As Stein himself points out, “in the US, millennials are the children of the baby boomers, who are also known as the Me generation.” Well, yes, let’s look at that a bit, shall we? In his excellent book Ill Fares the Land, Tony Judt makes a compelling argument that there’s a direct causal link between the individualism of the ‘60s and ‘70s and the hyper-individualism of the ‘80s and ‘90s – both are the product of a philosophy that placed the one above the many, the only difference being as the starry-eyed flower-waving of the hippie years ossified into the disinterested materialism of the yuppie years, any measure of idealism was replaced by flat-out, me-first cyncism. The result was that the baby boomers had it all, bless them – the pre-AIDS years of free love, the free education, the happy dilettantish flirtations with radicalism, the comfortable well-paid sinecures when the radicalism got tired, the big cars, the enduring sense of smugness, the tiresome Woodstock-centric mythology that still dominates popular cultural discourse. And now these assholes have the temerity to turn around and complain about their children? The millennials are the people who’ve inherited the hangover from the baby boomers’ party: a warming planet, a dysfunctional global financial system that rewards the rich and screws the poor, a polarized political class that’s moved so far to the right that a centrist like Barack Obama can be described with a straight face as “a socialist.” Millennials may be “narcissistic, materialistic and addicted to technology,” as Stein alleges early in his article; they’re also drowning in college debt, slaves to an internship “system” that demands ever-increasing work for no pay, and entrants into a job market that’s replaced employment rights with the “flexibility” of never being able to afford health insurance.
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Why Time’s Millennials Cover Story Says More About Joel Stein Than It Does About Millennials
Way to go, Tom!
(via
clambistro)
Yes, yes, yes.
(via clambistro)
![thesufjanstevensmodel5000:
The content of music journalism is rarely as sophisticated as its grammar. Consider this equivocal sentence from EW.com. What initially struck me as incorrect subject/verb agreement (“…a batch…struggle[s]…”) is actually a legitimate dependent clause (“….that struggle to break free…”) modifying the prepositional phrase (“of tracks”) as indicated by the plural pronoun (“their”) and plural image of “prisons.” In other words: EACH TRACK is confined to its OWN GORGEOUS PRISON (perhaps designed by Le Corbusier) with each prison containing a multitude of prison cells from which a multitude of musical ideas STRUGGLE TO BREAK FREE from an egregious BATCH (of MAMMOTH COOKIES?) incarcerating The National’s new album. Did someone say Prison Break!? I have a feeling there will be riots at Barclays. Or a huge bake sale. Thank you grammatical goddess Kory Stamper for the art of diagramming sentences, not yet lost to obsolescence.
brb, swooning harder than seems physically possible](http://24.media.tumblr.com/f78957b2127045a4e11d53252f0f8f90/tumblr_mmwjq3MLs21rgw0ado1_r2_1280.jpg)
