Not long ago, a man named Owl asked if I wanted to accompany him to a sacred site. He picked me up at an NJ Transit train station about 40 miles from Manhattan and drove me down a wooded road near the border of Bergen County, New Jersey, and Rockland County, New York. A lawyer in his early 50s, he wore black cargo pants, a black military vest, and a pair of thick glasses that made him look a little like his namesake. We pulled over near an ordinary-looking suburban home and began walking up an unmarked trail into the woods. About 15 minutes later, we stepped into a clearing scattered with blueberry bushes. There, looming before us, was a spectacular sight. A boulder about the size and shape of a small house sat at the top of the hill. A jagged fissure ran down the middle of it, and two smaller, flat boulders flanked its approach, like columns on either side of the gate to an ancient temple. “This is Split Rock,” Owl said. For thousands of years, maybe more, people who lived in these woods understood it to be a place of power, a portal to other worlds. We stood there for a moment in silence, listening to the birds and, from farther off, the dull roar of traffic on Route 17. “From the Indigenous perspective, these boulders are beings that should be respected, just like the trees, the water, the mountain,” Owl said. “Just now, in this age, the world is coming to the realization that the Earth itself is alive, but Indigenous people never lost that consciousness.”

Owl is a member of the Ramapough Lenape Nation, a community of a few thousand people who have lived in the Ramapo Mountains of New York and New Jersey for longer than anyone can remember. Among their white suburban neighbors, rumors about them have circulated for generations. As recently as 2012, a travel website called Weird NJ alluded to “stories of a degenerate race of people who live an isolated existence from the civilized world.” Outsiders have posited all sorts of theories about their origins, pegging them as the descendants of fugitive slaves or deserters from the Revolutionary War, but the Ramapough regard these tales as insidious lies. They say that they are among the last remaining members of the Ramapough Munsee band of the Lenape, the first inhabitants of the fields and forests that once stretched across what is now New York City and its suburbs. “This land has always been sacred to us,” Owl said.

On a recent Tuesday, Owl and a few dozen other tribe members and supporters gathered in a government building in Rockland County for a hearing that would potentially determine the fate of one of the most sacred parts of that land. If the county legislature were to vote in their favor that evening, the tribe would legally take possession of the Split Rock site, protecting it from the encroaching threat of real-estate development. The surrounding hills were too steep and rocky to have attracted much interest from developers in the past, which helps explain how the Ramapough, some of whom can see the New York City skyline from their front steps, have been able to hold on to their ancestral home for as long as they have. But in recent years, an influx of wealth into the area has driven more and more Ramapough out of their houses and off their land. Now there was a danger that they could lose access to Split Rock itself.

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For the time being, the mountain property belonged to the Rockland County Sewer District, which operates a wastewater-treatment plant at the bottom of the hill. The District had decided to auction off the undeveloped 53-acre parcel in 2019, but developers had yet to snatch it up. The Land Conservancy of New Jersey, along with the Ramapough tribe and other partners, had swooped in and asked the District to halt the auction. After conducting an appraisal, the Land Conservancy offered to buy the property for $290,000. The environmentalist group had forged close ties with the Ramapough, and had made arrangements to turn the land over to the tribe if the deal went through. Both the tribe and the environmentalists envisioned an unbroken expanse of woodland eventually stretching from the southern tip of New Jersey all the way up to New York’s Bear Mountain, and thought of the Split Rock land as an important piece of that puzzle. It was now up to the Rockland County Legislature to decide whether to allow the sale to go forward.

At the hearing, Chief Dwaine Perry, the senior leader of the tribe, stepped up to the podium in a gray blazer and a traditional Ramapough Munsee roach, a headdress made primarily from the hair of a deer tail. A Vietnam veteran, he noted that the Lenape had allowed George Washington to use the Ramapo Pass during the Revolutionary War, giving the Continental Army a key strategic advantage over the British. Like all important tribal decisions, this one was likely made at the Split Rock site, he said. Later, I asked if he had spent much time there as a kid. “The only thing I really knew about Split Rock was that the women, the elders, would go up there and do ‘something Indian,’” he said. “At the time, what that meant was, ‘You do not ask.’” He now understood why they had been so careful to keep their ceremonies a secret. In the 1960s, white supremacists burned crosses on the mountain, a deliberate act of desecration, he figured. Less has changed since that time than one might hope. Last year, someone spray-painted an American flag on one of the boulders.

