Teens To Twenties Quotes

Sometimes I think I'm an alien that accidentally fell off the mother ship, destined to wander among clueless earthling parents for all eternity.

There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years?

In my teens my drug of choice was acceptance, in my twenties it was approval, in my thirties it was love, in my forties it was Scotch. That lasted a while,’ she admitted. ‘Now all I really crave is a good bowel movement.

We leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years

It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him, what he knew so often in his teens and twenties, the sense of having opened a new door.

Combat and rape, the public and private forms of organized social violence, are primarily experiences of adolescent and early adult life. The United States Army enlists young men at seventeen; the average age of the Vietnam combat soldier was nineteen. In many other countries boys are conscripted for military service while barely in their teens. Similarly, the period of highest risk for rape is in late adolescence. Half of all victims are aged twenty or younger at the time they are raped; three-quarters are between the ages of thirteen and twenty-six. The period of greatest psychological vulnerability is also in reality the period of greatest traumatic exposure, for both young men and young women. Rape and combat might thus be considered complementary social rites of initiation into the coercive violence at the foundation of adult society. They are the paradigmatic forms of trauma for women and men.

I hope his penis falls off. I hope it rots and falls off inside of Miss Teen USA, therefore causing her perfect, twenty-two-year-old vagina to rot and fall out of her thong when she sneezes.

Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.

My friend Madea has "attitude" that comes with wisdom. Back in our teens and twenties, we thought we knew everything and made all those foolish mistakes. Then, when we got a little older, at thirty, we started getting these flashes of light, revelations of what a great and lucky thing it is that we didn't get caught doing those stupid things back then. Around forty, if we are lucky, we stop lying to ourselves. Fifty and above, we've run out of patience for foolishness. Take me to the bottom line.

I am quite content to be in my thirties, and nothing affirms that more than being around people in their late teens and early twenties.

He opened the door wearing an oversized wife-beater and dirty trunks to match. Funny, but he recognized me withouta struggle. Immediately, I assumed he was sober, which was a good thing. Yet, seeing me wasn’t expected or desired. For sure, I was the last person on his list of surprises. Jerry adjusted his head and sharpened his bloodshot eyes. It wasthen his booze-bated breath greeted me well before he did. Ok, he was in a stupor or maybe on the rebound. Next, soiled diapers stole the little oxygen I had left—and I was still OUTDOORS. Yet somehow, I mustered enough wind to greet my brother. I tried to beat him to the punch and said, “What’s up bruh?” What happened next stomped my soul me for years to come! He never bothered to truly acknowledge me. Yet, heresponded without hesitation, “You know I can’t have any company!” Then he violently slammed the door shut! Jerry was gone! I couldn’t differentiate from being stupid or dumbstruck. I just stood silent on his porch all alone for about five minutes. I’d dealt with Jerry’s nastiness many times before. But he would initially warm up before dropping his hammer. Without a doubt, l was lost, confused, and bewildered like a teen-age boy losing a prom date. Foolishly, I used logic to dissect my embarrassment. First, the guy scolded me as if I should’ve known better! To be fair, Jerry was the breadwinner. His wife left him years ago. That part I understood. Only a fool would have hung around his crazy ass. It was amazing they got together, let alone stayed that way long enough to create those children. Yet, all his kids were pushing the ages of twenty andabove. What the hell did he mean, “I can’t receive any company!” Of course, I heard those crying babies which madehim a granddaddy. That was strangely obvious to his existence. Yes, the cycle continues! Second, I really didn’t care to go inside. I didn’t want to be in his business. I just wanted his input on Aunt Kathy’s memorial.

Old people only say that life happens quickly to make themselves feel better. The truth is that it all happens in tiny increments like now now now now now now and it only takes twenty to thirty consecutive nows to realize that you’re aimed straight at a bench in Singleton Park. Fair play though, if I was old and had forgotten to do something worthwhile with my life, I would spend those final few years on a bench in the botanical gardens, convincing myself that time is so quick that even plants – who have no responsibilities whatsoever – hardly get a chance to do anything decent with their lives except, perhaps, produce one or two red or yellow flowers and, with a bit of luck and insects, reproduce. If the old man manages to get the words father and husband on his bench plaque then he thinks he can be reasonably proud of himself.

I mentally attacked myself for most of my teens and twenties before I learned how to love myself in my thirties.

When I was a little girl I wanted to be a reindeer-the flying kind. I spent a couple years galloping around looking for lichen and fantasizing about boy reindeer. Then one day I saw Peter Pan and my reindeer phase was over. I didn't understand the allure of not growing up, because every little girl got boobs and go steady. I did understand that a flying Peter Pan was better than a flying reindeer. Mary Lou had seen Peter Pan too, but Mary Lou's ambition was to be Wendy, so Mary Lou and I made a good pair. On most any day we could be seen holding hands, running through the neighborhood singing, "I can fly! I can fly!" If we'd been older this probably would have started rumors. The Peter Pan stage was actually pretty short-lived because a few months into Peter Pan I discovered Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman couldn't fly, but she had big, fat bulging boobs crammed into a sexy Wondersuit. Barbie was firmly entrenched as role model in the burg, but Wonder Woman gave her a good run for her money. Not only did Wonder Woman spill over her Wondercups but she also kicked serious ass. If I had to name the single most influential person in my life it would have to be Wonder Woman. All during my teens and early twenties I wanted to be a rock star. The fact that I can't play a musical instrument or carry a tune did nothing to diminish the fantasy. During my more realistic moments I wanted to be a rock star's girlfriend.

She'd been a good nurse, and now she'd never be a nurse again. She was bitter about it and had turned herself into the slut bride from Planet X, as if even in human form, she wanted people to know what she was now: different, other. Trouble was, she looked like a thousand other teens and early twenties who also wanted to be different and stand out.

But there were also times when she cried out in the darkness biting her lips - cried out against the substance of her age: for it was now that she should be young; now above all other times, with the wisdom in her, the wisdom that was frittered away in her 'teens', set aside in her twenties, now, lying there, palpable and with forty summers gone. She clenched her hands together. What good was wisdom; what good was anything when the fawn is fled from the grove?

politically, economically and socially, the Twenty-Teens are a Depression. The internet brought many laudable things, but prosperity, stability, accountability and honest politics were not four of them.

