The first time it snowed this year, I cried. Snow is one of my favorite things in the world—and it’s one of the Stanford man’s, too. He was surely trekking through it as well, somewhere in downtown Brooklyn. But unlike me, trudging mournfully to my office in the same pair of jeans I’d worn all week, the Stanford man would be crunching through the ice and salt in top-of-the-line hiking boots and a $1,900 jacket. He’d be filtering the flakes through fleece-lined leather gloves from Burberry and then returning to his glass apartment on the fortieth floor of a luxury building to shower with Molton Brown soaps. He’d greet the doorman on his way in, one of six, and it wouldn’t matter which was on duty, because he’d know all their names. He’d make cordial conversation with whomever was in the elevator, the trim blond pushing the stroller or the paunchy techie with the Labrador, because exchanging pleasantries is also one of his favorite things.

When the Stanford man broke up with me, he told me it was because he needed to date someone more “average.” He told me that intellectualizing and reading tomes were for graduate school, not the stuff of romance. He told me that ordinary pleasures, like watching basketball and dancing to thumping techno, were to be savored, not scrutinized. 

He reminded me, I realized, of Jim Barnett, the subject of Mary McCarthy’s “Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man,” from her 1942 novel The Company She Keeps.

“If other people on the left stood in superstitious awe of Jim,” McCarthy wrote:

Jim also stood in awe of himself. It was not that he considered that he was especially brilliant or talented; his estimation of his qualities was both just and modest. What he reverenced in himself was his intelligent mediocrity. He knew that he was the Average Thinking Man to whom in the end all appeals are addressed. . . . He was a walking Gallup Poll, and he had only to leaf over his feelings to discover what America was thinking.

Like Jim Barnett, who could have been a model if he’d fallen on hard times, the Stanford man is approached now and then by scouts and agents. He is tall, with a bronze complexion, thick, curly hair, and lips like pillows. He is clean but not in the ordinary, courteous sort of way. He’s so clean that it’s the first thing one notices about him. His skin glows and his clothes are spotless and everything he wears looks new. One can’t possibly imagine any odor wafting from his person. Even after exercising, the fabric of his premium gym clothes seems to, as advertised, absorb all efflux. He brushes five, sometimes six times a day, always for twice as long as the American Dental Association recommends, erasing all evidence of delicately prepared breakfast smoothies, sumptuous tenderloin dinners, and eighteen-dollar craft cocktails. 

Most evenings, after the Stanford man finishes speaking on conference calls and making spreadsheets on his computer—the things that propel his six-figure salary—he eats dinner with friends. Sometimes with just one friend, sometimes with five. Sometimes he and his roommates prepare fresh poke bowls in their globule above the city, only faintly registering the puny, glittering Statue of Liberty out their living room windows as they chop and chatter. Sometimes he sits at a table in Chelsea with a horde of other twenty-somethings who have also attended Stanford—or Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. They wear silver TAG Heuer wristwatches and dark blue cashmere sweaters, and they mostly exchange anecdotes about things that happened to them in South America or about companies that mutual friends are starting. Serious moments might entail ruminations upon spin class, air miles, stock prices, or cryptocurrencies. 

None of them, it ought to be said, are unintelligent. In fact, their minds are put to regular labor. They can tell you which health insurance plans come with the best digital applications. They can tell you exactly how long to aerate a bottle of Bordeaux before drinking it. They know how to execute a marketing strategy, maneuver a near-perfect standardized test score, and get 15 percent off a $2,500 leather sectional sofa. And they know a great deal about news: new events, new products, new headlines. One can almost never surprise them with breaking news, because they subscribe to information services, some to several at once, that cause their devices to buzz the moment anything of political consequence has happened. 

Still, for them, knowing is often the whole party. Over steaks and lobsters and braised pork (this type is almost never vegetarian), they prefer not to discuss politics, because they all know what happened that day, and they all know that the others know too. If an unsuspecting dinner guest were to bring up the latest defense budget or public transportation crisis in hopes of analysis, he’d be judged naïve, solicitous, even bookish. He’d be washed away (and the table thus put at ease) with laughter and quips—quips that made clear this civic matter was already summarized and appraised by Harvard-groomed pundits of the Post and the Journal and also by coastal meme queens and tweeting virtuosos. And because everything is already known and appraised, they hardly ever think about politics either. Their minds are made up without the making having necessarily occurred. 

