In this lecture, Gregory Jusdanis will argue that friendship is a beloved topic in everyday conversations and in popular culture. But it has been almost ignored by the academy in the modern period.  Indeed, only in the last few decades have scholars turned to friendship as a legitimate concern. Jusdanis will also propose that the recent turn towards friendship inside and outside the academy masks a certain anxiety we have towards friendship, especially male friendship.  Although we understand social relationships in the Internet age through the metaphor of friendship, we are uneasy about these relations. Jusdanis will claim that friendship is very much like art, a luxury we turn to after we attend first to the more serious parts of our lives -- family, marriage, and work.