| We are nearing the end of spring-break season, the annual rite involving rest, relaxation, and—for a certain type of college student—debauchery on a distant, sunny beach. In 2002, the New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead published “Endless Spring,” a portrait of the young, raucous crowds that gathered on South Padre Island, in Texas, for heavy drinking, wet-T-shirt contests, and other activities not fit for a grad-school application. Home, for much of the year, to just more than two thousand residents, South Padre Island swells during spring break, playing host in March alone to a hundred and eighty-six thousand students. The mayhem, Mead reports, is big business: in 2000, those visitors poured an estimated hundred and fifty-six million dollars into the local economy. Mead, who attended college in her native England, brings an outsider’s perspective, and a gently raised eyebrow, to the proceedings. In addition to the coeds, she notes the “old folks” who travel to South Padre Island to observe the festivities, “of whom there are a surprising number,” such as a seventy-year-old woman doing beer bong with a group of football players. As Mead examines the seedier elements of spring break, she locates its place in a youth culture that has moved from the “beach movies” of the sixties to “Animal House” and “Girls Gone Wild,” a giant hit at the time. Asked what he likes about spring break, one repeat attendee tells her, “I’m not sure I do like it. . . . But, then, I said that last year.” | 
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