Soleil Moon Frye’s documentary Kid 90, which premiered on Hulu this month, is an exercise in resurrected childhood. Frye was a child star in the early ’90s, the eponymous character in the show Punky Brewster, and she knew most of the other child and teen actors in the business. She often carried a camcorder to parties, and she now possesses footage of dozens of nostalgia-gilded faces caught at the height of their fame and completely off-guard. (David Arquette! Brian Austin Greene! Leonardo DiCaprio for about three seconds!)

What Kid 90 wants to say, outside of “look at all these famous…

It’s the second Friday in March, and nobody seems to be going outside anymore. I’m glued to my couch watching season 1, episode 11 of Gossip Girl, in which Blair Waldorf is coming to terms with her dad. He’s recently come out as gay and is moving to Paris to live with his boyfriend, who — scandal upon scandal! — used to be a model for Blair’s fashion designer mother.

Now it’s July, and I’ve moved a mile down the street from my old apartment. Gossip Girl’s Dan Humphrey is, improbably, getting a story published in the New Yorker as…

I have a confession to make: I know very little about the Hallmark Channel canon of holiday romance films. The TV in my childhood home picked up fewer than 10 channels on any given day; family-friendly melodramas were not part of the regular programming. Yet over the years, I’ve heard the many infamous tropes that define a Hallmark classic: the interchangeable character archetypes, the predictable storylines, the wholesome, open-hearted outlook on the world. It’s mindless nostalgia tied neatly with a bow, which not so ironically is all our pandemic-addled brains can process these days.

If there ever were a time…

Six years ago, my mom and I met for lunch in my hometown of Edison, New Jersey. I had some time before my train back to New York City, so I suggested we drive by our old house, a 1961 suburban ranch my parents bought for $45,000 in 1971 when my mom was pregnant with me. We parked across the street and I stared at the new curved driveway that decimated the huge magnolia tree in the front yard, and the grass replacing the 1970s rock garden my dad put in during the late 1980s.

“Let’s go inside,” my mom…

Some demographic disclosures: I was born in 1977, two weeks before Star Wars came out. I turned 42 in May. I am a late-edge member of the age cohort commonly known as Generation X. Sometimes the word “xennial” is used to describe people like me and my proximate-age peers, but I can’t use that word without feeling like I’m trying to weasel out of something, or weasel into something else. I identify as Gen X. It’s a label that makes my history make sense.

I used an internet-connected device for the first time in my friend’s parents’ basement in 1987…