"The Growing Obsolescence of the Older Ideal of the Nuclear Family "

"Like the cultural innovations of the Sixties youth, the current trends away from family and fertility and toward gender fluidity are likely to endure in some form. They are rooted, for the most part, in underlying social and economic changes that politics and policy cannot easily reverse. They are not confined to the United States but common in other advanced capitalist countries."

John Judis at The Liberal Patriot describes the 1960s and 2010s as "two periods in modern American history where many of the young have adopted distinctive and effective political and cultural outlooks."

And Aria Bendix at NBC News explains "[w]hy abortions rose after Roe was overturned."

"The Signifier and the Signified"

"They straddle a line between self and other (in the ways we have 'humanised' them, yet use them as objects). If I tell you someone has a pet pitbull, you might make assumptions about this person–very different from the assumptions you'd make about an acquaintance with a Yorkshire terrier. Breeds have accrued associations, from their presence in popular culture, to their phenotype, to our familiarity with them in daily life. Simply owning a dog is an exercise in expressing our cultural values, as our furry totem reflects them to the world."

Katrina Gulliver at Aeon discusses the "semiotics of dog ownership."

"Can We Have Come Full Circle?"

"Nixon announced his Family Assistance Plan in August, 1969 and fought for over two years for it, with limp liberal interest since it was, after all, Richard Nixon. More crucially there was conservative resistance in the GOP. California Gov. Ronald Reagan used 'FAP' to peel away Republicans from Richard Nixon. Reagan led the GOP move away from Nixon’s cash for the poor approach and toward the 1990s welfare 'reform.'"

John Roy Price at The Hill wonders if a revival is possible for Richard Nixon's Family Assistance Plan.

"Such Great Expectations"

"By writing an economic genealogy of the boomer generation, she grounds her argument about millennials in an intergenerational transference of class anxiety, demonstrating the historical aspect of contemporary exhaustion. Petersen shows that rather than fighting for social justice and work protections, many boomers responded to changing material conditions by 'doubl[ing] down on what they could try to control: their children.' By surveying a range of raced and classed respondents, Petersen connects the bourgeois core of boomerism to millennial malaise and finds 'busyness,' 'concerned cultivation,' helicopter parenting, and other optimizing practices at the heart of the intergenerational link. This rat race to raise the most successful generation led to the elimination of leisure from many aspects of childhood, breeding insecurity and instilling precarity in the efforts to pass down middle-class status. One generation’s aspiration becomes another generation’s anxiety."

Rithika Ramamurthy at the Los Angeles Review of Books looks at Anne Helen Petersen's Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.

"Encouragement to Irrational Optimism"

"These are the problem-solving strategies that Donald Trump brought to his marriages, six corporate bankruptcies, presidential campaign, and now, what increasingly appears to be a failed presidency. The consistent element in each of these has been to deny negative realities and keep moving. The casinos, the airline, the football league, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump University. . . all bear the same markings of hyper optimism and overpromise/underdeliver salesmanship."

Brent Orrell at The Bulwark discusses Norman Vincent Peale's influence on Donald Trump.

And at The Conversation, Kristin Kobes Du Mez explores why white Evangelical Protestants support Trump.

"That's Not a Problem That Is Going to Be Solved by Adding Another App to the Mix"

"Just because a piece of media or software is available online doesn't mean it is easily accessed. Introducing new technology to students, as any classroom teacher can tell you, requires more hands-on help, as students are not born knowing how to use digital resources but need explicit instruction in each one. Once students can read, they can use a textbook, but each new software program must be learned from scratch. This challenge is especially serious for poor students whose only home internet access may be through a phone."

Joanne Petrone at Slate calls on schools to bring back textbooks.

"The Damaged Product of an Absent Mother and a Sociopathic Father"

"'There were a lot of mob movies before "The Godfather," but "The Godfather" gave us a very specific understanding of being in a mob family because it was this rich, detailed, inside account of how a family dysfunctioned together,' he said. 'There was nothing new in "The Godfather" about how mobsters rolled, but the portrait it painted was so searing and rich and authentic that it defined our understanding of a criminal family. And, yes, there have been other books about the Trump family—Wayne's, mine, Gwenda's—but none of us captured his family life in the way that she has.' O’Brien predicted Mary Trump's work will have 'a seismic imprint.' 'It gives,' he said, 'the deepest understanding of his family dynamics that anyone has provided, and how that shapes his psychosis, and why he's such a dangerous leader.'"

