Colin Marshall

Vital stats:
Format: conversation’s about the man’s life with men who’ve lived it (including quite a few entertainers, comedians especially)
Episode duration: 30m-1h
Frequency: weekly, plus shorter supplements

What, exactly, happened to my generation? We got off to a promising start, but at some point in the past few years took a hard look in the proverbial mirror and found our reflection badly wanting. This tidal wave of self-doubt causes problems of its own — most of our problems, perhaps — but no smoke comes without fire: have look at film and television, its Judd Apatow characters standing as unkempt, juvenile evidence of men so feckless they can no longer even romance women, its Lena Dunham characters not worth romancing in the first place, and tell me how much confidence we can possibly have left. For all our high-profile technological and cultural successes, many of us thirty-ish-year-olds feel dogged by something obscurely yet manifestly broken in our capacity to lead self-respectable lives. In America, some of this has to do with coming of age in an economy crippled by nostalgia for the postwar years and of inheriting a social contract between the sexes torn up long before we got here. Blaming such broad conditions, alas, just makes us lazier about rectifying our individual situations.

To vaguely gesture toward Candide, then, we must grow our own gardens. Maybe, just maybe, we can cultivate ourselves out of the reach of greater generational dissolution. How my distaff peers can manage this I haven’t had the time to learn, since I’ve had so much catching up of my own to do. Hearing Glenn O’Brien on The Sound of Young America and reading his book How to Be a Man helped. Writing about other men’s style books for Put This On has certainly done its part, but most of the knowledge there has come, of course, through the particular lens of clothes. Not that clothes make for a disadvantageous place to start; take one look at modern man’s hoodies, greying tube socks, and jeans with walked-on hems, and you’ll sense a serious underlying problem. (Modern woman puts on a far superior display of outward maturity, though in many cases a display with deliberate intent to conceal.) But now we Millennial males have one more broad-spectrum resource for our quest: Man School, a new podcast from Caleb Bacon, television writer and former host of The Gentlemen’s Club.

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.