In The Now

I am the age that Maureen Dowd was in 2004. Say what you want about the Maureen Dowd of 2004 (and I said plenty!), her references then were, like, Sex and the City, something contemporary at the time. The issue here isn't that people who get older should be pushed off the stage, it's that we should understand that they perhaps don't have much to say about The Kids Today and similar.

 

Andy Rooney, what ever his merits, understood that he was a cranky old fart. It was his schtick! He didn't spend half his "act" getting mad at college students for not thinking he was cool and fun.

Aside from the rather unfortunate suggestion here, obviously neither of these people know what's on the history channel these days:

His range may be explained by something Maher, a Cornell history major, writes in his book: “I watch the History Channel like most guys watch Pornhub.”

 

Imagine thinking Bill Maher cares about anything except Bill Maher: 

Maher evokes the twin archetypes of the wisecracking kid who sat behind you in school and the grumpy uncle who sits next to you at Thanksgiving. He’s a rebel with a cause: He actually cares about the things he complains about, so there’s heart behind the cynicism.

Ah, the center, in charge of everything all the time and yet still the endlessly besieged source of sanity:

“Why can’t everybody live in my world, in the middle, where we’re not nuts?” he wondered, ordering a shot of tequila to go with his margherita pizza. The dedicated health freak, opponent of treating obesity as body positivity, and Ozempic skeptic has a small bottle with a dropper, dripping into his sparkling water a product called Jing, a bubbly water enhancer with no aspartame, gluten or carbs.