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Today the most precious commodity available is information. Simply on a personal level, as opposed to institutional, a person accrues a vast amount of data simply by existing: healthcare records, from immunization records to insurance filings; criminal justice proceedings, from noise complaints to sealed records; credit scores; pay stubs and leases and standardized test scores and location data acquired by apps that give geo-targeted feedback. Millennials — the generation defined not by their date of birth, but by their convenient status as scapegoat for all of today’s social issues — grew up, typically, with personal computers, and have been described as “digital natives” who “think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.”The crux of millennial privacy, therefore, is control. The difference between information that online millennials are willing to divulge and that which they would prefer to withhold is not a binary, but a spectrum. There is information which can be released at any point, and information that should be withheld to a certain extent (for example: not coming out to your family until you no longer live with them; not discussing holiday travel plans until they are more certain), and so on. Your partner will know more than, perhaps, your friend, who may know more than your employer.

WHAT TO WEAR WHEN: “Life, uh, finds a way.”

The thing about the MPDG is that she cannot exist in real life, simply by definition. In fiction, and in his original piece, Rabin defines her as a girl (not a woman: he also describes her as a “nymphet,” a word used prominently by Nabokov in “Lolita”) who “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” Nobody exists simply to provide forward motion to somebody else’s character arc. Since the beginning of recorded history humans have sought narrative, from assigning configurations and myths to the constellations to explaining the seasons as divine power struggles. It is simultaneously a strength and a coping mechanism. Regardless of how we perceive each other, nobody can be flattened to a two-dimensional character who exists -- who is, from the author’s point of view, solely created -- in order to further someone else’s story. On the other hand, our tendency to try and draw narratives from the disorganization of living is extremely powerful. Tim O’Brien writes in “The Things They Carried” that “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth”. A good story will outlive the teller and the participants by centuries.