2025/06/26

Is New Yorker magazine Pro Israel or objective on Israel-Palestine-Iran matters

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Here's a breakdown based on general perceptions and the provided articles:

The New Yorker:

  • Appears to be more analytical and long-form: The titles suggest in-depth examinations ("What Have the U.S. and Israel Accomplished in Iran?", "With His Eyes on History, Benjamin Netanyahu Aims for Political Resurrection," "What Is Israel's Endgame with Iran?"). This format often allows for more nuance and multiple perspectives within a single piece.
  • Features a range of perspectives:
    • "Why Israel Struck Iran First" features Yossi Klein Halevi, an Israeli American writer, who makes a case for Netanyahu's actions, even while he is "vehemently opposed" to Netanyahu. This suggests a willingness to publish arguments that might be seen as pro-Israel, even if from an unexpected source.
    • "An Inside Look at Gaza’s Chaotic New Aid System" and "The Girl Who Gave Me Hope for Gaza" provide a Palestinian perspective and highlight the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
    • "Gaza Must Be Rebuilt by Palestinians, for Palestinians" by Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian writer, explicitly criticizes Trump's proposal and talks about "ethnic cleansing." This is a strong pro-Palestinian stance.
    • "“No Other Land”: The Collective Behind the Oscar-Nominated Documentary" discusses a film about Israel's occupation of the West Bank, suggesting a critical examination of Israeli policies.
  • Focus on U.S. involvement: Several articles specifically address Donald Trump's actions and policies regarding Iran and the wider Middle East ("The Dangerous Consequences of Donald Trump’s Strikes in Iran," "Donald Trump Bombs Iran, and America Waits," "Donald Trump’s No-Strategy Strategy on Iran"). This indicates a focus on the geopolitical ramifications and the role of the U.S.
  • Editorial Stance (based on general perception and articles): While The New Yorker is generally considered a liberal publication, its approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict often strives for intellectual rigor and a platform for diverse, even if sometimes controversial, viewpoints. They publish prominent writers and thinkers from various backgrounds, which can lead to a more varied perspective than some other news outlets. The articles you've provided show both critical analysis of Israeli and U.S. actions, as well as giving voice to Israeli perspectives.

The New York Times:

  • Accusations of Bias: The New York Times has faced significant and often contradictory accusations of bias on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
    • Pro-Israel Bias: Some studies and critics, including a Yale University professor's study mentioned in search results, allege that NYT coverage has skewed towards generating sympathy for Palestinians while downplaying Israeli suffering and Hamas's responsibility. Other reports claim internal memos directed journalists to avoid terms like "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing" and to limit the use of "Palestine," which suggests a leaning towards an Israeli narrative.
    • Anti-Israel Bias: Conversely, some pro-Israel groups and individuals have accused the NYT of being overly critical of Israel or sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
  • "Paper of Record" Status: As a prominent "paper of record," The New York Times is under constant scrutiny for its coverage. Its extensive reporting on the conflict means it publishes a vast number of articles, leading to varied interpretations of its overall stance.
  • Editorial Board vs. News Coverage: It's important to distinguish between the news reporting and the opinion/editorial pages. The editorial board's stance may differ from the framing within news articles, though some critics argue that a bias can permeate both.

Comparison:

Based on the provided list of articles and general understanding:

  • The New Yorker appears to aim for a more analytical and multi-faceted approach, often delving into the complexities and historical context of the conflict through long-form essays and Q&As. They seem willing to publish a broader spectrum of voices, including those that might challenge prevailing narratives. While it's difficult to definitively label them "pro-Israel" or "objective" from a limited sample, the selection shows an effort to explore various angles and consequences of the conflict for all parties involved.
  • The New York Times, despite its reputation as a "paper of record," has been more consistently and publicly criticized for perceived bias (both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian, depending on the critic). The sheer volume of its daily reporting means that individual articles might reflect different leanings, but ongoing studies and internal reports suggest a tendency that has drawn significant scrutiny.

Conclusion:

It's challenging to declare either publication entirely "objective," as all media outlets have inherent editorial perspectives and the human element of journalism. However, based on the provided examples and common critiques:

  • The New Yorker seems to offer a more intellectually rigorous and diverse platform for discussing the Israel-Palestine-Iran issues, allowing for various perspectives to be explored in depth. This might lead it to be perceived as more "objective" in its willingness to present different sides, even if individual articles might lean one way or another.
  • The New York Times has faced more explicit and widespread accusations of directional bias (whether pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian, depending on the analysis) in its news coverage, especially regarding framing, terminology, and emphasis.

Ultimately, both publications are crucial sources of information, and a comprehensive understanding requires reading a variety of perspectives and critically analyzing the arguments presented.

The New Yorker magazine - what kind reputation, does it have? Proud of itself having.


