2026-04-18 21:00:34
Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that peacefully passed the crown, predicted trouble on the horizon, gave life after death, and coastally shelved an idea.
First, scientists watch a succession story play out for years in a naked mole rat colony. Then: prediction markets as a public health threat, the thorny questions of posthumous reproduction, and a walk on the shores of an ancient alien seas.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
Murderous queens. Bloody power struggles. Strictly enforced hierarchies. I’m speaking, of course, of naked mole rats, a bizarre species of rodent that becomes embroiled in violent conflicts over the succession of one breeding queen to the next.
Though aggression in succession is the norm for these animals, scientists now report a rare peaceful transition of power from one queen to her daughter in a captive colony.
The discovery suggests that “the less common peaceful trajectory to queen succession…is possible under some conditions” especially when “aggression-based enforcement may be insufficient or unnecessary and when the cost of a ‘war’ may be too high,” according to the new study.
As we’ve covered before on the Abstract, mole rats (both the naked kind and the non-naked kind) are the only mammals to live in eusocial colonies similar to bees or ants, meaning they are reigned over by one breeding queen and her subordinate workers. In addition to this unique social structure, mole rats display a number of fascinating behavioral and genetic adaptations, including long lifespans and low rates of cancer, which has made them a popular species for research.
Naked mole rats may not look all that intimidating, but when it’s time to anoint a new queen, the fur starts to fly (or it would, if these animals had any fur). If a queen dies or is deposed by rivals, subordinate females in the colony battle to take the throne.
But scientists co-led by Shanes Abeywardena and Alexandria M. Schraibman of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies observed a different succession story that unfolded over many years in the Amigos captive colony housed in San Diego.
Starting in 2019, a queen named Teré reigned over the colony and produced many healthy pups. Once the colony became crowded, with nearly 40 members, Queen Teré began delivering litters with no surviving pups. When the researchers removed half of the members, she began to produce surviving pups again, though not many. The team then deliberately introduced another stressor by moving the colony to a new facility in 2022, which ceased Queen Teré’s fertility.
In response, Alexandria, one of Teré’s daughters, became pregnant in 2023 and 2024, but her litters also produced no survivors, and she had to be euthanized in 2024 due to a uterine torsion. Finally, the long reproductive hiatus was ended after three years by the ascension of Alexandria’s sister, Arwen, who became Queen Arwen upon her delivery of healthy pups in October 2025.
“Aside from a single incident on 6 February 2025 in which one animal was found with a superficial bite wound and dried blood around the face, an injury that resolved without recurrence, no aggression or dominance related conflict was observed,” the researchers said. “Instead, Queen Teré was reported to exhibit ‘guarding’ behavior of Arwen and her litter. No other signs of social instability, behavioral escalation, or colony-wide distress were documented.”
“Together, these observations indicate that following the decline of Queen Teré’s reproductive capacity and the loss of the intermediary breeder Alexandria, Arwen successfully assumed the reproductive role without eliciting aggression from the reigning queen or from other colony members,” the team concluded.
The study is an antidote to the story we covered last week about a lethal chimp “civil war,” demonstrating that animals with strict dominance structures choose peace over violence in some cases. My only note is that Teré’ be given the honorific Queen Mother for her service.
In other news…
Prediction markets (PMs) are exploding in popularity, but researchers warn that the “addictive design, vulnerable users, and permissive regulatory environments” that characterize these markets “are a well-established formula for population-level harm,” according to the Policy Forum section of the journal Science.
PMs operated by companies like Kalshi or Polymarket “pose underappreciated threats to democratic integrity” and are linked to “addictive behaviors,” according to authors Nizan Geslevich Packin of Baruch College Zicklin School of Business and Sharon Rabinovitz of the University of Haifa. For instance, PMs can enable insider trading about classified government information and expose millions of users to the risk of addiction and major financial losses.
“A public health approach reframes PM risks as predictable outcomes of environmental design, analogous to tobacco control’s success in treating smoking as population-level exposure rather than individual vice,” the team argued in the article.
“The window for precautionary action is closing,” the researchers emphasized. “Each week of billion-dollar PM activity…prolongs a large uncontrolled experiment on users.”