I'm not sure when it happened, but sometime in my late teens or early twenties, it was as if Jesus packed his bags and moved from my heart into my head. He became an idea, a sort of theological mechanism by which salvation was attained. I described him in terms of atonement, logos, the object of my faith, and absolute truth. He was something I agreed to, not someone I followed. . . . This radial Jesus wanted to live not only in my heart and in my head but also in my hands, as i fed the hungry, reached out to my enemies, healed the sick, and comforted the lonely. Being a Christian, it seemed, isn't about agreeing to a certain way. It is about embodying a certain way. It is about living as an incarnation of Jesus, as Jesus lived as an incarnation of God.

In teen years, people yearned to be liked; in their twenties, to be impressive; in their thirties, to be needed

This used to be my drug of choice. In my teens my drug of choice was acceptance, in my twenties it was approval, in my thirties it was love, in my forties it was Scotch.

The shop floor was vast, and I decided to request assistance. The first woman I saw was matronly, and did not seem well placed to dispense fashion advice. The second was in her late teens or early twenties, and therefore too callow to advise me. The third, in the manner of Goldilocks, was just right—around my age, well groomed, sensible-looking. I approached with caution.

Our work is borders, crossing them. Borders are a big attraction for me, leaving one country on the way to another, leaving one thought on the way to another, leaving our teens for our twenties, leaving East for West Germany. The liminal is the place to be. The bleeding edge. The demilitarized zones of the psyche, the gray ones of the heart. No-man’s-land is yes-man’s-land.

To think that this is my twentieth birthday, and that I've left my teens behind me forever," said Anne, who was curled up on the hearth-rug with Rusty in her lap, to Aunt Jamesina who was reading in her pet chair. They were alone in the living room. Stella and Priscilla had gone to a committee meeting and Phil was upstairs adorning herself for a party. "I suppose you feel kind of sorry," said Aunt Jamesina. "The teens are such a nice part of life. I'm glad I've never gone out of them myself." Anne laughed. "You never will, Aunty. You'll be eighteen when you should be a hundred. Yes, I'm sorry, and a little dissatisfied as well. Miss Stacy told me long ago that by the time I was twenty my character would be formed, for good or evil. I don't feel that it's what it should be. It's full of flaws." "So's everybody's," said Aunt Jamesina cheerfully. "Mine's cracked in a hundred places. Your Miss Stacy likely meant that when you are twenty your character would have got its permanent bent in one direction or 'tother, and would go on developing in that line. Don't worry over it, Anne. Do your duty by God and your neighbor and yourself, and have a good time. That's my philosophy and it's always worked pretty well.

I always had this vision of myself doing something important during my teen years. I didn't think I would be a child prodigy, but I thought I would be something very close to it, and now I'm almost out of time. Before I know it, I'll be twenty-one and no one will be impressed by anything I do.

No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert was fond of "little girls"—not simply "young girls." Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets and "sex kittens." Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his "aging mistress.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Did young guys talk like this? For real? I didn’t remember knowing any psychopaths when I was twenty years old. Jesus Christ. Who talked like that? Then I remembered when I was a kid I had watched Faces of Death with the other neighborhood idiots, and I calmed down a bit.

In my teens and early twenties I frequently had the sense that a madwoman was driving the car of my life while I sat in the back seat observing it and wondering how we ended up here. This was one of those moments.

As a child, the best way to survive was to be still, to submit—to do nothing that might incur further harm. That belief had grown with me through my teens, my twenties, my thirties, an unacknowledged mentor directing my every path, reinforcing a ubiquitous sense of powerlessness and victimhood. I had believed that I was bad, and unloveable, and cowardly, and weak—beliefs that had been unconscious, and had always gone unchallenged. I believed them because they were true, and they were true because I believed them.

Dressing up is just like watching cartoons, something you enjoyed as a kid, before it passes through the no man’s land of teen angst, the ironic age of early twenties. And then somehow, miraculously, it crosses back into the realm of the genuine, the nostalgic. A place reserved for wonder.

Dressing up, he thinks, is just like watching cartoons, something you enjoyed as a kid, before it passes through the no man’s land of teen angst, the ironic age of early twenties. And then somehow, miraculously, it crosses back into the realm of the genuine, the nostalgic. A place reserved for wonder.

There will come a time when a person you most likely pushed out through your vagina and nursed from your nipples, whose bottom you wiped, and whose snot and spit you cleaned up over several sleep-starved years will apprehend you with a mixture of boredom and irritation and say, ‘Get a life, Mum.’ This would be a good time to remember that a) violence never solved anything; b) teenagers don’t have a full brain yet – the prefrontal cortex that controls the ability to make important distinctions, like who controls the pocket money, only kicks in around the age of twenty-four; and c) you are, in fact, the adult.

It's a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructable in our wake, and at the same time, are drawn to things that kill: whiskey and cigarette, unprotected sex and deep fried burritos. It's true that you can get away with drinking and smoking and sunbathing when you're in your teens and twenties, and it's true that rock stars are free to die at twenty-nine, but a lit star needs a long life.

The homicide rate for transgender women in America hit a historic high in 2015, according to the Human Rights Campaign, even with all the current support and visibility. Almost all of them were women of color, and the number killed was twenty-one as of November 2015—that’s basically two people a month, and the real number is likely to be even higher due to unreported cases. Worldwide it’s much worse: Between 2008 and 2014, there were 1,731 reported murders. That’s really terrifying, and a huge reason why I continue to be a public advocate and keep speaking out. Change happens through understanding, and one of my biggest hopes is that our next generation of kids will grow up in a world with more compassion.

I hoped she wouldn’t realize how spectacular she was until she was twenty-five and safely past letting it ruin her.

By 1930, when Louie was entering his teens, California was enraptured with eugenics, and would ultimately sterilize some twenty thousand people.

It's one thing to be a wisecracking precocious teen hanging out with twenty-seven year olds.It's another thing to get in the way of a grown man trying to get laid.

All of them giggled and swaggered in that happy ascendancy, repellent in any land, of teens on their turf.

surprise can warp our perceptions of time, and why most people’s most memorable experiences are clustered in their teens and twenties.

marrying later than the teen years does indeed protect against divorce, but this only holds true until about age twenty-five. After twenty-five, one’s age at marriage does not predict divorce.