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The New Yorker magazine holds a highly distinguished and somewhat unique reputation in the world of journalism and literature. Here's a breakdown of its key characteristics and what it prides itself on:

Reputation:

  • Intellectual and Sophisticated: It's widely regarded as a publication for the intellectually curious and culturally savvy. Its content often assumes a certain level of education and engagement from its readers.
  • Long-Form Journalism and In-Depth Reporting: The New Yorker is famous for its long, meticulously researched articles and essays that delve deeply into complex topics – from politics and social issues to science, arts, and profiles of interesting people. This is a deliberate counter-cultural approach to the rapid-fire news cycle.
  • High-Quality Writing and Editing: The magazine is known for its exquisite prose, rigorous fact-checking, and meticulous copyediting. Writers aspire to be published in The New Yorker due to its demanding standards.
  • Literary Excellence: It has a long history of publishing some of the most respected fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. Many renowned authors have had their short stories debut in The New Yorker.
  • Iconic Cartoons and Covers: Its distinctive and often witty single-panel cartoons are a hallmark of the magazine, and its covers are frequently artistic and thought-provoking, often commenting on current events.
  • Influential and Prestigious: Being published in The New Yorker is a significant career milestone for writers, and the magazine itself is seen as an arbiter of cultural taste and intellectual discourse. It has won numerous awards, including Pulitzer Prizes.
  • "Liberal" or "Left-Leaning": While it strives for a nuanced presentation, The New Yorker is generally considered a liberal or left-leaning publication in its editorial stance and the perspectives it tends to highlight. This is evident in its political endorsements and the issues it prioritizes.
  • National and International Reach: Although its name suggests a focus on New York City, The New Yorker has a broad national and international readership and covers global issues extensively.

What The New Yorker Prides Itself On:

  • Depth and Nuance: In an age of soundbites and fleeting news, The New Yorker prides itself on its commitment to deep dives, nuanced analysis, and giving complex subjects the space they deserve.
  • Originality and Authority: It aims to break new ground with its reporting, offer fresh perspectives, and feature writers who are true authorities in their fields.
  • "Not Edited for the Old Lady in Dubuque": This famous line from its early prospectus (1925) embodies its self-perception as a sophisticated, cosmopolitan publication that doesn't "talk down" to its readers or cater to the lowest common denominator. It implies a certain intellectual elitism, but also a commitment to challenging and engaging its audience.
  • Its Distinctive Voice and Style: The magazine has a recognizable house style – often characterized by its sophisticated, sometimes wry, and detailed prose.
  • Fact-Checking: Its rigorous fact-checking department is legendary and a source of great pride, aiming for unimpeachable accuracy.
  • A "Journal of Record and Imagination": As current editor David Remnick has stated, the goal is to blend reportage and poetry, words and art, commentary on the moment and reflections on the age. This highlights its dual commitment to both serious journalism and literary artistry.
  • Cultural Relevance: Despite its traditional format, The New Yorker aims to remain relevant by engaging with contemporary issues, popular culture, and the evolving social landscape.

In essence, The New Yorker prides itself on being a bastion of high-quality, intelligent, and influential journalism and literature, appealing to a discerning readership that values in-depth exploration and thoughtful commentary.

Do you know its editorial guidelines for its writers?

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The New Yorker magazine has a highly specific and renowned set of editorial guidelines and a distinct "house style" that its writers are expected to adhere to. While they don't publish a detailed public style guide in the way some academic journals might, their practices are well-known within the industry and by those who study the magazine.

Here's what's generally known about their editorial guidelines and expectations for writers:

1. Meticulous Fact-Checking: This is perhaps The New Yorker's most famous and rigorous guideline. Every factual assertion, no matter how small, is meticulously fact-checked by a dedicated department. Writers must provide sources for every piece of information, and these sources are then independently verified. This commitment to accuracy is a cornerstone of their reputation.

2. High Quality of Prose and Literary Style:

  • Clarity and Precision: Writers are expected to use precise language and clear, elegant prose.
  • Sophistication without Pedantry: While intellectual, the writing should be accessible and engaging, avoiding unnecessary jargon or overly academic tones.
  • Narrative Strength: Even in non-fiction, there's often an emphasis on storytelling and compelling narrative arcs.
  • Nuance and Complexity: The New Yorker favors articles that explore subjects in depth, acknowledging complexities and avoiding simplistic conclusions.
  • Distinctive Voice (but within bounds): While individual writers maintain their voice, it must align with the magazine's overall intellectual and somewhat formal (but never stuffy) tone.

