This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
这是《 Time-travel turver》（Time-Travel）周四的版本，这是通过大西洋档案馆的旅程，以将当前的档案化。在这里注册。
The writers of The Atlantic have a long history of fretting about the youths.
大西洋的作家对年轻人有悠久的历史。
Take one 1925 article, which began with a call for reason: a promise to judge fairly whether modern young adults were truly as delinquent as everyone seemed to be saying. “They are under suspicion on the counts of, briefly, dancing, drinking, kissing, motoring alone and often at night (‘alone’ means two together),” the author, identified only as “A Professor,” declared. “In the case of girls, dress is included, or rather, going about with legs and arms bared.”
以1925年的一篇文章为例，这是出于理性的呼吁：承诺公平地判断现代年轻人是否确实像每个人所说的那样真正拖欠。“他们对短暂的舞蹈，饮酒，亲吻，独自一人的驾驶（通常是'独自''的次数）的罪名感到怀疑，”作者仅确定为“教授”，宣称。“就女孩而言，包括衣服，或者是用腿和手臂裸露的。”
Of the drinking charge, young people seemed to be absolved. Certainly they were imbibing, but less than their elders—and they’d developed new etiquette to keep things under control. (“A really nice girl may drink cocktails in public,” the writer explained, “but not whiskey and soda.”) On the other counts, unfortunately, the Professor didn’t let them off so easily: “Legs are no more interesting than noses” when young ladies wear skirts this short. “The sad truth is that the human frame has ceased to be romantic.” Oh, and this new generation, in addition to diluting sex appeal, reportedly lacked intellectual curiosity. Also emotion: “There seems no doubt that these young things feel less, on the whole, and do more, than once did we.”
在饮酒指控中，年轻人似乎已被免除。当然，他们吸收了，但比长老少了 - 他们开发了新的礼节来控制一切。（“一个非常好的女孩可能会在公共场合喝鸡尾酒，”作者解释说：“但不是威士忌和苏打水。”）在其他统计上，不幸的是，教授并没有那么容易让他们如此轻松地放下：“当年轻女士穿着这么短的裙子时，“腿不比鼻子更有趣”。“可悲的事实是，人类框架已经不再是浪漫的。”哦，除了稀释性吸引力外，这一新一代还缺乏智力上的好奇心。同样的情感：“毫无疑问，这些年轻的事情总的来说，而不是一次，而且要做更多的事情。”
That was just one story in a whole canon of writing, published here and elsewhere, that has professed concern for young people—but with an undercurrent of condescension, even disdain. In a 1975 classic of the genre, the conservative journalist Midge Decter described the young hippies around her as coddled to the point of incompetence, having used the idea of a countercultural movement to get away with doing nothing much at all. “Heaped with largesse both of the pocketbook and of the spirit,” she wrote, “the children yet cannot find themselves.”
这只是整个写作的一个故事，在这里和其他地方出版，它自称是对年轻人的关注，但是有着谦逊的卑鄙，甚至不屑一顾。在1975年的流派经典中，保守派记者米奇·迪克特（Midge Decter）将她周围的年轻嬉皮士描述为无能的地步，他利用反文化运动的想法使他们完全没有做任何事情。她写道：“堆满了袖珍书和精神，孩子们却找不到自己。”
All those writers who peer at the youths, squinting through their binoculars and scribbling in their notepads, make up an embarrassing lineage. Recently, I’ve been wondering if I’m part of it. I write fairly often about Gen Z, sometimes worriedly—but I’m a Millennial. I didn’t have iPads around when I was a child; I wasn’t scrolling on Instagram in middle school. I’d already graduated college and made new friends in a new city when the pandemic hit. I’m still examining contemporary young adulthood from the inside, I’ve told myself. But a few days ago, I turned 30. Technically, I’m in a new life phase now: “established adulthood.”
