A note about listicles: So we know a lot of people hate listicles and associate them with cheap, low-quality, traffic-driving, link-bait articles. But here’s the thing—a list is a great format for an article, and a format I was using on my old blog almost 10 years ago. In fact, my first listicle, 19 Things I Don’t Understand, was published in August of 2005, a year before Buzzfeed was even founded. Then, over the last few years, I watched in horror as one of my favorite formats decided to prostitute itself all over the internet as the default format for lazy articles. Anyway the point is, A) I was doing listicles before they were cool, and B) A list headline doesn’t mean it can’t be a high-quality article, so C) Wait But Why will make a listicle when it’s the best format for that post, and don’t be mad at us cause it’s not what it looks like.

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When you’re a kid, or in high school, or in college, you don’t really work too hard on your friend situation. Friends just kind of happen.

For a bunch of years, you’re in a certain life your parents chose for you, and so are other people, and none of you have that much on your plates, so friendships inevitably form. Then in college, you’re in the perfect friend-making environment, one that hits all three ingredients sociologists consider necessary for close friendships to develop: “proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other.” More friendships happen.

Maybe they’re the right friends, maybe they’re not really, but you don’t put that much thought into any of it—you’re more of a passive observer.

Once student life ends, the people in your life start to shake themselves into more distinct tiers. Something like this:

At the top of your life mountain, in the green zone, you have your Tier 1 friends—those who feel like brothers and sisters. These are the people closest to you, those you call first when something important happens, those you love even when they suck, who make speeches at your wedding, whose best and worst sides you know through and through, and whose relationship with you is eternal—even if you go months or years without hanging out, nothing has changed when you find yourself together again. Unfortunately, depending on how things went down in your youth, Tier 1 can also contain your worst enemies, the people who can ruin your day with one subtle jab that only they could word so brilliantly hurtfully, the people you feel a burning resentment for, or jealousy of, or competition with. Tier 1 is high stakes.

Below, in the yellow zone, are your Tier 2 friends—your Pretty Good friends. Pretty Good friends are a much calmer situation than your brothers and sisters on Tier 1. You might be invited to their wedding, but you won’t have any responsibilities once you’re there. If you live in the same city, you might see them every month or two for dinner and have a great time when you do, but if one of you moves, you might not speak for the next year or two. And if something huge happens in their life, there’s a good chance you’ll hear it first from someone else.

Towards the bottom of the mountain in the orange zone, you have your Tier 3 friends—your Not Really friends. You might grab a one-on-one drink with one of them when you move to their city, but then it surprises neither of you when five years pass and drink #2 is still yet to happen. Your relationship tends to exist mostly as part of a bigger group or through the occasional Facebook like, and it doesn’t even really stress you out when you hear that one of them made $5 million last year. You may also try to sleep with one of these people at any given time.

The lowest part of Tier 3 begins to blend indistinguishably into your large group of acquaintances (the pink zone)—those people you’d stop and talk to if you saw them on the street or would maybe email for professional purposes, but whom you’d never hang out with one-on-one. When you hear that something bad happens to one of these people, you pretend to be sad but you don’t actually care.

Finally, acquaintances gradually blend into the endless world of strangers.

And depending on who you are and how things shook out in those first 25 years, the way your particular mountain looks will vary.

For example, there’s Walled-Off Wally:

And Phony Phoebe, who tries to be everyone’s best friend and ends up with a lot of people mad at her:

Even Unabomber Ulysses has a mountain:

Whatever your particular mountain looks like, eventually the blur of your youth is behind you, the dust has settled, and there you are living your life—when one day, usually around your mid or late 20s, it hits you:

It’s not that easy to make friends anymore.

Sure, you’ll make new friends in the future—at work, through your spouse, through your kids—but you won’t get to that Tier 1 brothers level, or even to Tier 2, with very many of them, because people who meet as adults don’t tend to get through the 100+ long, lazy hangouts needed to reach a bond of that strength. As time goes on, you start to realize that the 20-year frenzy of not-especially-thought-through haphazard friend-making you just did was the critical process of you making most of your lifelong friends.

