The XX Factor: What women really think.

Double X Book of the Week: "Cheerful Money"

I've been obsessed with WASP culture for as long as I can remember. Maybe it was because I watched too many Whit Stillman movies at an impressionable age, or maybe it's because I visited too many homes of gilded age robber barons on historical field trips. More likely it's because I was raised in a town that was restricted to non-WASPs until the '60s, and they were my best friends and early crushes. In any event, I was looking forward to reading Tad Friend's Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of WASP Splendor, because I thought it would reveal the inner workings of a group I've long observed from the outside ... (Read more in DoubleX.)