In researching my article for The New Yorker about transgender adolescents and their quest for earlier and earlier physical transformations, I spent some time on YouTube, where you can find thousands of videos chronicling the gender switches of young people. The videos offer a mash-up of youthful identity struggles, self-promoting confessionals, and thoughtful explorations of gender and its discontents…

Continue reading Margaret Talbot on the YouTube video diaries of transgender youth: http://nyr.kr/13S3Yyp

Photograph by Pari Dukovic.

In today’s Daily Comment, George Packer shares some thoughts on youth and age:

…since there’s never a shortage of evidence that things are, indeed, worse than they used to be, it’s incredibly satisfying to indulge the idea, and easy to confuse it with a veteran’s seasoned judgment. That’s the impulse you have to resist if you want to retain your credibility while you lose other features.

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/XsvESb

Pitch Me Another!: Chevrolet’s Century

Chevrolet celebrates its hundredth anniversary this month—the paperwork establishing the company was completed on November 3, 1911. Its first model, based on a design by Swiss-born racing-car driver, Louis Chevrolet, went on sale in 1912. Within a few years, however, Chevy shifted its focus to less expensive cars and became an early competitor to Henry Ford. Not so long after that, the automaker became an early advertiser in The New Yorker.

From the Chevrolet Six to the Corvette to the Caprice, eight examples of Chevy ads from our archive: http://nyr.kr/usJR4s

In response to Robin Marantz Henig’s piece about emerging adulthood in the Times, which describes twenty-somethings who flit from job to job and relationship to relationship and live in their childhood bedrooms, The Book Bench has compiled a list of novels for the “emerging adult.” Here’s number three:

“Flaubert’s classic Sentimental Education might be deemed an epic of distraction. We follow the protagonist, Frédéric Moreau, from youth to old age, but he is a quintessential ‘emerging adult,’ who never fully emerges. Obsessed with the married and unobtainable Madame Arnoux, he can never commit to a woman, stringing along mistress after mistress, running through friends and money. The title is at least partially ironic: there is an education of the emotions here, but it doesn’t take.”