This story, which ran recently in The New York Times Magazine, was powerful, and really hit home for me, as someone who taught at Pratt Institute, 2014-2015, during which time a student died by suicide.
The author focused on Worcester Polytechnic, which suffered seven deaths by suicide in a short time, forcing the college to look deeply at how it was teaching, and treating, its students.
What hit me hard was how unprepared professors were:
The first death happened before the academic year began. In July 2021, an undergraduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute was reported dead. The administration sent a notice out over email, with the familiar, thoroughly vetted phrasing and appended resources. Katherine Foo, an assistant professor in the department of integrative and global studies, felt especially crushed by the news. She taught this student. He was Chinese, and she felt connected to the particular set of pressures he faced. She read through old, anonymous course evaluations, looking for any sign she might have missed. But she was unsure where to put her personal feelings about a loss suffered in this professional context. What was the appropriate channel for processing, either with co-workers or students, the sorrow and fear that the death of a student inspired?
I was an adjunct professor at Pratt, an expensive private school in Brooklyn with a small, distinctive campus. I was thrilled to have the opportunity, even though it meant getting up at 6 a.m. for an hour’s drive for my 10:00 a.m. class — if I left any later I would get stuck in traffic. I tried, once, and almost was late for my own class.
I taught freshman composition, which the snobs sneer at but I was happy to do. My fall class had only 13 students. Towards the end of the semester, one stopped coming and, one night, emailed me to say they were feeling fragile. I urged them to go, immediately, for help.
But they left the school. Only months later did I find out how serious it had been, and the student thanked me for being one of the few teachers who had cared enough about her mental health.
I also taught a blogging class and it was in that class I suddenly had the challenge of comforting my shocked students after one of them had died on campus by suicide.
I don’t recall getting any guidance at all from the dean or the school as to how to discuss this with students — or not.
It was frightening and disorienting and all I wanted to be was useful, even though I had no training in that or institutional help to do so.
“It was a very dark time on campus,” Foo told me. “Faculty were being asked to take on a role that I think historically we haven’t been asked to play.” Her own anxiety intensified. She felt herself tensing anytime she looked at her work email. Even when there was no crisis announcement, faculty and staff members flooded one another’s inboxes with long group-email chains, processing fear and rage that had nowhere else to go.
When you teach as an adjunct, you are very much a second-class citizen — no office, no private place to hold needed office hours to meet with students, no backup at all. The dean was the sort of man who would walk away from me mid-sentence, clearly unwilling to offer me any advice. I really needed it sometimes! I knew no one on the staff, either adjunct or full-time; I made one friend because we sat in the cafeteria in the mornings at the same time, a visual artist.
My heart breaks for any student who feels this is their only or best option.
Have you, as a teacher or professor, faced this on your campus?
A recent Gallup polls finds 32 percent of Americans say they trust the media — a new low.
It’s time to talk more candidly, and especially to NON journalists, about what journalists do and why and for whom. It’s clear millions of voters have no idea at all what journalism actually is and what people do to produce it.
I found this recent story interesting — raising some questions about what we do and how we might do it better, and this bit, from Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, especially:
Mr. Woodward went on to argue for more openness on the part of the media as a way to help win the public’s trust. He explained that although The Post’s reporting is guided internally by four pillars for sourcing — witnesses, participants, contemporaneous notes and documents — it did not make these standards public.
The paper should publish them, Mr. Woodward said: “By telling people, I think it has the potential to enhance the credibility and address what I think is your most potent question: trust.”
This is crucial. While some newsrooms/outlets have close ties with their communities, no newsroom I’ve worked in ever asked what readers want(ed.) Maybe it’s less about what we choose to cover than why we choose it.
Everyone who works in journalism — from the youngest interns to war-hardened correspondents — knows or quickly learns what tends to drives coverage, even when we massively disagree with it or how it’s being handled. But how much, if at all, of this insider knowledge and decision-making is shared with readers, listeners and viewers? When, where and how do they have any access at all to understanding the quick and routine decisions we make about what’s deemed important?
The usual rules still apply: proximity (hence the endless paucity, in most American media, of foreign stories), celebrity, recency, novelty, power/wealth, to name only a few. The military. War, natural disasters, crime. Three’s a trend! We need to ruthlessly question what we consider important, adding and dropping traditional beats — religion now seems to be invisible, poverty mostly so — while climate change surges, as it must, to the forefront.
What do our audiences want…and is it silly celebrity fluff?
I’ve worked in journalism for more than 40 years, staff and freelance, and for three major newspapers — two Canadian, one in NY — and three American national magazines.
Some thoughts:
We need journalism: local, regional, national, global
While hundreds of local newspapers have closed down, (thanks to the loss of ad revenue due to the Internet), others are thriving, often now digital and non-profit, places like The 19th., focused on news about women. A program called Report for America, for whom I mentor two early career journalists, one in St. Paul, Minnesota and one in Charleston, WV, hires young reporters into smaller local and regional newsrooms around the U.S., offering an extra stipend to their employers to pay them better. It also offers individual mentoring from veterans like me, the older, wiser and more experienced pro’s usually the first laid off because we’re “expensive.” Local outlets include radio and television, like WYNC in New York, whose Brian Lehrer show, a smart, analytical show focused on politics, draws listeners from around the country (thanks to the Internet).