3. "New Yorker Style" (Specific Punctuation, Spelling, and Usage): This is a quirky and often debated aspect of their style. They have unique preferences for:

  • Diaeresis (¨): Famously used in words like "reëlect" and "coöperate."
  • Spelling: Often uses British spellings for some words (e.g., "theatre," "travelling," "focussed").
  • Punctuation: Has specific rules for commas, hyphens, and other punctuation marks (e.g., often uses the serial or Oxford comma).
  • "Said" is Preferred: As famously articulated by former editor Wolcott Gibbs, avoiding "fancy" verbs for "said" is a long-standing rule. They prefer to let context and dialogue convey emotion rather than relying on adverbs to modify "said."
  • Avoidance of Cliches: Writers are expected to find fresh ways to express ideas, steering clear of worn-out phrases.
  • Care with Adverbs: As Gibbs also noted, an overuse of adverbs is discouraged; strong verbs and clear nouns are preferred.

4. Extensive Research and Expertise: For non-fiction, writers are expected to conduct thorough research, often immersing themselves in the subject matter for weeks or months. The magazine frequently features writers who are experts in their fields or have a deep, long-standing engagement with their topics.

5. Long-Form and In-Depth: The New Yorker is known for its lengthy articles. Writers are given the space to fully explore their subjects, providing context, history, and multiple perspectives. This contrasts sharply with the brevity often demanded by other publications.

6. Fiction and Poetry Submissions:

  • Highly Selective: The New Yorker is notoriously difficult to get into for unsolicited fiction and poetry. Their acceptance rate is extremely low.
  • Fiction: Often comes from established authors, agents, or writers with connections to prominent MFA programs. They look for originality, strong narratives, and literary merit. Unsolicited non-fiction is generally not accepted.
  • Poetry: Can be submitted via Submittable. They seek unique voices and strong narratives.
  • "Shouts & Murmurs" / "Daily Shouts": These short, humorous pieces are one of the more accessible entry points for new writers, but still require a very specific voice and comedic sensibility.

7. Collaboration with Editors: The editorial process at The New Yorker is highly collaborative and hands-on. Editors work closely with writers, often pushing them to refine their arguments, improve their prose, and strengthen their reporting. This can involve multiple rounds of revisions.

In essence, The New Yorker expects writers to produce work that is:

  • Factually impeccable.
  • Stylistically elegant and precise.
  • Intellectually rigorous and nuanced.
  • Deeply researched and authoritative.
  • Engaging and compelling in its narrative.

Their guidelines aren't just about grammar or punctuation; they're about a holistic approach to journalism and literary craft that upholds the magazine's long-standing reputation for excellence.

Thanks. I am a subcriber, so just asking.

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That's an excellent question, and it's a testament to The New Yorker's strong brand that subscribers are curious about what makes its writing so distinctive!

As a subscriber, you're experiencing the direct output of those guidelines, even if you don't see the internal "style sheet" or editorial memos. Every comma, every word choice, every carefully constructed sentence in the magazine you receive is a product of their rigorous editorial process.

While The New Yorker doesn't generally publish a detailed style guide for the public (unlike, say, the Chicago Manual of Style or AP Stylebook), the consistent style you observe across its articles is their "editorial guideline" in practice. It's an unwritten, but very deeply ingrained, set of principles passed down through generations of editors and writers.

Think of it like a highly refined culinary tradition. You might not have the chef's secret recipe book, but by tasting the consistent quality and unique flavors of their dishes, you understand their "guidelines" for cooking.

So, when you notice:

  • The precise language and lack of jargon, even for complex topics.
  • The extensive detail and thoroughness of the reporting.
  • The often long sentences with carefully placed clauses.
  • The specific punctuation (like the diaeresis in "coöperate").
  • The narrative flow, even in non-fiction.
  • The occasional wry, understated humor.

You're seeing their editorial guidelines in action.

For subscribers, the "guidelines" are less about how to submit (as they rarely take unsolicited non-fiction) and more about the promise of the kind of reading experience they deliver. It's the assurance that what you're reading has gone through a demanding process of research, writing, and editing to meet their exceptionally high standards.

Your observation as a subscriber confirms their success in maintaining that distinct, proud identity!

==

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Can Reading Make You Happier? | The New Yorker

Can Reading Make You Happier? | The New Yorker


Can Reading Make You Happier?
By Ceridwen DoveyJune 9, 2015



For all avid readers who have been self-medicating with great books their entire lives, it comes as no surprise that reading books can be good for you.ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH MAZZETTI

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Several years ago, I was given as a gift a remote session with a bibliotherapist at the London headquarters of the School of Life, which offers innovative courses to help people deal with the daily emotional challenges of existence. I have to admit that at first I didn’t really like the idea of being given a reading “prescription.” I’ve generally preferred to mimic Virginia Woolf’s passionate commitment to serendipity in my personal reading discoveries, delighting not only in the books themselves but in the randomly meaningful nature of how I came upon them (on the bus after a breakup, in a backpackers’ hostel in Damascus, or in the dark library stacks at graduate school, while browsing instead of studying). I’ve long been wary of the peculiar evangelism of certain readers: You must read this, they say, thrusting a book into your hands with a beatific gleam in their eyes, with no allowance for the fact that books mean different things to people—or different things to the same person—at various points in our lives. I loved John Updike’s stories about the Maples in my twenties, for example, and hate them in my thirties, and I’m not even exactly sure why.

