The Big Uneasy

What’s roiling the liberal-arts campus?

At Oberlin, it started in December, when the temperatures ran high, although the weeping willows and the yellow poplars that had flared in the fall were bare already. Problems had a tendency to escalate. There was, to name one thing, the food fight: students had noted the inauthenticity of food at the school’s Afrikan Heritage House, and followed up with an on-site protest. (Some international students, meanwhile, complained that cafeteria dishes such as sushi and bánh mì were prepared with the wrong ingredients, making a mockery of cultural cuisine.) There was scrutiny of the curriculum: a student wanted trigger warnings on “Antigone.” And there was all the world outside. A year earlier, a black boy with a pellet gun named Tamir Rice was killed by a police officer thirty miles east of Oberlin’s campus, and the death seemed to instantiate what students had been hearing in the classroom and across the widening horizons of their lives. Class and race mattered. Power in a system would privilege its authors. After a grand jury declined to indict Rice’s shooter, the prosecutor called the death a “perfect storm of human error.”

Weeks passed. Finals came and went. The media turned its attention to the approaching Iowa caucus, while on campus an unease spread like a cold front coming off the lake. In mid-December, a group of black students wrote a fourteen-page letter to the school’s board and president outlining fifty nonnegotiable demands for changes in Oberlin’s admissions and personnel policies, academic offerings, and the like. “You include Black and other students of color in the institution and mark them with the words ‘equity, inclusion and diversity,’ ” it said, “when in fact this institution functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy.”

The letter was delivered by hand, but it leaked onto the Internet, and some of the more than seven hundred students who had signed it were hit with threats and hate speech online from anonymous accounts. The president, Marvin Krislov, rejected the letter’s stance, urging “collaboration.”

All across Oberlin—a school whose norms may run a little to the left of Bernie Sanders—there was instead talk about “allyship”: a more contemporary answer to the challenges of pluralism. If you are a white male student, the thought goes, you cannot know what it means to be, say, a Latina; the social and the institutional worlds respond differently to her, and a hundred aggressions, large and small, are baked into the system. You can make yourself her ally, though—deferring to her experience, learning from her accounts, and supporting her struggles. You can reach for unity in difference. (...)

During this academic year, schools across the country have been roiling with activism that has seemed to shift the meaning of contemporary liberalism without changing its ideals. At Yale, the associate head of a residence balked at the suggestion that students avoid potentially offensive Halloween costumes, proposing in an e-mail that it smothered transgressive expression. Her remarks were deemed insensitive, especially from someone tasked with fostering a sense of community, and the protests that followed escalated to address broader concerns. At Claremont McKenna, a dean sparked outrage when she sent an e-mail about better serving students—those of color, apparently—who didn’t fit the school’s “mold,” and resigned. In mid-November, a thousand students at Ithaca College walked out to demand the resignation of the president, who, they said, hadn’t responded aggressively enough to campus racism. More than a hundred other schools held rallies that week.

Protests continued through the winter. Harvard renamed its “house masters” faculty deans, and changed its law-school seal, which originated as a slaveholder’s coat of arms. Bowdoin students were disciplined for wearing miniature sombreros to a tequila-themed party. The president of Northwestern endorsed “safe spaces,” refuges open only to certain identity groups. At Wesleyan, the Eclectic Society, whose members lived in a large brick colonnaded house, was put on probation for two years, partly because its whimsical scrapbook-like application overstepped a line. And when Wesleyan’s newspaper, the Argus, published a controversial opinion piece questioning the integrity of the Black Lives Matter movement, some hundred and seventy people signed a petition that would have defunded the paper. Sensitivities seemed to reach a peak at Emory when students complained of being traumatized after finding “trump 2016” chalked on sidewalks around campus. The Trump-averse protesters chanted, “Come speak to us, we are in pain!,” until Emory’s president wrote a letter promising to “honor the concerns of these students.”

Such reports flummoxed many people who had always thought of themselves as devout liberals. Wasn’t free self-expression the whole point of social progressivism? Wasn’t liberal academe a way for ideas, good and bad, to be subjected to enlightened reason? Generations of professors and students imagined the university to be a temple for productive challenge and perpetually questioned certainties. Now, some feared, schools were being reimagined as safe spaces for coddled youths and the self-defined, untested truths that they held dear. Disorientingly, too, none of the disputes followed normal ideological divides: both the activists and their opponents were multicultural, educated, and true of heart. At some point, it seemed, the American left on campus stopped being able to hear itself think.

by Nathan Heller, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Oliver Munday 

The Monkees

How the Monkees Got Their 1960s Groove Back

Uncanny Valley

Morale is down. We are making plenty of money, but the office is teeming with salespeople: well-groomed social animals with good posture and dress shoes, men who chuckle and smooth their hair back when they can’t connect to our VPN. Their corner of the office is loud; their desks are scattered with freebies from other start-ups, stickers and koozies and flash drives. We escape for drinks and fret about our company culture. “Our culture is dying,” we say gravely, apocalyptic prophets all. “What should we do about the culture?”

It’s not just the salespeople, of course. It’s never just the salespeople. Our culture has been splintering for months. Members of our core team have been shepherded into conference rooms by top-level executives who proceed to question our loyalty. They’ve noticed the sea change. They’ve noticed we don’t seem as invested. We don’t stick around for in-office happy hour anymore; we don’t take new hires out for lunch on the company card. We’re not hitting our KPIs, we’re not serious about the OKRs. People keep using the wordparanoid. Our primary investor has funded a direct competitor. This is what investors do, but it feels personal: Daddy still loves us, but he loves us less.

We get ourselves out of the office and into a bar. We have more in common than our grievances, but we kick off by speculating about our job security, complaining about the bureaucratic double-downs, casting blame for blocks and poor product decisions. We talk about our IPO like it’s the deus ex machina coming down from on high to save us — like it’s an inevitability, like our stock options will lift us out of our existential dread, away from the collective anxiety that ebbs and flows. Realistically, we know it could be years before an IPO, if there’s an IPO at all; we know in our hearts that money is a salve, not a solution. Still, we are hopeful. We reassure ourselves and one another that this is just a phase; every start-up has its growing pains. Eventually we are drunk enough to change the subject, to remember our more private selves. The people we are on weekends, the people we were for years.

