Apartment Look

by Jean M. Twenge Jean M. Twenge has been writing about generational differences for 25 years, producing bestsellers like Generation Me and The Narcissism Epidemic . In her latest book, Twenge zeroes in on iGen, the kids born in 1995 and later who have grown up with smartphones, had an Instagram page before they started high school and do not remember a time before the internet. The average teen checks her phone more than 80 times a day. The oldest iGen-ers, as she calls them, were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced in 2007 and high school students when the iPad entered the market in 2010. Twenge argues the complete dominance of the smartphone among teens has had ripple effects across every area of iGen-er lives, from their social interactions to their mental health. Twenge draws on national surveys of 11 million Americans, conducted since 1960, to reach her conclusions. From about 2012, she started seeing "large, abrupt shifts in teens' behaviour and emoti...

They wrote about rock music and marijuana, when those were actually daring things to write about. They used profanity sometimes, when even sometimes was rude and shocking. In the back, past the ads for head shops, porn theaters and escort services, there were classified listings that featured a strange code of longing and desire: “ SWM seeks SWF for LT relationship, light S&M.” “Alternative” weeklies flowered in the 1970s in just about every American city, large and small. They were the alternative to the strait- laced establishment press and the successors to the ragtag “underground” papers that had raged against the Vietnam War. Less angry and more professional than their forebears, they still raged against authority when a new edition dropped outside the coffeehouse or club. Free- distribution alt weeklies — all those New Timeses and Real Papers — aren’t quite dead yet, but the fraternity is in some distress. The Boston Phoenix checked out in 2013. The San Francisco Bay Gu...

I read Michael Nesset ’s article (“The good old days ... were, in ways,” Opinion Exchange, Aug. 13) and was not quite sure how to take it. I, too, grew up in a small town, but my recollections of small-town life in the 1950s and ’60s are not quite so benign or so happy. I, too, remember the soda fountain with the marble-topped bar and daytime baseball games on the radio. I also remember that my hometown was 100 percent white and nearly 100 percent Christian . Needless to say, if you weren’t either of those, you didn’t really belong there, and those who did fit those criteria were eager to let you know that. I think that from the perspective of someone nonwhite or non-Christian, the nostalgia for small-town life is a bad dream. I still see rural areas and small towns maintaining those attitudes, hence the red-blue split between cities and nonurban areas. I can see how the “ make America great again” crowd yearns for the days when white Christian men made the rules and made all of t...