In this episode, Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather give the Next Generation award.
→ Download the Overthinking It Podcast (MP3)
Become a Member of Overthinking It
Support the site you love and get cool stuff in return, including free access to the latest editions of The Overview, on Tim Burton’s Batman and the Christopher Reeve Superman.
Subscribe to the Overthinking It Podcast
Want new episodes of the Overthinking It Podcast to download automatically?
Subscribe in iTunes
Subscribe with RSS
Tell us what you think!
Email us
(203) 285-6401 call/text
Your Panel
Further Reading
- Will Smith wins the Generation Award
- Pirkey Avot
- George Takei on Facebook
- Jessica Alba and The Honest Co.
- “Darmok”
- League of Legends on Wikipedia (Official Site)
- MOBA
- Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
The next celebrity to run for president will be Kelsey Grammer. He was on Colbert a few weeks lamenting the Republican party and you can see him seriously ponder the idea when Stephen brings it up. Hopefully he won’t need voter fraud like when Sideshow Bob ran for Mayor.
While I understand that both of your answers to the Question of the Week were tongue-in-cheek, based on the criteria that Pete gave, the one name that came to mind for my admittedly removed view of Millennials (I was born at the very tail end of the Baby Boom and my son is a Millennial) was Miley Cyrus.
Miley has a lot of name recognition among Millennials having been the Disney Channel’s Hannah Montana for most of their youth. But her post-teen-star career has been full of challenging choices which have tended to confound anyone of an older generation.
Her affiliation with The Flaming Lips has given her some serious music industry cred. Her Instagram account is notoriously edgy and befuddling. She has somehow latched onto that platform as a performative medium.
Now, every generation has a defining film which crystalizes and shapes that generation. For Baby Boomers it was “The Big Chill”. Generation X has “Reality Bites”. The quintessential portrayal of Millennials will prove to be the eponymous Saturday Night Live sketch where Miley Cyrus plays a gender-lazy portrait of entitlement.
To me it seemed like he was gonna say Zendaya. One: she fits a lot of his criteria. Two: I’m not that young (a couple years away from 30) and didn’t even find out about her until the whole Giuliana Rancic situation, but she’s made a pretty strong impression and I’d definitely be cool with her being the face of my generation or whatever. I was born almost 10 years before her, but she was born in 1996 (according to imdb) and anyone born before 2000 is still a millennial, right?
I really like “the face of my generation or whatever”
mediocre LOL player LFG
hitnrunrambler
Ummmm I’m in for some League
Cool! Maybe an Overthinking It club will work – I’ll make it, look for y’all online and send invites.
My summoner name is shann0n, (zero instead of an “o”) I’ll also have to follow you guys on Twitter!
Cool!
BTW, any League club would be an unofficial thing that we just do socially since we’re playing anyway, not a formal OTI member project.
Well actually, I know a formerly ranked League of Legends player (soon to be my son-in-law), so it made my ears perk up to hear you talk about the psychology and sociology of it all. It will give us something to talk about at the dinner table! As for the Willenials, you clarified the age gap between Will and me (I am four years older) so we are definitely peers. I agree with the younger folks that he was a big part of the pop culture for my twenties, but I have more in common with the references you see on “The Goldbergs” (i.e. “1980-something”) or even “Fresh Off The Boat” set in the mid-90s. Nowadays I see my celebrity peers taking on the role of “crazy old people” (either on screen or in real life) and I wonder who I could point to as the spokesperson for my generation. Kevin Smith? Cindy Crawford?