The Shades of Loneliness

As I spent the past year traveling through America, I’ve listened to countless politicians, urban planners, and pundits tell me about the resurgence of stronger social relationships in their communities.

But every time I trek through a new city, big or small, I witness a much different reality. When I strolled through empty neighborhoods in Detroit, mentally counted the number of abandoned community centers in the Bay Area, chatted with the last holdovers in small rundown towns like Rochester, or listened to a depressed local policy-maker bemoan the lack of funding to help the socially…