For the last few years, we’ve been asking Future Perfect newsletter readers what their biggest questions are. And while we usually answer privately, we figured we’d try something new: a reader mailbag!

This week, we’ve answered questions from three readers on classic FP issues: artificial intelligence, animal welfare coverage, and, of course, altruistic kidney donations. We’d like to do more of these, so if your question wasn’t featured — or privately answered — please stay in touch for a chance to be included in the future.

We’re also kicking off the process for our annual Future Perfect list of changemakers. We’re looking for experts, humanitarians, activists, movers, and shakers in global health, broadly speaking.

If there is someone you want to nominate, a topic you want explained, or a question you want us to answer in the future, fill out this form or email us at futureperfect@vox.com. — Izzie Ramirez, deputy editor

By which methods can one ascertain that whatever is produced by AI is exact and truthful?

For any question you’re considering asking an AI model, the first thing you need to do is think about its epistemic nature: Is the answer knowable in an objective way? Or is it subjective?

The best use case is a situation where it’s hard for you to come up with the answer, but once you get an answer from the AI, you can easily check to see if it’s correct. I find chatbots particularly helpful for semantic search — that is, cases where I say, “There’s some psychology theory or idea in philosophy that basically says XYZ, but I can’t remember what it’s called or who said it, help!” The chatbot will give its best guess, and then I can just fact-check that.

Same with other empirical facts that are verifiable through observation or data — anything from “What’s the boiling temperature for water?” to “Is it true that humans share 98.8 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees?” While you can easily verify the first by yourself through observation, you’ll need to rely on experts’ data for the second. In that case, you need to feel confident that what’s produced by your fellow humans is exact and truthful. We’ve developed tools that increase our confidence, like the scientific method, so if you’re consulting scientific experts, you can at least have some degree of confidence that they’re reporting observable and repeatable facts.

Then there are domains that are inherently subjective. If you’ve got the type of question for which there is no One True Answer, you’ll want to be more hesitant about using AI. I think ethical dilemmas fall into this category; no matter how much OpenAI tries to create a “universal verifier,” AI will always be limited in its ability to advise you on how to handle an ethical dilemma, because there’s no One True Ethics. So, you might see what thoughts an AI model provokes in you, but don’t trust it as giving you the final answer, especially if what it’s saying seems off to you. In other words, you can use it as a thought partner, but don’t treat it like an oracle.

— Sigal Samuel, senior reporter

Ok, after more than five years as a vegan and 73 years on the planet, I want to know why the great majority of journalists consistently abandon everything they learned about objectivity when it comes to a multitude of issues with the monster industry known as “animal agriculture?” And I want to know how to combat that bias effectively.

It is a huge blind spot for most of them. My best guess is the conditioning is so strong. It starts as a toddler, is reinforced by the parental relationship, expands to extended family, friends, reinforced again by all types of advertising media, entertainment, etc. Then they go to journalism school and are taught by instructors who also have this blind spot.

So later a reporter will go to a “chicken farm” and empathize with them when they tell their story about losing thousands of birds to avian flu — their sense of loss is not about the birds; it’s about the money. The reporter presents the story without questioning the basics. Things like “where are all the male birds?” [and] “how is it possible for anyone to think that 35,000 birds could be forced to live together in a building without reasonable access to the outdoors?” and “why does it smell so bad?” and “why do you have permission to confine animals without their permission?”

I think the reason is pretty simple: Journalists are people with their own biases, just like everyone else. That’s evident in how little coverage factory farming receives in the first place — it involves the abuse of billions of animals and hundreds of thousands of workers, and is a leading cause of many of our environmental problems, yet only a handful of US journalists write about it full-time (including yours truly). Most news outlets and editors don’t take factory farming seriously, which is why I’m proud to work at Vox, where we do.

That’s the most fundamental problem. But secondarily, while there is plenty of fantastic coverage of factory farming, more often than not, I find I’m disappointed with a lot of it, too. I see a few recurring issues:

I’ve written one story about how the media could cover these issues better, and I hope to keep covering that in the future.

— Kenny Torrella, senior reporter

Stories like Dylan Matthews’s years ago led me to investigate donating a kidney to a stranger. I asked my doctor about it, and surprisingly, instead of encouraging me to save a life, he tried to talk me out of it.

