Notwithstanding all the pundit-driven hot air about the horrors of being young in today's America, I'm willing to buy the argument that it's getting harder to survive those years, if only because there's so much more for the poor dears to worry about — more information, more technology, more stuff to consume, more sex (or is it less sex, but more talk?), more pressure from parents, teachers, and other self-styled experts. Most of all, there's more suffocating attention being paid to what it means to be a teenager, most of it coming from overlapping interest groups conspiring to sell things to the under-21s. Yet, for a constituency that has become the prime target of every late-capitalist enterprise under the sun, culturally speaking, teenagers are a grossly... More >>>