Eating alone is an increasingly common feature of modern life in the US, yet population-level research has not yet provided a systematic sociological account of this trend. Using the American Time Use Survey, this study provides the first comprehensive analysis of this rising trend from 2003 to 2024 across temporal, spatial, and social dimensions. We find that eating alone has become particularly pronounced in the workplace and has increased in contexts we expected to offer resistance: in the evening, during the holidays, at home, and even among parents and partnered people. Only in third places did Americans reduce their time eating alone. Furthermore, solo dining experienced pronounced increases among certain groups vulnerable to social isolation (Black adults, those with low levels of education, and part-time workers), though it also saw some growth among segments of the college-educated population. Some aspects of the rise in solo eating showed gradual change, while others were punctuated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, our study provides new evidence about when, where, and for whom eating functions as an integrative activity, revealing how this foundation of social connection has evolved over two eventful decades.
We propose a preconditioner for the statically condensed linear system arising from a hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin discretization of the coupled Stokes–Darcy system. This preconditioner is designed to be robust with respect to mesh size, viscosity, and permeability, under the assumption that ακ−1/2, in which α is a constant in the Beavers–Joseph–Saffman law and κ is the permeability constant, is bounded by a constant. The design strategy relies on first applying the operator-preconditioning framework (Mardal and Winther, 2011) to construct a preconditioner for the non-condensed discretization. This is done by proving there exist boundedness and stability constants of the scheme that are independent of mesh size, viscosity, and permeability. Next, we prove robustness of the resulting condensed preconditioner applied to the reduced linear system using the framework we proposed in Henríquez et al. (2025). Numerical examples demonstrate robustness of the proposed preconditioners.
In an era of rising autocracy and far-right populism across the globe as well as democratic development in some nations, the assumption of stable democratic regimes is becoming increasingly untenable, even in rich democracies. This study examines how year-to-year changes in democracy levels are linked to life satisfaction, a key marker of subjective wellbeing. Using a hybrid fixed-effect model on data from the Gallup World Poll, V-Dem from over 150 countries (2006-2022), this research distinguishes within-country differences from and between-country associations. The global result reveals a positive association between democracy and life satisfaction, even after accounting for economic, social and community-level confounders. Even short-term fluctuations in democratic development within countries have discernible implications for population level-well-being. Beyond these temporal dynamics, countries that are more democratic on average, also exhibit higher levels of life satisfaction. However, this global average conceals profound regional heterogeneity. A stratified analysis shows that the democracy-life satisfaction link is substantially stronger in Asia and the Pacific and Middle East and North Africa regions. This pattern reflects these region's low starting points and recent democratic transitions, which make institutional gains more consequential for well-being. Taken together, these findings suggest that democratic institutions can play meaningful role in promoting better, more satisfying life, especially in countries transitioning away from non-democratic regimes.
We offer a novel theoretical account of why entrepreneurs experience anxiety and how entrepreneurs cope with anxiety. We integrate insights from linguistic theories into entrepreneurship literature to propose that entrepreneurs’ linguistic architecture—particularly the vocabulary their language provides for identifying and describing emotions (i.e., its emotion lexicon)—is an essential linguistic microfoundation that systematically shapes how entrepreneurs process and experience anxiety. As moderators, we examine how bilingualism and entrepreneurial experience can systematically alter how entrepreneurs’ linguistic architecture influences their anxiety. Our final sample was 1,251 entrepreneurs speaking 14 different languages, supplemented by an experimental study with 202 bilingual entrepreneurs in Hong Kong. We find that entrepreneurs with a richer vocabulary for identifying and describing emotions (i.e., a richer emotion lexicon) heighten anxiety due to more precise and vivid emotional processing, and bilingualism weakens, yet prior entrepreneurial experience strengthens the positive effect of emotion lexicon on anxiety.
The article tests a common model of how different types of debt relate to substance use and suicidal ideation in early midlife. Drawing on data from US adults age 33 through 43 from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we model how consumption and investment debt relate to four outcomes: opioid painkiller misuse, other drug use, frequent binge drinking, and suicidal ideation. While educational and mortgage debt do not predict higher risk of these outcomes, consumption debt, incurred from sources other than education or housing, is consistently associated with increased risk across all four outcomes. Sensitivity tests do not isolate any compelling evidence of reverse causality, but we cannot conclusively determine that indebtedness causes increased risk of substance use or suicidal ideation. We contend, however, that high levels of consumption debt are consistently associated with behaviors and ideations that are associated with elevated health risk.
