The International Bureau of Coming-of-Age Affairs, had such an outfit existed, would have filed its annual report this month and quietly shredded it an hour later. From Lagos to Lausanne, the planet’s teenagers are still required to perform the same rickety stunts—first kiss, first hangover, first tax form—yet the safety net beneath those rituals has…
Welcome to the age of the boys—yes, those boys. Not the Netflix superheroes or the prep-school rugby squad, but the planetary swarm of young males aged 15-30 who now constitute history’s largest single demographic bloc. The UN calls them a “youth bulge.” Economists prefer the more market-friendly term “demographic dividend.” Development workers whisper the less…
Gen Z Years, or How to Age Gracefully in a World That Never Learned to Adult by Our Correspondent Somewhere Between TikTok and Existential Despair The generational cartographers at Pew finally drew the line: 1997–2012. In other words, if your first phone had Snake instead of Spotify, congratulations—you’re a millennial fossil. If you learned to…
Generation Z: The Planet’s First Global Cohort Learns to Live on the Ashes of Optimism By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Jakarta and Johannesburg If you want to meet Generation Z in the wild, skip the TikTok montages and try the overnight bus from Nairobi to Kampala. You’ll find them trading memes about climate collapse in…
Unknown Number: The High-School Catfish Who Trolled the Planet By Our Jaded Correspondent, Currently Suffering from Déjà Vu in Three Time Zones It began, as all twenty-first-century disasters do, with a vibrating rectangle. Somewhere in the fluorescent-lit limbo of an American high school—a place that doubles as a petri dish for future congressional interns—an “unknown…
