A Great Recession — and a Great Awakening?

A Great Recession — and a Great Awakening?

To explain how Millennials were really affected by the Great Recession, I need to tell you about a bank of windows on the southeast corner of 50th St. and 7th Ave. in Midtown Manhattan. I’d walk under it every day on my way to work in the Time & Life Building during the 2000s. And every day, there they’d be—a long line of twenty-something finance boys in starched Wall Street blues perched on the windowsill for their morning meeting...

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Trayvon Martin, Generation Y, and the Myth of 'Colorblindness'

Trayvon Martin, Generation Y, and the Myth of 'Colorblindness'

What a hard few days it’s been.

For some—the scores of people who thronged New York City’s Times Square, stopped traffic on a Los Angeles freeway, and more—Twitter’s #NoJustice hashtag says all that needs saying about the shooting death of Trayvon Martin on a rainy night in a gated Florida community more than a year ago. For those who saw in George Zimmerman a man unfairly labeled “racist” and worse for trying, however imperfectly, to keep his community safe, it may seem Zimmerman’s been even more vilified in the wake of his acquittal than he ever was on trial. And for the American justice system itself, well—no one will ever call this its finest hour.

But there’s one group that stands to gain something crucial from all this sadness...

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Just Hug Those Helicopter Parents

Just Hug Those Helicopter Parents

Parents always take a lot of heat in conversations about Generation Y. They're overindulgent, over-involved maniacs who've naturally raised kids with the most over-the-top expectations, the critique usually goes, and even when it's parents themselves doing the talking, they can't resist a little self-flagellation.

Just imagine, then, how things might unfold in a crowd full of those poor souls who've...

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'Being Human' (and Happy)

'Being Human' (and Happy)

There's some new video up of the cast of Syfy's Being Human being legitimately hilarious on a panel I moderated recently at the Paley Center for Media. You can watch it here for some of the highest hijinks of the night with Sam Witwer, Meaghan Rath, Sam Huntington, and Mark Stern, Syfy's president of original programming. And if you're up for a little self-indulgent reflection, watching it got me thinking, so here goes...

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Do Your Own Growing

Do Your Own Growing

If you've heard one adage, you've heard them all—or at least it's easy to feel that way in today's jaded, eye-rolling, seen-it-all climate. (And that's just the tweens.)

But every once in a while, a standby surprises you. That's what happened recently when, after speaking on Gen Y at the Kohler Distributor Conference, I listened to Vice President of Sales Frank Windsor's closing remarks. In the midst of discussing product and process innovations, he quoted something old and lovely...

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