By Scott Dickensheets
   
     From the premiere issue of My Generation, a new magazine from the American Association of Retired Persons that welcomes Baby Boomers to the fold, we learn many useful things about America’s most scrutinized generation.
     We discover that Boomers take an inventive, nontraditional approach to problem-solving: To cure snoring, My Generation instructs Boomers to “sew golf balls or marbles on your pajamas to prevent you from rolling onto your back.”
     We learn that years of imbibing Oprah and applying chicken soup to their souls have given Boomers a keen insight into the subtleties of the human condition: Responding to the magazine’s survey on aging, “a 54-year-old ham-radio operator in Montana admits that he’s recently noticed that ‘I don’t look the way I did 25 years ago.’”
     We learn that Boomers are, according to the cover lines,  interested in retiring rich and using sex to live longer. This certainly sets them apart from those other generations that, once Boomers finish draining Social Security, won’t be able to retire at all, no matter how long orgasms prolong their lives.
    Baby Boomers have been examined, analyzed, parsed, defined, mocked, maligned and blamed so often for so long it’s surprising they don’t already have an in-house magazine where they can soothe each other’s  nerves.
    Well, OK, there's Rolling Stone. 
    Now My Generation steps in to write even more about America's most written-about demographic. 
     Defining its audience as those folks between age 50 and their AARP card, the magazine has decided that they're busy with work, home life, their health and watching Ed Harris movies (he's the first-issue cover boy). 
     And, befitting a generation that hoped it would die before it got old, they're a little freaked at turning 50.
    “There’s no escaping the inevitable tangle of cosmic questions that seem to attach themselves to this birthday,” editor in chief Betsy Carter writes in her ed note. “What next? What kind of person will I be in this part of my life?”
     For Boomers locked into such rueful self-examination, My Generation is the magazine that answers: You're the kind of person who sews golf balls to your pajamas.
    They're busy, too—what with all that cosmic-question tangling and life-extending sex--and it appears too busy for anything but news-you-can-use service pieces.
     So, ditching the customary feature well, My Generation helpfully organizes its contents--both factoids and longer articles--into thematic, easy-to-skim clusters, each addressing a concern of the over-50 set:  Staying Alive, Working, Free Time, Bottom Line, Do Right and Leap of Faith. Readers can go straight to what they need, then return to rueful self-examination.
    The stories are for the most part blandly pragmatic, telling readers that it’s OK to eat eggs, how to explore Memphis, that leather is in, and what to expect should they decide to fulfill their lifelong fantasy of working at the zoo.
    Some editorial choices are downright puzzling, though.
    A long time ago, in a news cycle far, far away, it may have made sense to run a piece on Ben and Jerry or a short profile summarizing funny writer Bill Bryson.
    But these are Baby Boomers, a phylum that, Carter tells us, grew up reading magazines, many of which have written longer and better about these fellas.
    Meanwhile, the cover line “Have Sex, Live Longer” (an ideal Baby Boomer formulation, taking a perfectly pleasant activity and giving it a therapeutic dimension) appears to be pegged to a 98-word shortie. 
    Worse, this 98-word shortie can’t even make up its mind if having sex really makes you live longer.
    “People who have sex once or twice a week experience a 30 percent increase in levels of immunoglobulin A,” it declares. Then, a hop and skip later, it tells us that “people making love more frequently had the same levels of IgA as those having no sex at all.”
    Just 98 words, but so much to think about. It's indeed another cosmic question in need of a good tangling.
    Even in the best articles, the writing is mostly amiable and efficient, rarely flashy; it’s middle-age prose.
    And perhaps that's the most troubling aspect of My Generation--its implicit assumption that its readers are too busy micromanaging their lives to bother with the rigors of magazine writing that exhibits some stylistic daring.
    Still, for a magazine designed to court a fickle demographic, My Generation doesn’t balk at giving Boomers the occasional dose of bad vibes.
    “An Adult’s Education” by Annie Cheney nicely subverts the essentially narcissistic conceit of “giving back to the community.” It follows an arrogant Boomer’s miserable attempt to give up a lucrative consulting career for life as an inner-city math teacher. Clearly out of his element, he responds by concealing his kernel of true enthusiasm beneath sarcasm and condescension.
    This is a fine story somewhat underserved by its writing. A bit more kick in the prose might have made this a truly memorable parable of a generation's do-gooder pretensions turned upside down.
    In her note, Carter writes, “This generation refuses to believe it’s getting older.”  By this she means that Boomers can't stand that they don't look like they did 25 years ago. 
   “All Shook Up,” Carin Rubenstein’s write-up of the magazine’s survey on aging, concludes that a lot of Boomers aren’t going gently into that good early evening. 
    “Even though they want to feel good about themselves, they don’t,” she writes. “In fact, only 22 percent of Baby Boomers describe themselves as ‘popular,’ a feeling reminiscent of high school ... All of this sounds to us very much like an attack of second adolescence.”
     But these being Baby Boomers, there’s naturally a self-actualizing upside.
     “The key to surviving this second adolescence, we find, is being able to reinvent yourself.” Get a hobby, take a job at the zoo, gain perspective and option the whole package to the Lifetime Network. 
     Then you really can retire rich and maybe afford fancy pajamas with the golf balls already attached.

-Scott Dickensheets is a magazine critic for Media Life.

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