Read The Free Press today and you’ll find that everything old is new again.
We’ve gone back to the prim “Banned in Boston” Puritan regime of the pre-1960s. No, actually, we’ve gone well beyond all that to a modern hellscape combining the sanctimony of the Puritan prig with the thuggish eliminationist inclinations of the totalitarian Stalinist.
As is often the case these days, the courageous J.K. Rowling has stood up Liberty and Reason and thereby provoked the mob.
Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous novel, featuring the memoirs of an unrepentant pedophile named Humbert Humbert, has often been a flashpoint for controversy—including at the time of its 1955 publication, when the only outfit that would touch it was a French press best known for publishing literal porn. But however foolish or prudish the mid-century imbroglio surrounding Lolita might have been, it pales in comparison to the one now raging on the internet, where a sizable crowd has been moralistically shrieking about the book for three straight days.
Like so many other digital-age absurdities, this one originates with a millennial who is mad at J.K. Rowling. Here’s what happened: in the year 2000, in an interview with BBC Radio 4, Rowling praised the novel, saying, “[A] plot that could have been the most worthless pornography becomes, in Nabokov’s hands, a great and tragic love story.” Rowling’s sentiments about Lolita are not unique; Stanley Kubrick and Dorothy Parker famously felt the same, and my own copy even has a blurb on it from Vanity Fair, calling it “the only convincing love story of our century.” But nearly 25 years later, an actress named Sooz Kempner unearthed the interview and was shocked, shocked!
“JK Rowling doesn’t understand Lolita,” she wrote on X. “It is not a great and tragic love story, it is terrifying book [sic] written from the POV of a peadophile [sic], a very obviously unreliable narrator, and at no point are you meant to say ‘this is so romantic.’ She’s 12, Joanne. What the FUCK, Joanne.” Her sentiments were echoed by countless others, including novelist Ryan Ruby, who sniped, “Lolita is a moral test. Kempner passes it. Rowling does not.”
On the one hand, this is very much a tempest in a terminally online teapot. On the other hand, the wild virality of Kempner’s post (which has 5.2 million views and over 9,000 reposts) does unfortunately tell us something about the cultural discourse in the year 2024: namely, that people, in their fervor for recreational hatred, are rendering themselves functionally illiterate.
“So, you go into Yale, now you can begin to experience rejection!” warns Rachel Shin in The Atlantic.
Arrow Zhang came to Yale last fall eager to try new things. In high school, she had spent most of her free time writing and practicing piano, but at Yale, she envisioned dividing her time between activities as disparate as finance and international relations. Zhang did not anticipate how competitive Yale’s clubs would be.
She quickly learned that, not unlike the admissions process to the university itself, entrance to student clubs often requires written applications and interviews. She filled her Google Calendar with hours of info sessions and application tasks. After more than a month of nonstop auditions, applications, interviews, and even tests, Zhang found herself rejected from multiple clubs, including ones that had no obvious reason to be selective. Most of the clubs she was able to join—The Yale Herald, a dance group, the clock-tower bell-ringers —involved skills she’d already honed in high school.
“Everyone would say, You don’t need any experience to apply,” she said. “But then everyone who gets in are already pros.”
Yale’s competitive-admission clubs include many that are notoriously exclusive but also more surprising entries, such as the community-service club. One of Zhang’s rejections came from the Existential Threats Initiative, which meets to discuss issues such as climate change and AI. Zhang was turned away for not having enough experience dealing with existential threats. Her rejection email encouraged her to listen to more podcasts, such as 80,000 Hours (tagline: “In-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems”) or otherwise gain expertise in the field.
Ben Snyder, a recent Yale grad who co-founded Existential Threats in 2022, told me the club is simply not for beginners.
“We wanted to be more selective so we could have more advanced conversations,” said Snyder, whose expertise in this subject includes having researched the risk potential of pandemics at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation last summer.
High barriers to entry are no longer just for historically elite groups on campus like secret societies and the acapella group the Whiffenpoofs, or even for club sports teams, which can field only so many players. The investing club turned away 236 people last year. The “teach kids to code” club turned away 20. The musical-improv group turned away several dozen, leaving its rejectees to find more loosely organized ways to burst into song. Half of the applicants to the magic club saw their hopes vanish into thin air.
