now i read boston publications, sort of

the next series installment, on marriage and class, completely neglects the subject’s most historically significant recent development: how more affluent mates postpone marriage and childrearing through what’s known euphemistically as "assortative mating" (i.e., the sort of closely vetted, intraclass pairings of the privileged featured every week in the Vows section of the Times), versus the considerable pressures within poor communities to marry early and procreate often. Instead, the main dispatch by Times reporter Tamar Lewin sets up elaborate social quandaries better suited to a Victorian novel than to 21st-century American life. It describes the course of a second marriage for both partners that’s taken them beyond the reach of their familiar social stations: wife Cate Woolner is a rich heiress, husband Dan Croteau is a working-class car salesman. It’s hard to suss out just what the social lesson of such a plainly atypical union is supposed to be. Apart, that is, from the manifest truth that, left to their own devices, the rich will always raise the most irritating children on earth ("[Woolner’s son] Isaac fantasizes about opening a brewery-cum-performance space, traveling through South America, or operating a sunset massage cruise on the Caribbean").