One of my favorite new features in The New York Times is “The Interview,” in which a skilled interviewer such as Lulu Garcia-Navarro or David Marchese conducts a wide-ranging conversation with an interesting subject — and then, in an inspired touch, goes back a day or two later to ask follow-up questions (The feature is available as a podcast or as a transcript on the Times’ website.) The subject of the latest installment is Robert Putnam, the Harvard political science professor whose “Bowling Alone,” published in 2000, was pretty much completely correct about how America was turning, in Garcia-Navarro’s memorable phrase, “from a nation of joiners to a nation of loners.” (And this was before the advent of social media!)

“Bowling Alone” has been a hugely influential book for me, so I was curious to see what he thought about our current epidemic of loneliness. Here’s a quote from the interview that stood out for me:

Now, suddenly, I’m no longer the social scientist, I’m a preacher. I’m trying to say, we’re not going to fix polarization, inequality, social isolation until, first of all, we start feeling we have an obligation to care for other people. And that’s not easy, so don’t ask me how to do that.

As an added bonus, you’ll learn that Putnam actually was a member of a bowling team — and the Times has unearthed a priceless photo of an early Putman team.

Apparently, a new documentary — the bluntly titled “Join or Die” — takes a closer look at Putman’s work. More about documentaries later in this week’s Reader.

Our good friend Nicholas Kristof has a new opinion column in The New York Times in which he says he’s encouraged that, among all the talk about who might succeed Joe Biden if Biden decides to step away, a number of female candidates are on the list — and their gender, as he writes, “appears to go unmentioned.”

Which I suppose is progress. But, still, as Kristof notes, 5% of Americans told Gallup this year that they couldn’t vote for a woman for president. (Some 5% said they wouldn’t vote for a Black candidate, 7% couldn’t support a Jew, and nearly a quarter said they couldn’t back a gay candidate or a Muslim. Old prejudices die hard.)

Here’s this week’s long read. Tim Alberta, writing in The Atlantic, profiles the two campaign managers who have put Donald Trump on the doorstep of the White House again — and how it’s possible their campaign strategy might prove to be too effective.

And if you’re thinking it’s too early to be writing things like “Donald Trump is on the doorstep of the White House,” that’s probably true. But you might have second thoughts after reading this piece from political adviser Doug Sosnik, who says the numbers he’s looking at suggest that Joe Biden’s path to reelection has become exceedingly narrow.

You may have heard something about the comedy “Oh, Mary!,” which killed during an off-Broadway run and has just opened to raves on Broadway. What you might now know is that the writer and star of the show, Cole Escola, is an Oregon native, born in Clatskanie — or, as Escola puts it on their own website, “trailer trash born and raised in rural Oregon.” You can watch Escola, dressed in their “Oh, Mary!” costume, hype the show in this clip from “Last Night With Seth Meyers.”

Joe Freeman of The Oregonian/OregonLive has this profile of Jade Carey, the Oregon State University gymnast who’s headed to the Paris Olympics as part of the U.S. women’s gymnastics team. Carey, who won a gold medal in the floor exercise in the Tokyo Olympics, says she’s looking for a couple of things in Paris: redemption, for a subpar performance in the vault in Tokyo, and a sense of Olympics normalcy.

You might have heard about the new documentary “Eno,” a profile of the musician Brian Eno, which uses specially designed software to make it just about a certainty that you never see the same version of the movie twice. You might not know, however, that technology is at the heart of a raging debate in the world of documentaries: to what extent should documentaries be using generative AI? Andrew Deck of Harvard’s Nieman Lab recently sat down with the great documentary filmmaker Errol Morris for an entertaining, thoughtful and occasionally profane Q-and-A.

Speaking of books, as we were right at the very start of this edition, if you need help bulking up your summer reading list, The New York Times Book Review can help: Staffers at the Book Review — supplemented by ballots submitted by more than 500 writers — have picked the 100 best books of the 21st century (thus far). Now, I know that the first thing you’re going to do with the list is go through and see how many of the books you’ve read, which is perfectly understandable. The Times understands this as well, so the feature allows you to check off the books you’ve read. (I’ve read 33, so, work to do.) And I haven’t read No. 1! If you see me at the library and I seem to be in a hurry to get to a particular book, best steer clear.

That’s it for this weekend. Let’s get together next week and — I don’t know — form a book club? Sorry about that run-in at the library.