Pop Culture

So I was catching up on my Tivo'ed Project Runway episodes the other night when I couldn't sleep. (I won't call it a guilty pleasure -- I will defend Project Runway 'til the end!)  Thought I could escape Gen Y issues for a brief spell? No sir. In this particular episode, the lovely Frau Klum challenged the designers to "design a look for recent college graduates who are starting their lives as independent professional women."

Independent? Really? Then why did all these young women BRING THEIR MOTHERS ALONG? Naturally, the moms started dominating the working relationship with the designers, and the designers started pitching to the moms rather than to the daughters/clients. In defending their designs to the judges, the designers would say things like, "Holly and her mother seemed really happy with it" -- a reminder that with Gen Y, parents are (almost) always part of the package. How old does Gen Y have to get before their parents back off? I'm intensely curious.

In any event, with the exception of the winning design by Jerell, these were some of the worst clothes you could ever see in the workplace. Or anywhere. Yikes. (Read the blow-by-blow here.)

BusinessWeek continues the debate about Gen Y's "narcissism." (I put that in quotations marks because it's a loaded term, but also because it comes originally from Prof. Jean Twenge's study about Gen Y, not from me.)

The author of the BW article ("Gen Y: Really All That Naricisstic?") points out that there's a nicer side to this phenomenon, that Gen Y really just has a sense of "healthy self-esteem."

I'm not a psychiatrist, so I won't try to diagnose a person, or a whole generation, with a clinical disorder. However, as I've written about often, I do think that what we're seeing is an unhealthy level of self-esteem, self-esteem that is fake and fragile when it has not been earned. And I don't think it's crazy to spot elements of narcissism in an entire demographic that thinks the world wants to read blog postings about what they had for breakfast. An exaggeration, perhaps, but not far off. If lay-people want to call that narcissistic, I don't really have a bone to pick.

The comments to the BW article have already started coming in, and they are (as is often the case) just as interesting as the original article. ("Just like to point out that the Gen Ys are the kids of the original "Me Generation," the Boomers"...)

The boomer connection is an interesting one, and I've been mulling over the role of helicopter parents for a while now. I had one of those a-ha moments at a wedding I went to last year. Some of the younger kids wanted to perform. Some of them played piano, others hopped around on stage doing funny dances. It was funny, sometimes cute, sometimes not, and standard wedding fare. What seemed different from weddings many moons ago was that the parents expected the whole world to stop and watch what their kids were doing, and naturally they zoomed in with their camcorders to document every minute.

As I was watching, it dawned on me that an entire generation of kids has had every little gurgle and tap dance recorded for posterity, and I wonder what it does to a developing sense of self to be treated like a little celebrity from day one. Their every move has been documented and oohed and aahed over since before they emerged from the womb. It's like growing up with their very own paparazzi and publicists rolled into one.

I don't fault Gen Y for any of this. And even parents aren't completely to blame. Technology plays an interesting role here. Older generations didn't have access to cheap camcorders, for example, and one of the reasons previous generations of college students didn't talk to their parents six times a day was because you had to use a public phone booth -- down the hall! -- and pay a lot of money to make a long-distance call. Technology changes everything, obviously, and in this instance it enables helicopter and paparazzi parenting. Maybe it's not just a boomer thing, but I suspect it's a combination. Boomers + technology = helicopter/paparazzi parenting. It's interesting to me that so many of these articles about Gen Y and its "narcissism" seem to assume that this behavior springs forth sui generis.

More postings on Gen Y narcissism here and here. Postings about helicopter parents here. A post about real celebrity parents, Hilton/Lohan-style, here. And a post about the Say Everything phenomenon here.

Hylô! Bore da! Cymru am byth! (I’m showing off my limited Welsh.)

My vacation is supposed to be over today, and I’m supposed to be flying back to Boston as I write this. United has completely bungled its flights out of Heathrow, so while it turns out I’m not flying today after all, I’m officially getting back in the blogging saddle.

Two things I learned from my holiday:

1. I’m the only person who comes back from remote Wales with a sunburn and
   
2. even in remote Wales, it’s impossible to escape societal hand-wringing over Gen Y or the abject misery of highly paid lawyers.

