By Brett Yates If you had asked me in 2015 to name three people from Minnesota, I probably would have thought for a moment and then come up with iconic pop star Prince, Senator Al Franken, and the public radio […]
Tag: Gen y
Perfect lines: an anniversary of sorts
By Brett Yates I was hired in 2008 as a youth culture columnist for the Mountain Times, just a few months after my 20th birthday, and one of the earliest articles I wrote was an impassioned denunciation of emo music, […]
Save it forever
By Bret Yates Some weeks ago I mentioned here, offhand, that I expected to hate the new “Spider-Man: Homecoming” movie, which was turned out to be totally wrong; I saw it, and I enjoyed it more than any other comic […]
Rebels without a cause
By Brett Yates When I read about the fiasco that ensued when the South Burlington School Board decided to change the nickname of the local high school’s sports teams, I had a moment of déja vu that took a few […]
The world is a sandwich
By Brett Yates One of the important duties I’ve set for this column has been the task of settling, once and for all, in the inviolable space of print, some of the common internet debates in which pedantic males between […]
Feeling blue
By Brett Yates There’s a moment in the overrated sci-fi movie “Ex Machina” where the robot, whose programming allows her to discern unfailingly when someone isn’t telling the truth, is interviewing the protagonist. The first question: “What’s your favorite color?” […]
Thank God it’s Thursday
By Brett Yates In “Bit Rot,” Douglas Coupland’s recent collection of essays and stories, the author writes, “In the future, every day of the week will be a Thursday. We’re all working toward the grave, and life will be one […]
No apologies
By Brett Yates Why do celebrities ever apologize for anything? What does it do, exactly? Does it ever change anyone’s mind about whatever’s happened? When it comes to people whom we don’t know in real life, explanations are probably more […]
Subscribing to the truth
By Brett Yates The University of Vermont’s commencement speaker this year was James Fallows, a journalist for The Atlantic magazine. I’ve followed Fallows’ writing off and on since Obama’s election, more for familial bonding purposes than for his ramblings about […]
Watching children suffer
By Brett Yates The fifth season of “MasterChef Junior,” the competitive reality series on Fox, concluded in May. One of roughly 90 shows hosted by the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, “MasterChef Junior” is a spinoff of “MasterChef,” an amateur cooking […]