I have read previous work of Daum and was interested in this new release. It is pretty much as I expected. I would have like a different tone for some pieces, it was really just the same exhausting content page after page.

I never heard of Megan Daum prior to this book, but many of the reviews I've found are critical this book doesn't match her previous writing. Without reading her previous writing, I had nothing to compare to, and I can see why this book upset some people.

Daum criticises Cancel Culture and the mind set that accompanies it. She names names. She reflects on the history of feminism in the US. She identifies the echo chambers that allowed Trump to win the 2016 election while a favorite in most states yet still surprise people who assumed everyone thought like they did.

Anyone in one of the echo chambers is going to be offended... Might be good for you.

While I don't agree with some of what Daum says, I appreciate an intelligent argument from the other side. Either I can argue against it, proving I'm right, or I can't beat the argument, and I need to reevaluate my beliefs.

In her newest book, author and essayist Meghan Daum takes on the hot button issues of the day including the #metoo movement, identity politics and political correctness. As a liberal feminist who doesn’t follow a script, she is provocative and self-aware, recognizing her own inner conflicts and lack of sureness about the myriad cultural controversies. The lack of sureness is her central point. And as a champion of nuance – for which she and other writers and public intellectuals are often vilified - she believes more of us should be embracing complexity rather than taking a “virtue signaling” stand on social media that feeds a destructive tribalism. As serious as her subject matter is, she writes with humor, and especially in her final pages, poignancy.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for allowing me to read this ARC!

"In a free society, everyone, regardless of gender, or any other identification, is free to be a manipulative, narcissistic, emotionally destructive asshole." That doesn't sound like good news, but it turns out to be a refreshing call for fair treatment across gender lines.

Meghan Daum's "The Problem with Everything" was one of the strangest and most enlightening reading experiences I've had all year. The book begins in New York City in the 1990s and though I was initially put off by the writer (I felt that her personal anecdotes were crowding out the message) I ended the book wishing we could be friends.

Noting that current female rage is about "stopping the world as we've known it in its tracks," Daum questions how we got here by taking readers back to the androgyny of the 1970s. She then turns a critical eye on the 1980s where a surge of women entering the workforce competed with cultural warnings about kidnappings and latchkey kids.

Writing that “contemporary feminism has turned womanhood into another kind of childhood, one inculcated with the same kind of fear and paranoid that haunted the children of the 1980s," Daum looks at the divide between generations of feminists (and helped this reader clarify a great many thoughts I've been unable to articulate). The new "badass" fourth wave feminists are indicted for eschewing toughness in favor of a weaponized thin skin, crudeness, feminism as commodity and “reinforcing the idea of persecuted woman."

Daum investigates toxic masculinity and the toxic feminine, resistance as performance art, campus rape culture, respectability politics, why feminists should stop being so very crude, and #MeToo, as well as the current tendency to document, narrate, and react to everything - which can erase nuance, debate, and cognitive dissonance - to everyone's peril. Wondering if it is technology which has created the divide between generations of feminists, Daum writes that her generation "all grew up holding books in our hands. We called our friends from pay phones and negotiated sexual situations without technological assistance and registered opinions without being smacked down on social media moments later. We made mistakes in private and, in turn, respected the privacy of others in their mistakes." In the end, she doesn't offer any easy answers - least of all turning back the clock - but she notes that we're blessed to be able to negotiate these problems and search for answers. This text should provide instructors, especially, with topics for lively discussion!

I didn’t really like this book.it was kind of nuts and I didn’t know how to react. I also didn’t know how to review it, honestly. I got an advance copy fro Netgalley and part of the deal is providing reviews. I kind of feel like it would have been better as some essays brought together in a compendium.

I was given an advance copy of this book by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I read everything Meghan Daum writes, and have been a fan of her writing for more than 20 years. She often displays insights into the human condition that I'm so glad to be exposed to. So I was eager to read her tract on the oversimplified, overdichotomized social and political landscape of today, I agree wholeheartedly with her criticism that there is a lack of nuance in the beliefs that we liberals feel "allowed" to express.

And yet, at times in this book, it seems like Daum has a bit of trouble expressing herself. That's understandable, since these topics are tough to grapple with. Some of her assertions serve as perfect examples of how you just can't question the status quo without sounding like one of THEM. A couple of times, she sounded just like the "men's rights activists" we love to hate.

But at least she tries, which is more than I can say for most people. She is really thinking, which, as she argues, we all should do.

I love a good essay or two about virtue signalling and the dangers of absolutes in the age of tribalism. This book reminded me of a few essays in Jia Tolentino's "Trick Mirror." Like "Trick Mirror," though, I felt this book could have been shorter.

Daum's writing is humorous and nuanced, providing a refreshing take on the end-all, be-all virtue of political correctness in the "woke culture" that liberals exist in today. However, I felt like she repeats a lot of opinions throughout the book. I found myself skimming the bulk of a few essays just to get to the meat of them, or to find something different being said.

This is a tough one. I completely get where she's coming from - people are quick to full-on outrage on social media without waiting for all the facts first, and nuance is lacking. And she still has the great ability to relate bigger social issues to her own experiences in relevant, interesting ways. I also think it's helpful to hear Gen X perspectives on topics that are more of millennial issues. But they just feel a bit scattered and not completely fleshed out. She mentions that she wrote and rewrote and had to change topics of the book entirely after Hillary Clinton lost the election, and unfortunately that change of focus is felt pretty heavily. It doesn't capture the magic that many of her previous essays, like in The Unspeakable, have, but it has some interesting points and especially the argument for nuance is worthwhile.

Meghan Daum's The Problem with Everything is a mess, but at least it knows it. The book opens with back-to-back apologetic messages, one a letter from Gallery Books's Aimée Bell and the other the introduction by Daum, that serve to strap you in for the ride. Daum's intention was to write a pure critique of modern feminism, with the election of Hillary Clinton as the jumping-off point, but Donald Trump's surprise win, along with a few surprise developments in Daum's personal life, threw the project off course. The final product is a ... meditation (Yeah, that'll do) on everything you see on the book's cover: the MeToo movement, rape culture, misogyny, gaslighting, call-out culture, safe spaces, social justice, you name it. Yes, feminism, too.

At its most focused, The Problem with Everything reads like The Coddling of the American Mind minus the charts and as told by an excitable narrator. Where Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff acknowledged numerous times that the highly sensitive college students who began making news in 2015 for yelling at professors over Halloween costumes were perhaps just a blip on the radar, Daum has you believe that the hysterics of Twitter is the new normal, that it all doesn't simply vanish when you, say, close your laptop and go to the grocery store. By the time the book reaches its keep-calm-and-carry-on final paragraphs, you wonder what the big deal was in the first place.

Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery Books for the ARC in exchange for this review.