The ongoing loss of local journalism means plenty of important stories will remain unreported, and local politicians and law enforcement can behave with even greater impunity.
National media — some with enormous budgets — range from “legacy media” like USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times to broadcasts like 60 Minutes and Dateline to the many TV talk shows and ProPublica, whose reporting is extraordinary — like this database of the judges of the Supreme Court listing every extra little trip and gift they enjoyed, because, after all, who can scrape by on a mere $285,400 a year? ($298,500 for the chief justice.)
Global media include outlets like the NYT, FT, CNN, RFI, CBC, AP, BBC and Al Jazeera, to name only a few — many of whom routinely cover parts of the world (Africa, Asia, South America, for example) you’ll never hear or see in parochial American media — nightly television news especially — focused endlessly on sentiment, war, domestic politics or violence. I read the Financial Times (a globally focused British newspaper) daily and every day learn something I’m not finding elsewhere.
Plus thousands of podcasts produced by these legitimate outlets and their staff.
Here’s writer McKay Coppins, talking to PBS about his reporting on the rapacious hedge fund that’s been busy buying up American newspapers and stripping them for parts:
There’s a huge body of research that shows when a local newspaper either disappears or is significantly diminished, there are downstream effects on the communities they serve.
So, voter turnout drops. Misinformation spreads more easily. Civic engagement is lower. There is even evidence to suggest that city budgets get larger because there’s more dysfunction and corruption without a bustling newsroom of reporters holding city hall to account.
And what’s — what we have seen play out with the newspapers that Alden has bought is fairly similar, right? You have seen newspapers dramatically shrink their coverage of local government, of education, schools. In the case of The Chicago Tribune, which Alden bought earlier this year, they very quickly lost a quarter of their newsroom, which made it more difficult to cover, for example, the resignation of a powerful state lawmaker amid bribery charges.
This was an extraordinary NYC panel, held in 2019 — even before the explosion of AI.
No one tells us what to write
OK, not exactly.
There are many who now very firmly believe our corporate overlords stand beside our desks and tell us what to say, line by line, making sure we vilify the people they admire and exalt the people they loathe (MAGAs are devout in this belief.)
No.
If you’re a staff writer/broadcaster, you will have an editor directly above you to whom you report. That person will read and review everything you produce — and you won’t produce anything without them knowing about it beforehand and approving of it, from length to tone to sourcing (who you choose to interview/quote as experts.) That editor also reports to multiple layers of senior management, each of whom can challenge or question the work. They may spike it — an ancient newsroom term (when paper stories were jammed onto a spike atop their desk) — or kill it. It will never be heard or seen. Many newsrooms are still run on a military model of hierarchy, with a very clear chain of command. You mess with it at your professional peril.
In the best newsrooms, these are collegial relationships of mutual trust and respect. Too often, they’re not. Reporters are passionate curious people, often resembling truffle hunters — digging long and hard until we get a story we know is as complete as we can make it. But that zeal bumps up against our bosses’ hunger for clicks, views and a lot of content ground out quickly, which mitigates against quality. If you read/listen to specific outlets (like Fox) you will see a bias…just as readers of the NYT and Guardian know theirs as well. Choose accordingly, and be aware.
Press conferences/political events are bullshit theater
I’ve been to plenty and they’re often a joke. The people at the podium are in charge and on message, often allowing very little time for questions. The peer pressure of pack journalism means many reporters simply won’t even ask a question, for fear of looking stupid or giving something away to competitors. The only way to get real information is by cultivating our own sources, people we trust and who trust us, to spill the tea, sometimes off the record or on background.
Local journalism remains essential…$$$?!
“It took a generation for the American news industry to unravel, and it will take a generation to fully rebuild it,” Sarabeth Berman, C.E.O. of the American Journalism Project, which funds nonprofit newsrooms, said in a recent speech. “But real progress is underway.”
Here are some terrific examples, aggregated by The New York Times:
In the Hunter Hills neighborhood of Atlanta, idle freight trains blocked a main road, sometimes for more than 30 hours. — Capital B News
A city manager used political muscle and a community’s trust to remake DuBois, Pa., while granting himself raises, engaging in conflicts of interest, and allegedly stealing hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars. — Spotlight PA
An investigative report of wage theft in New York State uncovered rampant abuse in the horse racing industry, with repeat offenders owing workers over $4.4 million. — Documented
In his poem “Why Bother?”Sean Thomas Dougherty wrote, “Because right now, there is someone/out there with/a wound in the exact shape/of your words.” Those words are ours to provide, those wounds ours to plaster. Contrary to the widespread notion that speaking truth to power means being antagonistic and cold, journalists can, instead, act as a care-taking profession — one that soothes and nurtures. And we are among the only professions that can do so at a scale commensurate with the scope of the crises before us. We can make people who feel invisible feel seen. We can make everyone else look.
