Youth culture: what should a grizzled 50-something adult know about it?

I made the mistake of reading the comments on a Facebook article tonight.

Hayley Williams, a singer I had never heard of (more on this shortly) told Clash magazine that she doesn’t want any racist, sexist, or transphobic people to attend her concerts.

Since Hayley Williams’ statement is so vague as to be meaningless, the comments devolved into a war between older folks who smugly asked “Who?” and younger folks who seemed to regard Hayley Williams as some profound thinker.

Although my Gen X instinct is to yawn and roll my eyes at yet another instance of celebrity political preening, the aforementioned trend of the comments raises a question: when is it okay to leave youth culture behind?

In 1985, I thought that Def Leppard and Rush were the most important musical forces in Western Civilization. My parents (then right around 40) knew nothing of them. And my grandparents (then in their 60s) barely knew that MTV existed.

No—scratch that. My grandparents probably didn’t know that MTV existed. And they had certainly never seen a music video.

I’m going to suggest that there comes a time in adulthood when it is perfectly permissible to stop keeping up with youth music. I don’t feel ashamed that I had never heard of Hayley Williams. Nor do I tout this lacuna as a badge of honor.

I’m 57, and I continue to learn. I read multiple books each month, and I study new foreign languages. But I’m at a point in life where knowing the latest pop culture icon just doesn’t seem as important as it did in 1985.

Young people, for their part, should neither ridicule nor resent this. Let me ask the youngsters out there: do you really want 50- and 60-something adults to have a say in what is “popular” on the youth scene?

My guess is that you would prefer us to stay far, far away. And the vast majority of us are happy to leave youth culture to the young.

-ET

The BBC and the unspeakable horror of eating meat

Matilda Welin, a writer for the BBC, wants you to be disgusted by your next sirloin steak or salmon filet. The more grossed out you are, the better!
 
In an article entitled “How a month of abstinence can lead to ‘meat disgust'” Welin encourages readers to give up meat in anticipation of the New Year, during “Vegan January”, or “Veganuary”. While her article includes most of the usual vegan talking points, she focuses on the idea that meat is disgusting:
 
‘The more meat people managed to cut out during Veganuary, the more their meat disgust grew over that month,’ says study author Elisa Becker, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford in the UK. “When you stop eating meat, that disgust ramps up, which is really interesting. “This suggests that just one month of meat abstinence changes how you view meat.”
 
Perhaps. A few years ago I spent two weeks in Japan. During this time, I subsisted on slivers of raw fish, rice, and seaweed. When I returned to the USA, I craved steak, chicken, and eggs, like a ravenous Viking. No meat disgust for me!
 
From a purely clinical perspective, though, meat is disgusting. So are childbirth and sex. (Most vegans, being the ultimate killjoys, are against these, too.) And for that matter: the inevitable bodily functions of anyone who eats anything (vegan, carnivorous, or otherwise) can be quite disgusting. Should we stop exercising those body functions, too?
 
As Tennyson said, “Nature, red in tooth and claw”. Nature is not vegan, and human beings are part of nature. (Just try to sell a great white shark on the idea of going vegan.)
 
Like most articles on veganism, Welin’s piece is political, both in what it emphasizes and what it omits. I would love to see the British government ban halal slaughter. (Perhaps London Mayor Sadiq Khan could lead the effort.) But the BBC is much more concerned with lecturing ordinary Brits about the evils of eating bangers and mash.
 
-ET

What writers can learn from ‘Mayor of Kingstown’

I’ve recently been binge-watching Mayor of Kingstown, the gritty prison town drama co-created by Taylor Sheridan.

A few years ago I listened, just for giggles, to a lecture entitled “How to write a bestseller”. The lecturer, an author and a fan of women’s beach novels, warned her audience not to set their stories in impoverished or depressing environments.

Kingstown is a fictional small city in Michigan, on the Lake Michigan coast. Kingstown is the epitome of rust-belt poverty and decay. Kingstown is wracked by street crime and gang warfare. Mayor of Kingstown makes me grateful that I live in southwestern Ohio—no easy feat.

The only real industry in Kingstown is the city’s state prison. Most of the storylines involve the prison in one way or another.

