Jacob Savage is a ticket scalper and writer who lives in the Los Angeles suburbs. His December 2025 Compact piece “The Lost Generation” was amog the most viral magazine articles of the past year, accumulating tens of millions of views and drawing responses from JD Vance, Ross Douthat in the New York Times, Matt Bruenig at the People’s Policy Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, The Free Press, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Boston Globe, Thomas Chatterton Williams in the Atlantic, and many other such cases/places. His earlier Compact piece, “The Vanishing White Male Writer” (March 2025), documented the disappearance of white male millennials from literary fiction’s prize lists, year-end roundups, fellowship programs, and the pages of the New Yorker. He graduated from Princeton1 in 2006, and you can follow him on Substack by clicking here.
In this 90-minute conversation (for which I always provide helpful notes for those of you who hate podcasts/chatter/breath (all kinds)), we talked about why The Atlantic passed on the piece, which writers were “in like Flynn” before 2014 and which ones weren’t, the Bruenig census data critique, what Kamala could have done differently, Hollywood’s content and business model collapse, the New Yorker publishing corny Costco and airplane travel features, why academia likely won’t recover, and why a generation of “creatives” vanished into the vast depths of crypto and Substack. Now that’s a generous mouthful of delicious, USDA prime content!
On What Happened in the 2010s
We all watched this latter-day Wormley Agreement go down. Older white men in knowledge-work fields kept their lofty positions and then publicly championed diversity in the lower ranks, meaning the hiring changes landed on the cohort below them.
“Older white men basically made a deal for themselves that they could keep their jobs. They would trumpet diversity. It was billed as a win-win-win for everyone involved. But the clear losers were younger white men in all sorts of knowledge-work fields.”
“It was sort of hard to see the enormity of what was happening in the moment, because any individual decision — we don’t want to publish this book, you’re not going to get the staff writer job — could just be because you’re not good enough or they didn’t like you for whatever other reason. But a career is like a garden of forking paths. If on every previous 50-50 shot you had, it’s suddenly 80-20 against you, eventually that’s going to compound to just become more or less almost impossible.”
On Who Got Through Before the Door Closed
When I brought up names of millennial white men who did build major/semi-major careers — Ezra Klein, Sean McElwee, Malcolm Harris — Savage placed them all in the same arrived-on-time chronological category (pre-2014 “names”).
“They all kind of already cracked it, which made them sort of functionally Gen X in a way, and got to be the exceptions. There are almost no millennial white male creators, academics, whatever, who were not public presences by 2015 or so, who then broke through after that.”
On Why the Piece Worked
The article was originally pitched to The Atlantic, where Savage has a friend on the editorial staff. They offered to run a version limited to Hollywood and his personal experience. He turned it down.
“Their response was like, no, but if you wanted to do this just about Hollywood and your own failures, that’s fine, we’ll do it. But that doesn’t shift the conversation at all. It would have just been like, here is a piece by an angry white guy.”
“If I were 24, maybe I would be like, this is my shot, I’ll get in The Atlantic. But I’m not. My dream is not to publish two and a half pieces in The Atlantic over the course of my life.”
What made the piece break out, in his view, was that it addressed a liberal audience with the full institutional picture rather than a single anecdote.
“The Manhattan Institute, Chris Rufo, they would do these individual things — look at this outrageous policy at this one outrageous school. But you need to have it as: this is the entirety of what happened. Anyone can dismiss one issue. But if actually, this was a society-wide thing. I wasn’t writing towards the already converted, which I think was the superpower of the piece.”
On the Bruenig Census Data Critique
Matt Bruenig’s response used nationally representative Census data on 30-something non-Hispanic white men and found they held steady in employment, gained in degree attainment, and barely changed in arts/media occupation share between 2013-2024. Savage acknowledged some of the numbers but disputed the framing.
“Even Bruenig’s data was like, white men went from 16% of the top decile to 13%, which is a huge relative decline! And also, the way that the census categories work — the idea that this doesn’t matter because all white men weren’t fully immiserated in the 2010s and actually went on to find jobs that paid them money in other ways. I mean, you probably make more money doing corporate gigs than you would being an assistant professor.”
On the “Who Cares?” Response
Of the various pushbacks to the piece, Savage found one more honest than the rest.
“I think the most reasonable thing to respond with is: who cares? I think that’s more reasonable than saying it didn’t happen or they deserved it.”
