how to write a article essay

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How to Write an Essay

Last Updated: February 1, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Christopher Taylor, PhD and by wikiHow staff writer, Megaera Lorenz, PhD . Christopher Taylor is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Austin Community College in Texas. He received his PhD in English Literature and Medieval Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. There are 18 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 7,926,087 times.

An essay is a common type of academic writing that you'll likely be asked to do in multiple classes. Before you start writing your essay, make sure you understand the details of the assignment so that you know how to approach the essay and what your focus should be. Once you've chosen a topic, do some research and narrow down the main argument(s) you'd like to make. From there, you'll need to write an outline and flesh out your essay, which should consist of an introduction, body, and conclusion. After your essay is drafted, spend some time revising it to ensure your writing is as strong as possible.

Understanding Your Assignment

• The compare/contrast essay , which focuses on analyzing the similarities and differences between 2 things, such as ideas, people, events, places, or works of art.
• The narrative essay , which tells a story.
• The argumentative essay , in which the writer uses evidence and examples to convince the reader of their point of view.
• The critical or analytical essay, which examines something (such as a text or work of art) in detail. This type of essay may attempt to answer specific questions about the subject or focus more generally on its meaning.
• The informative essay , that educates the reader about a topic.

• How long your essay should be
• Which citation style to use
• Formatting requirements, such as margin size , line spacing, and font size and type

Christopher Taylor, PhD

Christopher Taylor, Professor of English, tells us: "Most essays will contain an introduction, a body or discussion portion, and a conclusion. When assigned a college essay, make sure to check the specific structural conventions related to your essay genre , your field of study, and your professor's expectations."

• If you're doing a research-based essay , you might find some inspiration from reading through some of the major sources on the subject.
• For a critical essay, you might choose to focus on a particular theme in the work you're discussing, or analyze the meaning of a specific passage.

• If you're having trouble narrowing down your topic, your instructor might be able to provide guidance or inspiration.

Planning and Organizing Your Essay

• Academic books and journals tend to be good sources of information. In addition to print sources, you may be able to find reliable information in scholarly databases such as JSTOR and Google Scholar.
• You can also look for primary source documents, such as letters, eyewitness accounts, and photographs.
• Always evaluate your sources critically. Even research papers by reputable academics can contain hidden biases, outdated information, and simple errors or faulty logic.

Tip: In general, Wikipedia articles are not considered appropriate sources for academic writing. However, you may be able to find useful sources in the “References” section at the end of the article.

• You might find it helpful to write your notes down on individual note cards or enter them into a text document on your computer so you can easily copy, paste , and rearrange them however you like.
• Try organizing your notes into different categories so you can identify specific ideas you'd like to focus on. For example, if you're analyzing a short story , you might put all your notes on a particular theme or character together.

• For example, if your essay is about the factors that led to the end of the Bronze Age in the ancient Middle East, you might focus on the question, “What role did natural disasters play in the collapse of Late Bronze Age society?”

• One easy way to come up with a thesis statement is to briefly answer the main question you would like to address.
• For example, if the question is “What role did natural disasters play in the collapse of Late Bronze Age society?” then your thesis might be, “Natural disasters during the Late Bronze Age destabilized local economies across the region. This set in motion a series of mass migrations of different peoples, creating widespread conflict that contributed to the collapse of several major Bronze Age political centers.”

• When you write the outline, think about how you would like to organize your essay. For example, you might start with your strongest arguments and then move to the weakest ones. Or, you could begin with a general overview of the source you're analyzing and then move on to addressing the major themes, tone, and style of the work.
• Introduction
• Point 1, with supporting examples
• Point 2, with supporting examples
• Point 3, with supporting examples
• Major counter-argument(s) to your thesis
• Your rebuttals to the counter-argument(s)

Drafting the Essay

• For example, if you're writing a critical essay about a work of art, your introduction might start with some basic information about the work, such as who created it, when and where it was created, and a brief description of the work itself. From there, introduce the question(s) about the work you'd like to address and present your thesis.
• A strong introduction should also contain a brief transitional sentence that creates a link to the first point or argument you would like to make. For example, if you're discussing the use of color in a work of art, lead-in by saying you'd like to start with an overview of symbolic color use in contemporary works by other artists.

Tip: Some writers find it helpful to write the introduction after they've written the rest of the essay. Once you've written out your main points, it's easier to summarize the gist of your essay in a few introductory sentences.

• For example, your topic sentence might be something like, “Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories are among the many literary influences apparent in P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves novels.” You could then back this up by quoting a passage that contains a reference to Sherlock Holmes.
• Try to show how the arguments in each paragraph link back to the main thesis of your essay.

• When creating transitions, transitional phrases can be helpful. For example, use words and phrases such as “In addition,” “Therefore,” “Similarly,” “Subsequently,” or “As a result.”
• For example, if you've just discussed the use of color to create contrast in a work of art, you might start the next paragraph with, “In addition to color, the artist also uses different line weights to distinguish between the more static and dynamic figures in the scene.”

• For example, if you're arguing that a particular kind of shrimp decorates its shell with red algae to attract a mate, you'll need to address the counterargument that the shell decoration is a warning to predators. You might do this by presenting evidence that the red shrimp are, in fact, more likely to get eaten than shrimp with undecorated shells.

• The way you cite your sources will vary depending on the citation style you're using. Typically, you'll need to include the name of the author, the title and publication date of the source, and location information such as the page number on which the information appears.
• In general, you don't need to cite common knowledge. For example, if you say, “A zebra is a type of mammal,” you probably won't need to cite a source.
• If you've cited any sources in the essay, you'll need to include a list of works cited (or a bibliography ) at the end.

• Keep your conclusion brief. While the appropriate length will vary based on the length of the essay, it should typically be no longer than 1-2 paragraphs.
• For example, if you're writing a 1,000-word essay, your conclusion should be about 4-5 sentences long. [16] X Research source

Revising the Essay

• If you don't have time to spend a couple of days away from your essay, at least take a few hours to relax or work on something else.

• Excessive wordiness
• Points that aren't explained enough
• Tangents or unnecessary information
• Unclear transitions or illogical organization
• Spelling , grammar , style, and formatting problems
• Inappropriate language or tone (e.g., slang or informal language in an academic essay)

• You might have to cut material from your essay in some places and add new material to others.
• You might also end up reordering some of the content of the essay if you think that helps it flow better.

• Read over each line slowly and carefully. It may be helpful to read each sentence out loud to yourself.

Tip: If possible, have someone else check your work. When you've been looking at your writing for too long, your brain begins to fill in what it expects to see rather than what's there, making it harder for you to spot mistakes.

Expert Q&A

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://www.yourdictionary.com/articles/essay-types
• ↑ https://students.unimelb.edu.au/academic-skills/resources/essay-writing/six-top-tips-for-writing-a-great-essay
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/common_writing_assignments/research_papers/choosing_a_topic.html
• ↑ https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/tips-reading-assignment-prompt
• ↑ https://library.unr.edu/help/quick-how-tos/writing/integrating-sources-into-your-paper
• ↑ https://advice.writing.utoronto.ca/researching/notes-from-research/
• ↑ https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/developing-thesis
• ↑ https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/outlining
• ↑ https://lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/undergraduates/writing-guides/how-do-i-write-an-intro--conclusion----body-paragraph.html
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/essay_writing/argumentative_essays.html
• ↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/transitions/
• ↑ https://lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/undergraduates/writing-guides/how-do-i-incorporate-a-counter-argument.html
• ↑ https://www.plagiarism.org/article/how-do-i-cite-sources
• ↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/conclusions/
• ↑ https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/twc/sites/utsc.utoronto.ca.twc/files/resource-files/Intros-Conclusions.pdf
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/the_writing_process/proofreading/steps_for_revising.html
• ↑ https://open.lib.umn.edu/writingforsuccess/chapter/8-4-revising-and-editing/
• ↑ https://writing.ku.edu/writing-process

About This Article

If you need to write an essay, start by gathering information from reputable sources, like books from the library or scholarly journals online. Take detailed notes and keep track of which facts come from which sources. As you're taking notes, look for a central theme that you're interested in writing about to create your thesis statement. Then, organize your notes into an outline that supports and explains your thesis statement. Working from your outline, write an introduction and subsequent paragraphs to address each major point. Start every paragraph with a topic sentence that briefly explains the main point of that paragraph. Finally, finish your paper with a strong conclusion that sums up the most important points. For tips from our English Professor co-author on helpful revision techniques, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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How to write better essays: 'nobody does introductions properly'

Is Wikipedia really a no-go? Should you bother with the whole reading list? And how do you make a convincing argument? We ask the experts

A s the government begins its crackdown on essay mill websites , it’s easy to see just how much pressure students are under to get top grades for their coursework these days. But writing a high-scoring paper doesn’t need to be complicated. We spoke to experts to get some simple techniques that will raise your writing game.

Tim Squirrell is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, and is teaching for the first time this year. When he was asked to deliver sessions on the art of essay-writing, he decided to publish a comprehensive (and brilliant) blog on the topic, offering wisdom gleaned from turning out two or three essays a week for his own undergraduate degree.

“There is a knack to it,” he says. “It took me until my second or third year at Cambridge to work it out. No one tells you how to put together an argument and push yourself from a 60 to a 70, but once you to get grips with how you’re meant to construct them, it’s simple.”

The goal of writing any essay is to show that you can think critically about the material at hand (whatever it may be). This means going beyond regurgitating what you’ve read; if you’re just repeating other people’s arguments, you’re never going to trouble the upper end of the marking scale.

“You need to be using your higher cognitive abilities,” says Bryan Greetham, author of the bestselling How to Write Better Essays . “You’re not just showing understanding and recall, but analysing and synthesising ideas from different sources, then critically evaluating them. That’s where the marks lie.”

But what does critical evaluation actually look like? According to Squirrell, it’s simple: you need to “poke holes” in the texts you’re exploring and work out the ways in which “the authors aren’t perfect”.

“That can be an intimidating idea,” he says. “You’re reading something that someone has probably spent their career studying, so how can you, as an undergraduate, critique it?

“The answer is that you’re not going to discover some gaping flaw in Foucault’s History of Sexuality Volume 3, but you are going to be able to say: ‘There are issues with these certain accounts, here is how you might resolve those’. That’s the difference between a 60-something essay and a 70-something essay.”

Critique your own arguments

Once you’ve cast a critical eye over the texts, you should turn it back on your own arguments. This may feel like going against the grain of what you’ve learned about writing academic essays, but it’s the key to drawing out developed points.

“We’re taught at an early age to present both sides of the argument,” Squirrell continues. “Then you get to university and you’re told to present one side of the argument and sustain it throughout the piece. But that’s not quite it: you need to figure out what the strongest objections to your own argument would be. Write them and try to respond to them, so you become aware of flaws in your reasoning. Every argument has its limits and if you can try and explore those, the markers will often reward that.”

Fine, use Wikipedia then

The use of Wikipedia for research is a controversial topic among academics, with many advising their students to stay away from the site altogether.

“I genuinely disagree,” says Squirrell. “Those on the other side say that you can’t know who has written it, what they had in mind, what their biases are. But if you’re just trying to get a handle on a subject, or you want to find a scattering of secondary sources, it can be quite useful. I would only recommend it as either a primer or a last resort, but it does have its place.”

Focus your reading

Reading lists can be a hindrance as well as a help. They should be your first port of call for guidance, but they aren’t to-do lists. A book may be listed, but that doesn’t mean you need to absorb the whole thing.

Squirrell advises reading the introduction and conclusion and a relevant chapter but no more. “Otherwise you won’t actually get anything out of it because you’re trying to plough your way through a 300-page monograph,” he says.

You also need to store the information you’re gathering in a helpful, systematic way. Bryan Greetham recommends a digital update of his old-school “project box” approach.

“I have a box to catch all of those small things – a figure, a quotation, something interesting someone says – I’ll write them down and put them in the box so I don’t lose them. Then when I come to write, I have all of my material.”

There are a plenty of online offerings to help with this, such as the project management app Scrivener and referencing tool Zotero , and, for the procrastinators, there are productivity programmes like Self Control , which allow users to block certain websites from their computers for a set period.

Look beyond the reading list

“This is comparatively easy to do,” says Squirrell. “Look at the citations used in the text, put them in Google Scholar, read the abstracts and decide whether they’re worth reading. Then you can look on Google Scholar at other papers that have cited the work you’re writing about – some of those will be useful. But quality matters more than quantity.”

And finally, the introduction

The old trick of dealing with your introduction last is common knowledge, but it seems few have really mastered the art of writing an effective opener.

“Introductions are the easiest things in the world to get right and nobody does it properly,” Squirrel says. “It should be ‘Here is the argument I am going to make, I am going to substantiate this with three or four strands of argumentation, drawing upon these theorists, who say these things, and I will conclude with some thoughts on this area and how it might clarify our understanding of this phenomenon.’ You should be able to encapsulate it in 100 words or so. That’s literally it.”

Keep up with the latest on Guardian Students: follow us on Twitter at @GdnStudents – and become a member to receive exclusive benefits and our weekly newsletter.

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How to Write a ‘How-To’: A Step-by-Step Guide to Our Contest

We walk you through how to brainstorm a topic, interview an expert and write your own original “How to ….”

By Natalie Proulx and Katherine Schulten

“If you want to know how to do something, don’t just search the internet,” advises Malia Wollan , the longtime writer of Tip , a how-to column that ran weekly in The New York Times Magazine for seven years. “Instead, find a person who already knows how and ask them.”

That’s the challenge we are posing to students in “How to … ,” our new informational writing contest for teenagers : Interview an expert about (almost) any skill and then write an engaging and informative essay explaining it to readers.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to do that, with advice from the how-to expert herself, Ms. Wollan. You’ll start by getting familiar with the Tip format. Then you’ll brainstorm a topic for your own piece, find and interview an expert and, finally, put it all together.

When you’re ready, you can submit your completed how-to essay to our contest , which is accepting submissions through Feb. 14.

A step-by-step guide:

1. read some “tip” articles to understand the form., 2. look more closely at one piece., 3. brainstorm your topic., 4. find an expert., 5. conduct the interview., 6. put it all together..

What does a how-to essay look like? There are, of course, many ways to write one. For instance, you may have consulted wikiHow in the past, whether to learn how to make a realistic New Year’s resolution , fold a fitted sheet , reheat rice or do one of the many, many other things the site can teach you.

But since the inspiration for our contest comes from the Tip column in The Times, spending some time examining how it works is the logical first step in constructing your own.

Start by reading any three Tip articles of your choice.

If you don’t have a Times subscription, this guide can help. If you click on any of the 40-plus Tip topics we link here, you can access them for free, as long as you open them directly from this page. (Note to teachers: If your class does have a Times subscription and you are working from the column itself , be aware that some articles may not be appropriate. Please preview before sharing.)

Here are some options to help you choose:

Maybe you’re interested in learning a physical skill, such as how to build a sand castle , skip a stone , do the splits , tackle someone , spot a shooting star , crack a safe or find a four-leaf clover .

Or maybe you would rather up your emotional intelligence by, say, learning how to laugh at yourself , let your mind wander , recover from being ghosted , build an intentional community , be less fearful of the dark or forgive .

Perhaps you want to know how to do something practical, like break in boots , fix a brake light , mend a pair of jeans , use emojis , put out a grease fire , read faster , survive an avalanche , ask for an extension or find a lost hamster .

Or maybe you’d rather choose something offbeat, like how to start a family band , talk to dogs , communicate through facial expressions , make a love potion , build a fort , enjoy snowflakes , wash your hair in space or race pigeons .

After you’ve read three, answer these questions:

What do you notice about the structure, organization and language of a Tip column?