Tabloids and broadsheets — the difference
Tabloids are those like the New York Daily News, while a broadsheet is the NYT or Wall Street Journal, the size you have to fold up neatly to read it in print in public. They differ widely/wildly in what they deem newsworthy and why — hence lots of lurid crime stories in the tabs, often winning “the wood”, the entire front page. Broadsheets tend to be more ponderous and wordy (offering more physical space, in print, to write long.)
I’ve been on staff at both — the Daily News is so hyper-local that if Christ re-appeared beyond the city’s five boroughs they’d let a competitor have it. Their audience is much lower-income than that of the Times, so my reporting took me to Queens and Harlem and the Bronx, showing me a wholly different city than one I previously knew. (Ask me about the old lady with the tire iron who threatened me when I mistakenly stole her parking spot beside the Bronx courthouse.)
Women journalists are bullied on social media daily
I won’t share the filth they hear and see, but doxxing (revealing where they/their families live to intimidate them) is a favorite. Being a woman journalist, especially a woman of color, means keeping a calm demeanor and emotional armor in the face of insults and degradation — usually for daring to simply do our job, which can mean challenging authority, aka white men with money. They hate that!
The late, great NYT media writer David Carr, a lively and funny speaker
Facts matter, a lot
Politicians lie. Corporate bigwigs lie. The military lies.
Power lies.
The journalist’s job is to ferret out bullshit (boosting profits, winning pork barrel legislation, deceiving voters.) Do some journalists lie? Probably. Once found out, though, they’re unlikely to ever work in the business again. In an era of such diminished audience trust, they’re a liability.
But without trained, smart, tough journalists asking a lot of nosy and persistent questions, challenging evidently absurd statements no matter how many millions of people think must be right and truthful because someone they admire said it! –— without us holding these people to account — everyone is screwed. We’ll consume tainted food and drink filthy water, take useless drugs, submit to un-needed medical procedures, all in the name of profit.
Like this, part of an ongoing NYT series on profitable and dubious medical procedures, some of which leave lasting damage on patients — in this case babies whose tongues are cut (!) to putatively make breastfeeding easier.
Who else is going to call these miscreants to account?
Once a story is submitted for publication or broadcast, copy editors read it over to check for clarity, house style (names, etc.), potential libel and more. Our work is fact-checked; when I write freelance for the NYT, my stories are read and questioned by as many as four different editors, each with new and and additional concerns, before they ever see the light of day. I have to answer every single one. Some national magazines still employ fact-checkers, whose job is to make sure everything in a story is accurate — from statistics to quotes. One medium that doesn’t have this? Books!
Attribution matters
When I left my native Canada to work in the U.S., I noticed this difference immediately — editors’ insistence on attribution: who said it. And not just “a think tank” but whether they lean left or right or are mostly funded by the Koch brothers, for example. Readers deserve to know who they’re being asked to listen to and why.
The news too often focuses on rich white people
Both in audience and story focus: billionaires and celebrities and give me a break! I loathe this, and am heartily sick of it. Americans are living in a time of truly grotesque income inequality — and every day The New York Times publishes enormous ads for Graff, whose diamonds are the size of a baby’s fist. It’s a real middle finger to non ULHNW readers (ultra high net worth) but there they are…
Editors with true power are still too often older white men who see the world, and what stories matter most, through old white men biases — while younger staffers and freelancers of every race, ethnicity and gender keep proposing a wider vision. But they’re last in and first out, with a difficult enough time even getting a full-time job and some can’t afford to work for low wages. Working in journalism as a person of color is often deeply exhausting and dis-spiriting.
Important stories like poverty are grim and depressing, as is opioid use, tainted water, unethical medical procedures funneling profit — but must be covered as well as fawning profiles of movie stars promoting their latest film.
Terrible freelance pay makes it an expensive hobby
Many many glossy magazines have gone digital — so easy to read! But their pay rates have also dropped from $3 or $2/word (yes, the Dickensian way writers are still paid) to barely 50 cents a word, in a time of crippling costs for rent, food, health insurance and university education. Yet we’re expected to keep bringing the same level of skill for pennies on the dollar.
I recently won two new assignments — at $300 per story, barely 30 cents a word. I agreed to do a personal essay I can write quickly, and chose not to do a reported story for that rate.
Quality costs money.
I’ve been writing for The New York Times since the 1990s — and their profits and audience are growing — while I still get exactly the same unchanged pay rate. This trend has driven many trained, smart, experienced freelance writers out of journalism. We simply can’t afford to take the time to do the work to produce the quality YOU deserve.
Yes, we make mistakes
Of course we do — and, thanks to the speed of the Internet — readers and listeners are quick to tell us, directly to us, to our employers and through social media.
I doubt many journalists start their day determined to lie and mislead, even though this is a growing perception. We arrive to our work with biases and blind spots, as do our editors. At best, we fight to see them and name them and work past them. But it’s a daily battle. I think acknowledging that could help (re) build some measure of trust in us.
Are there any news outlets you rely on and trust?
Any individual reporters/broadcasters? Who and why?
As someone very happy to flee university after four years, with no appetite for further academic training, I’ve found some less formal ways to learn about the world; the fancy word for someone self-taught is auto-didact and that feels like me.
