The Buffalo Journal

There is a collective hallucination currently infecting our cultural memory. If you listen to modern media or scroll through “revised” history on social media, you’d be led to believe that the slang of the late 20th century was only used by a handful of fringe bigots or “problematic” outliers. That is a flat-out lie. The reality is much simpler, much more pervasive, and much more uncomfortable for the “virtue” era to swallow: for decades, words like gay and retarded were the undisputed, universal standard protocol for every kid in the country. ...

Every photo album holds a quiet contradiction. Look at images from 1991 and you don’t see the 1990s. You see the 1980s — the clothes, the malls, the cars, the interiors, the hairstyles, the tone of everyday life. The same happens with 2002, which still looks like the 1990s, or 2012, which resembles the 2000s more than the decade it technically belongs to. This isn’t a glitch of memory or a trick of nostalgia. It exposes a structural truth about how culture evolves: our cultural decades do not match the calendar decades we assign to them. ...

Every generation has its icons of taste and indulgence. For some, it was the Hershey bar—an early, mass-market triumph. Others swore by Snickers, the workhorse of lunchboxes and vending machines. But among candy bars, one stands apart, not merely as a treat, but as a masterclass in balance, texture, and satisfaction: the NutRageous. Introduced by Hershey in the mid-1990s, the NutRageous was always destined to be misunderstood. In a market where consumers often gravitated toward the familiar—Snickers’ dependable nougat, Reese’s cups’ singular peanut butter—the NutRageous dared to innovate. It took the essence of Reese’s peanut butter, layered it with caramel, enrobed it in a lattice of roasted peanuts, and sealed it all with chocolate. The result was not a candy bar; it was a blueprint for culinary engineering. ...