What predictable elements can readers expect to find in every edition?

If you did the activity above, you might have noticed some of these elements:

Tip articles are short: Each column is about 400 words and around four paragraphs long. Our challenge asks you to write something of about the same length.

The topics are usually ultra-specific: The skills described might be physical ( how to skip a stone ) or emotional ( how to forgive ), serious ( how to suture a wound ) or offbeat ( how to befriend an eagle ), but they are always small enough that they can be fully explained within the limited word count.

Each article features a single expert source: You probably noticed that each column begins and ends with a quote from an expert on the topic and that the same expert gives background and advice throughout the piece. For this contest, we are not requiring you to follow that same format, but we are asking you to find and interview an expert to inform your essay. And if you’d like to follow that format, you may.

The advice is practical, but the pieces are engaging to read. Each includes concrete tips for how to accomplish a task, but it’s never just a boring list of steps. The writer also provides context for the skill so that readers understand how and why they might use it in their own lives. And the quotes Ms. Wollan chooses from her interviews are often colorful or full of voice, as you can see in this piece about how to appreciate spiders .

They are written to the reader: The writer addresses the reader as “you,” and often uses the imperative to craft sentences that tell the reader what (or what not) to do.

Now let’s break it down even further. Choose one Tip article to read — either one you already read in Step 1 or a new one — and then respond to the following questions:

Whom does the writer quote in the piece? Why do you think the author chose this person? What makes him or her an expert in this skill? Do you think this person was a good source of information?

Look closely at when the author chooses to quote the expert and when she paraphrases the information that person gave. What is the difference? Why do you think she chose to quote the lines she did? Give some examples from the piece to explain your reasoning.

You may have been taught in school to cite your sources by using footnotes or by putting them in parentheses after you’ve referenced the information. That’s not how journalists do it, yet they still make their sources clear. Where do you see this in the piece you read? What punctuation or wording does the author use to tell us where certain facts and details come from?

Now let’s look at how the author balances explaining how to acquire a skill and showing why it’s needed: Underline or highlight in one color the lines in the piece that tell readers how to accomplish the task, and use another color to highlight lines that give context. What do you notice about the difference in language? What do you notice about the way these pieces of information are woven together throughout?

After reading this, do you feel confident that you could accomplish the task on your own? What tips, if any, did the expert share that surprised you?

When, where and for what purpose might you use this skill in your own life? What lines help readers see how this skill might be relevant to their lives?

What else do you admire about this piece, whether it’s the topic covered, the way it’s written or anything else?

Now that you better understand how to write a how-to, it’s your turn to write one!

First, of course, you must find a topic. For a Times Insider article about how the Tip column is made , Ms. Wollan and her editor, Dean Robinson, describe how they found their ideas:

She often gets suggestions. Many people ask her to write about navigating interpersonal relationships; Ms. Wollan acquiesced in the case of a highly-requested Tip on how to break up with a therapist. She thinks people come to her because “that stuff is hard to navigate and it’s also hard to Google.” Some of the more recognizable scenarios featured in Tip columns come from Ms. Wollan’s own life. She credits being a mother as the inspiration for columns on delivering babies , singing lullabies and apologizing to children . Mr. Robinson occasionally comes across ideas in his life, too. He suggested a piece on how to find a hamster in your house, he said, “because we’ve lost some hamsters.”

Brainstorm as many possible topics as you can for your how-to piece. Here are some ways to start:

Respond to our related Student Opinion forum . We pose 10 questions designed to help you brainstorm about what you’d like to learn to do, and what you already do well. We hope you’ll not only provide your own answers, but also scroll through the answers of others.

Ask for suggestions. What skills have your friends, family and neighbors always wanted to learn? What do they already consider themselves experts on? Keep a running list.

Get inspiration from the Tip column . As you scroll through the column, which headlines stand out to you? Could you take on a similar topic in a different way? Do any of them inspire other ideas for you?

Work with your class to compile as long a list as you can. After you’ve tried the three ideas above, come to class with your list, then share. Your ideas might spark those of others — and when it’s time to find experts, your classmates may have contacts they can share.

Once you’ve come up with as many ideas as you can, choose one for your piece and refine it until it is the right size for a 400-word piece.

These questions can help:

Which of the topics that you listed gets you most excited? Why?

For which do you think you could realistically find an expert to interview? (More on that in the next step.)

Which are already specific enough that you could thoroughly explain them in 400 words or fewer?

Which are big, but could be broken down? For instance, if you chose “learn to cook,” make a list of specific skills within that larger goal. Maybe you’d like to learn how to chop an onion, bake chocolate chip cookies, or build a healthy meal from the noodles in a ramen packet.

Which topics do you think might be most interesting to a general audience? Which feel especially unique, helpful or unexpected?

Maybe you chose your topic because you know someone who is already an expert at that task or skill. But even if you have, read through this step, because it might help you find someone even more suitable or interesting.

Here is how Ms. Wollan says she found experts for her column:

Ms. Wollan finds interview subjects by “just poking around” online and on the phone. Sometimes she has to talk to a few people before reaching the source she will feature in the column. She interviews most of her subjects by phone for about 45 minutes, sometimes longer. “I love talking to people who just maybe don’t care so much about being an expert,” Ms. Wollan said. Some of her favorite interviews have been with children and people in their 80s, who are often “looser and more generous with their advice.”

Who could be an expert on your topic? At minimum, it should be someone who is knowledgeable enough about your subject that your readers will trust his or her advice.

Some choices might be easy. For example, for her column on how to choose a karaoke song , Ms. Wollan interviewed a world karaoke champion; for her piece on how to recommend a book , she interviewed a librarian; and for her article on how to suture a wound , she interviewed a doctor.

Other choices, however, may be less obvious. For a column on how to breathe , Ms. Wollan interviewed a clarinet player; for one on how to slice a pie , she interviewed a restaurant owner; and for one on how to say goodbye , she interviewed a child-care worker who had bid farewell to many children during her career.

Brainstorm as many potential experts for your piece as you can and then choose one as the subject of your piece.

Your expert doesn’t have to be a world champion or the national head of an organization to have expertise. This person can be anyone with specialized knowledge of a field or topic. For example, if you were writing a piece on how to start bird-watching, you could interview someone who works at a local park or zoo, someone from a birding group in your town or a bird-watcher you know personally, such as a neighbor or teacher.

Like Ms. Wollan, you might start by “poking around online” for potential subjects. And you may have to talk to a few people before you decide on the person you want to feature in your piece.

If you are doing this assignment with classmates, now might be a good time to pool resources. Share your topics, and find out who might know someone with expertise in those areas. Remember that you are not allowed to interview your relatives — but you can suggest your woodworker grandma or your skateboarder cousin to someone who is writing about those topics.

When you reach out to people, keep in mind this advice from Corey Kilgannon, a New York Times reporter who has interviewed people for profiles and who was a guest on a Learning Network webinar about profile writing :

Tell the person what your goal is and where you’re coming from — that you’re writing a profile for a school assignment or a contest or a newspaper or whatever. Be straight with the person you’re interviewing. Some people might be a little nervous or shy about how this is going to turn out, or how they’re going to look. So tell them what it’s for, how long it’s going to be, that there will be photos, or whatever you can.

Once you’ve found the expert for your piece, it’s time to conduct your interview.

In “ The Art of Learning to Do Things ,” Ms. Wollan offers excellent advice that everyone participating in our challenge should take to heart:

If you want to know how to do something, don’t just search the internet. Instead, find a person who already knows how and ask them. At first, they’ll give you a hurried, broad-strokes kind of answer, assuming that you’re uninterested in all the procedural details. But of course that’s precisely what you’re after! Ask for a slowed-down, step-by-step guide through the minutiae of the thing. For seven years, I did exactly that — I called a stranger and asked that person to describe how to do a specific task or skill.

That might sound like a straightforward task, but you should come up with some questions — on your own or with your class — before you talk to your expert.

These might include questions like:

If you were to explain how to do this skill or task to someone who had never done it before, what advice would you give?

What are some common errors that those first learning this skill or trying this task often make? How can they be avoided?

What is your background in this skill? How did you get started with it? How did you learn how to do it?

When or why might a person have to use this skill? What are the benefits of knowing it?

You might also return to some of the Tip articles you read at the beginning of this lesson. Read them closely and see if you can guess what questions the writer may have asked to get the specific quotes and information the expert shared in the piece. Which of these questions might be helpful for your own interview?

Remember that interviewing is an art — and Times journalists can offer you advice.

In addition to asking good questions, it’s also your job as a journalist to make the interviewee feel comfortable, to listen carefully, to ask follow-up questions and to clarify that you have accurate information.

We have written our own extensive how-to on interviewing, filled with tips from Times journalists. Steps 3, 4 and 5 in this lesson will be especially helpful. Created for a contest we ran in 2022, the guide can walk you through preparing and practicing for an interview; keeping the conversation going while conducting it; and shaping the material into a useful piece when you’re done.

Finally, it’s time to write your piece. If you are submitting to our how-to writing contest, keep in mind that your essay must be 400 words or fewer.

Remember, too, that we are inviting you to take inspiration from the Tip column, but that you don’t have to copy its form and structure exactly — unless you’d like to. Most important, though, is to find a way to write what you want in a way that sounds and feels like you.

That said, there are a few key elements that are important to include, which can be found in our contest rubric . Below, we share some examples from the Tip column to illustrate these elements.

Introduce your expert source.

The person you interviewed will be the main source of information for your piece. Ask yourself: How will my readers know this person is an expert in the skill or task? What information should I include about this person to make my readers feel that they can trust the person’s knowledge and advice?

Here is how Ms. Wollan introduces her expert in “ How to Skip a Stone ”:

“Throw at a 20-degree angle,” says Lydéric Bocquet, a physics professor at École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Later, she further explains Mr. Bocquet’s expertise:

Bocquet’s quest to understand how this happens — how a solid object can skim along water without immediately sinking — began more than a decade ago, while he was skipping stones on the Tarn River in southern France with his young son. “He turns to me,” Bocquet says, “and asks, ‘Why does the stone bounce on the water?’” To answer that question satisfactorily, Bocquet and his colleagues built a mechanical stone skipper and analyzed the angle of each toss using high-speed video. They also created a set of mathematical equations to predict the number of skips.

How do you know Bocquet is an expert in skipping stones? Do you, as the reader, trust him as an expert on this topic? Why or why not?

Explain how to do the task or skill.

The heart of your piece is, of course, your explanation. You might start by making a list of steps that your expert source shared and then paring it down to the most essential information.

Ask yourself:

What instructions are crucial to the reader’s understanding of how to accomplish this skill or task?

What did the expert share that I found surprising or may not have thought of?

What details can I leave out, either because they are not very interesting or because they are less important?

What sequence for the steps make the most sense for my readers?

Consider the first paragraph from “ How to Build a Sand Castle ”:

“Use your architect mind,” says Sudarsan Pattnaik, an award-winning sand sculptor from Puri, a seaside city in India. If you’re building from memory, first envision your castle. For Pattnaik, who is 42, that means well-known Hindu or Muslim sites. “I have made so many Taj Mahals,” he says. Build with fine-grained sand already wetted by an outgoing tide. “Dry sand is too, too difficult,” Pattnaik says. Bring tools: hand shovels, buckets with the bottoms cut off and squirt bottles. Tamp wet sand into your bucket molds, setting one layer and then the next, like bricks. Sculpt architectural details from the top of the mound down. Bring reference photographs if you’re aiming for realism.

See if you can identify all the steps to making a sand castle that the writer shares in this paragraph. What do you notice about the order? What, if anything, do you think the writer might have left out, and why do you think she made that choice? What tips did you find most surprising? What do these lines add to the piece?

Notice also the grammatical structure Ms. Wollan uses: “Build with fine-grained sand”; “bring tools”; “tamp wet sand into your bucket molds”; and so on. This is called the imperative mood and is often used when telling others how to do something.

Include at least one quote.

If you are submitting to our contest, you need to include a minimum of one direct quote from the expert. Ask yourself: What quotes from my interview are so interesting, important, surprising, informative or colorful that I need to find a way to fit them in?

Look at “ How to Do the Splits ,” in which Ms. Wollan interviewed Kendrick Young, a professional sumo wrestler:

Start by stretching every day after you get out of the shower (heat increases muscle and ligament flexibility). Wear comfortable, stretchy attire. “Definitely don’t try to do this in jeans,” Young says. Sit with your legs spread as wide as you can. Once you can do that without hunching, begin to lean toward the ground, exhaling as you go. “You don’t want to be bending over a big pocket of air in your lungs,” Young says. It might help to have someone push down on your midback (historically, sumo wrestlers often stood on one another’s backs to force the body to the floor).

Why do you think the writer chose to include these two specific quotes in the piece, while paraphrasing (or writing in her own words) the rest of what Young said? What additional context did the writer provide to help us understand the purpose and relevance of these quotations?

Provide a purpose for reading.

Remember that a how-to essay is not just a list of steps; your readers should also understand how this topic might be relevant to their lives. Ask yourself: Why should a reader care about this skill or task? Where, when or for what reasons might someone want or need to do it?

Consider the last paragraph in “ How to Start a Family Band ”:

To be in a family band, you have to be prepared to spend a lot of time together, actively working on cohesion. Music can act as a kind of binding agent. When they’re not in quarantine, the Haim sisters see, or at least talk to, each other every day. “Instead of camping as kids, or going hiking, it was like, ‘OK, we’re going to practice a few songs,’” Danielle says. “It was definitely my parents’ ploy to spend more time with us.”

What reason does the writer provide for why a reader might want to try this activity? What additional background does she share from the expert, Danielle Haim, to help explain why a family — even one that might not be musical — may want to start a band together?

Submit your final piece.

Once you’ve written and edited your essay, give it a title (“How to…”) and submit it to our contest by Feb. 14. We can’t wait to learn the skills you’ll teach us!

Natalie Proulx joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2017 after working as an English language arts teacher and curriculum writer. More about Natalie Proulx

Katherine Schulten has been a Learning Network editor since 2006. Before that, she spent 19 years in New York City public schools as an English teacher, school-newspaper adviser and literacy coach. More about Katherine Schulten

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A (Very) Simple Way to Improve Your Writing

• Mark Rennella

It’s called the “one-idea rule” — and any level of writer can use it.

The “one idea” rule is a simple concept that can help you sharpen your writing, persuade others by presenting your argument in a clear, concise, and engaging way. What exactly does the rule say?

• Every component of a successful piece of writing should express only one idea.
• In persuasive writing, your “one idea” is often the argument or belief you are presenting to the reader. Once you identify what that argument is, the “one-idea rule” can help you develop, revise, and connect the various components of your writing.
• For instance, let’s say you’re writing an essay. There are three components you will be working with throughout your piece: the title, the paragraphs, and the sentences.
• Each of these parts should be dedicated to just one idea. The ideas are not identical, of course, but they’re all related. If done correctly, the smaller ideas (in sentences) all build (in paragraphs) to support the main point (suggested in the title).

Where your work meets your life. See more from Ascend here .

Most advice about writing looks like a long laundry list of “do’s and don’ts.” These lists can be helpful from time to time, but they’re hard to remember … and, therefore, hard to depend on when you’re having trouble putting your thoughts to paper. During my time in academia, teaching composition at the undergraduate and graduate levels, I saw many people struggle with this.

• MR Mark Rennella is Associate Editor at HBP and has published two books, Entrepreneurs, Managers, and Leaders and The Boston Cosmopolitans .  

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• Essay Editor

Essay - What it Is and How to Write it With an AI Aithor

Writing concise and persuasive texts is a skill required in many professional settings. One of the ways we learn this skill is by writing essays. However, essays require lots of preparation and research, so they can be hard to write, especially if you struggle to understand how to make your essay better.

