I write this column on my younger brother’s 20th birthday—happy birthday, Zach! For me, naturally, this occasion of my younger brother’s aging out of adolescence has led, with predictably anxious self-centeredness, to reflections on my own increasingly ancient status within […]
Category: Generation Y
Generation Y
Gen Y: On marriage
Most of the young couples I know who have recently gotten married lived together for a couple years before becoming engaged. For two people who have cohabitated romantically for an extended period of time, their daily routine no different from […]
Generation Y
Please stop talking about “Game of Thrones”
A serious question: is it possible in modern society to attend a social gathering without having to listen to a conversation about the latest episode of “Game of Thrones?” Am I the only person whose heart sinks at the inevitable […]
Generation Y
My presidential endorsement
By Brett Yates At the end of primary season, politicians who initially opposed their party’s nominee are forced either by fear of the other party’s nominee or by a need to preserve their own standing within their party to fall […]
Generation Y
Gen Y: Our safe spaces
Recently, a Facebook friend posted some clickbait from The Atlantic called “A Dialogue With a 22-Year-Old Donald Trump Supporter.” In my prone-to-distraction feebleness, I actually read the whole piece, in which the reporter Conor Friedersdorf exchanged messages with a white […]
Generation Y
Gen Y: Take Two
Longtime readers of “Generation Y” are aware that, in addition to being a wildly successful newspaper columnist, I’m also a wildly unsuccessful fiction writer. Periodically I mention this hobby in the hope that some editor from Random House might own […]
Generation Y
To the graduating class
In the second half of May, colleges let out, and graduation ceremonies are held—it’s commencement speech season. I’ve long had a particular interest in this genre of essay, if it can be called that, in large part because, like wedding […]
Generation Y
Gen Y: Lemonade power rankings
Summer is rapidly approaching—well, technically, at the normal speed—and, thus, lemonade season, too, is just around the corner. For my money, fresh homemade lemonade is possibly the world’s best-tasting beverage in its bright refreshing simplicity, its sweetness perfectly offset by […]
Generation Y
Have I already written about everything?
If you’re a longtime reader of this newspaper, you might occasionally wonder: is Brett Yates ever going to leave us alone? Won’t he ever run out of opinions? Reader, I share your concerns. In a recent fit of anxiety, I […]
Generation Y
Art therapy
So far, the Internet-intellectual music criticism addressing the politics of Beyoncé’s new visual album “Lemonade”—an R&B confession of marital discord that attempts to locate, within its narrative of the spiritual-psychological consequences of infidelity, a counterintuitive yet interrelated locus of black […]