The Family Unit in a Divided Era

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In the not-so-United States of 2018, the last bastion of unity might be the most important unit in any society, the family.

But families aren't immune from the many forces pulling Americans apart.

How is the American family changing?

And how will those changes affect the nation?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, executive editor of The Atlantic.

And over there in New York is my esteemed co-host, Alex Wagner.

Alex, hello.

Hi, Matt.

It's so great to hear your voice.

And it's always so great to hear yours.

I'm like your hype man.

Yeah.

If only you could introduce me every time I spoke.

You know, people would be really enthusiastic to hear what I had to say.

I would be very happy with that job.

We are also joined today by Adrienne LaFrance here in DC, editor of theatlantic.com.

Adrian, welcome back.

Thank you for having me.

Teresa.

Adrienne.

What up?

Benvenuto.

And we are also welcoming today Becca Rosen for the first time at the Radio Atlantic table.

Becca,

senior editor at The Atlantic, editor of our new family section.

Welcome.

Whoa,

Becca, congratulations.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me on.

It's a family section.

That was supposed to be me announcing, it's a boy.

It's a girl.

It's a family section.

My baby's finally here.

Congratulations, Becca.

March 20th marked the launch of the family section on theatlantic.com.

Very exciting.

Now, America obviously is divided.

This is not a new observation.

We are subdivided into sharply defined classes, political parties, generational groups.

We are stratifying geographically into younger, browner cities and older, whiter, more rural areas.

Yet, even as we grow farther apart geographically and politically, now I can see all the Facebook updates of that one great uncle in Mississippi all the time.

These changes are affecting every aspect of our society, of course, but where these divides get real is at home in our families.

Now, Becca, you've just launched this brand new section on family, looking at how families are evolving, not just in America, but around the world.

But I wanted to start this conversation with the U.S.

How is the American family holding up under all these divides?

Well, that's one of the biggest questions that we are setting out to discover.

And, you know, I think the idea that we've already been looking into a lot as we've started this new section is just how there isn't really one American family and it's hard to say what the American family is experiencing.

As you're saying, the country is pretty divided and families are kind of in different regions and different groups and different socioeconomic classes are really faring quite differently.

So we're trying to hone in on what those divides are and trying to understand why some families seem to be thriving while others are struggling so much.

One dividing line we're really interested in is the education dividing line since it seems to predict so much else about where families live, how they're doing financially, and even just how solid their marriages are.

So that's going to be a huge topic of interest for us.

And then the last point I would just say to that is even just the first day in launching this new section, some of the feedback we got was just so acrimonious and intense already.

And you can just see already these very, very strong feelings that people have about families.

You know, it cuts to the core of who we are and how we raise our children is something people feel very strongly about.

And it's...

It'll be really interesting to just see how those fights, some of which are cultural, some of which are political, play out and what they mean for how families do.

Becca, what are you most interested in in terms of the way families have changed in the last 50 years?

I mean, it's hard to narrow it down because there's so much that's interesting right now about families.

A lot of times the writing that we read about families is very advice oriented.

How can I get my kids to do X?

How can I better relate with my siblings?

But seeing the shifts that are happening is something we almost miss that forest for the trees of the kind of daily ins and outs of family life.

So the changes I'm interested in, some of them go to what Matt was talking about before, the shifts in geography, the shifts in

child rearing, the cultural shifts.

A huge one for us is going to be what's happening right now with technological change.

The Atlantic had an amazing piece by Gene Twangi about the effect on teens that smartphones are having and just what happens to a teenager when so much of their life and their worldview is conducted through that small glass screen.

But it's obviously not not just teens, it's all of us, and how that's shaping our family experiences is fascinating to me.

And a really big topic that I'm super fascinated by is how age-segregated our society is.

We're living in one of the most age-segregated societies to ever exist on the planet.

Older people live with other older people, sometimes in specialized nursing homes or retirement facilities.

And young people tend to live with near and close to other young families, near schools and parks.

