Do you know where your Millennial is? If not, you may want to look up. Teens and 20-somethings have made headlines around the world recently for scaling tall buildings in order to take selfies. Yes, this risky fad has been going strong for a few years now, but the latest incidents highlight the fact that it's not going away anytime soon, especially with Instagram and YouTube fame at stake.
On Sunday, police in New York arrested 24-year-old Yaroslav Kolchin after he climbed to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge, as CBS New York reported. Kolchin was seen taking selfies with his iPhone, according to reports. The incident follows on the heels of a pair of German artists claiming responsibility for ascending the bridge to swap the large American flags on top with plain white ones, an incident that caused a small amount of hysteria in the New York newspapers and among police.
Separately, on Thursday, a trio of young photographers posted a video on YouTube (at top) of themselves eating bananas and snapping selfies with a stalk while perched atop The Centre, Hong Kong's fifth-tallest skyscraper, according to PetaPixel. The two gentlemen are said to be Andrew Tso and Daniel Lau, the former of whom is 26 and already has a lengthy portfolio of images taken from the edge of tall buildings from around the globe.
And of course, I would be remiss not to mention young Russian duo Vitaliy Raskalov and Vadim Makhorov, who have already been featured on The Verge for their perilous ascents to the top of Egypt's Great Pyramid and the Shanghai Tower, then China's tallest building.
It should go without saying that the majority of these climbs appear to be illegal trespasses, as well as dangerous, and I strongly advise all Millennials to refrain from scaling things in the quest for more impressive selfies. That said, every young viral fad has a catchy name, and I'm not entirely sure just what this fad is or should be called. I've proposed a few names below: