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People's Theories about Gen X's Strange Political Preferences

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    Yesterday, I posted on social media the graph you see here. It shows current levels of support for the presidential candidates according to gender for Generation Z, Millennials, Generation X, and Baby Boomers. I asked folks reading the post for their theories about what is going on with Gen X, and got a lot of responses. So here is my report on what people had to say! First, to summarize what this chart shows you: Millennials and Baby Boomers are nearly identical in their views, despite having a generation between them with different political preferences. About 70% of both Millennial and Boomer women support Harris, while only about 38% of men in those generations say they support her. That’s a striking binary gender gap of over 30 points. (The survey does not consider the preferences of nonbinary people.) Generations Z and X show different patterns. Gen Z voters are in the youngest voting age bracket, and for decades voters in that bracket have held more progressive views t
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The Myth of JD Vance's "Unique" Yale Experience in Hillbilly Elegy

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  This is a portrait of Elihu Yale and his intimates being served by an enslaved boy wearing a padlocked collar. I’m showing it to you because I want to talk about Yale Law School, and specifically its graduate JD Vance. A funny thing about Vance's Hillbilly Elegy book: the man believes he had a unique experience, because he felt like an outsider when attending an Ivy League university. He didn't come from a background of wealth and prep schools and world travel. He was at a loss as to how to handle his cutlery when taken out to a fancy restaurant by a potential employer, because the place settings included a salad fork and dinner fork, a soup spoon and teaspoon, a steak knife and a butter knife. And when he went back to his hometown, he found he did not want to brag to strangers about going to Yale. If they were the kind of people who would disrespect him unless he shared that credential, then they weren't people he wanted to bootlick, and if they were ordinary locals
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People Crave Narrative

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  Every time there is a mass shooting, or the shooting of a public figure, people become glued to their information sources for news of who did it and why. That's a pretty universal reaction, because we want to know what the story is. We want there to *be* a story. We want to be able to fit this incident into our understandings of the world.   In the contemporary US, where people can hold totally different worldviews and beliefs, and even occupy "bespoke realities" happily served up by content providers, there is a frantic effort to control the narrative that emerges. At the moment I am writing this, factual information about Thomas Crooks, who shot at Trump and instead killed one rallygoer and seriously wounded two others, is scant. This frustrates the millions who want to hear a complete story, most importantly the why of it. What was the shooter's motive?   The fact that shots were fired at Trump in a period of intense campaigning primes everyone for a certain expl
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