Thirty, forty miles?”  “Well,” said Lila, verbally pouting. “I guess we’d better settle in for a long trip.”  She pushed her body even harder against Raj, then glared at the side of her father’s head. Lila and Trevor got along with Meyer, but they were still teenagers. Piper, recently a teen herself, tried to understand, but often there was no use. Somewhere around your twenty-second birthday, teenagers started sounding like melodramatic idiots no matter what you did.  “That’s another reason to get a hotel room,” Piper said. “They might let planes fly again. We can take the Gulfstream.

purchased my laptop. It was 5:20 p.m., and the store would close in less than an hour. Womenswear was on the first floor (when did Ladieswear become Womenswear? I wondered) and I took the escalator, being unable to find the stairs. The shop floor was vast, and I decided to request assistance. The first woman I saw was matronly, and did not seem well placed to dispense fashion advice. The second was in her late teens or early twenties, and therefore too callow to advise me. The third, in the manner of Goldilocks, was just right—around my age, well groomed, sensible-looking. I approached with caution.

The internet, although beloved by all including Al Qaeda, went straight from barbarism to decadence without ever encountering a civilisation. It was never utopian, although it was free. Its lawyers are patent trolls. Its political parties are flash mobs in the streets. Its wealthy are nouveau-rich cranks. Its poor are a tidal wave of Third World young people. The Twenty-Teens are quite an interesting cultural period.

During those years at the end of my teens and the beginning of my twenties, I was constantly sexually harassed on the street and sometimes elsewhere. The harassed doesn't convey the menace that was often present.

Pregnancy—we were taught, if we were privileged—was something awful that went with sex, just as AIDS and genital warts went with sex, unless you used condoms (and even then, be really careful). It was made clear that sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy were simply not for us: We were to use birth control and go to college and if we somehow got pregnant too soon or with the wrong guy, we were to abort. There was no mention of the possibility that we might want to get pregnant too late. From the minute the dragon of our fertility came on the scene, we learned to chain it up and forget about it. Fertility meant nothing to us in our twenties; it was something to be secured in the dungeon and left there to molder. In our early thirties, we remembered it existed and wondered if we should check on it, and then—abruptly, horrifyingly—it became urgent: Somebody find that dragon! It was time to rouse it, get it ready for action. But the beast had not grown stronger during the decades of hibernation. By the time we tried to wake it, the dragon was weakened, wizened. Old.

The worst-tempered bit of a sickly slip that ever struggled into his teens. Happily, as Mr. Meathcliff conjectured, he'll not win twenty. I doubt whether he'll see spring, indeed. And small loss to his family whenever he drops off.

In my teens and early twenties, I often went clothes shopping with my mother and I could always see her dismay at where I am forced to shop. I could see that she wished her daughter had a different body. I could see her humiliation and frustration. ... I harbored no small amount of frustration, or anger, for her words, for her disappointment in me, for my inability to be a good daughter, for one more thing I couldn't have – the simple pleasure of having fun while shopping with my mother.

It’s the moment when the girl in the teen rom-com abandons her glasses and ponytail and descends the stairs in all her prom-ready glory. It’s the moment when her high school crush finally sees her for the beautiful twenty-six-year-old actress that she is.

It’s a kind of fugue state, anyway, early sex. Before the routine sets in, or the love. Back when the groping is largely anonymous. Sandbox sex. It starts in the teens and lasts until twenty or twenty-one. It’s all about learning to share. It’s about sharing your toys.

Our memories peak during our formative years (teens and early twenties), a phenomenon called the reminiscence bump. During this period of our lives, many of our experiences are new and startling; there are so many firsts, and they stay with us for the rest of our lives.

Like many of the kids I write about, I once was a runaway myself—and a few (but not all) of the other writers in the series also come from troubled backgrounds. That early experience influences my fiction, no doubt, but I don't think it's necessary to come from such a background in order to write a good Bordertown tale. To me, "running away to Bordertown" is as much a metaphorical act as an actual one. These tales aren't just for kids who have literally run away from home, but also for every kid, every person, who "runs away" from a difficult or constrictive past to build a different kind of life in some new place. Some of us "run away" to college . . . or we "run away" to a distant city or state . . . or we "run away" from a safe, secure career path to follow our passions or artistic muse. We "run away" from places we don't belong, or from families we have never fit into. We "run away" to find ourselves, or to find others like ourselves, or to find a place where we finally truly belong. And that kind of "running away from home"—the everyday, metaphorical kind—can be just as hard, lonely, and disorienting as crossing the Nevernever to Bordertown . . . particularly when you're in your teens, or early twenties, and your resources (both inner and outer) are still limited. I want to tell stories for young people who are making that journey, or contemplating making that journey. Stories in which friendship, community, and art is the "magic" that lights the way. (speaking about the Borderland series she "founded")

You’re wrong there,’ said Ruth, following Myrna’s gaze. ‘This used to be my drug of choice. In my teens my drug of choice was acceptance, in my twenties it was approval, in my thirties it was love, in my forties it was Scotch. That lasted a while,’ she admitted. ‘Now all I really crave is a good bowel movement.

She said we couldn’t be too careful what habits we formed and what ideals we acquired in our teens, because by the time we were twenty our characters would be developed and the foundation laid for our whole future life. And she said if the foundation was shaky we could never build anything really worth while on it.

In TV newsrooms, if it bleeds it leads remains the watchword. A study of 559 newscasts in twenty television markets across the United States compared the crimes covered by local news to the number and types of crimes actually committed. Although crime had fallen for eight years prior to the 2004 study, in all twenty markets “audiences were told essentially the same story—that random, violent crime was a persistent and structural feature of American society,” the researchers found. All the more misleading, the newscasts consistently gave the impression that murder and other serious crimes are rampant in places where they are rare.

To read—without military knowledge or good maps—accounts of fighting which were distorted before they reached the Divisional general and further distorted before they left him and then 'written up' out of all recognition by journalists, to strive to master what will be contradicted the next day, to fear and hope intensely on shaky evidence, is surely an ill use of the mind. Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in new Zealand.

Just as negative self-paradigms can put limitations on us, positive self-paradigms can bring out the best in us, as the following story about the son of King Louis XVI of France illustrates: King Louis had been taken from his throne and imprisoned. His young son, the prince, was taken by those who dethroned the king. They thought that inasmuch as the king’s son was heir to the throne, if they could destroy him morally, he would never realize the great and grand destiny that life had bestowed upon him. They took him to a community far away, and there they exposed the lad to every filthy and vile thing that life could offer. They exposed him to foods the richness of which would quickly make him a slave to appetite. They used vile language around him constantly. They exposed him to lewd and lusting women. They exposed him to dishonor and distrust. He was surrounded twenty-four hours a day by everything that could drag the soul of a man as low as one could slip. For over six months he had this treatment—but not once did the young lad buckle under pressure. Finally, after intensive temptation, they questioned him. Why had he not submitted himself to these things— why had he not partaken? These things would provide pleasure, satisfy his lusts, and were desirable; they were all his. The boy said, “I cannot do what you ask for I was born to be a king.

