"A Signifier of Something Beyond Music"

"If you buy the idea that what the Britpop brand represents is optimism, positivity and youth culture winning without compromise then you can see its appeal to a 17-year-old in 2025. Who wouldn't hanker after the notion of a prelapsarian world before the scrutiny of social media, 9/11, the rise of the 'alt-right' et al? And the era’s 'fuck you, we're gonna have a good time' excesses look alluring in an age of wellness influencers and constant cameraphone surveillance."

Alexis Petridis at The Guardian attempts to "explain why we're all still in thrall to the ​m​ad-fer-it 90s."

And Chris DeVille at Stereogum writes after a Chicago concert that, "at long last, Oasis have conquered America."

While Steven Zeitchik at The Hollywood Reporter says that "Oasis Just Glitched the Algorithm."

And Alex Edelman at Rolling Stone describes an Oasis reunion concert as a "religious experience, if the religion was 'football hooligan.'"

X Doesn't Save the World

"Like all Gen X-ers, I have been confronted with the absence of my own generation's cohesion, and also, therefore, with the peculiar dilemma of having to choose the temporal direction by which I vacate the emptying space of my generation's tenure—either forward, into the company of younger cohorts who seem unaware that they have dark depths to themselves, and appear to believe that whatever darkness remains can be clarified by rules and language reforms; or backward, to the generation born in the shadow of the Bomb, who tried to break free no matter how blindly, and to discover their own depths no matter how sloppily. For all their foolishness, they knew they had depths, and often knew, wisely, that they were fools. So there is much to cherish from their world, and for a while now I have been trying to see whether we might salvage some of that earlier generation's legacy, and to ensure that it lives on."

At Harper's Magazine, Justin E.H. Smith writes that he is "feeling defeated, and it is a symptom of this defeat that I have withdrawn to live in the past."

Boomers' Rule, OK?

"Like, it's not the generation itself. It's just the fact that, like, the unwillingness to understand that things have changed, things are changing, and kind of keep it the way it is because it worked for them, assuming that it'll work for everyone else. And that's just not true."

Paul Solman at PBS NewsHour interviews Millennials about Baby Boomers.

And he adds interviews of Boomers themselves.

"The Gen X Investors and CEOs Who Run the Industry Are Stuck on the Idea That Private Money Will Protect Them from a Promised Hellscape"

"One way to respond to the Reaganite degradation of government and other public-sector institutions is to (1) get yours as fast and with as many zeroes as you can, and (2) tell yourself you're doing right and find motivated reasons to believe it. The idea of privately exploring space and privately colonizing Mars or other worlds as backups to Earth fits right in with this worldview. So does disrupting public goods (like money or transit) that you believe are doomed anyway. Collective action to preserve and improve these common goods requires coordination across centuries-old institutions—that's not easy to address through software, or without deeply human organizational work that Silicon Valley culture dismisses as 'soft skills.'"

Cyd Harrell at Wired writes that she has "come to recognize some of my generation's worst pathologies in the extractive, divisive models promoted by Silicon Valley's venture capital class."

"The Gap Between Their Intentions and Their Ultimate Impact"

"If there's hope, it lies with Gen X. They are the last people with any memory, any foot in the pre-boomer world. The boomers were not Gen X's parents and they weren't Gen X's teachers, and that keeps them anchored and gives them some spark of life. The boomers, by clogging up the career pipeline, have refused to get off the stage and give Gen X its moment. So even though Gen X is aging now, we still have not yet seen all that they can do. We have not seen a world run by Gen X-ers."

Sean Illing at Vox interviews Helen Andrews, author of Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. 

"Promising Liberation for Everyone but Meaningfully Delivering It Only for the Entitled"

"Scan American history and the element that is most unique to the boomers' experience is their prosperity. By the nineteen-sixties, the standard of living was doubling each generation, a rate that had probably never been reached before, anywhere in the world—and in the United States has not been reached again since. The generational optimism and hope for change may have less to do with anything so nebulous as culture; it may, more simply, be the product of getting suddenly and phenomenally rich."

At The New Yorker, Benjamin Wallace-Wells reviews Helen Andrews's Boomers.

