The Cut - Teens Love LinkedIn

Back in 2015, designer Frank Chimero observed on then-Twitter that almost any New Yorker cartoon could be re-captioned with a single phrase: “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”

That canned come-on, as cold and dry as a reluctant handshake at a cash-bar, fluorescent-lit networking event, sums up most adults’ experience of the site: You feel like you have to be there, but you’d really rather be anywhere else, so you do the bare minimum and get out fast.

Younger users, though, don’t necessarily feel this way. Lately I’ve met adolescents — some who don’t yet meet the platform’s minimum-age requirement of 16 — who say LinkedIn is their happy place. From across the country and every socioeconomic background, these kids describe the platform as a zero-irony zone — a sanctuary from the angry rants, dark humor, thirst traps, and FOMO characteristic of other social-media networks.

Not naming this album Have Yourself a Very Cher-y Christmas or Songs for the Cher-mas Season was a real missed opportunity. Here’s a sentence you won’t read every day: “The passenger declared giraffe feces.” Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis are getting onboard with Tesla’s EV charging interface. A new study finds that the sound of human voices causes considerably more fear in wild mammals than the sound of lions roaring. And this is the kind of nepo-baby behavior we love to see.

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