In this article, you’ll learn what an essay is and how to use the Aithor AI essay generator for writing essays.

Revolutionize your writing process: our AI rewrite tool is here to help

What is an essay?

In a broad sense, an essay is a genre of writing that allows its author to explore a certain topic in detail. The main goal of an essay is to present certain facts and opinions to its readers, provoke thought, engage them in discussion around the issue at hand, and sometimes even convince them of the author’s point of view.

To do this, essays always follow a set structure consisting of:

• the introduction , where the author introduces readers to the topic of the essay and to the main argument the essay is set to prove,
• the body , where the author develops the main idea of the essay, expanding on its topic and providing reasoning to prove the main argument,
• the conclusion , where the author summarizes the entire text and once again states the initial argument.

Due to this complex structure, essay authors have to research the topic of their future essays and create detailed plans to communicate their points across. This can become an issue for many students who often have to write essays on subjects they aren’t closely familiar with.

Thankfully, it is now possible to use AI to help write essays with a strong premise and reasoning. Let’s find out how you can utilize essay generator Aithor to create essays for your academic purposes.

How to write an essay with AI essay generator Aithor

Aithor.com is an AI essay generator created specifically to provide aid to students with their essay assignments. There are multiple ways AI can be used to create perfect texts on any given topic. Here is an overview of how AI can help with each stage of writing a perfect essay.

1. Identifying the thesis statement

A thesis statement is a brief summary of an essay that contains the main argument you are going to refer to throughout the whole text. Your essay writing process should always start with identifying a proper thesis statement as it will influence your line of reasoning and analysis.

AI generators can prove a great assistance in this stage of essay writing. By simply typing in the broader topic of your essay, you can get a list of a dozen potential thesis statements offering different outlooks on the issue at hand. The only thing you will need to do is choose the one that resonates with you the most.

2. Gathering sources

Without learning about the background of an issue, it’s impossible to write a comprehensive essay. That’s when AI for writing essays can provide much-needed assistance.

The essay generator Aithor can sort through a large database of academic literature in mere seconds and find sources that can be used in your essay. This saves a tremendous amount of time, allowing you to focus on studying the subject instead of wasting your time on manual searching.

3. Meeting word count requirement

When you write an essay assignment, you often have to meet a certain word count requirement. However, this can prove hard when you feel like you’ve already exhausted the topic.

The good news is, that it’s easy to learn how to get AI to write an essay addition. Simply scan the text of your essay and find the parts you think need to be a bit longer. Then you can prompt an essay generator to continue writing a specific part of your essay, which can help you achieve the required word count.

4. Asking for examples

If you’re unsure of how your essay should look, you can use AI-generated essays as an example. AI generators are good at creating template texts illustrating how to write specific texts. It can also help you decide how you want to approach your analysis and present your arguments effectively.

5. Avoiding plagiarism

The essay generator Aithor has access to a vast database of texts and can check your essay for any accidental plagiarism. In addition, Aithor can help you reference your sources properly and per specific academic standards, which is also important to avoid triggering anti-plagiarism systems. 

6. Enhancing your grammar

Like any other written text, an essay shouldn’t include any grammar or stylistic mistakes, or you may end up with a lower grade than you hoped for.

AI can provide good feedback to improve the quality of your essay and correct any mistakes. This is particularly important for students who spend a long amount of time on their essays as they might become so engrossed in their writing that they fail to notice any errors.

Conclusion: How to Write it With an AI Aithor

AI essay generators like Aithor.com have become a great help when it comes to essay writing. From helping students conduct research to checking for grammar mistakes, AI tools can significantly improve the quality of students’ work. Knowing how to make your essay better with AI is crucial in the fast-paced world of academic studies, so make sure to explore all the ways of using AI for writing essays.

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Microsoft 365 Life Hacks > Writing > How AI can help proofread and edit your essays

How AI can help proofread and edit your essays

Don’t let little mistakes hold you back from getting a better grade. Learn how you can use AI to help you proofread and edit your essays.

Before submitting your essay, having a second set of eyes to catch any typos or grammatical errors is invaluable. If human help isn’t available, AI can step in to proofread or edit your work, offering instant feedback even under tight deadlines . Take a look at the different ways you can use AI for essay editing.

Ask AI to help you identify typos or grammatical errors

It’s easy for the human mind to skim over obvious typos and grammar errors. AI can help you identify these spelling mistakes and grammar issues so you can put some professional polish on your paper. If you’re aware of a specific issue that you struggle with in your essays, you can ask AI to proofread specifically on those errors. Copy and paste your essay into your favorite AI platform and try one of these prompts:

• Can you identify any typos in this paper and explain why they are incorrect?
• I often put commas in the wrong place. Can you identify any incorrect commas in my essay and tell me why they’re incorrect?
• Can you help me identify any incorrect homophones in my essay?

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Ask AI to help you refine your sentences

Writing clearly is important for all forms of writing, but it’s especially important for academic works. AI can help you edit your essays so that your sentences are easy to understand. Copy and paste your essay into an AI platform and try these prompts to refine its sentences:

• Can you find passive sentences in my essay and explain how to rewrite them actively?
• My teacher is a stickler for dangling modifiers . Can you point out any dangling modifiers in my essay?
• Are there any sentence fragments in my essay?

Ask AI for style guide assistance

If your instructor has asked you to follow a specific style guide , they may deduct points if your essay doesn’t follow it. Try these prompts to get some essay editing help:

• Can you review if book titles are correctly italicized according to the Chicago Manual of Style, and check for other style-specific issues?
• My essay is supposed to follow MLA format. Can you identify any parts of my essay that don’t follow MLA format ?
• How should I format quotes in APA format ?

Ask AI to fact-check your work

AI can help you identify incorrect facts that could impact your final grade. AI can also provide sources that you can use to back up your work. Try these prompts in your preferred AI platform to fact-check your work:

• Are the biographical facts I included about Jane Austen in my essay correct?
• Can you make sure all the dates that I listed in my essay are accurate?
• Can you confirm that the citations in my essay are from peer-reviewed and reputable sources ?

Getting the best proofreading and editing results from AI

When you use AI to proofread an essay, you’ll get better results when you provide it with as much context about the essay as possible. For example, you should include your teacher’s essay instructions so that the AI tool knows what to look for. If the teacher gave you their grading rubric, you should also give it to the AI tool so that it can provide even stronger proofreading and editing recommendations.

While AI can significantly aid in proofreading and editing, remember to use it responsibly, especially in academic settings. If you’re interested in learning more about AI, see if you can use AI to draft an essay for you .

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Should college essays touch on race? Some feel the affirmative action ruling leaves them no choice

When the supreme court ended affirmative action, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions.

Max Decker, a senior at Lincoln High School, sits for a portrait in the school library where he often worked on writing his college essays, in Portland, Ore., Wednesday, March 20, 2024.

Amanda Loman / AP

Like many students, Max Decker of Portland, Oregon, had drafted a college essay on one topic, only to change direction after the Supreme Court ruling in June.

Decker initially wrote about his love for video games. In a childhood surrounded by constant change, navigating his parents’ divorce, the games he took from place to place on his Nintendo DS were a source of comfort.

But the essay he submitted to colleges focused on the community he found through Word is Bond, a leadership group for young Black men in Portland.

As the only biracial, Jewish kid with divorced parents in a predominantly white, Christian community, Decker wrote he felt like the odd one out. On a trip with Word is Bond to Capitol Hill, he and friends who looked just like him shook hands with lawmakers. The experience, he wrote, changed how he saw himself.

“It’s because I’m different that I provide something precious to the world, not the other way around,” wrote Decker, whose top college choice is Tulane, in New Orleans, because of the region’s diversity.

This year’s senior class is the first in decades to navigate college admissions without affirmative action . The Supreme Court upheld the practice in decisions going back to the 1970s, but this court’s conservative supermajority found it is unconstitutional for colleges to give students extra weight because of their race alone.

Still, the decision left room for race to play an indirect role: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote universities can still consider how an applicant’s life was shaped by their race, “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability.”

Scores of colleges responded with new essay prompts asking about students’ backgrounds.

FILE - Demonstrators protest outside of the Supreme Court in Washington, in this June 29, 2023 file photo, after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, saying race cannot be a factor.

Jose Luis Magana / AP

Writing about feeling more comfortable with being Black

When Darrian Merritt started writing his essay, his first instinct was to write about events that led to him going to live with his grandmother as a child. Those were painful memories, but he thought they might play well at schools like Yale, Stanford and Vanderbilt.

“I feel like the admissions committee might expect a sob story or a tragic story,” said Merritt, a senior in Cleveland. “I wrestled with that a lot.”

Eventually he abandoned the idea and aimed for an essay that would stand out for its positivity.

Merritt wrote about a summer camp where he started to feel more comfortable in his own skin. He described embracing his personality and defying his tendency to please others. But the essay also reflects on his feelings of not being “Black enough” and getting made fun of for listening to “white people music.”

Related: Oregon colleges, universities weigh potential outcomes of US Supreme Court decision on affirmative action

Essay about how to embrace natural hair

When Hillary Amofa started writing her college essay, she told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. About being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana and growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. About hardship and struggle.

Then she deleted it all.

“I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18-year-old senior at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago. “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.”

Amofa was just starting to think about her essay when the court issued its decision, and it left her with a wave of questions. Could she still write about her race? Could she be penalized for it? She wanted to tell colleges about her heritage but she didn’t want to be defined by it.

In English class, Amofa and her classmates read sample essays that all seemed to focus on some trauma or hardship. It left her with the impression she had to write about her life’s hardest moments to show how far she’d come. But she and some classmates wondered if their lives had been hard enough to catch the attention of admissions offices.

Hillary Amofa, laughs as she participates in a team building game with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. "I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping," said the 18 year-old senior, "And I'm just like, this doesn't really say anything about me as a person."

Charles Rex Arbogast / AP

Amofa used to think affirmative action was only a factor at schools like Harvard and Yale. After the court’s ruling, she was surprised to find that race was taken into account even at public universities she was applying to.

Now, without affirmative action, she wondered if mostly white schools will become even whiter.

It’s been on her mind as she chooses between Indiana University and the University of Dayton, both of which have relatively few Black students. When she was one of the only Black students in her grade school, she could fall back on her family and Ghanaian friends at church. At college, she worries about loneliness.

“That’s what I’m nervous about,” she said. “Going and just feeling so isolated, even though I’m constantly around people.”

Related: Some Oregon universities, politicians disappointed in Supreme Court decision on affirmative action

The first drafts of her essay didn’t tell colleges about who she is now, she said.

Her final essay describes how she came to embrace her natural hair. She wrote about going to a mostly white grade school where classmates made jokes about her afro.

Over time, she ignored their insults and found beauty in the styles worn by women in her life. She now runs a business doing braids and other hairstyles in her neighborhood.

“Criticism will persist,” she wrote “but it loses its power when you know there’s a crown on your head!”

Ma reported from Portland, Oregon.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org .

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• Israel-Hamas War

Netanyahu’s Appetite for Confronting U.S. Presidents May Cost Israel This Time

I t was fully expected that Israel would be displeased that the United States abstained on a United Nations resolution calling for a Gaza ceasefire—instead of blocking it with a veto. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reaction was outright ridiculous, as he announced he won’t send his top advisors to Washington for talks about the war. Why did he do that?

Netanyahu has a long history of angering presidents—mostly, although not exclusively, Democrats. After he lectured Bill Clinton in the White House in 1996, the President grumbled to his staff: “Who the f**k does he think he is? Who’s the f**king superpower here?”

While you might think that Israel’s longest serving prime minister would have learned from experience, think about this: He probably has concluded that he always gets away with it. Netanyahu, a self-described expert on the U.S., is taking U.S. support for granted—in the belief that Evangelical Christians and America’s tiny Jewish minority will ensure that Israel is always loved, constantly armed, and repeatedly forgiven for any missteps.

And yet, at this point, after President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have said that Israel has been bombing indiscriminately in Gaza, and Biden said the military reaction to the Hamas massacres of October 7 has been “over the top,” Netanyahu still thinks he can take a slap at Biden.

It’s getting pretty clear that Israel’s prime minister is gambling, and he’s putting his chips on Donald Trump. Netanyahu—and the rightwing extremists in his government who want to annex the West Bank, and now would like to rebuild Jewish settlements in Gaza—feel that if Trump is back in the White House, he will again let Israel do whatever it wants. And, in their view, if Republicans can capture the Senate and keep the House, then Israel will really have it made.

That’s a lousy bet. No one can count on Trump to stick to whatever position he’s voicing at the moment. In fact, the former president bears a grudge against Netanyahu for congratulating Biden on his election victory in 2020. Trump harshly criticizes American Jews for voting for Democrats, and in an interview with an Israeli newspaper now says the Gaza war looks bad and tells Netanyahu to finish it fast and focus on peace.

For decades, in Israeli politics, the government wanted to look like it was 100% in lockstep with the U.S.—that beacon of a free country that, since the Yom Kippur War of 1973, has been Israel’s main arms supplier and protector in the world’s diplomatic arenas. Israel was proud to say that it maintained bipartisan support in the U.S., and both its diplomats and the American lobby AIPAC took pains to make friends with both Democrats and Republicans.

But Netanyahu has embraced the hubris of thinking he’ll look strong to his political base if he challenges American presidents and other foreign critics. He and his closest officials have strengthened ties with the Republicans—especially hawkish conservatives who admire what the small Jewish state is able to accomplish in an overwhelmingly Muslim region.

Read More: Israel Must Not Let Netanyahu Reject the Biden Peace Plan

When Israeli leaders perceived that many Democrats were questioning Israeli actions, especially its occupation of the West Bank since 1967, Israel turned a cold shoulder to the progressives. And the American Left, no longer admiring Israel as a liberal and enlightened enclave in the Middle East, made Zionism one of its main targets for condemnation.

As statistics and our own sensibilities show, that has contributed to an upsurge in antisemitism —in the U.S. and worldwide—notably since October 7 and the Israeli invasion of Gaza that followed. Jews in many countries are being harassed or attacked by anti-Semites and anti-Zionists, who are cut from the same cloth, on both the political Left and Right.

Netanyahu’s bull-headed insensitivity is partially to blame. In the U.S., he was turning off liberals long before his current feud with Biden. Recall his 2015 address to Congress, after an invitation extended only by Republicans. His speech called on America to reject Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Netanyahu preached, then lost. The support Israel forfeited from Democrats has had lasting impact.

The alliance between Israel and the U.S. is not a force of nature that can be taken for granted. Thirty years ago, we wrote a book aimed at deciphering the secrets of an alliance between a superpower and a tiny country in a far-off strategic region. We outlined factors such as shared democratic values, the importance of the Jewish American community, the strong attachment of Evangelicals to the Holy Land, and memories of the Holocaust.

We also warned that the passage of time and changes in U.S. demography could erode support for Israel. It's happening now, with protests on American campuses against the war in Gaza. Many of the protestors consume a diet of self-selected, sometimes fake news and have little understanding of the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel still enjoys widespread support in America, though it’s constantly eroded by the behavior of Netanyahu and the extremists in his cabinet. “It seems that U.S. officials speak politely but firmly to their Israeli counterparts,” former Israeli ambassador to Washington Danny Ayalon told us. “But the Israelis pretend they don’t understand what they’re being told.”

For now, the Israeli government and military officials who were going to fly to Washington this week will stay home. They had been invited by the White House to hear alternatives developed by Pentagon and CIA strategists: ways of crushing the last remnants of Hamas, and hopefully liberating hostages, without a huge attack on Rafah, where over a million Palestinian refugees have gathered.