He told me that it is illegal to donate a kidney to a stranger! I live in Hong Kong, and maybe the reason for prohibiting even the donation of a kidney to a stranger is the fear that people would secretly accept payment from the kidney recipient. But I don’t know why. Anyway, I thought about donating while on a vacation in the US, but it would require too much time, so I gave up.

Unfortunately, my second kidney will probably die with me in old age, and someone with kidney failure will needlessly die. Anyway, maybe another story idea would be about paying kidney providers in countries other than the US?

Most people aren’t as generous as you!

In the US, only a sliver of living donations go to strangers. Meanwhile, over 100,000 people sit on kidney waitlists. And, as you indicate, the need for kidneys is a global problem, too.

Many places only allow donations to relatives or known recipients (or require tough ethics reviews for unrelated donors), while a minority — like the US, UK, Canada, and Australia — offer a formal pathway for anonymous “good Samaritan” donors. In Hong Kong, where you’re based, you can donate to a family member easily, but unrelated donations need official approval, and there’s no standard program for that. (That’s probably why you were discouraged.)

This patchwork exists for a reason.

In the 1990s and 2000s, there was a serious trafficking and transplant tourism problem. In 2007, the WHO estimated that about 5–10 percent of kidney transplants involved trafficking, and countries like the Philippines and Pakistan became hubs for foreign patients buying organs from desperate locals.
Transplant experts met in Istanbul in 2008 and wrote what became the worldwide rulebook. The Istanbul Declaration pushed countries to crack down on coercive sales of organs. Every country had its own laws, but began incorporating the declaration’s recommendations. As a result, transplant tourism dropped sharply in Israel and the Philippines once new rules kicked in, and tighter oversight became the norm across Europe.

But, in its efforts to shut down trafficking, the declaration argued that compensating donors at all “leads inexorably to inequity and injustice.” There was little empirical data to back that claim, but because it came from a major international statement it hardened into gospel: organ donation must be “financially neutral.”

But neutrality isn’t actually neutral in practice. Living donors lose wages, take time off work, take medical risk, and sometimes even face higher insurance premiums after donating. We don’t call that exploitation — but it is a penalty for doing the right thing.

And it’s inconsistent with how we treat other socially valuable, risky, or unpleasant work. We pay people to do jury duty. We pay clinical trial participants. In many places, we even pay plasma donors.

There is one striking exception: Iran.

It’s the only country with a regulated system that pays kidney donors. Iran established this system in 1988, and today performs about 2,500-2,700 kidney transplants annually, and it claims to have essentially eliminated its waiting list. It’s a proof-of-concept that incentives can be structured.

The US debate is inching in that direction. Congress’s End Kidney Deaths Act would offer a federal tax credit to people who donate a kidney to a stranger. Donors would receive a $10,000 tax credit annually for five years, so not quite direct payment, but certainly a help. The act, which has not been voted on yet, acknowledges that donation involves real costs: time off work, medical risks, recovery time.
The path forward globally isn’t throwing out Istanbul’s anti-trafficking work, but to build on it with smart incentives and guardrails so people can donate altruistically if they want to. That means actually testing new approaches, but doing it carefully. Give donors independent advocates, make sure there’s time to think it over, and guarantee lifelong follow-up care.

In the meantime, you might not be able to easily donate your kidney to a stranger right now in Hong Kong, but the needle is moving in the right direction.

— Pratik Pawar, Future Perfect fellow

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Editor’s note, July 23, 2025, 1:45 pm ET: On July 23, Bryan Kohberger was sentenced to life in prison, having pled guilty to all four murders. With the deal, he avoided the death penalty but also waived his right to appeal. When asked to give a statement, Kohberger told the court, “I respectfully decline,” seemingly sealing his decision not to explain his motive. The story below was originally published on July 14.

When Bryan Kohberger entered a guilty plea on July 2 in the case of four murdered Idaho students, it brought an abrupt conclusion to one of the biggest true crime sagas in decades, but it has arguably left the public with more questions than answers. Soon, a new wave of true crime content, including two documentaries and a major book co-written by James Patterson, will attempt to answer those questions.

