I have a new release: Family Secrets. Here’s what it’s about (Amazon description):
“When a Cincinnati businessman connects with a distant cousin on Facebook, he agrees to stop by the man’s remote rural property on his way home from a business trip.
The visit should have lasted thirty minutes.
Instead, he finds himself trapped in a doublewide trailer deep in the woods, drawn into the disappearance of a local girl, and forced to search a dark pond for a body that may—or may not—be there.
But something else is moving through the woods that night.
Something ancient and hungry.
Family Secrets is a supernatural mystery/thriller inspired by regional folklore, nightmares, and the eerie landscapes of the Midwest.”
This is the second book in a new series I’ve created: Uncanny Ohio:
“Uncanny Ohio is a series of atmospheric supernatural tales set in southern Ohio, in and around the Cincinnati area. Traditional ghost stories and urban legends with a strong regional flavor.”
This was a natural move for me. Many of my supernatural stories are set in southern Ohio, and take inspiration from the ghost stories and urban legends that I absorbed as a kid in the 1970s and 1980s.
Family Secrets is currently enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.
In the mid-1980s, I became a rabid fan of Stephen King. My fandom started with a random confluence of events, as so many things do.
My sophomore year of high school, I had a job manning the checkout desk at my school’s library during my study hall period. So I had plenty of exposure to books. One day, I happened across a paperback copy of Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot.
The novel had been made into a two-part television miniseries five years earlier (1979). I had seen the miniseries, and it had creeped me out. I remembered enough about the miniseries to know what the novel would be about, but not enough to ruin the book for me.
I was instantly hooked. I blazed through ‘Salem’s Lot in only a few days. After that, I checked out every book in the school library that was written by Stephen King.
When I exhausted the school library shelves, I turned to the Waldenbooks and B. Dalton stores at the local mall. This was in the mid-1980s. By this time, Carrie, The Shining, Cujo, and Christine were already published.Rose Madder, The Green Mile, and 11/22/63 were still years in the future.
Teenagers are natural-born fanatics. During those years, I was a fanatic of Stephen King’s work in the same way that I was a fanatic of the music of Rush and Led Zeppelin. During the remainder of my high school years, I read Stephen King’s novels and short story collections with a dogged, joyful determination. I wanted to read everything he had written to that time. (And given Stephen King’s prolificness as a writer, there was a lot to read even then, in the mid-1980s).
By the time I graduated from high school in the spring of 1986, my dedicated reading had more or less caught up with Stephen King’s prolific writing. But a few months later, Stephen King had a new novel out, and it was widely billed as the writer’s magnum opus.
I looked forward to the book weeks before it came out.
The “it” I’m talking about is It, Stephen King’s mammoth horror epic. The book was released on September 15, 1986. I purchased my copy that very same day. I know this, because I preordered the book from the B. Dalton’s at my local shopping mall.
I remember starting the book while on a break at my university library. (I attended Northern Kentucky University in the fall of 1986.) To say that I was in an anticipatory mood would be a gross understatement. Here was 1,138 pages of new fiction from myfavorite author.
Original hardcover dust jacket for It, 1986
What followed was one of my first experiences in youthful disillusionment (Many more were to follow, of course; but those are other episodes for other essays). It dragged. The novel contained too many subplots, too much padding, and a long, saggy middle.
What I loved about Cujo, Carrie, and the short stories in Night Shift were King’s fast pacing, narrative discipline, and literary economy. Most of these early works were written when Stephen King was still establishing himself as a writer, and was therefore subject to marketplace competition.
By 1986, though, Stephen King was already a celebrity writer. His short story “Trucks” had been made into a movie that summer, Maximum Overdrive. King was frequently interviewed, and widely known as “the Master of the Macabre”. He had even done a television commercial for American Express. In 1986, American pop culture was still characterized by scarcity and monolithic names. In popular fiction, King was one of those monoliths, alongside big names like Danielle Steel and Tom Clancy.
Stephen King on the cover of Time magazine, 1986
No discussion of It would be complete without mentioning the book’s controversial sex scene—what amounts to an orgy among its adolescent characters.