While many millennials swear by the hustle culture and believe in giving their all at work and learning new skills that can be turned into a side hustle, there is a trend among many Gen Z to not let jobs dictate their life and take things easier.
After the trend of “quiet quitting”, which refers to doing the bare minimum of what is required of employees, a new trend going viral on social media is “lazy girl jobs”.
You must be wondering what “lazy girl jobs” refers to and if it means slacking off at work. The trend was made popular on TikTok by influencer Gabriel Judge. She explained the trend on her Instagram account named The Anti Work Girlboss (@antiworkgirlboss).
Lazy girl jobs refer to those jobs that require minimal effort, pays decently and is flexible with timings thus allowing employees a good work-life balance. Judge defines lazy girl jobs as something that you can basically “quiet quit”. She says there are a lot of jobs out there where one could make 60-80 thousand and not do much work and be remote. She said there are many non-technical tech roles like a marketing associate, some type of account manager or a customer success manager that are very good lazy girl jobs.
In another video, she shared her views and said having a 9 to 5n job is still cool but having a job where you can exercise work life balance and not be bound by fixed working hours is truly lazy girl jobs. She also shared how she has a lazy girl jobs programme that aims to help women find such jobs.
“And what we mean as lazy girl is a safe, high-paying, remote job that provides a safety net. Women are powerful beautiful and creative when we aren’t worrying about money. We have so many resources on how to get your next lazy girl job.”
Paul du Quenoy says his (pierced and tattooed) generation is conservative, because it remembers growing up under Reagan. (!)
What makes X-ers like me (born in 1977) so damn conservative? In the context of 2022, there is no great mystery. We grew up in the 1980s, a blessedly simpler time when life was fun and carefree, when the USA was cruising toward Cold War triumph, and when truth, justice, and the American way were both time-tested certainties and the unstoppable wave of the future. As far as we knew, we were living in the best of all possible worlds, riding our bikes without helmets, going to raves without social media tracking our every move and pill, knowing our moms and dads couldn’t be helicopter parents if they had the whole Army Air Cavalry Brigade at their disposal. Every problem had a solution. Every feeling found a form. Every dream became a reality.
Moronic boomers took our complacency for laziness. We were derided as “slackers,” dismissed as the first generation who would live worse than our parents. We were chided for our cynicism toward the Sixties ideals that our elders still mouthed but had abandoned so hypocritically that for us they were little more than a good laugh when the adults left the room.
For a brief moment, we were the Brat Pack ready to take the reins in a Pax Americana. Then, as the college students and young professionals of the 1990s, we watched the boomers piss it all away. Scandal followed scandal. Power grab followed power grab. One institution after the next was corroded by corruption and greed. By the end of the decade, the first boomer commander-in-chief left us wondering what the definition of “is” was as he testified in the first presidential impeachment trial in 130 years. The boomers knew they had failed. But rather than admit it, they retreated into Bob Dylan’s tedious word salads and hid behind corporatized Beatles lyrics.
Of course their values struck us as hollow and empty. The much promised better world — and the opportunities we were meant to have so long as we jumped through their achievement hoops — never materialized alongside all the wars and recessions. Like the latch-key kids we’d once been, we found our own solutions. We became self-reliant, self-directed, and self-assured. Our medium was sarcasm because nothing left to us was sacred or even authentic. More of us believed we would live to see UFOs than Social Security checks. To the mass irritation of our parents and teachers, we tuned in religiously to the satire of South Park before it got preachy, The Simpsons before it got zany, and Saturday Night Live before it sucked.
We watched with bemusement as the younger generation born after 1980 — the millennials now poised to vote Democratic despite it all — grew up coddled and medicated, enslaved by technology, unable to solve basic problems without turning to parental helicopters. Their entitled ways became even less intelligible as they spouted identity politics and grievance tropes gleaned from our failing schools and universities, using them to whine, shame, and scold their way into the lower echelons of the workplace while taking gruesome bites of avocado toast to help the overprescribed Xanax and Adderall go down. The irony with which they expressed their discontent seemed pointless and sad.
