Over the last decade, I’ve been studying this problem as a cultural anthropologist. In a recent book, Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down, I show how profound patterns of isolation and division have crept into the everyday texture of American life. Increasingly fortified homes and neighborhoods, bulked-up cars and trucks, visions of the body as an armored fortress, media that shut out contrary views: these interlocking walls have sharpened the divide between insiders and outsiders, separating Americans on an everyday basis and encouraging us to disregard our relationships with others.