Generation Y

By Brett Yates I’m aware that nearly everyone is probably tired of hearing about Confederate statues by now. But before I finally move on from the Unite the Right fallout and restore this column to its regularly scheduled programming, I want—for one very particular reason—to go back to Trump’s Charlottesville response last month, when he…

By Brett Yates Last week, I wrote a column whose conclusion I myself found, at the very least, debatable. Fortunately, my conception of my job here has never included a requirement to be correct—every week, I try my best only to put forth a single thought that might be interesting, and that’s all: my opinions…

By Brett Yates This month, following social media pressure upon their employers, two workers in the San Francisco Bay Area were fired for holding opinions widely deemed abhorrent. The first was a Google engineer who circulated a memo criticizing certain internal corporate policies: specifically, the diversity initiatives that Google had implemented in order to help…

By Bret Yates In July, the Boston Globe published an article about the painter Helen Frankenthaler that contained the following sentence: “Frankenthaler’s effects are more visceral, more buzzy and demanding, than pastoral evocations of space.” Every time I encounter the word “visceral” in print (which seems to happen more and more often), I have to…

By Bret Yates Some weeks ago I mentioned here, offhand, that I expected to hate the new “Spider-Man: Homecoming” movie, which was turned out to be totally wrong; I saw it, and I enjoyed it more than any other comic book movie of recent years. For me, that’s a fairly low bar, but I admired…

By Bret Yates What does it mean that the music video for “See You Again” by Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth is now the most viewed YouTube clip of all time? First of all, given the initial conception of YouTube as a repository for user-created (or at least user-uploaded) video, it’s kind of disappointing—although deeply…

By Brett Yates When I read about the fiasco that ensued when the South Burlington School Board decided to change the nickname of the local high school’s sports teams, I had a moment of déja vu that took a few minutes of Googling to resolve. In case you missed it, the racially insensitive moniker of…

By Brett Yates The Nickelodeon-produced major motion picture “Good Burger” debuted in theaters on July 25, 1997. Two decades later, it feels more popular than it was at the time of its release, when it met modest box-office success and critical revilement. With the children who saw it, it made a lasting impression, and now…

By Brett Yates I’ve gotten to the point where my hatred of superhero movies is so intense that I get angry just seeing that a new one has been released. In the case of last weekend, it was “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” the Marvel character’s second reboot in the past five years, and the sixth Spider-Man movie…

By Brett Yates One of the important duties I’ve set for this column has been the task of settling, once and for all, in the inviolable space of print, some of the common internet debates in which pedantic males between the ages of 14 and 45 take part on message boards and in comment threads…

By Brett Yates There’s a moment in the overrated sci-fi movie “Ex Machina” where the robot, whose programming allows her to discern unfailingly when someone isn’t telling the truth, is interviewing the protagonist. The first question: “What’s your favorite color?” The protagonist replies that it’s red, but the robot rejects this response, deeming it a…

By Brett Yates In “Bit Rot,” Douglas Coupland’s recent collection of essays and stories, the author writes, “In the future, every day of the week will be a Thursday. We’re all working toward the grave, and life will be one perpetual fast-food job of the soul. The weekend? Gone. We all pretty much know it…

By Brett Yates Why do celebrities ever apologize for anything? What does it do, exactly? Does it ever change anyone’s mind about whatever’s happened? When it comes to people whom we don’t know in real life, explanations are probably more appropriate than apologies. Regret and sympathy, contrition and forgiveness—these are the acts and emotions of…

By Brett Yates The University of Vermont’s commencement speaker this year was James Fallows, a journalist for The Atlantic magazine. I’ve followed Fallows’ writing off and on since Obama’s election, more for familial bonding purposes than for his ramblings about China and airplanes and his milquetoast political observations: the educated, reasonable, center-left perspective of Fallows…

By Brett Yates The fifth season of “MasterChef Junior,” the competitive reality series on Fox, concluded in May. One of roughly 90 shows hosted by the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, “MasterChef Junior” is a spinoff of “MasterChef,” an amateur cooking contest, replicated exactly but for the ages of the participants, who, in this iteration, range…