“The Atlantic” has a booklet-length essay by David Brooks,
link (paywall, maybe), "The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake". The tagline is “The family structure we’ve held
up as the cultural ideal for the past
half-century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways
to live together.”
Part 1 is called “The
era of extended clans.” Brooks talks
about the evolution of the extended family, in an era when people couldn’t
afford privacy. You were forced to
accept intimacy with people who were less than ideal, “the best you could do.”
Then came hyper-individualism, led by women and competitive
gay men.
Part II is called “redefining kinship”. It needs to happen, to bring back some localism,
as the “anywhere’s” leave the “somewhere’s” behind and risk being stranded in
outer space themselves, alone.
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