Culture December 12, 2012

We Americans love our icons of individuality—Henry David Thoreau, the Lone Ranger, Carrie Bradshaw—almost as much as we wish all the single people would just settle down and get married. As sociologist Eric Klinenberg writes in Going Solo, “Americans have never fully embraced individualism, and we remain deeply skeptical of its excesses.” Nevertheless, we’d better start getting OK with it—because, as Klinenberg shows, this country is getting more single by the minute. The facts are astonishing. “The majority of all American adults are single,” he writes. “The typical American will spend more of his or her adult life unmarried than