So, in a sense, of course he didn’t write the book, whether it’s true or not.

How should we feel, then, about “authors” who can’t, or won’t, write their own stuff? I should say that I have done ghostwriting and (crediting) collaboration several times, and I see nothing wrong with it. The work has usually been for practitioners in STEM fields whose expertise is far from the humanities, and who entrust their ideas to the prose of a trusted (and compensated) collaborator. (One of my ongoing gigs is with a health-care provider who is a very capable writer, but likes having a thought partner.) I see nothing wrong with this. I have also read a lot of books by celebrities who probably can’t write at all, but want to get a book out. Seems okay, too. (They usually thank the collaborator in the acknowledgments, for what it’s worth.)

Things get a bit dicier when the book (or article) is original scholarship, of the peer-reviewed kind. Here, the published work is supposed to advance the field, and presumably there are new claims or findings being advanced. It’s really important, in such cases, to know who, precisely, is speaking. I’d surely want a scholarly author to credit any collaborator, transparently. (Of course, all writers have their work touched, sometimes reworked, by editors; in books, the editor is often thanked, and maybe she should be thanked in journal articles, too?)

But as a general rule, one hopes that humanities scholars like Arday can write their own stuff. It may not be unethical to use a (credited) collaborator, and the rules feel different still with a memoir like Arday’s. But isn’t there something sad about a humanities professor who can’t, or can’t be bothered, to do his own writing?

I thought of this all again when I read the obituary of Ward Churchill. He was the Colorado professor driven out of his job after calling those killed in the 9/11 attacks “little Eichmanns.” But he was not fired for those comments (First Amendment principles would make that tough at a state school), but rather for a series of charges of breaches of academic ethics. One charge was that he had lied about being an Indian (my guess, on cursory reading, is that he had indeed lied). Another charge was that he had cited articles that he had ghostwritten as independent sources proving his views; that is, while pretending to cite others who agreed with him, he was in fact citing himself.

From the AAUP/Colorado report on the matter:

Churchill’s practice of ghostwriting for other scholars in the early 1990s, and the IC’s conclusion in 2005 that his having done so constitutes “a serious problem of research misconduct,” is analyzed in its own section later in this report. But they are of extraordinary relevance to the IC’s findings in Allegation A: As already noted, the Act does not expressly provide what Professor Churchill claims and therefore can provide no support for his claims whatsoever. The two other apparently independent third-party sources, the Robbins and Jaimes essay, turn out not to be independent sources at all but, rather, to have been ghostwritten in their entirety by Professor Churchill. This action provided him with apparent independent sources that he could and did in fact cite to support otherwise insupportable claims of legal and historical fact. . . . [bold is mine —MO]

The Committee is not claiming that Professor Churchill fabricated his general conclusions; rather, he fabricated the underlying data employed to support the insupportable details bolstering those conclusions.

My sense is that Arday and Churchill are both fabulists; one borrowed writing skills from others, the other lent his out. In either case, ghostwriting and collaborating are dicey games; buyers, and professors, beware.

My piece on the great career of the somehow underrated Richard Russo just dropped online and in print in The Atlantic. Excerpt:

“I’m the first writer in the family,” the novelist Richard Russo once said, “but I’m not the first bullshitter in the family.” That honor belonged to his divorced father, Jim, a highway worker with no interest in books and an only intermittent interest in his son. Jim’s strongest connections were with his buddies at the bar. On summer breaks from college, Russo returned to Gloversville, in upstate New York, and his dad would get him on the road crew. When work ended, they would head home, hitting pubs along the way. At each stop, Jim would regale the regulars with a story about something that had happened on the job that day.

“He would pay attention to what worked in Roadhouse A,” Russo said in 2025, “so that when he got to Roadhouse B, he would remember what got a laugh and what didn’t, and so he would change the story.” Jim would tell the same story over many days, cutting and shaping, finding the beats. “There’s a word for that,” Russo said. “It’s called revision.”

Revision, a refined term that Jim would never have used, is a staple of M.F.A. programs, such as the one his son attended at the University of Arizona. When Russo graduated in 1980, the experimental fiction of William Gass and Kurt Vonnegut was in vogue, but he much preferred the shambling shaggy-dog novels of Twain and Dickens, whose humor arose not from formal innovation but from the foibles of flawed characters (like his dad), many of them poor and unlettered (ditto). Early on, Russo threw in his lot with Tom and Huck and Jim, with David Copperfield and Oliver Twist—characters whose humble beginnings offer a vantage from which to see the absurdity of an unjust world.

Read the rest here.

Whither all the humanities tour guides?

Just went on two college visits with my high school daughter. Once again, the info sessions at these elite northeastern schools were—as they were last time I did the circuit, with another daughter—all about STEM opportunities, how undergrads can do research with professors, getting into med schools, etc. Not a single comment about the humanities, nor a single question from the kids and parents about the humanities. I don’t try to hate the other parents, but when they ask questions like, “I noticed one science building on the tour—how many buildings with labs do you have?”—well, what am I supposed to do??

There is often a ray of hope. At the end of one tour, I asked the young man giving the tour what his major was, figuring it would be (as it is for all tour guides) biochemistry or computer science. “English,“ he said. “I thought I’d give it a try. Fell in love with it. Doing a Shakespeare class now, and it’s hard—have to read everything three times!—but I love it.”

Now, a musical break:

What is the Times doing with Jason Arday?

I promise I have no fresh takes on Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor who it turns out invented his entire resume, life story, etc., but somehow is still getting his memoir published tomorrow by Simon & Schuster. But I do have to ask, what was The New York Times thinking when it published, possibly as some sort of clickbait, a summary of stories from said memoir without the surrounding context that this guy has apparently lied about everything? It’s just weird. It begins with a note of skepticism, but then devolves into a summary:

“Great and Unfortunate Things,” which goes on sale tomorrow, takes Arday from childhood up to his appointment at Cambridge. Here are some takeaways from it.

He was nonverbal until “miraculously, just a few days shy of my 12th birthday, I spoke”

By his own account, Arday, the son of Ghanaian immigrants who was raised in public housing in southwest London, spent most of his childhood and adolescence struggling with autism and other disabilities that he said left him nonverbal until almost age 12.

“But miraculously, just a few days shy of my 12th birthday, I spoke,” Arday writes, recalling an exchange with his speech therapist. “It was at the start of one of my sessions, and Katrina had just said, ‘Hello, Jason.’ At that moment, I was fiddling with my hearing aid, which was bothering me, and then I took it out of my ear and said hello back to her.”

School was difficult: “It could take me … an hour to read and absorb a single page”

Not until he turned 18, Arday laments in his memoir, could he read or write.

When he decided to go to college, his girlfriend “wrote out the entire application for me — including my personal statement.” At St. Mary’s University in London, he scored just 9 percent on his first exam. He worked hard, raising his grades so quickly that a professor at the school accused him of cheating.

“When you succeed against pretty much insurmountable odds, it weirdly makes people question your credibility,” he writes…

And so forth. Except that there have been numerous stories, including in the Times, that suggest that nothing Arday says can be believed. So why are they recounting tales from his memoir as if it was written by someone reliable?

“Finance Majors Go to Church. English Majors Don’t.”

Such is the headline of this terrific piece in Arc about religious leanings of different college majors.

Do happy people need vacations?

Arthur Brooks is one of those professional happiness mavens, often writing pieces—which I enjoy—about how to lead the good life. But two recent pieces give me pause. In one, he says that he travels constantly, pretty much every week (but is home for family time on weekends). In another, published today, he says he can’t enjoy a long, relaxing vacation. Excerpt:

As an expatriate in Barcelona during my mid-20s, I found many parts of life hard to understand—from eating supper at 11 p.m. to finding all the stores closed for three hours in the middle of every afternoon. But what baffled me the most was Spaniards’ sheer excellence at taking their vacation. Most of them abandoned any productive activity for the entire month of August, venturing off to the seaside or the mountains, and doing. . . well, nothing. And after this annual month of indolence, they returned victorious, radiating a deep peace. They were idleness grand masters, boredom virtuosos.

A very few years later, I would marry a Spaniard, learn both Spanish and Catalan, and adjust to the dietary routines and opening hours of my adopted country. But I never quite mastered the August vacation. Year after year, I tried to join with my wife either lounging on a Balearic beach or gazing at the mountains in a Pyrenean village. Inevitably, after about the first week, I wound up begging my wife to cut our monthlong vacation short—so that, for the love of God, I could do something.

Brooks is always quite self-knowing and funny about these ironies—a guy who tells you to stop and smell the roses, but can’t stop and smell the roses—but it does make me wonder: should we trust him?

Read more

But duty calls. So I set that piece aside, and return to the sexier topic of PEN America.

As loyal readers know, I recently wrote about how Dinaw Mengestu, the novelist who was the president of free-speech organization PEN America, recently resigned because he feared that the organization’s report on antisemitism in the publishing industry could be weaponized against a cause he believes in, boycotting Israel. Basically, he fears that attention to the travails of Jewish writers may be used by right-wingers to argue for laws looking to hamper the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement against Israel—and therefore such reports are irresponsible. Put another way (and you can decide if I am being unfair), “Don’t say true things when they hurt the cause.” That is not a responsible position for a writer, intellectual, or free-speech proponent to take, but to many in the left-leaning literary community, it seems obvious.

There have been many stupid takes in defense of Mengestu, but one take that I want to engage came from a scholar I respect, Josh Lambert, a nice and very smart man who teaches Jewish literature at Wellesley. Unfortunately, his Substack essay on the topic is dismissive of some real concerns—he calls the PEN report, which is sober and fair, “a mishmash of writers’ resentments and rumors and paranoid fantasies”—and gets some facts wrong in the process.

Lambert writes, with derision, about “Jewish-American author Lisa Barr” who, according to the PEN report, “said her novel Woman on Fire received 450 one-star reviews as a result of an organized review bombing.” Lambert then performs his takedown: “Go look at the 1-star reviews of this novel on Goodreads and Amazon. (I did; it took me maybe 10 minutes.) Every single one of them looks legitimate.”

The problem is that Lambert can only see the reviews which have a comment attached; review-bombers, who swoop in to leave a 1-star rating (which is not a review), do not write a comment to go with it (not least because they haven’t read the book). As of today, there are 37,820 ratings on Goodreads, but only 3,114 reviews/comments—

—and there are 550 reviews of one star—

—but only 86 of them have written comments, making them reviews, and those are the ones Lambert could see—

—so what this means is that Lambert read through the subset of reviews, 86 of them, that are most likely to be legit (because they come with actual comments, most of which reference the plot of the book) but did not see the 440+ ratings of one star with no comments attached—precisely those most likely to be the result of a “review-bomb” targeting a Jewish writer. In fact, her numbers add up: she said she got “450” negative reviews (more precisely, ratings) from the antisemites. That would be about the total of the anonymous ratings, the ones without comments. While it’s possible they came in organically, she would know if they tended to all appear in a matter of a couple weeks.

Bottom line: I think Barr was telling the truth, and Lambert adduces no evidence that she isn’t.

Now let’s turn to Lambert’s other attempt at a takedown, in which he tries to refute the claim that fewer Jewish-themed or Israeli books are being published by pointing to reviews in Kirkus, an industry trade magazine. He writes:

Here’s another way to do a quick reality check on the general claims in the PEN article. Search “Israel” in Kirkus Reviews, the pre-publication book review magazine that critics use to find books to review. In 2004 and 2005, which I selected somewhat haphazardly as a control period, “Israel” came up in 66 articles. In 2024 and 2025, “Israel” came up much more: 127 articles. “Hebrew” went from 29 to 73 mentions; “Israeli” from 49 up to 71. To be fair, “Gaza” also went from two mentions in 2004-2005 to 52 mentions in 2024-2025, but that’s probably because of, you know, the genocide?

The problem here, which will be immediately apparent to anyone involved in trade publishing, is that books under review—books being published this season—were signed up, i.e., the authors were given their contracts, years earlier. While it’s possible for books to go from contract to the bookshelf in a year, two years is more common, and three-years-and-up is the plurality of cases. In my own publishing history, the contract I signed in 2018 was for a book that came out in 2021 (about the Tree of Life synagogue shooting); the contract I signed in 2022 was for a book that came out in 2026 (my Judy Blume biography). And I write fast, and meet my deadlines!

What’s more, for Kirkus to review a book, they need the galleys (advance copies, or proofs) about six months before the publication date. So to review a book in, say, December 2024, there would have to be a near-publication draft of the book by, say, May 2024—which means the book would have been signed up (except in very rare circumstances) by the spring of 2023, and most likely would have been signed up in 2022 or earlier.

I can’t emphasize this enough: books coming out in 2024, and even 2025, were mostly signed up in 2022 or earlier—maybe 2023, but in that case probably before the October 7 attacks and the resulting war, which came when the year was 3/4 over. The real question, then, is what is being published now—in 2026 and 2027, and into 2028. That is the period when books put under contract in the aftermath of the 10/7 attacks would actually be getting reviewed in Kirkus.

This all sounds like inside-baseball gematria, but it’s really quite damning: Lambert’s “gotcha” stats drawn from Kirkus don’t prove his point at all. At least not yet. It’s entirely possible that in 2027 we’ll see more Israeli or Jewy books than ever being reviewed in Kirkus, and that would be evidence that the anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish bias was overblown. As it happens, it wouldn’t be very good evidence, since Kirkus reviews only a minuscule percentage of books published, so the final selection reviewed is not much of a reflection of the industry—it’s too small a sample size. One editor on Kirkus’s small staff could have an affection for books in translation, and choose books coming from Israel (and other countries), and that could queer the whole result. But in any case, we don’t know yet. Let’s check back in another year.

Meanwhile, Lambert never says what he makes of the strong anecdotal evidence from Deborah Harris, who is Israel’s leading literary agent (at least for Anglophone authors). Here is what PEN writes:

Jerusalem-based literary agent Deborah Harris represents dozens of leading voices of Israeli literature, from established titans to debut authors of “literary gems.” Her agency typically sells five to 10 literary novels a year into the United States. Since Oct. 7, 2023, they have not sold a single one.

Harris told PEN America that editors with whom she has worked for years simply don’t respond to her submissions, or reject them outright. She has been asked by some editors not to submit Israeli authors in the future.

“The standard line is, ‘I wouldn’t know how to publish this author right now,’” she said in an interview with PEN America. “Right now, we’re completely in this place where no one will even look. No one believes they can get a book that they love through an editorial meeting.”

That’s some pretty damning stuff. Does Lambert think she is inventing this? Is she just being a hysterical Jew, crying antisemitism where there is none? Is she just paranoid?

Not according to a better data set, which was written up in JTA just a couple days after the PEN report. The author Meg Keene, suspicious that her own career had been hurt by anti-Israel or anti-Jewish sentiment (she would surely be dismissed by Lambert et al. as just a disgruntled author), went looking for data. Here is what she found:

I turned to Publishers Marketplace, the leading industry database where many book deals are announced, and reviewed fiction deals for books by Jewish authors that publicly signaled Jewish or Israeli content. What I found was grim. Between 2023 and 2024, there was a 76% decline in fiction deal announcements to large presses that mentioned Jews, Judaism or Israel. The numbers improved somewhat in 2025, but they did not recover. Compared with 2023, announced sales of Jewish books were still down 47% at large presses.

