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Uncommon Women...That's Us

Where Credit Is Due

By GAIL COLLINS

A few months ago, a saleswoman at Macy’s tried to wheedle me into renewing my expired store credit card by offering a deep discount on the towels I was buying. So I dug it out of my wallet, where it was nestled between an expired press pass to the Texas State Capitol and an expired library card from Manchester, N.H., and happily handed it over.

She looked at it, puzzled. “But this isn’t your name,” she said. The card said Daniel Collins. That’s my husband, who I believe has never been to Macy’s, or bought a towel, in his entire life.

I flashed back to a moment when I was living in Connecticut. I have no idea what year it was, except that it is very possible Richard Nixon was still president. I was in the Macy’s in New Haven when a woman with a clipboard came up to me and asked me if I wanted to apply for a credit card. “Absolutely,” I said instantly.

She took up her pen. “What’s your husband’s name?” she asked. I wish I could tell you that I made a speech about equal rights and headed for the door, but I just let her fill out my application. This was an era when women still needed a male co-signer to get credit. In some places, you needed a husband or father to even get a library card.

Anyway, I was proud of being newly married and dumb about the women’s movement. I worked as a reporter in the Connecticut State Capitol, where the male legislators and male lobbyists and male reporters met in a place called the Hawaiian Room to drink. When a female journalist demanded that she be admitted, too, the media was barred completely. The guys in the press room blamed it all on the one woman, who, I am sorry to say, was not me. My only reaction was to wonder why anyone would want to go to the Hawaiian Room, which was in the attic, with steam pipes along the ceiling festooned with limp plastic leis.

I’m telling you all this because on Monday we will celebrate Women’s Equality Day, the anniversary of the 19th Amendment and women’s right to vote. That was in 1920, and there’s no longer anyone around who can tell us what that felt like to be disenfranchised because of your sex. But there are plenty of people who recall the time when women couldn’t get credit in their own name.

Next year, if we’re in the mood, we can celebrate the 40th anniversary of the day that Kathryn Kirschbaum, then the mayor of Davenport, Iowa, was told she could not have a Bank of America card without her husband’s signature.

The great thing about Equality Day is that it works in two ways. We can mull both how far we’ve come and how far we have to go. The one thought feeds the other. The idea of having 50 women in the U.S. Senate, or 250 female C.E.O.’s in the Fortune 500 seems less far-reaching if you contemplate the fact that in the 1960s, a spokesman for NASA said “talk of an American spacewoman makes me sick to my stomach.” Now, one of the two American astronauts on the International Space Station is a woman, and that is so routine that we’re not even aware of her name. (It’s Karen Nyberg.)

Monday is also the anniversary of the 1970 women’s march for equality in New York, which almost no one expected to be a very big deal. The New York Police Department had only given the marchers permission to use one lane of Fifth Avenue. “Then more people came and more people came and we spilled over, and we took over the entire avenue,” recalled Robin Morgan, the feminist author and activist. “And that was the moment your heart really sang. People were hanging out windows. I kept yelling: ‘Join us!’ ” And some of them, Morgan said, did just that.

Parades are great. For a long time, the drive for suffrage was seen as a depressing slog of petition-gathering by middle-class clubwomen. Then the parades started, and the movement belonged to everyone.

“We did not eat our little lunches in lobster palaces, but out in the street in front of lobster palaces. We stand for plain living and high thinking, that’s it,” a marcher told The New York Times during the equality parade in 1912.

That comment does seem a tad reverse-snobby, but the mixture of socialites and factory workers, marching for one cause, sent a message. It also sounds as though it was a lot of fun. After the march ended, a woman The Times identified as “Miss Annie S. Peck, the mountain climber,” stood on a chair, “waved a Joan of Arc flag, and told her audience that this was the banner that she had planted 21,000 feet above the sea on one of the highest peaks of the Andes.”

There don’t seem to be a lot of parades planned for Monday, which is probably all for the best. Once a parade becomes an annual institution, it becomes less about a political point and more about the afterparties. But we are going to have one heck of a time in 2020.

YEARS ago, while producing the hit TV series “The Shield,” Glen Mazzara noticed that two young female writers were quiet during story meetings. He pulled them aside and encouraged them to speak up more. Watch what happens when we do, they replied. Almost every time they started to speak, they were interrupted or shot down before finishing their pitch. When one had a good idea, a male writer would jump in and run with it before she could complete her thought.

Sadly, their experience is not unusual. We’ve both seen it happen again and again. When a woman speaks in a professional setting, she walks a tightrope. Either she’s barely heard or she’s judged as too aggressive. When a man says virtually the same thing, heads nod in appreciation for his fine idea. As a result, women often decide that saying less is more.

Some new studies support our observations. A study by a Yale psychologist, Victoria L. Brescoll, found that male senators with more power (as measured by tenure, leadership positions and track record of legislation passed) spoke more on the Senate floor than their junior colleagues. But for female senators, power was not linked to significantly more speaking time.

Suspecting that powerful women stayed quiet because they feared a backlash, Professor Brescoll looked deeper. She asked professional men and women to evaluate the competence of chief executives who voiced their opinions more or less frequently. Male executives who spoke more often than their peers were rewarded with 10 percent higher ratings of competence. When female executives spoke more than their peers, both men and women punished them with 14 percent lower ratings. As this and other research shows, women who worry that talking “too much” will cause them to be disliked are not paranoid; they are often right.

One of us, Adam, was dismayed to find similar patterns when studying a health care company and advising an international bank. When male employees contributed ideas that brought in new revenue, they got significantly higher performance evaluations. But female employees who spoke up with equally valuable ideas did not improve their managers’ perception of their performance. Also, the more the men spoke up, the more helpful their managers believed them to be. But when women spoke up more, there was no increase in their perceived helpfulness.

This speaking-up double bind harms organizations by depriving them of valuable ideas. A University of Texas researcher, Ethan Burris, conducted an experiment in which he asked teams to make strategic decisions for a bookstore. He randomly informed one member that the bookstore’s inventory system was flawed and gave that person data about a better approach. In subsequent analyses, he found that when women challenged the old system and suggested a new one, team leaders viewed them as less loyal and were less likely to act on their suggestions. Even when all team members were informed that one member possessed unique information that would benefit the group, suggestions from women with inside knowledge were discounted.