It remains to be seen whether this warning about the dangers of a wild new industry will materialize into meaningful regulatory action. Want to make a bet?
Posthumous children—children born after the death of one or both parents—are popular in myth and fiction, from the Greek Dionysus to more modern characters like John Connor or Daenerys Targaryen.
But this is also a real demographic of people that may evolve in interesting ways as reproductive technologies enable larger numbers of posthumous conceptions—in which the sperm and egg donors for an embryo may be deceased, such as the case of a boy born in 2018 whose mother and father had both died years earlier in a car crash.
In this way, “frozen sperm, eggs (or embryos) are, at one and the same time, both alive and dead,” said Sandra Bamford of the University of Toronto in a new anthropological study of the topic. “Through their frozen gametes and the potential of new kin connections in the future, the dead remain as active participants influencing the lives of the living.”
The study, which is part of a broader journal issue exploring kinship, pulls together many intriguing case studies, including the “Nuer ghost marriage” practices of Sudan, in which a deceased man can be considered the father of a kinsman’s children, or the case of William Kane, who bequeathed frozen sperm to his girlfriend, sparking a legal battle with his adult children after his death by suicide.
In other words, the legal, ethical, and practical implications of posthumous conception are still very much in flux, raising thorny questions about when, and how, the dead can produce new life. For instance: the ambiguities over judging the consent of a deceased person over the use of their posthumous gametes; the rights of posthumously conceived children to be named heirs of estates; and the possible emotional and psychological toll on posthumously conceived children, along with their family members.
We’ll close, as all things should, with waves lapping on long-lost alien shores. The surface of Mars is etched with the memory of rivers, lakes, and perhaps even an expansive ocean that may have covered much of its northern hemisphere between three and four billion years ago.
Scientists have already mapped out the rough contours of what may be an ancient Martian shoreline, but a new study throws the seas into sharper relief by identifying topographic signs of a possible coastal shelf. The team argued in their study that these shelf features may be a better indicator of a past ocean than shoreline features, based on similar observations on Earth.
“Our results indicate that long-lived ancient oceans on presently arid planets may be best identified not only through discrete shorelines but also through…a global coastal shelf,” said researchers led by Abdallah Zaki and Michael Lamb of Caltech University. The study supports “the presence of an ancient ocean on the northern plains of Mars that was bounded by a coastal shelf.”
While this ocean dried up long ago, its topographic remnants are a reminder of a time when Mars was warm, wet, and perhaps, wriggling with life.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
2026-04-17 23:44:59
On Wednesday the Federal Aviation Administration rescinded a temporary flight restriction (TFR) that created a no-fly zone within 3,000 feet of “Department of Homeland Security facilities and mobile assets.” The new restriction softened the language of the original and abandoned the threat of civil or criminal penalties but added the Department of Justice to the list of protected agencies.
A 2025 TFR restricted the presence of drones around Department of Energy and Pentagon assets. The FAA added ICE and CBP to the list of restricted agencies in January as ICE began operations in Minneapolis. The no-fly zone covered 3,000 feet around any ICE vehicle. Anyone who was caught violating it could be fined or jailed. Because ICE agents often drive through the city in unmarked vehicles it was impossible for drone operators to know if they were violating the order and local journalists who use drones to take pictures and monitor law enforcement activities were grounded.
Earlier this month, Minnesota journalist Rob Levine sued the FAA over the TFR. In a motion filed earlier this week, Levine’s lawyers argued that the FAA had violated his rights and should rescind the restrictions. Core to their argument was the unmarked vehicles which they said created a “flotilla of invisible, moving bubbles,” according to court documents. “Under any standard, the TFR’s chilling sweep violates the First Amendment as applied to the Petitioner’s use of drones in photojournalism.”
The FAA replaced the TFR this week after Levine’s lawyers filed the motion. The new advisory lessened restrictions, including dropping the language around 3,000 feet and criminal penalties, but expanded the amount of protected assets.
“UAS operators are advised to avoid flying in proximity to: Department of War, Department of Energy, Department of Justice, and Department of Homeland Security covered mobile assets,” the new TFR said. “UAS operators who fly within this airspace are warned that…DOW, DOE, DOJ, or DHS may take action that results in the interference, disruption, seizure, damaging, or destruction of unamended [aircraft] deemed to pose a credible safety or security threat to covered mobile assets.”
