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Random observations about current events, language, science, technology, culture, and life -- with a touch of humor

Meandering Tour

Small Talk | Bowling | Dunbar's Number | Paralipsis | Mongolia

May 26, 2026

"Nighthawks” (1942) by Edward Hopper

5) Chitchat

I was sitting in a coffee shop in Montclair, NJ, the other day when I struck up a conversation with Ryan, an AI consultant who’s a personal trainer on the side. We discussed stretches for active men of a certain age.

The next day, while ordering a latte, I met Elysia, who had rescued a puppy tied to a lamppost in nearby Patterson, NJ. She and Titus, now 14, are inseparable. We marveled at our shared love of dogs.

I started chatting with Kaia in an elevator last year after she overheard me talking to a friend about Nosara, a jungle town in Costa Rica where I’ve surfed. She was headed there for the first time the very next day. We’ve stayed in touch about our Central American adventures.

My grown children are appalled by such behavior, which they liken to the habit of the guy in the Progressive Insurance “becoming your parents” commercials who compulsively talks to strangers.

They’re right, but I can’t help myself; I really enjoy it. Research suggests that even brief interactions with strangers or acquaintances can improve our mood and strengthen our sense of community. According to many studies, including a new book titled “Brains Need Friends,” social interactions release dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin in our brains — “reward signals” which encourage us (well, some of us) to connect with others. I, for one, get an undeniable rush, a surge of energy.

I’m also doing my part to counteract a worrisome trend: A new report, “Sliding Into Silence,” published by researchers at the University of Arizona, found that we are talking to each other much less — an average of 28% fewer words daily between 2005 and 2019, falling from 16,600 to 11,900. Among adults under 25, the drop has been an alarming 44%. The culprits: iPhones, headphones, online commerce, and the like. The upshot: increasing isolation and decreasing trust.

“With every lost word," said lead author, Valeria Pfeifer, in an NPR interview, “we wear away our connection with others.” My family maintains I’m just wearing others out.

I think not; the people I chat with usually seem to enjoy our micro-relationships. And my small talk helps contribute to my own lifelong learning.

How else would I have discovered that the motto of the U.S. Coast Guard is Semper Paratus (Latin for “Always Ready”) if I hadn’t said hello to my Airbnb neighbor in the driveway this morning; he had just received a commission on a cutter that is about to start a 4,000-mile voyage. Or, based on my usual summer dining query, that there seems to be a growing number of Bulgarians working as seasonal waiters on Cape Cod.

To be honest, these conversations aren’t always rewarding — or quick. Once, while sitting outside a pizza joint in Greenwich Village, I complimented a passerby on his puppy. Twenty minutes later — my slice and brain congealed — the fellow claimed he had recently interviewed for a “C-suite job” with the dog on his lap.

Still, I find it’s worth the risk, especially if TIME saw fit just last week to publish an essay headlined “In Defense of Saying Hello.” (It’s come to that.)

“Recently, I’ve spent time in a smaller city,” the Silicon Valley–based author wrote. “There, people do say hello. Sometimes they do more than that: they pause, or they comment on the weather. They tell you your dog is beautiful . . . . You begin to feel, over the course of a day, that you are moving through a place where people register one another . . . . A hello is a small risk. It is also a small act of faith—that the person passing you is not a threat, but a neighbor you haven’t met yet.”

4) Pin Pals

My college roommate recently introduced me by e-mail to his friend Neil, who lives in Montclair, NJ, where I am currently meandering. I offered to meet Neil in person over lunch at a local restaurant — another source of mockery by family members, who claim that all I do is have lunch and breakfast with people, some of whom I hardly know.

It was a lovely get-together, during which I learned about Neil’s interesting career and tips for living in Montclair, a beautiful community 30 minutes west of New York City.

At one point, Neil asked if I bowl. Growing up in Baltimore, I replied, I used to bowl Duckpins almost every Saturday with my pal Richard, which is partly why, to this day, I favor crinkle-cut fries and thin, crusty pizza.

Scale diagram of balls and pins for three popular variations of bowling. The horizontal lines are one inch (2.5 cm) apart vertically. ( Wikipedia)

Neil proved to be a very patient fellow. All he actually wanted to know was, do I still bowl — the larger Tenpins, not Duckpins. “Not in ages,” I told him, “and only a few times over the years. Why?”