Obviously, businesses need to find ways to interrupt this gender bias. Just as orchestras that use blind auditions increase the number of women who are selected, organizations can increase women’s contributions by adopting practices that focus less on the speaker and more on the idea. For example, in innovation tournaments, employees submit suggestions and solutions to problems anonymously. Experts evaluate the proposals, give feedback to all participants and then implement the best plans.

SINCE most work cannot be done anonymously, leaders must also take steps to encourage women to speak and be heard. At “The Shield,” Mr. Mazzara, the show runner, found a clever way to change the dynamics that were holding those two female employees back. He announced to the writers that he was instituting a no-interruption rule while anyone — male or female — was pitching. It worked, and he later observed that it made the entire team more effective

The long-term solution to the double bind of speaking while female is to increase the number of women in leadership roles. (As we noted in our previous article, research shows that when it comes to leadership skills, although men are more confident, women are more competent.) As more women enter the upper echelons of organizations, people become more accustomed to women’s contributing and leading. Professor Burris and his colleagues studied a credit union where women made up 74 percent of supervisors and 84 percent of front-line employees. Sure enough, when women spoke up there, they were more likely to be heard than men. When President Obama held his last news conference of 2014, he called on eight reporters — all women. It made headlines worldwide. Had a politician given only men a chance to ask questions, it would not have been news; it would have been a regular day.

As 2015 starts, we wonder what would happen if we all held Obama-style meetings, offering women the floor whenever possible. Doing this for even a day or two might be a powerful bias interrupter, demonstrating to our teams and colleagues that speaking while female is still quite difficult. We’re going to try it to see what we learn. We hope you will, too — and then share your experiences with us all on Facebook or in the comments section.

“It’s none of your damned business!”

I’ve been told that. Just about anyone who wrote for The Times before June 20, 1986, was told that. So we learned to save the demeaning question for last when interviewing women: Are you a Mrs. or a Miss?

Before June 20, 1986, one could not be a Ms. in the pages of The Times.

“The top editor had persuaded the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, that the usage was a passing fad,” Betsy Wade wrote for an exhibition at the Manhattan borough president’s office. “Grace Lichtenstein, a successful and aggressive reporter, shouted at that editor in the city room one day that it was not a fad. She said that the newspaper’s style barrier to ‘Ms.’ was a big problem for all reporters. When writing of a woman, the lack of a title like ‘Mr.,’ which does not bespeak marital status, forced the reporter to ask a news source flat out: ‘Are you married?’ Frequently, a reporter was told, ‘It’s none of your damned business!’ ”

Ms. was scarcely a passing fad. It had been proposed at the dawn of the 20th century as an alternative to Miss and Mrs. In 1971, it was adopted as the name of a new magazine edited by Gloria Steinem. (“Ms.,” The Times explained to readers, was “the form of address preferred by feminists.”) In 1972, it was accepted as a courtesy title by the American Heritage School Dictionary. In 1973, it was in such common use that the novelist Jean Stafford objected, saying she would reject any first-class mail addressed to “Ms. Stafford” — after first slitting open the envelope to make sure there wasn’t a check inside.

In 1974, protesters gathered outside The Times’s headquarters, then at 229 West 43rd Street, carrying signs like “Miss, If She Chooses; Mrs., If She Chooses; Ms., If She Chooses” and “Form Follows Function — Ms. Now!” and “We’ve Come to M-ESS Up The Times.” Two photographs of the event, by Diana Mara Henry, are part of the exhibition. In the second photo, police are breaking up the demonstration.

Despite the unhappy ending to the protest, some Times executives were listening, as Richard F. Shepard described in “The Paper’s Papers: A Reporter’s Journey Through the Archives of The New York Times.”

Max Frankel, who was the Sunday editor in 1974, favored adopting Ms. “‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs.’ — as perceived by a fair number of women — are not simply neutral titles that some no longer like,” he wrote in a memorandum that year. “They define women entirely in terms of marital status, when that standard is not applied to men.”

But A. M. Rosenthal, the managing editor to whom the exhibition refers obliquely, was opposed. “The Times should use the best-accepted usage,” he wrote in a memo, “and not be in a position of coining usage or giving undue acceptability to usages of the moment by formalizing them in its style.”

After Mr. Sulzberger vetoed “Ms.” in 1974, he began facing questions at shareholders’ meetings posed by Paula S. Kassell, a feminist writer and publisher, who had asked the Women’s Caucus at The Times how she might be helpful. Ms. Wade, a founder of the caucus, said its members suggested that Ms. Kassell buy 10 shares of Times stock to secure a spot for herself and “pester the publisher about this sexism in print.”

At the April 1986 meeting, Ms. Kassell challenged Mr. Sulzberger to convene a debate among language experts and then reach a “rational” decision. He agreed.

A. M. Rosenthal, by then the executive editor, explained the new policy, which he had long opposed. “In less than two weeks, she got a note from the publisher saying that the debate would not be necessary because the editors were adopting the new style,” Ms. Wade wrote. “On the night it happened, Gloria Steinem, Mary Thom and other editors of Ms. magazine walked into the city room with a basket of flowers for the editor” — Mr. Rosenthal — “and the copy editors and reporters applauded.”

The Ms. episode is one of several covered by the exhibition, which Ms. Wade curated with Penelope Cox, the special events coordinator for the borough president, Gale A. Brewer. It will be on display through April 14 at the David N. Dinkins Manhattan Municipal Building.

Women in politics, notably Bella S. Abzug, are the principal focus of the show. But for every larger-than-life champion of women’s rights, the exhibition pinpoints those whose names are largely lost to history.

Emma Bugbee, for instance, was the first woman hired by The New York Tribune to cover hard news — hard being the operative word. In December 1912, she accompanied suffragists on a 12-day march from New York City to Albany, to make a public case for women’s right to vote. She was still working for The Tribune, which had acquired The Herald, when Ms. Wade was hired by that newspaper in 1952.

Ms. Wade, on the other hand, lasted little more than a year at The Herald Tribune. After marrying James Boylan, a journalist and historian, she was fired as an editor in the women’s news department when Eugenia Sheppard, the newspaper’s fashion editor, learned Ms. Wade was pregnant.

“Eugenia said: ‘Oh, dear — this is dreadful. I’ll have to talk to the managing editor,” Ms. Wade recalled to Nan Robertson, the author of “The Girls in the Balcony: Woman, Men and The New York Times.”

