personal essays new york magazine

How I Got Published in New York Magazine

My process to publication: Last summer I enrolled in a Personal Essay writing course offered by the Gotham Writers Workshop. It was a one-day workshop led by the excellent and generous instructor, Janet Flora . After a few exercises and an increased comfort level with the other women in the class, Janet asked us to go round robin and tell each other what the essence of our personal essay would be. When I mentioned dating at 70, heads turned, smiles appeared and there were comments like, “I’d read that!” “I’d send that to my mother.”

I mention this because most of my writing endeavors have been spurred on by encouragement and interest from others. I love to write, feel I have something to say, and have a solid track record. But nothing is more motivating than hearing, “You should write about that!” (It’s the only use of the word SHOULD that I encourage listening to.)

In the movie trailer for The Wife (which I plan to see next week) starring Glenn Close, she counters her writer husband’s assertion that you don’t need approval to write. “Everyone needs approval,” she affirms. I agree.

After receiving that approval and encouragement, I spent a week writing and re-writing that essay. I then contacted my writing coach and contracted her to edit it and give me feedback. She told me it was in good shape, needed a few tweaks — is this about your relationship with your mother (what isn’t?!) or dating? — then gave me a list of her editorial contacts at a number of distinguished publications.

I crafted a query letter. You don’t send an unsolicited piece of writing to an editor. You pitch them with the reason this particular article is of interest now. That took another several days to compose and get approved. Then I began the process of submitting the query.

I thought I’d start at the top and wrote to an editor at the NYTimes OpEd page. She gave me the go-ahead to send the article and held it for a few days. I was in heaven. Then she rejected it…kindly. That was mid-October.

Next on my list was New York Magazine. I sent it to an editor there who said it didn’t fit her department, but she would forward it to a colleague for whom it would be better suited. That was mid-November. Editor #2 wrote she thought it would be a fit.

As they say, until the check clears the bank, there’s no deal. I emailed four more times, every 2-3 weeks very gently, inquiring as to the status of my piece. On December 19 I received this message: “Yes — I love it. I hope to publish this in the next couple of weeks. More very soon.”

A Possible Comment Tag Line Here

Congrats Jane! Patience, persistence and perfection! You remind us all to bring our “A” game!

@Lynne – The 3 P’s! Thanks, Lynne!

Congratulations, Jane. I am intrigued by your persistence, your self-esteem, and the fact that you are dating at 70. I am 71, a widow, and can’t even fathom the concept of dating, much less engaging in it.

Kudos to you!! Deb

@Deb Thank you for your comment, and I’m very sorry for your loss. I really enjoy being in a relationship, and my 6+ year one that ended this summer was actually wonderful until it wasn’t. The dating part isn’t so much fun, but I keep myself focused on the end goal and stay positive.

I just completed a Gotham Writer’s Intensive with Janet Flora. Janet told me about your article in New York Magazine and sent me the link to this article. I’d like to read the original. Would you share with me the date of that article so I can purchase a copy of the magazine.

I found this article informative and encouraging. Thank you for explaining your process.

@Paula No need to purchase a copy of the magazine. It’s online. I sent you the link via email. Thanks so much for writing. I hope you have success with your piece. Janet is great.

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New York Times Opinion Guest Essays

Learn more about New York Times Opinion guest essays, including how to submit a guest essay for review and publication.

New York Times Opinion guest essays deliver an argument in the author’s voice, based on fact and drawn from expertise or experience. Our goal is to offer readers a robust range of ideas on newsworthy events or issues of broad public concern from people outside The New York Times.

We welcome ideas for submissions in all media, including audio, illustration, data and visualization .

If you’d like to submit a video guest essay , please visit New York Times Opinion Video guest essay for more information on the submission process.

Select an option below to learn more:

What is a Guest Essay?

Opinion guest essays were known as Op-Eds because they appeared in print opposite the editorial page. At its core, an Opinion guest essay provides an argument defined and substantiated with evidence. Rich discussion and debate, combined in a unique way, offer New York Times readers a better understanding of the world. Inviting “intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion” has been core to the work of The Times since 1896, when our publisher Adolph Ochs declared it part of the newspaper’s mission.

We believe in the value of creating space for people who aren’t journalists and who often have no institutional affiliation with The New York Times to speak directly to readers instead of being mediated through a reporter. By design, these arguments and voices often contrast with or challenge those of our newsroom and our own Opinion columnists and editorials .

Guest essays should provide New York Times readers with the most robust, wide-ranging and distinctive collection of arguments and ideas available.

Guest essays can take many forms, such as:

A place for experts to share knowledge and offer illuminating counterarguments: Where experts can present findings, highlight problems and propose solutions to the public and to one another. We seek out essays from experts in which they make an original, robust argument based on their unusual or deep expertise. Economists, lawyers, doctors, teachers, psychologists, playwrights and many others may have expertise on a given topic that can advance an important argument.
First-person accounts: Where everyday people can share their experiences in their own words, often coupled with reporting or research, in a way that compels readers to see the world in a different light.
A platform for public officials: Where public officials can make their case, explain their position or tell their stories. Because these individuals already have significant platforms, their essays are held to especially high standards and offer readers newsworthy insight.

We discourage essays that are fundamentally responses to other Opinion articles, columns or editorials. The best forum for responses is the Letters page. To send a letter, email [email protected] .

What Makes a Guest Essay Great?

This is an ever-evolving question because what we look for depends on the news and the issues in public conversation at any given moment.

The best Opinion essays:

Challenge and engage audiences that do not necessarily agree with the writer’s point of view.
Give specific and original insight into complicated problems or thorny ideas.
Anticipate readers’ questions and even confusion around news that has an impact on their lives and the world. One important role of a guest essay is to clarify and explain the stakes of changes and world events.
Start conversations, influence policymakers and have an impact far beyond the pages of Times Opinion.
Delight readers with great writing and originality and open a window to a world they might not otherwise see.
Have a word count typically from 800 to 1,200 words, although we sometimes publish essays that are shorter or longer.

Our Standards

Originality: Essays must be original and exclusive to The New York Times — meaning they cannot have appeared elsewhere in any form in print or online.

Ethics and conflicts: Guest writers are expected to avoid any conflict of interest or the appearance of such conflict and comply with The Times’s policies on ethical journalism .

Fact-checking: Before we publish your article, it must be fact-checked. If an essay is accepted for publication, the guest writer will be asked to submit an annotated copy of the essay, listing the relevant sources for each factual assertion.

We focus our checking on verifiable facts (for example, the number of Americans without health insurance, the median household income, the date a law was enacted).
We also investigate broader factual assertions (for example, “No one named to the court in the postwar period was as conservative as Justice Scalia or as liberal as Justice Brennan,” “Laos is one of the world’s most corrupt nations”) that may need to be qualified, explained or stated with greater precision or nuance.
We look at the factual evidence cited to verify that the methodology is sound and that the data is presented with precision and balance.
We prefer primary sources (for example, an N.I.H. research paper) to secondary ones (a news article about the paper’s findings).
If we determine that a particular fact cannot be verified, we will not publish it.

