Last week on this program, we discussed the question of family formation,

how unique features of American society make things a little harder for mothers and fathers,

and how Israel and even Jewish sub-communities in America are showing a different kind of example,

fostering a culture that is a little more family-friendly.

This week's conversation touches on a similar theme, but whereas we spoke before about

husbands and wives coming together to create children, and therefore the welcoming and

fostering of a new generation in time, this week we look at,

instead, the built environment of space. Neighborhoods have always played a distinctly important

role in American public life. The neighborhood is the site, well, not only of one's home,

it's the most intimate public setting outside of the home, in which the mediating institutions of our common

life connect us with one another. The neighborhood is where school is. It's where food is

purchased and prepared. It's where houses of worship call the graces of heaven into the human

heart. But in ways that are suggestively connected to America's loneliness epidemic, its underwhelming

public education system, in ways suggestively connected to America's demoralized societies,

American neighborhoods are fragile and unhealthy, and my guest today has ideas about how to improve

them.

Welcome to the Tickfoot podcast.

I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.

Seth Kaplan is the author of Fragile Neighborhoods, a new book that diagnoses America's

communal dilemmas, and then offers practical steps to nurse them back to health.

Coincidentally, just as in last week's conversation, so again this week.

The Orthodox neighborhood of Kemp Mill in Silver Spring,

...