Harry Styles’s Conscientious Remix of Baby Boomer Culture

It is a period of generational war. Gen Z-ers, striking with a withering “OK” from their TikTok base, have won their first victory against the Boomer empire. But battles over more serious matters than coolness—elections, Earth’s habitability, JoJo Rabbit’s Oscars fate—remain to be waged. Age makes for an ever more acrimonious social divide that, some analysts say, is now more crucial than race, class, or education. Political and economic resentments but so does culture. The year 2019, a half century since the end of the ’60s, featured multiple rebroadcasts of the gerontocracy’s line that the golden age of everything has already happened. Perhaps not coincidentally, there was some schadenfreude in the air when imploded.