RELATIONSHIPS

Autistic people experience loneliness far more acutely than neurotypical people – new research. Autistic people are up to four times more likely to experience loneliness than non-autistic people. Despite enduring stereotypes that autistic people lack the desire for meaningful social connections, new research from my colleagues and I unveils the profound distress they experience due to loneliness. It also shows the unexpected role that differences in the ways individuals receive and interpret different stimuli through their senses – their “sensory processing” – may play in this phenomenon. We combined two complementary studies that investigated autistic and non-autistic people’s experiences of loneliness, using different methods. In the first study, autistic and non-autistic participants co...

Friday essay: Lessons in Chemistry – the real Prince Charming in this ‘bad romance’ is a good dog. If you were charmed by the Apple TV+ adaptation of Bonnie Garmus’s debut novel Lessons In Chemistry and want learn more about the book, the first thing you’ll discover is that it was a New York Times bestseller (for more than 58 weeks) and international hit, with a #BookTok following and rights sold to 40 countries. US cover. The second is that some American readers were angry about the cover because the pink jacket with the sexy illustrated book face – all flippy hair, pouty lips and cat-eye glasses – implies a sassy romance the story does not deliver. Garmus even received hate mail. “They were like, ‘You’re the worst romance novelist ever’,” she told the New York...