By JORDAN S. CARROLL

After only a few episodes, HBO’s new series “Girls” has kicked up a flurry of controversy, criticism and (appropriately enough) navel-gazing. By The New York Post’s estimate, one in five “Girls” viewers tweeted about it on its premiere night. And, it seems, they haven’t stopped.

Debates about the show range from whether it adequately represents women to whether it’s too white to whether the leads are good “role models.” What’s striking to me, however, is not so much the questions raised but why this show has hit such a nerve.

“Girls” follows a group of post-college, twenty-something women living in New York City. In the pilot, the protagonist Hannah (Lena Dunham) finds herself without an income after her parents cut her off and she discovers that she is unable to parlay her year-long publishing internship into a paying gig.

The show, created by Dunham, portrays life as a young woman in an unglamorous and often uncomfortably realistic way. We watch as Hannah deals with body anxieties, bad sex, an emotionally abusive relationship and worries about sexually transmitted diseases.

While these are all certainly “relatable” problems, “Girls” refuses to allow audiences to easily identify with the characters. It’s true that Hannah proclaims herself the “voice of [her] generation,” but she does so in a druggedly confused moment and immediately second-guesses herself. Even as the show pulls us into the character’s lives, it works to maintain an ironic distance.

A particularly telling moment comes when Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) tries to give Hannah advice about her hideously awful non-boyfriend using a vapid self-help book titled Listen Ladies. Hannah’s bemused response to this is, “Who are the ladies?”

Other programs like “Sex in the City” seem to demand audiences fit themselves into an offered character category, an exercise Shoshanna ridiculously tries to rehearse in the pilot. (“I’m definitely a Carrie at heart, but sometimes Samantha kind of comes out. And when I’m at school I definitely try and put on my Miranda hat.”) “Girls,” however, portrays young women as resisting or falling out of any given role or position. As Hannah’s friend Jessa (Jemima Kirke) puts it, “I’m not the ladies!” Asking the characters to represent the audience then exactly counters the ethos of the show.

But the show’s refusal of viewer identification isn’t just the mark of heightened realism or character complexity.

“Girls” goes further to deliberately make audiences squirm by rendering the protagonists unlikable. Many reviewers have stopped there, condemning the cast as a bunch of vacuous hipsters. But I would argue that this strategy of revulsion shows us something about what it’s like to be in early adulthood after the financial crisis.

The unemployment rate for Americans ages 18 to 29 is 12.4 percent — considerably above the national average of 8.2 percent. Many of those lucky enough to have a job have found themselves underemployed — unable to find a career position or even a job that pays the bills. Now, more than 21 percent of adults live with their parents and we can be sure that an even greater number depend on them for financial assistance.

Some have called the Millennial generation a “Lost Generation” or “Generation Limbo.” Locked in a holding pattern, many graduates remain suspended between adolescence and adulthood, college and a career.

“Girls” dwells on this feeling of in-betweenness — the inability to fit anywhere or cleanly inhabit an accepted position. That’s what makes the show so unpleasant for some viewers. As Noël Carroll points out, the “category-jamming” hybrid has long inspired laughter, uneasiness and even disgust. Privileged yet penniless, educated yet clueless, Hannah and her misfitting friends speak to the emotional and financial insecurity of a declining class of young professionals and, by extension, an entire age-group still deep in the recession.

In other words, the awkwardness viewers feel when they are unable to immediately identify with some of the “Girls” only provides a taste of what it is like to be a member of Generation Limbo.

This explains the ferocity of the backlash against the show. For some, “Girls” strikes too close to home, but for others it calls up a free-floating hatred toward the young. Blaming the victim, as always, more trollish political elements brand Millennials as parasites, work-shy and infantile.

This controversy shows us the genius of the show which is its ability to uncover these seething tensions and presenting us an aspect of young women’s lives that is all too often ignored. Even if they were to aspire to be ladies, Hannah’s cohort is forced to remain girls.

JORDAN S. CARROLL is a Ph.D. student in English who can be reached at jscarroll@ucdavis.edu, point blank.

There was a certain point in my life where I thought I could run a successful music blog and distribute the latest and greatest to the masses in a simple, exciting and #based way. My original goal was to make it to The Hype Machine, a music aggregator website which compiles the best music blogs, but in the end the majority of my page views were from my little brothers’ friends (shout out Burlingame High School’s post-prom playlist).

And while my blog eventually died like 90 percent of blogs on the internet, it led me to a lot of research on what it’s like to run a music blog.

At this point there are three ways people actively find new music: Apple iTunes’ Genius, friends with good music taste (your definition of good taste), music blogs, Pandora or other recommendation services. In 2012 I’d say most people use a combination of the three in their quest for musical truth, with some relying heavily on one method, and swagsters relying mostly on the Avicii Pandora station (hope you’re down for 12 different “LE7ELS” remixes).

Ultimately, music blogs are where most of the organic music discovery goes down. New artists can catch fire or, as we in the business call it, “buzz” on a few blogs and next thing you know they are featured on the new “LE7ELS” re-work. Watching an artist go from obscurity to the stage is a beautiful thing. I’d call it the “American dream,” but  “Swedish dream” is probably more accurate at this point.

