personal essay the new yorker

The Illusion of the First Person

November 3, 2022 issue

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Hauser & Wirth

Mark Wallinger: Self-Portrait (Freehand 41) , 2013

The essay form…bears some responsibility for the fact that bad essays tell stories about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand.

—Theodor Adorno

The personal essay is a genre that is difficult to define but easy to denounce. The offending element is rarely the essay as a form, but its content, “the personal,” “a permanent temptation for a form whose suspiciousness of false profundity does not protect it from turning into slick superficiality,” writes Adorno. A list of counterparts to the personal essay might include more admirable imaginary genres such as the structural essay, the communal essay, the public essay, the critical essay, and the impersonal essay. Or, as Adorno insinuates, the good essay, which prioritizes “elucidating the matter at hand” instead of telling “stories about people,” as “bad essays” do.

What makes essays that tell stories about people bad? For Adorno, as for Walter Benjamin, one of the essayists Adorno most admired, essays about people betray the true object of essayistic criticism: the private individual. The private individual is not a particular person with a particular story to tell, no matter how distinctive, original, or purely bizarre that story may be. The private individual is not a proper name—not “Virginia Woolf” or “Elizabeth Hardwick,” not “Joan Didion” or “Zadie Smith” or whoever it is you consider your favorite personal essayist to be. Rather, it is the idea that animates all these figures, the powerful, unobtrusive concept that gives the personal essay the appearance of ventriloquizing a singular and spontaneous subjectivity.

Most essayists and scholars who write about the personal essay agree that its “I” is, by necessity and choice, an artful construction. Watch, they say, as it flickers in and out of focus as a “simulacrum,” a “chameleon,” a “made-up self,” a series of “distorting representations” of the individual from whose consciousness it originates and whose being it registers. Yet having marveled at its aesthetic flexibility and freedom, few critics put this claim through its paces. What if individual subjectivity were as much a fiction as the “I” with which it so prettily speaks? What if stressing the artifice of the first person were, as Louis Althusser argued, a strategy for masking “the internal limitations on what its author can and cannot say”? What if the real limitation of the genre were its glittering veneer of expressive freedom, of speaking and writing as a self-determining subject? What if no performance of stylish confession or sly concealment could shake this ideology loose? What if these performances only intensified the enchantments of subjectivity?

To answer these questions about the personal essay, its mode of address, and the private individual that enlivens them requires a biography of sorts, though not a personal one. The biographer could be any of the twentieth-century theorists who have heralded the entrance of individual subjectivity into history, but it is Benjamin who emerges as the thinker most interested in its literary aesthetics. According to Benjamin, the private individual was conceived sometime between 1830 and 1848, during the reign of Louis Philippe, often known as the first “bourgeois monarch.” Under his rule, the European ruling class and the middle class came together to realize their defining goal: the separation of the public domain from the private, where, as Karl Marx observes, the bourgeoisie could rejoice in “Property, the Family, Religion, and Order.”

Once labor had been cordoned off from life, once the productive activity of work had been extricated from the supposedly unproductive experience of dwelling, the private individual was born. He was, quite naturally, blind to his own history as a derivative creature, an artifact of political and economic processes that he had little incentive to question. The domestic sphere was his incubator, his sanctuary from commercial and social considerations. There he could retreat, wide-eyed and mewling, to probe what he believed to be his thoughts, lodged in his self, his mind, his body, and his home. “The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions,” Benjamin wrote, explaining how the ownership of property mirrored the ownership of subjectivity. He continued, “From this arise the phantasmagorias of the interior—which, for the private man, represents the universe.”

For Benjamin, the best representative of the private individual was the collector of decorative objects, “the true resident of the interior” as an architectural and an existential space. For us, it might be the personal essay collection, which props up the same ideology. The personal essay’s historical and aesthetic function has been to persuade us not just that personhood is beautiful or good, but that it is primordial—that individual subjectivity and its expression exist prior to the social formations that gave rise to it. This is a lie, the lie that subtends bourgeois individualism and all its intrusions into language, art, and education, as Adorno explains. The personal essay appears as the purest, most unflinching aesthetic expression of the lie, for the simple reason that, for an essay to qualify as personal in the first place, the primacy of the private individual must be presupposed, “implicitly but by the same token with all the more complicity,” Adorno wrote.

By my account, the personal essay is a modern formation. It is a wholly different creature from the essay birthed by Montaigne in 1570 and nurtured through the seventeenth century by Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas Fuller, and Abraham Cowley. Each of these essayists is unwilling to disentangle the individual from the condition of man or nature, a commitment reflected by how their prose slides with graceful abandon through the various third-person singulars. The “I” with and of which the modern personal essay speaks proclaims its distinctiveness from the “we” that crowds the eighteenth-century periodical essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, as well as the “they” that throngs the nineteenth-century metaphysical disquisitions of Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt. It bears a distant family resemblance to Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia , the “quintessence of the spirit of bourgeois intimacy,” according to Mario Praz. Though Lamb begets the lineage in the early nineteenth century, he takes care to thwart its autobiographical referentiality. Writing under the pseudonym Elia lets him throw a small but devastating wrench into the personal essay’s production of individual personhood—its demand for “a single subject whose identity is defined by the uncontested readability of his proper name,” as Paul de Man writes in his essay “Autobiography as De-facement.”

“No one has approached the essays of Elia,” writes Virginia Woolf in “The Decay of Essay-Writing.” Published nearly a quarter-century before Benjamin began his Arcades Project and a half-century before Adorno’s “The Essay as Form,” Woolf’s lament about the aesthetic decline of the personal essay grasps the problem of telling stories about people not head-on but obliquely. She opens not by offering a history of bourgeois individualism but by decrying its most obvious institutional manifestations: first, “the spread of education,” and second, the proliferation of print culture. The churn of both schools and presses results, ultimately, in the flattening of much written matter, Woolf complains, and in a feeling of oversaturation, of boredom on the part of the reader who bears the onslaught. But the reader’s boredom is not the boredom one feels when confronted with an apparently infinite, depersonalized expanse of writing—the boredom of slogging through tightly packed columns in a nineteenth-century periodical, for instance. Rather, it is the boredom of having to attend to “a very large number” of people, all of whom demand public recognition through the projection of a private interiority.

The intimate connection between education, the bourgeois public sphere, and the specter of private individuality compels Woolf to judge the personal essay “a sign of the times.” It is the genre whose formal conventions—the “capital I” of “I think” or “I feel”—not only draw the individual into public view, but also insist upon the primacy of the individual. This insistence occurs regardless of the quality of the essayist’s prose. The personal essay’s significance “lies not so much in the fact that we have attained any brilliant success in essay-writing…but in the undoubted facility with which we write essays as though this were beyond all others our natural way of speaking,” with the “amiable garrulity of the tea-table,” Woolf writes. It is “primarily an expression of personal opinion,” with the stress falling on the “personal,” one’s “individual likes and dislikes,” rather than the strength or the stylishness of the opinion expressed. While these individual likes and dislikes certainly add up to a large “number,” a word that Woolf repeats with scornful amazement, they do not combine in any sensible way. They cannot be imagined as a mass, a totality, cannot be integrated and set to any collective social or political purpose.

Woolf did not hold the desire for recognition to be unethical or untoward, nor did she believe that collective representation is the only purpose to which the essay ought to be directed. Rather, the essay had to maintain the contradictions between individual desires and social demands, between personal being and impersonal experience, to grant the form its unique ability to capture the texture of life—not a particular life, but the impersonal activity of living. “The Decay of Essay-Writing” thus concludes with two visions of potential essays, the first permissible, according to Woolf, the second unacceptable. “To say simply ‘I have a garden, and I will tell you what plants do best in my garden’ possibly justified its egoism,” Woolf writes;

but to say “I have no sons, though I have six daughters, all unmarried, but I will tell you how I should have brought up my sons had I had any” is not interesting, cannot be useful, and is a specimen of the amazing and unclothed egoism for which first the art of penmanship and then the invention of essay-writing are responsible.

The tacit hope is that one day, the essay may be blocked from circulating stories about private, homebound people into the wider world.

“The Decay of Essay Writing” appeared in 1905, roughly when the descriptor “the personal essay” began to spread through the English lexicon. Before the twentieth century, the essay as a form was assumed to be personal but, as the writing of Montaigne and his contemporaries reveals, only in a deliberately circumlocutory manner. Reading across composition textbooks from 1900 to 1940 reveals that the personal was not conveyed through action; not “the simple words ‘I was born’” and a description of the events that followed. Rather, it was through style, a different form of excess from the excesses Woolf decried.