This is a group of secret smokers, and we go in on a communal pack of cigarettes. The problem, we admit between drags, is that we do care. We care about one another. We even care about the executives who can make us feel like shit. We want good lives for them, just like we want good lives for ourselves. We care, for fuck’s sake, about the company culture. We are among the first twenty employees, and we are making something people want. It feels like ours. Work has wedged its way into our identities, and the only way to maintain sanity is to maintain that we are the company, the company is us. Whenever we see a stranger at the gym wearing a T-shirt with our logo on it, whenever we are mentioned on social media or on a client’s blog, whenever we get a positive support ticket, we share it in the company chat room and we’re proud, genuinely proud.

But we see now that we’ve been swimming in the Kool-Aid, and we’re coming up for air. We were lucky and in thrall and now we are bureaucrats, punching at our computers, making other people — some kids — unfathomably rich. We throw our dead cigarettes on the sidewalk and grind them out under our toes. Phones are opened and taxis summoned; we gulp the dregs of our beers as cartoon cars approach on-screen. We disperse, off to terrorize sleeping roommates and lovers, to answer just one, two more emails before bed. Eight hours later we’ll be back in the office, slurping down coffee, running out for congealed breakfast sandwiches, tweaking mediocre scripts and writing halfhearted emails, throwing weary and knowing glances across the table.

I skim recruiter emails and job listings like horoscopes, skidding down to the perks: competitive salary, dental and vision, 401k, free gym membership, catered lunch, bike storage, ski trips to Tahoe, off-sites to Napa, summits in Vegas, beer on tap, craft beer on tap, kombucha on tap, wine tastings, Whiskey Wednesdays, Open Bar Fridays, massage on-site, yoga on-site, pool table, Ping-Pong table, Ping-Pong robot, ball pit, game night, movie night, go-karts, zip line. Job listings are an excellent place to get sprayed with HR’s idea of fun and a 23-year-old’s idea of work-life balance. Sometimes I forget I’m not applying to summer camp. Customized setup: design your ultimate work station with the latest hardware. Change the world around you. Help humanity thrive by enabling — next! We work hard, we laugh hard, we give great high-fives. We have engineers in TopCoder’s Top 20. We’re not just another social web app. We’re not just another project-management tool. We’re not just another payment processor. I get a haircut and start exploring.

Most start-up offices look the same — faux midcentury furniture, brick walls, snack bar, bar cart. Interior designers in Silicon Valley are either brand-conscious or very literal. When tech products are projected into the physical world they become aesthetics unto themselves, as if to insist on their own reality: the office belonging to a home-sharing website is decorated like rooms in its customers’ pool houses and pieds-à-terre; the foyer of a hotel-booking start-up has a concierge desk replete with bell (no concierge); the headquarters of a ride-sharing app gleams in the same colors as the app itself, down to the sleek elevator bank. A book-related start-up holds a small and sad library, the shelves half-empty, paperbacks and object-oriented-programming manuals sloping against one another. It reminds me of the people who dressed like Michael Jackson to attend Michael Jackson’s funeral.

But this office, of a media app with millions in VC funding but no revenue model, is particularly sexy. This is something that an office shouldn’t be, and it jerks my heart rate way, way up. There are views of the city in every direction, fat leather loveseats, electric guitars plugged into amps, teak credenzas with white hardware. It looks like the loft apartment of the famous musician boyfriend I thought I’d have at 22 but somehow never met. I want to take off my dress and my shoes and lie on the voluminous sheepskin rug and eat fistfuls of MDMA, curl my naked body into the Eero Aarnio Ball Chair, never leave.

It’s not clear whether I’m here for lunch or an interview, which is normal. I am prepared for both and dressed for neither. My guide leads me through the communal kitchen, which has the trappings of every other start-up pantry: plastic bins of trail mix and Goldfish, bowls of Popchips and miniature candy bars. There’s the requisite wholesale box of assorted Clif Bars, and in the fridge are flavored water, string cheese, and single-serving cartons of chocolate milk. It can be hard to tell whether a company is training for a marathon or eating an after-school snack. Once I walked into our kitchen and found two Account Mana­gers pounding Shot Bloks, chewy cubes of glucose marketed to endurance athletes.

Over catered Afghan food, I meet the team, including a billionaire who made his fortune from a website that helps people feel close to celebrities and other strangers they’d hate in real life. He asks where I work, and I tell him. “Oh,” he says, not unkindly, snapping a piece of lavash in two, “I know that company. I think I tried to buy you.”

I take another personal day without giving a reason, an act of defiance that I fear is transparent. I spend the morning drinking coffee and skimming breathless tech press, then creep downtown to spend the afternoon in back-to-back interviews at a peanut-size start-up. All of the interviews are with men, which is fine. I like men. I had a boyfriend; I have a brother. The men ask me questions like, “How would you calculate the number of people who work for the United States Postal Service?” and “How would you describe the internet to a medieval farmer?” and “What is the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” They tell me to stand in front of the whiteboard and diagram my responses. These questions are self-conscious and infuriating, but it only serves to fuel me. I want to impress; I refuse to be discouraged by their self-importance. Here is a character flaw, my industry origin story: I have always responded positively to negging.

My third interview is with the technical cofounder. He enters the conference room in a crisp blue button-down, looking confidently unprepared. He tells me — apologetically — that he hasn’t done many interviews before, and as such he doesn’t have a ton of questions to ask me. Nonetheless, the office manager slated an hour for our conversation. This seems OK: I figure we will talk about the company, I will ask routine follow-up questions, and at four they will let me out for the day, like a middle school student, and the city will absorb me and my private errors. Then he tells me that his girlfriend is applying to law school and he’s been helping her prep. So instead of a conventional interview, he’s just going to have me take a section of the LSAT. I search his face to see if he’s kidding.

“If it’s cool with you, I’m just going to hang out here and check my email,” he says, sliding the test across the table and opening a laptop. He sets a timer.

I finish early, ever the overachiever. I check it twice. The cofounder grades it on the spot. “My mother would be so proud,” I joke, feeling brilliant and misplaced and low, lower than low.

by Anna Wiener, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Jennifer Murphy, Gold and Black Circles. 2007

The Shocking Essay Everyone’s Talking About

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Bob Almighty

Dylan turns 75 on 24th May. For millions of devotees like myself—many of whom consider him the world’s greatest living artist—it is a moment of celebration tinged with apprehension. Joan Baez, his most significant early anointer-disciple (Joan the Baptist), best expresses what might be described as “the Dylan feeling” in the excellent Martin Scorsese 2005 documentary when she says: “There are no veils, curtains, doors, walls, anything, between what pours out of Bob’s hand on to the page and what is somehow available to the core of people who are believers in him. Some people would say, ‘not interested,’ but if you are interested, he goes way, way deep.” I love this for lots of reasons but most of all because it captures not only the religious devotion that many who love him feel, but also the bemused indifference of the sane and secular who do not.

