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Magazine | how susan sontag taught me to think.

• How Susan Sontag Taught Me to Think

By A.O. SCOTT OCT. 8, 2019

The critic A.O. Scott reflects on the outsize influence Sontag has had on his life as a critic.

I spent my adolescence in a terrible hurry to read all the books, see all the movies, listen to all the music, look at everything in all the museums. That pursuit required more effort back then, when nothing was streaming and everything had to be hunted down, bought or borrowed. But those changes aren’t what this essay is about. Culturally ravenous young people have always been insufferable and never unusual, even though they tend to invest a lot in being different — in aspiring (or pretending) to something deeper, higher than the common run. Viewed with the chastened hindsight of adulthood, their seriousness shows its ridiculous side, but the longing that drives it is no joke. It’s a hunger not so much for knowledge as for experience of a particular kind. Two kinds, really: the specific experience of encountering a book or work of art and also the future experience, the state of perfectly cultivated being, that awaits you at the end of the search. Once you’ve read everything, then at last you can begin.

2 Furious consumption is often described as indiscriminate, but the point of it is always discrimination. It was on my parents’ bookshelves, amid other emblems of midcentury, middle-class American literary taste and intellectual curiosity, that I found a book with a title that seemed to offer something I desperately needed, even if (or precisely because) it went completely over my head. “Against Interpretation.” No subtitle, no how-to promise or self-help come-on. A 95-cent Dell paperback with a front-cover photograph of the author, Susan Sontag.

There is no doubt that the picture was part of the book’s allure — the angled, dark-eyed gaze, the knowing smile, the bobbed hair and buttoned-up coat — but the charisma of the title shouldn’t be underestimated. It was a statement of opposition, though I couldn’t say what exactly was being opposed. Whatever “interpretation” turned out to be, I was ready to enlist in the fight against it. I still am, even if interpretation, in one form or another, has been the main way I’ve made my living as an adult. It’s not fair to blame Susan Sontag for that, though I do.

3 “Against Interpretation,” a collection of articles from the 1960s reprinted from various journals and magazines, mainly devoted to of-the-moment texts and artifacts (Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Saint Genet,” Jean-Luc Godard’s “Vivre Sa Vie,’’ Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures”), modestly presents itself as “case studies for an aesthetic,” a theory of Sontag’s “own sensibility.” Really, though, it is the episodic chronicle of a mind in passionate struggle with the world and itself.

Sontag’s signature is ambivalence. “Against Interpretation” (the essay), which declares that “to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings,’ ” is clearly the work of a relentlessly analytical, meaning-driven intelligence. In a little more than 10 pages, she advances an appeal to the ecstasy of surrender rather than the protocols of exegesis, made in unstintingly cerebral terms. Her final, mic-drop declaration — “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art” — deploys abstraction in the service of carnality.

4 It’s hard for me, after so many years, to account for the impact “Against Interpretation” had on me. It was first published in 1966, the year of my birth, which struck me as terribly portentous. It brought news about books I hadn’t — hadn’t yet! — read and movies I hadn’t heard about and challenged pieties I had only begun to comprehend. It breathed the air of the ’60s, a momentous time I had unforgivably missed.

But I kept reading “Against Interpretation” — following it with “Styles of Radical Will,” “On Photography” and “Under the Sign of Saturn,” books Sontag would later deprecate as “juvenilia” — for something else. For the style, you could say (she wrote an essay called “On Style”). For the voice, I guess, but that’s a tame, trite word. It was because I craved the drama of her ambivalence, the tenacity of her enthusiasm, the sting of her doubt. I read those books because I needed to be with her. Is it too much to say that I was in love with her? Who was she, anyway?

5 Years after I plucked “Against Interpretation” from the living-room shelf, I came across a short story of Sontag’s called “Pilgrimage.” One of the very few overtly autobiographical pieces Sontag ever wrote, this lightly fictionalized memoir, set in Southern California in 1947, recalls an adolescence that I somehow suspect myself of having plagiarized a third of a century later. “I felt I was slumming in my own life,” Sontag writes, gently mocking and also proudly affirming the serious, voracious girl she used to be. The “pilgrimage” in question, undertaken with a friend named Merrill, was to Thomas Mann’s house in Pacific Palisades, where that venerable giant of German Kultur had been incongruously living while in exile from Nazi Germany.

The funniest and truest part of the story is young Susan’s “shame and dread” at the prospect of paying the call. “Oh, Merrill, how could you?” she melodramatically exclaims when she learns he has arranged for a teatime visit to the Mann residence. The second-funniest and truest part of the story is the disappointment Susan tries to fight off in the presence of a literary idol who talks “like a book review.” The encounter makes a charming anecdote with 40 years of hindsight, but it also proves that the youthful instincts were correct. “Why would I want to meet him?” she wondered. “I had his books.”

6 I never met Susan Sontag. Once when I was working late answering phones and manning the fax machine in the offices of The New York Review of Books, I took a message for Robert Silvers, one of the magazine’s editors. “Tell him Susan Sontag called. He’ll know why.” (Because it was his birthday.) Another time I caught a glimpse of her sweeping, swanning, promenading — or maybe just walking — through the galleries of the Frick.

Much later, I was commissioned by this magazine to write a profile of her. She was about to publish “Regarding the Pain of Others,” a sequel and corrective to her 1977 book “On Photography.” The furor she sparked with a few paragraphs written for The New Yorker after the Sept. 11 attacks — words that seemed obnoxiously rational at a time of horror and grief — had not yet died down. I felt I had a lot to say to her, but the one thing I could not bring myself to do was pick up the phone. Mostly I was terrified of disappointment, mine and hers. I didn’t want to fail to impress her; I didn’t want to have to try. The terror of seeking her approval, and the certainty that in spite of my journalistic pose I would be doing just that, were paralyzing. Instead of a profile, I wrote a short text that accompanied a portrait by Chuck Close . I didn’t want to risk knowing her in any way that might undermine or complicate the relationship we already had, which was plenty fraught. I had her books.

7 After Sontag died in 2004, the focus of attention began to drift away from her work and toward her person. Not her life so much as her self, her photographic image, her way of being at home and at parties — anywhere but on the page. Her son, David Rieff, wrote a piercing memoir about his mother’s illness and death. Annie Leibovitz, Sontag’s partner, off and on, from 1989 until her death, released a portfolio of photographs unsparing in their depiction of her cancer-ravaged, 70-year-old body. There were ruminations by Wayne Koestenbaum, Phillip Lopate and Terry Castle about her daunting reputation and the awe, envy and inadequacy she inspired in them. “Sempre Susan,” a short memoir by Sigrid Nunez, who lived with Sontag and Rieff for a while in the 1970s, is the masterpiece of the “I knew Susan” minigenre and a funhouse-mirror companion to Sontag’s own “Pilgrimage.” It’s about what can happen when you really get to know a writer, which is that you lose all sense of what or who it is you really know, including yourself.

8 In 2008, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sontag’s longtime publisher, issued “Reborn,” the first of two volumes so far culled from nearly 100 notebooks Sontag filled from early adolescence into late middle age. Because of their fragmentary nature, these journal entries aren’t intimidating in the way her more formal nonfiction prose could be, or abstruse in the manner of most of her pre-1990s fiction. They seem to offer an unobstructed window into her mind , documenting her intellectual anxieties, existential worries and emotional upheavals, along with everyday ephemera that proves to be almost as captivating. Lists of books to be read and films to be seen sit alongside quotations, aphorisms, observations and story ideas. Lovers are tantalizingly represented by a single letter (“I.”; “H”; “C.”). You wonder if Sontag hoped, if she knew, that you would be reading this someday — the intimate journal as a literary form is a recurring theme in her essays — and you wonder whether that possibility undermines the guilty intimacy of reading these pages or, on the contrary, accounts for it.

9 A new biography by Benjamin Moser — “Sontag: Her Life and Work,” published last month — shrinks Sontag down to life size, even as it also insists on her significance. “What mattered about Susan Sontag was what she symbolized,” he concludes, having studiously documented her love affairs, her petty cruelties and her lapses in personal hygiene.

I must say I find the notion horrifying. A woman whose great accomplishments were writing millions of words and reading who knows how many millions more — no exercise in Sontagiana can fail to mention the 15,000-book library in her Chelsea apartment — has at last been decisively captured by what she called “the image-world,” the counterfeit reality that threatens to destroy our apprehension of the actual world.

You can argue about the philosophical coherence, the political implications or the present-day relevance of this idea (one of the central claims of “On Photography”), but it’s hard to deny that Sontag currently belongs more to images than to words. Maybe it’s inevitable that after Sontag’s death, the literary persona she spent a lifetime constructing — that rigorous, serious, impersonal self — has been peeled away, revealing the person hiding behind the words. The unhappy daughter. The mercurial mother. The variously needy and domineering lover. The loyal, sometimes impossible friend. In the era of prestige TV, we may have lost our appetite for difficult books, but we relish difficult characters, and the biographical Sontag — brave and imperious, insecure and unpredictable — surely fits the bill.

10 “Interpretation,” according to Sontag, “is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world.” And biography, by the same measure, is the revenge of research upon the intellect. The life of the mind is turned into “the life,” a coffin full of rattling facts and spectral suppositions, less an invitation to read or reread than a handy, bulky excuse not to.

The point of this essay, which turns out not to be as simple as I thought it would be, is to resist that tendency. I can’t deny the reality of the image or the symbolic cachet of the name. I don’t want to devalue the ways Sontag serves as a talisman and a culture hero. All I really want to say is that Susan Sontag mattered because of what she wrote.

11 Or maybe I should just say that’s why she matters to me. In “Sempre Susan,” Sigrid Nunez describes Sontag as:

... the opposite of Thomas Bernhard’s comic “possessive thinker,” who feeds on the fantasy that every book or painting or piece of music he loves has been created solely for and belongs solely to him, and whose “art selfishness” makes the thought of anyone else enjoying or appreciating the works of genius he reveres intolerable. She wanted her passions to be shared by all, and to respond with equal intensity to any work she loved was to give her one of her biggest pleasures.

I’m the opposite of that. I don’t like to share my passions, even if the job of movie critic forces me to do it. I cling to an immature (and maybe also a typically male), proprietary investment in the work I care about most. My devotion to Sontag has often felt like a secret. She was never assigned in any course I took in college, and if her name ever came up while I was in graduate school, it was with a certain condescension. She wasn’t a theorist or a scholar but an essayist and a popularizer, and as such a bad fit with the desperate careerism that dominated the academy at the time. In the world of cultural journalism, she’s often dismissed as an egghead and a snob. Not really worth talking about, and so I mostly didn’t talk about her.

12 Nonetheless, I kept reading, with an ambivalence that mirrored hers. Perhaps her most famous essay — certainly among the most controversial — is “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” which scrutinizes a phenomenon defined by “the spirit of extravagance” with scrupulous sobriety. The inquiry proceeds from mixed feelings — “I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it” — that are heightened rather than resolved, and that curl through the 58 numbered sections of the “Notes” like tendrils in an Art Nouveau print. In writing about a mode of expression that is overwrought, artificial, frivolous and theatrical, Sontag adopts a style that is the antithesis of all those things.

If some kinds of camp represent “a seriousness that fails,” then “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” enacts a seriousness that succeeds. The essay is dedicated to Oscar Wilde, whose most tongue-in-cheek utterances gave voice to his deepest thoughts. Sontag reverses that Wildean current, so that her grave pronouncements sparkle with an almost invisible mischief. The essay is delightful because it seems to betray no sense of fun at all, because its jokes are buried so deep that they are, in effect, secrets.

13 In the chapter of “Against Interpretation” called “Camus’ Notebooks” — originally published in The New York Review of Books — Sontag divides great writers into “husbands” and “lovers,” a sly, sexy updating of older dichotomies (e.g., between Apollonian and Dionysian, Classical and Romantic, paleface and redskin). Albert Camus, at the time beginning his posthumous descent from Nobel laureate and existentialist martyr into the high school curriculum (which is where I found him), is named the “ideal husband of contemporary letters.” It isn’t really a compliment:

Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover — moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality — that they would never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar — if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions and dangerous sensations.

The sexual politics of this formulation are quite something. Reading is female, writing male. The lady reader exists to be seduced or provided for, ravished or served, by a man who is either a scamp or a solid citizen. Camus, in spite of his movie-star good looks (like Sontag, he photographed well), is condemned to husband status. He’s the guy the reader will settle for, who won’t ask too many questions when she returns from her flings with Kafka, Céline or Gide. He’s also the one who, more than any of them, inspires love.

14 After her marriage to the sociologist Philip Rieff ended in 1959, most of Sontag’s serious romantic relationships were with women. The writers whose company she kept on the page were overwhelmingly male (and almost exclusively European). Except for a short piece about Simone Weil and another about Nathalie Sarraute in “Against Interpretation” and an extensive takedown of Leni Riefenstahl in “Under the Sign of Saturn,” Sontag’s major criticism is all about men.

She herself was kind of a husband. Her writing is conscientious, thorough, patient and useful. Authoritative but not scolding. Rigorous, orderly and lucid even when venturing into landscapes of wildness, disruption and revolt. She begins her inquiry into “The Pornographic Imagination” with the warning that “No one should undertake a discussion of pornography before acknowledging the pornograph ies — there are at least three — and before pledging to take them on one at a time.”

The extravagant, self-subverting seriousness of this sentence makes it a perfect camp gesture. There is also something kinky about the setting of rules and procedures, an implied scenario of transgression and punishment that is unmistakably erotic. Should I be ashamed of myself for thinking that? Of course! Humiliation is one of the most intense and pleasurable effects of Sontag’s masterful prose. She’s the one in charge.

15 But the rules of the game don’t simply dictate silence or obedience on the reader’s part. What sustains the bond — the bondage, if you’ll allow it — is its volatility. The dominant party is always vulnerable, the submissive party always capable of rebellion, resistance or outright refusal.