Kohberger’s trial, previously scheduled to begin in August, would likely have surfaced much more information regarding the killings of Ethan Chapin, Kaylee Goncalves, Madison “Maddie” Mogen, and Xana Kernodle — students at the University of Idaho in small-town Moscow, Idaho, slaughtered in a late-night off-campus home invasion so horrific that it instantly became global news.

Years of delays in the journey to trial, paired with strict ongoing gag orders in the case, have meant that even three years later, most of what we know about the crime still comes from the initial probable cause affidavit filed against Kohberger prior to his arrest in December 2022, about six weeks after the murders took place on November 13. (He was charged, and eventually pleaded guilty, to four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary.) Since then, other pieces to the puzzle have been filled in primarily from anecdotal reports shared by friends and family of the Idaho Four and Kohberger, as well as clues gleaned unofficially from social media accounts and occasional investigation leaks.

The end result is that while the public can play connect-the-dots with much of the information surrounding the Moscow murders, the biggest question of all — why? — remains unanswered.

Here’s a look at what we know so far, what we’re likely to learn from upcoming media in the case, and what’s next for the players in this awful saga.

Why Kohberger pleaded guilty: He was out of moves

Given that Kohberger staunchly maintained his innocence for nearly three years, his sudden reversal might have come as a surprise to anyone not following the court proceedings closely. In fact, it may have been inevitable.

After stalling the judicial process for years, Kohberger’s defense team had swiftly been running out of plays following a series of judicial rulings favoring the prosecution and limiting the defense’s strategies. These included the court rejecting a potential alibi defense — with Judge Steven Hippler ruling that Kohberger’s claim to have been driving around looking at the stars during the time of the murders was not actually an alibi — and rejecting a potential alternate suspect defense, with Hippler dismissing the defense’s coterie of alternate perpetrators as “rank speculation.” With few other moves left, Kohberger faced a mountain of overwhelming evidence, including his DNA on the knife sheath left at the crime scene, phone records tracking him at the location and across town the night of the crime, and a recently revealed second eyewitness, a Door Dash driver who delivered a meal to Xana Kernodle and claims to have seen Kohberger at the 1122 King Road address just before the murders.

Kohberger’s guilty plea — which prosecutors shared directly with the victims’ families before the news broke on June 30 — allows him to avoid the death penalty. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for July 23, where, per the terms of the agreement, he will receive four consecutive life sentences on the murder counts and the maximum penalty of 10 years on the burglary count. But while avoiding a trial means avoiding trauma for witnesses and victims’ families, not everyone is happy about this outcome. The family of Kaylee Goncalves, in particular, has been vocal in their displeasure that Kohberger will not have to stand trial or face the death penalty, though other victims’ families, including that of Goncalves’s lifelong best friend Mogen, have stated their support for the plea deal.

Onlookers hoping that Kohberger’s plea deal might yield some new insight were left disappointed when his plea hearing included no additional admissions from Kohberger about why he committed the crime, whether he premeditated any or all of the acts, or why he apparently chose to leave the two remaining housemates, Bethany Funke and Dylan Mortensen, alive.

In the absence of any official answers, and without a trial to provide them, the public will instead be getting a deluge of new media about the case, most of it releasing in mid-July, originally intended to drop just before Kohberger’s trial. Instead, what we have left is a fairly broad spectrum of journalism around the case, ranging from investigative reporting via Dateline to interview-heavy streaming documentaries from Amazon and Peacock to classic true crime narrative nonfiction via mega-bestseller Patterson and his co-writer, British journalist Vicky Ward. Additionally, media outlets have asked the judge to lift the remaining gag orders in the case, so that witnesses and authorities who have been banned from speaking until the trial might finally have a chance to do so.

The lack of a trial “makes it all the more consequential,” Patterson’s publicist told me in an email. “The book now is the only chance people will get to delve into what happened that night.”

What did happen that night? Here’s what we know so far, and what we’re likely to learn from July’s new onslaught of updates.