Of course, the first order of business when writing about Dylan is to urge readers to ignore writers who write about Dylan. We are like Jehovah’s Witnesses, forever tramping door to door with our clumsy bonhomie and earnest smudgy leaflets; in all honesty, you would be much better off seeking out the resonant majesty of the actual work. Indeed, you’ll be relieved—and possibly endeared—to hear that Dylan himself considers his disciples to be deranged. “Why is it when people talk about me they have to go crazy?” Dylan asked in a recent interview for Rolling Stone. “What the fuck is the matter with them?”

I should say in passing that I am only mildly afflicted by comparison. There are tens of thousands of Dylan fans who are in a far more advanced state of insanity. Fervent purveyors of set-lists and bootlegs and best-of-performances; the blue-faced blogging battalions; the tens of millions who watch YouTube footage of him changing the lyrics to a song here or performing an unreleased track there. Soon these poor folk will be sifting the brand new 6,000-piece literary archive of his ephemera (acquired in March by the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a rumoured $60m) for clues as to his state of mind sequestered in the addenda to his legal contracts. There are already hundreds of “Dylanologists” who like to listen to individual instrumental tracks of his gazillion bootleg recordings—“stems” as they are called—so as to focus in on his rhythm guitar playing or keyboards. Then there are the serial show-goers stretching all the way back to the Gaslight Café in New York in 1962. There’s no other songwriter that comes anywhere near this kind of… what? Devotion, loyalty, study, analysis, contemplation, regard, fixation.

There are many answers as to why this might be (answers to Dylan’s own question) but the most straightforward is found in the lyrical texture and complexity of his early work. Like TS Eliot or Walt Whitman, his words mesmerise, occlude and invite interpretation. The whole crazy-devotional interpretative approach to his oeuvre began with people simply trying to decode the meaning of his songs—something approximate to parsing “The Waste Land” or “Leaves of Grass.” Over time, that inquisitorial dynamic spread beyond the art and on into the artist himself until it had intensified to the point of absurdity.

And yet not quite absurdity with regard to the songs. Because Dylan rewards meditation and repeated listening like no other. Very few of his stanzas succeed as on-the-page poetry—he is a performing artist—but when he sings, he imbues his words with a significance that is somehow rich with multivalent meanings, many of which feel just out of reach. This is something to do with the startling originality and range of his poetic imagination as expressed through the quality and skill of his word selection and the tone and timbre of his sung delivery. As Baez implies, the listener either wheels away wincing or they must be forever drawn in deeper and deeper seeking to further understand, savour and construe. (In this way, Dylan’s work is a bit like Ludwig van Beethoven in classical music: it’s all or nothing and you can’t have him on in the background.)

To put it another way, there are hundreds of Dylan’s lines that precisely capture or enact deeply personal human feelings that then turn out to be capacious enough to capture or enact entirely different human feelings decades later. Some of this effect is the accidental by-product of his staggering facility with the language, but a lot more than he pretends is consciously designed. Certainly, it’s why people began to study him in the first place. To quote the man himself: “What drives [us] to you is what drives [us] insane.”

But I don’t want to attempt to unpack the mighty genius of Dylan’s writing here; that’s a subject for another lifetime… Instead, by way of celebration and in an attempt to explain to non-believers, I want to offer up for consideration some other aspects of Dylan’s life and work that are not routinely considered: five qualities that I find inspiring and that I have come to admire since his 60th when I last wrote about him in a birthday context. (...)

Self Reliance

Dylan is famously indifferent to what his critics, audience or commentators think, say, feel or want. Actually, indifference is an understatement since it suggests a relationship—even if denied. Dylan’s attitude towards the press and public might be more accurately characterised as being something approximate to the attitude of Pluto as to whether humankind decides to classify it as a planet or not. Indeed, the last time I saw him—at the London shows in autumn 2015—I realised midway through that there was nobody in the Royal Albert Hall who was less interested in Dylan than the man himself. Which is probably why he was singing so much Frank Sinatra.

To my ear, these were the worst concerts I had seen him do for many years. (Contrary to popular perception, Dylan diehards are more acutely aware than the critics about how awful he can be; we know—we were there.) Why croon for two hours when you yourself were the man who rid the world of all this saccharine Sinatran slush the first time around? And, if you must croon, why not deploy your own back catalogue, which contains dozens of far more beautiful and sophisticated love songs? The point is that Dylan doesn’t care what anyone thinks—least of all his audience—and probably hasn’t since roughly 1965.

Those of you who know something of Dylan lore might dimly recall that this is when he “went electric” and fans starting booing and hissing and screaming “Judas!” (In fact he’d been electric before he was folk.) But Dylan didn’t just exasperate and lose his audience once. He’s done the same more or less every five years: he annoyed folk fans with rock music; rock fans with country music; country fans with cover-song crooning (Self Portrait in 1970 was the first time around for the crooning-Bob); cover-song-crooning-lovers with a caustic bitter-sweet divorce album; bitter-sweet-Bob-lovers with a Christian-gospel-rock; Christian-gospel-rock fans with a Zionist phase; the entire Live Aid world audience by using the moment to get drunk and draw attention away from Africa to the plight of American farmers; the remaining loyalists with a “comeback” that then subsided into two albums of finger-picking early blues covers featuring songs like “Froggie Went A Courtin’.” And so on. And so on.

He only really stopped annoying people in 1997 when he released the first of his late masterpieces, Time Out Of Mind. And that’s only because from around that date onward, people finally realised that he was always going to do whatever the hell he liked. In 2009, incidentally, Dylan put out an album of Christmas carols, which in my estimation has strong claims to be the worst album released by any artist in the history of recorded time.

by Edward Docx, Prospect |  Read more:

Image: John Cohen/Getty Images

Hannabi designs modular Urban Nomad sofa for generation rent

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Luxottica

[ed. The prices of glasses are insane. Here's the reason. See also: At Warby Parker, a Sense of Exclusion in a Low Price.]

Which Rock Star Will Historians of the Future Remember?

Classifying anyone as the “most successful” at anything tends to reflect more on the source than the subject. So keep that in mind when I make the following statement: John Philip Sousa is the most successful American musician of all time.

Marching music is a maddeningly durable genre, recognizable to pretty much everyone who has lived in the United States for any period. It works as a sonic shorthand for any filmmaker hoping to evoke the late 19th century and serves as the auditory backdrop for national holidays, the circus and college football. It’s not “popular” music, but it’s entrenched within the popular experience. It will be no less fashionable tomorrow than it is today.

