“The helicopter parent has crashed and burned...Sally Koslow [has] documented a generation so cosseted that they have lost the impetus to grow up or leave home. The over-involved parent has gone from paragon of caring to a figure of fun.”—Lisa Endlich Heffernan, The Atlantic Parents once dreamed of dropping their prodigies at first-choice colleges and sighing with relief at a job well done. Nowadays, though, mothers and fathers are stressing about whether Jessica or Josh will boomerang back after graduation—and still be there years later. Why are so many wunderkinds now s-l-o-w-l-y slouching toward adulthood? Panicked after reading that twenty-eight is the new nineteen, Sally Koslow—journalist and mother—searched for answers. Part hard-hitting investigation and part hilarious memoir, Slouching Toward Adulthood is a heartfelt cri de coeur that can help families negotiate life around the unexpectedly crowded dining tables for years to come.

“The helicopter parent has crashed and burned...Sally Koslow [has] documented a generation so cosseted that they have lost the impetus to grow up or leave home. The over-involved parent has gone from paragon of caring to a figure of fun.”—Lisa Endlich Heffernan, The Atlantic Parents once dreamed of dropping their prodigies at first-choice colleges and sighing with relief at a job well done. Nowadays, though, mothers and fathers are stressing about whether Jessica or Josh will boomerang back after graduation—and still be there years later. Why are so many wunderkinds now s-l-o-w-l-y slouching toward adulthood? Panicked after reading that twenty-eight is the new nineteen, Sally Koslow—journalist and mother—searched for answers. Part hard-hitting investigation and part hilarious memoir, Slouching Toward Adulthood is a heartfelt cri de coeur that can help families negotiate life around the unexpectedly crowded dining tables for years to come.

An instant New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller from one of the world’s leading economists, offering a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, but left us unsatisfied “A magisterial history.”—​Paul Krugman Named a Best Book of 2022 by Financial Times * Economist * Fast Company Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. When 1870–2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo. Economist Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia tells the story of how this unprecedented explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe, and why it failed to deliver us to utopia. Of remarkable breadth and ambition, it reveals the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction.

A journalist and mother of two formerly dependent adult children analyzes the reasons behind the current young adult generation's unwillingness or inability to pursue independence, drawing on probing interviews with parents and their grown children to assess the employment, monetary and social aspects of prolonged dependency. 25,000 first printing.

A RICH DISPLAY OF SOME OF THE BEST PROSE WRITTEN TODAY IN THE USA.

In The White Album, Joan Didion famously wrote that "a place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively...loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image." Cruising in her Daytona yellow Corvette Stingray, taking it all in behind dark glasses, Joan Didion claimed California for all time. Slouching Towards Los Angeles is a multi-faceted portrait of the literary icon who, in turn, belongs to us. This collection of original essays covers the turf that made Didion a sensation--Hollywood and Patty Hearst; Malibu, Manson and the Mojave; the Summer of Love and the Central Park Five--while bringing together some of the finest voices of today's Los Angeles and beyond. Slouching Towards Los Angeles is a love letter and thank you note; personal memoir and social commentary; cultural history and literary critique. Fans of Didion, lovers of California, and fellow writers alike will all find something to dig into, in this rich exploration of the inner and outer landscapes Joan Didion traveled, shaping our own journeys in the process. Featuring essays by Ann Friedman Jori Finkel Margaret Wappler Jessica Hundley Christine Lennon Catherine Wagley Su Wu Joshua Wolf Shenk Lauren Sandler Michelle Chihara Sarah Tomlinson Linda Immediato Tracy McMillan Dan Crane Steph Cha Caroline Ryder Joe Donnelly Monica Corcoran Harel Alysia Abbott Stacie Stukin Heather John Fogarty Marc Weingarten Scott Benzel Ezrha Jean Black

Literary Nonfiction. Politics. SLOUCHING TOWARD UTOPIA is George Scialabba's fifth collection from Pressed Wafer, following WHAT ARE INTELLECTUALS GOOD FOR? (2009), THE MODERN PREDICAMENT (2011), FOR THE REPUBLIC (2013), and LOW DISHONEST DECADES (2016). Like the others, SLOUCHING TOWARD UTOPIA features trenchant commentary on contemporary politics and culture, couched in graceful and limpid prose. In addition to reviews of Samuel Huntington, Ivan Illich, Alexander Cockburn, and Mark Lilla, along with a dozen others, there is a symposium contribution on identity politics, two long interviews about intellectuals and American politics, and the title essay, a lecture offering an original meditation on how to get past the conventional wisdom about political morality and begin to at least stumble toward utopia. Samuel Moyn has called George Scialabba "a national treasure of long standing" and "our preeminent chronicler of American public intellectuals," and says that "this new collection of his inimitable essays and reviews is one every serious reader needs." Art Goldhammer calls SLOUCHING TOWARD UTOPIA "a collection of elegant, erudite, eminently humane meditations...that illuminate these dark days of the Republic with admirable intellectual rigor. [Scialabba's] is a quiet voice that needs to be heard above the raucous cacophony that dominates our public space." In his Foreword to SLOUCHING TOWARD UTOPIA, Jedediah Purdy praises Scialabba for writing "lucidly about benightedness, vividly about purblindness, so that his essays and reviews show thought as a thing possible in a world that can seem a conspiracy against sense and reason." George worked for 35 years in building management at Harvard University in order to support his book-reviewing habit. When he retired in 2015, the city of Cambridge declared a "George Scialabba Day," and Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, and others gathered to celebrate.