What’s new: Perspectives from the victims’ families and friends — and chilling insight into Kohberger

During the six-week national manhunt for the perpetrator, the roommates, friends, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, and family members of the Idaho Four were put through the ringer in terms of public scrutiny and speculation. The new cache of media puts this community front and center and allows them to talk about their experiences. Among them is One Night in Idaho: The College Murders, a new Amazon Prime docuseries released on July 11, co-directed by documentarian Liz Garbus, who more recently helmed a documentary about the Gilgo Beach killer for Netflix.

Over four 60-minute episodes, Garbus and her co-director Matthew Galkin focus on the stories of the victims’ friends and families, including heartbreaking details from family interviews, like Ethan Chapin’s siblings — now the remaining two triplets — spending their last night with him together at a sorority formal just hours before his death. A second documentary for Peacock, The Idaho Student Murders, premiered the day after Kohberger pleaded guilty. It similarly gathers friends and family together to remember Ethan, Kaylee, Maddie, and Xana while opening up about their own trauma and loss.

Then there’s The Idaho Four: An American Tragedy, the book by Ward and Patterson, due out today. While Patterson co-authors the book, it’s Ward who has done the bulk of the investigation, conducting hundreds of interviews in and around Moscow, as well as Kohberger’s home back in the Poconos region of Pennsylvania. The book is a true deep-dive into the case and the context of the murders — as much as any book can be while still obeying the court gag order. Ward spends time early on laying out the complicated dynamics of the King Road friends group, and what a large, interconnected community the four were a part of — a community that was absolutely shattered in the wake of the crime.

While all of this is an important piece of the story, it’s only half. One of the most striking things about the Idaho murders is that the motives of the suspect have, up until now, been largely opaque. What little we know about Kohberger has come mainly from his turbulent academic history. Once a star criminology student who studied under premier true crime writer and forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland (who recently opened up about Kohberger for the very first time in the New York Times), Kohberger moved to Pullman, Washington, near Moscow, Idaho, in the fall of 2022 to do his doctorate at the Washington State University. After becoming a teaching assistant, however, he quickly bottomed out. Over the course of one semester, he was reprimanded, then fired for reportedly grading students too harshly and getting into an altercation with his supervising professor during a performance review. Just over a week after Kohberger was placed on a performance improvement plan, the murders took place.

Still, apart from his academic spiral, up until very recently, there’s been little indication of what, if anything, could have prompted Kohberger’s actions. Even Ramsland, veteran author of books on serial killer psychology, told the New York Times that at first she doubted he could possibly be the culprit.

Recent insight leaked from the investigation to Dateline for a May episode of the show, however, shows that Kohberger had an incriminating search history, including searches for pornography with the keywords “drugged” and “passed out.” He also searched for serial killers like Ted Bundy, though as a criminologist, that might be excusable. Less excusable, however: Dateline’s reveal that according to cell tower records, Kohberger had been in the vicinity of King Road no less than 23 times in four months.

The Idaho Four leans into the idea of Kohberger as an obsessive with dark tendencies. One source — the father of a childhood friend — alleges in the book that as a teen, Kohberger stalked him over a long period of time, frequently breaking into his house and stealing small items that belonged to him. Multiple sources recount Kohberger’s harsh and condescending treatment of female students and his difficulty interacting with women.

Patterson and Ward also hammer home the many similarities between Kohberger and the 2014 Isla Vista mass shooter Elliot Rodger, the patron antihero of the misogynistic incel movement. There’s very little direct evidence that Kohberger was influenced by Rodger, but Ward (who has written about this theory elsewhere) and Patterson draw out every similarity they can, all but implying that Kohberger intentionally styled his murders after the notorious woman hater. There’s been no official confirmation or indication that Kohberger was consciously imitating Rodger.

What we may never really know: Why?

Even factoring in Kohberger’s alleged misogyny, though, none of that exactly answers the question: Why these four students? There’s no evidence that any of the students in the King Road circle knew Kohberger at all. Yet almost since the crimes unfolded, informal suspicion has fallen on Kohberger as being fixated on Maddie Mogen in particular. The most compelling reason for this is that, according to victims’ family and friends, an account believed to belong to Kohberger had allegedly previously liked and followed Mogen’s Instagram posts. Authorities reportedly confirmed that an Instagram account belonging to Kohberger followed the accounts of all three of the women he killed.

