More Americans Than Ever Are Living Single. Here’s Why.

Flying solo is in–in a serious way. A New York Times Q&A with Eric Kilnenberg, NYU sociology professor and author of the new book “Going Solo,” leads with the facts: In 1950, 22 percent of American adults were single. Now that number is almost 50 percent. One in seven adults lives alone. Half of all [...]

Read Full Post »

Freedom, Fertility, and Feminism

Today’s post is one of those ones that I’ve thought about writing often, but been happy to shy away from. It’s tricky territory. But over the past week, fate intervened: first, in the form of the New York Magazine in my mailbox, which screamed from the cover: Fifty years ago, the pill ushered in a [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

The Trouble with Girlfriends: Quarterlife Crisis, redux

I came across this story in the Philadelphia Enquirer the other day about the new angst of quarterlifers. (I’ve buried the lead once again. But stay with me here.) The story revisited the book, Quarterlife Crisis, written back in 2001, and then went on to enumerate the ways in which the Crisis, thanks to the [...]

Read Full Post »

Highway to the Danger Zone

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of emails from former students, wondering what to do with themselves when grown-up dreams get bitch-slapped by recession-era reality. One, from a talented writer, whose job fell through after only a matter of weeks, particularly hit home. Should she stay in the big city, where she had just scored [...]

Read Full Post »

suddenly, lost summer

But is that necessarily a bad thing? Not completely. In a piece in last week’s New York Times, Alex Williams explored what college kids and newly minted graduates might be doing this recessionary summer. The answer? For a great many of them, moving back home with mom and pop. He writes: The well-paying summer jobs [...]

Read Full Post »

the numbers have it

Undecided? Numbers say you’re in good company If Hana R. Alberts is right about quarter-lifers being the hardest hit by the choice conundrum, there are a lot of twenty somethings out there scratching their heads, trying to make up their minds. The census bureau reports that there are some 75 million millenials (born between 1980 [...]

Read Full Post »

Quarterlife Quagmire

Woe be the quarterlifers: a generation of folks between the ages of 18 and 34 that’s sixty million strong, according to Hana R. Alberts in her recent Forbes.com piece “The Economics of Quarterlife.” It’s a generation she describes as “confused and even paralyzed by too many choices and a lack of direction…” And quarterlife is [...]

Read Full Post »