"And for an only-would-be-famous person — that is, a civilian who is active on social media — cigarettes are a playful, blasé-bad-girl prop."

"A scroll through TikTok and Reels will show plenty of seductive supercuts of smoking scenes in movies and on TV; cult-popular Instagram accounts like @Cigfluencers ('your favourite smoker’s favourite smokers') give fans a place to leave impassioned comments like 'MADE ME WANT A CIG SO BAD' (re: Ava’s Parisian cigarette in the Hacks finale) with only the occasional scold ('Wow, a page dedicated to people who will die early of lung cancer').... Ironically, the efficacy of turn-of-the-century laws banning cigarettes from public spaces... combined with early-aughts anti-smoking campaigns... which worked to keep millennials from being as cigarette-crazed as older generations, have, by the harsh light of 2026, given cigarette smoking the rosy glow of a bad habit from the good old days...."

From "Cigarettes are back in vogue. How did this happen? Celebrities like Dua Lipa and Gracie Abrams have been photographed with cigs, as have social media influencers who like the retro vibes" (WaPo).

"That eyebrow pierce.... You’ll have trouble getting the barbell out and eventually someone will have to use tiny pliers to cut it out of your face."

Said Molly Jong-Fast, speaking at the Bennington graduation and, later, quoting herself in a NYT essay titled "It’s No Wonder Grads Are Booing Their Commencement Speakers."

The booing that's famously happening this year is in response to graduation speakers who attempt to say something encouraging about what A.I. is going to do to the career they may still hope to pull off.

"Why are millions of young Indians suddenly calling themselves cockroaches?"

"The chief justice of the Supreme Court of India probably did not anticipate that an off-the-cuff courtroom remark would trigger one of the most popular political satire movements his country has seen. At a May 15 hearing on judicial appointments, Justice Surya Kant made a comment about youngsters 'like cockroaches,' who, unable to find employment or establish themselves professionally, drift into media, social media and political activism.... Many viewed the remark as dehumanizing. Lawyers debated proper judicial conduct while young Indians flooded social media with angry responses and memes. Then a 30-year-old Boston University graduate named Abhijeet Dipke launched a satirical Instagram page called the 'Cockroach Janta Party' — a play on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party...."

From "This Indian youth party started as satire. Then it got serious. The movement's growth reflects the depth of frustration of a generation that feels unseen and unheard" (WaPo)(gift link).

This gets the old "insect politics" tag.

"I understand that the job market is rough, but what is it with this lemming-like behavior where so many young people feel they need to be in NYC?"

"It shows a real lack of imagination. NYC is not that great; there are alternatives."

"Move. Go elsewhere. Find meaning and joy in your life outside of NYC. It exists. This is a big country."

"I must be the one confused …. it seems. Average student debt of $38k but move to the most expensive city without a job and complain about the affordability of hip-hop dance classes?"

Those are the top 3 highest-rated comments on the NYT article "In a City of Big Dreams, Many Young Adults See a Cloudy Future/A bleak job market. Rising rents. Huge debt. In New York and other cities, traditional milestones of adulthood feel further away for some 20- and 30-year-olds."

Right under the headline, there's a photograph of a 24-year-old man, lying flat on his back in bed and clutching a pillow. He looks despondent. We're told he "feels guilty telling friends he can’t join them for dinner. He wants to start a family one day, but worries. 'I can’t even afford myself, so how am I going to afford someone else?' he said. And he laments that he can’t pursue some of the hobbies that have always brought him joy, such as hip-hop dance. Classes are too expensive: about $25."

"Once the domain of mellow Gen X-ers in the ’80s and ’90s, the hacky sack is experiencing a renaissance at the hands — well, the feet — of Gen Z."

"High school students around the country are freshly enthusiastic about the toys, crocheted bean bags that once hung in the air like the scent of marijuana. Parents and teachers mostly seem glad to watch young people be entranced by something other than their phones...."

From "Hacky Sack Mounts a Comeback With Gen Z/Teenagers are booting the game out of the 1990s. 'It’s kind of bringing everybody together,' one said" (NYT).

"At Notion, the $11 billion business software developer he founded 13 years ago, [Ivan Zhao] hired a high-schooler."