I often read her work in a spirit of defiance, of disobedience, as if hoping to provoke a reaction. For a while, I thought she was wrong about everything. “Against Interpretation” was a sentimental and self-defeating polemic against criticism, the very thing she had taught me to believe in. “On Photography” was a sentimental defense of a shopworn aesthetic ideology wrapped around a superstitious horror at technology. And who cared about Elias Canetti and Walter Benjamin anyway? Or about E.M. Cioran or Antonin Artaud or any of the other Euro-weirdos in her pantheon?

Not me! And yet. ... Over the years I’ve purchased at least three copies of “Under the Sign of Saturn” — if pressed to choose a favorite Sontag volume, I’d pick that one — and in each the essay on Canetti, “Mind as Passion,” is the most dog-eared. Why? Not so I could recommend it to someone eager to learn about the first native Bulgarian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, because I’ve never met such a person. “Mind as Passion” is the best thing I’ve ever read about the emotional dynamics of literary admiration, about the way a great writer “teaches us how to breathe,” about how readerly surrender is a form of self-creation.

16 In a very few cases, the people Sontag wrote about were people she knew: Roland Barthes and Paul Goodman, for example, whose deaths inspired brief appreciations reprinted in “Under the Sign of Saturn.” Even in those elegies, the primary intimacy recorded is the one between writer and reader, and the reader — who is also, of course, a writer — is commemorating and pursuing a form of knowledge that lies somewhere between the cerebral and the biblical.

Because the intimacy is extended to Sontag’s reader, the love story becomes an implicit ménage à trois. Each essay enacts the effort — the dialectic of struggle, doubt, ecstasy and letdown — to know another writer, and to make you know him, too. And, more deeply though also more discreetly, to know her.

17 The version of this essay that I least want to write — the one that keeps pushing against my resistance to it — is the one that uses Sontag as a cudgel against the intellectual deficiencies and the deficient intellectuals of the present. It’s almost comically easy to plot a vector of decline from then to now. Why aren’t the kids reading Canetti? Why don’t trade publishers print collections of essays about European writers and avant-garde filmmakers? Sontag herself was not immune to such laments. In 1995, she mourned the death of cinema. In 1996, she worried that “the very idea of the serious (and the honorable) seems quaint, ‘unrealistic’ to most people.”

Worse, there are ideas and assumptions abroad in the digital land that look like debased, parodic versions of positions she staked out half a century ago. The “new sensibility” she heralded in the ’60s, “dedicated both to an excruciating seriousness and to fun and wit and nostalgia,” survives in the form of a frantic, algorithm-fueled eclecticism. The popular meme admonishing critics and other designated haters to shut up and “let people enjoy things” looks like an emoji-friendly update of “Against Interpretation,” with “enjoy things” a safer formulation than Sontag’s “erotics of art.”

That isn’t what she meant, any more than her prickly, nuanced “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” had much to do with the Instagram-ready insouciance of this year’s Met Gala, which borrowed the title for its theme. And speaking of the ’Gram, its ascendance seems to confirm the direst prophecies of “On Photography,” which saw the unchecked spread of visual media as a kind of ecological catastrophe for human consciousness.

18 In other ways, the Sontag of the ’60s and ’70s can strike current sensibilities as problematic or outlandish. She wrote almost exclusively about white men. She believed in fixed hierarchies and absolute standards. She wrote at daunting length with the kind of unapologetic erudition that makes people feel bad. Even at her most polemical, she never trafficked in contrarian hot takes. Her name will never be the answer to the standard, time-killing social-media query “What classic writer would be awesome on Twitter?” The tl;dr of any Sontag essay could only be every word of it.

Sontag was a queer, Jewish woman writer who disdained the rhetoric of identity. She was diffident about disclosing her sexuality. Moser criticizes her for not coming out in the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, when doing so might have been a powerful political statement. The political statements that she did make tended to get her into trouble. In 1966, she wrote that “the white race is the cancer of human history.” In 1982, in a speech at Town Hall in Manhattan, she called communism “fascism with a human face.” After Sept. 11, she cautioned against letting emotion cloud political judgment. “Let’s by all means grieve together, but let’s not be stupid together.”

That doesn’t sound so unreasonable now, but the bulk of Sontag’s writing served no overt or implicit ideological agenda. Her agenda — a list of problems to be tackled rather than a roster of positions to be taken — was stubbornly aesthetic. And that may be the most unfashionable, the most shocking, the most infuriating thing about her.

19 Right now, at what can feel like a time of moral and political emergency, we cling to sentimental bromides about the importance of art. We treat it as an escape, a balm, a vague set of values that exist beyond the ugliness and venality of the market and the state. Or we look to art for affirmation of our pieties and prejudices. It splits the difference between resistance and complicity.

Sontag was also aware of living in emergency conditions, in a world menaced by violence, environmental disaster, political polarization and corruption. But the art she valued most didn’t soothe the anguish of modern life so much as refract and magnify its agonies. She didn’t read — or go to movies, plays, museums or dance performances — to retreat from that world but to bring herself closer to it. What art does, she says again and again, is confront the nature of human consciousness at a time of historical crisis, to unmake and redefine its own terms and procedures. It confers a solemn obligation: “From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.”

20 “Consciousness” is one of her keywords, and she uses it in a way that may have an odd ring to 21st-century ears. It’s sometimes invoked now, in a weak sense, as a synonym for the moral awareness of injustice. Its status as a philosophical problem, meanwhile, has been diminished by the rise of cognitive science, which subordinates the mysteries of the human mind to the chemical and physical operations of the brain.

But consciousness as Sontag understands it has hardly vanished, because it names a phenomenon that belongs — in ways that escape scientific analysis — to both the individual and the species. Consciousness inheres in a single person’s private, incommunicable experience, but it also lives in groups, in cultures and populations and historical epochs. Its closest synonym is thought, which similarly dwells both within the walls of a solitary skull and out in the collective sphere.

If Sontag’s great theme was consciousness, her great achievement was as a thinker. Usually that label is reserved for theorists and system-builders — Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud — but Sontag doesn’t quite belong in that company. Instead, she wrote in a way that dramatized how thinking happens. The essays are exciting not just because of the ideas they impart but because you feel within them the rhythms and pulsations of a living intelligence; they bring you as close to another person as it is possible to be.

21 “Under the Sign of Saturn” opens in a “tiny room in Paris” where she has been living for the previous year — “small bare quarters” that answer “some need to strip down, to close off for a while, to make a new start with as little as possible to fall back on.” Even though, according to Sigrid Nunez, Sontag preferred to have other people around her when she was working, I tend to picture her in the solitude of that Paris room, which I suppose is a kind of physical manifestation, a symbol, of her solitary consciousness. A consciousness that was animated by the products of other minds, just as mine is activated by hers. If she’s alone in there, I can claim the privilege of being her only company.

Which is a fantasy, of course. She has had better readers, and I have loved other writers. The metaphors of marriage and possession, of pleasure and power, can be carried only so far. There is no real harm in reading casually, promiscuously, abusively or selfishly. The page is a safe space; every word is a safe word. Your lover might be my husband.

It’s only reading. By which I mean: It’s everything.

A.O. Scott is a chief film critic at The Times and the author of “Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth.” He last wrote for the magazine about the great film performances of 2018.

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Maya Angelou

Poet, dancer, singer, activist, and scholar Maya Angelou was a world-famous author. She was best known for her unique and pioneering autobiographical writing style.

On April 4, 1928, Marguerite Ann Johnson, known to the world as Maya Angelou, was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Due to her parents’ tumultuous marriage and subsequent divorce, Angelou went to live with her paternal grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas at an early age. Her older brother, Bailey, gave Angelou her nickname “Maya.”

Returning to her mother’s care briefly at the age of seven, Angelou was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. He was later jailed and then killed when released from jail. Believing that her confession of the trauma had a hand in the man’s death, Angelou became mute for six years. During her mutism and into her teens, she again lived with her grandmother in Arkansas.

Angelou’s interest in the written word and the English language was evident from an early age. Throughout her childhood, she wrote essays, poetry, and kept a journal. When she returned to Arkansas, she took an interest in poetry and memorized works by Shakespeare and Poe.

Prior to the start of World War II, Angelou moved back in with her mother, who at this time was living in Oakland, California. She attended George Washington High School and took dance and drama courses at the California Labor School.

When war broke out, Angelou applied to join the Women’s Army Corps. However, her application was rejected because of her involvement in the California Labor School, which was said to have Communist ties. Determined to gain employment, despite being only 15 years old, she decided to apply for the position of a streetcar conductor. Many men had left their jobs to join the services, enabling women to fill them. However, Angelou was barred from applying at first because of her race. But she was undeterred. Every day for three weeks, she requested a job application, but was denied. Finally, the company relented and handed her an application. Because she was under the legal working age, she wrote that she was 19. She was accepted for the position and became the first African American woman to work as a streetcar conductor in San Francisco. Angelou was employed for a semester but then decided to return to school. She graduated from Mission High School in the summer of 1944 and soon after gave birth to her only child, Clyde Bailey (Guy) Johnson.

After graduation, Angelou undertook a series of odd jobs to support herself and her son. In 1949, she married Tosh Angelos, an electrician in the US Navy. She adopted a form of his surname and kept it throughout her life, though the marriage ended in divorce in 1952.

Angelou was also noted for her talents as a singer and dancer, particularly in the calypso and cabaret styles. In the 1950s, she performed professionally in the US, Europe, and northern Africa, and sold albums of her recordings.

In 1950, African American writers in New York City formed the Harlem Writers Guild to nurture and support the publication of Black authors. Angelou joined the Guild in 1959. She also became active in the Civil Rights Movement and served as the northern coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a prominent African American advocacy organization

In 1969, Angelou published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , an autobiography of her early life. Her tale of personal strength amid childhood trauma and racism resonated with readers and was nominated for the National Book Award. Many schools sought to ban the book for its frank depiction of sexual abuse, but it is credited with helping other abuse survivors tell their stories.  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has been translated into numerous languages and has sold over a million copies worldwide. Angelou eventually published six more autobiographies, culminating in 2013’s Mom & Me & Mom.   

She wrote numerous poetry volumes, such as the Pulitzer Prize-nominated  Just Give me a Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971), as well as several essay collections. She also recorded spoken albums of her poetry, including “On the Pulse of the Morning,” for which she won a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album. The poem was originally written for and delivered at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993. She also won a Grammy in 1995, and again in 2002, for her spoken albums of poetry.

Angelou carried out a wide variety of activities on stage and screen as a writer, actor, director, and producer. In 1972, she became the first African American woman to have her screen play turned into a film with the production of Georgia, Georgia . Angelou earned a Tony nomination in 1973 for her supporting role in Jerome Kitty’s play Look Away , and portrayed Kunta Kinte’s grandmother in the television miniseries Roots in 1977.

She was recognized by many organizations both nationally and internationally for her contributions to literature. In 1981, Wake Forest University offered Angelou the Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. President Clinton awarded Angelou the National Medal of Arts in 2000. In 2012, she was a member of the inaugural class inducted into the Wake Forest University Writers Hall of Fame. The following year, she received the National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award for outstanding service to the American literary community. Angelou also gave many commencement speeches and was awarded more than 30 honorary degrees in her lifetime.

Angelou died on May 28, 2014. Several memorials were held in her honor, including ones at Wake Forest University and Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. To honor her legacy, the US Postal Service issued a stamp with her likeness on it in 2015. (The US Postal Service mistakenly included a quote on the stamp that has long been associated with Angelou but was actually first written by Joan Walsh Anglund .) 

In 2010, President Barack Obama awarded Angelou the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. It was a fitting recognition for Angelou’s remarkable and inspiring career in the arts.

Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. (New York: Random House, 1969). Angelou, Maya. Maya Angelou: A Glorious Celebration. (New York: Doubleday, 2008).

“Poet – Maya Angelou.” Academy of American Poets. Accessed August 8, 2017. https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/maya-angelou

Brown, Emma. “Maya Angelou, Writer and Poet, dies at age 86.” The Washington Post, May 28, 2014. Accessed August 8, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/maya-angelou-writer-and-poet-dies-at-age-86/2014/05/28/2948ef5e-c5da-11df-94e1-c5afa35a9e59_story.html?utm_term=.408fffb9a82c

Brown , DeNeen L. “Maya Angelou honored for her first job as a street car conductor in San Francisco.” The Washington Post, March 12, 2014. Accessed August 8, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/local/wp/2014/03/12/maya-angelou-honored-for-her-first-job-as-a-street-car-conductor-in-san-francisco/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.92c836957f2f

“About Harlem Writers Guild.” Harlem Writers Guild. Accessed August 10, 2017. http://theharlemwritersguild.org/about.html

Moore, Lucinda. “Growing Up Maya Angelou.” Smithsonian.com, April 2013. Accessed August 8, 2017. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/growing-up-maya-angelou-79582387/

Nixon, Ron. “Postal Service Won’t Reissue Maya Angelou Stamp.” The New York Times, April 8, 2017. Accessed August 8, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/us/postal-service-wont-reissue-maya-angelou-stamp.html

“History.” Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Accessed August 10, 2017. http://nationalsclc.org/about-us/history/

Thursby, Jacqueline S. "Angelou, Maya (4 Apr. 1928–28 May 2014), writer, performer, and activist." American National Biography. 29 Nov. 2018; Accessed 7 Dec. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.013.00700

“Dr. Maya Angelou.” National Book Foundation. Accessed December 7, 2021. https://www.nationalbook.org/people/dr-maya-angelou/#fullBio

MLA - Spring, Kelly. “Maya Angelou." National Women's History Museum. National Women's History Museum, 2017. Date accessed.

Chicago - Spring, Kelly. "Maya Angelou." National Women's History Museum. 2017. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/maya-angelou.

Photo Credit:  MAYA ANGELOU, circa 1976. Courtesy: CSU Archives / Everett Collection. 

Angelou, Maya. Just Give me a Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie . (New York: Bantam, 1976).

