"Upon completing [David Lodge's] A Man of Parts and Girl Land, the new offering from Caitlin Flanagan, I know that our young girls are in extreme peril: if they are not succored by their families, they will wind up in nude animal ecstasy with H.G. Wells." —Lydia Kiesling, you say that as if it is a bad thing.

Brace yourself. Caitlin Flanagan has an exceedingly perceptive and well-done essay in the Atlantic! Sure, there is a psychologically deep-seated and somewhat deranged whiff of/riff on gender essentialism (boys like Hunter Thompson and girls like Joan Didion!), but hey, that's at least a little true. For one thing, she draws well the obvious connections that Didion and John Gregory Dunne were the most extreme caricatures of their generation of parents (in short: rather terrible), the parents who made their childrens' generation into helicoptering nightmares.

David: I need a haircut, Maria. I look like a duckling right now.

Maria: And a stiff drink, if you listened to that radio interview with Caitlin Flanagan, like we were supposed to. Evidently the women of America had calmed down too much since her last book, To Hell With All That, caused such a ruckus over what was widely perceived as the author's throwback and essentialist anti-feminist ideology. So not content to get people in a stir with Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker appearances, she's written a new one, Girl Land. Even the cover of which is pretty provoking.

All these moms are fine [...]

Although Caitlin Flanagan has sketchily rewritten history (the teen pregnancy and abortion rate was much higher in the 70s than it is now!), her lament about "the coarseness of contemporary sexual culture and its impact on the souls of teenage girls" is still emotionally true, writes… Ross Douthat.

I have no idea why they're covering it now, more than six months after it was released, and it goes completely off the rails about halfway through, as is the case with pretty much everything the reviewer writes, but Caitlin Flanagan's take on the Alec Baldwin divorce memoir in the current issue of the Atlantic does deserve points for this lead: Alec Baldwin's A Promise to Ourselves proceeds from a double-pronged thesis: that American divorce laws are deeply flawed, and that Kim Basinger is a crazy bitch.

While you're over there, check out "The Quiet Coup," a former IMF economist's scary-as-shit assessment of the current economic crisis and [...]