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one of the great divides of modern politics: young versus old. In Britain, age is now a better predictor of voting intention than social class. Overall, the Boomers voted for Brexit in 2016 and the Conservatives in 2017; their Millennial children voted Remain and Labour.

The debate is also about so much more than abstract disagreements over policy and government funding.

Caring for the elderly, for example, becomes wrapped up in assertions of “just deserts”—I’ve worked hard all my life and paid my taxes—and fears about money-grubbing children selling off their parents’ houses. It is also, like taxes on inheritance, a subject that prods at many people’s deep desire to pass something on to their offspring.

hopeful signs mask deeper problems that developed out of the 2007-08 financial panic, the Great Recession, the slow-growth recovery, and a string of bad decisions the baby boomers made in that span.

the recession accelerated a trend that saw employers replacing younger, less-experienced employees with machines operated by older, more-experienced ones. That’s one reason the wage premium associated with age has ballooned. In 1950 working American men 45 to 54 earned around 4% more on average than men 25 to 34. That gap is now almost 35%.

employers required more work experience for many openings they advertised during the recession. Anemic job creation left millennials with fewer opportunities on their way up the career ladder. They stayed in lower-paying positions longer and acquired skills more slowly than earlier generations had

while older generations have always looked down on younger kids or talked about things “back in their day,” she and other teens believe older people are actively hurting young people

“Everybody in Gen Z is affected by the choices of the boomers, that they made and are still making,” she said. “Those choices are hurting us and our future. Everyone in my generation can relate to that experience and we’re all really frustrated by it.”

“Essentials are more expensive than ever before, we pay 50 percent of our income to rent, no one has health insurance,”

Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history

what’s to blame for this institutional aging?

One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018.

it will require much more than Republican congressional defeats in 2018 to halt Trumpocracy. Indeed, such defeats may well perversely strengthen President Trump. Congressional defeats will weaken alternative power centers within the Republican Party. If they lose the House or the Senate or many governorships—or some combination of those defeats—then Republicans may feel all the more compelled to defend their president. The party faithful may interpret any internal criticism of Trump as a treasonable surrender to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

The more isolated Trump becomes within the American political system as a whole, the more he will dominate whatever remains of the conservative portion of that system. He will devour his party from within.

If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.

Today, one in three adults is considered clinically obese, along with one in five kids, and 24 million Americans are afflicted by type 2 diabetes, often caused by poor diet, with another 79 million people having pre-diabetes. Even gout, a painful form of arthritis once known as “the rich man’s disease” for its associations with gluttony, now afflicts eight million Americans.

The public and the food companies have known for decades now — or at the very least since this meeting — that sugary, salty, fatty foods are not good for us in the quantities that we consume them. So why are the diabetes and obesity and hypertension numbers still spiraling out of control? It’s not just a matter of poor willpower on the part of the consumer and a give-the-people-what-they-want attitude on the part of the food manufacturers. What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive

the powerful sensory force that food scientists call “mouth feel.” This is the way a product interacts with the mouth, as defined more specifically by a host of related sensations, from dryness to gumminess to moisture release.

American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion

Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s; and the social-protest movements of the 1960s and early ’70s

A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation. Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system. These are moments of agitation and excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion.

About one in 11 Americans age 50 and older lacks a spouse, partner or living child, census figures and other research show. That amounts to about eight million people in the U.S. without close ki

The University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, which has tracked American attitudes since 1972, asked respondents four years ago how often they lacked companionship, felt left out and felt isolated from others. Baby boomers said they experienced these feelings with greater frequency than any other generation, including the older “silent generation.”

More senior women than men are kinless because women’s life expectancies are nearly five years longer, at 81 years. Of Americans age 50 and over in 2016, 27% of women were widowed or never married, compared with 16% of men. Women are also less likely to cohabitate and date later in life, research shows

now the boomers are approaching the other side. Not death necessarily (though the time has begun when no one will say we were cut down too early). We’re reaching the other side of striving.

ight, the way a Frenchman expects to have decent wine at a reasonable price, and the whole month of August on vacation.

Maybe it goes all the way back to the Declaration of Independence, our founding document. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Millennials, as a group, are not broke—they are, in fact, thriving economically. That wasn’t true a decade ago, and prosperity within the generation today is not evenly shared. But since the mid-2010s, Millennials on the whole have made a breathtaking financial comeback.

he belief that Millennials have been excluded from the implicit promises that America makes to its people—a house for most, middle-class security, a better life than your parents had—remains predominant in society and, to go by surveys and the tenor of social media, among Millennials themselves.

That prompts a question with implications for the cultural and political future of the United States, a country premised, to a large extent, on the idea of material progress: What if the American dream is still alive, but no one believes it to be?

Wallace Stegner. He thought rightly that we Americans, by inclination at least, have been divided into two kinds: “boomers” and “stickers.” Boomers, he said, are “those who pillage and run,” who want “to make a killing and end up on Easy Street,” whereas stickers are “those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.”2 “Boomer” names a kind of person and a kind of ambition that is the major theme, so far, of the history of the European races in our country. “Sticker” names a kind of person and also a desire that is, so far, a minor theme of that history, but a theme persistent enough to remain significant and to offer, still, a significant hope.

