I Won’t Grow Up
If the conversation around “adulting” hits a nerve, meet Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska.
Sasse is concerned with what he regards as the slow-to-nonexistent development of independent and thriving adults in the US and has written a book on the subject, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis–and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample). It is zooming up the Amazon rankings, thanks to his appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation yesterday and CBS This Morning today, moving from #43 to #7.
He tells Face the Nation‘s John Dickerson, “this book is 100 percent not about politics, and it’s 99 percent not about policy. It’s about this new category of perpetual adolescence.” However, as one of the Republicans who expressed reservations about the firing of James Comey as Director of the FBI, that subject dominates the interview. Sasse finally gets to promote the book towards the end, saying it’s about the recent phenomenon of “perpetual adolescence …Peter Pan’s Neverland is a hell … we don’t want [to] have our kids caught at a place where they’re not learning how to be adults.”
He followed up with an appearance on CBS This Morning, which also focused on the firing of Comey.
Sasse is making the media rounds. He is scheduled to appear tonight on Late Night with Seth Meyers. He has been on NPR’s On Point, the NYT has an interview, Sasse himself writes an essay for the Wall Street Journal (subscription maybe required), MarketWatch offers a summary, and Time covers it in an article titled “Ben Sasse Explains Why His New Book Is Really, Truly Not About Running for President.”