He saw boys and girls in their teens and early twenties as his ideal agents. They had been brought up in the fanatical personality cult of Mao and the militant doctrine of “class struggle.” They were endowed with the qualities of youth—they were rebellious, fearless, eager to fight for a “just cause,” thirsty for adventure and action. They were also irresponsible, ignorant, and easy to manipulate—and prone to violence.

In the eyes of his contemporaries, Caesar was cast in the mold of a Catilina: bright, radical and scandalous. He had already acquired an exotic reputation. His adventures during his teens when he had been on the run from Sulla had been only the start. In his twenties, like many young upper-class Romans, he had gone soldiering in Asia and won the Civic Crown—an award analogous to the Medal of Honor—for conspicuous gallantry in action. He may also have had a brief love affair with the King of Bithynia, but it did not inhibit his vigorous sex life among the wives of his contemporaries back in Rome. A Senator once referred to him in a speech as “every woman’s man and every man’s woman” and for the rest of Caesar’s career he had to endure much heavy-handed jocularity about the incident. A few years later Caesar was captured by pirates, who were endemic in the Mediterranean; while waiting for his ransom to arrive he got onto friendly terms with his captors, but warned them that he would return and have them crucified. They thought he was joking. They were not the last to underestimate Caesar’s determination and regret it. AS soon as he was free, he raised a squadron on his own initiative, tracked down the pirates and executed them, just as he had promised.

When had it begun, my fantasy of the golden letter? It was probably in my late teens or early twenties that I first became inexplicably possessed of the notion that one day the mailman would deliver a letter to my door that would dramatically alter my life. For the better, I should add: this conviction was in no way a premonition of misfortune or sorrow. In fact, in my daydream the letter was surrounded by a kind of golden aura.

Wraeththu have been with me for the greater part of my life. My first rather ham-fisted (and half-finished) stories about them began in my mid-teens. It wasn't until I was twenty-six that I began work properly on the full-length novel that became The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, first volume of the Wraeththu trilogy, which was published in 1987. This was followed by The Bewitchments of Love and Hate and the Fulfilments of Fate and Desire.

The British public had quickly and sincerely taken the new princess-to-be to their hearts. Diana had high expectations to live up to and she was still very young. She had barely turned twenty. Her birthday was July 1. I wondered if some part of the reason for the late July wedding date was so that she would be comfortably out of her teens when she married. I thought mischievously about the palace’s reaction to possible headlines such as “Prince Weds Teenager.

Most sailors were in their teens or twenties. Anyone who had reached his thirties was considered a veteran scalawag; by the time he had survived to that age, he had seen what life at sea held: brutality, loneliness, and disease; he had experienced flashes of camaraderie and heroism, as well as persistent dishonesty and callousness. He knew all about the avarice of shipowners, the uncomprehending indifference of kings under whose flags the expedition sailed, and the tyranny of captains.

In that sense, “otaku” referred to a sudden, spontaneous, and, to most Japanese, inexplicable eruption of extreme obsessiveness among the country’s youth. One day, Japanese in their teens and twenties were normal, well-adjusted young people. The next day, or so it seemed, they were hopeless geeks who had forsaken all social skills in favor of a deep dive into—whatever. Manga (comics). Anime. Super-hard-core deviant anime porn in which tender young schoolgirls are violated by multi-tentacled octopi. Trains. It could be anything really.

I realized that most women in their teens and twenties hadn’t yet experienced one or more of the great radicalizing events of a woman’s life: marrying and discovering it isn’t yet an equal (or even nonviolent) institution; getting into the paid labor force and experiencing its limits, from the corporate “glass ceiling” to the “sticky floor” of the pink-collar ghetto; having children and finding out who takes care of them and who doesn’t; and, finally, aging, still the most impoverishing and disempowering event for women of every race and so the most radicalizing.

As women gain rights, families flourish, and so do societies. That connection is built on a simple truth: Whenever you include a group that’s been excluded, you benefit everyone. And when you’re working globally to include women and girls, who are half of every population, you’re working to benefit all members of every community. Gender equity lifts everyone. From high rates of education, employment, and economic growth to low rates of teen births, domestic violence, and crime—the inclusion and elevation of women correlate with the signs of a healthy society. Women’s rights and society’s health and wealth rise together. Countries that are dominated by men suffer not only because they don’t use the talent of their women but because they are run by men who have a need to exclude. Until they change their leadership or the views of their leaders, those countries will not flourish. Understanding this link between women’s empowerment and the wealth and health of societies is crucial for humanity. As much as any insight we’ve gained in our work over the past twenty years, this was our huge missed idea. My huge missed idea. If you want to lift up humanity, empower women. It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high-leverage investment you can make in human beings.

Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.

Being lonely as a kid might well have been necessary for me,” I told audiences in my talks. “If I’d had the friends I dreamt of, I’d never have spent the time to become the machine aficionado I am today. Now that I’m grown I can put that in perspective. The world is full of friendly people with no technical skills. The few of us who see into machines like others see into humans are singularly uncommon, and we’re valued for that. If we use a technology like TMS to help a lonely teen today, will we be taking that exceptional ability away from him tomorrow? Should we trade friends in seventh grade for designing a working spaceship at age twenty-five?

Nothing frustrates me so much as watching young women at the start of their lives wasting years in succession on lacklustre, unappreciative, boring child-men who were only ever looking for a magic girl to show off to their friends, a girl who would in private be both surrogate mother and sex partner. I’ve been that girl. It’s no fun being that girl. That girl doesn’t get to have the kind of adventures you really ought to be having in your teens and twenties. It’s not that her dreams and plans don’t matter, but they always matter slightly less than the boy’s, because that’s what boys are taught to expect—that their girlfriend is there to play a supporting role in their life.

to look twenty-nine. The young look older and the old look younger, collapsing the adult lifespan into one long twentysomething ride. Even a new term—amortality—has been coined to describe living the same way, at the same pitch, from our teens until death. This is a contradictory and dangerous message. We are led to believe the twentysomething years don’t matter, yet, with the glamorization of and near obsession with the twenties, there is little to remind us that anything else ever will. This causes too many men and women to squander the most transformative years of their adult lives, only to pay the price in decades to come. Our cultural attitude toward the twenties is something like good old American irrational exuberance. Twenty-first-century twentysomethings have grown up alongside the dot-com craze, the supersize years, the housing

He later claimed he had been conceived during a twenty-four-hour storm on the river. His ancestors were generations of lightermen and thus he had a river body that showed an accent only on land. He knew every tideway between Twickenham and Lower Hope Point and could identify docks by their smell or the sound of loading cargo. His father had been “a freeman of the river,” he boasted; this in spite of the fact that he also spoke of him as a cruel man who’d forced him into the boxing profession in his teens. The Darter also had a mouthful of whistles, for every barge, he told us, had its own signal. You learned it when starting work on a new boat. It was the only signal you were allowed to use over the water as a recognition or a warning, and each whistle was based on a bird call. He’d met river people, he said, who walking in a landlocked forest had suddenly heard their own barge whistle though there was no river in sight.

