Author: Jonathon Platt

The Villages Is A Boomer’s Utopia—And Demographic Time Bomb — Vanity Fair

With the Baby Boom, there was a sudden, unexpected surge in births—and within a decade, diaper services went from a novelty to the equivalent in 2021 dollars of a nearly half‑billion‑dollar industry. Cities rushed to build more schools. Then a bit later America had millions of teenagers, so businesses and industries reorganized around them.

Over and over, age‑dependent systems struggled to accommodate the encroaching boomers. To use a boom‑appropriate analogy, America has been a nation of Lucille Balls scrambling to handle the conveyor belt of chocolates. And now, more than 75 years into the boom, you might be able to predict which systems will be overrun.

Excerpt from The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America

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A Fall In Five Scenes

Originally published by Baylor Line Magazine in Fall 2021.

1.

“KAYE!” Curtis watched as the fall happened in slow motion, her name erupting from his lips without even realizing it. No matter how fast he tried to move, he knew it was too late. Despite a running leap, Kaye hadn’t fully made it across a five-foot gorge. Before Curtis’s eyes, the woman he had come to love as life itself was falling back from the edge of a cliff 20 feet down — and 20 feet is a very long way to fall. What should have certainly been a death sentence, though, changed their lives (and the lives of many, many others) for the better.

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