And this entire musical idiom is now encapsulated in one person: John Philip Sousa. Even the most cursory two-sentence description of marching music inevitably cites him by name. I have no data on this, but I would assert that if we were to ask the entire population of the United States to name every composer of marching music they could think of, 98 percent of the populace would name either one person (Sousa) or no one at all. There’s just no separation between the awareness of this person and the awareness of this music, and it’s hard to believe that will ever change.

Now, the reason this happened — or at least the explanation we’ve decided to accept — is that Sousa was simply the best at this art. He composed 136 marches over a span of six decades and is regularly described as the most famous musician of his era. The story of his life and career has been shoehorned into the U.S. education curriculum at a fundamental level. (I first learned of Sousa in fourth grade, a year before we memorized the state capitals.) And this, it seems, is how mainstream musical memory works. As the timeline moves forward, tangential artists in any field fade from the collective radar, until only one person remains; the significance of that individual is then exaggerated, until the genre and the person become interchangeable. Sometimes this is easy to predict: I have zero doubt that the worldwide memory of Bob Marley will eventually have the same tenacity and familiarity as the worldwide memory of reggae itself.

But envisioning this process with rock music is harder. Almost anything can be labeled “rock”: Metallica, ABBA, Mannheim Steamroller, a haircut, a muffler. If you’re a successful tax lawyer who owns a hot tub, clients will refer to you as a “rock-star C.P.A.” when describing your business to less-hip neighbors. The defining music of the first half of the 20th century was jazz; the defining music of the second half of the 20th century was rock, but with an ideology and saturation far more pervasive. Only television surpasses its influence.

And pretty much from the moment it came into being, people who liked rock insisted it was dying. The critic Richard Meltzer supposedly claimed that rock was already dead in 1968. And he was wrong to the same degree that he was right. Meltzer’s wrongness is obvious and does not require explanation, unless you honestly think “Purple Rain” is awful. But his rightness is more complicated: Rock is dead, in the sense that its “aliveness” is a subjective assertion based on whatever criteria the listener happens to care about.

This is why the essential significance of rock remains a plausible thing to debate, as does the relative value of major figures within that system (the Doors, R.E.M., Radiohead). It still projects the illusion of a universe containing multitudes. But it won’t seem that way in 300 years.

The symbolic value of rock is conflict-based: It emerged as a byproduct of the post-World War II invention of the teenager, soundtracking a 25-year period when the gap between generations was utterly real and uncommonly vast. That dissonance gave rock music a distinctive, nonmusical importance for a long time. But that period is over. Rock — or at least the anthemic, metaphoric, Hard Rock Cafe version of big rock — has become more socially accessible but less socially essential, synchronously shackled by its own formal limitations. Its cultural recession is intertwined with its cultural absorption. As a result, what we’re left with is a youth-oriented music genre that a) isn’t symbolically important; b) lacks creative potential; and c) has no specific tie to young people. It has completed its historical trajectory. Which means, eventually, it will exist primarily as an academic pursuit. It will exist as something people have to be taught to feel and understand.

I imagine a college classroom in 300 years, in which a hip instructor is leading a tutorial filled with students. These students relate to rock music with no more fluency than they do the music of Mesopotamia: It’s a style they’ve learned to recognize, but just barely (and only because they’ve taken this specific class). Nobody in the room can name more than two rock songs, except the professor. He explains the sonic structure of rock, its origins, the way it served as cultural currency and how it shaped and defined three generations of a global superpower. He shows the class a photo, or perhaps a hologram, of an artist who has been intentionally selected to epitomize the entire concept. For these future students, that singular image defines what rock was.

So what’s the image?

Certainly, there’s one response to this hypothetical that feels immediate and sensible: the Beatles. All logic points to their dominance. They were the most popular band in the world during the period they were active and are only slightly less popular now, five decades later. The Beatles defined the concept of what a “rock group” was supposed to be, and all subsequent rock groups are (consciously or unconsciously) modeled upon the template they naturally embodied. Their 1964 appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” is so regularly cited as the genesis for other bands that they arguably invented the culture of the 1970s, a decade when they were no longer together. The Beatles arguably invented everything, including the very notion of a band’s breaking up. There are still things about the Beatles that can’t be explained, almost to the point of the supernatural: the way their music resonates with toddlers, for example, or the way it resonated with Charles Manson. It’s impossible to imagine another rock group where half its members faced unrelated assassination attempts. In any reasonable world, the Beatles are the answer to the question “Who will be the Sousa of rock?”

But our world is not reasonable. And the way this question will be asked tomorrow is (probably) not the same way we would ask it today.

In Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person — the “journey” of a particular “hero,” in the lingo of the mythologist Joseph Campbell — as a prism for understanding everything else. That inclination works to the Beatles’ communal detriment. But it buoys two other figures: Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan. The Beatles are the most meaningful group, but Elvis and Dylan are the towering individuals, so eminent that I wouldn’t necessarily need to use Elvis’s last name or Dylan’s first.

Still, neither is an ideal manifestation of rock as a concept.

It has been said that Presley invented rock and roll, but he actually staged a form of primordial “prerock” that barely resembles the post-“Rubber Soul” aesthetics that came to define what this music is. He also exited rock culture relatively early; he was pretty much out of the game by 1973. Conversely, Dylan’s career spans the entirety of rock. Yet he never made an album that “rocked” in any conventional way (the live album “Hard Rain” probably comes closest). Still, these people are rock people. Both are integral to the core of the enterprise and influenced everything we have come to understand about the form (including the Beatles themselves, a group that would not have existed without Elvis and would not have pursued introspection without Dylan).

In 300 years, the idea of “rock music” being represented by a two‑pronged combination of Elvis and Dylan would be equitable and oddly accurate. But the passage of time makes this progressively more difficult. It’s always easier for a culture to retain one story instead of two, and the stories of Presley and Dylan barely intersect (they supposedly met only once, in a Las Vegas hotel room). As I write this sentence, the social stature of Elvis and Dylan feels similar, perhaps even identical. But it’s entirely possible one of them will be dropped as time plods forward. And if that happens, the consequence will be huge. If we concede that the “hero’s journey” is the de facto story through which we understand history, the differences between these two heroes would profoundly alter the description of what rock music supposedly was.