The second was in her late teens or early twenties, and therefore too callow to advise me. The third, in the manner of Goldilocks, was just right—around my age, well groomed, sensible-looking. I approached with caution. “Excuse me, I wonder if I could possibly ask for your assistance?” I said. She stopped folding sweaters and turned to me, smiling insincerely. “I’m attending a concert at a fashionable venue, and I wondered if you might assist me with the selection of an appropriate ensemble?” Her smile broadened and looked more genuine. “Well, we do offer a personal shopper service,” she said. “I could make you an appointment, if you like?” “Oh no,” I said, “it’s for this evening. I really do need something right now, I’m afraid.” She looked me up and down. “Where is it that you’re going?” “The Cuttings,” I said proudly. She stuck out her bottom lip, nodded once, slowly. “What are you, a twelve?” I nodded, impressed that she had been able to size me up so accurately by sight alone. She checked her watch.

My Father Comes Home From Work" My father comes home from work sweating through layers of bleached cotton t-shirts sweating through his wool plaid shirt. He kisses my mother starching our school dresses at the ironing board, swings his metal lunchbox onto the formica kitchen table rattling the remnants of the lunch she packed that morning before daylight: crumbs of baloney sandwiches, empty metal thermos of coffee, cores of hard red apples that fueled his body through the packing and unpacking of sides of beef into the walk-in refrigerators at James Allen and Sons Meat Packers. He is twenty-six. Duty propels him each day through the dark to Butcher Town where steers walk streets from pen to slaughterhouse. He whispers Jesus Christ to no one in particular. We hear him-- me, my sister Linda, my baby brother Willy, and Mercedes la cubana’s daughter who my mother babysits. When he comes home we have to be quiet. He comes into the dark living room. Dick Clark’s American Bandstand lights my father’s face white and unlined like a movie star’s. His black hair is combed into a wavy pompadour. He sinks into the couch, takes off work boots thick damp socks, rises to carry them to the porch. Leaving the room he jerks his chin toward the teen gyrations on the screen, says, I guess it beats carrying a brown bag. He pauses, for a moment to watch.

The First World War legitimized violence to a degree that not even Bismarck’s wars of unification in 1864-70 had been able to do. Before the war, Germans even of widely differing and bitterly opposed political beliefs had been able to discuss their differences without resorting to violence.152 After 1918, however, things were entirely different. The changed climate could already be observed in parliamentary proceedings. These had remained relatively decorous under the Empire, but after 1918 they degenerated all too often into unseemly shouting matches, with each side showing open contempt for the other, and the chair unable to keep order. Far worse, however, was the situation on the streets, where all sides organized armed squads of thugs, fights and brawls became commonplace, and beatings-up and assassinations were widely used. Those who carried out these acts of violence were not only former soldiers, but also included men in their late teens and twenties who had been too young to fight in the war themselves and for whom civil violence became a way of legitimizing themselves in the face of the powerful myth of the older generation of front-soldiers.153 Not untypical was the experience of the young Raimund Pretzel, child of a well-to-do senior civil servant, who remembered later that he and his schoolfriends played war games all the time from 1914 to 1918, followed battle reports with avid interest, and with his entire generation ‘experienced war as a great, thrilling, enthralling game between nations, which provided far more excitement and emotional satisfaction than anything peace could offer; and that’, he added in the 1930s,‘has now become the underlying vision of Nazism.’154 War, armed conflict, violence and death were often for them abstract concepts, killing something they had read about and had processed in their adolescent minds under the influence of a propaganda that presented it as a heroic, necessary, patriotic act.155

Baines told his son that children always got in the way of a marriage. Finding a state boarding school in England for Roland was good for everyone ‘all round’. Rosalind Baines, neé Morley, army wife, child of her times, did not chafe or rage against her powerlessness or sulk about it. She and Robert had left school at fourteen. He became a butcher’s boy in Glasgow, she was a chambermaid in a middle-class house near Farnham. A clean and ordered home remained her passion. Robert and Rosalind wanted for Roland the education they had been denied. This was the story she told herself. That he might have attended a day school and stayed with her was an idea she must have dutifully banished. She was a small nervous woman, a worrier, very pretty, everyone agreed. Easily intimidated, fearful of Robert when he drank, which was every day. She was at her best, her most relaxed, in a long heart-to-heart with a close friend. Then she told stories and laughed easily, a light and liquid sound that Captain Baines himself rarely heard. Roland was one of her close friends. In the holidays, when they did the housework together, she told stories of her childhood in the village of Ash, near the garrison town of Aldershot. She and her brothers and sisters used to brush their teeth with twigs. Her employer gave her her first toothbrush. Like so many of her generation she lost all her teeth in her early twenties. In newspaper cartoons people in bed were often shown with their false teeth in a glass of water on the bedside table. She was the oldest of five and spent much of her childhood minding her sisters and brothers. She was closest to her sister Joy who still lived near Ash. Where was their mother when Rosalind was minding the children? Her reply was always the same, a child’s view unrevised in adulthood: your granny would take the bus to Aldershot and spend the day window-shopping. Rosalind’s mother fiercely disapproved of make-up. In her teens, on rare nights out, Rosalind would meet her friend Sybil and together they