As a mature adult in 2026, I am supposed to get in a high dudgeon about the potential exploitation issues involved here. Back in 1986, very few adults did. There were some raised eyebrows, sure; but no public outcry greeted It, not even among members of the religious right. They were too busy lobbying to get Playboy and Penthouse banned from 7-Eleven.
But there was another factor in play for me, at the time. Keep in mind that in the fall of 1986, I was barely 18 years old myself, and only a few months out of high school. I was much closer in age to the members of the Losers Club than to the novel’s middle-aged author. Did my youthful age place me adjacent to something exploitive? Was I somehow a victim in all of this, too? Teenagers of the 1980s were not programmed to ask such questions.
Even at that age, though, I sensed that something was odd about this scene in It. I remember wondering if, perhaps, Stephen King had been drunk or high while writing this scene. (In light of King’s subsequent revelations about his substance abuse struggles during this period, my speculations may not have been too far from the mark.)
The sex scene involving the adolescent members of The Losers Club may or may not have been exploitative. It was, however, inappropriate and unnecessary, and definitely jarred me out of the story.
Forty years after the publication of It, Stephen King is still writing novels and I am still a fan.
Nowadays, however, I tend to read his work more selectively. King’s novellas and short stories are as engaging for me as ever. I often skip his longer, doorstop-size novels. I struggled to get through The Outsider, 11/22/63, and Fairy Tale.
Likewise, my early, teenage attempts at writing fiction were thinly disguised attempts at imitating Stephen King. But after all these years, and so many books of my own, I don’t sense much of King’s influences in my own work anymore. (I will, however, forever admire the stories in his first collection, the aforementioned Night Shift (1978). Every one of those stories is a gem.)
Stephen King is now almost 80, and I’m, well…a lot older, too. I hope King has many more years of writing ahead of him. I can’t promise to read all of his novels, but I’ll always show up for his short story collections.
Yesterday Madonna “took over” NYC’s Times Square with a public concert. The 67-year-old appeared onstage in skimpy attire. Her performance included sensual writhing with a group of dancers. Oh, my.
Madonna, born in August 1958, is exactly 10 years older than me. Her rise to fame coincided with my own teenage years. As a result, Madonna and her music were omnipresent while I passed through high school, college, and young adulthood.
I was never a superfan. But I was never a hater, either. I suspect that many Gen Xers are of a similar mindset. Let me explain.
Part of Madonna’s longevity is based on her chameleon-like ability to shift with the winds of musical taste. Listen to Madonna’s entire oeuvre, and you won’t like everything you hear. But unless you simply don’t like pop music, you’re almost certain to find something that you like. Madonna has been making music for 40-plus years now, after all. There is a lot of her stuff to listen to.
But in the 1980s and 1990s, Madonna’s brand was partly based on sexually transgressive lyrics, appearances, and statements. Her early songs (for example, “Like a Virgin”) are rife with sexual innuendos. One of her albums in the early 1990s was titled Erotica. In 1992, she released a coffee table book called Sex. Her MTV videos in the 1980s were filled with sexual imagery.
At the same time, Madonna was never really a sex symbol, in the same way that Taylor Swift or Sydney Sweeney are sex symbols today. In the mid-1980s, when Madonna was in her 20s, teenage boys did not widely lust after her. The sexual transgression was part of the marketing machine, one more thing that the star and her handlers did to keep her in the public consciousness.
But transgression was much easier in the days before the internet, social media, and OnlyFans. America does not have a legal sex industry. (The world’s oldest profession is banned everywhere, save for a few counties in Nevada.) But our culture pulsates with a never-ending stream of titillation.
“Look at this celebrity’s revealing Instagram pics!” Fox News exhorts us. While the OnlyFans fervor seems to have subsided of late, for a while hardly a week passed without news of yet another celebrity joining the site for a seven-figure payoff. The fastest growing sector of the fiction market is the sexually explicit romance novel. (Ask anyone who subscribes to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, if you doubt me on this.)
Study after study shows that Americans are having less actual sex. In an age of political correctness, religious zealotry, and #MeToo, sex itself has become too problematic. But there is a lot of money to be made with the safety valve of constant titillation.
