It's Friday, August 29, 2025. I'm Albert Moller, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

Well, we are told America has a boy crisis. You probably knew that already. The lead on the Sunday opinion page of the New York Times just this week says,

Lonely, detached, and isolated.

Today's young men are adrift.

We faced this problem a century ago.

We can solve the boy crisis again.

Two major intellectual figures are producing this.

Robert D. Putnam and Richard V. Reeves, and both of them

are pretty well known. Reeves has been leading into the space for some time. Robert Putnam,

of course, has been very, very famous for theories such as the problem in America of bowling alone,

the loss of social capital. Both of them are serious figures. And I think

they're right, there's a serious problem here. And the New York Times, interestingly, in its own

archives, has all the evidence you need about what it refers to here as a boy crisis of 100

years ago or the boy crisis of the last century. And so what was that? What are we talking about?

Well, if you go back to the late

19th century, the early 20th century, especially in America's big cities, you had a boy problem.

And that was also preceded and accompanied by developments in European cities elsewhere,

where you had industrialization, you had so many people moving into the cities, you had fathers

working in factories and largely out of the home during the day. You had boys on the streets

and boys by the thousands and the thousands and the thousands. And guess what, you had a problem.

You had social pathologies. You had juvenile delinquency. You had boys falling behind.

You had a lot of boys staying out of school. The response

...