Not long after I learned about Frozen, I went to see a friend of mine who works in the music industry. We sat in his living room on the Upper East Side, facing each other in easy chairs, as he worked his way through a mountain of CDs. He played “Angel,” by the reggae singer Shaggy, and then “The Joker,” by the Steve Miller Band, and told me to listen very carefully to the similarity in bass lines. He played Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” and then Muddy Waters’s “You Need Love,” to show the extent to which Led Zeppelin had mined the blues for inspiration. He played “Twice My Age,” by Shabba Ranks and Krystal, and then the saccharine ’70s pop standard “Seasons in the Sun,” until I could hear the echoes of the second song in the first. He played “Last Christmas,” by Wham! followed by Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You” to explain why Manilow might have been startled when he first heard that song, and then “Joanna,” by Kool and the Gang, because, in a different way, “Last Christmas” was an homage to Kool and the Gang as well. “That sound you hear in Nirvana,” my friend said at one point, “that soft and then loud kind of exploding thing, a lot of that was inspired by the Pixies. Yet Kurt Cobain” — Nirvana’s lead singer and songwriter — “was such a genius that he managed to make it his own. And ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’?” — here he was referring to perhaps the best-known Nirvana song. “That’s Boston’s ‘More Than a Feeling.’ ” He began to hum the riff of the Boston hit, and said, “The first time I heard ‘Teen Spirit,’ I said, ‘That guitar lick is from “More Than a Feeling.” ’ But it was different — it was urgent and brilliant and new.” He played another CD. It was Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” a huge hit from the 1970s. The chorus has a distinctive, catchy hook — the kind of tune that millions of Americans probably hummed in the shower the year it came out. Then he put on “Taj Mahal,” by the Brazilian artist Jorge Ben Jor, which was recorded several years before the Rod Stewart song. In his twenties, my friend was a DJ at various downtown clubs, and at some point he’d become interested in world music. “I caught it back then,” he said. A small, sly smile spread across his face. The opening bars of “Taj Mahal” were very South American, a world away from what we had just listened to. And then I heard it. It was so obvious and unambiguous that I laughed out loud; virtually note for note, it was the hook from “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.” It was possible that Rod Stewart had independently come up with that riff, because resemblance is not proof of influence. It was also possible that he’d been in Brazil, listened to some local music, and liked what he heard.

China’s mobile, savvy millennials and Gen Z youngsters mostly in their teens, twenties and thirties, who make up more than half of China’s population compared to one-third in the United State

Your childhood, teens, and college years are the stuff of Han Solo, beer, road trips, random sexual encounters, and self-discovery. Pure magic. From your mid-twenties through your mid-forties, though, shit gets real—work, stress, and the realization that, despite what your teachers and your mom told you, you likely won’t be a senator or have a fragrance named after you.

I just really think if you read the Bible, you’d understand. If you really dug into the Word.” “Mom, I’ve read that whole book. I spent my entire teens and twenties wrestling with it.” I want to keep talking—and it’s horrible, and made up, and a tool of oppression and delusion, and perhaps evil!—but I don’t say that.

Depression rates have been surging since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Between 1999 and 2019, American suicide rates increased by 33 percent. Between 2009 and 2019, the percentage of teens who reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 37 percent. By 2021, it had shot up to 44 percent. The percentage of Americans who said they have no close friends quadrupled between 1990 and 2020. In one survey, 54 percent of Americans reported that no one knows them well. The number of American adults without a romantic partner increased by a third. More to the point, 36 percent of Americans reported that they felt lonely frequently or almost all of the time, including 61 percent of young adults and 51 percent of young mothers. People were spending much more time alone. In 2013, Americans spent an average of six and a half hours per week with friends. By 2019, they were spending only four hours per week with friends, a 38 percent drop. By 2021, as the Covid-19 pandemic was easing, they were spending only two hours and forty-five minutes per week with friends, a 58 percent decline. The General Social Survey asks Americans to rate their happiness levels. Between 1990 and 2018, the share of Americans who put themselves in the lowest happiness category increased by more than 50 percent.

Narcissistic Disorder The basic premise of this personality disorder is an inflated sense of self worth. This trait is often emphasized by a need to be appreciated and admired although someone with this disorder usually is unable to have any empathy for others; no matter what their situation. People with this disorder will often be fond of overly grand gestures and will assume they are the most important part of anyone’s life; even if you met them just five minutes ago. There are very few scenarios where this inflated sense of self worth is appropriate in modern society. Surprisingly, under this façade there is usually a very fragile self esteem which needs the consistent bolstering of ego that their behavior attracts. People with this disorder will often appear to be snobbish, disdainful or simply patronizing and condescending. They are likely to give out opinions on the failings of others at the drop of a hat without acknowledging their own shortcomings. The belief that they should be the most important person in any room can lead to issues when dealing with relationships at home or at work; this will be particularly noticeable if someone else is praised and you are not. In situations such as these, it is common for someone with this disorder to react angrily or impatiently; making it very difficult to build a long term relationship. The Symptoms Again, in order for someone to be diagnosed with this condition they will need to display at least five of the following symptoms and to have had these issues for at least one year. •   A sufferer has a hugely inflated opinion of their own self worth. They will usually inflate their achievements and skills to ensure they are the best in the room. They are unlikely to be able to substantiate any of these claims. •   They often indulge in a fantasy world where they have unlimited success, power, money and love. This indulgence can occur at any time. •   They will have a belief that they are very special and that there are only a few other people in the world which are on the same level as them. This belief means they will often try to associate with these people and no one else; as these are the only people who will understand them. •   The belief that they are special necessitates them to expect and demand your praise and adulation at all times of the day. They expect to be admired simply for being who they are. This belief extends to expecting others to provide them with favorable treatment and to know their expectations without being told them. •   This feeling of their own self worth will cause many people with this disorder to take advantage of others in order to achieve their own goal. They are unlikely to see this as exploitation; instead, it is just others doing what they should to satisfy their needs. •   It is usual for someone with this personality disorder to lack empathy towards others, particularly those who they feel are beneath them; which is almost everyone. •   Envy is a common trait in people with this disorder. They are liable to be envious of anyone who has something they do not and they will believe others are envious of them; because of their importance. •   People who suffer from this illness will often come across as arrogant, haughty or even rude. This disorder occurs in more men than women and current estimates suggest that the disorder is present in approximately six percent of the population. Symptoms associated with this disorder will always be present, even when a child; but the constantly evolving personality is likely to mask this and it is not usually possible to diagnose the condition until the late teens or early twenties.

even though my boyfriend has confronted them about it. What can I do to get them to accept me? Acceptance is overrated! So are birthday dinners, good health, and, frankly, having parents. I killed mine while I was still a teen, because I knew that if I didn’t, my adult life would be ceaselessly tormented by the insurmountable demands of my overbearing mom and dad, people who couldn’t be bothered to teach me how to balance a checkbook but would nevertheless feel entitled to weigh in on my choice of career and life mate and Internet service provider. Neither of them lived long enough to suffer through the indignity of an introductory meal with someone I was sleeping with, and thank goodness for that. My parents have been dead for twenty-two years and even now my insides churn at the very thought of my father scowling at my wife over his leather-tough tri tip at the Sizzler like, “You’re a what now?

