From Fox News:

A college student is helping young adults feel more confident in the future of their love life with a new insurance policy tool.

Finding “the one” can be something that happens early in life for some people — or later on for others.

In 2022, the average age of marriage for a female was 30, while the average age of marriage for a male was 32, according to the Knot.

Liam McGregor, however, is making sure that even those at the age of 30 and 32 have some sort of “insurance policy” for living a life in marriage.

In 2017, McGregor and another college student started the Marriage Pact — a tool for students at Stanford University to have a spousal “backup plan.”

Essentially, students who signed up would take a questionnaire that would then match them with someone on campus, a percentage of quality and an email address to reach out if they so choose.

McGregor told Fox News Digital the purpose of the pact.

“A marriage pact is an informal agreement between two people that if both parties remain unmarried by the time they turn 30 or 40, to simply marry each other,” he said.

He added, “When you look up from your career in your mid-30s and realize you never prioritized ‘the one’ … you’re going to need a backup plan. The Marriage Pact matches you with your optimal backup plan in your community, based on what really matters in lifelong relationships.”

The questions on the Marriage Pact vary based on the particular college campus — and students can only be matched with others from their same school.

The 50-question survey is based on core values, according to the Associated Press, and includes questions about communication styles, conflict resolution, smoking and drug habits and more. 

McGregor told Fox News Digital that the algorithm doesn’t ask for pictures, height or any of the other typical dating site criteria — saying there’s “no swiping or search[ing].”

An example of a question used at the University of Michigan is: “There is a place for revenge when someone has wronged me.”

From there, the students must rate their response on a scale of one to seven, with one being “turn the other cheek” and seven being “plotting rn (right now).”

A question on the Boston College Marriage Pact is: “I would end a friendship over differing political views.”

Notre Dame has one that reads: “I would send older relatives to a nursing home.”

Based on how individuals respond, the algorithm attempts to match them with their optimal marriage backup plan partner.

“It’s designed using decades of relationship science research to match you with the person who you’re most likely to be compatible with in the long term,” he said.

The economics student, who graduated from Stanford University in 2020, had over 1,000 people sign up from Stanford on the first day, followed by another 1,000 the next and so on.

McGregor said that by the end of the first week of Marriage Pact, 60% of Stanford students had signed up to get their “optimal marital backup plan.”

McGregor told Fox News Digital he was “floored” by the initial response to the survey.

“The way people describe it, it’s the only thing people can talk about for weeks when the Marriage Pact happens at their school,” he said.

Now, seven years later, Marriage Pact is on 88 college campuses across the country and has nearly 500,000 participants.

The U.S. Department of Education and Marriage Pact say there are 14 schools where students are more likely to make a pact by the end of their senior year than students who will graduate.

McGregor said students from 15 different schools initially tried to join the Marriage Pact when it was released at Stanford — and the interest grew from there.

In the fall of 2020, the Marriage Pact was in seven schools — and by the spring of 2021, it was in 50.

McGregor told the AP that about 30% of matches meet up in person and one in nine of those end up dating for a year or longer — many actually getting married.

For example, Max Walker and Melia Summers joined the Marriage Pact as New York University students in the fall of 2020.

Walker was at the New York campus, while Summers was at NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus, per the AP.

Summers eventually decided to do a semester in New York. That’s when she and Walker met for the first time and went on a date — nearly one year after their match.

The pair will wed in June 2024 after having a match rate of 99.65%.

Link to the rest at Fox News

One of the several things that crossed PG’s mind when he read the OP is whether the arrangement will create an implied license to stalk.

Another thought was that more than one interesting story could be written about those who signed up for this service.

Thanks to F. for the tip.

Note: This year, The Paris Review chose author Tobias Wolff to receive the Hadada Award, the magazine’s annual prize for lifetime achievement in literature. Following is an excerpt from Mr. Wolff’s remarks.

From The Paris Review:

When Lady Astor was breathing her last, a large group of family and friends gathered around the bed to see her off. Just before she departed this life, she snapped awake and looked around and said, “Is this my birthday, or am I dying?”

Well, don’t tell me.

The scene here bears some resemblances to hers. I look out and see my dear wife, Catherine, and my oldest and best friends, and others who’ve come into our life in later years, even as I still vividly recall the laughing, never-to-be-forgotten faces of two beloved friends who left our company too soon, George Crile and Edward McIlvain. I have been lucky, blessed, really, in family and friendship, and in too many other ways to describe here.