所有那些凝视年轻人，斜视双筒望远镜并在记事本上涂鸦的作家都构成了令人尴尬的血统。最近，我一直在想我是否是其中的一部分。我经常写有关Z世代的文章，有时是担心的，但我是千禧一代。我小时候没有iPad。我不是在中学的Instagram上滚动。我已经毕业了大学，并在大流行时在一个新城市结交了新朋友。我告诉自己，我仍在从内部研究当代的年轻成年。但是几天前，我已经30岁了。从技术上讲，我现在处于一个新的生活阶段：“成年。”
Where’s the line between ogling and empathizing? And how do you describe trends—which are broad by definition—without using too broad a brush? The young people of the 1970s arguably were, on the whole, more interested in challenging norms than their parent’s generation had been; that seems worth documenting. Any dysfunction that came along with that may have been worth noting too. (Joan Didion clearly thought so.) Likewise, the Professor wasn’t wrong that social mores were transforming with each successive generation. Legs were becoming more like noses, and that’s the honest truth.
ogling和同情之间的界线在哪里？您如何描述使用过于宽的刷子的趋势（从定义上讲是广泛的）？总的来说，1970年代的年轻人比父母的一代更感兴趣。这似乎值得记录。随之而来的任何功能障碍也可能值得注意。（琼·迪迪恩（Joan Didion）清楚地认为。）同样，教授与每一个连续一代人都在改变社会的道德并没有错。腿变得越来越像鼻子，这就是诚实的事实。
The task, I think, is to write with humility and nuance—to cast young adults not as hopelessly lost or uniquely brilliant and heroic, but just as people, dealing with the particular challenges and opportunities of their day. In 1972, The Atlantic published a letter from a father who jokingly wondered how the youths described in the papers could possibly be the same species as his children. “Not long ago the president of Yale University said in the press that when the young are silent it means they are feeling ‘a monumental scorn’ for political hypocrisy,” he wrote. “When my son, Willard, Jr., is silent, I am never sure what it means, but I believe that he has his mind considerably on sexual matters and on methods of developing the flexor muscles of his upper arms.” Readers have always been able to tell the difference between real curiosity and zoological scrutinizing. They know when a stereotype rings hollow.
我认为这项任务是要谦卑和细微差别写作 - 使年轻人毫无希望地迷失或独特而聪明和英雄，而是像人们一样，应对当时的特殊挑战和机会。1972年，大西洋发表了一位父亲的来信，他开玩笑地想知道论文中描述的年轻人如何与他的孩子是同一物种。他写道：“不久前，耶鲁大学的校长在媒体上说，当年轻人沉默时，这意味着他们对政治虚伪感到''毫无蔑视'。”“当我的儿子小威拉德（Willard，Jr。）保持沉默时，我永远不确定这是什么意思，但我相信他对性事务和发展上臂的屈肌肌肉的方法有很大的想法。”读者一直能够分辨出真正的好奇心和动物学审查之间的区别。他们知道刻板印象何时空心。
Just rifle through the five pages of responses to Decter’s story, which The Atlantic published with headlines such as “Sentimental Kitsch,” “Hideous Clichés,” and—my personal favorite—“Boring and Irrelevant.” One reader told Decter, with bite, not to worry so much about those wild children who weren’t settling down in their jobs and houses like good boys and girls. “Rest assured,” he wrote, “my generation will be like hers—led by the silent, nervous superachievers, intent on their material goal, lacking the time to question the madness of their method.”
只需步枪穿越对Decter故事的五页，大西洋就以“感性媚俗”，“丑陋的陈词滥调”和我个人最喜欢的“无聊和无关紧要”等头条而出版。一位读者告诉Decter，咬人，不必担心那些没有在好男孩和女孩等工作和房屋中安顿下来的野生孩子。他写道：“放心，我们这一代人会像她一样 - 由沉默，紧张的超级成绩领导，意图他们的物质目标，缺乏时间来质疑他们方法的疯狂。”
The characterization is cutting. But that letter also raises another good point: Young people are not immune to oversimplifying, either. They’ll eventually get old enough to write about their elders, and to include their own sweeping generalizations and nuggets of truth. “I wonder what will be written in 1995 about our children. I get the feeling we will make the same mistakes,” another reader wrote to Decter. “For isn’t that the American way?”
表征正在切割。但是那封信也提出了另一个好处：年轻人也不能使过分简化。他们最终会变得足够大，可以写出自己的长者，并包括自己的真理概括和掘金。另一位读者写道：“我想知道1995年将写什么关于我们的孩子。我感到我们会犯同样的错误。”“因为那不是美国的方式吗？”
