MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksIn his new book Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, he warns that we ought to take the historical formation of this cohort seriously, because it represents a single point of failure for a society veering toward oligarchy and/or dystopia ... Harris’s thesis is simple: young people are doing more and getting less in a society that that has incentivized their labor with the promise of a fair shake, and that older generations are profiting handsomely from the breach of contract ...highlight of the book is its admirably lucid précis of higher education, the student debt crisis, and the institutional wealth accumulation it fuels ...rest of the book, unfortunately, is more hit-or-miss ...a very white book, in ways that it might not have been if not for Harris’s insistence on capturing the experience of a monolithic millennial cohort ...Harris paints millennials as a renegade version of the generation of heroes.
Angela Nagle
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksBooks like Nagle’s need to be written. The alt-right’s origins and constituents remain somewhat obscure to a national media that was devastatingly slow to apprehend its significance, and has since scrambled to gain purchase on its exponentially broadening influence ... Gamergate, in Nagle’s telling, was a moment of cosmic convergence for the alt-right: it linked angry reactionaries to other online subcultures that shared their violent 'opposition to political correctness, feminism, multiculturalism, etc' ... I’m troubled by Nagle’s implicit suggestion that the emergence of the alt-right is a logical consequence of leftist hysteria ... For all of Nagle’s interest in distinguishing 'the liberal left and the materialist left,' peculiarly absent is any speculation on what all of this transgression might have to do with capitalism ... Just as I don’t buy her account of the movement’s origins in leftist pathology, I’m ultimately unpersuaded by Nagle’s assertion that the alt-right 'defeated' the mainstream media.
Lillian Ross
PositiveThe Boston ReviewThe volume is a rich pleasure and an encounter with a pioneering vision.