The Irish painter John Yeats, the poet’s father, described the making of art as the social act of a solitary person. Actually, he said “a solitary man.” They talked like that then. Anyway, I nodded in recognition when I came across that line. Maybe Hemingway could write in a crowded café, but I and the other artists and writers I’ve known have had to be shut away somewhere, out of the human stream, to get our work done. Yet as the years have frosted and mowed this head of mine, I have come to a different understanding of the situation. You may have retreated to your attic studio, you may even have pulled up the ladder behind you, but you were not alone. Never.

Case in point:

When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher became exasperated with my mulish refusal to learn cursive. I liked to print my words, so that they looked like the ones in the books I read. Finally, Mrs. Post sent me home with a note to my mother, telling her that I would not be allowed to return to school until I learned to write in cursive. My mother did not need this complication. She was raising me alone, in a small apartment above a garage, working on her feet all day at a Dairy Queen. By the time she got home and finished making dinner she was ready to put those aching feet up and lean back with a book. Now she had to spend her evenings teaching me how to … well, write.

This is how she did it: she started with the “quick brown fox,” and when that became unbearably tedious she chose passages from the books I’d borrowed from the library: Lassie Come-Home; Old Yeller; Jack London’s White Fang and Call of the Wild; Lad: A Dog, or another volume of Albert Payson Terhune’s many-volumed testaments to his love of collies. You see a pattern here. I wanted a dog. So: passage chosen, my mother adjusted the pencil just so in my fingers, then put her hand on mine and guided hand and pencil over the page, copying the chosen passage in her beautiful script that I could never duplicate, though damned if I didn’t finally learn to stitch letters together, and make recognizable if unlovely words and sentences, until I was allowed back into the classroom. And to this day, when I write in longhand, I sometimes stop and remember those nights, and the feeling of my mother’s hand on mine. 

Some years later I received a scholarship—preposterously undeserved, but that’s another story—to a rigorous boarding school in Pennsylvania. I spent the summer before school began with my brother Geoffrey. We had not seen each other in six years. He had just graduated summa cum laude in English from Princeton, and was shocked to discover that I couldn’t write an essay, not really. I’d been skating by in a rural high school in Washington State, the classrooms full, the teachers overwhelmed. Late as the day was, my brother took my education in hand. He assigned books for me to read, and essays to write on those books while he was at work, and then he went over my essays when he got home. He was both demanding and kind, his red pencil unsparing but also, often enough, encouraging. So did this young man with plans of his own give his summer nights to his little brother, hoping to get him launched with some hope of success.

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

From The Economist:

Adelle Waldman’s sharp-eyed observations of intellectuals in Brooklyn chasing book deals and bedmates made her first novel, “The Love Affairs of Nathanial P.” (2013), a hit. For her follow-up, she has traded the excesses of the urban elite for the struggles of unskilled workers farther afield. This may sound dreary, but “Help Wanted” is a lively, humane book.

To write about the employees of a big-box store in upstate New York, Ms Waldman spent months working at one herself, earning $12.25 an hour unloading trucks of merchandise at 4am. Many of her colleagues had been working at the shop for years, but their hours were limited and unpredictable, which made it hard for them to make plans, get a second job or reliably cover their bills.

Town Square, the shop in “Help Wanted”, is a rare source of jobs in a town that has seen better days. The fictional Potterstown still hasn’t recovered from losing an office of IBM, a computer firm, to Mexico decades ago. The employees who show up to the “dungeon-like” warehouse in the small hours are not thrilled by their lives, but they are grateful to be there.

Ms Waldman probes the needs of this motley morning team, such as Nicole, a young mother with an unemployed fiancé, who hides her anxiety about how she will feed her daughter beneath “an air of boredom and free-floating hostility”. These affectionate portraits chronicle the rough luck of people who cannot afford university and who struggle to make ends meet or, in some cases, to stay out of prison.

. . . .

