Nautilus Magazine: Families of Choice Are Remaking America

But that wisdom was wrong: The meaning of family is morphing once again. Fueled by a convergence of historical currents—including birth control and the rising status of women, increased wealth and social security, LGBTQ activism, and the spread of personal communication technologies and social media—more people are choosing to live alone than ever before.

Pick a random American household today, and it’s more likely to look like Dan’s than like Ozzie and Harriet’s. Nearly half of adults ages 18 and older are single. About 1 in 7 live alone. Americans are marrying later, divorcing in larger numbers, and becoming less interested in remarrying. According to the Pew Research Center, by the time today’s young adults reach age 50, a quarter of them will have never married at all.

The surge of singlehood is not just an American phenomenon. Between 1980 and 2011, the number of one-person households worldwide more than doubled, from about 118 million to 277 million, and will rise to 334 million by 2020, according to Euromonitor International. More than a dozen countries, including Japan and several European nations, now have even larger proportions of solo-dwellers than the U.S. (Sweden ranks highest at almost 50 percent.)2 Individuals, not couples or clans or other social groups, are fast becoming the fundamental units of society. [...]

More than a century of statistical scrutiny tells us that any link between singlehood and asocial behavior, including suicide, has been vastly overstated, if one exists at all.3 And yet the stereotype persists. In our own research on the perceptions of single people, my colleagues and I presented study participants with pairs of near-identical biographical profiles, differing only in marital status. Participants routinely judged the married people as kinder, more loyal, and more caring. They tended to view the singles as shyer, lonelier, and more selfish. [...]

It’s not just singles who are leading the charge. Even traditionally coupled people are living more independently than they once did. A study comparing marriages in 2000 with those in 1980 found that millennial spouses were less likely to eat together, do chores together, go out for fun together, and have as many mutual friends as did spouses 20 years earlier.12 Today’s couples often have separate phones, computers, and online accounts. Although their social networks may overlap, they are unique.

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UnHerd: Rochester Cathedral is full of balls

Setting up a crazy golf course in the nave of Rochester cathedral is all about inclusive access and generosity of welcome. And those who decry the idea are elitist snobs whose treasured sense of musty ecclesiastical silence certainly hasn’t proved to be box-office for ordinary people. After all, weren’t cathedrals originally also meeting places of market-place chaos and light-hearted ribaldry. A Christianity that takes seriously the incarnation has no need of protecting the sacred from the profane. Cathedrals should stop taking themselves so seriously. Throw open the doors. Give people a little of what they want. [...]

But we have developed this extraordinary sense that boredom is some sort of moral failing. The philosopher Lars Svendsen – author of a Philosophy of Boredom – makes the interesting argument that the idea of boredom being a moral failing is something that comes about with modernity. That in having replaced a belief in God with a belief in the self as the ultimate source of meaning, modern boredom is a bit like a loss of faith in the self’s ability to generate its own meaning. It is almost as if bored people have let themselves down. This is modernity’s equivalent to loss of faith. [...]

Crazy golf in the nave is not, strictly speaking, a desecration of the holy. The holy has no need of our protection; still less the protection of pompous priests and bossy vergers. But a space for silence and the possibility of prayer does need careful ring-fencing. Where else in our noisy culture is one able deliberately to sit quietly and contemplate the meaning of our existence?

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UnHerd: How the Left lost Wales

While Brecon and Radnorshire voters are today expected to hand a victory to the Liberal Democrats, the governing party will most likely only lose because of the strong showing of the Brexit Party, with Labour way behind in fourth. Across the country the Tories sit on 24%, two points ahead of Labour, with Nigel Farage’s outfit following close behind in third. This means that in one of the EU’s most deprived regions – and historically Britain’s socialist heartland – more than four in ten voters opt for Right-wing parties. [...]

It’s true that many still harbour a great deal of resentment towards the Conservative Party. Some areas of South Wales have never recovered from the crash-deindustrialisation programme enacted by the Thatcher government, and the unemployment rate remains one of the highest in Britain. According to NHS data collected in 2013, one in six residents of Blaenau Gwent was collecting a prescription for antidepressants. Life expectancy in the region is among the lowest in England and Wales. [...]