There is no Jack Reacher-like superhero at the center of this show. Nor is there a good-looking young dude who is sure to make the female audience swoon. The hero (I use that term loosely) of Mayor of Kingstown is Mike McClusky (Jeremy Renner) a fiftyish ex-con and fixer who tries to bring some semblance of order to the town. The female lead in Mayor of Kingstown is Iris (Emma Laird) a prostitute with a history of abuse.

This show depresses me every time I watch it. But I can’t help tuning in, because the storytelling is so compelling. Every scene in Mayor of Kingstown is filled with multiple levels of conflict, and usually ends with a polarity shift.

Mayor of Kingstown is entertaining television. But for writers looking to branch out beyond clichés, the show is also proof that you don’t necessarily need to write “the same, but different” in order to find an audience. You just have to tell a good story.

-ET

RIP Sarah Beckstrom

Sarah Beckstrom, one of the West Virginia National Guard members shot by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, has died.

Beckstrom was twenty. I had no connection to this young woman. But as someone who has lived nearly three times that long, I have a sense of all that was taken from her. 

And for what? Blind faith in immigration policies that have proven disastrous for everyone involved.

Beckstrom’s death has led to a predictable debate about the wisdom of bringing so many Afghan refugees into the USA following the American bug-out from Afghanistan. (Which happened, incidentally, less than one year before Ukraine became “essential to our national interest”.) 

Sarah Beckstrom’s murderer was one of the 77,000 Afghan refugees brought to the USA in the wake of the Taliban takeover. 

I wrote on X:

“This goes both ways. I certainly wouldn’t recommend relocating 77,000 Americans to Afghanistan. If you did, there would be similar problems.

Islam is one of the world’s great civilizations. But it has never been compatible with Western civilization (or vice versa). The best way to keep peace between Islam and the West is to keep them apart.

As for the Afghan refugees post-Taliban, they should have been resettled in another Muslim-majority country. There were more than 50 to choose from. Why bring so many people to an alien civilization that so radically clashes with their own cultural values? It makes no sense.”

I am not a performative Quran burner. (That’s just asinine, not to mention very unoriginal, in 2025.) Nor am I in favor of turning a blind eye to the plight of refugees.

But nor do I agree that it makes sense for everyone to come here, as if the USA (or some other Western country) was the only option. 

There are in fact, many other options, many of which would better serve refugees from non-Western countries like Afghanistan.

-ET

 

The first date financial question

Who should pay on a first date? This question has been coming up a lot in my social media feeds in recent weeks. I must therefore conclude that many people are in a quandary. And since daters tend to skew young, I’ll also assume that young people are especially in a bind over this.

Many young men seem to fear that the money they spend on a first date is a sunk cost that may lead nowhere. The young lady may decide she’s not interested in you, or the dreaded, “I like you a lot—as a friend.”

This can, indeed, be the outcome. But this is nothing new. Young men faced the same range of possibilities in the 1990s, when I was a twentysomething. Such outcomes were possible in the 1980s, when I was a high school student. They were the same in the 1970s, and so on.

A first date is not, and has never been, a sure thing.

And yet, men do the inviting, and men do the paying. I’m not going to play a dirge on my violin for you because you’re a man and you end up paying for first dates. Just like I’m not going to play a violin dirge for women who complain that they must bear the burden of childbirth. Nature—and that includes human nature—is not egalitarian. There are downsides to being a man, there are downsides to being a woman. Deal with it.

Nevertheless, a little common sense can mitigate some of the economic “risk” involved in a first date.

I’m not a gambler, but an occasional (and financially solvent) gambler once told me: don’t gamble money that you can’t afford to lose.

When applied to the first date, this means: cheerfully pay, if you’re a man, but keep the first date modest in scope. The details of this will obviously depend on your age, working status, region, and socioeconomic level.

This really isn’t that hard.

-ET

‘Save the Cat!’ and the fiction writer 

I recently listened to the audiobook version of Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!

Save the Cat! was originally conceived as a screenwriting book, but there is now a series of Save the Cat books for fiction writers, too. I’ve read Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat! Writes a Novel: The Last Book On Novel Writing You’ll Ever Need.

V iew it on Amazon

Save the Cat! is a 15-point formula found in many screenplays and movies. Is this formula worthwhile for novelists and short story writers?

Yes, and no, and maybe.

