X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking

Read Jeff Gordinier's posts on the Penguin Blog

In this simultaneously hilarious and incisive manifesto for a generation that's never had much use for manifestos, Gordinier suggests that for the first time since the Smells Like Teen Spirit breakthrough of the early 1990s, Gen X has what it takes to rescue American culture from a state of collapse. Over the past twenty years, the so-called slackers have irrevocably changed countless elements of our culture-from the way we watch movies to the way we make sense of a cracked political process to the way the whole world does business.