We will work to verify the facts in your article, but as the writer, you bear the ultimate responsibility for the accuracy of your work. We cannot fix anything after publication without appending a correction, and corrections are permanently archived. Past errors are a factor when we consider whether to accept future work from a writer.

How Do I Submit an Opinion Guest Essay?

To submit your guest essay, please complete this form .

When submitting your essay:

Explain the professional or personal background that connects you to the argument or idea in your essay.
Include sources (in hyperlinks in the text or in parentheses) for key assertions made in your essay.

A member of our staff will read and review every submission, but because of the large number of messages we receive, we may not be able to respond to everyone individually. Unfortunately, we have to reject many excellent essays and ideas. If you do not hear from us within three business days, you should feel free to submit your work elsewhere.

How Do I Contact Other Teams?

To contact the Editorial Page editor, email [email protected] .
To report a factual error in a news article, email [email protected] . All letters asserting factual errors will be forwarded to the appropriate editors.
To contact Op-Docs, email [email protected] .

To send a letter to a specific Sunday section :

Can't find what you're looking for?

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?

Previous Post How I built up to full time freelance writing (and hit $100K in my first year)

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Personal essays are back — and authors are sick of writing them

Tajja isen and vivek shraya join elamin to explain why everyone’s enamoured with personal essays again.

Social Sharing

Last month, two personal essays published in New York Magazine's The Cut made their rounds on the internet. One essay was titled, " Should I Leave My Husband? The Lure of Divorce " and the other one, " How I Fell for an Amazon Scam Call and Handed Over $50,000 "

The former was written by Emily Gould, a novelist and a writer for New York Magazine. The latter was written by Charlotte Cowles, The Cut's financial-advice columnist. People online had a lot of thoughts about these two essays, and it harkened back to an era of the internet when personal essays went viral with a frequency writers strive for these days.

Last Tuesday, writer Tajja Isen published a piece in Vulture titled " Do I Really Need to Op-Ed to Sell Books ?" where she reveals that personal essays aren't just things pitched by freelance writers, it's often a requirement from book publishers during prepublication. Authors are encouraged to write an op-ed about a theme that appears in their forthcoming book, to attract new readers and to sell more books.

To talk more about the expectation for authors to write personal essays and why publishers, media sites and readers alike have become enamoured with them, Isen and fellow writer Vivek Shraya joins host Elamin Abdelmahmoud on Commotion.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, plus a review of the movie Lapaataa Ladies, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast on your favourite podcast player.

LISTEN | Today's episode on YouTube:

Elamin: Vivek, when the piece by Tajja went up, you replied in all caps saying "THANK YOU FOR SAYING THE THING." What was it about Tajja's piece that resonated with you so much?

Vivek: I've written a memoir. It's called I'm Afraid of Men . There's a lot to like. It's personal exploration. And then I'm asked, "Have you thought about writing an op-ed on masculinity?

I've written the book. I also got into the fiction world. A few years ago I published a book called The Subtweet , and it's about social media and whatnot. And it was like all about an op-ed on social media. And as an artist I'm constantly grappling with what is the best medium for a conversation. And if I thought that a personal essay was the best medium, that would have been the medium I would have chosen instead of a 300 page novel in a fictional world. And I think the other thing that's a bit frustrating, too, is that things get dangled. [Publications will say] "If you write this op-ed, maybe we'll give you the cover story." And so I say, "Okay, fine, I will write this thing that I don't really want to write." And then of course the cover doesn't happen. And you haven't been paid for this op-ed because we're all doing you a favour by printing this article to publicise your book. And it just doesn't feel great.

Elamin: At the core of this, though, is a dynamic that I'm really interested in, which is that it seems to me the reason why publishers ask so many writers to do this, is that readers are attracted to this, Tajja. The dynamic when a writer becomes the face of an issue or becomes the entry point into an issue, why do you think readers are so drawn to this particular dynamic?

Tajja: I think it's when it comes to a big and sometimes messy issue, it can be very compelling to have a charismatic voice cut through the noise and help you figure out how to think.

When it's the kind of viral personal essay that you're talking about, it's juicy, right? Everybody loves it. Who doesn't love a scam story? So I agree, there's an appeal from the reader's perspective, even if that appeal doesn't always translate into a book sale, which I think the expectation might be.

Elamin: I think the internet presents us with virality as the key mode for you to be present. Vivek, what do you make of the pressures of virality on an artist? Sometimes you write a really beautiful thing that is worthwhile being in the world and it doesn't go viral.

Vivek: I think about this all the time. I was around a bunch of influencers who were trying to convince me that the reason why my music career isn't where I wanted it to be is because I'm not on TikTok trying to go viral. I think there is this argument at all times that the thing that we should be aspiring for the most part is going viral. And I'm someone who's always advocating for artists, especially emerging artists to not pay attention to the numbers. Don't pay attention to the metrics and don't follow that stuff.

Because especially when you're on tour — and to talk about books specifically — you can't actually track things like book sales, but you actually can't track how often someone picks up a physical object and engages with it, and it has an impact. And when you're out in the real world off the internet, I can't tell you how often I meet people who I'm not able to track their response, But at the same time, I think if you're in it for the long game, you need to let go of all that.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts .

Panel produced by Stuart Berman

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eva Zhu is an Associate Producer for CBC. She currently works at CBC Arts and Syndication. She has bylines in CBC Books, Chatelaine, Healthy Debate, re:porter, Exclaim! Magazine and other publications. Follow Eva on X (formerly Twitter) @evawritesthings

The Lure of Divorce

Seven years into my marriage, i hit a breaking point — and had to decide whether life would be better without my husband in it..

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

In the summer of 2022, I lost my mind. At first, it seemed I was simply overwhelmed because life had become very difficult, and I needed to — had every right to — blow off some steam. Our family was losing its apartment and had to find another one, fast, in a rental market gone so wild that people were offering over the asking price on rent. My husband, Keith, was preparing to publish a book, Raising Raffi, about our son, a book he’d written with my support and permission but that, as publication loomed, I began to have mixed feelings about. To cope with the stress, I asked my psychiatrist to increase the dosage of the antidepressant I’d been on for years. Sometime around then, I started talking too fast and drinking a lot.

I felt invincibly alive, powerful, and self-assured, troubled only by impatience with how slowly everyone around me was moving and thinking. Drinking felt necessary because it slightly calmed my racing brain. Some days, I’d have drinks with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which I ate at restaurants so the drink order didn’t seem too unusual. Who doesn’t have an Aperol spritz on the way home from the gym in the morning? The restaurant meals cost money, as did the gym, as did all the other random things I bought, spending money we didn’t really have on ill-fitting lingerie from Instagram and workout clothes and lots of planters from Etsy. I grew distant and impatient with Keith as the book’s publication approached, even as I planned a giant party to celebrate its launch. At the party, everyone got COVID. I handed out cigarettes from a giant salad bowl — I had gone from smoking once or twice a day to chain-smoking whenever I could get away with it. When well-meaning friends tried to point out what was going on, I screamed at them and pointed out everything that was wrong in their lives. And most crucially, I became convinced that my marriage was over and had been over for years.

