• Shakespeare’s Sister isn’t buying amateur anthropologist Robert Putnam’s latest alleged finding — that diverse communities are less trusting than homogeneous ones. Her experience in Chicago’s northeasternmost neighborhood was quite different: “I lived in Chicago’s most ethnically diverse neighborhood, Rogers Park, for a decade, the last two years of which were spent as part of a condo association that looked like a mini-U.N. — whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Arabs, Jews, mixed-race individuals and couples, straight people, gay people. We were, collectively, desk jockeys, teachers, nurses, actors, writers, hairstylists. Parents and not, religious and not. And we used to regularly hang out on each other’s back decks with a couple of beers and a grill going, talking about everything under the sun. We had each other’s spare keys. We fed each other’s pets during out-of-town holidays. We accepted each other’s packages. And I would find it simply astounding if we were some sort of crazy aberration.“

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