Save the Cat forces you to think about stories as systems of moving parts. This may be a new and necessary insight for many writers.

Most fiction writers know that they need an inciting incident, and a climax/conclusion. Where fiction writers most often struggle is in the vast middle portions of novels (and even long short stories). Save the Cat has remedies for this. The midpoint and “bad guys close in” are concepts that can be profitably employed in any story form.

One can argue that novelists should write with movies and television in mind, anyway. Visual media has affected the expectations that readers bring to fiction, and you ignore this at your peril. Try to write like Melville (or even Saul Bellow) today, and you won’t get far.

View it on Amazon

That said, stories and novels are fundamentally different from screen-based media. A novel is not a screenplay, just as a screenplay is not a novel. This may be why screen adaptations of novels are seldom satisfactory for viewers who have already read the book.

In particular: the screenwriter’s obsession with scenes and “show don’t tell”. Scenes are the building blocks of any story, but they aren’t the sole building blocks of fiction. All fiction contains some backstory and exposition that simply couldn’t exist in a movie. This is true even of commercial fiction. The “show don’t tell” dictum, when carried to extremes, can become counterproductive. In this regard, it’s a lot like the oft-repeated “no adverbs” rule.

If your goal is to write screenplays, stick with the original Blake Snyder book. If you’re interested in writing fiction, go with the Jessica Brody spinoff, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel.

-ET

The folks at Trojan Brand Condoms want you to get out more

Nowadays it’s often hard to tell the satirical from the straightforward in my Facebook feed. Today I came across this item, sponsored by Time Out USA and Trojan Brand Condoms:

“Meeting people is hard. Meeting people you actually like? Even harder. That’s why we created the Let’s Connect calendar with Trojan Brand Condoms—a curated list of low-key, high-vibe events happening all across the country. From DJ-backed dance nights to board game hangouts, book clubs to beach sports, there’s something happening near you. No awkward icebreakers, no name tags, no soul-sucking small talk. Just real people doing cool things, ready to meet someone new.

Tap the link to check out what’s happening in your area. Your group chat could use some fresh faces.”

An ad in my Facebook feed today

This ad campaign actually makes sense, from a business perspective. When adults under 34 are spending all their time on “apps”, or staring into the screens of their phones, guess what they’re not doing. Onanism and asexuality don’t lead to many condom sales!

Needless to say, social intercourse doesn’t always lead to sexual intercourse. But you can’t get the latter without the former.

-ET

Attack of the China bots

No, this is not the name of a new science fiction story I’m working on.

Anyone who owns a WordPress site has noticed a sharp increase in traffic from China and Singapore since early October. These visits have a one hundred percent bounce rate. They don’t represent actual users, but scraping bots.

I would support a total Internet firewall between the USA and China. While bad traffic comes from all over the globe, a disproportionate amount of it comes from China, Russia, Turkey, and Brazil.

Since the Chinese government doesn’t allow its citizens to read what the 老外 have to say anyway, this would be no real loss for the average human Internet user in China. And it would save the rest of us a lot of headaches. Just saying!

-ET

Phone location anxiety

I was in the locker room of my gym this afternoon. A man in his early sixties (just a few years older than me) was desperately searching for his cell phone.

I felt sorry for him. I helped him out by checking the area immediately around his locker.

This story had a happy ending. His phone, it turned out, was in his gym bag all the time.

The two of us got to talking about how those damn cell phones have become yet one more thing that a person needs to keep track of.

We were both old enough to remember when a man only had to keep track of his wallet and his keys. Life was so much simpler back then.

But nowadays, the loss of a cell phone can be just as life-changing as the loss of either a wallet or keys/car fob. So you had better not lose or misplace it.

In 1985, no one had to worry about losing their cell phone or having their email hacked. Cybercrime did not exist. Nor did the many neuroses associated with social media.

I don’t plan to abandon my iPhone anytime soon. But it’s worth noting: twenty-first-century technology enslaves us as much as it frees us. There was a time, not so long ago, when we happily did without all of it.

-ET

Paulina Porizkova in her underwear: a contrarian take

I don’t remember Paulina Porizkova from her 1980s heyday. I should, because I was a teenager in the 1980s. Porizkova is only three years older than me; we’re basically the same age.