And the early 2026 numbers are worse: Looking at what has been announced so far this year and annualizing the comparison, fiction deals mentioning Jewish content are down 82% at large presses compared with 2023.

Like all data sets, this one is imperfect. Not every book deal is announced on Publishers Marketplace, and not every announcement mentions Jewish content when a book contains it. It may be that agents and publishers are less willing than they once were to mention Jewish themes in deal announcements, despite the content of the books themselves.

For those who don’t know, Publishers Marketplace is a website and newsletter that, among other things, tries to aggregate book deals, relying on information sent to them by agents (when an agent closes a deal for her client, she will often announce the deal by sending news of it to Publishers Marketplace, which then puts a notice in its daily newsletter; one reason to do this, especially for nonfiction books, is that it scares off other authors—if the world knows you just signed a deal with Random House to write a biography of Nancy Pelosi, then authors considering such a project will know about it and back off). Publishers Marketplace is better data than Kirkus, for at least two reasons: it reports deals made, rather than books published, which is a more accurate measure of industry interest (or prejudice), since plenty of books with contracts are never finished and don’t make it to market; and it reports way more books or deals—it’s just a bigger data set.

Still, despite the robustness of her findings, Keene is modest:

But the data is the best we have for now. And if the problem is that Jewish content is something the industry feels that it needs to obscure when announcing deals, that is also a major problem.

Unless, of course, one wants Israeli cultural production to be shut out of the marketplace, which is, I think it’s fair to say, the goal of the boycott-Israel camp! And hundreds, perhaps thousands, of writers, artists, and industry people have made clear this is exactly what they want. (See this open letter, among others.) And I can think of several editors who would never sign a pro-boycott letter, because their bosses in their conglomerates wouldn’t want them to, but who certainly support the boycott movement. So isn’t it perhaps the case that BDS is, for better or worse, working?

This all reminds me of those who said (I know one such person), with regard to the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, “They were innocent, but if they were guilty, they did the right thing.” Now it’s something like, “BDS isn’t affecting Israeli writers’ chances of getting published—but if it is, that’s good.”

What’s sad is that we can’t have an honest conversation about this. The people I know who have expressed the most skepticism to me about the PEN report are precisely those who in other contexts will express joy that there is a growing movement to boycott Israel, and who will defend cultural boycotts, despite their impact on individual artists who may have any kind of politics. It’s a community of people who are somewhat, sorta interested in truth, but also very interested in achieving certain political aims. The latter goal affects the former goal—because they are human, and we are all fallible. The tells are everywhere, like when Lambert writes, at the end, “I would certainly be embarrassed to be associated with such a sloppy piece of work [the PEN report], especially one that is guaranteed to feed the pernicious weaponization of antisemitism.” (Bold added by me.) As I have written elsewhere, it’s not our job to worry about how our work is “weaponized” by bad people—they’ll do what they’ll do. Our job is to get stuff right.

This all gives us some insight into a certain pathology on the left: their fear of saying anything that can be “weaponized” really does blind them to real facts on the ground. There is a kind of person who sees a headline about antisemitism and a) assumes it comes from someone on the right, and b) wants the article to be wrong. This is perfectly human—we all have feelings—but the mistake comes when we think that, in our own work, we can somehow foolproof it against such uses. We can’t. If we report on antisemitism, no matter how responsibly, with as little alarmism as possible, it will still be used by someone to bash universities, call for their defunding, etc. We should always be careful, but we should never delude ourselves that any amount of care in our research and writing will keep it form being swept up in political debates, often by the side we oppose. To think that being more precise, by hedging more, by being less alarmist, you can ensure that your writing never ends up in a footnote by a Republican is madness. It’s also wrong.

Were you ever in analysis?

Me neither. But ‘s interview with psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, author of the new Love’s Labor: How We Break and Make the Bonds of Love, is one of the most engrossing interviews I have heard in a while, and near the end it basically turns into a sofa session with Sullivan—about his upbringing, his gayness, coming out to his parents, his workaholism, and more. It gains speed as it goes along—listen to the whole thing.

Best of the year SO FAR??

I sure better make the year-end list, New Yorker! No, seriously, thanks for the compliment of being named one of the best books of the year so far.

And now, to end on a delightful note…

Enjoy these identical twins from New England, covering Bob Dylan:

(I’m almost done with it. It’s pretty good.) But sometimes a thing happens in the world that requires me to take my puppy off my lap, rouse myself from my sofa, and opine. Speaking of that new puppy, here is Nigel:

The thing that happened that forced me to take Nigel off my lap, after which he put himself into voluntary exile in his crate, was that PEN America issued a report about a real thing that is happening—the publishing industry has, to some extent, turned against works by Israeli and Jewish writers in the last couple years—and PEN’s president resigned because this truth might prove bad for his pet cause.

The short report by PEN, a free-speech organization which I am not a member of (I’m not a member of much, besides my shul and Friends of Edgewood Park; I let my membership in the Straus Family Historical Society lapse) says something that should not be controversial, which I can sum up with this excerpt, from the beginning of the piece:

Jerusalem-based literary agent Deborah Harris represents dozens of leading voices of Israeli literature, from established titans to debut authors of “literary gems.” Her agency typically sells five to 10 literary novels a year into the United States. Since Oct. 7, 2023, they have not sold a single one.

Harris told PEN America that editors with whom she has worked for years simply don’t respond to her submissions, or reject them outright. She has been asked by some editors not to submit Israeli authors in the future.

“The standard line is, ‘I wouldn’t know how to publish this author right now,’” she said in an interview with PEN America. “Right now, we’re completely in this place where no one will even look. No one believes they can get a book that they love through an editorial meeting.”

In interviews with PEN America, more than 30 Israeli and Jewish writers and literary professionals described a widening cultural isolation since the attacks of Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza. Many spoke of rising hostility and exclusion both domestically and internationally that has taken a heavy and worsening toll.

This is a reality that has been documented by a few watchdogs for a while now (Erika Dreifus being one), and it’s good to see PEN reporting this news. And doing so should not be controversial. It takes nothing away from the horrors suffered by writers in Gaza, or discrimination faced by pro-Palestine writers and intellectuals, to speak out loud the truth that some Israelis and Jews are being discriminated against by the publishing industry. Indeed, given the reality of unconscious bias in the world (a reality that the left has done much to awaken us to), and the anti-Israel slant of the literary community, it would be surprising if this bias didn’t exist. And it would seem pretty basic that if there is discrimination in publishing, we’d want to know about it; and an organization like PEN should play a role in publicizing it.

So what’s the problem?

Well, there was a big problem, according to PEN board president Dinaw Mengestu, the novelist, who resigned his position (unpaid position, I think—I think he’s a volunteer board chair, not staff) over the report that his own organization promulgated. Here is what the Times wrote:

Dinaw Mengestu said he resigned as president of the free expression group PEN America on Thursday, in part because of an article about Israeli and Jewish writers in which the group outlines its opposition to cultural boycotts.

He called that approach “unethical” because it could portray the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which seeks to economically isolate Israel because of its treatment of Palestinians, as discriminatory conduct instead of protected political speech. In an email, PEN America said it rejected any effort to read the article that way.

“We have the responsibility,” Mengestu said in an interview on Friday, “to be conscious and aware of how our work can impact and influence those debates, and especially if that means producing work that might actually restrict or limit or suppress what is constitutionally protected speech.”

Okay, to unpack this: PEN opposes cultural boycotts because—as the authors write in the report—they “believe that such boycotts threaten the free expression rights not only of those associated with the boycotted institutions but also of those in the countries where the boycott is practiced.” But many anti-Zionists see boycotting Israel, through the BDS movement, as a key tactic of opposition. So there is a tension there: Mengestu’s organization is against boycotts, but he is personally for them.

For what it’s worth, the report added that individual boycotters are exercising a free-speech right: “PEN America also recognizes that participating in or advocating for boycotts is an exercise of free expression, and we defend the rights of writers to do so without facing retaliation.” It’s just that the organization opposes boycotting as a tactic. And has reasons for doing so.

But that was not satisfactory for Mengestu, who worried that the existence of a piece that recognized that tension around boycotts, but which also told, sympathetically, the stories of Israelis and Jews who felt they were being discriminated against, would be bad for his cause. That is, Mengestu sees de-platforming Israelis, in part by not publishing them, as a form of noble, protected free speech, in service to a cause he believes in; but the PEN report treated their struggles to get published as evidence of a form of discrimination.

In reality, a boycott can be both: a political tactic for a cause one believes in, and—by definition—a form of discrimination. It can be for the greater good (or not), and still have real human costs. We should be able to talk about all this, which is what the PEN report did.

But here is the really troubling thing: Mengestu believes that certain truths should not be spoken because they are bad for The Cause. When he says, “We have the responsibility to be conscious and aware of how our work can impact and influence those debates, and especially if that means producing work that might actually restrict or limit or suppress what is constitutionally protected speech,” he is saying that before speaking a truth, we have to ask whether bad people will use that truth against us.

But that’s not what intellectuals and writers are supposed to do. We are supposed to speak truths no matter what—even if, or especially if, they aren’t convenient for us.

Honest intellectual inquiry isn’t for everyone. I always asked my students aspiring to journalism, “If you came across a story that was bad for a cause you held dear—abortion rights, or death penalty abolition, or wind power—and you knew that if you published the story, it would be seen as a major defeat for your side, would you publish it? If the answer is ‘No,’ probably you should find another line of work.”

Many writers fail this test. Here is Sara Schulman, on Facebook, defending Mengestu:

However, Dinaw had to resign this week (in a 15 page letter) because the Pen Blog went over his head to run one of those fake anti-semitism pieces about how “Jewish and Israeli” writers are being discriminated against. Dinaw is one hundred percent correct that this kind of fake victim propaganda can be used to support anti-Boycott legislation which violates the First Amendment and is everywhere as popular support for Palestinians grows.

Note that Schulman offers no evidence that anything in the PEN report is untrue; it could all be correct, but is still, to her, “fake anti-semitism” and “fake victim propaganda.” Worse still, from her point of view, it “can be used to support anti-Boycott legislation.”

Mengestu tried to clarify his position by attacking, on Instagram, Gal Beckerman’s Atlantic piece on this controversy. Go read Mengestu’s Insta-post. You’ll note that he spends much of it defending BDS movements on campus; he says not a word about real writers, far from campuses, who are seeing their novels rejected because of their ethnicity or nationality. Again, one can have a real debate about whether they are simply collateral damage in a war of ideas that must be fought; but one has to at least acknowledge the reality on the ground, in order to have that debate. After reading Mengestu and Schulman, one still has no firm sense to what extent they believe the story about writers having a hard time publishing is true; and if they think it’s a lie, they can’t tell us why.

Here let me say that I don’t like anti-boycott legislation (I also don’t like cultural boycotts). I am for the free speech of everyone, including anti-Zionists, uber-Zionists, monarchists, Mamdani stans, smoothie influencers, looksmaxxers, and Canadians. But the reason not to publish something can’t be that it can be weaponized to further anti-boycott legislation; the reason would have to be that it’s untrue. If it’s true, publish away.

On another note, I am struck by the coldness of Schulman’s Facebook post, the ruthless, calculated, political tone. What if, Instead of writing, “As long as we (Jews and Americans) are funding, supporting, and committing genocide, brutal occupation, and devastating apartheid, the world has the obligation to oppose Israeli state sponsored institutions,” she had instead written, “Look, cultural boycotts have victims. If a UK publisher boycotted American writers because of our current president’s warmongering ways, and all of a sudden I lost my UK publisher, and the check that comes with UK publication, a check I was counting on for my mortgage, I’d be peeved. I’d also have a bitter sense of irony about the whole thing, because I am an anti-imperialist voice at home, and ensuring that I sell fewer books helps Trump, if anything. But I also believe in political boycotts, and ultimately I’d have to direct my anger toward Trump rather than toward the UK publisher. It would suck, but life sucks sometimes. So I say to some of the Israeli writers caught in the crosshairs of this: We know that some of you hate the Gaza war [or apartheid, genocide, whatever] as much as we do, and we’re sorry that your careers are affected by this. Let’s all end the war and end the occupation and get back to reading good books in translation!”

Schulman could have written something like that—but instead she erased the actual people involved and whinged about “fake victim propaganda.” No reason it had to be that way.

Music for you

A dear reader told me she likes my music suggestions, so here’s another one:

A theologian and a poet walk into a bar

In Arc last week, we published a review by of Glimmerings, a new book cowritten by poet Christian Wiman and theologian Miroslav Volf. It’s an epistolary book, a collection of emails written back and forth between the two friends, expanding on conversations they had during long walks through New Haven. One reader of the review, a major scholar in her own right, called it, admiringly, “devastating,” which makes it sound like it trashes the book under review. I don’t think that’s right. The review has some negative things to say, about two writers who generally receive adoration; Smith doesn’t love Wiman’s poetry, and he thinks Volf’s theology is sometimes incoherent. But the “devastating” also has a positive tinge, I think; beautiful music can be devastating. And Smith is one of those critics whose work is devastating in both ways; he can be ruthlessly clear-eyed about another writer’s failings, but he offers such a deeply engaged reading of the books he writes about that his reviews are a testament to the project of criticism, in a beautiful way. I’d be happy for one of my books to be worthy of his devastation. Read the review here.

Joyce Maynard on her estranged child

Readers of this newsletter know of my love for Oldster, a web magazine about being 50+ (like me!). Two of its features are the monthly “Ask a Sober Oldster” series, featuring interviews with ex-drinkers like Anne Lamott, NPR’s Neda Ulaby, and songwriter Rhett Miller, and the weekly Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, which this week features Joyce Maynard (whom I got to know a little when she returned to Yale in her sixties as an undergrad, then later when I interviewed her for my Judy Blume biography). Excerpt, on her estranged child:

But Jim’s death wasn’t my greatest challenge. In my life as a parent, I have struggled with the choice of one of my three adult children, to remain largely distanced from me, which has also meant that I have not gotten to experience the joy—no doubt, incomparable—of knowing and being known by his children.

Estrangement from an adult child has reached epidemic proportions—particularly in middle class American culture, but those on the receiving end seldom speak of the pain that accompanies the decision of a beloved child to distance themselves or cut their parent off entirely. I’ll mention my sorrow on this front here, though it remains the absolute hardest part of my life, because I know this experience is shared by a surprising number of parents of adult children these days—loving, flawed people, who made mistakes as parents always do, but never failed to love their child, never dreamed they wouldn’t be a part of their child’s life, and their grandchildren’s lives, in a meaningful way.

Few of those who experience some form of estrangement speak about it, because there’s so much shame attached. I speak about this here out of the knowledge that so many parents of my generation—including, no doubt, some reading my words here—are going through this, and feel alone in their grief. I want to say, they are not alone.