The employees of Town Square enjoy their shared rituals and take pleasure in their “sense of mastery” as they expertly stack boxes and arrange displays. Their pride is real but fragile, threatened by greedy employers, monopolistic e-tailers and the prospect of automation, which looms ominously near the end of the book.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From Public Books:

The Pacific islands of Samoa and the Cook Islands are about as far from each other (960 miles) as the American West Coast cities of Los Angeles, California, and Portland, Oregon. And yet, the inhabitants of the two islands must contend with a time difference of a remarkable 23 hours. The reason is that they are separated by the International Date Line, which divides one calendar day from another. Here, deep in the Pacific, the impact of Western colonialism runs deep: it even shapes the way Pacific Islanders experience time. It does so by erecting a barrier between geographically close and historically linked islands, a divide, explains scholar Maile Arvin, that is “irreconcilable with Indigenous epistemologies of the Moana, or Pacific Ocean that emphasize the ocean as connection rather than barrier.”

The Pacific Islands have long had a shared culture, yet were divided by European colonizers—with terminology based on their encounters with Africa—into “Polynesia,” “Micronesia,” and “Melanesia.” “White people carved this vast oceanic world into categories of race,” Nitasha Tamar Sharma writes, “appointing Melanesians as the Black people of the Pacific because of their dark skin and curly hair, in contrast to Polynesians, whom Europeans considered closer to Whiteness.”

A case study for understanding Pacific Islanders’ relationship to whiteness can be found in Guam, a Micronesian island held by the US as a territory. One of the most militarized islands in the western Pacific Ocean, Guam contains two major military bases: Naval Base Guam in Santa Rita and Andersen Air Force Base in Yigo. It is the construction of modern Guam as a strategic military outpost for the United States that forms the basis of Alfred Peredo Flores’s Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and US Settler Militarism in Guåhan, 1944–1962. Flores posits that Guam (which Flores calls Guåhan, the island’s Chamorro name, but which I will refer to in this essay as Guam for ease of recognition by unfamiliar readers) was developed by the United States through a process of “settler militarism,” and that the formation and maintenance of Guam’s civilian military labor system depended on privileging the needs—financial and sexual—of white Americans over those of Chamorro (the Indigenous people of Guam, also spelled CHamoru) and Filipino workers. “Settler militarism,” according to Juliet Nebolon, underscores the extent to which “settler colonialism and militarization have simultaneously perpetuated, legitimated, and concealed one another,” making it a useful term to understand the development of Guam as both a cultural and military asset to the United States.

This question of proximity to whiteness is also considered by Arvin in Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai`i and Oceania, which theorizes that Pacific Islanders’ identity has been shaped by a “logic of possession through whiteness.” By this logic, Arvin argues, Polynesians were considered “almost white”: allowing white settlers to claim indigeneity and thus settler colonial ownership over Hawaii and other parts of Polynesia. Such near-whiteness contrasts Micronesians (including Chamorros in Guam) and Melanesians, whom Arvin argues were considered closer to Blackness and, thus, racially subjugated in a more conventional manner. Polynesians’ perceived proximity to whiteness, according to Arvin, was primarily rooted in the belief that “because Polynesian language, myth, and biology contained an Aryan heritage, Polynesian peoples and land were naturally also the heritage of white settlers.”

Arvin’s “logic of possession through whiteness” illuminates Flores’s account of what happened in mid-20th-century Guam. Putting these two books in conversation, I argue that Chamorros’ racialization as dark and “other” in contrast to white Americans allowed for the privileging of whiteness and white labor in the settler colonial project in Guam, in contrast to Arvin’s example of settler colonialism in Polynesia, specifically Hawaii, relying on constructing Polynesians as proximal to white Americans. In the first instance, settler colonialism positioned Chamorros as distant from whiteness in order to underscore Pacific Islanders’ perceived inferiority as laborers and residents of Guam compared to their white counterparts. In the second instance, settler colonialism similarly exalted whiteness not by underscoring Pacific Islanders’ distance from whiteness but by locating Polynesians as “almost white as an attempt to make Polynesia into a Western, settler colonial project, not merely a place.”

In post–World War II Guam, then, Arvin’s “logic of possession through whiteness” operates slightly differently than it does in Polynesia to nevertheless exercise control over Chamorros, specifically by underscoring their distance from whiteness rather than assigning them an “almost white” status.

It is necessary to first define the parameters of Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia, even though the terms are a “form of knowledge production that structures settler colonialism.” Polynesia is the largest by area of the three regions and includes Hawaii, Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti Nui, the Cook Islands, and New Zealand, among other islands. West of Polynesia is Melanesia, which includes Fiji, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands, among others. North of Melanesia are the islands of Micronesia, including Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, and the Federated States of Micronesia.