Remarkably, they nevertheless serve as pipelines of the zeitgeist’s most distilled and moderate ideas. For it is due to people like the Stanford man and his friends that the middle ground is the point of politics’ ascension. 

—

Jim Barnett, in Mary McCarthy’s story, is a writer at the Liberal, a leftist magazine in New York. One day at a staff meeting, he is introduced to Margaret Sargent, a new assistant to the magazine’s literary editor. He notices something rebellious about the pretty, young woman in her black dress with white ruffles. When the managing editor criticizes Trotsky, Margaret draws a deep breath and looks stubborn and angry. “All at once, Jim was sure that he liked her, for she was going to fight back, he saw, and it took courage to do that on your first day in a new job.” 

On our first date, the Stanford man told me I was every part the writer. “So handsome and poised, but also spirited, ready to argue,” he said proudly. And when I met his friends, he said it again: “You’re the same with them! Just as articulate and fired up!” 

I was flattered, though I didn’t understand why he found spirited discourse so notable. My own friends were always debating among themselves. They welcomed pomposity, as long as it was in earnest. But I also knew there was something different about his group. One among them had commented on my necklace, a semicircle of silver chili peppers, in what I’d thought was a satire of sartorial prudishness—“That’s some intense jewelry!”—before I noticed they were all wearing pastel polos and pullovers. Another in the group, who had just moved to the city, asked me which was the neighborhood in Brooklyn “where all the hipsters live,” possibly the first time I’d heard such self-ascribed opposition to alternativism from someone my own age. I realized later that I’d been made so uncomfortable because I’d found myself plunked into mainstream materialism after managing to evade it for most of my adult life.

Of course, that his group exhibited the mainstream revealed as much about them as it did about the market’s projections of conventionality. Even if their spending habits weren’t exactly normal, the aspiration to buy freely has long been a precept of the American marketplace. His friends certainly never questioned a $300 brunch bill. They bought vintage record players for décor while using Sonos bluetooth speakers for music. They appraised items by their brand names, not the things themselves—more remarkably, this fealty excited them and warranted eye-popping price tags. So, no, they weren’t kinfolk of the proletariat so much as they were brethren of Silicon Valley: consultants and managers, yes, but also founders and starters, doers and organizers. For them, technology was the obvious frontier of progress. Efficiency was highly valued. Feasibility was gold. And profitability was perfectly inoffensive, even in the contexts of sustainability and welfare. They had faith in the business speak of Deloitte and McKinsey because they were part of what the gadfly Anand Giridharadas, in his book Winners Take All, cannily calls MarketWorld: “an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo.”

Jim Barnett, always on the hunt for “some formula by which he would demonstrate his political seriousness without embroiling himself in any way,” sounded quite a bit like one of MarketWorld’s early evangelists. Giridharadas recounts a Clinton Global Initiative discussion in 2016, moderated by President Clinton himself, in which “five political figures share a stage and have not one moment of real argument.” For the panelists, “politics was technocratic, dedicated to discovering right answers that were knowable and out there, and just needed to be analyzed and spreadsheeted into being.”

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that the Stanford man and his friends hated Bernie Sanders as a candidate for the presidency. They did not simply demur at his idealism. They hated him. Bernie’s unrelenting insistence upon reforming the economy trampled upon something dear to them—not the political goals to which they professed their allegiance but the actual things that filled their days, the things they purchased, owned, and computed. So they called him “aggressive,” “vicious,” “grumpy,” and “impractical.” They much preferred Hillary Clinton and Pete Buttegieg, who also promised respect and equality but by much gentler means. They were even willing to get on board with Elizabeth Warren, but only because they loved specifics, especially if the specifics disproved quixotic schemes like universal healthcare. Theorizing of any kind taunted them with its tolerance for nihilism. 

“Philosophy,” the Stanford man once told me across a candlelit table packed with Spanish tapas and mezcal Negronis, “is a waste of time. Crunching numbers is how the new world works.” But where did that leave me and my friends? I asked him. Where did that leave poets, writers, painters, and jazz musicians? “Well,” he admitted, gorgeous as ever, “it leaves you in the old one.” 