But even this most painful experience has brought with it lessons. Radical acceptance being one of these. And the realization that it is possible to know great sorrow without surrendering one’s joy. I would have loved to have had the opportunity to be an active and involved grandmother in the lives of my older son’s three children—and who knows, maybe one day sometime in the future, if I live as long as my friend Bea, they may seek me out, and if they do, oh will I ever rejoice and welcome them. Meanwhile, I have had to learn that it works better for a person to celebrate the gifts in her life than mourn for what she doesn’t have.

Read the whole thing here.

Self-checkout or checkout lane—which side are you on?

The inimitable Jeff Maurer on a new Rhode Island law:

You know how when you were a kid, when someone asked what you want to do when you grow up, you’d say “I want to scan groceries at a Sam’s Club in Warwick, Rhode Island”? Well, awesome news: Rhode Island has passed a law requiring grocery stores to have one traditional checkout lane operating for every three self-checkout machines, and also someone has to staff the self-checkout machines at all times. The law was backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, and its goal is to protect Space Age scanning-stuff-while-making-idle-chit-chat-because-you’re-bored-out-of-your-fucking-mind jobs.

I confess that I hate self-checkout—is there a more annoying thirty seconds than waiting for the one worker assigned to that lane to get your scanner up and running again after it locks you out for trying to buy scallions with the smudged barcode?—and I am thinking of moving to Rhode Island just to use the new mandated checkout lanes. I still think Maurer is the funniest writer alive.

A riveting account of the 1958 Princeton antisemitism scandal, when dozens of Jews were rejected by the school’s exclusive eating clubs

In February 1958, at the end of the annual “bicker” period—when Princeton sophomores seek admission to the university’s prestigious eating clubs—an unusually high number of students got no offers—and most of them were Jews.

The “dirty bicker,” as it came to be known, was a troubling episode that laid bare the persistence of antisemitism in higher education. The Dirty Bicker tells the story of the affair that rocked the world of upper-class privilege, shedding light on the challenges that ambitious, upwardly mobile young Jewish men faced in postwar America.

Drawing on exclusive interviews with the men involved, both the rejected students and those who rejected them, Mark Oppenheimer transports readers to a time when status was tied to family heritage and even the ability to select the right blazer for the occasion. He addresses questions about what it means to belong—both in the Ivy League and in society more broadly.

Were students blackballed because they were Jewish or because they were public schoolers in a pecking order presided over by preps? Were there quotas or just a gentleman’s agreement not to admit too many “undesirables”? And what was the role of the administration in perpetrating a system that treated some boys as more equal than others?

A must-read for anyone who wants to understand campus antisemitism today, The Dirty Bicker is an absorbing account of a national scandal that spoke to the barriers confronting minority and working-class students in their struggle to be accepted in the upper echelons of society.

I would never use AI for any part of my book, which features original illustrations by the great Ariana Killoran. But for fun, I asked AI to design a jacket (which won’t be the one the press uses). Here is what Monsieur Le Chat came up with—and it ain’t half bad!

FWIW, I think this story would make a great movie, in a Mad Men sort of way: late ’50s people in sharp clothing behaving badly but looking smashing while doing it. The IP is available—who wants to option this baby?

I fan-boy Meghan Daum

When I was a young nonfiction tyro, just getting my sea legs, I—and many like me—stood in awe of , who seemed to be about three years older but light years ahead in her career. The nonfiction essays she published in Harper’s and The New Yorker, collected in her first book, My Misspent Youth, were terrific, and knowledge of them functioned as a kind of secret handshake among those of us who aspired to be the next Joan Didion or Janet Malcolm or Ian Frazier. Meghan has had a terrific and varied career as a magazine writer, newspaper columnist, novelist, essayist, and provocateuse. She gets better and truer and braver with age. So it was an honor to talk about my Judy Blume biography on Meghan’s podcast:

Every day is Father’s Day!

I didn’t write anything for Father’s Day, but if I had, I hope it would have been half as eloquent as my friend Liam Brennan’s ode to fatherhood. (, you should be reading Liam.) The link to the whole thing is here; excerpt:

Fatherhood is ultimately an endeavor measured in lifelong well-being rather than moment-to-moment pleasure – though I do think we give the fun part short shrift. (Greek nerds, we’re talking eudaimonia versus hedonia here. In Biblical terms, building your life on solid rock.) It’s understandable that some men are conflicted about fatherhood. Data shows parents report lower moment-to-moment happiness than non-parents, that they are harried and overdrawn.

But the time-stamp approach to happiness is the wrong way to think about even hedonic pursuits. As someone who has recently been to Disney World I can tell you: people routinely pass through long swaths of unpleasant moments for brief but enjoyable ones and they find it worth it. They spend hours in sweaty lines for rides that last three minutes and come away certain they’ve had a good time. Indeed, they go back and do it again and again. And it’s not just amusement parks – cooking elaborate meals gone in minutes, hiking long miles for a few moments at the summit. In all these pursuits, we endure long stretches of discomfort for the magnitude of the short ones that make it all worthwhile.

Parents struggling through the drudgery but swearing they wouldn’t have it any other way are not deluding themselves. They are drawing from the same well, only deeper. Little feet, big hugs, the miracle of each child’s uniqueness – each of these instills in us a profound awe for existence. My children’s eyes would grow wide when they were first trying to form sounds, as if they could see the noise coming from their mouths. They were expressions of both intentness and surprise. I’d laugh at the nonsensical noise, and their looks would grow even more confused.

It was endlessly delightful!

Today, we can talk openly about parenting’s challenges. That’s good, and it’s new. For decades, the idealized mid-century family left no room to say the quiet part: that raising kids is hard. But a culture of woe-is-the-parent memes never captures the magic of seeing first steps. Some of my children struggled with learning to read, others with learning to ride a bike. Watching them finally succeed in each of those efforts sparked a unique joy—and the best kind, the one you can feel for another person.

What to do with a lazy father-in-law?

Abigail Shrier has emerged as one of our tartest, funniest advice columnists. I challenge you to read this letter and guess at her reply:

Dear Abigail,

My wife and I both work full-time, and I grew up around working women: My mother and my grandmothers had careers. My mother-in-law did, too. In fact, she is what you’d call an old-school feminist: educated, opinionated, independent, the kind of woman who spent decades rejecting traditional gender roles. Which is why I find her marriage so baffling.

My father-in-law is treated like someone who cannot function independently. When they visit us, he sits at the table waiting to be served. If food arrives while others are still bringing dishes from the kitchen, he simply starts eating. When he finishes, he leaves the plate there for someone else to clear. If he wants something, he asks his wife to get it. If he wakes up before her, he waits for her to get up and make breakfast. It’s honestly astonishing to watch.

What bothers me isn’t some abstract political issue about household labor. I have three boys, aged between 10 and 15. And though I’m not trying to raise my sons according to internet slogans about fairness—in fact, we’re probably more conservative than liberal in most ways—I do want them to grow up understanding that a competent adult man should know how to take care of himself, contribute to a household, and not behave like a dependent child waiting for women to orbit around him.

My kids see me cook, clean, fold laundry, and do dishes. I take them to doctor and dentist appointments because my schedule is more flexible than my wife’s. Not because I’m trying to make a statement but because that’s what functioning adults do.

Now, my oldest son is beginning to notice his grandfather’s behavior and is asking: “Why doesn’t he help?” I usually say something diplomatic like “he grew up in a different time,” but what I really think is: Because everyone around him enabled him to become spoiled and helpless.

The truth is that watching this dynamic unfold in my house makes me angry. Not occasionally irritated—genuinely angry. Partly because of the example it sets, and partly because my wife and I are both exhausted professionals and he contributes nothing, spending most of the day watching videos on his phone. Increasingly I find myself wanting to say, politely but firmly: “When you visit our house, you’re expected to participate. Clear your plate. Help carry things. Get up and get what you need.”

Am I being unreasonable? Is this something I should address directly? Or is it one of those family dynamics where keeping the peace matters more than trying to correct behavior that will realistically never change?

—Eli, 49

I’ll just leave it at this: she didn’t say what I thought she’d say. But she persuaded me that she was mostly right, and my instinct was mostly wrong.

What is UP with sociology?

This is a question posed by the great Musa Al-Gharbi, here:

Work on inequality has crowded out other research (with inequalities tied to race, gender and sexuality occupying more attention than socioeconomic inequalities per se). Almost any phenomena analyzed by contemporary sociologists is framed in terms of social inequalities. To illustrate, roughly 80 percent of articles published in contemporary flagship sociology journals these days touch on inequality.

This work is often moralizing and is regularly framed in terms of social justice advocacy. For instance, the theme for the 2026 annual meeting is, “Disrupting the Status Quo: Putting Sociology to Work for a More Equitable Society.”

In reality, however, sociologists produce very little empirical work on how to practically improve life chances for working people and the poor. Contemporary sociologists analyze and describe social problems in great detail. We identify and measure new axes and instantiations of inequality, even in the most minute and niche contexts. But for all that, we dedicate comparatively little effort to conceptualizing, testing or raising the salience of plausible tactics to mitigate societal challenges, leaving us with little to offer policymakers, activists, non-profits or other stakeholders who are focused on solving concrete problems for actually-existing people in the real world here and now.

The whole post is long and awesome.

Best book ever?

I don’t care if I get Father’s Day gifts, but I sure was chuffed on Father’s Day when my wife went out with a couple of the kids to browse a used bookstore and came back with this book for me:

I don’t know why I didn’t read this the second it came out, but I read the frick out of it on Sunday, and I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed the first 80 pp. of Middlemarch any of the three times I have made it to p. 80 of Middlemarch. Frankly, it seems clear to me that Seth Rogen is a better author than George Eliot.

Islam and iPhones

I would say that I have been crushing it over at Arc lately, but really it’s my authors who have been crushing it. I just get out of their way. Check out this piece by Haroon Moghul about how his Muslim-education classes for Cincinnati teens fought the iPhone:

During the pandemic, our kids’ Sunday school went online. My wife and I sat through a few sessions, more than enough to know this wouldn’t cut it. Convinced our kids could not learn their religion virtually, my wife suggested I design something better. We called what emerged a “halaqa,” an Arabic term for a study circle—which, in this case, is an ongoing experiment in connecting our kids, and many of their friends and peers, to their faith tradition. My halaqas have reached dozens of Muslim students around Cincinnati, from a short-lived elementary school class with over 15 students to the culmination of that effort, what I teasingly call the AP Halaqa, with about a dozen high schoolers. While the specifics of the halaqa might be particular to American Islam, what I’ve learned speaks to some of the more urgent questions of our moment: how communities form and sustain themselves, what we owe the generations ahead of us, even the vital role faith traditions might play in redefining our relationship to technology.

Plenty of Americans accept that addictive algorithms have brainrotted us. Faith traditions, however, seem absent from many of the conversations about just what we’re supposed to do about this. That’s unfortunate. I’ve come to believe that the widespread adoption of smartphones verges on the practically idolatrous. Smartphones may not be shirk in the strict theological sense, the gravest theological sin in Islam, though if any other practice were to so distort our time and worship, replace the tasbih, the prayer beads that Catholics would call rosaries, and colonize our time in mosques, we might not consider that too far-fetched a claim.

What follows is an elaboration of how faith might be a firewall. Because something has to be.

Look, just subscribe to the Arc newsletter, would you? Easy link here.

Finally, a present, from me to you:

Before I send you off to Amy’s piece, I want to offer my own thoughts on co-ops. I was raised in a co-op, sort of: Mudpie was an anti-racist, anti-sexist child-care cooperative that flourished in Springfield, Massachusetts, from the mid-1970s until it folded in the aughts. When my parents joined, in 1977, when I was three, there was a robust requirement for parents to donate time; there was one full-time teacher, but the assistant-teaching (or babysitting, really), the cleaning, the yardwork, the accounting—it was all handled by parents, donating their several hours a week.

Read more

I find conversion fascinating, maybe because I would never consider converting away from my natal Judaism—but maybe also because I underwent a sort of mild conversion of my own, meaning I went from being a totally secular Jew to a mediumly-observant, fairly deeply engaged Jew. I know what it’s like to decide that organized religion has something to offer. While I don’t share their attraction to Catholicism, I get what they were after, and they explain well why Catholicism was able to offer it—until it wasn’t.

The point I want to get to is what I think their conversions to Catholicism have to say about Judaism—ultimately, what they found lacking in the religion that I share with them, how their stories should force us to take a hard look at what we Jews do. But first, a bit more about their stories.

Linker has written about his story at various points (though I wish he would write a book about it, à la Gilman). The gist is that he was looking for a well-ordered, integrated life, in which his daily work related to higher purpose, and the Catholic Church seemed to offer it. It was also the cultural milieu in which he then moved, the conservative Christian world, filled with Catholics, of the magazine First Things, of which he was then an editor. He was looking for a moral structure, and a community, and a system of ritual—all of it—and found it in Catholicism. Why not look toward his father’s Judaism? He writes:

The story of how I ended up converting to Roman Catholicism instead of attempting to dig deeper into my Jewish background is a psychologically and biographically complicated one. Suffice it to say that by my early 30s, I knew far more about the Christian tradition than I did about Judaism, and I chose the easier path.

As Linker told me on the podcast, he didn’t know much about Judaism, and with its foreign languages, the inaccessibility of the liturgy and worship service, etc., it was easier to plug into Catholicism. He was also surrounded by Catholics who were delighted for him to become a Catholic, but not by Jews who had any stake in his Jewish life.

Gilman’s book tells a much more curious, and, given its length, richer story. Born in 1923, he too was raised a secular Jew in New York City (like Linker), and he came to Catholicism in his twenties, after some spirit seemed to possess him to read a library copy of Etienne Gilson’s The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. He pulled it off a library shelf, at random, put it back, took it off again, put it back. Finally checked it out. Took it home, didn’t read it. Trying not to read it, finally giving in and reading it:

I read on through the evening and into the night … smoking furiously, taking numerous notes, marking passage after passage, finally toward dawn dropping down on the sofa in my clothes for a few hours of sleep. When I woke up I grabbed the book and started reading again. I read through breakfast, a thin lunch, a thinner supper and on into the evening…. I turned the last page (of 400, 500, more?), made my final notation, put the book down and said, aloud, to myself and to the air, in a voice that didn’t sound like mine at all, feeling a little self-conscious as I did it, something like this: “It’s true, all of it, it’s all true.”

(Read the book; it’s really good.) Gilman got baptized, then spent eight years as a Catholic, got his start writing for Catholic magazines Jubilee and Commonweal, and had a close circle of Catholic friends. His wife even converted (they soon divorced, and he would have two more wives, one the literary agent Lynn Nesbit). Gilman eventually lost his faith, although his explanation for why is the weakest part of the book. Best I can tell, it seems that he finally decided that the vices he had hoped Catholicism would rescue him from, principally lust (he visited prostitutes who would dominate him in ways his wife would not; he had a lot of shame about his light S&M kinks, which in today’s context are pretty vanilla) and pride, or ambition, were not so bad after all, and were in him ineradicable. Rather than continue to sin, then confess, then sin, then confess, he decided to quit playing the whole game and accept that he was a mildly kinky, highly ambitious writer, and that he could live a good life like that. “[T]he battle against carnality and ambition … had become too much for me.”

