Quotes from Eric Klinenberg

In one major U.S. city, The New York Times reports, unclaimed bodies "are piling up faster than the city can handle them"; boxes containing the personal papers of the deceased are "piled floor to ceiling" in the county office.22 "We had never been so busy before," one Cook County investigator explained, "but nothing about the heat wave was really unusual except the amounts" (see fig

The coronavirus pandemic is going to cause immense pain and suffering. But it will force us to reconsider who we are and what we value, and, in the long run, it could help us rediscover the better version of ourselves.

The boys were already dead, though, and when the paramedics arrived, they determined that the body temperatures were 107 and 108 degrees.

Today, more than 50 percent of American adults are single, and 31 million—roughly one out of every seven adults—live alone.

The four countries with the highest rates of living alone are Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark, where roughly 40 to 45 percent of all households have just one person. By investing in each other's social welfare and affirming their

Today, our communities are full of children whose future, like Jelani's, will be formed in the places where they go to learn about themselves and the world they'll inherit. They deserve palaces. Whether they get them is up to us.

To this day, there are wide racial disparities in swimming ability in the United States, with whites twice as likely to know how to swim as blacks, and black children being three times more likely to die from unintentional drowning.

Spending time in a market-driven social setting—even a relatively inexpensive fast-food restaurant or pastry shop—requires paying for the privilege.

More than one thousand people in excess of the July norm were admitted to inpatient units in local hospitals because of heatstroke, dehydration, heat exhaustion, renal failure, and electrolytic imbalances. Those who developed heatstroke suffered permanent damage, such as loss of independent function and multisystem organ failures. Thousands of other stricken by heat-related illnesses were treated in emergency rooms.

quite often happens that a phenomenon is insignificant only because one fails to take it into account."4 The missing dimension in our current understanding of the heat wave stems precisely from this kind of diagnostic failure.

They determined that the death count based solely on the medical autopsies had underestimated the damage. Between 14 and 20 July, 739 more Chicago residents died than in a typical week for that month. In fact, public health scholars have established that the proportional death toll from the heat wave in Chicago has no equal in the record of U.S. heat disasters.

Publicly traded corporations, including Facebook, are legally required to maximize shareholder value, and while some CEOs define value expansively, most focus on the bottom line.

Alexis de Tocqueville admired the laws that formally established America's democratic order, but he argued that voluntary organizations were the real source of the nation's robust civic life. John Dewey claimed that social connection is predicated on the vitality and depth of close and direct intercourse and attachment. Democracy begins at home, he famously wrote, and its home is the neighborly community.

modern infrastructure—for reliable power, clean water, fast transit, affordable food, and resilient structures—has done more to improve public health than any other modern intervention, including scientific medicine

spaces," places (like cafés, diners, barbershops, and bookstores) where people are welcome to congregate and linger regardless of what they've purchased. Entrepreneurs typically start these kinds of businesses because they want to generate income. But in the process, as close observers of the city such as Jane Jacobs and the Yale ethnographer Elijah Anderson have discovered, they help produce the material foundations for social life.

Few modern social infrastructures are natural, however, and in densely populated areas even beaches and forests require careful engineering and management to meet human needs. This means that all social infrastructures require investment, whether for development or upkeep, and when we fail to build and maintain it, the material foundations of our social and civic life erode.

We were making some progress on climate-change adaptation in the late 1990s," Klaus Jacob observed. "But September 11th set us back a decade on extreme-weather hazards, because we started focusing on a completely different set of threats.

The accessible physical space of the library is not the only factor that makes it work well as social infrastructure. The institution's extensive programming, organized by a professional staff that upholds a principled commitment to openness and inclusivity, fosters social cohesion among clients who might otherwise keep to themselves.

There's a term you don't hear these days, one you used to hear all the time when the Carnegie branches opened: Palaces for the People. The library really is a palace. It bestows nobility on people who can't otherwise afford a shred of it. People need to have nobility and dignity in their lives. And, you know, they need other people to recognize it in them too.

For most of us, Facebook friends and Instagram followers are supplements to -- not surrogates for -- our social lives. As meaningful as the friendships we establish online can be, most of us are unsatisfied with virtual ties that never develop into face-to-face relationships. Building real connections requires a shared physical environment -- a social infrastructure.

Schumpeter may well have seen singles as rational. but in a survey of Americans conducted in 1957, more than half the respondents said that unmarried people were "sick", "immoral", or "neurotic," while about a third viewed them "neutrally".

Do you know why so many of us live alone?" a Swedish statistician I interview in the charming Old Town district asks me. He quickly answers his own question: "Because we can.

The Philadelphia studies suggest that place-based interventions are far more likely to succeed than people-based projects.

in the end, a source of deep meaning and security, but because it allows us the freedom to cultivate our selves, develop original ideas, and make a productive return to the world.