What Happened to Millennials by Charlie Wells

Join us for a conversation with award-winning reporter Charlie Wells to launch his new book, a deeply reported look at the millennial generation that draws on the experiences of five diverse individuals and explores where we go from here.

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From an award-winning journalist, a reflective, smart, and deeply reported look at the millennial generation that draws on the experiences of five diverse individuals and explores where we go from here

What happened to millennials? At the birth of America’s largest living generation, the outlook was strong: unparalleled economic growth, the emerging Internet, the rise of the cell phone, and a geopolitics that had allegedly reached “the end of history” all set expectations exceedingly high for a cohort entering adulthood at the dawn of the new millennium. That adulthood—a work in progress for more than a quarter century—has been disrupted by war, recession, pandemic, and a sharp turn toward cultural and economic polarization. It has also been endlessly critiqued by others as immature, lazy, weak, incomplete, selfish, and supposedly riddled with failure.

Now, 25 years after the first millennials began turning 18, Bloomberg News reporter Charlie Wells comes to the generation’s defense with a cultural history of an adulthood disrupted. Drawing on hundreds of hours of intimate interviews with five millennials from across the country, he explores how the biggest events, ideas, and transformations of the century played out in private lives. Between the data points and statistical studies, news reports and archival records, his brutally honest, on-the-record conversations about love, loss, work, addiction, tragedy, and sacrifice reveal how a generation once minimized can no longer be ignored.

What Happened to Millennials charts a path from our nostalgic past to a better future, shaped by the challenges we have surmounted, the people we have loved, and the adults we have become.

Photo Credit: Ivan Weiss

CHARLIE WELLS is an award-winning reporter at Bloomberg News who has covered finance, tech, real estate, and culture. Before Bloomberg, he spent five years at The Wall Street Journal and then four at The Economist. He is a regular contributor to Bloomberg Television, radio, and podcasts and has moderated major conference panels and appeared on the BBC, Al Jazeera, Fox Business, and other major national and local US networks.

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