Despite the threat to shoot journalist’s drones out of the sky, Levine and his lawyers see the new TFR as a victory. “This is a big win. It was heartbreaking to have my drones grounded at a time of such importance to my community, but I'm looking forward to getting back up there and getting back to my journalism as soon as possible,” Levine said in a statement provided to 404 Media.
Grayson Clary, a lawyer with Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press who took on Levine’s case, said there is still work to do. “We're glad to see the FAA rescind its original order, which was an egregious overreach that had serious consequences for reporters nationwide. But this kind of arbitrary back-and-forth from the FAA is exactly the problem, and we intend to make clear to the D.C. Circuit that this restriction never should have been implemented in the first place,” he said.
2026-04-17 21:00:36
The remnants of a bizarre long-lost world that fell apart before our planet was fully formed are falling to Earth in the form of meteorites, according to a new study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
For decades, scientists have puzzled over the origin of angrites, a rare class of about 70 meteorites with unique volcanic compositions that suggest they were forged in a large ancient object with differentiated layers, including a metallic core and a magma ocean.
Scientists have long assumed that this object, the so-called angrite parent body (APB), was roughly a few hundred miles across, similar in size to the asteroid 4 Vesta. But researchers recently raised the tantalizing possibility that the APB might have been much larger, perhaps on the scale of Earth’s moon.
Now, a team led by Aaron Bell, an experimental petrologist and an assistant research professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has discovered “the first unequivocal evidence supporting the large angrite parent body hypothesis, which posits that the angrites are samples derived from a protoplanet that was catastrophically disrupted during the earliest evolutionary stages of the inner solar system,” according to the new study.
“It probably got destroyed in the early solar system, so [angrites] are remnants of a lost protoplanet,” Bell said in a call with 404 Media. “A few pieces broke off and are now in the asteroid belt, and a few of them have come to Earth, and we’ve picked them up.”
Angrites date back about 4.56 billion years, making them among the oldest known volcanic rocks. They belong to a class of stony “achondritic” meteorites that contain the crystalized signatures of melted rock, such as basalts, hinting that they originate in larger bodies that underwent some degree of planetary processing and layered differentiation, even if those early planetary embryos never accreted into full planets.
“Angrites are interesting in that they don't have a known parent body,” Bell said. “It's never been definitively identified, and that's one of the mysteries.”
“There are a bunch of arguments about why angrites are so geochemically unusual,” he added. “They're kind of this oddity.”
Most models of early planetary accretion predict that relatively small objects formed within the first few million years of the solar system, which is why the APB was assumed to be an asteroid-sized object, rather than a much larger nascent planet.
While working on a previous study, Bell became interested in an aluminum-rich angrite from Northwest Africa, known as NWA 12,774, which was classified in 2019. The meteorite is one of a handful of unusual primitive angrites that appear to have been crystallized at high pressure within the APB, indicating that it formed deep under the surface and therefore might shed light on the size of this bygone world.
“Even among angrites, there's only four or five that have these primitive compositions,” Bell said, adding that the meteorite had “off-the-charts aluminum content, which is really very unusual.”
Bell and his colleagues developed a geobarometer—a tool that calculates the pressures at which rocks and minerals formed—-that estimated it would take at least 1.7 gigapascals to account for the rock’s special properties. This pressure corresponds to an object with a minimum radius of 620 miles (1,000 kilometers), which is just under the size of Pluto. The APB may even have been as large as the Moon, which has a roughly 1000-mile radius.
“Clearly, within the first few million years of solar system evolution, you could grow planetary embryos that were 1,000-plus kilometers” in radius, Bell said. “We're talking within three million years of the condensation of the first solids in the solar system, so it’s right at the beginning.”
The discovery suggests that the APB may have been a first-generation protoplanet that coalesced and shattered millions of years before the familiar worlds of our solar system took full shape. Judging by the strange properties of angrites, the APB was also on track to be a very different kind of world than Earth and its neighbors, had it survived the chaotic environment of its infancy.
