Apartment Look

At the end of one sticky month during the summer of 2017, Elizabeth Bolles will have finished packing the contents of her Riverbend apartment. She, her partner, their two young sons and two dogs will then pile into her Subaru and drive 350 miles to Houston, where her partner will start a new job.   The move is the upshot of six years of frustration and disappointment for Bolles since she graduated from Tulane University's law school in 2011. Since then, she's struggled to find a well-paying job in New Orleans; she's been runner-up for several positions and has worked odd jobs and short-term gigs to make ends meet . She's in the same boat as many of her friends and acquaintances in the city — a one- time National Merit Scholar who's been waiting tables for a decade, a buddy with two doctorates who can't find a professional job .   "You hear one person's story," Bolles says, "and you think maybe there's something going on with them, maybe...

by Jean M. Twenge Jean M. Twenge has been writing about generational differences for 25 years, producing bestsellers like Generation Me and The Narcissism Epidemic . In her latest book, Twenge zeroes in on iGen, the kids born in 1995 and later who have grown up with smartphones, had an Instagram page before they started high school and do not remember a time before the internet. The average teen checks her phone more than 80 times a day. The oldest iGen-ers, as she calls them, were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced in 2007 and high school students when the iPad entered the market in 2010. Twenge argues the complete dominance of the smartphone among teens has had ripple effects across every area of iGen-er lives, from their social interactions to their mental health. Twenge draws on national surveys of 11 million Americans, conducted since 1960, to reach her conclusions. From about 2012, she started seeing "large, abrupt shifts in teens' behaviour and emoti...