Angelou, Maya. Mom & Me & Mom . (London: Virago, 2013).

“THE INAUGURATION; Maya Angelou: 'On the Pulse of Morning’.” The New York Times, January 21 1993.  http://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/21/us/the-inauguration-maya-angelou-on-the-pulse-of-morning.html Classroom Posters:

• Maya Angelou Classroom Poster (11x17 in) | Maya Angelou Classroom Poster (24x36 in)

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Biography of Judith Sargent Murray, Early Feminist and Writer

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Judith Sargent Murray (May 1, 1751–July 6, 1820) was an early American feminist who wrote essays on political, social, and religious themes. She was also a gifted poet and dramatist, and her letters, some recently discovered, give insight into her life during and after the American Revolution. She is especially known for her essays about the American Revolution under the pseudonym "The Gleaner" and for her feminist essay, "On the Equality of the Sexes." 

Fast Facts: Judith Sargent Murray

• Known For : Early feminist essayist, poet, novelist, and dramatist
• Born : May 1, 1751 in Gloucester, Massachusetts
• Parents : Winthrop Sargent and Judith Saunders
• Died : July 6, 1820 in Natchez, Mississippi
• Education : Tutored at home
• Published Works : On the Equality of the Sexes, Sketch of the Present Situation in America, Story of Margaretta, Virtue Triumphant , and The Traveller Returned
• Spouse(s) : Captain John Stevens (m. 1769–1786); Rev. John Murray (m. 1788–1809).
• Children : With John Murray: George (1789) who died as an infant, and a daughter, Julia Maria Murray (1791–1822)

Judith Sargent Murray was born Judith Sargent on May 1, 1751, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, to shipowner and merchant Captain Winthrop Sargent (1727–1793) and his wife Judith Saunders (1731–1793). She was the oldest of the eight Sargent children. At first, Judith was educated at home and learned basic reading and writing. Her brother Winthrop, who was intended to go to Harvard, received a more advanced education at home, but when their parents recognized Judith's exceptional abilities she was allowed to share Winthrop's training in classical Greek and Latin. Winthrop went did go on to Harvard , and Judith later noted that she, being female, had no such possibilities .

Her first marriage, on October 3, 1769, was to Captain John Stevens, a well-to-do sea captain and trader. They had no children but adopted two of her husband's nieces and one of her own, Polly Odell.

Universalism

In the 1770s, Judith Stevens turned away from the Calvinism of the Congregational church she was raised in and became involved in Universalism. Calvinists said that only believers could be "saved," and nonbelievers were doomed. In contrast, Universalists believed that all human beings could be saved and all people were equal. The movement was brought to Massachusetts by Rev. John Murray, who arrived in Gloucester in 1774, and Judith and her families the Sargents and the Stevens converted to Universalism. Judith Sargent Stevens and John Murray began a long correspondence and respectful friendship: in this she defied custom, which suggested it was suspect for a married woman to correspond with a man who was unrelated to her.

By 1775, the Stevens family had fallen into serious financial difficulties when the American Revolution interfered with shipping and trade, difficulties that may have been heightened by Stevens' mismanagement of finances. To help out, Judith began writing; her first poems were written in 1775. Judith's first essay was "Desultory Thoughts upon the Utility of Encouraging a Degree of Self-Complacency, Especially in Female Bosoms," which was published in 1784 under the pseudonym Constancia in the Boston periodical, Gentleman and Lady's Town and Country Magazine . In 1786, Captain Stevens, to avoid debtor's prison and in hopes of turning his finances around, sailed to the West Indies, but he died there in 1786.

After the death of Captain Stevens, the friendship between John Murray and Judith Stevens blossomed into courtship, and on October 6, 1788, they married. 

Travel and a Widening Sphere

Judith Sargent Murray accompanied her new husband on many of his preaching tours, and they counted among acquaintances and friends many early leaders of the United States, including John and Abigail Adams, Benjamin Franklin's family, and Martha Custis Washington, with whom they sometimes stayed. Her letters describing these visits and her correspondence with friends and relatives are invaluable in understanding the daily life in the federal period of American history.

Throughout this period, Judith Sargent Murray wrote poetry, essays, and drama: some biographers suggest the loss of her son in 1790 and her own survival of what would be called postpartum depression today spurred a burst of creativity. Her essay, " On the Equality of the Sexes ," written in 1779, was finally published in 1790. The essay challenges the prevailing theory that men and women are not intellectually equal, and among all of her writings, that essay established her as an early feminist theorist. She added a letter including her interpretation of the biblical Adam and Eve story, insisting that Eve was equal, if not superior, to Adam. Her daughter, Julia Maria Murray, was born in 1791.

Essays and Drama

In February, 1792, Murray began a series of essays for the Massachusetts Magazine titled "The Gleaner" (also her pseudonym), which focused on the politics of the new nation of America as well as religious and moral themes, including women's equality. One of her common early topics was the importance of educating female children—Julia Maria was 6 months old when her mother began her column. Her novel, "The Story of Margaretta," was written in a series among "The Gleaner" essays. It is the tale of a young woman who falls prey to a sinister lover and rejects him, and she is portrayed not as a "fallen woman" but rather as an intelligent heroine who is capable of forging an independent life for herself.

The Murrays moved from Gloucester to Boston in 1793, where together they founded a Universalist congregation. Several of her writings reveal her role in shaping the tenets of Universalism, which was the first American religion to ordain women.

Murray wrote drama first in response to a call for original work by American writers (also directed to her husband, John Murray), and though her plays did not find critical acclaim, they did achieve some popular success. Her first play was "The Medium: or Virtue Triumphant," and it opened and quickly closed on the Boston stage. It was, however, the first play dramatized there by an American author.

In 1798, Murray published a collection of her writings in three volumes as "The Gleaner." She thereby became the first American woman to self-publish a book. The books were sold on subscription, to help support the family. John Adams and George Washington were among the subscribers. In 1802 she helped to found a school for girls in Dorchester.

Later Life and Death

John Murray, whose health had been frail for some time, had a stroke in 1809 that paralyzed him for the rest of his life. In 1812, her daughter Julia Maria married a wealthy Mississippian named Adam Louis Bingaman, whose family had contributed somewhat to his education while he lived with Judith and John Murray.

By 1812, the Murrays were experiencing painful financial issues. Judith Murray edited and published John Murray's letters and sermons that same year, as "Letters and Sketches of Sermons." John Murray died in 1815, and in 1816, Judith Sargent Murray published his autobiography, "Records of the Life of the Rev. John Murray." In her last years, Judith Sargent Murray continued her correspondence with her family and friends; her daughter and husband supported her financially in her later life, and she moved to their home in Natchez, Mississippi in 1816.

Judith Sargent Murray died on July 6, 1820, in Natchez at the age of 69.

Judith Sargent Murray was largely forgotten as a writer until late in the 20th century. Alice Rossi resurrected "On the Equality of the Sexes" for a collection called "The Feminist Papers" in 1974, bringing it to wider attention.

In 1984, Unitarian Universalist minister, Gordon Gibson, found Judith Sargent Murray's letter books in Natchez, Mississippi—books into which she kept copies of her letters. (They are now in the Mississippi Archives.) She is the only woman from that period of time for whom we have such letter books, and these copies have allowed scholars to discover much about not only Judith Sargent Murray's life and ideas, but also about daily life in the time of the American Revolution and early Republic.

In 1996, Bonnie Hurd Smith founded the Judith Sargent Murray Society to promote Judith's life and work. Smith provided useful suggestions for details in this profile, which also drew on other resources about Judith Sargent Murray.

• Field, Vena Bernadette. "Constantia: A Study of the Life and Works of Judith Sargent Murray, 1751-1920." Orono: University of Maine Studies, 2012.
• Harris, Sharon M., ed. "Selected Writings of Judith Sargent Murray." New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Murray, Judith Sargent [as Constancia]. "The Gleaner: A Miscellaneous Production, Volumes 1–3." Boston: J. Thomas and E.T. Andrews, 1798.
• Rossi, Alice S., ed. "The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir." Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1973.
• Smith, Bonnie Hurd. "Judith Sargent Murray and the Emergence of an American Women's Literary Traditions." Farmington Hills, Michigan: Gale Researcher Guide, 2018.
• Kritzer, Amelia Howe. “ Playing with Republican Motherhood: Self-Representation in Plays by Susanna Haswell Rowson and Judith Sargent Murray .” Early American Literature 31.2, 1996. 150–166.  
• Skemp, Sheila L. "First Lady of Letters: Judith Sargent Murray and the Struggle for Female Independence." Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
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“Trifles” by Susan Glaspell: Murder, She Wrote Essay

Susan Glaspell’s Trifles is a complex piece of literature to analyze. Beginning in the middle of the action without an introduction laying out the situation, it forces the reader to rely fully on dialogue to understand what happens in the story. The single act gives a glimpse into the investigation of the murder of John Wright, who is believed to have been killed by his wife, Minnie. Although not a single line is spoken by either of those characters, one can assess their relationship based on the cues from the text and historical evidence.

The first clues appear when Hale describes Minnie’s behavior shortly after the murder. As Lewis Hale enters the house, he finds Minnie “rockin’ back and forth” in her chair, looking emptily into the distance and patting her apron (James et al. “9: Power and Responsibility”). When he finds out about the murder, Hale notes Mrs. Wright was looking “unconcerned” (James et al. “9: Power and Responsibility”). Minnie’s remark and behavior indicate her indifference toward the matter. This shows a troubling relationship between the spouses, which is soon confirmed by the discovery of a dead canary-bird by Lewis Hale’s wife, Mrs. Hale, and the Sheriff’s wife, Mrs. Peters.

When Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters find a broken birdcage, the neighbor’s wife comments that Minnie used to be a good singer. She continues to tell that Mr. Wright was harsh, and spending time with him was unpleasant. As they discover a dead canary-bird, strangled similarly as was Mr. Wright, Mrs. Hale makes an insightful statement: “No, Wright wouldn’t like the bird – a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that, too.” (James et al. “9: Power and Responsibility”) Furthermore, the interaction of the two women makes it evident that the couple did not have children and did not live in harmony. As Mrs. Hale says, “I know how things can be – for women,” she hints toward difficult spousal relationships in her neighborhood, possibly indicating abusive and unhappy marriages (James et al. “9: Power and Responsibility”). As such, Glaspell carefully plants cues that allow the reader to solve the crime.

Apart from the highlighted remarks, it is important to remember the historical context of this play. It was written in 1916 when the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the US was at its peak, giving Glaspell a platform to highlight the difficult place of women in her society (Karagoz Gumuscubuk 398). This contributes to the reader’s understanding of the Wright family dynamic, suggesting a lack of freedom for Minnie that could have led to the murder. Similarly, Chaisilwattana et al. suggest that Trifles is about the “repression of women’s domesticated farm life,” further substantiating the above assumption (4). Thus, a combination of academic research and literary analysis lets the reader fill in the blanks for Minnie’s motive to murder her husband.

In conclusion, a reader can assemble the hints placed by the author in the text, together with the historical context of the play into a vague representation of the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Wright. Indifference toward her husband’s death, a dead bird, and personality differences of the spouses indicate an unhappy marriage. The historical context suggests limited opportunities for females to express themselves or defend their rights. Together, these clues help a reader imagine Mrs. Wright’s everyday reality.

Works Cited

Chaisilwattana, Yuwapa et al. “The Housewife and the Stage: A Study of Domestic Space and Homemaking in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles”. Journal of Liberal Arts , vol. 15, no. 2, 2015, pp. 1-23.

James, Missy et al. Reading Literature and Writing Argument, 6 th ed. Pearson, 2016. Pearson Education E-book . Web.

Karagoz Gumuscubuk, Ozlem. “Domestic Space: A Terrain of Empowerment and Entrapment in Susan Glaspell’s ‘Trifles.’” Dokuz Eylul University Journal of Graduate School of Social Sciences , vol. 21, no. 2. 2019, pp. 397–407.

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IvyPanda. (2022, May 11). "Trifles" by Susan Glaspell: Murder, She Wrote. https://ivypanda.com/essays/investigating-glaspells-trifles/

""Trifles" by Susan Glaspell: Murder, She Wrote." IvyPanda , 11 May 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/investigating-glaspells-trifles/.

IvyPanda . (2022) '"Trifles" by Susan Glaspell: Murder, She Wrote'. 11 May.

IvyPanda . 2022. ""Trifles" by Susan Glaspell: Murder, She Wrote." May 11, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/investigating-glaspells-trifles/.

1. IvyPanda . ""Trifles" by Susan Glaspell: Murder, She Wrote." May 11, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/investigating-glaspells-trifles/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . ""Trifles" by Susan Glaspell: Murder, She Wrote." May 11, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/investigating-glaspells-trifles/.

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The 2 Madonna Songs That ‘Feel Like Home’ to Britney Spears

Britney Spears is one of numerous female pop stars who will be forever compared to Madonna . Fascinatingly, Spears said two of Madonna’s songs sound timeless to her. The two songs have nothing in common. 

Britney Spears called 2 Madonna songs ‘iconic’ in an essay she wrote for Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone ranked Madonna No. 36 on their list of the best artists of all time. As part of that article, the “… Baby One More Time” star explained why she admires the Queen of Pop. “Madonna was the first female pop star to take control of every aspect of her career and to take responsibility for creating her image, no matter how much flak she might get,” she wrote. “She’s proved that she can do so many different things — music and movies and being a parent, too. 

“Her music has become iconic: Songs like ‘Holiday’ or ‘Live to Tell’ are timeless — not just disposable hits,” Spears added. “They feel like home. She has her spells of being moody and vibey and spiritual, but her words are so easy to relate to.”

Spears lumping “Holiday” in with “Live to Tell” is fascinating. The former is a simple bubblegum pop song whose main appeal is its groove. It’s lyrics are so simple that a small child could understand them. Meanwhile, “Live to Tell” is an oblique, dramatic ballad that shows off the singer’s more mature side. 

