 Okay, I just read a great analysis of Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey. And this is from the late Laurent Belant, who was a scholar of affect, meaning of emotion. And she had this read of Obama and Oprah. She says, Oprah's sentimentality always abdures the political means, puts, pushes aside the political. It always sees changes coming from within. It always sees obstacles to changes, internal wounds and not structural blockages in the political and wider economic context. Similarly, Obama wanted to believe that through him, we could dissolve in our emotions what's antagonistic in wider political and economic structures in social structures so that the long history of American racism could be dissolved because he will stimulate in us, you know, emotions that will overcome American racism. And then because we have Obama has healed us emotionally, he will bring politics to make structural what has been achieved first in our feelings. So both Oprah and Obama are classic sentimentalists who view individual feeling as the crucible for political change. And without considering their appeal to our emotions, to our sentiments, we cannot account for their popular appeal, nor for their limitations. I thought that was great analysis. So in 2016, Lauren Ballant showed Obama's, yes, we can, advertisements to undergraduates who were too young to have followed the 2008 presidential campaign and how did her undergraduates react? They began to cry. But until that moment, she says her students did not know that they had national sentimentality. And the author of this piece says, I once took my English boyfriend to a minor league baseball game and he rolled up at the Star-Spangled Banner. That is the power of American affect or American national emotions for you. The author says, I laughed at him. But Lauren Ballant was generous enough to watch the students cry over Barack Obama and his message of yes, we can and conclude that the world is just not a very safe space for people's tender sentiments. And this tenderness means that we would like the world to be different and we don't want to experience more loss on the way to this different world. So that analysis struck me as brilliant. So you may wonder who is Lauren Ballant and who is the author of this book review? Peace. Erin McLaugh is her name, the author. And I've got a brief little video of her there. She is a professor of English. I have a long standing interest in gender history. And so it sort of fits into that, that kind of wider trajectory. It's interesting. She kind of speaks with a, is this a Valley Girl affect? This, is this a Valley, Valley Girl accent? How would you describe this American accent? She is a professor at the University of Sheffield in Northern England. Great. My first book, I was really interested in gender and the early modern Venetian empire and this kind of multi. So she seems to have very much of kind of a girl affect in her voice and manner. It's very girly here. It was kind of not very scholarly. It's a national multi-ethnic Mediterranean world. And I was looking at the patrician men who were kind of colonial governors and then married women who were actually their own subjects. So and her voice seems swallowed in the back of her throat. There isn't a lot of musicality to the voice. It seems seems very monotone who were perhaps Greek Orthodox. And these kind of, yeah, these mixed marriages. But when I finished that book, I really wanted to move beyond the kind of patrician and to look at the experiences of ordinary women and particularly experiences of kind of ordinary motherhood. The patrician is obviously fascinating and the sources are kind of incredible for, for, for those, that kind of group of people. But I, I wanted a bit more of a challenge and I, yeah, wanted to kind of get at these, these experiences of ordinary women. And I think also it's, it was a personal preoccupation. I, I had a baby and now have a toddler. And so the, the very delicate balance between paid work and, and care work is very much on my mind in a kind of personal capacity too. And then I guess the kind of last thing that sort of drew me in this direction is I really felt like within early modern history more broadly, the kind of ongoing debates about women's work. I think are kind of one of the most vibrant areas of the field. There's amazing, these sort of huge projects on early modern England and Sweden and a lot of scholarship on Italy too. And it just felt like such a kind of vibrant and interesting area to be working where there were really kind of current debates about methodology, about the gender division of labor, about this kind of relationship between paid and unpaid work, which I find so fascinating. And so I think all of those kind of things together drew me into this world of sort of how ordinary women navigated this like really difficult boundary, I think, between undertaking paid work for the market and reproductive labor. So why do some people keep ending their sentences in yeah. So according to the chat, it's not Valley Girl speech. This is East Coast liberal arts speak. That's what earlier Latt says. But why do so many people like this female professor and their sentences in yeah. So most British people, according to Cora, you, you are a most British people don't say yeah, the end of a sentence. It would be most prevalent in certain dialects in South Eastern England. So this is an English dialect affectation. It's unusual to hear combined with an American accent. So it's used as an affirmation that the sentence ends. So I think it's better to end your sentences with yeah, rather than just plow on as many people do without really checking in that you're following along. So it's used as an affirmation that the sentence has ended or the series of sentences that precedes its use. Right. The making of a statement. It's to confirm that the listener understands what has been said. It's often used as a question requiring a response from the listener. That was a great match. Yeah. So other dialogue, dialects use other forms in a similar way. So some people say eh or eh. So it means do you understand? So different dialects around the British isles use different words for the same linguistic purpose. So ending your sentence in yeah, it's not all that common, particularly unusual to see it coming from an American accent.