Derek Thompson
speaker
564 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 24 Jul
Derek Thompson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
They were starting more clubs.
They belonged to unions.
They had what are sometimes called more third places, like the bowling alleys that Robert Putnam famously wrote about.
Putnam's book, Bolding Alone, is actually really remarkable to read now, even though it's now 26 years old.
I mean, he has data about how frequently people are writing greeting cards to each other, how frequently they're calling each other on the phone or playing, you know, card games with each other, hosting cocktail parties.
All of this was ascendant in the first 60 years of the 20th century.
And then Putnam put his finger on this idea that in the last half of the 20th century, all of this was declining.
And every single indicator of socialization was declining at the same time.
And so he publishes this book, famously, Bowling Alone.
And a lot of the sociological community comes out and says, this is bollocks.
Putnam doesn't know what he's talking about.
And most importantly, he doesn't realize that we're on the verge of a revolution in socializing.
That revolution is the internet revolution.
we're going to have these sort of new relationships with each other on the internet that are gonna replace the declining relationships that we're having in the real world.
And then 26 years after he publishes this book, which was so controversial for its thesis, every indicator, again, of socializing is going down.
According to the American Time-Use Survey, the average American spends 25% less time socializing presently in the real world.
The American Time-Use Survey asks about how often people attend or host parties
Americans under 25, so Gen Z, spend 70% less time at parties than they did just 26 years ago, the year that Bowling Alone was published.
So it's like we've had a socializing recession on top of a socializing recession.
And I call it the antisocial century because I was, when I wrote this cover story for The Atlantic about a year and a half ago, that itself was called the antisocial century.
Showing 61–80 of 564 · page 4 of 29
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