Michael Bierut, Jessica Helfand|Audio
November 15, 2019
Episode 114: Kids Today
This week, Jessica and Michael discuss the return of the generational divide, as heard in the phrase “OK Boomer.” which the New York Times’ Taylor Lorenz describes as “Generation Z’s endlessly repeated retort to the problem of older people who just don’t get it.”
Michael says,
When I hear ‘OK boomer’ what I hear is this blanket dismissal of the kind of carefully wrought structures that our generation both accepted and burnished and now maintain because it is from those structures that we retain our power and authority. And the younger generations, quite appropriately, are questioning that… and it also is just something that I don’t think is necessarily relevant to the systems we work with today.
Also mentioned this week:
- Yale, Harvey Cushing Center
- Caltech Brain Imaging Center
- Bob Ross & John Thamm, Contemplative Lady (Season 16 Episode 6), YouTube
- Courtney Cogburn, 1000 Cut Journey at Tribeca Film Festival Virtual Arcade
- Peter Kuli & Jedwill, “ok boomer” song, YouTube
- Martin Scorsese, New York Times, I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.
- Video: Judd Apatow on Bill Maher
- Jessica, Design Observer, Every Poem an Epitaph: The Protestant Cemetery in Rome (2010)
- Paul Shaw, Helvetica and the New York City Subway System
- Richard Hollis: Designs for White Chapel, Hyphen Press
- Robin Kinross, About Hyphen Press
And here are some pictures Jessica took in the Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno:



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Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.