Who knew?

From the Daily Mail (“Mothers are Raising a Generation of Wimps”):

Enjoying a glass of early evening wine at a friend's house the other day, we were rudely interrupted by the wailing tones of her 12-year-old son. His plaintive yelp of hunger was swiftly attended to by his mother, who instructed him to "raid the fruit bowl".

He would, he said, but could she "peel an apple" for him. Embarrassed by my hearing this, she attempted to ignore him. He continued, repeating Dalek-fashion: "Mum, I'm hungry, Mum I'm hungry."

Finally, exasperated, she crashed her glass down on the table, stomped through to the kitchen, bashed a couple of doors about and returned with a face as a red as a tomato.

"Why couldn't he do that for himself?" I asked her.

"He doesn't know how to," was her snappy reply.

My friend's son is a wimp. Not in the traditional sense. He is not physically scrawny or the target of bullies (he plays junior rugby for our Gloucestershire town, and is popular with his peers) but he lacks backbone, gumption....

So who is responsible for this unenviable state of affairs? For more than 30 years, and heightened in intensity over the past decade, the women of Britain - as primary carers either with a husband or partner, or as a single parent - have systematically mollycoddled their sons to within an inch of their lives.

And not one but two headlines from today’s London Times:

• “Children to Get Lessons in Money – and Debt,” about a new mandatory curriculum “to help youngsters to prepare for financial pressures after leaving school” and
  
• “Never Letting Go,” subtitled “Are we in danger of producing a generation of tethered teens who are so cosseted and indulged that they will never be able to withstand life’s hard knocks?”

While we're on the subject of helicopter parents: I read an interesting article in a German newspaper last week. It quoted a high school geography teacher complaining about parents who threaten to sue if she gives their kids a C, and she talked about how she has to document all of the kids’ failings in the classroom, CYA style, in case she gets hauled into court. What strikes me as so interesting about her experience is that teachers are obviously still able to distinguish between good and bad achievement, but parents do so much bullying and buffering that their kids never hear anything but praise. What horrible Hilton-Lohan-style parenting, and what a disaster for their kids.

Also in the news over here? How much big-firm lawyers hate their jobs even as they make gobs of money. From an article in the London Times (“One in Four Lawyers Wants to Change Jobs”):

Almost a quarter of lawyers want to leave the profession because of stress and long hours, according to a survey published this week.

The poll of 2,500 lawyers also indicates that assistant solicitors — those who are not partners — are even more unhappy, with more than a third wanting to give up their jobs.

The YouGov survey for The Lawyer magazine confirms that there is widespread dissatisfaction with the work-life balance in law, despite record levels of pay.

It coincides with an inquiry by the Law Society of England and Wales into the long hours and lack of career prospects for lawyers with families.

The survey also shows that 20 per cent of managing partners — those in charge of the the firm — wish they were in another job. But few lawyers feel able to leave their jobs, chiefly because of the pay cut.

Almost a quarter of lawyers want to leave the profession because of stress and long hours, according to a new survey published this week.

The poll of over 2,500 lawyers also indicates that assistant solicitors - those who are not partners - are even more unhappy, with more than a third wanting to give up their jobs.

Where are the headlines about investment bankers hating their jobs despite the gobs of money they earn? No such headlines. Law firms are deluding themselves if they think their lawyers are miserable just because of "stress and long hours."

Getting at the crux of the problem is a follow-on story in the Times called “Why Are Lawyers Miserable: Want a List?”

The juxtaposition of two stories in The Times last week – one reporting that top-flight City lawyers were charging as much as £1,000 an hour for their expertise, another that a quarter of lawyers wanted to leave their profession – raised a pertinent question: just why are those in the legal business so miserable?

. . .

You see, as with everything else, America has been doing lawyer dissatisfaction bigger and better than us for decades. Polls have at various times established that not just a quarter, but up to 40 per cent of US lawyers want to leave their profession; and whereas British lawyers are only just waking up to the fact they are miserable and want to die, their American counterparts have been alert to it since 1989, which saw the publication of Deborah Arron’s Running From the Law: Why Good Lawyers are Getting Out of the Legal Profession.

