Ambition, Identity, Mommy Wars, and “The Most Important Job In The World.”

Last week, I attended an alumni/student networking event at my alma mater, UC Santa Barbara. The event consisted of about 50 working professionals (I was in this camp), and 100 soon-to-be-grads, sniffing around for some intel on what the “real world” might have in store. The kids (umm – ouch — you know you’re getting [...]

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Let’s Talk About Sex

Everyone else seems to be. They’re talking about women and sex and “Girls” and sex and feminism and sex and HBO and sex and the sexual revolution as failure and the sexual revolution as success. It feels a little weird to be writing this, honestly, being that it’s 2012 and all. But with whom and [...]

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New Generation, Same Story?

Bryce Covert’s recent post on The Nation’s website got me thinking today. It’s about an Accenture survey of Gen Y working women which found that -they have the most positive outlook for women in the workplace of any other generation. And yet: -when it comes to their careers, they’re less likely to proactively manage their [...]

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Burn Me Up, Burn Me Out?

The other day, I got a ping from a former student who sent a link to a recent piece she’d read over on Forbes.com.  “Have you seen this?” she wrote.  “It reminds me of Undecided!” The topic? Burn-out.  Apparently, it’s rampant among high achieving millennial women. At least that’s the skinny according to a piece [...]

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Everyone Is Wrong About You

Last week, at a reading in Seattle, WA, a young woman who’d recently graduated from none less than Harvard, raised her hand: She and her girlfriends had been so thrilled when they were accepted to the school whose name is virtually synonymous with overachievement, accomplishment, and success, she said, “it was like, this is what [...]

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Emerging Adulthood, Part Deux

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about a NYT mag piece that put forth Jeffrey Jensen Arnett’s cause to define “Emerging Adulthood” as its own, unique life stage. And this week, the magazine’s entire Letters section was devoted to responses to that piece. And with good reason: when it comes to the differences between [...]

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Emerging Adultiness: 20-Somethings Are The New 20-Somethings

By now, you’ve surely seen it. The cover story in this Sunday’s New York Times magazine went viral days before it landed on my doorstep. Robin Marantz Henig’s “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” focuses a lot on the work of psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, who’s trying to get “Emerging Adulthood” identified as an official, distinct [...]

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You Are Here

Last week I came across a fascinating piece at Salon.com… which, arguably, is made are all the more fascinating for its utter familiarity. The piece, by Rebecca Traister, is called “The new single womanhood: Young, urban and not necessarily looking for a man, a crop of memoirists are sketching out a brave new female world,” [...]

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I Don’t Wanna Grow Up

… and according to a recent New York Times piece (that, as fate would have it, ran on Friday, a big birthday for yours truly; big enough to officially bump me from one age range box to the next, in fact) neither do you. Surely by now you’ve heard the phrase “extended adolescence”. And whether [...]

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Helicopters Gone Wild

This just in: parents take helicoptering over the top. To wit, this post on the NYTimes Motherlode blog that links to a CNN story on moms who quit their jobs to help their kids get into college. No joke. According to the piece, these are highly educated, professional women who take a “college prep leave” [...]

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