In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wesleyan president Michael S. Roth writes about the work of Matthew B. Crawford, author of the new book The World Beyond Your Head.
[Crawford's] critique of our so-called knowledge economy is a thoughtful extension of the powerful 19th-century Romantic rejection of the triumphs of modernity. John Ruskin, writing in the 1850s on "The Nature of the Gothic," emphasized that all classes require a "right understanding … of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy." Looking around industrializing England, proudly preening in disruption, he wrote: "It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure." Although he doesn’t cite Ruskin, Crawford is his heir.
The editors of n+1 on convenient stereotypes about the millenial generation:
In 2010, parents across America emailed the New York Times Magazine article “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” to the adult children living in their basements. “The question pops up everywhere,” the article went, “underlying concerns about ‘failure to launch’ and ‘boomerang kids.’... It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall."[...]
Of course the kids stay home because they can’t get jobs that pay rent. But the function of millennial-speak is to disguise structural causes (the lack of jobs) as human desires (the kids want to stay home), and to justify further measures (make hiring and firing easier) in terms of those desires. This is why millennials are constantly figured as happily zigzagging from job to job, fleeing long-term employment, luxuriating in the intense anxiety of a precariousness said to be uniquely theirs. If they (we?) don’t like a job, what use is there in organizing or demanding more from it? Just quit and move on, we’re told, and so we tell ourselves the same.
Roger Cohen's "Confessions of a Francophile" in the New York Times:
Last September, I wrote of my attempts to sell a village house I’ve owned for 20 years and the real estate agent who began her pitch by saying: “Monsieur, you cannot sell it. This is a family home. You know it the moment you step in. You sense it in the walls. You breathe it in every room. You feel it in your bones. This is a house you must keep for your children. I will help you sell it if you insist, but my advice is not to sell.”
Since then, I’ve been asked many times what happened to the house. I sold it. She was right: It was a mistake. The world needs real estate agents who tell you not to sell your home—and they are only to be found in France.