And since you matched up with most of them A) by circumstance, and B) before you really knew yourself yet, the result is that your Tier 1 and Tier 2 friends—those closest to you—fall in a very scattered way on what I’ll call the Does This Friendship Make Sense graph:

So who are all those close friends in the three non-ideal quadrants?

As time goes on, most of us tend to have fewer friends in Quadrants 2-4, because A) people mature, and B) people have more self-respect and higher standards for what they’ll deal with as they get older. But the fact is, friendships made in the formative years often stick, whether they’re ideal or not, leaving most of us with a portion of our Tier 1 and Tier 2 friendships that just don’t make that much sense. We’ll get to the great, Quadrant 1 friendships later in the post, but in order to treat those relationships properly, we need to take a thorough look at the odd ones first. Here are 10 common ones—

1) The Non-Question-Asking Friend

You’ll be having a good day. You’ll be having a bad day. You’ll be happy at work. You’ll quit your job. You’ll fall in love. You’ll catch your new love cheating on you and murder them both in an act of incredible passion. And it doesn’t matter, because none of it will be discussed with The Non-Question-Asking Friend, who never, ever, ever asks you anything about your life. This friend can be explained in one of three ways:

1) He’s extremely self-absorbed and only wants to talk about himself

2) He avoids getting close to people and doesn’t want to talk about either you or himself or anything personal, just third-party topics

3) He thinks you’re insufferably self-absorbed and knows if he asks you about your life, you’ll talk his ear off about it

Giving you the benefit of the doubt here, we’re left with two possibilities. Possibility #1 isn’t fun at all and this person should not be allowed space on Tier 1. The green part of the mountain is sacred territory, and super self-absorbed people shouldn’t be permitted to set foot up there. Put him on Tier 2 and just be happy you’re not dating him.

Possibility #2 is a pretty dark situation for your friend, but it can actually be fun for you. I have a friend who I’ve hung out with one-on-one about four times in the last year, and he has no idea Wait But Why exists. I’ve known him for 14 years and I’m not sure he knows if I have siblings or not. But I actually enjoy the shit out of this friend—sure, there’s a limit on how close we’ll ever be, but without ever spending time talking about our lives, we actually end up in a lot of fun, interesting conversations.

2) The Friend in the Group You Can’t Be Alone With Under Any Circumstances

In almost every group of friends, there’s one pair who can’t ever be alone together. It’s not that they dislike each other—they might get along great—it’s just that they have no individual friendship with each other whatsoever. This leaves both of them petrified of the lumbering elephant that appears in the room anytime they’re alone together. They’re way too on top of shit to ever end up in the car alone together if a group is going somewhere in multiple cars, but there are smaller dangers afoot—like being the first two to arrive at a restaurant or being in a group of three when the third member goes to the bathroom.

The thing is, sometimes it’s not even that these people couldn’t have an individual friendship—it’s just that they don’t, and neither one has the guts to try to make that leap when things have gone on for so long as is.

3) The Non-Character-Breaking Friend You Have to be “On” With

This is a friend who’s terrified of having an earnest interaction, and as such, your friendship with him is always in some kind of skit—you always have to be on when you’re interacting.

Sometimes the skit is that you both burst out laughing at everything constantly. He can only exist with you in “This is so fucking hilarious it’s too much!” mode, so you have to be in some kind of joke-telling or sarcastic mode yourself at all times or he’ll become socially horrified.

Another version of this is the “always and only ironic” friend, who you really bum out if you ever break that social shell and say something earnest. This type of person hates earnest people because someone being earnest dares him to come out from under his ironic safety blanket and let the sun touch his face, and no fucking thanks.

A third example is the “You’re great, I’m great, ugh why is everyone else so terrible and not great like us” friend. Of course, she doesn’t really think you’re perfectly great at all—if she were with someone else, you’d be one of the voodoo dolls on the table to be dissected and scoffed at. The key here is that the two of you must be on a team at all times while interacting. The only comfortable mode for this person is bonding with you by building a little pedestal for you both to stand on while you criticize everyone else. You can either play along and everything will go smoothly, even though you’ll both despise yourselves and each other the whole time, or you can commit the ultimate sin and have the integrity to disagree with the friend or defend a non-present party the friend criticizes. Doing this will shatter the fragile team vibe and make the friend recoil and say something quietly like, “Hm…yeah…I guess.” The friend now respects you for the first time and will also criticize you extra hard next time she’s playing her pedestal game with a different friend.