Britney Spears worked with the Queen of Pop multiple times

Spears elaborated on her love for the Material Girl . “She’s a diva and does what she wants, but she’s a loving person. Madonna has done so much, and she’s been around so long, and the b**** still looks good,” Spears wrote. “She’s spent years in the public eye, and that can be really hard for anyone to deal with. But she dug deep and started writing from her heart.”

The connection between Spears and Madonna extends beyond the essay. The two pop stars worked together on the dance song “Me Against the Music” and kissed each other during a memorable MTV performance. Madonna also made an appearance in the documentary Britney: For the Record , where she compared Spears to herself. Spears also appeared onstage with Madonna to perform “Human Nature” while on tour.

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How Madonna’s ‘Holiday’ and ‘Live to Tell’ performed

While “Holiday” is often cited as one of Madonna’s best songs, it wasn’t one of her biggest songs. The tune peaked at No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 , staying on the chart for 21 weeks. “Holiday” appeared on the album Madonna . That record reached No. 8 on the Billboard 200 and remained on the chart for 168 weeks — longer than any of the singer’s other albums.

“Live to Tell” performed better than “Holiday,” probably because it came out after Madonna became a megastar. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 for a week and stayed on the chart for 18 weeks in total. “Live to Tell” appeared on the album True Blue . That record reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for five of its 82 weeks on the chart.

“Holiday” and “Live to Tell” are two wildly different songs in Madonna’s discography but they have a similar effect on Spears.

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The Nora Ephron We Forget

By Rachel Syme

“I have spent a great deal of my life discovering that my ambitions and fantasies—which I once thought of as totally unique—turn out to be clichés,” Nora Ephron wrote in 1973, in a column for Esquire . Ephron was then thirty-two, and her subject was the particular clichéd ambition of becoming Dorothy Parker, a writer she had idolized in her youth. Ephron first met Parker as a child, in her pajamas, at her screenwriter parents’ schmoozy Hollywood parties. They crossed paths again when Ephron was twenty; she remembered the meeting in crisp detail, describing Parker as “frail and tiny and twinkly.” But her encounters with the queen of the bon mot weren’t the point. “The point is the legend,” Ephron wrote. “I grew up on it and coveted it desperately. All I wanted in this world was to come to New York and be Dorothy Parker. The funny lady. The only lady at the table.”

Unfortunately, after Ephron moved to Manhattan, in 1962, she discovered that she was far from the only lady at the table to have a “Dorothy Parker problem.” Every woman with a typewriter and an inflated sense of confidence believed that she was going to be crowned the next Miss One-Liner. To make matters worse, once Ephron started reading deep into Parker’s work, she found much of it to be corny and maudlin and, to use Ephron’s withering words, “so embarrassing.” Reluctantly, she let her childhood hero go. “Before one looked too hard at it,” Ephron wrote, “it was a lovely myth.”

In its way, Ephron’s column is a love letter to Parker—albeit one dipped in vinegar, as so much of Ephron’s best work was. To Ephron, close reading, even when it finds the subject sorely wanting, is the very foundation of romance. If Ephron has a lasting legacy as a writer, a filmmaker, and a cultural icon, it’s this: she showed how we can fall in and out of love with people based solely on the words that they speak and write. Words are important. Choose them carefully. And certainly don’t cling to a myth just because it’s lovely. It’s only in pushing past lazy clichés that a love affair moves from theoretical to tangible, from something a girl believes to something a woman knows how to work with.

The great irony of Ephron’s afterlife, then, is how quickly she’s been reduced to sentimental lore. Since her death, a decade ago, at seventy-one, the romanticization of her work has swelled like a movie score. A writer of tart, acidic observation has been turned into an influencer: revered for her aesthetic, and for her arsenal of life-style tips. On TikTok, memes like “Meg Ryan Fall”—the actress starred in Ephron hits like “When Harry Met Sally,” “Sleepless in Seattle,” and “You’ve Got Mail”—celebrate the prim oxford shirts, baggy khakis, and chunky knit sweaters that Ephron immortalized onscreen. Burgeoning home cooks cling to her vinaigrette recipe from “Heartburn,” her 1983 novel, not because it’s unique (it’s Grey Poupon mustard, red-wine vinegar, and olive oil, whisked together until thick and creamy) but because it’s Nora’s . And giddy writers still stream into New York with their own “Nora Ephron problem,” dreaming of an Upper West Side fantasia where they can sit at Cafe Lalo, eat a single slice of flourless chocolate cake, and deliver a withering retort to any man who dares disturb their peace. I should know; I was one of them.

Transforming Ephron into a cuddly heroine, a figure of mood and atmosphere, obscures the artist whose interest, above all, was in verbal precision. (As Ryan once said, “Her allegiance to language was sometimes more than her allegiance to someone’s feelings.”) In “Nora Ephron: A Biography” (Chicago Review), the journalist Kristin Marguerite Doidge continues the trend. Doidge’s book is warm, dutiful, and at times illuminating. It’s also, I’m sorry to say, often bland, and deeply in thrall to Ephron mythologies: the plucky gal Friday who worked her way from the Newsweek typing pool to a sprawling apartment in the Apthorp, the jilted wife who got her revenge in the pages of a soapy novel, the woman director holding her own with the big boys. “Why does Nora Ephron still matter?” Doidge writes in the introduction. “Because she gives us hope. The intelligent, self-described cynic was the one who helped us see that it’s never too late to go after your dreams.” This conflates Ephron with the genre—romance—that she interrogated. Ephron still matters, of course, but not because she embodied enthusiasm or perseverance. Dreams are useless, she might have clucked, if you can’t pick them apart on the page.

Ephron was born in New York City in 1941, to the playwrights Henry and Phoebe Ephron. When she was five, the family moved to Los Angeles, where the Ephrons wrote for the movies. Henry and Phoebe were talented—they penned several sharp screwball comedies, including the Hepburn-Tracy vehicle “Desk Set”—but they also struggled, battling both alcoholism and the occasional allegation of Communist sympathizing. Doidge doesn’t have much original research about Nora’s youth; many of her quotes come from Ephron’s public interviews and essays, as well as from “Everything Is Copy,” a 2015 documentary directed by Ephron’s son, the journalist Jacob Bernstein. But she does speak to a few of Ephron’s old summer-camp friends, one of whom recalls Ephron as a “natural leader.” The most telling detail is from Ephron’s years at Camp Tocaloma, in Arizona, where she would regale her bunkmates with her mother’s lively letters from home. “My friends—first at camp, then at college—would laugh and listen, utterly rapt at the sophistication of it all,” Ephron said in her mother’s eulogy, in 1971.

Doidge asserts that answering these letters allowed Ephron to “gain confidence in her writing.” She likely also gained something more specific: a love for the epistolary form. She found that her mother, both difficult and opaque in life, was a rollicking delight in her correspondence, and, furthermore, that Phoebe gave generously of herself there in ways she could not have otherwise. Writing redeems, and writing runs cover. Many Ephron acolytes interpret the phrase “Everything is copy,” which Ephron attributed to her mother, as encouragement that life never hands you material that you can’t use. But the phrase feels more portentous than exhilarating, given the source. “I now believe that what my mother meant was this: When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you,” Ephron once said. “But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh, so you become a hero rather than the victim of the joke.” Of course, that’s only the case if you are funnier in the telling than you are in the falling.

Phoebe’s letters to Nora were a challenge and an invitation; to spar, to volley, to narratively step up to the plate. The love language of the Ephron home was that of bravura back-and-forth dispatches: you spoke intensely, and someone else responded in kind. Doidge describes a house in which the four Ephron daughters learned to read early, and where the parents saw family dinner, served promptly at six-thirty, as “an opportunity for the young girls to learn the art of storytelling.” (“The competition for airtime was Darwinian,” Hallie, the second-youngest, recalled.) All four girls became writers. Ephron became an obsessive reader, too, not just of her favorite books but of people and their patterns.

After graduating from Wellesley, Ephron moved to a series of small apartments in New York City, aiming to become a journalist. According to Doidge, she spent her time working as a grunt at Newsweek and reading constantly at home. “She’d curl up on her new, wide-wale corduroy couch with a cup of hot tea and her dog-eared paperback copy of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook ,” Doidge writes. But Ephron’s reading wasn’t entirely recreational. She was learning how to ingest a text and riff on it, to pull what she needed to make it her own. This skill flourished during the newspaper strike of 1962, which shut down every major paper in the city. Ephron’s friend the editor Victor Navasky—who would go on to edit The Nation —began to print parodies of the New York City rags. He asked Ephron if she could write a parody of Leonard Lyons’s gossip column in the New York Post . Ephron voyaged to the Newsweek archives, read clippings of Lyons’s column, and parroted his voice so well that her work caught the attention of the Post’s publisher, Dorothy Schiff. “If they can parody the Post , they can write for it,” Schiff said. Ephron landed her first gig as a staff reporter.

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Ephron’s abilities made her a dogged beat journalist, but they also made her a star at a moment when journalism was changing, with a wave of writers bringing a new verve and sense of style to the page. Ephron soon moved to Esquire , producing wildly popular essays on the media, feminism, and having small breasts. Phoebe Ephron once told her daughter to write as if she were mailing a letter, “then, tear off the salutation”; this advice, combined with Ephron’s observational prowess, forged her signature voice. Whereas some of her peers, like Joan Didion or Susan Sontag, looked at the world and wrote down what they saw with chilly detachment, Ephron reported back with a conspiratorial sense of intimacy, as if she were chatting with the reader over an order of cheesecake. Even when Ephron was cruel—and she could be vicious; after she left the Post , she lambasted Schiff as “skittishly feminine”—it felt light, fizzy, precise, but never ponderous.

This was true even when she had skin in the game. Ephron wrote her first novel, “Heartburn,” after discovering that her second husband, the journalist Carl Bernstein, was cheating on her while she was pregnant. Ephron had separated from her first husband, the humorist Dan Greenburg, by 1974; she married Bernstein two years later. “Heartburn” is a thinly veiled account of their divorce, and it opens in medias res: “The first day I did not think it was funny. I didn’t think it was funny the third day either, but I managed to make a little joke about it.” Rachel Samstat, the narrator, is a food writer who drops original recipes into the text—but she is also a woman dissecting the end of her union, and doing so with Ephron’s trademark specificity. Samstat becomes a marriage detective, reading the signs of her husband’s infidelity with Sherlockian accuracy. Once, she notices a Virginia Slims cigarette butt in his apartment and knows immediately that he has been with another woman. He claims that he bummed it from a colleague. “I said that even copy girls at the office weren’t naive enough to smoke Virginia Slims,” Ephron writes. Relationships are full of codes and shorthand, little tells, both spoken and unspoken. By untangling the knot of her own pain, Ephron had stumbled onto her best material.

“Heartburn” became a best-seller and then, in 1986, a movie, starring Meryl Streep and directed by Mike Nichols. Ephron wrote the screenplay. As Doidge notes, she turned to film “partially out of pragmatism.” She was newly single and living with her two young children in the apartment of Robert Gottlieb, her editor. She could no longer afford to gallivant across the world, reporting pieces, so she began writing scripts to pay the bills. In doing so, she discovered a medium that combined the convivial dialogue of her mother’s letters with the ability to close-read people in three dimensions. It also allowed her to inspect her cynicism about love. Movies were for the masses, and they let Ephron puncture big, dopey, Hollywood myths about relationships while she was conjuring new ones.

Ephron’s films are highly literary—many of them are about reading and writing—and they suggest that language is at the heart of romance. The most obvious example is “You’ve Got Mail” (1998), in which Kathleen (Meg Ryan), a children’s-bookshop owner, falls in love with Joe (Tom Hanks), a corporate overlord opening a mega-bookstore that threatens her business. The two meet in an “Over Thirty” chat room and begin a lively anonymous correspondence, flinging taut observations at each other about their quirky experiences of the city. “Don’t you love New York in the fall?” Joe writes. “It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.” In another e-mail, Kathleen writes, “Once I read a story about a butterfly in the subway, and today, I saw one. . . . It got on at 42nd and got off at 59th, where I assume it was going to Bloomingdale’s to buy a hat that will turn out to be a mistake, as almost all hats are.” These notes are cozy and performative and a little dorky, the kind of thinky seduction that Ephron writes best. Of course, even in the golden age of AOL, few people wrote such e-mails. But this is Ephron’s version of movie magic: a world in which words are so important that you can fall for your enemy just because he knows how to use them.

Ephron’s romances are physically chaste but rhetorically hot. In “When Harry Met Sally” (1989), her breakthrough hit, the protagonists, played by Meg Ryan (a verbose journalist) and Billy Crystal (a verbose political consultant), spend a decade talking to each other, delivering long disquisitions as an extended form of foreplay. On a stroll through the park, Sally tells Harry about a recurring erotic dream in which a faceless man rips off her clothes. By asking a needling follow-up, Harry shows that he’s willing to read the monologue critically: “That’s it? A faceless guy rips off all your clothes, and that’s the sex fantasy you’ve been having since you were twelve?” Sally returns the serve. “Sometimes I vary it a little,” she says. “Which part?” Harry asks. “What I’m wearing,” Sally replies. What makes the scene funny isn’t Sally’s dream but the micro-adjustments she makes to it. Throughout the movie, she’s exacting in her word choices, even when ordering pie at a restaurant. (“I’d like the pie heated, and I don’t want the ice cream on the top, I want it on the side, and I’d like strawberry instead of vanilla if you have it. If not, then no ice cream, just whipped cream but only if it’s real. If it’s out of a can, then nothing.”) Romance, here, is a man telling a woman that he likes her for, and not in spite of, her exhaustive language. “I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich,” Harry says in the film’s climactic speech.

