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May 14, 2025

Libraries Are Doing the Work—Let’s Fund Them Accordingly

Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of visiting libraries of all sizes—from quiet rural branches to vibrant urban hubs. Each one tells a story—not just through the…

October 11, 2024

It’s time to face up to our social poverty problem

Over the past half-century, virtually all aspects of social life have deteriorated in America. We spend less time with fewer friends, form fewer families and have turned away from organized civic life and religious institutions. We trust…

June 7, 2024

An Epidemic of Loneliness in the Age of Boundaries

Social media features a different viral villain every day. If we’re lucky, he or she tells us something about ourselves. In just such a case, a man named Marcus Shepard got…

March 27, 2024

Narcan Babies

“As medical professionals who work with pregnant patients, you face numerous medical, legal, and ethical decision points when treating a patient for substance use during pregnancy, and when providing care…

March 12, 2024

Family Dinners Offer a Silver Lining in a Bleak Social Capital Landscape

Across a variety of indicators, social capital in America is deteriorating. But one trend appears to be cutting across conventional wisdom—gathering the family around the dinner table. Dinners offer an…

January 31, 2024

Perspective: The ‘social workplace’ and why it matters to Zoomers

Social connections are increasingly as important as pay to younger workers. A mission-led workplace can help In his 1759 book “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Adam Smith observed that human…

December 19, 2023

Sins of Omission: Public Broadcasting Fails to Reach a Broad Cross-Section of America

Increasing numbers of Americans get their news from Facebook and Apple but nonetheless, every day, six American television networks — ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, CNN and PBS — continue…

October 23, 2023

Teach Your Children Well

A few years ago, David Brooks wrote a column in which he took a friend without a high school degree to a sandwich shop. “Suddenly,” he recounted, “I saw her…

August 10, 2023

The Real Reason People Leave Religion

More than a decade ago, the Pew Research Center released a path-breaking study on people without religion: “Nones” on the Rise. At the time, I was in graduate school studying political science…

June 22, 2023

In An Age Of Low Social Trust, Stopping By Your Neighbor’s House Is Weird And Creepy

It was presaged during the pandemic: “Masks have also become so much more than mere barrier between germs and lungs,” the New York Times reported in April 2021. “They can keep that too-chatty neighbor…