Then I heard that P.G. Sittenfeld was running for the U.S. Senate from Ohio — the same P.G. Sittenfeld I went to college with. (There is only one person in America named P.G. Sittenfeld.) I’d never really gotten to know a politician before. Now someone I already knew had decided to become a politician. The opportunity to watch that transition in real time was too good — and too rare — to pass up....

Sittenfeld is new to politics; the sum total of his electoral experience consists of serving on the Cincinnati City Council for the last four years. He is only 30 years old. If he wins next November, he would just barely clear the Senate’s Constitutional age requirement. The next youngest senator would be nearly a decade his senior. In fact, he would be one of the youngest senators in U.S. history, as well as the first member of his generation, the so-called millennial generation, elected to such high office....

It is hard to imagine, say, Jim Webb expressing the same sort of boyish delight over astronaut trivia. Or marveling about recurring donations. Or recording a Facebook video, selfie-style, as soon as he finished his sugary oatmeal. Or filling his backseat with heaps of collegiate debris: a paperback copy of Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” a bottle of Suave styling gel, a single Acuvue contact lens....

It’s hard to overstate how unusual Sittenfeld’s choice of career is for someone his age. Over the last dozen years, the Organization Kids’ early apathy toward politics has curdled into outright antipathy. The story of the 2000s was, in many ways, a story of political dysfunction and failure: the misbegotten invasion of Iraq, the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, the devastating financial collapse of 2008, the unprecedented gridlock on Capitol Hill. Deep in debt, weary of war and anxious about their own job prospects, millennials have become Cynic Kids who are “deeply resistant to idealism,” according to one of their own — who “don’t like the system” and are “dismissive of their ability to actually achieve the desired modifications.”