Angrites are “geochemically fundamentally different, and that's why people were interested in the first place—because they were odd,” Bell said. “They don't look like garden-variety
basalts you get from Mars or the Moon or Earth.”
“It's sort of this path not taken—or maybe it was, but we just have a couple pieces of it that tell us something we didn't know,” he concluded. “There were once large bodies that, maybe, didn’t look like the terrestrial planets.”
2026-04-17 21:00:29
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss the Madonna-whore algorithm, reader tips, and jazz.
SAM: Yesterday morning I published a story I started working on weeks ago and only in the last week or so felt enough distance from the topic to be able to articulate it clearly: My year in the wedding planning social media abyss. The piece is a long, more sourced BTB, and I don’t have a ton to add to what’s said in it, but I do want to highlight some of the comments I’ve gotten so far that touch on things the story doesn’t elaborate on.
2026-04-17 00:34:12
A new report from the nonprofit research group Tech Transparency Project (TTP) claims that Google and Apple’s app stores go beyond simply hosting harmful “nudify” and “undress” apps that remove women’s clothing in images, and actually encourage users to download those apps.
In January, TTP published research that showed how the app stores host dozens of “nudify” and undressing apps. This new research, released on Wednesday and first reported by Bloomberg, shows how the stores don’t just passively host those apps, but push them toward users through search and advertising.
TTP conducted a series of searches in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, according to their writeup of the research, using terms like “nudify,” “undress,” and “deepnude.”
After testing the apps that appeared in the top 10 search results, they found that “roughly 40 percent of the apps that came up in both the Apple and Google Play search results could render women nude or scantily clad,” and that “Apple and Google ran ads for nudify apps in some of the search results—including, in Google’s case, a carousel of ads for some of the most sexually explicit apps encountered in the investigation.” They also found that the stores can lead users to more and different nudify apps through autocomplete search queries.
“TTP found that ads for nudify apps came up as the top result in three of the Apple searches. Apple, which controls all of the advertising in its app store, is selling and placing these ads,” the researchers wrote. “Apple says it prohibits ad content that ‘promotes adult-oriented themes or graphic content.’ But TTP’s findings suggest Apple is not always enforcing that policy.” The first result for an App Store search for “deepfake,” they found, was for an app that easily replaces women’s clothed images with nude versions.
In 2024, 404 Media covered how Google surfaced apps through searches for “undress apps,” “best deepfake nudes,” and similar terms with promoted results, despite Google’s ad policies against this type of content.
Nudify apps became a popular market for years, but today, they’re extremely easy to access and are advertised on social media. In schools, children use nudify apps to bully classmates with disastrous results for both the bullies and the victims, and school administrators are often unprepared for how to deal with students using these wildly popular apps.
Google and Apple did not immediately respond to 404 Media’s request for comment. TTP wrote that Apple declined to comment, while Google spokesperson Dan Jackson told them many of the apps identified by TTP have been suspended. "When violations of our policies are reported to us, we investigate and take appropriate action," Jackson told TTP.
2026-04-16 21:00:34
I thought I would be a “cool” bride. I believed this because I never dreamed of my own wedding. When other girls daydreamed aloud about riding down the aisle on a pony, or gracefully officiated the union of a Princess Diana Beanie Baby and a Hot Wheels truck, I came up blank. Despite a constant stream of ‘90s media featuring transformative white dresses, there was nothing my imagination could conjure for it. I was busy scheduling meetings on my toy Palm Pilot. This was fine until 30 years later, when my now-husband asked me what I wanted for our own wedding, and I had nothing. After years of watching friends plan weddings, I only had one preference for the day: I didn’t want to feel stressed out.
There are a few industries that prey on emotion particularly brazenly. The funeral industry is one. The wedding industry is another. I knew this going in. I thought I could defeat hundreds of years of socially ingrained pressure backed by a multi-billion dollar consumer machine. No problem.
What I did not account for—shamefully, considering how much time I spend thinking and writing about technology in my professional life—was that in the more than three decades I’d spent building a resistance to deeply gendered expectations on my existence, that machine was perfecting the art of making me feel weird, broke, and ugly, and I wouldn’t recognize what was happening until I was deep in it. I’m talking about the wedding planning algorithm.
