Brooks’s point, it seemed to me, was to make an erudite case for why the nuclear family is, even in the US, a historical oddity. This is not a point that’s rout

Brooks’s point, it seemed to me, was to make an erudite case for why the nuclear family is, even in the US, a historical oddity. This is not a point that’s routinely made in US cultural discussions, so it needed a fair amount of background. His next point was that what comes next is path dependent, and may not look like what’s come before. So it seems overly dismissive to say that Asian cultures offer an alternative trade-off, end of story. There are other possibilities besides tight genetically related extended families and nuclear families.