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"Colony Girl"
A rebellious young Eve stands at the center of a novel about a Midwestern religious cult.
By Sarah Vowell
[09/16/99]

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"Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything"
The more efficient we get the less efficient we feel, and other paradoxes of the sped-up world.
By Edward Neuert
[09/15/99]

Ivory Tower
The call of the past
The strange echo resembling a bird's call in the Mayan Temple of Kukulkan has two disparate academic fields collaborating. Will acoustical archaeology dig up the next batch of history?
By Jennifer Ouellette
[09/15/99]

Jelly maker
Despite what liberal critics say, Michael Jordan is the true heir to the radical legacy of Muhammad Ali.
By Larry S. Platt
[09/14/99]

Dear Mr. Blue
When I'm 63
I love sex and I love men, but the only ones who ever ask me out are married. Where can I go to meet interesting, sexy men?
By Garrison Keillor
[09/14/99]

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And today's teens do have new stories to tell. They are working more hours at part-time jobs, including during the school year, than they did two decades ago. And with the money they earn from laboring at diners and dry cleaners they shop like crazy, spending $141 billion per year, according to Teen Research Unlimited. 1980s teens spent just half as much.

The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager By Thomas Hine Bard/Avon 324 pages Girls on the Verge By Vendela Vida St. Martin's Press 192 pages Ophelia Speaks By Sara Shandler HarperPerennial 285 pages The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager Girls on the Verge Ophelia Speaks

What are these fresh-faced materialists thinking about? We'd know better if we met a live one in the pages of "The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager." Instead, author Thomas Hine offers an engaging, if contrived, history of teenagers in America from Puritan days to the present. Before 1900, adolescence concluded when boys and girls matured physically. A century ago, girls menstruated at an average age of 15. (Today, it's at 12 years and nine months.) In the 1930s, a majority of the kids who enrolled in high school did so because the Depression had eliminated many of the jobs they might have taken instead. In fact, the word "teenager" emerged out of the New Deal gestalt. According to Hine, social and market conditions have altered considerably since the word "teenager" first came into general usage and the time has come to scrap the concept. He believes the category "teenager" encourages adults to think of young people as dependent and irresponsible. Hine thinks we should start thinking of teens as "beginner" adults.

For such a zealous would-be reformer of today's youth, Hine seems remarkably unconvinced that 21st century kids are in trouble, and traditional social indicators do suggest that they aren't. Late '90s teens, for example, have lower pregnancy rates than people in their 20s. "The early word on them is that this new cohort isn't as depressive or angry as their Gen-X grungy forbears," Hine writes. Why, then, use the word "fall" in the title? Like David Stevenson and Barbara L. Schneider, authors of another recent book, "The Ambitious Generation: America's Teenagers, Motivated but Directionless," Hine has jumped on a gloomy trendlet in books about adolescents -- servings of optimistic data crowned with a paradoxically glum title. It's as if these authors think that they can give instant urgency to their studies by making dark insinuations that never quite pan out.

Hine realizes that the facts don't point to any kind of "fall" in the traditional sense of the word. The "fall" he's talking about is a happy one, the new irrelevance of the term "teenager." As he puts it, jettisoning this false, overprotective category will be character-building for the newly redefined young people, sort of like the casting out of Adam and Eve from Eden. At the same time, Hine dismisses some of the forces that really are troubling today's adolescents. Although he notes that some theorists have christened these teens "a postmodern proletariat," a generation so opiated by pop culture that they are unaware of how cruelly the economy is treating them, he doesn't credit the observation, dubbing it simply the "leftist" view. As in the rest of "The Decline and Fall of the American Teenager," Hine doesn't offer new material, such as interviews with teens, to back up his claims.

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