Consolation Champs

First of all, thanks to Ethan Watters for sharing his sources and updating this blog yesterday more than it’s been updated for quite a while! The Virtual Book Tour moves on today to Geoffrey Long’s Inkblots.
Now, I absolutely meant to post this last night, when I had Mr. Urban Tribes himself in residence, but I […]

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This chapter documents how people’s love lives and tribe lives can come into grave conflict. Not many links to point you to here because I relied on the personal stories of people who struggled to make the transition from tribes to families. There is good news. The divorce rates appear to be going down. Experts […]

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Over the last ten years women have often been blamed for the marriage delay. “Women are not behaving correctly” was the subtext of books like The Rules*. Conservative commentators similarly believed that women had been the cause of the death of courtship. Chief among these doomsayers were Patrick Buchanan (who still has his site […]

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In this chapter I go looking for my personal reason (excuse) for reaching my mid-thirties and still being single. I travel to the American Psychological Association’s national convention and criticize the work of William Pollack and David Lisak who were arguing at the conference that all male commitment issues came from bad socialization. I was […]

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The fifth chapter marks a major shift in the book. I turn my attention to why my generation is experiencing the marriage delay. I visit the American Association of Single People. I chide them a little for using the word “single” in the name of their organization. I get the executive director Tom Coleman to […]

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Here I try to make the case that my generation is actually good at building community. Mainly I take aim at Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, where he argues that this generation of young adults has not done its part in creating “social capital.” It’s true that we’ve not joined the community groups our grandparents […]

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In this chapter I try to figure out how groups of friends help the individual become their best self. Some amateur scholars helped me understand what Aristotle meant by “friendship in the good.” I also talk about how my group helped support our friend Nik Weinstein as he created one of the largest lighting installations […]

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The second chapter starts with my dawning understanding that the initial article I wrote for the New York Times Magazine got the idea of the urban tribe all wrong. The groups weren’t “tight knit” as I claimed but much looser and more porous. Hundreds of people who filled out a survey on my site alerted […]

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The book starts at the annual arts festival Burning Man. It was at Burning Man that I suddenly saw that my group of friends added up to more than the sum of the individual relationships. It was a (drug-free) insight that started me thinking about writing the article that led to the book. […]

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Here are some chapter by chapter links relating to my book Urban Tribes. In the book I try to write in the style of the best conversations I’ve had with my smartest friends. As I say in the book:
“In trying to chart the landscape of our early adulthood, we drew no sharp distinction […]

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