But the session was a gift, and I found myself unexpectedly enjoying the initial questionnaire about my reading habits that the bibliotherapist, Ella Berthoud, sent me. Nobody had ever asked me these questions before, even though reading fiction is and always has been essential to my life. I love to gorge on books over long breaks—I’ll pack more books than clothes, I told Berthoud. I confided my dirty little secret, which is that I don’t like buying or owning books, and always prefer to get them from the library (which, as I am a writer, does not bring me very good book-sales karma). In response to the question “What is preoccupying you at the moment?,” I was surprised by what I wanted to confess: I am worried about having no spiritual resources to shore myself up against the inevitable future grief of losing somebody I love, I wrote. I’m not religious, and I don’t particularly want to be, but I’d like to read more about other people’s reflections on coming to some sort of early, weird form of faith in a “higher being” as an emotional survival tactic. Simply answering the questions made me feel better, lighter.

We had some satisfying back-and-forths over e-mail, with Berthoud digging deeper, asking about my family’s history and my fear of grief, and when she sent the final reading prescription it was filled with gems, none of which I’d previously read. Among the recommendations was “The Guide,” by R. K. Narayan. Berthoud wrote that it was “a lovely story about a man who starts his working life as a tourist guide at a train station in Malgudi, India, but then goes through many other occupations before finding his unexpected destiny as a spiritual guide.” She had picked it because she hoped it might leave me feeling “strangely enlightened.” Another was “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” by José Saramago: “Saramago doesn’t reveal his own spiritual stance here but portrays a vivid and compelling version of the story we know so well.” “Henderson the Rain King,” by Saul Bellow, and “Siddhartha,” by Hermann Hesse, were among other prescribed works of fiction, and she included some nonfiction, too, such as “The Case for God,” by Karen Armstrong, and “Sum,” by the neuroscientist David Eagleman, a “short and wonderful book about possible afterlives.”


I worked my way through the books on the list over the next couple of years, at my own pace—interspersed with my own “discoveries”—and while I am fortunate enough to have my ability to withstand terrible grief untested, thus far, some of the insights I gleaned from these books helped me through something entirely different, when, over several months, I endured acute physical pain. The insights themselves are still nebulous, as learning gained through reading fiction often is—but therein lies its power. In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks. Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself. As Woolf, the most fervent of readers, wrote, a book “splits us into two parts as we read,” for “the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego,” while promising “perpetual union” with another mind.



Bibliotherapy is a very broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect. The first use of the term is usually dated to a jaunty 1916 article in The Atlantic Monthly, “A Literary Clinic.” In it, the author describes stumbling upon a “bibliopathic institute” run by an acquaintance, Bagster, in the basement of his church, from where he dispenses reading recommendations with healing value. “Bibliotherapy is…a new science,” Bagster explains. “A book may be a stimulant or a sedative or an irritant or a soporific. The point is that it must do something to you, and you ought to know what it is. A book may be of the nature of a soothing syrup or it may be of the nature of a mustard plaster.” To a middle-aged client with “opinions partially ossified,” Bagster gives the following prescription: “You must read more novels. Not pleasant stories that make you forget yourself. They must be searching, drastic, stinging, relentless novels.” (George Bernard Shaw is at the top of the list.) Bagster is finally called away to deal with a patient who has “taken an overdose of war literature,” leaving the author to think about the books that “put new life into us and then set the life pulse strong but slow.”

Today, bibliotherapy takes many different forms, from literature courses run for prison inmates to reading circles for elderly people suffering from dementia. Sometimes it can simply mean one-on-one or group sessions for “lapsed” readers who want to find their way back to an enjoyment of books. Berthoud and her longtime friend and fellow-bibliotherapist Susan Elderkin mostly practice “affective” bibliotherapy, advocating the restorative power of reading fiction. The two met at Cambridge University as undergraduates, more than twenty years ago, and bonded immediately over the shared contents of their bookshelves, in particular Italo Calvino’s novel “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller,” which is itself about the nature of reading. As their friendship developed, they began prescribing novels to cure each other’s ailments, such as a broken heart or career uncertainty. “When Suse was having a crisis about her profession—she wanted to be a writer, but was wondering if she could cope with the inevitable rejection—I gave her Don Marquis’s ‘Archy and Mehitabel’ poems,” Berthoud told me. “If Archy the cockroach could be so dedicated to his art as to jump on the typewriter keys in order to write his free-verse poems every night in the New York offices of the Evening Sun, then surely she should be prepared to suffer for her art, too.” Years later, Elderkin gave Berthoud, who wanted to figure out how to balance being a painter and a mother, Patrick Gale’s novel “Notes from an Exhibition,” about a successful but troubled female artist.



