Jezebel flips through Time Out New York’s sex issue from 1996—a year “when business was booming and ‘hookup culture’ hadn’t been invented yet”—and finds that things were sorta-kinda different then, but not really.

Meanwhile, The Awl takes a pretty ambivalent look back at Kids, on the fifteenth anniversary of that movie’s release.

The Times reports on an annual reunion of people who posed for Norman Rockwell—those still around are mostly elderly folks who modeled for Rockwell as kids. I do wonder what they have to talk about…how much mileage can they really have gotten out of that experience? The paper also recently offered a dispatch from the Chinatown Fair video arcade—”one of the last of the traditional arcades left in the city”—and a piece pointing out how, despite it being difficult and sort of useless, psychological researchers are determined to find a basis for generalizing about generations:

Generation Y’s collective personality, if such a thing exists, is not likely to be much different from other generations’. Still, small differences may matter…[one psychologist] has found a slight decrease in trust over the generations and a slight increase in a something called “ascendancy,” or “competence” — a self-professed confidence in getting things done.

At Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, an elegy for the “cluttered little beauty” of a Union Square newsstand that was recently replaced by one of the slick new glass and steel designs.

e.p.t. brand pregnancy tests are offering a special pouch you can send in for, in which to preserve your peed-on pregnancy test and by extension, “the moment you knew.”

Anticipating a time when “[b]ooks will…suffer the fate that has already befallen letters sent by mail: preciousness,” Mark Oppenheimer writes in Slate about what we lose when electronic devices take the place of books, whose covers we’ve come to count on to tell us something about the person reading them: “[W]hat will you do, Kindle generation, when you cannot tell which of the quiet boys holding the e-reader on the subway is engrossed by the latest, predictable legal thriller, and which one by a cheery, long-forgotten Laurie Colwin novel?”

At Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz commemorates Kodachrome film, the very last frames of which were produced last month:

Kodachrome photos were luminous and warm but not garish; in some inexpressible way, they seemed to capture the sensation of remembering the past, fixing nostalgia along with people and places….Its official end as a commercial format — one that you could just drop off and pick up at the local pharmacy — is yet another notable marker in an ongoing story: society’s total conversion from analog to digital media….That’s ultimately what the end of Kodachrome is really about: the end of a small but significant kind of poetry that was bound up with analog image-making.

Right, Katie Roiphe’s piece about Mad Men from a couple weeks back: “In the early ’60s they smoldered against the repression of the ’50s; and it may be that we smolder a little against the wilier and subtler repression of our own undoubtedly healthier, more upstanding times,” she writes by way of explaining our obsession with the show, and suggesting that we might learn to embrace some of the oh-so-sexy “messiness” that shapes the lives of its characters. “Juxtaposed against all this flamboyance, the tameness of contemporary sins can be a little disheartening.”  Maybe it’s the attempt at juxtaposition that’s the problem?

In a smart response at The Awl, Peter Birkenhead wonders, “Where has she gotten the positively Mad Men-era idea that ‘embracing the responsibility’ of marriage precludes a messy, exciting—sometimes even transcendentally so—life? Does Roiphe not get that, in her creaky old (and exceedingly bougie) critique of ‘bourgeois culture,’ she sounds like one of the be-goateed trust-funders Don meets during the first season of the show?”

Speaking of Mad Men (and really, when aren’t we?), Ruth La Ferla considers the relentless cycle of nostalgic fashion, most recently inspired by the ubiquitous show: “Lately though, such revivals seem shopworn — not to say mindlessly literal. Where, after all, is the irony in pushing replicas of grandma’s twin sets, camel’s hair coats and crinolines on a generation bred on loose-fitting T-shirts, denim and cyberworld tints?”

And check out these gorgeous color photos taken between 1939 and 1943…It’s amazing how your whole sense of that time can change when you see it captured in something other than black-and-white. Call it The Wizard of Oz effect?