And the way that this is changing the experience of being a parent, being a child, being a grandparent when people aren't together in the same household is really fascinating.

Rebecca, one of the things we've talked about a lot over the years that I find so interesting is the changing ways that families use their time and largely how that's changed because of role changes, like women working more, for example.

And so I wonder how you think about, I mean, you mentioned like families changing because they're all not under one roof together,

the different ages necessarily, but also it's about how they're spending their time when they're not together, right?

Certainly the rise of two parent households where both members work has been a many decade-long shift, and it's now extremely common, if not the norm for families.

You know, I think that one of the ways that we've structured our society over time was this idea that there would be one breadwinner, one person at the office all day.

That was typically the man, one homemaker, the wife who was home during the day taking care of the household and kids were either at home when they were very young or off at school and we had this kind of these three major centers of society the school the home and work

wherever people were earning and over the last 60 70 years as more and more women have entered the workforce increasingly both of those parents are out of the household during the day eight nine hours sometimes and the home is empty and kids are in the care of either school, or daycare, or some other kind of programming, or sometimes occasionally nannies or other relatives.

And it's just a total shift in the way we structure our society to now have the household not be a center for many families in the middle part of every single day.

So, what does this do for the kids' experience?

What does this do, obviously, for the parents' experience?

A fascinating topic over the last 40, 50 years has been how that's shifted the division of labor at home, or more often how it hasn't.

And just how parents contend with that new allocation of their time is a real challenge for people and something that we'll want to look at a lot.

And why,

in this environment that has changed so much, where there's been this total restructuring at some level of our society and how people spend their time, have there been so other little institutional changes to support that shift?

Workdays are still very long.

Office life, in some ways, has even become more demanding as technology has allowed people to be reachable at all hours.

So it's really left this vacuum at home.

And I think that's a huge challenge that a lot of families deal with all the time.

I was going to ask you, too, you mentioned the sort of institutional lag, like just the fact that like a kid's school day gets out at 2.30 or 3.

It's sort of incomprehensible.

What are parents to do?

Right.

And I mean, so many nursery schools are like 12 hours a week or something.

So it's clearly not not designed for a family where both people work unless that family is making other accommodations with money that not a lot of families have.

So

it's a really tough situation.

We just haven't designed our institutions for the actual families that we have today.

And like you're saying, Alex, like a lot of schools end at 2.30 or 3.

Parents have to scramble for aftercare.

There's this big gap.

Think about summer break.

That's three months when a lot of families have no child care at all.

That's pretty rough for people.

And it's clearly coming from a period when there was an at-home caretaker, the mom.

One of the interesting aspects of the age segregation that you're talking about, Becca, is what's happening between adults and their parents.

There's this fascinating anecdote from a story that our own Derek Thompson wrote in August 2016 in a story called Millennials, the Mobile and the Stuck.

Derek writes, quote, in the aftermath of the recession and weak recovery, the share of 18 to 34 year olds, aka millennials, who own a home has fallen to a 30-year low.

For the first time on record, going back more than a century, young people are now more likely to live with their parents than with the spouse.

That change in more than a century, the first time in more than a century, that shift itself, I think, is such a stunning indication of where the family has gone over the past several decades.

Well, a really interesting factor here was just the recession and the way that shuffled up some of the trends we were seeing in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s.

But what you generally see over time is that age segregation is something that people choose when they have affluence.

So especially in particular, the establishment of Social Security gave older Americans much more affluence than they'd had before.

And what many of them opted to do with that extra money was to live on their own.

Similarly, younger people who have more financial independence and are doing better in our economy do tend to live out of the house.

And when they struggle, as many, many continue to do, but many more did in the years right after the recession, they moved back in with their parents.

So, I mean, I think it's clear to people when you take a step back from things that age segregation in some ways is a loss.

That there's, I mean, I certainly feel it in my own life, not living with my parents.

And I, you know, when they're around, it's wonderful.