Style was marked by the excesses of language, by an author’s pace, punctuation, diction, and grammar; her distinctive deployment of adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions, which, as Jeff Dolven observes in Senses of Style (2017), “cannot be counted upon to shore up the first person as a verb does.” Consider, for instance, Woolf’s ecstatic tendency to set off adverbs in pairs (“simply and solemnly,” “finely and gaily”). Consider Hardwick’s love of trebling adjectives and sometimes hitching an adverb to the last one, so that her prose appears to increase in precision exponentially in the short span of a sentence. (“She is self-absorbed, haughty, destructive.” “They are defenseless, cast adrift, and yet of an obviously fine quality.”) Consider Didion’s habit of beginning with a missing antecedent to create the impression that writer and reader have arrived at a scene in medias res. (“It is an altogether curious structure…”) Framed by teachers of writing as “conversational” and “chatty,” characterized by its air of “spontaneity,” the essay suggested the author’s “personality” as a specular structure. Its refusal to subject the writer to direct observation was an integral part of its signature.

The essays from earlier centuries that are retroactively designated as “personal” today were commonly referred to as “familiar” essays in the early twentieth century. Their counterparts were “didactic,” “factual,” “informative,” or “instructive” essays. The familiar essay seldom treated the author as its object of interest. Rather, familiarity concerned the relationship triangulated between the essay’s writer and its reader—a relationship between friends. Always, this friendship was mediated by the presence of an object to which the writer had committed her powers of perception and analysis, and, through it, secured her reader’s interest: a novel or a painting, a historic figure such as Cato, a creature such as a moth. “One might put it thus,” writes Christopher Morley in the 1921 anthology Modern Essays : “that the perfection of the familiar essay is a conscious revelation of self done inadvertently.”

By contrast, the personal essay distinguished itself from the beginning by its failure to maintain the practice of triangulation between the essayist, her reader, and the object that shared their attention—its unwillingness to commit to inadvertency. It indulged the temptation to “fall into monologue,” Morley complained, allowing its language to curdle into disclosures that were “too ostentatiously quaint, too deliberately ‘whimsical’ (the word which, by loathsome repetition, has become emetic).”

As many of the composition textbooks from the early twentieth century recognized, direct address could not be avoided entirely: it was inherent in the use of the first person. Yet its influence on essay writing and reading could be minimized, made to harmonize with competing forms of address that were more depersonalized in the kind of friendship they imagined—indeed, that held impersonality to be a sign of the essay’s aesthetic and ethical success.

Any avowal of “impartial publicness” is, of course, never as impartial as it insists. Public styles are always marked by nationality, literacy, class, and race; there exists no such thing as a perfectly inclusive or universal language. Yet the claim to mediating friendship through style nevertheless reveals how, against the rising tide of individualism, the familiar essay demanded that its readers place the highest premium on the imaginative interactions of nonintimate selves. It is the friction between social and private modes of representation that the contemporary personal essay smooths away with increasing vigor in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Why are people attracted to stories about individuals? The answer is as obvious as it is petty and perhaps cynical. The fiction of private individuality projected by the personal essay allows bourgeois subjects to accrue various economic, cultural, and social rewards. These rewards are dispersed by institutions that are both constituted by the fiction of the private individual and responsible for reproducing it. The most obvious institution of this kind is the school and, as Adorno observes, its elevation of “pedagogical necessity” into “a metaphysical virtue.” Once the production of personhood becomes bound to and administered by pedagogy, its illusions gain in intensity and reach, as does the personal essay.

A more specific genealogy for the genre—and an explanation of its distinctively American quality today—is the “personal statement” that high school students applying to US colleges and universities were asked to produce starting around 1920, and which has evolved into a cornerstone of the admissions process. Although it is difficult to pinpoint how many students per year write personal statements, more than 5.6 million applications were submitted in 2019–2020 through the Common App, a generic college admission application that requires the applicant to write at least one personal essay. Orbiting these millions of essays is a burgeoning industry of tutoring, prepping, and editing services, evinced by the popularity of books such as How to Write the Perfect Personal Statement , The Berkeley Book of College Essays , College Essays That Made a Difference , and How to Write a Winning Personal Statement . The personal narrative is the designated genre to reveal the writer’s “inner self,” an “opportunity to differentiate yourself from everyone else,” writes Alan Gelb in Conquering the College Admissions Essay in 10 Steps .

The first mention of the personal essay as an admissions requirement, according to Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (2005), came during Harvard’s drastic changes to its admissions practices in the 1920s. Since the turn of the century, selection based on exam scores had created what administrators called a “Jewish problem”: the admission of more Jewish applicants than the university deemed acceptable. “We can reduce the number of Jews by talking about other qualifications than those of admission examination,” wrote Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell in 1922, advocating for a subjective set of criteria. The other qualifications he listed, “character” and “leadership,” were to be assessed through three new genres, as Karabel writes: “Demographic information, a personal essay, and a detailed description of extracurricular activities.” The assumption was that Jewish applicants would fall short of the school’s desired “character standard”—that their “centuries of oppression and degradation” meant that they were characterized not by a commitment to individual and personal self-assertion but by a “martyr air.”

To weed out Jewish applicants, universities mobilized the essay as an heir to the Catholic tradition of confession and the later Protestant tradition of narratives of “saving faith,” notes the historian Charles Petersen in his dissertation on meritocracy. No doubt the version of individualism championed by administrators drew on the moral culture of the Protestant bourgeoisie, what Max Weber described as its use of education to cultivate a rational, self-assertive personality. This type was marked by its ability to adhere to a consistent and subjective set of values in a disenchanted world. Forced to conceive the meaning of things, and even man’s relationship to reality, as an individual matter, Weber’s rational personality type formed intellectual arrangements to anoint himself the master and the arbiter of his own destiny, and eventually the destinies of those around him.

The premise of elite college admissions was that this relation could be cinched, and indeed enhanced, by reversing its terms: that the ability to demonstrate, through the genre of the essay, one’s commitment to an idealized model of private and rational individualism marked the applicant as someone well-suited to higher education. Whereas in previous centuries, higher education would have secured a career in the ministry, now it led to executive roles in industry and government. Beyond its discriminatory function, the personal essay sought to identify the students whom the university could transform into the political and economic leaders of the future. Learning how to “game the system” was only a sign of the system’s success at shaping applicants’ behavior.

The overtly discriminatory origins of the admissions essay have been superseded by more covert models of calibrating personhood by ethnicity, as in the recent case of Harvard University admissions officers accused of assigning Asian American applicants lower scores in subjective categories such as “positive personality.” Yet the value the admissions essay—and the college application process in general—places on the private individual as a self-reflective and self-governing subject, the rightful heir to the spoils of capitalism, remains as powerful as ever. Kathryn Murphy and Thomas Karshan, in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present (2020), write:

Applicants are encouraged to draw a moral out of a personal anecdote, often about struggle, and enriched by some element of their reading or studies: “failure,” an expert on the admissions essay tells us, “is essayistic gold.”

Far from signaling weakness, the proud narration of failure speaks of character in precisely the terms set by the educated bourgeoisie of the early twentieth century: character as the capacity to maintain one’s self-comportment in a moment of distress, to tell a tale of hardship lit by the glow of self-knowledge.

At the start of the last century what Petersen has described as the “Catholic tradition of confession,” with its ponderous moral and spiritual accent, its desire for masochistic public exposure and redemption, had yet to enter the scene of personal essay writing and did not do so until the mid-1960s. Almost all the guides mentioned earlier warn applicants away from striking a tone that is too testimonial or therapeutic, working hard to buffer the admissions essay from the sins and perils of what is commonly called confessional writing. Unlike the admissions essay, whose rules and stakes are firmly pegged to educational institutions, confessional writing speaks to a shift in the importance of the individual and the technologies used to conceptualize new notions of personhood. “Its development coincides with new cold war cultures of privacy and surveillance, with therapy/pop psychology culture, with the falling away of modernist and ‘New Critical’ approaches to art and literature, with the rise of the television talk show and the cult of the celebrity,” writes Jo Gill in Modern Confessional Writing (2006).

