Generation

WE OFTEN HEAR these days that our youth are a generation without ethics. They are called The Me Generation, or The Gimme Generation, and are said to care only for consumer goods. In a recent report, "The Ethics of American Youth," the Josephson Institute for the Advancement of Ethics concluded that "today's 18-30 generation is less anchored in bedrock ethical values than any other." It calls them "IDIs"--since their implicit assumption is, "I deserve it."

NEW YORK - For all its perks, being a popular young actor like Shia LaBeouf in today's media climate can come with some intense pressures. So intense that one of Hollywood's longest lasting stars says he probably couldn't handle them. "I don't envy Shia's generation," said Robert Redford, LaBeouf's director and co-star in the new dramatic thriller "The Company You Keep. " "If what's put to him had been put to me when I was starting out, I might have stayed a painter. " VIDEO: Robert Redford on "The Company You Keep" LaBeouf, who joined Redford for an interview here this week, brought in a historical perspective.

Jane Fowler thinks it's about time college students had "the talk" with their grandparents. She doesn't mean grandmothers and grandfathers explaining the facts of life. She wants kids to explain safe sex to their elders. It's part of a broader message the 72-year-old has advocated for more than a decade. Ever since she contracted HIV when she was in her 50s, Fowler has made it her mission to help aging baby boomers and members of her generation avoid her mistakes.

Generational disparity is a seductive idea, inspiring myriad studies and books in the last 30 years. Today, we prefer to discuss cultural groupings around influential events or trends. The baby boom generation belongs to that post-World War II spike in the birthrate. It was followed by a baby bust, Generation X. Tamara Erickson, a management writer who has published books looking at the age groups on either side of Gen X, now finds herself advising 30- to 45-year-olds in her new book, "What's Next, Gen X?

Long ago, Tim O'Brien dreamed he would live on a golf course. And here he is now, in a home perched beside the 18th green of the Onion Creek Club, sitting pretty. His subdivision on the far outskirts of Austin has streets named after golf courses like Pebble Beach and Pinehurst. Swans ply the waters of a fairway pond just down the street.

Reflecting its diversifying community, the Japanese American National Museum announced Friday that it had hired a fourth-generation Alaskan of Japanese and European heritage as chief executive of one of Little Tokyo's most important institutions. G.W. "Greg" Kimura, who headed the Alaska Humanities Forum, will take over the museum as it struggles with an aging donor base, fundraising difficulties and the challenge of appealing to younger and more assimilated Japanese Americans. Gordon Yamate, chairman of the museum board, said Kimura's fundraising skills would be particularly needed, even as his institution has financially stabilized after retiring about $2 million in short-term debt in the past few years.

The Greeks call it "Generation 700": a mass of highly educated twenty- and early thirtysomethings stuck in amiable insolvency, living with their parents, drifting from coffee shop to coffee shop with companions they can't afford to marry. From their settled perches, the elders criticize and cluck. The young, they say, have either no initiative, a dearth of opportunities, or some combination of the two. They fear that young people will be unable to start their own families and they fret over the prospect of Greece's demographic undoing.

At midlife, the nation's 78 million baby boomers appear to be in worse health than the generation that preceded them, a new study finds . Researchers from West Virginia University School of Medicine and the Medical University of South Carolina knew that American's life expectancy has steadily improved, but they wondered whether that meant baby boomers were healthier than their parents or simply benefiting from better medical treatments....

At a friend's home two years ago, Ann Magovern announced that she had big news. The friend silently wondered, "Is she pregnant?" No, this was about a secret ambition, one that Magovern, usually frank and open, had nursed for years. "I want to become a nun," blurted the 25-year-old teacher, the youngest daughter of a prominent surgeon whose five other children had become doctors, lawyers and computer programmers. Friends and family members were stunned.

The Trayvon Martin case, the"Kony 2012" phenomenon, the L.A. riots anniversary.... The conversation about race in America never went away. Now a new discussion about so-called hipster racism has brought the talk to the millennials, and it's gotten a little awkward. Among the questions: Is hipster racism real? Is it any different from more traditional racism? Or is all this talk just the byproduct of a generation that barely remembers Rodney King and O.J. Simpson and has no idea how to talk about race?