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"Boomerang Kids, Anxious Parents, and the Private Toll of Global Competition" (Encore presentation.)

Aired on Wednesday, May 2nd.
Aired on Wednesday, May 2nd.

On today's show, which originally aired earlier this year, we offer a conversation with Katherine Newman, Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, who's written several books on middle-class economic instability, urban poverty, and the sociology of inequality. Newman's newest book is "The Accordion Family: Boomerang Kids, Anxious Parents, and the Private Toll of Global Competition." It's a well-written, deeply researched study that basically sets out to answer one question: Why are so many adults in their twenties and thirties still living in their parents' homes . . . in the world's wealthiest countries? As the noted economic scholar and author (and frequent public radio commentator) Robert B. Reich has written: "Newman [here] identifies a previously unexamined casualty of the new global economy --- the prolonged dependence of adult children on their families. The resulting 'accordion family,' as she calls it, is emerging all over the developed world due to declining job prospects for young people, increasingly expensive higher education, and the increasing costs of living on one's own. The responses to this trend --- social, political, and economic --- will shape generations to come. [This book is] brilliant and important."

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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