Netanyahu isn’t really interested in those talks. He explicitly declares that the Israel Defense Forces must enter Rafah, to kill or capture the top Hamas military chiefs. That means he, apparently backed by everyone in his post-October 7 war cabinet, feels it is necessary to restore Israeli deterrence by showing the power of the IDF.

To the Biden Administration and most of the world, that looks like indifference toward the tens of thousands of Gaza civilians who have been killed or wounded, and the hundreds of thousands made homeless.

Biden’s decision to abstain at the U.N. – rather than protect Israel, as usual, with a veto – was a message to Netanyahu that enough is enough. Netanyahu thinks he’s able to slap back, but his petulance reminds us of the satirical Peter Sellers movie of 1959, “The Mouse that Roared,” in which a tiny fictitious country declares war on the U.S. in the hope of receiving reconstruction aid.

That was farce, of course. The reality is that Israel cannot afford to endanger the aid that's already flowing. On top of $3.8 billion in annual direct military assistance, the U.S. has sent more than 400 transport planes and 30 ships carrying 20,000 tons of ammunition, rockets, and other essential military equipment to help Israel prosecute the Gaza war. "Without this re-supply, the Israeli army wouldn't be able to keep fighting beyond another six months," a former Israeli general told us.

Darker days for American-Israeli relations could follow, especially if Netanyahu keeps misjudging the country that’s been Israel’s greatest defender.

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The chickadee in the snowbank: A ‘canary in the coal mine’ for climate change in the Sierra Nevada mountains

Ph.D. Candidate in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology, University of Nevada, Reno

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Benjamin Sonnenberg receives funding from the National Science Foundation.

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Wet snow pelts my face and pulls against my skis as I climb above 8,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada of eastern California, tugging a sled loaded with batteries, bolts, wire and 40 pounds of sunflower seeds critical to our mountain chickadee research.

As we reach the remote research site, I duck under a tarp and open a laptop. A chorus of identification numbers are shouted back and forth as fellow behavioral ecologist Vladimir Pravosudov and I program “smart” bird feeders for an upcoming experiment.

I have spent the past six years monitoring a population of mountain chickadees here, tracking their life cycles and, importantly, their memory, working in a system Pravosudov established in 2013 . The long, consistent record from this research site has allowed us to observe how chickadees survive in extreme winter snowfall and to identify ecological patterns and changes.

In recent history, intense winters are often followed by drought years here in the Sierra Nevada and in much of the U.S. West . This teeter-totter pattern has been identified as one of the unexpected symptoms of climate change, and its impact on the chickadees is providing an early warning of the disruptions ahead for the dynamics within these coniferous forest ecosystems.

Our research shows that a mountain chickadee facing deep snow is, to borrow a cliche, like a canary in a coal mine – its survivability tells us about the challenges ahead.

The extraordinary memory of a chickadee

As Pravosudov calls out the next identification number, and as my legs slowly get colder and wetter, a charming and chipper “ DEE DEE DEE ” chimes down from a nearby tree. How is it that a bird weighing barely more than a few sheets of paper is more comfortable in this storm than I am?

The answer comes down to the chickadees’ incredible spatial cognitive abilities.

Cognition is the processes by which animals acquire, process, store and act on information from their environment . It is critical to many species but is often subtle and difficult to measure in nonhuman animals.

Chickadees are food-storing specialists that hide tens of thousands of individual food items throughout the forest under edges of tree bark, or even between pine needles, each fall. Then, they use their specialized spatial memory to retrieve those food caches in the months to come.

Conditions in the high Sierras can be harsh, and if chickadees can’t remember where their food is, they die.

We measure the spatial memory of chickadees using a classic associative learning task but in a very atypical location . To do this, we hang a circular array of eight feeders equipped with radio-frequency identification and filled with seed in several locations across our field site . Birds are tagged with “keys” – transponder tags in leg bands that contain individual identification numbers and allow them to open the doors of their assigned feeders to get a food reward.

The setup allows us to measure the spatial memory performance of individual chickadees, because they have to remember which feeder their key enables them to open. Over eight years, our findings demonstrate that chickadees with better spatial memory ability are more likely to survive in the high mountains than those with worse memories.

However, chickadees may be facing increasing challenges that will shape their future in the high mountains. In 2017, a year with record-breaking snow levels, adult chickadees showed the lowest probability of survival ever measured at our site . This exceptionally extreme winter came with recurrent storms containing cold weather and high winds, making it difficult for even the memory savvy chickadees to forage and survive.

Nevertheless, triumphant populations have persisted in high-elevation mountain environments, but their future is becoming uncertain.

What’s the problem?

“It’s weather whiplash,” says Adrian Harpold , a mountain ecohydrologist. Harpold works to understand variations in climate patterns within forest environments, and one of his field sites lies alongside our chickadee research site.

The Sierra Nevada and other mountain ranges in western North America have been experiencing more extreme snow years and drought years , amplified by climate change. Extreme snow linked to global warming might seem counterintuitive, but it’s basic physics. Warmer air can hold more moisture – about 7% more for every degree Celsius (every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) that temperatures rise. This can result in heavier snowfall when storms strike.

In 2023’s record winter, over 17 feet (5 meters) of snow covered the landscape that our chickadees were using every day. In fact, these intense storms and cold temperatures not only made it difficult for birds to survive the winter but made it almost impossible for them to breed the next summer: 46% of chickadee nests at our higher elevation site failed to produce any offspring. This was likely due to the deep snow that prevented them from finding emerging insects to feed nestlings or even reaching nesting sites at all until July.

The cascading harms from too much snow

Even in years of tremendous snowfall, chickadees can still use their finely honed spatial memories to recover food. However, severe storms can shorten their survival odds. And if they do survive the winter, their nesting sites – tree cavities – may be buried under feet of snow in the spring.

It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you can’t reach your nest.

Extreme snow oscillations also affect insects that are critical for feeding chickadee chicks. Limited resources lead to smaller chickadee offspring that are less likely to survive high in the mountains.

Snow cover is good for overwintering insects in most cases, as it provides an insulating blanket that saves them from dying during those freezing months. However, if the snow persists too long into the summer, insects can run out of energy and die before they can emerge, or emerge after chickadees really need them . Drought years also can drive insect population decline.

Extremes at both ends of the spectrum are making it harder for chickadees to thrive, and more and more we are seeing oscillations between these extremes.

These compounded effects mean that in some years chickadees simply don’t successfully nest at all. This leads to a decline in chickadee populations in years with worse whiplash – drought followed by high snow on repeat – especially at high elevations. This is especially concerning, as many mountain-dwelling avian species are forecasted to move up in elevation to escape warming temperatures, which may turn out to be hazardous.

Lessons for the future

Chickadees may be portrayed as radiating tranquil beauty on holiday cards, but realistically, these loud, round ruffians are tough survivors of harsh winter environments in northern latitudes.

Our long-term research following these chickadees provides a unique window into the relationships between winter snow, chickadee populations and the biological community around them, such as coniferous forests and insect populations.

These relationships illustrate that climate change is a more complicated story than just the temperature climb – and that its whiplash and cascading effects can destabilize ecosystems.

• Climate change
• Sierra Nevada

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Writing My Autobiography

A re you still writing?” he asked.

“I am,” I answered.

“What are you working on at the moment?”

“An autobiography,” I said.

“Interesting,” he replied. “Whose?”

The implication here, you will note, is that mine hasn’t been a life sufficiently interesting to merit an autobiography. The implication isn’t altogether foolish. Most autobiographies, at least the best autobiographies, have been written by people who have historical standing, or have known many important people, or have lived in significant times, or have noteworthy family connections or serious lessons to convey . I qualify on none of these grounds. Not that, roughly two years ago when I sat down to write my autobiography, I let that stop me.

An autobiography, to state the obvious, is at base a biography written by its own subject. But how is one to write it: as a matter of setting the record straight, as a form of confessional, as a mode of seeking justice, or as a justification of one’s life? “An autobiography,” wrote George Orwell, “is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” Is this true? I prefer to think not.

Autobiography is a complex enterprise, calling for its author not only to know himself but to be honest in conveying that knowledge. “I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Let him relate the events of his own life with Honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them.” One of the nicest things about being a professor, it has been said, is that one gets to talk for fifty minutes without being interrupted. So one of the allurements of autobiography is that one gets to write hundreds of pages about that eminently fascinating character, oneself, even if in doing so one only establishes one’s insignificance.

The great autobiographies—of which there have not been all that many—have been wildly various. One of the first, that of the Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, is marked by an almost unrelieved braggadocio: No artist was more perfect, no warrior more brave, no lover more pleasing than the author, or so he would have us believe. Edward Gibbon’s autobiography, though elegantly written, is disappointing in its brevity. That of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, heavily striking the confessional note, might have been told in a booth to a priest. Ben Franklin’s autobiography is full of advice on how the rest of us should live. John Stuart Mill’s is astounding in its account of its author’s prodigiously early education, which began with his learning Greek under his father’s instruction at the age of three. Then there is Henry Adams’s autobiography, suffused with disappointment over his feeling out of joint with his times and the world’s not recognizing his true value. In Making It , Norman Podhoretz wrote an autobiography informed by a single message, which he termed a “dirty little secret,” namely that there is nothing wrong with ambition and that success, despite what leftist intellectuals might claim, is nothing to be ashamed of.

Please note that all of these are books written by men. Might it be that women lack the vanity required to write—or should I say “indulge in”—the literary act of autobiography? In Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome , I recently read that Agrippina the Younger, the mother of Nero, wrote her autobiography, which has not survived, and which Mary Beard counts as “one of the great losses of all classical literature.” I wish that Jane Austen had written an autobiography, and so too George Eliot and Willa Cather. Perhaps these three women, great writers all, were too sensibly modest for autobiography, that least modest of all literary forms.

A utobiography can be the making or breaking of writers who attempt it. John Stuart Mill’s autobiography has gone a long way toward humanizing a writer whose other writings tend toward the coldly formal. Harold Laski wrote that Mill’s “ Autobiography , in the end the most imperishable of his writings, is a record as noble as any in our literature of consistent devotion to the public good.”

If Mill’s autobiography humanized him, the autobiography of the novelist Anthony Trollope did for him something approaching the reverse. In An Autobiography , Trollope disdains the notion of an author’s needing inspiration to write well. He reports that “there was no day on which it was my positive duty to write for the publishers, as it was my duty to write reports for the Post Office,” where he had a regular job. “I was free to be idle if I pleased. But as I had made up my mind to undertake this second profession [that of novelist], I found it to be expedient to bind myself by certain self-imposed laws.” Trollope recounts—emphasis here on “counts”—that as a novelist he averages forty pages per week, at 250 words per page. He writes: “There are those who would be ashamed to subject themselves to such a taskmaster, and who think that the man who works with his imagination should allow himself to wait till inspiration moves him. When I have heard such doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my scorn.” Trollope then mentions that on the day after he finished his novel Doctor Thorne , he began writing his next novel, The Bertrams . For a long spell the literati refused to forgive Trollope for shearing inspiration away from the creation of literary art, for comparing the job of the novelist to a job at the post office. Only the splendid quality of his many novels eventually won him forgiveness and proper recognition.

A serious biography takes up what the world thinks of its subject, what his friends and family think of him, and—if the information is available in letters, diaries, journals, or interviews—what he thinks of himself. An autobiography is ultimately about the last question: what the author thinks of himself. Yet how many of us have sufficient self-knowledge to give a convincing answer? In her splendid novel Memoirs of Hadrian , Marguerite Yourcenar has Hadrian note: “When I seek deep within me for knowledge of myself what I find is obscure, internal, unformulated, and as secret as any complicity.” The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the scrupulously examined one is rare indeed.

My own life has not provided the richest fodder for autobiography. For one thing, it has not featured much in the way of drama. For another, good fortune has allowed me the freedom to do with my life much as I have wished. I have given my autobiography the title Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life , with the subtitle Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life . Now well along in its closing chapter, mine, I contend, has been thus far—here I pause to touch wood—a most lucky life.

My title derives from the story of Croesus, who ruled the country of Lydia from circa 585–547 b.c. , and who is perhaps today best known for the phrase “rich as Croesus.” The vastly wealthy Croesus thought himself the luckiest man on earth and asked confirmation of this from Solon, the wise Athenian, who told him that in fact the luckiest man on earth was another Athenian who had two sons in that year’s Olympics. When Croesus asked who was second luckiest, Solon cited another Greek who had a most happy family life. Croesus was displeased but not convinced by Solon’s answers. Years later he was captured by the Persian Cyrus, divested of his kingdom and his wealth, and set on a pyre to be burned alive, before which he was heard to exclaim that Solon had been right. The moral of the story is, of course: Never say you have had a lucky life until you know how your life ends.

I have known serious sadness in my life. I have undergone a divorce. I have become a member of that most dolorous of clubs, parents who have buried one of their children. Yet I have had much to be grateful for. In the final paragraph of a book I wrote some years ago on the subject of ambition, I noted that “We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing.” In all these realms, I lucked out. I was born to intelligent, kindly parents; at a time that, though I was drafted into the army, allowed me to miss being called up to fight in any wars; and in the largely unmitigated prosperity enjoyed by the world’s most interesting country, the United States of America.

Writing is a form of discovery. Yet can even writing ferret out the quality and meaning of one’s own life? Alexis de Tocqueville, the endlessly quotable Tocqueville, wrote: “The fate of individuals is still more hidden than that of peoples,” and “the destinies of individuals are often as uncertain as those of nations.” Fate, destiny, those two great tricksters, who knows what they have in store for one, even in the final days of one’s life? I, for example, as late as the age of eighteen, had never heard the word “intellectual.” If you had asked me what a man of letters was, I would have said a guy who works at the post office. Yet I have been destined to function as an intellectual for the better part of my adult life, and have more than once been called a man of letters. Fate, destiny, go figure!

T he first question that arises in writing one’s autobiography is what to include and what to exclude. Take, for starters, sex. In his nearly seven-hundred-page autobiography, Journeys of the Mind , the historian of late antiquity Peter Brown waits until page 581 to mention, in the most glancing way, that he is married. Forty or so pages later, the name of a second wife is mentioned. Whether he had children with either of these wives, we never learn. But then, Brown’s is a purely intellectual autobiography, concerned all but exclusively with the development of the author’s mind and those who influenced that development.

My autobiography, though less than half the length of Brown’s, allowed no such luxury of reticence. Sex, especially when I was an adolescent, was a central subject, close to a preoccupation. After all, boys—as I frequently instructed my beautiful granddaughter Annabelle when she was growing up—are brutes. I came of age BP, or Before the Pill, and consummated sex, known in that day as “going all the way,” was not then a serious possibility. Too much was at risk—pregnancy, loss of reputation—for middle-class girls. My friends and I turned to prostitution.

Apart from occasionally picking up streetwalkers on some of Chicago’s darker streets, prostitution for the most part meant trips of sixty or so miles to the bordellos of Braidwood or Kankakee, Illinois. The sex, costing $3, was less than perfunctory. (“Don’t bother to take off your socks or that sweater,” one was instructed.) What was entailed was less sensual pleasure than a rite of passage, of becoming a man, of “losing your cherry,” a phrase I have only recently learned means forgoing one’s innocence. We usually went on these trips in groups of five or six in one or another of our fathers’ cars. Much joking on the way up and even more on the way back. Along Chicago’s Outer Drive, which we took home in those days, there was a Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer sign that read, “Have you had it lately?,” which always got a good laugh.

I like to think of myself as a shy pornographer, or, perhaps better, a sly pornographer. By this I mean that in my fiction and where necessary in my essays I do not shy away from the subject of sex, only from the need to describe it in any of its lurid details. So I have done in my autobiography. On the subject of sex in my first marriage (of two), for example, I say merely, “I did not want my money back.” But, then, all sex, if one comes to think about it, is essentially comic, except of course one’s own.

