Dan Savage recently turned to Eric Klinenberg, author of Going Solo, in one of his widely-read Savage Love columns. “Few young adults say they’re not interested in sex or relationships, but [the reader’s] preference for going solo is hardly unique,” said Klinenberg. “Today, an unprecedented number of people are opting to live alone. One-person households represent 28 percent of all households in the U.S., and in cities the numbers are higher.”

Eric Klinenberg, Lavin speaker and author of Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, talking with CBS News.

An interesting article, drawing on the work of Lavin speaker Eric Klinenberg, examines why Girls, on HBO, has struck a chord:

Sex apart, another reason for the show’s appeal, according to Eric Klinenberg, the author of Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, is that it depicts a new way of living. The four main characters, he said from his New York University office, are typical of college graduates who move to cities and form “tribes” of friends en route to maturity and independence.

“We always see a tension in these friendships because this is a phase, a second adolescence, which will give way to something else,” he said.

Klinenberg, a sociology professor who studies urban and demographic patterns, said that this was a relatively new phenomenon. “It’s a kind of luxury for young Americans from affluent families. It used to be you married young and stayed married.”

Here’s Lavin speaker Eric Klinenberg talking about his new book, Going Solo, on Real Time with Bill Maher. The book looks at the astonishing rise of single living in the United States and around the world. “I would say this is the biggest social change of the last 50 or 60 years that we have failed to name or identify”, says Klinenberg.

From the New Yorker review of Eric Klinenberg’s Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.