Labour’s Welsh decline cannot entirely be pinned on Corbyn. Support here has been ebbing for some time and during the New Labour years the party’s share of the vote fell faster in Wales than in either England or Scotland. In fact Labour’s historical dominance of Welsh politics is arguably a factor in its declining fortunes. As Dan Evans wrote in a perceptive piece for Jacobin, one-partyism has encouraged complacency and nepotism in many traditional strongholds. Here “people advance and achieve positions of power not through their political competence or vision, but through party loyalty”. [...]

Labour has also been losing the battle of values, which in part explains the shift to the Conservatives. The coastal regions have long flirted with the Tories, but the Valleys – the traditional bastions of socialist politics – are also home to a small-c conservatism that sits uneasily with some of the liberal shibboleths that dominate contemporary Left-wing thought. Moreover, this anti-Conservative sentiment found in South Wales is partly a legacy of Margaret Thatcher, herself a liberal free marketeer rather than a traditional conservative.

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FiveThirtyEight: Where I Think The Candidates Stand After The Second Debate

First things first: Joe Biden is pretty clearly out in front, so I don’t quite get why prediction markets only have him in a rough tie with Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. Pre-debate, he led his nearest competitors (Bernie Sanders and Warren) by 16 to 17 points in the RCP polling average, a margin that’s nothing to be sneezed at given the historical accuracy of primary polls at this stage. And he’s shown some resilience, having already bounced back in the polling average to where he was before the first debate, and then having had a second debate which — while it wasn’t great, in my view — was better than the first one despite a lot of incoming fire from other Democrats. I’m still a seller of the proposition that Biden is an odds-on favorite to win the nomination — that is, I think his chances are under 50 percent. But I think he’s more likely than anyone else.

With that said, I’d keep an eye on Warren, whose strong first-night performance looks better by comparison after a series of uneven evenings for the Democrats last night. She has a clearer message than Harris, and she makes for a sharper contrast to Biden, whom she hasn’t had a chance to share a debate stage with yet. [...]

If I had to pick someone from among the Tier 4 candidates, it would probably be Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, who was among the stronger performers on Tuesday night, and who has a variety of interesting attributes (electability, executive experience, a mix of moderation and economic populism) that differentiate him from the field. But he’s far from qualifying for the next debates, so he’s going to have to find some way to command attention in what could be a slow period for the campaign.

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Vox: “Have We No Decency?”: National Cathedral questions Americans’ silence over Trump’s racism

“This week, President Trump crossed another threshold,” wrote the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington; the Very Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, dean of Washington National Cathedral; and the Rev. Canon Kelly Brown Douglas, canon theologian of Washington National Cathedral, about Trump’s attacks on the city of Baltimore and its congressional representative, Elijah Cummings (D-MD).

“Not only did he insult a leader in the fight for racial justice and equality for all persons,” they continued, “not only did he savage the nations from which immigrants to this country have come; but now he has condemned the residents of an entire American city. Where will he go from here?” [...]

“When does silence become complicity?” the church leaders wrote. “What will it take for us all to say, with one voice, that we have had enough? The question is less about the president’s sense of decency, but of ours.”

Although the Washington National Cathedral — “a house of prayer for all people” — rarely delves into politics, it is no stranger to clashing with the Trump administration. When Trump announced a ban on transgender people serving openly in the military, the cathedral was quick to announce that it would always welcome the transgender community.

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Vox: 22 percent of millennials say they have “no friends”

A recent poll from YouGov, a polling firm and market research company, found that 30 percent of millennials say they feel lonely. This is the highest percentage of all the generations surveyed.

Furthermore, 22 percent of millennials in the poll said they had zero friends. Twenty-seven percent said they had “no close friends,” 30 percent said they have “no best friends,” and 25 percent said they have no acquaintances. (I wonder if the poll respondents have differing thoughts on what “acquaintance” means; I take it to mean “people you interact with now and then.”) [...]

If this generation is truly lonelier, that’s concerning for a number of reasons: Research shows that loneliness tends to increase as we get older. What will happen to millennials, who are already reporting high levels of loneliness, when they reach old age? [...]

“As long as we then do what we should do — reconnect with people — then loneliness is a good thing,” Luhmann said. “It becomes a bad thing when it becomes chronic. That’s when the health effects kick in. And it becomes harder and harder to connect with other people the longer you are in the state of loneliness.”

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