"Astronomer has gotten a lot of questions over the last few days, and they wanted me to answer the most common ones," said Paltrow, who split with Coldplay singer Chris Martin in 2014.

In her essay about the recent exposure of an affair on a Coldplay concert’s kiss cam, Ms. Schulman exhibits a common and troubling misunderstanding of the distinction between shame and humiliation.

The episode resulted in endless memes, parody videos and screenshots of the pair’s shocked faces filling social media feeds.