"'We had to ask his parents for permission,' he explained. 'This guy has no experience working anywhere, but he is so talented, and he just grew up with YouTube, grew up with language models, so he knows how to access information given the tools in front of him.' The move was a small example, Zhao argued, of what he referred to as a new 'abundance approach' unlocked by powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tools. 'We’ve become a lot less picky about your capabilities and years of experience,' he explained. 'We are almost doing the reverse of what we were doing before.' Where once Zhao hired mostly mid-career, mid-level workers, Notion... now targets either very young or senior operators. The former are high on 'agency' (the enthusiasm to try things and embrace new tools); the latter often have high taste (a sense of what works and what doesn’t, refined through years of experience)...."

So begins "America’s white-collar jobs bloodbath gathers pace/US business has embraced AI, but predictions of mass unemployment may be based on the false premise that there’s a fixed amount of work to be done" (London Times).

"When [Grok] produced a 'corrected' version of my face, unrecognisable yet eerily similar to every airbrushed influencer..."

"... I closed my laptop and laughed. In my thirties I have enough context and confidence to know I don’t need to remodel my face like it’s a damp two-bed riddled with asbestos. But at 16 I’m not so sure I would have found it funny. I might have taken it as a blueprint, a glimpse of how I was supposed to look, and chased it down into the rabbit hole."

Writes Lydia Veljanovski, in "The new rise of female looksmaxxing/I tried AI apps suggesting surgery and rating young women who want to be 'Staceys'" (London Times).

"There’s one thing that’s stealing when you are a teenager and you want the adrenaline rush. And part of it is about testing the rules..."

"... and getting away with something. But what I’m seeing on TikTok and social media is people saying that they’re stealing from Whole Foods not just for the thrill of it, but out of a feeling of anger and moral justification. Because the rich don’t play by the rules, so why should I? And Jeff Bezos has too much money — he’s a billionaire — so why should I have to pay for organic avocados? My friends and I have started calling this microlooting, because it has a slight political valence to theft, as opposed to just the thrill of getting away with something. Have you noticed this around you online? Have you noticed more people talking about stealing in this way?"

Says NYT writer Nadja Spiegelman on an episode of the NYT "Opinions" podcast, "'The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?'Why petty theft might be the new political protest."

Those other 2 characters are New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino and Hasan Piker, a political commentator I blogged about a year ago when he was being touted as the potential "Joe Rogan of the left."

Tolentino says: "I think it’s great that the valence of property is on the table as something to be toyed with, in terms of direct action. We’ve forgotten that there is a long and storied history of sabotage and engagement with property destruction, even, which is abhorrent to people...."

Piker: "In the Marxist tradition, adventurism is the action that is oftentimes decentralized. Oftentimes, anarchists will say, 'This is the propaganda of the deed.'

"The urge to bring back old words is evergreen..."

"... general interest articles on the subject abound, and the political landscape inspires regular pleas on social media to restore potent pejoratives such as 'lummox,' 'bloviate,' 'bumptious' and 'hoodwink.' Some requests are whimsical, too, like that of a user on Bluesky who suggested, 'We should bring back the word "spake," e.g. "Thus spake my friend Jeff."'... Whether these campaigns are sincere or silly, we may be closer to a wordy renaissance than we think.... Henry David Thoreau’s 19th-century coinage, 'brain-rot,' is now the ruin of modern minds. Calling someone a 'goon' is no longer just a 1920s habit. We’re saying 'sheesh' again, apparently, and even the president has spoken of skedaddling. Is there a science to this kind of resurgence?"

I'm reading "Why Kids Are Starting to Sound Like Their Grandparents/The strange resurgence of words like 'yap' and 'skedaddle'" (NYT).

1. I'm all for reaching out to more unusual and interesting words and fighting the tendency to withdraw into a smaller and smaller vocabulary. I hope these kids today are doing it because it's fun, it's mind-sharpening, and it's aesthetically pleasing. We're not talking here about showing off or making other people feel dumb, I don't think. This isn't a William F. Buckley move.

2. "Bloviate" — just a few days ago, I had a post titled "Bloviate." It's a Warren G. Harding word. Harding was born in 1865, so he's hardly at the grandparent level for today's "kids." More like great-great grandparent or even great-great-great grandparent. As for Henry David Thoreau, he was born in 1817, so that would put him at the great-great-great or great-great-great-great level. But he's no one's great-great-etc. grandfather. Like so many of these kids today, he was childless.

3. Did Thoreau ever opine about kids? Yes: "Children appear to me as raw as the fresh fungi on a fence rail." More aptly, on the subject of whether one ought to have children: "The only excuse for reproduction is improvement. Nature abhors repetition. Beasts merely propagate their kind, but the offspring of noble men & women will be superior to themselves, as their aspirations are."

