil — is always relevant , but it ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as it is here .
( The Good Lord Bird is available to Showtime subscribers across all Showtime platforms , and the series premiere is available for free on Showtime ’ s website ; seven episodes ) How To With John Wilson How To With John Wilson is both thought-provoking and absolutely hilarious , truly the most winning of combinations any television show can offer .
Director John Wilson films everything around him , everywhere he goes , capturing footage in his neighborhood in Queens , at an office building in Midtown Manhattan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ industry trade show in New Orleans .
Then he sorts it into themed episodes and narrates it all , making himself the active lead character in this fascinating “ instructional ” docuseries about a variety of topics he finds interesting or elusive .
Wilson has an impeccable knack for observational commentary , and every image that appears on screen is perfectly curated and arranged to match the script , making for some of the smartest visual humor on TV now or ever .
If you ’ ve ever wondered about how to make @ @ @ @ @ @ @ furniture to protect it from your cat ’ s claws , well , so has John Wilson .
But each new search for answers leads John to surprising places , and you will love following along with every step of the journey .
( Available to stream on HBO and HBO Max ; six episodes once the season one finale airs Friday , November 26 ) Michaela Coel is transfixing in I May Destroy You , a riveting and elegiac series that ’ s part mystery , part drama , part comedy , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , who created the show and wrote every episode ) is a millennial writer with a new book deal , one that she landed after her first book , based on her funny tweets , enjoys huge success .
But Arabella is distracted by too much else in her life to really get the ball rolling on her sophomore effort .
The biggest thing robbing her of her focus is her rape , which happened one night at a bar when she was drugged by a man she can ’ t remember .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ premise , and the show never lets you forget that .
Still , I May Destroy You isn ’ t all about dragging Arabella through the mud as she tries to solve her own mystery ; the show ’ s surprising charm comes from how conscious it is that Arabella has a busy life that soldiers on beyond that one terrible night , with joy , with reckoning , with ambition — even as the trauma seeps into nearly every part of it .
( I May Destroy You is available to stream @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It happens more than most of us realize : A woman meets a nice man who compliments her , makes her feel special , takes her dancing , tells her she ’ s his soulmate .
They move in together .
They get married .
And then one day he ’ s just gone .
Efforts to locate him unveil a dark truth : He was never who he said he was .
This story has been told before — the podcast and resulting TV show Dirty John is one of the most @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a four-episode Showtime documentary series , tells it in a way that underscores how cons like this are both mundane and totally wild .
Love Fraud centers on one man , Richard Scott Smith , who was at large when production began .
The series is full of twists and turns , and what it learns about Smith is eye-opening .
He ’ s not conning wealthy women or murdering them , like so many men of his kind ; he ’ s targeting ordinary women who fall for him and then leaving @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he disappears , but mostly it seems like he ’ s after their dignity .
Love Fraud is highly bingeable , but it ’ s not just gawking at a trainwreck ; it ’ s asking us to consider what kind of a man would do this sort of thing , and what it would take for women , and the society around them , to fight back .
( Love Fraud is available to Showtime subscribers across all Showtime platforms ; four episodes ) We Are Who We Are Call Me by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ keen eye for coming-of-age tales is a huge boon to this eight-episode HBO series about two teenagers meeting at a US Army base in Italy .
A young man named Fraser arrives at the base in the series ’ first episode alongside his two mothers — the series ’ queer representation is matter-of-fact and lovely — and quickly finds himself drawn to Caitlin , a girl around his age .
But Caitlin , Fraser soon learns , is navigating complicated feelings around gender , and will sometimes ask Fraser to use the name @ @ @ @ @ @ @ together .
That could make We Are Who We Are sound like a story about trans identities , but the series gains its power from the way it blends smart storytelling about gender into a larger narrative about teenage loneliness and the importance of finding exactly the right friend at exactly the right moment .
( We Are Who We Are is available to HBO Max and HBO subscribers ; eight episodes ) For an easy-to-play video game that just about anyone can get into , Among Us is a popular choice .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ strangers , or both ( up to 10 players total ; you can log in by yourself to be matched with other players or set up private games with friends ) to work together on a spaceship , keeping the machinery up and running while completing a variety of tasks .
