Latest news with #millennial
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'The Summer I Turned Pretty' is triggering millennials who watched 'The Hills' — and here's why
'As a millennial I can't believe I have to watch a woman give up going to paris just to make a manchild happy. AGAIN,' one fan wrote on X. Any millennial raised on MTV-era reality television knows all too well that there's nothing worse than being remembered as the girl who didn't go to Paris. On Wednesday's episode of The Summer I Turned Pretty, which is currently airing its third and final season on Prime Video, the show's main character, 21-year-old Isabel 'Belly' Conklin (Lola Tung) seemingly chooses to forego her semester abroad in Paris so she can spend the summer at a beach house with her fiancé, Jeremiah Fisher (Gavin Casalegno). 'I don't want us to be separated right after we get married,' Belly tells Jeremiah. So, she decides, 'I'll stay.' Immediately, many millennial viewers were reminded of another lovestruck woman who famously chose her boyfriend over a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the French capital: Lauren Conrad from MTV's The Hills. In the Season 1 finale of The Hills, which aired in 2006, Conrad, the show's star, is offered a coveted summer internship with Teen Vogue in Paris. But like Belly, she ultimately chooses to spend the summer with her boyfriend, Jason, on a beach in Los Angeles. The aftermath of this widely frowned-upon decision was addressed in the season two premiere, during a conversation between Conrad, her coworker Whitney Port and Teen Vogue editor Lisa Love. 'Lauren didn't go to Paris. She's going to always be known as the girl who didn't go to Paris,' Love says, before asking Conrad, 'Do you regret that decision? How was your summer at the beach with your boyfriend? Did that work out for you?' Having clocked the uncanny similarities between Belly's and Conrad's decisions, fans of The Summer I Turned Pretty and The Hills have been heading to social media platforms like TikTok and X to air their grievances. Giving up Paris for a 'manchild,' according to these loyal viewers, is so not the move. It's clear, as another fan points out, that Belly didn't watch The Hills. So, does Belly really not go to Paris? And if she doesn't, is it something she'll live to regret? And is Jeremiah actually her forever love? The Summer I Turned Pretty is based on a trilogy of books written by author Jenny Han, so technically, those who have read them know how this story plays out — though Han has teased a possible change of the ending. For right now, it seems Belly is satisfied with choosing the boy over the dream. Conrad was too, though she and Jason ultimately broke up. Solve the daily Crossword
Fast Company
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Fast Company
Millennials! Your childhood is now a history lesson for Gen Alpha. Feel old yet?
A history teacher recently turned her sixth grade classroom into a museum for millennial paraphernalia and posted the results on TikTok. Judging by the comment section, millennials aren't sure whether to be thrilled or horrified.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Are young women finally being spared the unique cruelty of male literary opinions?
Gen X, millennial and gen Z men are reading less than boomers and older generations in Australia, and there's only one good thing about it. Thirsty, bookish young women might now be spared the niche heterofatalist torture of a sexual objective frustrated by the obstacle of male literary opinion. Oh, what a second-by-second social negotiation it was; if she hadn't read the enthused-about text, would her desired object find her vapid and shallow? If she had read it, she was in even more trouble: would his interest be piqued or levelled dare she confess she found Stranger in a Strange Land a meandering journey? Would she argue Fight Club beat you around the head with its message? Would the young woman really have to listen to him read out bits from And the Ass Saw the Angel before his pants removal? I'm grateful, at least, that the latest generation of girls who bear the heterosexual burden are unlikely to experience the unique cruelty of collective, instant male disinterest after blurting out 'Goldberry is a completely unnecessary character!' amid casual Lord of the Rings chat at the pub. But I am sad that, if figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and discussed by the ABC last week are to be believed, the steps of this complex, sometimes ugly, sometimes exhilarating dance may be becoming the stuff of anthropological archives rather than an ongoing scene of potential frisson. The ABS data does exclude reading for study or any online reading – including news – so it's possible younger men are indulging in the written word in other areas. Oh, boys; with the passage of time, have your forsaken your Goldberry … or have you forgotten her entirely? It's even sadder news that reading is down across the board. Among Australian senior school students, according to Australia Reads, 29% of them did not reportedly read a physical book last year. It's not an Australian problem. In the 1970s, 60% of American year 12 students read daily. By 2016, it was 16%. Obviously, screens, the internet, binge TV replacing long-form narrative consumption habits and the – yes, again – handheld doom machines are