But we can see that we've lost something by having everybody living in their own households but fundamentally this is something that people seem to want and that they choose when they can so there's obviously a gain this being the age segregation that parents live separately from adult children and grandparents live separately from their adult children mostly what we've gained here is independence and privacy and an ability to have your own space and home.

And that's something that people want and crave.

So what we do see is when the economy is weaker, we'll see that shift back again.

Well, you mentioned, though, Becca, the article, the great article by Gene Twangi that talks about smartphones and the effect they're having on kids.

And one of the most, I think,

disturbing, I'm going to just say,

findings that she mentioned in that piece is that teens, in large part because technology, they're so reliant on technology for socializing that

they're having harder times getting into relationships.

I mean, harder.

I shouldn't say it like that and put a value judgment on it, but they're in intense relationships at a later age or not at all compared to where teens were in decades prior.

They're having sex later, teen pregnancy rates are lower, so that's a benefit.

But that human intrapersonal connection seems to be really

diminished in the age of sort of smartphone socializing.

So I do kind of wonder while economics may be driving the, you know, everyone under the

same room, same roof, I wonder how much s changing social patterns are going to keep us alone in our bedrooms.

And by us, I mean the kids.

Totally.

I think that's a really good point.

I mean, just looking at the ways that communities form now and how often communities are formed online across dispersed geographical locations.

So

I don't see any sign of that trend abating.

And I think we're only just beginning to understand

the effect it will have on the way we form relationships and the way communities form.

So yeah, I mean, it's huge.

It can't be overstated.

The family unit is supposed to be, in many respects, it's the tightest unit within society.

We have, in our history, and

several Atlantic journalists have traced some of the social capital losses that have affected American society over the past several decades.

Famously, of course, bowling alone, Robert Putnam's sociological theory about America, the finding that Americans are bowling as often as they ever were, but less often in leagues.

That there are all of these institutions, the church, school, that are less powerful in American life than they used to be.

And that that loss of capital, that loss of connectedness as a society is having these big, deep effects on the divides that are political divides.

Well, Well, yeah.

I mean, if people no longer trust the institutions that are part of what makes someone invested in being a citizen, then how can we expect them to be engaged by a sort of chipping away at democracy?

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Exactly.

And if the family unit itself, our tightest social glue, if the family unit becomes increasingly unglued in some key ways because of economic stratification, geographic stratification,

what happens

as a consequence of that?

Can I offer something counter to that, though?

Because it feels like this moment is really about tribalism.

I mean, politically, right?

And I guess I wonder whether that tribalism doesn't extend to one's immediate family.

What do you guys think?

I think that's a fascinating question, Alex.

And

it's hard for me to reconcile exactly because I think that there's a way in which, yes, our family units, our immediate families especially, are tribes.

They're the most natural tribe that we have and that we inherit.

At the same time, I think that this moment places some demands and puts some tension on that tribalism.

There's a way in which social media, especially Facebook, allows us to see the different tribes that we belong to, some of which may not be our families, and some of which may

force different allegiances on us.

That may cause tension with our family members.

Adrian, you wrote a great piece in 2016 about the perils of sharenting.

Oh, yeah.

I remember that one.

You wrote, quote, someone might blog about a child's medical condition as a way to seek or offer to support or to raise crucial funds for healthcare.

Sharing baby photos on Facebook is a way to keep far-flung families feeling close.

There are a lot of benefits to what social media has allowed for families to stay connected, for grandparents to see how their grandkids are developing.

And you've written about both the benefits and some of the perils.

As you see social media developing, do you think that our technological forces are drawing us closer together as families, farther apart?

I think they're drawing us close together, but the sort of risk-reward calculation is very complicated.

So

I, you know, automatically will like every baby picture of my friends' children on Facebook.

I'm delighted to see it.

I would miss them if they weren't there.

At the same time, I understand why people choose not to publish intimate details of their lives to platforms like Facebook, which have shown total willful disregard for people's privacy

and for the use of their data.

I mean, so I think there are like a lot of complicated questions wrapped into that.

The sort of like net gain, like is the world better?

