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 a ski house in Killington, read one of my pieces in the Mountain Times, and…

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 toasts or newspaper columns, commencement speeches seem inherently doomed by the nature of their format…

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 its tartness. As a man in my 20s, however, I feel that spending my time…

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 combed through the “Generation Y” archives in order to determine whether indeed I’ve already covered…

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 feminist empowerment—has coexisted in equal superabundance with apolitical scuttlebutt inquiring as to the real identity…

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 able to achieve a record-setting 73 wins. A friend, discussing the article with me, argued…

In case you hate basketball enough to have ignored the NBA so completely as to have missed this, in which case you probably shouldn’t actually read this particular column—the big storyline in the NBA this season was the Golden State Warriors, who broke the all-time regular-season record for wins with 73, eclipsing Michael Jordan’s Bulls…

There’s a new feature on Facebook that allows users to broadcast live video. Within the usual Facebook content parameters, the subjects of these videos can be anything, but so far, most of the broadcasters have turned their cameras onto themselves, creating video streams that resemble unedited personal vlogs, achieving a small degree of excitement through…

Have you ever watched that Bravo show “Inside the Actors Studio,” where, during every episode, the host James Lipton ritualistically asks his interviewee the same series of artfully banal personal questions—clearly idiotic but boosted into respectability by their French provenance (their origin being the journalist Bernard Pivot, not, as is sometimes claimed, the novelist Marcel…

Following last week’s terrorist attack in Brussels, Hillary Clinton tweeted sentiments of solidarity, resolve, and anti-Islamophobia, as well as an info-graphic displaying her three-point “plan to defeat ISIS” in Syria and Iraq. Bernie Sanders expressed his condolences to the people of Brussels, stating that this “attack is a brutal reminder that the international community must…

A “skeuomorph” is a design feature transferred from a traditional object to a newer iteration of the same device for the purpose of continuity of appearance rather than utility. Technically obsolete details once intrinsic to the construction of the object in question will often carry over as stylistic elements intended to create an experience of…

Do you know someone who goes around claiming that, if Donald Trump is elected president, he’ll move to Canada in protest? This will never happen—first, because Donald Trump will never be the president; and second, because even if Trump did win the general election, your friend wouldn’t actually follow through on his threat to leave…

Has there ever been a time more plagued by pop-culture nostalgia than the present moment? Our new TV shows, increasingly, are old TV shows: not remakes or “reimaginings,” which typically carry the challenging novelty of all-new casts and new characters responding in contemporary style to the older premise (as in the short-lived, high-tech modernizations of…

By the time this column reaches you, reader, the 88th Academy Awards will have come and gone, and you’ll barely be able to remember what happened. But as I write this, the Oscars are still a couple of days away, and both the professional and amateur spheres of movie criticism are abuzz with predictions and…

Jan. 27: In response to tweets by rapper Wiz Khalifa alleging that Kanye’s new proposed album title (“Waves”) plagiarizes the catchphrase (“wavy”) of rapper Max B, Kanye unleashes a Twitter rant proclaiming that he is “the greatest artist of all time” and that Khalifa has “distracted from my creative process.” He will later change the…