To our immense frustration, the boomers cultivated millennial dependency and helplessness, all while keeping real power, success, and independence out of their emotionally impaired reach. “You will own nothing and you will be happy,” an arch boomer recently told them without discernible objection. Is it any surprise that more American millennials view socialism more favorably than capitalism and vote that way? For both sides of this codependent intergenerational alliance, the ideology of the left offers to provide for their ever greater needs while absolving them of all responsibility. There’s an app for that. It is called the Democratic Party.
Generation X-ers are caught in the precarious middle. Our financial fortunes have been broadly held back by Boomers unwilling to pass the torch, and are coveted by millennials. The freedoms we knew and cherished through our young adulthoods are now ever more forfeit to the nihilistic abstractions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which are demanded by our insecure juniors and mandated by our browbeaten seniors. The uplifting unity we felt when the Berlin Wall fell has yielded the crude, hackneyed divisions of identity politics and a digital age atomization so thorough that 65 percent of young Americans do not feel comfortable having a face-to-face conversation. Our natural esteem for success and prosperity is locked in mortal combat with the crippling self-doubt, poisonous envy, and consequent ill will of the generations surrounding us.
For the X-er, the choice is clear. One party, whatever its faults, vibes morally and ethically with the spreading of human happiness and success tempered by traditional values. The other party tries to enforce alien moral and ethical vibes as a precondition of human happiness and success at the expense of traditional values, especially if they get in the way of its peculiar vision of “social justice.” Nearly six out of ten X-ers are drawing on their halcyon childhoods to find the right way forward.
I certainly hope he’s right about the voting, but personally I’m skeptical of the alleged perspicacity of the generation that thought Punk Rock was any good.
The Verge gleefully reported yesterday on an “open letter” written by SpaceX employees and circulated on the company’s internal chat system, criticizing Elon Musk’s public statements and urging “the company to better address executive leadership behavior as well as sexual harassment complaints.”
An open letter to SpaceX decrying CEO Elon Musk’s recent behavior has sparked open discussion among the company’s employees in an internal chat system. Employees are being encouraged to sign onto the letter’s suggestions, either publicly or anonymously, with a signed version of the letter to be delivered to the desk of SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell.
The letter, reviewed by The Verge, describes how Musk’s actions and the recent allegations of sexual harassment against him are negatively affecting SpaceX’s reputation. The document claims that employees “across the spectra of gender, ethnicity, seniority, and technical roles have collaborated on” writing the letter. It’s not known which SpaceX employees wrote the letter; the employees who posted the letter in the internal chat system have not responded to requests for comment.
“Elon’s behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us, particularly in recent weeks,” the letter states. “As our CEO and most prominent spokesperson, Elon is seen as the face of SpaceX — every Tweet that Elon sends is a de facto public statement by the company. It is critical to make clear to our teams and to our potential talent pool that his messaging does not reflect our work, our mission, or our values.”
SpaceX fired several employees involved in a letter that criticized Chief Executive Elon Musk and the way the company applies internal rules, according to an email to staff from SpaceX’s president and people familiar with it.
Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, said the company conducted an investigation and decided to terminate a number of employees who participated in the effort, according to the email, a copy of which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Her email didn’t say how many people the company let go, and that number couldn’t immediately be determined.
Agatha Christie became famous in the 1920s as a mystery writer.
For younger generations, she’s the next hot thing.
Shashwata Roy, a 17-year-old fan of space and computers, tweeted in March that Ms. Christie’s 1926 novel “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” is an “absolute must read…review coming up.”
The student in Kolkata said he planned to read all her novels. “The unique way of storytelling is something I think is very rare nowadays,” he said.
The British author may be long gone, but her fictional whodunits—often solved by an elderly British lady or a fussy Belgian detective—have made her a star with fans more used to streaming Marvel movies or scrolling through TikTok—where videos labeled with the tag #AgathaChristie have racked up more than 26 million views.