“But the idea that you are a 40-year-old white man and you don’t have the right to exert political influence in society so that it won’t screw you — that is bizarre. The idea that you should not express your desire for fair treatment, that is the fundamental politics. And we somehow completely forgot that. And that obviously channeled itself into Donald Trump 2.0.”
On Kamala and the Liberal Coalition
Savage was pessimistic about whether the Democratic Party is capable of adjusting on this issue.
“If Kamala at the convention had just done a Nixon-to-China thing for DEI — ‘Look, it’s a little rich coming from me, but I promise, from now on, an American is an American. We believe in meritocracy, it’s never been completely fair, but it’s over. All of this dividing by race or gender or immigration status, it’s over, we’re Americans’ — I think she would have managed to eke out a victory. I maintain that.”
He pointed to the Pod Save America post-mortem with the Harris campaign team as evidence of how locked-in the thinking remains.
“They just said they did everything according to the data. There was nothing else they could have done. Trump has proved, in a bizarre other way, that you can just change your positions.”
The Democratic outreach to young white men struck him as comically off-target.
“There was one ad specifically that was like, there’s some kid jerking off in his bedroom and a Republican congressman barges in and says we’re going to ban porn. That was the theory of the case for a younger white man. Not ‘you want a job like everyone else wants a job’ or ‘let’s make buying a house easier.’ The idea that this constituency only wants to watch porn in peace. It was bizarre.”
On Academia as the Lost Cause
Savage sees Hollywood and media as at least partially self-correcting through market pressures. Academia, in his view, will not recover.
“Hollywood will self-correct. Media, you have alternative outlets. But academia is the lost cause for the next generation. The people who did get tenure tended not only not to be white men, but they tended to be the true believers in this stuff. I don’t see a way past that going forward.”
“Until all the boomers retire finally in 2040 and they discover the academy is actually 10% white male, I just don’t see academia recovering from this in any meaningful way.”
He spent time combing through faculty rosters during his reporting, and the uniformity of the research interests stood out.
“I would go through all these different departments and look at all the assistant professors. It was crazy how — doesn’t matter what field — it was post-colonial this, post-colonial that. Your specialty could be anything and it was the same. And they’re not adding scholarship. The book that you wrote would be read by 10 people. What was the point of this?”
He contrasted this with one of his interview subjects, a classicist and lawyer who simply loved the material.
“He just loved classics. You want people in academia who love it, whose love of the sources, of the history, just exudes that this is the most interesting thing in the world to me. And I don’t get that sense from the politicized cohort of the last decade. Maybe you’re not the best Shakespeare scholar, but you love Shakespeare so much that you know every little piece of it and you’re gonna teach the next generation. That love is gone.”
On Hollywood’s Decline
Savage identified two separate problems: the content getting worse and the business model failing. The DEI-era hiring contributed to the first, but the bigger structural issue was that studios stopped saying no to established auteurs with bad ideas.
“Here’s an industry that was making money hand over fist in 2012, they all knew the future was streaming, and none of them could pivot.”
“Woody Allen would write two or three scripts a year and he’d have a producer who’d be like, okay, this one, not that one. They stopped being able to say no to auteurs. Take Scorsese — the Irishman was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Watching an 85-year-old De Niro try to curb stomp someone in slow motion. No one at Netflix could be like, hey Marty, cut an hour out of this script, and cast someone who’s not 90 to play someone who’s 30. They were just so thrilled to have him in the family that there’s no note.”
The generation that would have produced the next wave of showrunners was hollowed out during Peak TV’s diversity push.
“All the people who would have had jobs on the ‘good shows’ 10 years ago would be making their grand entrance right now with some show that everyone loves. Those people don’t exist anymore.”
He’s raising his kiddo on pre-2012 content.
“We don’t really let him watch any movies made after 2012 or so. If you watch the difference between Finding Nemo and Finding Nemo 2, just in terms of the craftsmanship, it’s enormous. There’s a human behind the animation in the first one, and the second one just doesn’t have that.”
On Institutions Not Caring About Audience
One pattern Savage kept returning to was institutions producing content with no apparent interest in whether anyone consumed it.
