a journey through american loneliness

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Seek you: a journey through american loneliness audible audiobook – unabridged.

From the acclaimed author of Imagine Wanting Only This - a timely and moving meditation on isolation and longing, both as individuals and as a society. 

One of Lit Hub 's Most Anticipated Books of 2021

There is a silent epidemic in America: loneliness. Shameful to talk about and often misunderstood, loneliness is everywhere, from the most major of metropolises to the smallest of towns.

In Seek You , Kristen Radtke's wide-ranging exploration of our inner lives and public selves, Radtke digs into the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another, and the distance that remains. Through the lenses of gender and violence, technology and art, Radtke ushers us through a history of loneliness and longing and shares what feels impossible to share.

Ranging from the invention of the laugh track to the rise of Instagram, the bootstrap-pulling cowboy to the brutal experiments of Harry Harlow, Radtke investigates why we engage with each other and what we risk when we turn away. With her distinctive, emotionally charged, and deeply empathetic prose, Kristen Radtke masterfully shines a light on some of our most vulnerable and sublime moments and asks how we might keep the spaces between us from splitting entirely.

• Listening Length 1 hour and 58 minutes
• Author Kristen Radtke
• Narrator Kristen Radtke
• Audible release date July 13, 2021
• Language English
• Publisher Random House Audio
• ASIN B08WFLDQML
• Version Unabridged
• Program Type Audiobook
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Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness

• Staff Reviews

"Kristen Radtke compellingly blends the deeply personal with an analytical look at the concept of loneliness in  Seek You , which redefines graphic literature by mixing memoir with sociological and scientific research. This journey is framed by artwork that joins a tradition (painter Edward Hopper, graphic novelist Adriane Tomine, et al.) of stark but beautiful melancholy. It lingers with you, and you'll find yourself returning to it, precisely when the author intended—in moments of solitude and quiet. Loneliness is deeply familiar to all of us, particularly after this year.  Seek You  builds a bridge into the void, as all great literature will do."

See all my recommendations »

From the acclaimed author of Imagine Wanting Only This —a timely and moving meditation on isolation and longing, both as individuals and as a society • One of Lit Hub 's Most Anticipated Books of 2021

“Radtke shines her brilliant light into modern America's experiment in loneliness with this supremely elegant and devastating book." —Lauren Groff, author of Florida

“If you’ve ever felt alone in America, this is the book you have been waiting to hold, and the one that will hold you back.” —Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk

There is a silent epidemic in America: loneliness. Shameful to talk about and often misunderstood, loneliness is everywhere, from the most major of metropolises to the smallest of towns.

In Seek You , Kristen Radtke's wide-ranging exploration of our inner lives and public selves, Radtke digs into the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another, and the distance that remains. Through the lenses of gender and violence, technology and art, Radtke ushers us through a history of loneliness and longing, and shares what feels impossible to share.

Ranging from the invention of the laugh-track to the rise of Instagram, the bootstrap-pulling cowboy to the brutal experiments of Harry Harlow, Radtke investigates why we engage with each other, and what we risk when we turn away. With her distinctive, emotionally-charged drawings and deeply empathetic prose, Kristen Radtke masterfully shines a light on some of our most vulnerable and sublime moments, and asks how we might keep the spaces between us from splitting entirely.

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Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness Hardcover – July 13 2021

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• Part of series Pantheon Graphic Library
• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Pantheon
• Publication date July 13 2021
• Dimensions 16.51 x 3.05 x 21.84 cm
• ISBN-10 1524748064
• ISBN-13 978-1524748067
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pantheon (July 13 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1524748064
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1524748067
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 845 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.51 x 3.05 x 21.84 cm
• #142 in Educational & Nonfiction Graphic Novels
• #214 in Graphic Novel Biographies
• #249 in Urban Communities

About the author

Kristen radtke.

Kristen Radtke is the author of the graphic nonfiction books Seek You A Journey Through American Loneliness (2021) and Imagine Wanting Only This (2017). She is the art director of The Believer magazine.

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Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness Hardcover – 13 July 2021

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• Part of series Pantheon Graphic Library
• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Pantheon
• Publication date 13 July 2021
• Dimensions 16.51 x 3.05 x 21.84 cm
• ISBN-10 1524748064
• ISBN-13 978-1524748067
• See all details

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Product description

"Through incisive, often disarmingly confessional writing, Radtke gets to the core of what loneliness is and what it does to our bodies and minds . . . Throughout Seek You , we are guided by Radtke's beautifully muted art . . . Seek You is a captivating combination of raw emotional exploration and thoughtful, sophisticated imagination." -- BookPage , starred

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pantheon; 1st edition (13 July 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1524748064
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1524748067
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.51 x 3.05 x 21.84 cm
• 2,453 in Family & Lifestyle Depression

About the author

Kristen radtke.

Kristen Radtke is the author of the graphic nonfiction books Seek You A Journey Through American Loneliness (2021) and Imagine Wanting Only This (2017). She is the art director of The Believer magazine.

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• Part of series Pantheon Graphic Library
• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Pantheon
• Publication date 13 July 2021
• Dimensions 16.51 x 3.05 x 21.84 cm
• ISBN-10 1524748064
• ISBN-13 978-1524748067
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pantheon (13 July 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1524748064
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1524748067
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 845 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.51 x 3.05 x 21.84 cm
• Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ India
• #1,052 in Anthropology (Books)
• #7,952 in Comics

About the author

Kristen radtke.

Kristen Radtke is the author of the graphic nonfiction books Seek You A Journey Through American Loneliness (2021) and Imagine Wanting Only This (2017). She is the art director of The Believer magazine.

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A JOURNEY THROUGH AMERICAN LONELINESS

by Kristen Radtke ; illustrated by Kristen Radtke ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 6, 2021

Superb. A rigorous, vulnerable book on a subject that is too often neglected.

An exploration of loneliness, the troubling ways we’ve studied it, and the subtle ways we strain to avoid it.