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I built a case against my husband in my mind. This book of his was simply the culmination of a pattern: He had always put his career before mine; while I had tended to our children during the pandemic, he had written a book about parenting. I tried to balance writing my own novel with drop-offs, pickups, sick days, and planning meals and shopping and cooking, most of which had always been my primary responsibility since I was a freelancer and Keith had a full-time job teaching journalism. We were incompatible in every way, except that we could talk to each other as we could to no one else, but that seemed beside the point. More relevant: I spent money like it was water, never budgeting, leaving Keith to make sure we made rent every month. Every few months, we’d have a fight about this and I’d vow to change; some system would be put in place, but it never stuck. We were headed for disaster, and finally it came.

Our last fight happened after a long day spent at a wedding upstate. I’d been drinking, first spiked lemonade at lunch alone and then boxed wine during the wedding reception, where I couldn’t eat any of the food — it all contained wheat, and I have celiac disease. When we got back, late, to the house where we were staying, I ordered takeout and demanded he go pick it up for me. Calling from the restaurant, he was incensed. Did I know how much my takeout order had cost? I hadn’t paid attention as I checked boxes in the app, nor had I realized that our bank account was perilously low — I never looked at receipts or opened statements. Not knowing this, I felt like he was actually denying me food, basic sustenance. It was the last straw. I packed a bag as the kids played happily with their cousins downstairs, then waited by the side of the road for a friend who lived nearby to come pick me up, even as Keith stood there begging me to stay. But his words washed over me; I was made of stone. I said it was over — really over. This was it, the definitive moment I’d been waiting for. I had a concrete reason to leave.

A few days later, still upstate at my friend’s house, I had a Zoom call with my therapist and my psychiatrist, who both urged me in no uncertain terms to check myself into a psychiatric hospital. Even I couldn’t ignore a message that clear. My friend drove me to the city, stopping for burgers along the way — I should have relished the burger more, as it was some of the last noninstitutional food I would eat for a long time — and helped me check into NYU Langone. My bags were searched, and anything that could be used as a weapon was removed, including my mascara. I spent my first night there in a gown in a cold holding room with no phone, nothing but my thoughts. Eventually, a bed upstairs became free and I was brought to the psych ward, where I was introduced to a roommate, had blood drawn, and was given the first of many pills that would help me stop feeling so irrepressibly energetic and angry. They started me on lithium right away. In a meeting with a team of psychiatrists, they broke the news: I had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder; they weren’t sure which kind yet. They gave me a nicotine patch every few hours plus Klonopin and Seroquel and lithium.

I wasn’t being held involuntarily, which meant I could write letters on an official form explaining why I ought to be released, which the psychiatrists then had three days to consider. I attached extra notebook pages to the letters explaining that I was divorcing my husband and was terrified I would never be able to see my kids again if I was declared unfit because I was insane. These letters did not result in my release; if anything, they prolonged my stay. I got my phone back — it would soon be revoked again, wisely — but in that brief interim, I sent out a newsletter to my hundreds of subscribers declaring that I was getting a divorce and asking them to Venmo me money for the custody battle I foresaw. In this newsletter, I also referenced Shakespeare. The drugs clearly had not kicked in yet. I cycled through three different roommates, all of whom were lovely, though I preferred the depressed one to the borderline ones. We amused ourselves during the day by going to art therapy, music therapy, and meetings with our psychiatrists. I made a lot of beaded bracelets.

In the meetings with the shrinks, I steadfastly maintained that I was sane and that my main problem was the ending of my marriage. I put Keith, and my mother, on a list of people who weren’t allowed to visit me. Undaunted, Keith brought me gluten-free egg sandwiches in the morning, which I grudgingly ate — anything for a break from the hospital food. My parents came up from D.C. and helped Keith take care of our children. I was in the hospital for a little more than three weeks, almost the entire month of October, longer than I’d ever been away from my kids before in their lives. I celebrated my 41st birthday in the hospital and received a lot of very creative cards that my fellow crazies had decorated during art therapy. Eventually, the drugs began to work: I could tell they were working because instead of feeling energetic, I suddenly couldn’t stop crying. The tears came involuntarily, like vomit. I cried continuously for hours and had to be given gabapentin in order to sleep.

On the day I was released, I didn’t let anyone pick me up. I expected the superhuman strength I’d felt for months to carry me, but it was gone, lithiumed away. Instead, I felt almost paralyzed as I carried my bags to a cab. When I arrived at my apartment, I couldn’t figure out where I should sleep. It didn’t feel like my home anymore. We couldn’t afford to live separately, even temporarily, but the one thing that our somewhat decrepit, inconveniently located new apartment had in its favor was two small attic bedrooms and one larger bedroom downstairs. I claimed this downstairs room for myself and began to live there alone, coming into contact with Keith only when we had to be together with our children.

You might assume that my fixation on divorce would have subsided now that my mental health had stabilized and I was on strong antipsychotic medication. But I still did not want to stay in my marriage. If anything, I felt a newfound clarity: Keith and I had fundamentally incompatible selves. Our marriage had been built on a flaw. My husband was older, more established and successful in his career. These were the facts, so it had to be my job to do more of the work at home. Unless, of course, I decided to take myself and my work as seriously as he took his. But that was unappealing; I had managed to publish three books before turning 40, but I didn’t want to work all the time, like he does.

I wondered if my marriage would always feel like a competition and if the only way to call the competition a draw would be to end it.

We picked the kids up from school and dropped them off, or really mostly Keith did. I appeared at meals and tried to act normal. I was at a loss for what to do much of the time. I attended AA meetings and the DBT meetings required by the hospital outpatient program, and I read. I read books about insanity: Darkness Visible, The Bell Jar, An Unquiet Mind, Postcards From the Edge. I tried to understand what was happening to me, but nothing seemed to resonate until I began to read books about divorce. I felt I was preparing myself for what was coming. The first book I read was Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, which has become the go-to literary divorce bible since its 2012 publication. In it, Cusk describes the way her life shattered and recomposed after the dissolution of her marriage, when her daughters were still very young. She makes the case for the untenability of her relationship by explaining that men and women are fundamentally unequal. She posits that men and women who marry and have children are perpetually fighting separate battles, lost to each other: “The baby can seem like something her husband has given her as a substitute for himself, a kind of transitional object, like a doll, for her to hold so that he can return to the world. And he does, he leaves her, returning to work, setting sail for Troy. He is free, for in the baby the romance of man and woman has been concluded: each can now do without the other.”