What follows in the article is a great -- make that a really, really great, dead-on, must-read --  list of reasons why highly-paid lawyers are so unhappy. Item 3 in particular caught my eye:

3. the yawning gap between the ideals of those entering the profession and the reality. Some go into law because they dream of fighting injustice, but discover on entering that most of what lawyers do benefits big business.

Others enter the profession because they are seduced by the apparent glamour of the trade, as portrayed in Ally McBeal and LA Law, only to find that the work is about as glamorous as getting a verruca (cf point 2). Then there are those graduates – as much as 47 per cent of the profession, according to a recent survey – who drift into the job because they don’t know what else to do, assuming vaguely that it might be fun, and find on entering that it is about as amusing as breaking a limb in a traffic accident (cf point 1). Repeatedly. For 90 hours a week.

Lots to chew on, and I hope I've made up for lost time. Happy reading!

It's that time of year when Top Chef and Hell's Kitchen both rank very highly on my TiVo Season Pass list, and catching up on those episodes, I'm reminded of how bone-crushingly physical kitchen-work is. I'm also reflecting on a NYT article I read last month called "Top Chef Dreams Crushed by Student Loan Debt." An excerpt:In the way that the work of directors like Martin Scorsese flooded film schools with students in the 1970s, and the television show ''L.A. Law'' packed law schools in the 1980s, the rise of celebrity chefs has been good for culinary schools.

But would-be top chefs face a challenge that most lawyers, engineers or nurses do not: few jobs in their chosen field pay enough for them to retire their student loans. As a result, as many as 11 percent of graduates at some culinary schools are defaulting on federal student loans. The national average for all students last year was roughly half that, at 5.1 percent.

Although the restaurant industry is expected to create two million new jobs in the next decade, the Department of Labor reports that in 2005, the latest year for which data were available, the average hourly wage for a restaurant cook was $9.86.

''The problem isn't getting a job, the problem is getting a high-paying job,'' said Susan Sykes Hendee, a dean at Baltimore International College and a member of the American Culinary Federation Foundation Accrediting Commission, which accredits many culinary schools....

''Truly the worst horror stories are from private culinary schools,'' said Alan Collinge, who founded the grass-roots lobbying group Student Loan Justice and collects information from people with student loan problems. ''The story is always the same. The school convinces the student they are going to be the next Julia Child or Wolfgang Puck, and the student will sign anything.''I'm all in favor of people pursuing their career passions, but, as always, I encourage them to know what they're getting themselves into and to ask themselves whether they really need an expensive degree to get from here to there. Is culinary school worth it? Read the debates at Chowhound, Accidental Hedonist, Portland Food and Drink, and David Lebovitz (former pastry chef at Chez Panisse; check out what his blog posting has to say about culinary school "recruiting techniques").

Are we raising a generation of Paris Hiltons?

One of the things that jumped out at me during the latest chapter in the Life of Paris was the image of this 26-year-old woman in court screaming for her mommy, as if she were being led off to the electric chair instead of 45 days of carbs, cell phone bans, Not-Hot uniforms, and bushy eyebrows.

There’s a little Paris Hilton in all of us. There are days we all want to throw a tantrum and cry for mommy, but part of being an adult is taking what life throws at you without reacting like an eight-year-old. Oh, how I miss the jail-days of Martha Stewart, who donned her stripes like a grown-up and marched off to prison to teach her fellow felons how to make macramé owls or whatever. (Crafts are not my strong suit.) I love that she "foraged for dandelions and other wild greens” and “concocted recipes in a microwave.” Even someone as talentless as Paris could make herself useful on the inside. Imagine if she gave everyone makeovers? (Actually… I’m reminded by a lawyer who represents teenage hookers in the juvenile justice system that makeup is verboten in jail, so I guess makeovers are out.)