“The last person hired was the first person fired, and I went,” she continued. “You couldn’t get unemployment insurance in those days if you were pregnant. We were living up the Hudson River at Fort Lee, N.J. I was in a state of terror and confusion, sewing a layette. My career was washed up.”

In fact, it had just begun. Hired by The Times in 1956, she was the first woman assigned to a Times copy desk and, in 1972, the first woman to head a Times copy desk. In 1974, she was the lead named plaintiff in a federal lawsuit — Elizabeth Boylan v. The New York Times — charging the company with discriminating against women in pay, promotions and job opportunities. The case was settled in 1978.

Eight years later, the “Ms.” barrier fell. The first front page under the new policy carried an article reporting that the Supreme Court had ruled that sexual harassment of an employee by a supervisor violated federal law. The plaintiff was Mechelle Vinson, a former employee of the Meritor Savings Bank of Washington. The article referred to her as “Ms. Vinson.” It was edited by Ms. Wade.

MS vs MRS

Speaking While Female

New York Times - January 12, 2015

In a new special project, a team of Times reporters and editors is taking a deeper look at the tradition of using honorifics to address married women.

In 1932, the aviator Amelia Earhart wrote to the publisher of The New York Times and asked to be referred to by her professional name in print. Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

To us, she has always been Amelia Earhart, but there was a time when The New York Times called her Mrs. Putnam in newspaper articles, linking her identity to that of her husband, George. She wasn’t the only one: Frida Kahlo was sometimes called Mrs. Diego Rivera; Coretta Scott King was Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr.; and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was Mrs. John F. Kennedy.

The practice of referring to a married woman — even a famous one — by her husband’s name wasn’t unique to The Times. Much of society often referred — and sometimes still refers — to women this way. It was not until 1986 — after a vociferous debate — that The Times began using the less polarizing title “Ms.”

This year, a team of reporters and editors at The Times decided to take a deeper look at honorifics with a project called the Mrs. Files, which will appear online on Friday and in print this Sunday, with the potential for additional installments. In examining history with a contemporary lens, we asked: What do honorifics mean for us as a society? And how do they help women shape their identity in the world?

Jennifer Schuessler, a Culture reporter, writes about what sharing a name meant for the partnership of the artists and designers Charles and Ray Eames, who were often referred to as Mr. and Mrs. Eames. Kathleen Massara, an editor on the Culture desk, explores how queer women interpret “Mrs.” when considering terms like “wife” and “marriage.” Another essay examines how even when we put less emphasis on “Mrs.,” pop culture still treats marriage like a prize. We also asked poets to write about these themes, and showed them examples from The Times’s card catalog for inspiration. And Anika Burgess, our photo editor, illustrated the package with stunning photographs from our archives.

We also set out to learn about the history of honorifics and spoke with several gender historians. Some thought of “Mrs.” as an erasure of a woman’s identity. “‘Mrs. Man’ is historically specific to the 19th and 20th centuries, and some people are still wedded to it in the 21st century believing it is ‘time-honored’ or ‘immemorial,’” Dr. Amy Erickson, a Cambridge University professor, wrote in an email. “For those women who adopt(ed) it, it seems to have represented some sort of status. For the rest of us, it’s incomprehensible.”

Betsy Wade, who was The Times’s first female copy editor when she was hired in 1956, helped lead a crusade — or in her words, a “whoo-ha” — in the 1970s to get the paper to change its style on honorifics.

“The sexism was ferocious in those days,” Ms. Wade said in an email. “I remember one dispatch from Vietnam where a female physician was styled ‘Mrs.,’ along with the nurses and I had really to take hold of myself to make the change.”

It would take more than a decade for her efforts to pay off. Protesters picketed outside The Times; there were heated debates among the paper’s (male) leaders; and at least one person suggested that the paper’s leadership consult with language experts.

Finally, in 1986, The Times said it was adopting a new policy, an announcement that was celebrated with flowers, applause and a visit from Gloria Steinem. A memo was disseminated to staff on June 19 and an editors’ note was published in the paper the next day. The Times would begin using “Ms.” for women whose marital status was unknown, or who preferred it. Some sections — like Sports and the Book Review — don’t use honorifics. The Times has started to use the gender-neutral honorific Mx.

As we assembled the Mrs. Files we thought about our own experiences with names and the powerful expression of self that a simple word can capture.

Examining the Meaning of "MRS"

On March 25, 1911, Frances Perkins was visiting with a friend who lived near Washington Square in New York City when they heard fire engines and people screaming. They rushed out to the street to see what the trouble was. A fire had broken out in a garment factory on the upper floors of a building on Washington Square, and the blaze ripped through the lint in the air. The only way out was down the elevator, which had been abandoned at the base of its shaft, or through an exit to the roof. But the factory owner had locked the roof exit that day because, he later testified, he was worried some of his workers might steal some of the blouses they were making.

“The people had just begun to jump when we got there,” Perkins later recalled. “They had been holding until that time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer. Finally the men were trying to get out this thing that the firemen carry with them, a net to catch people if they do jump, the[y] were trying to get that out and they couldn’t wait any longer. They began to jump. The… weight of the bodies was so great, at the speed at which they were traveling that they broke through the net. Every one of them was killed, everybody who jumped was killed. It was a horrifying spectacle.”

By the time the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was out, 147 young people were dead, either from their fall from the factory windows or from smoke inhalation.

Perkins had few illusions about industrial America: she had worked in a settlement house in an impoverished immigrant neighborhood in Chicago and was the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for workers. But even she was shocked by the scene she witnessed on March 25.

By the next day, New Yorkers were gathering to talk about what had happened on their watch. “I can't begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere,” Perkins said. “It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn't have been. We were sorry…. We didn't want it that way. We hadn’t intended to have 147 girls and boys killed in a factory. It was a terrible thing for the people of the City of New York and the State of New York to face.”

The Democratic majority leader in the New York legislature, Al Smith—who would a few years later go on to four terms as New York governor and become the Democratic presidential nominee in 1928—went to visit the families of the dead to express his sympathy and his grief. “It was a human, decent, natural thing to do,” Perkins said, “and it was a sight he never forgot. It burned it into his mind. He also got to the morgue, I remember, at just the time when the survivors were being allowed to sort out the dead and see who was theirs and who could be recognized. He went along with a number of others to the morgue to support and help, you know, the old father or the sorrowing sister, do her terrible picking out.”