In the 1980s, real sex was much less problematic, but simulated sex was less omnipresent in our popular culture. Madonna, therefore, stood out. But Madonna is still trying to market herself with sexual overtones, within a culture that now has a surfeit of such overtones.
Her age, and length of time in the public spotlight, are also factors. Early on, Madonna was a twenty-something newcomer whom most Americans were seeing and hearing for the first time. She is now a sexagenarian who has been a fixture in the music scene since Ronald Reagan was in the White House.
If Madonna wants to be sexually provocative at age 67, far be it from me to suggest that this is not a good idea. I would, however, ask if it is still necessary for her to cavort onstage in her underwear. That schtick certainly served its purpose in its time, but Madonna shouldn’t need to rely on it anymore.
This is a public domain photo that appeared in my Facebook feed not long ago. It is a 1951 senior class photo from a local high school here in Clermont County, Ohio.
1951 senior class photo from rural Ohio
What do you notice about these kids from the post World War II, Truman era?
Not one of them is obese.
If this photo had been taken in 2025, about 1 in 5 of these youngsters (21%) would have been clinically obese.
When I graduated from high school in 1986, the juvenile obesity rate hovered between 5 percent and 8 percent—measurable, but still low.
What was the juvenile obesity rate in 1951?
Zero to 2 percent. In other words, too low to meaningfully measure.
Not everything was better back then, of course. We can safely bet that many of these kids were smokers and drinkers (or would be, as they moved into full adulthood).
Mid-century automobiles were death traps, compared to vehicles today. Many people did not wear seatbelts. (Seat belt use was by no means universal even in the 1970s, during my early childhood. I frequently rode without a seatbelt in my early years.)
The Korean War was going on in 1951, too. At least some of the boys in this photo probably ended up in combat on the Korean Peninsula. Some of them may have died there.
But where juvenile obesity is concerned, at least, 1951 was better than 2026, hands down. Herein lies the proof that obesity is not a necessary human condition and certainly not for young people.
Our youngest generation of adults is much ballyhooed as a sophisticated tribe of hyperconnected “digital natives”. Members of Generation Z were practically using the internet in utero, we are often told.
And yet, our youngest generation of adults has the most difficult time connecting with other members of their own generation. In the words of the LA Times, “Gen Z is the loneliest generation of all”. What gives?
As it turns out, an exaggerated reliance on technology is a crutch. Most young adults can’t read a map. (“I’ll just input the address into my GPS!” they chirp.) Should we therefore be surprised that they also have trouble meeting new people?
In the 1980s, most social contact was direct and in-person. Want to meet someone new in 1986? Forget dating apps and social media—they won’t exist for another twenty years.
In the 1980s, you had to walk up to people and talk to them. Yes, girls and women occasionally made the first move—if you were Jon Bon Jovi or David Lee Roth. For most boys and young men, learning to meet and talk to the opposite sex was a process that involved plenty of trial and error.
Kobo, the Canadian alternative to Amazon, has recently announced that its Kobo Plus subscription program will be made available in the Czech Republic, Greece, Luxembourg, the Philippines, Poland and Romania. (Kobo already has a significant presence in many other European countries.)
This move will doubtless benefit the many writers who are producing work in those local languages.
I should also note that there are presently many fiction writers in Europe who should be writing in their local languages, but who are nonetheless writing in maladroit and often incorrect English, because they have been programmed to believe that English is the only language that matters in the book market. I want Polish and Romanian language writers to have all the opportunities that can reasonably be made available to them.
But what about writers like me, who mostly produce work in English? Since I have my writer/publisher hat on now, I’m going to take the liberty of examining this from a self-interested perspective.
Some indie writer gurus wax enthusiastic about the prospect of selling to the “whole wide world”. This often comes up in the context of wide distribution, i.e. distribution beyond Amazon. These commentators make much of the fact that their books can be made available in Poland, France, Spain, South Korea, and Bulgaria.
This is mostly wishful thinking.
Yes, I realize that English is studied as a second language all over the world. But even in Germany, where English-language skills are higher than the European average, books really need to be translated into German in order to sell well in the local market.