If Elvis (minus Dylan) is the definition of rock, then rock is remembered as showbiz. Like Frank Sinatra, Elvis did not write songs; he interpreted songs that were written by other people (and like Sinatra, he did this brilliantly). But removing the centrality of songwriting from the rock equation radically alters it. Rock becomes a performative art form, where the meaning of a song matters less than the person singing it. It becomes personality music, and the dominant qualities of Presley’s persona — his sexuality, his masculinity, his larger‑than‑life charisma — become the dominant signifiers of what rock was. His physical decline and reclusive death become an allegory for the entire culture. The reminiscence of the rock genre adopts a tragic hue, punctuated by gluttony, drugs and the conscious theft of black culture by white opportunists.

But if Dylan (minus Elvis) becomes the definition of rock, everything reverses. In this contingency, lyrical authenticity becomes everything; rock is somehow calcified as an intellectual craft, interlocked with the folk tradition. It would be remembered as far more political than it actually was, and significantly more political than Dylan himself. The fact that Dylan does not have a conventionally “good” singing voice becomes retrospective proof that rock audiences prioritized substance over style, and the portrait of his seven‑decade voyage would align with the most romantic version of how an eclectic collection of autonomous states eventually became a place called “America.”

These are the two best versions of this potential process. And both are flawed.

There is, of course, another way to consider how these things might unspool, and it might be closer to the way histories are actually built. I’m creating a binary reality where Elvis and Dylan start the race to posterity as equals, only to have one runner fall and disappear. The one who remains “wins” by default (and maybe that happens). But it might work in reverse. A more plausible situation is that future people will haphazardly decide how they want to remember rock, and whatever they decide will dictate who is declared its architect. If the constructed memory is a caricature of big‑hair arena rock, the answer is probably Elvis; if it’s a buoyant, unrealistic apparition of punk hagiography, the answer is probably Dylan. But both conclusions direct us back to the same recalcitrant question: What makes us remember the things we remember?

In 2014, the jazz historian Ted Gioia published a short essay about music criticism that outraged a class of perpetually outraged music critics. Gioia’s assertion was that 21st‑century music writing has devolved into a form of lifestyle journalism that willfully ignores the technical details of the music itself. Many critics took this attack personally and accused Gioia of devaluing their vocation. Which is odd, considering the colossal degree of power Gioia ascribes to record reviewers: He believes specialists are the people who galvanize history. Critics have almost no impact on what music is popular at any given time, but they’re extraordinarily well positioned to dictate what music is reintroduced after its popularity has waned.

“Over time, critics and historians will play a larger role in deciding whose fame endures,” Gioia wrote me in an email. “Commercial factors will have less impact. I don’t see why rock and pop will follow any different trajectory from jazz and blues.” He rattled off several illustrative examples: Ben Selvin outsold Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. In 1956, Nelson Riddle and Les Baxter outsold “almost every rock ’n’ roll star not named Elvis,” but they’ve been virtually erased from the public record. A year after that, the closeted gay crooner Tab Hunter was bigger than Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino, “but critics and music historians hate sentimental love songs. They’ve constructed a perspective that emphasizes the rise of rock and pushes everything else into the background. Transgressive rockers, in contrast, enjoy lasting fame.” He points to a contemporary version of that phenomenon: “Right now, electronic dance music probably outsells hip‑hop. This is identical to the punk‑versus‑disco trade‑off of the 1970s. My prediction: edgy hip‑hop music will win the fame game in the long run, while E.D.M. will be seen as another mindless dance craze.”

Gioia is touching on a variety of volatile ideas here, particularly the outsize memory of transgressive art. His example is the adversarial divide between punk and disco: In 1977, the disco soundtrack to “Saturday Night Fever” and the Sex Pistols’ “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols” were both released. The soundtrack to “Saturday Night Fever” has sold more than 15 million copies; it took “Never Mind the Bollocks” 15 years to go platinum. Yet virtually all pop historiographers elevate the importance of the Pistols above that of the Bee Gees. The same year the Sex Pistols finally sold the millionth copy of their debut, SPIN magazine placed them on a list of the seven greatest bands of all time. “Never Mind the Bollocks” is part of the White House record library, supposedly inserted by Amy Carter just before her dad lost to Ronald Reagan. The album’s reputation improves by simply existing: In 1985, the British publication NME classified it as the 13th‑greatest album of all time; in 1993, NME made a new list and decided it now deserved to be ranked third. This has as much to do with its transgressive identity as its musical integrity. The album is overtly transgressive (and therefore memorable), while “Saturday Night Fever” has been framed as a prefab totem of a facile culture (and thus forgettable). For more than three decades, that has been the overwhelming consensus.

But I’ve noticed — just in the last four or five years — that this consensus is shifting. Why? Because the definition of “transgressive” is shifting. It’s no longer appropriate to dismiss disco as superficial. More and more, we recognize how disco latently pushed gay, urban culture into white suburbia, which is a more meaningful transgression than going on a British TV talk show and swearing at the host. So is it possible that the punk‑disco polarity will eventually flip? Yes. It’s possible everyone could decide to reverse how we remember 1977. But there’s still another stage here, beyond that hypothetical inversion: the stage in which everybody who was around for punk and disco is dead and buried, and no one is left to contradict how that moment felt. When that happens, the debate over transgressions freezes and all that is left is the music. Which means the Sex Pistols could win again or maybe they lose bigger, depending on the judge.

by Chuck Klosterman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Sagmeister & Walsh

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The Train That Saved Denver

A decade ago, travelers arriving at Denver’s sprawling new airport would look out over a vast expanse of flat, prairie dog-infested grassland and wonder if their plane had somehow fallen short of its destination. The $4.9 billion airport—at 53 square miles, larger than Manhattan—was derided as being “halfway to Kansas,” and given the emptiness of the 23-mile drive to the city, it felt that way.

Last month, arriving visitors boarded the first trains headed for downtown, a journey that zips past a new Japanese-style “smart city” emerging from the prairie before depositing passengers 37 minutes later in a bustling urban hive of restaurants, shops and residential towers that only six years ago was a gravelly no man’s land—an entire $2 billion downtown neighborhood that’s mushroomed up around the hub of Denver’s rapidly expanding light rail system.

