When was the last time you lingered somewhere that wasn't home and wasn't work? A coffee shop, a park bench, a barbershop, a library — a place where you could just be around other people?

Those places are disappearing. And Dr. Gwendolyn Purifoye, an urban ethnographer and Assistant Professor of Racial Justice and Conflict Transformation at the University of Notre Dame, has spent years studying why — and what it's costing us.

In this episode, Gwendolyn takes us from Cherry Lane — the street in her childhood neighborhood where dozens of kids would gather every summer to play — to a present where we can go an entire day without seeing, smelling, or touching another human being. She explains how we formalized play, overscheduled our children, and automated our errands until we quietly lost the spaces where civilization gets practiced. And she offers a thesis I haven't been able to shake: the more we have to be around each other, the better we get at it. The less we have to, the worse we become.

Resources:

• Race on the Move: Public Transportation and Unequal Spaces by Dr. Gwendolyn Purifoye — forthcoming from NYU Press, available for pre-order at NYU Press and Amazon
• "Where Have All the 'Third Places' Gone?" — The New York Times, February 2025
• "Seeing a Pandemic: How COVID Changed Urban Spaces and Places" — Gwendolyn Purifoye, Visual Studies, 2024
• The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg — the 1989 book that coined the term "third place"

Your analog assignment this week: Find your third place. A library, a park, a bench, a coffee shop — somewhere in the actual world. Go there. Go back. And keep going back. You don't have to say a word. Just let yourself be seen.