At the plea hearing, prosecutors confirmed that when Kohberger broke into the King Road house he went directly upstairs to Mogen’s room, where he also encountered Goncalves. While this still isn’t as satisfying as a confession with a motive coming from Kohberger himself, the implication is that Kohberger had his sights set on Mogen. Her room was easily visible from the street and adjacent parking lots. She was an exposed and vulnerable target.

And so, Goncalves, who no longer even lived at the house but was visiting her best friend, and Chapin and Kernodle, who appear to have been awakened by the struggle upstairs in Mogen’s room, were likely all collateral damage. We may never know why Kohberger spared their roommate Dylan Mortensen, who exited her room and made eye contact with a masked man in a hoodie, with only his eyes and infamous “bushy eyebrows” visible as he walked past her out of the apartment, nor their downstairs roommate, Bethany Funke.

The event — the cruel and seemingly random killing of young people near a college campus, as if ripped from a slasher movie — is almost impossible to comprehend as real life, which was also true as it was unfolding. Once Mortensen, in a panic, ran downstairs to join Funke, the two decided that she must have been exaggerating the whole event. (Mortensen told investigators she had been drunk at the time and unsure if what she’d seen had even been real.) Not even later, as the two of them gradually realized over the course of the next morning that something was very strange, did the two survivors understand what had happened in their house. Not even as they were calling 911, passing the phone around to their equally confused friends.

Even three years later, it’s difficult to understand anything that happened that night in Moscow. The more we learn, the more it becomes clear that no answer will ever truly bring a satisfying end to a truly haunting case.

Last weekend, my colleague Christian Paz wrote about how the Democratic Party could be on the brink of a grassroots takeover, similar to what the GOP experienced with the Tea Party movement. It’s a fascinating piece that could have huge ramifications for Democratic politics, so I sat down with him to chat about his reporting for Vox’s daily newsletter, Today, Explained.

Our conversation is below, and you can sign up for the newsletter here for more conversations like this.

Hey, Christian, how are you? Remind us what the original Tea Party was. What is this movement we’re talking about?

The movement that I’m talking about started before Obama was elected. It was a mostly libertarian, grassroots, localized, not-that-big movement — a reaction to the bailouts at the end of the Bush administration. The idea being there’s too much deficit spending and government is becoming way too big and becoming unmoored from constitutional limited-government principles.

It evolved when Obama was elected into a broader anti-Obama backlash and then a major explosion because of the Affordable Care Act fights. It basically turned into an effort to primary incumbent Republicans, an effort to move the party more toward this wing and eventually try to win back control of Congress.

After it took off, what happened to the GOP?

They were able to win, I believe, five out of the 10 Senate seats that they were challenging. Something like 40 members of Congress were Tea Party-affiliated.

The primary thing was that they were successful in massively mobilizing Republican voters and getting people to turn out in the 2010 midterms, which turned out to be one of the biggest “shellackings,” as Obama called it, that Democrats or that any incumbent president and their party had sustained. Democrats lost control of the House and lost seats in the Senate, and that was a massive setback.

From then on, what happened was a successful move by more conservative primary challengers in future elections, the most iconic one being in 2014 — the primary that ousted Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, in favor of a Tea Party activist. It also forced the party as a whole to move to the right, making it more combative, more extreme, and more captive to a more ideological part of the Republican base.

Why are we hearing about this now with the Democratic Party?

The underlying idea is that there’s a divide between the establishment Democrats and populist-minded progressive Democratic candidates. And that’s part of the reason why we’re hearing this now, because there was a victory in New York City’s mayoral primary by Zohran Mamdani, a candidate who is fully in that latter category — a self-described democratic socialist appealing to this idea of bringing out new parts of the electorate, mobilizing people with populist appeal, with targeted, non-polished messaging, and taking more left-leaning positions on policy.

The big thing fueling talk about this Tea Party moment for Democrats is that the base has never really been as angry as it is right now. What we’re seeing is a combination of anti-Trump anger, wanting a change in direction, wanting a change in leadership, and also some folks who are like, Maybe we should become more progressive as a party.