I later did study again formally, 15 years later, at the New York School of Interior Design and loved every class except for drafting. Our classes were very small and I realized that hands-on and visual learning were a better fit for me than sitting in class listening passively to lectures.
While some people are thrilled to be back in a classroom setting, there are so many other ways to learn.
These are some of the informal ways I learn about the world:
Ballet
The way I’ve discovered some of my favorite pieces of classical music is through watching the ballets they are set to; ballet is an art form I studied for years and love. Two of those pieces are Romeo and Juliet by Prokofiev and Serenade, the first full-length ballet created by American choreographer George Balanchine. The music for both is so perfectly aligned with every character and scene. I never tire of hearing it.
The opening chords of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade slay me every single time, bringing me to tears. Here’s the ballet — 30 minutes. It’s been said that its powerful opening gesture — every dancer standing still while holding her arm high at an angle was inspired by working with them outdoors, they shielding their eyes, a gesture he kept.
Wine
Jose recently bought a bottle of crisp white wine, a pinot grigio with an unusual German name, made in the Alto Adige….which is what? where? It’s the northernmost part of Italy, with stunning mountain vistas, and a prime winemaking region. Now I want to go there! I had never heard of it. Every bottle of wine originates somewhere, from Ontario, Canada to Napa Valley to Argentina to Cyprus. I love learning about all of these places.
TV
It’s been a terrible summer — my right hip is so painful I just can’t go very far and I’ve lost hours and hours napping to rest from the fatigue it causes. So my travel (except for 8 days in Toronto in June) has been limited to the screen. Thanks to so many great shows, I now have a better understanding of/appreciation for rural Portugal (Gloria), Tasmania (Deadloch), Yorkshire (Happy Valley and other shows there), Call My Agent (Paris), London (The Diplomat and others). Many shows include trivia and insider details — like explaining the indigenous words and names used in Deadloch.
The most exotic, oddly, has been Murder By the Lake, set in and around Lake Constance (Bodensee in German), bordered by (who knew?) Austria, Germany and Switzerland. One episode hinged on the traditional abduction of the bride, carried aloft on five people’s shoulders, for the groom to find, another on a hops farmer who makes a deadly deal with the owner of a local brewery. I had no idea what hops in the field even looked like! I love seeing how different each show’s local dress, clothing, dialect and architecture are.
Travel
Unless you only do cruises or Disney or resorts, you are likely learn a lot when you travel, either domestically or internationally, about food, culture, history, politics, architecture, art. Sometimes it’s weird things, like a large golden horse head mounted high up in some Paris streets (they sell horse meat.) I discovered two much loved forms of music when visiting France — a Corsican band called I Muvrini and a great jazz station, TSF Jazz.
Movies
I hate to admit this, but I didn’t know much growing up about WWII; Canadians don’t spend a lot of time teaching it. The one film that really brought to life for me was Saving Private Ryan. When we finally visited Juno Beach and the Canadian cemetery in Normandy, I recognized those fields and landscape through films I’d seen. I love the film Cabaret and it has led me to finally read its origin, The Berlin Stories, by Christopher Isherwood, who lived for four years in Weimar Berlin, a period that fascinates me. Cold Mountain, which is such a visually stunning film, taught me a lot more about the American Civil War and the women left behind to cope on their own; it stars Renee Zellweger and Nicole Kidman. It’s heart-rending, but so good.
Documentaries, obviously!
Books
From every reference book — design, cooking, history — I learn so much! I especially love what’s called “social history” and recently enjoyed “How to Be a Tudor”, a dawn to dusk guide to Tudor life (16th century.) I picked it up at the Met museum after a show of Tudor art and artifacts, and loved all its details, from what people wore and ate to what they earned. As a nerdy only child, I loved reading a history of medicine — so I knew even then who Galen and Vesalius and Jenner and Semmelweiss were and how each advanced our knowledge.
Twitterchats
My favorite has been #TRLT, (The Road Less Traveled) as it draws a wide array of adventurous people. Unlike too much travel coverage in magazines, it’s not focused mostly or solely on luxury or resorts. People check in from Vancouver, Glasgow, Kenya, Malawi and more.
Museums
I’ve been a sailor since childhood and knew the names of many legendary sailors like Isabelle Autissier, Robin Knox and Tania Aiebi, some of whose memoirs I read. But only in March 2023, on a visit to the new Sailing Museum in Newport, RI, did I learn of Bill Pinkney, the first black man to sail the world using the dangerous southern route; the link is to his recent NYT obituary.
I do read the wall descriptions in some museums so was intrigued, during a show at the Met, to learn that even (!?) Michelangelo and da Vinci had some difficult, broke years —- as did Japanese legend Hokusai, whose Great Wave (1831) is surely one of the best-known Japanese images. He also relied heavily on his talented daughter, also an artist, which I learned from a great museum show at the British Museum in July 2017. At show of Degas at DC’s National Gallery, I learned that he often used photographs as the basis for his famous pastels of ballet dancers, making use of that then new-ish medium.
Of course, there’s also Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, none of which I use; not for lack of interest, per se.
I’ve been all over the world — but never to PEI, which everyone assures me is gorgeous!
