When was the last time you lingered somewhere that wasn't home and wasn't work? A coffee shop, a park bench, a barbershop, a library — a place where you could just be around other people?

Those places are disappearing. And Dr. Gwendolyn Purifoye, an urban ethnographer and Assistant Professor of Racial Justice and Conflict Transformation at the University of Notre Dame, has spent years studying why — and what it's costing us.

In this episode, Gwendolyn takes us from Cherry Lane — the street in her childhood neighborhood where dozens of kids would gather every summer to play — to a present where we can go an entire day without seeing, smelling, or touching another human being. She explains how we formalized play, overscheduled our children, and automated our errands until we quietly lost the spaces where civilization gets practiced. And ...