But at least one person in the group will be designated as a secret schemer whose role is to take out the other players without getting exposed .
Debates can get heated when everyone comes together to deliberate on who among us @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s all in good fun .
Even AOC is a fan .
( Among Us is available free on iOS and Android devices and $ 4.99 for Windows PCs ) For the Queen is the best tabletop role-playing game out there for beginners .
It ’ s quick , easy , and fun for players of all skill levels .
Plus , it ’ s playable with anywhere from two to six people , which makes it a good fit for families of all sizes .
Players take on the roles of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ long journey .
The queen can be a traditional fairy-tale queen .
She can be a queen bee .
She could be the homecoming queen .
The important thing is nobody actually plays her .
Instead , by answering open-ended questions about the queen and her followers , read off cards as they are drawn , players fill in details about the ruler and the journey .
Playable in under two hours and available on the online platform Roll20 , For the Queen is a great way to spend an afternoon .
( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Roll20 ) This video game stretches the definition of “ you can complete it in a weekend ” by assuming that you will pour all of your free time into it ( and given how much is contained within it , you might never discover all of Hades ’ secrets ) .
But honestly , Hades is such a good game that you just might want to give an entire weekend to it .
Players control Zagreus , the son of Hades , Greek god of the underworld , as Zagreus attempts to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the process .
He dies a lot .
But because he ’ s already in the underworld , Zagreus gains new abilities and knowledge from each escape attempt , and his relationships with the other gods and mythic figures in the underworld evolve over time .
Hades is very difficult , but the fact that dying actually adds new content to the game makes it easier to push past frustration and keep going ; alternately , if it ’ s too difficult , playing in “ god mode ” reduces the difficulty level @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the story , which is compelling and fascinating on its own .
And because the layout of the underworld changes with every new playthrough , the game is incredibly replayable .
( Available on Steam , the Epic Game Store , and Nintendo Switch ) The Pathless is an atmospheric video game where players assume the role of a young hunter roaming a wide-open world , mostly following her own compass .
This wandering hero is avowed to lift a curse off the island she ’ s found herself on , armed only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ adorable eagle sidekick to help her get around .
The game provides no world map to direct the hunter as to where to go : She is guided only by her own instincts about where the dangerous , evil spirits haunting the island may be hiding .
The good thing is that the hunter can do this with abandon , as there is no way for her to die ; only her items are lost in this game , not her life .
The Pathless is a stylish and not-very-long adventure that will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you can even pet the very cute eagle that follows the hunter around .
( The Pathless is available as part of an Apple Arcade subscription , or on PlayStation 4 , PlayStation 5 , and Windows PCs for $ 39.99 ) One of the best board games out there is also one of the simplest .
Rummikub has existed in Europe and Israel since the 1940s , but it only became a success in the US in the late 1970s .
Up to four players draw numbered tiles out of a bag @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; a player can lay down a run of three or more consecutive numbers in the same color , or a set of three or more tiles of the same number in different colors .
Once a player has made their initial play ( of tiles equaling 30 or more points ) , they can add tiles to the sets laid down by other players .
If you don ’ t have any playable tiles you have to draw a tile , and the first person to play all their tiles wins .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s also one of those games that ’ s a little different every time through , and it ’ s suitable for children who know numbers and colors ( though they might need a little time to catch on ) .
The game ’ s new Onyx edition mostly gives everything better production values — sleek black tiles , in particular .
But either way , Rummikub is a great tabletop game that most people can pick up right away .
( Available anywhere board games are sold ; there ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Apple and Google Play stores )

If you’re living in the United States, there’s a good chance you have a long weekend coming up, in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday. Many people will have Thanksgiving off; some will even have the whole four-day weekend off. That leaves plenty of time for rest and relaxation and plenty of time to find new ways to entertain yourself.
In a year when the spike in Covid-19 cases makes gathering with family and friends an especially bad idea, you might be looking for diversions you can enjoy with your immediate household, your romantic partner, or even by yourself.
