“I’ve studied how and when people realize that moving up the ladder may actually be very difficult.
He explained that Americans tend to have a strong, optimistic belief in meritocracy - the idea that hard work demonstrates exceptional skill, and that if you have both, you will be rewarded accordingly. Shai Davidai is a professor at Columbia’s business school and studies the way people in the United States make sense of economic success. Every human is someone’s child, but not everyone’s parents are a blue link on Wikipedia.
“Nepotism baby” is a toolīeyond the satisfaction it provides linguistically and in terms of pure meanness, what makes “nepotism baby” so popular is that it also functions as a tool, a simple way for our brains to deconstruct the bigger idea of upward mobility in inequality. Imagine them as a helpless little loser baby. In your head, think about a nemesis you have. It’s also quite pleasing in any context to casually insult adult humans by referring to them as babies, because babies cannot help themselves. But there’s a satisfying roundness to it. The term “nepotism baby” itself is mildly redundant, like “false pretense” or “6 am in the morning,” in that nepotism already means the practice in which someone gives their family members, particularly their children, a benefit. It was so frantic that Euphoria showrunner Sam Levinson, a nepo baby himself, somehow eluded scrutiny. No doubt the tension between people of a certain age knowing Maude Apatow had famous parents and shock at younger people only now finding out the obvious truth helped launch a feeding frenzy around the term. (God, she was so good in Blockers.) Maude Apatow (center) and her famous parents! Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic for HBO Mann appeared in some of those movies and has been a comedic stalwart worthy of greater recognition since Big Daddy in 1999. Maude is in the same industry as her successful parents, shares her father’s last name, and has acted in their projects for years, so it’s not as though she ever intended her parentage to be a secret.Īt the time, however, the civilian nepotism detective wasn’t immediately familiar with how movies like Anchorman, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Superbad, which Judd Apatow produced or directed, had the late aughts in a cultural stranglehold. “Nepotism baby” or “nepo baby” exploded back in May, when a Twitter user at the handle noticed that Maude Apatow, star of HBO’s Euphoria, was the daughter of actress Leslie Mann and producer-director Judd Apatow. The feelings we may have toward a nepotism baby - frustration, admiration, indifference, schadenfreude - say as much about us as they do about the children of privilege. The phrase also says a lot about how we’re attempting to grapple with the systems of power that make up our world. Yet the musicality of the phrase, the hilarity of reducing an adult human to a tiny helpless infant, and the stickiness of the label all ensure that we never forget nepotism when it comes to this person and their accomplishments.īut “nepotism baby” and its current popularity is more than just an insult or identifier. “Nepo baby” is simply an extension of the “see something, say something” approach to nepotism. As does the act of identifying, bemoaning, and maybe even admiring it. To be clear, the practice of nepotism - people parlaying their own success to benefit their friends and family members, children primarily - predates all of us, going back to the days of the old gods and young Earth. Nepotism babies have accomplished a lot, but it’s only recently that we’ve given them a satisfying name.
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