While one could trace the history of confessional writing back to Augustine, Rousseau, or Freud, as the scholar Christopher Grobe does in The Art of Confession , it was only during the mid-twentieth century that “the confessional” coalesced as a “reinstatement of two closely related literary conventions,” writes the critic Robert von Hallberg: that literature originates “in [their] subject matter” and that writers “mean, at least literally, what they say.” Hallberg was writing about confessional poetry, but one could apply the claim to literature more generally. Perceived by many critics as a rejoinder to New Critical ideologies of reading, the confessional generation appeared to turn away from the university, where the modernist idea that a work exists independently of its creator had been institutionalized. The confessional school, by contrast, squatted at the nexus of therapeutic culture, with its air of psychological self-seriousness; second-wave feminism, from which it drew its reputation as a genre of female complaint; and 1960s counterculture, which imagined literary production as a loose and spontaneous activity.

The rise of confessional writing authorized new groups to speak as individuals, amplifying the voice of the “voiceless” in testimonies to dispossession. Yet as Cheryl Butler argues in The Art of the Black Essay (2003), the essays of James Baldwin, Rebecca Walker, and, more recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates are only awkwardly aligned with the tradition of the personal essay. Even if personal experience is what authorizes the essay form, its function as “a weapon for the downtrodden and the desperate-to-be-heard” presumes that personhood was, from the outset, an unequally distributed resource. Nowhere is this more evident than in Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village,” in which he examines himself from the self-estranged perspective of the white Swiss villagers who rub his skin and touch his hair, astounded by his blackness: “There was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder.”

The uncanniness that Butler identifies in Baldwin’s moment of double-consciousness—the same uncanniness that marks “the Latino essay” and “the woman’s essay,” she claims—resides in the moment when the essayist recognizes “who I am.” Yet this recognition is also the moment when the question of the private individual is dissolved by the knowledge that the ability to write and to speak as an “I” is a restricted social and political phenomenon. “Haunted by sociopolitical dramas around issues of race, sex, and class, for example, the essay itself might arrive as a racy document with a radical politics left unveiled,” Butler writes. Had the personal essay followed in the footsteps of the racy documents of the 1960s, it might not exist anymore, having yielded entirely to the countercultural currents of the political essay.

A genuinely countercultural practice can only flourish for so long before being co-opted by the dominant culture. In this case, co-optation proceeded not through the university, but through the publishing industry, which, as one publisher’s report concluded in 1982, had realized that “giving the actual names of girl-friends involved with [one’s] sex ventures…further increased the curiosity of the general reader, and also promoted sales.” Running under this gleeful voyeurism were more depressing and commonplace changes in the conditions of publishing after the recession of the 1980s forced the industry to grow “leaner and meaner.” “Confession is a growth industry,” announced The Sydney Morning Herald , a claim that was echoed in Irina Dunn’s textbook The Writer’s Guide (1999).

On the production side, confession’s growth had been spurred by a proliferation in new media forms attractive to nonprofessional writers, particularly the rise of blogs and self-publishing, at the same time that professional editorial jobs were being made redundant and advances for nonfiction books were beginning to decrease. On the consumption side, it was marked by the erasure of meaningful aesthetic differences between “quality media and the tabloids.” These economic factors made individual experience more salable than ever, simply because it could be bought on the cheap and sold on the regular, especially when tethered to intimate, therapeutic disclosures about transgressive sexual activity, trauma, and family members in crisis.

While one could read individual essay collections to trace how the market emboldened the aesthetics of confession, parody presents a more fruitful opportunity for understanding the personal essay’s evolving commercial function through the 1990s and 2000s. “I am a Personal Essay and I was born with a port wine stain and beaten by my mother,” declares the Personal Essay who narrates Christy Vannoy’s “A Personal Essay by a Personal Essay,” published in McSweeney’s in 2010. “A brief affair with a second cousin produced my first and only developmentally disabled child.” Here, in close and crowded quarters, appear the most notable features of confessional writing, beginning with its audacious use of the first-person pronoun at birth—a wink at Woolf’s line in “The Decay of Essay-Writing”: “The simple words ‘I was born’ have somehow a charm beside which all the splendours of romance and fairy-tale turn to moonshine and tinsel.” Yet the charm of the Personal Essay wears off immediately in Vannoy’s delightful piece. It is sullied not by the port wine stain—there is magic to that punning detail—but by the rapid accretion of traumatic disclosures: the observation of physical deformity, the admission of family violence, the recollection of sexual transgression. In aggregate, they add up not to a story, but a sales pitch.

The Personal Essay speaks to us from “a clinic led by the Article’s Director and Editor for a national women’s magazine,” which will publish the most promising personal essay out of a crowded field of candidates. In attendance are “the Essay Without Arms,” the “Exercise Bulimia” essay, “Divorce Essays,” the “Alopecia” essay, and a pitiful, misfit essay who refuses to speak in the first person and talks only about “Tuesday.” “Not the Tuesday of an amputation, just a regular any old Tuesday,” the Personal Essay tells us, bewitched by this essay’s descriptive prowess and scandalized by its refusal to play by the rules. Doesn’t the Tuesday essay know what it takes to secure a social position in the contemporary literary field? she wonders. Our narrator prevails as the winner of this competition, as we know she will from her triumphantly abject beginning. “Anyway, come November I will be buying every copy of Marie Claire I can get my one good hand on!” she crows. “If you haven’t looked death straight in the eye or been sued by a sister wife, you won’t see yourself in my story.”

Whereas the narrator of a personal essay draws our attention to the experience of a single individual, the Personal Essay Vannoy ventriloquizes channels the genre’s conceptual production of personhood as a salable commodity. This production takes place through a competitive practice of disclosure, a game of one-upmanship that promises access to publishing’s networks of mentorship, distribution, and circulation. And the conventions of confession, the shocking clichés that the personal essays in the clinic must mobilize to perform their singular and embodied personhood, depend so much on their content that they short-circuit any consideration of individual style on the part of either reader or writer. We have no idea how these essays are written; we only know what they are about. We see this in the naming of the personal essays at the clinic—not by the readability of the proper name, but by subgenre, a categorical descriptor that could belong to any number of individuals. (Certainly, more than one essayist has written on divorce.) One could imagine the clinic filling up with an infinitely receding horizon of subgenres that, for all their startling combinations, never get any closer to grounding the essay in the peculiarities of prose. The tension between personality and impersonality, essential to early understanding of the familiar essay, has gone slack, bloated by traumatic content.

Under what conditions is content king? When the personal essay makes the production of personhood not only publicly legible but also monetizable. “Secretly…we each hoped to out-devastate the other and nail ourselves a freelance contract,” confesses Vannoy’s Personal Essay. Her confession is comic, cruel, and pathetic, revealing the mismatch between out-devastating another person through self-exposure and the rewards it yields. In a publishing industry that has largely done away with staff writers, an industry in which art and literature have dwindled into minor cultural forms and creative laborers must maintain appealing online personae to crowdfund their livelihoods, few things could be more coveted than a “freelance contract.” If there is something painfully anachronistic about buying every copy of Marie Claire , then there is something equally painful in the recognition that the Personal Essay’s performance of personhood only gives her access to exploitative labor conditions. But this is as good as it gets.

The Personal Essay’s appraisal of the economic situation reveals why the triangulation of reader, writer, and object secured by the familiar essay is no longer possible. Fewer places will pay for it; fewer people are trained to produce it. The confessional has proved a highly successful strategy for extracting literary production from an increasingly deskilled workforce that needs to do little more than share experiences. As Jia Tolentino, the New Yorker writer, has pointed out in “The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over,” low-budget websites pay young women a pittance for “ultra-confessional” essays that allow for the “negotiation of [their] vulnerability,” knowing that these essays will encourage voyeuristic traffic and, by extension, increase the advertising revenue on which these sites depend. The Personal Essay who narrates the conditions of her own existence is more matter-of-fact about what other essayists have failed to recognize, or, in Tolentino’s case, have helped to perpetuate: the precarious conditions under which creative labor is performed.

For Tolentino, the end of the personal essay boom is explained by the election of Donald Trump and the suspicion that, since his reign, the personal is no longer political. Yet its decline is explained more by the structural shift on the Internet toward a “self-branding social media influence economy,” as Sarah Brouillette has argued. In the last analysis, it is not a decline so much as the convergence of the genre with social media platforms that has rendered online venues devoted to personal essays redundant. Whereas personhood, as a collection of tastes, preferences, and experiences, was once bought and sold through long-form narrative, now it can be sold and bought in the form of views, shares, and followers—personal data managed not by editors and the publications they run but by corporations such as Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon. What we ought to mourn, then, is not the decline of the personal essay; its ethos and its aesthetics persist. Rather, it is the much longer, slower death of the conditions that gave rise to the essay’s unintimate friendship, a familiarity mediated not by a spectacular personhood but by the skillful cultivation of style.