And if that’s the case, we have you covered. Here are 11 terrific entertainments — six to watch and five to play — to help pass the time. All of them are possible to complete over the long weekend, too, so you can emerge on the other side with something new to recommend to your friends.
Things to watch
City So Real
Steve James knows Chicago; in several of his films, from the Oscar-nominated 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams to 2011’s The Interrupters to the 2018 docuseries America to Me, he’s explored the third-largest city in the US through the stories of its residents, often illuminating the complexities of bigger national issues by showing how they actually play out in individual lives. Any of these works would make for a great weekend marathon watch — they’re all highly entertaining and thought-provoking.
But in 2020, the clear choice is James’s docuseries City So Real, for which he focused on the groundbreaking 2019 Chicago mayoral election. The race featured a crowded field of candidates seeking to distinguish themselves and gain constituents’ trust, against the backdrop of protests over the impending Lincoln Yards development project and the trial of police officer Jason Van Dyke, who shot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times. The winner, Lori Lightfoot, took over the city during a period of immense unrest and has been criticized for her response to everything from protests over police brutality to Covid-19. So after City So Real’s festival run pre-pandemic, James directed a fifth episode of the series focusing on how Chicago has been changed during this very unusual year. It’s an engrossing, enlightening portrait of a city — and a country — at an inflection point, and a love letter to Chicago, too. (City So Real is streaming on Hulu; five episodes)
—Alissa Wilkinson
The Good Lord Bird
An adaptation of James McBride’s National Book Award-winning 2013 novel of the same name, this seven-episode Showtime miniseries is a surprisingly comic romp through the life of abolitionist John Brown, as played by Ethan Hawke.
Brown led the 1859 raid on an armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in the hope that his actions would inspire a nationwide rebellion against slavery; Hawke gives a tremendous performance in the role, both ferocious and funny, and his character’s relationship with a young slave named Onion (Joshua Caleb Johnson) who ends up traveling with him provides a poignant center for the series.
The central question of The Good Lord Bird’s narrative — what is the most effective way to act when you believe your nation is complicit in evil — is always relevant, but it’s rarely presented in as lively a fashion as it is here. (The Good Lord Bird is available to Showtime subscribers across all Showtime platforms, and the series premiere is available for free on Showtime’s website; seven episodes)
—Emily VanDerWerff
How To With John Wilson
How To With John Wilson is both thought-provoking and absolutely hilarious, truly the most winning of combinations any television show can offer. Director John Wilson films everything around him, everywhere he goes, capturing footage in his neighborhood in Queens, at an office building in Midtown Manhattan, on the floor of a scaffolding industry trade show in New Orleans.
Then he sorts it into themed episodes and narrates it all, making himself the active lead character in this fascinating “instructional” docuseries about a variety of topics he finds interesting or elusive. Wilson has an impeccable knack for observational commentary, and every image that appears on screen is perfectly curated and arranged to match the script, making for some of the smartest visual humor on TV now or ever.
If you’ve ever wondered about how to make small talk or how to cover your furniture to protect it from your cat’s claws, well, so has John Wilson. But each new search for answers leads John to surprising places, and you will love following along with every step of the journey. (Available to stream on HBO and HBO Max; six episodes once the season one finale airs Friday, November 26)
—Allegra Frank
I May Destroy You
Michaela Coel is transfixing in I May Destroy You, a riveting and elegiac series that’s part mystery, part drama, part comedy, and part dream. Arabella (Coel, who created the show and wrote every episode) is a millennial writer with a new book deal, one that she landed after her first book, based on her funny tweets, enjoys huge success.
But Arabella is distracted by too much else in her life to really get the ball rolling on her sophomore effort. The biggest thing robbing her of her focus is her rape, which happened one night at a bar when she was drugged by a man she can’t remember. It’s a heavy and dismaying premise, and the show never lets you forget that.
Still, I May Destroy You isn’t all about dragging Arabella through the mud as she tries to solve her own mystery; the show’s surprising charm comes from how conscious it is that Arabella has a busy life that soldiers on beyond that one terrible night, with joy, with reckoning, with ambition — even as the trauma seeps into nearly every part of it. (I May Destroy You is available to stream on HBO and HBO Max.)
