Dan Brooks
Prehistoric Arrangements
Dan Brooks
There is a surplus of children in this world; ask any orphan. They will probably frame the issue as a shortage of parents, and they might be onto something. One Thursday afternoon last fall, I escaped to a bar to read a book about hunter-gatherers, and a man my age struck up a conversation about whether, all things considered, we might have been better off under prehistoric arrangements. “No child...
No Returns | On Family Functions and Dysfunctions
Dan Brooks
In December, The New Yorker asked, “How Did Polyamory Become So Popular?” in a piece that tracked the rise of the open relationship, from the obscure “province of utopian free-love communities” to its status as a mainstay of “Park Slope marriages and prestige television.” In January, New York magazine took on the same topic in a cover story, which explored the “increasingly mainstream world of ethical non-monogamy” and included “a...
