The Tissue Review: Our top pieces, favorite reads + groups, and newsletter resolutions
In 2024, we entered our toddler years at Connective Tissue. We’ve grown (from ~400 to ~2,700 subscribers + followers). We’ve learned how to talk (e.g., adding Originals and Q&As to our repertoire). We’ve even thrown tantrums (see: “Why startups will not ‘solve’ loneliness”). Fortunately, to our knowledge, none of us have bitten anyone or pulled anyone’s hair.
Now, as we approach the end of our first full year at Connective Tissue — and step fully into our toddler era — we wanted to pause to celebrate the good stuff and look ahead to 2025. We do this through three sections built on forced rhymery:
The Tissue Review: A round up of this year’s top pieces, highlights, and subscribers.
The Tissue Milieu: Some of the reads, newsletters, and groups we encountered this year that we can’t stop talking about.
The Tissue To Do: Our newsletter resolution for 2025 (let us know what you’d like to see more of in the quick poll below).
Whether you just joined us as a subscriber or you’ve been a day one homie, we’re so grateful for your support, engagement, and contributions to our work this year. Wishing y’all happy holidays and new year — and we’ll see ya on the other side!
-Sam, David, + Eric
The Tissue Review
Our round up of our most liked pieces, top highlight from the newsletter, and most engaged subscribers in 2024.
Top Original Piece: “Why startups will not ‘solve’ loneliness”
“There’s also a bigger question here, at least for me: ‘Why is it that so many of us feel the need to turn to the tools of capitalism to solve problems related to human relationships?’ The logic of growth, without proper boundaries, can consume everything. And because the goal of venture-backed startups is exponential growth, we start by creating tools to serve our objectives, but we end up serving the objectives of the tools.”
In our most popular piece of 2024, Sam makes the case that the business model of venture-backed startups — particularly the emphasis on speed, scale, and, at times, premiumization — is misaligned with the slow, friction-full, and local work of strengthening connection in communities.
Other top Originals:
Top Q&A: “Building societal structures to hold the messiness of our relationships” with Hahrie Han
"The question of 'What commitments are we willing to extend to each other?' is deeply interrelated to this question of 'How do we perceive who deserves grace?' ... As anyone who's been in a relationship or family unit knows, it's really messy work. The question facing us now is: 'How do we build societal structures that can hold that kind of messiness?'"
In our widely shared interview with Johns Hopkins political scientist and Undivided author Hahrie Han, we explored several salient questions on solidarity, faith, and civic life. Why is rootedness critical to facilitating durable social change? What can civil society groups learn from the evangelical church’s emphasis on transformation? And how can we design civil society structures that bend without breaking under the weight of our disagreements, conflicts, and crises?
Other top Q&As:
“Designing in our neighborhoods, for our neighborhoods” with
“How our emphasis on measurement shapes civil society and weakens social trust” with Aaron Horvath
Top Curated List: “Love’s braided dance”
“Insofar as we deny the fact that we need each other, we don't put ourselves in a position to recognize the needs in others … It's not about solutions. It's not that you express your need and I can say, ‘Oh yeah, I'll take care of that’ … It's this experience of knowing that you're not alone, that you're in a context where you are going to be cared for, you'll be nurtured, and you'll be forgiven when you make mistakes means that you can carry on together. And that's often enough.”
Our top curated list of the year centered on an interview with Duke Theologian Norman Wirzba on the For the Life of the World podcast. In it, Wirzba movingly describes how the agrarian principles of interdependence, stewardship, rootedness, and thinking in “generational time” can reconnect us to hope in an age of crisis. This newsletter also featured Patrick Sharkey’s research on how America has become “a nation of homebodies,” Matthew Crawford’s reflection on how individualism fails to create individuals, and a piece on citizen assembly experiments in Bend, OR. From spiritual reflections, to social science research, to a philosophical takes, to practical actions, this curated list truly ran the gamut of the threads we like to explore in Connective Tissue.
Other top Curated Lists:
Top Highlight: Falls Church creates a Welcome Kit!
Inspired by our “Why every town should offer a welcome kit” post, Falls Church Forward — a civic group in Falls Church, VA — recently created a “Welcome Kit” of their own.
The foremost goal of the Welcome Kit is to “ensure people who are coming to Falls Church and who are already here feel like they can belong and participate in the community.” The Falls Church Welcome Kit includes everything from tips for getting started in the community, to a civic directory featuring an active and growing list of groups community members can join, to a “word on the street” section that includes a directory of newsletters, blogs, and forums related to life in Falls Church. Welcome Kits are distributed by a group of Community Ambassadors — that is, neighbors who bring the practice of welcoming to life by committing to welcome anyone new to the Little City and make sure people feel connected.