—

After a few dinners together, I became infatuated with the Stanford man’s mastery of frivolity. Of living well. He offered me escapism. He delivered me from long, self-flagellating hours of dense reading and deadlines. He indulged my inner-rich kid, whom I’d locked up years ago, by upgrading us to first class. If there were eight appetizers on a menu, he’d order six, relieving me of the onerous deliberations to which I’d grown accustomed. And he’d eat them happily. He was happy, and this fascinated me. His winsome light-heartedness had waitresses, bartenders, and gallery attendants tripping over themselves to assist us. 

I’d grown up on the other side of the globe, in a wealthy family that went bankrupt when I was a teenager. He’d grown up in California, so poor that he’d spent eleventh grade living in a motel. We’d both yearned for snowy Christmases. We’d both gotten scholarships. I’d abjured all hopes of revitalizing generational affluence the moment I decided my immigration and creative life were to be forever intertwined. He, on the other hand, had vowed to never again rub shoulders with poverty. I admired him for this—for the sheer savvy that powered the expanse between his bank account balance on that first day in Palo Alto and the mountainous cushion he’d amassed a decade later. My token objections to his flight upgrades and dinner orders had a performative rectitude, the way I imagine Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, had embraced daily chores like chopping and splitting firewood while in exile. In truth, I found the Stanford man’s pristine meals and quiet, spacious bedroom to be irresistibly resuscitating. I discovered that I too could be happy if I just consented to internal quiescence—if I shushed all qualms about the inanity of ordinary luxuries by touting their restorative benefits.

Plus, he was so damn good looking. It was almost unjustly easy to find contentment and pride in it. One can write off even the most pivotal flaws when stratospheric beauty is involved. At my birthday party, a friend who’d just met him for the first time took me aside, flustered. “Quick, fill me in! Where is he from? What does he do? I was too distracted by his face to listen!”

But then, unfortunately, the Stanford man made some discoveries of his own. When I told him I directed a fellatio- and nudity-filled film as a freshman in college, his expression sank. He realized I was “weird.” That he was dating outside the margins of institutional acclaim. Alumni of Stanford’s film department won Oscars. Those of my liberal arts college hosted avant-garde installations at the New Museum on Bowery. Stanford’s business graduates went on to lead Google and Netflix. The closest thing my college had to an MBA was a Curatorial Studies master’s focused on post-1960s contemporary art. Yes, both schools were patronized by the country’s elitest echelons. But surely it counted for something that mine glorified esoterica? That it abstained from aggrandizement for its own sake? When all was said and done, what distinguished the Stanford man’s paradigmatic conventionality was just how far removed he’d remained from all strains of artistic and political subversion, despite being young, liberal, and queer. 

—

After months of listening to Margaret Sargent’s stubborn strictures against liberal hypocrisies, Jim Barnett’s sentiments had soured. They’d had an affair, while his wife was pregnant, no less. Jim had even told Margaret that he loved her. But why was she so contentious? And “why, he thought impatiently, was it necessary for Marxists to talk in this high-flown way? . . . surely on the left itself, there could be a little more friendliness, a little more co-operativeness, a little more give-and-take.” Margaret was always writing angry letters and renouncing people, while Jim had never once quarreled with his friends.

It turned out that the worst thing about me, the Stanford man told me one day, was that I also was too combative.

“How so?” I asked. “What is objectionable about directed dialogue?” 

“There you go again!” he answered. 

“But surely it’s permissible,” I countered, “to respond to the charge that democratic socialists are impractical?”

Wasn’t a perquisite of romance supposed to be a cocooned-off dialectical space that could get as heated as the lovemaking that followed? His friends spoke very quickly too, didn’t they? But they also spoke haphazardly, I conceded privately to myself, each with the tendency to start their sentences before the other was done with their own. It produced more of a carnivorous jibber-jabbering than focused conversations with escalating trajectories. 

