Generation Bubble
Generation Y
Millennial Tension: The Generation-Y Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Anyone who has had a job in the real world can report that bringing one’s personal life into the workplace is strenuously discouraged as a drag on one’s productivity. But one would never know this if all she had to go by was Hollywood. And, lacking much sustained or significant engagement with the real world for having been cosseted and micro-parented by their anxious Boomer parents, Gen-Y’ers seem incapable of drawing a clear distinction between their personal and professional lives largely because of all the television and cinema they’ve imbibed. They are thus nonplussed when hotness and ample self-esteem don’t send them hurtling pass their co-workers into the executive boardroom.
The Looks Have It: Social Media and Pathological Narcissism
Given our current economic situation, having a nation of mirror gazers doesn’t bode well. It means that most of us are too damn fabulous to devote any time to stop the looting of the Treasury, to protest the closing of our public libraries (which almost happened to Harrisburg’s Free Library), or demand a stop to that wholesale destruction of the middle class that is currently going on. A glance at most Facebook pages will tell you that people still care more about running that sub-50 marathon or getting up the courage to suffer that first prick of the Botox-filled needle than considering what the United States will look like in ten years (needing substantial cosmetic surgery itself, undoubtedly).
Crummy Day Real Estate: Williamsburg's Demise Leads to Hipster Diaspora
In Billyburg, however, it’s not so much sour grapes as grapes of wrath that are the order of the day, as hipsters hightail it out of the borough like so many latter-day Joads. Sadly, Steinbeck’s California no longer beckons, its waving grain and musky grapes now themselves but figments of a fever dream — or, worse, collateral for IOUs.
Their Vegetable Love: Zombie Banks and the Advent of Japan's "Herbivore Men"
Japan has of late been experiencing an explosion in population of a native ruminant — “herbivore men.” Dubbed this by Maki Fukasawa, a Japanese culture columnist, herbivore men are remarkable for their impecunity, thrift, fastidiousness, and, most bizarrely, their asexuality. CNN.com reports on the etymology of this curious epithet: “In Japan, sex is translated as [...]
Containing Multitudes: Annie Finch on Facebook and the New Poetry Community
You can’t write poetry on the computer. — Quentin Tarantino Via harriet, The Poetry Foundation’s blog, comes this piece by Annie Finch on the effect Facebook has had on the versifying demimonde. She regards it as largely positive, because it promotes, as she puts it, “a sense of awareness” of a vast number of other [...]
Boho Meets Hobo: Hipsters Hit Hard in “Youth Magnet” Cities
Overextended and underemployed in creative-class Xanadu is probably not how many hipsters envisioned their post-collegiate years, but such is the sobering reality for many of them. Which can come as nothing but good news for local employers, who stand to acquire specialized labor at bargain-basement wages, as well as for landlords, the ultimate winners in all such demographic trends.
Bubble Baron: Mirrorplay
Regardez moi. . . We at Generation Bubble are reminded of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who, in his landmark study, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” writes: The human offspring, at an age when he is for a time, however short, outdone [...]
H8 When It’s 2 L8 2 S8 Ur Urge 2 4nic8: Hipster Carles’s Libidinal Runoff
The folks at American Apparel have chosen to confine their politics to the unsexy abstraction of fair labor practices, which is unfortunate, because it suggests that a company’s laudable ethics will never in their own right be enough of an inducement to purchase its products. It must instead dive headlong into the wallow of pornographic suggestiveness. American Apparel may indeed be righteous, but it wants to remind us that it can be hip as well.
The Twitter End
Celebrities have been kickin’ up a twit-storm lately. The Examiner reports that, last Thursday, Demi Moore saved a fan from suicide through her Twitter page. The fan, known as “sandiguy,” sent a tweet to Moore saying, “I’m just wondering if anyone cares that I’m gonna kill myself now.” Moore responded with supreme sang froid, heroically [...]
Recession Regression
It’s jammie time for Generation Y! Sky Mall’s Spring 2009 catalogue contains this latest consumerist sugar tit: Millennials can now cosset themselves in supreme toddler comfort as they ride out economic downturns. Bibs and blankies not included. Can anyone say “bubble snuggle sesh?!” Related Posts:Serfin’ USA: The Taxpayer as Ignorant IngrateSol Invictus: From Boom to [...]
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
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