Claude S. Fischer Are we really living through a uniquely lonely moment in American history? When it comes to friendship, this isn’t the first time that authorities have cried wolf. Social scientists studying a representative town in America’s heartland reported widespread concern among its residents that friendship was waning, that true friends were fewer than a generation before. This report, Middletown, was published in 1929. About two decades later, The Lonely Crowd, a sociological study of ...