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Bowling Alone (Magill’s Literary Annual 2001)

Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard University, has a Web site at www.BowlingAlone.com. It includes a sidebar illustrating trends that trouble him. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, for example, American attendance at club meetings went down by 58 percent. Family dinners declined by 33 percent. Inviting friends to one’s home decreased by 45 percent. The sidebar supplements those findings by posting two other claims: A ten-minute commute slashes social capital (“features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate...

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