"We've Grown Old Before Actually Getting Old"

"The thing is, we're in sort of a weird spot. We were raised in the pre-digital era, and our values were very much shaped by the analog world. Now we're having to contend with the post-digital era—not just contend with it but figure out how to sustain long lives and careers within it. Because we're not that old yet! But we are the last cohort to have known the world in its pre-digital form as adults. I mean, I worked jobs, as an adult, where there was no email and we were still using Rolodexes and Selectric typewriters alongside our giant computers. This was in the early 1990s, which wasn't that long ago. The pace at which things have changed is breathtaking, really. The result is that Gen Xers can sometimes sound like grouchy old people while we're still in our 40s."

Otis Houston at Los Angeles Review of Books interviews Meghan Daum.

"Could Warn Against the Hubris of the Present"

"If a Gen Xer doesn't win in 2020, there will be another chance in 2024. But by that time the field may be crowded with Millennials—born from 1981 to 1996—whose ranks include Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and rising Republican stars such as Representatives Dan Crenshaw and Matt Gaetz. Sandwiched between two larger and more politically consequential generations—Boomers and Millennials—Generation X may never produce a president at all."

In The Atlantic, Peter Beinart laments the fate of middle-aged politicians.

"How Many People Must Live in the Street Before We Can Build New Homes?"

"Apartment bans are a case of rich vs. poor, longtime resident vs. newcomer, and, all too often, white vs. black, but they are something else too: generational warfare, a showdown in which older homeowners are telling younger renters that there's no more room. Seen that way, the housing affordability crisis serves as a useful framework for understanding a handful of urgent American issues that have stalled out, particularly intraparty conflicts on the left like those over student debt and climate change. Whether by intention or simply in effect, it has begun to feel like the politics of an older generation saying, 'Fuck you, I got mine.'"

Henry Grabar at Slate argues that "[l]ike college debt and climate change, the housing affordability crisis is generational warfare."

"Jogger Clearly On First Run Of Plan To Turn Life Around"

"Witnesses reported seeing a red-faced Andreychuk gasping for air with his hands on his knees several minutes later, clearly entertaining the very first doubts about his resolve that will soon derail his grand plan to remake himself."

From The Onion, 2016.

"It's Really the White Middle-Class Boomers Who Exemplify All the Awful Characteristics and Behaviors That Have Defined This Generation"

"I'll give you something abstract and something concrete. On an abstract level, I think the worst thing they've done is destroy a sense of social solidarity, a sense of commitment to fellow citizens. That ethos is gone and it's been replaced by a cult of individualism. It's hard to overstate how damaging this is.
"On a concrete level, their policies of under-investment and debt accumulation have made it very hard to deal with our most serious challenges going forward. Because we failed to confront things like infrastructure decay and climate change early on, they've only grown into bigger and more expensive problems. When something breaks, it's a lot more expensive to fix than it would have been to just maintain it all along."

Sean Illing at Vox interviews Bruce Gibney, author of A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America.

"Might Be Our Last, Best Hope"

"In this way, the chain was broken, and the boomers went zooming into the chaos. Which explains the saving attitude of Generation X, those born between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s, say. We are a revolt against the boomers, a revolt against the revolt, a market correction, a restoration not of a power elite but of a philosophy. I always believed we had more in common with the poets haunting the taverns on 52nd Street at the end of the 30s than with the hippies at Woodstock. Cynical, wised up, sane. We'd seen what became of the big projects of the boomers as that earlier generation had seen what became of all the big social projects. As a result we could not stand to hear the Utopian talk of the boomers as we cannot stand to hear the Utopian talk of the millennials. We know that most people are rotten to the core, but some are good, and proceed accordingly."

Rich Cohen at Vanity Fair argues that "it's Generation X that will be called the greatest."

Baby Busters

"It's increasingly clear that Generation X, and possibly millennials, haven't learned from the boomers' mistakes. My son will rightly criticize me someday for my generation's love of SUVs. He’ll probably wonder why he has to pay higher taxes or work several more years just to get a retirement that's worse than my dad's or maybe even mine.
"Every generation wants to leave a better world for the ones to follow. I truly believe that boomers had no idea, for a long time, that the sum of their choices—of their quest to make life as good as it could be for themselves—might be a worse world for their children. But it's apparent now."

