Bobo in the New Yorker this week (you can thank me for not excerpting the weird sexual second paragraph):
After the boom and bust, the mania and the meltdown, the Composure Class rose once again. Its members didn’t make their money through hedge-fund wizardry or by some big financial score. Theirs was a statelier ascent. They got good grades in school, established solid social connections, joined fine companies, medical practices, and law firms. Wealth settled down upon them gradually, like a gentle snow.
[….]A few times a year, members of this class head to a mountain resort, carrying only a Council on Foreign Relations tote bag (when you have your own plane, you don’t need luggage that actually closes).
How many doctors and lawyers got own-your-own-plane rich via the gentle snow of wealth? No, don’t give me “maybe he means a two-seater”, you know that’s not what he means, and, no, making it by representing OJ Simpson or via a biotech IPO doesn’t count as count as “gentle snow”.
I’m not sure why he’s doing it, maybe to reinforce the notion of the deserving rich.
Update. This is weird and unintentionally comedic, but it didn’t creep me out as much as the paragraph about male lower bodies and female upper bodies, so I’m sharing it:
The server came to their table and took their orders. The restaurant seemed to specialize in hard-to-eat salads. Erica, anticipating this, chose an appetizer that could be easily forked and a main dish that didn’t require cutlery expertise. But Harold went for a salad, composed of splayed green tentacles that could not be shoved into his mouth without brushing salad dressing on both of his cheeks. None of it mattered, because Harold and Erica clicked. Most emotional communication is nonverbal. Gestures are a language that we use not only to express our feelings but to constitute them. By making a gesture, people help produce an internal state. Harold and Erica licked their lips, leaned forward in their chairs, glanced at each other out of the corners of their eyes, and performed all the other tricks of unconscious choreography that people do while flirting. Erica did the head cant women do to signal romantic interest, a slight tilt of the head that exposes the neck. Then, there was the hair flip: she raised her arms to adjust her hair and heaved her chest into view.