Radtke’s second graphic memoir feels almost custom-made for the social-distancing era: She explores our need for connection and touch (“skin hunger” is the psychological term) and the negative social and personal effects of isolation. But the book is a much broader and deeply affecting study of loneliness, uncovering the host of ways our craving for community manifests itself in ways that are sometimes quirky and sometimes terrifying. Laugh tracks on sitcoms, for instance, offer a sense of communal feeling within a cold medium; so, too, did the Web 1.0 sites and chatrooms Radtke obsessed over, where strangers laid out their private thoughts and fears. The anxiety runs deep: We crave reports of mass shooters that say the perpetrator was a loner because it satisfies our need to not associate with them. “The collective branding of mass killers is a clumsy act of self-preservation,” she writes. In clean, graceful renderings and a constricted color palette, Radtke expresses her own experiences with loneliness, as a child and in relationships, and gets people to open up about theirs. Along the way, she discovered unusual approaches to combatting loneliness—e.g., a hotline that elderly people can call to have someone to talk to. The author also writes about the cruel experiments psychologist Harry Harlow conducted on monkeys in the 1950s to debunk the belief that children shouldn’t be emotionally coddled. Harlow himself lived a troubled, isolated life, and Radtke wonders if he projected his anxiety upon the animals he tormented in the name of science. If so, how much of our own fear of isolation do we project on the world? Throughout, Radtke is an engaging and thoughtful guide through our fear of being alone.

Pub Date: July 6, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-5247-4806-7

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: March 9, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021

PSYCHOLOGY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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WELCOME TO THE NEW WORLD

by Jake Halpern ; illustrated by Michael Sloan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 8, 2020

An accessible, informative journey through complex issues during turbulent times.

Immersion journalism in the form of a graphic narrative following a Syrian family on their immigration to America.

Originally published as a 22-part series in the New York Times that garnered a Pulitzer for editorial cartooning, the story of the Aldabaan family—first in exile in Jordan and then in New Haven, Connecticut—holds together well as a full-length book. Halpern and Sloan, who spent more than three years with the Aldabaans, movingly explore the family’s significant obstacles, paying special attention to teenage son Naji, whose desire for the ideal of the American dream was the strongest. While not minimizing the harshness of the repression that led them to journey to the U.S.—or the challenges they encountered after they arrived—the focus on the day-by-day adjustment of a typical teenager makes the narrative refreshingly tangible and free of political polemic. Still, the family arrived at New York’s JFK airport during extraordinarily political times: Nov. 8, 2016, the day that Donald Trump was elected. The plan had been for the entire extended family to move, but some had traveled while others awaited approval, a process that was hampered by Trump’s travel ban. The Aldabaans encountered the daunting odds that many immigrants face: find shelter and employment, become self-sustaining quickly, learn English, and adjust to a new culture and climate (Naji learned to shovel snow, which he had never seen). They also received anonymous death threats, and Naji wanted to buy a gun for protection. He asked himself, “Was this the great future you were talking about back in Jordan?” Yet with the assistance of selfless volunteers and a community of fellow immigrants, the Aldabaans persevered. The epilogue provides explanatory context and where-are-they-now accounts, and Sloan’s streamlined, uncluttered illustrations nicely complement the text, consistently emphasizing the humanity of each person.

Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-30559-6

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | ETHNICITY & RACE | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | POLITICS

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by Jake Halpern & Peter Kujawinski

by Jake Halpern

THE BOOK OF GENESIS ILLUSTRATED

by R. Crumb ; illustrated by R. Crumb ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 19, 2009

An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.

The Book of Genesis as imagined by a veteran voice of underground comics.

R. Crumb’s pass at the opening chapters of the Bible isn’t nearly the act of heresy the comic artist’s reputation might suggest. In fact, the creator of Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural is fastidiously respectful. Crumb took pains to preserve every word of Genesis—drawing from numerous source texts, but mainly Robert Alter’s translation, The Five Books of Moses (2004)—and he clearly did his homework on the clothing, shelter and landscapes that surrounded Noah, Abraham and Isaac. This dedication to faithful representation makes the book, as Crumb writes in his introduction, a “straight illustration job, with no intention to ridicule or make visual jokes.” But his efforts are in their own way irreverent, and Crumb feels no particular need to deify even the most divine characters. God Himself is not much taller than Adam and Eve, and instead of omnisciently imparting orders and judgment He stands beside them in Eden, speaking to them directly. Jacob wrestles not with an angel, as is so often depicted in paintings, but with a man who looks not much different from himself. The women are uniformly Crumbian, voluptuous Earth goddesses who are both sexualized and strong-willed. (The endnotes offer a close study of the kinds of power women wielded in Genesis.) The downside of fitting all the text in is that many pages are packed tight with small panels, and too rarely—as with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—does Crumb expand his lens and treat signature events dramatically. Even the Flood is fairly restrained, though the exodus of the animals from the Ark is beautifully detailed. The author’s respect for Genesis is admirable, but it may leave readers wishing he had taken a few more chances with his interpretation, as when he draws the serpent in the Garden of Eden as a provocative half-man/half-lizard. On the whole, though, the book is largely a tribute to Crumb’s immense talents as a draftsman and stubborn adherence to the script.

Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-393-06102-4

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009

GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION

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by R. Crumb A. Crumb illustrated by R. Crumb A. Crumb

edited by S. Crumb & A. Crumb & R. Crumb

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Why Do We Look Down On Lonely People?

A new graphic novel argues that even though social isolation is extremely common, it is too easily maligned.

Last month at a bar, a man called me a bitch. I had let him sit with me at my table and he was peppering me with questions. I was working on a deadline and snapped at him, uncharacteristically. He seemed genuinely hurt. Women, he said, always gave him an opening and then backtracked, laughing at him or shutting him down or calling him a creep. “Why do you go out if you can’t be open to meeting people?”

Sexism aside, I happen to agree with him, and I usually do try to be open to meeting people when I go out. He had attempted to make conversation, with varying degrees of vulnerability. He boasted about his company and how much he paid in rent, but also taught me how to wish someone well in Hebrew. He mentioned how hard he’d tried to meet someone in New York. “People are mean,” he said. I felt helpless. People are mean. I wanted to care, but did not. I regretted my curtness, but the damage was done; all I’d managed was to prove him right to himself.

