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Nona Willis Aronowitz

Nona Willis Aronowitz is a journalist and Pipeline fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

Recent Articles

Young Detroiters Double Down

Nona Willis AronowitzJul 30, 2013
The American Prospect/Aaron Cassara
Courtesy Margarita Barry Margarita Barry This is the last installment of a four-part series on millennials and the new economy, based on the author’s monthlong road trip with stops in the Rust Belt, Omaha, and Texas. Read the first , second , and third . M argarita Barry was nursing her eight-month-old and browsing the news online when a headline caught her eye: “Detroit Declares Bankruptcy.” Pretty soon, her inbox and Facebook feed were clogged with reports from family and friends sharing the news that Detroit had become the largest U.S. city ever to file for Chapter Nine. Barry, a 28-year-old web designer and entrepreneur who was born and raised on the northwest side of the city, knew it would happen eventually. “It was only a matter of when,” she says. Much ink has been spilled over the infiltration of young, educated transplants to Detroit—a youth hostel here, a craft cocktail bar there, a co-working space downtown purchased for pennies on the dollar. But the bankruptcy hints that...

Coming Home for the Recession

Nona Willis AronowitzJul 19, 2013
AP Photo/Bob Leverone
AP Photo/Bob Leverone This is the third installment of a four-part series on Millennials and the new economy, based on the author’s monthlong road trip with stops in the Rust Belt, Omaha, and Texas. Read the first and second . O ne mosquito-heavy evening in May, I met 30-year-old Pat Valdez near San Antonio’s old Lone Star brewery. Valdez makes $15 an hour working in the human-resources department of Wells Fargo. She takes classes part-time at an online university, where she hopes to earn a degree in journalism. With $30,000 in student-loan debt, she’s living paycheck to paycheck. But unlike other Millennials struggling to make ends meet on their own, she’s not in dire straits. After a short, “way too expensive” stint in California living with her older brother, she’s back at home with her parents. She suspects that some people from her South Side neighborhood think she is following the example of many other women in more traditional Hispanic families: staying home until she marries...

The Recession That Always Was

Nona Willis AronowitzJul 10, 2013
Nona Willis Aronowitz
Nona Willis Aronowitz Young fast-food and retail workers demonstrate on the streets of Milwaukee This is the second installment of a four-part series on Millennials and the new economy, based on the author’s monthlong road trip with stops in the Rust Belt, Omaha, and Texas. Read the first . T his past May, I visited Milwaukee and spent the day with a few young startup founders. You know the types: college-educated twenty-somethings who, upon graduating into a terrible job market, decided to create their own jobs instead. Bright, organized, and creative, they are the kind of Millennials often held up as the scrappy saviors of our brave new economic world. They told me how affordable Milwaukee was, especially compared to the city’s pricier neighbor, Chicago. Angela Damiani, director of NEWaukee, a networking organization for young professionals, and a homeowner at 27, observed that “if you want to start a business or follow a pipe dream, Milwaukee is the type of place you can do that,...

Bright Kids, Small City

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania has long been the sort of place where you grew up and got out. But with fewer opportunities elsewhere, many young people are choosing to stay.

Nona Willis AronowitzJul 01, 2013
Amanda Owens/Makespace
Amanda Owens/Makespace This is the first installment of a four-part series on Millennials and the new economy, based on the author’s monthlong road trip with stops in the Rust Belt, Omaha, and Texas. A fter 24-year-old Sam Melville graduated from a small arts school 20 minutes outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, she made a beeline for Los Angeles, where she hoped to make it in the film industry. She scored a production internship and was excited to put her film degree to good use. But she spent most of her time working at a frozen yogurt shop 30 hours a week for minimum wage, a night job that was an hour-and-a-half bus ride from her house. She was scraping by, but her career was going nowhere. She didn’t have time to meet anyone. And she certainly didn’t have time to work on her own projects. A few months later, she decided to move back to Harrisburg. “I knew I’d have a social life there, and I knew it was cheap,” Melville said. Now working at a sandwich shop, “I make about the same...

Mo' Children, Mo' Problems

Are the parents of only children selfish? Maybe, but Lauren Sandler’s new book says that's okay.

Nona Willis AronowitzJun 14, 2013
Courtesy of Nona Willis Aronowitz
Courtesy of Nona Willis Aronowitz The author with her mother, feminist and author Ellen Willis, and father, professor and labor activist Stanley Aronowitz in 1986 W hen I was around six years old, I begged my parents for a younger sister. When she failed to materialize, I dreamed up Shelly, who showed up in family portraits I drew in art class with a frilly dress and a Pebbles ponytail. When friends came over, I told them she was with the babysitter. At school, I bragged about my bottle-feeding skills. After my teacher made a concerned phone call about my lies, my mother—a journalist and feminist activist who had me at 42—sat me on her lap, and we had a surprisingly candid conversation about why she wasn’t going to have another baby. In her late 40s, she could have copped out and told me that biology wouldn’t let her. Instead, she brushed a curl from my face and said: “We’re happy with just you.” I thought about this moment halfway through Lauren Sandler’s new book, One and Only: The...

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