In 2004, the author Damian Barr published Get It Together: Surviving Your Quartlerlife Crisis. Barr would go on to write poignant and beautiful books (including the memoir Maggie and Me), but this was not either of those things. It was more of a fun, generational howl — how is this stuff supposed to work? How are you supposed to become an adult in these conditions?
The dream of life in your 20s — flailing around not sure what to do, mooching from one dead-end job to another, but still managing to afford a gigantic, lovely apartment in the center of everything, failing romantically, hilariously, while it all turns out for the best, never feeling anxious for no reason or as if you are slipping through the sieve of polite society, too small and weightless to remain in the in-crowd — well, that dream was cracking a little.
As Barr put it in a radio interview, the question, essentially, was this: what if Friends, which by then was in its 10th and final season, was not very true to life?
Definitely, the economic winds were changing: Wages in the UK started to stagnate in 2003; in the US, graduate wages had been falling since 2000, and health cover had been cut for young employees, both graduates and not, since 2002. All of this, plus climbing student debt, was dwarfed by the 2007-2008 financial crash, after which everyone got much poorer, much faster. The casual 1990s elision between “young” and “carefree” was already not true by the mid-2000s.
Like everyone else, I have been thinking about Friends because of the premature death of Matthew Perry. He was more than the guy off Friends; his death poses deeper questions than about sitcom culture, mainly about the opioid crisis and the rapacious pharmaceutical industry that created it.
It is hard not to mourn, along with the actor, the spirit of the 1990s, with its relentless optimism and comically low stakes. It felt like a time when nothing could go wrong, and anything that did would be worth it for the anecdote.
Was that just about the economy, stupid? Or were there other things going on? OK, I came of age in the 1990s, and arguably everyone remembers with fond elation the decade they were young in, but I look at my kids now and I cannot for my life imagine them in 30 years, going: “Ah, the 2020s — heady, foolish times.”
The funny thing about Friends was that its characters did worry about money, and healthcare and work, but they emphatically did not worry about geopolitics. OK, that is not what a sitcom is for — yet try to imagine Ross, a scientist, now never thinking about climate change.
Today, Phoebe would be a member of Extinction Rebellion; Rachel would be into fashion sustainability; Monica would have seven different recycling bins, not 11 types of towel; Joey … well, Joey would be the same. You can have characters now who do not worry about the future, but they are not everyman characters: they are in space, or the past, or heaven, or maybe hell.
We stopped worrying about nuclear annihilation in the 1990s — Cold War and all that — and that alone gave the decade this intense hedonism that Friends seemed to mirror straight back, with a tighter script.
Its identity politics were all over the place. The implausible whiteness of the show was a major flaw — what conceivable myopia would lead you to set a comedy in Manhattan without a single black character until Charlie arrives in season nine? And Kathleen Turner’s trans character was a kind of pinata part, this flamboyant, colorful punchbag that everyone hit with a stick until sweets came out, but there was no hate in there. Two lesbian mothers made a decent, beautiful family, and Ross just had to make it work. There was always a subtext that, if nobody was a jerk, things would probably be OK.
Those three factors that stamped themselves on the 1990s — economic boom, respite from any existential species threat and a generalized presumption of goodwill — are hard to prise apart, and maybe they do all boil down to the economy, stupid. Chimeric and debt-fueled as the good times were, it is hard not to miss them.
Taiwan’s semiconductor industry gives it a strategic advantage, but that advantage would be threatened as the US seeks to end Taiwan’s monopoly in the industry and as China grows more assertive, analysts said at a security dialogue last week. While the semiconductor industry is Taiwan’s “silicon shield,” its dominance has been seen by some in the US as “a monopoly,” South Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University academic Kwon Seok-joon said at an event held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In addition, Taiwan lacks sufficient energy sources and is vulnerable to natural disasters and geopolitical threats from China, he said.
After reading the article by Hideki Nagayama [English version on same page] published in the Liberty Times (sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) on Wednesday, I decided to write this article in hopes of ever so slightly easing my depression. In August, I visited the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan, to attend a seminar. While there, I had the chance to look at the museum’s collections. I felt extreme annoyance at seeing that the museum had classified Taiwanese indigenous peoples as part of China’s ethnic minorities. I kept thinking about how I could make this known, but after returning
What value does the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hold in Taiwan? One might say that it is to defend — or at the very least, maintain — truly “blue” qualities. To be truly “blue” — without impurities, rejecting any “red” influence — is to uphold the ideology consistent with that on which the Republic of China (ROC) was established. The KMT would likely not object to this notion. However, if the current generation of KMT political elites do not understand what it means to be “blue” — or even light blue — their knowledge and bravery are far too lacking
Taipei’s population is estimated to drop below 2.5 million by the end of this month — the only city among the nation’s six special municipalities that has more people moving out than moving in this year. A city that is classified as a special municipality can have three deputy mayors if it has a population of more than 2.5 million people, Article 55 of the Local Government Act (地方制度法) states. To counter the capital’s shrinking population, Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) held a cross-departmental population policy committee meeting on Wednesday last week to discuss possible solutions. According to Taipei City Government data, Taipei’s