“What’s weird to me is how little a lot of these mainstream institutions — whether media or TV — even care whether the product is consumed. Taking my own article: if this had appeared in some neutered version in the Atlantic or the New York Times Magazine, it would have been the biggest article of the year. You could tell them, this is going to get you 20 times the normal traffic. But that’s not a concern. At most a secondary, tertiary concern.”
He brought up a Joshua Cohen short story in the New Yorker about Gaza that he thought was great.
“I looked on Twitter and Bluesky to see if anyone had mentioned it. It got maybe two mentions. I don’t think anyone read this story. There’s such a cultural autopilot that it’s not clear to me anyone still reads the New Yorker. There’s a subscription base, but do people read the articles? I would take a truther line on that.”
On the New Yorker Specifically
The conversation turned to how the magazine’s ambitions have narrowed. Savage singled out one writer, Burkhard Bilger (what a mouthful that name is!), whose earlier work he admired.
“He did this piece in the early 2000s about short-order cooks in Las Vegas that was just incredible. Spent a month trailing around short-order cooks and crafting the perfect piece about people who could flip a thousand burgers an hour. And now it’s ‘Why Your Next Flight Is Likelier to Hit Turbulence.’ This is a guy who spent a month on short-order cooks and now he’s doing slop.”
“The point of the New Yorker was not to get a Stacey Abrams profile.2 It was to investigate a Mexican cockroach colony and what it meant for something. They just don’t do that anymore.”
On the 2010s as a Cultural Period
Savage has been thinking about a book, not an expansion of the Lost Generation piece, but something broader about the 2010s as the decade when millennial culture curdled.
“I kind of have an idea to maybe do something about the 2010s more broadly as the decade millennials just lost their shit. More like a cultural ‘this is what happened.’ But I haven’t cracked whatever the organizing principle would be.”
“There was something like a millennial quest for fake authenticity that then curdled into complete nonsense. There was this documentary [Death by Audio] about a DIY venue in North Williamsburg, filmed around 2008 to 2012. All these liberal white guys trying to be good white guys, trying to do the Gen-X thing — I’m just creative, fuck the man, I’m here to let art happen. It’s not clear that getting the Dirty Projectors means art happened. But there was something very poignant about that last attempt to be a good white guy who lives his life with intention and meaning in an artsy way, and by 2016 that had completely vanished as a possibility.”
On Whether to Write the Book
A couple of agents reached out after the piece. Savage isn’t sure there’s a book-length version of the Lost Generation argument that would be worth writing.
“I could expand it, do another five industries, find another five people to interview. But by the time it comes out, it’s a different political moment. To the extent I’m satisfied that I proved my point — if someone was like, here’s a million dollars, go do the book, I wouldn’t say no. But the idea that I would spend two years of my life writing this book that just says the same thing I said already does not interest me.”
On the Escape Valves
Savage noted that none of the white male writers who found audiences outside legacy media — including me — ever received an offer to write a regular column at a major mainstream outlet.
“None of those guys, and I include you in that, have ever gotten an offer to just be like, yeah, write a weekly column for us at this big mainstream place. It just doesn’t happen.”
Appendix: You Decide!
Savage’s article and Matt Bruenig’s Census-based response are measuring different things. Savage tracks hiring flows and compositional shares within specific institutions. Bruenig tracks aggregate outcomes for an entire demographic cohort using what he presents as “nationally representative survey data.”
