Malcolm Harris

Malcolm Harris
Harris in 2023
Born1988 (age 35–36)
Alma materUniversity of Maryland
Occupations
  • Journalist
  • critic
  • editor

Malcolm Harris (born 1988)[1] is an American journalist, critic, and editor based on the East Coast.[2][3]

He is an editor at The New Inquiry and wrote Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials (2017). Harris was involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Early life and education

He was born in Santa Cruz, California and grew up in the suburb Palo Alto, California in the San Francisco Bay area after his family moved there while he was in grade school.[3] He graduated from the University of Maryland in 2010.[4]

Career

Harris is an editor at the online magazine The New Inquiry.[5][6]

Harris was "heavily involved" in the Occupy Wall Street movement.[7] In 2012, he pleaded guilty and was convicted of disorderly conduct for his participation in an October 2011 Occupy protest on the Brooklyn Bridge. The court case became "a significant focus of attention for its involvement of posts to social networking sites and legal arguments over who controls that material",[8][9][10][11] as the prosecution sought to undermine his defense using his own Twitter posts which he had deleted.

Harris's 2017 book, Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials, is a social critique of American millennials as human capital.[12][13][14][15] In it, he explores the economic, social, and political conditions and institutions that nurtured American millennials and shaped them into a distinct group.[2][16] Yohann Koshy wrote in the Financial Times that Harris argues that "society conspires to make life worse for young people", that "millennials are producing lots of value at work that is not reflected in job quality or wages", and that much of this applies to Britain too.[2]

During the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020, Harris wrote about Palo Alto, California where he grew up after his family moved from Santa Cruz. He felt that he did not understand his home state or the suburb of Palo Alto until he left it for college on the East Coast, at the University of Maryland. His book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, was published in February 2023. The book is his history of that city and its role in the 21st century US economy, which is defined by the internet and electronic devices made by people, companies and financial capital in Silicon Valley.[3] One review of the book said that it was “nominally a history, but it is really a work of grand theory … Marxism” and describes a “capitalist horror show”, with little positive balance to the criticisms of the faults of capitalism.[17]

Personal life

He lives in the East Coast of US, including Philadelphia,[2] Washington, D.C.,[3] and Brooklyn, New York.[18]

Publications

  • Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials. New York: Little, Brown and Company. 2017. ISBN 978-0316510868.
  • Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History. Melville House. 2020. ISBN 9781612198378.[19]
  • Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. Little, Brown and Company. 2023. ISBN 9780316592031.

See also

References

  1. ^ "'Kids These Days' Convinces You That Millennials Aren't Ruining Everything". www.wbur.org. November 7, 2017. Archived from the original on September 28, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  2. ^ a b c d Koshy, Yohann (November 3, 2017). "Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris — no free brunch". Financial Times. Archived from the original on September 28, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  3. ^ a b c d Romanoff, Zan (February 20, 2023). "Silicon Valley Is Everywhere". Alta On Line. San Francisco. Retrieved June 22, 2024. He was born in Santa Cruz in 1988; his family moved to Palo Alto when he was in elementary school. (Harris now lives in Washington, D.C.)
  4. ^ "Hachettte profile: Malcolm Harris". Hachette Book Group. June 28, 2017. Retrieved June 28, 2023.
  5. ^ Illing, Sean (February 4, 2019). "Why are millennials burned out? Capitalism". Vox. Archived from the original on October 7, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  6. ^ "About: Contributing Editors". The New Inquiry. Retrieved June 22, 2024.
  7. ^ "Kids These Days and iGen: two competing visions of what makes a millennial". www.newstatesman.com. November 13, 2017. Archived from the original on September 28, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  8. ^ Buettner, Russ (December 12, 2012). "Malcolm Harris Pleads Guilty Over 2011 March". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on September 28, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  9. ^ "Judge: Twitter Must Turn Over Protester's Tweets Or Face Hefty Fine". HuffPost. September 11, 2012. Archived from the original on August 2, 2022. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  10. ^ Zetterv, Kim (August 27, 2012). "Twitter Fights Back to Protect 'Occupy Wall Street' Protester". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Archived from the original on July 15, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  11. ^ Williams, Matt (September 14, 2012). "Twitter complies with prosecutors to surrender Occupy activist's tweets". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on July 17, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  12. ^ Shine, Jacqui (November 26, 2017). "Won't Get Fooled Again: Malcolm Harris's "Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials"". Los Angeles Review of Books. Archived from the original on September 28, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  13. ^ "Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials". TheHumanist.com. April 26, 2018. Archived from the original on September 28, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  14. ^ Mehta, Stephanie (January 5, 2018). "Review". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Archived from the original on June 5, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  15. ^ "How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation". BuzzFeed News. January 5, 2019. Archived from the original on September 28, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  16. ^ "The Kids Aren't Alright". Dissent Magazine. Archived from the original on September 28, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  17. ^ Kamiya, Gary (February 14, 2023). "Can One City Be a Microcosm of Everything That's Wrong?". The New York Times. Retrieved June 22, 2024.
  18. ^ "Malcolm Harris". The New Inquiry. Retrieved June 22, 2024. writer and editor living in Brooklyn
  19. ^ Maxton, Ian (April 2, 2020). "Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit: by Malcolm Harris". Spectrum Culture. Retrieved September 4, 2022.