“This was the kind of shock that we all had,” Perkins remembered.

The next Sunday, concerned New Yorkers met at the Metropolitan Opera House with the conviction that “something must be done. We've got to turn this into some kind of victory, some kind of constructive action….” One man contributed $25,000 to fund citizens’ action to “make sure that this kind of thing can never happen again.”

The gathering appointed a committee, which asked the legislature to create a bipartisan commission to figure out how to improve fire safety in factories. For four years, Frances Perkins was their chief investigator.

She later explained that although their mission was to stop factory fires, “we went on and kept expanding the function of the commission 'till it came to be the report on sanitary conditions and to provide for their removal and to report all kinds of unsafe conditions and then to report all kinds of human conditions that were unfavorable to the employees, including long hours, including low wages, including the labor of children, including the overwork of women, including homework put out by the factories to be taken home by the women. It included almost everything you could think of that had been in agitation for years. We were authorized to investigate and report and recommend action on all these subjects.”

And they did. Al Smith was the speaker of the house when they published their report, and soon would become governor. Much of what the commission recommended became law.

Perkins later mused that perhaps the new legislation to protect workers had in some way paid the debt society owed to the young people, dead at the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. “The extent to which this legislation in New York marked a change in American political attitudes and policies toward social responsibility can scarcely be overrated,” she said. “It was, I am convinced, a turning point.”

But she was not done. In 1919, over the fervent objections of men, Governor Smith appointed Perkins to the New York State Industrial Commission to help weed out the corruption that was weakening the new laws. She continued to be one of his closest advisers on labor issues. In 1929, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt replaced Smith as New York governor, he appointed Perkins to oversee the state’s labor department as the Depression worsened. When President Herbert Hoover claimed that unemployment was ending, Perkins made national news when she repeatedly called him out with figures proving the opposite and said his “misleading statements” were “cruel and irresponsible.” She began to work with leaders from other states to figure out how to protect workers and promote employment by working together.

In 1933, after the people had rejected Hoover’s plan to let the Depression burn itself out, President-elect Roosevelt asked Perkins to serve as Secretary of Labor in his administration. She accepted only on the condition that he back her goals: unemployment insurance; health insurance; old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week; a minimum wage; and abolition of child labor. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”

She promised to find out.

Once in office, Perkins was a driving force behind the administration’s massive investment in public works projects to get people back to work. She urged the government to spend $3.3 billion on schools, roads, housing, and post offices. Those projects employed more than a million people in 1934.

In 1935, FDR signed the Social Security Act, providing ordinary Americans with unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services.

In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and maximum hours. It banned child labor.

Frances Perkins, and all those who worked with her, transformed the horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire into the heart of our nation’s basic social safety net.

“There is always a large horizon…. There is much to be done,” Perkins said. “It is up to you to contribute some small part to a program of human betterment for all time.”

Happy Labor Day, everyone.

OUR OWN FRANCES PERKINS

The truth is I almost declined to be the inaugural poet. Why? I was terrified.

I was scared of failing my people, my poetry. But I was also terrified on a physical level. Covid was still raging, and my age group couldn’t get vaccinated yet. Just a few weeks before, domestic terrorists assaulted the U.S. Capitol, the very steps where I would recite. I didn’t know then that I’d become famous, but I did know at the inauguration I was going to become highly visible — which is a very dangerous thing to be in America, especially if you’re Black and outspoken and have no Secret Service.

It didn’t help that I was getting DMs from friends telling me not so jokingly to buy a bulletproof vest. My mom had us crouch in our living room so that she could practice shielding my body from bullets. A loved one warned me to “be ready to die” if I went to the Capitol, telling me, “It’s just not worth it.” I had insomnia and nightmares, barely ate or drank for days. I finally wrote to some close friends and family, telling them that I was most likely going to pull out of the ceremony.

I got some texts praising the Lord. I got called pathologically insane. But I knew only I could answer the question for myself: Was this poem worth it?

The night before I was to give the Inaugural Committee my final decision felt like the longest of my life. My neighborhood was eerily quiet in that early morning dark, though I strained my ears for noise to distract me from the choice that lay ahead. It felt like my little world stood still. And then it struck me: Maybe being brave enough doesn’t mean lessening my fear, but listening to it. I closed my eyes in bed and let myself utter all the leviathans that scared me, both monstrous and minuscule. What stood out most of all was the worry that I’d spend the rest of my life wondering what this poem could have achieved. There was only one way to find out.

By the time the sun rose, I knew one thing for sure: I was going to be the 2021 inaugural poet. I can’t say I was completely confident in my choice, but I was completely committed to it.

I’m a firm believer that often terror is trying to tell us of a force far greater than despair. In this way, I look at fear not as cowardice but as a call forward, a summons to fight for what we hold dear. And now more than ever, we have every right to be affected, afflicted, affronted. If you’re alive, you’re afraid. If you’re not afraid, then you’re not paying attention. The only thing we have to fear is having no fear itself — having no feeling on behalf of whom and what we’ve lost, whom and what we love.

On the morning of Inauguration Day, I went through the motions of getting ready on autopilot, mindless and mechanical, doing my hair and makeup even as I anxiously practiced my poem. On the way to the Capitol, I recited the mantra I say before any performance. "I am the daughter of Black writers. We’re descended from freedom fighters who broke their chains, and they changed the world. They call me."

Though I spent the next hour shivering in my seat from nerves and the unforgiving January cold, as I stepped up to the podium to recite, I felt warm, as if the words waiting in my mouth were aflame. It seemed that the world stood still. I looked out and spoke to it. I haven’t looked back.

On that Jan. 20, what I found waiting beyond my fear was all those who searched beyond their own fears to find space for hope in their lives, who welcomed the impact of a poem into protests, hospitals, classrooms, conversations, living rooms, offices, art and all manner of moments. I may have worked on the words, but it was other people who put those words to work. What we’ve seen isn’t just the power of a poem. It’s the power of the people.