At our relationship’s lowest moments, this metaphor had barely been a metaphor. I remembered, the previous winter, Keith going off on a reporting trip to Ukraine at the very beginning of the war, leaving me and the kids with very little assurance of his safety. I had felt okay for the first couple of days until I heard on the news of bombing very close to where he was staying. After that, I went and bummed a cigarette from a neighbor, leaving the kids sleeping in their beds in order to do so. It was my first cigarette in 15 years. Though that had been the winter before my mania began, I believe the first seeds of it were sown then: leaving the children, smoking the cigarette, resenting Keith for putting himself in harm’s way and going out into the greater world while I tended to lunches, homework, and laundry as though everything were normal.

In Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, as in Aftermath, I found an airtight case for divorce. The husband was the villain and the wife the wronged party, and the inevitable result was splitting up. I felt an echo of this later on when I read Lyz Lenz’s polemic This American Ex-Wife, out this month, marketed as “a deeply validating manifesto on the gender politics of marriage (bad) and divorce (actually pretty good!).” The book begins by detailing how Lenz’s husband rarely did household chores and hid belongings of hers that he didn’t like — e.g., a mug that said WRITE LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER — in a box in the basement. “I didn’t want to waste my one wild and precious life telling a grown man where to find the ketchup,” Lenz writes. “What was compelling about my marriage wasn’t its evils or its villains, but its commonplace horror.”

This was not quite the way I felt. Even though I could not stand to see my husband’s face or hear his voice, even though I still felt the same simmering resentment I had since I entered the hospital, I also found myself feeling pangs of sympathy for him. After all, he was going through this too. When we were inevitably together, at mealtimes that were silent unless the children spoke, I could see how wounded he was, how he was barely keeping it together. His clothes hung off his gaunt frame. And at night, when we passed in the kitchen making cups of tea that we would take to our respective rooms, he sometimes asked me for a hug, just a hug. One time I gave in and felt his ribs through his T-shirt. He must have lost at least 15 pounds.

It began to seem like I only ever talked to friends who had been through divorces or were contemplating them. One friend who didn’t know whether to split up with her husband thought opening their marriage might be the answer. Another friend described the ease of sharing custody of his young daughter, then admitted that he and his ex-wife still had sex most weekends. In my chronically undecided state, I admired both of these friends who had found, or might have found, a way to split the difference. Maybe it was possible to break up and remain friends with an ex, something that had never happened to me before in my entire life. Maybe it was possible to be married and not married at the same time. Then I went a little further in my imagination, and the idea of someone else having sex with my husband made me want to gag with jealousy. Maybe that meant something. I was so confused, and the confusion seemed to have no end.

I read more books about divorce. I received an early copy of Sarah Manguso’s Liars, marketed as “a searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars out of us all.” In it, John, a creative dilettante, and Jane, a writer, meet and soon decide to marry. Liars describes their marriage from beginning to end, a span of almost 15 years, and is narrated by Jane. The beginning of their relationship is delirious: “I tried to explain that first ferocious hunger and couldn’t. It came from somewhere beyond reason.” But the opening of that book also contains a warning. “Then I married a man, as women do. My life became archetypal, a drag show of nuclear familyhood. I got enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.” I felt perversely reassured that I was merely adding another story to the 10 billion. It made it seem less like it was my fault.

The beginning of my relationship with my husband wasn’t that dramatic or definitive. I thought I was getting into something casual with someone I didn’t even know if I particularly liked, much less loved, but was still oddly fascinated by. I wanted to see the way he lived, to see if I could emulate it and become more like him. He lived with roommates in his 30s — well, that was the price you paid if you wanted to do nothing but write. I wanted what he had, his seriousness about his work. We went on dates where we both sat with our laptops in a café, writing, and this was somehow the most romantic thing I’d ever experienced. On our third date, we went to his father’s home on Cape Cod to dog-sit for a weekend, and it was awkward in the car until we realized we were both thinking about the same Mary Gaitskill story, “A Romantic Weekend,” in which a couple with dramatically mismatched needs learn the truth about each other through painful trial and error. Our weekend was awkward, too, but not nearly as awkward as the one in the story. On the way home, I remember admiring Keith’s driving, effortless yet masterful. I trusted him in the car completely. A whisper of a thought: He would make a good father.

In Liars, cracks begin to form almost immediately, even before John and Jane get engaged; she is accepted to a prestigious fellowship and he isn’t, and he is forthright about his fear that she will become more successful than he is: “A moment later he said he didn’t want to be the unsuccessful partner of the successful person. Then he apologized and said that he’d just wanted to be honest. I said, It was brave and considerate to tell me. ”

Through the next few years, so gradually that it’s almost imperceptible, John makes it impossible for Jane to succeed. He launches tech companies that require cross-country moves, forcing Jane to bounce between adjunct-teaching gigs. And then, of course, they have a baby. The problem with the baby is that Jane wants everything to be perfect for him and throws herself into creating a tidy home and an ideal child-development scenario, whereas John works more and more, moving the family again as one start-up fails and another flourishes. Jane begins to wonder whether she has created a prison for herself but pacifies herself with the thought that her situation is normal: “No married woman I knew was better off, so I determined to carry on. After all, I was a control freak, a neat freak, a crazy person.” The story John tells her about herself becomes her own story for a while. For a while, it’s impossible to know whose story is the truth.

I thought about Keith’s side of the story when I read Liars. Maybe it was the lack of alcohol’s blur that enabled me to see this clearly for the first time — I began to see how burdened he had been, had always been, with a partner who refused to plan for the future and who took on, without being asked, household chores that could just as easily have been distributed evenly. Our situation had never been as clear-cut as it was for Lyz Lenz; Keith had never refused to take out the trash or hidden my favorite mug. But he worked more and later hours, and my intermittent book advances and freelance income could not be counted on to pay our rent. As soon as we’d had a child, he had been shunted into the role of breadwinner without choosing it or claiming it. At first, I did all the cooking because I liked cooking and then, when I stopped liking cooking, I did it anyway out of habit. For our marriage to change, we would have needed to consciously decide to change it, insofar as our essential natures and our financial situation would allow. But when were we supposed to have found the time to do that? It was maddening that the root of our fracture was so commonplace and clichéd — and that even though the problem was ordinary, I still couldn’t think my way out of it.

Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, by Leslie Jamison , is in some ways the successor to Aftermath — the latest divorce book by a literary superstar. It is mostly an account of Jamison’s passionate marriage to a fellow writer, C., and the way that marriage fell apart after her career accelerated and they had a child together. It then details her first months of life as a single mother and her forays into dating. In it, she is strenuously fair to C., taking much of the blame for the dissolution of their marriage. But she can’t avoid describing his anger that her book merits an extensive tour, while his novel — based on his relationship with his first wife, who had died of leukemia — fails commercially. “It didn’t get the reception he had hoped for,” Jamison writes, and now, “I could feel him struggling. He wanted to support me, but there was a thorn in every interview.” C. grows distant, refusing to publicly perform the charming self that Jamison fell in love with. “I wished there was a way to say, Your work matters, that didn’t involve muting my own,” Jamison writes.

