Matt Labash: Millennials Have Officially Killed the Holiday Office Party 

Thanks Vox.com.

Matt Labash writes: As we celebrate this Christmas season (or this “holiday,” for Christ-haters), I don’t wish to be a killjoy to the world. But reflecting on the year gone by, it’s hard not to notice that we have lost a few of our favorite things: Tom Petty, political moderation, our dignity.

And yet, as we’ve hunkered down throughout 2017 to weather every storm from Hurricane Harvey (the tropical cyclone that nearly destroyed Houston) to Hurricane Harvey (the film producer/sex-criminal who has all but destroyed famous men), there seems to be another death that has barely registered—that of the open-bar office Christmas party.

It is a time-honored tradition, and in Dilbert-ified America most cubicle monkeys know the drill: Don your smart-yet-festive sweater vest. Show up to your company’s voluntary holiday gathering, where absences are informally noted by supervisors who will passive-aggressively punish the missing come January. Pretend you enjoy socializing with colleagues that you wouldn’t invite over to your house on a dare. All while drinking until your liver cries uncle, or until Jones from purchasing miraculously transforms into a sparkling conversationalist.

[Read the full story here, at The Weekly Standard]

But the already-ailing patient might have died on the table last week, when news broke that Vox Media, after an internal sexual-harassment scandal that saw editorial director Lockhart Steele get fired, announced of their holiday party in a staff memo: “At the request of many of you, we will ramp up the food and cut down on the drinks.” According to accuser Eden Rohatensky’s Medium post, after an apparent drinking bout, the man eventually revealed as Steele caressed her hand and kissed the back of her neck in an Uber.

Vox Media, in case you don’t read the Internet, is, as they put it with characteristic modesty, “a prestigious modern media company .  .  . [that is] shaping the future of journalism and entertainment.”

The parent company’s myriad media outlets—or “brands,” as modern media companies now insist on calling themselves—include everything from tech-news site the Verge to foodie site Eater to the flagship itself, Vox. In just three years, Vox has become destination reading in a crowded mediascape for anyone in need of having the world explained to them by 24-year-olds armed with charts. (Typical and actual Vox headline: “The real reason you should be afraid on Halloween, in one chart.”)

The Vox holiday party would still go off at Freehold, the kind of trendy Williamsburg bar (or “gastropub,” as they now say in Brooklyn) where they serve hopelessly hip vittles like harissa buffalo cauliflower while giving their brunch cocktails cloying names like Puttin’ on the Spritz. But Vox management went on to say that even though they recognize “that alcohol isn’t always the reason for unprofessional behavior, creating an environment that encourages overconsumption certainly contributes to it.” Consequently … (read more)

Source: The Weekly Standard