The 22.8-mile spur from the airport to downtown is the latest addition to a regional rail system that has transformed Denver and its suburbs. Using an unprecedented public-private partnership that combines private funding, local tax dollars and federal grants, Denver has done something no other major metro area has accomplished in the past decade, though a number of cities have tried. At a moment when aging mass transit systems in several major cities are capturing headlines for mismanagement, chronic delays and even deaths, Denver is unveiling a shiny new and widely praised network: 68 stations along 10 different spurs, covering 98 miles, with another 15 miles still to come. Even before the new lines opened, 77,000 people were riding light rail each day, making it the eighth-largest system in the country even though Denver is not in the top 20 cities for population. The effects on the region’s quality of life have been measurable and also surprising, even to the project’s most committed advocates. Originally intended to unclog congested highways and defeat a stubborn brown smog that was as unhealthy as it was ugly, the new rail system has proven that its greatest value is the remarkable changes in land use its stations have prompted, from revitalizing moribund neighborhoods, like the area around Union Station, to creating new communities where once there was only sprawl or buffalo grass.

“We are talking about a culture-transforming moment,” says Denver mayor Michael Hancock. “Light rail has really moved Denver into the 21st century.”

“Our adolescence is over, and we’ve matured to adulthood,” he adds.

How the $7.6 billion FasTracks project saved Denver from a dreaded fate locals call “Houstonization” is the story of regional cooperation that required the buy-in of businesspeople, elected officials, civil servants and environmentalists across a region the size of Delaware. Their ability to work collectively—and the public’s willingness to approve major taxpayer investments—has created a transit system that is already altering Denver’s perception of itself, turning an auto-centric city into a higher-density, tightly-integrated urban center that aims to outcompete the bigger, older coastal cities on the global stage.

by Colin Woodard, Politico | Read more:
Image: Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures

Honda Grom: Big Thrills, Tiny Bike

The Honda Grom: Big Thrills, Tiny Bike

[ed. Very cool. Expect to see more of these (and others) on a street near you soon.]

Fractured: A First Date

I was going out. I deserved it. I’d had lunch — one Diet Coke, two Marlboro Lights and a Chef’s Signature Lean Cuisine. I’d even done two luxurious miles in 24 minutes on the treadmill at the gym down the block. My stomach growled, angry for being empty, but I felt thin and attractive. There’s nothing more dangerous than a girl who feels thin and attractive.

I hailed a cab to Union Hall in south Park Slope. It was warm for late October. I was meeting friends. The top floor of Union Hall has fireplaces, leather couches, an indoor bocce court and a library with actual books, where pseudo intellectuals discussed the same three writers (Hemingway, Kerouac, Salinger) between Jaeger bombs. Wrinkle-free gingham button-downs, Wayfarers even though it was dark, boat shoes because we were close to the Gowanus. These guys all went to honorary Ivies and had entry levels at their dads’ companies. The suit factory can produce a fun night. Just don’t expect them to go Dutch on your Plan B.

The line to the bar was long, so when I arrived I ordered two Jack and Diets for myself. The best investment you’ll ever make is a large tip on your first drink.

I made my way downstairs. My favorite kind of dance floor is so dark and crowded that no one notices that I can’t dance, and this was that. I swayed to the beat without spilling either drink (talent) and scanned the crowd.

Once I had a few (eight) drinks in me I had no use for the friends I came with. I talked to them all the time. I knew their deal. Whiskey made the world a warm hug. Everything and everyone was nice. Addiction, pollution, violence — these were things to worry about tomorrow.

I pushed away some young thugs wearing flat brims who were coming on stronger than my drink. It was clear they were working me together. Two guys? Maybe, but these were not my type. The night was just starting. It was too early to lower my expectations.

I walked back upstairs and outside to the patio and lit up. I saw him. He was standing alone with a beer, smoking. He was looking at his phone, the way you look at your phone when you have no one to talk to. It was easier to pick a guy up when they were separate from their bro herd.

“Hey, I’m Jessica. What’s that monkey doing on your glass?”

He had a little toy monkey hanging off the side of his pint. “It was trivia night,” he smiled.

The next two hours were a blur. So let’s call him Rick. He worked at an app. Everyone worked at an app. Liquor before beer or beer before liquor? I couldn’t remember which one was supposed to come first so I just went back and forth.

We were smoking again, out on the patio. My self-confidence was directly proportionate to my blood-alcohol level. I was Kate Moss. I pulled a bar stool between us. “Let’s arm wrestle,” I said. A command, not a question.

“Uhh, I don’t know. I bench 220. I was a high school quarterback …” he backpedaled.

“Stop making excuses,” I said.

We knelt down on the cement and put up our arms on the small uneven surface of the bar stool. He won the first round. We went left the second round.

“You’re letting me win,” I said. He just laughed. “Come on, arm wrestle me for real. Don’t be a girl!”

We went right again. My arm snapped in half. Rick had broken my humerus in two, a clean fracture. I bent my arm 90 degrees and watched my arm leave my arm. I took my left hand and held the two pieces of my right arm together. “Oh my God,” he said. He was freaking out. “Go close my tab and get us a cab. We’re going to the E.R.,” I said. Cool as a cucumber.

by Jessica Caldwell, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Maelle Doliveux

Music of the Unquiet Mind

Through Cage and his take on Zen philosophy, I have made a truce with my O.C.D. I recognize that it is integral to who I am and have come to accept myself, warts and all. Obsessive-compulsives are, not surprisingly, perfectionists. Yet, I have learned to relinquish the grand illusion of the goal and relish, instead, the unfolding of the process. Cage’s highly forgiving definition of error, as “simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality,” has helped temper my self-judgmental parameters of right and wrong, all or nothing. (...)

O.C.D.’s most salient feature is its viselike hold on the mind, imbuing unwanted thoughts with a ferocious, pitiless tenacity. Cage’s Zen-inspired text “Lecture on Nothing” is balm to an obsessive-compulsive: “Regard it as something seen momentarily, as though from a window while traveling … at any instant, one may leave it, and whenever one wishes one may return to it. Or you may leave it forever and never return to it, for we possess nothing. …Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not possess it) and thus need not fear its loss.”

Fear of loss rules the life of an obsessive-compulsive — fear of loss of control, fear of loss in both physical and metaphysical realms (paradoxically, the fear of losing worthwhile thoughts), and the ultimate fear — fear over the loss of time when consumed by compulsive rituals; I live in a constant race with time to make up for the time lost to the dictates of the disease.

by Margaret Leng Tan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Karen Barbour
repost ( ..."I would prefer not to wear holes in the carpet of my mind.")

First Month, Last Month and Everything in Between

In the summer of 2013 my job at an advertising agency in London was transferred to New York. I was excited; who wouldn’t grab the opportunity to work in one of the world’s most exciting cities? What’s more, for a short period my company even paid for an apartment for myself and a colleague while we explored different neighbourhoods and found our own place to stay.

When the time came to navigate my way through New York’s real estate market, however, I was shocked to be confronted with prices and practices even London’s letting agents would shy away from.

