It's the Brian Laris Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Is it possible that we're

learning some of the wrong lessons about American culture from the pandemic? In a New York Times op-ed, NYU sociologist Eric

Kleinenberg writes that people tend to talk about an epidemic of loneliness that the pandemic

spawned. Kleinenberg says it's really a loss of trust we should be talking about. That theory is part

of a new book by Kleinenberg called

2020, One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Change. The city is New York. We'll hear

about some of the seven people and talk about what changed that we should still be talking about

in 2024, trust and other things. Yes, 2020, the year that brought an

economic crash precipitated by COVID-19. 2020, the year George Floyd was murdered by a police officer.

2020, the year that President Biden first went head-to-head with Donald Trump. Eric Kleinenberg

is also director of the Institute

for Public Knowledge at NYU. And again, the book title is 2020, one city, seven people, and the year

everything changed. Eric, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC. Thank you. It's nice to be here.

And I want to start, even though this is so personal,

obviously, to so many people who are in grief and everything else since 2020. Still, I want to

start on kind of an abstraction, I guess, with your theory of crisis and what we can learn from it.

You're right. Extreme events can make visible a

range of conditions that are always present but difficult to perceive. So talk about that theory of

crisis. Well, it's the theory that has motivated my work for several decades now. It's the idea

that crises reveal things, who we are, what we value, whose lives matter, and of course,

whose don't. And so when 2020 started knowing this, my first, you know, very human impulse was

to socially distance, to close the door, to take care of myself and my family. But I also knew we were living through something that would be historic.

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