Uf

Reading this felt like peeking into a world I’ve otherwise gotten only very briefly glimpses of: Dutch “student associations”. They’re don’t quite map to their ~equivalents abroad (fraternities and sororities in the US or associações de estudantes in Portugal). They’re a strange mix of elitism, propriety, substance abuse, and normalization of sexual violence.

Moments that come to mind: the observation that some people seem to succeed socially because they… feel they should, given their surname, and this gives them an insurmountable leg up over those who might be more handsome, smarter or have more (new) money, but a surname that is not quite right. I can imagine it to be true, but it is divorced from my reality, where all surnames are roughly equally unimportant. More generally, this book was a window into a world where status is very different.