Generation Z

Monday

Alexander Larman

Stop turning dead authors into sex symbols

From our UK edition

'As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a TikTok sensation.' This is not – blessedly – how Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis begins. But almost exactly a century after his death, the Bohemian writer would be astonished to find that not only had his friend and literary executor Max Brod disobeyed his instructions and published works of his that included The Trial and The Castle, but that he had become, of all things, a social media sensation. It was reported recently that Kafka has become the unlikeliest of sex symbols.

Saturday

Panda La Terriere

Why Gen Z is turning against woke culture

From our UK edition

The other day, in a bar in London frequented by students of the infamously ‘woke’ Goldsmiths University, I met a young white cis-male who said that the English were to blame for his inherited trauma because of their historic oppression of the Irish. The only problem was, he wasn’t Irish – he was American and so were his parents and probably grandparents. ‘Pain lasts a long time,’ he assured me. What struck me about this encounter was not that it was typical of my Gen Z generation but that it was so obviously cringe-inducing – a sort of hackneyed pick-up line. Another student at the same bar – sporting an orange mullet and a thong as a T-shirt – tried to convince me my age was a social construct.

Wednesday

Matt Purple

The generation war and why millennials are drifting leftward

The war between the generations is on, and the battle lines have been drawn. The baby boomers don't like the millennials because they can't understand why the millennials won't just buy a house already. The millennials don't like the boomers because, as they've explained, a house no longer costs $75 with a couple coupons like it did back in 1972. And lately the millennials and Generation Z have been mixing it up as well, over such important issues as hair partings and emojis. So a fractured conflict, this one, a bit like Lebanon's civil war except with more awful Facebook posts. Yet if you're looking to really understand the social media-fueled rifts between the generations, then you have to start with the main combatants, the boomers and the millennials.

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Monday

Rikki Schlott

Young people should see climate change as a challenge

I’ve been fed two competing storylines for as long as I can remember. On one side, the world I’ve inherited is a tinderbox just waiting to erupt in flames. If I’m not the one engulfed, then surely my children or my grandchildren will be. And on the other side... crickets. The conversation around climate change has no spectrum. It’s just a bimodal screaming match luring young people into either skipping along into the sunset in blissful ignorance or slowly sliding into the fiery pits of hell in nihilistic resignation. Through young eyes, the dominant message from the right amounts to: your ecological inheritance is diddly-squat to us.

climate change

Thursday

Nicky Otis Smith

The final word on the millennial generation

More than anything else, the phrase “I’m still figuring it out” defines the millennial generation. Floating from passion to passion, job to job, lover to lover, possible spouse to possible dead end. In Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, Renate Reinsve plays Julie, a person that most of us would recognize from life, and certainly from the last ten years of media: approaching thirty; romantic and flighty to a fault (in the prologue, she drops out of medical school to become a philosopher and then a photographer); beginning to feel a void she doesn’t know how to fill.

worst

Monday

Joel Kotkin

How the boomers robbed the young of all hope

"Young people do not degenerate; this occurs only after grown men have already become corrupt.” — Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1748. The great test of a generation is whether it leaves better prospects for its descendants. Yet by virtually every indication, the baby boomers, and even the Gen Xers, are leaving a heritage of economic carnage — as well as a growing social and cultural dissipation that could shape our future and the fate of democratic self-rule, and not for the better. This legacy comes not from outside forces, but the investment bankers, tech oligarchs and their partners in the clerisy who have weakened their national economies and undermined the chances of upward mobility for most young people.

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Wednesday

Mary Kate Skehan

Crypto casino

When I was in high school, I worked at an ice rink in the winter and a swimming pool in the summer. My friends toiled at Target and gofered at golf courses, making minimum wage and spending it on gas and low-rise jeans from Abercrombie: it was 2008, after all. These days, gas may still cost $4 per gallon, but now the jeans are high-waisted and the teens are more ambitious. My youngest brother Ted is 18. He spent the summer before his first year in college working in a cheese shop, sweeping floors and straining ricotta: a classic summer job, tedious and stress-free. Yet some of his friends are taking a different route. Ted’s buddy Tom just cashed out $3,000 in bitcoin winnings to buy a weeklong Airbnb in Ocean City, Maryland for all his friends.

crypto

Tuesday

Cockburn

The worst of Instagram activism

What do veganism, fashion, and architecture all have in common? According to Gen Z, they’re all racist.America’s teens and twenty-somethings have taken up the mantle of civil rights by reposting informative guides to Critical Race Theory on their Instagram Stories. Cockburn’s nieces were kind enough to send him a few links.You might think that these posts inform the zoomers about topics like fatherlessness, abortion, the welfare state and other serious issues that disproportionately face the African American community. However, these guides are almost entirely composed of far-left talking points, creating a social media echo chamber of unabated cultural Marxism and cringe.

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