The idea of swooning over someone’s syntax so dramatically that you change your life appears again and again in Ephron’s work. In “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), Annie (Meg Ryan, playing another journalist) hears Sam (Tom Hanks) on a radio call-in show talking in soft, poignant detail about his dead wife. Though freshly engaged, she flies across the country in order to pursue him. Once again, the plot turns on a letter: Annie writes to Sam, suggesting that they meet at the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day. Once again, the rapport is resolutely nonphysical: Sam and Annie appear in just three brief scenes together. And once again Ephron slyly pokes at the tropes of courtship, using the grammar of classic, nineteen-fifties romance films to critique the genre. “You don’t want to be in love,” Annie’s best friend, played by Rosie O’Donnell, tells her. “You want to be in love in a movie!”

By then, Ephron had found the real thing. In 1987, she married Nicholas Pileggi, who wrote the books (and the screenplays) that became “Goodfellas” and “Casino,” and who remained with her until her death. In Ephron’s final film, “Julie & Julia” (2009), she explored her hallmark themes beyond the boundaries of time or traditional romance. The story flits between two threads: one, set in the fifties, in which Julia Child (Meryl Streep) strains to publish her first book, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” in a male-dominated industry, and another, set in the two-thousands, in which Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a failed novelist trapped in a soul-crushing job, becomes so devoted to Child’s book that she decides to cook each of its five hundred and twenty-four recipes in the course of a year. Also, she’ll blog about it.

“Julie & Julia” is perhaps Ephron’s most outwardly sentimental film, in that it’s the most effusive about the transformative acts of writing and being read. Child’s main journey is her struggle to complete the book, and the triumphant final shot freezes on Streep’s giddy face as she opens her first box of galleys from the publisher. Powell, in not only reading Child’s work but revisiting it, daily, with monklike commitment, enters into an ardent literary affair that ignites her dormant skills. Because she is reading, suddenly she can write; and, because she can write, she can be read, by her husband, by the public, and by book agents. Once she finds readers, she finds peace. Ephron considered herself an essentially “happy person,” but perhaps that was because she figured out exactly how she wanted to express herself at a young age. In Ephron’s world, the key to a fulfilled life was knowing how to put one word after another until they were undeniably yours, and the way to show affection was to push others to do the same. Many of Ephron’s friends, Doidge notes, said that she had a tendency to run their lives; to tell them how to do their hair or what to send as a birthday gift or how to roast a chicken. But what she was really doing was pressing them to make definitional choices. She read people closely, which was an act of care, and she gave ample line edits.

One of Ephron’s best pieces is a profile of the Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, which ran in Esquire in 1970. At the end of the essay, Ephron notes that she once wrote a freelance piece for Brown, and that the editor wanted Ephron to include a line about how women were allowed to take baths while menstruating. Ephron thought this addition was preposterous. “I hung up, convinced I had seen straight to the soul of Helen Gurley Brown. Straight to the foolishness, the tastelessness her critics so often accused her of,” she writes. “But I was wrong. She really isn’t that way at all.” Ephron realizes that she must meet Brown where she is, using Brown’s vocabulary for advising women how to live. “She’s just worried that somewhere out there is a girl who hasn’t taken a bath during her period since puberty . . . that somewhere out there is a mouseburger who doesn’t realize she has the capability of becoming anything, anything at all, anything she wants to, of becoming Helen Gurley Brown, for God’s sake. And don’t you see? She is only trying to help .” As in her essay on Parker, Ephron rejects gauzy sentiment for the salve of attention. She is reading Brown the way that Brown asks to be read. Isn’t it romantic? ♦

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Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay from ‘The 1619 Project’ wins commentary Pulitzer

Of all the thousands upon thousands of stories and projects produced by American media last year, perhaps the one most-talked about was The New York Times Magazine’s ambitious “The 1619 Project,” which recognized the 400th anniversary of the moment enslaved Africans were first brought to what would become the United States and how it forever changed the country.

It was a phenomenal piece of journalism.

And while the project in its entirety did not make the list of Pulitzer Prize finalists, the introductory essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones , the creator of the landmark project, was honored with a prestigious Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

After the announcement that she has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Hannah-Jones told the Times’ staff it was “the most important work of my life.”

While nearly impossible, and almost insulting, to try and describe in a handful of words or even sentences, Hannah-Jones’ essay was introduced with this headline: “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True.”

In her essay, Hannah-Jones wrote, “But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.”

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Hannah-Jones’ and “The 1619 Project,” however, were not without controversy. There was criticism of the project, particularly from conservatives. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich called it “propaganda.” A commentator for The Federalist tweeted the goal of the project was to “delegitimize America, and further divide and demoralize its citizenry.”

But the most noteworthy criticism came from a group of five historians. ln a letter to the Times , they wrote that they were “dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.” They added, “These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing.’ They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.”

Wall Street Journal assistant editorial features editor Elliot Kaufman wrote a column with the subhead: “The New York Times tries to rewrite U.S. history, but its falsehoods are exposed by surprising sources.”

In a rare move, the Times responded to the criticism with its own response . New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein wrote, “Though we respect the work of the signatories, appreciate that they are motivated by scholarly concern and applaud the efforts they have made in their own writings to illuminate the nation’s past, we disagree with their claim that our project contains significant factual errors and is driven by ideology rather than historical understanding. While we welcome criticism, we don’t believe that the request for corrections to The 1619 Project is warranted.”

That was just a portion of the rather lengthy and stern, but respectful response defending the project.

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In the end, the 1619 Project — and Hannah-Jones’ essay, in particular — will be remembered for one of the most impactful and thought-provoking pieces on race, slavery and its impact on America that we’ve ever seen.

And maybe there was another reason for the pushback besides those questioning its historical accuracy.

As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote in December , “U.S. history is often taught and popularly understood through the eyes of its great men, who are seen as either heroic or tragic figures in a global struggle for human freedom. The 1619 Project, named for the date of the first arrival of Africans on American soil, sought to place ‘the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.’ Viewed from the perspective of those historically denied the rights enumerated in America’s founding documents, the story of the country’s great men necessarily looks very different.”

There’s no question that Hannah-Jones’ essay, which requires the kind of smart thinking and discussion that this country needs to continue having, deserved to be recognized with a Pulitzer as the top commentary of 2019. After all, and this is not hyperbole, it’s one of the most important essays ever.

In addition, we should acknowledge the other two finalists in this category: Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins and Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez.

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Jenkins continues to be among the best sports columnists in the country. Meanwhile, has any writer done more to shine a light on homelessness than Lopez? This is the third time in the past four years (and fourth time overall) that Lopez has been a finalist in the commentary category.

In any other year, both would be deserving of Pulitzer Prizes. But 2019 will be remembered for Nikole Hannah-Jones’ powerful essay and project.

More Pulitzer coverage from Poynter

• With most newsrooms closed, Pulitzer Prize celebrations were a little different this year
• Here are the winners of the 2020 Pulitzer Prizes
• Here are the 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoons
• Pulitzers honor Ida B. Wells, an early pioneer of investigative journalism and civil rights icon
• Reporting about climate change was a winner in this year’s Pulitzers
• ‘Lawless,’ an expose of villages without police protection, wins Anchorage Daily News its third Public Service Pulitzer
• The iconic ‘This American Life’ won the first-ever ‘Audio Reporting’ Pulitzer
• The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for a novel climate change story

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A complete timeline of Sophia Bush and Ashlyn Harris' relationship

Sophia Bush confirmed that she and Ashlyn Harris were in a relationship in a Glamour cover story.Frazer Harrison/Getty Images; Dia Dipasupil/WireImage

• Sophia Bush and former US soccer player Ashlyn Harris began dating in 2023.
• Bush confirmed her and Harris' relationship and came out as queer in a Glamour cover story.

Sophia Bush has opened up about her relationship with Ashlyn Harris for the first time, six months after they were first romantically linked .

In an essay written for her April 2024 Glamour cover story, the " One Tree Hill " actor revealed that she and the recently retired professional soccer player reconnected in an ad-hoc divorcée support group following the end of their respective relationships.

Bush filed for divorce from her entrepreneur husband, Grant Hughes, in early August 2023 after just over a year of marriage.

Meanwhile, Harris, a former member of the United States Women's National Soccer Team, officially divorced her wife, fellow soccer pro Ali Krieger, in September 2023, per Page Six. The two had exchanged their vows less than four years earlier in December 2019 , ESPN reported.

Bush wrote in her Glamour essay that she "didn't expect to find love" in the support system she found to help her through her heartbreak.

"I don't know how else to say it other than: I didn't see it until I saw it," she continued. "And I think it's very easy not to see something that's been in front of your face for a long time when you'd never looked at it as an option and you had never been looked at as an option. What I saw was a friend with her big, happy life. And now I know she thought the same thing about me."

Here's a complete timeline of everything we know about Bush and Harris' relationship.

August 4, 2019: Sophia Bush and Ashlyn Harris are photographed together for the first time, possibly at their first meeting

In her Glamour essay, Bush wrote that she and Harris first met in 2019.

While she didn't elaborate on the details of when or where, that year the two were photographed together, speaking to comedian Travon Free at a US Women's Soccer Team Brunch in Los Angeles on August 4, 2019.

June 19, 2023: The pair appear on a panel at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sophia Bush (@sophiabush)

July 26, 2023: The pair pose alongside each other at a World Cup watch party.

A month later and back in America, Bush and Harris were publicly seen together during a World Cup watch party.

In one photo from the evening, they smiled for cameras alongside Harris' teammate, Sydney Leroux.

August 4, 2023: Bush files for divorce from her husband after 13 months of marriage.

Seven weeks after marking her first anniversary with Grant Hughes on Instagram by calling their marriage the "best decision" of her life, Bush began proceedings for their legal separation, People reported .

Bush and Hughes, who told Vogue they met a decade ago on a New Year's trip to Nicaragua, tied the knot at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June 2022.

Seven weeks after marking her first anniversary with Grant Hughes on Instagram by calling their marriage the best decision of her life, Bush began proceedings for their legal separation, People reported .

September 19, 2023: Harris files for divorce from former teammate Ali Krieger.

According to court documents obtained by Page Six , Harris submitted her petition stating that their union was "irretrievably broken." The news of their split wasn't reported until almost a month later, on October 11.

The pair, who met as USWNT teammates in 2010, share two adopted children: a daughter, Sloane, and a son, Ocean, according to People.

According to court documents obtained by Page Six , Harris submitted her petition stating that their union was irretrievably broken. The news of their split wasn't reported until almost a month later, on October 11.

October 17, 2023: People reports that Bush and Harris are seeing each other.

In October 2023, People reported that Bush and Harris were dating, citing an anonymous source close to the couple.

"After being friends for years, and running in the same social circles, Sophia and Ashlyn went out on their first dinner date a couple of weeks ago," one anonymous source told People. "This is so recent, and they are both beginning new chapters."

At the time, representatives for Bush and Harris did not respond to People's request for comment.

The same anonymous source told People that Krieger and Harris' divorce "began months ago," and that they had been living separately.

After being friends for years, and running in the same social circles, Sophia and Ashlyn went out on their first dinner date a couple of weeks ago, one anonymous source told People. This is so recent, and they are both beginning new chapters.

The same anonymous source told People that Krieger and Harris' divorce began months ago, and that they had been living separately.

October 19, 2023: Krieger insinuates that Harris was unfaithful by posting about being in her 'Beyoncé lemonade era'

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Ali Krieger (@alikrieger)

November 18, 2023: Harris denies that she had been unfaithful in her marriage.

In an Instagram post , Harris addressed the end of her marriage to Krieger, denying that she had cheated on her. The post did not mention Bush. In it, Harris wrote that she and Krieger planned to keep the news of their separation private until the end of Krieger's season, before it became public.

"Let me be clear: I did not step out on my marriage," she wrote in the post. "I was always faithful in my marriage, if not always totally happy. Like in many partnerships, there was work and therapy and processing done. None of this happened on a whim. We spent the entire summer working to tackle the separation and divorce steps outlined for us by our therapists, lawyers, and our shared agency."

Let me be clear: I did not step out on my marriage, she wrote in the post. I was always faithful in my marriage, if not always totally happy. Like in many partnerships, there was work and therapy and processing done. None of this happened on a whim. We spent the entire summer working to tackle the separation and divorce steps outlined for us by our therapists, lawyers, and our shared agency.

December 7, 2023: Bush and Harris are seen together in Miami.

Gallery owner Michelle Tillou shared a photo from Art Basel Miami, posing alongside Harris and Bush and captioning the post "@artbasel selfies."

Gallery owner Michelle Tillou shared a photo from Art Basel Miami, posing alongside Harris and Bush and captioning the post @artbasel selfies.

March 10, 2024: Bush and Harris are photographed together at Elton John's Oscars party.

The couple were seen together with actor Eric McCormack in a photo, marking their first time at a public event as a couple, People reported.

April 25, 2024: Bush discusses her relationship with Harris for the first time.

Bush's Glamour story marked the first time she publicly addressed her relationship with Harris.

"Falling in love with her has sutured some of my own childhood wounds, and made me so much closer to my own mother," Bush wrote. "Seeing Ashlyn choose to not simply survive, but thrive, for her babies has been the most beautiful thing I've ever witnessed a friend do. And now I get to love her. How lucky am I?"

Bush also wrote that she felt the word "queer" best described her sexuality and reflected on her public coming out process.

"Would I like to make the public part of this journey a choice for myself, and not have it taken from my lips and set ablaze by gossip blogs and bottom-feeder online bots? Of course," she wrote.

"I'm very aware, though, as we discuss bullying and harassment and being outed without consent — that I'm incredibly lucky this happened in my adulthood," she continued. "I really love who I am, at this age and in this moment."

Falling in love with her has sutured some of my own childhood wounds, and made me so much closer to my own mother, Bush wrote. Seeing Ashlyn choose to not simply survive, but thrive, for her babies has been the most beautiful thing I've ever witnessed a friend do. And now I get to love her. How lucky am I?

Bush also wrote that she felt the word queer best described her sexuality and reflected on her public coming out process.