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Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism and the Director of the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan. She is the host of The Critic and Her Publics , a new podcast series produced in partnership with The New York Review and Lit Hub. (April 2024)

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I Got Published In The New Yorker: Tips And Insights From A Successful Submitter

Getting your writing published in the prestigious pages of The New Yorker is a career-defining accomplishment for any writer or journalist. The magazine’s legendary selectivity and rigorous editing process means that just landing an article, short story or poem in The New Yorker is a major success worthy of celebrating. But how does one actually go about getting published there? In this comprehensive guide, we share insider tips and hard-won lessons from someone who successfully made it into the hallowed pages of The New Yorker.

If you’re short on time, here’s a quick answer to your question: The keys to getting published in The New Yorker are 1) Target your submissions carefully by deeply understanding the magazine’s voice and sections, 2) Perfect and polish your best work before submitting, and 3) Persist through rejection after rejection until an acceptance finally comes through .

In the sections below, we’ll share everything I learned and did along my journey to New Yorker publication, from how I identified what to pitch and submit, to handling those inevitable rejection slips, to working with editors once a piece was accepted. I’ll also pass along wisdom from New Yorker staff and other successful contributors. Whether you’re a writer who dreams of seeing your name under those distinctive cartoons and columns, or simply curious about the submission process, use this guide to gain real-world insights into achieving the writing milestone of getting into The New Yorker.

Understanding The New Yorker’s Editorial Needs

Getting published in The New Yorker is a dream for many writers. With its prestigious reputation and high editorial standards, it’s no wonder that aspiring authors aim to see their work in its pages. To increase your chances of success, it’s important to understand The New Yorker’s editorial needs.

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Studying the different sections of the magazine

The New Yorker is known for its diverse range of content, covering topics such as fiction, poetry, essays, cartoons, and more. To better understand what the magazine is looking for, it’s essential to study the different sections and get a sense of their style and themes.

Spend time reading through past issues and familiarize yourself with the types of pieces that are typically published in each section.

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Reading issues like an editor

When reading The New Yorker, approach it with an editor’s mindset. Take note of the articles, essays, or poems that stand out to you and analyze what makes them compelling. Consider the structure, writing style, and unique perspectives that make these pieces successful.

By doing this, you’ll start to develop an understanding of the editorial preferences and tendencies of The New Yorker.

Additionally, pay attention to the topics and subject matters covered in the magazine. Are there any recurring themes or areas of interest? Understanding the magazine’s editorial direction will help you align your work with their needs and increase your chances of catching the attention of the editors.

Remember, The New Yorker receives an overwhelming number of submissions, so it’s crucial to stand out from the crowd. By studying the different sections of the magazine and reading issues like an editor, you’ll be better equipped to tailor your submission to meet The New Yorker’s editorial needs.

Crafting Your Best New Yorker-Worthy Submissions

Submitting your work to The New Yorker can be a daunting task, but with the right approach and a little bit of luck, you too can see your writing published in this prestigious magazine. Here are some tips and insights to help you craft your best New Yorker-worthy submissions:

Matching your writing style to The New Yorker’s voice

One of the most important aspects of getting published in The New Yorker is understanding and matching their distinctive voice and style. The magazine is known for its sophisticated and witty writing, so it’s essential to familiarize yourself with their articles and essays.

Pay attention to the tone, language, and overall vibe of the pieces they publish. This will give you a better understanding of what they are looking for in submissions.

Additionally, don’t be afraid to inject your own personality and unique perspective into your writing. The New Yorker appreciates fresh and original voices, so find a way to stand out while still staying true to their style.

Experiment with different writing techniques and incorporate elements of humor or satire if it aligns with your work.

Creating multiple targeted drafts

When submitting to The New Yorker, it’s crucial to tailor your drafts specifically for the magazine. Avoid sending the same piece to multiple publications without making any modifications. Instead, create different versions of your work, each targeted towards a specific theme or section of the magazine.

Research the different sections of The New Yorker and identify the ones that best align with your writing. Whether it’s fiction, poetry, essays, or cultural commentary, each section has its own unique requirements.

Take the time to understand what they are looking for in each category and adapt your writing accordingly.

Remember, quality is key. Take the time to polish your drafts and make sure they are the best representation of your work. Proofread for grammar and spelling errors, and consider seeking feedback from writing groups or trusted friends.

The more effort you put into crafting targeted and well-written submissions, the better your chances of catching the attention of The New Yorker’s editors.

For more information and inspiration, you can visit The New Yorker’s official website at www.newyorker.com . Their website provides valuable resources, including writing guidelines and examples of previously published work, which can further guide you in crafting your best New Yorker-worthy submissions.

Submitting Your Work and Handling Rejections

Submitting your work to The New Yorker or any other prestigious publication can be an exciting but nerve-wracking experience. However, with the right approach and mindset, you can increase your chances of success.

Here are some valuable tips and insights to help you navigate the submission process and handle rejections with grace.

Following submission guidelines closely

One of the most important aspects of submitting your work to The New Yorker is to follow their submission guidelines closely. The guidelines are there for a reason, and not adhering to them could result in your work being rejected without even being considered.

Take the time to carefully read and understand the guidelines, and make sure your submission meets all the specified requirements. This includes formatting, word count, and any other specific instructions given by the publication.

Furthermore, it’s worth noting that The New Yorker is known for having a unique style and voice. Familiarize yourself with the publication by reading previous issues and understanding their editorial preferences.

This will help you tailor your submission to align with their aesthetic and increase your chances of acceptance.

Persisting through inevitable rejections

Receiving a rejection letter can be disheartening, but it’s important not to let it discourage you from continuing to submit your work. Even the most successful writers have faced numerous rejections throughout their careers.

Remember, rejection is not a reflection of your talent or worth as a writer; it’s simply a part of the publishing process.

Instead of dwelling on rejections, use them as an opportunity to learn and improve. Take the feedback provided, if any, and consider it constructively. Reflect on your work, make revisions if necessary, and keep submitting. The more you persist, the higher your chances of eventually getting published.

It’s all about perseverance and resilience.

Additionally, it can be helpful to join writing communities or seek support from fellow writers who have experienced rejection themselves. Sharing your experiences and discussing strategies can provide valuable insights and encouragement.

Remember, every successful writer has faced rejection at some point in their journey. It’s how you handle those rejections and continue to refine your craft that will ultimately lead to success. So, don’t give up, keep submitting, and one day you may see your work in the pages of The New Yorker or any other publication you aspire to be a part of.

Working Successfully with New Yorker Editors

Expecting rigorous editing of accepted pieces.

One of the key aspects of working with New Yorker editors is understanding and embracing the rigorous editing process that your accepted piece will go through. The New Yorker has a longstanding reputation for its high editorial standards, and they take great care in refining and polishing every piece of work that gets published.

This means that as a writer, you should be prepared for multiple rounds of revisions and feedback from the editors. Don’t be discouraged or take it personally if your piece undergoes significant changes during the editing process .

It’s all part of the collaborative effort to ensure that the final product meets the publication’s standards.

Collaborating professionally during the refinement process

When working with New Yorker editors, it’s crucial to maintain a professional and collaborative attitude throughout the refinement process. Listen to and consider their feedback carefully , as they have a wealth of experience and insight into what works best for their publication.

Be open to suggestions and be willing to make revisions that align with the overall vision of the piece. Remember, the goal is to create the best possible version of your work that resonates with The New Yorker’s audience.

During the collaboration, it’s important to communicate effectively and promptly . Respond to emails or requests for revisions in a timely manner, and make sure to ask for clarification if there’s something you don’t understand.

Be respectful of the editors’ time and workload and show your appreciation for their expertise and guidance.

While working with New Yorker editors can be an intense and demanding process, it is also an incredibly rewarding one. The collaboration and refinement of your work with experienced professionals can help elevate your writing to new heights and increase your chances of getting published in one of the most prestigious literary magazines in the world.

Maximizing the Benefits of Being a New Yorker Contributor

Getting published in The New Yorker is a dream come true for many writers. It not only gives you the satisfaction of seeing your work in one of the most prestigious literary magazines in the world, but it also opens up a world of opportunities for your writing career.

