It’s one thing to be young, cherub-faced, straight woman doing and saying things that make people uncomfortable. It’s quite another – and far riskier… - Anne Helen Petersen

The story of middle-class ascendancy is all about individual hard work. And no one wants to lose any of the hard-won benefits of that work, which helps explain the popularity of the Personal Responsibility Crusade amongst boomers and their parents. Members of the middle class were so freaked out by seeping economic instability that they started pulling the ladder up behind them.

In How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell makes a deeply compelling case for ignoring all of the impulses toward productivity and perfection that have come to imbue our lives, leisure, and otherwise. That means doing, well, nothing — at least nothing that is conceived of as value-making under capitalism.

As Darcy Lockman puts it in All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership, “Reports of the modern, involved father have been greatly exaggerated.