Truth be told, I’d started reacting to him and his friends with digs and cerebral offensives. What must have appeared combative were actually compulsions of self-protection. Their implied superiority—a result of belonging to institutions and high-rise apartments at which the rest of the world oohed and aahed—produced in them a nearly unflappable sort of gaiety, peppered with umbrage only toward weirdos, hipsters, and bohemians. And I, in my loosely ambassadorial capacity, was inclined to weaponize intellectualism so that it cut to the cant of their technocratic beau monde. 

In a perverse, convoluted sort of way, I was relieved when I discovered, not long after we met, that he went to Stanford. It gave me the license to expect a magnitude of conversational prowess while simultaneously lambasting the institution’s power to conjure such expectations. It boosted my prestige in the eyes of my Indian family while permitting me to privately interrogate my boyfriend’s premises and prerogatives. Perhaps what I didn’t admit to myself, let alone to him, was the degree to which weirdness, alternativism, and esoterica served as antidotes—talismans of counter-elitism to be brandished by the weary traveler on the journey to anti-materialist glory. Maybe it was only when set against middlebrow Ivy Leaguers that my own grade of humanism could justify its right-mindedness. After all, if my voluntary impoverishment was undermined by the hauteur of literary life, it looked most redeemable next to the barefaced Machiavellianism of MarketWorld.

—

The Stanford man did agree to some world sharing. He subscribed to Jacobin and Current Affairs. He slept over at my apartment every fourth date, enduring my creaky wooden floors and $200 mattress with brave, magnanimous smiles. Even so, he’d rush home in the morning to his motion sensor trash cans and beloved washing machine because, somehow, he always had laundry to do. 

This diligent cleaner of clothes was also a fixer of people. He’d been an RA at Stanford, and with this vested authority, he’d decided that if I were to be fixed, my writing needed to be more marketable and applicable. 

“Applicable to what?” I asked. 

“To society!” 

“Ideas don’t belong in society? Why must they be marketable?” 

“That’s what success is, honey. Don’t you want your ideas to change the world?”

“Ah yes, only products can change the world.”

More importantly, if I were to be fixed, I had to become less exhausting, less polemical, and more diplomatic. “No boyfriend likes to feel like a student,” he said after I read him Eisenhower’s speech about the military-industrial complex. But I’d felt like a student too, and I was quite enjoying it! He’d taught me how to fit hangers into my shirts without stretching the fabric. How to arrange my shower curtains to prevent mold. What to do with my savings account. He was so good at doing things, and I, as a result, felt corporally attuned for the first time in years. 

He was also impressively diplomatic. It seemed everyone in his social nexus—friends, family members, former lovers—was given equal weight and function. And whereas I hated the phrase “agree to disagree” more than any other three words strung together, he encouraged such anodynes. 

I later realized that the Stanford man, like Jim Barnett, didn’t have a single enemy! But this is why the identical standing of every friend and ex-lover made me so uneasy: if he liked them all equally, then he loved none, he hated none, and none filled him with passion or commotion. I was the exception. Without my surly disputations, he was free to soar the thermals of consensus and congratulation. 

—

When the Stanford man told me he wanted to enter politics, I found myself disheartened. Not because a political career can’t be respectable or promising, but because he’d already decided that Harvard Kennedy School was the way he’d do it. It was because, whether or not he knew it, and like Giridharadas’s “elites,” he believed that social change should be “supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies.” It was because, when I’d hear him work from home, I could tell he’d fully internalized, with a mechanical sort of osmosis, the rhetoric and procedures that enrich companies buying and selling expensive technology. He’d say things like: “efficiency,” “optimization,” “user-friendly,” “client base,” “growth,” “sector,” “customer satisfaction,” “at scale.” 

But I think I was most disheartened because I’d known, from the day I met him, that he was destined for the establishmentarian elite. And his destiny only confirmed my suspicion that those in political power aren’t conniving puppeteers so much as they are templates of that osmosis. They are ambitious and narcissistic, but also genial and deeply social. The constraints of their antiseptic résumés rule out any serious sexual, rhetorical, and associational transgressions. They are perfect agents of change within a status quo for which only sputtering increments are acceptable. So firmly rooted are their habits and assumptions that they themselves don’t ache for reform—in fact, they don’t really want much to change at all. Perhaps the deliciously noxious Gore Vidal was right: “Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so.”

