The universe's awkward phase

In the first part of the talk I will review some developments on the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction of the universe. In the second part I will present new work on how the wavefunction depends on the spatial topology such as S^1 x S^2. Quantum effects are crucial to make the wavefunction normalizable. In the last part I will describe the calculation of the (awkward) phase of some gravity path integrals that appear in de Sitter.