And what then? Did he take his new-ish spirituality back into Judaism? “I tried for a time to go back to Judaism. But I’d never really been there, so the effort was fated quickly to expire.”

Gilman’s story, in particular, is fascinating in how it turns over and over, for inspection, the experience of a convert, in his case at midcentury and in New York’s fertile, highly secular, and rather anti-Catholic milieu—he could not bring himself to tell his parents; Commonweal was a good landing place, since it was a Catholic magazine that employed non-Catholics (by then, he was on his way out again); he seems less troubled by the fact that he visited prostitutes than by what he asked them to do to him, or for him, which says something about the nature of taboo and shame; he reinforced his Catholicism with readings by Merton, Mauriac, Gilson, etc. All of it is just so interesting.

But what both of these stories had me thinking was where Judaism fell in all of this. In each case, they had been—like so many American Jews—exposed to the thinnest of gruel. There were the obvious difficulties: They didn’t know what Jewish practice was—Gilman’s family had attended synagogue, but occasionally; Linker’s, not at all. Neither had any Hebrew, the lingua franca of Jewish observance (even the once resolutely Anglophone Reform tradition moved to re-insert Hebrew into worship, in the 1960s and since). They both had probably picked up more about normative Catholic practice from the movies and their avid reading than they had of the less standardized, haphazard Jewish practice.

But there was more. In each case, there was a Catholic community eager to receive them; had they wanted to reengage with Judaism, they might have found a class at a local synagogue (a class that would have been both too difficult, if it required even the basic Hebrew alphabet, and too easy, in that the philosophical texts and arguments encountered would have seemed dumbed-down to these two men, schooled in the whole canon of political philosophy (Linker) or the Western canon of literature, especially modernists like Proust, Pound, etc. (Gilman)). But they didn’t know a bunch of men and women, even a small clique, who took any interest in their Jewish practice—or, put another way, who would have been visibly excited to bring them to synagogue, as so many Catholics would have been delighted to bring Linker to church.

Put yet another way: As secular as the journalism world is, if you find some self-identified Catholics, you will quickly know that they attend Mass, have a priest they admire, take the Catholic calendar seriously, etc. If you find some self-identified Jews, unless they are Orthodox, they are unlikely to talk about their home practice (Shabbat dinners, etc.), which they likely don’t have, their synagogue, their favorite rabbi, their recent holiday (unless it was Hanukkah), etc. Even if they have these aspects to their religious life, they will wear them less publicly, and they won’t have been raised to think that part of their job on earth is to bring lapsed Jews into a closer relationship to the tradition.

(It should be said that there are groups that do see kiruv, or outreach, as their Jewish mission, groups like Chabad and Aish HaTorah. They are Orthodox, and—I say this neither to praise nor to criticize—they are not the right point of entry for many Jews, for reasons that would merit another post. They are also not well-dispersed into secular American society such that they’d encounter you as, say, a fellow journalist, office worker, ER doctor, or fireman.)

I don’t mean to overstate Catholicism’s success in kiruv, nor Judaism’s failings. There aren’t a lot of converts to either religion, relative to the whole society, and even fewer who go from Judaism to Catholicism. I am talking about a niche phenomenon. But it’s striking how, when one does read of conversion to Christianity, the story often involves a kind of love (critics would say “love-bombing,” drawing on cult studies), or simply available community, that Judaism had failed to offer. These people get invited to Mass, get invited on retreats, get engaged in conversations about theology, by Catholics; from their Jewish acquaintances, they get none of that.

There are historical and sociological reasons why Jews don’t seek to convert—principally, for most of our history, we lived in lands where seeking to convert the Gentiles would have got us killed. And there are theological reasons: in our theology, Gentiles aren’t seen as potential Jews, whereas in Christian theology (much as they might deny or quarrel with this, in these liberal times) it is a good thing, if not always seen anymore as a necessary thing, for Jews to become Christians.

But it’s nevertheless the case that there is a certain kind of welcome that Jews don’t extend, even to our own. Even for Jews who have a practice, they are likely, especially in older generations, to see it as a “private” matter; Jews have long thought that they benefitted, safety-wise, from liberal orders, in which the state gets out of the church’s business, and in which religion is privatized—where it’s not a matter of national identity or public pageantry. I’m not sure that supposition holds up: Nazi Germany was of course highly secular—those parades weren’t for the pope, or for Christianity—and states with official churches, like England and the Scandinavian countries, have often been quite benevolent to the Jews. But whatever its merits, many Jews have internalized a sense that we don’t talk about our Jewishness. So when there are Jews in our midst, who might be curious about who we are or what we do, we aren’t there to teach them.

Of course, most Jews wouldn’t know what to teach—just as your everyday Catholics aren’t good guides to theology. What Linker and Gilman were looking for was a highly intellectualized religion; the average Catholic would not have had much to give Linker, but the crowd at First Things did. Even here, the comparison to the Jewish world is apt; I have written for, edited at, or generally been in the orbit of numerous Jewish magazines, and only rarely have colleagues sought to engage each other, religiously, on a personal level—an invitation to synagogue, say. The general principle is respect for diversity: the staff that has Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, secular, Reconstructionist, diasporist, and Renewal members is one where people don’t want to overstep boundaries; any invitation to a religious event might imply an attempt to move someone into a different sphere of observance. The potential to give offense is there. Whereas at the Catholic magazine, while it’s known that this parish down the block is conservative and this one more liberal, they all offer Mass, confession, etc. An invitation to any of them probably seems benign.

And Gilman—he got to Catholicism through literature. He was made Catholic by Gilson, and in part by Thomas Merton. That’s a story I have heard before! And yet if he had gone looking for the Jewish analogues to Gilson, Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Waugh, Mauriac, Percy, Merton—looking for books explicitly or implicitly Jewish in a religious sense, not just in a sociological or cultural sense (cf. Henry Roth, Philip Roth, Bellow, Richler, Howard Jacobson)—books that deal with questions of evil, theodicy, ultimate purpose—the pickings would have been slim. Today, there are more Jewish authors like that to choose from (David Bezmozgis, Joshua Cohen, Tova Mirvis), and probably fewer coming out of the Catholic tradition than a century ago. But it’s still the case that Jews have not created a rich secular literature about religiosity; the most religious among us almost never write literature, and the most literate eschew religion, and there are fewer in the crossover camp than in the Christian world.

All of which is to say: What might it have looked like for Gilman and Linker to have been welcomed, enticed, or nudged into Jewish engagement, as they had been into Catholic engagement? I ask this only partly for the sake of the Jewish community, which needs to think about how to welcome people in, or back, but moreover for the sake of Linker and Gilman themselves. Linker seems happy in his current secularism, but Gilman is emphatic, at book’s end, that he has not found happiness in atheism, that he is still, in some sense, a seeker:

But I’m not happy, I’ve less happiness than I once had…. And the thought has come to me more than once of late that I may have lost my chance on that evening twenty-five years ago when my feet wouldn’t move on the church steps [a time when he knew he was leaving the Church for good].

As I read this, Gilman is saying that Catholicism didn’t make him happy, but it had offered the promise of happiness. We don’t all find our bliss, or our thriving, through religion, but Gilman almost did. Is it crazy to think that such a spiritually oriented man ought to have looked further—if not to Judaism, then, I don’t know, to Buddhism and beyond?—and that it should be a source of sadness to him, and to us, that he did not?

A rabbi goes off Facebook

A longstanding fascination of mine is how much of theological discussion now happens among clergy, professors, and laypeople on social media, whether it’s JD Vance trolling the pope or rabbis sharing sermon ideas. Yet social media is bad for these people. Which is something my own rabbi addressed in an email to our congregation on Friday:

Every day in the last week, I’ve compulsively logged in to Facebook to see what other rabbis and friends are writing about the world. Nestled between advertisements for products I’ve already bought or decided against buying, I see posts by rabbinic friends fighting with each other. I see news stories with horrible comments. I see disturbing Substack screeds shared, I get sucked in, and I feel worse than ever.

It’s time for a detox. I’m checking out of Facebook for at least a month, and perhaps all the way to Tisha Be-Av. I can’t subject myself any longer to the posts of friends, colleagues, and, most of all, people who I don’t know at all, speaking horribly to each other about every topics, from every political or cultural perspective.

If you have Facebook, you might feel the same way. Or perhaps there is another area in your life where you feel a need to check out—something where a dynamic, or a behavior, is making your psyche worse.

Tomorrow, we read Parshat Beha’alotecha. One famous section of the parashah describes the story of Miriam and Aaron gossiping about Moses. This is a complicated story with a lot going on, but one thing that happens in it is that, as Miriam speaks ill of another, she herself becomes afflicted. That is, we might think that we can expose ourselves to bad behavior and evil speech without being affected, but in truth, we cannot.

I want you to think about a way that you can protect your emotional or mental health by checking out of something. It could be Facebook, it could be checking out of a routine fight you have with a relative, it could be stepping back from a frustrating project or dynamic in your home. Think of something, and, tomorrow in shul, I’m going to ask you (you won’t have to share) where it is for you.

May this be a Shabbat of checking out—so that we can better check in to ourselves and our real lives.

Rabbi Woodward

Harry Potter in Yiddish

Loved this piece in Jewish Review of Books by Rowling’s Yiddish translator. It begins:

“Call him Voldemort,” Dumbledore had told Harry. “Always use the proper name for things.” “Ruf im Voldemor. Zolst tomid onrufn a zakh mitn geherikn nomen.” This was my primary directive as I attempted to translate the characters and objects of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone into Yiddish.

Take, for example, the name Slytherin, a house at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, whose mascot is a serpent and whose students and alumni—from Draco Malfoy to Bellatrix Lestrange to Voldemort himself—are known for cunning and ruthlessness. Initially, I saw only two possibilities: either a close phonetic approximation such as Sliderin or a literal translation of the verb “to slither,” something like Shlengelin. I went back and forth for weeks, unsure of which was better, feeling out how each sounded and remaining unsatisfied. Then, I was struck by a completely different solution that immediately felt right: Samderin, composed of two words—sam and derin—that together mean “venom within.”

There is more.

Trump’s hair and the fate of the world

Although follicular vanity for men has become less stigmatized than it used to be, I still hold that the best presidents will be those who go bald or gray naturally, without resorting to extreme measures to thwart nature’s course. It all went wrong with that dyad of hair-plugging presidents, Biden and Trump. It’s with pleasure that I read this Washington Post article about Trump memory-holing his own hair-loss drugs:

President Donald Trump’s medical reports no longer include a common hair-loss prevention drug that his physicians said he routinely used during his first term in office.

Finasteride—also known by the brand name Propecia—is used by millions of American men to prevent male-pattern hair loss. Three of Trump’s past physicians have said that he used the drug before and during his first term as president.

But the drug has not appeared on Trump’s medical reports since he returned to office last year, including a report released Friday night that mentioned three other medications.

Can AI cure cancer?

As readers know, my question is not whether AI can cure cancer, but can it cure lupus, a devastating disease that we have come a long toward making manageable, but which still afflicts mostly women, and the treatment includes steroids that can make the patient fat? Lupus: that is my bar for AI. Meanwhile, here are Kelsey Piper and Jerusalem Demsas on whether AI can cure cancer.

The Darby Saxbe School for Academics Who Can’t Write Good

Zoolander got there first.

But here is on teaching academics to write clearly for a popular audience:

Here’s what I tell academics or intellectuals trying to convey their ideas: Never try to sound smart at the expense of being clear. Being clear will require you to boil down your ideas into the simplest possible units and the leanest possible sentences. I always start my writing process with a sloppy, long-winded draft, and then I edit ruthlessly, taking out any extraneous words or phrases that might drag on the reader. You might feel like you’re dumbing your ideas down. That’s good! You can always build it back up later, as you layer more complexity onto your sentences. But start by streamlining. Every paragraph should have a purpose. Every sentence should have a purpose.

Academic writing (or business or policy writing) demands certain conventions (weak, conditional language; passive voice; jargon or highly technical language). Good writers seek to make their writing as strong, engaging, and active as possible within those conventions, or (better) they toss those conventions out whenever they can. Informational writing need not be boring! But you might have to work harder to get readers interested.

True.

I don’t buy for a second that universities can’t quit Canvas. Of course they can: just turn it off. The main reason they think they can’t—the main reason they won’t—is because of the sunk cost. They have spent so much money pointlessly moving classwork online, even for classes that meet in person, that they can’t possibly admit the money was completely, totally wasted. Over the past couple decades, universities, in the vain hope of saving money, have burned money on two systems, Canvas for course management and Workday for human resources; what’s more, Workday is sometimes used for course management, too—at WashU, where I work, it’s used for course listings and selection. It sucks, faculty hate it, students hate it, and there is no going back. At WashU, the student newspaper reported the total cost of the Canvas migration to be $265 million. To paraphrase the apocryphal quotation attributed to Sen. Everett Dirksen, “A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Here is the article from WashU’s Student Life, and here is an excerpt:

The total cost of the project and implementation of WashU’s Workday and Student Sunrise projects totaled over $265 million, spent over at least seven years, according to David Gray, executive vice chancellor for finance and chief financial officer (CFO) of WashU.

The cost of Workday has been criticized by some members of the University community. On Oct. 23, undergraduate and graduate students and faculty protested outside a meeting between Gray and the WashU Faculty Senate Council during which Gray provided information about current and past University finances. Some of the protesters held signs reading “support workers, not Workday.”

According to Gray, the Workday cost can be broken down into three main segments: $81 million for Workday’s financial and human resources services, called Human Capital Management (HCM); $98.9 million for Student Sunrise, which includes Workday Student; and $56.5 million for planning, data integration, financial aid support PowerFAIDs, and other costs related to Workday. The University is also spending $23.8 million in fiscal year (FY) 2026 for Workday support teams and operations and pays a $5.7 million annual licensing fee.

Workday HCM and finance aspects were in the works since at least 2018 and went live in 2021. Planning for Student Sunrise began in 2020 and went live over stages in 2024 and 2025.

The costs of Workday HCM and Student Sunrise have also drawn increased scrutiny as University prorations increased for the fourth consecutive time this year. According to slides displayed by Gray at the Faculty Senate Council meeting, prorations increases accounted for an additional $200 million paid by WashU schools between FY 2022 and 2026.

So, basically, we signed up for Workday, costs kept going up, and we kept paying them. I don’t have figures for Canvas; the web tells me that it’s more like $1 million a year, though that probably does not include the cost of onboarding and an initial license (N.B.: I could be wrong!). So way less, but still the cost of ten competent human teachers (or admins, or mental health counselors, or whatever).

But to me, the money isn’t the issue: it’s that paper was a better medium for coursework. There is no improving—at least in the humanities—on students handing in papers, teachers grading those papers (in pen), and handing them back. And in terms of communication, we pretty well topped out with phones and email; all Canvas does is serve as a client for emails (and make it a bit easier to email a bunch of students at once). What’s more, by layering Canvas on top of simple Pine or Gmail or whatever, we created one more system that can suffer “outages,” and one more way for students to lie about not getting their work done (“Canvas wouldn’t let me upload my paper, which really, truly was finished!”).

