EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH: Life On The Island: The digital age has been accompanied by a concerning rise in hyper-individualism.

Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, but note this point, in a different context, from an InstaPundit commenter: “The long-term goal of the government’s social policies are to flatten society out into one atomized mass. There will be only the state and the individual, and the individual will have no protection, no mediating institutions, between itself and the state. Antipathy towards a wide variety of actors–the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts, ‘special interests’ of all types, political parties, private universities–can all be understood in light of this fact.”