On the inclusion-exclusion question, the next subject I had to consider was money, or my personal finances. Financially I have nothing to brag about. In my autobiography I do, though, occasionally give the exact salaries—none of them spectacular—of the jobs I’ve held. With some hesitation (lest it seem boasting) I mention that a book I wrote on the subject of snobbery earned, with its paperback sale, roughly half-a-million dollars. I fail to mention those of my books that earned paltry royalties, or, as I came to think of them, peasantries. In my autobiography, I contented myself with noting my good fortune in being able to earn enough money doing pretty much what I wished to do and ending up having acquired enough money not to worry overmuch about financial matters. Like the man said, a lucky life.

If I deal glancingly in my autobiography with sex and personal finances, I tried to take a pass on politics. My own political development is of little interest. I started out in my political life a fairly standard liberal—which in those days meant despising Richard Nixon—and have ended up today contemptuous of both our political parties: Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, as the critic Dwight Macdonald referred to them. Forgive the self-congratulatory note, but in politics I prefer to think myself a member in good standing of that third American political party, never alas on the ballot, the anti-BS party.

Of course, sometimes one needs to have a politics, if only to fight off the politics of others. Ours is a time when politics seems to be swamping all else: art, education, journalism, culture generally. I have had the dubious distinction of having been “canceled,” for what were thought my political views, and I write about this experience in my autobiography. I was fired from the editorship of Phi Beta Kappa’s quarterly magazine, the American Scholar —a job I had held for more than twenty years—because of my ostensibly conservative, I suppose I ought to make that “right-wing,” politics. My chief cancellers were two academic feminists and an African-American historian-biographer, who sat on the senate, or governing board, of Phi Beta Kappa.

T he official version given out by Phi Beta Kappa for my cancellation—in those days still known as a firing—was that the magazine was losing subscribers and needed to seek younger readers. Neither assertion was true, but both currently appear in the Wikipedia entry under my name. The New York Times also printed this “official” but untrue version of my cancellation. In fact, I was canceled because I had failed to run anything in the magazine about academic feminism or race, both subjects that had already been done to death elsewhere and that I thought cliché-ridden and hence of little interest for a magazine I specifically tried to keep apolitical. During my twenty-two years at the American Scholar , the name of no current United States president was mentioned. If anything resembling a theme emerged during my editorship, it was the preservation of the tradition of the liberal arts, a subject on which I was able to acquire contributions from Jacques Barzun, Paul Kristeller, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Frederick Crews, and others.

That I was fired not for anything I had done but for things I had failed to do is an indication of how far we had come in the realm of political correctness. I take up this topic in my autobiography, one theme of which is the vast changes that have taken place in American culture over my lifetime. A notable example is an essay on homosexuality that I wrote and published in Harper’s in 1970, a mere fifty-three years ago. The essay made the points that we still did not know much about the origin of male homosexuality, that there was much hypocrisy concerning the subject, that homosexuals were living under considerable social pressure and prejudice, and that given a choice, most people would prefer that their children not be homosexual. This, as I say, was in 1970, before the gay liberation movement had got underway in earnest. The essay attracted a vast number of letters in opposition, and a man named Merle Miller, who claimed I was calling for genocide of homosexuals, wrote a book based on the essay. Gore Vidal, never known for his temperate reasoning, claimed my argument was ad Hitlerum . (Vidal, after contracting Epstein-Barr virus late in life, claimed that “Joseph Epstein gave it to me.”) I have never reprinted the essay in any of my collections because I felt that it would stir up too much strong feeling. For what it is worth, I also happen to be pleased by the greater tolerance accorded homosexuality in the half century since my essay was published.

The larger point is that today neither Harper’s nor any other mainstream magazine would dare to publish that essay. Yet a few years after the essay was published, I was offered a job teaching in the English Department of Northwestern University, and the year after that, I was appointed editor of the American Scholar. Today, of course, neither job would have been available to me.

Do these matters—my cancellation from the American Scholar , my unearned reputation as a homophobe—come under the heading of self-justification? Perhaps so. But then, what better, or at least more convenient, place to attempt to justify oneself than in one’s autobiography?

Many changes have taken place in my lifetime, some for the better, some for the worse, some whose value cannot yet be known. I note, for example, if not the death then the attenuation of the extended family (nephews, nieces, cousins) in American life. Whereas much of my parents’ social life revolved around an extensive cousinage, I today have grandnephews and grandnieces living on both coasts whom I have never met and probably never shall. I imagine some of them one day being notified of my death and responding, “Really? [Pause] What’s for dinner?”

I take up in my autobiography what Philip Rieff called, in his book of this title, the Triumph of the Therapeutic, a development that has altered child-rearing, artistic creation, and much else in our culture. Although the doctrines of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and others are no longer taken as gospel, their secondary influence has conquered much of modern culture. My parents’ generation did not hold with therapeutic culture, which contends that the essentials of life are the achievement of self-esteem and individual happiness, replacing honor, courage, kindness, and generosity.

In my autobiography, I note that when my mother was depressed by her knowledge that she was dying of cancer, a friend suggested that there were support groups for people with terminal diseases, one of which might be helpful. I imagined telling my mother about such groups, and her response: “Let me see,” she is likely to have said. “You want me to go into a room with strangers, where I will listen to their problems and then I’ll tell them mine, and this will make me feel better.” Pause. “Is this the kind of idiot I’ve raised as a son?”

T hen there is digital culture, the verdict on which is not yet in. Digital culture has changed the way we read, think, make social connections, do business, and so much more. I write in my autobiography that in its consequences digital culture is up there with the printing press and the automobile. Its influence is still far from fully fathomed.

One of my challenges in writing my autobiography was to avoid seeming to brag about my quite modest accomplishments. In the Rhetoric , Aristotle writes: “Speaking at length about oneself, making false claims, taking the credit for what another has done, these are signs of boastfulness.” I tried not to lapse into boasting. Yet at one point I quote Jacques Barzun, in a letter to me, claiming that as a writer I am in the direct line of William Hazlitt, though in some ways better, for my task—that of finding the proper language to establish both intimacy and critical distance—is in the current day more difficult than in Hazlitt’s. At least I deliberately neglected to mention that, in response to my being fired from the American Scholar, Daniel Patrick Moynihan flew an American flag at half-mast over the Capitol, a flag he sent to me as a souvenir. Quoting others about my accomplishments, is this anything other than boasting by other means? I hope so, though even now I’m not altogether sure.

I have a certain pride in these modest accomplishments. Setting out in life, I never thought I should publish some thirty-odd books or have the good luck to continue writing well into my eighties. The question for me as an autobiographer was how to express that pride without preening. The most efficient way, of course, is never to write an autobiography.

Why, then, did I write mine? Although I have earlier characterized writing as a form of discovery, I did not, in writing my autobiography, expect to discover many radically new things about my character or the general lineaments of my life. Nor did I think that my life bore any lessons that were important to others. I had, and still have, little to confess; I have no hidden desire to be spanked by an NFL linebacker in a nun’s habit. A writer, a mere scribbler, I have led a largely spectatorial life, standing on the sidelines, glass of wine in hand, watching the circus pass before me.

Still, I wrote my autobiography, based in a loose way on Wordsworth’s notion that poetry arises from “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Writing it gave me an opportunity to review my life at the end of my life in a tranquil manner. I was able to note certain trends, parallels, and phenomena that have marked my life and set my destiny.

The first of these, as I remarked earlier, was the fortunate time in which I was born, namely the tail end of the Great Depression—to be specific, in 1937. Because of the Depression, people were having fewer children, and often having them later. (My mother was twenty-seven, my father thirty at my birth.) Born when it was, my generation, though subject to the draft—not, in my experience of it, a bad thing—danced between the wars: We were too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam. We were also children during World War II, the last war the country fully supported, which gave us a love of our country. Ours was a low-population generation, untroubled by the vagaries of college admissions or the trauma of rejection by the school of one’s choice. Colleges, in fact, wanted us.

Or consider parents, another fateful phenomenon over which one has no choice. To be born to thoughtless, or disagreeable, or depressed, or deeply neurotic parents cannot but substantially affect all one’s days. Having a father who is hugely successful in the world can be as dampening to the spirit as having a father who is a failure. And yet about all this one has no say. I have given the chapter on my parents the title “A Winning Ticket in the Parents Lottery,” for my own parents, though neither went to college, were thoughtful, honorable, and in no way psychologically crushing. They gave my younger brother and me the freedom to develop on our own; they never told me what schools to attend, what work to seek, whom or when to marry. I knew I was never at the center of my parents’ lives, yet I also knew I could count on them when I needed their support, which more than once I did, and they did not fail to come through. As I say, a winning ticket.

As one writes about one’s own life, certain themes are likely to emerge that hadn’t previously stood out so emphatically. In my case, one persistent motif is that of older boys, then older men, who have supported or aided me in various ways. A boy nearly two years older than I named Jack Libby saw to it that I wasn’t bullied or pushed around in a neighborhood where I was the youngest kid on the block. In high school, a boy to whom I have given the name Jeremy Klein taught me a thing or two about gambling and corruption generally. Later in life, men eight, nine, ten, even twenty or more years older than I promoted my career: Hilton Kramer in promoting my candidacy for the editorship of the American Scholar , Irving Howe in helping me get a teaching job (without an advanced degree) at Northwestern, John Gross in publishing me regularly on important subjects in the Times Literary Supplement , Edward Shils in ways too numerous to mention. Something there was about me, evidently, that was highly protégéable.

I  haven’t yet seen the index for my autobiography, but my guess is that it could have been name-ier. I failed, for example, to include my brief but pleasing friendship with Sol Linowitz. Sol was the chairman of Xerox, and later served the Johnson administration as ambassador to the Organization of American States. He also happened to be a reader of mine, and on my various trips to Washington I was often his guest at the F Street Club, a political lunch club where he reserved a private room in which we told each other jokes, chiefly Jewish jokes. I might also have added my six years as a member of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Arts, whose members included the actors Robert Stack and Celeste Holm, the Balanchine dancer Arthur Mitchell, Robert Joffrey, the soprano Renée Fleming, the novelist Toni Morrison, the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, the architect I. M. Pei, the painter Helen Frankenthaler, and other highly droppable names.

Confronting one’s regrets is another inescapable element in writing one’s autobiography. Ah, regrets: the red MG convertible one didn’t buy in one’s twenties, the elegant young Asian woman one should have asked to dinner, the year one failed to spend in Paris. The greater the number of one’s regrets, the grander their scope, the sadder, at its close, one’s life figures to be. I come out fairly well in the regrets ledger. I regret not having studied classics at university, and so today I cannot read ancient Greek. I regret not having been a better father to my sons. I regret not asking my mother more questions about her family and not telling my father what a good man I thought he was. As regrets go, these are not minor, yet neither have I found them to be crippling.

Then there is the matter of recognizing one’s quirks, or peculiar habits. A notable one of mine, acquired late in life, is to have become near to the reverse of a hypochondriac. I have not yet reached the stage of anosognosia, or the belief that one is well when one is ill—a stage, by the way, that Chekhov, himself a physician, seems to have attained. I take vitamins, get flu and Covid shots, and watch what I eat, but I try to steer clear of physicians. This tendency kicked in not long after my decades-long primary care physician retired. In his The Body: A Guide for Occupants , Bill Bryson defines good health as the health enjoyed by someone who hasn’t had a physical lately. The ancients made this point more directly, advising bene caca et declina medicos (translation on request) . For a variety of reasons, physicians of the current day are fond of sending patients for a multiplicity of tests: bone density tests, colonoscopies, biopsies, X-rays of all sorts, CT scans, MRIs, stopping only at SATs. I am not keen to discover ailments that don’t bother me. At the age of eighty-seven, I figure I am playing with house money, and I have no wish to upset the house by prodding my health in search of imperfections any more than is absolutely necessary.

The older one gets, unless one’s life is lived in pain or deepest regret, the more fortunate one feels. Not always, not everyone, I suppose. “The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum,” said George Bernard Shaw, who lived to age ninety-four. Though the world seems to be in a hell of a shape just now, I nonetheless prefer to delay my exit for as long as I can. I like it here, continue to find much that is interesting and amusing, and have no wish to depart the planet.

Still, with advancing years I have found my interests narrowing. Not least among my waning interests is that in travel. I like my domestic routine too much to abandon it for foreign countries where the natives figure to be wearing Air Jordan shoes, Ralph Lauren shirts, and cargo pants. Magazines that I once looked forward to, many of which I have written for in the past, no longer contain much that I find worth reading. A former moviegoer, I haven’t been to a movie theater in at least a decade. The high price of concert and opera tickets has driven me away. The supposedly great American playwrights—Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee—have never seemed all that good to me, and I miss them not at all. If all this sounds like a complaint that the culture has deserted me, I don’t feel that it has. I can still listen to my beloved Mozart on discs, read Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Willa Cather, and the other great novelists, watch the splendid movies of earlier days on Turner Classics and HBO—live, in other words, on the culture of the past.

“Vho needs dis?” Igor Stravinsky is supposed to have remarked when presented with some new phenomena of the avant-garde or other work in the realm of art without obvious benefit. “Vho needs dis?” is a question that occurred to me more than once or twice as I wrote my autobiography. All I can say is that those who read my autobiography will read of the life of a man lucky enough to have devoted the better part of his days to fitting words together into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into essays and stories on a wide variety of topics. Now in his autobiography all the sentences and paragraphs are about his own life. He hopes that these sentences are well made, these paragraphs have a point, and together they attain to a respectable truth quotient, containing no falsehoods whatsoever. He hopes that, on these modest grounds at least, his autobiography qualifies as worth reading.

Joseph Epstein  is author of  Gallimaufry , a collection of essays and reviews.

Image by  Museum Rotterdam on Wikimedia Commons , licensed via Creative Commons . Image cropped. 

Articles by Joseph Epstein

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• How to conclude an essay | Interactive example

How to Conclude an Essay | Interactive Example

Published on January 24, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on July 23, 2023.

The conclusion is the final paragraph of your essay . A strong conclusion aims to:

• Tie together the essay’s main points
• Show why your argument matters
• Leave the reader with a strong impression

Your conclusion should give a sense of closure and completion to your argument, but also show what new questions or possibilities it has opened up.

This conclusion is taken from our annotated essay example , which discusses the history of the Braille system. Hover over each part to see why it’s effective.

Braille paved the way for dramatic cultural changes in the way blind people were treated and the opportunities available to them. Louis Braille’s innovation was to reimagine existing reading systems from a blind perspective, and the success of this invention required sighted teachers to adapt to their students’ reality instead of the other way around. In this sense, Braille helped drive broader social changes in the status of blindness. New accessibility tools provide practical advantages to those who need them, but they can also change the perspectives and attitudes of those who do not.

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Table of contents

Step 1: return to your thesis, step 2: review your main points, step 3: show why it matters, what shouldn’t go in the conclusion, more examples of essay conclusions, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about writing an essay conclusion.

To begin your conclusion, signal that the essay is coming to an end by returning to your overall argument.

Don’t just repeat your thesis statement —instead, try to rephrase your argument in a way that shows how it has been developed since the introduction.

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Next, remind the reader of the main points that you used to support your argument.

Avoid simply summarizing each paragraph or repeating each point in order; try to bring your points together in a way that makes the connections between them clear. The conclusion is your final chance to show how all the paragraphs of your essay add up to a coherent whole.