Kristen Radtke’s new graphic novel, Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness , explores the biological and cultural contexts for loneliness; in doing so, it argues that loneliness affects not just lonely people but also those around them, those who move past them. As Radtke shows, scientists have been tracking increasing isolation for decades (one recent prelimina ry study conducted during the coronavirus pandemic estimated that more than a third of Americans, including more than half of young adults, experienced “serious loneliness”). The novel’s title is a play on the “CQ call,” the name given to the series of beeps amateur radio operators sometimes send out across the airwaves to invite listeners to respond. A CQ call is an active reach toward a stranger—the opposite of society’s growing tendency to push people away.

Read: How loneliness begets loneliness

The book combines documentary, memoir, reporting, and stunning art: low, dark colors with the occasional neon, making the reader feel like she’s floating on a reflective surface, a reflection with no original. Grays and blues and sea greens recall rain highlighted by streetlights, televisions talking to empty rooms. Through vivid images of people fumbling with house keys late at night, falling asleep on the subway, leaving a liquor store, Radtke shows how recognizable and universal loneliness is—but also how easy it is to remove ourselves from others’ loneliness, to turn theirs into an experience incompatible with our own. We can romanticize loneliness, applying what Radtke calls “an Edward Hopper glaze over the crystalline banality of a stranger’s routine”; we can pathologize it, especially when it shows up in our lives in extreme ways, as with “incels” who become mass shooters.

One prominent theory posits that, biologically, loneliness has an essential function: to stimulate an itch that needs to be scratched, to make sure we “feel deeply troubled when we observe minor social shuns so we can correct our behavior” and revert to not-loneliness, our ideal state for survival. But in an epidemic of loneliness, a chronic and overactive immune response to loneliness can lead to high levels of inflammation , which is in turn linked to feeling even lonelier. “Hypervigilance” experienced by lonely people can lead to them perceiving snubs and exclusion where none exist. Loneliness foments more loneliness .

Read: To prevent loneliness, start in the classroom

Narratives of mass shootings tend to highlight social isolation as a cause. “This explanation offers some relief: if the shooter is a loner, he is not one of us,” Radtke writes. It’s easier than contemplating the alternative: that all our loneliness may be connected, that the depression of one person has real significance for everyone around them. Radtke is interested in challenging these distinctions.

Her investigation recalls Tony Tulathimutte’s viral short story “ The Feminist ,” whose protagonist steadily becomes unhinged as his attempts at intimacy are repeatedly rejected, despite his desperate efforts to be good. The people around him find him gross and want to avoid him; after slowly being forced into invisibility, he finally shoots up a restaurant. This protagonist is the picture of loneliness, and, perhaps like many of the men who have talked to me at bars, he becomes worse at not being alone the more he is alone. He becomes worse at appropriate conversation the more people refuse real conversation with him. “There are so many ways to bear arms, and we do, all of us, all the time, whether we are the shooter or the mourner,” Radtke writes. “To arm ourselves is the most extreme form of separation I can imagine.” There are many ways to be a victim, too; I may have been the target of sexist language at the bar, but I’m not the one who went home to an empty apartment.

One of Radtke’s most striking readings of loneliness concerns the story of Harry Harlow, who studied the effects of isolation on rhesus monkeys in order to better understand social deprivation and early-childhood development. Some of the baby monkeys that he raised in cages, deprived of any maternal or other physical contact, starved themselves and cowered in a corner when finally placed in a group. Some of those who had been raised in isolation, when they became mothers, killed their newborns.

While Harlow was studying social deprivation in monkeys, his first wife, a graduate student who gave up a promising career to marry him, filed for divorce, citing his neglect. His second wife, a colleague, was similarly forced to step down from her research position after she married Harlow; she became terminally ill, and within a year of her death, Harlow, having undergone treatment for depression and become obsessed with his research, remarried his first wife. “For someone who spent much of his career studying isolation, he exhibited an almost pathological inability to be single or alone,” Radtke writes.

Harlow’s cruelty toward his subjects and his mistreatment of his family register as significant because of his obsession with neglect. “What if, instead of ambition or sadism or his teenage hope for fame, I imagine that his work was born out of love?” Radtke asks. “In every monstrous act, there was also a person so desperate to understand the circumstances of this sadness that he spent decades creating it … until he was himself reflected back.” Love and loneliness may seem like opposites, “but the drive of each is similar. They’re both designed to keep us together.”

This type of generous reading of other people and their loneliness is what Radtke’s book seems to call for—a willingness to read loneliness where we might otherwise see monstrosity, to read love where we see loneliness. Widespread loneliness is not a problem just for the chronically lonely; it says something ugly and true about all of us. Reading Seek You forced me to rethink my own various brief interactions that left a lonely person feeling lonelier.

Radtke doesn’t offer solutions; as she admits, she herself is never free of loneliness. But passing interactions and relationships might still be meaningful: touching a friend’s elbow and making eye contact when talking with them, dedicating a song to someone on the radio, playing with a loved one’s hair. “I want us to use loneliness—yours, and mine—to find our way back to one another,” she writes. What if, just as she chooses to read Harlow’s work and life as motivated by love rather than cruelty, we choose to collapse our distinct experiences of isolation into a shared loneliness, so that even though we are alone, there’s still hope of reaching toward one another, and being lonely together? “To move through a life without weapons,” she writes—weapons of any kind—is “to remain open to the world, and at its mercy.”

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Kristen Radtke

Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales Download high-res here .

Kristen Radtke is the author of Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness (2021) and Imagine Wanting Only This (2017).

She is the creative director of The Verge .

The recipient of grants from the Whiting Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, her work has been nominated for a PEN/Jean Stein Award, an Eisner Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Metal, and numerous National Magazine Awards. Her comics and writing have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Marie Claire, The Atlantic, Elle, Vanity Fair, Vogue , and many other places.

Find her on Instagram @kristenradtke_ .

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Visualizing Loneliness in Kristen Radtke’s Seek You

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness Kristen Radtke Pantheon | July 13, 2021

Seek You begins with an Author’s Note that acknowledges the unavoidable. Kristen Radtke writes that she began working on the book of graphic nonfiction about loneliness in 2016 when the topic “wasn’t a subject I heard people talk about very often.” Since then, the conversation around loneliness has expanded, and it continues to evolve as we emerge from isolation. While this preface is the book’s only section that mentions the pandemic, it offers no panacea, only an honest admission that Radtke can’t envision how “we might acquaint ourselves with one another again.” As a first step, she assures us “loneliness is one of the most universal things any person can feel,” directing our attention to the timelessness, rather than the timeliness, of this emotion. Loneliness was already present in American life, and it will persist even after this period is a distant memory.