For all my marriage’s faults, we never fought in public. Friends encouraged us to reconcile, saying, “You always seemed so good together.” (As if there were another way to seem! Standing next to each other at a party, it had always been easy to relax because we couldn’t fight.) And we never did anything but praise each other’s work. Until this last book of my husband’s, that is. I had read Raising Raffi for the first time six months before it was published, while I was out of town for the weekend. I had, at that time, enjoyed reading it — it was refreshing, in a way, to see someone else’s perspective on a part of my own life. I even felt a certain relief that my child’s early years, in all their specificity and cuteness, had been recorded. This work had been accomplished, and I hadn’t had to do it! There had been only a slight pang in the background of that feeling that I hadn’t been the one to do it. But as publication drew nearer, the pang turned into outright anger . The opening chapter described my giving birth to our first son, and I didn’t realize how violated I felt by that until it was vetted by The New Yorker ’s fact-checker after that section was selected as an excerpt for its website. Had a geyser of blood shot out of my vagina? I didn’t actually know. I had been busy at the time. I hung up on the fact-checker who called me, asking her to please call my husband instead. (In case you’re wondering, Keith has read this essay and suggested minimal changes.)

I related to the writers in Splinters trying to love each other despite the underlying thrum of competing ambitions. But most of all, Jamison’s book made me even more terrified about sharing custody. “There was only one time I got on my knees and begged. It happened in our living room, where I knelt beside the wooden coffee table and pleaded not to be away from her for two nights each week,” she writes. Envisioning a future in which we shared custody of our children made me cringe with horror. It seemed like absolute hell. At the time we separated, our younger son was only 4 years old and required stories and cuddles to get to bed. Missing a night of those stories seemed like a punishment neither of us deserved, and yet we would have to sacrifice time with our kids if we were going to escape each other, which seemed like the only possible solution to our problem. Thanksgiving rolled around, and I cooked a festive meal that we ate without looking at each other. Whenever I looked at Keith, I started to cry.

We decided to enter divorce mediation at the beginning of December. On Sixth Avenue, heading to the therapist’s office, we passed the hospital where I’d once been rushed for an emergency fetal EKG when I was pregnant with our first son. His heart had turned out to be fine. But as we passed that spot, I sensed correctly that we were both thinking of that moment, of a time when we had felt so connected in our panic and desperate hope, and now the invisible cord that had bound us had been, if not severed, shredded and torn. For a moment on the sidewalk there, we allowed ourselves to hold hands, remembering.

The therapist was a small older woman with short curly reddish hair. She seemed wise, like she’d seen it all and seen worse. I was the one who talked the most in that session, blaming Keith for making me go crazy, even though I knew this wasn’t technically true or possible: I had gone crazy from a combination of sky-high stress and a too-high SSRI prescription and a latent crazy that had been in me, part of me, since long before Keith married me, since I was born. Still, I blamed his job, his book, his ambition and workaholism, which always surpassed my own efforts. I cried throughout the session; I think we both did. I confessed that I was not the primary wronged person in these negotiations, and to be fair I have to talk about why. Sometime post–Last Fight and pre-hospitalization, I had managed to cheat on my husband. I had been so sure we were basically already divorced that I justified the act to myself; I couldn’t have done it any other way. I had thought I might panic at the last minute or even throw up or faint, but I had gone through with it thanks to the delusional state I was in. There aren’t many more details anyone needs to know. It was just one time, and it was like a drug I used to keep myself from feeling sad about what was really happening. Anyway, there’s a yoga retreat center I’ll never be able to go to again in my life.

At the end of the session, we decided to continue with the therapist but in couples therapy instead of divorce mediation. It was a service she also provided, and as a bonus, it was $100 cheaper per session. She didn’t say why she made this recommendation, but maybe it was our palpable shared grief that convinced her that our marriage was salvageable. Or maybe it was that, despite everything I had told her in that session, she could see that, even in my profound sadness and anger, I looked toward Keith to complete my sentences when I was searching for the right word and that he did the same thing with me. As broken as we were, we were still pieces of one once-whole thing.

My husband would have to forgive me for cheating and wasting our money. I would have to forgive him for treading on my literary territory: our family’s life, my own life. My husband would have to forgive me for having a mental breakdown, leaving him to take care of our family on his own for a month, costing us thousands of uninsured dollars in hospital bills. I would have to forgive him for taking for granted, for years, that I would be available on a sick day or to do an early pickup or to watch the baby while he wrote about our elder son. I would have to forgive him for taking for granted that there would always be dinner on the table without his having to think about how it got there. He would have to forgive me for never taking out the recycling and never learning how to drive so that I could move the car during alternate-side parking. I would have to forgive him for usurping the time and energy and brain space with which I might have written a better book than his. Could the therapist help us overcome what I knew to be true: that we’d gone into marriage already aware that we were destined for constant conflict just because of who we are? The therapist couldn’t help me ask him to do more if I didn’t feel like I deserved it, if I couldn’t bring myself to ask him myself. I had to learn how to ask.

No one asked anything or forgave anything that day in the couples therapist’s office. After what felt like months but was probably only a few days, I was watching Ramy on my laptop in my downstairs-bedroom cave after the kids’ bedtime when some moment struck me as something Keith would love. Acting purely on impulse, I left my room and found him sitting on the couch, drinking tea. I told him I’d been watching this show I thought was funny and that he would really like it. Soon, we were sitting side by side on the couch, watching Ramy together. We went back to our respective rooms afterward, but still, we’d made progress.

After a few more weeks and a season’s worth of shared episodes of Ramy, I ventured for the first time upstairs to Keith’s attic room. It smelled alien to me, and I recognized that this was the pure smell of Keith, not the shared smell of the bedrooms in every apartment we’d lived in together. I lay down next to him in the mess of his bed. He made room for me. We didn’t touch, not yet. But we slept, that night, together. The next night, we went back to sleeping alone.

Pickups and drop-offs became evenly divided among me and Keith and a sitter. Keith learned to make spaghetti with meat sauce. He could even improvise other dishes, with somewhat less success, but he was improving. I made a conscious effort not to tidy the house after the children left for school. I made myself focus on my work even when there was chaos around me. Slowly, I began to be able to make eye contact with Keith again. At couples therapy, we still clutched tissue boxes in our hands, but we used them less. Our separate chairs inched closer together in the room.