It’s easily reached from the northeastern U.S. (Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut) by car or by air from Toronto, Montreal and other Canadian airports.
We’re planning a really cool three-day workshop in Charlottetown for anyone who wants to improve their ability to tell truly compelling stories, with their photos and their words: August 23 to August 25, 2024.
The three people teaching are me, my husband Jose. R. Lopez and legendary Canadian nature and portrait photographer Dave Brosha, who lives there (when he’s not out all over the world leading his own workshops.)
all photos here are mine
Jose is a Pulitzer winning former New York Times photo editor and photographer (eight years in the White House Press Corps, multiple Superbowls, two Olympics and more) and has been mentoring and teaching his skills for decades, including a decade running the New York Times Student Journalism Institute’s photo classes.
I’m the winner of a Canadian National Magazine Award, author of two books, and have sold more than 100 stories to The New York Times. I’ll be teaching writing but also how to better integrate terrific photos into your storytelling, whether for your blog, for paid publication, for your clients. I began my career as a photographer, selling three cover images to Toronto Calendar magazine while I was still in high school. My photo work has later appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post and more.
We’re three photographers (one writer!) with very different ways of seeing the world — Dave is legendary for his images of nature, Jose for historic high-impact photos like his 1993 black and white portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the steps of the Supreme Court. My photos often carry a sense of mystery; I like viewers to stop and try to determine what they’re looking at, unlike my writing, whose role is to be more explicit. I’ll talk about how my powerful visual skills inform my own storytelling and how yours can too.
The three days — exclusive of travel and lodging — is $2450 Canadian or about $1800 U.S.
We guarantee a great hands-on learning experience, limited to a group of 20 students.
My guilty secret? I ate a lot of consoling pastry on my long walk home every day…
By Caitlin Kelly
The largest lawsuit settlement in the U.S. — $9.1 million dollars — was recently awarded to the New Jersey parents of a young girl, Mallory Grossman, who died at 12 by suicide after being relentlessly bullied, in and out of school.
Being bullied is a terrifying, exhausting, brutalizing experience, as anyone who has been through it well knows. It scars you for life, even if you find ways to get through years of it, abused daily by your peers while teachers and school authorities pretend not to notice.
That was me, ages 14.5 to 17, after arriving at a Toronto high school where everyone had attended the same schools from early childhood, lived in the same neighborhood and all knew one another. I landed in their midst — with acne, weird clothes, a lot of confidence and no idea how to be around boys after spending the previous six years (except for one) in single-sex private school. I had worn a uniform I loved and been surrounded by smart girls and women teachers who pushed us daily to academic excellence. I had been part of a community — until I was asked to leave the school after Grade Nine for being too disruptive. It really hurt.
I moved briefly to Mexico with my mother, but she had a manic breakdown there and I returned to Toronto to live with my father (for the first time in seven years) and his girlfriend, a woman I barely knew who was 13 years older — too young to be maternal and too old to be a sister. It was difficult.
At school I was called Doglin. Boys barked at me in the echoing hallways and one brought a dog biscuit to my desk.
It was hell. I came home every day and cried, often crawling into bed for comfort.
I have no doubt teachers saw and heard it. No one ever intervened — until I slammed a very thick math textbook on the head of a bully sitting in front of me in Grade 12 math class. His steady stream of sotto voce abuse only made math — not my best subject! — even less tolerable.
I was able to make some dear friends, saw a therapist and had lovely summers at a camp where I was valued and welcomed. I appeared several times on a TV quiz show and helped our school reach the quarter finals. These helped me sustain a sense of pride and self-worth.
I somehow got through it all and reigned in my senior year; we then had Grade 13. I started a high school newspaper and rounded up pals to help produce it; I sold three cover photos to a local magazine and even became prom queen. I had a cool fun boyfriend. It was sweet revenge to leave on a high note.
But those earlier years were very painful. To this day, I only want attention I invite — verbal, visual, for my work or writing. If someone stares at me I dislike it, although objectively I look fine.
When I arrived at University of Toronto, I was inundated with male attention, all of it charming but also...I was the same person!? I had fled a school that felt 20 years behind the times, the girls docile, the boys dominant. That was disorienting, for sure.
Decades later, a pal from high school said I was bullied because I was so self-confident I scared people. Another pal recalled me, with admiration, for being “progressive.”
Anyone who has been bullied knows it’s typically ignored, laughed off or minimized. Victims are told to ignore it or tolerate it. Yet few among us would calmly accept daily physical assaults upon a student within their classroom — neither teachers, administrators, parents nor fellow students.
So it only reinforced my disdain for those “in authority” — in my view, that means not only having power, but using it to make sure students are safe and are able to learn in school, not dread every next assault or insult.
Changing schools is not, for many reasons, always an option. It also reinforces the fantasy that the problem is somehow ours to solve individually — not directly and forcefully addressing the nastiness surrounding us.
The dining hall of Massey College, the campus for graduate students at University of Toronto, my alma mater
By Caitlin Kelly
Here’s a depressing reminder of how much money really counts if you want to attend an elite school in the United States.
From The New York Times:
Elite colleges have long been filled with the children of the richest families: At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent.