The innovative structure of Seek You reinforces this universality, exploring loneliness through a kaleidoscope of perspectives, under a loose architecture of four sections: Listen , Watch , Click , and Touch (with another Listen as coda). The text weaves together disparate threads of American pop culture, sociology, evolutionary biology, psychology, history, and memoir with an essayistic flair—not surprising, given Radtke’s study of nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa and her receipt of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to finish Seek You . The result reads like an illustrated essay, a longform collage influenced as much by Leslie Jamison as Alison Bechdel. Some of these threads, such as Radtke’s analysis of Don Draper’s “invisible pain” in “Mad Men,” appear briefly. Others are more central to the narrative, like her extensive reflections on Harry Harlow’s controversial experiments on rhesus monkeys in the 1960s.

Seek You is a visual departure from Radtke’s first book, Imagine Wanting Only This , most notably in its embrace of color—a cool palette of greens, blues, and purples, with contrasting pops of orange. While her debut primarily employed panels, the illustrations in Seek You explode onto a grander scale, often occupying full pages or two-page spreads. And where IWOT was obsessed with ruin and decay, the images in Seek You contain more human elements. Though Radtke is skilled at realist detail, her abstract figure drawings are especially powerful: the disembodied eyes of mass shooters, the mouths behind a laugh track, the regal finger of banishment, a lonely brain producing a stress response “designed to pull us back into our communities.”

Through this visual language, Radtke builds on her textual influences, including The Lonely City by Olivia Laing and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone , by using the strengths of the graphic medium, conveying how loneliness feels by portraying what it looks like. Rather than choosing a single metaphor, she captures the emotion in large illustrations. We see bodies floating in space, people submerged underwater, a solitary monkey isolated in Harlow’s cruel “pit of despair.” These striking drawings complement the pages that rely more heavily on words, including some long paragraphs that occasionally crowd the images and a handful of photorealistic drawings of headlines and logos that don’t add much to the accompanying text.

Seek You is sharpest when focusing on others. The book began as a series in The New Yorker in which Radtke captured the mundane grace of strangers’ subway naps and solitary jobs . She admits, “I didn’t expect the ease with which I’d come to project loneliness on these moments.” With interview subjects, she probes deeper than this superficial gaze, asking about their personal experiences of loneliness. The overlapping responses are richly specific, though as Radtke notes, they share common themes:

So many of these memories centered on newness and moments of change, when recalibration leaves us without familiar tethers. They’re often tied to catastrophe or the empty stretch of time that follows.

While reading Seek You , I wondered about the author’s own relationship to loneliness, as Radtke writes herself into the book, though it’s not quite a memoir. These passages plumb the past, like her Midwestern childhood (“Be quiet. Don’t touch.”) and teenage forays into the early internet (with a self-portrait that echoes her father making the ham-radio CQ calls that inspired the book’s title). Her present circumstances remain mysterious. She mentions “Las Vegas, where I worked for a magazine,” presumably The Believer, where she serves as art director and deputy publisher. No romantic arc resolves her twentysomething resistance to long-term relationships.

Near the book’s end, Radtke finally admits, “Of course I am still lonely,” but we don’t know why. Though this confession is followed by the subtle suggestion of long-term love, Seek You doesn’t address loneliness within relationships. Also unexplored is the psychic isolation of the artist, which Adrian Tomine centers in his recent graphic memoir The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist . Unlike Tomine, Radtke doesn’t mention distancing from one’s life to make art about it or include anecdotes about disappointing event attendance, writerly rejection, or the literary world overlooking graphic art. Her project’s scope is more broadly concerned with examining our collective experience than revealing her own. One could argue the author feels lonely because—at least, in America—we all have.

But in our culture of loneliness, the artist’s role is relevant. The artist can shine a light on taboo topics, make people feel something, and bring them together. (Throughout the pandemic, Radtke and her team at The Believer hosted Friday Night Comics , a weekly web series attended by more than 10,000 people.) Making and sharing art is an excellent way to put loneliness to work—to “use it,” as Radtke urges, “to find our way back to one another.” While some readers may not be ready to sit with this subject, others may find Seek You well-timed for a critical step we’ve collectively neglected—processing what we’ve endured this past year.

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Where Loneliness Comes From

By Katy Waldman

Loneliness is a poetic feeling, as agreeably melancholic to behold from a distance as it is terrible to experience up close. By one account, it is even the first feeling—and the first thing, in the entire universe, to be deemed bad. Adam’s loneliness prompts God to create Eve: “it is not good for man to be alone.” When Milton picks up the story, in “ Paradise Lost ,” Satan tempts the pair after he is cast out of Heaven. (Loneliness correlates with aggression, some studies show.) And yet, for all the shame of being lonely—the scars of exclusion at school or rejection in love—other people’s solitude is often beautiful to us. This may be because most people don’t usually imagine loneliness to be deserved. Or perhaps it’s just that, by marking loneliness in others, we feel a little less alone ourselves.

After the pandemic hit, the yearning for connection registered more as an emergency than as an inducement to lyrical reflection. “Isolation was imposed on all of us at once,” Kristen Radtke writes in “ Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness ,” her new work of graphic nonfiction. The condition—“like being underwater,” Radtke writes, “fumbling against a muted world in which the sound of your own body is loud against the quiet of everything else”—was suddenly collective, synchronous. Even our shared desire to be together was not enough to surmount it. “Seek You” was mostly composed before COVID , but quarantine may have exposed something for Radtke. She portrays loneliness not as innate or natural so much as socialized, filtered through and irradiated by culture, politics, and media. For her, the feeling is shaped by the imperfect conditions in which we live. Perhaps there was loneliness in Eden, but Radtke’s version is postlapsarian, partially cracked. Like a weed, it sprouts in gaps.