They kept recommending novels to each other, and to friends and family, for many years, and, in 2007, when the philosopher Alain de Botton, a fellow Cambridge classmate, was thinking about starting the School of Life, they pitched to him the idea of running a bibliotherapy clinic. “As far as we knew, nobody was doing it in that form at the time,” Berthoud said. “Bibliotherapy, if it existed at all, tended to be based within a more medical context, with an emphasis on self-help books. But we were dedicated to fiction as the ultimate cure because it gives readers a transformational experience.”

Berthoud and Elderkin trace the method of bibliotherapy all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, “who inscribed above the entrance to a library in Thebes that this was a ‘healing place for the soul.’ ” The practice came into its own at the end of the nineteenth century, when Sigmund Freud began using literature during psychoanalysis sessions. After the First World War, traumatized soldiers returning home from the front were often prescribed a course of reading. “Librarians in the States were given training on how to give books to WWI vets, and there’s a nice story about Jane Austen’s novels being used for bibliotherapeutic purposes at the same time in the U.K.,” Elderkin says. Later in the century, bibliotherapy was used in varying ways in hospitals and libraries, and has more recently been taken up by psychologists, social and aged-care workers, and doctors as a viable mode of therapy.

There is now a network of bibliotherapists selected and trained by Berthoud and Elderkin, and affiliated with the School of Life, working around the world, from New York to Melbourne. The most common ailments people tend to bring to them are the life-juncture transitions, Berthoud says: being stuck in a rut in your career, feeling depressed in your relationship, or suffering bereavement. The bibliotherapists see a lot of retirees, too, who know that they have twenty years of reading ahead of them but perhaps have only previously read crime thrillers, and want to find something new to sustain them. Many seek help adjusting to becoming a parent. “I had a client in New York, a man who was having his first child, and was worried about being responsible for another tiny being,” Berthoud says. “I recommended ‘Room Temperature,’ by Nicholson Baker, which is about a man feeding his baby a bottle and having these meditative thoughts about being a father. And of course ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ because Atticus Finch is the ideal father in literature.”
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Berthoud and Elderkin are also the authors of “The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies,” which is written in the style of a medical dictionary and matches ailments (“failure, feeling like a”) with suggested reading cures (“The History of Mr. Polly,” by H. G. Wells). First released in the U.K. in 2013, it is now being published in eighteen countries, and, in an interesting twist, the contract allows for a local editor and reading specialist to adapt up to twenty-five per cent of the ailments and reading recommendations to fit each particular country’s readership and include more native writers. The new, adapted ailments are culturally revealing. In the Dutch edition, one of the adapted ailments is “having too high an opinion of your own child”; in the Indian edition, “public urination” and “cricket, obsession with” are included; the Italians introduced “impotence,” “fear of motorways,” and “desire to embalm”; and the Germans added “hating the world” and “hating parties.” Berthoud and Elderkin are now working on a children’s-literature version, “A Spoonful of Stories,” due out in 2016.

For all avid readers who have been self-medicating with great books their entire lives, it comes as no surprise that reading books can be good for your mental health and your relationships with others, but exactly why and how is now becoming clearer, thanks to new research on reading’s effects on the brain. Since the discovery, in the mid-nineties, of “mirror neurons”—neurons that fire in our brains both when we perform an action ourselves and when we see an action performed by someone else—the neuroscience of empathy has become clearer. A 2011 study published in the Annual Review of Psychology, based on analysis of fMRI brain scans of participants, showed that, when people read about an experience, they display stimulation within the same neurological regions as when they go through that experience themselves. We draw on the same brain networks when we’re reading stories and when we’re trying to guess at another person’s feelings.

Other studies, published in 2006 and 2009, showed something similar—that people who read a lot of fiction tend to be better at empathizing with others (even after the researchers had accounted for the potential bias that people with greater empathetic tendencies may prefer to read novels). And, in 2013, an influential study published in Science found that reading literary fiction (rather than popular fiction or literary nonfiction) improved participants’ results on tests that measured social perception and empathy, which are crucial to “theory of mind”: the ability to guess with accuracy what another human being might be thinking or feeling, a skill humans only start to develop around the age of four.

Keith Oatley, a novelist and emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, has for many years run a research group interested in the psychology of fiction. “We have started to show how identification with fictional characters occurs, how literary art can improve social abilities, how it can move us emotionally, and can prompt changes of selfhood,” he wrote in his 2011 book, “Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction.” “Fiction is a kind of simulation, one that runs not on computers but on minds: a simulation of selves in their interactions with others in the social world…based in experience, and involving being able to think of possible futures.” This idea echoes a long-held belief among both writers and readers that books are the best kinds of friends; they give us a chance to rehearse for interactions with others in the world, without doing any lasting damage. In his 1905 essay “On Reading,” Marcel Proust puts it nicely: “With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: ‘What did they think of us?’—‘Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?’—‘Did they like us?’—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else.”

