A fond farewell to the royal train

Chinese Ivy Leaguers are finding America oddly familiar

When Marco Rubio announced in May that the US would begin “aggressively” revoking the visas of Chinese students, says Lavender Au in The Atlantic, it was the start of a “red line” being drawn to keep out students perceived as a national security threat. The trouble is, “no one knows exactly where the line is”. One Chinese social sciences student told me she’d downloaded the encrypted messaging app, Signal, and set all her messages to disappear after 24 hours. She no longer sends even remotely sensitive links in group chats – anything “Donald Trump, Israel or DEI” is off the cards – and discussion of American politics in the campus cafeteria with her Chinese classmates happens in hushed tones.

There’s a sense these students are caught in a “guessing game”. A formerly benign decision about whether to go on a trip beyond US borders now seems like a “high-stakes gamble”. One master’s student who did venture abroad was pulled into an immigration interview room at the airport on her re-entry – a place known colloquially among Chinese students as the “little black room”. Back home in China, it’s used for suspicion of anti-government conduct. In the US, Chinese students could find themselves in there simply for studying computer science. A PhD student was expressly warned by her adviser to avoid all protests, steer away from posting pro-Palestine content online, and drive carefully amid fears Chinese students could be deported for such minor infractions as a speeding ticket. Another received an email from her university department with an “emergency plan for sudden visa revocation”, which included making a contact list of immigration attorneys and guidance on securing temporary housing. For a lot of Chinese kids, America is starting to feel just like home. “But not in a good way.”

How glad I am to have avoided the “sex police”

When it comes to sex, says Rowan Pelling in The Daily Telegraph, “youth is wasted on the young”. We’re edging ever-closer to a real-life version of PD James’s novel The Children of Men, in which mass infertility leaves humanity teetering on the edge of extinction. Just look at the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles: over the past three decades, there has been a “steady decrease” in the average number of so-called “sexual episodes” among millennials and Gen Z. Nearly a quarter of them have been celibate for at least a year. The reason? The “draconian rules and regs” that have infected modern dating, which make “Cistercian monks look like Woodstock hippies”.

At a recent dinner party, we Gen X crew learnt from our children that it is now, apparently, “unspeakably creepy” for a young man to approach a woman and flatter her with a compliment. Even if two youngsters do somehow start dating, it takes a “cryptic set of intimacy stepping stones” before they admit to it. “Call someone a ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’ before the relationship’s official and a 20-something will react like you’ve arranged a shotgun marriage”. When my son said he wouldn’t dream of kissing a girl unless he had permission, “we oldies yelped in horror” and protested there is nothing sexy about a man asking: “May I kiss you?” It makes me long for the “good-old bad days of the early 1990s”, and the joy of sexual amateurism that made chemistry and a little enthusiasm far more important than whether you’d “ticked every box on the sex police’s form”. I can’t help but feel we veterans “snatched the best of the sexual revolution”.

My power struggle with Anna Wintour

Anna Wintour’s decision to step down as editor-in-chief of US Vogue brings to an end a 37-year “Nuclear Wintour”, says Graydon Carter in The Times. When I briefly worked at the magazine, you could “almost smell the fear” among Wintour’s underlings. “Attractive young women skittered by with terrified looks on their faces.” At the one editorial meeting I went to – chairs arranged in a V formation, Anna’s desk at the point – she met most story ideas with “cold stares”. At one point I looked around at my fellow attendees. “I’ve seen cheerier faces in hostage videos.”

At times I found Anna’s efforts to seem intimidating and powerful “almost comical”. When our children were in the same class at school and they put on a fashion show, I turned up to find Anna in the front row wearing her trademark black sunglasses. “I almost burst out laughing and had to turn my back.” Another of her power moves was to turn up early: arrange a meeting for 9am, and she’ll catch you unawares at 8.45; move the next one to 8.45, and she’ll turn up at 8.30. Towards the end of my time as editor of Vanity Fair, we had a meeting scheduled at my offices at 11am. Sure enough, at 10.40 my assistant came into my office in a panic saying Anna was there already. “Good,” I replied. “Ask her if she’d like anything and tell her I’ll see her at 11.” I’ve never felt braver.

🥩⏱️ Dinner with Anna is like something dreamed up by a “McKinsey efficiency expert”. Seated at 8pm. No need to see a menu (“steak, rare”). And if she’s with colleagues, the moment she finishes her last mouthful she gets the bill. “Her dinner mates might be mid-bite.”