Binge Drinking

Caitlin Flanagan offers a characteristically searching analysis of the roots of our binge drinking academic, tracing it to a new mode of parenting that she describes as “Get-Real Parenting.” But she recognizes that it has a deeper source than parenting style:

The hollowness at the center of their lives—the increasing abandonment of religion, the untethering of sexuality not just from relationships but even from kindness, the race to jump aboard the STEM express because that’s where the money is, the understanding of eventual parenthood as something that will be subordinated to the management of two successful careers, and the understanding that their own parents care so little about them that they will happily allow them to sustain the kind of moral injuries that blackout behavior often engenders—would make too much consciousness hard for anyone to take.