I had previously lived in four different flats and house shares in and around King’s Cross and Angel over a period of six years. My last flat was on a Camden council estate and was a two-bed converted into a three bed, for which I was paying £550 a month before bills.

I thought the capital’s rental market was fast and aggressive – decisions had to be made on the spot and deposits paid quickly in order to secure a place. But that was before I moved to New York. Compared to London it felt like the wild west: I was shown apartments that didn’t seem legal or safe, usually by agents who were utterly clueless.

Learning the jargon was the first hurdle. When I arrived I had no idea what “pre-war” or “rail-road” meant. Pre-war sounds classy; you imagine big parlours and arches – but in reality it means a large room split up to cram in more people. This means one of you will have a sunlit bedroom but the other gets a tiny room with no windows. We saw several pre-war apartments. Some landlords, in an effort to improve the second room, had added a window … looking into another room – not ideal for privacy.

Rail-road style apartments are worse. There is no corridor. Instead, one room leads directly into the next, the ones in the middle having two doors. That means walking through your roommate’s bedroom every time you need to use the bathroom or leave the house.

And if an advert does not have “two true bedrooms” then prepare for the worst. In London two bedrooms means two bedrooms, each with four walls, a window and a door. I wasted so much time in New York being shown apartments where one of the rooms was in fact a corridor. Or have a window looking into the living room, or no window at all. Sometimes it would be no more than a glorified closet.

I learned that “walk-up” is also something to be wary of. It means no elevator, and stairs are no fun if you live in a high rise and have heavy shopping bags or a pile of laundry – New Yorkers don’t have washing machines in their homes. All this is before you even start thinking about the hassle of moving furniture in or out. I discovered that if an agency had taken professional photos, this usually meant something was wrong with the flat and they could not get it rented.

Eventually we found a place, and once we agreed to take it we were whisked to an office and told to put in an application. This could only be completed if we could give them a cheque for the first and last month’s rent, and our guarantor’s bank statement.

In New York the standard is for landlords to request evidence that you earn more than 40 times the monthly rent to prove you can comfortably afford it. I wasn’t even close. No one outside the US is allowed to be a guarantor, so I had to ask our company’s vice president to be mine.

There was no guarantee our application would be successful – multiple applications are accepted at once and you cannot be sure you will get back all of your money if you are unsuccessful. Although the deposit and rent are returned if you don’t secure the apartment, most realtors will keep some of the money to cover their admin charges, including the cost of background checks. I doubt very much that the background checks were even carried out.

by Alex Wolynski, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty

Robert Redford, Golden Boy

Robert Redford still does it for me. He did it for me when I first saw him in Butch Cassidy, he did it for me when he was washing Meryl Streep’s hair in Out of Africa. He did it for me in uniform in The Way We Were and with full hippie beard in Jeremiah Johnson. He’s classically handsome — the type of handsome on which you, your mom, your grandmother, and your best gay friend can all agree — with a flatness of expression that morphs sardonic when you least expect it. He has a storytime voice, the perfect level of tan, and haphazardly spaced highlights that betray a life lived en plein air. I love him for his palpable Westernness, his ease with open spaces, the scent of high altitude that seems to waft from him. He looks as good in jean cut-offs as he does in a well-tailored suit. And for nearly 40 years, he’s been Hollywood’s golden boy: likable and bankable, if a bit self-serious.

Redford belongs to the class of actors I think of in my head as the silver foxes: indigenous to the ‘60s and ‘70s, they’ve ripened before our eyes. Most of them have semi- or totally retired, some have passed away; all live in my memory both as their original, gorgeous selves and their well-lined, refined later-in-life iterations. Newman and Beatty, of course, but also De Niro and Hackman, Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson, Jane Fonda and Julie Christie.

They’re not classic Hollywood, per se. They never had to deal with studio contracts. They got to use their real names and marry whom they pleased. They shunned publicity, or at least pretended to shun publicity as they posed for the cover of Life. They were a different type of star, in terms of interaction with the industry at large, but stars nonetheless — embodiments of what mattered to Americans at various cultural moments. And Redford, I realize now, was proof positive that beautiful American men could still exist amidst the turmoil of the age. Turns out he was a bit of a true liberal, but at the time, he had the looks of a jock, the demeanor of a respectable man, and just enough zest to titillate. I can’t quite decide whether he’s a good actor or a perfect star — which, if you think about it, is true of the most memorable of our idols.

Throughout his career, Redford’s split critics: maybe he could act, but could he act other than himself? And isn’t that the very hallmark of a star? David Thomson called him a waste, while Pauline Kael understood that his golden diffidence was part of his allure, what drew us back to watch him over and over again. He never gave himself over fully the way that his co-stars did — not because he wasn’t acting, but because that was the point. He was, and remains, too cool. Which is part of why his enduring popularity is so surprising — is it his looks that bring us back, again and again? Or is the semi-masochistic desire to watch him maintain that aloofness?

Redford was born in Santa Monica, because of course he was. His father was a milkman but, in a page straight from the American Dream handbook, eventually became an accountant, moving his family to Van Nuys. There, Redford played on the high school baseball team and, if looks are to be believed, slayed the entire female population. A baseball scholarship to the University of Colorado followed, and I can just imagine him skamping all around Boulder, drinking beer and breaking hearts.

I mean, please. But he had better things to do than play beer pong, so he traveled Europe, took painting at Pratt, and eventually got caught up in acting, making his way into the live television scene in New York, which was thriving in the ‘50s. At some point between flipflopping his way through Europe and going to Pratt, he married Lola Van Wagenen, whose native Utah he would gradually make his own.

by Anne Helen Petersen, The Hairpin |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Mads Berg
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What Do Clothes Say?

Where language falls short though, clothes might speak. Ideas, we languidly suppose, are to be found in books and poems, visualised in buildings and paintings, exposited in philosophical propositions and mathematical deductions. They are taught in classrooms; expressed in language, number and diagram. Much trickier to accept is that clothes might also be understood as forms of thought, reflections and meditations as articulate as any poem or equation. What if the world could open up to us with the tug of a thread, its mysteries disentangling like a frayed hemline? What if clothes were not simply reflective of personality, indicative of our banal preferences for grey over green, but more deeply imprinted with the ways that human beings have lived: a material record of our experiences and an expression of our ambition? What if we could understand the world in the perfect geometry of a notched lapel, the orderly measures of a pleated skirt, the stilled, skin-warmed perfection of a circlet of pearls?