Watching the Stanford man and his friends after work, after organizing and streamlining the operations of billion-dollar companies, I realized that our future establishmentarians fulfilled each other. In each other’s company, they were a symbiotic social organism, breathing together, laughing together, tiring together, and presuming together. If a quiescent sort of interiority thrives within entrenched structures, it might be because very little dissension is needed to rearrange, expedite, and capitalize upon objects in the world. Those of us with conflicted interiors, on the other hand, suffer by the dialectical sword. We have a harder time swimming in schools. We have tantrums. We could not decide to enter politics and then sit in calculated silence long enough to survive the ensuing years of being groomed. We would break. Someone would find us out in the first three days. Hence the age-old conflict between politics and philosophy. 

“It was the philosopher,” wrote Hannah Arendt about ancient Greece, who exiled himself from “the City of men and then told those he had left behind that, at best, they were deceived by the trust they put in their senses, by their willingness to believe the poets and be taught by the populace, when they should have been using their minds, and that, at worst, they were content to live only for sensual pleasure and to be glutted like cattle.”

This “true philosopher,” Arendt wrote in The Life of the Mind, wished to be rid of his body and all the things required to keep his body happy, so he could think instead. “To put it quite simply,” she wrote, “while you are thinking, you are unaware of your own corporality.” 

The Stanford man, highly deliberate in his movements and manners, was always aware of his corporality. His body was his temple—that’s why it was so clean—and society, a multitude of bodies, brought him joy and purpose. Because he loved his “City of men,” he thought it was absurd that I reveled in fantasies of Himalayan hermitage, of founding a secluded literary commune in the woods, of dying young.

Arendt herself died before she finished The Life of the Mind. The task fell to Mary McCarthy, one of her closest friends, to edit and cohere the manuscript. When it was published, two years after Arendt’s sudden passing, it emerged as a tour de force in the metaphysics of consciousness. 

One of my favorite chapters burrows into this conflict between thinking and doing:

Only the spectator occupies a position that enables him to see the whole play—as the philosopher is able to see the kosmos as a harmonious ordered whole. The actor, being part of the whole, must enact his part; not only is he a “part” by definition, he is bound to the particular that finds its ultimate meaning and the justification of its existence solely as a constituent of a whole.

It made sense that the Stanford man thought philosophy accomplished nothing. He spent very little time talking to himself. Thinking, according to him, wasn’t doing, and doing could thus proceed without a great deal of thinking.

—

It turns out Jim Barnett, our Yale man, loves his wife, Nancy. She is “a kind of American Athena”: a perfect hostess, partygoer, and caretaker—cheerful, demure, and insouciant, at all the right times. 

If I am to face facts, there seems to be no doubt the Stanford man will marry a kind of American Apollo. His husband will be a social butterfly, online and off. He’ll enjoy Fire Island parties and electronic music festivals in Berlin and São Paulo and Mykonos. He’ll also be tall, and he’ll stand handsomely and hygienically next to the Stanford man as he announces his candidacies and delivers his victory speeches. 

Still, even as he rises into a prominent career, Jim never quite forgets Margaret Sargent. Their affair begins to take on an “allegorical significance.” For months afterward, he can’t get Margaret’s voice out of his head. He anticipates her arguments and criticisms, and he finds himself nervously defending his positions. It’s as if, for the first time, he has an inner-antagonist—an enemy with whom to contend. “She had shown him the cage of his own nature,” he concludes, and for this, “he would hate her forever as Adam hates Eve.” 

As I wept on that snowy January afternoon, I found myself hoping that I’d haunt the Stanford man for months, even years. That he’d hear my voice, phantasms of my combative dialectic, the way Margaret’s “spirit of criticism” lingers inside Jim. He had, after all, seduced me. This future senator or cabinet advisor or ambassador to Montenegro had charmed me out of my better judgment. He’d given me some respite from my excoriationist exile, then he’d taken it away. Now, I wanted to rearrange the furniture in his mind and reveal some gap that couldn’t be filled with things, friends, or institutions. I wanted to irradiate the spectacle and disenchant the actor. I wanted to hover and plague and write my way into his conscience—an undying emissary of the old, weird world. ■

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