It turns out Neil belongs to a bowling club and invited me to join him there one evening as his guest. Located in what was once part of an old church, the Commonwealth Club was founded in 1904 by Benjamin Moore (of paint fame) “to promote sociability and good fellowship,” boasts six relatively modern lanes installed in the 1970s, and, according to its web site, “could be the longest continuously running bowling league in the nation.”

“This is right up my alley,” I told Neil, who endured my banter with remarkable composure. I resisted the urge to add that my middle name is actually “Lane.” Truly.

Neil’s invitation had a special appeal, beyond the prospect of sweaty rental shoes and a pulled hamstring. Last year, I wrote about the social scientist Robert Putnam, who, in 1995, published a seminal article in the Journal of Democracy titled “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.” His thesis, which led to his best-selling 2000 book titled “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, was that the country’s social connectedness and civil engagement had eroded significantly, as evidenced by the decline of organizations such as church groups, labor unions, fraternal orders, and the Boy Scouts. The causes: two-career families, suburban life, television, and computers, among other factors.

“The most whimsical yet discomfiting bit of evidence of social disengagement in contemporary America,” Putnam wrote, “is this: more Americans are bowling today than ever before. But bowling in organized leagues has plummeted.” Between 1980 and 1993, he reported, the total number of bowlers increased by 10% while league bowling decreased by 40%.

Putnam, now Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, noted the significance “in the social interaction and even occasionally civic conversations over beer and pizza that solo bowlers forgo . . . . [B]owling teams illustrate yet another vanishing form of social capital.”

Not in Montclair! The Commonwealth Club is a model for what Putnam maintains is sorely lacking in American society these days. Its commitment to social responsibility and community involvement only adds to its distinction.

Breakfasts, lunches, and now perhaps an occasional round of bowling will help keep me connected and happy.

I’ve gathered a few essentials for my visit to the club. Semper Paratus.

3) Number Theory

Even if you are not lonely, belong to several social clubs, and have many friends, research suggests there is a limit to the number of meaningful relationships you can sustain — usually considered to be roughly 150, according to a famous research paper by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, “Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates.”

Apparently, there is a correlation between brain size and number of friends, the latter loosely described by Dunbar in his book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language as "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar."

Here’s a summary of Dunbar’s Number, from a popular science website.

Dunbar mapped out a relationship across 36 primate genera between the size of the neocortex (the brain’s outermost, most recently evolved layer) and the average size of the social groups each species forms. The correlation was remarkably tight. Species with proportionally larger neocortices consistently lived in bigger groups. When Dunbar extrapolated the trend line to human brain proportions, the predicted group size came out to roughly 150.

The number isn’t just a mathematical curiosity. It shows up repeatedly in real-world data. Hunter-gatherer clans average about 127 people. Christmas card lists tend to hover near 150 names. Military companies throughout history have clustered around the same size. The Roman maniple, the basic tactical infantry unit, numbered 120 men. Modern military companies typically fall in the 100 to 150 range. The pattern appears so often that it’s hard to dismiss as coincidence.

Dunbar also proposed that social circles are layered concentrically, with the tightest circle — your loved ones, the people you would call in a crisis — numbering five, although at the very center, before reaching friends, he includes romantic relationships.

In an interview in The Atlantic in 2021, Dunbar elaborated on the bands, as follows:

The innermost layer of 1.5 is the most intimate; clearly that has to do with your romantic relationships. The next layer of five is your shoulders-to-cry-on friendships. They are the ones who will drop everything to support us when our world falls apart. The 15 layer includes the previous five, and your core social partners. They are our main social companions, so they provide the context for having fun times. They also provide the main circle for exchange of child care. We trust them enough to leave our children with them. The next layer up, at 50, is your big-weekend-barbecue people. And the 150 layer is your weddings and funerals group who would come to your once-in-a-lifetime event.

“What determines these layers in real life, in the face-to-face world . . . is the frequency at which you see people,” Dunbar once told the BBC. “You’re having to make a decision every day about how you invest what time you have available for social interaction, and that’s limited.”

There are critiques of Dunbar’s Number, but I don’t have time to review the literature. I’m busy field-testing my own theory for an upcoming paper: “No Limits: Sherman’s Number in a Fractured World.”

2) Sidetracks

Apophasis is a synonym, more commonly used in rhetorical and literary analysis. According to a Wikipedia entry, in the second debate of the 1984 U.S. presidential campaign, against Walter Mondale, President Ronald Reagan used a humorous apophasis to deflect scrutiny of his own fitness at age 73 by saying, "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."

1) Travel Tip

From the August 20, 2025, online edition of The Villager, a local newspaper covering the south Denver metro area.