We may, as we say, “know” statistical sums, but we cannot imagine them. It is by imagination that knowledge is “carried to the heart” (to borrow again from Allen Tate).5 The faculties of the mind—reason, memory, feeling, intuition, imagination, and the rest—are not distinct from one another. Though some may be favored over others and some ignored, none functions alone. But the human mind, even in its wholeness, even in instances of greatest genius, is irremediably limited. Its several faculties, when we try to use them separately or specialize them, are even more limited.

The fact is that we humans are not much to be trusted with what I am calling statistical knowledge, and the larger the statistical quantities the less we are to be trusted. We don’t learn much from big numbers. We don’t understand them very well, and we aren’t much affected by them. The reality that is responsibly manageable by human intelligence is much nearer in scale to a small rural community or urban neighborhood than to the “globe.”

Obviously, no one can be blamed for his own addiction or depression. But the causes of death this study highlights are the kinds of things—drinking, doping, suicide—that people who feel good about their lives don’t tend to do.So, what’s eating less-educated Boomers?

One persuasive explanation, and one the researchers put forth, is financial strain. Jobs in fields like manufacturing and construction, which were historically filled by people without college degrees, have been evaporating quickly over the past 15 years

Nearly half of Americans in their 40s and 50s don’t have enough money saved for retirement to live as they’re accustomed to, even if they work until they’re 65. All of this is crashing down on Boomers, who were raised on the promise of the American Dream.

Germany looks less and less like the country boomers remember, or imagine. A majority of Frankfurt residents, for example, have an immigrant background, including three-quarters of children under 6. Other cities are trending rapidly in the same direction.

yet the national political establishment ignores such developments. It continues to insist on recent immigrants’ becoming “German” not just linguistically but also culturally. In a place with no dominant ethnic group, an emphasis on cultural homogeneity is not just unrealistic — it’s harmful

the insistence on a coherent, centrist German political establishment masks the fact that nationalist, authoritarian and xenophobic beliefs have long been present in the German middle class. Not until 1985 were German citizens ready for a president like Richard von Weizsäcker who would clearly state that the end of World War II was not a defeat but a step toward freedom and democracy.

the parades and games and clubs, most definitely the political ones, also give people a sense of belonging and purpose — of still being able to make a difference. Whatever their ideological persuasion, residents are constantly reminded that civic engagement matters. That they matter

Like at all retirement communities, the social life at the Villages tackles head-on the scourges of isolation, despair and loneliness that are eating away at so many Americans as the nation’s social fabric frays.

In a culture that can feel as though it is leaving seniors behind, the Villages is designed to bring people together. And despite the at times harrowing political warfare, the community largely succeeds in doing so — even if it isn’t always easy.

In the late 1990s, high-end outer suburbs contained most of the expensive housing in the United States, as measured by price per square foot,

Today, the most expensive housing is in the high-density, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods of the center city and inner suburbs.

The millennials are just now beginning to emerge from the nest — at least those who can afford to live on their own. This coming-of-age cohort also favors urban downtowns and suburban town centers — for lifestyle reasons and the convenience of not having to own cars.

There Is a Generational Divide Among RepublicansIt shows up most clearly in the debate over whether parents should get federal money for their children.

hese questions are being hashed out on social media, on chat shows, in magazines, journals and other public spaces. But in my experience the most interesting and honest conversations are happening in private, with people trying to answer the question, “Who are we and what comes next?”So far these questions have been mostly theoretical. But the debate about the nature and direction of the American right became much more concrete when the Biden administration included a child allowance as part of the Covid relief bill that just passed. While most of the attention was focused on the terms of the $1,400 stimulus payments and the proposed increase in the minimum wage, the child allowance is a major initiative that received comparatively little attention.The Biden plan will pay families a cash benefit of up to $3,600 per year for each child under 6 years old and $3,000 per year for those aged 6 to 17. A version of this plan was proposed in 2017 by Senators Michael Bennet and Sherrod Brown as a stand-alone bill that never went anywhere. In the relief bill that passed the Senate over the weekend (and must now be passed again by the House), it is available only this year, but the authors of the proposal surely hope that once in place it will be made permanent.

Somewhere along the line, American conservatism came to define itself — at least in its actions — as primarily about money. Taxes and G.D.P. got policy support; families and communities got lip service. That’s changing, at least with the Republican rank-and-file. A recent poll shows 68 percent of Americans, including 60 percent of Republicans, support a child allowance like the ones put forward by Mr. Biden and Mr. Romney.

"Normally in a presidential election, we have anywhere from 68% to 73% turnout," Rodriguez told NPR. "We're expecting 80% turnout this year based on the voting numbers that have come in."

Among states that are reporting data, voters have requested 87 million mail ballots, according to McDonald, and roughly 41 million ballots have been returned by mail.

Democrats currently hold a roughly 2-to-1 advantage in returned mail-in ballots in states with party registration.

Apparently, I’m still guilty of the “Millennial pause.” After hitting “Record,” I wait a split second before I start speaking, just to make sure that TikTok is actually recording.

Now that Gen Z has all the attention, the internet quirks that Millennials have called their own for years can feel a bit stale, if not downright cringey.

Once my eyes were opened to the Millennial pause, I started noticing my age in every part of my internet experience. I get confused whenever Instagram changes its layout. I use GIFs to make jokes in Slack. I have posted song lyrics on my Instagram Story.