But let’s circle back to Mama-San Hilton for a second. What was she doing during all of this? Bitching about how unfair it is to punish her grown daughter for driving drunk, driving with a suspended license, and violating the terms of her probation. Just as Mama Lohan defended Lindsay when her boss complained about her horrible work ethic and job performance. (How telling when a movie producer is the only grown-up around.)

I see that same attitude in lots of helicopter parents, who think their Gen Y progeny can do no wrong. Nor should their babies endure any hardships, like, say, having to take a class at 8:30 in the morning or show up for a job interview. Part of growing up means realizing that actions have consequences, and that life doesn’t always let you sleep in. Gen Y’s parents try to delay those a-ha moments for as long as possible.

I also see a little bit of Paris in that sense of entitlement for which Gen Y has become famous. There’s been a lot in the media recently about the gratuitous praise Gen Y expects after years of trophies for the entire soccer team and A’s for attendance. Who better epitomizes that phenomenon than someone who has become famous for doing absolutely nothing? (Even before the sex tape, I mean.) I don’t think it’s possible to find someone who ranks so high on the fame axis and yet so low on the accomplishment axis. At least Lindsay has been out there working for a living, when she’s not blowing it all up her nose in the bathroom at Teddy’s with mom’s blessings.

I can’t really fault the Paris-Lindsay-Britney crowd. They were raised a certain way, and their parents tell them day in and day out that they deserve a free pass. The outcome can’t be a big surprise given the parental malpractice involved. What’s troubling to me is that these aren’t just mega-celebrities run amok. I see that kind of parenting outside of the celebrity set on a daily basis, and I wonder what the consequences are when it happens on such a large scale. We’re raising a generation of Paris Hiltons, and the results won’t be pretty.

More thoughts here.

The CIA, like the Las Vegas Police Department, has figured out that it needs to think more creatively to reach Gen Y. Its newly unveiled recruiting website features lots of snappy Flash animation spy quizzes and 24-style sound effects. Oddly, their press release says that they've posted a diversity recruiting video featuring Jennifer Garner of Alias fame, but after much clicking around I can't find it. Guess I flunked that test, huh? I did find this rather lame diversity video, though. Where's Jennifer?

What do you get when you mix bored boomers with hip twenty-somethings in cool new condo complexes? Comedy gold.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has one of the funniest articles I’ve read in a long time (“Animal House Meets the Empty Nest”).  Apparently a bunch of real estate developers have specifically been targeting twenty- and thirty-something professionals and trying to lure them into their urban condo complexes with cool amenities like video-game lounges, outdoor fire pits, rooftop hot tubs, movie theaters, and poolside bars. The article calls the developments a “throw-back to the sort of singles-oriented complexes that were popular in the ‘60s and ‘70s.” Problem is, a bunch of aging boomers from the suburbs have decided they too want to live the hip life and are muscling in:

Ms. Lammel says that while the atmosphere at Viridian has been largely cordial, the building has already developed "cliques" and there have been some tensions. Ms. Lammel describes the pool scene, for example, as an "animal house."

"One time I went up there and the twentysomethings had the whole place monopolized," she recalls, "and I thought, Well, not today." Ms. Lammel says she and some of her cohorts have a strategy for reclaiming the space, at least temporarily: They're planning a covered-dish pool party. "Anyone is welcome," she says in her pleasant Southern drawl. "But we'll see who shows up."

(I think I’ve seen that show before. It’s called Three’s Company.)

At other complexes, developers are finding that many twenty-somethings don’t actually want to live like mini-Lindsay Lohans relapsing at the Roosevelt:

The William Beaver House, a planned 320-unit high-rise in Manhattan's financial district, has an R-rated marketing campaign featuring a martini-swilling beaver (the project is named for its location at the intersection of William and Beaver streets) and provocative, animé-style images of scantily clad men and women trading flirtatious glances. The building will feature a poolside bar, a residents-only penthouse lounge and a 44-seat movie theater that can double as a nightclub. . . .

