"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.