Here are some tips and insights on how to maximize the benefits of being a New Yorker contributor.

Adding a New Yorker credit to your writing portfolio

Having a New Yorker credit in your writing portfolio is like having a golden stamp of approval. It instantly elevates your credibility as a writer and catches the attention of literary agents, publishers, and other industry professionals.

When showcasing your New Yorker publication, be sure to highlight it prominently in your portfolio, whether it’s a physical or online version.

Include a brief description of the piece you had published, and if possible, provide a direct link to the article or a PDF version. This allows potential clients or employers to read your work easily and see the quality of your writing firsthand.

Remember to update your portfolio regularly with any new New Yorker publications to keep it fresh and relevant.

Leveraging the prestige of New Yorker publication

The prestige of being a New Yorker contributor goes beyond just having a credit in your portfolio. It can open doors to various writing opportunities and collaborations. Use your New Yorker publication as a springboard to pitch ideas or submit your work to other prestigious publications, literary magazines, or even book publishers.

When reaching out to other publications, mention your New Yorker credit in your pitch or query letter to grab the editor’s attention. Highlight how your writing has been recognized by one of the most respected publications in the industry and emphasize the unique perspective or style that got you published in The New Yorker.

This can increase your chances of being accepted by other publications and boost your overall writing career.

Furthermore, being a New Yorker contributor can also attract speaking engagements, panel discussions, or even teaching opportunities. Organizations and institutions often seek out writers with a strong publication record, especially if they have been published in prestigious outlets like The New Yorker.

Leverage your New Yorker credit to showcase your expertise and secure these types of opportunities.

As a writer, seeing your name printed in The New Yorker is an incredible feeling hard to replicate. While getting published there requires immense skill as a writer, persistence through rejection, and professionalism when working with demanding editors, it is an accomplishment well worth striving for over a writing career. Use the tips and learnings from my journey outlined here to tilt the odds of a New Yorker acceptance in your favor, no matter how long it takes. The destination is worth the journey many times over when you can finally call yourself a New Yorker contributor.

Hi there, I'm Jessica, the solo traveler behind the travel blog Eye & Pen. I launched my site in 2020 to share over a decade of adventurous stories and vivid photography from my expeditions across 30+ countries. When I'm not wandering, you can find me freelance writing from my home base in Denver, hiking Colorado's peaks with my rescue pup Belle, or enjoying local craft beers with friends.

I specialize in budget tips, unique lodging spotlights, road trip routes, travel hacking guides, and female solo travel for publications like Travel+Leisure and Matador Network. Through my photography and writing, I hope to immerse readers in new cultures and compelling destinations not found in most guidebooks. I'd love for you to join me on my lifelong journey of visual storytelling!

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Virginia Woolf: There Are Way Too Many Personal Essays Out There

Just because you can write it, doesn’t mean you have to publish it.

Every now and again, an article appears on the internet that stops the literary world in its tracks, filling up Facebook and Twitter timelines with hot takes, cold takes, bad takes… Thus it was with Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker piece, “The Personal-Essay Boom is Over.” Prior to her gig at the New Yorker Tolentino was an editor at Jezebel and also worked at The Hairpin, both sites that contributed significantly to that boom with all manner of personal essay.

In 1905, Virginia Woolf wrote a bad-tempered essay entitled “ The Decay of Essay Writing ” in which she bemoaned the proliferation of personal essays in the excess of reading materials. “One member of the household is almost officially deputed to stand at the hall door with flaming sword and do battle with the invading armies,” she wrote. “Tracts, pamphlets, advertisements, gratuitous copies of magazines, and the literary productions of friends come by post, by van, by messenger—come at all hours of the day and fall in the night, so that the morning breakfast table is fairly snowed up with them.”

When I first discovered this essay several years ago, after buying a complete collection of Woolf’s works for a buck from Kindle, I thought it had been written as satire, at first reading it as some kind of Woolfian defense of a woman’s right to write. But as I read further into the essay, I realized that Woolf was serious in her grumblings that too much writing was being produced. I made notes at the time that Woolf would have hated the internet, but forgot it as a potential essay as other projects captured my imagination.

Tolentino’s essay made me retrieve the Woolf to discover that the two were speaking to one another across a century.

Woolf mentions the age’s fiction and other literary devices but soon settles on the source of much of the paper on her table: the personal essay. It is true that it originated with Montaigne, she says, but it has become so popular a literary device that “we are justified in looking upon it as something of our own.”

But just because a lot of personal essays are getting written doesn’t mean that they’re particularly good as literature. She admits that the essay’s “peculiar form” lends itself to a wide variety of writing, although it is characterized primarily by its “egoism.”

“Almost all essays begin with a capital I—‘I think,’ ‘I feel,’—and when you have said that, it is clear that you are not writing history or philosophy or biography or anything but an essay, which may be brilliant or profound, which may deal with the immortality of the soul, or the rheumatism in your left shoulder, but is primarily an expression of personal opinion.”

Readers may note that Woolf’s idea of an absurd essay is someone writing about the rheumatism in their left shoulder. For Tolentino, the nadir was the woman who wrote about having a clump of cat hair removed from her vagina. One wonders if Edwardian editors had not been so constrained by obscenity laws of their time if they might not have published an essay about vaginas full of cat hair.

Woolf argues that her time is not more egotistical than previous ages, but that her contemporaries have the advantage of having “manual dexterity with a pen.” She contends that the proliferation of writing is due to the large number of people who know how to write and have access to pen and paper.

“There are, of course, distinguished people who use this medium from genuine inspiration because it best embodies the soul of their thought. But, on the other hand, there is a very large number who make the fatal pause, and the mechanical act of writing is allowed to set the brain in motion which should only be accessible to a higher inspiration.”

In other words, people are of the opinion that because they can move a pen across paper, they can therefore write. But as any writing teacher can tell you now, as Woolf could tell you then, “it ain’t necessarily so.”

Woolf writes that one of the consequences of this flooding into publication of written productions is the dumbing down of arts criticism. Anyone feels themselves capable of declaring whether they like or don’t like something, so that criticism has taken on “the amiable garrulity of the tea-table—cast into the form of essays.”

So it turns out that the recent gnashing of teeth over over the decreasing intellectual levels of arts criticism are yet another criticism anticipated by Woolf in 1905.

She pleads that if people are going to write essays, that they stop sharing their opinions about the arts and instead, learn to tell the truth about themselves on the page. She notes that the biggest problem with contemporary autobiographies and writing of that kind is a failure of nerve.

“Confronted with the terrible specter of themselves, the bravest are inclined to run away or shade their eyes.” For Woolf, the rottenness at the core of the personal essay was that people thought they could write well on subjects they had only obtuse opinions of. And the real writing to be done in a personal essay—to tell the truth about one’s life—was being avoided. Essays failed in “the cardinal virtue of sincerity,” while writers pretended an “oracular and infallible nature.”

A century on, however, Tolentino says that the essays that reach deep to tell a truth about a life have contributed to a genre that has gotten out of hand. And she makes the point that most of the people who wrote these personal essays were women, who were willing to do what Woolf had demanded of her contemporaries a century before: to confront the terrible specter of themselves, and to not blink, but to write fearlessly about it. The problem arose when these essays became a commodity that content sites on the outside of the dot.com boom came to rely on, creating a daily need of women who would bare their souls in exchange for a byline and a small amount of money. Many of these women may have thought of themselves as “serious” writers who were starting out on a career track, doing what writers are told to do: build a portfolio. Tolentino says that editors—desperate for “clicks” to increase revenue—exploited naïve writers and published material that should have been left as private journal entries rather than shared with the voyeuristic internet.

While many did not reap writing careers from their sharing, some of our celebrated women writers got their start writing personal essays for the internet. For many, those personal essays—be they stories of busted relationships, death in the family, or revelations of the self—became a way to being recognized as a writer.

While editors were willing to publish crappy writing if it had a sensational story to tell, editors also tell stories of discovering great writers who responded to their calls for personal writing. It’s a point Tolentino herself admits when she writes at the end, “I am moved by the negotiation of vulnerability. I never got tired of coming across a writerly style that seemed to exist for no good reason. I loved watching people figure out if they had something to say.”