To wrap up your conclusion, zoom out to a broader view of the topic and consider the implications of your argument. For example:

• Does it contribute a new understanding of your topic?
• Does it raise new questions for future study?
• Does it lead to practical suggestions or predictions?
• Can it be applied to different contexts?
• Can it be connected to a broader debate or theme?

Whatever your essay is about, the conclusion should aim to emphasize the significance of your argument, whether that’s within your academic subject or in the wider world.

Try to end with a strong, decisive sentence, leaving the reader with a lingering sense of interest in your topic.

The easiest way to improve your conclusion is to eliminate these common mistakes.

Don’t include new evidence

Any evidence or analysis that is essential to supporting your thesis statement should appear in the main body of the essay.

The conclusion might include minor pieces of new information—for example, a sentence or two discussing broader implications, or a quotation that nicely summarizes your central point. But it shouldn’t introduce any major new sources or ideas that need further explanation to understand.

Don’t use “concluding phrases”

Avoid using obvious stock phrases to tell the reader what you’re doing:

• “In conclusion…”
• “To sum up…”

These phrases aren’t forbidden, but they can make your writing sound weak. By returning to your main argument, it will quickly become clear that you are concluding the essay—you shouldn’t have to spell it out.

Don’t undermine your argument

Avoid using apologetic phrases that sound uncertain or confused:

• “This is just one approach among many.”
• “There are good arguments on both sides of this issue.”
• “There is no clear answer to this problem.”

Even if your essay has explored different points of view, your own position should be clear. There may be many possible approaches to the topic, but you want to leave the reader convinced that yours is the best one!

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• Argumentative
• Literary analysis

This conclusion is taken from an argumentative essay about the internet’s impact on education. It acknowledges the opposing arguments while taking a clear, decisive position.

The internet has had a major positive impact on the world of education; occasional pitfalls aside, its value is evident in numerous applications. The future of teaching lies in the possibilities the internet opens up for communication, research, and interactivity. As the popularity of distance learning shows, students value the flexibility and accessibility offered by digital education, and educators should fully embrace these advantages. The internet’s dangers, real and imaginary, have been documented exhaustively by skeptics, but the internet is here to stay; it is time to focus seriously on its potential for good.

This conclusion is taken from a short expository essay that explains the invention of the printing press and its effects on European society. It focuses on giving a clear, concise overview of what was covered in the essay.

The invention of the printing press was important not only in terms of its immediate cultural and economic effects, but also in terms of its major impact on politics and religion across Europe. In the century following the invention of the printing press, the relatively stationary intellectual atmosphere of the Middle Ages gave way to the social upheavals of the Reformation and the Renaissance. A single technological innovation had contributed to the total reshaping of the continent.

This conclusion is taken from a literary analysis essay about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . It summarizes what the essay’s analysis achieved and emphasizes its originality.

By tracing the depiction of Frankenstein through the novel’s three volumes, I have demonstrated how the narrative structure shifts our perception of the character. While the Frankenstein of the first volume is depicted as having innocent intentions, the second and third volumes—first in the creature’s accusatory voice, and then in his own voice—increasingly undermine him, causing him to appear alternately ridiculous and vindictive. Far from the one-dimensional villain he is often taken to be, the character of Frankenstein is compelling because of the dynamic narrative frame in which he is placed. In this frame, Frankenstein’s narrative self-presentation responds to the images of him we see from others’ perspectives. This conclusion sheds new light on the novel, foregrounding Shelley’s unique layering of narrative perspectives and its importance for the depiction of character.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

College essays

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• Comparing and Contrasting in an Essay

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Your essay’s conclusion should contain:

• A rephrased version of your overall thesis
• A brief review of the key points you made in the main body
• An indication of why your argument matters

The conclusion may also reflect on the broader implications of your argument, showing how your ideas could applied to other contexts or debates.

For a stronger conclusion paragraph, avoid including:

• Important evidence or analysis that wasn’t mentioned in the main body
• Generic concluding phrases (e.g. “In conclusion…”)
• Weak statements that undermine your argument (e.g. “There are good points on both sides of this issue.”)

Your conclusion should leave the reader with a strong, decisive impression of your work.

The conclusion paragraph of an essay is usually shorter than the introduction . As a rule, it shouldn’t take up more than 10–15% of the text.

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McCombes, S. (2023, July 23). How to Conclude an Essay | Interactive Example. Scribbr. Retrieved March 28, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/conclusion/

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Lauren Oyler Doesn’t Take Her Work Too Seriously

By Chris Black

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This is an edition of the newsletter Pulling Weeds With Chris Black, in which the columnist weighs in on hot topics in culture. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Thursday.

Nothing gets the internet—and our depleted attention spans—going more than a good essay. They give us a glimpse into the writer’s psyche and something to talk about. Known for her meticulous and sometimes scathing book reviews, much-discussed article about going on the Goop Cruise, and her first novel, Fake Accounts , the writer Lauren Oyler has just released a witty essay collection, No Judgements , that hits a nice assortment of conversation-starters: Berlin, autofiction, Goodreads, anxiety, vulnerability, and gossip. Oyler is polarizing, but I chuckled at the part in the book where she describes herself as “a snob, highbrow, elitist.” I spoke to Oyler from my apartment in New York City while she was at The Line Hotel in Los Angeles, making a stop on her book tour. We discussed self-awareness, the idea of persona, Berghain, and authenticity.

Lauren Oyler: I moved to Berlin in 2012, but I went back to New York after a couple of years and I’d go back and forth. Now I’m in Berlin forever unless they kick me out. There’s a lot of it that makes sense, and you can make a bunch of political arguments about why I like life there. The hangout, Bohemian lifestyle is possible because everything is so much cheaper and people don’t have jobs, and the values are different. You don’t have to look any particular way. It’s a cosmopolitan city in that it’s very diverse, particularly for Europe, so it’s always exciting to meet people from all over the world. There’s this ineffable, mysterious thing to it. I don’t know why I’m so drawn to it and not to New York. I don’t really care about New York.

Is it, though? Is it actually the most important city in the world?

Probably Beijing at this point. But I think that some of what’s happening in Berlin now is the result of it slowly, resistantly modernizing. It used to be that you couldn’t find a good meal to save your life and now it is a bit more worldly. Also, it is more expensive so you’re losing a lot of the great, old grungy club stuff.

I don’t find it easy to work really at all. I find it quite difficult to work. I’m very much dreading it, but it’s all my internal ambitions for whatever it is I’m doing that are keeping me doing it. But I do feel separate now, away from all the New York media and social media. I think it was easier for me to write this book without really caring as much about how it would be received.

I think humor is an opt-in sort of thing in life, particularly in writing. For a lot of writers, particularly in the last 10 years, there was this idea that if you were making a joke, you didn’t care about the destruction of American society. Like, “Why are you writing book reviews when democracy is collapsing?” The things that I write about aren’t that serious. I’m not doing hardcore war reporting where it would be quite difficult, if not impossible, to make a joke.

It’s even true of the more serious things in the book. The Berlin essay is quite earnest in many ways, and the autofiction one is too, but we’re talking about autofiction. It’s a literary form, it should be funny. But if people don’t want to get the joke, they don’t have to, particularly because my sense of humor is so ironic and I’m saying something that can be interpreted two ways. I also think there’s now a resistance to understanding ambiguity in tone. If you’re using irony to represent Goodreads, it’s funny, but maybe actually affects the publishing industry and therefore has a trickle down effect on capital L literature, which I care very much about, so it is kind of serious. If you use irony, you can acknowledge both of those. It’s very economical as a rhetorical strategy because you can say, "Obviously this is stupid, but maybe it’s not." I try to be critical and also make fun of myself and implicate myself in these things.

I think it’s fun. I would say, if I may use some sort of literary language for a second, I’m working with the idea of persona and using it in my work to critique the idea of the persona. But I find it quite dispiriting when I meet people and they’re like, “Oh, I thought you were going to be really mean. I’m scared of you.”

Really? Your persona is pretty upbeat.

There’s this idea that the persona is fake and your real self must be radically different from the character that you perform, but my feeling is that the character you perform is just a heightened party version. Your persona is still you.

People are afraid you’re trying to trick them, but I just want you to have a good time with my work and enjoy reading it.

To go back to Berlin, there are things that only nightlife makes possible. I would never meet that guy in any other context and I certainly wouldn’t spend eight hours talking to him about the future of Poland. I could have written a version of that article which would be buttoned up and be a straightforward profile of Maxime as a representative of the new Eastern European refugee in the EU, but people wouldn’t read that and it wouldn’t allow you to get into his brilliant character. You should enjoy him as I have enjoyed him as well.

I was a bit worried about quote-unquote “writing” about Berghain for a variety of reasons. One is “don’t talk about Fight Club” or whatever. But I feel like Berghain is cashed. It’s not over, I obviously love Berghain, but it’s as famous as it’s going to be and so nothing you say about it can affect its future in any direction. But there’s this response, which is related to the idea of persona, with people saying, “Oh, you went to Berghain and you think that’s so cool?” Well, no. If I were to write about a cooler club that you’d never heard of, you actually wouldn’t say that.

And you write about this on the other side—these global, western, millennial spaces that signify a lot of stuff. I just read your thing about Sweetgreen and Equinox , which are kind of like the bougie, uncool version of Berghain. Everybody knows what those things are, you’re not supposed to say that you enjoy them, but you do. It’s quite hard to write about life today without talking about those very weighty, signifying, iconic things.

You’re welcome to come anytime. I usually go on Sunday and I stay sober for as long as it’s feasible. You get there early because you’ve got to get in before the line, so you’re tired and after about eight hours you’re like, “I’m either going to do some drugs or go home.”

I have this long essay about autofiction in the book, and I wanted to write this for many years because autofiction as a literary form has been much maligned in the media. Literary critics will do a sideswipe and roll their eyes, and it is often vaguely defined. A lot of people don’t think it’s a useful term at all, but I do. Basically it is any work of fiction in which the protagonist, narrator, or main character is perceived to be the author. In the reader’s mind, the main character is the same person as the person whose name is on the cover. In the last 15 years or so, the paradigmatic autofictioneers are Knausgård, Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, Tao Lin, Teju Cole and lesser figures. The way that they create, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, the effect of the narrator or the protagonist being the same person they are is through a straightforward, almost naturalistic mode of narration, so you feel like you’re basically reading a person’s thoughts. The setup of the novel is often that there’s a writer, the writer has a career that maps onto the author’s career, and they live in the same place that the author lives. It’s not new, there’s many examples of works from the 20th century in particular that would count, including Proust.

The reason [autofiction] had this resurgence in the last 15 years is that the persona relationship between the author and the narrator mimics the relationship between the social media user and the “real person.” They’re used to relating to people and texts that they understand are mostly but not fully true. So if there’s a literary form that mimics that social media relationship, it feels familiar and more exciting in the way that social media felt very exciting because it felt like you were accessing something real or authentic.

Rachel Cusk had this interview many years ago, where she was like, “Fiction is fake and embarrassing. I don’t want to sit at my desk and make up little people and make them do stuff.” I think that was a feeling many authors had in the context of this 24-hour media cycle, globalized attention economy thing. I think it connects with the personal essay boom as well.

In Fake Accounts I had a lot of fun playing with the feeling of honesty, the feeling of authenticity, the feeling of reality, and taking that assumption and testing whether you could lie in a certain way where people won’t say anything to you. I heard a story about a friend of a friend who got stopped at customs on the way back to Germany and in her bag she had tons of weird drugs. I was told that what she did was just annoyingly explain every single drug to the customs agents until they got so fed up with her that they just let her through. And I think that that’s also what happens online a lot—you’re just like, It’s fine. Just stop .

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Is a robot writing your kids’ essays? We asked educators to weigh in on the growing role of AI in classrooms.

Educators weigh in on the growing role of ai and chatgpt in classrooms..

Remember writing essays in high school? Chances are you had to look up stuff in an encyclopedia — an actual one, not Wikipedia — or else connect to AOL via a modem bigger than your parents’ Taurus station wagon.

Now, of course, there’s artificial intelligence. According to new research from Pew, about 1 in 5 US teens who’ve heard of ChatGPT have used it for schoolwork. Kids in upper grades are more apt to have used the chatbot: About a quarter of 11th- and 12th-graders who know about ChatGPT have tried it.

For the uninitiated, ChatGPT arrived on the scene in late 2022, and educators continue to grapple with the ethics surrounding its growing popularity. Essentially, it generates free, human-like responses based on commands. (I’m sure this sentence will look antiquated in about six months, like when people described the internet as the “information superhighway.”)

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I used ChatGPT to plug in this prompt: “Write an essay on ‘The Scarlet Letter.’” Within moments, ChatGPT created an essay as thorough as anything I’d labored over in AP English.

Is this cheating? Is it just part of our strange new world? I talked to several educators about what they’re seeing in classrooms and how they’re monitoring it. Before you berate your child over how you wrote essays with a No. 2 pencil, here are some things to consider.

Adapting to new technology isn’t immoral. “We have to recalibrate our sense of what’s acceptable. There was a time when every teacher said: ‘Oh, it’s cheating to use Wikipedia.’ And guess what? We got used to it, we decided it’s reputable enough, and we cite Wikipedia all the time,” says Noah Giansiracusa, an associate math professor at Bentley University who hosts the podcast “ AI in Academia: Navigating the Future .”

“There’s a calibration period where a technology is new and untested. It’s good to be cautious and to treat it with trepidation. Then, over time, the norms kind of adapt,” he says — just like new-fangled graphing calculators or the internet in days of yore.

“I think the current conversation around AI should not be centered on an issue with plagiarism. It should be centered on how AI will alter methods for learning and expressing oneself. ‘Catching’ students who use fully AI-generated products ... implies a ‘gotcha’ atmosphere,” says Jim Nagle, a history teacher at Bedford High School. “Since AI is already a huge part of our day-to-day lives, it’s no surprise our students are making it a part of their academic tool kit. Teachers and students should be at the forefront of discussions about responsible and ethical use.”

Teachers and parents could use AI to think about education at a higher level. Really, learning is about more than regurgitating information — or it should be, anyway. But regurgitation is what AI does best.

“If our system is just for students to write a bunch of essays and then grade the results? Something’s missing. We need to really talk about their purpose and what they’re getting out of this, and maybe think about different forms of assignments and grading,” Giansiracusa says.

After all, while AI aggregates and organizes ideas, the quality of its responses depends on the users’ prompts. Instead of recoiling from it, use it as a conversation-starter.

“What parents and teachers can do is to start the conversation with kids: ‘What are we trying to learn here? Is it even something that ChatGPT could answer? Why did your assignment not convince you that you need to do this thinking on your own when a tool can do it for you?’” says Houman Harouni , a lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Harouni urges parents to read an essay written by ChatGPT alongside their student. Was it good? What could be done better? Did it feel like a short cut?

“What they’re going to remember is that you had that conversation with them; that someone thought, at some point in their lives, that taking a shortcut is not the best way ... especially if you do it with the tool right in front of you, because you have something real to talk about,” he says.

Harouni hopes teachers think about its implications, too. Consider math: So much grunt work has been eliminated by calculators and computers. Yet kids are still tested as in days of old, when perhaps they could expand their learning to be assessed in ways that are more personal and human-centric, leaving the rote stuff to AI.

“We could take this moment of confusion and loss of certainty seriously, at least in some small pockets, and start thinking about what a different kind of school would look like. Five years from now, we might have the beginnings of some very interesting exploration. Five years from now, you and I might be talking about schools wherein teaching and learning is happening in a very self-directed way, in a way that’s more based on … igniting the kid’s interest and seeing where they go and supporting them to go deeper and to go wider,” Harouni says.

Teachers have the chance to offer assignments with more intentionality.

