The New York Times Magazine: Where The Writer Comes First
May 25, 2008; April 23, 1972
"Every generation thinks it's special—my grandparents because they remember horses and buggies, my parents because of the Depression. The over-30's are special because they knew the Red Scare of Korea, Chuck Berry and beatniks. My older sister is special because she belonged to the first generation of teen-agers (before that, people in their teens were "adolescents"), when being a teen-ager was still fun.... My generation is special because of what we missed rather than what we got, because in a certain sense we are the first and the last. The first to take technology for granted."–Joyce Maynard, An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life, The New York Times Magazine, April 23, 1972.
genius, Matt.
this was a very smart parallel.
It's a little frightening how modern that piece, now more then 34 years old, reads.
Good for you Matt Haber. The moment I read Emily Gould's exegesis on herself my mind immediately flashed back to Joyce Maynard's similarly self-indulgent piece from over a generation earlier. You, alone among the commentariat, appear to have drawn the bright line connecting the two. This will, no doubt, come as a raw realization to those who wish to use the Time's publication of this latest piece as incontrovertible evidence of the hastening decline of editorial judgment at what is still known in some circles as "the newspaper of record."