The problem is that few of the writers who made themselves naked on the page were able to turn that moment of internet recognition into a writing career. It’s one of the problems with the internet in general: it has such a huge appetite for content that an article that can move you to tears one morning simply creates an expectation in the reader that there are other essays out there capable of doing the same. And while a number of writers developed enormous followings on the internet that turned into book contracts and literary success, others may have felt that they had made themselves vulnerable as a literary exercise, only to have it treated as a form of cheap entertainment.

Tolentino and Woolf are both speaking to the writers of their day. Woolf urged writers to stop writing crappy book and theatre reviews and put something real on the page when they wrote personal essays. Tolentino is telling writers to stop writing personal essays where the “I” on the page has an experience that cannot be related to the greater structures in which we’re operating. If writers want to write about the personal, she seems to be saying, it’s time for us to consider how our experiences are shaped by the forces of racism or gender or class that distort the “I” we present to the world.

Woolf didn’t really want the personal essay to go away , she just wanted it to get better, and Tolentino is making a similar argument. The personal essay has to evolve; we are living in a time when the government is inserting itself into personal decisions that range from where our children go to school to what women allow in their vaginas. These things are still worth writing about. But we need to treat the personal essay with more dignity than we have done. There are infinite glimpses of human truth to be had in personal writing, but it really is okay not to publish every single thing you write. To adapt Woolf for our age: just because you can type it into your computer doesn’t mean you have to.

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7 publications that pay well for personal narrative essays

Despite The New Yorker declaring that the personal essay boom was over in 2017, I’ve seen the opposite. Whenever I look on Twitter, I see callouts from editors for candid, revealing and thought-provoking first person pieces. For freelance writers, the advantage of writing a personal narrative essay is that you are drawing on your own experience, so there is very little need for external research or case studies. Many writers also say that writing down their own experience and sharing it with others feels validating, affirming and therapeutic.

Before I became a full time freelancer , I wrote quite a few personal narrative essays.

Why? Because personal narrative essays are one of the fastest and easiest ways to get published.

When I was writing my first-person pieces, I found numerous articles about how to sell personal essays in the age of over-sharing and how to write compelling first person pieces for major publications.

I quickly learnt that if you are willing to open up and share your own experience, you can be compensated well for it.

And if you’re interested to learn more about how to write a personal essay (and how to get paid for it!) I’ve created the ultimate guide to step you through the process.

It takes you through:

Choosing the perfect topic for a personal essay
How to start a personal essay (including what to do and not to do and examples of banging beginnings)
Common mistakes people make when writing first-person narratives
How to write a compelling personal essay that keeps people reading right to the end
Examples of great personal narrative essays
How to pitching your story to an editor
And lots more!

The guide also includes 15+ paying markets for personal narrative essays, but I know that it can be tricky to find publications that accept freelance submissions.

The good news is that there are plenty of online and print publications looking for personal essays.

So if you have a personal story you want to share, where can you pitch it?

If you’re a writer who has had a book published, it’s definitely worth pitching to Allure (a magazine predominantly for women about beauty) as they pay up to $3,000 for personal essays up to 2000 words.

For those mere mortals among us who haven’t written a book, the rate for personal essays seems to be more like $250 – $500.

Glamour is another women’s magazine that heavily focuses on beauty, fashion and entertainment stories. Personal essays published by Glamour are reported to fetch around $2/word.

3. The Guardian

You have to love an editor who puts what she wants from writers out there and Jessica Reed from The Guardian certainly delivers. For beautifully written personal essays, The Guardian reportedly pays 60c/word.

4. Marie Claire

If you’ve got something compelling, insightful, intimate, funny, relatable or awkward to say about your love or sex life, then a personal essay directed to Marie Claire might be just the ticket. Writers report that Marie Claire pays $2/word.

Are you spotting a theme here? Women’s magazines love personal essays. If you want to write first hand experience about fitness, food, health or culture, it’s worth pitching to SELF magazine, who pay up to $700 for 2000 words.

A dynamic site covering world affairs, pop culture, science, business, politics and more, Vox pay around $500 for personal narrative essays. What’s even better is their clear pitching guidelines for their First Person section .

7. News.com.au

If you feel like a sharing a real life story like this one , you can pitch to the lifestyle vertical on the Australian website news.com.au. Writers are reportedly paid around $500 for a post.

Great examples of personal essays

You could spend years reading all the personal narrative essays that get published, but here are my picks for some of the best:

My washing line is heavy with the weight of our ash-ridden tent hung out to air. I wonder if the smell of smoke will ever be gone. I have no recollection of the tent being packed away – I was focused on the children, keeping them calm. All I know is that we’d never packed up a campsite so damn quickly. But then, we’d never fled a bushfire. You can read the rest of the article here.

“I love you so much.” Those whispered words make everything better – and when my soul mate and husband died, five years ago, I truly believed I would never hear them again. You can read the rest of the article here.

My epiphany came, like many of them do, while I was taking a dump. Specifically, it came while I was trying to take a dump in the woods after three years of struggling with gastrointestinal issues. It went something like this: you don’t need to be gluten-free anymore. You just need to relax. You can read the rest of the article here.

The rules for pitching a personal essay are much the same as when you query an editor for any other kind of writing assignment.

You just need a strong hook and engaging writing style.

The writers I know who create personal narrative essays love it.

They feel free and are absolutely thrilled when readers respond to their articles with “me too!”

After all, isn’t the point of writing to reach and connect with others? Personal essays tend to do that in a very special way.

Do you write personal narrative essays? Have you found other well-paying markets?

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What the future looked like 60 years ago

Looking at a 60-year-old magazine is an exercise not only in history but also in humility..

Back in 1964, not even the most innovative computer scientists were envisioning a world where nearly everyone would walk around with a pocket-sized device that could connect with any other device in a global wireless network of information and disinformation.

I am not sure why, amid my collection of miscellaneous old magazines, I have a copy of The New Yorker from April 1964, but I do. And on a rainy April 2024 morning, I sat down to read through it, curious to open a time capsule from exactly 60 years ago.

Well, first there are the ads. There are a lot of them, and they are uniformly and snobbily aspirational, with an undertone of anxiety. “Where money is no object, taste sets the criteria,” says an ad for sheets and towels. A tweed suit is “impeccably tailored to our exacting British Sportswear standards.” Even a cheap New York state champagne is bottled “under the artistic management of European wine masters.” The many travel ads appeal to the reader’s wish to be sophisticated (“Don’t bother going to Buenos Aires to keep up with the Joneses. They haven’t been there yet”) while also offering reassurance that the food will not be too spicy and you can still get a good steak. There is a distinct message here that Americans — the white middle-class Americans who read The New Yorker, that is — are on top of the world.

There are no clouds on the horizon. The future is good. The New York World’s Fair is about to open, a two-year extravaganza including exhibits on rockets, computers, and “modern living underground, with pseudo-sunlight.” General Electric will be running demonstrations every six minutes on nuclear fusion. General Motors offers rides to a city of the future. The magazine’s listing of the fair’s attractions includes something for everyone. In the Vatican Pavilion you can see Michelangelo’s Pietà, and in the Wisconsin Pavilion you can see the world’s biggest piece of cheese.

The New Yorker of that era was known for its long pieces of in-depth journalism, and there are several in this issue. One is about Southeast Asia: an analysis by Robert Shaplen of the enigmatic political strategies of Cambodia’s leader, Norodom Sihanouk, who had recently alarmed the United States by renouncing American aid and threatening to ally himself with Communist China. Shaplen explains that Cambodia is caught between volatile competing outside interests: the United States, Russia, China, France, Thailand, and North and South Vietnam. Sihanouk has “a growing conviction that the tide of war in South Vietnam was going against the Vietnamese and their American backers.” He is quoted as saying, “Communism will sooner or later take over all of South Vietnam, and by consequence us also,” but he hopes to preserve Cambodia as a neutral country.

The other major article in the issue is Christopher Rand’s admiring, curious, New-Yorker-in-Wonderland piece about Cambridge, Massachusetts, focusing mostly on the computer scientists at Harvard and MIT. What are they up to? Where do they think the future is going to take us? Computers are already being used to count the frequency of words in texts, to advise political candidates on whether taking a particular position will gain or lose votes, to help the Indian government manage the agricultural water supply in the Indus River Valley, to teach foreign languages. Will it one day be possible to scan and retrieve all of the written information in libraries? Many experts say this is a pipe dream. But some people at MIT believe that “whole cities, if not whole nations, will eventually be wired up to central computers.”

