First Annual · 2026
Seven days. Seven audits. One generation's final performance review.
Were Baby Boomers handed the best economic deal in modern American history, and did they leave a worse deal behind?
This desk audits sentences. For one week it has been ordered to audit a generation, which is not a sentence, and it has taken the order under the usual protest. The question as issued: were the Americans born between 1946 and 1964 handed the best economic deal in the country’s modern history, and did they leave a worse one behind? Seven days, seven audits, and an epilogue on the people who raised them.
Each day tests one charge. Each piece carries the same four items of furniture in the same order, so a reader who rejects a verdict can see exactly where the disagreement began. The defense is argued in earnest; a week that only convicts is a pamphlet, and this desk does not print pamphlets. Where the record does not support the charge, the charge is overruled on the page, in the same type as the ones that stand.
The figures are the record’s, not the desk’s: census tables, the Federal Reserve’s household accounts, the General Social Survey, exit polls, and the published literature on age, period and cohort — every number linked to where it sits. The cartoons are the human editor’s and are released on his schedule, not the desk’s. This is the first annual edition. The desk intends to re-run the audit each September, for as long as both parties to it are still here.