Michael Kruse at Politico reviews Mary L. Trump's Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man.

"By Distracting Us from These Truths, Educationism Is Part of the Problem"

"For all the genuine flaws of the American education system, the nation still has many high-achieving public-school districts. Nearly all of them are united by a thriving community of economically secure middle-class families with sufficient political power to demand great schools, the time and resources to participate in those schools, and the tax money to amply fund them. In short, great public schools are the product of a thriving middle class, not the other way around. Pay people enough to afford dignified middle-class lives, and high-quality public schools will follow. But allow economic inequality to grow, and educational inequality will inevitably grow with it."

Nick Hanauer at The Atlantic writes that "the most direct way to address rising economic inequality is to simply pay ordinary workers more, by increasing the minimum wage and the salary threshold for overtime exemption; by restoring bargaining power for labor; and by instating higher taxes—much higher taxes—on rich people like me and on our estates."

"Gender Dynamics Had Always Been Part of It"

"And Americans today are likely to recognize the names of the most famous temperance activists not from that work but from their efforts for women's suffrage—not that those two weren't connected. In 1853, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the Women's State Temperance Society in upstate New York. Stanton would even refer to alcohol as 'the unclean thing.' It became clear to them that giving women the right to vote was only way they could ban alcohol. As Anthony put it in 1899, 'the only hope' for Prohibition was 'putting the ballot into the hands of women.'"

Olivia B. Waxman at Time explains that "Prohibition and women's suffrage went hand in hand."

"It's Very Blurry and Over-Applied"

"It is being used to apply to a wider and wider range of experiences and acts. It's being used, for example, to refer to the enacting of to-do lists in daily life—pick up the laundry, shop for potatoes, that kind of thing. Which I think is an overextension. It's also being applied to perfectionism: You've absolutely got to do the perfect Christmas holiday. And that can be a confusion and an overextension. I do think that managing anxiety associated with obligatory chores is emotional labor. I would say that. But I don't think that common examples I could give are necessarily emotional labor." 

Julie Beck at The Atlantic interviews sociologist Arlie Hochschild about "The Concept Creep of 'Emotional Labor.'"

"This Isn't a Story About American Childhood; it's About American Inequality"

"'Kids' sports has seen an explosion of travel-team culture, where rich parents are writing a $3,000 check to get their kids on super teams from two counties, or two states, away,' said Tom Farrey, the executive director of Aspen's Sports & Society program. Expensive travel leagues siphon off talented young athletes from well-off families, leaving behind desiccated local leagues with fewer players, fewer involved parents, and fewer resources. 'When these kids move to the travel team, you pull bodies out of the local town's recreation league, and it sends a message [to those] who didn't get onto that track that they don't really have a future in the sport.' The result is a classist system: the travel-team talents and the local leftovers.
"Unsurprisingly, the leftovers often lose interest."

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic discusses the decline of youth sports.

"All Children Are Worthy of Their Consideration"

"This idea that your own child is the most important thing—that's something we could try to rethink. When affluent white parents are making these decisions about parenting, they could consider in some way at least how their decisions will affect not only their kid, but other kids. This might mean a parent votes for policies that would lead to the best possible outcome for as many kids as possible, but might be less advantageous for their own child. My overall point is that in this moment when being a good citizen conflicts with being a good parent, I think that most white parents choose to be good parents, when, sometimes at the very least, they should choose to be good citizens."

Joe Pinsker at The Atlantic interviews Margaret Hagerman, author of White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America.

"What About the Responsibility of the Institutions and the Society"?

"In a paper called 'Patriarchy, Power, and Pay: The Transformation of American Families, 1800–2015,' Ruggles wrote that out-of-wedlock births and the decline of marriage didn't just happen because hippies preached free love or because scientists invented the birth-control pill. 'There must be a source of exogenous pressure for people to reject the values with which they were raised,' he wrote. 'Between 1800 and 2000, that pressure was exerted by an economic revolution.'
"The revolution he refers to is actually several: the rise of wage labor in the 19th century, the post-World War II economic boom and union wages that often allowed one parent to stay home, the subsequent decline in men's wages that accelerated during Ronald Reagan's presidency and continues, the corresponding entry of more women into the workplace, and other macro shifts that produced the inequalities of today. 'I think it is kind of ridiculous to say the reason for social problems is that people do not have good enough morals,' Ruggles says."