4. I didn't remember that "brain-rot" — 2024's Word of the Year — came from Thoreau.

"When did we all decide that sweats and pajama pants were the appropriate attire for air travel?"

"What incentive do we have in such a demoralizing environment?"

What was so bad about 1976?

That's the teaser on the front page of the NYT for an article with a different headline, "The Conservative Conspiracy Against Women’s Progress Is Real" (by Jessica Grose).

The article says nothing about the 1970s. I do see a reference to the 1960s: "The report’s authors know they can’t tell all women to be stay-at-home mothers (returning the country to 1960s employment levels for women) because that would contradict their other goal, to dismantle the welfare state and put even more work conditions on parents receiving government aid." The 60s were 60 years ago, and the article does call the report "a curious set of guidelines for the future, since it seems mired in culture war battles from the 20th century, unable to face the past 60 years of change."

Usually the 1950s are selected as the era of the traditional wife and the 1960s represent the exciting period of changing gender roles. The 70s were the heyday of feminism. These decades feel quite distinct from each other to me, a person born in 1951. Jessica Grose was born... when? Maybe to millennials, the 50s, 60s, and 70s seem like one big chunk of boomer oldness. 

"A few (male) editors have told me they wish they could figure out what men would read, what books they would buy."

"I think they do read. They read nonfiction and genre fiction, mostly. And then they probably read the canon. They’re just not reading, like, contemporary literary fiction, and I don’t know if that’s bad or good. I also think it’s a question of generations — they’re wondering what younger millennial men are reading and Gen-Z boys/men. They’re young, and their tastes are as yet unformed, so … get to work!"

Said an unnamed literary agent, quoted in "28 Book Industry Professionals Get Candid About the State of the Industry" (New York Magazine).

"It’s 100 percent my intention to build this franchise into the next Disney."

Said Alan Chikin Chow, quoted in "'Alan’s Universe' Shows What It Might Look Like to Win at YouTube/As Gen Alpha’s attention drifts from TV and movies, video creators like Alan Chikin Chow are eager to fill the void" (NYT)(gift link so you can get more info and see quick clips of the awful video that is the art of our time, enfolding our children).

Some content creators attempt to tailor material to TikTok, Instagram and any other potentially profitable platform. But by 2020, Chow, aware that the Trump administration might ban TikTok, had also read the book “Essentialism,” whose message he summarized as “you can be good at many things or you can the best at one thing.” He threw himself into YouTube, specifically YouTube Shorts, videos often under a minute that are designed to be watched on phones.... 

The audience is heavily Generation Alpha, children roughly 7 to 14 who grew up with screens.

"Why everything is ‘aesthetic’ to Gen Z and Alpha/'Aesthetic' is now an adjective and a one-word compliment. Why does it still sound wrong to older ears?"

That headline at the Washington Post sent me right to the OED to see when "aesthetic" first became an adjective. 

The relevant meaning is "Of a thing: in accordance with principles of artistic beauty or taste; giving or designed to give pleasure through beauty; of pleasing appearance." The OED traces that back to the 1800s:

"Think of all the lost boys who have disappeared into their rooms, only to return as something unrecognizable, like a modern changeling."

That's my favorite sentence in "Your Phone Isn’t a Drug. It’s a Portal to the Otherworld" (NYT).

I'd make that a gift link but I'm out of them, but I think you can figure it out..

"Even brands are acknowledging the stakes of putting yourself out there — a hallmark of cringe — when things could turn out poorly."

"Earlier this month, Nike reworked its longtime tagline 'Just Do It' into a new campaign called 'Why Do It?' The ad, narrated by Tyler, the Creator, depicts athletes, many of them mid-game, as he asks why they are trying if failure is an option.... Reflecting on how her phrase, cringe mountain, had spread, [creator consultant Erin] Mallett said it was already a common feeling that was in need of a name. 'I gave them a personal mantra and maybe just an opposing excuse,' she said. 'If someone goes, "Oh, but you shouldn’t do that." Now my excuse is, "But I can, because it’s OK." You can’t get to the land of cool without first climbing cringe mountain.'"

From "Climbing Cringe Mountain With Gen Z/Raised online and under constant scrutiny, young adults are leaning into embarrassment as a necessary part of growing up" (NYT).

"With subtitles on, I find myself being able to quickly gather what one character has said, look down at my phone, react to a message..."