So tell me about that. A change in leadership, a change in the establishment — what does this movement actually want?

It’s interesting. Because at least back with the original Tea Party movement, you could point to a core list of priorities there were about repealing Obamacare, about never repeating a bailout, about limiting the federal government’s ability to spend.

Something like that doesn’t exist right now, because it is a pretty disparate energy. The core thing is Democratic voters do not want the current leadership in Congress. They don’t like Hakeem Jeffries’s style of leadership in the House. They don’t like Chuck Schumer’s style of leadership in the Senate. There’s frustration at older members of Congress being in Congress and serving in leadership capacity right now.

In the polling, over and over again, we see, Democrats should be focused on providing a working-class vision for Americans. They should be more focused on kitchen table affordability issues. And that is the thing that most Democratic voters can actually agree on, and basically saying that that’s not what they think their current leadership is focused on.

What would it look like for the Democratic Party if this actually happens?

There are some strategists and activists who are drawing up lists of potential candidates to primary. There are already some challenges underway. I’m thinking of some House seats in Arizona, House seats in Illinois. There’s talk, especially after this New York City mayoral contest, about primarying Kirsten Gillibrand or Chuck Schumer and finding challengers to some more moderate House members in the New York area.

I’d be looking to see if there actually are younger people launching primary campaigns targeting older or centrist Democratic members of Congress. Once we get to primary season next year, how successful in fundraising are these candidates? Is there an actual effort by some established progressive members of the House to try to support some of these younger candidates?

Basically, just seeing if there’s money there, if there’s actual interest there in supporting these candidates, and whether we do see primary challenges in New York, in Massachusetts, be successful.

Plenty of single people have witnessed how curiosity dies in real time: It happens seated across from a first date who doesn’t seem interested in asking you a question. Or, maybe worse, it happens when you’re the person who has no questions for someone who seemed like a promising potential crush.

The wildest thing about these bleak anti-meet cutes is that no one does this on purpose. No one wants to go on bad dates; few people think of themselves as apathetic conversationalists. Yet, all across this big world, lousy encounters continue.

According to experts, the most important thing for a dater to be is curious about the person they’re meeting. That can be surprisingly hard, in part because many people show up to coffee or drinks knowing too much. There’s Google, for one thing — a surefire way to take the mystery out of any stranger — and then there are the apps that might have helped you find the date in the first place. With their computer algorithms touting compatibility, swiping has flattened our romantic interest. This isn’t to say that people didn’t go on bad dates before the rise of Tinder, Bumble, and OkCupid, but those platforms aren’t as helpful as they seem for actually connecting. Maybe that’s why a reported 1.4 million people left the apps last year.

Maintaining some air of in-person wonder is absolutely vital to getting to know another person for real. Here’s how you can keep the joy of meeting people alive, including what to ask.

Why curiosity matters so much to dating

“I say ‘curious’ more than any other word when I’m with my clients,” Alexandra Solomon, a psychologist and author who teaches at Northwestern University and specializes in relationships, tells me. Solomon explained that whether you’re on a first date or in the 27th year of a marriage, being keen on a partner’s life — their thoughts, emotions, their day-to-day — is integral to healthy relationships. Solomon said that over her nine hours of therapeutic sessions with clients on the day we spoke, she must have used that word a hundred times.

“Curiosity is where the spark lives,” Solomon adds.

The poetically tragic thing about modern dating is that the apps so many people use, along with accomplices like Google and social media platforms, are curiosity’s biggest killers. Everything that’s helping us to connect with people to go on dates is also capable of sabotaging those dates.

Dating app profiles don’t just contain the basic statistics of what we look like, how tall we are, and our hair color. From favorite foods to morning routines, beloved movies to the dorkiest thing about ourselves, dealbreakers to our shower thoughts — we’re told to divulge all these snippets of ourselves on the off-chance that this curated version of our taste and experiences might rustle up a romantic response.

What do you ask a person when you know that they love macaroni and cheese and need three cups of coffee to wake up? How do you act interested when they say The Godfather is their favorite movie, but you’ve already talked about how many times they’ve seen it? Do you have to laugh at their line about being an only child because their parents knew they couldn’t do any better, even though they made the same joke on their profile?

When we think we know someone already, we might not make the effort to really get to know them. If we don’t make an effort to get to know someone, we’ll be less likely to be interested.

“You also don’t want to build an idea of someone in your mind and be disappointed if they don’t live up to the hype you’ve created,” says Anna Morgenstern, a matchmaker and dating expert.

Morgenstern explained that expectation and judgment are big pitfalls when it comes to the apps. If people aren’t using the info we have on apps to imagine a perfect partner and create an impossible standard for romance, then they might be scouring to find a dealbreaker. Maybe it’s an old photo on their Instagram or that they went to the same school as an ex, but some people will find a way to talk themselves out of a date with a potential romantic partner.

“If you’re looking for an ick on a potential date, you’ll find one,” she says. Plus, “the date will be pretty boring if you’ve already found out everything about them.”

There’s also a cumulative effect from scrolling through our options that can wear us down.

Solomon says that biologically, humans are wired to have small personal circles. Swiping on profile after profile, seeing all these faces and all this data about them confounds our human instincts. Going on multiple dates with multiple people via apps that are more or less pretty similar is going to cause some kind of fatigue. One can only have a “favorite book” or “secret bad habit” conversation so many times, even if the answers may be unique.

The draw to the most popular dating apps is that they take the stuff we seek in potential suitors — looks, values, education, pictures (possibly holding a giant fish), etc. — and present all of these things to us in a streamlined way. Most apps also allow you to filter these people by how tall they are or their age or ethnicity. By the time one decides to go on a date, the person they’ve agreed to meet has already made it through rigorous romantic sifting, and the promise of compatibility.

Theoretically, all this box-checking should lead to more perfect matches, but that’s not the way human relationships work.

How to be a more curious dater

If knowing too much about a person can kill a date, what about going on blind dates? It’s a practice that feels very much of a time before apps, Instagram, and Google, but it’s the way some people used to date back in the day: being set up without knowing who exactly is going to show up.

“A blind date can feel exciting,” Morgenstern, the matchmaker, says, “to give up some of that control and go back to simpler times by trusting a friend or family member with their matchmaking skills.”

An actual matchmaker can mimic this kind of useful surprise, too. Morgenstern explains that while her clients obviously know themselves better than anyone else, they might still be limiting their options for a partner. Morgenstern finds them matches they might not even consider.

“When you’re too close to your own dating patterns, it’s easy to miss red flags or repeat unhealthy choices,” says Simona Fusco, the founder of Perfect 12, an exclusive matchmaking service that serves high-profile clients. Fusco says that dating apps are more or less a waste of time, because of the lack of privacy.

Of course, not everyone is comfortable signing up for a matchmaking service, or can afford to. But anyone could tap into a similar energy by asking friends, coworkers, and family members to set them up. By the same token, we could play matchmaker to our single friends, coworkers, and family members, who’ve ditched apps.

Sarah Hensley, a relationship coach and psychologist, echoed these sentiments. She says her clients have started seeking out more organic ways of meeting people — social clubs, fitness, volunteering — and looking for potential partners who are friends with their friends. This discovery process is more exciting than what you’d find on the apps, she says, and “can spark attraction that wouldn’t otherwise manifest.”

But even with a more intriguing way to date, there’s still that nagging problem of what to ask someone you just met.

Experts I spoke to shared a few of their surefire questions to ask to spark curiosity:

All of these questions encourage the person answering to tell a story and have a point of view, and they also make the person asking an active listener. A question doesn’t have to be particularly deep or probing — one expert recommended asking what media personalities, celebrities, and influencers your date follows. The goal of each of these questions is to feed our curiosities.

For Solomon, the psychologist based at Northwestern, the best question is “What made you light up this week?” As she explained, it isn’t fixed. The time provides a frame, so your date doesn’t have to go searching the recesses of their memory, but the timeliness keeps the answer from skewing into something generic. It also breaks up the monotony of “best” or “favorite” replies.

Of course, some dates are destined to die on the vine regardless of how curious you are. Sometimes you — or your date — could be as eager and endearing as can be, but the spark isn’t there.

If worse comes to worst, you could always just go back to the apps, maybe having learned something new.