five quotes (2.6.26)

five things I read the week my youngest turned, somehow, 9

Parents often say, “No one helped me.” They imagine this is moral strength. Usually, it’s nostalgia dressed up as righteousness. Hardship has a place, but withholding good out of principle is not virtue. Generational blessing, not generational deprivation, is the healthier pattern.

Others say, “We paid for their college.” But college has become the respectable dumping ground for parental generosity. You can waste $60,000 on a degree a child never uses and no one questions it. Give them $20,000 to start a business or nonprofit, and if it fails, everyone whispers.

—Justin Powell, “Dying to Give” (Newsletter)

In response to this stuff, I always say, “There are boomers and then are Boomers.” Which is only to say, generational stereotypes are useful if their applicability is limited in scope. Because this is one thing my parents are absolutely crushing. They are so, so generous to my entire family. And I have a lot of friends whose first homes were made possible by parental largesse. If I ever stumble into wealth, I certainly intend to dole it out before I am old and die and pass it on to my late-middle-aged children. Use it, man. Use it.

There are signs that some Gen Z women fed up with this culture are seeking older partners—not as part of the age-old search for wealth or status, but out of a desire for greater emotional maturity. A viral dating trend has emerged that promotes dating someone who is less attractive and often older with the hope of receiving better treatment. It’s called “Shrekking”—inspired by the green ogre who married a princess way out of his league.

—Mary Julia Koch, “Love Is an Online Battlefield” (Wall Street Journal)

OK. Shrekking is a great term. Also, let’s just go ahead and say that this isn’t a new phenomenon. Since time out of mind, women have been more concerned with status and wealth than with physical attraction. Generally speaking, they are more willing to sacrifice a partner's attractiveness for other relational bonds. It might have been exacerbated online or with the perception that boys these days just won’t grow up, but this isn’t something created by eHarmony.

Neither of my parents ever brought their work home in the way that both Matt and I are forced to do. They didn’t have email or cell phones or Slack; once they left work and came home, that was it, there was no carryover — the thought alone makes me feel wildly jealous. Their jobs were a kind of mystery, something we only ever encountered if there was an awkward work picnic. On the one hand, their distractions weren’t career-oriented; if or when they ignored us, it had nothing to do with work. On the other, my only interaction with the concept of work or ambition came through the TV and what Murphy Brown was up to. Everything about being an adult was a fantasy.

—Amil Niazi, “What Does Seeing Me Work All the Time Do to My Kids?” (The Cut)

Dude, I've been fretting over this question for a long time. It is genuinely worrisome. This was so true of my dad. He left the house around the time we woke up and got home around the time we ate dinner. In between, well, he worked. We went to his office. We saw where he worked. However, if you asked me what he did, I would have said, “Manages.” Vague notions of meetings, phone calls, and walking purposefully would flit through my head. Now, in the era of Total Work, we bring work everywhere. It follows us to our homes, to children’s sporting events, and on vacation. And, thus, we are taking some of the mystery out of things. And childhood depends upon mystery.

The war also threw these Northeastern political elites together with a new social group: the rising class of industrialists, engineers, and financiers who made great fortunes building the industrial supply chains and financial machinery that sustained the Union war effort. The Eastern Establishment was born from the fusion of these two groups.

The “fusion” of the new class was not only ideological, economic, and political, but biological. The marriage of the different wings of the Eastern Establishment was literally consummated on hundreds of Northeastern bridal beds.

—Tanner Greer, “35 Theses on the WASPs” (The Scholar’s Stage)

This is a cool historical post. The “war” in question here is the Civil War, which decimated the Southern economy and allowed an “eastern establishment” without competition to form. The fusion of political elites with the growing movers-and-shakers in our blooming economy set the cultural priorities for the century that followed. Read the whole thing.

Plato was no advocate for free expression. He argued that the state should censor poetry because it obscures truth in pursuit of art. Two millennia later America’s biggest university has chosen to ban students from reading his work. In January administrators at Texas A&M told Martin Peterson that he could either strike Plato’s “Symposium” from the syllabus of his introductory philosophy course or be reassigned. Reading Plato, they argued, exposed students to one of Texas’s banned topics: gender and race ideology.

— “Republican states are censoring universities” (The Economist)

This is, of course, ridiculous. It turns out that both sides of the political aisle are perfectly fine with book bans; they just disagree about which books to ban. The liberals in my English program in graduate school wanted to ban Plato because he was a dead white guy; conservatives want to ban him because he talks about gender and race. The guy can’t win. One of the major points of college is to be exposed to things you have never confronted before and ideas outside of your childhood experience blah blah blah. Just kidding. College is a game, increasingly designed to help you play the next game: employment. No one needs to read The Symposium anymore. Let ChatGPT write a summary and if it mentions gender or sexuality, ban it.