“Really think about the purpose of the assignments. Don’t just think of the outcome and the deliverable: ‘I need a student to produce a document.’ Why are we getting students to write? Why are we doing all these things in the first place? If teachers are more mindful, and maybe parents can also be more mindful, I think it pushes us away from this dangerous trap of thinking about in terms of ‘cheating,’ which, to me, is a really slippery path,” Giansiracusa says.

AI can boost confidence and reduce procrastination. Sometimes, a robot can do something better than a human, such as writing a dreaded resume and cover letter. And that’s OK; it’s useful, even.

“Often, students avoid applying to internships because they’re just overwhelmed at the thought of writing a cover letter, or they’re afraid their resume isn’t good enough. I think that tools like this can help them feel more confident. They may be more likely to do it sooner and have more organized and better applications,” says Kristin Casasanto, director of post-graduate planning at Olin College of Engineering.

Casasanto says that AI is also useful for de-stressing during interview prep.

“Students can use generative AI to plug in a job description and say, ‘Come up with a list of interview questions based on the job description,’ which will give them an idea of what may be asked, and they can even then say, ‘Here’s my resume. Give me answers to these questions based on my skills and experience.’ They’re going to really build their confidence around that,” Casasanto says.

Plus, when students use AI for basics, it frees up more time to meet with career counselors about substantive issues.

“It will help us as far as scalability. … Career services staff can then utilize our personal time in much more meaningful ways with students,” Casasanto says.

We need to remember: These kids grew up during a pandemic. We can’t expect kids to resist technology when they’ve been forced to learn in new ways since COVID hit.

“Now we’re seeing pandemic-era high school students come into college. They’ve been channeled through Google Classroom their whole career,” says Katherine Jewell, a history professor at Fitchburg State University.

“They need to have technology management and information literacy built into the curriculum,” Jewell says.

Jewell recently graded a paper on the history of college sports. It was obvious which papers were written by AI: They didn’t address the question. In her syllabus, Jewell defines plagiarism as “any attempt by a student to represent the work of another, including computers, as their own.”

This means that AI qualifies, but she also has an open mind, given students’ circumstances.

“My students want to do the right thing, for the most part. They don’t want to get away with stuff. I understand why they turned to these tools; I really do. I try to reassure them that I’m here to help them learn systems. I’m focusing much more on the learning process. I incentivize them to improve, and I acknowledge: ‘You don’t know how to do this the first time out of the gate,’” Jewell says. “I try to incentivize them so that they’re improving their confidence in their abilities, so they don’t feel the need to turn to these tools.”

Understand the forces that make kids resort to AI in the first place . Clubs, sports, homework: Kids are busy and under pressure. Why not do what’s easy?

“Kids are so overscheduled in their day-to-day lives. I think there’s so much enormous pressure on these kids, whether it’s self-inflicted, parent-inflicted, or school-culture inflicted. It’s on them to maximize their schedule. They’ve learned that AI can be a way to take an assignment that would take five hours and cut it down to one,” says a teacher at a competitive high school outside Boston who asked to remain anonymous.

Recently, this teacher says, “I got papers back that were just so robotic and so cold. I had to tell [students]: ‘I understand that you tried to use a tool to help you. I’m not going to penalize you, but what I am going to penalize you for is that you didn’t actually answer the prompt.”

Afterward, more students felt safe to come forward to say they’d used AI. This teacher hopes that age restrictions become implemented for these programs, similar to apps such as Snapchat. Educationally and developmentally, they say, high-schoolers are still finding their voice — a voice that could be easily thwarted by a robot.

“Part of high school writing is to figure out who you are, and what is your voice as a writer. And I think, developmentally, that takes all of high school to figure out,” they say.

And AI can’t replicate voice and personality — for now, at least.

Kara Baskin can be reached at [email protected] . Follow her @kcbaskin .

March 19, 2024

Evidence Does Not Support the Use of the Death Penalty

Capital punishment must come to an end. It does not deter crime, is not humane and has no moral or medical basis

By The Editors

A death penalty vigil, held in 2021 outside an Indiana penitentiary.

Bryan Woolston/Reuters/Redux

It is long past time to abolish the death penalty in the U.S.

Capital punishment was halted in the U.S. in 1972 but reinstated in 1976, and since then, nearly 1,600 people have been executed. To whose gain? Study after study shows that the death penalty does not deter crime, puts innocent people to death , is racially biased , and is cruel and inhumane. It is state-sanctioned homicide, wholly ineffective, often botched, and a much more expensive punishment than life imprisonment. There is no ethical, scientifically supported, medically acceptable or morally justifiable way to carry it out.

The recent execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith demonstrates this barbarity. After a failed attempt at lethal injection by prison officials seemingly inexperienced in the placement of an IV, the state of Alabama killed Smith in January using nitrogen gas . The Alabama attorney general claimed that this method of execution was fast and humane , despite no supporting evidence. Eyewitnesses recounted that Smith thrashed during the nitrogen administration and took more than 20 minutes to die.

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Opposition to the death penalty is growing among the American public , and the Biden administration must follow through on its promise to end this horror. The Department of Justice must heed its own admission that the death penalty doesn’t stop crime, and our legislators must continue to take up the issue on the congressional floor. The few states that still condemn people to death must follow the lead of states that have considered the evidence and rejected capital punishment.

Programs such as the Innocence Project have shown, over and over, that innocent people have been sentenced to death. Since 1973 nearly 200 people on death row have been exonerated, based on appeals, the reopening of cases, and the entrance of new and sometimes previously suppressed evidence. People have recanted testimony, and supposedly airtight cases have been poked full of evidentiary holes.

Through the death penalty, the criminal justice system has killed at least 20 people now believed to have been innocent and uncounted others whose cases have not been reexamined . Too many of these victims have been Black or Hispanic. This is not justice. These are state-sanctioned hate crimes.

Using rigorous statistical and experimental control methods, both economics and criminal justice studies have consistently found that there is no evidence for deterrence of violent crimes in states that allow capital punishment. One such study, a 2009 paper by criminology researchers at the University of Dallas, outlines experimental and statistical flaws in econometrics-based death penalty studies that claim to find a correlated reduction in violent crime. The death penalty does not stop people from killing. Executions don’t make us safer.

The methods used to kill prisoners are inhumane. Electrocution fails , causing significant pain and suffering. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist who criticizes the use of medicines in carrying out the death penalty, has found (at the request of lawyers of death row inmates) that the lungs of prisoners who were killed by lethal injection were often heavy with fluid and froth that suggested they were struggling to breathe and felt like they were drowning. Nitrogen gas is used in some veterinary euthanasia, but based in part on the behavior of rats in its presence, it is “unacceptable” for mammals , according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. This means that Smith, as his lawyers claimed in efforts to stop his execution, became a human subject in an immoral experiment.

Courts have often decided, against the abundant evidence, that these killings are constitutional and do not fall under the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause of the 8th Amendment or, in Smith’s appeal , both the 8th Amendment and the due process protection clause of the 14th amendment.

A small number of prosecutors and judges in a few states, mostly in the South, are responsible for most of the death sentences being handed down in the U.S. today. It’s a power they should not be able to wield. Smith was sentenced to life in prison by a jury before the judge in his case overruled the jury and gave him the death sentence.

A furious urge for vengeance against those who have done wrong—or those we think have done wrong—is the biggest motivation for the death penalty. But this desire for violent retribution is the very impulse that our criminal justice system is made to check, not abet. Elected officials need to reform this aspect of our justice system at both the state and federal levels. Capital punishment does not stop crime and mocks both justice and humanity. The death penalty in the U.S. must come to an end.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American .

The War at Stanford

I didn’t know that college would be a factory of unreason.

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ne of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month. “I’d be happy if Biden was dead.” He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only complicit but responsible for it. “I’m not calling for a vigilante to do it,” he later clarified, “but I’m saying he is guilty of mass murder and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin would be (and we all know terrorists with dark skin are typically bombed and drone striked by American planes).” El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he answers: “Peace.”

I switched to a different computer-science section.

Israel is 7,500 miles away from Stanford’s campus, where I am a sophomore. But the Hamas invasion and the Israeli counterinvasion have fractured my university, a place typically less focused on geopolitics than on venture-capital funding for the latest dorm-based tech start-up. Few students would call for Biden’s head—I think—but many of the same young people who say they want peace in Gaza don’t seem to realize that they are in fact advocating for violence. Extremism has swept through classrooms and dorms, and it is becoming normal for students to be harassed and intimidated for their faith, heritage, or appearance—they have been called perpetrators of genocide for wearing kippahs, and accused of supporting terrorism for wearing keffiyehs. The extremism and anti-Semitism at Ivy League universities on the East Coast have attracted so much media and congressional attention that two Ivy presidents have lost their jobs. But few people seem to have noticed the culture war that has taken over our California campus.

For four months, two rival groups of protesters, separated by a narrow bike path, faced off on Stanford’s palm-covered grounds. The “Sit-In to Stop Genocide” encampment was erected by students in mid-October, even before Israeli troops had crossed into Gaza, to demand that the university divest from Israel and condemn its behavior. Posters were hung equating Hamas with Ukraine and Nelson Mandela. Across from the sit-in, a rival group of pro-Israel students eventually set up the “Blue and White Tent” to provide, as one activist put it, a “safe space” to “be a proud Jew on campus.” Soon it became the center of its own cluster of tents, with photos of Hamas’s victims sitting opposite the rubble-ridden images of Gaza and a long (and incomplete) list of the names of slain Palestinians displayed by the students at the sit-in.

Some days the dueling encampments would host only a few people each, but on a sunny weekday afternoon, there could be dozens. Most of the time, the groups tolerated each other. But not always. Students on both sides were reportedly spit on and yelled at, and had their belongings destroyed. (The perpetrators in many cases seemed to be adults who weren’t affiliated with Stanford, a security guard told me.) The university put in place round-the-clock security, but when something actually happened, no one quite knew what to do.

Conor Friedersdorf: How October 7 changed America’s free speech culture

Stanford has a policy barring overnight camping, but for months didn’t enforce it, “out of a desire to support the peaceful expression of free speech in the ways that students choose to exercise that expression”—and, the administration told alumni, because the university feared that confronting the students would only make the conflict worse. When the school finally said the tents had to go last month, enormous protests against the university administration, and against Israel, followed.

“We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” students chanted, a slogan advocating that Israel be dismantled and replaced by a single Arab nation. Palestinian flags flew alongside bright “Welcome!” banners left over from new-student orientation. A young woman gave a speech that seemed to capture the sense of urgency and power that so many students here feel. “We are Stanford University!” she shouted. “We control things!”

“W e’ve had protests in the past,” Richard Saller, the university’s interim president, told me in November—about the environment, and apartheid, and Vietnam. But they didn’t pit “students against each other” the way that this conflict has.

I’ve spoken with Saller, a scholar of Roman history, a few times over the past six months in my capacity as a student journalist. We first met in September, a few weeks into his tenure. His predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had resigned as president after my reporting for The Stanford Daily exposed misconduct in his academic research. (Tessier-Lavigne had failed to retract papers with faked data over the course of 20 years. In his resignation statement , he denied allegations of fraud and misconduct; a Stanford investigation determined that he had not personally manipulated data or ordered any manipulation but that he had repeatedly “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes” from his lab.)

In that first conversation, Saller told me that everyone was “eager to move on” from the Tessier-Lavigne scandal. He was cheerful and upbeat. He knew he wasn’t staying in the job long; he hadn’t even bothered to move into the recently vacated presidential manor. In any case, campus, at that time, was serene. Then, a week later, came October 7.

The attack was as clear a litmus test as one could imagine for the Middle East conflict. Hamas insurgents raided homes and a music festival with the goal of slaughtering as many civilians as possible. Some victims were raped and mutilated, several independent investigations found. Hundreds of hostages were taken into Gaza and many have been tortured.

This, of course, was bad. Saying this was bad does not negate or marginalize the abuses and suffering Palestinians have experienced in Gaza and elsewhere. Everyone, of every ideology, should be able to say that this was bad. But much of this campus failed that simple test.

Two days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Stanford released milquetoast statements marking the “moment of intense emotion” and declaring “deep concern” over “the crisis in Israel and Palestine.” The official statements did not use the words Hamas or violence .

The absence of a clear institutional response led some teachers to take matters into their own hands. During a mandatory freshman seminar on October 10, a lecturer named Ameer Loggins tossed out his lesson plan to tell students that the actions of the Palestinian “military force” had been justified, that Israelis were colonizers, and that the Holocaust had been overemphasized, according to interviews I conducted with students in the class. Loggins then asked the Jewish students to identify themselves. He instructed one of them to “stand up, face the window, and he kind of kicked away his chair,” a witness told me. Loggins described this as an effort to demonstrate Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. (Loggins did not reply to a request for comment; a spokesperson for Stanford said that there were “different recollections of the details regarding what happened” in the class.)

“We’re only in our third week of college, and we’re afraid to be here,” three students in the class wrote in an email that night to administrators. “This isn’t what Stanford was supposed to be.” The class Loggins taught is called COLLEGE, short for “Civic, Liberal, and Global Education,” and it is billed as an effort to develop “the skills that empower and enable us to live together.”

Loggins was suspended from teaching duties and an investigation was opened; this angered pro-Palestine activists, who organized a petition that garnered more than 1,700 signatures contesting the suspension. A pamphlet from the petitioners argued that Loggins’s behavior had not been out of bounds.

The day after the class, Stanford put out a statement written by Saller and Jenny Martinez, the university provost, more forcefully condemning the Hamas attack. Immediately, this new statement generated backlash.

Pro-Palestine activists complained about it during an event held the same day, the first of several “teach-ins” about the conflict. Students gathered in one of Stanford’s dorms to “bear witness to the struggles of decolonization.” The grievances and pain shared by Palestinian students were real. They told of discrimination and violence, of frightened family members subjected to harsh conditions. But the most raucous reaction from the crowd was in response to a young woman who said, “You ask us, do we condemn Hamas? Fuck you!” She added that she was “so proud of my resistance.”

David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature with a focus on postcolonial studies, also spoke at the teach-in, explaining to the crowd that “European settlers” had come to “replace” Palestine’s “native population.”

Palumbo-Liu is known as an intelligent and supportive professor, and is popular among students, who call him by his initials, DPL. I wanted to ask him about his involvement in the teach-in, so we met one day in a café a few hundred feet away from the tents. I asked if he could elaborate on what he’d said at the event about Palestine’s native population. He was happy to expand: This was “one of those discussions that could go on forever. Like, who is actually native? At what point does nativism lapse, right? Well, you haven’t been native for X number of years, so …” In the end, he said, “you have two people who both feel they have a claim to the land,” and “they have to live together. Both sides have to cede something.”

The struggle at Stanford, he told me, “is to find a way in which open discussions can be had that allow people to disagree.” It’s true that Stanford has utterly failed in its efforts to encourage productive dialogue. But I still found it hard to reconcile DPL’s words with his public statements on Israel, which he’d recently said on Facebook should be “the most hated nation in the world.” He also wrote: “When Zionists say they don’t feel ‘safe’ on campus, I’ve come to see that as they no longer feel immune to criticism of Israel.” He continued: “Well as the saying goes, get used to it.”

Z ionists, and indeed Jewish students of all political beliefs, have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets. At least one was told he was a “dirty Jew.” At least twice, mezuzahs have been ripped from students’ doors, and swastikas have been drawn in dorms. Arab and Muslim students also face alarming threats. The computer-science section leader, El Boudali, a pro-Palestine activist, told me he felt “safe personally,” but knew others who did not: “Some people have reported feeling like they’re followed, especially women who wear the hijab.”

