On a regular basis selections accumulate right into a life.
That is an version of The Marvel Reader, a e-newsletter through which our editors advocate a set of tales to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Join right here to get it each Saturday morning.
In The Atlantic’s newest cowl story, my colleague Derek Thompson explores how Individuals turned anti-social. Many younger persons are actively selecting the solitary life, spending time at dwelling in entrance of screens as an alternative of out with different folks, he explains. In a dialog with my colleague Lora Kelley, he famous that this form of isolation is the results of decisions that add up: “The anti-social century is about accretion,” he stated. “It’s about many small selections that we make minute to minute and hour to hour in our life, main to an enormous nationwide development of steadily rising total aloneness.”
These decisions might sound minor, however they matter: To name a good friend, or scroll on Instagram? To go to church, the weekly soccer sport, or ebook membership—or sleep in and scroll once more? Right this moment’s e-newsletter rounds up tales on the actions that convey us collectively, and those that hold us aside.
On Hanging Out
The Anti-Social Century
By Derek Thompson
Individuals at the moment are spending extra time alone than ever. It’s altering our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to actuality.
Individuals Have to Social gathering Extra
By Ellen Cushing
We’re not doing it as a lot as we used to. You might be the change we’d like.
The Friendship Paradox
By Olga Khazan
All of us need extra time with our associates, however we’re spending extra time alone.
Nonetheless Curious?
- The dying of the eating room: “The housing disaster—and the arbitrary rules that gas it—is killing off locations to eat whether or not we prefer it or not, designing loneliness into American ground plans,” M. Nolan Grey wrote final yr.
- How America acquired imply: Folks not develop up studying easy methods to be respectable to at least one one other, David Brooks argued in 2023.
Different Diversions
P.S.
I lately requested readers to share a photograph of one thing that sparks their sense of awe on the planet. Mark Bernstein, 75, from Wellfleet, Massachusetts, despatched this photograph of “a storm over Blackfish Creek, Cape Cod.”
I’ll proceed to characteristic your responses within the coming weeks.
— Isabel