Are families better off because we have Facebook, for example, or because we have the internet?

I think yes.

Like I am a reluctant optimist on this.

I would not want the internet to go away.

But I, again, think that we're still only just beginning to really even begin to take stock of what is happening as a result of this new digital environment that we're all in.

I completely agree with what Adrian's saying.

And I don't think that we understand at all the full emotional and social consequences of our investment in social media.

But I think that the depth of American loneliness like long precedes the rise of social media.

And we have, I mean, obviously bullying alone traced the decline of other kinds of communal institutions, but we really don't see that many options and that many good examples of really strong communities where adult friendship is unquestioned and deep and really unconditional the way that you see like parent-child affection outside a very few contexts like particularly religion stands out as a context in which there's a very strong adult communities but those um we're seeing a lot of

secularization in this age and not a kind of obvious rise of something to take its place to provide those deep social ties among adults and i think that that's a huge question and deeply affects people's whole socio-emotional well-being at their core.

And I think it leads to so many of these other kinds of effects that we've been talking about.

And the technology certainly plays a role in that, but there's huge other factors.

So instead of going to church, people are going to Facebook, is what you're saying.

Our colleague Emma Greene has written about this a bit, that instead of going to church, they're going to work.

That's really common right now.

And I think she wrote about a Pew survey, I believe it was last summer, that found that the number one reason people stop going to church isn't a loss of faith, which I think people probably, a lot of people assume is a reason behind people's reluctant or lower levels of church attendance, but that they feel that they don't have time for it.

And I think that that's a consequence of when you have more adults in your household working and you feel very pressed to get stuff done on the weekends and take care of all the household stuff that you didn't do during the week.

That's what, at least this one survey that Emma covered showed was that that was a huge factor in people's declining religious involvement.

Was there a golden age for the American family?

One assumes when I say the word golden age, I think that just is like harkens back to the 1950s.

But is there a period in our history where the family unit was as strong, as robust, as intergenerational as it ever has been?

Do we know?

Certainly, if you look through the Atlantic archives, it doesn't look great.

There's a lot of

at every age in the American experience that the Atlantic has chronicled, there's a lot of worry over the fate of American families and what's happening to children and why families are struggling so much.

So

nothing about what we're going through seems particularly different, although obviously it's different in texture and substance, and every age has its particularities.

But there wasn't a real happy period that stands out in me.

And Alex, I suspect that, as with many questions of that sort, the answer very much depends on which American families are you talking about.

Right.

Because I'm pretty sure that the golden age for black families may yet be in the future.

Yeah.

Right.

And certainly people idolize the white middle class nuclear families of the post-war period, but what you saw was a huge amount of unhappiness, especially for women and divorce.

Yeah.

So I'm reluctant to really admire any prior period at this point.

I'm actually curious about this question, the golden age of family, what does it look like?

Because there's a way in which you could argue that actually

greater individual autonomy is leading us into a sort of golden age, that now kids have more agency.

A kid growing up gay in central Florida today has a few more cultural and social options available to him or her than

a kid did back in the

mid to late 90s, let's say.

And that could unquestionably be a good thing from an individual perspective.

Even the rise of divorce, we're seeing societies like Sweden, where divorce is increasing as an option, as we've written about in the Atlantic.

And that may not unambiguously be a bad thing,

but

to the extent that it does detract from the family unit and could have like strange, deleterious effects otherwise, who knows what consequences ultimately emerge from that.

Aaron Powell, I think that's right.

And you're also sort of hinting at something that I've thought about, which is that when we talk about what a family is, I mean, it's so many different things.

So

if being in a position of economic autonomy for women who are able to work and can be financially responsible for themselves today, who in the 70s would have had to have a man co-sign a credit card application, for example, I mean, they have other options open to them, one of which may be divorce, as you say.

And so it's not totally straightforward that the family unit, being married to one person forever, having 2.5 kids, whatever the concept may be, that may not be the best thing for individuals or for society.

Yeah.

