Millennials
Story Stream
The Millennial virtue economy is dead February 24, 2025
Millennials are having their post-Soviet moment: the truths, the lifestyles, the ideologies, and the religions that girded us through adulthood: all vapor. Our mode of social experience — in which boilerplate moralizing, right-think, and right-langua...
It's Always High School February 18, 2025
The writer Elizabeth Ellen earned my admiration in October of 2022 when, as the Deputy Editor of literary journal Hobart Pulp, she defied the then-reigning orthodoxy of cancellations and speech-policing and published an interview containing taboo, fo...
The Work of Celebration February 10, 2025
Millennial moms on social media—which is to say, basically all of us—see endless memes and complaints about the “mental load,” which, per one internet source, is “a discrete category of family work, which entails the planning, schedule and rememberin...
'Hardly Working' Brews Up Millennial Malaise December 05, 2024
On the occasion I decide to spend $4.50 on a drip coffee from an artisanal shop, the barista serving me is usually a bubbly woman with a septum piercing and a tasteful forearm tattoo—or, if male, a pasty environmentalist with flabby arms. Obedient an...
Prince Harry: the Millennial’s Millennial September 13, 2024
Somewhere in Montecito on Sunday, a balding Englishman will celebrate his birthday over a bold Tignanello, clinking glasses with his glamorous Californian wife. Like Footloose, Agadoo and the original Apple Mac, Prince Harry is turning 40 — leaving b...
The Temporary License of Literary Bratdom September 06, 2024
Goodbye forever, brat summer. Thanks to you, slime green has joined the viral-color pantheon alongside minion yellow and millennial pink. When our fairy bratmother, the pop star Charli XCX, named her sixth album “brat,” she inaugurated a season of pe...
How Old Do I Look? March 28, 2024
This is a tale of three TikToks—a tragedy for the digital age. It begins with a woman wearing a raspberry-colored sweater, gazing shyly into her front-facing camera. She says, “I’m having a pretty good day today. So I thought, let’s ruin it by guessi...
Criticism in the Internet Age March 21, 2024
I have had an encounter by proxy with novelist and critic Lauren Oyler. My wife once tweeted, innocently, “nothing in the world is better than a husband who is good with children.” It’s true: I am good with children. Oyler quote-tweeted, “Why am I se...
'The Hearing Test' Is a Pitch-Perfect Novel About Loss March 14, 2024
In Eliza Callahan’s debut novel, The Hearing Test, a woman develops sudden deafness shortly before her 30th birthday. What follows is a story about loss and aging, but without the self-indulgence common to the millennial novel....
The Year the Millennial Internet Died January 02, 2024
The millennial internet first died in 2015.I remember the day exactly because I was one of seven staffers, in addition to many more permalancers, at Gawker Media who were laid off as part of a company-wide restructuring. I received a message on Slack...