Jim Tankersley in The Washington Post calls on baby boomers to sacrifice for the future.

I Wore My Fringe Like Roger McGuinn's

"Guillory's jeremiad against bangs—that they require too much effort; that they cause forehead acne; that they de-emphasize your nose at the expense of your eyes; that on the continuum of hairstyle-based regret and childish regression, they presumably rank somewhere near the mullets-and-fauxhawks section—inspired hosannas, rebukes, soul-searching, and a whole lot of digging-up of old childhood pictures. Outpourings of memories! Bowls came up a lot, and also perspiration, as well as existential anxieties about the relationship between being and time."

Staffers at Slate recall their experiences with bangs.

"A Social Arrangement That Is Legal, but Not Moral"

"If people groaning under the weight of student loans simply said, 'Enough,' then all the pieties about debt that have become absorbed into all the pieties about higher education might be brought into alignment with reality. Instead of guaranteeing loans, the government would have to guarantee a college education. There are a lot of people who could learn to live with that, too."


Lee Siegel in The New York Times argues that college graduates should stop paying off their student loans.

Whatever Happened to the Frat Pack?

"And this, perhaps, is why the last gasp of the Pack–Zoolander 2, which Stiller and Wilson teased this week on the Valentino catwalk–may just be a stroke of genius. Derek and Hansel were aware they were ageing models ripe for the recycling bin in the first film. Fifteen years on, their plight mirrors that of the actors playing them. Maybe there’s pathos in going out of fashion."


Benjamin Lee in The Guardian looks at the titans of 2000s' comedy.

"Increasingly Desperate Advertisers Settle For More Attainable 35-To-44-Year-Old Demographic"

"Pfeiffer then reassured herself that she and her clients could do a lot worse, pointing to Tommy Bahama's 'sad' long-term relationship with 45-to-60-year-old single males with annual incomes of less than $50,000."


From The Onion.

"Sometimes Economic Forces Really Do Shape the Cultural Zone"

"You can almost feel Scott manfully struggling to resist lamenting the fact that no one knows how to dress for dinner anymore, or how to mix a cocktail that isn't some funny color. Even as he complains about middle-aged men wearing flip-flops, or female colleagues wearing plastic barrettes in their hair (the horror!), he tries to fend off charges that he’s a 'scold, snob or curmudgeon' with self-mockery, admitting that his instinctual responses to such phenomena are 'absurd,' 'impotent' and 'out of touch.' His piece is full of astute 'aha' moments–I particularly admire the connection he draws between the man-child heroes of classic American literature, the anxious bro-comedies of Judd Apatow et al., and the critique of male privilege embedded in the persona of Louis C.K. But by the end he finds himself pinned on the horns of a dilemma, clearly displeased with 'the general immaturity of contemporary culture' but not quite willing to reject its ethos of perennial liberation, borderless exploration and 'perpetual flux,' no doubt for fear of looking like a hopeless troglodyte.
"This fundamental confusion and ambivalence reflects a deep-seated blind spot, I would argue, one that’s endemic to the culture-vulture trade. Scott carefully anatomizes the trees but misses the forest, or to speak more precisely ignores the condition of the soil. There really is something beneath his 'death of adulthood' premise, whether or not you like the prejudicial phrase. But to coin a phrase: It's the economy, stupid."


In Salon, Andrew O'Hehir responds to A.O. Scott's New York Times essay “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture.”

"Man Cautiously Avoids Barnes & Noble Section Where Teens Check Out Graphic Novels"

"'I really don’t want to go over there,' said Gannon, adding that he would prefer to avoid asking the lip-pierced, teenage girl with a ski cap covering her dyed-red hair if she would please move her backpack so he could browse the shelves. 'I’ll just pretend to browse the Business and Money section until they leave.'"

From The Onion.

"Paul Lynde Impersonation Lost On Daughter's Friends"

"After dropping the girls off at school, Ammons stared into his car's rear-view mirror at the crow's feet developing around his eyes."

From The Onion, 2002.