"In 1968, Janet Malcolm visited a new showroom for high-end furniture that was, she wrote, among 'the most beautiful and interesting' in New York."

"The venue was designed by Warren Platner, an architect who himself designed furniture; Donald Trump would later acquire a set of his chairs, and sounded gratified when, during an interview in 2010, a reporter from the Times recognized them. Platner’s son, Bronson, went into law, in Maine; his son Graham studied at Hotchkiss, a tony boarding school in Connecticut, though he hated it, skipped classes, and was quickly kicked out. Graham transferred to a different private school closer to home, where he starred in a production of 'My Fair Lady.' He played Henry Higgins, the haughty phonetician who teaches a lower-class flower girl to speak proper...."

Those are the opening lines of an essay by Jon Allsop titled "The Changing Face of 'Authenticity' in Politics/What Graham Platner’s scandal-plagued Senate run says about a tired cliché" (The New Yorker).

Here's how Platner entered the political arena, last summer:

Allsop ponders "authenticity":

The modern notion of “authenticity” grew out of the Enlightenment era. Prior to that, in medieval Europe, societies were highly localized and hierarchical, and their denizens were not encouraged to think reflectively about their “real selves,” or how they related, as individuals, to the world around them. Then came modernity, or, as the academic Charles Lindholm has put it, “the condition of living among strangers.” This required trust, which in turn required sincerity, which in turn raised all sorts of questions—What does it mean to be sincere? What internal truths should guide us? And how do we access those, anyway?—that philosophers are still sorting through today....