Some people love clothes: they collect them, care for and clamour over them, taking pains to present themselves correctly and considering their purchases with great seriousness. For some, the making and wearing of clothes is an art form, indicative of their taste and discernment: clothes signal their distinction. For others, clothes fulfill a function, or provide a uniform, barely warranting a thought beyond the requisite specifications of decency, the regulation of temperature and the unremarkable meeting of social mores. But clothes are freighted with memory and meaning: the ties, if you like, that bind. In clothes, we are connected to other people and other places in complicated, powerful and unyielding ways, expressed in an idiom that is found everywhere, if only we care to read it.

If dress claims our attention as a mode of understanding, it’s because, for all the abstract and elevated formulations of selfhood and the soul, our interior life is so often clothed. How could we ever pretend that the ways we dress are not concerned with our impulses to desire and deny, the fever and fret with which we love and are loved? The garments we wear bear our secrets and betray us at every turn, revealing more than we can know or intend. If through them we seek to declare our place in the world, our confidence and belonging, we do so under a veil of deception.

Old, favoured clothes can be loyal as lovers, when newer ones dazzle then betray us, treacherous in our moments of greatest need. There is a naivety in the perilous ways we trust in clothes. Shakespeare knew this. King Lear grandly insists to ragged Poor Tom that: ‘Through tattered clothes great vices do appear;/ Robes and furred gowns hide all’ – even when his own opulence can no longer obscure his moral bankruptcy. Emerson too, mockingly corrects us when he writes: ‘There is one other reason for dressing well… namely that dogs respect it [and] will not attack you.’ (...)

We’re prone to disparage as crude the analogue of self with stuff, as though the substance of the soul might only be short-changed by the material things with which we seek to express it. And it is difficult not to read the diminution of dress in philosophy as part of a more general disdain for matters regarded as maternal, domestic or feminine. ‘Surface,’ wrote Nietzsche, is a ‘woman’s soul, a mobile, stormy film on shallow water.’ Relegating women to the shallows is, of course, to deny them depth, but the surface to which they are condemned is not without its own qualities: fluidity, responsiveness, sensitivity to a given moment or sensation. Female writers have always understood this. In Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth (1905), Lily Bart concedes to herself the powerful truth of her passion for Lawrence Selden:

She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes – she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.

When we speak of things being ‘woven together’, we mean affinity, association, inseparability, but Wharton’s ‘inwoven’ intimates more: an intimacy so close that it is constitutive. Wharton’s contemporary Oscar Wilde quipped in The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890) that ‘it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.’ With his dandyish green coats and carnations, Wilde teasingly nudges us towards the stark secularity of a new world in which divinity could be as readily located in dresses as in deities.

But Wharton’s insight goes beyond reference to a newly outward-facing modernity, and is more profound than the upturned paradox of a surface that could speak of the inner self. Lily is bound to Lawrence not simply by some romantic pledge of affection but in the particularities of his being, as though the tightest seam ran back and forth between her slow-gathered sense impressions (his voice, his hair, his clothes) and the interior life to which they seem to reach. As Lily is to Lawrence, we too are inwoven with the stuff of the world and the people to whom those things belong or refer. (...)

This is not to say that clothes are the self, but to suggest, exploratively, that our experiences of selfhood are contoured and adumbrated by many things, including clothes, and that the prejudices by which we disregard the concern for appearances or relegate dress to the domain of vanity, are an obstacle to a significant kind of understanding. As Susan Sontag says, contra Plato, perhaps there is ‘[no] opposition between a style one assumes and one’s “true” being… In almost every case, our manner of appearing is our manner of being.’

Perhaps we simply are in clothes. And in clothes, our various selves are subject to modification, alteration and wear. This happens in clumsy ways – the glasses you hope might lend you new seriousness, the reddened lips that mimic arousal – but also in innumerably subtle ways: the heel that cants the body, contracting your stride, the tie that stiffens your neck and straightens your spine. Some garments constrict and reshape us physically, but also, sometimes, emotionally. And there are garments we can feel, that itch and chafe, that make apparent the difference of their textures to that of the surface of our skin, as though we and they are not one. In these, we are alert to the experience of being in our bodies, in a way that seems at odds with the rest of the world gliding past, apparently immune to discomfort. In such garments, too, we are always alert to the ever-present physicality of our bodies.

By contrast, there are clothes we wear almost imperceptibly, that are light or diaphanous to the point of being hardly seen or felt, as though we are sheathed in air. There are clothes that we are so accustomed to that we go about our business with barely a thought to the bodies they encase. If the self is somehow experienced, then perhaps there are moments when we strive to be seen and others when we seek a certain kind of invisibility. We wax and wane in the things that we wear. In clothes, there are always possibilities for difference and transformation.

by Shahidha Bari, Aeon | Read more:
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Who Is A Millennial?

Given that generational labels are at best approximate and especially mutable around the edges it is of course impossible to fix a time frame on what age range defines millennials—let’s not even get into the tricky subject of who exactly we are speaking of when we use the word—but I will propose a rough guide to the characteristics common to the generations in order to better help you establish your place in our advertising-friendly cosmology.

• If your cohort is marked by self-obsession, a belief that you changed the world for the better and an inability to recognize that you got the best out of the economy, the environment and technology and you are going to die in comfort right before the negative effects that your reckless plunder on all of those things makes life unbearable for everyone who came after, you are a Boomer.

• If your cohort is marked by self-disgust, a belief that you never had a fair shot and an inability to shut up about how people used to talk to each other in person plus a vestigial obsession with shitty rock music from the Pacific Northwest, you are Generation X.

• If your cohort is marked by the belief that not enough people are making it about you, you are Generation Catalano.

• If your cohort is marked by self-obsession, a belief that you will change the world for the better and an inability to recognize that GIFs are not conversation, Tweeting is not marching, and quizzes that are almost comically transparent in their desire to turn you into a marketable commodity are not an actual ratification of how special you are, you are a millennial.

• If your cohort is marked by an astounding amount of potential and an already-notable lack of annoying self-regard you are whatever we would call the next generation. Unfortunately we are not going to come up with a name, because due to the way the Boomers fucked up the future for everyone you are going to spend most of your life running from fires and hiding from the killer robots that want to eat you. Sorry. Life isn’t fair (unless you’re a Boomer, in which case man did you really get away with one).

I hope that helps! But if you want something a little shorter so that you can share on social media here’s a brief takeaway that should settle the question at hand: If during the time it took to read this you started to get agitated about how long it had been since you last received praise from your supervisor, you are a millennial. Good for you!

by Alex Balk, The Awl |  Read more:

Image: The Awl