There is a tendency in publishing circles to conflate two very different categories:
People who can function in English
People who can (and will) read novels in English for pleasure
I have adult-level reading skills in both Japanese and Spanish. I can read a newspaper in either one of those languages with only an occasional reference to a dictionary.
And yet—I rarely read fiction in Japanese or Spanish—unless I’m specifically working on leveling up my language skills. And when I do purchase fiction in Japanese or Spanish, it’s almost always a work by a well-known writer: Keigo Higashino or Gabriel García Márquez.
The bottom line is that a reader in Poland who has rudimentary skills in English isn’t going to read or purchase many indie-published novels from the United States. This is a fact that US-based publishing commentators and wishful thinkers (few of whom have much experience with foreign languages) frequently overlook.
“Women’s faces are rated as more attractive than men’s, even by other women, but the perceived gap declines with age and all but vanishes by the time people reach their 80s, researchers have said.”
To restate this in a single sentence: All but the most elderly women are, on average, more visually appealing than most men.
This generalization will simultaneously upset a certain kind of feminist, the sex-starved zealots from the manosphere, as well as the sexless “gender-neutral” crowd.
But it’s true. This is something I discerned decades ago. It was the early 1980s. I was an adolescent boy who was just starting to “notice” girls and women. I was at the grocery store, and I spotted the seductively attractive woman on that month’s cover of Cosmopolitan.
There was a seductively attractive woman on the cover of Cosmopolitan every month, I observed. Often these women were clad in revealing attire. These were images that the average heterosexual man would find very attractive.
Cosmopolitan, though, isn’t a girly magazine aimed at horny men. The target market of Cosmopolitan has always been heterosexual women.
But at the same time, the covers of Cosmopolitan were always adorned with photos of attractive women.
Cosmopolitan, May 1980
What gives? I wondered.
Gradually, I understood. Even heterosexual women would rather look at images of other women than at just about any man.
(Here’s another piece of magazine trivia from long ago. In the mid-1970s, they came out with Playgirl, a magazine that was supposed to be the women’s equivalent of Playboy. The magazine attracted almost no female readership (though some women did consider it a novelty/joke). The only demographic who read Playgirl in significant numbers were gay men.)
Neither one of them is much to look at. Sure, you could make the case that both Bailey and Krasinski are “less ugly” than I am. But I can’t think of a reason why any human eye would linger on either of these two men for a second longer than necessary.
This is one reason why, as a thoroughly average-looking man, I have never been particularly sensitive about my looks. I may not be much to look at. But neither is that other guy.
I know some people in the restaurant business. The latest challenge for restaurateurs is coping with requests from dog fanatics, er, owners who want to bring their canines into human dining facilities. A friend of mine in Pittsburgh recently sent me a photo of a man who brought his dog into a dining facility without asking anyone for permission. (And the dog wasn’t a service dog.)
This is illegal in most states. Yet entitled dog owners often insist on dining in public with their pooches nonetheless.
At the same time, there is a growing prejudice against children—actual humans—in dining facilities. According to a recent article at FoxNews, 75% of diners now believe that restaurants should offer some form of “adults only” dining—no children allowed.
WTF?
I don’t have children; and at the age of 57 it’s unlikely at this point that I ever will. Nor am I one of those adults who gets giddy and silly every time I see a child. I see children as younger humans, no more, no less.
Yes, there are times when children fail to conform to the exact behavioral standards of adults. If you walk into a restaurant and there is a birthday party for five-year-olds at the next table over, don’t expect to have a quiet dinner.
But that is the exception rather than the rule. I see children in restaurants all the time, and only rarely are they disruptive. In my entire life (and remember, I’m 57 years old) I have had to ask a parent to control their unruly child in a restaurant exactly once.
In most cases, the presence of children simply isn’t that big a deal. And I reiterate: I’m a 57-year-old man who has never had children. I was an only child myself. If anyone is preconditioned to be allergic to kids, it’s me.
We’ve become just a little bit too precious—and our priorities are more than a little askew—if a significant number of us now seeks to ban children from public spaces.
And at the same time, the push to bring slobbering, excrement-dropping, panting dogs into restaurants?