Madilyn was not stupid, she was just a little sightless, and by the time she went to high school, she lost the glass and was not a bad-looking girl at all just shy. She was always tiny, at that time she had boobs and hips that would not quit. Yet she was still the one that got picked on. I do not think I had ever said more than two words to her. Though I think Maddie was hushed friends with her just, so she could get her homework done. Madilyn was the smarty- pants in our grade. Likewise, she was on the softball time too, with us yet she sits alone most of the time. Yet she did not seem too mined. One time, during our freshman, it came to one of the big parties and said that she was a virgin and did not drink. We all laughed at her. I remember Jenny- saying get down on your knees girl and see what it is like. And she did, and I got it all on my phone and posted it on my web page. Then Maddie said, to me we need to get that girl popped. Therefore, I found her a random scuzzy guy to go and do her. I had to yet I do not know why, but I feel as if that was so wrong now, yet I did it for my friends at the time. It was no different than what I went through really. If you were not given it all away by the time you were in training bras then there was something majorly wrong with you, or so the boys and some girls thought. I was the one that had her purity taken away, to some twenty-five-year-old loser. Like she was only fourteen! But like I said… I was a lot younger my first time, so maybe that makes it okay. What do you think? I remember, Madilyn doing the walk of shame, we all have been there. Yet like I said that was the fun of it, seeing all that taking place in front of everyone at the party. I am not going to go into detail, but you could see that she was ridden hard and put away wet. We all laughed at her after the fact, because she said it hurt and did not know what all that ‘stuff’ as she called it… was all over her face and body. ‘What do you think it is?’ said Jenny. ‘I- I DON’T know’ said Madilyn downright freaked out. Just so, you know I am not saying this to be gross or anything like that… No! This crap is what happens to us pre-teens and teens, I was one of them. Yet will I always be remembered for being one of them, just like that I am afraid so, I am afraid to live it all over?

In your teens and early twenties, fear doesn’t seem to equate the way it does when you’re older.

I couldn’t believe I had given the entirety of my teens and twenties to a movement that was more concerned with power and self-protection than caring for the most vulnerable. I now understand what so many people of color and folks from all kinds of marginalized groups have been saying for so long: this has been a trend throughout white evangelicalism’s history.

I love you, and I promise you I will support any reasonable endeavor you ever embark upon. But we are talking about twenty-five thousand dollars. Twenty-five thousand. And you have proven yourself to be a good man and a good son. But right now, you are a very poor investment.

The only thing she was certain of was that she wasn’t thin. Except for a brief respite during her late teens and early twenties, she had struggled with her weight her entire life. This was the dark truth behind Lydia’s burning hatred for the Mothers: she couldn’t stand them because she couldn’t be more like them. She liked potato chips. She loved bread. She lived for a good cupcake—or three. She didn’t have time to work out with a trainer or take back-to-back Pilates classes.

I can honestly say that I'm happy, in a way I’ve never been before. I am finally inhabiting myself, the shadow me once hidden under the floorboards. I feel entirely comfortable, as if I had always been this way in waking life. I’m old, and that’s unfortunate, although I’m exceedingly lucky: on some days in certain kinds of light I don’t look my age. I naturally wish I could have transitioned in my teens, or my twenties, or any age earlier than mine, but there are compensations, being left in peace, remaining immune to all affinity-group competition, being able to nestle my changes into a life that was already structured, having outlived all the censorious elders.

Though he was over thirty, a casual glance would have put him down in the early twenties if not in his teens.

Trainwrecks, as public figures, are necessarily also myths. But they’re the villains of the story; they’re our monsters and demons, images of what we fear, and who we fear becoming. I hated Britney early on, because I hated being forced into the role she seemingly enjoyed playing; I wanted to reject the feminine ideal she supposedly embodied, and I wound up rejecting her. But every wreck is a potential role that women need or want to reject; the magnitude of our hatred for them is determined by how powerfully we fear what they represent. In Britney’s case, she represented the end of youth, and the corruption of purity: She was the pretty, good little girl who became ugly and bad when she grew up, the “Queen of Teen” who was used- up and over-the-hill by age twenty-five. She was the Wages of Feminism, the working mother who tried to have it all and wound up nearly dropping her baby onto the sidewalk. She was the cost of public life, for women.

Most ordinary Tudor men and women waited until their late teens or early twenties to marry simply because the majority of people could not afford to do so earlier.

The number-one source of sodium for American kids and teens is pizza.61 A single slice of Pizza Hut pepperoni pizza can contain half your recommended sodium intake limit for the entire day.62 For adults over fifty, it’s bread, but between the ages of twenty and fifty, the greatest contributor of sodium to the diet is chicken—not the canned soups, pretzels, or potato chips one might expect.

People who haven’t lost anyone think that to speak of grief is to summon it. People who haven’t grappled with their own mortality think that to speak of death is to make it real. And in my teens and twenties, most of my friends had never buried anybody who wasn’t a grandparent or a dog. So nobody asked after my father. Nobody asked after me. And sadness, forever unacknowledged, eventually becomes resentment.

Young people—and by that I mean anyone under ninety-nine, but especially those in their teens and twenties—need such activities to help release stress, because today’s world is exposing us to every crisis that has ever occurred in real time.

All those songs I used to pretend to understand, all the angsty, heartbroken songs I had heard all my life, they suddenly made so much more sense. "Well, then she probably needs a giant coffee, a huge box of your creations, and some time to nurse her feelings in private, don't you think?" Brantley Dane, local hero, saves girl from sure death brought on by sheer mortification. That'd be his headline. "Come on, sweetheart," he said, moving behind me, casually touching my hip in the process, and going behind counter. "What's your poison? Judging by the situation, I am thinking something cold, mocha or caramel filled and absolutely towering with full fat whipped cream." That was exactly what I wanted. But, broken heart aside, I knew I couldn't let myself drown in sweets. Gaining twenty pounds wasn't going to help anything. There was absolutely no enthusiasm in my voice when I said, "Ah, actually, can I have a large black coffee with one sugar please?" "Not that I'm not turned on as all fuck by a woman who appreciates black coffee," he started, making me jerk back suddenly at the bluntness of that comment and the dose of profanity I wasn't accustomed to hearing in my sleepy hometown. "But if you're only one day into a break-up, you're allowed to have some full fat chocolate concoction to indulge a bit. I promise from here on out I won't make you anything even half as food-gasm-ing as this." He leaned across the counter, getting close enough that I could see golden flecks in his warm brown eyes. "Honey, not even if you beg," he added and, if I wasn't mistaken, there was absolutely some kind of sexually-charged edge to his words. "Say yes," he added, lips tipping up at one corner. "Alright, yes," I agreed, knowing I would love every last drop of whatever he made me and likely punish myself with an extra long run for it too. "Good girl," he said as he turned away. And there was not, was absolutely not some weird fluttering feeling in my belly at that. Nope. That would be completely insane. "Okay, I got you one of everything!" my mother said, coming up beside me and pressing the box into my hands. She even tied it with her signature (and expensive, something I had tried to talk her out of many times over the years when she was struggling financially) satin bow. I smiled at her, knowing that sometimes, there was nothing liked baked goods from your mother after a hard day. I was just lucky enough to have a mother who was a pastry chef. "Thanks, Mom," I said, the words heavy. I wasn't just thanking her for the sweets, but for letting me come home, for not asking questions, for not making it seem like even the slightest inconvenience. She gave me a smile that said she knew exactly what I meant. "You have nothing to thank me for." She meant that too. Coming from a family that, when they found out she was knocked up as a teen, had kicked her out and disowned her, she made it clear all my life that she was always there, no matter what I did with my life, no matter how high I soared, or how low I crashed. Her arms, her heart, and her door were always open for me. "Alright. A large mocha frappe with full fat milk, full fat whipped cream, and both a mocha and caramel drizzle. It's practically dessert masked as coffee," Brantley said, making my attention snap to where he was pushing what was an obnoxiously large frappe with whipped cream that was towering out of the dome that the pink and sage straw stuck out of. "Don't even think about it, sweetheart," he said, shaking his head as I reached for my wallet. "Thank you," I smiled, and found that it was a genuine one as I reached for it and, in a move that was maybe not brilliant on my part, took a sip. And proceeded to let out an almost porn-star worthy groan of pure, delicious pleasure. Judging by the way Brant's smile went a little wicked, his thoughts ran along the same lines as well.

The result of my not caring so much about what I say allows me to care more about how I say it. I think it makes my writing more personal and more enjoyable. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a woman. Or perhaps you’re a gay man getting a present for your even gayer friend. Maybe you accidentally bought this thinking it was the Malala book. However this book made its way from the “Female Humor/Brave Minority Voices/Stress-free Summer Reads!” section of your bookstore to your hands, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is you are here now. Welcome. I’m excited to share my stories with you, so you can see what I’m really like. If my childhood, teens, and twenties were about wanting people to like me, now I want people to know me.

It was not their first choice, and they did not know if they would ever feel at home there, but they could afford, finally, a small house as well as a car. They had found their own happiness, weighted by resignation: that they were who they were, that they could never truly know the thoughts of another person, that their love was bruised by the carelessness of their own parents (his mother, her father); that they would wander the world in their dreams with ghostly, intangible lovers, that their children would move from adoration of them to fury, that they and their parents would die in different cities, that they would never accomplish anything that would leave any lasting mark on the world. They had longed for this, from the first lonely moment of their childhoods when they realized they could not marry their fathers or mothers, through the burning romanticism of their teens, to the bustling search of their twenties, and there was the faint regret that this tumult and exhaustion was what they had longed for too, and soon it would be gone.

Being a good girl, a perfect girl, can kill you fast, or it can kill you slow, flattening everything precious inside you, the best dreams of your one life, into drab homogeneity. At seventeen I decided to make a stab at a different kind of life, and it was scary, and too much, and it still is, but so is staying at home with a painted-on smile. I see women making that choice every day, in their teens and twenties and sixties and seventies, and in this brave new world where empowerment means expensive shoes and the choice to bend over for your boss, it’s the only choice that really matters. Those who make it get called selfish bitches, freaks and sluts and cunts and whores, and sometimes we get called rebels and degenerates and troublemakers, and sometimes we are known to the police. We’re the ones who laugh too loud and talk too much and reach too high and work for ourselves and see a new world just out of reach, at the edge of language, struggling to be spoken. And sometimes, in the narrow hours of the night, we call ourselves feminists.

Teen pregnancy is not in itself a problem, although it is a marker of a problem in a society where good jobs are distributed almost exclusively to people who go through a long period of higher education. When girls believe, correctly, that neither they nor their children would be better off if they waited until their twenties to have their children, it means their opportunities are slim indeed. And that - rather than worries about sexually active girls - should trouble us a great deal.

Whatever She may have been thought to signify, its impact upon publication was tremendous. Everyone read it, especially men; a whole generation was influenced by it, and the generation after that. A dozen or so films have been based on it, and a huge amount of the pulp-magazine fiction churned out in the teens, twenties, and thirties of the twentieth century bears its impress. Every time a young but possibly old and/or dead woman turns up, especially if she’s ruling a lost tribe in a wilderness and is a hypnotic seductress, you’re looking at a descendant of She. Literary writers too felt Her foot on their necks. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness owes a lot to Her, as Gilbert and Gubar have indicated. James Hilton’s Shangri-La, with its ancient, beautiful, and eventually crumbling heroine, is an obvious relative. C. S. Lewis felt Her power, fond as he was of creating sweet-talking, good-looking evil queens; and in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, She splits into two: Galadriel, powerful but good, who’s got exactly the same water-mirror as the one possessed by She; and a very ancient cave-dwelling man-devouring spider-creature named, tellingly, Shelob

Throughout the early years of the twenty-first century, Zaitsev and his Russian colleagues continued their occasional series of messages from the Crimea to the stars. In addition to the Teen Age Message, they sent Cosmic Calls I and II, which were constructed along principles similar to those behind Drake’s original Arecibo message, but contained significantly more information.

But back in the fifties, cool-cat teens who greased their hair and snapped their fingers to Pat Boone’s versions of Little Richard songs didn't understand that they weren’t really that cool at all and were in fact their era’s version of Justin Bieber fans.  Had they known this, they might have developed a self-awareness that would have better prepared them for their eventual deaths in Vietnam.    It’s