In the past few years, evidence has mounted of widespread loneliness in the U.S., which has been connected to alarming rates of suicide and drug addiction, among much else. To Kay Hymowitz, there is overwhelming reason to believe that behind the loneliness epidemic are the massive social changes that began in the middle of the last century—what sociologists term the Second Demographic Transition (SDT)—bringing about lower fertility, less marriage, more births out of wedlock, and more divorce. She writes:

Postwar baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, were Generation Zero for the SDT in the United States. Now shuffling their way into their sixties and seventies, older boomers give a glimpse of the long-term downside of the post-SDT culture. If we had to pick just one word to describe it, “lonely” would do. In widely quoted research, . . . Ashton M. Verdery and Rachel Margolis uncovered a recent surge in the number of “kinless” older adults. Lower fertility translates into fewer siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins, whether for hospital visits or emergency contacts.

A jump in the number of never-married and divorced adults is also part of the kinlessness story. [Verdery and Margolis] don’t mention cohabitation, but it’s a key ingredient in the rise of kinlessness. Superficially, cohabitation looks roughly equivalent to marriage; couples live together as “husband and wife,” sharing a bed, living space, meals, and, in many cases, children, but without the ring and city-hall certificate. In reality, especially in the U.S., shacking up is a kind of marriage-lite that has added to the tenuousness of post-transition relations. Cohabiting couples break up faster and more often than marrieds. Separated, cohabiting fathers are more likely to withdraw from their kids’ lives than previously married and divorced dads, who are already more unreliable than married dads still in the house. . . .

In translating family formation into a strictly private matter, the SDT whistled past a critical fact of our history—namely, that kinship has been the most powerful glue of human groups since Homo sapiens first discovered the mother-in-law. . . . [T]hough marriage has shape-shifted over the centuries and across cultures, it has always defined those people—spouses, parents, children, grandparents, siblings, in-laws—to whom we owe special attention and mutual protection. That would explain why cohabiting couples, even those with children, don’t have the same support from extended family as married couples with children. Marriage creates kin; cohabitation does not.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”