“Agatha is sparking with younger readers, and I don’t see that with any other writer from her period,” said Devin Abraham, owner of the Once Upon A Crime mystery bookstore in Minneapolis. Customers who ask for books by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett—both contemporaries of Ms. Christie—are generally in their 50s or 60s, said Ms. Abraham.
“Who’s that? I have never heard of Raymond Chandler,” said Ari DiDomenico, a 17-year-old Christie fan in San Diego. She said classic novelists, such as Jane Austen, didn’t hold her attention since the “language was too old-timey[! -JDZ].”
“Agatha Christie’s writing style is more to the point, and the pacing works really well,” she said.
You probably missed it. I did. Last Fall, Newsweek reported that 39 per cent of Gen Z-ers polled described themselves as LGBTQ.
Thirty percent of Millennials identify as LGBTQ, according to a soon-to-be released study that is based on scientific polling data. Among Christians the numbers were lower—but only slightly, with just under 30 percent of Millennial Christians identifying as LGBTQ.
The portion of the population that describes itself as gay has varied over the years, from 10 percent, based on research by Alfred Kinsey and widely promoted by the National Gay Task Force in 1977, to less than 6 percent in a recent Gallup poll. The pollster who worked on the new study, George Barna, attributes the unusually high number he found to social and news media coverage that makes it “safe and cool” for young Americans to identify as LGBTQ—whether or not it represents their actual sexual orientation.
“It’s a subset of a larger issue, that this is a generation where three out of four are searching for meaning. This is a group that doesn’t have a reason to get out of bed in the morning,” Barna says. “Therefore, the LGBTQ identity gives them comfort. A lot of this generation claim to be moving in that direction, but there’s a big difference between claiming the identity and living the lifestyle.”
Among Millennials, 30 percent identify as LGBTQ, more than three times that of the rest of the adult population, and when the researchers broke out the youngest of the group, ages 18-24 (which some call Gen Z), they found 39 percent called themselves LGBTQ.
The millennial girl’s bête noir: the needy, exploitative “Soft-Boy” type was apparently first explicitly defined defined in 2016 by Amelia Nierenberg in the Oldest College Daily.
The term “soft-boy” has been floating around the feminist corner of the internet for a while. … For a loose definition, the “soft-boy” is not necessarily a romantic interest, but rather a boy who exhibits his sensitivity as a social tool, transforming his awkward emotionality into a likeable characteristic.
Still confused? Let me paint a picture for you. The soft-boy doesn’t care about body hair on his woman partners, but wants to make sure that everyone knows that he’s very chill about it. It’s the boy who speaks pretty openly about going to see a therapist, but then speaks pretty openly about his friend going to see a therapist, too, and she didn’t OK that as public knowledge. It’s the boy who jokes about his own fragile masculinity, but then gets really testy about the fact that he was picked last for the high school badminton tournament. Think messenger bag. Think Michael Cera. Think an indulgent (and spurious) use of the word “problematic.” He wants you to know how many feelings he has.
Although he’s not overtly a keg-standing, never-crying, hard-grilling misogynist, the Yale soft-boy is a different presentation of an equally pernicious masculinity because he slips under the radar. Appearing emotionally intelligent excuses him from criticism because he disguises his emotional neediness as the hard-earned vulnerability of a close friendship. The soft-boy is a weight, opening up to lure caring women to his side. If it sounds like I’m using predatory language to describe these vultures of fourth-wave feminism, good read. I am. Soft-boys of Yale are a social epidemic, invisibly soliciting unreciprocated emotional labor from their woman friends. …
But the soft-boy is not a “friend” to the web of women he has spun to entertain him when he is lonely, coax him through break-ups when he is sad and help him out when he is feeling low. Instead, he’s bartered openness for a time commitment, demanding an inordinate amount of this emotional buttressing from his women friends. And he doesn’t see why that’s a problem — he thinks he’s entitled to the time his women friends spend caring for his emotional well-being, and notices neither the toll it takes on them nor the fact that he rarely reciprocates the devotion. It’s a corruption of an empathy that should be freely given, rather than demanded. And frankly, it’s exhausting.
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