Dissatisfied with remote school and disillusioned with college in general, he decided to take a year off - from class, but not from learning. Williams’s allegiance passed in due course to Bernie Sanders, whose campaign suffered irretrievable defeat just before COVID shut down Williams’s campus. The campaign did not achieve its goal of sending Gravel to the Democratic-primary debates, though it did attract mystified attention and national press. ) The campaign consisted primarily of a vigorous presence on dirtbag-left Twitter, where the so-called Gravel Teens gave their 89-year-old candidate’s account an unlikely fluency. (They had heard about the senator on the socialist comedy podcast Chapo Trap House. Freshman year, he and a friend started a not-quite-kidding presidential campaign for former Alaska senator Mike Gravel. But his undergraduate career at Columbia was still young when other events intervened.

Eventually, he imagined, he might get a Ph.D. When Henry Williams arrived at college, he was a STEM guy: Computers were what you did to be practical. in film would seem like a bad plan to Henry. For a time when Henry was growing up, an aunt in her 20s lived with his family while she was between jobs. Henry’s suburban childhood was comfortable, but even so, it was shadowed by an awareness of precarity.

Henry Williams was 7 in 2008, and what he remembers about 2008 is that his dad lost his job.

The deluge by adam tooze