Brian Alexander at Slate talks to critics of the "success sequence."

"Trump Has Instead Redefined His Party Around White Nationalism"

"'Family values' once defined the GOP, informing its embrace of the pro-life platform (protecting unborn children) and its resistance to marriage equality (the union between a husband and wife was sacrosanct). Conservative lawyers led the campaign to censor rap lyrics, and evangelicals condemned extramarital affairs—conservative foot soldiers, for a time, marched under the banner of protecting children and preserving the institution of the family.
"But in the Trump era, it is clear these values no longer define the movement."

Alex Wagner at The Atlantic argues that the "migrant crisis signals an official end to one chapter of conservatism and the beginning of a terrifying new one."

"Self-Control Alone Couldn't Overcome Economic and Social Disadvantages"

"The failed replication of the marshmallow test does more than just debunk the earlier notion; it suggests other possible explanations for why poorer kids would be less motivated to wait for that second marshmallow. For them, daily life holds fewer guarantees: There might be food in the pantry today, but there might not be tomorrow, so there is a risk that comes with waiting. And even if their parents promise to buy more of a certain food, sometimes that promise gets broken out of financial necessity.
"Meanwhile, for kids who come from households headed by parents who are better educated and earn more money, it's typically easier to delay gratification: Experience tends to tell them that adults have the resources and financial stability to keep the pantry well stocked. And even if these children don't delay gratification, they can trust that things will all work out in the end—that even if they don't get the second marshmallow, they can probably count on their parents to take them out for ice cream instead."

Jessica McCrory Calarco at The Atlantic discusses "the class dimension of the marshmallow test."

"The Adoption of Any German Customs Stateside Would Require Nothing Less Than a Full Armed Revolution"

"While well-intentioned liberal parents (aka this book's audience) will find numerous aspects of the German style superior—and many of our own trends duly worrying—most of the substantial change Achtung Baby suggests requires a large-scale shift in both prevailing attitude and state funding, neither of which will be forthcoming in this country for the foreseeable future. There's only so much one American parent can do—I and my sad little bike commute can certainly attest to that. And what's more, there's only so much one American parent, slammed with work and barely hanging on, will want to do. Achtung Baby is a great read, but it may leave the American reader feeling helpless rather than inspired—a sentiment all too common in, if you'll pardon the expression, the current Zeitgeist."

Sara Zaske at Slate reviews Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children.

"Urban Suburbia"

"'The first wave of suburbanites were people attracted to urban environments, like artists, who had cultural capital but needed affordable housing and liked racially and culturally diverse environments,' said Christopher Niedt, a sociologist at Hofstra University and the academic director of its National Center for Suburban Studies. 'The art they create attracts people who are less tolerant of diversity and want to create a more homogeneous environment.'
"Ride-hailing apps are also popular with this cohort, which largely grew up in places without much public transportation. Uber and Lyft remind some customers of rides home with their parents or their parents' friends because the driver always knows where to go and little communication is needed.
"'You can depend on the car being there, kind of like depending on mom or dad,' said Eden Sutley, a 28-year-old TV producer from Lafayette, La., who lives in the East Village."

Aaron Elstein at Crain's New York Business discusses the suburbanization of New York City.

Their Pal Foot Foot

"Krakow's band had gone so far as to acquire reissues of the cheap guitars that the Wiggins are shown holding on the cover of 'Philosophy.' Though it was clear that Krakow and his cohorts deeply respect and love this music, what did it mean to celebrate a mistake? If accidental art is re-created on purpose, what is it?"

Howard Fishman at The New Yorker reports from a reunion of the Shaggs.

"Soldier Excited To Take Over Father's Old Afghanistan Patrol Route"

"At press time, a tear fell from Corcoran's eye as he hugged his dad goodbye in the very same manner he remembered his father doing to him when he was a toddler."

From The Onion.

"The Future of Dining Out Might Look a Lot Like Eating In"

"We are living through a golden age in food—if you can pay the bill.

"Today's restaurant renaissance is an expression of the long-term growth of leisure spending in the U.S. But there's nothing leisurely about the restaurant business today. The superabundance of quality and variety among restaurateurs has created cut-throat competition, particularly in the fast casual sector. The price gap between grocery bills and restaurant checks has never been higher. The rise of takeout has forced restaurants to serve more diners who don't step foot on their property."

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic discusses trends relating to restaurants and food.