What these all have in common is the friend has tall walls up, at least toward you, and so she builds a little skit for you two to hang out in to make sure any authentic connection can be avoided. Sometimes that person only does this out of her own social anxiety and can become a great, authentic friend if you can just stomp through the ice. Other times, the person is just hopelessly scared and closed off and there’s no hope and you have to get out.

In any case, I can’t stand these interactions and am in a full panic the entire time they’re happening.

4) The Double-Obligated Friendship

Think of a friend you get together with from time to time, which usually happens after a long and lackluster email or text exchange during which you just can’t find a time that works for both of you—and you’re never really happy when these plans are being made and not really psyched when you wake up and it’s finally on your schedule for that day.

Maybe you’re aware that you don’t want to be friends with that person, or maybe you’re delusional about it—but what you’re most likely not aware of is that they probably don’t want to see you either.

There are lopsided situations where one person is far more interested in hanging out than the other (we’ll get to those later), but in the case we’re talking about here, both parties often think it’s a lopsided situation without realizing that the other person actually feels the same way—that’s why it takes so long to schedule a time. When someone’s excited about something, they figure out how to get it into their schedule—when they’re not, they figure out ways to push it farther into the future.

Sometimes you don’t think hard enough about it to even realize you don’t like being friends with the person, and other times you really like the idea or the aesthetic of being friends with that particular person—being friends with them is part of your Story. But even in cases where you’re perfectly lucid about your feelings—since neither of you knows the other feels the same way and neither has the guts to just cut things off or move it down a tier, this friendship usually just continues along for eternity.

5) The Half Marriage

Somewhere in your life, you’re probably part of a friendship that would be a marriage if only the other person weren’t very, very, extremely not interested in that happening. 1 for 2 on yes votes—just one vote away—so close.

You might be on either side of this—and either way it’s one of the least healthy parts of your life. Fun!

If you’re on the if only side of things, probably the right move is to get your fucking shit together? Ya know? This friendship is one long, continuous rejection of you as a human being, and you’re just wallowing there in your yearning like a sobbing little seal. Plus, duh, if you gather your self-respect and move on with your life, it’ll raise their perception of your value and they might actually become interested in you.

If you’re on the oh yeah definitely not side of the situation, here’s what’s happening—there’s this suffering human in the world, and you know they’re suffering, and you fucking love it, because it gives your little ego a succulent sponge bath every time you hang out with them. You enjoy it so much you probably even lead them on intentionally, don’t you—you make sure to keep just enough ambiguity in the situation that their bleeding heart continues to lather your ego from head to toe at your whim.

Both of you—go do something else.

6) The Historical Friend

A Historical Friend is someone you became friends with in the first place because you met when you were little and stayed friends through the years, even though you’re a very weird match. Most old friends fall somewhat into this category, but a true Historical Friend is someone you absolutely would not be friends with if you met them today.

You’re not especially pleased with who they are, and they feel the same way about you. You’re not each other’s type one bit. Unfortunately, you’re also extremely close friends from when you were four, and you’re both just a part of each other’s situation forever, sorry.

7) The Non-Parallel Life Paths Friendship

Throughout childhood and much of young adulthood, most people your age are in the same life stage as you are. But when it comes to advancing into full adulthood, people do so at widely varying paces, which leads to certain friends suddenly having totally different existences from one another.

Anyone within three years of 30 has a bunch of these going on. It’s just a weird time for everyone. Some people have become Future 52-year-olds, while others are super into being Previous 21-year-olds. At some point, things will start to meld together again, but being 30-ish is the friendship equivalent of a kid going through an awkward pubescent stage.