These music bloggers become the taste-makers of culture. From deciding what songs should be featured on their spring must-have list to breaking down the best new Canadian artists from the first half of 2012, these blogs dictate what is buzzworthy and deserves the attention of music fans.  There’s practically no trickle down effect as the news is handed right from the artist to the blogger to the fans in a matter of minutes. In a certain respect, music blogs have more power over what we listen to than any record company ever did — especially in the age of free mixtapes and single releases.

While this is a really great way to distribute music cheaply and relatively fairly without muddling with suits, there are still flaws in the system. Because music blogs are in the business of both sharing and editorializing, there can be a conflict of interest.

Lets say, for the sake of argument, that Drew Verderosa is a popular underground Bay Area rap sensation with mad tumblr followers and he’s about to release a new mixtape. Drew’s mixtape is going to get “mad hits” because he is popular, so he doesn’t really need to do much, besides tweet the link. The only problem is the new mixtape isn’t really his best work. Now if a blog bashes or “pans” the album, Drew is probably not going to grant that blog interviews or sneak peaks in the future. They are left with a choice: dap up the album as something that should be listened to and try to stay in good grace with the artist, or tell the truth to the fans and readers.

While magazines have faced similar issues in the past the circumstances were quite different since blogs can be updated throughout the day. We now live in an accelerated culture which puts a crazy emphasis on the production of content, news or buzz.

Magazines like Rolling Stone did not accrue the same kind of relationship bloggers have with artists — sure, maybe some writers did, but never the brand “Rolling Stone” itself.  The creators of the majority of music blogs are also the writers and editors themselves. It’s a very transparent process and you can follow the writers of each blog on Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram to see what show they are backstage at, or find out what they are listening to at that moment.

Bloggers and musicians are almost equally dependent on each other in today’s musical landscape, and if the editorial wall wasn’t already falling, most of them are actually friends with each other, as evidenced by Twitter.

While I spend the majority of my computer battery checking the blogosphere, I have to remember to take every good review with a grain of salt. Music blogging is now a business — and businesses are in business to keep doing more business.

ANDY VERDEROSA is just a bro trying to get mad hits on this digital content farm of ours, and you can contact him at asverderosa@ucdavis.edu.

Americans are unintelligent and overweight while Europeans are loose, pretentious druggies. We’ve all heard something like that about each other. TV, movies and, most importantly, general ignorance (Amsterdam, anyone?) foster many of the most prevalent stereotypes about foreigners. Either accurate or questionable, but always effective and blunt, stereotypes can be flattering but more often are simply offensive.

And yet they still influence our attitudes towards people who are different from us. Yes, stereotypes do not come from nowhere — it’s usually the truth that they exaggerate. But despite being only crude generalizations, they are often treated as facts. That grain of truth is often enough to justify far reaching assumptions and that’s what makes stereotypes at all worth talking about.

Narrow-mindedness, fake smiles, ginormous everything, familiarity, loving everything but really nothing, arrogance. But also: the American Dream, independence, freedom to be yourself, patriotism, adventures, lightheartedness. These are all stereotypes of Americans that I brought from back home and from my friends and family. I haven’t lived here long enough, though, to have any of these validated or unquestionably dismissed. I’ll let you be the judge then.

We like to think in stereotypes because they let us put everyone in these neat little boxes. Thus in the eyes of many people I simply cannot be from Lithuania (or Eastern Europe, in general) because I don’t drink, I am not a tall skinny blonde, I don’t speak Russian and I can’t stand the cold. But nothing is that simple! Stereotypes might be born from the truth, but believing them blindly is just stupid.

Stereotypes can be nasty and it’s normal to want to disagree with them. In public, at least. But try as much as you want, stereotypes won’t go away that easily. People prefer audacious statements such as any of those mentioned above over undistorted facts. Why? I think it’s mostly because stereotypes are comforting — they automatically portray your own kind in a better light. But it’s also much more interesting that way, isn’t it?

As foreign exchange students we are representatives of our countries. This also means that we might unintentionally start new stereotypes among our international friends or among the community that welcomes us. I’ve recently learned that Davis restaurants really don’t like international students because we don’t leave an adequate tip.

Now, it would be courteous to do it properly, but we all come from countries with different tipping practices. When it comes to money, no one wants to spend more than they think they have to. And boom, a stereotype is born — exchange students are very cheap!

Open-mindedness is the key when dealing with stereotypes. Not all Lithuanians are quiet like me and not all Americans think that the Berlin Wall was in Israel! A big chunk of people might conform to the stereotypes, but a large proportion don’t, and they do that in various, completely different ways. We are all unique, and that shouldn’t be lost for the sake of stereotypes. By being ourselves, we help straighten out the beliefs that are definitely wrong, even though it often feels like fighting windmills.

Will I go back home with the same stereotypes of Americans? I don’t know. Davis is as different of an American experience as you can ever get, being a college town and all. But through my travels I have been able to see a fair share of that stereotypical land, too. I hope, though, that I at least learned how not to judge anyone by stereotype and I’m thankful to my American friends for helping me do that.

Stereotypes are a tricky business. By assuming some things you can offend people. But you also can learn a lot about those same people from stereotypes about them. As long as you know when to keep quiet, you should be just fine.

If you’re not afraid of your personal information being leaked to some Eastern European mobsters, you can reach KRISTINA SIMONAITYTE at ksimonaityte@ucdavis.edu.