Yet while the inauguration might have seemed like a ray of light, this past year for many has felt like a return to the same old gloom. Our nation is still haunted by disease, inequality and environmental crises. But though our fears may be the same, we are not. If nothing else, this must be known: Even as we’ve grieved, we’ve grown; even fatigued, we’ve found that this hill we climb is one we must mount together. We are battered but bolder, worn but wiser. I’m not telling you to not be tired or afraid. If anything, the very fact that we’re weary means we are, by definition, changed; we are brave enough to listen to, and learn from, our fear. This time will be different because this time we’ll be different. We already are.

And yes, I still am terrified every day. Yet fear can be love trying its best in the dark. So do not fear your fear. Own it. Free it. This isn’t a liberation that I or anyone can give you — it’s a power you must look for, learn, love, lead and locate for yourself.

Why? The truth is, hope isn’t a promise we give. It’s a promise we live. Tell it like this, and we, like our words, will not rest.

And the rest is history.

Amanda Gorman Performed at the Inauguration, and the Rest is History!

Late one night in 1995, in a cramped airplane cabin high over the Pacific, Madeleine Albright put down a draft of a speech I was set to deliver in Beijing at the upcoming United Nations conference on women, fixed me with the firm stare that had made fearsome dictators shudder, and asked what I was really trying to accomplish with this address.

“I want to push the envelope as far as I can,” I replied. “Then do it,” she said. She proceeded to tell me how I could sharpen the speech’s argument that women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights.

That was Madeleine, always cutting right to the heart of the matter with clarity and courage. She pushed the envelope her entire life. She did it on behalf of women and girls, shattering the glass ceiling of diplomacy as the first woman to serve as secretary of state and calling out atrocities against women all over the world. She did it for the country that took her in as a child fleeing tyranny in Europe, championing the United States as an indispensable nation and the leader of the free world. She never stopped pushing the envelope for freedom and democracy, including cajoling sometimes skeptical generals and diplomats to see human rights as a national security imperative.

For Bill and me and her many friends all over the world, Madeleine’s passing is a painful personal loss. She was irrepressible: wickedly funny, stylish and always game for adventure and fun. I’ll never forget how excited she was to walk me through the streets of her native Prague and show me the yellow house where she lived as a girl. We couldn’t stop laughing when an unexpected rainstorm blew our umbrellas inside out, and couldn’t stop smiling when the captivating playwright and dissident turned president Václav Havel charmed us over dinner. Madeleine was 10 years ahead of me at Wellesley, and for decades we used to address and sign our notes to each other “Dear ’59” and “Love, ’69.”

Madeleine’s death is also a great loss for our country and for the cause of democracy at a time when it is under serious and sustained threat around the world and here at home. Now more than ever, we could use Madeleine’s vital voice, her cleareyed view of a dangerous world and her unstinting faith in both the unique power of the American idea and the universal appeal of freedom and democracy. We can honor her memory by heeding her wisdom.

Stand up to bullies and dictators

In the 1990s, when my husband named Madeleine U.N. ambassador and then secretary of state, she went toe-to-toe with the blood-soaked Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. She helped marshal American power and the NATO alliance to end the brutal war in Bosnia and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. She saw the chronically underestimated Russian president Vladimir Putin for what he is: a vicious autocrat intent on reclaiming Russia’s lost empire and a committed foe of democracy everywhere. In a prescient column in The Times published Feb. 23, she warned that an invasion of Ukraine would be “a historic error” that would leave Russia “diplomatically isolated, economically crippled and strategically vulnerable in the face of a stronger, more united Western alliance.” As happened so often, the man with the guns was wrong and Madeleine was right.

Hillary Clinton: Madeleine Albright Warned Us, and She Was Right

Everything hurts,

Our hearts shadowed and strange,

Minds made muddied and mute.

We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.

And yet none of it is new;

We knew it as home,

As horror,

As heritage.

Even our children

Cannot be children,

Cannot be.

Everything hurts.

It’s a hard time to be alive,

And even harder to stay that way.

We’re burdened to live out these days,

While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.

This alarm is how we know

We must be altered —

That we must differ or die,

That we must triumph or try.

Thus while hate cannot be terminated,

It can be transformed

Into a love that lets us live.

May we not just grieve, but give:

May we not just ache, but act;

May our signed right to bear arms

Never blind our sight from shared harm;

May we choose our children over chaos.

May another innocent never be lost.

Maybe everything hurts,

Our hearts shadowed & strange.

But only when everything hurts

May everything change.

HYMN FOR THE HURTING by AMANDA GORMAN

There’s a brutal moment in youth when you go from looking up to your elders to looking somewhat down on them. Or at least seeing them with a more jaundiced eye. Maybe it happens at a party. You glance around the room and realize the gentleman you once saw as distinguished has cheerfully dipped a half-eaten chicken wing into a bowl of hummus. You see what one might politely refer to as a “not young” woman waving her arms around with a little too much gusto on the dance floor. And it hits you: They don’t realize that they’re old.

So how do you know when it’s happening to you?

There are a few signs. For me, it was contentedly listening to my favorite podcast, one in which three funny, charming and totally-with-it co-hosts — the kind of guys I’d want to hang out with, the kind of guys I’d label “cool” or “hip” or what do they call it now — banter around and feel like a part of the gang. Then I reckoned with the fact that they are all in their 50s. Their 50s.

It’s that shift from copying the outfits of your slightly younger colleagues to realizing that their fashion choices would not look at all OK on you. And then moving on to the final frontier: looking at the outfits of your much younger colleagues and really not wanting to dress like them at all. With a lurch, you recall those Harper’s Bazaar features about what to wear for each decade of your life and understand that you’ve entered the age in which wearing jewel tones is meant to be a good idea. Welcome to the long slide.

Then it starts hitting you repeatedly in the face. It’s all those little moments: waking up after a really good, long night’s sleep only to feel worse off than you did when you got into bed the night before. You don’t bounce out but instead heave yourself up to audible snaps and crackles. You learn that you can inflict a grave injury to your own body simply by reaching for the alarm clock in the wrong way. You know that when you wind up in physical therapy it will not be the result of a marathon or water-skiing but because of something that happened on a sidewalk.

It’s in understanding that after a lifetime of incremental improvements to your self-care regimen, you’ve finally figured out how to make your face and hair look the best they possibly can at precisely the moment it’s all for naught. Your resting bitch face that in an earlier decade may have given off a miffed Jeanne Moreau vibe has hardened into something that more closely resembles unbridled fury. “What’s wrong?” people ask you while you’re daydreaming or gazing softly into the middle distance.