From a quirky Connective Tissue post to real civic action to welcome newcomers, all in under a year. Bravo Falls Church!
Top Subscribers
Last but not least in this Tissue Review: we’ve been blown away by how engaged y’all have been as subscribers. We still need to figure out what to call you guys. The Tissue Box? The Tissue Crew? The Connective Collective? We’ll keep workshopping. Anyway, a few of y’all have been particular standouts, so we wanted to give y’all a special shout-out:
Most Forwards: Maureen Devine-Ahl and
Most Comments:
ofMost Likes:
and Amy Reilly
The Tissue Milieu
Some of the reads, newsletters, and groups we encountered this year that we can’t stop talking about.
The Read we can’t stop thinking about: “We were wrong about what happened to America in 2020” by Eric Klinenberg
“Because loneliness was never the core problem. It was, rather, the sense among so many different people that they’d been left to navigate the crisis on their own.”
That turn of phrase — from “loneliness” to “left on their own” — has influenced our framing more than any other this year. This reframe repositions what Eric Klinenberg calls “institutional abandonment” as the core issue, rather than an individualized and medicalized definition of “loneliness.” And it is in this reframe that we can access the deeper human needs that seem to be missing in civic life today: for purpose, for agency, and for solidarity.
The Newsletter we can’t stop recommending: by
Elise Granata describes GROUP HUG as “focused on [the] mysterious, magical, unpredictable human funk that makes being in community with other people a wonderful or awful thing!”
That description really captures GROUP HUG’s vibe: it’s the perfect mix of whimsy, playful, thoughtful, contrarian, and practical — everything you would want in a newsletter about cultivating community. I (Sam) first came across GROUP HUG last month after reading “What We Lose When Optimizing Community,” and I’ve been catching up on the archives ever since. I really can’t recommend GROUP HUG enough.
The Civic Group we can’t stop talking about: Warm Cookies of the Revolution
Warm Cookies of the Revolution is a “civic health club” that “gets regular people engaged in crucial civic issues by creating innovative and fun arts and cultural programs.” Instead of “shaming people for not being more involved,” they “make civic life as irresistible and joyous as possible.”
But what does this look like in practice? Warm Cookies hosts a mix of one-off events and longer-term projects in urban, suburban, and rural areas throughout Colorado. One-off events are thoughtfully designed entry points for civic life and involves things like hosting civic house parties with immigrant communities in Aurora and sports watch parties that involve exploring civic issues. Longer-term projects focus on facilitating sustained engagement, including initiatives like the Stompin’ Ground Games, a neighborhood olympics where neighbors “show us what your neighborhood has to offer and take part in envisioning what our community could be.” Their newest initiative, The Future Town Tour, “inspires ongoing cross-cultural community gatherings” in small towns and rural areas “where residents can share stories, dreams, fears, and their talents, while having a damn good time.”
Interested in learning more? Check out the recording of the recent civic joy event we hosted with Warm Cookies, CivicLex, the Department of Public Transformation, Boston’s Office of Civic Organizing, and Democracy Notes.
The Tissue To-Do
Our Newsletter Resolution: Grow Connective Tissue into a more participatory, member-driven community.
We’ve been pretty surprised by what’s happened with our humble little newsletter this year. We started the year with 415 subscribers and followers, and we’ll be ending the year with ~2,700. Our Q&As and Originals have been picked up in pieces by actual journalists. And several communities have adopted — or are in the process of adopting — some of our ideas for town membership: the welcome kit, the activities fair, and the civic homecoming. That’s kind of wild.
If 2024 was about getting our sea legs underneath us as a newsletter, 2025 will be about inviting more people to join the ship (we don’t think it’s sinking). We’ll invite in more guest essays and more guest contributions. We’ll have more virtual events like the one we hosted this past week. We’ll even explore the possibility of hosting in-person gatherings and cultivating an ongoing community experience, both digitally and in our enchanted world that’s not mediated by screens.
Any growth beyond what we’re already doing will demand your buy-in and ownership. This means expanding from a passive subscriber model to an active membership model, which may involve developing ways to sustain our work financially and creating co-governance structures for members. So, in the new year, we’ll be soliciting your input on if and how we can make a member-powered Connective Tissue work for you. In the meantime, thanks for cheering, supporting, and shaping this work. We don’t take it for granted.