Would I like to make the public part of this journey a choice for myself, and not have it taken from my lips and set ablaze by gossip blogs and bottom-feeder online bots? Of course, she wrote.

I'm very aware, though, as we discuss bullying and harassment and being outed without consent — that I'm incredibly lucky this happened in my adulthood, she continued. I really love who I am, at this age and in this moment.

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Sophia Bush comes out as queer, confirms relationship with Ashlyn Harris

Actor Sophia Bush came out as queer in an emotional essay in Glamour and confirmed she’s in a relationship with retired U.S. Women’s National Team soccer player Ashlyn Harris. 

“I sort of hate the notion of having to come out in 2024,” Bush wrote in a cover story for the fashion magazine published Thursday. “But I’m deeply aware that we are having this conversation in a year when we’re seeing the most aggressive attacks on the LGBTQIA+ community in modern history.” 

Bush noted that there were more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills proposed in state legislatures last year and said this motivated her to “give the act of coming out the respect and honor it deserves.” 

“I’ve experienced so much safety, respect, and love in the queer community, as an ally all of my life, that, as I came into myself, I already felt it was my home,” she wrote. “I think I’ve always known that my sexuality exists on a spectrum. Right now I think the word that best defines it is queer . I can’t say it without smiling, actually. And that feels pretty great.”

The “One Tree Hill” star filed for divorce from entrepreneur Grant Hughes in August. People magazine first reported in October that Bush and Harris were dating, but neither confirmed nor commented on the report. The pair later attended an Oscar’s viewing party together in March . 

In the essay, Bush addressed online rumors that her relationship with Harris began before Harris had officially divorced from fellow soccer star Ali Krieger, in September. 

“Everyone that matters to me knows what’s true and what isn’t,” Bush wrote. “But even still there’s a part of me that’s a ferocious defender, who wants to correct the record piece by piece. But my better self, with her earned patience, has to sit back and ask, What’s the f------- point? For who? For internet trolls? No, thank you. I’ll spend my precious time doing things I love instead.”

Bush said that after news about her and Harris became public, her mom told her that a friend called and said, “Well, this can’t be true. I mean, your daughter isn’t gay .” 

“My mom felt that it was obvious, from the way her friend emphasized the word, that she meant it judgmentally,” Bush wrote. “And you know what my mom said? ‘Oh honey, I think she’s pretty gay. And she’s happy .’”

Bush wrote that she felt like she was wearing a weighted vest that she could finally put down. 

“I finally feel like I can breathe,” Bush wrote. “I turned 41 last summer, amid all of this, and I heard the words I was saying to my best friend as they came out of my mouth. ‘I feel like this is my first birthday,’ I told her. This year was my very first birthday.”

For more from NBC Out, sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Jo Yurcaba is a reporter for NBC Out.

• In My Own Words
• Younger Readers

10 June 2020

J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues

Warning: the below content is not appropriate for children. please check with an adult before you read this page. to go back to the children’s page, please click here ..

This isn’t an easy piece to write, for reasons that will shortly become clear, but I know it’s time to explain myself on an issue surrounded by toxicity. I write this without any desire to add to that toxicity.

For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.

My interest in trans issues pre-dated Maya’s case by almost two years, during which I followed the debate around the concept of gender identity closely. I’ve met trans people, and read sundry books, blogs and articles by trans people, gender specialists, intersex people, psychologists, safeguarding experts, social workers and doctors, and followed the discourse online and in traditional media. On one level, my interest in this issue has been professional, because I’m writing a crime series, set in the present day, and my fictional female detective is of an age to be interested in, and affected by, these issues herself, but on another, it’s intensely personal, as I’m about to explain.

All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’. When I started taking an interest in gender identity and transgender matters, I began screenshotting comments that interested me, as a way of reminding myself what I might want to research later. On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.

Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Berns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.

I mention all this only to explain that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen when I supported Maya. I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate , to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.

What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive. They came from a cross-section of kind, empathetic and intelligent people, some of them working in fields dealing with gender dysphoria and trans people, who’re all deeply concerned about the way a socio-political concept is influencing politics, medical practice and safeguarding. They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well.

I’d stepped back from Twitter for many months both before and after tweeting support for Maya, because I knew it was doing nothing good for my mental health. I only returned because I wanted to share a free children’s book during the pandemic. Immediately, activists who clearly believe themselves to be good, kind and progressive people swarmed back into my timeline, assuming a right to police my speech, accuse me of hatred, call me misogynistic slurs and, above all – as every woman involved in this debate will know – TERF.

If you didn’t already know – and why should you? – ‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists. Examples of so-called TERFs range from the mother of a gay child who was afraid their child wanted to transition to escape homophobic bullying, to a hitherto totally unfeminist older lady who’s vowed never to visit Marks & Spencer again because they’re allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms. Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women.

But accusations of TERFery have been sufficient to intimidate many people, institutions and organisations I once admired, who’re cowering before the tactics of the playground. ‘They’ll call us transphobic!’ ‘They’ll say I hate trans people!’ What next, they’ll say you’ve got fleas? Speaking as a biological woman, a lot of people in positions of power really need to grow a pair (which is doubtless literally possible, according to the kind of people who argue that clownfish prove humans aren’t a dimorphic species).

So why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my head down?

Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.

Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women. It’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.

The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.

The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.

The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.

Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.

The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018,  American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:

‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’

Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’

Her paper caused a furore. She was accused of bias and of spreading misinformation about transgender people, subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted campaign to discredit both her and her work. The journal took the paper offline and re-reviewed it before republishing it. However, her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.

The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves. In an article explaining why he resigned from the Tavistock (an NHS gender clinic in England) psychiatrist Marcus Evans stated that claims that children will kill themselves if not permitted to transition do not ‘align substantially with any robust data or studies in this area. Nor do they align with the cases I have encountered over decades as a psychotherapist.’

The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people.  The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.

When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’ and Simone de Beauvoir’s words: ‘It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.’

As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens. Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are.

I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria. Again and again I’ve been told to ‘just meet some trans people.’ I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful. Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe (and certainly hope) she’s completely happy to have transitioned. Being older, though, she went through a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation. The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law. Many people aren’t aware of this.

We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls. Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now. From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble. Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else.

I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive. It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class. The hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last few days prove this erosion concerns many others just as much.  It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.

But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.

Which brings me to the fifth reason I’m deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism.

I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember. I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too. However, a short while ago, I asked her how she’d feel if I were publicly honest about that part of my life, and she encouraged me to go ahead.

I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.

I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty, but I’m now married to a truly good and principled man, safe and secure in ways I never in a million years expected to be. However, the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.

If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship. I have a visceral sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their last seconds on earth, because I too have known moments of blind fear when I realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self-restraint of my attacker.

I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.

So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.

On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’. Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn for my book under lockdown, I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity.  I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with womens and girls’ safety.

Late on Saturday evening, scrolling through children’s pictures before I went to bed, I forgot the first rule of Twitter – never, ever expect a nuanced conversation – and reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women. I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand.

It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow. There’s joy, relief and safety in conformity. As Simone de Beauvoir also wrote, “… without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.”

Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.

But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces. Polls show those women are in the vast majority, and exclude only those privileged or lucky enough never to have come up against male violence or sexual assault, and who’ve never troubled to educate themselves on how prevalent it is.

The one thing that gives me hope is that the women who can protest and organise, are doing so, and they have some truly decent men and trans people alongside them. Political parties seeking to appease the loudest voices in this debate are ignoring women’s concerns at their peril. In the UK, women are reaching out to each other across party lines, concerned about the erosion of their hard-won rights and widespread intimidation. None of the gender critical women I’ve talked to hates trans people; on the contrary. Many of them became interested in this issue in the first place out of concern for trans youth, and they’re hugely sympathetic towards trans adults who simply want to live their lives, but who’re facing a backlash for a brand of activism they don’t endorse. The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement’s seen in decades.

The last thing I want to say is this. I haven’t written this essay in the hope that anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teeny-weeny one. I’m extraordinarily fortunate; I’m a survivor, certainly not a victim. I’ve only mentioned my past because, like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions. I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people.

All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.

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NPR suspends veteran editor as it grapples with his public criticism

David Folkenflik

NPR suspended senior editor Uri Berliner for five days without pay after he wrote an essay accusing the network of losing the public's trust and appeared on a podcast to explain his argument. Uri Berliner hide caption

NPR suspended senior editor Uri Berliner for five days without pay after he wrote an essay accusing the network of losing the public's trust and appeared on a podcast to explain his argument.

NPR has formally punished Uri Berliner, the senior editor who publicly argued a week ago that the network had "lost America's trust" by approaching news stories with a rigidly progressive mindset.

Berliner's five-day suspension without pay, which began last Friday, has not been previously reported.

Yet the public radio network is grappling in other ways with the fallout from Berliner's essay for the online news site The Free Press . It angered many of his colleagues, led NPR leaders to announce monthly internal reviews of the network's coverage, and gave fresh ammunition to conservative and partisan Republican critics of NPR, including former President Donald Trump.

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo is among those now targeting NPR's new chief executive, Katherine Maher, for messages she posted to social media years before joining the network. Among others, those posts include a 2020 tweet that called Trump racist and another that appeared to minimize rioting during social justice protests that year. Maher took the job at NPR last month — her first at a news organization .

In a statement Monday about the messages she had posted, Maher praised the integrity of NPR's journalists and underscored the independence of their reporting.

"In America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen," she said. "What matters is NPR's work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public. NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests."

The network noted that "the CEO is not involved in editorial decisions."

In an interview with me later on Monday, Berliner said the social media posts demonstrated Maher was all but incapable of being the person best poised to direct the organization.

"We're looking for a leader right now who's going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about," Berliner said. "And this seems to be the opposite of that."

Conservative critics of NPR are now targeting its new chief executive, Katherine Maher, for messages she posted to social media years before joining the public radio network last month. Stephen Voss/Stephen Voss hide caption

Conservative critics of NPR are now targeting its new chief executive, Katherine Maher, for messages she posted to social media years before joining the public radio network last month.

He said that he tried repeatedly to make his concerns over NPR's coverage known to news leaders and to Maher's predecessor as chief executive before publishing his essay.

Berliner has singled out coverage of several issues dominating the 2020s for criticism, including trans rights, the Israel-Hamas war and COVID. Berliner says he sees the same problems at other news organizations, but argues NPR, as a mission-driven institution, has a greater obligation to fairness.

"I love NPR and feel it's a national trust," Berliner says. "We have great journalists here. If they shed their opinions and did the great journalism they're capable of, this would be a much more interesting and fulfilling organization for our listeners."

A "final warning"

The circumstances surrounding the interview were singular.

Berliner provided me with a copy of the formal rebuke to review. NPR did not confirm or comment upon his suspension for this article.

In presenting Berliner's suspension Thursday afternoon, the organization told the editor he had failed to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets, as is required of NPR journalists. It called the letter a "final warning," saying Berliner would be fired if he violated NPR's policy again. Berliner is a dues-paying member of NPR's newsroom union but says he is not appealing the punishment.

The Free Press is a site that has become a haven for journalists who believe that mainstream media outlets have become too liberal. In addition to his essay, Berliner appeared in an episode of its podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss.

A few hours after the essay appeared online, NPR chief business editor Pallavi Gogoi reminded Berliner of the requirement that he secure approval before appearing in outside press, according to a copy of the note provided by Berliner.

In its formal rebuke, NPR did not cite Berliner's appearance on Chris Cuomo's NewsNation program last Tuesday night, for which NPR gave him the green light. (NPR's chief communications officer told Berliner to focus on his own experience and not share proprietary information.) The NPR letter also did not cite his remarks to The New York Times , which ran its article mid-afternoon Thursday, shortly before the reprimand was sent. Berliner says he did not seek approval before talking with the Times .

NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

Berliner says he did not get permission from NPR to speak with me for this story but that he was not worried about the consequences: "Talking to an NPR journalist and being fired for that would be extraordinary, I think."

Berliner is a member of NPR's business desk, as am I, and he has helped to edit many of my stories. He had no involvement in the preparation of this article and did not see it before it was posted publicly.

In rebuking Berliner, NPR said he had also publicly released proprietary information about audience demographics, which it considers confidential. He said those figures "were essentially marketing material. If they had been really good, they probably would have distributed them and sent them out to the world."

Feelings of anger and betrayal inside the newsroom

His essay and subsequent public remarks stirred deep anger and dismay within NPR. Colleagues contend Berliner cherry-picked examples to fit his arguments and challenge the accuracy of his accounts. They also note he did not seek comment from the journalists involved in the work he cited.

Morning Edition host Michel Martin told me some colleagues at the network share Berliner's concerns that coverage is frequently presented through an ideological or idealistic prism that can alienate listeners.

"The way to address that is through training and mentorship," says Martin, herself a veteran of nearly two decades at the network who has also reported for The Wall Street Journal and ABC News. "It's not by blowing the place up, by trashing your colleagues, in full view of people who don't really care about it anyway."

Several NPR journalists told me they are no longer willing to work with Berliner as they no longer have confidence that he will keep private their internal musings about stories as they work through coverage.

"Newsrooms run on trust," NPR political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben tweeted last week, without mentioning Berliner by name. "If you violate everyone's trust by going to another outlet and sh--ing on your colleagues (while doing a bad job journalistically, for that matter), I don't know how you do your job now."

Berliner rejected that critique, saying nothing in his essay or subsequent remarks betrayed private observations or arguments about coverage.

Other newsrooms are also grappling with questions over news judgment and confidentiality. On Monday, New York Times Executive Editor Joseph Kahn announced to his staff that the newspaper's inquiry into who leaked internal dissent over a planned episode of its podcast The Daily to another news outlet proved inconclusive. The episode was to focus on a December report on the use of sexual assault as part of the Hamas attack on Israel in October. Audio staffers aired doubts over how well the reporting stood up to scrutiny.

"We work together with trust and collegiality everyday on everything we produce, and I have every expectation that this incident will prove to be a singular exception to an important rule," Kahn wrote to Times staffers.