No one is applying words like “moxie” or “edgy” or “gamine” to describe you anymore.

And then, wait a minute, you are shocked: People you know and like — friends, contemporaries — are using Botox? Yes, and they have been doing so for years. Where the hell have you been?

“But I think you look the same as you did in high school,” you want to say. Then you blink hard at the photos on Facebook through your progressive-lens glasses and realize: Wait a minute. Not at all. Your people are middle-aged.

Boomers, we know, didn’t appreciate getting long in the tooth. They’re the ones who started this whole fight against Old. But as a Gen Xer, I have to assume it’s worse for us. Our entire gestalt is built around an aura of disaffected youth. There is no natural progression for that energy into middle age. I don’t see us easing into words like “seasoned” or “mature.” Millennials will no doubt take their own kind of offense to aging when it’s their turn, but that is not our cross to bear.

For we are tired now, and some of this comes as a relief.

Nobody is waiting for you to join TikTok, and it is a blessing. You are not wanted there. You don’t have to keep up, keep up, keep-keep-keeping up. You can let some of it go. You don’t need to understand Harry Styles. You will never head off to a Super Junior concert. It’s fine to have no idea what Dua Lipa does.

You see small children in the wild and, rather than find them cute or amusing or in any way fun-seeming, you instead think, “I don’t have to do that anymore.” Many things are no longer your problem. And plenty of well-worn excuses enable you to shrug off your oldskie ways. If you’re a woman, you can blame it all on hormones, just like a teenager. If you’re a man, you can wave it off as a midlife crisis; you’ve got lots of novels that help explain.

You realize you are getting closer to something inconceivable only a short time ago: the grandma years. When you are a grandma, you won’t even need excuses. You can behave in ways entirely inexplicable to everyone younger than yourself and it will be seen as an eccentricity. You can sidle up to strange men in line for the movies and take some of their popcorn to give to your grandchild, the way my grandma did. You can pretend to have gone entirely batty whenever it suits you. You can pretend you don’t know that you’re shouting or that you can’t hear anything anyone else says.

And you know what? It starts to feel like something to look forward to.

Wait, Who Did You Say Middle-Aged?

by Pamela Paul

The modern women’s movement was so transformative that it’s easy to forget the old days in the 1960s and ‘70s, when the other side was good at portraying us as man-hating harpies and it was a challenge to make women feel comfortable being in the fight.

Then we discovered that in this country, a spoonful of humor could help make the message palatable. Enter writers like Nora Ephron, a fighter for the cause who was a genius at using wit to handle any woe.

“The Most of Nora Ephron” is a tome that includes so much of what she published, from current affairs journalism to food blogging to Broadway plays. She shows us who we are and how we got there and makes you wish she were still here to write about the future.

Nora came out of the old world; when she was a White House intern, she proudly took her then-fiancé on a tour, and when they came to the end of all the fabulous, historic rooms, he told her, “No wife of mine is going to work in a place like this.” But she figured out how to get around every barrier with humor as her weapon. Her second husband, Carl Bernstein, was the star of a famous Washington sex scandal; she turned her role as betrayed wife into the bestselling novel and movie “Heartburn.”

“The Most” shows Nora’s gift for making the enemies of free speech, reproductive rights and all-purpose social progress look silly. Which, truly, they hate more than anything.

For those of us who knew Nora, the essays are a great reminder of the way she combined a serious attempt to improve the world with dedication to creating the best possible cocktail party. Truly, we want them both. I remember joining her in trying to get deep into “The Golden Notebook,” Doris Lessing’s cerebral feminist novel, and feeling so rewarded when the discussion kinda turned into a celebrity gossip session.

In “The Most,” you’ll find observations on modern life from the personal and pragmatic (“There’s a reason why 40, 50 and 60 don’t look the way they used to, and it’s not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It’s because of hair dye”) to the very political. “I hope that you choose not to be a lady,” she told the 1996 graduates at her alma mater, Wellesley. “I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.”

“The Most of Nora Ephron” is certainly not all about politics, and you may find some opinions you disagree with — pretty impossible to have as many as she did and not come up with a conflict or two.

But it never dwindles. It ends in two lists: “What I Won’t Miss” and “What I Will Miss.” The things she knew she’d miss range from her kids and her husband Nick Pileggi to “Pride and Prejudice” and pie. The stuff she wouldn’t includes bills, email and — talk about a woman ahead of her time — Clarence Thomas.

Humor is a great coping mechanism, sure. And coping mechanisms are important; you have to survive the present before you can build the future. But “The Most” is a reminder that it’s also a political strategy. Pointing out how ridiculous the status quo is breaks its spell and gives us the freedom to dream up something better. Imagine what she’d say now about library book banning or the latest abortion battle or — oh, wow — the governor of Florida’s war on Disney.

America is Honestly Very Funny

by Gail Collins

On "The Most of Nora Ephron"

Vassar College, one of the first institutions of higher learning for women in the United States, prides itself on being a pioneer in women’s education and deeply committed to equality between the sexes.

And yet, Vassar, a liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, N. Y., where tuition this year is $67,000, has systematically paid its female full professors less than their male counterparts for the past two decades, according to a recent federal lawsuit.

The suit, filed last month by five former or current tenured faculty members, has roiled the left-leaning campus with allegations of unequal pay, delayed promotions for female professors and a discriminatory performance-evaluation system.

Hundreds of students rallied outside a faculty meeting last week to demand that female professors be paid the same as men. On a campus where the promise of gender equality is a draw for students seeking a college culture steeped in diversity and equity, many students interviewed said the issues raised by the suit had left them feeling betrayed.

Solaar KirkDacker, a senior who helped to organize the protest, said she was “enraged” by the allegations.

“They really capitalize off of this idea of promoting the advancement of women in higher education, and that was something that really attracted me,” she said. “I felt very cheated by Vassar.”

Adopting the college’s current fund-raising slogan, “Fearlessly Consequential,” several students said they had decided to be “fearlessly consequential” by standing up for the values Vassar says it upholds.

“It just feels like a culmination of my education here,” Charlie Kanner, a recent graduate and rally organizer, said. “Being able to use all of the skills that our professors have given us to support them feels really, really special.”

In a display of solidarity, dozens of professors wore white to the faculty meeting. As students cheered outside, some educators arriving for the meeting became visibly emotional. About 35 full and retired Vassar professors have signed a letter in support of the suit.

Officials at Vassar, which became coeducational in 1969, have issued several statements defending the college but have declined interview requests.

“Vassar College has been working diligently and continuously on the issue of pay equity with a group of professors since January 2019,” Anthony J. Friscia, the board of trustees’ chair, wrote in a statement posted on the school’s website after the suit was filed. “Vassar believes it pays its faculty fairly and equitably and has complied with the law, and it would like to resolve this issue.

Vassar’s president, Elizabeth Bradley, said in a letter to the editorpublished in the student newspaper, The Miscellany News, that she knew that the allegations might “leave many people in the community feeling confused, angry or hurt.”

However, she wrote, “the faculty members who brought this lawsuit have a different understanding of the relevant facts and law that is at issue in this disput

One of America’s First Women’s Colleges Is Accused of Paying Men More

Many years ago, I received this piece of advice: “Set your own agenda, or someone else will set it for you.” I’ve carried those words with me ever since.

That’s why, next week, I will leave the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, of which I was a co-founder almost 25 years ago, to open a new chapter in my philanthropy. To begin, I am announcing $1 billion in new spending over the next two years for people and organizations working on behalf of women and families around the world, including on reproductive rights in the United States.

In nearly 20 years as an advocate for women and girls, I have learned that there will always be people who say it’s not the right time to talk about gender equality. Not if you want to be relevant. Not if you want to be effective with world leaders (most of them men). The second the global agenda gets crowded, women and girls fall off.

It’s frustrating and shortsighted. Decades of research on economics, well-being and governance make it clear that investing in women and girls benefits everyone. We know that economies with women’s full participation have more room to grow. That women’s political participation is associated with decreased corruption. That peace agreements are more durable when women are involved in writing them. That reducing the time women spend in poor health could add as much as $1 trillion to the global economy by 2040.

And yet, around the world, women are seeing a tremendous upsurge in political violence and other threats to their safety, in conflict zones where rape is used as a tool of war, in Afghanistan where the Taliban takeover has erased 20 years of progress for women and girls, in many low-income countries where the number of acutely malnourished pregnant and breastfeeding women is soaring.

In the United States, maternal mortality rates continue to be unconscionable, with Black and Native American mothers at highest risk. Women in 14 states have lost the right to terminate a pregnancy under almost any circumstances. We remain the only advanced economy without any form of national paid family leave. And the number of teenage girls experiencing suicidal thoughts and persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness is at a decade high.

Despite the pressing need, only about 2 percent of charitable giving in the United States goes to organizations focused on women and girls, and only about half a percentage point goes to organizations focused on women of color specifically.

When we allow this cause to go so chronically underfunded, we all pay the cost. As shocking as it is to contemplate, my 1-year-old granddaughter may grow up with fewer rights than I had.

Over the past few weeks, as part of the $1 billion in new funding I’m committing to these efforts, I have begun directing new grants through my organization, Pivotal, to groups working in the United States to protect the rights of women and advance their power and influence. These include the National Women’s Law Center, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the Center for Reproductive Rights

While I have long focused on improving contraceptive access overseas, in the post-Dobbs era, I now feel compelled to support reproductive rights here at home. For too long, a lack of money has forced organizations fighting for women's rights into a defensive posture while the enemies of progress play offense. I want to help even the match.

I’m also experimenting with novel tactics to bring a wider range of perspectives into philanthropy. Recently, I offered 12 people whose work I admire their own $20 million grant-making fund to distribute as he or she sees fit. That group — which includes the former prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, the athlete and maternal-health advocate Allyson Felix, and an Afghan champion of girls’ education, Shabana Basij-Rasikh — represents a wide range of expertise and experience. I’m eager to see the landscape of funding opportunities through their eyes, and the results their approaches unlock.

In the fall, I will introduce a $250 million initiative focused on improving the mental and physical health of women and girls globally. By issuing an open call to grass-roots organizations beyond the reach of major funders, I hope to lift up groups with personal connections to the issues they work on. People on the front lines should get the attention and investment they deserve, including from me.

As a young woman, I could never have imagined that one day I would be part of an effort like this. Because I have been given this extraordinary opportunity, I am determined to do everything I can to seize it and to set an agenda that helps other women and girls set theirs, too.

Why I'm Investing in Women and Girls

by Melinda French Gates

Tee Minot, the owner of Christopher’s Books in San Francisco, wrote me a letter not long ago about the joys of owning a bookstore. In the end, she said that if she could recommend one book to me, it would be “This Is Happiness,” by Niall Williams. I checked the shelves of my own bookstore, Parnassus Books in Nashville, doubting we’d have a copy of a paperback from 2019, but there it was.

“This Is Happiness” chronicles the arrival of electricity in the small Irish village of Faha in 1958, an event that splits the lives of the citizens into the periods of before and after. “I think I understood too that I was living in the vestige of a world whose threads were all the time blowing away,” the young narrator says of when the man came to sell them fine appliances that could be purchased in advance of electricity’s arrival, “and some blew away right then ….”

I signed up for email in 1995. I remember the efficiency apartment I was living in at the time and the terrible desk from Office Depot I’d put together myself. The server was AOL, and when I wanted to check my account, I unplugged the jack from the back of my landline and plugged it into the modem, waiting for the dial up. For most of my friends, email came after cellphones, but I didn’t have a cellphone.

Cellphones were the worst idea in the world as far as I was concerned. My stepfather had made my mother carry a pager when I was growing up, and when it beeped she had to find a pay phone and see what he wanted. What he wanted was to know where she was, a bad habit that intensified after cellphones came around.

Cellphones were a means of making a person trackable. I wasn’t falling for that. The few flip phones I’ve had in my life died ignoble, uncharged deaths in the backs of dresser drawers. For a while I had a phone the size of a credit card that served as the GPS for my car, but whoever broke into my car took the phone, so that was that. I wish the person luck trying to figure it out.

Email was a different story. Email was mail, and I loved the mail. In my youth, I ran to the box to see if there might be an envelope whose contents would change the course of my life — an acceptance letter, a love letter, a check. What was email but the chance for more friends, more love, more work? I signed up as enthusiastically as the women of Faha signed up for electric stoves, with no idea that my life was about to crack into the hemispheres of before and after.

