The trajectory of some Boomers from would-be establishment wreckers into effusive caressers of farmer’s market vegetables was bound to feed the cynicism of the generation below them. The first thing Gen X learned in school was not to talk to strangers. Christian Lorentzen has described his levy – with his Gen X smirk and tossing of the hands – as the generation that will never have to suffer one of its own members as the American President. Zadie Smith has done some quick moral accounting for her cohort: right about trying to get men to do childcare; wrong about the internet. If the Boomers flattered themselves as the chief protagonists of post-war culture and history, Gen X marveled at the hypocrisies of the generation above them – the way the Boomers had cast off their most signature accomplishments, from anti-war coalitions to independent cinema. Gen X was the last generation for whom Selling Out meant something (an attitude which Millennials like to suggest is luxury masquerading as principle). Gen X’s signature lit mags were the anti-establishment Baffler, McSweeney’s, which was a way of selling out by other means (inviting New Yorker writers into your upstart magazine, sometimes under pseudonyms), and the early n+1, when it prioritized author’s voices over mappings of social movements. It was a generation for whom ‘Victory for the forces of democratic freedom’ was less a credo solemnly scrawled on placards than something David Foster Wallace’s ‘hideous men’ compulsively spurted out during orgasms.