By Brett Yates On July 21, from the stage at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, the libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel proclaimed before a crowd of fellow Donald Trump supporters that he is “proud to be gay”—an unprecedented event at a […]
Tag: brett yates
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
True wins
Last week I wrote an NBA-related article about the league’s shift toward conference parity and, at the end of the piece, I speculated that the regression of the Western Conference was one of the reasons the Golden State Warriors were […]