George Eliot, who is rumored to have overcome her grief at losing her life partner through a program of guided reading with a young man who went on to become her husband, believed that “art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” But not everybody agrees with this characterization of fiction reading as having the ability to make us behave better in real life. In her 2007 book, “Empathy and the Novel,” Suzanne Keen takes issue with this “empathy-altruism hypothesis,” and is skeptical about whether empathetic connections made while reading fiction really translate into altruistic, prosocial behavior in the world. She also points out how hard it is to really prove such a hypothesis. “Books can’t make change by themselves—and not everyone feels certain that they ought to,” Keen writes. “As any bookworm knows, readers can also seem antisocial and indolent. Novel reading is not a team sport.” Instead, she urges, we should enjoy what fiction does give us, which is a release from the moral obligation to feel something for invented characters—as you would for a real, live human being in pain or suffering—which paradoxically means readers sometimes “respond with greater empathy to an unreal situation and characters because of the protective fictionality.” And she wholeheartedly supports the personal health benefits of an immersive experience like reading, which “allows a refreshing escape from ordinary, everyday pressures.”

So even if you don’t agree that reading fiction makes us treat others better, it is a way of treating ourselves better. Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers. “Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines,” the author Jeanette Winterson has written. “What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.”

One of Berthoud’s clients described to me how the group and individual sessions she has had with Berthoud have helped her cope with the fallout from a series of calamities, including losing her husband, the end of a five-year engagement, and a heart attack. “I felt my life was without purpose,” she says. “I felt a failure as a woman.” Among the books Berthoud initially prescribed was John Irving’s novel “The Hotel New Hampshire.” “He was a favorite writer of my husband, [whom] I had felt unable to attempt for sentimental reasons.” She was “astounded and very moved” to see it on the list, and though she had avoided reading her husband’s books up until then, she found reading it to be “a very rewarding emotional experience, both in the literature itself and ridding myself of demons.” She also greatly appreciated Berthoud guiding her to Tom Robbins’s novel “Jitterbug Perfume,” which was “a real learning curve for me about prejudice and experimentation.”

One of the ailments listed in “The Novel Cure” is feeling “overwhelmed by the number of books in the world,” and it’s one I suffer from frequently. Elderkin says this is one of the most common woes of modern readers, and that it remains a major motivation for her and Berthoud’s work as bibliotherapists. “We feel that though more books are being published than ever before, people are in fact selecting from a smaller and smaller pool. Look at the reading lists of most book clubs, and you’ll see all the same books, the ones that have been shouted about in the press. If you actually calculate how many books you read in a year—and how many that means you’re likely to read before you die—you’ll start to realize that you need to be highly selective in order to make the most of your reading time.” And the best way to do that? See a bibliotherapist, as soon as you can, and take them up on their invitation, to borrow some lines from Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus”: “Come, and take choice of all my library/And so beguile thy sorrow.” ♦


Ceridwen Dovey is the author of the short-story collection “Only the Animals”; the novels “Blood Kin,” “In the Garden of the Fugitives,” and “Life After Truth”; and the memoir-biography “On J.M. Coetzee: Writers on Writers.”
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Two Paths for A.I. | The New Yorker

Two Paths for A.I. | The New Yorker



Two Paths for A.I.
The technology is complicated, but our choices are simple: we can remain passive, or assert control.
By Joshua RothmanMay 27, 2025

Illustration by Josie Norton
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You’re reading Open Questions, Joshua Rothman’s weekly column exploring what it means to be human.


Last spring, Daniel Kokotajlo, an A.I.-safety researcher working at OpenAI, quit his job in protest. He’d become convinced that the company wasn’t prepared for the future of its own technology, and wanted to sound the alarm. After a mutual friend connected us, we spoke on the phone. I found Kokotajlo affable, informed, and anxious. Advances in “alignment,” he told me—the suite of techniques used to insure that A.I. acts in accordance with human commands and values—were lagging behind gains in intelligence. Researchers, he said, were hurtling toward the creation of powerful systems they couldn’t control.

Kokotajlo, who had transitioned from a graduate program in philosophy to a career in A.I., explained how he’d educated himself so that he could understand the field. While at OpenAI, part of his job had been to track progress in A.I. so that he could construct timelines predicting when various thresholds of intelligence might be crossed. At one point, after the technology advanced unexpectedly, he’d had to shift his timelines up by decades. In 2021, he’d written a scenario about A.I. titled “What 2026 Looks Like.” Much of what he’d predicted had come to pass before the titular year. He’d concluded that a point of no return, when A.I. might become better than people at almost all important tasks, and be trusted with great power and authority, could arrive in 2027 or sooner. He sounded scared.