That Christmas, we rented a tiny Airbnb near his dad’s house in Falmouth. It had only two bedrooms, one with bunk beds for the kids and one with a king-size bed that took up almost the entirety of the small room. We would have to share a bed for the duration of the trip. The decision I made to reach across the giant bed toward Keith on one of the last nights of the trip felt, again, impulsive. But there were years of information and habit guiding my impulse. Sex felt, paradoxically, completely comfortable and completely new, like losing my virginity. It felt like sleeping with a different person and also like sleeping with the same person, which made sense, in a way. We had become different people while somehow staying the same people we’d always been.

Slowly, over the course of the next months, I moved most of my things upstairs to his room, now our room. We still see the therapist twice a month. We talk about how to make things more equal in our marriage, how not to revert to old patterns. I have, for instance, mostly given up on making dinner, doing it only when it makes more sense in the schedule of our shared day or when I actually want to cook. It turns out that pretty much anyone can throw some spaghetti sauce on some pasta; it also turns out that the kids won’t eat dinner no matter who cooks it, and now we get to experience that frustration equally. Keith’s work is still more stable and prestigious than mine, but we conspire to pretend that this isn’t the case, making sure to leave space for my potential and my leisure. We check in to make sure we’re not bowing to the overwhelming pressure to cede our whole lives to the physical and financial demands, not to mention the fervently expressed wants, of our children. It’s the work that we’d never found time to do before, and it is work. The difference is that we now understand what can happen when we don’t do it. I’m always surprised by how much I initially don’t want to go to therapy and then by how much lighter I feel afterward. For now, those sessions are a convenient container for our marriage’s intractable defects so that we get to spend the rest of our time together focusing on what’s not wrong with us.

The downstairs bedroom is now dormant, a place for occasional guests to stay or for our elder son to lie in bed as he plays video games. Some of my clothes from a year earlier still fill the drawers, but none of it seems like mine. I never go into that room if I can help it. It was the room of my exile from my marriage, from my family. If I could magically disappear it from our apartment, I would do it in a heartbeat. And in the attic bedroom, we are together, not as we were before but as we are now.

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30 publications that pay writers for personal essays.

Compiled By H. Lovelyn Bettison

The following is a list of 30 magazines, newspapers, and websites that pay for personal essays. Included is a wide variety of publishers, covering many specialties and topics. For even more publishers seeking submissions, grab a copy of the Paid Publishing Guidebook.

The Boston Globe

The Boston Globe accepts personal essays about relationships for their Connections section. The essays should be about 650 words. Please send an email with “Query” as the subject line to [email protected] to pitch your essay.

Extra Crispy

Extra Crispy pays for personal essays about food. The articles they publish have a conversational tone with a bit of humor. http://www.extracrispy.com/culture/185/how-to-pitch-extra-crispy

Dame is a women’s magazine. They don’t have a submissions page, but do provide an email address for pitches: [email protected] http://www.damemagazine.com/

Kveller is a parenting magazine that accepts personal essays about parenting and women’s issues as seen through a Jewish lens. http://www.kveller.com/article/submission-guidelines/ They pay $25 per post.

The New York Times: Modern Love

The New York Times Modern Love is looking for essays about love and relationships in modern times payment $300. The desired length for essays is 1500 to 1700. The submission page is old, but still up to date. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/fashion/howtosubmit_modernlove.html?_r=1&

The New York Times: Lives

New York Times Lives accepts essays about meaningful life experiences. http://www.nytimes.com/column/lives Read the section to get an idea of what they want and send pitches to [email protected]

Salon publishes personal essays. Send your pitches in the body of the email not as an attachment. They also would like to know about your background and what makes you qualified to write the piece you’re proposing. http://www.salon.com/about/submissions/

Slate is an online magazine about news, politics, and culture. Please indicate which section you’re pitching to in the subject line of your email. http://www.slate.com/articles/briefing/contact_us/2006/08/whereto_find_slate_staff.html

Slice is a print magazine based in Brooklyn. They accept short fiction and personal essays. Submissions will open again on April 1. They pay $250

https://slicemagazine.org/submit/

The Smart Set

The Smart Set is an online magazine about arts and culture, science, and global and national affairs. http://thesmartset.com/about-us/#submissions

The Billfold

The Billfold is a publication about money. They accept personal essays about your experiences with money, saving, and debt. https://thebillfold.com/about

MotherwellMotherwell is a parenting magazine that looks for personal essays that take a novel angle on parenting. Essays should be up to 1200 words. https://motherwellmag.com/submissions/

Tin House is a literary journal that publishes personal essays up to 10,000 words. They have themed issues and only accept unsolicited submissions in September and March. http://www.tinhouse.com/magazine/submission-guidelines.html

Narratively

Narratively is devoted to untold human stories. They accept pitches and completed essays. http://narrative.ly/contribute/

Guideposts is looking for your true stories of inspiration and hope. Submit completed essays via the submission form on their website. https://www.guideposts.org/tell-us-your-story

The Christian Science Monitor: Home Forum

Home Forum publishes upbeat personal essays that are 600 to 800 words in length. The payment is $75. http://www.csmonitor.com/About/Contributor- guidelines/Contributor-Guidelines-The-Home-Forum

The Establishment

The Establishment is a multimedia publication that encourages diversity. They accept essays 800 to 1,500 words long and pay $125. https://theestablishment.co/pitch-us-b0788d803a0b#.34no26v7l

The Sun is a literary journal that is mainly interested in personal stories. They pay $300-$2000 for personal essays up to 7,000 words. http://thesunmagazine.org/about/submission_guidelines/writing

Skirt is a women’s magazine that publishes essays that are about 800 to 1100 words long. Each issue of the magazine has a theme. Look at their editorial calender for subjects. They pays $200 per essay. http://www.skirt.com/contribute/

Travels’ Tales

Travels’ Tales publishes your travel essays in their anthologies. They pay $100 per essay. http://travelerstales.com/submission-guidelines/

Brain, Child

Brain, Child is an award-winning literary magazine for mothers. They pay for personal essays on parenting. https://www.brainchildmag.com/about/writers-guidelines/

Chicken Soup for the Soul

Chicken Soup for the Soul releases themed books throughout the year. They accept uplifting essays that are less than 1200 words. The pay is $200. http://www.chickensoup.com/story-submissions/possible-book-topics

Backpacker has a Destinations section where they publish first person accounts of outdoor experiences. The pay is $0.40-$1 per word http://www.backpacker.com/backpacker-contributor-s-guidelines/

Paste Magazine

Paste Magazine focuses on music, movies, TV, videogames, comedy, books and more. They do accept personal essays. Read past essays to get an idea about what they are looking for. Pay varies. https://www.pastemagazine.com/paste/2012/03/writer-guidelines.html

True Story is published by Creative Nonfiction. They accept personal essay between 5000-10000 words and pay $300. https://www.creativenonfiction.org/submissions/true-story

Good Old Days

Good Old Days accepts personal essays about growing up between 1935 and 1960. They should be informal and conversational in tone. Payment varies. http://www.goodolddaysmagazine.com/contributor_guidelines.php

