Nathan Heller:

Today, more than fifty per cent of U.S. residents are single, nearly a third of all households have just one resident, and five million adults younger than thirty-five live alone.

Eric Klinenberg:

What matters is not whether we live alone, but whether we feel alone. There's ample support for this conclusion outside the laboratory. As divorced or separated people often say, there's nothing lonelier than living with the wrong person.

Stephen Marche:

In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.

Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are.

Kim Tingley:

To restore ecosystems to acoustic health, researchers must determine, to the last raindrop, what compositions nature would play without us.

In the United States, more than 80 percent of land is within two-thirds of a mile of a road.

Ted Thornhill:

They say silence is golden -- but there's a room in the U.S that's so quiet it becomes unbearable after a short time.

The longest that anyone has survived in the 'anechoic chamber' at Orfield Laboratories in South Minneapolis is just 45 minutes.

It's 99.99 per cent sound absorbent and holds the Guinness World Record for the world's quietest place, but stay there too long and you may start hallucinating.