Rinere, herself a first-generation college student, was an administrator at Princeton, Harvard and Columbia; she’s also an adept teacher, entertaining us with other people’s tales of triumph and woe. She does a particularly good job of looking at worst-case scenarios. What if your child gets in nowhere? What if your child refuses to sign the FERPA form? And what the hell is a FERPA form? (Everyone knows that medical information for people over 18 is private, but so are a young adult’s grades … unless he or she signs a waiver. Wonder what that waiver is going to cost me.)

We’re all trained to think about how our kids are going to deal with drinking and drugs at school, but Rinere raises a less-discussed but still critical subject: What about those kids who are trying to break with the past and want to go off prescribed medication? Without hijacking the focus on your child, Rinere also tackles some of the questions parents are asking about themselves — with the emphasis on diving more enthusiastically back into your own life, especially your work life, given the bills you may be facing. It’s not just your kid who has to think about the future.

Do you want to learn your geopolitics from the same people who teach you how to keep your necklaces from tangling when you travel? Then, unquestionably, HOW TO SKIMM YOUR LIFE (Ballantine, $27), by Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg, the women behind the popular newsletter theSkimm, is for you. That newsletter describes itself as “a membership company dedicated to helping female millennials live smarter lives,” a task it seemingly accomplishes by offering tips about functioning adult behavior in no discernible order. Instructions on how to pair wine with food and how to clean your toilet are in adjacent chapters. Still, both are valuable skills. So while the book’s organization may be a bit random, the information itself is often valid and amusingly packaged.

I do think, however, there’s some information it’s safe to know just a teeny bit about, and some that requires more depth. For instance, this is how theSkimm summarizes foreign interference in the 2016 election: “Then it came out that Russian hackers had attempted to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election in favor of President Trump. Cue an investigation into whether people on Team Trump colluded with Russia. The investigation found no evidence of collusion.”

Well, not really! Sometimes it helps to know the difference between “no evidence” and “not provable in a court of law.” This is why the Mueller Report isn’t the kind of thing you want to “skimm.” On the bright side, though, I now know how to fold a fitted sheet and why not to recycle a pizza box. So thanks, ladies.