—AF
Love Fraud
It happens more than most of us realize: A woman meets a nice man who compliments her, makes her feel special, takes her dancing, tells her she’s his soulmate. They move in together. They get married. And then one day he’s just gone. Efforts to locate him unveil a dark truth: He was never who he said he was.
This story has been told before — the podcast and resulting TV show Dirty John is one of the most famous examples — but Love Fraud, a four-episode Showtime documentary series, tells it in a way that underscores how cons like this are both mundane and totally wild. Love Fraud centers on one man, Richard Scott Smith, who was at large when production began. The series is full of twists and turns, and what it learns about Smith is eye-opening. He’s not conning wealthy women or murdering them, like so many men of his kind; he’s targeting ordinary women who fall for him and then leaving them.
Sometimes he takes money as he disappears, but mostly it seems like he’s after their dignity. Love Fraud is highly bingeable, but it’s not just gawking at a trainwreck; it’s asking us to consider what kind of a man would do this sort of thing, and what it would take for women, and the society around them, to fight back. (Love Fraud is available to Showtime subscribers across all Showtime platforms; four episodes)
—AW
We Are Who We Are
Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino’s keen eye for coming-of-age tales is a huge boon to this eight-episode HBO series about two teenagers meeting at a US Army base in Italy. A young man named Fraser arrives at the base in the series’ first episode alongside his two mothers — the series’ queer representation is matter-of-fact and lovely — and quickly finds himself drawn to Caitlin, a girl around his age.
But Caitlin, Fraser soon learns, is navigating complicated feelings around gender, and will sometimes ask Fraser to use the name Harper when they’re hanging out together. That could make We Are Who We Are sound like a story about trans identities, but the series gains its power from the way it blends smart storytelling about gender into a larger narrative about teenage loneliness and the importance of finding exactly the right friend at exactly the right moment. (We Are Who We Are is available to HBO Max and HBO subscribers; eight episodes)
—EV
Things to play
Among Us
For an easy-to-play video game that just about anyone can get into, Among Us is a popular choice. Gameplay requires a group of friends, strangers, or both (up to 10 players total; you can log in by yourself to be matched with other players or set up private games with friends) to work together on a spaceship, keeping the machinery up and running while completing a variety of tasks.
But at least one person in the group will be designated as a secret schemer whose role is to take out the other players without getting exposed. Debates can get heated when everyone comes together to deliberate on who among us is the imposter, but it’s all in good fun. Even AOC is a fan. (Among Us is available free on iOS and Android devices and $4.99 for Windows PCs)
—AF
For the Queen
For the Queen is the best tabletop role-playing game out there for beginners. It’s quick, easy, and fun for players of all skill levels. Plus, it’s playable with anywhere from two to six people, which makes it a good fit for families of all sizes.
Players take on the roles of a retinue traveling with a queen on a long journey. The queen can be a traditional fairy-tale queen. She can be a queen bee. She could be the homecoming queen. The important thing is nobody actually plays her. Instead, by answering open-ended questions about the queen and her followers, read off cards as they are drawn, players fill in details about the ruler and the journey. Playable in under two hours and available on the online platform Roll20, For the Queen is a great way to spend an afternoon. (Available in physical and digital form from Roll20)
—EV
Hades
This video game stretches the definition of “you can complete it in a weekend” by assuming that you will pour all of your free time into it (and given how much is contained within it, you might never discover all of Hades’ secrets). But honestly, Hades is such a good game that you just might want to give an entire weekend to it.
Players control Zagreus, the son of Hades, Greek god of the underworld, as Zagreus attempts to escape the afterlife. He dies in the process. He dies a lot. But because he’s already in the underworld, Zagreus gains new abilities and knowledge from each escape attempt, and his relationships with the other gods and mythic figures in the underworld evolve over time.
