Malcolm Harris

Malcolm Harris
Harris in 2023
Born	1988 (age 37–38) Santa Cruz, California, U.S.
Alma mater	University of Maryland
Occupations	Journalist critic editor

Malcolm Harris (born 1988) is an American journalist, critic, and editor based on the East Coast.

He is an editor at The New Inquiry and wrote Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials (2017) and Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (2023). Harris was involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Early life and education

Harris was born in Santa Cruz, California, and grew up in nearby Palo Alto after his family moved there while he was in grade school. He graduated from the University of Maryland in 2010.

Career

Harris is an editor at the online magazine The New Inquiry.

Harris was "heavily involved" in the Occupy Wall Street movement. In 2012, he pleaded guilty and was convicted of disorderly conduct for his participation in an October 2011 Occupy protest on the Brooklyn Bridge. The court case became "a significant focus of attention for its involvement of posts to social networking sites and legal arguments over who controls that material", as the prosecution sought to undermine his defense using his own Twitter posts which he had deleted.

Harris's 2017 book, Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials, is a social critique of American millennials as human capital. In it, he explores the economic, social, and political conditions and institutions that nurtured American millennials and shaped them into a distinct group. Yohann Koshy wrote in the Financial Times that Harris argues that "society conspires to make life worse for young people", that "millennials are producing lots of value at work that is not reflected in job quality or wages", and that much of this applies to Britain too.

During the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020, Harris devoted time to writing about his home town, Palo Alto, California. He felt that he did not understand his home state or the suburb of Palo Alto until he left for college on the East Coast, at the University of Maryland. The resulting book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, which was published in February 2023, details the history of that city and its role in the 21st-century U.S. economy, which is largely defined by the Internet and the electronic devices produced by people, companies and financial capital in Silicon Valley. One review of the book said that it was “nominally a history, but it is really a work of grand theory … Marxism” and describes a “capitalist horror show,” with little positive balance to the book's criticisms of the faults of capitalism.

Personal life

He lives in the East Coast of US, including Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn, New York.

See also

• Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman

External links

• Malcolm Harris on Twitter
• Harris' writing at The New Inquiry
• Harris' writing at Pacific Standard