Millennial Writers Reflect on a Generation’s Despair

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2021

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The eldest millennials turned forty this year, and the producer Ngofeen Mputubwele comments on a sense of despair he finds in his generation, having to do with the state of the planet, the nation, the Internet, intolerance, and more. He set out to explore why millennials feel hopeless and how they can live with that feeling, in conversations with five writers: Kaveh Akbar, the author of “Pilgrim Bell”; Carlos Maza, the creator of the video essay “How to Be Hopeless”; Shauna McGarry, a writer on “BoJack Horseman”; Patrick Nathan, the author of “Image Control: Art, Facism, and the Right to Resist”; and the climate activist Daniel Sherrell, whose recent memoir is “Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:08.6	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:12.2	The birth of the generation we call millennial spans from 1981 to 1996, according to the Pew Research Center.
0:20.0	So the eldest of them turned 40 this year,
0:22.7	and the youngest are in their mid-20s. The radio hours go fan, and puttubuele, sits close in
0:29.5	the middle of that generation. And lately, he's been looking into what seems to be a tide of
0:34.7	despair among millennials, and it has something to do with the state of the planet,
0:39.0	the state of the nation, and the state of the internet. Pretty much everything. Here's Gophane.
0:44.0	In the biblical story of the flood, Noah pulls the animals and his family onto the ark.
1:04.3	And when the waters come, they come from two places.
1:08.1	They fall from above, from the heavens gaping open, but also they gush forth
1:15.6	from below, from the great deeps. It conjures an image in my mind of water inching up from below the
1:24.3	ground, like a great swamp, slowly engulfing the people.
1:32.5	I've grown up in the church. I'm confirmed Catholic, spent years in a black Baptist church,
1:38.9	but then, from middle school on, have spent a lot of time in the white evangelical church.
1:45.7	And when I say spent,
1:52.3	I don't mean I've visited or am familiar with. I mean there is no part of evangelical life I don't know, Bible study and community group and D time and VBS and mission strips.
1:58.9	Lately I've been working on a memoir about the one little wrinkle in my story.
2:03.8	My Being Gay.
2:05.4	It's a text about queerness and race and God.
2:08.9	The first attempt of my life, outside this I say, to talk publicly about my sexuality.
2:14.3	A plea not to be disowned or excommunicated.
	...

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