I don’t know why I’m never quoted in trend-pieces about What the Millennials Are Doing. I’m 23. I live in Brooklyn. I’m a perpetually underemployed graduate of a highly ranked East Coast university. I live with a female roommate who owns a lot of ramekins. And I decided to become a sperm donor to make ends meet In This Economy. READ MORE

The comments on this Dealbook piece about how Wall Street has reconstituted the notion of employment as bottom-line cyclical churn are 100% mean, as you'd expect. ("I can't help but wonder if any of these laid-off wunderkinds ever ask themselves whether they contributed to the current economic situation," for example. And: "My God these people are pathetic. Even when they're laid off and collecting unemployment, they still sound like insufferable snobs.") But the sheer numbers involved in the way financial firms chew up and spit out young people are pretty bad. These are the very kids who were the children of the subjects of New York magazine parenting articles: we cared about them when we worried they were probably autistic, and then when their young parents were striving to get them into the best preschools, and then again when the kids spent the next sixteen years trying to beat each other on the SATs and the GPAs and the extracurriculars, so why shouldn't we care about them now that they've entered a workforce where they regularly get kicked to the curb because some dickface in management has to sack a quota of analysts to make his now-regular layoff goal? When you're laid off twice by 28, that's rough! And that's tens and tens of thousands of young people who were sold a dream and an expectation about merit, performance and success, and now they're figuring out one by one that it was literally all a lie. Probably half these kids will turn out bitter and evil and scheming, but, if we're lucky, half the kids will figure out that the prevailing corporate system of doing business is utterly screwed. Maybe a few will even do something about it.

"If I know I will be leaving campus during the day, I almost always put my Harvard t-shirt back in the drawer and pick something more unidentifiable. If it slips my mind and I find myself in Central Square with 'Harvard' emblazoned across my chest, I suddenly become self-conscious." READ MORE

"I met another guy who was funny and went to film school at NYU. He was twenty-two and had a tiny apartment on Great Jones Alley and I thought he might make a suitable boyfriend, or at least a suitable deflowerer. He was older, he’d done it before, and, I had been told, all men were dying to have sex at all times, so it would be easy enough to get him on board with my project. It was harder than I thought. He was eager to make out and grope, but to my surprise and disgust, he seemed very uneasy about engaging in actual intercourse once I admitted—in the most blasé terms—that it would be my first time. It is possible this young man had located the term “statutory rape” somewhere in the back of his head. Or, perhaps his father or mother had warned him that girls get attached to their first lover—you break it you bought it, or some such. But his reluctance was no match for my romantic poetry: I told him that he didn’t have to worry about me falling in love with him, and that if he wouldn’t sleep with me I’d find someone else who would. As it happened, we split the difference." READ MORE

Nothing says summer like the arrival of fresh-faced children in our office, bearing lattes in each hand. Thanks, interns! Please welcome this season's Youngs, in alphabetical order.... READ MORE

Evil Swedish free subway rag Metro went big this morning in an attempt to make sense of the current NYC population undercount. Their online headline is "Hipsters to Blame for Census Losses?" but they amped it up younger for the bleary subway crowd. Also maybe it was those pesky "illegal immigrants"! Or something else! Mm, hipster outrage bait. (via, via)

This is not quite what I expected to see in response to the death of Osama bin Laden. I guess it makes sense? It must have been weird for them to have tried to understand 9/11 in 5th grade. Good thing we don't have a draft. I guess. READ MORE

A few days ago, in my professional capacity as a Japanese TV News Producer (read: guy who carries tripod, tells police, “sorry, we’ll leave”), I was dispatched to Detroit for the North American International Auto Show. READ MORE