When Lillie and her fiance Morgan got engaged, Lillie told me she saw the difference in her social media feeds the moment she texted her friends the news. (They’re using first names only in this story for their privacy.) “Immediately, all of my social media was just flooded,” she told me in a phone call. “And I think at the beginning it was all just so shiny and new. I was like, ‘This is so awesome.’ So I did kind of consume a lot of bridal media pretty strongly out of the gate, because I didn't quite realize yet how much it was going to take over every single one of my social media apps.”
We talk a lot here on 404 Media about “the algorithm.” Usually we're referring to either Instagram Reels or Tiktok. Part of the reason we discuss and dissect it so frequently is because if you're not careful, the algorithm—the spew of content these apps automatically show you based on your past viewing habits, data from other apps, or what the app thinks you’re interested in—becomes a mirror of your mind; this is dangerous territory considering it's easy to manipulate by people, brands, networks and corporations with perverse incentives.
Some of this actually seems, and sometimes is, helpful at first. The design pattern of infinite scrolling relies on a variable reward system to be effective and truly endless. The next thing you see in your feed might be the exact nugget of wisdom, life hack, or listicle you needed to make your life better, or, in this case, your wedding flawless. But you’ll never know unless you keep scrolling through the next hundred useless or actively brainrotting videos.
Like Lillie, the moment I got engaged and started Googling wedding dresses and venues was the moment my entire social media experience shifted into the Bride Algo. Every Reel and Tiktok, and I do mean every single post, contained something new I needed to change about myself:
Journalist CT Jones calls the effect this content has on even the most level-headed people “wedding brain.” They recently wrote: “There’s this fog around my head that I can’t seem to shake when it comes to this event. My TikTok algorithm tells me every three swipes about the ‘biggest mistakes people make that ruin their special days.’”
Today's authority on weddings is Vogue, and in January 2020, Vogue correctly identified that social media was changing everything about how couples plan weddings. “Women of the 2010s became a lot more knowledgeable thanks to social media,” designer Danielle Frankel told the magazine. “They began seeing not just their friends getting married, but aspirational brides they follow on Instagram. There’s something kind of cool about researching through real people and their experiences, and the ability to share stories through a social platform.” In the six years that followed, this chipper assessment of there being “something kind of cool” about literal celebrity weddings does not age well. Being an influencer or content creator became one of the dwindling few ways for anyone in a creative field to make a living, a situation solidified by a tanked economy, a never-ending housing crisis, widespread unemployment, and AI gutting of a variety of fields.
Fast forward to earlier this month, New York magazine published a story about the behind-the-scenes process that decides whose wedding makes it into Vogue, and what happens when they don’t. “One woman in the fashion industry had a breakdown after Vogue turned her down,” journalist Charlotte Klein wrote, adding that the jilted bride went to trauma rehab after. But the real crux of the issue—how multi-million dollar Vogue weddings, most of which are not celebrities but are parties thrown by total unknowns, are perceived, consumed, and rely on real, normal people’s attention—comes at the very end of the story, in a quote from a mysteriously anonymous fashion editor: “A wedding is a lot of work. It’s a full production and you’re spending months on it and you’re designing it—it’s a creative achievement in a way. If someone puts on a play or does an art installation, they get press and attention for it. And it’s like, Well, I did all this stuff for my wedding. Where is my round of applause?”
That editor is talking about the Beckhams of the world, and the reality TV stars, and the old, old money Beltway normies. But they’re also talking to, and about, the rest of us.
This is all so much insidious than it used to be. While the lifestyles of the rich and famous used to be reserved for magazines and Hollywood, we’re all swimming in the same algorithmic ocean now. “Today, Instagram encourages people to treat life itself like a wedding-like a production engineered to be witnessed and admired by an audience,” Jia Tolentino wrote in her 2019 book of essays Trick Mirror. “It has become common for people, especially women, to interact with themselves as if they were famous all the time. Under these circumstances, the vision of the bride as celebrity princess has hardened into something like a rule. Expectations of bridal beauty have collided with the wellness industry and produced a massive dark star of obligation.”
