Although it has become commonplace to assume that measures to combat the spread of the coronavirus has caused people to feel more alone, Lyman Stone argues that available statistical evidence suggests that, in general, Americans report feeling no more lonely in 2020 than they did in 2019. But a closer look at the data reveals something else:

Married people were the least likely to describe themselves as lonely in 2019, and 2020 and saw no change in their reports of loneliness from 2019. Separated, cohabiting, and dating people all saw declines in their loneliness indices from 2019 to 2020—but loneliness rose slightly for people with no partner. While people with more children were less lonely than those with fewer or no children in 2019, this gradient became steeper in 2020: people with two or more children were less lonely in 2020 than in 2019, while people with one or no children were lonelier.

In other words, the least lonely people were those who were married with kids, and the loneliness gap between those people and childless singles (the loneliest people, by their own reports) grew wider between 2019 and 2020.

Moving beyond family, in terms of sexual partners, the least lonely people were those with precisely one reported sexual partner in the prior two years.

Combined with the lack of correlation between more sexual partners and loneliness, this suggests that the lower reports of loneliness among marrieds or parents is not simply related to having extra people around, but it is specifically related to having family around.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.