Millennial Writers Reflect on a Generation’s Despair
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 13 December 2021
⏱️ 32 minutes
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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.”
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| 1:15.8 | The birth of the generation we call millennial spans from 1981 to 1996, according to the Pew Research Center. |
| 1:24.1 | So the eldest of them turned 40 this year, and the youngest are in their mid-20s. |
| 1:30.0 | The radio hours, Gauphin, and Poutou-Buele, sits close in the middle of that generation. |
| 1:35.2 | And lately, he's been looking into what seems to be a tide of despair among millennials, |
| 1:40.2 | and it has something to do with the state of the planet, the state of the nation, |
| 1:45.8 | and the state of the internet. |
| 1:46.8 | Pretty much everything. |
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