| This month, as freshly minted college graduates join the “real world” in droves, they’ll ask questions that have echoed since the first commencement ceremony: What will we do with our lives, and what will it mean? In 1967, a revolutionary new film put those questions on the screen, and made a splash in the process. “The Graduate,” starring Dustin Hoffman in his breakout role, spoke directly to the generational concerns of the baby boomers, the first of whom had begun receiving their college degrees. Older critics loved the film, too, awarding it five Golden Globes and the Oscar for Best Director. The movie’s theme song—“Mrs. Robinson,” by an up-and-coming duo named Simon and Garfunkel—hit No. 1 on the charts, and Hoffman was invited to the nation’s capital to speak on the topic of “Youth Today.” To make sense of the commotion, The New Yorker turned to an unusually young writer. Just a year before “The Graduate” ’s release, Jacob R. Brackman had been writing for his college paper—and now he was allotted an epic word count to weigh in. “What does it add up to now, in this country, to be twenty-one,” he asked, “with a high-quality education behind you and a brilliant future ahead of you?” Today, even many who have never seen “The Graduate” recognize its famous ending—the halted wedding and gloriously defeated adults, Hoffman and his love interest bewildered but liberated at the back of a bus. Their generation has advanced to senior citizenship, but the dilemmas posed by the film, and articulated in Brackman’s appraisal, continue to resonate. | 
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