"... then look up before that character has even finished their line. The viewing experience thus becomes multifaceted and efficient. The subtitles allow us to go on our phone but still absorb the content and gist of the TV show....  And social media itself has encouraged the use of subtitles across the board. It is now a given that most creators add text captions to their videos – without the option to turn them off.... This isn’t simply a trend but a feature anchored in the algorithm itself. Text captions, rather than dialogue, encourage the video to crop up in the TikTok search engine.... It began as an accessibility improvement, but the rapidity with which it has caught on suggests it’s business-oriented and crucial to getting that sweet algorithm boost. The fact that 85% of social media visual content is now watched on mute... coupled with the ease with which AI can generate subtitles without the need for human transcription, means we’re living in a subtitled world – one that is often poorly translated, low-quality and error-ridden...."

Writes Isabel Brooks, in "Most of gen Z watch TV with the subtitles on – and I understand why" (The Guardian).

"In dozens of focus groups conducted by my polling firm, young men identified three forces shaping their lives..."

"... economic displacement that keeps stability out of reach, institutional distrust born of broken promises, and a crisis of belonging rooted in masculinity... [Charlie] Kirk’s network transformed this frustration into political energy by linking stalled progress to a broader narrative of national decline and conservative resurgence. His message blended faith, family and MAGA-infused patriotism with a simple pitch: You don’t have to accept being worse off than your parents. Democrats, by contrast, rarely spoke to young men’s deeper questions about success, significance or belonging, leaving a gap Mr. Kirk knew how to fill...."

Writes John Della Volpe, in "What Democrats Can Learn From Charlie Kirk" (NYT).

"Republicans meet young men where they already spend their time; Democrats, more often, expect them to show up in formal political spaces that feel staged.... Young men... see Republicans as confident and direct, Democrats as scripted and afraid to offend. Mr. Kirk capitalized on that contrast by showing up on left-leaning campuses, taking tough questions and engaging head-on...

"'I was poly before poly was a term,' he says, blue hair tied back, maroon nail varnish on his toes."

"Jay, an IT consultant and self-confessed computer nerd, grew up in suburban New Jersey and became interested in polyamory at the age of ten after reading Robert A Heinlein sci-fi books featuring sexually promiscuous open marriages. His first teenage relationship was nonmonogamous.... He moved to Somerville in the mid-1990s to find many people he knew coalescing around Boston’s university hub — either tech nerds he’d met in online chatrooms or those who attended the sci-fi conventions he would frequent. Large numbers of them were interested in polyamory. 'We had all independently been working on this thing [polyamory], and we found each other and we had a lot to talk about,' he says. He started organising casual poly meet-ups in people’s homes, applying the same academic rigour to discussions about romance as they did to technology. 'How do you handle jealousy? How do you handle getting a new partner when you’ve had one for a while?'"

From "Forget love triangles. Meet the ‘polycule’ with 80 people in it/Polyamory is on the rise — especially in one US city where romantic partners have organised themselves into ever expanding networks. Yes, it can get complicated, they tell Megan Agnew" (London Times).

Who knew the polyamory movement was so connected to science fiction? And yet one can imagine the sort of adolescent who gets submerged in science fiction while dreaming about an alternative to the existing world of finding a real-life girlfriend/boyfriend. Some entirely new structure is needed, he thinks.... blue hair tied back, maroon nail varnish on his toes.

ADDED: A little colloquy between me and ChatGPT.

"... 'soft-clubbing'... 'what happens when a generation raised on overstimulation and burnout wants the fun without the fatigue.' Think lo-fi coffee shop D.J. sets at 2 p.m...."

"... with everyone behaving a little too respectfully. Perhaps that explains the natural — or 'natty,' if you’ve been here a while — wine craze that has taken over New York’s restaurant and bar scene in the last couple of years, attracting 20-somethings looking to drink a little more 'intentionally.' And perhaps that’s how you get something called a wine rave at Public Records, a vast multilevel bar in Brooklyn, hosted by the D.J. collective Beverages on a Saturday afternoon. Here, finance bros in light blue linen button-ups and weathered Stan Smiths milled about clutching wine glasses, sediment occasionally pooling at the bottom."

From "Is Partying Dead, or Are You Just Old? Gen Z was alive during a week of supper clubs, daytime raves and rooftop ragers in New York City" (NYT).

Lots of photographs at the link, including the one I captured a segment of, because I've been keeping track of men (and women) in shorts:

I'll translate my feelings into a survey:

What do you think of young people going out "partying" dressed in shorts?

Only if you're "going out" to a friend's basement den or backyard.

Only if you look better because your bare legs are out in the open.

Only if it's part of an important heat-regulation strategy.

Only if they're all doing it because everyone else is.

Only if it happened to be what you already had on when you decided to leave the house.

 

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