Point being: this is all a case of the sunk cost fallacy. “It’s worth doing because we have spent so much on it already.” Quit Canvas now. Burn it down. Go back to paper.

Opposing opinions welcome.

Who’s the GOAT?

I reviewed The Mountain Goats in New Haven. Whole thing here; excerpt:

I am a pretty big music fan, with the “pretty” doing a lot of work. If I were a “big” music fan, I’d know more than most everybody; if I were just a “fan,” maybe I’d still be listening to my Freedom Rock CDs from high school. What being a pretty big music fan means, as I see it, is that whenever I am in a conversation about music, the person I am talking to either knows way less about the current scene than I do, or way more. Knowledge-wise, I’m the guy in the middle.

For the guy in the middle, it’s an open question how much I should know about The Mountain Goats. The longtime, mighty prolific musical project of erstwhile novelist John Darnielle, The Mountain Goats are a literate, guitar-driven act that has generally lacked widespread radio (or streaming) success but has, I would bet, more fans who have seen 20 of their shows than all but a few other acts anywhere. If you love The Mountain Goats, you love them immoderately; but it’s not terribly hard to have entirely missed the memo.

I’m one of the guys who missed the memo….

To a tyro like me, the songs sounded alike, although I realize that that’s the weakest of critiques: all rap sounds alike to the non-fan, all Jeff Buckley sounds alike to the non-fan, etc. If all of X sounds the same to you, then you just need to listen to more X. In my own defense, I’ll say that even The Mountain Goats fans I know will generally concede that Darnielle’s genius is, mostly, in his lyrics, and if you don’t know the lyrics—if you haven’t memorized them, as about half the fans in the house Sunday night seem to have—then the show loses something. That’s not a knock against The Mountain Goats, just a fact. Go see The Avett Brothers, or HAIM, or The Heavy Heavy—to pick three bands that have passed through the region lately—and you’ll get more melodic variation, and more genres: ballads for the ballad-lovers, some nods to Laurel Canyon acoustics, some jazzy chords, some crunch guitars for people who want to rock out, a little something for everyone. With The Mountain Goats, the up-tempo major-chord music is the vehicle for Darnielle’s stories, delivered in his passable voice, loveable if you love being reminded of The Mountain Goats.

Reunion time!

My 30th reunion was this past weekend. In its honor, enjoy this time capsule:

Israel on Broadway

One of the best Substack newsletters out there is ’s Marquee: The Broadway Maven’s Weekly Blast. If you love theater, sign up now. It’s not a political newsletter, not by a longshot, but recently he posted this important essay about “a small but growing movement among Broadway people to boycott Israel.” Read it here, excerpt here:

here’s something to watch: several dozen theater organizations have endorsed a “Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel” organized by Theater Workers for a Ceasefire. Part of the group’s expansive definition of “ceasefire” includes demands for an end to the “Israeli occupation” of “Historic Palestine.” That is not a call merely to end occupation of the West Bank or Gaza. It frames the Jewish state itself as an occupation. That leaves no room for peaceful coexistence with a Jewish state.

The boycott, underscored by a petition signed by thousands of theater workers, represents a disturbing trend inside the performing arts that treats public geopolitical alignment not as a personal choice, but increasingly as a form of cultural virtue.

The Substack Stage Left Report has been covering the movement and encouraging theater workers attending the Tonys and other awards shows to wear ceasefire pins “to show solidarity with the movement.”

As an American-born Jewish Israeli who publishes a Broadway newsletter, I find this trend disturbing not simply because it targets Israel, but because it misunderstands what Broadway is supposed to be. Broadway is not a political party. It is not an activist coalition. It is not a morality pageant where artists prove their worth through ideological signaling.

To Catholic and back again

I recently hosted a podcast episode with the very bright and engaging Damon Linker, who writes the excellent newsletter . We talked about a lot of stuff, including the Catholic right, but the part that was most interesting to hear about was his conversion to Catholicism, and then his renunciation of that conversion (and his return to an agnostic cultural Judaism more or less). I’ll have more to say about this in a future newsletter, but for now listen to the pod here.

And here is some of his writing on his deconversion; excerpt here:

Those who have read my obituary for my father know that he raised me and my younger brother alone from the time I was eight years old. My mother suffered a mental breakdown, emotionally abused my younger brother, my father, and myself, and then abandoned us.

In the chaotic years that followed, Dad made the choice not to give us a religious education. He was raised by observant Jewish immigrants from Poland and Austria, but he rejected everything he learned from them about Judaism, except for a watery cultural pride.

So my brother and I were raised to think of ourselves as Jewish, but in thoroughly secular terms. How secular? So much so that growing up I never attended synagogue, never celebrated the High Holidays, never went to Hebrew School, and never celebrated a Bar Mitzvah. I grew up in a world devoid of divinity in either the absolute sense of a felt presence “out there” or in the quotidian sense of a habitual and communal set of liturgical practices and worshipful prayers.

Which meant I was godless by default—someone who would respond with irritable incredulity when I’d encounter someone who claimed to believe in a deity. This occasionally led to some pretty obnoxious behavior, like the time I made a girl in my high school cry when she tried to defend her Christian faith against my onslaught of skeptical objections. But most of the time, religion didn’t even come up in my life—not at home, not at school, not in my own reading and thinking.

But that began to change—or rather, I began to long for it to change—when I was completing my Ph.D. in political science, with a focus on political philosophy. Studying with students of Leo Strauss taught me that my own atheism—like nearly all modern forms of godlessness—was dogmatic and circular, unphilosophically presuming the truth of what needed to be demonstrated.

Once my teachers pointed to the absence of an adequate demonstration of atheism in the writings of a series of irreverent and impious modern philosophers, it became impossible to ignore. Suddenly faith began to seem like an active possibility—especially once I took to heart Strauss’ claim that the “moral man as such is the potential believer.” What he meant was that religious faith and experience are secondary to moral faith and experience. Anyone who feels a call within himself to righteousness or virtue, or who responds with rage to injustice or vice (whether on a global scale or in one’s own life), longs for or presumes the existence of providential gods—something in the universe that knows and cares about human beings, hears and sometimes answers prayers, intervenes in history, and makes the world a moral whole by promising to reward the righteous and punish the wicked.

Honesty compelled me to admit that I was such a moral man. I cared very deeply about justice. My soul yearned for a world in which the virtuous would thrive and the vicious suffer. And since our world was not such a place, that meant I also (secretly) longed for some force of goodness to make this inchoate moral order a reality. “God” was the name for such a force. I guess you could say I left graduate school as one of Strauss’ “potential believers,” longing for a God I didn’t think existed, beyond the stirrings in my own head and heart.

Reunion time!

Did I mention my 30th college reunion happened?

Rapey dogs redux

Finally, many of you wrote to me about my short essay on the Nicholas Kristof column that repeated the bizarre allegation that dogs are raping Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Most of you agreed with me, but a couple wrote along the lines of, “Why did you focus on that one allegation, when there is so much that Israelis are doing wrong?”’

Let me pick that apart, briefly.

First, if you believe, as I argued, that the dog-rape claim is implausible, borderline insane, the product of a broken mind, then you do not take seriously the other claims that person makes—although perhaps they are made elsewhere, by more reliable thinkers. But you don’t say, “Well, this person may believe in Jewish space lasers, and that’s probably wrong, but what about his views on the West Bank?” This is not the person whose views on the West Bank you should care about.

Second, even if you do find the rest of the person’s reporting, or commentating, reliable or useful, it is still worth calling him out on the one clearly insane charge. And here is why: to make a bizarre charge, like the rapey-dog charge, is categorically different from charges about prisoner abuse, land grabs, even genocide. Because, you see, it posits that Jews are capable of supernatural evil. There are lots of things that many governments do, some defensible, some indefensible: torture, murder, drone warfare, poisoning the environment, etc. I am prepared to believe that every country is capable of those things, including countries that I love. That’s life in a fallen world. We can’t be blasé about it, nor can we avert our eyes from it. But to believe that a country is run by people with special secret powers—like making weapons that vaporize people, leaving no trace of them, as the NGO that made the dog-rape allegation has also alleged—is to buy into conspiratorial, magical thinking. It’s one thing to believe that Jews—or Muslims, or Black people, or queer people, or whatever—have committed war crimes; it’s another thing to believe that they have invisibility cloaks or can engage in time-travel. I think the dog-rape charge is of that order. And so it has to be called out, specifically.

On Monday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed discussing disturbing allegations about abuse, rape, and sexual torture perpetrated by the Israeli military against Palestinian prisoners. The allegations are powerful and disturbing, and if there is even a grain of truth in them—and I am persuaded there is more than a grain—then we should all be horrified, as we should be horrified by any torture or rape. That such acts are committed by soldiers in every war does not excuse these acts; to the contrary, it’s one reason we must always be vigilant, and clear-eyed, and willing to investigate such allegations, even—or especially—when committed by “our side.”

But, as many of you no doubt know already, the op-ed has also generated a good deal of pushback because of its repetition of some allegations that are poorly sourced, of dubious authenticity, or clearly false. I stand with Haviv Rettig Gur, who asks, “Why, if there is no doubt that abuse occurred—and there is no doubt—was there so much obvious propaganda in Kristof’s op-ed?”

I don’t have a complete answer to that question, but I want to talk about one of Kristof’s propagandistic allegations, the one that surely has gotten the most press: the one about dog rape. Kristof wrote, “Other Palestinian prisoners and human rights monitors have also cited reports of police dogs being coached to rape prisoners.” The dog-rape allegation is so poorly sourced that one wonders how Kristof wrote it, and how his editors allowed it to get into print. But I am not so surprised. We all believe bullshit, at one point or another. The question is not why we believe bullshit, but why we believe a particular case of it. To understand, it’s helpful to look back at two urban legends from the 1990s.

If you are of a certain age, in your forties or fifties, say, you will remember the widespread urban legend that a certain famous, handsome actor had been admitted to an emergency room for the removal of a gerbil from his anus. According to this widely repeated story, the actor—whom I won’t name, because the story is absurd, and besides, plenty of you know exactly whom I am talking about—had been playing a weird sex game, in which a gerbil was inserted, possibly using a cardboard toilet-paper roll (there were various versions of the story), the idea being that the desperate gerbil running around inside him was sexually exciting. Some versions of the story held that this was a known practice, “gerbilling,” common in the gay and/or kink community (you’d be right to hear undertones of homophobia, in a story born in the panicked age of AIDS). According to the story, the actor could not remove the dead gerbil (did I mention that in “gerbilling,” the gerbil ran around until it asphyxiated and died?), hence the trip to the ER.

Today, we live in an age when the concept of “urban legend” is a bit outdated, because the web offers up approximately 738 new conspiracy theories, bogus stories, or deep fakes per hour, often repeated, or incited, by presidents or vice presidents (cf. “Haitian immigrants eating your pets”)—it’s all urban legend now. But before the web, it was a few stories per year, or decade, that took hold, repeated on schoolyards, in barbershops and hair salons, over poker, whatever. And the gerbil story was ubiquitous. In the mid-1990s, you’d have to have been uniquely friendless, or else living in a Catholic abbey, not to have heard it somewhere. And shoot, I bet even the monks heard it.

(In fact, a lot of you clicked on this post because when you saw “gerbils” in the headline, your monkey brain lit up with memories of this urban legend. You hoped I’d be writing about the actor and the gerbilling. You’re welcome.)

And here was the crazy thing: even people who should have known better believed the story. In fact, if memory serves me—and if there is a lesson to be taken from what I am writing, it’s that our senses and judgment deceive us, so perhaps memory does not serve me!—some of the most enthusiastic perpetrators of this hoax were doctors, who loved to claim the inside track on the story. At least two friends of mine in med school reported having heard the story from professors of theirs, who had reported hearing it from old med-school classmates of theirs. “My prof did residency with the guy at the UCLA hospital who had to sew his anus together again”—that sort of thing. Never mind the confidentiality/HIPAA violations that such a chain of repetition would imply—“inside access” stories like these were commonplace. I have one doctor friend who, to this day, claims to have read about this case, in a med-school textbook, in which the actor was cited by name.

None of it made sense, not then or now. But it didn’t matter, because the story was too good. Also, the story fit preexisting narratives, anxieties, and exoticizing obsessions: Is all of Hollywood secretly gay, or perverted, or otherwise abnormal? Is this what gay men do? Is this why they get AIDS? The story also had a strong whiff of schadenfreude: He looks like he has the perfect life, this actor, with his looks and his money and his gorgeous, famous wife—he had one—but actually he is a sick perv.

And so forth.

Around the same time, there was another urban legend, about a sexy female movie actress who was, allegedly, biologically male, or possibly intersex. Again, there were multiple versions of the story, but they generally all held that this actress had been born with a penis, or with sexually ambiguous genitalia, or with XY chromosomes but with a condition that made him unable to process testosterone, and so he developed to look female. Some versions of the story had this actress undergoing surgery (or hormone therapy) to present as female, or to confirm her female identity.

As with the gerbil story, there was no meaningful confirmation anywhere—no article in a proper journal, or in a mainstream newspaper; even before the web, one could search newspapers and journals, using microfilm, various indexes (remember The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature?), etc., and nobody ever produced a citation confirming this rumor, let alone a photocopy of a relevant article, or even what we’d now call a “deepfake.”

But this story was, if anything, believed even more passionately. Again, if you are my age, you likely remember somebody saying, often in a compassionate, or performatively progressive way, “You know, _______ is biologically male. It’s more common than you think … ” The speaker’s point was often to destigmatize such conditions, or to show the speaker’s own enlightenment in such matters.

If you pressed the speaker on this claim—which I would, because I have long been curious about urban legends, and because I am argumentative—and asked how they knew, they would say something like, “It’s widely known in the medical community.” Again, there might be an appeal to “experts”: “If you ask people who work on these matters, like doctors who work with intersex kids, they will tell you she is a famous case.” And, this line of thinking went, she turned out to be beautiful, and fully “passing,” and rich and famous, and isn’t that wonderful?

Again, doctors were not immune to the charms of this story, which according to them had always been shared in residency, or in med school, often by older students or professors who “knew,” because “everybody knows!” If you challenged them on the story’s provenance, they would get frustrated and wave their hands in despair, insisting that this story was so widely known in the medical community that to doubt it was some sort of willful know-nothing-ism—and possibly marked you as a right-winger, since you were denying the veracity of an inspiring story of triumph and courage in a marginalized community.

It’s hard to overstate the certainty with which some very bright people could hold these beliefs—bright people who, given my circles, were nearly always left-leaning, the kind of people today decrying (with good reason) the lies and misinformation that come out of the White House. In the summer of 1997, I was teaching a summer-school writing class at Andover, the boarding school. One day, we were talking in the class about the importance of skepticism and fact-checking. I mentioned this actress, knowing that many of my students would have heard the story (they had) and believed it (they did), and pointed out to them that there was not a shred of evidence for it. One boy raised his hand and told me he knew it was true, because his mother had gone to elementary school with the actress, and—follow me here—the actress’s mother had told the boy’s grandmother about her daughter’s syndrome. I told the boy that I was dubious—I said that I was sure his mother believed her story to be true, but that I was pretty sure she was wrong.