Looking at the magazine across a retrospective gulf of six decades, a lot of what you see are the blind spots. Some are cultural: There’s a blithely optimistic article on race in America that does not quote a single Black person. Some are due to the absence of vital pieces of information that were deliberately kept hidden at the time; while Shaplen was talking to his diplomatic sources in Cambodia he could not have known that back in the United States, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was secretly urging President Lyndon Johnson to send vast numbers of troops and bombers to Vietnam — an escalation of war that would eventually pull Cambodia into its own genocidal hell. And some are simply due to an inability to predict the future — to imagine the unimaginable. Back in 1964, not even the most innovative computer scientists were envisioning a world where nearly everyone would walk around with a pocket-sized device that could connect with any other device in a global wireless network of information and disinformation.

It can be tempting to view the blind spots of the past with condescension, to believe that we are so much more knowledgeable and enlightened today — to say, with a kind of ferocious impatient self-righteousness, that our predecessors lived in a bubble.

But isn’t our belief that we have no blind spots the very definition of a blind spot? Looking at a 60-year-old magazine is an exercise not only in history but also in humility. The 1964 New Yorker pieces about Cambodia and computers were as informed and intelligent as any journalism could have been back then. But the future went in other directions, as it will.

Joan Wickersham is the author of “The Suicide Index” and “The News from Spain.” Her column appears regularly in the Globe.

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Sophia Bush Publicly Comes Out as Queer For the First Time in Moving Personal Essay

“I finally feel like I can breathe.”

Sophia Bush attends the 2024 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at the University of Southern California on April 20, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.

At 41 years old, Sophia Bush is experiencing what she says is something of a "first birthday" all over again.

Bush has publicly come out as queer for the very first time in a moving personal essay for Glamour , writing that her public declaration has given her the ability to "finally feel like I can breathe."

"I don’t think I can explain how profound that is,” she wrote for the publication while simultaneously posing as their April 2024 cover star.

"I feel like I was wearing a weighted vest for who knows how long," she said. "I hadn’t realized how heavy it was until I finally just put it down. This might sound crazy—but I think other people in trauma recovery will get it—I am taking deep breaths again. I can feel my legs and feet. I can feel my feet in my shoes right now. It makes me want to cry and laugh at the same time."

Sophia Bush attends the 2024 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at the University of Southern California on April 20, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.

In August 2023, Bush filed for divorce from her former husband and entrepreneur Grant Hughes after one year of marriage, People reported at the time.

After her divorce, Bush reportedly started dating Ashlyn Harris, a former soccer player, who recently filed from divorce from her former wife Ali Krieger in September 2023, again according to People who first broke the story .

“The idea that I left my marriage based on some hysterical rendezvous—that, to be crystal-clear, never happened—rather than having taken over a year to do the most soul crushing work of my life? … It feels brutal," Bush wrote, addressing accusations that her relationship with Harris was nefarious and the rumored affair ended their respective marriages.

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“It took me 41 years to get here,” she continued, discussing her sexuality. “When I take stock of the last few years, I can tell you that I have never operated out of more integrity in my life. I hope that’s clear enough for everyone speculating out there, while being as gentle as I possibly can be.”

Sophia Bush attends the FASHION TRUST U.S. Awards 2024 on April 09, 2024 in Beverly Hills, California.

Bush described how she grew close to Harris in 2023, after they both helped each other navigate the end of their marriages.

As time went on she said she eventually asked Harris to go on a "non-friend-group-hang" that she described as one of "the most surreal experiences" of her life.

“Maybe it was all fated. Maybe it really is a version of invisible string theory. I don’t really know,” she continued. “But I do know that for a sparkly moment I felt like maybe the universe had been conspiring for me. And that feeling that I have in my bones is one I’ll hold on to no matter where things go from here.”

Danielle Campoamor is an award-winning freelance writer covering mental health, reproductive justice, abortion access, maternal mental health, politics, and feminist issues. She has been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBC, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, InStyle, Playboy, Teen Vogue, Glamour, The Daily Beast, and more.

Bella Hadid wearing a low cut strapless dress on a red carpet to illustrate a story about her nearly naked Orebella dresses

The supermodel gave fans a sneak-peek at her upcoming label.

By India Roby Published 25 April 24

Céline Dion lors de son mariage avec René Angélil à Montreal le 17 décembre 1994, canada

"The pressure was too much."

By Danielle Campoamor Published 25 April 24

Sophia Geiss seen wearing Saint Lauren black sunglasses, Uniqlo white cotton basic top, Calvin Klein blue denim baggy wide leg jeans pants, black leather belt, Meotine creamy white canvas jacket, Bottega Veneta creamy white / vanilla leather mini Jodie bag, on April 12, 2024 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Jeremy Moeller/Getty Images)

A new season calls for new staples.

By Brooke Knappenberger Published 25 April 24

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Helen Vendler, poetry critic both revered and feared, dies at 90

Called a ‘colossus’ of poetry criticism, she wielded influence that could elevate poets’ careers and introduce their work to wide audiences.

Helen Vendler, a literary scholar and reviewer of poetry who was revered and feared in equal measures, whose scalpel-sharp critiques could elevate or wound careers and who introduced hundreds of poets to a wider audience, died April 23 at her home in Laguna Niguel, Calif. She was 90.

The cause of death was cancer, said her son, David Vendler.

Among poets writing in English — and especially Americans — Dr. Vendler stood as a powerful gatekeeper in the same way that top theater critics can make or break a Broadway show. For the reading public, meanwhile, she helped bring attention to poets and their work with reviews in the New Republic, the London Review of Books, the New Yorker and other outlets.

Her clout grew steadily over more than five decades through a prolific output of reviews and more than two dozen books. She also carried added sway as a longtime poetry judge for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, as well as a nominator for the “genius” grants of the MacArthur Foundation.

Literary critic Bruce Bawer called her “the colossus of contemporary American poetry criticism.”

“I do understand, I think, what it feels like to be a poet, even though I’m not one,” Dr. Vendler once said at Harvard University, where she began teaching in the 1980s. “I was born with a mind that likes condensed and unusual language, which is what you get from poetry.”

She acknowledged that poetry was often a deeply personal experience for the reader. “You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem,” she told the Paris Review. “You are the voice in the poem.” But she also made clear what she favored and why.

Dr. Vendler objected to poetry that pushed an ideology, an instinct she traced back to her dismay over the controls of the Catholic Church during her education while growing up in Boston. She could find kinship with poets exploring the world through a woman’s eyes, recalling the cold reception she received in the 1950s as a graduate student at Harvard’s English Department.

She insisted that her goal wasn’t to be an arbiter of poetry. She instead regarded herself as an interpreter of the craft, seeking to analyze the form, flow, intent and literary inspirations behind a piece. Harold Bloom , a noted literary critic, called her the ultimate “close reader.”

“Reviewing doesn’t mean much if your fellow poets don’t think you are good,” Dr. Vendler told the New York Times in 1997. “The canon is made by poets themselves.”

Yet there was no doubt of the boost she gave to those she praised, such as Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney ; Rita Dove, the U.S. poet laureate from 1993 to 1995; and Pulitzer winner Jorie Graham . (During the early 1970s, Dr. Vendler helped select poets whose work was evaluated by the New York Times Book Review.)

“She is like a receiving station picking up on each poem, unscrambling things out of word-waves, making sense of it and making sure of it. She can second-guess the sixth sense of the poem,” Heaney once said.

She also wrote in a taut, journalistic style that could carry a punch.

In 1982, she pounced on the “ventriloquism” of a future Nobel laureate, Derek Walcott , whom she criticized for being “at the mercy of influence” of other writers. In a 1996 review in the New Yorker, she called out American poet and memoirist Mark Doty for “inert” rhythms. In the same story, she celebrated August Kleinzahler for “his irreverent joy in the American demotic” — a recurring point of reference for Dr. Vendler and her interest in poets seeking to convey the American experience.

When Alice Quinn, the poetry editor at the New Yorker, pulled together unpublished works by the late poet Elizabeth Bishop in the 2006 anthology “Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box,” the reception from Dr. Vendler was harsh . She chided Quinn for publishing the “maimed and stunted siblings” of Bishop’s completed poems. “I am told that poets now, fearing an Alice Quinn in their future, are incinerating their drafts,” Dr. Vendler added in the New Republic.