Radtke’s previous book, “ Imagine Wanting Only This ,” wove text and image, memoir and criticism, into a reverie on the theme of abandoned physical spaces. Something about the quality of her attention—a quickness to light on metaphors—seemed to sublime even concrete into longing. “Seek You,” which Radtke began in 2016, is swathed in a similar atmosphere. It wants to synthesize various evocative strands—loneliness’s tropes and ambassadors, relevant research, and her own and others’ memories—into a mood, an aesthetic. (The comic could be compared to other art, such as “ Inside ,” by Bo Burnham, that tries to represent quarantine less as a historical phenomenon than as a vibe.) In both of her books, Radtke integrates disparate materials, and yet the structures that result aren’t solid or sharply defined. “Seek You” is full of ghostly hatch marks, thin lines, and muffled scenes washed in shadowy reds, blues, and purples. There are empty classrooms, bars with the stools upside down, and vacant lots. The human figures, many of them unnamed, hunch their shoulders and thrust their hands into pockets; they seem to be waiting to be told what to do.

Radtke grew up in rural Wisconsin. She writes that her town’s sparse geography inspired in her “a basic sense of unbelonging that many children are prone to feeling.” As an adult, she moved to New York and confronted “my childhood’s opposite: the inescapability of other people.” (Commuters, wallflowers, bodies maintaining their privacy in public—the book is lonelier for their presence.) Often, tensions are raised by the idea of proximity. Radtke writes, for instance, about the history of the laugh track, which was first inserted into radio shows, offering solitary listeners the illusion of company. Yet, as the recordings closed one type of distance, they opened up another. The rise of radio and television, which also adopted laugh tracks, allowed families to retreat further—Radtke renders a TV dinner in closeup, its components perfectly atomized on the tray—from their neighbors. “Creating defined spaces around oneself was so foundational to the twentieth century American dream,” Radtke argues, “that separation was part of its formula.”

Loneliness may be built into the country’s story, but it has also amassed its own myths. One is that the dangers associated with isolation—shorter lifespans and higher rates of disease—can be wholly explained by a purported tendency to engage in riskier behaviors on our own. (They cannot.) Other misconceptions run deeper. “Loneliness implies a flaw in us like no other longing or sadness does,” Radtke suggests. “ ‘I’m lonely’ translates to ‘I’m unlovable’ or ‘Nobody likes me.’ ” A perception that “everyone else is connected” often aggravates the matter, inflaming our anger and eroding trust. The book winds from Hannah Arendt, who described loneliness as “the common ground for terror,” to Trump (pithily conjured with a MAGA poster) to the parade of “loners” who have opened fire on sites of community life: schools and shopping centers, places of worship and work. As attuned as Radtke is to the tragedy of isolation, she is suspicious of the archetype of the murderous reject. She writes that this “collective branding” of killers may not be accurate so much as it “offers some relief: if the shooter is a loner, he is not one of us.”

Loneliness can be used to demonize, but it just as often imparts glamour, invoking notions of heroic individualism. Another section of “Seek You” studies the American cowboy, who “doesn’t need to rely on the inconvenient confines of government”—and doesn’t need the women who keep falling in love with him, either. The cowboy, Radtke writes, aspires to “a commitment-free life.” (A page earlier, the words “Reagan Country” appear beneath a lasso-throwing silhouette. The book stops short of explicitly connecting the “commitment-free” ideal to Republican policy, but the parallel—and the sense of predation—is clear.) Elsewhere, Radtke considers the antiheroes of prestige TV: Don Draper, Walter White, Jimmy McNulty. This terrain is well-trodden, but, by emphasizing the characters’ misery, Radtke finds a fresh angle. Her tone is neither reluctantly charmed nor righteously angry. The antihero must telegraph “disinterest in others,” she points out, because “it implies superiority, and only when a man is superior to others is his loneliness meaningful instead of pathetic.”

In another chapter, we meet the cowboy’s female counterpart: the princess, trapped in a castle and cut off from the world. Here solitude signals weakness rather than power, and it’s possible to map Radtke’s characters onto a broader argument about gender and media. The cowboy section of the book is called “Watch”; the next section, which wanders from anonymous chat rooms to Instagram, stars mostly female figures, and is titled “Click.” Radtke seems to imply that the lonely man is a creature of television, whereas the lonely woman belongs to the Internet. This framing hinges on the idea that online life is full of mediations, which resemble a fairy tale’s enchantments, and which alienate users from themselves and from one another. The problem of digital existence, in other words, is the problem of the false front—or magic mirror. Yet Radtke herself isn’t satisfied with the axiom that Internet relationships are fake. Sometimes, she notes, one’s physical location fails to offer the community that a Web site can provide, and even a “carefully edited” post can express a genuine desire to connect. “Is display a form of dilution,” Radtke wonders, “or is the broadcast part of what makes it real?”

The book’s penultimate section, “Touch,” discusses the experimental psychologist Harry Harlow, who studied the effects of social deprivation on baby monkeys. Harlow’s cruelty, which extended to tossing his subjects into a “pit of despair,” is juxtaposed with his spiralling depression, the collapse of his first marriage, and the death of his second wife. Radtke doesn’t defend animal torture, but she does credit Harlow with illuminating the importance of care by dispensing its opposite. Harlow proved “that love is not a distraction or a pedestrian label slapped onto action, but that love is the action itself,” she writes. On this point, I wished for more: What relationship is being proposed between love and loneliness? Radtke prefers to present her examples, her totems of disconnection, straightforwardly; it’s possible to wring from them surprising analyses, but this work is left largely to the reader. Such restraint can be frustrating when the material—canonical psych results, a meditation on social-media mourning, an inquiry into the Trumpist mind-set—feels so familiar. And yet, paging through Radtke’s book, I was again pulled in by the deserted streets and darkened rooms, and by the anonymous, sifting crowds. Ambience can go where words cannot. One can sink deep into the images of “Seek You” without realizing that one is looking at anything at all.

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By Garth Greenwell

By Inkoo Kang

By Jessica Winter

By Kyle Chayka

The Loneliness of the American Worker

M ore Americans are profoundly lonely, and the way they work—more digitally linked but less personally connected—is deepening that sense of isolation.

Nick Skarda, 29 years old, works two jobs in logistics and office administration in San Diego to keep up with his bills. After a couple of years at the logistics job, he has one friend there. He says hi to co-workers at his office job but doesn’t really know any.

“I feel sort of an emptiness or lack of belonging,” he says.