A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes. They tended to have higher SAT scores and finely honed résumés, and applied at a higher rate — but they were overrepresented even after accounting for those things. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in.
You may think this doesn’t matter — or matter much — and maybe it doesn’t for some students and some schools. But there are entire industries and cities/regions where an Ivy or elite school degree means the difference between your resume getting read, let alone getting a job interview. Journalism is certainly one of these! I arrived in New York City at the age of 30 in a recession with Canada’s top university — University of Toronto — on my resume.
It might as well have been blank. I was, and always have been, facing competition from people who attended East Coast prep schools (mine was also in Toronto), then Ivy colleges and often Ivy graduate school. If a hiring manager is only looking for those people…forget it!
But there is so much unfair about this American arms race to groom even mediocre students with a lot of family money — while smart, talented lower income kids never even get the chance to compete.
I live in a middle income town in a county north of New York City that also has some extremely affluent towns — Scarsdale, Bronxville, Rye, Bedford and Chappaqua (home to the Clintons) — and whew, the endless tutoring and coaching and making sure Muffy and Jeff keep a tight hold on the best possible chance to keep climbing the ladders of affluence.
For a very brief time, I knew a local woman with tremendous wealth whose daughter said she wanted to become a journalist — an industry whose pay scales are low for all but a very few. The only question she kept asking me — how much money would her daughter earn?
Sorry, wrong question!
Certainly for that industry.
I find this endless focus on money so depressing, especially after being a Big Sister (volunteer mentor) to a 13 year old girl a while back. I should not have been so shocked to see the many obstacles she faced but I was: a noisy and chaotic household, a mother who disappeared for years only to reappear and spend her days playing video games, no quiet place to even do her homework.
The very basics other more affluent children take for granted: silence, support, discipline.
I tried to get her accepted to a local prep school but she never even showed up for the meeting. The whole thing collapsed into a mess of my liberal fantasies and her family’s clear lack of interest in, maybe even opposition to, her escaping the situation holding her back. I was deeply disheartened by it all, knowing she had intelligence and drive and a sense of humor but a lot of internal and external issues to resolve.
I moved from my native Canada to the U.S. in 1989 to live in small town New Hampshire, adjacent to the Ivy college Dartmouth, with no idea how divided the world is here between the affluent and the rest of us. Whew.
I also read two deeply formative books I recommend:
There Are No Children Here, a 1992 book about life in a Chicago housing project and Savage Inequalities, also published in 1992, which compared the educations available in two American schools — one in a wealthy suburb and one in a low-income Manhattan neighborhood.
The way education here is funded is so different than many other places determined to create a smart, well-educated population and a more level playing field.
I am also so fed up of “legacies” — students who gain admission because their family members went to the same school or donated a lot of money. Canada simply doesn’t have this.
I was fortunate to attend high school in Toronto and a university whose first year’s tuition was — yes, really — $660. It’s now around $10,000 a year for undergraduates…not $60,000 to $70,000 and beyond.
This country faces so many complex challenges: climate change, religious fundamentalism, attacks on women’s reproductive rights, racism, income inequality, gun violence…
I despair now at the lack of civic participation, of educated debate, of serious conversation among millions of Americans.
Without affordable, accessible quality education it’s not going to happen.
I’ve been hanging out on Twitter for a few years, but have never had a tweet go viral — more than 11,000 likes!!
This one did:
I recently got a NYT call for pitches, none of which worked for me at all — but was perfect for a friend, and one with a new book on that topic, now both soon to appear. This is what we all should be doing. It is rarely as zero-sum as everyone assumes. #freelance
I didn’t think much of posting this, as it’s nothing I haven’t said there many times before.
Maybe it was the “ooooooh!” allure of an elusive New York Times byline that caught people’s attention?
Maybe it’s just the luck of that fickle algorithm?
But it’s been really gratifying and satisfying to see it retweeted and liked and bookmarked.
At its best, Twitter can offer a bully pulpit.
It was nice when that specific writer outed herself in reply and thanked me but I was just happy to make that introduction; I know her and I know her work and I trust her to do work of NYT quality. I don’t just do it for anyone; referrals can wildly backfire if the person you refer is less than completely professional.
I recently signed up to be a mentor with Report for America, a program designed to encourage younger/newer journalists as they start their careers, some in small towns, others in larger markets. It’s a joy to be helpful.
I’ve also been really busy this week emailing fellow alumni of our Toronto high school to create a new annual award for a graduating senior for creativity, named in honor of a fellow student who was funny as hell and much beloved and whose later life was very much marked by severe mental illness, a terrible loss.
Three fellow alumni from our year, so far, have agreed to share the cost with me.
Thanks to the school’s guidance counselor, we’re figuring it out quickly and I hope to be up in Toronto June 28th to present the award with a fellow student, a dear friend of that student.
Without kids of my own or nieces or nephews to encourage, I feel it’s really important to encourage the latest generation…already so plagued with so many challenges like COVID and climate change as it is.
Our high school is still pretty upper middle class, but now more diverse racially and ethnically, and has some lower-income students — the $1,000 we will offer is still a nice amount.