My student was a bit wounded—he felt I had called his mother a liar—but he let it go. Then, at the end of the term, when the parents came to pack their kids up and move them home, his mother found me. In a nice, non-angry way, she told me that her son had repeated the classroom discussion to her, and she wanted me to know that she had in fact gone to school with the actress, their mothers had been friends, and the actress’s mother had told her mother about the girl’s condition, so she knew it to be true. She said her mother had confided in her, and she had never told a soul. Until, that is, she got married and had children, at which point she told her husband and children.

Was this the holy grail? Had I verified an urban legend, proof of which had eluded the tabloids, the medical journals, the rest of the world? And was the proof this woman’s memory that the actress’s mother had violated her daughter’s confidence decades earlier to tell a mom of a playmate about her daughter’s condition—then seen as private and shameful—trusting that the fellow mom would keep her mouth shut (which she didn’t)? Oh, and does it matter that the actress’s mom was also a well-known public figure, thus making it less likely that she’d be naïve and loose-lipped about gossip?

You be the judge. My point is that there are things that are ridiculous, or at least unprovable (it’s not ridiculous that somebody would have a sex/chromosomal variation, but it is ridiculous that millions of people would happen to know because of back channels and secret sources and because, well, “everybody knows!”), but that very smart people take on faith. And they take these stories on faith because the stories confirm prejudices, suspicions, or prior convictions they already hold. Or because telling the story confirms them as the kind of person they aspire to be.

And so we get to Nicholas Kristof and dog-on-man rape. His assertion in the column is thinly sourced—one of his main sources is an activist organization called Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which, as Jeff Maurer pointed out, has also spread rumors that Israel has a secret bomb that can “evaporate” bodies; they are also all in on the rumor that Israel harvests organs from dead Palestinians—but that’s a bit beside the point, which is that the story is, on the face of it, absurd. (When I read the column, I remembered the other time I heard about a dog penetrating a human: it was in a Penthouse Forum “letter” that an older cousin of mine read aloud to a bunch of his younger relatives, rapt, in his bedroom, the night after his bar mitzvah.)

Why would anyone believe this story? Here I’d be remiss not to mention that anti-Israel activists and fabulists have a long history of concocting stories about Israel conscripting animals to perpetrate their depravity. Online, you can read about theories that Israelis have trained spy dolphins, spy cattle, plague-carrying rats, microchipped bee-eaters, and more. If you see your enemy not as humans you disagree with, even go to war with, but as bearers of supernatural evil, then no charge is too absurd. Spy dolphins? Sure. Rapist dogs? Why not?

My point is not that Nicholas Kristof views Israelis the way that Iranian ayatollahs do, or even the way Jeremy Corbyn does. It’s that all of us have blind spots; all of us will fall for some version of the gerbil myth, or the spy-dolphin myth. Or the rape-dog myth. The question is why. While Kristof does have a history of falling for too-good-to-be-true myths, one that might inspire his bosses to assign an extra fact-checker or two to his columns, I’d argue that the question is not why he falls for bullshit—we all fall for bullshit—but why he falls for this particular bullshit. Millions believed the gerbil myth because it fed our preexisting fears or stereotypes about “deviant” sex in the age of AIDS; millions repeated the male-actress myth because it was saucy, yes, but also because it affirmed the storyteller as somebody sophisticated about human sex variation, and compassionate.

And Kristof believes that Israelis are so depraved that they turn man’s best friend into an agent of wartime torture because—well, why would he believe it? I suspect one reason he can believe such a lie about Jews, specifically, is because of what Jay Michaelson calls “the Great Hardening,” in which, as he writes, “Zionists and Anti-Zionists have each decided that the other side is made up of Nazis. Literally.” In this new era of hardened battle lines, “For many on the Hard Left, all Zionists are Genociders…. Zionism is settler colonialism and entails genocide.” And people who will commit genocide will do anything; they have no moral guardrails. Dog-on-man rape, the Israel-haters surely believe, could be just the beginning. Harvesting organs? Sure. Who knows what the Israelis’ version of Josef Mengele is cooking up? According to this mindset, Kristof (and his editors) are released from the norms of common sense by the Israelis themselves, who by behaving in sub-human ways have rendered inoperative the ways we usually think about human behavior.

But to get to the dog-rape charge we need more than a Nazi, genocidal morality. After all, it would seem to be biologically impossible to get a dog aroused by a human. (Some anti-Israel wags have been trying to prove that dogs can rape humans, but their sourcing is painfully thin, and decades old; for example, this piece by Zaid Jilani includes a link to a British tabloid article about a serial killer in which the headline promises a dog-rape reveal that the article never actually mentions.) The mental leap required is easier, of course, if you believe that Jews are capable of superhuman feats—like building the Jewish space lasers of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s fantasy world, or training dolphins to be spies. If Jews are not only evil but supernaturally evil, they can turn dogs into rapey men (much as the Nazis, in their propaganda, turned Jews into vermin).

There are thus two tragedies here: the crimes possibly committed by Israelis against prisoners of war—in a war started October 7, 2023, by the horrific crimes of Hamas—and the tragedy of rising antisemitism, sampling from the generous buffet of Judeopathic lies, canards, and conspiracy theories, and breaking the brains of once-thoughtful opinion columnists. And that is something that Israel, on its worst day, did not do.

Sitting at this moment in the business school courtyard, I want to tell you about that time, the fall quarter of 2003, and then offer some reflections from the perspective of a very, very wise almost-52-year-old. Maybe there will be some useful gleanings for aspiring writers, or for aspiring adults of any kind.

I graduated from graduate school having known, since nearly the beginning of the six-year program in religious studies, that I was not cut out to be a career professor. I had been very up-front with my advisors since the beginning that my aspirations lay elsewhere—somewhere elsewhere, though I was not sure where. I had worked briefly in the magazine world—okay, I won’t be coy: for six months after college I was an editorial assistant in the Washington, D.C., “bureau” (or closet) of The New Yorker, where I was paid $20,000 a year, or, as one of my older colleagues put it, “less than [editor-in-chief] Tina Brown’s clothing allowance,” which may or may not have been true, but felt true—and published a little freelance journalism. I cared about the sound of my prose in a way that was not conducive to a career in the humanities academy. With my dissertation nearly done, I had applied for one job, as an assistant professor at Wesleyan University, and gotten an interview. I remember nothing of the interview: I do not think that I impressed them, and I am pretty sure that they did not impress me. The indifference was mutual.

Not having any plans, having almost no savings but (blessedly) no debt, I was casting about for something to do after I finally got my Ph.D. and thus was thrown into the world, out of academia at last, with no idea what to do for health insurance. I can’t remember how I heard of it, but I applied for something called the Koret Young Writer on Jewish Themes fellowship. This fellowship was funded by a Bay Area philanthropy called the Koret Foundation, drawing on a clothing fortune, from the Koret of California brand; the grant was for writers “on Jewish themes,” and I had just started a book about the practice of the bar and bat mitzvah across America; it carried with it a one-quarter teaching appointment at Stanford; and, if I am not mistaken, it paid $30,000 for the four months I would have to be, or get to be, in residence at Stanford. I’d be rich!

I applied, maybe in December 2002, so six months before Yale awarded me a degree and thus threw me out. Sometime that spring, maybe March, I got a call from somebody telling me I had won the fellowship. I forget who called me. I was, as you can imagine, elated. A few days later, I got an email from the late novelist Leslie Epstein, who had, he told me, been the judge who gave me the prize, or maybe had been the chair of the committee that gave me the prize. I forget what writing sample I had submitted (it may have been this 2000 essay for a small literary magazine), but he had been impressed. And now I got to go to Stanford the following fall.

I’ll skip ahead, past the graduation, at which my 93-year-old grandfather got to see me receive a doctorate (from Yale!—unthinkable to him, the son of an unlettered immigrant cobbler), past the road trip west with my friend Jerry, now tearing up South Florida politics, and land in Redwood City, the town, not far from Palo Alto, where I would be renting the garage of an old friend who had moved west for her medical residency. When I say I rented the garage, I don’t mean some finished apartment in what had once been a garage—I mean that I rented her unheated, unfinished garage, where she had put a bed over the cement floor, where I needed a space heater and lots of blankets to sleep through the 40-degree nights. I lived in a garage. For $300 a month. It was a steal, and lots of fun.

(Would you believe I remember the address? This was the house, now worth $1.8 million. The rear, standalone garage is not visible in the photos.)

Read more

A multiyear effort to refinance debt, raise funds, pursue land development and increase enrollment failed to produce a viable path to saving the 56-year-old college. On Sunday, its board of trustees voted to shut down, according to the school’s president.

Hampshire is the alma mater of the filmmaker Ken Burns, who made his first documentary movie as a student there.

“This is an extraordinary loss for those of us who went there,” Mr. Burns, who graduated from Hampshire in 1975, said in an interview on Tuesday. The school, known for experimentation in classes and methods, offered “sort of medieval guild-like tutors and apprenticeships,” he said.

Hampshire, in Amherst, Mass., joins an epidemic of college closures over the past two decades. More than 300 U.S. colleges and universities closed from 2008 to 2024, according to an analysis by The Hechinger Report.

I grew up about 20 miles from Hampshire College, but I did not think of going there. I was aware of its reputation for letting students design their own curriculum, and I had a vague sense of the kind of artsy kid the school attracted, and I wanted no part of it. Not because I wasn’t artsy—I was one of the theater mainstays at my high school, I wanted to act for a living, and I won the English prize at graduation—but because it just didn’t sound like a place where a serious student would enroll.

Why did I think that intellectual freedom was a sign of unseriousness? Today, my prejudice would run in the opposite direction: I imagine that people who want to give free reign to their intellect, to read widely and without restriction, to chart their own courses, are the most interesting, curious people. But back then, the feeling was the opposite: that a school that would give you that much freedom probably wouldn’t teach you anything.

Of course, freedom can, in fact, cut both ways. Freedom can mean the freedom to pursue your own interests, or it can mean the freedom to do nothing and skate by. Give two people a trust fund, and one of them will spend his life reading widely, visiting every continent, learning languages, and sampling all the world has to offer—while the other will use the freedom not to work as an excuse to smoke weed and play video games. (This is a truth widely known to anyone who has known a couple rich people, or who has watched HBO’s Succession.) And I strongly imagine that Hampshire College, even in its prime, got both kinds of people. Not that they were all trust-fund babies; that’s not my point. My point is that some students want a choose-your-own-adventure, no-requirement, no-grades college so they can be radically curious and inventive; others want it so they can be radically stoned.

When I was coming up, at my school anyway, the smartest kids weren’t always the most curious, and the most curious weren’t always the smartest, but neither kind saw Hampshire (or Green Mountain, or any of the other hippie schools) as an option. Maybe we should have; maybe our college guidance office should have pushed us less toward Yale or Colgate or Emory or Chicago, and more toward Hampshire. I don’t think it would have been the place for me; I like structure, and even if the weirdest fringe-y types were a minority, there probably would have been too many of them for me. I’m more patient with aggressively non-traditional people than I used to be, but back in my teens, I had a bad allergy to people who fashioned themselves as “alternative.” I was an artsy kid who did not like self-consciously artsy people (to be honest, I still don’t).

Still, I am sorry to bid farewell to Hampshire. I am sure it was the right school for a certain kind of student, and we need more options for education, not fewer.

Which is one reason that I am heartened to read about the rise of the micro-college, in this essay by Matthew J. Smith, president of the start-up Hildegard College. What’s interesting about these new tiny colleges—like Hildegard, Thales, New College Franklin, University of Austin, etc.—is that they seem to be succeeding (albeit on a small scale, for now) by having very concrete senses of purpose. Some are Christian, some are great books–oriented, some teach the trades, but with very few exceptions they are not as “free,” curriculum-wise, as Hampshire and some of the other small colleges that are folding. There is diversity among these schools, but perhaps less diversity within them. They have very specific ideas of what one should be reading. Hampshire’s identity was, “You can do anything”; the new colleges’ identity is, “You must do this one very specific thing.”

Smith writes:

Christian institutions occupy the vanguard of the startup college movement, though we’ve also seen the launches of a Buddhist liberal arts school, Naropa University in Boulder, as well as an Islamic one, Zaytuna College in Berkeley. Many of the Christian micro-colleges use classical models. Contrary to popular belief, “classical” education is relatively modern—newer, in fact, than the “Great Books” approach spearheaded by Mortimer Adler in the 1930s. The classical model combines the medieval liberal arts with a Christian interpretation of education for a self-governing society. Thus, many of these new institutions offer only one degree track, in which students study classic texts, logic, rhetoric, Latin, natural philosophy, and music.

What makes these institutions disruptive to the industry is not only their return to the traditional liberal arts but also their streamlined institutional structures. Many simplify things by offering just one degree option, investing in teaching faculty instead of research, using modest or even shared campus facilities, getting creative with student housing, maintaining relatively small student bodies, and (as a consequence of these factors) advertising radically affordable annual tuition prices—sometimes in the ten- to fifteen-thousand-dollar range.

If you talk to the founders of these schools, however, you won’t hear a story about a strategy to disrupt a stagnant industry. Instead, they speak with passion about the social, religious, and moral problems they endeavored to solve by starting their colleges. Nevertheless, such micro-colleges are indeed innovative, and they’ve attracted early adopters by appealing to pressure points like mission drift at mainstream Christian schools, ideological homogeneity at secular universities, and financial waste across the board at U.S. colleges.

Of course, Hampshire was probably never as loosey-goosey as its reputation suggested; it was probably politically quite homogeneous, for example. Did it have many Republicans? (Does the University of Austin have many Democrats?) All schools take on a vibe; if they don’t, they are just credential mills.

There remains the question of whether “elite” students will ever choose these small colleges. If these colleges are one response to mission drift in the Ivies and other elite schools, if they are promising a return to a more rigorous education than the grade-inflated fancy places are offering, they still don’t have the reputational/signaling advantage that Harvard or Stanford does—and I doubt they ever will. If you graduate from Harvard, even as a dullard with a grade-inflated 3.9, your resume will get a second look. Will your degree from Sattler College do the same?

I doubt it. But maybe it should.

In defense of husbands

I am really enjoying Natal Gazing, the Substack of , a psychologist whose book on the science of fatherhood is forthcoming. In a recent post, she argued that husbands are picking up more of the housework than they are being given credit for:

[A] 2025 paper reporting on data from the American Time Use Study, our best source of changing trends in Americans’ behavior, tells a totally different story. There has been a striking convergence in men and women’s household labor over the last few decades.

These latest findings upend some commonly held wisdom in the field. Sociologists have been writing about a “stalled gender revolution” in unpaid household labor since the late 1980s, when Arlie Hochschild wrote The Second Shift. In the 1960s, married women did seven times more housework and four times more childcare than married men. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, as women surged into the workforce, that gap narrowed to about a two-to-one ratio. But then the trend lines seem to flatten out, so that the rate of women’s rising participation in the paid labor market outpaced men’s plateau-ing participation in unpaid household work. This discrepancy has launched a thousand think pieces and a cottage industry of self-help materials geared to frustrated wives.