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2. My company has gone for a hybrid, 2-day at the office schedule, along with whatever work is required at customer sites. People can come to the office 5 days a week if they want (and a few do), and there are a few exceptional cases where people are 100% remote. This is our “new normal.”.

The next speaker was David Johnson, an independent archeologist who said he had studied hundreds of Native American ceremonial sites. Split Rock was “one of the most important” of all of them, he said. A lifelong resident of Poughkeepsie, Johnson spent years investigating the Nazca Lines, a network of ancient geoglyphs in the desert of southern Peru. “Then I came back to New York State and realized I had this in my backyard,” he told me. According to Johnson, Split Rock sat at the center of a complex of similar sites — boulders that had been moved by glaciers and modified, in various ways, by human hands. If you knew how to interpret these formations, you could travel across the region from one site to another as though following a “Rand McNally map of the Native Americans.” The Lenape viewed each of these sites as a portal between the present world, the underground realm of ancestors, and the spiritual world of the sky above, Johnson said. At least once a year, Split Rock’s connection to the celestial world would have been especially clear. On the morning of the winter solstice, according to Owl and other witnesses, sunlight shoots through the shaft in the rock, projecting a laserlike beam onto a nearby boulder.

The possibility of developers claiming the property represented just the latest threat to the Ramapough land and people. As a 2007 report by the state of New Jersey had noted, the Ramapough faced “blatant discrimination” and “significant and direct threats to their physical and economic well-being.” In just the last few years, an oil company had attempted to thread a pair of pipelines through the mountains; a private homeowners association called the Ramapo Hunt & Polo Club had been trying to shut down the tribe’s prayer camp; and the Environmental Protection Agency had announced what the tribe considered a dangerously inadequate plan to clean up the toxic sludge that the Ford Motor Company had dumped on their land back in the ’60s and ’70s. “It is a great stain on the history of the United States what has been done to Native Americans in this country,” Itamar Yeger, a county legislator, said at the hearing. The proposed measure was “one small step that we can take” to “right the wrongs,” he added. The measure was put to a vote, and the legislators, all of them, let out a chorus of ayes.

Afterward, as tribe members mingled outside, some expressed amazement that the hearing had gone so well. Stewart and Joyce DeGroat, cousins, reflected on the long history of real-estate scams that had cheated the Lenape out of nearly all of their land. According to the well-known apocryphal legend, the Lenape sold the island of Manhattan for some trinkets and beads in 1626. “We make some of the best jewelry in the world,” Stewart said, holding out a beaded necklace that Joyce had made for him. “Why would we need beads from you?” Joyce told me that she hoped that the perception of the Ramapough was finally changing. “I know a lot of people look at us like we’re in a cult,” she said. “We’re not a cult, all right? We know who we are.”

Owl regarded the hearing as a hopeful sign for the planet as a whole. “All Indigenous ceremonies are about respecting the environment, and that’s part of what’s important about this decision,” he said. “If we listen to Indigenous people and honor our ancestors, perhaps we can live in a better way than we’re living now.” Back when I visited the site with him, he had guided me through a brief meditation, and then had led me to the edge of an escarpment. In the distance, beyond the gray ribbon of the Hudson, rose the hazy outline of Manhattan. I asked Owl if everything that we were looking at had once been Lenape land. “It still is,” he said.

1. Guys swipe right on 47% of profiles. Women only swipe right on 12%. I knew some guys would swipe right more than women but wasn’t prepared for how little women swipe right!

2.I used to work at Bumble, although this was about 4-5 years ago. Globally, about 90% of the users are men, so there is a huge male to female disparity, although it’s not that bad on a per country basis (for some countries).

The most depressing stat though was the histogram of word count in messages. Something like 91% of opening messages were just one word “hey”, and ~85% of conversations were just one exchange long (“hey” -> no reply ever).

Looking at human, digital mating habits splayed out in data science form was really depressing.

3. I ran operations for an online dating company (notably not affiliated with Match). From database analytics I can tell you a few things. Men initiate contact around 80% of the time in straight matchmaking, and if you are a woman looking to date other women and you simply initiate contact with another woman you have a good chance of success simply because it’s very very very common for women to match but then neither initiates contact.

We were able to determine that it takes on average about 3 dates before sex happens (I don’t recall how we worked that out, I’m not a data analyst, but presumably it was some keyword-based algorithm looking at chat messages).

4.I used to work with a guy who had been an engineer for Match.com. He said 99% of the profiles were inactive, and that 80% of the active profiles were men.

He didn’t provide numbers but also said the was a huge disparity between the average number of messages sent to women versus those sent to men. According to him, all told the site was mostly men reaching out to dead profiles and never getting responses.

5. A friend wrote her master thesis about the different criteria in online dating and real life. Almost half (43%) the female participants who were in a relationship told they’d never have swiped right on their current partner. Other interesting results were that over 60% of men they wrote with on apps and agreed to go on a date, would have no chance, if they asked in real life.

6.I worked for Match for a couple of years. This is probably widely known but women frequently lie about their age and weight and men lie about their height and salary. Also, it’s a big problem that women are inundated with DMs while most men get none.

7. I used to moderate OK Cupid. The amount of unsolicited dick pictures men would send women, not even accompanied by any words was horrifying. I mean, you’d expect it because online dating is a cesspit but the sheer amount would still surprise you.

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I had to look at each reported picture and say, ” Yes, that’s a penis.”

8. Most dating sites and apps are owned by one company, The Match Group. They have a near-monopoly. I think Bumble is one of the few not owned by them.

9. Female dating app users tend to sign off for the day several hours earlier than male users, which results in men who login after ~10PM generally not encountering many logged-in female users.

10. I did a study on how dating app usage affects someone’s narcissistic tendencies (whether adaptive or maladaptive). I found out that someone with a more pathological form of narcissism (maladaptive) is more socially and emotionally impaired when they aren’t getting the results they desire. Since narcissism runs on a continuum from grandiose to vulnerable this shows how damaging this can be for anyone expressing these tendencies.

Most people know about grandiose narcissism but many don’t know about the other side of narcissism which is the vulnerable side. The best way I can describe these people are these are the ones who look for someone to idolize and will do ANYTHING for that person. Since they are looking to fulfill a sense of self they are missing they look to others for that purpose (hence the idolizing). Dating app usage is extremely dangerous for these people because they spend hours searching for someone and when they don’t match with them it causes a narcissistic injury.

11. I read a blog by a guy who used to work for OK Cupid.

He said the creepiest thing about it is every move you make on the site, every photo you click on, every message you send is logged.

Also, they keep track of the accounts that receive the most attention, and use their images in their advertising and around the site.

All of this in an effort to commercialize and commodify our need for intimacy and human contact, and perpetuate and reinforce culturally imposed standards of beauty.

If that isn’t creepy I don’t know what is.

12. I don’t know if it’s changed but my roommate used to work at one of the big dating apps and one of the issues they had was that their algorithm changed at one point to more emphatically enforce dating “pools” where people who got more right swipes would only see profiles of people who get more right swipes etc. With the idea being that it would put people in similar “tiers” to actually match.

13.I helped software engineers optimize their profiles.

Men get VERY FEW matches, regardless of how good their profile is.

Women get A LOT of matches, but most of those matches are useless.

14. We used to create fake accounts and chat with users. It was everything from someone having a premium account that wasn’t getting responses to bored employees.

15. Lots of gay guys get banned from Grindr selling weed. Would get a lot of emails of “why am I banned?” Go to their profile and will say “HMU for that 🌳”

16. My ex bf worked for the Yahoo Italy dating site back in the earlyish 2000s. His job was to pretend to be a woman, and message male customers just as their accounts were going to expire. This would encourage them to pay to renew their subscriptions. Once they renewed, he would ghost them.

He only lasted for a few months due to how unethical it was.

17.Almost every dating app has a significantly larger percentage of men than women.

18. My old boss was the financial controller of a big dating site. He kept on seeing these big invoices for modeling agencies and initially thought it was because of the big parties they used to host. When he asked about it it turned out it was just content for the fake profiles they created to lure in users.

19. Many apps seed attractive bots to keep people engaged. The bots will send / respond to a couple of substandard questions. “How was your week?” “What are you looking for?” Then ghost.

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Despite the ghost, the high of matching with a super attractive person that spoke to you is enough to get many people hooked and chasing the dragon.

I have a theory (unproven – I work on the comms side, not engineering) that these bots created ghosting culture. The bots just abruptly stopped chatting which isn’t how a normal actual human ends a conversation but people became so used to it happening to them, they started doing it to others. Learned behavior.

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20. Get some decent profile photos. Go get your talented friend or just hire a photographer to take some really nicely-lit well-composed photos of yourself and watch your match rate soar.