Here's a clip from an article on Pitchfork.com (a music website) dealing with millenials and nostalgia for music of the late 90's that uses the term:
Third Eye Blind and Dashboard Confessional—both de facto one-man rock bands who kick off a joint tour this month—is the latest flashpoint of Millennial nostalgia to hit the summer concert circuit. It’s a curious cultural phenomena that belies at least one aspect of the glib headlines and narratives of hot takes about the impatience, entitled attitudes, and short-sightedness of so-called Millennials.
In the article, "hot takes" is a hyperlink to an opinion column on a Bloomberg site that deals with millenials "whining" about their lack of opportunities in the professional world. The Bloomberg article, by Pitchfork's estimation, is a "hot take": an opinion piece that uses the writer's personal anecdote and some pithy, overly-simplistic, historicizing to argue against millenial angst. It says things like,
I was also pointed yesterday to the “Old Economy Steve”meme, which celebrates/laments the ease with which prior generations graduated from college, got hired into a good job with health insurance, lifetime employment, a pension or at least a 401(k), became a homeowner at a tender age, and so forth[...]
And as someone who lived through the brief golden era of the late 1990s, and has done a bit of research into the lengthier imagined golden era, let me point out that a few of us do have a bit of an idea about student debt, underemployment and lifelong renting. The good old days weren’t always good, and tomorrow’s not as bad as it seems.
That’s a line from a Billy Joel song, by the way. Billy Joel was a famous musician, back in that magical fairyland of excellent jobs with lush benefits from which no one ever got fired.
The Bloomberg piece goes on to relate the personal career path of the writer--a gen-Xer who just like the milennials struggled to make her way--to show that Americans have always struggled and milennials should count their blessings. Along with describing the writer's tortuous path to success, it includes pithy statements like this,
Message from the Universe: you got an above-average deal the minute you were born in America in the late 20th century, instead of in Europe in the middle of the Black Death, or in Angola in the middle of a civil war. Anything you get on top of that is strictly bonus -- and that goes double for middle-class college graduates.
The piece considers the plights of different generations to find professional success in terms of personal anecdotes. As well it makes superficial insights into the broader and more complex factors of success in America (race, class, gender), like the following,
Blacks certainly weren’t having an easy time of anything, nor were Mexicans, nor American Indians, nor Asians, nor women -- who were paid less than married men for the same work as a matter of policy and mostly couldn’t get the same work.
The entire piece dusts over if and why there is validity in millenials feeling the angst that they do because, as the writer says, they're all a "pack of whiners".
The off-the-cuff approach to the writing, even if the piece employs some statistical analysis of things like amounts of tenured employees of both men and women, keeps the opinion, the "take", firmly in the columnist's purview.
The column furthers its brazen and slighting approach through an informal register and use of imprecise language:
In other words, while it’s true that there are fewer guarantees than there used to be, it’s not true that everyone in the good old days had an easy path to lifetime employment.
It even carries on the informal slighting when the columnist is trying to show compassion:
Is the job market unusually bad right now for millennials? It sure is, and believe me, millennials have nothing but the deepest sympathy from me and our hypothetical. Life seems scary, and y’all don’t deserve this.
The piece is at it's core and opinion piece, but one that's using a slew of anecdotal evidence and over-simplified historicizing to put people, milennials, in their place. That's what qualifies it as a hot take, by my estimation. It's "hot" and agressive, but it's not thorough, there's no depth--it's just a take.
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