Hades is very difficult, but the fact that dying actually adds new content to the game makes it easier to push past frustration and keep going; alternately, if it’s too difficult, playing in “god mode” reduces the difficulty level to zero so you can just experience the story, which is compelling and fascinating on its own. And because the layout of the underworld changes with every new playthrough, the game is incredibly replayable. (Available on Steam, the Epic Game Store, and Nintendo Switch)
—EV
The Pathless
The Pathless is an atmospheric video game where players assume the role of a young hunter roaming a wide-open world, mostly following her own compass. This wandering hero is avowed to lift a curse off the island she’s found herself on, armed only with a bow and arrow and her adorable eagle sidekick to help her get around.
The game provides no world map to direct the hunter as to where to go: She is guided only by her own instincts about where the dangerous, evil spirits haunting the island may be hiding. The good thing is that the hunter can do this with abandon, as there is no way for her to die; only her items are lost in this game, not her life. The Pathless is a stylish and not-very-long adventure that will immerse you within a beautiful world; you can even pet the very cute eagle that follows the hunter around. (The Pathless is available as part of an Apple Arcade subscription, or on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Windows PCs for $39.99)
—AF
Rummikub Onyx
One of the best board games out there is also one of the simplest. Rummikub has existed in Europe and Israel since the 1940s, but it only became a success in the US in the late 1970s. Up to four players draw numbered tiles out of a bag. The tiles come in four colors; a player can lay down a run of three or more consecutive numbers in the same color, or a set of three or more tiles of the same number in different colors.
Once a player has made their initial play (of tiles equaling 30 or more points), they can add tiles to the sets laid down by other players. If you don’t have any playable tiles you have to draw a tile, and the first person to play all their tiles wins. Rummikub really is that simple, but it’s also one of those games that’s a little different every time through, and it’s suitable for children who know numbers and colors (though they might need a little time to catch on).
The game’s new Onyx edition mostly gives everything better production values — sleek black tiles, in particular. But either way, Rummikub is a great tabletop game that most people can pick up right away. (Available anywhere board games are sold; there’s also a free digital version on the Apple and Google Play stores)
—EV


vox--2020-11-26--Laura Ingalls Wilder only had one good Thanksgiving in the Little House books

Thanksgiving is different this year .
And it can be helpful , when holidays don ’ t feel quite right , to return to the holidays of children ’ s literature , where everything is codified and comfortably familiar .
You might think that Laura Ingalls Wilder ’ s immortal Little House books would suit our purposes perfectly .
But in the entire nine-volume saga , there are only two Thanksgiving scenes .
That seems wrong .
The Little House books are obsessed with food and patriotism , and what is Thanksgiving but our national excuse to indulge in both @ @ @ @ @ @ @ designed to codify the myth of the self-sufficient pioneers , pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and living off the fat of the land .
They take an almost pornographic pleasure in describing butter-churning and hog-slaughtering and corn-harvesting .
Thanksgiving should be entirely up their alley .
But the Little House books are also about deprivation and hunger , about how for the Ingalls family luxuries are always scarce , and even necessities aren ’ t exactly abundant .
So while Wilder always makes room in her narrative for a Christmas scene or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ minimal , the better to set off the Ingallses ’ austere morality .
Laura and Mary are delighted by tiny Christmas cakes made with pristine white sugar and white flour instead of the everyday brown ; they dutifully ask Pa to purchase workhorses for Christmas instead of spending money on buying them presents .
There simply isn ’ t room , in these books about survivalism , for more than one pious feast day a year .
So the two Thanksgiving scenes that we do get serve very specific purposes .
The first @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Plum Creek , serves as the calm before the storm : The Ingallses feast on stewed goose with dumplings and give thanks for the bounty of their land , little knowing that a biblical plague of grasshoppers is about to descend upon them and destroy their farm .
Christmas that year is a disaster .
Thanksgiving is the only reprieve they have .
The second Thanksgiving comes in Little Town on the Prairie , toward the end of the series , when the Ingalls family has settled down in the slowly developing town @ @ @ @ @ @ @ For the first time , they have neighbors living close by ; they have an infrastructure to supply them with such perks as surplus food and coal and medical care .
For Laura , the town is equal parts exciting and suffocating : she longs to travel further west , to be utterly isolated on the prairie , but she also loves the companionship and sociability of the town , and she knows that her delicate invalid sisters ( blind Mary , undernourished Carrie , and baby Grace ) need its riches to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this book , it ’ s not just a family affair .