I know that I’m not alone in the Weddingtok and the Bridal Algo because people have started making videos mocking the content that’s stressing us all out. “If you feel calm, it’s probably because you’re forgetting something,” one planner says in a satirical video. The comments on these send-up videos reveal hundreds of women saying they’re stressed beyond belief, losing their minds, or otherwise crashing out. A comment on another such video: “Me locking in because I’m getting married next month and I fucking hate myself is literally my entire personality.” On another: “Pulling my hair out and screaming and can’t wait to disappear.”
Looking back, the moment I first heard the phrase “cake inspo board” feels like foreshadowing. I'd emailed a handful of bakeries and filled out a dozen inquiry forms at that point in the planning process. Because of competitiveness among vendors about rates and offerings (or possibly because some evil McKinsey for Weddings-type MBA entity decided this is a useful lead generation sales flow), every piece of information has to come directly from a vendor these days and is almost never listed on their websites publicly. It’s acquired by prospective clients, who blast 400 inquiries to their contact forms, some of them requiring multiple choice quizzes about the budget, timeline, “wedding day vibe” and personal social media handles. A few bakers got back to me with quotes for simple cakes. One asked for my mood board. For a cake? Like... flavors? I felt like I’d missed a step going down the stairs. I didn't have a vision board for the cake. I needed a vision board for the cake.
Prior to planning a wedding, I hadn’t used Pinterest since 2008. When I started using it again after several vendors asked me for it, I felt a sugary thrill at pinning a disjointed collage of flowers, dresses, and other things I’d only describe as moon-landing-aspirational boards. Pinterest, meanwhile, is increasingly a minefield of AI slop, and has been for a while, with AI-generated makeup inspiration photos and dresses, which makes the process feel more confusing and unachievable.
Alongside the thickly-iced and piped “vintage” triple-layer cakes is “thinspo” content, in the form of viral walking routines, the Gabby George arm workouts, and ads for ordering a GLP-1 online. “Thinspo” content is all over Pinterest and other social media platforms.
“On Pinterest, every single photo is bones. Like, I can see clavicles. I can see sternums. I can see collarbones,” Lillie said. “Especially with the bridal outfits.” Once she starts feeling herself spending too much time looking through this kind of content, she takes a break.
"I'm like, okay, you know what? At least it's not just me, at least I'm not the only one who's like, ‘This is crazy.’”
I asked my friend Kelli Sullivan, whose objectively stunning wedding I attended in 2025, if she’d felt any of these anxieties while planning hers. “I feel like social media especially in recent years has gone so overboard with talking about and showcasing weddings, and particularly in a super influencer and curated style, that even subliminally influenced my own decisions when planning,” she said.
“I don’t feel like social media gave me direct pressure when it came to planning and decision making, but it definitely influenced my wedding,” Kelli said. But it wasn’t all bad for her, necessarily. “I really loved immersing myself in that niche of social media and was inspired by Pinterest, Instagram and TikTok wedding ideas that helped shape many of my decisions and ideas I never would have really even considered as a possibility otherwise,” she said. “I also really appreciated insights from other brides and hearing their horror stories and similar struggles made me feel less alone when things felt heavy in planning.”
Lillie said the same. “That is just the beauty of social media, sometimes, to just not feel alone. That has been really, really helpful for me,” she said. “But I'm like, okay, you know what? At least it's not just me, at least I'm not the only one who's like, ‘This is crazy.’”
Attending Kelli’s wedding, and all the other beautiful but vastly different weddings my friends have planned over the years, felt essential to understanding the many unspoken rules around ceremony, etiquette, and tradition, and all the ways these rules should be broken. But Lillie is the first of her friends to have a wedding. “I will kind of be the guinea pig for all of my friends, I guess, to look at my wedding and be like, ‘this is how Lillie did it,’” she said. “That’s also kind of been a lot of pressure. It's hard.”
Adding to that pressure, she and Morgan are navigating these expectations as a lesbian couple in Idaho, and where they live skews heavily Mormon, conservative, and Christian. They use social media to vet vendors’ friendliness toward queer couples before contacting them, scanning Facebook and Instagram pages for signs of intolerance or hate. Lillie calls this being “on the lookout.”