And we're talking a little bit about the family, the distance between the family you make and the family that you inherit, which I think we'll probably come back to again in this conversation.

It may be that we are enabling people to make different types of family arrangements that are better protective of their individual desires for themselves.

But I think one of the questions that that raises is, are the families that we're creating as strong as the families that humans have inherited for many centuries?

You kind of talked about this as having do individuals who have greater autonomy and security end up creating or finding building families that are stronger or happier, whether that's because they stay together longer or because they make the right choice of not staying together.

But I just want to say that in the background of that, I do think there's this fundamental question.

And this goes back to what I was saying earlier.

You know, that gay kid growing up in the middle of wherever and finding connecting to other gay teens online, it's more about that communal and social connection than it is in some ways about individual autonomy.

So I think that underlying the happiness of families is the happiness or strength of whether people have strong social ties more broadly beyond their family.

And those kinds of social ties really support strong families.

and I guess my my contention would be that the golden age of families will come when we solve kind of those emotional and human relational questions more broadly so good luck to us in that project

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Alex, I have a question for you.

This goes back to technology, but also kind of touches on some of these issues we've been discussing about the individual, the family, and society.

Do you think that in your life, social media, having access to

the

somewhat to a curated version of the interior lives of

family members,

either close or distant,

has that improved connections that you've been able to observed within your family or other families that you've had access to?

Or has it diminished them?

The internet is a double-edged sword, right?

So social media is a double-edged sword.

On one level, it's theoretically great that you can know what your cousin in Thailand is doing as he researches his PhD in Burma.

But on the other hand,

you know, I think it creates a false sense of community that you can sort of be close to someone without actually ever having a conversation with them.

And I also wonder about, I mean, so the reason I ask this question in part, and maybe I'll just re-ask it with this context, but one of the things that I've observed, both in talking to friends and in conversations with various loved ones, there's a sort of context collapse that happens on social media.

And I think that often one of the places where this gets real is between teenagers and their parents.

Teenagers go through this process of identity formation where they are at school, you know, back in the day, the like outdated version of how teenagers used to express themselves is they have their high school locker where they have their favorite musicians and their personal style is on display.

And it's also notably and importantly, not visible.

to their parents.

They can be one way with their friends and another way around the dinner table.

This is what Instagram stories are for, man.

But I I mean, I definitely have seen relationships, close family relationships, very close family relationships that are troubled by the newfound visibility that families have to each other on social media.

I've seen relatives with different political attitudes, for example, now with this very sudden, very new sense of what they each believe politically and how far apart they really are.

I've been privy to long and searching and very, very emotional conversations between family members about their political, their partisan divides.

And I don't know whether social media makes those gaps that have always manifested around the Thanksgiving table, for example, just more visible, or whether it actually hurts family ties.

And for a kid, for a teenager at school, does the fact that your parent can now possibly see you in the slang that you use with your friends on Twitter or that you have to lock them out of that world altogether, does that just elevate the sense of remoteness and disconnection that teenagers often feel from their parents?

I think you're talking about like the information, right?

How much of the information do any of us need from anyone else, whether as a parent or a spouse or a friend?

And the internet and social media have like done away with that question entirely and inserted instead all the information.

Like you're going to find out one way or the other what your kid is doing and who he's talking to or who she's talking to and

what your aunt thinks about Bernie Sanders.

This is just the kind of the way things are now.

I just sort of feel a little bit like the train's left the station.

It's only a question of how much that information we want to censor from one another for our own nefarious purposes or self-protective ideas.

I think it's right.

I mean, I think that the train has sort of left the station at the same time as we're discussing the dynamics of the family.

One of the geographic ones, Becca, that you've highlighted and that you've edited several stories about has been the geographic shift, the rural and urban divide.

We've mentioned, touched on this a little bit, but it also tracks to some degree with our politics.

So, Alana Samuels wrote in June 2016: quote, those who live in rural America tend to like it, but they're aging, and there aren't enough jobs to keep younger people around.