It ’ s a town event , a New England dinner hosted by the church ’ s Ladies ’ Aid Society .
It ’ s a big , bustling celebration , packed with people and food , at once lavish and exciting and overwhelming : Laura stood stock-still for an instant .
Even Pa and Ma almost halted , though they were too grown-up to show surprise .
A grown-up person must never let feeling be shown by voice or manner @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gently hushed Grace , though she was as excited and overwhelmed as Carrie was .
In the very center of one table a pig was standing , roasted brown , and holding in its mouth a beautiful red apple .
In all their lives , Laura and Carrie had never seen so much food .
Those tables were loaded .
There were heaped dishes of mashed potatoes and of mashed turnips , and of mashed yellow squash , all dribbling melted butter down their sides from little hollows in their peaks .
There @ @ @ @ @ @ @ soaked soft again and cooked with cream .
There were plates piled high with golden squares of corn bread and slices of white bread and of brown , nutty-tasting graham bread .
There were cucumber pickles and beet pickles and green tomato pickles , and glass bowls on tall glass stems were full of red tomato preserves and wild-chokecherry jelly .
On each table was a long , wide , deep pan of chicken pie , with steam rising through the slits in its flaky crust .
Most marvelous of all was the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ propped up by short sticks , above a great pan filled with baked apples .
It smelled so good .
Better than any smell of any other food was that rich , oily , brown smell of roasted pork , that Laura had not smelled for so long .
Laura , overwhelmed by all the people and all the rich food around her , does not get to dive into that roasted pig herself .
Instead , she stays busy washing dishes throughout the entire dinner , like a dutiful and responsible young @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , she can ’ t stop herself from thinking about that pig .
She ’ s only able to eat at the end of the night , when “ a pile of bones lay where the pig had been , ” although Laura notes optimistically that “ plenty of meat remained on them.
” That onslaught of sensory detail ; the immense , lavish display of table after table of food after so many passages full of deprivation and misery ; the longing for luxury that is so intense as to feel almost @ @ @ @ @ @ @ away from physical pleasures to do one ’ s duty : Those are the conflicting strains that run through all of the Little House books , that grant them their visceral emotional force .
And here , they argue that community is necessary to Thanksgiving .
In the Little House books , Christmas happens every year , but Thanksgiving only appears in all its table-groaning glory when the Ingalls family has become part of a town .
Thanksgiving in Little Town on the Prairie means crowds that are both exciting and suffocating ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of dirty dishes that have to be cleaned .
And most importantly , it means feasting after famine , luxuriating in food after years with almost nothing — even if you ’ re last in line to eat .
In 2020 , Thanksgiving for so many of us will be a Thanksgiving without crowds and without community , because that is what we have to do in order to preserve our communities , so that they are here for us to celebrate with next year .
But Little Town on the Prairie is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for us after we make it through this dark year .
This is the grasshopper year , the year when everything goes wrong .
This is the year that time passes , and on the other side of it will be our best Thanksgiving yet .

Thanksgiving is different this year. And it can be helpful, when holidays don’t feel quite right, to return to the holidays of children’s literature, where everything is codified and comfortably familiar.
You might think that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s immortal Little House books would suit our purposes perfectly. But in the entire nine-volume saga, there are only two Thanksgiving scenes.
That seems wrong. The Little House books are obsessed with food and patriotism, and what is Thanksgiving but our national excuse to indulge in both in equal measure? These books are designed to codify the myth of the self-sufficient pioneers, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and living off the fat of the land. They take an almost pornographic pleasure in describing butter-churning and hog-slaughtering and corn-harvesting. Thanksgiving should be entirely up their alley.
But the Little House books are also about deprivation and hunger, about how for the Ingalls family luxuries are always scarce, and even necessities aren’t exactly abundant. So while Wilder always makes room in her narrative for a Christmas scene or two, the celebration is usually pointedly minimal, the better to set off the Ingallses’ austere morality. Laura and Mary are delighted by tiny Christmas cakes made with pristine white sugar and white flour instead of the everyday brown; they dutifully ask Pa to purchase workhorses for Christmas instead of spending money on buying them presents.
