Tag Archives: Neil Howe

TunesDay: that new old sound

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If you pay attention to my music entries, you may have noticed a recurrent theme. It seems a lot of the bands I hear these days, many of which I really like, remind me of bands from the past. Like The Mary Onettes:

I recently tripped across one such example, Sweden’s The Mary Onettes. They can’t seem to make up their minds whether they want to be The Church, Echo & the Bunnymen, or maybe something along the Joy Division/New Order continuum.

And The Flaws:

In a nutshell, The Flaws are [Joy Division] meets The Killers with a smattering of Johnny Marr. Read more

The “dumbest generation”: sloppy thinking, maybe, but it’s put-up-or-shut-up time for Gen X

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In the past I’ve written about a variety of generational issues, and have often focused on the Millennials. At times I’ve been construed as dogging them pretty hard. As I’ve tried to explain, my criticisms of them (for being entitled, for lacking critical thinking skills, etc.) haven’t really been criticisms of them, per se – a cohort that’s 75-100 million strong doesn’t get to be a certain way all by itself. The blame, if we want to use that word, falls on those responsible for educating and developing the generation.

Further, some have erroneously interpreted my critiques as somehow suggesting that my generation – X – was without flaw. Which, of course, is ridiculous. Every generation has its relative strengths and weaknesses, and X has been a trainwreck in some respects.

All of which leads me to the other morning, when fellow scrogue Brian Angliss forwarded along the link to a Washington Post column from Neil Howe, the man who co-authored, along with William Strauss, the finest series of works on America’s generations I’ve ever encountered. Read more

Bill Strauss, generational analyst

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Bill Strauss, who co-authored a number of important books on generational dynamics, is dead at 60.

This is a great loss. Strauss and his colleague Neil Howe were responsible for some of the most insightful and important analyses ever done into American generations. Thanks to them we now have a heightened ability to understand the cyclical nature of generations, affording us a tremendous capability to anticipate coming trends.

13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail, their examination of Generation X, literally changed my life. Up until I discovered it in th early ’90s I had no idea about the broad economic and social factors shaping what I thought was my own personal little hell. Read more