Any critic, of course, faces criticism. Dr. Vendler was sometimes described as too protective of poetry in its traditional forms and failing to give sufficient recognition of other outlets such as hip-hop, rap and spoken-word poetry slams. In 2011, she engaged in back-and-forth barbs with Dove over the “The Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry,” which Dove edited. Dr. Vendler asserted that “multicultural inclusiveness” meant too many poets were represented.

“No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading,” Dr. Vendler wrote in the New York Review of Books, “so why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value? … Selectivity has been condemned as ‘elitism.’”

Dove shot back, “I would not have believed Vendler capable of throwing such cheap dirt.”

‘Poetry in the house’

Helen Hennessy was born April 30, 1933, in Boston. Her father taught Romance languages at high schools; her mother had been a teacher in the Boston Public School system but was forced to resign under a rule at the time requiring female teachers to be single.

Helen learned Spanish, French and Italian from her father, and said her love of poetry was inspired by her mother, who “was the fount of poetry in the house.”

She wrote her first poem at 6. “I went on writing until I was 26, and then I stopped,” she recalled. “I had found my real vocation as a critic by then.”

As a student, she attended Catholic schools and then Boston’s Emmanuel College because her parents opposed a “secular” education. “Women intellectuals were not thick on the ground in the Catholic Church,” she told the Boston Globe. “There was no place for me to be. There was no club for me to join.”

She wanted to study French literature at Emmanuel but found that many French writers, including Voltaire and Gustave Flaubert, were banned by the church at the time. She switched to chemistry. After graduating in 1954, she studied in Belgium under a Fulbright fellowship. When she returned in 1955, she took undergraduate courses in English at Boston University and in 1956 entered Harvard as a graduate student.

The head of the English department told her that “we don’t want any women here,” and she was once blocked by a recalcitrant professor from attending a seminar on the author Herman Melville, she recalled.

“I was very shaken,” she said. She completed her doctorate in 1960 and soon married Zeno Vendler, a philosopher who had once trained for the Jesuit priesthood.

After her divorce in 1964, she struggled financially as a single mother. She told the Boston Globe that she refused to abandon writing, calling that path a “form of self-murder.”

In 1966, the Massachusetts Review magazine asked her for an article looking at that year’s new poetry. Three years later, she published a volume analyzing the poems of Wallace Stevens , making a strong case for a reevaluation of his work, which many other scholars had dismissed as overwrought and tedious.

In her 1975 book “The Poetry of George Herbert,” she asserted that the poet was more complex than his far more famous contemporary John Donne.

For more than two decades, she taught at various campuses including Cornell University, Smith College and Boston University. In 1985, Dr. Vendler joined the Harvard faculty full-time. She retired in 2018.

Her books and essays included explorations of John Keats, Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare’s sonnets. She remained forceful in her opinions about some poets, including T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, over political views that some characterized as antisemitic .

In 2004, the National Endowment for the Humanities named her a Jefferson Lecturer, the highest government honor on a scholar of the humanities. A collection of her essays and reviews, “Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets” (1980), won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

In addition to her son, David, survivors include a brother; and two grandchildren.

In a 1996 interview with the Paris Review, Dr. Vendler was asked whether her reviews ever outshone the poetry she was reviewing.

“Oh, no,” she said. “My language is so much the inferior of the poets’. Even a minor poet has far greater gifts of language than I have.”

Sophia Bush Addresses Rumor She Left Ex Grant Hughes for Ashlyn Harris

Sophia bush opened up about the end of her marriage to grant hughes—and the beginning of her new romance with girlfriend ashlyn harris—in a new and deeply personal essay..

Sophia Bush doesn't wanna be anything other than herself.

The One Tree Hill alum recently opened up about the changes she's undergone in her personal life in recent years, including her split from ex-husband Grant Hughes and the beginning of a romantic relationship with longtime friend Ashlyn Harris . A relationship—she wants to make clear—that began completely above board, despite rumors to the contrary.

"There was a lot that quickly turned ugly," Sophia wrote in an essay for Glamour published April 25 . "People looking in from the outside weren't privy to just how much time it took, how many painful conversations were had. What felt like seconds after I started to see what was in front of me, the online rumor mill began to spit in the ugliest ways."

She continued, "There were blatant lies. Violent threats. There were accusations of being a home-wrecker. The ones who said I'd left my ex because I suddenly realized I wanted to be with women—my partners have known what I'm into for as long as I have (so that's not it, y'all, sorry!)."

In fact, the 41-year-old says any ideas that her relationship with Ashlyn developed from anything other than time and a preexisting friendship have no basis.

"The idea that I left my marriage based on some hysterical rendezvous—that, to be crystal-clear, never happened—rather than having taken over a year to do the most soul crushing work of my life? It feels brutal," she wrote. "Just because I didn't want to process my realizations in real time on social media and spell them out for the world doesn't mean the journey wasn't long and thoughtful and exhaustive."

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Khloe kardashian has welcomed an adorable new member to the family.

After Reports About Trump Jurors, Judge Demands Restraint From the Press

Some news reports have included details about jurors that had been aired in open court. One was excused after she developed concerns about being identified.

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Reporters stand near lights and cameras.

By Jesse McKinley , Kate Christobek and Matthew Haag

April 18, 2024

The judge in former President Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial ordered reporters to not disclose employment information about potential jurors after he excused a woman who said she was worried about her identity becoming known.

The woman, who had been seated on the jury on Tuesday, told the judge that her friends and colleagues had warned her that she had been identified as a juror in the high-profile case. Although the judge has kept prospective jurors’ names private, some have disclosed their employers and other identifying information in court.

She also said that she did not believe she could be impartial.

The judge, Juan M. Merchan, promptly dismissed her.

Moments later, Justice Merchan ordered the press to not report the answer to two queries on a lengthy questionnaire for prospective jurors: “Who is your current employer?” and “Who was your prior employer?”

The judge conceded that the information about employers was necessary for lawyers to know. But he directed that those two answers be redacted from the transcript.

Justice Merchan also said that he was concerned about news outlets publishing physical descriptions of prospective or seated jurors, asking reporters to “simply apply common sense.”

“It serves no purpose,” Justice Merchan said about publishing physical descriptions, adding that he was directing the press to “refrain from writing about anything you observe with your eyes.”

William P. Marshall, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law in Chapel Hill, said that Justice Merchan’s order appeared “constitutionally suspect.” Professor Marshall said that a landmark Supreme Court ruling in a 1976 case, Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart, struck down a trial judge’s ruling barring the news media from reporting information introduced in open court.

“The presumption against prior restraint is incredibly high in First Amendment law,” Professor Marshall said. “It’s even higher when it’s publishing something that is already a matter of public record.”

Lawyers for news outlets, including The New York Times, were expected to seek clarification on the order.

With the loss of the female juror on Thursday morning, six seated jurors remain.

In early March, Justice Merchan issued an order prohibiting publicly disclosing the names of jurors, while allowing legal teams and the defendant to know their identities.

But before the trial, Mr. Trump’s lawyers requested that potential jurors not be told that the jury would be anonymous unless he or she expressed concerns. Justice Merchan told the parties that he’d “make every effort to not unnecessarily alert the jurors” to this secrecy, merely telling jurors that they would be identified in court by a number.

On Thursday, Justice Merchan seemed frustrated by news reports that included identifying characteristics of potential jurors that had been aired in open court. He said: “There’s a reason why this is an anonymous jury, and we’ve taken the measures we have taken.”

“It kind of defeats the purpose of that when so much information is put out there,” he said.

He added that “the press can write about anything the attorney and the courts discuss and anything you observe us do.”

But he also said he had the legal authority to prevent reporters from relaying employer information on prospective jurors. He added that “if you can’t stick to that, we’re going to have to see if there is anything else we can do to keep the jurors safe.”

Jesse McKinley is a Times reporter covering upstate New York, courts and politics. More about Jesse McKinley

Kate Christobek is a reporter covering the civil and criminal cases against former president Donald J. Trump for The Times. More about Kate Christobek

Matthew Haag writes about the intersection of real estate and politics in the New York region. He has been a journalist for two decades. More about Matthew Haag

Our Coverage of the Trump Hush-Money Trial

News and Analysis

Prosecutors accused Donald Trump of violating a gag order four additional times , saying that he continues to defy the judge’s directions not to attack witnesses , prosecutors and jurors in his hush-money trial.

Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan is off to an ominous start for the former president, and it might not get any easier in the days ahead. Here’s why.

The National Enquirer was more than a friendly media outlet for Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. It was a powerful, national political weapon that was thrust into the service of a single candidate , in violation of campaign finance law.

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