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It’s impossible to talk about the past without sounding like my grandmother Eva Mae Wilkinson, b. 1909, d. 2005. She told me she wasn’t allowed to serve a slice of Cheddar with apple pie when she was a waitress in Kansas because her boss told her it was against the law to serve a slice of Cheddar on apple pie. “When you are born in one century and find yourself walking around in another there’s a certain infirmity to your footing,” says Noe, Niall Williams’s narrator. “May we all be so lucky to live long enough to see our time turn to fable.”

Let me tell you the story of my own now-unimaginable past: I wrote my first novel at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., in the winter that finished off 1990 and began 1991. There was no internet, and none of us had cellphones or televisions. There were so many hours in every day and so few ways to spend them that after trying to figure out how to write a novel all day, I’d drive to Race Point beach to look at the stars.

“As though an infinite store had been discovered, more and more stars kept appearing,” Noe says about the nights in Faha. “The sky grew immense. Although you couldn’t see it, you could smell the sea.”

That’s the way it was in Provincetown, the way it was in Ireland, and I’m sure that’s the way it is now, except that if I were now in Provincetown or Ireland on a clear night, I’d probably be at my computer checking my email. I love email, and I hate email.

Let’s start with the love because the love is in the friendship, be it the three emails a year I exchange with my friend Liz, or the three emails a day I exchange with my friend Kate. The connection it provides here in Tennessee, where I live, far away from many of the people I feel closest to, stands in place of conversation: Good morning. Have you read? Did you know? What news of your mother, your travels, your childhood friend? Send pictures. I have a novel in my head. How’s your novel going? As the dialogue sails back and forth through the day, we create a ghost proximity.

But then my dog wants to go outside and I see my real neighbors with their real dogs, living beings, snuffling and wagging while we talk about the house down the street that’s being gutted and the owl we all heard the night before at dusk. I love my neighbors, and sometimes I wonder what friendship I’ve missed with them by communicating so extravagantly with so many people who are far away. I can have both, of course, I do have both, but the balance is skewed toward the people I tap out my feelings for rather than the ones in front of me.

Email is also great for work. I love what shows up unexpectedly, the requests to write things I would never have thought to write. Take this email for example: “We’re inviting a dozen writers to reflect on how a single regret has influenced their life.” I walked around for days puzzling over that one, Regret? Regret? What do I actually regret? Not sticking with French? Not playing the piano? Does childhood sloth really constitute regret? And then just as I was ready to decline the offer, it came to me: I regret email. If it wasn’t for email, I might never have put that together.

Because I do regret email. Even though I’ve turned off the pingthat once heralded every new message, I regret how susceptible I am to its constant interruptions. I regret all the times I look, only to find there’s nothing there. I regret the minutes it takes for my attention to fully return to other work at hand after stopping to check. I regret how I can spend an hour a day writing back to people I’ve never met, explaining why I can’t speak at their school or judge their contest or read their novel. I regret how every person who hits “reply all” to the holiday message sent to a hundred people shaves off a few seconds from all of our lives. Those seconds add up.

Aside from being a black hole where time goes, email is all about reading and writing, and reading and writing are the two things I do for a living. It’s impossible not to translate the time I’ve spent in the past nearly 30 years reading emails and writing them (and in some cases actually composing them, giving great thought to what it is I mean to say) into books that could have been written and read, all those words spilled over the keyboard that amounted to nothing.

Could I manage without it? People with smartphones look at me as if I’m the last of the carrier pigeons. “Faha knew it was not only behind the times,” Noe says of his tiny village before electricity, “but much further back than that, it was outside the times altogether, And what of it?”

I live so much of my life outside of these times. Cellphone aside, I have no accounts on social media (though my bookstore does). I don’t watch television (though my husband is watching a football game now). I own an independent bookstore, for heaven’s sake. I read in bed with a flashlight.

There are things I’ve done to ease my problem. I have two email accounts, one for any transaction that involves money and one for everything else. The account I use to order tennis shoes and make charitable contributions is a festival of spam I empty out like my refrigerator, on a quarterly basis. The other one I attend to with an overblown sense of obligation. The solution would be to close both accounts, but I’m not sure I could find my way out. It’s one thing to decline electricity, as Noe’s grandparents eventually choose to do; it’s another to shut the lights off after they’ve been burning so brightly for half your life. For better or worse, email has become one of the primary ways in which I communicate, and when I think of pulling the plug I think of Kate, writing first thing every day to say good morning. Pretty much just that: Good morning. I love you.

I’m a fairly disciplined person. Most novelists are. I’ve turned my email off for certain hours of the day. I’ve made deals with myself about how often I can check. But here’s the thing: They keep on coming regardless of whether or not I look. Taking a day off from email means sitting up for hours at night, digging myself out. I go to bed to find my husband and dog already asleep. I have missed them.

And even knowing this, that the warmth of husband and dog should in every case supersede the contracts to be DocuSigned, I can’t go to sleep with them sitting there. The very fact of how it all piles up weighs on me. I sit down to answer because, despite everything I know, I can never stop believing that answering email is a task that can be completed, instead of a river that will forever be raging forward, which brings me back to full-on regret.

“Seriously?” my sister asked when I told her I was going to write this essay. “You regret email?”

“I do,” I said.

“You’re going to look like an idiot if you write about that.”

I love my sister. We love each other. We talk this way. “Lots of people regret email,” I said.

“Lots of people regret affairs,” she said. “They regret significant acts of unkindness, things they didn’t do or say. They don’t regret email.” She shook her head, by which she means Who has a life so lovely that she would think to regret email? Her point is not lost on me.

“You can’t correct the mistakes of a lifetime,” Niall Williams writes in his novel. “You are your own past. These things happened, you did them, you have to accommodate them inside your skin and go forward. Even if you could — and you couldn’t, can’t — there was no going back.”

If I can’t correct my mistake, at least I found a novel in which to take comfort. “Beneath the pinholed heaven, the night was God-dimensioned and monumental before electric light.” I know what he means, and I miss that darkness, the feeling of a wide expanse of empty time in which to wander, and so for a moment I close my computer, close my eyes and do my best to remember the world that came before.

The Decision I Made 30 Years Ago That I Still Regret

by Ann Patchett