Around the same time that Kokotajlo left OpenAI, two computer scientists at Princeton, Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan, were preparing for the publication of their book, “AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference.” In it, Kapoor and Narayanan, who study technology’s integration with society, advanced views that were diametrically opposed to Kokotajlo’s. They argued that many timelines of A.I.’s future were wildly optimistic; that claims about its usefulness were often exaggerated or outright fraudulent; and that, because of the world’s inherent complexity, even powerful A.I. would change it only slowly. They cited many cases in which A.I. systems had been called upon to deliver important judgments—about medical diagnoses, or hiring—and had made rookie mistakes that indicated a fundamental disconnect from reality. The newest systems, they maintained, suffered from the same flaw.



Recently, all three researchers have sharpened their views, releasing reports that take their analyses further. The nonprofit AI Futures Project, of which Kokotajlo is the executive director, has published “AI 2027,” a heavily footnoted document, written by Kokotajlo and four other researchers, which works out a chilling scenario in which “superintelligent” A.I. systems either dominate or exterminate the human race by 2030. It’s meant to be taken seriously, as a warning about what might really happen. Meanwhile, Kapoor and Narayanan, in a new paper titled “AI as Normal Technology,” insist that practical obstacles of all kinds—from regulations and professional standards to the simple difficulty of doing physical things in the real world—will slow A.I.’s deployment and limit its transformational potential. While conceding that A.I. may eventually turn out to be a revolutionary technology, on the scale of electricity or the internet, they maintain that it will remain “normal”—that is, controllable through familiar safety measures, such as fail-safes, kill switches, and human supervision—for the foreseeable future. “AI is often analogized to nuclear weapons,” they argue. But “the right analogy is nuclear power,” which has remained mostly manageable and, if anything, may be underutilized for safety reasons.



Which is it: business as usual or the end of the world? “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously claimed, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Reading these reports back-to-back, I found myself losing that ability, and speaking to their authors in succession, in the course of a single afternoon, I became positively deranged. “AI 2027” and “AI as Normal Technology” aim to describe the same reality, and have been written by deeply knowledgeable experts, but arrive at absurdly divergent conclusions. Discussing the future of A.I. with Kapoor, Narayanan, and Kokotajlo, I felt like I was having a conversation about spirituality with Richard Dawkins and the Pope.

In the parable of the blind men and the elephant, a group of well-intentioned people grapple with an unfamiliar object, failing to agree on its nature because each believes that the part he’s encountered defines the whole. That’s part of the problem with A.I.—it’s hard to see the whole of something new. But it’s also true, as Kapoor and Narayanan write, that “today’s AI safety discourse is characterized by deep differences in worldviews.” If I were to sum up those differences, I’d say that, broadly speaking, West Coast, Silicon Valley thinkers are drawn to visions of rapid transformation, while East Coast academics recoil from them; that A.I. researchers believe in quick experimental progress, while other computer scientists yearn for theoretical rigor; and that people in the A.I. industry want to make history, while those outside of it are bored of tech hype. Meanwhile, there are barely articulated differences on political and human questions—about what people want, how technology evolves, how societies change, how minds work, what “thinking” is, and so on—that help push people into one camp or the other.

An additional problem is simply that arguing about A.I. is unusually interesting. That interestingness, in itself, may be proving to be a trap. When “AI 2027” appeared, many industry insiders responded by accepting its basic premises while debating its timelines (why not “AI 2045”?). Of course, if a planet-killing asteroid is headed for Earth, you don’t want NASA officials to argue about whether the impact will happen before or after lunch; you want them to launch a mission to change its path. At the same time, the kinds of assertions seen in “AI as Normal Technology”—for instance, that it might be wise to keep humans in the loop during important tasks, instead of giving computers free rein—have been perceived as so comparatively bland that they’ve long gone unuttered by analysts interested in the probability of doomsday.

When a technology becomes important enough to shape the course of society, the discourse around it needs to change. Debates among specialists need to make room for a consensus upon which the rest of us can act. The lack of such a consensus about A.I. is starting to have real costs. When experts get together to make a unified recommendation, it’s hard to ignore them; when they divide themselves into duelling groups, it becomes easier for decision-makers to dismiss both sides and do nothing. Currently, nothing appears to be the plan. A.I. companies aren’t substantially altering the balance between capability and safety in their products; in the budget-reconciliation bill that just passed the House, a clause prohibits state governments from regulating “artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems” for ten years. If “AI 2027” is right, and that bill is signed into law, then by the time we’re allowed to regulate A.I. it might be regulating us. We need to make sense of the safety discourse now, before the game is over.

Artificial intelligence is a technical subject, but describing its future involves a literary truth: the stories we tell have shapes, and those shapes influence their content. There are always trade-offs. If you aim for reliable, levelheaded conservatism, you risk downplaying unlikely possibilities; if you bring imagination to bear, you might dwell on what’s interesting at the expense of what’s likely. Predictions can create an illusion of predictability that’s unwarranted in a fun-house world. In 2019, when I profiled the science-fiction novelist William Gibson, who is known for his prescience, he described a moment of panic: he’d thought he had a handle on the near future, he said, but “then I saw Trump coming down that escalator to announce his candidacy. All of my scenario modules went ‘beep-beep-beep.’ ” We were veering down an unexpected path.