AARP Magazine

AARP Magazine publishes thoughtful, timely personal essays that are relevant to people over 50. Payment varies. http://www.aarp.org/about-aarp/info-05-2010/writers-guidelines-aarp-magazine.html

Broadly is a website devoted to representing a wide variety of women’s experiences. They publish personal essays. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/page/about

The Three Penny Review

The Three Penny Review is a literary magazine that publishes both fiction and creative nonfiction. They pay $400 per story or article. http://www.threepennyreview.com/submissions.html

Vox First Person

Vox First Person is dedicated to publishing thoughtful, in-depth first person narratives. They pay, but don’t list the rates on their site. http://www.vox.com/2015/6/12/8767221/vox-first-person-explained

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Six Great New York Stories to Read Over the Long Weekend

Today in our One Great Story newsletter , we’re looking back at some of the stories our readers loved most this year that we think would make excellent pool/beach/lakeside reading over the holiday weekend. From wild tales of high-stakes scams and Beverly Hills squatters to personal reflections on divorce and chronic illness, here are six great stories you might have missed (or might want to revisit). And for a new editor-selected feature in your inbox every weeknight, sign up for the newsletter here .

. The Squatters of Beverly Hills

After a fugitive doctor abandoned his mansion, an enterprising group of party throwers slid in the front door. Read the story …

. The Women Who Walked Away

What drove a Colorado mother to flee into the Rocky Mountains with her teenage son and her sister? Read the story …

. The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger

I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam. Read the story …

. The Lure of Divorce

Seven years into my marriage, I hit a breaking point — and had to decide whether life would be better without my husband in it. Read the story …

. The Moral Panic Over Ozempic Misses the Point

The media has made the drugs about body politics and our obsession with thinness. That’s the wrong story. Read the story …

. My Unraveling

I had my health. I had a job. And then, abruptly, I didn’t. Read the story …

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Current Issue

The President Can Now Assassinate You, Officially

Under this new standard, a president can go on a four-to-eight-year crime spree and then retire from public life, never to be held accountable.

United States Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait on October 7, 2022, in Washington, DC.

Welp, Donald Trump won. The Supreme Court today ruled that presidents are entitled to “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for official acts, then contended that pressuring the vice president and the Department of Justice to overthrow the government was an “official act,” then said that talking to advisers or making public statements are “official acts” as well, and then determined that evidence of what presidents say and do cannot be used against them to establish that their acts are “unofficial.”

The ruling from the Supreme Court was 6-3, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, on a straight party-line vote, with all the Republican-appointed justices joining to give the president the power of a king. While some parts of the federal indictment against Trump will be remanded back down to the district-court trial judge to determine whether any of Trump’s actions were “unofficial” (“unofficial” acts, the court says, are not entitled to immunity), Trump’s victory in front of the Supreme Court is total. Essentially, all he has to do is claim that everything he did to plot a coup was part of his “official” duties, and the Supreme Court provided no clear method or evidentiary standard that can be used to challenge that presumption.

Legally, there are two critical things to understand about the totality of the court’s ruling here:

The immunity is absolute
There is no legislative way to get rid of what the court has given

On the first point, the immunity granted to Trump in this case far exceeds the immunity granted to, say, police officers or other government officials, when they act in their official capacities. Those officials are granted “qualified” immunity from civil penalties. Because the immunity is “qualified,” it can be taken away (“pierced” is the legal jargon for taking away an official’s qualified immunity). People can bring evidence against officials and argue that they shouldn’t be given immunity because of the gravity or depravity of their acts.

Not so with Trump. Presidents are now entitled to “absolute” immunity, which means that no matter what they do, the immunity cannot be lost. They are always and forever immune, no matter what evidence is brought to bear.

Moreover, unlike other officials, presidents are now entitled to absolute immunity from criminal charges. Even a cop can be charged with, say, murder , even if they argue that killing people is part of their jobs. But not presidents. Presidents can murder, rape, steal, and pretty much do whatever they want, so long as they argue that murdering, raping, or stealing is part of the official job of the president of the United States. There is no crime that pierces the veil of absolute immunity.

And there is essentially nothing we can do to change it. The courts created qualified immunity for public officials, but it can be undone by state or federal legislatures if they pass a law removing that protection. Not so with absolute presidential immunity. The court here says that absolute immunity is required by the separation of powers inherent in the Constitution, meaning that Congress cannot take it away. Congress, according to the Supreme Court, does not have the power to pass legislation saying “the president can be prosecuted for crimes.” Impeachment, and only impeachment, is the only way to punish presidents, and, somewhat obviously, impeachment does nothing to a president who is already no longer in office.

The Nation Weekly

Under this new standard, a president can go on a four-to-eight-year crime spree, steal all the money and murder all the people they can get their hands on, all under guise of presumptive “official” behavior, and then retire from public life, never to be held accountable for their crimes while in office. That, according to the court, is what the Constitution requires.

There will be Republicans and legal academics and whatever the hell job Jonathan Turley has who will go into overdrive arguing that the decision isn’t as bad as all that. These bad-faith actors will be quoted or even published in The Washington Post and The New York Times . They will argue that presidents can still be prosecuted for “unofficial acts,” and so they will say that everything is fine.

But they will be wrong, because while the Supreme Court says “unofficial” acts are still prosecutable, the court has left nearly no sphere in which the president can be said to be acting “unofficially.” And more importantly, the court has left virtually no vector of evidence that can be deployed against a president to prove that their acts were “unofficial.” If trying to overthrow the government is “official,” then what isn’t? And if we can’t use the evidence of what the president says or does, because communications with their advisers, other government officials, and the public is “official,” then how can we ever show that an act was taken “unofficially”?

Take the now-classic example of a president ordering Seal Team Six to assassinate a political rival. According to the logic of the Republicans on the Supreme Court, that would likely be an official act. According to their logic, there is also no way to prove it’s “unofficial,” because any conversation the president has with their military advisers (where, for instance, the president tells them why they want a particular person assassinated) is official and cannot be used against them.

There will doubtless be people still wondering if Trump can somehow be prosecuted: The answer is “no.” Special counsel Jack Smith will surely argue that presenting fake electors in connection with his cadre of campaign sycophants was not an “official act.” Lower-court judges may well agree. But when that appeal gets back to the Supreme Court next year, the same justices who just ruled that Trump is entitled to absolute immunity will surely rule that submitting fake electors was also part of Trump’s “official” responsibilities.

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Biden Did Not Save His Presidency on ABC Biden Did Not Save His Presidency on ABC

Why aren’t we talking about trump’s fascism why aren’t we talking about trump’s fascism, donald trump’s secret weapon to dismantle american education donald trump’s secret weapon to dismantle american education.