The latest analysis looked specifically at time use trends from the last 20 years (from 2003-2023) and took a more sophisticated look at the data by testing a “differential convergence” model that broke housework into more granular categories, including “core” housework (tasks that need to be performed frequently, like cooking, cleaning, and laundry), “occasional” housework (a category that includes more male-typed tasks like yardwork and home repair), shopping, and childcare. That “core” category has historically been particularly “feminized” and thus considered more stubbornly resistant to change.

Contrary to the narrative that men have stalled out at home, married men’s housework contributions continued to rise during this period. As a result, the women-to-men ratio of homework time was 1.8:1 in 2003–2005 and 1.6:1 in 2022–2023. Even more striking, the shrinking gap was driven by changes in “core” housework, where it narrowed by 40 percent, from 4.2:1 to 2.5:1. Men in 2023 were especially likely to be doing more housecleaning and laundry than men in 2003. Men also spent more time shopping for essentials like groceries, gas, and food, such that the male-female ratio came close to 1:1. The childcare time gap shrunk too, from 2:1 to 1.8:1.

It’s worth reading the whole post.

Music Hour

I dig this piece on made-in-American vinyl-record manufacturing. And for some made-in-America music, I thank the newsletter of for introducing me to Sharp Pins:

And I also respect cars for what they are—that is, I knew as an 8-year-old that the old Le Car (remember that?)

and the Yugo

were cheap, quirky cars for people without a lot of money, and I always sensed that, in their way, they were realizing their car-potential in the way that a cool Mercedes or IROC Z-28 was realizing its potential (the latter, by being the car of mulleted teenagers in my neighborhood, who cruised around the baseball oval in Forest Park blasting REO Speedwagon).

So it’s not surprising that I dug the Times info-graphical opinion essay, by Clifford Winston, about why we don’t have cheap cars anymore; cars that, inflation-adjusted, used to be $10,000 cars are now being sold for over $20,000 (the Honda Civic being a prime example); but also, more to the point, there are just far fewer budget cars being made. Turns out that the margins are just much better on expensive cars, like high-end SUVs.

I read all this, taking it in, thinking that this was an excellent populist essay. It’s basically about how problematic it is that the working man or woman can’t get a good, cheap car, at a time when people are struggling with stagnant incomes and high inflation, and in a country where huge swaths of people don’t have access to good public transit. This essay is practically engineered for the disaffected Trump or Bernie voter.

Except that the solution is more free trade! The author’s Rx for the lack of cheap cars is less protectionism: reduce tariffs and let us import excellent, cheap Chinese cars. Winston gives as examples the Chinese car from BYD, the Seal model:

Those Chinese cars aren’t just cheaper than the American alternatives. They’re often better. Take BYD’s slightly more upscale Seal sedan. It’s similar to Tesla’s Model 3, introduced nine years ago. But the Seal costs roughly $20,000 less than the Model 3. The Seal’s premium model offers substantially more horsepower, and its battery not only lasts longer, it can also be 80 percent charged in just 37 minutes. The Seal isn’t just a budget alternative; it is a more advanced machine.

But of course this car is made in China. And China has huge government supports for the EV and auto industries, and a huge pool of underpaid labor, and a huge disregard for environmental standards.

Read more

Jennifer Finney Boylan—novelist, opinion writer, Barnard professor, and pioneering trans writer—was one of the most high-profile signatories, but the day after it posted she expressed regret for having signed it. Her backtracking, after what she now says was significant pressure from other trans writers and allies, was big news. Here was Newsweek at the time:

One of the signatories of an open letter against cancel culture has recanted her support of the initiative.

Around 150 writers, academics and activists signed a piece published by Harper’s Magazine in which they denounce the “restriction of debate.”

High profile signatories include the likes of Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky, and J.K. Rowling, who has been receiving intense criticism for her views on transgender people.

The latter has drawn huge media attention with some of those involved now distancing themselves from it.

Author Jennifer Finney Boylan has recanted her support of the letter, saying she wasn’t aware of who else had signed the letter.

Finney Boylan tweeted: “I did not know who else had signed that letter. I thought I was endorsing a well-meaning, if vague, message against internet shaming. I did know Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company.”

She added: “The consequences are mine to bear. I am so sorry.”

But now, in episode 2 of the podcast Strange Bedfellows, Boylan says she was “chickenshit” to have taken her name off the letter. Start listening around 29:00:

Well, I signed it, but they didn’t tell me who the other signatories were, one of whom was J.K. Rowling... My community just came at me and said, “How dare you stand with J.K. Rowling? ...What you’re saying is that transgender people should just knuckle under to people like J.K.” ... I was getting letter after letter from people who I respected and loved who said, “You’ve broken my heart.”

I finally said something like, “The meaning of this letter changes depending on who the signatories are, and though I agree with the idea that we should all be more respectful to each other, I also regret not having the big picture. So this was my fault.” And I kind of stood down from it and said, ‘The responsibility is mine...”

It was a chickenshit move... I shouldn’t have backed down from it. I should have stood my ground. It was a chickenshit move, and I regret disassociating myself from it.

Boylan recanting her recanting shows integrity. No matter what the issue, and no matter what one’s politics, one should not refuse to take a public position because of who one’s bedfellows would be. If a letter says something true, it doesn’t become less true because people you dislike feel the same way.

I reached out to Jennifer Finney Boylan to talk more about her change of heart—I think it would be a fascinating conversation—but she declined to talk with me.

When I was in seventh grade, I was bullied by an eighth grader I will call Tom O’Dwyer. Tom was a pale, porcine fellow, his skin spider-webbed with broken capillaries; it was as if his face already knew about the alcoholic he’d someday be. Tom was a pretty miserable specimen. He didn’t seem to know how to be a proper bully. He was bigger than me, and he enjoyed shoving me in the hallway, but he had no other moves, no swirlies or noogies or locker-stuffing. Hopelessly inarticulate, for insults he could do no better than some light antisemitism—“I bet you like money, you Jew”—and standard taunts about my mother and the size of certain body parts.

I knew even then that this was about as much power as Tom would ever have, that he was peaking in eighth grade, and it wasn’t a high peak. I may even have felt bad for him. Still, it was annoying, having to dodge him in the halls and put up with his weak but persistent gibes. One day, at debate team practice, I complained about Tom to my friend Joe Manuli. Joe was a high school senior—our school ran from seventh to 12^th grade—and he did not like bullies. “Do you want me to talk to him?” Joe asked.

I must have shrugged some sort of assent, but I was not expecting what happened the next day, when after lunch Joe showed up in the middle school locker area. It was a small school, with only about 20 of us total in grades seven and eight; when a senior walked into our midst, he was immediately noticed. All eyes turned toward Joe.

“Where’s Tom O’Dwyer?” Joe said.

We all fell silent, looking around. Finally, out of the scrum of eighth-grade boys, Tom emerged. “What do you want?” he said, weakly.

“I hear you’ve been f–king with Oppy,” Joe said, using my nickname.

Tom gulped. His Adam’s apple protruded, his face flushed redder than usual. “Whatever he said, it’s bulls–t,” Tom said.

Joe got right up close to Tom. “So you haven’t been f–king with Oppy?” he said.

Tom gulped again, didn’t say anything. Whatever was coming, he knew he was powerless to stop it.

And now I should say something about Joe. He was 3 feet tall. He was not a dwarf. Rather, he had arms of a six-foot-tall man, and an almost-normal torso (a bit short because he was missing some ribs), but no legs, just tiny stumps sticking out in front of him at nearly 90-degree angles; when he sat down, they swung in front of him, like the bottom of a capital L. He got around by walking on his hands. (When I tell people that, they often imagine that he was walking upside down, but that’s not right; his torso was erect, and his arms, hanging by his sides, functioned as legs. Imagine, if you can, a 6-foot-tall man, arms hanging by his sides, whose legs get mostly lopped off, dropping him straight down to the ground, where his palms, flat out, stop his fall—that’s what Joe looked like. Picture R2-D2 from Star Wars.) Back then, I didn’t know why Joe didn’t have legs, and I never dared to ask, but I preferred to assume he had lost them in some violent episode, maybe a car wreck. If not that, then (I hoped) he had been born without legs—an accident of fate, sad but clean.

So Joe came up only to Tom’s waist. But Joe had authority. He was a handsome, square-jawed boy—man, really, 19 years old—dapper in the togs of our school’s jacket-and-tie dress code: He favored white shirts and red ties, and his blue blazer dragged on the ground as he walked. But also, Joe was the most badass, fearless, uncowed cripple any of us had ever met, with a massive muscularity in his chest, and arms pumped up by years of doing double duty as legs. Joe also lifted weights, and he wrestled for the school team, to the chagrin of lightweight opponents who had not counted on wrestling against 112 pounds of pure upper body strength.

As I said, all Tom could do was gulp. Everyone was scared for him. I was scared for him. Whatever was about to come, nobody thought Tom wouldn’t get the worst of it. He looked down at Joe, his eyes pleading for mercy.

I don’t know what we thought would come next—maybe that Joe would punch Tom in the balls, which were perfectly placed for a roundhouse right? Or grab him by the belt and yank him down to the ground, where he’d wrestle him into submission?

But what Joe did was something that shocked us all: He climbed up Tom. In a flash, Joe grabbed Tom at the waist, maybe by the belt, with one arm; with the other arm, he grabbed Tom’s necktie and pulled himself up toward Tom’s neck and shoulders; then, with the first arm, he encircled Tom’s head in a powerful headlock; finally, he let go of Tom’s tie and pulled both arms together, fortifying the headlock. A 3-foot, 100-pound person was now hanging from Tom’s neck, which was being brutally strangled; Tom had no choice but to fall forward to the ground, on top of Joe, who quickly, wrestler that he was, reversed their positions, so that Tom was on his back, gasping for air. Joe swiveled out to the side, one arm under Tom’s neck, gripped by the hand of the other arm, squeezing, while the rest of his body pressed down on Tom’s chest.

“You ever gonna f–k with Oppy again?” Joe said.

Tom couldn’t speak; he could barely breathe.

“What was that?” Joe said, inches from Tom’s face. “I can’t hear you.”

“No,” Tom rasped, his face a beet red. “No!”

Joe released Tom’s neck, rolled off him, and righted himself on his arms. Tom sat up on his butt and scurried backwards.

“What the f–k?” Tom said, coughing. “I mean, what the f–k?”

Joe moved toward Tom, backing him up into a row of orange lockers, as if to say, You want more of this? They were now face-to-face.

“If I hear you’re f–king with Oppy again,” Joe said, his voice low, “if I have to come down here again, Tom—I’m going to have to kill you. You understand?

Tom nodded.

With a slightly formal air—he’d have clicked his heels, if he had heels—Joe turned and hand-walked out, leaving behind the awed silence of the seventh and eighth graders.

After a few beats, the group finally dispersed, nobody talking. Fifth period was starting, and people had to get to class. Tom and I were the last two left behind. He arranged himself, smoothed down his shirt and tie. I looked at him, now unafraid, curious. He put on his blazer, then slung his backpack over one shoulder. “So,” he said, “I guess you have to get people to fight your fights for you.”

And by the old schoolyard logic, Tom might have had a point: You don’t snitch to the teachers; you don’t call in mom or dad; you don’t even go running to your big brother and his friends. Except that when you go big, very big, the schoolyard logic does not apply. I hadn’t gone running to the principal, or to some random senior tough with a pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of his T-shirt. I had gone to Joe, and Joe was Don Corleone. He was Gen. Patton. He was the Israeli Defense Forces. So yeah, Tom O’Dwyer, maybe I was a scrawny Jew. But I had Joe Manuli.

Joe graduated from high school in 1987, and I never saw or spoke to him again. I always meant to get in touch, to thank him for sticking up for me. I have never suffered from a shortage of people who will stick up for me. I have loyal, loving parents (still loyal and loving in their 80s); three loyal, loving siblings; a wife and five loyal, loving children; a clutch of close male friends who would get my back, if ever a rival group of 50-something plaid-clad NPR listeners with bad lower backs challenged us to a rumble. But still, you don’t forget the one guy who put his ass on the line for you. I have never been in a fight, but a fight was once fought for me. I should have thanked him.

I always meant to reach out, and when I finally tried, about a year ago, I discovered that I had just missed him: He had died on April 20, 2024, at the age of 56. When I got in touch with the younger of his two older sisters, I learned that the birth defects that had taken his legs had taken his life. He had died at home, alone, from a tangle of health complications, including kidney problems, that I had not known he had. As I was to learn, he had once had legs, but not really; he had never been healthy, not really; and he was never expected to live long enough to go to school. He was a superhero for beating up Tom O’Dwyer, and a hero for living long enough to do the job.

Read the rest here.

Now, a note from the home front.

After having made use of the day by crushing two email inboxes to smithereens, the personal Gmail account and the WashU account used for Arc business, I found a few minutes late on Sunday to read Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent, which is the latest book that my chum and I are reading for our Two-Man Book Club (the last book was Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director, which was magnificent, despite its uninviting cover). It was about six p.m., I was lying down on my favorite sofa, in the front room, and I heard the door open, and I was all prepared to say hello to our second daughter, who is 17 and had been out for the day with a friend of hers. But then in walked our fourth daughter, who is 12 and had been out for the day rehearsing a play that her 14-year-old friend is directing, with a cast of neighborhood children (the play is under no auspices, no nonprofit children’s theater or local school; it’s just a play that Miriam decided to direct and recruited her friends for; yes, it’s a marvelous thing). And as I saw the 12-year-old bounce inside the house, I was totally surprised to see her. I had, in some sense, forgotten that she existed; I knew the 19-year-old was off at college, and the 15-year-old was away at school, and the 7-year-old boy was in the kitchen with his mother and puppy, Nigel, and the 17-year-old was out with her friend and due back—but the 12-year-old had escaped my consciousness.

This wasn’t a disturbing realization, but a delightful one: there was this extra child in the world, capable of surprising me just by stepping inside. People ask what having five children is like, and this afternoon, that’s what it was like: a sense of abundance, of a bit more than I can hold in my head. And it’s great.

Now, on to the weird stuff

According to JTA, a Georgia state senate candidate placed this ad in the Atlanta Jewish Times:

This prompts a few thoughts:

1. Did this candidate have not one single semi-observant Jew in her network who could vet this ad?

2. Why did nobody at the Jewish Times tell her about leavened bread?

3. Why do folks keep getting this stuff wrong? Have they no Wikipedia or ChatGPT? Today, at my local supermarket. I saw a Passover display under a banner that said HAPPY PURIM. So close, yet no cigar!

4. Finally, and this is the bit that JTA missed: No Jew would EVER SAY “HAVE A BLESSED PASSOVER.” “Hav[ing] a blessed” anything is simply not Jew-speak. Having a blessed ______ is a Christian thing to do. There is some language that is simply Christian-coded, and “have a blessed” is way high up on the list.

   Also on the list—as we used to endlessly remark on the podcast Unorthodox—is the verb “fellowship.” Christians may fellowship with each other, but we Jews do not fellowship. This rule is slightly complicated by the fact that the best translation of havurah, meaning a small Jewish worship and friendship group, is “fellowship.” (And of course Jews use the noun in the academic sense—a grad-student fellowship, the Tikvah Fellowship, etc.) But nobody has used that translation much since the 1970s, and in any event we would never use it as a verb.

