Interviews with adolescent boys over years, tracking the same subjects as they move from early to late teens.
At thirteen they describe close friendships in emotional, unguarded terms. By sixteen or seventeen the same boys are hedging, apologising, and calling it gay before anyone else can. The research shows the loss happening in their own words across a few years of transcripts.
It reframes male loneliness as something taught rather than innate, which is a more useful and more damning account than most of what gets written about it.
Read April 2018.