One of my favorite books, on how to be a productive creative person
By Caitlin Kelly
It’s an odd thing to ask of fellow adults, perhaps — more common for young kids and teens to have someone older to look up to and possibly emulate.
I don’t have kids and fear the adulation so many youngsters now offer to celebrities, influencers and millionaires. The best people aren’t necessarily those with the fattest bank accounts. Fame and fortune are just easy, visible metrics.
I take a spin class at our local JCC with a teacher I knew was clearly in his late 70s. He’s whippet-thin, with nary an ounce of body fat. He also teaches fitness classes. I recently discovered he’s in his 80s. Amazing!
He’s also low-key, modest and very encouraging, all super admirable qualities in my book.
As I head into a quieter period of my life with less focus — finally! — on hustling for work, I relish finding older people whose lives and values I admire.
People with physical and intellectual energy, curiosity and liveliness, people still engaged in community, or community building. Where we live, (a place I enjoy), is also an expensive and competitive part of the U.S., which means most people are focused totally on getting and sustaining high incomes, raising their children to do the same.
Those priorities leave little time, room and interest in friendship, without which we can’t really see who someone is beyond the surface,
As former President Jimmy Carter enters hospice care at home, I know millions of us have long admired a man who spent decades helping others, often through Habitat for Humanity, a program that helps build housing for those in need. I wish we had more role models like him!
People like Paul Farmer, who spent years working as an MD in Haiti, or Peter Reed, a former medic recently killed at 33 by a missile — while volunteering in Ukraine.
Footballer Sadio Mane, like some other star athletes, has donated much of his salary to build a hospital and other facilities in his native Senegal.
People who choose to put themselves in harm’s way to help others are also extraordinary to me. I admit, I have tremendous admiration for the career journalists, like fellow Canadian Lyse Doucet of the BBC, who spend their lives bearing witness in some terrifying times and places.
Brave young women activists like Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai.
I was also fortunate at 25 to meet a man I dedicated my first book to, Philippe Viannay, who died in the mid 80s, a few years after I won the fellowship in Paris he created for journalists from around the world to learn about Europe by reporting on it through four solo trips. He was a Resistance hero, helped found a major newspaper and sailing school and home for troubled boys. He was also a lot of fun! It was the greatest honor to know him and be liked by him. He came into my life when I was 25 and my own father, never an easy man, was often distant, emotionally and physically. It was deeply encouraging to meet and know someone so incredibly accomplished who — liked me! So I wasn’t simply admiring someone from a distance, but seeing up close how he comported himself in later life.
Social media can also create monstrous “role models” — like the wealthy Tate brothers, whose toxic influence on gullible teen British boys is so widespread that teachers are now addressing it.
In recent months, Ms. Stanton said, students have started bringing up Mr. Tate in class. They extol his wealth and fast cars. And for the first time in her 20 years of teaching, her 11- to 16-year-old students have challenged her for working and asked if she had her husband’s permission.
She has heard students talk casually about rape. “As the only woman in the room, I felt uncomfortable,” she said. Once, a student asked her if she was going to cry. At home, even her own three sons seemed to defend Mr. Tate.
“He is brainwashing a generation of boys, and it’s very frightening,” she said. “They seem to think he is right. He’s right because he’s rich.”
In the Midlands, Nathan Robertson, a specialist who works with students who need additional support, said that in the past year, he had regularly heard Mr. Tate broadcasting from students’ smartphones. Many in a class of 14- and 15-year-olds he worked with cited Mr. Tate as a role model. When the topic of abortion came up in class, boys began laughing, he said, and called feminism poisonous. Some said that women did not have any rights and that men should make decisions for them.
Many people see someone in their own family as a role model.
I have mixed feelings about my own parents…both born wealthy to difficult parents of their own. My mother’s mother married six (!) times, twice to the same man (my grandfather, who I never met) and my mother, desperate to flee, married at 17, never attending university, then or later.
So I did admire my mother’s spirit of adventure — she later traveled the world alone for years, living for a while alone in New Mexico, Bath and Lima, Peru. She was self-taught and read widely and deeply. She could be a lot of fun. In our good years, we laughed a lot. She offered her time as a volunteer to hospice patients in the hospital.
My father, an award-winning film-maker, is similar — their marriage lasted 13 years before divorce. He, too, loves to travel, is artistically talented as well, and was often gone for weeks working — in Ireland or the Arctic or Mideast. He is perpetually curious and has a wide range of interests, even at 93.
So in some senses, they are role models for me.
The qualities I most admire, in anyone:
Resilience
Bravery
Modesty
Compassion/Empathy
Kindness
Humor
Curiosity
A ferocious work ethic
I admit, I most often look to people who are fairly talented and highly accomplished at their work or in using their talents. But it’s not about their wealth or fame or public adulation. Too often, people who’ve hit the heights are quite happy to leave needy others behind.
We all need people to look up to, people whose behavior and demeanor set a high bar we can aspire to.
In 1845, a young girl made this sampler…early creativity
By Caitlin Kelly
Back when I started this blog — 2009 (!) — one of my first and best-read posts was about the endless American fetish for “productivity” when creativity is really what drives most innovation, and certainly the arts.
