He was studying writing; his betrothed was studying film. He’s a Syrian refugee; she had to flee the creeping authoritarianism of Russia. And yet they found each other. A breathless profile in The New York Times tells us that as love began to blossom between the young students, “make-out sessions began to occur spontaneously.” The couple, wed in 2022, were both students at Bard, the evergreen safety school for the disappointing children of our ruling class.
The Vows column is standard Style-section fluff, telling us which important figures and institutions these crazy kids are associated with to explain why we care they found love. But reading the profile of Mohamad Eisa and Yolka Gessen left me with a kind of dread, the kind that comes when a spin-off from a hit show spawns a spin-off of its own, promising/threatening hundreds of new hours of content to keep up with. In this specific case, it was the information that there’s a whole new branch of the Gould-Gessen family to pay attention to as the next generation comes of age and is ushered into cultural dominance.