“Are these people that I want to interact with? How are they going to treat me? Am I going to be treated differently? I have to get some stuff altered for the boys suits, and we’d gotten in contact with a local seamstress up here, and I'm like, scrolling through her Facebook to see how she feels about me. And that's just a tiring thing to do. But it’s for my own safety. I don't want to go into these people's houses if it’s not going to be somewhere safe for me. That sometimes sounds really dramatic, but it's not. It just kind of casts a sort of shadow over everything,” Lillie explained. “This is supposed to be just such a joyous time of our life.”
Almost all of the most viral wedding planning content on social media is aggressively heteronormative—a reflection of an industry struggling to keep up, and attitudes toward queer relationships and marriage in this country that are painfully, dangerously outdated. Lillie tells vendors that she and her fiancée are both women, and they still ask her who the groom is. They routinely ask her, “Who’s going to be the boy?” Meanwhile, Tiktok tells us a silk scarf basque waist dress and a sparkler exit is the real sin.
During my own planning, guests and vendors frequently asked me what our “colors” were. I didn't want to have specific colors, but the algorithm told me that even multicolor weddings are on-trend (derogatory), part of a “wildflower” fad of eclecticism. The algo also told me, over and over, that no matter what else I did, there was one combination to avoid lest I become a cringe dated chopped unc chud of a bride: chartreuse and burgundy.
One of the planning tasks I truly enjoyed was picking out and arranging my own (minimal) florals. If the wedding you’re planning is at a venue that’s not all-inclusive—meaning, it’s on you to supply everything from the chairs and linens to the sound system, florals, food, dessert, on and on—a lot of the process is emails and payment portals. I wanted to choose and assemble my own flowers for this reason: I needed to do something with my hands, finally, that brings me joy.
My fiancé and I went to a wholesale flower market two days before our wedding and picked bunches. And ultimately, when I got to the flower market with no plan for my bouquet other than to choose what called to me, I ended up with a swaggy handful of hanging burgundy amaranthus stems and bright lime Bells-of-Ireland. Now everyone would know I got married sometime between 2025-2026.
This fear of being dated is a real joy killer, and a heavily-pushed narrative on the bridal algo right now. I love Basque waisted dresses and find them reliably flattering for my body shape, but #2026Bride influencers deemed them inexplicably cringe at some point in the last year, so my attraction to them soured, and finding a dress became a nightmare of rush shipping, returns and restocking fees. (While writing this story, InStyle published a piece that could only be made in that lab: a series of collage illustrations imagining Taylor Swift in wedding dresses, including one captioned “If you’re on #WeddingTok in 2026 like I am, you’ll know that the patron saint of basic bitches, Taylor Swift, is a basque-waist dress, burgundy-and-chartreuse color palette girl.”)
The fact that I can be swayed at all by what an internet person thinks, as a 36 year old with decades of being socially weird under my belt, disturbs me. I know that everything about what we do, wear, say, and choose is destined to be dated someday because we exist in a specific time. And yet, realizing when I got back with my bouquet and 15 pounds of freshly cut florals that I’d still somehow broken the year’s biggest, most made up mean-girl rule made me feel like an uncool little kid again.
In the car on the way back from the flower market, I bemoaned all of these things to my fiancé, who endured our apartment transforming into a shipping warehouse for weeks. He asked if it's a “comparison is the thief of joy” type-thing. It is that, but the comparison is no longer with some girl you went to high school with. Rather, it's an entire universe of options, budgets, opinions, and salespeople. In the scroll, it’s hard to tell the difference between a wedding real people got married at, and a photo spread that's meant to highlight a set of vendors or brands. Twenty years ago, an average couple might have had a wedding in their backyard or at the firehouse with catering, but surely they weren’t this stressed about tablescapes or cake inspo Pinterest boards.
"Most couples aren’t models, most budgets aren’t six figures, and most wedding days don’t unfold under perfect conditions."
