Michelle Janning

Between Michelle Janning

We are bombarded by extremes. Life is presented to us in our social media feeds,
by our politicians, and sometimes by our opinionated friends and relatives as if
every issue were simple and only open to two opposing sides. In our real experiences,
though, we often find ourselves between things -- between opinions,
between places where we spend our time, between identities, between moods,
between life stages, between networks of people, and even between preferences
for clothing styles, food, and furniture. Between: Living Life in Neither Extreme
takes issues that emerge from the news, popular culture, and the author's past
and present experiences and plops them into a set of essays that reflect the reality
of our complex and messy lives. From family life to politics, from body
issues to the workplace, each essay contains bits of sociological wisdom from
the author, who has spent the last two decades helping students learn about the
blurred boundaries of our everyday social lives.