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There is no way to change that outcome in the short term. In the long term, the only way to undo the authoritarianism the court has just ushered in is to expand the Supreme Court . Democrats would have to win the upcoming presidential election and the House and the Senate. Then Congress would have to pass a law expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court; then the Senate would have to pass that law as well, which, at a minimum, would likely have to include getting rid of the filibuster. Then the president would have to sign such a bill, and appoint additional Supreme Court justices who do not think that presidents should be kings—and then those justices would have to be confirmed. And all of that would have to happen before the current Supreme Court hears whatever Trump appeal from his January 6 charges comes up next, because if court expansion happens after the current Supreme Court dismisses the charges against him, double jeopardy will attach and Trump can never be prosecuted again under a less-fascist court.

So, since that’s not going to happen, Trump won. He won completely. He tried to overthrow the government, and he got away with it. I cannot even imagine what he’ll try if he is actually given power again, knowing full well that he will never be held accountable for literal crimes.

If you ever wondered what you’d have done in ancient Rome, when the Roman Republic was shuttered and Augustus Caesar declared himself the “first” citizen of Rome, the answer is: whatever you’re doing right now. It’s what you would have done during the Restoration of King Charles II in England, and what you would have done when Napoleon declared himself emperor of France. This, right here, is how republics die.

And the answer that cries out from the abyss of history is that most people, in real time, don’t care. Republics fall because most citizens are willing to give it away. Most people think that it won’t be that bad to lose the rule of law, and the people who stand to benefit from the ending of republican self-government tell everybody that it will be OK. When the Imperium came to be, the Romans didn’t realize that they were seeing the last form of European self-government for 2,000 years, and the ones who did were largely happy about it.

For my part, I assume that like Mark Antony’s wife, Fulvia, defiling the decapitated head of Cicero, Martha-Ann Alito will be jabbing her golden hairpin into my tongue for criticizing the powerful soon enough. But I’m just a writer. I wonder what the rest of you will do as the last vestiges of democracy are taken away by the Imperial Supreme Court and the untouchable executive officer they’ve just created.

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Harvard business school announces 3 new application essays.

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Harvard Business School.

Harvard Business School announced a surprising departure from its single, open-ended application essay to three short essays with specific prompts. The HBS website sums up the kind of applicant the school is seeking: “We are looking for future leaders who are passionate about business, leadership, and growth.”

The prompts for the class that will begin in fall 2025 instruct applicants to address each topic in turn.

Business-Minded Essay : Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you will have on the businesses, organizations, and communities you plan to serve. (up to 300 words)
Leadership-Focused Essay : What experiences have shaped who you are, how you invest in others, and what kind of leader you want to become? (up to 250 words)
Growth-Oriented Essay : Curiosity can be seen in many ways. Please share an example of how you have demonstrated curiosity and how that has influenced your growth. (up to 250 words)

The prompts ask applicants to go beyond simply asserting their allegiance to the ideals of business, leadership and growth. Each of the three questions asks for evidence: “experiences,” “experiences” and “an example,” respectively.

The prompts do not expect a straightforward list of what happened in the past. Rather, they encourage reflection on how these experiences affected present realities and future goals.

Applicants are asked to reflect on past, present and future as an ongoing process of becoming who they are now and who they wish to become. Even the “Business-Minded Essay” is about past choices and future impact; it also assumes you “plan to serve.” The “Leadership-Focused Essay” does not ask applicants to recite a list of titles, but to discuss who they are and how they relate to others; not what title they aspire to, but “what kind of leader you wish to become.”

Perhaps the most surprising essay prompt is No. 3, which asks about curiosity. It opens the door for applicants to discuss a more personal aspect of their candidacies. The prompt asks not about end result, but about the process of change. Once again, the emphasis is on “growth.”

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In short, the prompts ask about person and process.

How The 3 New Prompts Differ From Last Year’s Single Question

This year’s prompts give applicants more direction than the previous open-ended instruction, which was: “As we review your application, what more would you like us to know as we consider your candidacy for the Harvard Business School MBA program?”

Applicants may find it easier to follow these more detailed instructions and to stay on topic. They no longer need to face an open question and a blank page.

Another aid is the shorter word limit. The essay on being business-minded has a limit of 300 words, and the essays on leadership and growth through curiosity are limited to 250 words each.

A third difference is the specific inquiry about business. Last year’s prompt allowed candidates to choose anything they thought would be important for HBS to consider. Some applicants struggled to decide whether to focus on business or something beyond work. While the “Business-Minded Essay” is still personal, it does ask applicants to reflect on their careers.

One might also speculate that the new, more directive prompts makes it easier for the admissions committee to compare essays across applications, while still leaving room for considerable variation in how applicants choose to address the essay prompts.

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The First Amendment Is Out of Control

A photograph of the “Contemplation of Justice” statue outside the Supreme Court.

Mr. Wu is a law professor at Columbia who writes often about Big Tech. He served on the National Economic Council as a special assistant to the president for competition and tech policy from 2021 to 2023.

The First Amendment was written in the 18th century with the noble and vitally important goal of ensuring robust political debate and a free press. For much of American history, First Amendment cases involving speech typically concerned political dissenters, religious outcasts, intrepid journalists and others whose ability to express their views was threatened by a powerful and sometimes overbearing state. The First Amendment was a tool that helped the underdog.

But sometime in this century the judiciary lost the plot. Judges have transmuted a constitutional provision meant to protect unpopular opinion into an all-purpose tool of legislative nullification that now mostly protects corporate interests. Nearly any law that has to do with the movement of information can be attacked in the name of the First Amendment.

Monday’s Supreme Court decision in the two NetChoice cases greatly adds to the problem. The cases concern two state laws, one in Florida and one in Texas, that limit the ability of social media platforms to remove or moderate content. (Both laws were enacted in response to the perceived censorship of political conservatives.) While the Supreme Court remanded both cases to lower courts for further factual development, the court nonetheless went out of its way to state that the millions of algorithmic decisions made every day by social media platforms are protected by the First Amendment. It did so by blithely assuming that those algorithmic decisions are equivalent to the expressive decisions made by human editors at newspapers.

Even if one has concerns about the wisdom and questionable constitutionality of the Florida and Texas laws (as I do), the breadth of the court’s reasoning should serve as a wake-up call. The judiciary needs to realize that the First Amendment is spinning out of control. It is beginning to threaten many of the essential jobs of the state, such as protecting national security and the safety and privacy of its citizens.

How did we get here? The reach of the First Amendment started to expand in the 1960s and ’70s, when the Supreme Court issued a series of rulings that held that the First Amendment concerned not just political and religious speech but also other forms of expression (such as sexual content ) and commercial communication (such as advertisements ). These initial changes to the scope of the First Amendment were reasonable.

Over the past decade or two, however, liberal as well as conservative judges and justices have extended the First Amendment to protect nearly anything that can be called speech, regardless of its value or whether the speaker is a human or a corporation. It has come to protect corporate donations to political campaigns (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010), the buying and tracking of data (Sorrell v. IMS Health in 2011), even outright lies (United States v. Alvarez in 2012). As a result, it has become harder for the government to protect its citizens.

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