People are getting wise to this. And there’s one type of wedding that I scrolled past over and over again before I realized they were all entirely staged: styled shoots. “Styled shoots are a common cheat. It’s kind of unethical imo. Once you know what to look out for, it’s pretty obvious,” Lana Dubkova, a documentary-style event and brand photographer, recently posted on X. Lana’s been a photographer for a decade but started doing weddings full-time in 2023. In a styled shoot, photographers, confectioners, designers, florists, venues, stylists, and the rest of the wedding vendor galaxy come together, often with professional models to serve as the bride, groom and guests, to display their wares in an editorial setting. These aren’t real weddings, but are meant to advertise their work to real couples and planners. And they are impacting real couples’ wedding day wants.
Lana told me in an email that although her clients typically come to her for her own candid style, she often needs to “gently recalibrate” their expectations. “A common tension is that couples want both a highly immersive experience and an extensive set of posed, editorial images... without realizing those require time! A wedding day is finite, and every decision is a tradeoff: more time spent on photos often means less time spent with guests,” she said. “Most of these expectations come from social media, where timelines, budgets, and logistics are invisible. What’s presented as effortless is usually highly produced, and that disconnect can create unnecessary pressure.”
She doesn’t believe styled shoots are all bad. They do serve a purpose for vendors’ portfolios. “There's a case to be made that maybe you're not getting hired for the type of weddings you would like to photograph and so you invest the money into a styled shoot to be able to display the style of wedding you want to be hired for in your portfolio,” she said. “Takes money to make money etc. But let's say you're a client looking to hire a photographer for a wedding. How would you feel if you found out the photographer you hired had ONLY styled shoots in their portfolio and had never actually shot a real wedding before? I imagine you'd want to know that ahead of time.”
Styled shoots “become problematic when they’re presented without context,” she said. “A styled shoot is, by definition, a controlled environment: professional models, ideal lighting, high-end venues, curated florals, and unlimited time. Real weddings are the opposite: dynamic, time-constrained, and emotionally complex. Most couples aren’t models, most budgets aren’t six figures, and most wedding days don’t unfold under perfect conditions. A photographer’s ability to work quickly, adapt to changing light, and make people feel comfortable matters far more than their ability to create a perfect image in a controlled setting.”
If you’re not planning a wedding or haven’t in the last three years or so, you might not be familiar with any of the content I’ve described so far. But this is the insidious nature of “the algorithm.” No one else is seeing yours. No one attending my wedding (except for others who were also recently married and are online) knew or cared that chartreuse and burgundy have been deemed cliche. They just liked the bouquet and thought it was pretty. And if they knew, they didn’t say it to my face, because talking about the internet in real life is absurd.
“If social media didn’t exist or especially exist in the way it does with the curation (for weddings in particular) I probably would have done things way differently and maybe simpler,” Kelli told me. “Having a universe of options shown constantly online did give decision fatigue and also a pressure to have everything be aesthetic, especially with the knowledge that what we will share from the wedding will be perceived by others on social media.”
“If I knew then what I know now, would I have planned a smaller wedding? Would I have probably eloped? Yes,” Lillie told me. “Do I still have, like, $8,000 in nonrefundable deposits down? Yes.”
The things I remember about my friends’ weddings are not their tablescapes or whether they featured some forbidden color combination, and I didn’t make lists of things that made me secretly hate them. I remember, most of all, the moments around the weddings: meeting at a cobblestone street cafe the night before for warm Kronenbourgs, pouring mimosas on a moving bus in the morning, gluing an eyelash back on in a beach bathroom, fireworks shows both planned and unplanned, watching my newlywed friends sing and dance and feeling grateful to witness it all. The million tiny moments I remember from my own wedding are part of a different galaxy than all the shit my algorithm told me to worry about.
In the end, I didn’t make a cake vision board. I picked up cakes at the grocery store two days before the wedding, and in the heat of the evening, they melted into piles of buttercream goo before we could cut them fast enough. While we struggled to light candles, they toppled into heaps of pink and white icing and we just laughed.
Now that I’m several weeks beyond my own wedding, my algorithm has moved on, almost entirely free of bridal content of any kind. It has realized, or decided, that I have no need for it anymore, and must push me on my way to the next Arbitrary Human Milestone. It’s the exact same type of pseudo-authority influencers and ragebait disguised as wisdom, just for another industry the profit-making machine has been waiting eons to target me with: babies.