This is insane.
(And just to clarify: despite the tone of the above paragraph, I have nothing against dogs, or dog owners, per se.
I do, however, object to neurotic dog culture as it’s manifested in the third decade of the 21st century. Like so much else in our society at present, dog culture has been taken to ridiculous extremes.)
To put this in perspective: the U.S. was 80% white in 1980. I was 12 years old that year.
This is the kind of study that is politically charged, of course. If you fall to one side of the political continuum, you’re supposed to clap your hands and cheer for all the diversity. Yippee! If you identify with the other side, you’re supposed to lament this as the inevitable downfall of the USA.
To bring this back to me: I’ll be 82 years old in 2050. So whether this turns out to be a good thing or a bad thing, all the rest of you can work it out.
But I wouldn’t get too excited about this study one way or the other in 2026. 2050 is a long way off. A lot of things could happen between now and then that could change this predicted outcome—or reinforce it.
For example, immigration from abroad could be completely cut off. Or…it could double or triple.
Childbearing rates could change, too. That’s one thing to keep in mind when they’re talking about low birth rates. Low birth rates are never more than one generation away from reversing. The postwar Baby Boom generation kind of proved that. The childbearing young adults of 2040 aren’t even in junior high yet. They may all decide that they want to have five kids.
In 1979 my sixth-grade science teacher predicted that within 10 years, everyone in the USA would be using the metric system for everything. Because the metric system was the wave of the future!
That means that all those gallons, feet, and inches should have gone away before 1990. Guess how that turned out? I purchased gasoline by the gallon just this afternoon, in 2026. I bought a dozen eggs, too. And young Americans, who weren’t even born in 1979, reflexively give their height and weight in feet and pounds.
Take all predictions with a grain of salt. Especially predictions of outcomes that won’t show up for decades.
Many of you have noticed that my books are now available at multiple retailers.
But not all of my books are available at multiple retailers.
There are reasons for this. Allow me to explain.
As recently as last year, I was Amazon-exclusive on all titles (with the exception of a few non-fiction books). All of my fiction was in Kindle Unlimited.
That’s not the way it is anymore.
Why?
The publishing landscape is changing.
Amazon is still the dominant player in the ebook retailing space (and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future).
But Kobo is rapidly emerging as a viable alternative for many readers (as the video below demonstrates). Other readers will toggle back and forth between the two.
Kobo is not the only non-Amazon e-book retailer, of course. There are also Apple Books, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble.
But Kobo, with its high-profile line of e-readers, seems to be the one that is making the most headway. Kobo is serious about increasing its market share.
Where readers go, authors will follow, and vice versa.
The wild card here is Kindle Unlimited’s exclusivity clause. If a title is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, it can’t be sold (in ebook format) at any of the other retailers. Historically, this has meant that thousands of titles listed at Amazon aren’t available at Kobo, Google Play, etc.
Many readers, I suspect, aren’t even aware of this.
I’ve noticed a trend: More romance authors are publishing their books “wide”, with an emphasis on Kobo.
Yes, romance… the genre that dare not speak its name at this blog. Regular readers will know how I hate werebear shapeshifter romance, reverse harem romance, and all the other ridiculous romance genres.
But I don’t deny their collective footprint in the marketplace. Those weird romance genres, much as I disdain them, may be instrumental in propelling Kobo’s growth in the near future.
This will indirectly benefit the other non-Amazon retailers—not only Kobo. Because if you’re publishing your book on Kobo, then you had might as well publish it on Google Play, Apple Books, and Barnes & Noble too.
Readers will go where the books go. This is the network effect in action.
But for me, publishing wide doesn’t mean abandoning Kindle Unlimited. I will still be keeping many backlist and new titles in Amazon’s exclusive subscription program.
Yes—I know that means that those titles will only be available at Amazon. But Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program is a major player in its own right. In my opinion, part of being “wide” means having a footprint in Kindle Unlimited.
This diversified strategy may strike some readers as needlessly complicated. But remember: I’m from the 1980s. And back in the 1980s, content publishers regularly thought in terms of market segmentation.
For example: there were movies and TV shows that were available on network television for free.
