Who is popular today?

The author’s search for her childhood friend who shared her dreams of fleeing Clinton, Arkansas, is an elegiac story of lost opportunitiesWhen journalist Monica Potts came across multiple studies concluding that, over the past decade, the life expectancy of the least-educated white Americans showed the longest and most sustained decline in 100 years, she determined to investigate. The downward trend was most marked among women, and she could easily have become one of those statistics.Potts grew up in Clinton, Arkansas, a rural, majority-white town in the Ozark mountains, where poverty and lack of educational opportunities combined with the pervasive culture of evangelical Christianity to steer girls into early marriage and motherhood. Addiction and domestic abuse were widespread, though rarely acknowledged or addressed. A 2015 study by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton attributed the drop in life expectancy among poor middle-aged white people to increases in drug overdoses, suicides and complications from alcoholism: “a trio of ailments they called ‘deaths of despair’”. “Words like malaise and despair hint at stories that can’t be told with data and statistics,” Potts writes. So she returned to Clinton, “with its ageing, shrinking population, governed by a small group of people who worshipped at the same churches as their parents and who had knit around themselves an ever thicker and tighter web of personal and political self-deceits”, in search of the women behind the statistics. Continue reading...