It was nearly three years ago that the journalist Farhad Manjoo published the seminal Slate article “This Is the Greatest Hoodie Ever Made: How American Giant created the best sweatshirt known to man”—still surely the most influential and frequently cited work in the annals of hoodie journalism and the main catalyst for the popularity of…

As an actual male fan of the writer/director/actress Lena Dunham, I subscribed to her new email newsletter—called “Lenny”—almost as soon as I heard about it. Dunham’s fame stems from having created the HBO program “Girls,” a critically acclaimed but only marginally popular sitcom that nevertheless serves as one of the primary totems of Millennial culture.…

The apparent association between craft beer and cycling is one of the more perplexing aspects of microbrew culture. In my early 20s, I noticed that brewery gift shops seemed to sell a surprising number of cycling jerseys—from Allagash to Stone, they’re as ubiquitous as branded pint glasses, and once or twice my brother and I…

The Oscar winner Robert Zemeckis put forth “What Lies Beneath” in the midst of Hollywood’s end-of-millennium resurgence of interest in ghost stories. This period began in 1999 with “The Sixth Sense,” “Stir of Echoes,” “The Haunting,” and “Sleepy Hollow,” and continued into the 2000s with “The Others” (2001) and “The Ring” (2002). Zemeckis, who also…

Movies are often based on true stories. When a true story is based on a fictional movie, it’s a somewhat more special circumstance. “Man with a Plan,” a 1996 independent mockumentary, is a special movie. Directed by John O’Brien, a Harvard-educated sheep farmer from Tunbridge, Vt., it’s one of the few genuinely notable examples of…

“The Trouble with Harry,” the 1955 comic mystery film, was technically Alfred Hitchcock’s second movie set in the Green Mountain State: previously, the soundstage “mental hospital” in “Spellbound” (1943) was somewhat arbitrarily designated a Vermont address, a detail that bore little or no significance to the story. On the other hand, “The Trouble With Harry”…

Earlier this month, the California-based craft beer powerhouse Lagunitas Brewing Company announced that it was entering into a “joint venture” and/or “powerful new partnership” with Heineken International, a Dutch corporation that, in addition to putting skunky pale lagers into transparent green bottles under its own name, owns “over 170 beer brands” in “more than 70…

What is it with people who claim that breakfast is their favorite meal of the day? Stop saying this, people. In fact, it’s come to my attention that the phrase “favorite meal of the day” is employed solely in the context of breakfast: no one ever uses it to describe lunch or dinner. Yet both…

What, exactly, is the difference between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump? “Everything,” you might say. “Every single thing.” Yeah, that’s mostly right, but not entirely. There is one very obvious similarity, in that both Sanders and Trump have, from opposite ends of the liberal-conservative spectrum, engendered more genuine, visible excitement than their counterparts from within…

Have you ever had the feeling that, for the majority of the country, rural New England exists primarily as a collection of elite and picturesque yet vaguely sinister private boarding schools? In movies and novels, the New England prep school is not merely a setting but a hermetic, lyrically genteel genre unto itself, with its…

Hey, look, guys: summer is almost over. Does that fill you with sadness or excitement? And if the former—and if you haven’t been enrolled in school in more than a few years—then why? Selecting a “favorite season” is first of all an unnecessary endeavor and, like choosing a favorite thing in any other category (books,…

Sometimes, when I read my column in the Mountain Times, I wonder: does anyone actually use the phrase “Generation Y” anymore? It’s been my impression lately that the term “Millennials” has almost completely replaced “Generation Y” in trend-based think-pieces. The actual data, which I looked up today, is not quite so dire, but it suggests…

Ever since I was a boy, I thought it would be really fun someday to watch the Olympics in person. Alas, I might have actually fulfilled this dream if, in late July, Boston had not dropped its bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympic Games. That said, the city of Boston almost certainly made the…

I recently took a bold step into the future: I’ve “cut the cord”—that is, I no longer have cable TV service. I did this in part to save money and in part due to pressure from various magazine articles about how “millennials” are increasingly “cutting the cord,” relying on Internet streaming to fulfill their entertainment…

When E.L. Doctorow died last week in New York at the age of 84, Barack Obama took to Twitter to honor the late author: “E.L. Doctorow was one of America's greatest novelists. His books taught me much, and he will be missed,” our president graciously tweeted. It marks the seventh occasion during the Obama presidency…