Savage’s Institutional Data
TV/Film3
White men: 48% of lower-level TV writers in 2011 → 11.9% by 2024
Women of color: 34.6% of lower-level TV writers by 2025
White men directed 69% of TV episodes in 2014 → 34% by 2021
Disney Writing Program: 107 writing fellowships over the past decade, zero to white men
Sundance Screenwriters Lab: white men were 27.5% of applicants in 2016-17 but 14.7% of participants; since 2018, 8 of 138 fellows (5.8%) were white men
Internal 2017 talent agency “needs sheet” documented shows explicitly requesting “diverse,” “female,” “women and diverse only” for staffing
Academy Award screenwriting nominations (2014-2023): 50+ Gen-X white men, 6 white male millennials
Since 2021, 11 directors under 40 nominated for Emmys, zero white men
Journalism/Media
Vox Media: 82% male and 88% white in 2013 → 37% male and 59% white by 2022; leadership 73% female by 2025
NYT newsroom: 57% male and 78% white in 2015 → 46% male and 66% white by 2024
BuzzFeed: 52% male and 75% white in 2014 → 36% male and 52% white by 2023
Condé Nast 2021 new hires: 25% male, 49% white
NPR 2021 new hires: 78% people of color
The Atlantic since 2020: ~65% of hires women, ~50% people of color; in 2024 specifically, 75% of editorial hires women, 69% people of color
NYT fellowship (replaced summer internship in 2018): ~220 fellows, 10% white men
LA Times interns since 2020: 7.7% white men
Washington Post interns 2018-2024: 2-3 white men per year out of ~30
Academia
Harvard tenure-track: white men from 49% in 2014 → 27% in 2024 (humanities: 39% → 21%)
Yale: 14.6% of tenure-track hires since 2018 were white American men (humanities: 6 of 76, or 7.9%)
Brown: 45 tenure-track hires in humanities/social sciences since 2022, 3 white American men (6.7%)
Brown 2022 humanities hiring funnel: 728 applicants (55% male) → longlist 48% male → shortlist 42% male → interview 34% male → offers 29% male
Berkeley: white male tenure-track hires 52.7% in 2015 → 21.5% in 2023
UC Irvine: 64 tenure-track hires in humanities/social sciences since 2020, 3 white men (4.7%)
UC Santa Cruz: 59 assistant professors 2020-2024, 2 white men (3%)
White foreign-national PhDs nearly twice as likely as white US citizens to secure tenure-track positions (61.0% vs 33.1% in 2023)
Other Fields
Google: white men from ~50% of workforce in 2014 to less than 1/3 by 2024
Amazon mid-level managers: 55.8% white male in 2014 → 33.8% in 2024 (nearly 40% decline)
Law school: white men from 31.2% of matriculants in 2016 → 25.7% in 2024
Medical students: white men from 31% in 2014 → 20.5% by 2025
MacArthur “Genius” Fellowships: 7 white male Gen-Xers won in 2013 alone — same as total white male millennials who’ve won since
National Book Awards: 3 white male millennials out of 70 millennial nominees in the decade after 2014
2024 Whitney Biennial: 45 millennial artists, zero white American men
Bruenig’s Census Data
Using nationally representative Census microdata on non-Hispanic white men aged 30-39 (2013-2024):
Education: 30-something white men with bachelor’s degrees rose from ~24% in 2013 to ~32% in 2024. Post-bachelor’s degrees: ~13% to ~14% (everyone else: ~13% to ~17%).
Employment: Percentage of 30-something white men working 50+ weeks/year held roughly steady, remained ~10 percentage points above the rate for all other groups (though their full-time employment had not fully recovered to pre-pandemic peak, unlike other groups).
Earnings distribution: White men in the top 50% of 30-something earners went from ~69% to ~67%. Top 20%: ~34% to ~32%. Top 10%: ~19% to ~16%.
Arts/media employment: Percentage of 30-something white men in arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations (Census codes 2600-2920): essentially flat.
What’s your take? Share your perspective in the comments! There are no wrong answers because, as Nassim Taleb once posted,
Further Reading
“The Lost Generation” — Jacob Savage, Compact (December 2025)
“The Vanishing White Male Writer” — Jacob Savage, Compact (March 2025)
“What Does the Census Data Say About ‘The Lost Generation’” — Matt Bruenig, People’s Policy Project
“The Wrong Kind of Black” — Thomas Chatterton Williams, The Atlantic
“Confronting the Unspeakable Truth” — Aaron Renn
“Should We Feel Sorry for White Men?” — The Free Press
“Young White Men Feel Wronged. Should Liberals Care?” — Boston Globe
“Are Young White Men Facing Discrimination?” — Survey Center on American Life
“Is Academe Discriminating Against White Men?” — Chronicle of Higher Education
Longboxes by Nate McDonough — referenced at the end of the interview, and quite possibly the best comics work I’ve come across since the early strips of the great Ben Katchor (whom I interviewed here)
Sitting Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito (class of 1972), Sonia Sotomayor (class of 1976), and Elena Kagan (class of 1981) all received their undergraduate educations at Princeton.
I liked the WaPo mag story about Abrams that featured these odd photos of her wearing a cape. What a fine distillation of the ethos of the era that was, much like her appearance in one of the Star Wars series.
Whenever you see a section like this, assume that I quickly compiled it using an AI application. That is what I do in my day job, after all.
