#14

What will the hipsters be remembered for? The last few months I have raised this question in Brooklyn, on the sagging couches of its Brownstones and over the din of the glowing jukeboxes in its dives. The most common answer is “Nothing.” New York Rock? So much retread. The hipsters’ championing of vintage clothing? Sorry, you can’t be remembered for remembering. The embrace of white-trash chic--trucker hats and so on? Interesting but evil. Though not authentically evil. The hippies had Charles Manson, one friend noted. “We haven’t even produced a decent serial killer.”

They exist in a state of perpetual luxuriant slumming. They drink blue-collar beers but hold white-collar jobs. Or vice versa. Whether he comes from above or below, the hipster takes care never to appear to be striving. Class anxiety isn’t hip. There’s something utopian about the trucker hat. But of course the hipster couldn’t afford to dress down if there weren’t a taut social safety net in place.

What Happens When a Generation Refuses to Grow Up

#13

First of all, there is Profland, the traditional faculty, oriented, presumably, to serious scholarship and its code of values. But Profland lacks real cohesion. Its postmodern wing, for instance, usually doubles as a faction of the PC Mafia. This is even more true of the Myrmidons of the Downtrodden, who staff the various 'oppression studies' programmes - Women's Studies, Black Studies, Latino Studies, Queer Studies, Native American Studies, and so forth. Collectively, they are the consiglieri of the PC Mafia.

Academic strife: the American University in the slough of despond

#12

A core value of American liberals is the importance of redistributing wealth from the prosperous to others, through highly progressive taxes and transfer payments. Which leads to a question: If redistributing wealth is a good idea for workers, companies, individuals, and families, then intellectual consistency suggests it should be equally valid for institutions like colleges and universities. Right?

Soak the Rich! (Colleges)

#11

There are many reasons why now is a good moment to bring back the SCUM Manifesto, the wild-eyed treatise by Valerie Solanas, a lesbian drifter, psychotic and would-be writer who is best known for shooting Andy Warhol nearly to death in June 1968. The Manifesto is a text that tries to do many things – everything -- at once. It’s gleefully incoherent, crackling with the energy set up by its impossible, mutually contradictory demands. It’s a fierce call to arms for the destruction of the male sex; a manic re-imagining of the world economy, in which capitalism will be undone from within by women’s “unwork”; and a vision of the coming utopia

S.C.U.M. Manifesto

#10

The issue was whether we attended college, and—most important—how seriously we took the experience once we got there. I thought everyone felt this way. You can imagine my confusion, then, when I first met someone who had gone to Harvard.

There was, first of all, that strange initial reluctance to talk about the matter of college at all—a glance downward, a shuffling of the feet, a mumbled mention of Cambridge. “Did you go to Harvard?” I would ask. I had just moved to the United States. I didn’t know the rules. An uncomfortable nod would follow. Don’t define me by my school, they seemed to be saying, which implied that their school actually could define them. And, of course, it did.

GETTING IN: The social logic of Ivy League admissions.

#9

Irony has become one of those thoroughly annoying words, but let's return to 1991 when the concept in its contemporary, tonal incarnation was fairly fresh. Douglas Coupland's novel Generation X and Richard Linklater's movie Slacker distilled a mostly white, college-educated, upper-middle-class North American sensibility. It was partly a politicized worldview shared by the children of baby boomers who were disgusted with capitalism (the Iran-Contra scandal, El Salvador, Reaganism, Wall Street) but who also saw that the alternatives—communism and socialism—had flopped. The I-word came to represent an attitude of passive engagement at a recession-era moment, typified by the motto of Linklater's movie: "Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy." An ironic stance toward America and its culture provided a space for novelty and pleasure, and, potentially, a sense of purpose.

Wilmerding Shrugged: The political ambitions of Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision.

#8

Further evidence that the war in Iraq is wrecking the U.S. Army: Recruiters, having failed to meet their enlistment targets, are now being authorized to pursue high-school dropouts and (not to mince words) stupid people.

The Dumbing Down of the U.S. Army

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