The Frank Forum

The furthest I ever went on a family vacation growing up was one state over east--to Wisconsin. It lasted about 5 days or so. Most years, the routine would be 3 or 4 days and a 3-to-4 hour car trip to either Duluth, Minnesota at the western end of the Great Lakes or to Minneapolis, Minnesota where we'd take in a Twins baseball game. On no level is this a complaint. This was sufficient and I only had two real comparisons to it.  My father had never stayed overnight with his parents anywhere. This was not necessarily an economic choice, but a product of my paternal grandfather's experiences in the Second World War and a desire to never leave home again for the night. The other comparison was to peers. Here I'd get a bit more of a sense that friends of my would go on trips to Europe or Florida or elsewhere. To this day I've never traveled on a plane with my parents and likely never will. Earlier this month my wife and I traveled with our son for the fifth time on a plane i...

You have to listen to this . I always thought of David Brooks as being a hopeless neoconservative ideologue with not much of substance to contribute to the American political dialectic, but now I realize that I was unfair in my assessment. He is, on the contrary, a thoughtful mind with valuable and noteworthy insights.  A few days ago, Brooks shared his thoughts on our plague of cultural and social atomization.  In a short audio snippet (just six and a half minutes in length) the New York Times  columnist walks us through his personal evolution. "I grew up somewhat aloof", he explained, "I was not a guy who was necessarily intimately involved with others." He described himself as being a sort of "observer", who looked at life from the sidelines, but didn't really participate in it.  This kind of disposition is, needless to say, anti-Communitarian. Brooks, though, possessing the - what seems like, nowadays - rare ability to self-reflect, knew that he ha...

These days, just about everything I write about is on the topic of Communitarianism and civic engagement. That is the whole point of this blog, after all. But often, when I tell my friends and contemporaries about our dearth in social capital, they ask the very logical question: so what are we to do about it? To be sure, much of the writing on this topic is long in description, and short in prescription. There are, however, some inventive minds that are dedicating their lives to the cause of reviving our civic culture. Urban planners, most notably, have been at the forefront of this effort. They believe that, through the implementation of community-friendly infrastructure, they can facilitate environments conducive to social-connectedness.  I've written in the past about Dover, Kohl, & Partners, a town planning firm founded in 1987, and their new effort to turn Lake Wales, Florida, a city of just around 16,000 people, into a Communitarian epicenter.  This from the DK...

Dating in 2023 ain't cheap! According to a new article in Business Insider , young people are forgoing dating because of the costs involved. One New York City teacher told Insider that she spends upwards of $200 a month on dates. This might even seem moderately conservative to some who are particularly determined to find a partner. Dinner and drinks multiple times a month can easily  run you hundreds of dollars. Unless your plan is to take your dates out for $1.00 pizza (which is now at least $1.50, thanks to inflation) and perhaps a quick stroll around the park, you ought to be prepared to dish over a pretty penny.  What's more, some dating apps have begun to dramatically up their rates. Tinder, for instance, has launched a confoundedly expensive $500 a month VIP plan that offers users exclusive features, like the ability to direct message people who you didn't match with. In other words, you now will have the ability to creepily pester someone who most likely swiped le...

Loneliness in America has not, in any remarkable way, been ameliorated. Instead, our focus has been diverted elsewhere.  In light of the news of the still unfolding Israel-Hamas war,  American media has all but completely forgotten America's deadly loneliness epidemic.  The Hill, a news outlet I frequent for it's concise articles on all things politics, has dedicated nearly all of it's recent coverage to two topics: The Israel-Hamas war and the headache-inducing circus sideshow that is the House Speakership battle. Of the last 16 articles written in The Hill (there are 16 articles per page), 6 cover Mid-East affairs; 4, the speakership race; and the remaining 6 reporting on the 2024 presidential race, and COVID-19.  In fact, the last article written for The Hill on the topic of social atomization was on September 28, Loneliness: The Silent Epidemic Hiding in Plain Sight .  Since then: crickets.  While other outlets have continued to report on the problem he...

We need, as a nation, to return to Kirkean principles.  I recently read a book that is, shamefully, obscure, even in conservative intellectual circles: Russell Kirk's The American Cause. Published in 1957, this short read (only 137 pages) provides readers with a powerful and pithy defense of American culture. Kirk very astutely observed that many of our fellow countrymen -  though well-meaning and, undoubtedly, patriotic - lacked the ability to properly articulate what it was exactly that they loved about the American way of life. Short of platitudes and hollow shibboleths (i.e. freedom, liberty, natural rights, etc...), many of us fall short in defining the distinct nature of this great country.  In comes Kirk... The America that Kirk describes is not simply an "experiment" or a collective of people with abstract rights, but a uniquely awesome inheritance. The conservatism of Kirk puts enormous emphasis on our shared history (Yoram Hazony calls this "historical empi...