Comments back a week from tomorrow.
This Week’s Posts
From the Archives
Neoconservatism never really dies, so we need to keep publishing pieces like this one I wrote in 2014.
Song of the Week
Book Recommendation
Generation X, Douglas Coupland, 1991
Douglas Coupland is often unjustly derided as an author who was beholden to one cultural moment, one which has passed. That's distinctly uncharitable, particularly given how much of this book seems timeless. So many of his observations about Generation X apply equally well to Millennials and, maybe, Zoomers too. I'm a skeptic of generation narratives in general, and it seems to me that many of these social artifacts we identify are about age, not generation. But Coupland recognizes that this kind of analysis is a form of entertainment, not sociology, and this book is very entertaining indeed. Not much happens in this book, famously, with the most plot-ty plot point, a car lit on fire, amounting to a footnote in the text. Instead there's a preoccupation with interaction, an eye for the peculiar social norms and language of the young and directionless. You do have to have a tolerance for a particular form of 90s blank sarcasm, but if you have experienced the internet you already know whether you like that or not. And it’s all set against the desert, the book's central image and metaphor, which literalizes the character's omnipresent sense of living on the edge of the world.
Non-Garbage Online Reading
That’s it. Domani.