There are darker, more permanent Non-Parallel Life Path situations. Like when Person A starts to become a person who rejects material wealth, partially because she genuinely feels that pursuing an artistic path matters more and partially because she needs a defense mechanism against feeling envious of richer people, and Person B’s path makes her scoff at people who pursue creative paths, partially because she genuinely thinks expressing yourself is an inherently narcissistic venture and partially because she needs a defense mechanism against feeling regretful that she never pursued her creative dreams—these two will have problems. They may still like each other, but they can’t be as close as they used to be—each of their lives is a bit of a middle finger at the other’s choices, and that’s just awkward for everyone. It’s not always that bad—but to survive an Off-Line Life Situation, friends need to be really different people who don’t at all want the same things out of life.

This friendship is a distant cousin of The Morally Off-Line Friendship—

8) The Frenemy

The Frenemy roots very hard against you. And I’m not talking about the friends that will feel a little twinge of pleasure when they hear your big break didn’t pan out after all or that your relationship is in bad shape. I’m not even talking about someone who secretly roots against you when they’re not doing so well at some area of life and it hurts them to see you do better. Those are bad emotions, but they can exist in people who are still good friends.

I’m talking about a real Frenemy—someone who really wants bad things for you. Because you’re you.

You and the Frenemy usually go way back, have a very deep friendship, and the trouble probably started a long time ago.

There’s a lot of complex psychology going on in these situations that I don’t fully understand, but my hunch is that a Frenemy’s resentment is rooted in his own pain, or his own shortcomings, or his own regret—and for some reason, your existence stings them in these places hard.

A little less dark but no less harmful is a bully situation where a friend sees some weakness or vulnerability in you and she enjoys prodding you there either for sadistic reasons or to prop herself up.

A Frenemy knows how to hurt you better than anyone because you’re deeply similar in some way and she knows how you’re wired, and she’ll do whatever she can to bring you down any chance she gets, often in such a subtle way it’s hard to see that it’s happening.

Whatever the reason, if you have a Frenemy in your life, kick her toxic ass off your mountain, or at least kick her down the mountain—just get her off of Tier 1. A Frenemy has about a tenth of the power to hurt you from Tier 2 as she does from Tier 1.

9) The Facebook Celebrity Friend

This person isn’t a celebrity to anyone other than you, you creep. You know exactly who I’m talking about—there are a small handful of people whose Facebook page you’re uncomfortably well-acquainted with, and those people have no idea that this is happening. On the plus side, there are people out there you haven’t spoken to in seven years who know all about the new thing you’re trying with your hair, since it goes both ways.

This is a rare Tier 3 friend, or even an acquaintance, who qualifies as an odd friendship, because you found a way to make it unhealthy even though you’re not actually friends. Well done.

10) The Lopsided Friendship

There are a lot of ways a friendship can be lopsided.

Someone can be higher on their friend’s mountain than vice versa.

Someone can want to spend more time with a friend than vice versa.

One member can consistently do 90% of the listening and only 10% of the talking, and in situations where most of the talking is about life problems, what’s happening is a one-sided therapy situation, with a badly off-balance give-and-take ratio, and that’s not much of a friendship—it’s someone using someone else.

And then there’s the lopsided power friendship. Of course, this is a hideous quality in many not-great couples, but it’s also a prominent feature of plenty of friendships.

A near 50/50 friendship is ideal, but anything out to 65/35 is fine and can often be attributed to two different styles of personality. It’s when the number gap gets even wider that something less healthy is going on—something that doesn’t reflect very well on either party.

There are some obvious ways to assess the nature of a friendship’s power dynamic—does one person cut in and interrupt the other person while they’re talking far more than the other way around? Is one person’s opinion or preference just kind of understood to carry more weight than the other’s? Is one person allowed to be more of a dick to the other than vice versa?

Another interesting litmus test is what I call the “mood determiner test.” This comes into play when two friends get together but they’re in very different moods—the idea is, whose mood “wins” and determines the mood of the hangout. If Person A is in a bad mood, Person B is in a good mood, and Person B reacts by being timid and respectful of Person A’s mood, leaving the vibe down there until Person A snaps out of it on her own—but when the moods are reversed, Person B quickly disregards her own bad mood and acts more cheerful to match Person A’s happy mood—and this is how it always goes—then Person A is in a serious power position.

Not All Friendships Are Grim…

In the Does This Friendship Make Sense graph above, the friendships we just discussed are all in Quandrants 2, 3, or 4—i.e. they’re all a bit unenjoyable, unhealthy, or both. That’s why this has been depressing. On the bright side, there’s also Quadrant 1—all the friendships that do make sense.