At NPR, some of Berliner's colleagues have weighed in online against his claim that the network has focused on diversifying its workforce without a concomitant commitment to diversity of viewpoint. Recently retired Chief Executive John Lansing has referred to this pursuit of diversity within NPR's workforce as its " North Star ," a moral imperative and chief business strategy.

In his essay, Berliner tagged the strategy as a failure, citing the drop in NPR's broadcast audiences and its struggle to attract more Black and Latino listeners in particular.

"During most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding," Berliner writes. "In recent years, however, that has changed."

Berliner writes, "For NPR, which purports to consider all things, it's devastating both for its journalism and its business model."

NPR investigative reporter Chiara Eisner wrote in a comment for this story: "Minorities do not all think the same and do not report the same. Good reporters and editors should know that by now. It's embarrassing to me as a reporter at NPR that a senior editor here missed that point in 2024."

Some colleagues drafted a letter to Maher and NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, seeking greater clarity on NPR's standards for its coverage and the behavior of its journalists — clearly pointed at Berliner.

A plan for "healthy discussion"

On Friday, CEO Maher stood up for the network's mission and the journalism, taking issue with Berliner's critique, though never mentioning him by name. Among her chief issues, she said Berliner's essay offered "a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are."

Berliner took great exception to that, saying she had denigrated him. He said that he supported diversifying NPR's workforce to look more like the U.S. population at large. She did not address that in a subsequent private exchange he shared with me for this story. (An NPR spokesperson declined further comment.)

Late Monday afternoon, Chapin announced to the newsroom that Executive Editor Eva Rodriguez would lead monthly meetings to review coverage.

"Among the questions we'll ask of ourselves each month: Did we capture the diversity of this country — racial, ethnic, religious, economic, political geographic, etc — in all of its complexity and in a way that helped listeners and readers recognize themselves and their communities?" Chapin wrote in the memo. "Did we offer coverage that helped them understand — even if just a bit better — those neighbors with whom they share little in common?"

Berliner said he welcomed the announcement but would withhold judgment until those meetings played out.

In a text for this story, Chapin said such sessions had been discussed since Lansing unified the news and programming divisions under her acting leadership last year.

"Now seemed [the] time to deliver if we were going to do it," Chapin said. "Healthy discussion is something we need more of."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

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Romance, She Wrote: A Hermeneutical Essay on Song of Songs Paperback – January 1, 1998

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 240 pages
• Language English
• Publisher UNKNO
• Publication date January 1, 1998
• Dimensions 6.25 x 0.75 x 9.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1563382334
• ISBN-13 978-1563382338
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

From the author, from the back cover.

Andr LaCocque is Professor Emeritus, Hebrew Scriptures, Chicago Theological Seminary.

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ UNKNO (January 1, 1998)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1563382334
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1563382338
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 0.75 x 9.25 inches

About the author

André lacocque.

André LACOCQUE (1927-present) was born in Liège, Belgium. He earned a PhD in Jewish Literature in 1957 and a ThD in Old Testament in 1961, both from the University of Strasbourg (France).

He was married to Claire Tournay who is now deceased.

He taught in Brussels, at the Faculté Protestante Universitaire de Bruxelles, from 1957 to 1968, after studies and research at the Rabbinic School of Paris, the University of Strasbourg, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he visited two separate times -- 1951-53 and 1961-62.

From 1969-1999, he taught at the Chicago Theological Seminary where he was Professor of Hebrew Scriptures and Founding Director of the Center of Jewish-Christian Studies.

He also taught at Spertus College of Judaica in Chicago from 1969 to 1971. He coauthored THINKING BIBLICALLY with Paul Ricoeur which was published by University of Chicago Press in 1998. The book won the prestigious University of Chicago Gordon J. Laing Prize (1999). This book is translated into nine languages.

André LaCocque’s latest work, published in 2020, is WORK AND CREATIVITY: A PHILOSOPHICAL STUDY FROM CREATION TO POSTMODERNITY (Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2020)

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Lisa Marie Presley Said She Was 'Destroyed' by Son Benjamin's Death but Kept 'Going for My Girls'

In honor of National Grief Awareness Day, Lisa Marie Presley penned an emotional essay about what she's learned in the time since her son Benjamin Keough's death by suicide in 2020

Editor's note: Nearly five months before her death on Jan. 12 at 54, Lisa Marie Presley shared exclusively with PEOPLE an essay she wrote about navigating grief following the heartbreaking death of her son Benjamin Keough in 2020. This essay was first published on Aug. 30, 2022.

Lisa Marie Presley is opening up about life after the loss of her late son Benjamin Keough .

In honor of "National Grief Awareness Day" on Tuesday, the singer, 54, penned an emotional essay about the low points she's faced in the time since Keough's death by suicide in 2020 at age 27. She also gets real about keeping strong for her three daughters (Presley shares Benjamin and daughter Riley with ex-husband Danny Keough, and she has 13-year-old twin daughters Finley Aaron Love and Harper Vivienne Anne with Michael Lockwood , from whom her divorce was finalized last May) .

Read on for Presley's essay, which has been shared exclusively with PEOPLE and lightly edited for clarity .

Today is "National Grief Awareness Day," and since I have been living in the horrific reality of its unrelenting grips since my son's death two years ago, I thought I would share a few things to be aware of in regard to grief for anyone who is interested. If not to help yourself but maybe to help another who is grieving …

This is not a comfortable subject for anyone, and it is most unpopular to talk about. This is quite long, potentially triggering and very hard to confront. But if we're going make any progress on the subject, grief has to get talked about. I'm sharing my thoughts in the hopes that somehow, we can change that.

Death is part of life whether we like it or not — and so is grieving. There is so much to learn and understand on the subject, but here's what I know so far: One is that grief does not stop or go away in any sense, a year, or years after the loss. Grief is something you will have to carry with you for the rest of your life, in spite of what certain people or our culture wants us to believe. You do not "get over it," you do not "move on," period.

Two, grief is incredibly lonely. Despite people coming in the heat of the moment to be there for you right after the loss takes place, they soon disappear and go on with their own lives and they kind of expect for you to do the same, especially after some time has passed. This includes "family" as well. If you're incredibly lucky, less than a handful will remain in contact with you after the first month or so. Unfortunately, that is a cold hard truth for most. So, if you know someone who lost a loved one, regardless of how long it's been, please call them to see how they are doing. Go visit them. They will really really appreciate it, more than you know …

Three, and particularly if the loss was premature, unnatural, or tragic, you will become a pariah in a sense. You can feel stigmatized and perhaps judged in some way as to why the tragic loss took place. This becomes magnetized by a million if you are the parent of a child who passed. No matter how old they were. No matter the circumstances.

RELATED VIDEO: Lisa Marie Presley Opened Up About Being 'Ferociously Protective' of Her Kids in 2014 Interview

I already battle with and beat myself up tirelessly and chronically, blaming myself every single day and that's hard enough to now live with, but others will judge and blame you too, even secretly or behind your back which is even more cruel and painful on top of everything else.

This is where finding others who have experienced a similar loss can be the only way to go. Support groups that have your specific kind of loss in common. I go to them, and I hold them for other bereaved parents at my home.

Nothing, absolutely NOTHING takes away the pain, but finding support can sometimes help you feel a little bit less alone.

Your old "friends" and even your family can and will run for the hills.

The unrelenting reality is that you are FORCED into this horrendous "club," if you will, that you never wanted to be in or a part of, and you are FORCED to then, for lack of a better term, have to go and find your new people now.

I now truly cherish the few who have stayed in there with us throughout this entire nightmare process from the onset. And I have also now come to love and cherish my newfound friends who are in this same "club."

If I'm being honest, I can understand why people may want to avoid you once a terrible tragedy has struck. Especially a parent losing their child because it is truly your worst nightmare. I can recall a couple of times in my life where I knew parents who lost their child and while I could be there for them when it happened, I avoided them after and never bothered to follow up with them because they quite literally became a representative of my biggest fear. I also low-key judged them, and I swore I'd never do whatever it was that I felt they either did or neglected in their parental actions and choices with their child.

Yet here I am, I am now living what it's like to be that same representative to other parents ... Obviously, no parent chooses this road, and thankfully not all parents will have to become a victim to it — and I do mean VICTIM here. I used to hate that word. Now I know why. I've dealt with death, grief and loss since the age of 9 years old. I've had more than anyone's fair share of it in my lifetime and somehow, I've made it this far. But this one, the death of my beautiful, beautiful son? The sweetest and most incredible being that I have ever had the privilege of knowing, who made me feel so honored every single day to be his mother? Who was so much like his grandfather on so many levels that he actually scared me? Which made me worry about him even more than I naturally would have? No. Just no ... no no no no ...

RELATED VIDEO: Lisa Marie Presley Shares Sweet Photo with All 4 of Her Kids: 'Mama Lion with Cubs'

It's a real choice to keep going, one that I have to make every single day and one that is constantly challenging to say the least ... But I keep going for my girls. I keep going because my son made it very clear in his final moments that taking care of his little sisters and looking out for them were on the forefront of his concerns and his mind. He absolutely adored them and they him.

My and my three daughters' lives as we knew it were completely detonated and destroyed by his death. We live in this every. Single. Day.

I'm saying all this, on this particular day, "National Grief Awareness Day," in the hopes that I can help raise some awareness of grief and loss. Just know after this day passes, for all your friends who have had a loved one die, every day is grief awareness day. I'm saying this, in the hopes that it helps someone who is suffering as I and my children suffer. In the hopes that maybe today or as soon as possible, you can reach out to someone who is grieving someone they loved and lost. Whether they lost a child, a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a fiancé, anyone.

Ask them how they're doing, ask them to talk about their person. Yes! We DO want to talk about them. That's how we keep them alive in our hearts, that's how they don't get forgotten, that is what keeps us alive as well. And do me a favor, don't tell them that "you can't imagine" their pain. The truth is, oh yes you can — you just don't want to.

Thanks for reading all of this. I know how hard and triggering it is. But maybe let it trigger you to reach out to someone who needs it right now rather than it just triggering something bad.

For help and info on what to say, visit Grief.com and show up.

Written with all of my love and my pain, most sincerely ~LMP

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, text "STRENGTH" to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or go to 988lifeline.org .

Related Articles

Choose Your Test

Sat / act prep online guides and tips, getting college essay help: important do's and don’ts.

College Essays

If you grow up to be a professional writer, everything you write will first go through an editor before being published. This is because the process of writing is really a process of re-writing —of rethinking and reexamining your work, usually with the help of someone else. So what does this mean for your student writing? And in particular, what does it mean for very important, but nonprofessional writing like your college essay? Should you ask your parents to look at your essay? Pay for an essay service?

If you are wondering what kind of help you can, and should, get with your personal statement, you've come to the right place! In this article, I'll talk about what kind of writing help is useful, ethical, and even expected for your college admission essay . I'll also point out who would make a good editor, what the differences between editing and proofreading are, what to expect from a good editor, and how to spot and stay away from a bad one.

Table of Contents

What Kind of Help for Your Essay Can You Get?

What's Good Editing?

What should an editor do for you, what kind of editing should you avoid, proofreading, what's good proofreading, what kind of proofreading should you avoid.

What Do Colleges Think Of You Getting Help With Your Essay?

Who Can/Should Help You?

Advice for editors.

Should You Pay Money For Essay Editing?

The Bottom Line

What's next, what kind of help with your essay can you get.

Rather than talking in general terms about "help," let's first clarify the two different ways that someone else can improve your writing . There is editing, which is the more intensive kind of assistance that you can use throughout the whole process. And then there's proofreading, which is the last step of really polishing your final product.

Let me go into some more detail about editing and proofreading, and then explain how good editors and proofreaders can help you."

Editing is helping the author (in this case, you) go from a rough draft to a finished work . Editing is the process of asking questions about what you're saying, how you're saying it, and how you're organizing your ideas. But not all editing is good editing . In fact, it's very easy for an editor to cross the line from supportive to overbearing and over-involved.

Ability to clarify assignments. A good editor is usually a good writer, and certainly has to be a good reader. For example, in this case, a good editor should make sure you understand the actual essay prompt you're supposed to be answering.

Open-endedness. Good editing is all about asking questions about your ideas and work, but without providing answers. It's about letting you stick to your story and message, and doesn't alter your point of view.

Think of an editor as a great travel guide. It can show you the many different places your trip could take you. It should explain any parts of the trip that could derail your trip or confuse the traveler. But it never dictates your path, never forces you to go somewhere you don't want to go, and never ignores your interests so that the trip no longer seems like it's your own. So what should good editors do?

Help Brainstorm Topics

Sometimes it's easier to bounce thoughts off of someone else. This doesn't mean that your editor gets to come up with ideas, but they can certainly respond to the various topic options you've come up with. This way, you're less likely to write about the most boring of your ideas, or to write about something that isn't actually important to you.

If you're wondering how to come up with options for your editor to consider, check out our guide to brainstorming topics for your college essay .

Help Revise Your Drafts

Here, your editor can't upset the delicate balance of not intervening too much or too little. It's tricky, but a great way to think about it is to remember: editing is about asking questions, not giving answers .

Revision questions should point out:

• Places where more detail or more description would help the reader connect with your essay
• Places where structure and logic don't flow, losing the reader's attention
• Places where there aren't transitions between paragraphs, confusing the reader
• Moments where your narrative or the arguments you're making are unclear

But pointing to potential problems is not the same as actually rewriting—editors let authors fix the problems themselves.

Bad editing is usually very heavy-handed editing. Instead of helping you find your best voice and ideas, a bad editor changes your writing into their own vision.

