How old is Britain's youngest football hooligan? The answer may surprise you.

"In the new study, Russell Clayton, now a doctoral student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, found that anxiety and alcohol use significantly predicted emotional connectedness to Facebook. He discovered that students who reported higher levels of anxiousness and alcohol use appeared to be more emotionally connected with the social networking site. Clayton and his colleagues also found that students who reported higher levels of loneliness and anxiousness use Facebook as a platform to connect with others."

"Alison Caporimo, a 24-year-old who lives in Manhattan's East Village, is undaunted by newfangled smartphones and computers. But as for old-fashioned, coin-slot pay phones? The magazine editor had never really trained her Warby Parker eyeglasses on the contraptions. 'I lost a lot of coins,' confesses Ms. Caporimo, who didn't even know how to work a pay phone before Tuesday."

When I think back to my early twenties—the intensity of emotion, the clarity of conviction, the insupportable arrogance—I am filled with a mixture of revulsion and self-pity. Seriously, can you really bear to reflect on the period of your life when you fervently believed that all those things that didn't really matter actually made a difference? Perhaps the greatest gift of coming to the realization that your time here is finite and ludicrously unremarkable is the comfort in not having to really invest any of your energy caring about who said what about whom or how you feel about this and that. The sheer joy of deciding that you're not [...]

Kids today. I remember when people thought it was crazy when Kriss Kross wore their jeans backwards. Currently there seems to be a new trend sweeping the hip-hop nation. As evidenced in a number of recent popular rap music videos, the new thing seems to be smoking two blunts at the same time. Or two joints. Two marijuana cigarettes. This would not be so remarkable [Ed.: it is actually not that remarkable], were it not for the fact that it flies in face of age-old conventional wisdom about pot smoking.

"The mental ability of teenagers can improve or decline on a far greater scale than previously thought, according to new research. Until now the assumption has been that intellectual capacity, as measured by IQ, stays quite static during life. But tests conducted on teenagers at an average age of 14 and then repeated when their average age was nearly 18 found improvements – and deterioration." Big deal, my IQ fluctuates pretty much every day. Although that is probably related to alcohol.

I still use AIM. That's right. I am an AIM user. This apparently makes me old. The kids today, with their Facebooks and Gchats and beeboos or whatever it's called, they laugh at me when I tell them I use AIM. Oh, you should hear the mockery and disrespect, the snickering. It burns, the way they do an imitation of me using a walker. Some of them have even asked me what AIM is. Anyway, I have been content, in my stubborn, fogeyish way, to remain on AIM even as my group of contacts moves on to the newer, flashier thing. It is a kind of digital natural selection, [...]

And here it is, a culmination of this morning's themes (Twitter, kids today, the arrival of spring): "As the spring semester nears the end, a growing number of college students are tweeting about their use of the ADHD medication Adderall. Twitter allows experts and policymakers the opportunity to track the use of Adderall, in much the same way an outbreak of influenza can be followed as it works its way across the nation. In the new study, BYU health science and computer science researchers report the findings of their six-month investigation in the Journal of Medical Internet Research." What did they learn? "Tweets about Adderall peak [...]

"Brace yourself for 'MacGyver,' Michael Jackson and 'Saved by the Bell' references: The '80s baby lawmakers are coming to Washington. In January, four new House members born during the Reagan years will be sworn in, bringing to six the number of lawmakers who could have gotten their first AOL accounts while in high school."

"U.S. food companies are reaching children by embedding their products in simple and enticing games for touch-screen phones and tablets. The new medium is far cheaper than Saturday morning TV commercials and could prove as effective."

"I'm a 23-year old undergraduate at a small liberal arts college. In my view, there's nothing inherently wrong with having a very close relationship with your parents. Calling your parents five or six times a day–why not, especially if you consider them your friends? Just because the Boomers (and the Gen X-ers, to a certain extent) had bad relationships with their parents doesn't mean we need to repeat that experience." —This comment, in response to Terry Castle's essay on what it's like to teach the current crop of parent-attached young people, is pretty amazing! It's gonna be a long couple decades.

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.

Manual labor jobs are on the decline, you know. Based on how winded I got trying to move a box of books into a new apartment a few months back, I probably couldn’t survive in a manual-labor-based economy, but like anybody with a steady flow of testosterone, I still like [...]

"A new study finds that many college students believe the positive effects of heavy drinking outweigh the negative consequences. According to study participants, heavy drinking increases courage, eases communication, and has other social benefits that overshadow negative effects of hangovers, fights and regrettable sexual situations." They left out the part about how alcohol also temporarily relieves the sorrowful burden of existence, but other than that I have to say that I am pretty impressed with the knowledge and understanding displayed by our nation's college students. It's a very proud day.

Science, what's going on with the youth of today?

Teens who drink alcohol spend more time using the computer for activities such as social networking than do those who don't drink alcohol, according to a new study. The study found a link between recreational use of the computer (for non-school related activities) and teen drinking…. However, the study found only an association, and not a direct cause-effect link. This means it's impossible to tell which happened first: the computer use or the drinking. It could also be that teens who drink are prone to using the computer for longer periods of time.

Yes, it's a real mystery. [...]

"[A] new study showed young adults who text more than 100 times a day tend to be more interested in wealth, vanity and less so in leading a virtuous life. Led by psychology professors Paul Trapnell and Lisa Sinclair, the University of Winnipeg study suggested that students who text that much are 30 percent less likely to value living an 'ethical, principled life,' compared to those who texted 50 times or less a day. The study also showed that heavy texters exhibited higher levels of ethnic prejudice."

When I was 5 years old I got a toy shooting gallery for Christmas. It was a contraption with a line of metal balls and a bright blue gun with a magnet in it; you'd lift up the balls and fire them at different targets. (I'm pretty sure this was it; I vividly remember that gun.) I played with it for a night and then the next day I did something "bad"—I've asked around, and no one remembers quite what, because it was FOREVER AGO—and my parents took it away to punish me. They kept it around on the top of the fridge for about a week or [...]

Are kids today devaluing "I love you" by using it all the time?

"In a series of papers on adolescent health published in The Lancet today, scientists describe how new research has changed our understanding of adolescence which was thought to start with the physical changes to the body around puberty and to be completed when growth stopped in the late teens. Now researchers believe the brain goes on maturing and is not fully developed until at least the age of 24."

"What hope is there for childhood in the UK today if this is how adults think? We seem to have forgotten the fact that most children are well behaved and instead we are unquestionably accepting a stereotype of young people as criminal and revolting. We aren't asking people to put up with yobbish behaviour, but we do need to change our attitudes towards troubled children." —Anne Marie Carrie, chief executive at British children's charity Barnardo's, responds to results of a survey conducted by ICM Research that found of 2,000 people polled, 49 percent agreed that "children are beginning to behave like animals."

Science, tell me how the next generation is doing. If you're a young adult, chances are high blood pressure isn't high on your list of things to worry about. But a new study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill suggests maybe it should be. They found that nearly one in five young adults between the ages of 24 and 32 has high blood pressure, also referred to as hypertension.

Okay, well, I can't exactly claim to be surprised by this, what with our sedentary lifestyles and the amount of processed crap we cram into our gullets as we sit, dull-eyed, in the [...]