Marriage has always been connected to class status: today’s online dating services are premised on the eugenic notion that a person can find the perfect match—a match presumed to be based on shared class and educational interests. In 2014–15, a series of television commercials for eHarmony.com was sending the same message: that no “normal” middle-class applicant has to be stuck with a tawdry (i.e., lower-class) loser. And as the historian Jill Lepore has pointed out in the New Yorker, the entrepreneurial Dr. Paul Popenoe began his career as a leading authority on eugenics, before moving on to
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