There simply isn’t room, in these books about survivalism, for more than one pious feast day a year. So the two Thanksgiving scenes that we do get serve very specific purposes.
The first one, in On the Banks of Plum Creek, serves as the calm before the storm: The Ingallses feast on stewed goose with dumplings and give thanks for the bounty of their land, little knowing that a biblical plague of grasshoppers is about to descend upon them and destroy their farm. Christmas that year is a disaster. Thanksgiving is the only reprieve they have.
The second Thanksgiving comes in Little Town on the Prairie, toward the end of the series, when the Ingalls family has settled down in the slowly developing town of De Smet, South Dakota. For the first time, they have neighbors living close by; they have an infrastructure to supply them with such perks as surplus food and coal and medical care.
For Laura, the town is equal parts exciting and suffocating: she longs to travel further west, to be utterly isolated on the prairie, but she also loves the companionship and sociability of the town, and she knows that her delicate invalid sisters (blind Mary, undernourished Carrie, and baby Grace) need its riches to survive.
So when Thanksgiving arrives in this book, it’s not just a family affair. It’s a town event, a New England dinner hosted by the church’s Ladies’ Aid Society. It’s a big, bustling celebration, packed with people and food, at once lavish and exciting and overwhelming:
Laura stood stock-still for an instant. Even Pa and Ma almost halted, though they were too grown-up to show surprise. A grown-up person must never let feeling be shown by voice or manner. So Laura only looked, and gently hushed Grace, though she was as excited and overwhelmed as Carrie was. In the very center of one table a pig was standing, roasted brown, and holding in its mouth a beautiful red apple. In all their lives, Laura and Carrie had never seen so much food. Those tables were loaded. There were heaped dishes of mashed potatoes and of mashed turnips, and of mashed yellow squash, all dribbling melted butter down their sides from little hollows in their peaks. There were large bowls of dried corn, soaked soft again and cooked with cream. There were plates piled high with golden squares of corn bread and slices of white bread and of brown, nutty-tasting graham bread. There were cucumber pickles and beet pickles and green tomato pickles, and glass bowls on tall glass stems were full of red tomato preserves and wild-chokecherry jelly. On each table was a long, wide, deep pan of chicken pie, with steam rising through the slits in its flaky crust. Most marvelous of all was the pig. It stood so life-like, propped up by short sticks, above a great pan filled with baked apples. It smelled so good. Better than any smell of any other food was that rich, oily, brown smell of roasted pork, that Laura had not smelled for so long.
Laura, overwhelmed by all the people and all the rich food around her, does not get to dive into that roasted pig herself. Instead, she stays busy washing dishes throughout the entire dinner, like a dutiful and responsible young lady. But try as she might, she can’t stop herself from thinking about that pig. She’s only able to eat at the end of the night, when “a pile of bones lay where the pig had been,” although Laura notes optimistically that “plenty of meat remained on them.”
That onslaught of sensory detail; the immense, lavish display of table after table of food after so many passages full of deprivation and misery; the longing for luxury that is so intense as to feel almost illicit; the ostentatious choice to turn away from physical pleasures to do one’s duty: Those are the conflicting strains that run through all of the Little House books, that grant them their visceral emotional force.
And here, they argue that community is necessary to Thanksgiving. In the Little House books, Christmas happens every year, but Thanksgiving only appears in all its table-groaning glory when the Ingalls family has become part of a town. Thanksgiving in Little Town on the Prairie means crowds that are both exciting and suffocating; it means piles of food and piles of dirty dishes that have to be cleaned. And most importantly, it means feasting after famine, luxuriating in food after years with almost nothing — even if you’re last in line to eat.
In 2020, Thanksgiving for so many of us will be a Thanksgiving without crowds and without community, because that is what we have to do in order to preserve our communities, so that they are here for us to celebrate with next year. But Little Town on the Prairie is a reminder of what’s waiting for us after we make it through this dark year.
This is the grasshopper year, the year when everything goes wrong. This is the year that time passes, and on the other side of it will be our best Thanksgiving yet.