As every blogger knows, blogging demands creativity! Ideas, some skill and the eternal optimism there might actually be an audience out there for us.
As readers here know, I only moved to the United States at the age of 30, so its cradle-to-grave obsession with work and being seen as obsessed with work — above all other pursuits (family, friends, health, a spiritual life, etc,) struck me, then as now, as weird. Yes, I know about the Puritan work ethic. But we’re not all wearing shoes with buckles or moving around by horseback and making our own soaps and clothing either…
In a country whose minimum wage pushes millions into poverty, millions will never find the time and energy and encouragement to savor creative pursuits, even for their own pleasure — cooking, knitting, crocheting, embroidery, woodworking, making music or visual art. American capitalism makes sure only the well-off have the leisure to do it without sacrifice — I still get a payment every year from Canada’s Public Lending Rights program, a sort of royalty system that pays authors for the library use of our books. It’s not a large amount, but is deeply meaningful to me, both because it democratizes access to our work and sends a powerful message to creators — you matter!
I don’t have children, but I do see the tremendous pressure American children face — to pass endless state tests, to do terrifying “active shooter drills”, to get into fancy and costly colleges.
None of which seem likely to foster creativity.
So I’m always in awe of creative people, some of whom manage to keep producing their work in the face of some serious odds.
Here’s a 9:07 video of actor Ethan Hawke talking about creativity; it’s gotten 5.2 million views.
“We’re educating kids out of creativity” says Sir Ken Robinson on this 2006 TED talk; it’s 19:12 minutes long and has received 74 million views, with lots of laughter and insight. “We need to radically rethink our idea of intelligence,” he says. Worth it!
Here’s one unlikely and interesting example of creativity — a book out May 16, 2023 from a San Antonio nephrologist whose Twitter threads on medicine were moving and powerful. Social media networks like Twitter, Instagram and YouTube have fostered and spread all sorts of creativity, from high schoolers to seasoned professionals.
We recently visited friends who worked with my husband at The New York Times for decades, one a photographer renowned for his portraits and his wife, a photo editor. Her father was an architect and her mother a textile designer; his father and grandfather were bakers.
I grew up in a home filled with all sorts of art — Inuit prints and sculpture, 19th c Japanese prints, Mexican masks, a Picasso lithograph — and all three of my parents (father, mother, stepmother) worked in creative fields: journalism, TV and film-making. So it feels natural and felt inevitable I’d work in some creative capacity, as I’ve done since my teens when I sold three photos as magazine covers in Toronto while still in high school.
But creativity requires many things some people never have:
silence
solitude
uninterrupted time to think deeply
a physical space in which to paint, draw, print photos in a darkroom, weave, sew
access to needed tools and materials
the disposable income to buy needed tools and materials
a larger culture that admires and celebrates creativity, whether family, school, neighborhood, country
skill sufficient to make something you might want to keep or sell
time, energy and spare income to learn and perfect those skills
good health and mental focus
encouragement!
My favorite book on the subject is the 2003 book The Creative Habit by American choreographer Twyla Tharp.
Whether by innate voracious curiosity or decades of working in journalism, my first instinct in response to almost everything I read, hear or watch is to ask….what’s missing?
It’s essential in that work to pay really close attention not only to what’s offered…but what isn’t being said? What does a long pause or silence in an interview mean? Why does almost every American national TV news report lack any useful or meaningful context? I routinely shout at the TV screen in frustration!
It might be a lack of diversity in sourcing — very common.
It might be sadly clear that the “news” item was simply a rewritten press release, also known as a “puff piece.”
It might be the reporter, editor and producer were too lazy or ignorant to dig deeper — like (!?) a recent report on the national nightly news from CBS that urged listeners to get vaccinated against polio (a good thing) but failed to even mention how polio is spread.
Or it might be the creators knew there was a minefield beneath the flowers — and decided to just let things lie.
This was immediately obvious to me while recently watching a new documentary about Leonard Cohen, a renowned Canadian singer/songwriter who died in 2016, but who has millions of fans worldwide. His life never lacked for drama — partnered with very beautiful women, one (Suzanne Elrod) who bore him two children, Lorca and Adam, spending six years in a Zen monastery outside Los Angeles, emerging to discover that a longtime friend and manager, Kelly Lynch, had robbed him blind, pocketing some $5 million of his earnings. She only got 18 months in prison — and he went out on tour at 79 (!) to make back his losses, which he did.
Here’s the thing:
I love his work.
I know many of his songs by heart.
I admire his art.
But to produce a documentary that doesn’t even speak to his children, or explain that maybe they wouldn’t speak on camera (!?) struck me at once as a huge oversight. It could not have been in error.
The film includes many musicians talking about their admiration for Cohen and his influence on them, from Judy Collins to Brandie Carlisle to Glenn Hansard.
As someone from an accomplished family, and parents who were devoted to their work, this hit hard. I’ve long wanted to write a book interviewing the adult children of highly successful parents, and not just “celebrities” like the Kardashians. I know that being the child of famous and successful parents can come at a very real emotional cost.
A little more candor here would have done the trick for me.
Broadside 