Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

Our culture is obsessed with youth--and why not? What's the appeal of growing old, of gaining responsibilities and giving up on dreams, of steadily trading possibility for experience?

The philosopher Susan Neiman argues that the absence of appealing models of maturity is not an accident: by describing life as a downhill process, we prepare young people to expect--and demand--very little from it. In Why Grow Up?, she challenges our culture of permanent adolescence, turning to thinkers includi...