PositiveThe Wall Street JournalWe are, Mr. Baker warns, \'in the midst of a full-blown loneliness epidemic,\' and it was gathering steam well before Covid arrived ... Mr. Baker, a pleasantly pugnacious idealist, is not one to send up the white flag. The best cure for loneliness, he believes, is good old-fashioned friendship, and he’s willing to put himself into harrowing situations to prove his point, including booking passage on a pre-Covid cruise packed with female fans of the pop band New Kids on the Block. In another day he might reasonably expect sainthood for this level of sacrifice ... Mr. Baker may strike some readers as a touch glib, others as a touch earnest. He counts \'vulnerability\' as a virtue and practices heroic compassion: \'Life is harder when you care.\' Others might raise an eyebrow over his observation that \'our human story is not one of loners, but of groups, collectives, communities, friends\' and that the \'absolute zenith of human society\' was achieved by Native Americans before Europeans introduced \'poisonous extrinsic values—things like money and class and authority, a culture that prized market and state over community and family. You know, those things that remain our devils.\'