Employers and researchers are just beginning to understand how workplace shifts over the past four years are contributing to what the U.S. Surgeon General declared a loneliness health epidemic last year. The alienation affects remote and in-person workers alike. Among 1-800-Flowers.com’s 5,000 hybrid and fully on-site employees, for instance, the most popular community chat group offered by a company mental-health provider is simply called “Loneliness.”

Consider these phenomena of modern work:

More than 40% of fully remote workers polled in a 2023 survey of working parents by Bright Horizons said they go days without leaving the house.

Those who work in-office spend nearly a quarter of their time in virtual meetings, while face-to-face meetings account for only 8% of their time, according to data from real-estate company Cushman & Wakefield.

Americans have tripled the time spent in meetings since 2020, data from Microsoft’s suite of business software show—leaving less time for the casual interactions that social scientists say foster happiness at work.

Among 101,000 people using the professional coaching platform BetterUp since 2019, 68% said they knew their co-workers on a personal level, down from 79% five years ago.

It is a marked shift from even a decade ago, when bonds fostered at work helped compensate for declining participation in church, community groups and other social institutions. As the American workday becomes more faceless and scheduled, the number of U.S. adults who call themselves lonely has climbed to 58% from 46% in 2018, according to a recent Cigna poll of 10,000 Americans.

Juggling two jobs leaves Skarda exhausted, with little energy or time to grab drinks with co-workers, he says. “It makes it harder to go in and give it your all if you don’t feel like anyone is there rooting for you,” he adds.

The disconnection is driving up staff turnover and worker absences, making it a business issue for more employers, executives and researchers say. Cigna, the health-insurance company, estimates that loneliness is costing companies $154 billion a year in absenteeism alone.

“Work is social, it’s a lot more than a paycheck,” says James McCann, founder and chairman of 1-800-Flowers.com.

Earlier this year, 1-800-Flowers.com moved from three days in the office to four to boost a sense of connectivity among workers. It has also begun tapping workers across teams to serve as designated hosts during lunchtime, encouraging people to sit with colleagues they don’t know in common areas and chat, and suggesting conversation topics.

The meeting equation

While today’s workers have more ways to connect than ever, “there are only so many memes and jokes you can send over Slack,” says Maëlle Gavet, chief executive of Techstars, a pre-seed fund that has invested in 4,100 startups. “We tend to have more and more people with back-to-back calendars, more meetings and less connections.”

Gavet says that is especially the case for hybrid workers on in-office days, which they tend to use to dash from one meeting to the next.

Paradoxically, meetings can make people feel lonelier—and even more so if the meetings are virtual, behavioral researchers say. A 2023 survey by employee experience and analytics company Perceptyx found people who described themselves as “very lonely” tended to have heavier meeting loads than less-lonely staffers. More than 40% of those people spent more than half their work hours in meetings.

In Cincinnati, Kelly Roehm says she came to chafe at the meetings—sometimes as many as 12—consuming her day after joining a consulting company in 2021. She would often feel her eyes glazing over as she multitasked on other screens.

“It’s like you’re a zombie, there but not there,” says Roehm, who lived 10 minutes from the office but worked mostly remotely because she says few colleagues typically came in. It is a more common setup as companies distribute teams across more locations: At Microsoft, 27% of the company’s teams all worked in the same location last year, compared with 61% in 2019.

She compares that experience with her time more than a decade ago at a company now owned by AstraZeneca. There, she enjoyed lots of social outlets at work: a Weight Watchers group and a lunchtime crochet club.

“Now if I were to think about asking, ‘Hey, do you want to participate in something like this,’ it would just sound weird,” says Roehm, who left this year to focus on her own career-consulting business. “There wasn’t that emotional attachment that made it difficult to say, it’s time to move on.”

The power of small talk

Office chitchat, sometimes an unwanted distraction, seems to provide more benefits than many people realize, says Jessica Methot, an associate professor at Rutgers University who studies social ties at work.

In a study of 100 employees at different workplaces, Methot and fellow researchers surveyed participants at points throughout the day. They found those who had engaged in small talk reported less stress and more positivity toward co-workers.

Even exchanging pleasantries with a co-worker you barely know can help, says Sarah Wright, an associate professor at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury who studies worker loneliness.

“We used to think loneliness has to be overcome by developing meaningful relationships and having that degree of intimacy,” Wright says. “More and more, though, we’re seeing it’s these day-to-day weak ties and frequency of [interactions] with people that matters.”

Such interactions are substantially harder to replicate in a virtual environment. “The default now is, I have to schedule time with you, even if it’s five minutes, instead of just picking up the phone,” says Katie Tyson, president of Hive Brands, an online food retailer founded in 2020 as a fully remote company.

The frictions add up, she says. Last fall, the company added an office in New York where employees voluntarily gather a couple of times a week to foster more cohesion.

Coming to the office, even on a hybrid basis, tends to yield a roughly 20% to 30% boost in serendipitous connections, according to Syndezo, which analyzed survey data and email and messaging traffic from more than two dozen large companies.

Yet there are diminishing returns to time in person, says Philip Arkcoll, founder of Worklytics, which analyzes workforce data for Fortune 500 companies. Coming in once a month provides a significant boost in ties; two or three times a month adds a little more, Worklytics data show. Once or twice a week results in a smaller increase, though, and working in-person four or five days a week makes almost no difference.

A business priority

Ernst & Young has asked managers to use the first five minutes of team calls to engage in conversation “as real human beings,” says Frank Giampietro, whose title, chief well-being officer for the Americas, was created in 2021 to help support employees during the pandemic.

The professional-services firm is also training employees to spot and reach out to co-workers struggling with issues such as isolation. To date, more than 1,600 employees have taken the training.

One challenge is that American workers have sacrificed connection for productivity, says Julie Rice, co-founder of fitness chain SoulCycle. These days, with more business contacts preferring video calls, she finds breakfast meetings and coffee dates on her calendar have been replaced with Zoom. Though efficient, such video calls are less likely to yield conversations that can turn into useful professional connections or lasting friendships, she says.

“Even people I’m meeting with here in New York, we’ll just Zoom,” she says.

Last year, Rice co-founded Peoplehood, a company that runs “gathers” to improve connectivity and relationship skills, and employers are signing up. One, a beauty-services business with hundreds of field employees who never see each other, asked Peoplehood to host a series of gatherings for workers to meet and share job advice. Another, a marketing company with far-flung employees, requested help after surveys showed staff wanted to feel more connected.