In recent years, the Czech-born former supermodel has made headlines for her social media posts.

No—she isn’t shoving her political views in our faces, like Alyssa Milano or John Cusack. Porizkova, rather, has become recently famous for posting revealing photos of herself on Instagram, her advanced years notwithstanding. Porizkova’s latest addition is a photo of herself in her underwear at the age of 60.

And I have to say, she looks pretty good. Yes, if you compared her to the fittest 25-year-olds here in Ohio, she would come up short. But if you compared her to the typical 25-year-old here in Ohio (Ohio consistently runs among the top ten or twelve states in obesity) this 60-year-old definitely holds her own.

The mainstream media largely ran with this from the direction of aging and body positivity. Many mainstream media journalists are women over 40, and there have been a lot of articles of late about women over 40 supposedly being “invisible”. 

(A 44-year-old Huffpost writer took a bravado stance on this issue a few days ago, declaring: “aging has given me something that I didn’t even know I needed: delicious invisibility and freedom from unwanted male attention.” (Yes, I completely believe that those are her honest feelings on the matter.))

While I cringe at clichés like “sixty is the new forty”, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with reassessing the definitions of both old age and youth. Times have changed, after all. In the year 1900, the average life expectancy at birth was 47.3 years. Most people were old by the time they were forty, if they were still alive at all. Surviving fifty- and sixty-somethings were hoary elders.

From the other side of this, we could reasonably ask: does the Internet really need photos of 60-year-olds in their underwear, no matter how fit they are?

I’m going to take a different angle entirely. Back to those obesity rates. We have a national obesity epidemic, which has created yet another opportunity for Big Pharma. I know at least half a dozen people who are presently taking Ozempic or Mounjaro.

In the US, the younger you are, the more likely you are to be obese. Millennials have become the most obese generation in the history of humankind.

There are no 60-something Millennials. Millennials are presently in their 30s and 40s. Obesity rates are high among Gen Z, too. Gen Zs are presently in their twenties.

And hey, what about all the Gen Xers? (This is the generation to which I belong.) Paulina Porizkova, born in 1965, is the oldest you can be and still be an official Gen Xer.

Let us set aside debates about MILFs, cougars, and “X age is the new Y age”. If Paulina Porizkova can look gym-toned at sixty, then there’s no excuse for all the obesity we see in the USA nowadays, across multiple generations.

-ET

YouTube and the smart television

My primary social media goal for 2026 is to build up my YouTube presence and extend my reach there. In preparation, I’ve been doing some research into the dreaded YouTube algorithm.

One of the trends that YouTube is responding to is the tendency toward watching online videos on smart TVs like the Sony Bravia.

This means that YouTube now favors “reclinable” videos: i.e., videos that a person would want to watch for an extended period of time, on a big screen, from the comfort of their living room.

This dovetails with the maturation of the platform. If you think that YouTube is just for young folks, then you must be living in 2006. My dad, now in his late 70s, has become a YouTube enthusiast over the past few years. He’s retired, and he has plenty of time to watch videos.

But my dad has no interest in accessing YouTube on an iPhone, even though he owns one. My dad has a big 80-inch Sony Bravia in his living room. That’s where he watches YouTube.

To me, this makes a lot of sense. I have never understood the obsession with watching videos on a tiny smartphone screen. Yes, I can understand why you might do this incidentally, if you’re stuck in an airport or waiting for your appointment at the dentist’s office. But even the screen of my MacBook provides a much better viewing experience than the largest, most expensive smartphone. Certain kinds of videos, moreover (my dad watches a lot of travelogues) simply can’t be appreciated on a tiny cellphone screen.

The smart TV, not the phone, is the wave of the video consumption future. If you make videos for YouTube, take this into consideration when planning your content.

-ET

A college football game, and the sad state of American manhood

The Internet got silly (as the Internet so often does) over the appearance of a winsome young woman at the Georgia-Texas football game this past weekend.

A pretty brunette, “Harley” who identifies herself as @harlyisbae on TikTok, was briefly filmed in the crowd. 

The result: legions of men who acted as if they had never seen a human female before. “Just became a Georgia Bulldog fan,” X user @Jacoby_27 wrote. A (presumably male) TikTok commenter declared, “You broke Twitter and I’m not complaining.”