No friendship is perfect, but those in Quadrant 1 are doing what friendships are supposed to do—they’re making the lives of both parties better. And when a friendship is both in Quadrant 1 of the graph and on Tier 1 of your mountain—that friendship is a rock in your life.

Rock friendships don’t just make us happy—they’re the thing (along with rock family and romantic relationships) that makes us happy. Investing serious time and energy into those is a no-brainer long term life strategy.

But in the case of most people over 25—at least in New York—I think A) not enough time is carved out as dedicated friend time, and B) the time that is carved out is spread too thin, and too evenly, among the Tier 1 and Tier 2 friendships in all four quadrants. I’m definitely guilty of this myself.

There’s something I call the Perpetual Catch-Up Trap. When you haven’t seen a good friend in a long time, the first order of business is a big catch-up—you want to know what’s going on in their career, with their girlfriend, with their family, etc., and they want to catch up on your life. In theory, once this happens, you can go back to just hanging out, shooting the shit, and actually being in the friendship. The problem is, when you don’t make enough time for good friends, seeing them only for a meal and not that often—you end up spending each get-together catching up, and you never actually get to just enjoy the friendship or get far past the surface. That’s the Perpetual Catch-Up Trap, and I find myself falling into it with way too many of the rocks in my life.

So I think there are two orders of business:

1) Think about your friendships, figure out which ones aren’t in Quadrant 1, and demote them down the mountain. I’m not suggesting you stop being friends with those people—you still love them and feel loyal to them, and old friends are critical to hold onto—but if the friendships aren’t that healthy or enjoyable, they don’t really deserve to be in your Tier 1, and you probably shouldn’t be in theirs. Most importantly, doing this clears up time to…

2) Dedicate even more time to the Quadrant 1, Tier 1 rocks in your life. If you’re in your mid-20s or older, your current rocks are probably the only ones you’ll ever have. Your rock friendships don’t warrant 2x the time you give to your other friends—they warrant 5 or 10x. And keep in mind that seeing one of them for an hour-long meal isn’t really enough—your rocks deserve serious, dedicated time so you can stay close. So go make plans with them.

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If you liked this, check out:

How to Pick Your Life Partner

10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys

Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy

The Great Perils of Social Interaction


Here are a few questions you won’t hear asked of the parade of Israeli officials crossing US television screens during the current crisis in Gaza:

What would you do if a foreign country was occupying your land?

What does it mean that Israeli cabinet ministers deny Palestine’s right to exist?

What should we make of a prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, who as opposition leader in the 1990s addressed a rally under a banner reading “Death to Arafat” a year after the Palestinian leader signed a peace accord with Israel?

These are contentious questions, to be sure, and with complicated answers. But they are relevant to understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today. They also parallel the issues routinely raised by American journalists with Palestinian officials, pressing to consider how the US would react if it were under rocket fire from Mexico, to explain why Hamas won’t recognise Israel and to repudiate Palestinian anti-Semitism.

But it’s a feature of much mainstream journalism in the US, not just an issue of coverage during the last three weeks of the Gaza crisis, that while one set of questions gets asked all the time, the other is heard hardly at all.

In years of reporting from and about Israel, I’ve followed the frequently robust debate in its press about whether Netanyahu really wants a peace deal, about the growing power of right-wing members inside the Israeli cabinet opposed to a Palestinian state, about the creeping air of permanence to the occupation.

So it has been all the more striking to discover a far narrower discourse in Washington and the notoriously pro-Israel mainstream media in the US at a time when difficult questions are more important than ever. John Kerry, the US secretary of state, and a crop of foreign leaders have ratcheted up warnings that the door for the two-state solution is closing, in no small part because of Israel’s actions. But still the difficult questions go unasked.

Take Netanyahu’s appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. The host, Bob Schieffer, permitted the Israeli leader to make a lengthy case for the his military’s ground attack, guiding him along with one sympathetic question after another. Finally, after describing Netanyahu’s position as “very understandable”, Schieffer asked about dead Palestinian civilians – but only to wonder if they presented a public relations problem in “the battle for world opinion”.