In a remarkably short period of time, aggression and abuse have become commonplace, an accepted part of campus activism. In January, Jewish students organized an event dedicated to ameliorating anti-Semitism. It marked one of Saller’s first public appearances in the new year. Its topic seemed uncontroversial, and I thought it would generate little backlash.

Protests began before the panel discussion even started, with activists lining the stairs leading to the auditorium. During the event they drowned out the panelists, one of whom was Israel’s special envoy for combatting anti-Semitism, by demanding a cease-fire. After participants began cycling out into the dark, things got ugly.

Activists, their faces covered by keffiyehs or medical masks, confronted attendees. “Go back to Brooklyn!” a young woman shouted at Jewish students. One protester, who emerged as the leader of the group, said that she and her compatriots would “take all of your places and ensure Israel falls.” She told attendees to get “off our fucking campus” and launched into conspiracy theories about Jews being involved in “child trafficking.” As a rabbi tried to leave the event, protesters pursued him, chanting, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”

At one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling them, “We know your names and we know where you work.” The ringleader added: “And we’ll soon find out where you live.” The religious leaders formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi and the imam appeared to be crying.

S aller avoided the protest by leaving through another door. Early that morning, his private residence had been vandalized. Protesters frequently tell him he “can’t hide” and shout him down. “We charge you with genocide!” they chant, demanding that Stanford divest from Israel. (When asked whether Stanford actually invested in Israel, a spokesperson replied that, beyond small exposures from passive funds that track indexes such as the S&P 500, the university’s endowment “has no direct holdings in Israeli companies, or direct holdings in defense contractors.”)

When the university finally said the protest tents had to be removed, students responded by accusing Saller of suppressing their right to free speech. This is probably the last charge he expected to face. Saller once served as provost at the University of Chicago, which is known for holding itself to a position of strict institutional neutrality so that its students can freely explore ideas for themselves. Saller has a lifelong belief in First Amendment rights. But that conviction in impartial college governance does not align with Stanford’s behavior in recent years. Despite the fact that many students seemed largely uninterested in the headlines before this year, Stanford’s administrative leadership has often taken positions on political issues and events, such as the Paris climate conference and the murder of George Floyd. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Stanford’s Hoover Tower was lit up in blue and yellow, and the school released a statement in solidarity.

Thomas Chatterton Williams: Let the activists have their loathsome rallies

When we first met, a week before October 7, I asked Saller about this. Did Stanford have a moral duty to denounce the war in Ukraine, for example, or the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur Muslims in China? “On international political issues, no,” he said. “That’s not a responsibility for the university as a whole, as an institution.”

But when Saller tried to apply his convictions on neutrality for the first time as president, dozens of faculty members condemned the response, many pro-Israel alumni were outraged, donors had private discussions about pulling funding, and an Israeli university sent an open letter to Saller and Martinez saying, “Stanford’s administration has failed us.” The initial statement had tried to make clear that the school’s policy was not Israel-specific: It noted that the university would not take a position on the turmoil in Nagorno-Karabakh (where Armenians are undergoing ethnic cleansing) either. But the message didn’t get through.

Saller had to beat an awkward retreat or risk the exact sort of public humiliation that he, as caretaker president, had presumably been hired to avoid. He came up with a compromise that landed somewhere in the middle: an unequivocal condemnation of Hamas’s “intolerable atrocities” paired with a statement making clear that Stanford would commit to institutional neutrality going forward.

“The events in Israel and Gaza this week have affected and engaged large numbers of students on our campus in ways that many other events have not,” the statement read. “This is why we feel compelled to both address the impact of these events on our campus and to explain why our general policy of not issuing statements about news events not directly connected to campus has limited the breadth of our comments thus far, and why you should not expect frequent commentary from us in the future.”

I asked Saller why he had changed tack on Israel and not on Nagorno-Karabakh. “We don’t feel as if we should be making statements on every war crime and atrocity,” he told me. This felt like a statement in and of itself.

In making such decisions, Saller works closely with Martinez, Stanford’s provost. I happened to interview her, too, a few days before October 7, not long after she’d been appointed. When I asked about her hopes for the job, she said that a “priority is ensuring an environment in which free speech and academic freedom are preserved.”

We talked about the so-called Leonard Law—a provision unique to California that requires private universities to be governed by the same First Amendment protections as public ones. This restricts what Stanford can do in terms of penalizing speech, putting it in a stricter bind than Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, or any of the other elite private institutions that have more latitude to set the standards for their campus (whether or not they have done so).

So I was surprised when, in December, the university announced that abstract calls for genocide “clearly violate Stanford’s Fundamental Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university.” The statement was a response to the outrage following the congressional testimony of three university presidents—outrage that eventually led to the resignation of two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill. Gay and Magill, who had both previously held positions at Stanford, did not commit to punishing calls for the genocide of Jews.

Experts told me that Stanford’s policy is impossible to enforce—and Saller himself acknowledged as much in our March interview.

“Liz Magill is a good friend,” Saller told me, adding, “Having watched what happened at Harvard and Penn, it seemed prudent” to publicly state that Stanford rejected calls for genocide. But saying that those calls violate the code of conduct “is not the same thing as to say that we could actually punish it.”

Stanford’s leaders seem to be trying their best while adapting to the situation in real time. But the muddled messaging has created a policy of neutrality that does not feel neutral at all.

When we met back in November, I tried to get Saller to open up about his experience running an institution in turmoil. What’s it like to know that so many students seem to believe that he—a mild-mannered 71-year-old classicist who swing-dances with his anthropologist wife—is a warmonger? Saller was more candid than I expected—perhaps more candid than any prominent university president has been yet. We sat in the same conference room as we had in September. The weather hadn’t really changed. Yet I felt like I was sitting in front of a different person. He was hunched over and looked exhausted, and his voice broke when he talked about the loss of life in Gaza and Israel and “the fact that we’re caught up in it.” A capable administrator with decades of experience, Saller seemed almost at a loss. “It’s been a kind of roller coaster, to be honest.”

He said he hadn’t anticipated the deluge of the emails “blaming me for lack of moral courage.” Anything the university says seems bound to be wrong: “If I say that our position is that we grieve over the loss of innocent lives, that in itself will draw some hostile reactions.”

“I find that really difficult to navigate,” he said with a sigh.

By March, it seemed that his views had solidified. He said he knew he was “a target,” but he was not going to be pushed into issuing any more statements. The continuing crisis seems to have granted him new insight. “I am certain that whatever I say will not have any material effect on the war in Gaza.” It’s hard to argue with that.

P eople tend to blame the campus wars on two villains: dithering administrators and radical student activists. But colleges have always had dithering administrators and radical student activists. To my mind, it’s the average students who have changed.

Elite universities attract a certain kind of student: the overachieving striver who has won all the right accolades for all the right activities. Is it such a surprise that the kids who are trained in the constant pursuit of perfect scores think they have to look at the world like a series of multiple-choice questions, with clearly right or wrong answers? Or that they think they can gamify a political cause in the same way they ace a standardized test?

Everyone knows that the only reliable way to get into a school like Stanford is to be really good at looking really good. Now that they’re here, students know that one easy way to keep looking good is to side with the majority of protesters, and condemn Israel.

It’s not that there isn’t real anger and anxiety over what is happening in Gaza—there is, and justifiably so. I know that among the protesters are many people who are deeply connected to this issue. But they are not the majority. What really activates the crowds now seems less a principled devotion to Palestine or to pacifism than a desire for collective action, to fit in by embracing the fashionable cause of the moment—as if a centuries-old conflict in which both sides have stolen and killed could ever be a simple matter of right and wrong. In their haste to exhibit moral righteousness, many of the least informed protesters end up being the loudest and most uncompromising.

Today’s students grew up in the Trump era, in which violent rhetoric has become a normal part of political discourse and activism is as easy as reposting an infographic. Many young people have come to feel that being angry is enough to foment change. Furious at the world’s injustices and desperate for a simple way to express that fury, they don’t seem interested in any form of engagement more nuanced than backing a pure protagonist and denouncing an evil enemy. They don’t, always, seem that concerned with the truth.

At the protest last month to prevent the removal of the sit-in, an activist in a pink Women’s March “pussy hat” shouted that no rape was committed by Hamas on October 7. “There hasn’t been proof of these rape accusations,” a student told me in a separate conversation, criticizing the Blue and White Tent for spreading what he considered to be misinformation about sexual violence. (In March, a United Nations report found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence,” including “rape and gang rape,” occurred in multiple locations on October 7, as well as “clear and convincing information” on the “rape and sexualized torture” of hostages.) “The level of propaganda” surrounding Hamas, he told me, “is just unbelievable.”

The real story at Stanford is not about the malicious actors who endorse sexual assault and murder as forms of resistance, but about those who passively enable them because they believe their side can do no wrong. You don’t have to understand what you’re arguing for in order to argue for it. You don’t have to be able to name the river or the sea under discussion to chant “From the river to the sea.” This kind of obliviousness explains how one of my friends, a gay activist, can justify Hamas’s actions, even though it would have the two of us—an outspoken queer person and a Jewish reporter—killed in a heartbeat. A similar mentality can exist on the other side: I have heard students insist on the absolute righteousness of Israel yet seem uninterested in learning anything about what life is like in Gaza.

I’m familiar with the pull of achievement culture—after all, I’m a product of the same system. I fell in love with Stanford as a 7-year-old, lying on the floor of an East Coast library and picturing all the cool technology those West Coast geniuses were dreaming up. I cried when I was accepted; I spent the next few months scrolling through the course catalog, giddy with anticipation. I wanted to learn everything.

I learned more than I expected. Within my first week here, someone asked me: “Why are all Jews so rich?” In 2016, when Stanford’s undergraduate senate had debated a resolution against anti-Semitism, one of its members argued that the idea of “Jews controlling the media, economy, government, and other societal institutions” represented “a very valid discussion.” (He apologized, and the resolution passed.) In my dorm last year, a student discussed being Jewish and awoke the next day to swastikas and a portrait of Hitler affixed to his door.

David Frum: There is no right to bully and harass

I grew up secularly, with no strong affiliation to Jewish culture. When I found out as a teenager that some of my ancestors had hidden their identity from their children and that dozens of my relatives had died in the Holocaust (something no living member of my family had known), I felt the barest tremor of identity. After I saw so many people I know cheering after October 7, I felt something stronger stir. I know others have experienced something similar. Even a professor texted me to say that she felt Jewish in a way she never had before.

But my frustration with the conflict on campus has little to do with my own identity. Across the many conversations and hours of formal interviews I conducted for this article, I’ve encountered a persistent anti-intellectual streak. I’ve watched many of my classmates treat death so cavalierly that they can protest as a pregame to a party. Indeed, two parties at Stanford were reported to the university this fall for allegedly making people say “Fuck Israel” or “Free Palestine” to get in the door. A spokesperson for the university said it was “unable to confirm the facts of what occurred,” but that it had “met with students involved in both parties to make clear that Stanford’s nondiscrimination policy applies to parties.” As a friend emailed me not long ago: “A place that was supposed to be a sanctuary from such unreason has become a factory for it.”

Readers may be tempted to discount the conduct displayed at Stanford. After all, the thinking goes, these are privileged kids doing what they always do: embracing faux-radicalism in college before taking jobs in fintech or consulting. These students, some might say, aren’t representative of America.

And yet they are representative of something: of the conduct many of the most accomplished students in my generation have accepted as tolerable, and what that means for the future of our country. I admire activism. We need people willing to protest what they see as wrong and take on entrenched systems of repression. But we also need to read, learn, discuss, accept the existence of nuance, embrace diversity of thought, and hold our own allies to high standards. More than ever, we need universities to teach young people how to do all of this.

F or so long , Stanford’s physical standoff seemed intractable. Then, in early February, a storm swept in, and the natural world dictated its own conclusion.

Heavy rains flooded campus. For hours, the students battled to save their tents. The sit-in activists used sandbags and anything else they could find to hold back the water—at one point, David Palumbo-Liu, the professor, told me he stood in the lashing downpour to anchor one of the sit-in’s tents with his own body. When the storm hit, many of the Jewish activists had been attending a discussion on anti-Semitism. They raced back and struggled to salvage the Blue and White Tent, but it was too late—the wind had ripped it out of the ground.

The next day, the weary Jewish protesters returned to discover that their space had been taken.

A new collection of tents had been set up by El Boudali, the pro-Palestine activist, and a dozen friends. He said they were there to protest Islamophobia and to teach about Islam and jihad, and that they were a separate entity from the Sit-In to Stop Genocide, though I observed students cycling between the tents. Palestinian flags now flew from the bookstore to the quad.

Administrators told me they’d quickly informed El Boudali and his allies that the space had been reserved by the Jewish advocates, and offered to help move them to a different location. But the protesters told me they had no intention of going. (El Boudali later said that they did not take over the entire space, and would have been “happy to exist side by side, but they wanted to kick us off entirely from that lawn.”)

When it was clear that the area where they’d set up their tents would not be ceded back to the pro-Israel group willingly, Stanford changed course and decided to clear everyone out in one fell swoop. On February 8, school officials ordered all students to vacate the plaza overnight. The university was finally going to enforce its rule prohibiting people from sleeping outside on campus and requiring the removal of belongings from the plaza between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. The order cited the danger posed by the storm as a justification for changing course and, probably hoping to avoid allegations of bias, described the decision as “viewpoint-neutral.”

That didn’t work.

About a week of protests, led by the sit-in organizers, followed. Chants were chanted. More demands for a “river to the sea” solution to the Israel problem were made. A friend boasted to me about her willingness to be arrested. Stanford sent a handful of staff members, who stood near balloons left over from an event earlier in the day. They were there, one of them told me, to “make students feel supported and safe.”

In the end, Saller and Martinez agreed to talk with the leaders of the sit-in about their demands to divest the university and condemn Israel, under the proviso that the activists comply with Stanford’s anti-camping guidelines “regardless of the outcome of discussions.” Eight days after they were first instructed to leave, 120 days after setting up camp, the sit-in protesters slept in their own beds. In defiance of the university’s instructions, they left behind their tents. But sometime in the very early hours of the morning, law-enforcement officers confiscated the structures. The area was cordoned off without any violence and the plaza filled once more with electric skateboards and farmers’ markets.

The conflict continues in its own way. Saller was just shouted down by protesters chanting “No peace on stolen land” at a Family Weekend event, and protesters later displayed an effigy of him covered in blood. Students still feel tense; Saller still seems worried. He told me that the university is planning to change all manner of things—residential-assistant training, new-student orientation, even the acceptance letters that students receive—in hopes of fostering a culture of greater tolerance. But no campus edict or panel discussion can address a problem that is so much bigger than our university.

At one rally last fall, a speaker expressed disillusionment about the power of “peaceful resistance” on college campuses. “What is there left to do but to take up arms?” The crowd cheered as he said Israel must be destroyed. But what would happen to its citizens? I’d prefer to believe that most protesters chanting “Palestine is Arab” and shouting that we must “smash the Zionist settler state” don’t actually think Jews should be killed en masse. But can one truly be so ignorant as to advocate widespread violence in the name of peace?

When the world is rendered in black-and-white—portrayed as a simple fight between colonizer and colonized—the answer is yes. Solutions, by this logic, are absolute: Israel or Palestine, nothing in between. Either you support liberation of the oppressed or you support genocide. Either Stanford is all good or all bad; all in favor of free speech or all authoritarian; all anti-Semitic or all Islamophobic.

At January’s anti-anti-Semitism event, I watched an exchange between a Jewish attendee and a protester from a few feet away. “Are you pro-Palestine?” the protester asked.

“Yes,” the attendee responded, and he went on to describe his disgust with the human-rights abuses Palestinians have faced for years.

“But are you a Zionist?”

“Then we are enemies.”