Other movies and shows were available on HBO (a subscription program).
Others required viewers to access them via a pay-per-view system.
Then there were all those VHS rentals.
And finally, there were movies that could only be seen at the cinema.
I’m doing something very similar. Some of my titles are exclusively at Amazon, other titles are “wide”.
Nor have I forgotten about free, frictionless discovery venues: I’ve also been adding readings of some of my books and stories to my YouTube channel.
The 2026 content distribution marketplace is complicated; but in some ways, it’s no more convoluted than it was in 1986. So we go back to the 1980s yet again.
Night Ranger was one of my favorite bands of the golden age of MTV, long before music degenerated into grunge, then rap, and now Taylor Swift. (Barf.)
Night Ranger’s music was not innovative in the manner of Rush or Yes. But it was accessible, the sort of music that you wouldn’t mind listening to on a long drive.
The band was also remarkably consistent over multiple albums. I became a fan with Dawn Patrol (1982), then followed the group through Midnight Madness (1983), 7 Wishes (1985) and Big Life (1987).
I’m gratified to know that the band is still touring, and that three of the original members—Jack Blades, Kelly Keagy, and Brad Gillis—are still with the group.
I like Night Ranger’s music for its own sake, but I won’t deny a certain nostalgic pull. These songs bring back the 1980s for me every time I play them. Good music from a better, bygone time.
Brett Arnold of Yahoo! is distinctly unimpressed with the latest, endless installment in the Star Wars franchise:
“‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ is easily the worst Star Wars movie, but even calling it a movie feels like giving it more credit than it deserves. It’s a feature-length episode of streaming-era television, and boy, does it look and feel like it. It’s uncinematic in pretty much every way, from the drab visuals to its repetitive structure that lacks the storytelling heft needed to make the jump from TV to film. Say what you will about ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ or the prequel trilogy; at least they’re movies!”
Reading the above, I feel a little like the lead singer in the J. Geils Band, who discovered that his high school sweetheart had been turned into onanistic fodder for a girlie magazine:
Star Wars was amazing when it first came out. I can say this with certainty because I was there at the beginning.
It was the summer of 1977 and I sat with my dad in a cinema in northern Kentucky as the very first Star Wars film began.
I was nine years old.
I will soon be 58.
I’m sure you caught the irony. That was almost half a century ago.
The last Star Wars movie that was really necessary was Return of the Jedi in 1983. I remember watching The Phantom Menace in 1999, sixteen years later. It didn’t feel like Star Wars.
Since then, the movies have only gotten worse. It’s obvious that Disney is just milking the Star Wars universe as one of its few reliable cash cows.
Star Wars was great! But it’s time for new science fiction stories and fresh space operas.
In the spring of 1986 I was a senior in high school. My honors English teacher, Mrs. Bollmer, assigned our class Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play, Cyrano de Bergerac. As part of the study of the play, we also watched the 1950 film adaptation starring José Ferrer.
Since I was a 17-going-on-18-year-old boy, I naturally focused on the play’s romantic plot, the homely Cyrano’s pursuit of the lovely but vapid Roxane, who is in love with the handsome but vapid Christian de Neuvillette. (Note for male readers: Cyrano’s method of wooing Roxane is not likely to yield any more satisfying a result in the real world than it did in the play.)
The awkward love plot is a necessary contrivance for a stage drama. What Cyrano de Bergerac is really about, though, is finding your individuality—and personal integrity—in an anonymizing world that seeks to crush both.
And in this regard, the play is relevant to everyone: men, women, the old, the young, and everyone in between.
This theme was certainly relevant in 1986, but that was long before the internet, social media, or the culture wars as we know them today. American culture, politics, and intellectualism were not without their flaws in those days, but they were generally better than they are today.
Take politics. When I was a young man, I thought that I was a liberal. As I entered full adulthood, I thought that I was a conservative. In the political landscape of 2026, I am simply an outsider. My opinions won’t please the personality cult of the MAGA base; nor would I fit in among the lemmings on Bluesky, who compliantly use unnecessary neologisms in the name of political correctness.
In the words of Shakespeare’s Mercutio, “A plague o’ both your houses!”
