Malcolm Harris

Malcolm Harris
Harris in 2023
Born1988 (age 37–38)
Santa Cruz, California, U.S.
EducationUniversity of Maryland
Occupations
  • Journalist
  • critic
  • editor

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

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 Palo Alto after his family moved there while he was in grade school. He is both of Jewish and Irish heritage. He graduated from the University of Maryland in 2010.[citation needed]

Career

Harris is an editor at the online magazine The New Inquiry. He has also contributed pieces to the magazine on Zionism as white nationalism, capitalist schooling, accelerationism, and prison theater companies.

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 Tweets 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 the United Kingdom too.

In 2020, he released Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History, a collection of essays written from 2010 to 2019 about the worsening of general life and politics in that decade, through topics such as gender, wages, millenials, Marx, and popular media.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Harris spent time writing about his home town of Palo Alto, California. 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 in Silicon Valley. One review of the book said that it is “nominally a history, but it is really a work of grand theory [...] Marxism” and describes a “capitalist horror show.”

His 2025 book What's Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis focuses on the climate crisis and the options available for averting it: markets, collective action, and communism.

Personal life

He lives in the East Coast of the U.S.

Publications

References

  1. 1 2 Babendir, Bradley (November 7, 2017). "'Kids These Days' Convinces You That Millennials Aren't Ruining Everything". wbur. Archived from the original on September 28, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  2. 1 2 3 Koshy, Yohann (November 3, 2017). "Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris — no free brunch". Financial Times. Archived from the original on September 28, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Romanoff, Zan (February 20, 2023). "Silicon Valley Is Everywhere". Alta On Line. San Francisco. Retrieved June 22, 2024.
  4. ↑ Olunkwa, Emmanuel (May 2023). "Malcolm Harris". novembermag.com. Retrieved June 17, 2026.
  5. ↑ Gilens, Naomi (September 14, 2012). "Twitter Forced to Hand Over Occupy Wall Street Protester Info". American Civil Liberties Union. Retrieved June 17, 2026.
  6. ↑ Baesemann, Ryan (February 14, 2023). "Palo Alto, Disinterred: An Interview with Malcolm Harris". Cleveland Review of Books. Retrieved June 17, 2026.
  7. ↑ "Hachettte profile: Malcolm Harris". Hachette Book Group. June 28, 2017. Retrieved June 28, 2023.
  8. ↑ Illing, Sean (February 4, 2019). "Why are millennials burned out? Capitalism". Vox. Archived from the original on October 7, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  9. ↑ Harris, Malcolm (April 15, 2015). "Justice in One Country". The New Inquiry. Retrieved June 17, 2026.
  10. ↑ Harris, Malcolm (March 18, 2016). "Reform School". The New Inquiry. Retrieved June 17, 2026.
  11. ↑ Harris, Malcolm (July 14, 2014). "Turn Down for What?". The New Inquiry. Retrieved June 17, 2026.
  12. ↑ Harris, Malcolm (August 5, 2013). "Drama for Cannibals". The New Inquiry. Retrieved June 17, 2026.
  13. ↑ Barekat, Houman (November 13, 2017). "Kids These Days and iGen: two competing visions of what makes a millennial". The New Statesman. Archived from the original on September 28, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  14. ↑ Buettner, Russ (December 12, 2012). "Malcolm Harris Pleads Guilty Over 2011 March". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on September 28, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  15. ↑ Ax, Joseph (September 11, 2012). "Judge: Twitter Must Turn Over Protester's Tweets Or Face Hefty Fine". HuffPost. Archived from the original on August 2, 2022. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  16. ↑ Zetterv, Kim (August 27, 2012). "Twitter Fights Back to Protect 'Occupy Wall Street' Protester". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Archived from the original on July 15, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  17. ↑ Williams, Matt (September 14, 2012). "Twitter complies with prosecutors to surrender Occupy activist's tweets". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on July 17, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  18. ↑ Moe, John (July 3, 2012). "Judge orders release of protester's tweets". Marketplace. Retrieved June 17, 2026.
  19. ↑ Couts, Andrew (July 3, 2012). "Anything you say publicly on Twitter can be used against you in a court of law". Digital Trends. Retrieved June 17, 2026.
  20. ↑ Harris, Malcolm (July 28, 2016). "The Right to Have Remained Silent". Real Life. Retrieved June 17, 2026.
  21. ↑ Bamburic, Mihăiță (July 20, 2012). "Twitter fights for its users". BetaNews. Retrieved June 17, 2026.
  22. ↑ Shine, Jacqui (November 26, 2017). "Won't Get Fooled Again: Malcolm Harris's "Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials"". Los Angeles Review of Books. Archived from the original on September 28, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  23. ↑ Dunbar, Mark (April 26, 2018). "Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials". TheHumanist.com. Archived from the original on September 28, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  24. ↑ Mehta, Stephanie (January 5, 2018). "Knocking down generalizations about the millennial generation". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Archived from the original on June 5, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  25. ↑ Petersen, Anne Helen (January 5, 2019). "How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation". BuzzFeed News. Archived from the original on September 28, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  26. ↑ Lennard, Natasha (Winter 2018). "The Kids Aren't Alright". Dissent Magazine. Archived from the original on September 28, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.
  27. ↑ Maxton, Ian (April 2, 2020). "Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit: by Malcolm Harris". Spectrum Culture. Retrieved September 4, 2022.
  28. ↑ Kamiya, Gary (February 14, 2023). "Can One City Be a Microcosm of Everything That's Wrong?". The New York Times. Retrieved June 22, 2024.
  29. ↑ "WHAT'S LEFT". Kirkus Reviews. February 13, 2025.
  30. ↑ "Malcolm Harris". The New Inquiry. July 6, 2016. Retrieved June 22, 2024. writer and editor living in Brooklyn