   Merriam-Webster keeps track of recent uses of words. For the verb “fellowship,” it has several cases, all Christian-ish:

   Now that the severity of the pandemic is waning, the call to action to fellowship beyond the church remains strong.
   — Williesha Morris | Wmorris@al.com, al, 10 Sep. 2023

   And:

   After the rosary, the guests and dancers fellowship with food and warm drinks.
   — Carmina Tiscareño, Dallas News, 11 Dec. 2020

   And:

   Bring your favorite breakfast dish to share and enjoy this time to fellowship with your church family.
   — Becca Martin-Brown, Arkansas Online, 10 Sep. 2022

   And:

   Digital Grow Groups are made up of five or more people who gather weekly via Zoom to discuss sermons, the bible and just to fellowship and talk about life!
   — Dallas News, 8 Apr. 2021

   You see what’s missing? “After doing water aerobics at the JCC, move up to the social hall with your fellow temple sisterhood members to fellowship over mah-jongg.” Nope. Not there.

   And if we Jews were out and about fellowshipping, we would not be wishing anyone a blessed anything.

Moment of Zen

The great Hank Phillippi Ryan, my interlocutor at An Unlikely Story bookstore in Plainville, Mass., for my talk about Judy Blume, sent along this GIF-ish photo (it in fact was just an iPhone photo on “live” setting) of us, including me doing “We must, we must, we must increase our bust” from Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. It’s one for the ages.

Second, before I talk about the thing I want to talk about, I want to mention that some dear friends of mine threw a book party for me, and among the guests were my high school debate coach (also my logic teacher); my sophomore year of high school English teacher; my high school’s dean of faculty; my high school friend K, who dated the man with the best name I have ever heard, Nimrod Weiselfish; and the woman who, over 20 years ago, introduced me to my wife (but whom I have not seen for years). I joked that it was probably the best assemblage of people I love until my funeral. But I hope I am wrong. Also, my parents came! Here I am with my parents:

It has been a crazy month. Judy Blume: A Life was published on March 10—did you know that books publish on Tuesdays, much as movies used to be released on Fridays? I forget when record albums came out, but they had a specific day of the week, too—and since then, it has gotten love from The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and Newsweek, and the podcasts of Mike Pesca and and the radio show of WNYC’s great Alison Stewart, whom of course I revere because she is a link to the glory days of MTV.

I have also taped the podcast of —one of my favorite writers—and the Slate Gabfest, which is 20 years young, in some ways the grandpappy of all pods. Here is part I of the Alison Stewart/WNYC interview, which ran over 3 days:

In short, all that could go well has. I am humbled and gratified. Above all, I dare to hope that this publicity will help readers find their way to the book itself, which I think is a good book about a great figure.

But what I want to talk about is what attention means to a writer. Most writers, including most of the best, never get a lot of attention; most of the best writers never get anywhere near the attention they deserve. Did Evan S. Connell Jr., author of the classics Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, ever get his share of the spotlight? I don’t think so. I searched back issues of the Times and The New Yorker, and there was a little love, but just a little. (I tried to remedy the situation with this piece a few years back.) What about Walter Tevis, of The Hustler and The Queen’s Gambit? Some of my best-read friends don’t know his name.

When it comes to how attention is spread around, there is not no justice, but there is not enough of it. Which means that when one writer hogs the attention for a few weeks, he should be allowed to enjoy it, but he shouldn’t think he deserves it. There is no desert, not really.

Writing is an insecure, mad vocation, and we writers are all teetering on the edge of sanity. A good accountant knows that she has saved her client some money on taxes; a good plumber fixes the leak; but a good writer is never sure she has reached anybody. Philip Roth ended his days annoyed that the Nobel Prize had eluded him—”Was Bellow really the greater writer?” We all know that the best books don’t sell the best—but it’s not as if bad sales connote talent; unknown writers can’t see their ignominy as proof of talent. There is nothing reassuring to fall back on. You never feel as if you have “made it,” and you don’t even know what “making it” would look like—we just know it’s the thing that has happened to the other guy.

A few writers have reached out in the past couple weeks to say how happy they are for me; one writer friend had the candor to say he was feeling jealous. But I am jealous of him! He has, I think, sold more books than I have, and he had a long-running TV gig. I have friends who despair of ever publishing a book but have much more robust magazine-writing careers; I have radio/podcast friends who wish they could get into print, but then again, people overhear them speaking at the farmers’ market and, at the sound of their familiar voices, swoon and ask for autographs. We all have our little wins—except, of course, for those of us who don’t. There are really good writers who never get a win, who remain entirely obscure and unremunerated.

How does my jealousy come out? For one thing, it comes out as mild bitterness, as when I think of the writers who refused to consider blurbing my book, pleading that they were too busy, but then somehow found the time to blurb three other books this season. (I think I have mentioned before the august journalist, a former colleague and a friend, who told me she couldn’t blurb Squirrel Hill because she “didn’t know enough about Judaism,” by which she meant the subject matter was too Jewish.) You’d think I’d just shut up and be grateful for my endorsement from Tayari Jones—and I am! Her enthusiasm for Judy Blume means the world. Yet somehow I still feel that I’m not in the truly elite club; the rejections loom larger than the acceptances. We all feel there is the party that we’re not invited to. (Although the truly blessed are those who are so interested in their art that they really don’t worry about the parties at all—I like to think Janet Malcolm was like that. Maybe Lorrie Moore? Was Evan Connell?)

When, after everyone left our seder two nights ago, I fired up the Times and saw this profile of Patrick Radden Keefe, it stung, in part because his is the career so many of us want: regular paycheck from The New Yorker, plus the regular appearance of critically acclaimed books. (Also, I assume he got free clothes when he modeled for J. Crew.) But then I remembered that the last time the Times ran a long profile of a writer, it was about me; also, Patrick is a super nice guy (who once spent an hour on the phone with me, talking craft); also, he is extremely gifted and does great work.

Also, he no doubt battles his own insecurities.

Also, he would probably agree with me that fame, even of the minor writerly kind, is distributed unfairly, and he, like me, would have his own list of people who should be getting a share of the fame that is accruing to him.

What’s my list? Here are three:

• Daniel Duane. Probably the best writer on rock-climbing we have, and one of our great surfing writers, and a fine novelist, and just a wonderful writer—and here’s hoping his forthcoming book about Yosemite is HUGE.

• Paul Clemens. The guy wrote two books; his first, the memoir Made in Detroit, is gold.

• Brian Morton. A good example of how success is shifty: on the one hand, Hollywood has made his books into movies—see the great Starting Out in the Evening, with Frank Langella and Lauren Ambrose, who comes from New Haven and whom I once saw eating with her husband and baby at Modern Apizza. On the other hand, I don’t think his novels sell. They should. So should his recent guide to writing, Writing as a Way of Life.

• Jane Gardam. On the one hand, quite famous, especially in England. On the other hand, I bet no more than 1 percent of you have read her works. Start with Old Filth.

Anyway, bottom line, fame is a mirage, all that matters on earth is family, dogs, and ice cream. Speaking of which, my wife got this ice cream cake for the Passover seders, making sure that Ashley’s Ice Cream did not use their usual Oreo-cookie crust, since that would be hametz:

Oh, I need a web redesign for MarkOppenheimer.com—anyone want to help out?? If so, hit me up in the comments section.

In the world of book writing, there is this urban legend that, back in the olden times, publishers used to have big budgets to send writers on “book tours,” flying them from city to city to give readings to adoring crowds at bookstores from coast to coast. I know there is at least a grain of truth to this, because some older writers have confirmed it for me; there were even freelance “author handlers” in some cities, book lovers who got to pick up writers at the airport, drive them to hotels and from there to the bookstores. For one version of this mythology, check out the 2015 movie The End of the Tour, based on a David Foster Wallace tour.

Among my author friends, even the most successful writers have been sent to at most two or three or four cities. But for my latest, a biography of the mega-selling children’s author Judy Blume, my publisher is sending me all over the place—to about 15 cities, with more dates still getting added. I know this ain’t about me—the book has gotten good reviews, I am chuffed as can be, but the widespread interest has more to do with the subject, one of the world’s most beloved authors, than with her biographer.

When Midbrow learned that I would be crisscrossing the country to meet my readers, they asked me to keep a tour diary. After three weeks, I have landed at the end of the first leg of the tour, and, as I type in a hotel in St. Louis, I am ready to file this report from the road. Here is my illustrated tour diary (hat tip to Judy Blume herself, who once kept and published a tour diary):

March 8: Two days before my book is published, The New York Times publishes a photo of me in my unshod feet.

March 10: Book is published. I have an opening-night event at R.J. Julia bookstore in Madison, Conn. Nice turnout, boosted by loyal Westville neighbors.

March 11: Maplewood, N.J., at [words] bookstore. First time I see this book in a front-window display. The event is moderated by my friend Jordana Horn.

March 12: Southern Pines, N.C. I read at the Country Bookshop, a charming place owned by the local daily newspaper. After reading, I get myself some local ice cream, at a store named Local Ice Cream. I buy the tee shirt:

Also on the main drag—a nifty God/fudge combo:

March 13: Gainesville, Fla. I read at the Lynx, which is owned by novelist Lauren Groff. One of the clerks has a Virginia Woolf tattoo:

March 16: Plainville, Mass. I read at An Unlikely Story, the bookstore owned by Diary of a Wimpy Kid author Jeff Kinney, who has himself sold 300 million books (more than three times as many as Judy Blume has sold). Kinney shows up and gives me a tour of his studio. He draws in an English phone booth:

On the way home, I stop to charge my car and get fries and a drink; I drink Mello Yello for the first time in decades:

March 17: Winnetka, Ill. I read at the Book Stall. My sister comes. The hotel, The Graduate, in Evanston, is Chicago-themed, hence this copy of a Saul Bellow novel on a stand in my room:

March 18: Milwaukee. I read at the Milwaukee Public Library, with books sold by Boswell’s, their terrific local indie. In the hotel room, I have the creepy experience, now common, of having the TV greet me by name:

En route home, I see my book in an airport bookstore—the real test of success. I am proudly shelved between Oasis and Susan Orlean, which is awesome.

Airports get weirder all the time:

March 24: South Hadley, Mass. I read at the Odyssey. My mom and dad come.

March 25: St. Louis. I read and sign at the public library. I am interviewed onstage by a former neighbor, novelist Gavriel Savit. But first, on deplaning in the airport, I see the saddest ad ever:

Then I stay at the Cheshire, a roadside motel that has been converted into a baronial English-themed manor lodge, with rooms named for British authors. (I stayed in Arthur Conan Doyle.)

The highlight of the tour? Meeting a guy with a name that is almost mine. I hereby give you, from St. Louis, Mark Oppenheim:

I love love love , so I was thrilled when they asked me to write about my new Judy Blume biography. Because Oldster is known for its interviews, I decided to do an interview with myself, which I have excerpted below (and then give a link to the whole thing). But first, a special deal: anyone who buys an annual subscription to my Substack this week will get, included with that subscription, a personally inscribed copy of Judy Blume: A Life sent to you (anywhere within the US). So … subscribe! (Once you do, I get an email that contains your email; I’ll write to you to ask what inscription you want, and where I should send the book.) OK, do it now:

OK, with that out of the way, here is the beginning of the Oldster interview:

As a huge fan of Oldster, I was over the moon when they asked me to contribute. But I was, I confess, disappointed when I realized I was not to be the subject of my favorite Oldster feature, The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire. What gives? It’s not that I am too young—Meg Stone took the questionnaire when she was, as she put it, “51 … 52 in August,” which is exactly my age, right down to the birthday month. Obviously, Oldster wanted me not because of me, but because of my latest book, a biography of a much more important oldster, Judy Blume, who turned 88 in February. So, while I still hold out hope that I’ll someday get to take the questionnaire I love so much, for now I’ll play ball and write about Judy. However, I hope I can be forgiven if I do it in questionnaire form. Below, please find my interview with myself about my new book, Judy Blume: A Life.

How old are you?

See above.

Some other fun facts about you?

Let’s see … I grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, the eldest of four children. I am devoted to corduroy, the movies of John Hughes, and my friends. I play in a monthly poker game with eight other guys (we usually get six or seven per game), one of whom wrote the definitive biography of Bruce Lee. I edit a cool (I think) magazine about religion, politics, and culture. I am married to a wonderful human being, and we have four daughters and a son. Our dog, Archie, has been with us fourteen years but, alas, seems to be slowing down. I have been to 48 states—still missing Montana and Hawaii.

You’re a writer. What kind of reader were you as a child?

I liked to read, but I was not a voracious reader, not one of those kids who always had a book in his hand. Partly it was a matter of having other interests—boyhood obsessions included baseball, chess, movies, and, briefly, the long-forgotten video game console Vectrex—but partly it was a matter of not finding stuff I wanted to read. Back in the early 1980s, if you were a bookish boy, teachers and booksellers were always forcing fantasy into your little hands, Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander and the like. And I didn’t really enjoy fantasy (still don’t). I liked realism. So when, around the age of 8 or 9, I discovered Judy Blume, who was writing realism for young people, I was hooked. And I just started reading and re-reading Judy Blume.

That’s interesting. What about librarians—did you ever ask a children’s librarian to recommend other realistic fiction? Maybe they would have pointed you toward Norma Klein or Paul Zindel or S.E. Hinton.

I did discover Hinton when I was a bit older, maybe early high school, and she was great. But no, I had no wonderful children’s librarian in my life. Quite the opposite. The children’s librarian at the Forest Park branch of the Springfield (Mass.) Public Library was a terrible human being, mean and spiteful. She seemed to consider it her job to keep us away from books. If we asked for help, she’d say, “Go use the card catalogue.” If we asked for a book that had sensitive themes (maybe like a Judy Blume), she’d peer over her glasses, assess the age of the child asking, and say things like, “You’re not ready yet.” Then she’d go back to her paperwork.

I’ll tell you a story. One summer the library had some sort of reading contest; if you read a certain number of books, you got a prize, or if you read the most books, you got a big prize. Something like that. I didn’t have a lot to do that summer, so I read all the time, and I kept a list. I was determined to win the prize. Around Labor Day, I presented the list to the librarian—I had used the proper library form and everything, and gotten my mom or dad to sign the bottom—and she looked at the list, sniffed, and handed it back to me.

“There are books here that aren’t in the library’s collection,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “Some of them, my parents bought for me, or they were just in the house.”

“Well I’m sorry,” she said, “but the contest was for reading library books. Most of your books don’t qualify.”

To this day, I think she made up that rule on the spot. But even if she didn’t, you’d think she’d have had an ounce of compassion for a boy who thought he had a shot at the title but had to be informed was disqualified on a technicality. But I swear she enjoyed delivering the news.

What does that have to do with Judy Blume?

Not much, except that it’s one reason I just kept re-reading the tattered Blume books I already owned, rather than taking new books out of the library. It was Judy, plus whatever I could buy with the occasional $5 bill at Edwards Books, in the downtown Baystate West mall.

Read the rest here.

And here’s that subscription link again: