TALKIN' 'BOUT THEIR GENERATION

 Forty-six million Americans are between the ages of twenty and thirty, and marketers and the media are falling all over themselves trying to figure out who these new consumers are: Scotch drinkers? Kurt Cobain mourners? "Psychic Friends" customers? Generation X? When, in 1991, Time magazine ran a scolding cover story on the bad attitude and sorry prospects of the generation, other national media followed suit. That same year the term "slacker," from a film about aimless young people in Austin, Texas, caught on.

 Meanwhile, a generation of magazines being created for w and by -- the twentysomethings is emerging. Editors at these magazines deal in different ways with the GenX stereotypes: they hate them, use them, resist them, endlessly analyze them, and, in the best of cases, try to rise above them, to be about something more than just being young.

 Here's what some of them have produced:

 Inside Edge (circulation: 125,000), is a Neanderthalian how-to-party-and-get-lucky manual for the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old male. Still, editor-in-chief Jon Hsu feels compelled to define it this way: "Inside Edge is not a 'slacker' magazine. We would do well at any time in history."

 Hsu and publisher Aaron Shapiro started Inside Edge last year, while they were juniors at Harvard, after concluding that there were no magazines for men their age. Hsu initially promoted the magazine as a GenX publication, but now resists the stereotype: "Who would want to market to a group that is lazy, apathetic, unmotivated, and alienated from mainstream society?" he asks.

Indeed, though twentysomething hype has helped publicize IE, the magazine's themes are familiar good ol' boy fare: the covers display tightly clad live Barbies draped over average-looking guys, and two recent issues offered such timeless heads as "Are You a Slobbering Alcoholic?" "Advice on Women, Beer, and Booze," and "Confessions of a 2 Timer."

 In eloquent defiance of GenX hype, the angry young men behind The Baffler (circulation: about 3,500), a Chicago journal of cultural criticism, proclaim their publication "the enemy of the stars, the deflator of celebrity." They are outsiders and proud of it: "In a time when the 'cutting edge' has become a powerful tool for mediocratization, we dedicate ourselves to its blunting." Since its founding in 1988 by another pair of undergraduates -- Keith White and Tom Frank (now graduate students) -- this journal has come out five times. The Baffler reader (presumably male, as nearly all the magazine's writers are) is skeptical about everything mainstream culture tries to sell him, from the Details magazine man ("bee-stung lips, carefully unkempt hair . . . baggy Versace suits, the attendant awed babes, the tatoos . . .") to traditional work ("the brain-deadening architecture of your office complexes"). He is too smart for his current job; he was too smart for the suburbs he grew up in. In fact, his ideity has evolved in opposition to his mall-and-cheerleaders upbringing, and his anti-establishment politics were formed by the '70s and '80s punk rock explosion. Past issues have addressed such topics as life in the suburbs and "consolidated deviance" (Bafflerspeak for the cooptation of rebellion); the August issue will focus on the corporate workplace, particularly from the perspective of temps.

 Though for obvious reasons it doesn't have an easy time getting advertisers, The Baffler has received deservedly favorable press attention, particularly for an exclusive titled "Harsh Realm, Mr. Sulzberger!" which revealed that a New York Times Styles section list of Seattle twentysomething slang had been fed to the paper as a prank and was, in fact, utterly fabricated.

 Might, despite a slick appearance, also positions itself as an alternative to mass culture. A "goddamn brain picnic for the young and restless," Might's first issue, which hit national newstands in early February, opens with a table of contents -- unrelated to the magazine's actual material -- that satirizes the media's usual youth-oriented offerings: "Cindy Crawford -- She's a Model and She's Kind of Smart: The Might Interview," "Hair -- How Much Is Too Much?" and "Depeche Mode: Are They Great or What?" Throughout the magazine margins are lined with Jenny Holzer-style messages (like "Why is office?" "When is marriage?"), highlighted in black. Articles include a thoughtful essay on Katie Roiphe and the date-rape-hype controversy by Paula Kamen, author of Feminist Fatale, and features about activist rappers, teaching abroad, and pirate radio.

 Co-founder David Eggers says the next issue will be less generationally self-conscious. "We made a rule that we wouldn't use the word 'generation' in the next issue," he says. "Or 'X,' or 'slacker.' We wanted to move beyond that to stuff we're interested in." So far this "stuff" remains somewhat undefined, though this seeming directionlessness may be right on target.

 Might is not unlike its imagined reader, a twentysomething who doesn't have a great job but is trying to figure out what to do with her life. She (or he) shares with The Baffler reader a skepticism about politics, marketing, and American culture, but is less angry, more open-minded. Might has no corporate backing, but it does have some advertisers, and all 10,000 newstand copies of the February premiere issue were sold out.

 The Next Progressive (circulation: 5,000) is an unabashedly political quarterly started in August 1991 by Eric Liu, then a Senate aide, who felt that articulate young people needed to weigh in against that summer's anti-twentysomething barrage. The intentionally stark layout emphasizes content over form and repudiates the flashy graphics frequently used to target GenX. Calling his generation "pragmatic," "media savvy," and "post-partisan," Liu, who writes speeches for Bill Clinton, says he wants the magazine to be full of "thoughtful political pieces by writers who just happen to be young, to move away from pieces that are self-consciously generational." TNP's imagined readers are, like many of its writers, Ivy-educated, have jobs that older people respect, and are confident that their opinions matter.

 Diversity & Division (circulation: 10,000), a quarterly funded in part by the Washington, D.C.-based Madison Center for Educational Affairs, is aimed at young conservatives. Like TNP, it started in 1991 in response to media denigration of its "buster" generation. The reader is assumed to be a student or recent graduate, embittered by a too-liberal education. One writer recounts his lonely odyssey as a conservative in radical scholar Cornel West's class at Princeton. Recently, a particularly outraged feature revealed that author Maya Angelou cancelled a campus appearance due to "illness," then appeared on Arsenio that same day. Less hysterical and more reflective are occasional pop culture essays -- one explores the possible conservatism of "grunge."

 D & D's writers use part of the GenX mythology, the supposed hostility toward baby boomers, to condemn the liberal and radical movements of the 1960s, recasting old-fashioned partisan politics into sexier generational rage. The magazine is letting up on that tactic, however, according to editor-in-chief Jeff Muir: "We rode the GenX wave as far as we could. For self-interested reasons."

 Who Cares, a "journal of service and action," edited entirely by women in their twenties, was launched last October. Founded by three recent college graduates -- Heather McLeod, Leslie Crutchfield, and Chloe Breyer -- and funded by grants, subscriptions, newsstand sales, and advertising, Who Cares seeks to provide a forum for a perceived growing movement of entrepreneurial grassroots service projects run by young people. The first two issues were star-studded; Annie Leibowitz, Robert Coles, Ted Kennedy, and Bernie Sanders were among the contributors. Articles pondered potential glitches in Clinton's national service plan and racism within white-dominated activist communities. At its best, Who Cares has a lively and ironic tone.

 The magazine represents a generation of "pragmatic idealists" and intends, Breyer says, "to counteract the inaccurate stereotype of us as 'slackers,' indifferent to the problems of society." But, Crutchfield adds, "This is not generational warfare. These young people learned from the activists of the sixties and seventies."

 Whether they despise, mock, deconstruct, or traffic in GenX, all of these magazines must negotiate it delicately. They owe their existence to the twentysomething moment, yet their future depends on transcending MTV cliches with a larger mission, one that will continue to matter even after twentysomethings turn thirty and Nirvana and Pearl Jam become Classic Rock.

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