As if Schieffer’s position wasn’t already blindingly clear, he went on to quote former prime minister Golda Meir’s line that Israelis can never forgive Arabs “for forcing us to kill their children”.

As way of balance, CBS followed with a short clip of an interview by Charlie Rose with the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, who was pressed on his willingness to recognise Israel.

There has been fine reporting from on the ground in Gaza by courageous American journalists who have laid bare the price being paid by ordinary Palestinians. That, in turn, has prompted some stiff questioning in American TV studios of Israeli officials about the scale of civilian deaths and shelling of schools and hospitals. Some pro-Israel American pundits admit to have becoming “less pro-Israel”.

But the broader framework of how the conflict is presented in the US is more troubling.

‘We have a media scandal that we need to expose,’ says Rula Jebreal. Still via CNN

Former MSNBC contributor Rula Jebreal drew widespread attention to the media divide when she condemned NBC News on air, on MSNBC, for pulling its only Arab-American correspondent, Ayman Mohyeldin, out of Gaza, only to reinstate him because of the backlash. “We are disgustingly biased on this issue,” she said.

She has a point.

An analysis by Punditfact of CNN coverage during the first two weeks of the latest Gaza crisis showed that appearances by Israeli officials outnumbered Palestinian officials by more than four-to-one. There were substantially more interviews with what Punditfact called Palestinian “laymen”, but they included the relatives of a Palestinian-American beaten by Israeli soldiers that offered little insight into the bigger picture.

All appearances by Palestinian officials were outnumbered by interviews with a single man: Israel’s former ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, whom CNN hired as a Middle East analyst earlier this year. The network presents Oren as a kind of neutral interpreter, when just a few months ago he was vigorously defending Israel on behalf of Netanyahu’s government. His limited value as an analyst was swiftly exposed by his assertion that Hamas was trying to get Israel to kill as many Palestinian children as possible as part of a media strategy.

The number of guests booked or sources quoted has never been balanced on this issue in the mainstream American press, but more important is the nature of interviews and the broader coverage when Israel and Palestine are not thrust into the news by a fresh surge in violence.

At one extreme is Fox News, where last week Sean Hannity shouted down a Palestinian guest, Yousef Munayyer, because he would not condemn Hamas as a terrorist organisation, then proceeded to terminate the interview.

Munayyer, director of the Jerusalem Fund in Washington, has appeared repeatedly on CNN where he is treated more respectfully. But he told me he is frequently brought on to answer accusations from the Israeli side, rather than explain the Palestinian perspective in the way that Israeli officials and commentators are allowed to lay out their case.

“Most of the time I go on it is to be put on the defensive, in response to a conversation that’s framed around Israel’s security concerns first and foremost,” Munayyer said.

Palestinians should face difficult questions about recognition of Israel, about Hamas’s policies and actions, about how peace would work in practice.

But on the other side, I’ve rarely seen a major channel match that kind of routine close questioning of Israeli officials about the position of a government packed with ministers hostile to a Palestinian state, who advocate annexation of much of the occupied territories and who propose second-class citizenship for Arabs.

Israel’s preferred representatives in the US media – Oren, plus the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, and Netanyahu’s spokesman, Mark Regev – all project the country as a liberal democracy, an unwilling occupier that is thirsting for peace.

But that does not fit with the views of leading politicians back in Israel. Naftali Bennett, the economy minister and leader of the most powerful political party on the right, has said: “I will do everything in my power to make sure [the Palestinians] never get a state.”

Danny Danon, the increasingly powerful chairman of the central committee of Netanyahu’s Likud party, openly opposes a Palestinian state and has said the prime minister doesn’t believe in it either. “I want the majority of the land with the minimum amount of Palestinians,” Danon, whom Netanyahu just fired as deputy defense minister for being critical of opposition to a ceasefire, told me last year.

And Israel’s ultranationalist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, wants a good chunk of Israel’s Arab population stripped of citizenship.

Perhaps none of these men will get what they want. But they hold important levers of power, and good journalism would seem to demand that probing questions get asked about where Israel is headed under such leadership.

