By Jia Tolentino @ Cultural Comment @ newyorker.com, Aug. 4

 This is a crib sheet on a fascinating American popular culture meme about boy-men that I have totally missed. I caught it on their "most popular" list. Besides its application to current political stories, it also seems to have some things going on with male boomers' disappointment with their millennial sons. The beginning excerpted:

In January, 2015, shortly after Mike Huckabee announced that he was exploring a second bid for the Presidency, a Twitter user with the handle @JuliusIrvington posted an old Huckabee family photo in which the politician, wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt, sits next to his wife on a wooden bench. Behind them, three kids smile at the camera. On the right is a young Sarah Huckabee (now Sanders). Next to her are her two brothers, John Mark and David, who are the same size as their father and wear matching striped shirts. “My favorite thing in the world is that Mike Huckabee literally has large adult sons,” @JuliusIrvington wrote.

This seems to be roughly when the large-son meme went more or less mainstream. It had been germinating in arcane corners of the Internet for a couple of years by then. In 2012  [....]