You may be dealing with a bad editor if they:

• Add material (examples, descriptions) that doesn't come from you
• Use a thesaurus to make your college essay sound "more mature"
• Add meaning or insight to the essay that doesn't come from you
• Tell you what to say and how to say it
• Write sentences, phrases, and paragraphs for you
• Change your voice in the essay so it no longer sounds like it was written by a teenager

Colleges can tell the difference between a 17-year-old's writing and a 50-year-old's writing. Not only that, they have access to your SAT or ACT Writing section, so they can compare your essay to something else you wrote. Writing that's a little more polished is great and expected. But a totally different voice and style will raise questions.

Where's the Line Between Helpful Editing and Unethical Over-Editing?

Sometimes it's hard to tell whether your college essay editor is doing the right thing. Here are some guidelines for staying on the ethical side of the line.

• An editor should say that the opening paragraph is kind of boring, and explain what exactly is making it drag. But it's overstepping for an editor to tell you exactly how to change it.
• An editor should point out where your prose is unclear or vague. But it's completely inappropriate for the editor to rewrite that section of your essay.
• An editor should let you know that a section is light on detail or description. But giving you similes and metaphors to beef up that description is a no-go.

Proofreading (also called copy-editing) is checking for errors in the last draft of a written work. It happens at the end of the process and is meant as the final polishing touch. Proofreading is meticulous and detail-oriented, focusing on small corrections. It sands off all the surface rough spots that could alienate the reader.

Because proofreading is usually concerned with making fixes on the word or sentence level, this is the only process where someone else can actually add to or take away things from your essay . This is because what they are adding or taking away tends to be one or two misplaced letters.

Laser focus. Proofreading is all about the tiny details, so the ability to really concentrate on finding small slip-ups is a must.

Excellent grammar and spelling skills. Proofreaders need to dot every "i" and cross every "t." Good proofreaders should correct spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar. They should put foreign words in italics and surround quotations with quotation marks. They should check that you used the correct college's name, and that you adhered to any formatting requirements (name and date at the top of the page, uniform font and size, uniform spacing).

Limited interference. A proofreader needs to make sure that you followed any word limits. But if cuts need to be made to shorten the essay, that's your job and not the proofreader's.

A bad proofreader either tries to turn into an editor, or just lacks the skills and knowledge necessary to do the job.

Some signs that you're working with a bad proofreader are:

• If they suggest making major changes to the final draft of your essay. Proofreading happens when editing is already finished.
• If they aren't particularly good at spelling, or don't know grammar, or aren't detail-oriented enough to find someone else's small mistakes.
• If they start swapping out your words for fancier-sounding synonyms, or changing the voice and sound of your essay in other ways. A proofreader is there to check for errors, not to take the 17-year-old out of your writing.

What Do Colleges Think of Your Getting Help With Your Essay?

Admissions officers agree: light editing and proofreading are good—even required ! But they also want to make sure you're the one doing the work on your essay. They want essays with stories, voice, and themes that come from you. They want to see work that reflects your actual writing ability, and that focuses on what you find important.

On the Importance of Editing

Get feedback. Have a fresh pair of eyes give you some feedback. Don't allow someone else to rewrite your essay, but do take advantage of others' edits and opinions when they seem helpful. ( Bates College )

Read your essay aloud to someone. Reading the essay out loud offers a chance to hear how your essay sounds outside your head. This exercise reveals flaws in the essay's flow, highlights grammatical errors and helps you ensure that you are communicating the exact message you intended. ( Dickinson College )

On the Value of Proofreading

Share your essays with at least one or two people who know you well—such as a parent, teacher, counselor, or friend—and ask for feedback. Remember that you ultimately have control over your essays, and your essays should retain your own voice, but others may be able to catch mistakes that you missed and help suggest areas to cut if you are over the word limit. ( Yale University )

Proofread and then ask someone else to proofread for you. Although we want substance, we also want to be able to see that you can write a paper for our professors and avoid careless mistakes that would drive them crazy. ( Oberlin College )

On Watching Out for Too Much Outside Influence

Limit the number of people who review your essay. Too much input usually means your voice is lost in the writing style. ( Carleton College )

Ask for input (but not too much). Your parents, friends, guidance counselors, coaches, and teachers are great people to bounce ideas off of for your essay. They know how unique and spectacular you are, and they can help you decide how to articulate it. Keep in mind, however, that a 45-year-old lawyer writes quite differently from an 18-year-old student, so if your dad ends up writing the bulk of your essay, we're probably going to notice. ( Vanderbilt University )

Now let's talk about some potential people to approach for your college essay editing and proofreading needs. It's best to start close to home and slowly expand outward. Not only are your family and friends more invested in your success than strangers, but they also have a better handle on your interests and personality. This knowledge is key for judging whether your essay is expressing your true self.

Parents or Close Relatives

Your family may be full of potentially excellent editors! Parents are deeply committed to your well-being, and family members know you and your life well enough to offer details or incidents that can be included in your essay. On the other hand, the rewriting process necessarily involves criticism, which is sometimes hard to hear from someone very close to you.

A parent or close family member is a great choice for an editor if you can answer "yes" to the following questions. Is your parent or close relative a good writer or reader? Do you have a relationship where editing your essay won't create conflict? Are you able to constructively listen to criticism and suggestion from the parent?

One suggestion for defusing face-to-face discussions is to try working on the essay over email. Send your parent a draft, have them write you back some comments, and then you can pick which of their suggestions you want to use and which to discard.

Teachers or Tutors

A humanities teacher that you have a good relationship with is a great choice. I am purposefully saying humanities, and not just English, because teachers of Philosophy, History, Anthropology, and any other classes where you do a lot of writing, are all used to reviewing student work.

Moreover, any teacher or tutor that has been working with you for some time, knows you very well and can vet the essay to make sure it "sounds like you."

If your teacher or tutor has some experience with what college essays are supposed to be like, ask them to be your editor. If not, then ask whether they have time to proofread your final draft.

Guidance or College Counselor at Your School

The best thing about asking your counselor to edit your work is that this is their job. This means that they have a very good sense of what colleges are looking for in an application essay.

At the same time, school counselors tend to have relationships with admissions officers in many colleges, which again gives them insight into what works and which college is focused on what aspect of the application.

Unfortunately, in many schools the guidance counselor tends to be way overextended. If your ratio is 300 students to 1 college counselor, you're unlikely to get that person's undivided attention and focus. It is still useful to ask them for general advice about your potential topics, but don't expect them to be able to stay with your essay from first draft to final version.

Friends, Siblings, or Classmates

Although they most likely don't have much experience with what colleges are hoping to see, your peers are excellent sources for checking that your essay is you .

Friends and siblings are perfect for the read-aloud edit. Read your essay to them so they can listen for words and phrases that are stilted, pompous, or phrases that just don't sound like you.

You can even trade essays and give helpful advice on each other's work.

If your editor hasn't worked with college admissions essays very much, no worries! Any astute and attentive reader can still greatly help with your process. But, as in all things, beginners do better with some preparation.

First, your editor should read our advice about how to write a college essay introduction , how to spot and fix a bad college essay , and get a sense of what other students have written by going through some admissions essays that worked .

Then, as they read your essay, they can work through the following series of questions that will help them to guide you.

Introduction Questions

• Is the first sentence a killer opening line? Why or why not?
• Does the introduction hook the reader? Does it have a colorful, detailed, and interesting narrative? Or does it propose a compelling or surprising idea?
• Can you feel the author's voice in the introduction, or is the tone dry, dull, or overly formal? Show the places where the voice comes through.

Essay Body Questions

• Does the essay have a through-line? Is it built around a central argument, thought, idea, or focus? Can you put this idea into your own words?
• How is the essay organized? By logical progression? Chronologically? Do you feel order when you read it, or are there moments where you are confused or lose the thread of the essay?
• Does the essay have both narratives about the author's life and explanations and insight into what these stories reveal about the author's character, personality, goals, or dreams? If not, which is missing?
• Does the essay flow? Are there smooth transitions/clever links between paragraphs? Between the narrative and moments of insight?

Reader Response Questions

• Does the writer's personality come through? Do we know what the speaker cares about? Do we get a sense of "who he or she is"?
• Where did you feel most connected to the essay? Which parts of the essay gave you a "you are there" sensation by invoking your senses? What moments could you picture in your head well?
• Where are the details and examples vague and not specific enough?
• Did you get an "a-ha!" feeling anywhere in the essay? Is there a moment of insight that connected all the dots for you? Is there a good reveal or "twist" anywhere in the essay?
• What are the strengths of this essay? What needs the most improvement?

Should You Pay Money for Essay Editing?

One alternative to asking someone you know to help you with your college essay is the paid editor route. There are two different ways to pay for essay help: a private essay coach or a less personal editing service , like the many proliferating on the internet.

My advice is to think of these options as a last resort rather than your go-to first choice. I'll first go through the reasons why. Then, if you do decide to go with a paid editor, I'll help you decide between a coach and a service.

When to Consider a Paid Editor

In general, I think hiring someone to work on your essay makes a lot of sense if none of the people I discussed above are a possibility for you.

If you can't ask your parents. For example, if your parents aren't good writers, or if English isn't their first language. Or if you think getting your parents to help is going create unnecessary extra conflict in your relationship with them (applying to college is stressful as it is!)

If you can't ask your teacher or tutor. Maybe you don't have a trusted teacher or tutor that has time to look over your essay with focus. Or, for instance, your favorite humanities teacher has very limited experience with college essays and so won't know what admissions officers want to see.

If you can't ask your guidance counselor. This could be because your guidance counselor is way overwhelmed with other students.

If you can't share your essay with those who know you. It might be that your essay is on a very personal topic that you're unwilling to share with parents, teachers, or peers. Just make sure it doesn't fall into one of the bad-idea topics in our article on bad college essays .

If the cost isn't a consideration. Many of these services are quite expensive, and private coaches even more so. If you have finite resources, I'd say that hiring an SAT or ACT tutor (whether it's PrepScholar or someone else) is better way to spend your money . This is because there's no guarantee that a slightly better essay will sufficiently elevate the rest of your application, but a significantly higher SAT score will definitely raise your applicant profile much more.

Should You Hire an Essay Coach?

On the plus side, essay coaches have read dozens or even hundreds of college essays, so they have experience with the format. Also, because you'll be working closely with a specific person, it's more personal than sending your essay to a service, which will know even less about you.

But, on the minus side, you'll still be bouncing ideas off of someone who doesn't know that much about you . In general, if you can adequately get the help from someone you know, there is no advantage to paying someone to help you.

If you do decide to hire a coach, ask your school counselor, or older students that have used the service for recommendations. If you can't afford the coach's fees, ask whether they can work on a sliding scale —many do. And finally, beware those who guarantee admission to your school of choice—essay coaches don't have any special magic that can back up those promises.

Should You Send Your Essay to a Service?

On the plus side, essay editing services provide a similar product to essay coaches, and they cost significantly less . If you have some assurance that you'll be working with a good editor, the lack of face-to-face interaction won't prevent great results.

On the minus side, however, it can be difficult to gauge the quality of the service before working with them . If they are churning through many application essays without getting to know the students they are helping, you could end up with an over-edited essay that sounds just like everyone else's. In the worst case scenario, an unscrupulous service could send you back a plagiarized essay.

Getting recommendations from friends or a school counselor for reputable services is key to avoiding heavy-handed editing that writes essays for you or does too much to change your essay. Including a badly-edited essay like this in your application could cause problems if there are inconsistencies. For example, in interviews it might be clear you didn't write the essay, or the skill of the essay might not be reflected in your schoolwork and test scores.

Should You Buy an Essay Written by Someone Else?

Let me elaborate. There are super sketchy places on the internet where you can simply buy a pre-written essay. Don't do this!

For one thing, you'll be lying on an official, signed document. All college applications make you sign a statement saying something like this:

I certify that all information submitted in the admission process—including the application, the personal essay, any supplements, and any other supporting materials—is my own work, factually true, and honestly presented... I understand that I may be subject to a range of possible disciplinary actions, including admission revocation, expulsion, or revocation of course credit, grades, and degree, should the information I have certified be false. (From the Common Application )

For another thing, if your academic record doesn't match the essay's quality, the admissions officer will start thinking your whole application is riddled with lies.

Admission officers have full access to your writing portion of the SAT or ACT so that they can compare work that was done in proctored conditions with that done at home. They can tell if these were written by different people. Not only that, but there are now a number of search engines that faculty and admission officers can use to see if an essay contains strings of words that have appeared in other essays—you have no guarantee that the essay you bought wasn't also bought by 50 other students.

• You should get college essay help with both editing and proofreading
• A good editor will ask questions about your idea, logic, and structure, and will point out places where clarity is needed
• A good editor will absolutely not answer these questions, give you their own ideas, or write the essay or parts of the essay for you
• A good proofreader will find typos and check your formatting
• All of them agree that getting light editing and proofreading is necessary
• Parents, teachers, guidance or college counselor, and peers or siblings
• If you can't ask any of those, you can pay for college essay help, but watch out for services or coaches who over-edit you work
• Don't buy a pre-written essay! Colleges can tell, and it'll make your whole application sound false.

Ready to start working on your essay? Check out our explanation of the point of the personal essay and the role it plays on your applications and then explore our step-by-step guide to writing a great college essay .

Using the Common Application for your college applications? We have an excellent guide to the Common App essay prompts and useful advice on how to pick the Common App prompt that's right for you . Wondering how other people tackled these prompts? Then work through our roundup of over 130 real college essay examples published by colleges .

Stressed about whether to take the SAT again before submitting your application? Let us help you decide how many times to take this test . If you choose to go for it, we have the ultimate guide to studying for the SAT to give you the ins and outs of the best ways to study.

Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education.

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Sophia Bush wrote a lengthy essay where she is speaking out about her life over the past year.

If you don’t know, last year, Sophia and her husband of one year, Grant Hughes , broke up. Shortly after, it was discovered she was dating soccer player Ashlyn Harris , who was also going through a divorce from her wife, Ali Krieger . There were lots of rumors around this time period, and now, Sophia is clearing everything up in an essay for Glamour .

We’ve gathered the highlights here for you to see.

Keep reading to see what Sophia Bush shared…

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