What Kids Know That Grown-Ups Forget

Growing up is supposed to mean getting wiser. So why does it so often feel like losing something you can’t quite name?

Julian Shapiro-Barnum, the creator of Recess Therapy, thinks kids still have some of the answers. In How to Grow Up Without Becoming a Grown-Up, he asks what happens when we trade emotional honesty, imagination, and hope for the version of adulthood we think we’re supposed to perform.

Then historian Tobias Becker takes the other side of that longing in Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia: why we keep reaching for the past...