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Pete's NYT book review of "Palaces for the People"
The Key to Happiness Might Be as Simple as a Library or a Park
Pete Buttigieg
“Klinenberg is an N.Y.U. sociologist best known recently as Aziz Ansari’s co-author for “Modern Romance,” in which he helped the comedian apply social science tools to better understand dating. Here, he begins with questions he first addressed in an earlier book on a lethal heat wave that struck Chicago in 1995. He asked how two adjacent poor neighborhoods on the South Side, demographically similar and presumably equally vulnerable, could fare so differently in the disaster. Why did elderly victims in the Englewood neighborhood lose their lives at 10 times the rate of those in Auburn Gresham?
The explanation had to do with social capital, the amount of interpersonal contact that exists in a community. In the neighborhood with fewer fatalities, people checked on one another and knew where to go for help; in the other, social isolation was the norm, with residents more often left to fend for themselves, even to perish in sweltering housing units. Crucially, these were not cultural or economic differences, but rather had to do with things like the density of shops and the vacancy rate along streets, which either helped or hurt people get to know one another in their communities.
The new book’s exploration of this reality begins in the basement of a library in a low-income Brooklyn neighborhood, where an Xbox-based bowling competition pits local seniors against rival teams from a dozen library branches across the borough. The example of a virtual bowling league has particular poetic resonance two decades after Robert Putnam, the Harvard political scientist, raised fears of societal collapse in his study “Bowling Alone.” Where Putnam charted the decline of American communal participation through shrinking bowling league membership, Klinenberg’s basement of virtual bowlers illustrates how technology might actually enhance our social fabric — provided there are supportive spaces. Given what we have learned about the health impacts of social isolation among the elderly, lives may depend on creating more such opportunities.”
https://t.co/o420ZBK36Z
C/O Chasten Buttigieg
https://mobile.twitter.com/Chas10Buttigieg/status/1114527212290502657
= new reply since forum marked as read
