In 2024, a study from the opinion research firm YouGov revealed that Americans of every generation could only agree on one thing: Art and culture were more fun when they were in high school. It didn’t matter whether this happened to be in 1968, 1988, or 2008. The point was that culture simply felt a bit more thrilling when many of them personally happened to be in their late teens. The YouGov study is not quoted in cultural critic W. David Marx’s new book Blank Space: A Cultural History of the