Someone To Talk To

Someone To Talk To reveals the often counter-intuitive nature of social support, showing that Americans often take pains to avoid close friends and family--their "strong ties"--when deciding on whom to rely. In contrast, they often confide in "weak ties," as the need for understanding or empathy trumps their fear of misplaced trust. Amid a growing wave of big data and large-scale network analysis, Mario L. Small returns to the basic questions of who we connect with, how, and why, upending decades of conventional wisdom on how we should think about and analyze social networks.