Lockdown nostalgia? Becoming better men? Mapping social trust?
A post-holiday week backlog of listens, reads, and resources
Some weeks there is just a lot of good stuff we want to share with no apparent throughline across them. This week is one of those weeks.
We kick off the newsletter with something a little different, sharing a podcast episode that we joined as the featured guests. From there, we explore a range of different reads and resources from the past few weeks, including:
A case for nostalgia for the presence, friction, and reduced choices of the pandemic era lockdown times
A feature on a men’s group that helps formerly incarcerated men become better versions of themselves
An exploration of how the decline of living rooms may be contributing to more alone time
A new resource that maps the geography of social trust in the U.S.
Enjoy this post-holiday week backlog of listens, reads, and resources. And, as always, please continue to send recommendations for articles to share, guests to interview, ideas for pieces, and ways we can improve. This continues to be a work-in-progress.
- Sam + David
A Listen
Common Good Podcast - “Commitments, Connections, & Communities” by Joey Taylor and Sam Pressler (July 2024)
“The antidote to alienation is participation. If you want to have people feel like they have more agency and trust in their community institutions — both government and civil society — the answer is not to ask why they don’t trust you. It is to continually invite people in and allow them to be agents over their own destiny.”
The Common Good Collective is an initiative founded by John McKnight, Peter Block, and Walter Bruegemann that is focused on promoting economic connection, the significance of place, and the structure of belonging. Last week, I (Sam) joined their Common Good Podcast for a wide-ranging discussion on things I’ve been exploring within and beyond this newsletter. We talk about the sacred experiences that can emerge in community, the meme-ification and individualization of the loneliness discourse, the privatization of community, and the role of policy in strengthening connection. I even get to share one of the more magical stories from my time with ASAP. As always, not all of these ideas are fully formed - I encourage you to give it a listen and let me know why I’m wrong.
→ Listen to the full podcast here.
Some Reads
- “Lockdown Nostalgia” by (June 2024)
“… if I long for anything, it is not a return to pandemic-era isolation but rather to a time where physical presence, because of its very impossibility, seemed once more to be the most important way of being. We waited desperately for the days we could hold each other again — and now that we can, it seems we have forgotten how to want to.”
In this provocative piece, Strange Rites author Tara Isabella Burton describes her nostalgia for the first two years of the pandemic. She talks about her nostalgia for the “friction” associated with the pandemic — particularly the day-to-day decisions of how to live — that ran countercultural to the “frictionlessness” of our contemporary “algorithmic culture.” She talks about her nostalgia for the togetherness she felt with the neighbors who came for the “too-sweet too-burnt coffee” at the Morningside Heights Bodega every morning. She talks about her nostalgia for having fewer choices, and for the fullness she experienced in making the ones she could. And she concludes with a question: how can we foster the social connections that we so desperately yearned for in the pandemic, now that we actually can be with others?
The New York Times - “Where Can Men Go to Become Better Men” by Joseph Bernstein (July 2024)
“‘I was under the covers at night, praying to God to send someone to love me.’”
This emotionally stirring article is about All Kings’ Nature Quest program — an intensive, weekend-long retreat for men who seek to collectively process their emotions, heal from past traumas, and grow into stronger, kinder, more purposeful versions of themselves. It utilizes tenets from mens work, which is a type of personal growth therapy that argues western men are suffering from poorly understood emotional damage and that damage has lasting impacts on the communities they are a part of. The program is facilitated by peers — not trained mental health professionals — who equally throw themselves into the weekend's dramatic, emotionally harrowing, and ritualistic programming. After the weekend is over, the group stays connected via online gatherings. More than half of the individuals All Kings serves are formerly incarcerated and only five percent of participants reoffend after joining the group (vs. the average 82 percent reoffense rate according to the DoJ). The powerful quote above was from a middle-aged, formerly incarcerated participant named Dion Johnson, who said of his experience: “‘it helped me to forgive myself.’”
The Atlantic - “Why Dining Rooms Are Disappearing From American Homes” by M. Nolan Gray (June 2024)
“The housing crisis — and the arbitrary regulations that fuel it — is killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans.”
In this article, M. Nolan Gray examines the decline of dining rooms as a communal space for shared meals in homes and apartments, attempting to draw a clear line from this architectural shift to our so-called “crisis of loneliness.” While consumer-driven trends are often cited as key contributors to the death of the dining room, the author also identifies structural shifts outside of individual control: restrictive zoning laws, the shrinking size of new apartment buildings, and our current housing supply crisis. Regardless of the reason, this design change correlates with a decrease in shared meals (half of the time we eat our meals alone) and a rise in physical and mental health problems across the country. As Gray states in the conclusion of the article, “in an age when Americans are spending less and less time with one another, a table and some chairs could be just what we need.” As always, causes and correlates are difficult to disentangle — and silver bullet solutions rarely exist — but more dining rooms couldn’t hurt.
A Resource
Weave’s Social Trust Map: an interactive tool to help us understand the geography of social trust in America.
Policymakers, researchers, and funders often talk about the difficulty of measuring social capital at the community level. In 2022, Opportunity Insights made a major contribution by publishing the Social Capital Atlas, which mapped the geography of economic connectedness (e.g., cross-class connections) at the zip code level throughout the U.S. But much more work still needed to be done.
Weave’s Social Trust Map — launched late last month — can be seen as another meaningful contribution to helping us understand the geography of social capital. The online tool draws on a range of data sources to map social trust at the zip code level, enabling the user to explore the data on social trust in their neighborhood (or any other community they’re interested in). Weave describes social trust as a function of three dimensions: trusting behavior, trusting intentions, and trusting spaces. The higher a zip code scores on these three dimensions, the higher the social trust in the neighborhood. Weave also integrates stories and videos of community-builders from across the country to humanize the data.
Check out the map and let us know what you think. How can a tool like this be helpful (and what do you see as its limitations)? Does your community’s social trust score align with your day-to-day experience?