There are many problems with Joel Stein’s cover story about Millennials—people born between 1980 and 2000. The most glaring substantive one is probably that, in his discussion of my generation’s relatively slow start and disappointment in employment, he finds plenty of time to talk about the widespread availability of social technologies, and none whatsoever to talk about the dramatic contraction of economic opportunity that has made it harder for Millennials to find jobs, and more dependent on their parents’ financial help and health insurance as a fallback, rather than as a lifestyle choice. I can believe that Stein would make that omission, but it’s difficult to believe that his editors let the piece into print that way.

But one thing I think is useful and clarifying about the article, even as I find it frustrating, isn’t in the text at all. It’s the way that it’s being sold to the public: namely, with a picture of a well-dressed young woman, gazing into her iPhone, seemingly taking a picture of herself:

Stein’s piece wisely acknowledges that the condemnation of Millennials that’s a common trope these days, and that makes his piece feel like trolling, is only the latest iteration of a generational cycle. And what might have made the article interesting rather than repetitive is a discussion of the way this cycle is different from the ones that came before.

One avenue the choice of cover suggested is that there might be a gendered component to the irritation with Millennials. Dependence, interiority, and the careful construction of fantasy lives aren’t solely the provenance of girls and women of course, but they’re traits that are coded as feminine. And technology and economics have made those traits much more visible when men and women display them. If a scrapbook was something you kept for yourself to archive your memories, Instagram is that scrapbook, except shared with everyone. If you kept one of those inspiration boards with ribbons sewn into fabric stretched over a board in your dorm room or your childhood bedroom, you’re probably doing the same thing on Pinterest. And where your parents might have paid your first and last month’s rent as a deposit—or if you were spectacularly lucky, bought you an apartment—a version of support that wasn’t necessarily obvious, though it could be deduced by a reasonably intelligent observer, their reduced circumstances and yours might leave you living at home, a much more visible sign of your economic interdependence with your family.

Neither Stein’s article, nor anything else I’ve read about generational research suggests that women are exhibiting the traits he calls out as negative out in greater numbers. If anything, Millennial men and women are coming into alignment in certain ways, whether it’s wanting equal flexibility in work so both men and women can balance their careers and family responsibilities, or using social networking tools (though men and women tend to gravitate to different services). If what irritates non-Millennials about the current generation of young adults, male and female alike, isn’t just that they’re self-absorbed, or entitled, or dependent, but self-absorbed, entitled, and dependent in feminine ways, that’s telling.

And it says a lot about the second half of Stein’s thesis, which is ostensibly about how Millennials could save us all. If what Millennials have to offer is lessons about genuine introspection, more reasonable expectations of work-life balance, and the need for a fair social safety net and reasonable return on the investment of getting a college education, that seems like a genuinely valuable conversation. It’s just too bad that it’s one implied by Time’s cover, rather than discussed in Stein’s article.

I have essentially no hope that America will embrace a show that’s about Jason Isaacs playing the Surgeon General of the United States, but for however-many episodes it airs before it gets cancelled, it will probably be my favorite show on television. Well, except for the idea that his character is supposed to be too noble for the politics of the job:

The medical show centers on America’s doctor: the surgeon general of the United States, with Isaacs set to play Dr. John Sherman, a man of solid build and character. He’s got a rare mix of resolve, humanity and dry wit. When he’s injured during his service as am military medic, he becomes a national hero and is appointed to the office of Surgeon General upon his return to America. The character is a widower who is raising two teen girls on his own, with a bit of help from his mother-in-law and doesn’t take kindly to the political aspect of his position. All he wants to be concerned with is the nation’s health, but he can’t ignore the politics that come with the job.

There’s a great cable show in the career of, say, C. Everett Koop, the Surgeon General under President Ronald Reagan, who resisted political pressure to say that abortion harmed women, even though he was philosophically opposed to the procedure and waged a long-running battle to avoid releasing a report that would come to those conclusions, while also acting on both HIV and tobacco, even if his actions on the former garnered mixed reviews from AIDS activists and public health experts. Then there’s Luther Terry, who oversaw the production of Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the United States, which produced a seismic change in American use of tobacco. But what’s interesting about the best Surgeon Generals is the way they dived into politics, and often behaved in ways that were politically unpredictable. The best way to get at that tradition of independence isn’t to pretend they were aloof, but to highlight the way they fought for public health precisely because they were engaged and politically savvy.