Why Did You Write This Book?

Available October 17th
https://amzn.to/3RFCJ86

The Canceling of the American Mind
Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All—But There Is a Solution
By Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott

About the book:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Canceling-of-the-American-Mind/Greg-Lukianoff/9781668019146

Greg Lukianoff:
I really wanted to write with Rikki because we I could tell that we were going to make a really great team writing. And what we originally were planning to do, or at least what I was thinking about proposing, was that, "The Coddling of the American Mind," my book with the wonderful Jonathan Haidt that came out in 2018, talks a lot about mental health problems created by social media and parenting and all sorts of other issues that overwhelmingly affects Gen Z women.

But meanwhile, both me and Haidt are Generation X, so having a young woman who actually can attest to this and give some of her own experiences like, oh great, we're going to write a following up to “The Coddling of the American Mind” that's going to go deeper into the themes that we had in there. But we decided to make it specifically about cancel culture because as we were working together, I realized that there were still people out there who are trying to claim that cancel culture doesn't even exist.

And I'm like, I'm sorry. I've been working on campuses for 22 years. I have never seen it as bad as it's been since the beginning of cancel culture, which we say is about 2014. It got much worse, particularly for professors in 2017 and 2020, and 2021 were some of the worst years for academic freedom in history. So I felt like we had to basically prove once and for all that this is happening, that this is historic, and it doesn't have to be this way.