Polynesians, specifically Native Hawaiians, were positioned as racially proximal to whiteness. As such, they were elevated above Micronesians and Melanesians, who were named so literally because of their melanin. Micronesians fell somewhere in between: darker in complexion than Polynesians but lighter than Melanesians, occupying the liminal space between whiteness and Blackness. Some scholars offer a more capacious definition of Blackness: According to legal scholar Charles Lawrence as summarized by Sharma, Blackness “includes Micronesian and Hawaiian men whose lives are burdened (and cut short) by racist people in positions of power—who in Hawai’i include Asians.” Under this framing, both Chamorros and Native Hawaiians occupy a position of relative Blackness compared to non-Indigenous Asian and white settlers.

So where do all Pacific Islanders, considered separately from Asian Americans (with whom they have been grouped), stand in relation to whiteness? Considering this question is important as Asian Americans litigate their own positionality in relation to whiteness, especially with looming discourse contending that Asian Americans are “honorary white people” in light of issues such as affirmative action and policing.

Pacific Islanders are often lumped together with Asian Americans in US community surveys, data reports, and government-sanctioned celebrations. These include Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, alternatively referred to by the federal government as Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and, most recently, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month: three names that underscore the government’s ongoing uncertainty when it comes to defining and locating Pacific Islander communities in relation to Asian Americans.

In 1997, the US Census finally separated the categories “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander” and “Asian.” Still, Pacific Islanders are seldom considered separately from Asians in mainstream news coverage and scholarly criticism, beyond references to the Pacific Islands in geopolitical and military contexts. But there are “stark, documented inequalities between Asian American and Pacific Islander groups,” as Arvin observes. Moreover, grouping them together ignores “the distinction that Pacific Islanders are Indigenous peoples,” meaning they are the earliest known inhabitants of the region.

And the dearth of specific information about the demographic makeup and needs of Pacific Islander communities has led to fewer resources for those communities, especially when health and economic studies in reality focus primarily on Asian ethnicity groups but purport to target AAPI communities. Disaggregating data among Asian American and Pacific Islander communities can help: a San Francisco Unified School District student population recount found that almost three times as many students identified as Pacific Islander compared to the school’s initial report for the 2018–19 academic year—and that more than half of them identified as Samoan, which led to the creation of an educational pathway for students “rooted in Sāmoa Aganu’u indigenous values and practices.” Clearly, when it comes to Pacific Islanders, questions of terminology have material consequences.

Link to the rest at Public Books

PG doesn’t agree with ideas of racial guilt or historical racial subjugation as the most relevant elements in today’s society.

He also disagrees with the statement in the OP that “The Pacific Islands have long had a shared culture.”

How did this sharing of culture take place in a region that covers an enormous area—64 million square miles—a space larger than all the land masses of the world combined—during times when a huge portion of Pacific Islanders could only travel by small boats powered by sails or paddles?

PG will limit himself to a discussion of only one more statement in the OP – “White people do not need to be present for whiteness to exert its hegemony.”

What is “whiteness”? Is the “whiteness” of Finland the same as the “whiteness” of white people living in South Africa? How about the “whiteness” of Alaskans and the “whiteness” of white sharecroppers who live in Alabama?

The author of the OP is a woman named Meena Venkataramanan (Harvard University, BA in English; University of Cambridge, MPhil in English), who writes for The Washington Post and speaks English, Spanish and Tamil.

On Ms. Venkataramanan’s blog, we learn that:

My writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, POLITICO, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Chicago Review of Books, Harvard Magazine, the Texas Tribune, the Arizona Republic, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and ABC News. My work has been featured on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show and All In With Chris Hayes, and I have discussed my reporting across national and regional media.

On a different page of her blog, we can see “links to selected media appearances on television, radio, video, and podcasts.” In various of these media appearances, we learn that she is a recognized expert on why more American women want their tubes tied and how Queen Elizabeth’s death resurfaced colonial trauma for some people. Additionally, her thoughts about a “Bad Bunny and El Muerto Variant Cover” on TikTok apparently rated an article in The Washington Post.

Ms. Venkataramanan is certainly a useful expert on a wide variety of subjects—where Pacific Islanders stand in relation to Whitness, knowledge production that structures settler colonialism, how Asian Americans litigate their own positionality in relation to Whiteness, and so forth.

PG just realized that he forgot to mention another field of expertise Ms. Venkataramanan has mastered – Why “Some Black Germans want change.”