I must admit that I do not understand all of the fuss. Yes, “Harley” is an attractive young woman. But unless she is planning to show up at my residence in Ohio (not an outcome I’m anticipating), Harley’s beauty is about as relevant to me as the proverbial tea prices in China.

@harlyisbae

GO DAWGS BEAT TEXAS

♬ Delta Dawn – Tanya Tucker

Men in their early middle-age years historically define public masculine culture. These are men who are too old to be college boys, but too young to be grandpas. Gentlemen in their thirties and forties, basically.

Millennial men now occupy that demographic. And the dominant masculine value that they have established is “simping”: i.e., slavishly fawning over women who don’t even know that most of the fawners exist.

One sees examples of male simping constantly on the Internet nowadays. Its most pernicious examples can be found on the cancerous OnlyFans platform, where men plunk down billions of dollars each year to briefly interact with women through a computer screen.

But one also observes simping on mainstream social media platforms, where men will endlessly flatter random women in the hope that…who knows?…they may get a moment’s worth of positive acknowledgment in return.

Not that all this simping is good for women, either. The message sent here is: we are not supposed to objectify women…except when they flash their wares on TikTok, and are clearly seeking to be objectified.

But it is men who choose how they will react to what they see online. Many are reacting like 13-year-old schoolboys nowadays.

To paraphrase Darth Vader, “Your lack of testosterone disturbs me.” Man up, gentlemen, and stop panting like golden retrievers over random women on the Internet.

-ET

Does Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ need a modern reimagining?

“The Lottery” (1948) is one of those short stories that generations of high school students have read. And sure enough, I read “The Lottery” as a high school student in the 1980s.

I recently reread the story. “The Lottery” packs a powerful punch in less than 4,000 words. Having read this story, no one can doubt Shirley Jackson’s skills as a writer.

(Likewise, I won’t summarize the story’s plot here. If you haven’t read the story yet, then do so now and then come back to this essay.)

Shirley Jackson died in 1965 at the age of 48. We can only imagined what she might have accomplished, had she been given another three or four decades to write.

Shirley Jackson

“The Lottery” seems to imply that sinister things are happening in small-town America. Stephen King, who has cited Jackson as an influence, has often written about the evil fishbowl of the American small town. Many of King’s novels and stories—‘Salem’s Lot, “Children of the Corn”, Under the Dome, etc.—reprise this theme.

Shirley Jackson was born in 1916, and Stephen King was born in 1947. I was born in 1968, and I can’t say for certain what life in small-town America might have been like in say, 1959. I have no firsthand experience of that world.

Throughout my lifetime, however, the big cities have been the epicenters of mindless violence in American life. Crime rates are almost uniformly higher in our big cities. Our big cities are often sources of grassroots mass violence: the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and the urban riots of 2020 being but a few salient examples.

Here in Cincinnati (near my home) a group of inner-city residents beat several people half to death over this previous summer.

Since 2020, residents of big blue cities have famously fled urban states like New York and California for more bucolic settings in states like Texas and Tennessee.

None of the above diminishes the impact of “The Lottery”. But perhaps this story, now published almost 80 years ago, needs to be “reimagined”. It would be interesting if a short story-writer were to pen a 21st-century version of “The Lottery”, set not in a small town, but in inner-city New York or Los Angeles.

For all you writers and aspiring writers out there, consider this a free writing prompt.

-ET 

Bad Bunny, Spanish, and the son of my childhood acquaintance

Regular readers will know that I’m a language aficionado, and I encourage others to learn foreign languages.

Language-related news stories, moreover, tend to catch my attention. This is especially true when I have a connection to the story, however tenuous.

The son of a woman I attended grade school and high school with has recently gone viral because of his Spanish study. Bad Bunny’s music has apparently motivated the young man to learn the language.

First he went viral on TikTok. Then the mainstream media picked up his story. The above video clip is his recent interview with Telemundo.

This young language learner’s mother and I are friends on Facebook. It would probably be most accurate to describe her as a friendly acquaintance in real life. We were a year apart in school, and I haven’t had any in-person contact with her in forty years.

Nevertheless, I remember her as a kind person with a sunny disposition. I’m glad that her son has received this recognition for his efforts.

-ET

The year is 1938…

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