Stayin’ Alive: The life and death prospects of community ties

"People talk a lot about community these days. How we’ve lost whatever sense of it we might have once had. How we don’t really know each other much anymore. How we yearn for more intimacy, with connection that transcends the typically weak ties of social media."

"We talk about it in the abstract, not fully understanding the whole of what it really means, as though we were recalling some endearing product feature lost to time."

Scott Doyon drills into the town-building patterns that foster community, and looks at what happens when they're missing. In one instance, it mean 10x the death rate in elders during a heat wave.

"Community, not the individual, is the basic unit of human survival."