In the course of reviewing a new biography of Helen Gurley Brown over at The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan cranks out this wonderful little essay loosely about how modern feminism has undermined marriage. The whole thing is wonderful, but it’s worth reading for this description of John Edwards alone:

Obviously vain, stupendously wealthy from his career as a personal-injury lawyer, the kind of educated southerner who drops his gs when the crowd seems common and then whips out the Queen’s English when the company is elevated, spanked soundly by Dick Cheney (Dick Cheney!) during a vice-presidential debate that was supposed to show off the terrifying intelligence that resided just beneath the foppish do (he has spent his life looking like a kid just on the verge of getting his first big-boy haircut), wont to describe his childhood as a North Carolina mill worker’s son with such bathos that you would have thought he’d survived the Holocaust—he was the kind of guy who would have been a fantastic host of a local news show, or the headmaster of a regionally impressive prep school, or, well, a personal-injury lawyer.