“Whatever relationships we had pre-Covid have sort of run out of gas,” Rice says.

Good luck prodding employees to socialize, though. Nearly all the 150-odd staff at the Pleasanton, Calif., headquarters of Shaklee, the nutrition-supplements company, used to attend annual Earth Day gatherings, which involved community service, lunch and breaking early for the day, says Jonathan Ramot, the company’s North American human-resources director. Office happy hours, bowling outings and “mix and mingles” were also robustly attended.

Now that the workforce has gone remote, last year’s Earth Day event attracted 20 staffers, even though most workers live nearby.

“We have a lot of people asking for in-person events, but when we plan them, they don’t show up,” Ramot says. “Then they complain they’re lonely.”

This past April, Shaklee instead held a mandatory get-together with the chief executive, who had relocated to Florida during the pandemic and was in town. About 100 employees gathered at a brewery for food, drinks and conversation—and no speeches from the bosses.

There was a buzz in the air, Ramot says, as staff hugged and delighted in seeing each other, some for the first time. “People were saying, I miss this,” he says.

Write to Te-Ping Chen at [email protected]

More From Forbes

Returning to the office is not a quick fix for worker loneliness.

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In-office work isn't a quick fix for worker loneliness.

The workplace is among the most important social resources in a typical American adult’s life. Fifty-four percent of Americans with close friends made at least one of them through work — their own or a partner’s, according to 2021 research from the Survey Center on American Life . In fact, adults in the U.S. are more likely to make friends at work than any other way, including through school, from their neighborhood, or through existing friends.

That’s why it’s so tempting to blame the workplace for our current state of social crisis. Right now, Americans are experiencing a surge in loneliness so profound that the Surgeon General has characterized it as an epidemic. Some critics believe that remote and flexible work is at fault, fraying our social ties by removing incidental interactions from our daily lives — a position explored in recent reporting from Te-Ping Chen in the Wall Street Journal , which describes some hybrid teams upping their in-office time in a bid to boost connection.

It makes intuitive sense to reach that conclusion, but the data tells a different story.

Loneliness Is (Mostly) Location-Agnostic

Since 2007, Gallup’s quarterly Q12 employee engagement survey has measured the strength of workplace “best friend”-ship — found to be a key predictor of profitability, productivity, and other business outcomes. According to this data , the low point for office friendship — the year that the fewest Americans reported having a best friend at work — was 2013.

In fact, social connection in general has been declining for more than a decade. Since 2003, the time we spend weekly with friends is down 20 hours per month , while time spent socially isolated spiked by 24 hours per month. These patterns hold true in the workplace, with research from BetterUp, as reported in the Journal , finding that only 68% of workers in 2024 say they know their colleagues on a personal level, down from 79% in 2019.

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The modern workplace may indeed be at fault, but there’s no strong indication that work location is the problem. A meta-analysis of studies on loneliness at work found that remote work was weakly linked to loneliness at the height of the pandemic, but there was no correlation at all in studies conducted prior to the pandemic. Research from Perceptyx yields similar results, finding that about 42% of all workers report that they are lonely, with the highest levels among remote and in-office workers, and the lowest levels among hybrid workers.

That report adds that RTO is unlikely to solve the problem, noting, “Remote workers often prefer to work from home for specific reasons. Forcing them back to the office sends their engagement plummeting, which in turn drives up loneliness and all the associated health and productivity implications.”

Workplace Factors That Ease Loneliness

The Perceptyx study finds that the key factors driving loneliness at work are not location but gender, seniority, and time spent in meetings. Men were far more lonely than women and senior leaders were far more lonely than other workers. Counterintuitively, people who spent the most time in meetings were more than twice as likely to say that they were “very lonely” than those with fewer meetings.

It may be that the overload of meetings — which are ineffective 72% of the time — is one symptom of a set of major fault-lines in workplace culture. The over-scheduled calendar of a typical knowledge worker can indicate any number of leadership problems — a desire for unsustainable growth and productivity, a need to surveil what employees are doing, a belief that simply meeting demonstrates that work is progressing — none of them good for people or businesses.

What does work is clear:

• Create space for people at work to talk about non-work topics . BetterUp’s 2024 Connection Report finds that the top predictors of connection between colleagues all focus on getting to know people on a personal level, through casual, fun conversation. Conversations about work are not strongly associated with better relationships. Create opportunities for chit-chat within the flow of existing work conversations — people don’t tend to show up to optional workplace social time — and make sure leaders participate too.
• In-person time, but not all of the time. Atlassian Atlassian has found that one high-quality in-person interaction with coworkers delivers a boost to productivity and engagement that lasts for 3-4 months. Similarly, the people analytics platform Worklytics has found that you need just one in-office interaction per month to provide 90% of the social benefits of in-person work; after that there are diminishing returns on in-person interactions.
• Eliminate the junk meetings. Meetings without purpose or agenda are hurting teams. Here’s a handy diagnostic for eliminating low-impact meetings and boosting the outcomes of the ones that remain. When you do meet, be sure to carve out time for socializing.
• Focus on trust and psychological safety. Small talk boosts weak ties, which are important at work, but vulnerability is the key to true connection and friendship. Workplaces that create a culture of trust and psychological safety not only enjoy better business outcomes , they also create more fertile ground for strong social networks to flourish.

Loneliness is not a simple problem, and it defies simple, binary solutions (like enforcing a return-to-office mandate). Like so many workplace problems, solving it starts with a commitment to team culture, regardless of location, and builds from there.

The good news is, the workplace is predisposed to alleviate loneliness. People may be lonely at work, but they’re significantly lonelier without it: being part of a team improves loneliness almost 10%, according to Perceptyx. By continuing to build on that foundation, leaders and organizations not only improve their outcomes; they make real strides towards a happier and more connected workforce as a whole.

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What to read this summer, based on your major

This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

It is challenging to keep up with your reading goals amid the chaotic quarter system. But now that we’ve made it to summer, we can hopefully take some time to read without other timely responsibilities hovering at the back of our minds. So if you too want to pick up a book this summer but are not sure which one, we have a recommendation for each major!