That kind of piercing American journalism can be found, mostly in foreign-policy journals and long magazine articles, such as David Remnick’s insightful report in the New Yorker last year on the rising political power of Jewish settlers. But much of the press demonstrates a frightening lack of inquiry, and if the mainstream media won’t do it, others are increasingly willing to do it for them.

It’s no secret that younger Americans do not rely on the nightly news, cable networks or printed newspapers for information in the way many older people do. The internet has opened access to foreign news media, which often has a different take in Israel, and has opened up a stream of links to to first-hand accounts as well as writing by analysts and activists who offer insights and information wilfully ignored by the Bob Schieffers and Sean Hannitys of the world.

There is evidence of a shift in public opinion, mostly generational: a Pew poll this month showed falling support for Israel among younger Americans. Over 65s backed the Jewish state by 60% to just 9% support for the Palestinians. Among young adults, aged 18-29, just 44% were behind Israel with backing for the Palestinians rising to 22%.

As opinion shifts, it will be harder to go on presenting just one side of the story.

• This article was amended on 1 August 2014. An earlier version said Netanyahu had addressed rallies in the 1990s under a banner reading “Death to Arabs”. That has been corrected to say that Netanyahu addressed a rally under a banner reading “Death to Arafat” a year after the Palestinian leader signed a peace accord with Israel.

• Comments on this article are set to remain open for 24 hours from the time of publication but may be closed overnight (UK time)


GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Gazan authorities on Wednesday issued notices to restaurants and hotels in the Strip banning establishments from throwing New Years Eve celebrations, a Gaza police spokesperson said.

Ayman al-Butneiji told Ma'an the notices were issued because New Years Eve celebrations, in the eyes of the Hamas-run Gazan government, "contradict" Islam, and "are mainly an imitation of the west.”

He also highlighted the "pains and sacrifices" that come with living in Gaza due to Israel's "imposed siege" on the Strip.

Palestinian culture encourages communities to refrain from having celebrations during times of death or upheaval.

In Bethlehem, Christmas celebrations were toned-down significantly out of respect for the more than 120 Palestinian families who have lost loved ones since the start this year's upheaval in October.

Since the start of October, municipalities across the occupied West Bank have also asked bars and restaurants to refrain from having large parties or celebrations out of respect for the seriousness of the current political situation.


Commencement May 18, 2003

Honorary Degree: Religious Studies

Conferred on Bernard J. Cooke

Candidate presented by: Philip Rossi, S.J., Professor and Chair of Theology

Bernard J. Cooke, internationally recognized theologian and educator, has been a pioneer in shaping Catholic theological education in colleges and universities for more than forty years. Joining the Marquette faculty in 1957, he soon instituted an undergraduate theology major and revised the curriculum for master of arts students.

Generations of Marquette students remember him for his indefatigable energy, his enlightening closed circuit television lectures for undergraduates, his "Cooke Book" of notes for graduates, his passion for justice and his dedication to the improvement of general education throughout the university. He received Marquette's Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence in 1964.

His most lasting accomplishment at Marquette was the inauguration of the Ph.D. program in Theology in 1963. Marquette was the first institution in the nation to offer doctoral level training to Catholic laypeople in preparation for careers of theological scholarship and teaching. Dr. Cooke's enduring legacy are the three hundred graduates of Marquette's doctoral program who have taught in college and university classrooms throughout North America, produced significant theological scholarship, and served as leaders in the academy and in the church.

As a theological scholar, Dr. Cooke has published major works on the sacraments and on ministry in the Catholic Church. After leaving the Marquette faculty in 1968, he lectured in many countries, worked extensively in programs for lay ministry formation, and has held faculty positions at the University of Windsor and the University of Calgary in Canada and at the College of the Holy Cross here in the United States, where he held the title of Loyola Professor of Theology. His books, articles, courses and lectures have been for many people throughout the world a rich source for theological reflection and inspiration.

Marquette University is proud to welcome Dr. Cooke home to Marquette and to acknowledge his gifts as an educator and scholar. Because of his many contributions to Marquette and his pioneering work for Catholic theological education in colleges and universities, Reverend President, I hereby recommend Bernard J. Cooke for the Marquette Degree of Doctor of Religious Studies, honoris causa.