So kids and grandkids move to the cities, coming back on holidays, inheriting their parents' homes and leaving them empty, wondering what will happen to the towns their parents say used to thrive.

This is how rural America dies, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

That

process that Alana describes in that story of kids looking for a job, moving out of their parents' exurb or rural district and into a city, that's going to influence their social network.

It's going to influence how their politics develop.

It's going to influence their own sense of their identity.

They may go to that city and catch the gay.

I love that Alana piece.

And I think that, again, this goes back to what I was saying earlier, but this is, again, driven by that dividing line of education, that we see a lot more mobility, geographic and economic, for people who attain a college degree.

And they are much more likely to leave college and end up in a city than they are to go back to the towns they grew up in.

Young people who don't have a college degree are much less likely to leave, and the opportunities for them in cities aren't as good.

So we are seeing that rural-urban divide and it's certainly affecting families, but it's also an education divide that layers on top of all of this and really is sorting out our society in a lot of ways.

And it obviously ties to politics and economics and all these things.

They all are highly correlated.

So there's a policy follow-up question that I have for you, Becca, which is that there's obviously political.

We could design policy that helps support kids staying out in rural America, or we could support policy that helps the urbanization process.

One of those might help families but hurt individual economic prospects.

Another one of those might help individual economic prospects but hurt families.

From your vantage point, how should policymakers be thinking about that type of a a divide?

Well, I don't really know what either of those two policies would look like.

I do know that overall what we're seeing, there was a time in the American economic story where rural and urban places were experiencing growth and were developing, providing greater and greater prosperity for their residents.

And since pretty much the 80s, we've seen a split where urban areas are doing better and better and there's more stagnation rurally.

I mean, it's uneven geographically, and some places are doing much better than others.

So at the big picture level, we need to figure out a way that we don't have two diverging economic stories in this country, whether that's about encouraging young people to go move back to rural areas.

Or I mean, I think that there's a much bigger economic policy question there about how we structure companies, the size of companies, the way we tax, that all of these things have led to this kind of concentration in a a couple urban areas.

But it's not just a matter of the demographics of where young people shake out.

I think it's a broader question of how the economy works.

And I don't think we've really figured out or know, even politics aside,

how we address that.

Certainly, I mean, there's a lot of people who have answers out there.

And we are hearing more and more about antitrust policy as one measure for addressing that split, but there are a lot of factors here.

Adrian, I'm curious.

We've been writing about the family for a long time, as you pointed out.

I want to shout out a piece in the November 1946 issue of The Atlantic, 72, nearly 72 years ago, called What's Wrong with the Family by Della D.

Cyrus.

And Cyrus writes, quote, the family falls apart in modern urban life not because human nature is more depraved than it used to be, but because the family is out of harmony with the modern world and no longer meets the most vital needs of its members.

The statistics which we all view with so much alarm reflect the simple fact that the family lets people down and there is nothing else to supply the values and satisfactions which the family once supplied.

So the

demise, decline, diminishment, peril, dangers of the modern family is not a new beat for the Atlantic.

What do you think is most new in the matter of the family in American life?

Well, we touched on this a little bit, and I come to this with the bias of having been a tech reporter

in a recent former life.

But I think, I mean, technology, just looking at the very rapid changes brought upon by the rise of the mobile web is, I mean, to me, there's so much there.

We've talked about social networks.

And so, yeah, I think the role of technology in individuals' lives and families' lives is just, there's so much there.

Alex, in a forthcoming episode of Radio Atlantic, which I am very excited about, we are going to talk about your book,

The Future Face,

in which you investigated your own family's

history, your ancestry,

and

excavated some lessons from that history for the rest of us.

I'm curious, after that process, How do you think about the value of the family that your ancestry has given you next to the family that you are making.

Well, without giving away the ending of the book, Matt, I'll say this.

What I did,

I learned, I mean, as an only child of two people from very different cultures, I always sort of didn't feel like I belonged.

So the book is a lot about my quest to find my people.