Listen to Cyrano’s monologue above (from the 1950 film adaptation). Now, more than ever, you need to find your inner Cyrano. Acquiescence to the whims and default opinions of the crowd probably wasn’t a good idea even in 1986. But today such acquiescence is toxic, and destructive to both the individual and society.
The so-called “Gen Z stare” has attracted a lot of attention in the media recently, especially in regard to workplace situations.
The Gen Z stare is a vapid, amused, or annoyed look that young people sometimes give their elders. And in the workplace, most of the management team is going to be over forty and therefore an “elder”.
I’m not sure that there is really anything new here. Watch a teen movie from the 1980s. You will see teenagers from the Reagan era giving older adults similar looks (often accompanied by eye rolls). Keep in mind: those teenagers of the 1980s are now late middle-aged adults in their 50s and early 60s.
The point being: young people have always believed that older people are fuddy-duddies, not current, old-fashioned. If those adults would only get with it, already!
Older people have always believed that young people are too arrogant, and need to spend more time learning the way things are done, versus expressing their opinions.
Both viewpoints are right and both viewpoints are wrong. It depends on the context. The tug between tradition and change is as old as civilization itself.
But in the workplace, the situation is less ambiguous. The workplace is not going to change for the new hire right out of college. Change is going to happen in the opposite direction.
That’s why I’m not a fan of videos like the one recently published by MS NOW, entitled “Did You Just Get the Gen Z Stare at Work? This is Why.”The video asserts that today’s young adults were brought up in a “participatory” culture, and—therefore— don’t cope well with “hierarchy”.
Here’s a newsflash: you could have said more or less the same thing about young adults entering the workplace in 1990. Here’s another newsflash: those young adults of 35 years ago had to change and adapt to the workplace. Today’s young adults will have to change and adapt, too.
The workplace, whether we like it or not, is all about hierarchy. Just ask anyone who’s ever held a job for any length of time.
The internet has officially declared that Two Minutes Hate will be exercised daily for Keith Ervin, the Tennessee school board official who hugged a 17-year-old female student and told her she was “hot”. Ervin has also been charged with assault.
The incident itself (you can watch it on video) was certainly eyebrow-raising and inappropriate. Did it rise to the level of assault? The hugged girl subsequently gave a speech about how offended she was, and this is not the first time Ervin has been in hot water over similar actions. Make of it what you will.
I’m not here to defend Keith Ervin, or to brand him a combination of Osama bin Laden, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Attila the Hun (as so much of the internet seems intent on doing). I’ll address this from a more practical perspective.
Modern life requires one to read the zeitgeist. In 1985, the year I turned seventeen, 17-year-olds were considered “almost adults”. We did not want to be classified as “children”.
Also in 1985, an older man could have gotten away with referring to a 17-year-old girl as “hot” without a national emergency being declared. (But even then, it would have raised some eyebrows.)
This is not 1985. This is 2026. Older teens are now widely regarded as “little children”. The country is in the throes of pedophile hysteria, with the definition of “pedophile” being expanded weekly. A 50-year-old man who expresses amorous appreciation for a 25-year-old might well be branded a pedophile in the current climate; so what the heck did Keith Ervin think he was doing, making such a remark to a 17-year-old?
I graduated from college in 1991, the year of the Tailhook scandal, and the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. I have heard that corporate workplaces were freewheeling, Wild West environments in the 1980s; but I was a teenager then. Sexual harassment avoidance indoctrination was part of my workplace training from my very first day on the job.
The message I received in such training was simple: when in doubt, don’t do it. Don’t say hello to that pretty coworker who ignored you the last time. And—for Heaven’s sake—don’t tell her she’s pretty. That’s an immediate firing offense. Keep your eyes forward at all times. Adopt the air of a polite eunuch.
And this is in a workplace environment with only adults. I haven’t been in a K-12 classroom since 1986. But the behavioral standards in an educational environment, with minors present, must be all the more stringent.
In other words, there is really no excuse for making a mistake like this in 2026—not unless one has been living under a rock for the past 35 years. Keith Ervin is around sixty years old. He had plenty of time to get the memo. What was he thinking?