accessories to their cultural decline. Johann Hari's excellent book Stolen Focus explains in detail how technology has 'hacked' our attention spans for short-form, immediate interruption, with the result of rewiring our brains against the concentration required to immerse in a book. In case you can't find the time, energy or quietude to read it, Hari also explains that overwork, chronic stress, ultra-processed foods, poor sleep and environmental stressors are compounding the problem. Neuroscientists agree: Prof Maryanne Wolf has warned that reduced practice in sustained reading may not only weaken the brain's capacity to manage complex texts, but might also denude critical thinking, empathy and cognitive depth. This is where the gendered division of the world's remaining novel readers may be most painfully felt. Anna Burkey, from the book industry initiative Australia Reads, told the ABC that studies have shown parents read less to their male children than female ones, reinforcing an unconscious pattern that puts crucial developmental tools further away from boys who need them. As educators, male literary identity Brandon Jack and the Tough Guy book club movement strategise how to reverse the damage of gender-holing literary curiosity and get books back into boys' hands, the rest of us must grapple with the emotional world the present reading divide has contributed to creating. It's a gendered empathy deficit. Not only does it facilitate social carelessness and cruelty, but it is socially isolating. And it is leaving men and boys lonely and socially isolated at disproportional rates compared with women and girls. Nearly 43% of Australian men report loneliness, a recent survey shows, with 16% experiencing severe loneliness. I can't help but recall advice my mother gave me growing up as an only child with working parents: 'You'll never feel alone if you make friends with books.' I didn't, because I did. Humans invented storytelling in order to provide lessons in survival: we faced this, we dealt with it this way, this is the result, for good or ill. Sure, we can get stories from screens, but as that market has widened it's also flattened; a 'new literalism' of storytelling on screens has emerged of such comprehensive over-explication that there are few imaginative demands placed on viewers at all. It's from the imaginative, interpretative effort of reading stories from text that our brains wire a broader, personally felt social understanding, which provide us strategies for forming connections, maintaining relationships, overcoming restrictive and uncomfortable social roles, and being able to negotiate systems of help and of care. The same social psychologist who tracked the decline in reading among American teenagers published data from her 40-year longitudinal study identifying a maturity regression among today's western young people. They're having less sex, fewer dates, less civic participation and drinking less, meaning that 18-year-olds are more like how 15-year-olds used to be 40 years ago. Other scholars confirm; the rising generations have become more risk-averse. I've argued that the omnipresent social surveillance of mobile phone technology may be a reason … but one wonders if it's partially because they're consuming less vicarious experience from books to construct informed risk matrices around what they're likely to encounter. There are always social and emotional risks in the dance of sexual attraction. But sometimes, ah – mutual book-learnin' left boys and girls with some stories to tell. Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist.
Wall Street Journal
24-07-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Downwardly Mobile Elites Love Zohran Mamdani
One of the most important things to understand about Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old socialist who recently stunned the political establishment by winning the Democratic mayoral nomination in New York City, is that he has spent his young adult life much worse off than his parents. He knows the sting of having grown up in bourgeois comfort only to find himself scrambling to pay the rent in a less fashionable neighborhood. That experience is a major reason why he's emerged as the darling of the millennial left, a movement defined by its sense of downward mobility. It would have been hard for any young adult to match the accomplishments of Mamdani's father, Mahmood Mamdani, a tenured professor at Columbia University and prominent left-wing intellectual, and his mother, Mira Nair, a renowned filmmaker whose directorial debut, 'Salaam Bombay!,' was released to global acclaim when she was 31. But even the children of less successful Boomers often feel as though they haven't measured up to their parents.
Washington Post
23-07-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
China's strategy? Let Trump cook.
It's cringe for an elder millennial to use Gen Z parlance, but there are times when a colloquialism just hits. That's the case when gauging China's evolving view of President Donald Trump's second term. Beijing sees Trump's disruptive actions — his gutting of institutions of U.S. soft power, his launching of trade wars against adversaries and allies alike, his steady eroding of trust in the U.S. alliance system — as acts of self-sabotage that need no Chinese prompting. Better for now, as Gen Z would say, to let him cook.