And there is a real distinction between the people that you are sort of born into this life with, which is to say your immediate family and your ancestors, and the family that you find, which is your community and your friends and those people.

And I think we, at this moment in particular, are really excited and animated by the idea of our ancestors and where we came from and how, and the ways in which they're somehow determinative.

I think it's really good to know your family history, in part because most of the stories I realized my mom and dad were telling me were really

missing a lot of important details.

And knowing where you came from is useful in terms of understanding where you are today.

But I think we're way too preoccupied with the past and not the present.

And I think that

what I came away with at the end of that book was a real sense that I needed to reinvest in my family of now because we are given one life.

I mean, maybe...

Some religion is correct about what happens after you die, but as far as I know, science tells us that this is our time on planet Earth.

And

I became really focused on redoubling my efforts to establish community in the here and now.

I think I just gave away the end of the book, but that's okay.

There is much, much more for us to dive into.

So I don't, I don't, I have no fear.

But I, you know, I think a lot of people feel really lonely.

And children of divorces like I am feel lonely.

Mixed race kids in America don't feel like they fit into a bucket necessarily and can feel lonely.

I mean, people who are, you know, just classify themselves as all white or all black or all Asian or all Hispanic also feel lonely for other reasons.

You know, people feel left out of conversations, people feel left out of parts of society, and then you have technology that's aiding and abetting that fundamental loneliness.

So I think the quest to belong and to find unity, whether in the family or in the church or at work, is a totally

valid quest.

I just think perhaps

we want an easy answer and

that we want to discover it like a pot of gold.

And it's not that easy.

You're telling us there's no easy answer to the problem with a family in America.

It just takes work.

It's not as easy as logging onto Facebook or just calling your mom.

There's got to be follow through.

That's what I'm saying, at least from my experience.

And that's what I learned in the book.

I think that that's a core part of

why we're seeing communities decline is that they are hard and they take a lot of work and investment.

And we do have these easier options just at our fingertips.

And we don't get the same return from them over time.

Nope.

And now let us turn to keepers,

the closing segment from Radio Atlantic, in which I ask you what you've watched, heard, read, listened to, experienced recently that you do not want to forget.

Last week, I asked for keepers from our listeners.

And thanks to several of you.

That is so great.

Thanks to all the listeners that sent theirs in, and thank you to Autumn Slater, who shared with us this keeper.

So I'm a school counseling intern, and this week I got to witness as about half of our school joined in the walkout.

And that is something I hope I never forget, just to see those kids be able to take really, very real emotions.

being scared and doing you know exercising their right and having a voice it was really special to see and to,

you know, give them an opportunity to ask and ask them why and then just have them kind of give you very, very mature and well-thought-out answers.

So that's something I hope I always, always remember.

Thank you so much.

Bye.

Awesome.

I will keep that one with me too.

And I will once again call for keepers from our listeners.

If you have a keeper that you would like to share, dial 202-266-7600.

And now I'll turn to my guest co-host here, Alex.

What would you like to keep?

You know, now my keeper is going to feel really tangential.

I would

like

to say that keeper, that keeper is awesome.

And I would just second that keeper without redoubling it.

It is, it was, you know,

we need to focus on the positive keeper.

Well, I guess all the keepers are positive because we want to hang on to them, but those are, those moments are really worth keeping keeping with us as we plod through the rest of these times in which we live.

My keeper, Matt, funny you should ask,

is,

well, it's so, it's, it's abstract, but I was watching very late to the game the movie Call Me By Your Name,

which was nominated for

several Oscars.

And I was really struck by the movie, which is beautiful and so atmospheric, but also was clearly shot on film.

And I am going to be the snob that says things look a lot better when they're shot on film.

And if there was only a way that we could have a sort of Luddite cinematic revolution, I know it would be more expensive to make movies.

And I get that digital is part of the democratization process of cinema, and that's great and fine and good.

But man, does a film look a lot better when it's actually on film?

I'm just saying, Chris Nolan, keep doing you.

Luca

Guadininho, you keep you.

