| Movies, fashion, and political movements reflect their times, and so do teen-age gangs. On Friday, The New Yorker’s Rachel Monroe published an unsettling dispatch from Gilbert, Arizona, an affluent community outside Phoenix where violent assaults by high-schoolers have led to one death and criminal charges against seven gang members. The evidence comes partly in the form of D.M.s, group chats, and smartphone videos; the circumstances also derive, in a less direct way, from the effects of urban sprawl and climate change. Tales of youthful gangs have a long history in The New Yorker. In 1993, Joan Didion contributed a superlative entry in the collection, chronicling the teen-instigated troubles of Lakewood, California. A planned city built after the Second World War, Lakewood was part of “Southern California’s industrial underbelly,” Didion wrote—not far geographically from Los Angeles, but a distant planet in terms of jobs, life style, and glamour. By the time police arrested and handcuffed a group of local boys in their classrooms, accusations of assault, theft, and sexual violence were rampant, and a pipe-bomb explosion had rattled the town. Aspects of the story carry a strong whiff of the nineties, such as appearances by gang members on “Maury Povich,” “Jenny Jones,” and other tabloid talk shows. But in Didion’s signature way, she traces the chaos to larger patterns in American culture that are still with us, including antipathy toward immigrants, the veneration of high-school athletes, and a tendency not to believe accusers. The father of one boy tells Didion, of the students who said they had been raped, “These girls weren’t the victims they were made out to be. One of these girls had tattoos, for chrissake.” | 
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