"I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam"

Two essays, three theories.

A Writer Trimming his Pen, Jan Eckels the Younger (1784)

The journalism industry may be dying, but the personal essay is alive and well — at least judging by the response to two published last week.

Emily Gould’s “The Lure of Divorce,” published in New York Magazine’s The Cut, broke brains, if not hearts, on Valentine’s Day. The former Gawker editor described her medicine-induced manic episode and subsequent almost-divorce from her husband, author Keith Gessen, in excruciating detail:

I spent money like it was water, never budgeting, leaving Keith to make sure we made rent every month. Every few months, we’d have a fight about this and I’d vow to change; some system would be put in place, but it never stuck. We were headed for disaster, and finally it came.

But it was Charlotte Cowles’ “The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger,” published the next day, that detonated a nuclear bomb of schadenfreude.

(To be fair, lines like this didn’t help: “Still, how could I have been such easy prey? Scam victims tend to be single, lonely, and economically insecure with low financial literacy. I am none of those things. I’m closer to the opposite.”)

The Cut’s “financial-advice columnist” admitted to being scammed for tens of thousands in a single day: beginning with taking a phone call from someone who purported to be investigating fraud for Amazon’s customer service, ending with her handing a box full of cash through the window of a white Mercedes she believed was sent to her house by the CIA.

Readers fell over themselves to declare her an idiot and note that they would never be so stupid.

The pieces are still leading New York Magazine’s website.

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Still, plenty of people write insane things on the internet every day. So why the explosive response to these essays in particular?

First theory: Gould and Cowles are women baring their flaws and failures in public, and we are still, as a culture, prone to treat this with contempt. Examples abound, so I’ll leave this for now.

Second theory: Expectations of public writing have changed.  Maybe it used to be enough for an essay to simply showcase good writing and/or analysis. But now, such a piece must also be sure to demonstrate alignment with the mores of the moment (usually progressive, occasionally conservative), or at least show that the author has undergone some personal growth. These essays… don’t really do that. 

Gould didn’t genuflect to the Brooklynite zeitgeist by actually divorcing her long-suffering husband (to the annoyance of some), or even by becoming performatively polyamorous. Cowles didn’t seem to learn much of anything except that she shouldn’t drop a shoebox full of cash into an idling car and watch it drive away.

Which leads to the third theory: Perhaps the howling opprobrium comes from the fact that Gould and Cowles are cultural elites, exposing their elite privilege, and yet aren’t living up to elite standards. And that makes readers — especially those who feel themselves unfairly relegated to a tier below— mad.

In some way, we expect those with status to be somehow better than the average person —savvier, smarter, something— otherwise they don’t deserve their lot. So how dare these two women have the resources to be so egregiously stupid, to recover in ways that the majority of people could not, and then have the gall to ask for sympathy?

(Resources including but not limited to: an easy $50k in cash; supportive partners to neglect, the clearly class-informed belief that the CIA is intrinsically trustworthy and that Amazon would actually put effort into helping you.) No sympathy forthcoming. Instead, disgust.

As a friend put it in a group-chat discussion of Cowles’ piece: “Our rich elites betray us when they turn out to be fools.” 

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In other news, I’m starting as a staff writer at The Atlantic this week. Wish me luck! I’ll still be here at WoC, of course, but keep an eye on my personal ‘stack, The Editrix , for further updates and ✨ gift links ✨ to forthcoming pieces.