Every filmmaker out there who is foregoing lunch or dinner or drink so that they can afford the film to shoot on film, my hat is off to you.

I keep the flame lit in support of what you're doing.

And I'm going to just throw in a related plug to

the wonderful animation of an excerpt from Helen Keller's 1932

Put Your Husband in the Kitchen by Caitlin Cadieu, to Alex's point,

which was voiced by none other than the esteemed Alex Wagner herself.

To your point, Alex, Caitlin animated that video in the style of 1930s animation and the process that she went through to draw those like old steamboat willy-looking cartoons.

You can't duplicate it.

Yeah.

You can't duplicate it.

Very manual, very time-intensive, and it had an awesome result.

It's worth it.

It's worth it.

We're going to throw that link in the show notes.

Becca, what do you want to keep?

At the risk of being too on point,

as my colleagues know, I'm not the biggest consumer of culture and I'm constantly behind.

But I'm going to just hold on to this little blessing of snow that we've had today.

We went a whole winter with no great snowfall, and I just am finding it beautiful, and I love seeing the kids play in it, and it's really a treat to get a little

end of winter, a little snow up before the end of winter.

You can have our snow in New York, Becca.

I know you guys have been flammed, but I'm happy today for ours, and it'll be gone by tomorrow.

So I'm also happy for that.

As an adopted Minnesotan, I can say I also look out the window with love at the snow.

It's because you have it in your DNA, Matt.

Adrienne LaFrance, what's your keeper?

I have a keeper today in the spirit of the new family section.

I am going to share my grandmother's Nokia recipe, which is very short and proves what a good cook she was because I have no idea what to do with it.

It reads, four or five medium potatoes, one egg, four or five cups of flour, no water, roll out, press with finger.

Awesome.

So I will try to do this.

Four or five, four or five.

Four or five cups of water.

No, no water.

No water.

No water.

Four or five cups of flour.

That's like a big difference.

Meme knew.

Mehmei knew what to do.

So hopefully someday I'll figure it out.

Yeah.

That sounds great.

I want to do it.

Pearls to swine.

Pearls to swine.

For my keeper,

I'm going to mention

a couple of tweets from one of my favorite writers, Linda Holmes, critic at NPR, the host of NPR's Monkey Sea and pop culture happy hour.

Linda was responding to a tweet by former MTV VJ Dave Holmes who talked about going to see Love Simon

and thinking about himself and growing up as a kid and wondering what it would be like to see that in the city where he grew up as a young gay kid.

And Linda responded and said, quote, there are so many great things about this.

One is representation means lots of things.

It means the same menu of warm, sentimental, dark, cynical, plausible, fantastic, meaningful, frothy stuff for more people.

Entertainment has a purpose and is a language.

It's not just giving everybody their war and peace, it's giving everybody their dirty dancing.

That's right, Harm.

Nobody puts Matt Thompson's keeper in the corner.

I thought that was such a lovely point.

And I hope that I never forget.

And I hope that we all have Dirty Dancings aplenty to share.

May we all feel represented.

Alex, Becca, Adrian, thank you so much for.

This is great.

Thank you.

Thank you, Matt.

Thank you so much.

I will see you all

imminently anon.

And Alex, I'll speak to you next week.

Yes, you will.

Bye.

That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was once again produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau.

Thank you to Adrienne LaFrance and Becca Rosen for joining us.

Thanks, as always, to my esteemed co-host, Alex Wagner, and thanks again to John Batiste for the soul-stirring rendition of the Battle Hymn of the Republic that serves as our theme.

I have a special request for you.

Tell us your keeper.

What do you not want to forget?

Leave us a voicemail with your contact information.

And if you'd like your thoughts on the episode and your keeper at 202-266-7600.

Check us out at facebook.com/slash radioatlandic and theatlantic.com/slash radio.

Catch the show notes in the episode description, and if you like what you're hearing, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Most importantly, thank you for listening.

Whether your family is the one you've inherited, the one you've made, or both, may it sustain you.

We'll see you next week.