Kepler-80: Analysis of a Compact System

It’s been a week for unusual planetary systems, and I’ll cap it off with Kepler-80, a star about 1100 light years away that features five planets in extraordinarily tight orbits. Such systems are now being referred to as STIPs (Systems with Tightly-spaced Planets), a nod to our apparently imperishable drive to create acronyms. Whatever we call them, though, systems like these make us realize that our own Solar System’s configuration is but one possibility in a sea of other outcomes. Yesterday’s post on ‘warm Jupiters’ is yet another confirmation of the thought.

What we have in new work from Mariah MacDonald, Darin Ragozzine (Florida Institute of Technology) and colleagues is an analysis of transit timing variations (TTVs) of the planets around this star, all of which orbit inside 1/10 AU. Here the planets’ years are 1.0, 3.1, 4.6, 7.1 and 9.5 days, respectively, close enough that gravitational perturbations can create slight changes in transit times. Although the innermost planet has a very weak TTV signal, the other four show signals strong enough for the researchers to work out the masses of each.

Gravitational interactions that disturb a perfectly periodic sequence of transits are a valuable way of making mass estimates for planets small enough that radial velocity detections are difficult. Usefully, Kepler has measured hundreds of TTV signals allowing for such estimates. They’re particularly helpful in multiple-planet transiting systems because now we can use the combination of mass and planetary radius to produce density measurements.

The Kepler-80 planets are f, d, e, b, and c in order of period. The inferred masses for the four outer planets are roughly 6.75, 4.13, 6.93 and 6.74 Earth masses, but we learn that the two outermost planets are almost twice as large as the inner two. The researchers believe this is consistent with terrestrial compositions for d and e and extended, puffy atmospheres of hydrogen and helium for b and c. Here’s how the paper describes these worlds:

Although all four planets have very similar masses, planets d and e are terrestrial and planets b and c have ∼2% (by mass) H/He envelopes assuming Earth-like cores. Their orbits are similar and models suggest that photo-evaporation would have removed ∼1% H/He from all four planets. Though simulations suggest the system has been affected by planetary tides, we did not consider the effect of dissipation on the atmospheric history of the planets. It is unusual to have four well-measured densities in the same system and future comparative planetology may constrain the formation and evolution of their atmospheres.

Due to orbital resonances, the four outer planets are synchronized, returning to the same configuration every 27 days. The paper notes that Kepler-80’s planetary orbits are stable in the long-term as long as we assume orbital eccentricities below about 0.2 (the researchers point out that TTVs cannot reliably detect eccentricities for this system). Although the available Kepler data are not enough to reveal the evolution of the atmospheres on these planets, the researchers’ simulations show that the outer two planets could have migrated inward from original positions in the disk where accretion of hydrogen and helium would be more likely to occur.

Image: This animation shows the position of the five planets of Kepler-80 whenever the outer two planets (green and red) pass by one another, about every 27 days over the course of four years of observations by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. Due to the rare synchronized nature of the system, the middle two planets (blue and purple) also return to almost exactly the same location. The innermost planet (yellow) is not synchronized and hence is found at a random location every 27 days. MacDonald et al. 2016 were able to show that this pattern indicates formation by “migration,” where the orbits shrink very slightly over time. The orbits are to scale with each other, but the planets are shown 50 times larger. The outer four planets are all about 4-6 times the mass of the Earth. The inner three planets (blue, purple, and yellow) appear rocky and the outer two planets (green and red) are likely rocky with a very puffy Hydrogen/Helium atmosphere. Credit: MacDonald/Ragozzine/FIT.

Improved mass and eccentricity estimates will fall to future space-based observatories. With its complex resonances and intriguing dynamical history, Kepler-80 should be a useful laboratory for studying planet formation. The Kepler mission has given us a wealth of information about how planetary systems can be built, and it’s clear that their formation and evolution will be the subject of study for decades. The systems we’ve looked at this week hint at what is possible as exoplanetary architectures continue to surprise us.

The paper is MacDonald et al., “A Dynamical Analysis of the Kepler-80 System of Five Transiting Planets,” accepted at The Astronomical Journal. A Florida Institute of Technology news release is available.