
Why Community Theaters Keep Closing
America has thousands of volunteer stages and loses a stubborn handful every year; the causes are older than the recession everyone blames.
Reporting on how Americans actually live alongside one another, from congregations and unions to block associations and school boards. The section documents which shared institutions are holding, which are emptying out, and what replaces them. For readers interested in social change described through people rather than statistics alone.
Reporting on American social life: neighborhoods, class, religion, family and the shared institutions people still use or have quietly abandoned.

America has thousands of volunteer stages and loses a stubborn handful every year; the causes are older than the recession everyone blames.

The National Endowment for the Arts has been counting museum visitors for four decades, and the answer is more complicated, and more gray-haired, than the brochure suggests.