Some experts say developers -- many of them in their 40s and 50s -- don't always have the right idea about what this generation of buyers is really looking for. Condos replete with barbecue pits and hot tubs may actually be more appealing to boomers than to young home-buyers looking for a sound investment. A recent survey by the National Association of Home Builders found that price was by far the most significant factor among young condo buyers; location was a distant second. In addition, people under 35 were less likely than their older counterparts to say they take advantage of many on-site facilities. . . .

Indeed, on a recent Tuesday evening at Realm, the lounge off the lobby sat empty, its flat-screen televisions switched off and its pool table unused. An upstairs club room had more flat-screens but no one was watching them. Outside, jets sprayed arching streams of water into a vacant swimming pool, and the fire pit and barbecue on the terrace were unlit.

Turns out that Boogie Nights shag-pads don’t appeal to Gen Y so much after all. When you end up attracting a bunch of 50-somethings trying to relive their youth, you know your Gen Y marketing campaign has bombed. (I can see it now – all of today’s helicopter parents invading their kids' condo complexes when the time comes. There is no escape. . . )

Another sign that these developers have seriously misgauged their market: It’s hilarious that they’re trying to attract the video-game-playing and animé-cartoon-watching crowd in particular with marketing materials full of smooching couples and scantily clad women. All the gamers I know – all of them male – strongly prefer each other’s company. The only hot babes they seem to have any use for are the virtual kind.

The New York Times recently reported on "Fat Studies," a fringe area of scholarship that is picking up steam. An excerpt:

Fat studies is still a fringe area of scholarship, but it is gaining traction. Three years ago, the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, which promotes scholarly research of popular culture, added a fat studies component to regional and national conferences.Professors in sociology, exercise physiology, history, English and law are shoehorning discussions of fat into their teachings and research.

At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, the subject has emerged in a course, “The Social Construction of Obesity,” taught by Margaret Carlisle Duncan, a professor in the department of human movement sciences, who takes a skeptical view of the “war on obesity.”

At the New College of California School of Law, Sondra Solovay, a diversity lawyer and author of “Tipping the Scales of Justice,” talks about weightism in her torts classes.And the critics:Others argue, though, that a movement does not make a scholarly pursuit and that this is simply a way to institutionalize victimhood.

“In one field after another, passion and venting have come to define the nature of what academics do,” said Stephen H. Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, a group of university professors and academics who have a more traditional view of higher education. “Ethnic studies, women’s studies, queer studies — they’re all about vindicating the grievances of some particular group. That’s not what the academy should be about.

“Obviously in the classroom you can look at issues of right and wrong and justice and injustice,” he added, “But if the purpose is to vindicate fatness, to make fatness seem better in the eyes of society, then that purpose begs a fundamental intellectual question.”

Or as Big Arm Woman, a blogger, wrote: “I don’t care if people are fat or thin. I do, however, care that universities are spending money on scholarship about the ‘politics of fatness’ when half of the freshman class can’t read or write at the college level.”Leaving aside whether "fat studies" is a legitimate scholarly pursuit, let me say "amen" to Big Arm Woman. Any cause would be better served if its advocates first mastered how to speak and write well. (Incidentally, I love the subtitle of her blog: "Making fun of academics, 'cause it's easy!")

Getting Ahead at "The Office": Dwight Schrute, drunk with power, talks about life as Assistant to the Regional Manager, while actor Rainn "I've Worked At and Been Fired From Some of the Finest Offices in Manhattan" Wilson discusses suffering through crummy jobs in the service of art.

Apparently CNN thinks that your hair color is relevant to being fired, at least if you're young, blonde, and female. Its headline for the news that Donald Trump gave one of his judges-slash-panelists the heave-ho:

Trump tells Carolyn: 'You're fired!' Kepcher, blonde assistant of 'The Apprentice,' loses job after Trump tires of her.

Interesting. George Ross had the same exact role on the show as Carolyn. He sat to The Donald's right at the conference table, while Carolyn sat to his left, and together the three of them grilled and reemed the contestants. Rather than refer to George as Trump's "assistant," though, the same article refers to him as "the 78-year-old real estate lawyer." No word on the color of his remaining strands. (I say that with fondness. I love George.) Permit me some vicarious indignation.