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Chances are if you’re reading this, then you’re not in middle school anymore. If you are, then stop reading right now because you must preserve your reputation for “coolness.”

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I was scared of my privilege, of being drawn into “the biz” by nepotism or lack of effort or whatever simple force had acted on the rest of the men in my family, men I respected and did not want to resent.

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Netflix should just create a genre called “Colin Firth movies in which he spends a lot of time being all unreadable and Colin Firthy but in the end it turns out he is filled with smoldering passion and also is an excellent kisser.”

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…Are you going to finish that? I just noticed it, hanging off the edge of your plate like that so I just thought I’d ask if you were going to finish it?

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The problem arises when a show is marketed as universal, and the protagonist actually utters the phrase “voice of a generation,” even if it is meant to be comical and absurd.

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This asseveration lead me to the undeserved conceit of imagining life as Ellis (“…after all, who am I compared to him?” says the Woody Allen sequitir in my head), and thus, to imagining what I would do if I were B.E.E. for a day.

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Movies are a medium of passion. If there is no passion, there is no movie. This is what Hollywood thinks about a “true-to-the-zeitgeist intellectual tome documenting the depths of teenage confusion”: if there is no drama, we cannot sell it.

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People eat healthy in Los Angeles. They’re all about the mixed greens, the fresh pressed juices and embracing any fad diet that promises immediate weight loss. Because of this, you end up going to a lot of restaurants that have things like “elixir edamame” and “buddha burger” on the menu. Forty dollars later, you’re still starving and may need to have a fourth meal at Taco Bell just to deal.

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And it’s not just that the characters find themselves in depressing situation after depressing situation (well, they kind of do), it’s the fact that the scope of the novel makes every depressing instance so much more tragic because you’re highly familiar with what lead each character to the sad place they’re in currently.

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Since the glorification of all/ most of these are generally frowned upon nowadays (in the Age of Irony and Equality), people who love Hemingway secretly appreciate and/ or fantasize about the way the world used to be; about being Hemingway’s Brett, or his Catherine, or Hemingway himself…