Just Some Write-Ups

On one of those lazy Youtube-surfing days anyone with a stable net connection tends to have in this century, I chanced upon this video featuring a comedian (I can’t remember anymore who) joking about American millennials and, among other and of all things, avocados. Now while I was able to grasp the connection with the other items he mentioned (which most probably included house music, skinny jeans, and social media posts), the avocado matter left me somewhat perplexed at the time. My guess was that it probably had something to do with how millennials tended to be more health-conscious and anti-corporatist in their food choices, opting for gluten-free, organic, locally grown produce instead of the preservative-rich and chemically induced food items that are so readily available to us via fast-food chains, convenience stores, and grocery shelves. However, my theory still didn’t feel all that satisfactory, and I decided to do a little more digging to find out exactly how Gen Yers ...

Cartoon characters as hipsters by Matt Lassen Hipsters are this decade’s answer to the pop punk kids of the early 2000s, or the carefree grunge adolescents of the ‘90s. Although its etymology is oftentimes muddled and contested, the term hipster has been used to refer to various trends and subcultures since it first entered the lexicon in the 1940s. Our modern understanding of it, though, is best summed up by Joshua Lipson  in The Harvard Crimson: In the 1990s, social commentators began to use the term to apply to the type of people who listen to independent music, ride fixed-gear bicycles, and eat organic foods. This early conception differs little from the 2010-era hipster, a much more culturally prominent being. Lipson, however, points out the problematics of this definition: the three abovementioned elements—independent music, fixed-gear bicycles, and organic foods—don’t really have anything else in common outside of their stereotypical association with the hip...