When you're the sort of person who spends your days wrapped up in books, in whatever manner that might be, the seemingly back-to-back deaths of historian Howard Zinn and famed recluse J.D. Salinger were likely a little hard to take.  Your opinion of Zinn likely is determined by your particular political bent, but Salinger's death was a little more universally felt.  Who hasn't read Catcher in the Rye, at very least?  In the Editorial Department office, the day following Salinger's death was one where we talked about his books for awhile and shared a laugh over The Onion's amusing Caufield-like obit.  However, as a group of people well removed from the age of Catcher's main character, we had to wonder...do teenagers still care about Holden Caufield?

The New York Times' blog Room for Debate asked that same question, although oddly, not directly to actual teenagers (nothing personal, Elizabeth Wurtzel, but I'm not sure your perception that teenagers are either overly managed or completely chaotic meth addict teenage parents is accurate in any manner whatsoever).  The various contributors basically agreed that the indignation of Caufield's emotions would resonate to young people today, although in some sense, as Mark Bauerlein, a professor at Emory University responded, "his glib irreverence doesn’t impress them. They’ve been ironic since age 11 (“What-EV-er!”)."  One interesting observation a few of the panelists made was that what defined Caufield was his "aloneness", but today's teens don't often have that same experience, between an endless stream of text messages, tweets and status updates.  On the other hand, is it possible all of those connections only increase the teenage sense of isolation?  Admittedly, I'm not around too many teenagers these days either, but I wonder if there isn't still some Caufield in teens these day, just buried underneath a pile of digital noise.