The computer science major: “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” by Philip K. Dick

Written in 1968, this dystopian classic — which inspired the infamous “Blade Runner” movies — is set in San Francisco in 2020 following a nuclear global war that left Earth bereft. While humanity has formed colonies outside of Earth with android helpers, some androids have rebelled and come back to Earth. The protagonist, Rick Deckard, is one of many bounty hunters on Earth whose job is to hunt down the androids, but things quickly get complicated as these androids look exactly like real humans. For CS majors who like pondering upon the future implications of AI — or actually enjoyed the ethics class they had to take as a major requirement — this book will be a fun ride!

The history major: “Kindred” by Octavia Butler

For the history major who doesn’t have time to dive into science or fiction, I recommend this fantastic sci-fi novel from Octavia Butler. A young Black woman writer named Dana is transported back in time to the antebellum South in this action-packed novel. It is a story that explores the intersection of race, gender, history and politics, all while exploring the question of what it means to be “kin.” (There is also an HBO show based on it… the novel is better.)

The engineer: “The Martian” by Andy Weir

I recommend Andy Weir’s books to pretty much any man who says they want to get into reading. Of course, engineering nerds need to pick this one up, too. In 2035, astronaut Mark Watney is presumed dead after an accident during a hurried evacuation of a Mars expedition. But Watney is not dead. Instead, he has to find a way to stay alive on the planet, wondering if he will ever see his crew, or his family, again. We follow his journal entries for years on this alien planet through a novel that manages to be eminently readable while, above all, being deeply interesting . This straight sci-fi book gets an easy five stars from me.

The philosophy major: “On Beauty” by Zadie Smith

In my opinion, Zadie Smith is one of the great philosophical thinkers of our time. “On Beauty” is a 2005 novel that follows a mixed-race British/American family on the fictional campus of the East Coast Wellington College. When the lives of one family intertwine with another’s, issues of liberal and conservative academic values, along with deeper philosophical questions of the nature of beauty and cultural exchange, come to the forefront. The novel is as relevant today as it was when it came out, especially for those living and working on a college campus. 

The communication major: “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote

Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” tells the true story of the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas. A deeply researched nonfiction novel, this book is perfect for seeing research and communication come together to tell a story about crime and brutality. The book also places a fascinating focus on the psychological complexities of the killers’ minds. Far from being a trashy true crime story, “In Cold Blood” is quintessential American literature.

The athlete: “Boys in the Boat” by Daniel James Brown

If you’re on the rowing team, you’ve probably read this one. If not, you’re in for a treat. This book follows the University of Washington crew team and their challenges and sacrifices to compete at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It’s historically fascinating, intellectually sound and deeply athletically inspiring: perfect for the Stanford athlete. In between summer workouts, I recommend picking up a copy of Brown’s “Boys in the Boat” (especially relevant given Paris 2024).

The classics major: “The Penelopiad” by Margaret Atwood 

As a classics major, you have likely already read countless books detailing the great journeys of men. And perhaps within these epics, there were a couple of women the men encountered along their journeys. So if you ever get bored of reading about wars that men start, hurdles that men overcome and countries that men rule, pick up a feminist retelling of classic stories that delve deeper into the women’s point of views. Margaret Atwood’s “The Penelopiad” details the story of Odysseus’s wife Penelope, throughout the timeline of “The Odyssey.” If you ever wondered what Penelope was up to for the 20 years that her husband spent finding his way back to his hometown, or if you’re hungry for a modern and feminist retelling of this tale, this is the book for you!

The earth systems major: “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” by Olga Tokarczuk

This Polish modern classic follows the story of an old woman living in a rural village after the death of her neighbor. Janina, who in her day-to-day life studies astrology and translates the poetry of William Blake, has a unique love for animals and is their sole defender in a village of hunters. As more people in her town are discovered dead, readers are further exposed to Janina’s obsessive love for animals and her fight to defend their lives in a novel that explores themes of fate, loneliness and justice. If you’re an earth systems major who enjoys vivid descriptions of nature and is tired of being the only voice speaking up for environmental justice, this is a must read.

The biology major: “The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist” by Ben Barres

A neuroscientist at Stanford, Ben Barres pioneered research into glial cells, a type of brain cell that was well overlooked before Barres’s work. Barres, who passed away in 2017, was known for his work purifying and discovering methods to culture these cells, as well as their roles in human development and degenerative diseases. He was also praised for his mentorship and efforts to uplift the voices of women and minorities in science. His memoir details not only his scientific works and experience in academia, but his journey as a transgender man at Stanford. It will be an inspiring read for all biologists!

The chemistry major: “Real Life” by Brandon Taylor

“Real Life” explores the journey of Wallace, a Ph.D. student in biochemistry at a predominantly white midwestern university. Wallace is often troubled by feelings of isolation — not only when he’s staring at nematodes under a microscope, but also as he ponders being the only Black student in his friend group after having moved for the first time from his small hometown to a big campus college. His competence in the lab is questioned for other people’s mistakes, he experiences grief while juggling toxic working hours in academia and his experiences in a white middle-class. For STEM majors who might have experienced imposter syndrome or toxic lab cultures, Wallace’s story will hit close to home.

The undeclared: “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by James Joyce

This Irish classic follows Stephan Dedalus from his childhood to college years detailing his experience growing up in a Catholic boarding school, his devotion to faith and his eventual move to Dublin and discovery of a new lifestyle. Whether it’s his family’s struggles with poverty or his bewilderment by beauty and love, Stephen is on a constant quest to find his calling in life. If you find yourself contemplating what major to choose, or struggle to constrain your many interests, Stephen’s long journey and his gradual dedication to art will be a fascinating read. 

The gap year-taker: “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Ottessa Moshfegh

I promise I didn’t just pick this one for its title! This fever-dream of a novel follows an unnamed young woman who recently graduated college. Our protagonist and narrator is deeply unhappy with her current life and, with the help of a seriously questionable psychiatrist, takes as many prescription drugs as it takes to sleep for as many hours of the day as possible. The novel delves into mental health and illness, dissatisfaction, and navigating the ins and outs of all types of relationships.

Leyla Yilmaz '25 is the vol. 264 Reads desk editor for the Arts & Life section. She is from Istanbul, Turkey and a prospective Biology major who enjoys frequent trips to the bookstore and collecting cacti. Contact the Daily's Arts & Life section at arts ‘at’ stanforddaily.com.

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