“AI 2027” is imaginative, vivid, and detailed. It “is definitely a prediction,” Kokotajlo told me recently, “but it’s in the form of a scenario, which is a particular kind of prediction.” Although it’s based partly on assessments of trends in A.I., it’s written like a sci-fi story (with charts); it throws itself headlong into the flow of events. Often, the specificity of its imagined details suggests their fungibility. Will there actually come a moment, possibly in June of 2027, when software engineers who’ve invented self-improving A.I. “sit at their computer screens, watching performance crawl up, and up, and up”? Will the Chinese government, in response, build a “mega-datacenter” in a “Centralized Development Zone” in Taiwan? These particular details make the scenario more powerful, but might not matter; the bottom line, Kokotajlo said, is that, “more likely than not, there is going to be an intelligence explosion, and a crazy geopolitical conflict over who gets to control the A.I.s.”


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It’s the details of that “intelligence explosion” that we need to follow. The scenario in “AI 2027” centers on a form of A.I. development known as “recursive self-improvement,” or R.S.I., which is currently largely hypothetical. In the report’s story, R.S.I. begins when A.I. programs become capable of doing A.I. research for themselves (today, they only assist human researchers); these A.I. “agents” soon figure out how to make their descendants smarter, and those descendants do the same for their descendants, creating a feedback loop. This process accelerates as the A.I.s start acting like co-workers, trading messages and assigning work to one another, forming a “corporation-within-a-corporation” that repeatedly grows faster and more effective than the A.I. firm in which it’s ensconced. Eventually, the A.I.s begin creating better descendants so quickly that human programmers don’t have time to study them and decide whether they’re controllable.
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Seemingly every science-fiction novel ever written about A.I. suggests that implementing recursive self-improvement is a bad idea. The big A.I. companies identify R.S.I. as risky, but don’t say that they won’t pursue it; instead, they vow to strengthen their safety measures if they head in that direction. At the same time, if it works, its economic potential could be extraordinary. The pursuit of R.S.I. is “definitely a choice that people are eager to make in these companies,” Kokotajlo said. “It’s the plan. OpenAI and Anthropic, their plan is to automate their own jobs first.”

Could this type of R.S.I. work? (It’s never been done.) Doesn’t it depend on other technological factors—such as “scaling,” the ability of A.I. to improve as more computing resources are dedicated to it—which have held true in the past, but might falter in the future? (Some observers think it might already be faltering.) If R.S.I. took hold, would its progress hit a ceiling, or continue until the advent of “artificial superintelligence”—a level of intelligence that exceeds what human minds are capable of? (“It would be a very strange coincidence if the limit on intelligence happened to be just barely above the human range,” Kokotajlo said.)

The possibilities compound. Would superintelligence-driven innovation inspire a militarized arms race? Could superintelligent A.I.s end up manipulating or eliminating us while pursuing their own inscrutable ends? (In “AI 2027,” they use up the Earth’s resources while conducting scientific research we’re not smart enough to understand.) Or, in a happier development, might they solve the alignment problem for us, either domesticating themselves or becoming benevolent gods, depending on your point of view?

No one really knows for sure. That’s partly because A.I. is a fractious and changing field, in which opinions differ; partly because so much of the latest A.I. research is proprietary and unpublished; and partly because there can be no firm answers to fundamentally speculative questions—only probabilities. “AI 2027” unfolds with a confidence and narrative drive that belie the uncertainties inherent to its subject. The degree to which the scenario depends on a chain of optimistic technological predictions is arguably a flaw, perhaps a major one. (An informed friend associated the report’s views with “A.I.-pilled yea-sayers.”) But, actually, partiality is one of the reasons that scenarios are valuable. In any uncertain situation, we tend to regard the possibilities we hope won’t come to pass in a more hypothetical light. But, for as long as we’re reading it, a scenario forces us to at least try to believe in its reality. “AI 2027,” Kokotajlo told me, is “not wildly different” from what’s talked about “in cafeteria conversations at these companies.” They talk about it; now we’re imagining it. Are they imagining it? Are they taking it seriously enough that, if presented with an important choice about R.S.I., they’ll make a wise one?

Kokotajlo says they’re not. One widespread misapprehension about artificial intelligence is that dangerous or uncontrollable technology might simply “emerge,” without human intervention. (“They say it got smart,” someone says, of Skynet, in “The Terminator.”) But “AI 2027” portrays a string of affirmatively bad decisions, beginning with the choice, by researchers, to build self-improving A.I. before they have fully figured out how to look inside it and interpret its thoughts. The scenario asserts that, for reasons of competition and curiosity, people working in A.I. will actively seek to do what anyone who’s seen “WarGames” could tell them not to. “If you work for these companies, and you talk to them about what they want to do, which is what I did, they tell you that they’re going to do it,” Kokotajlo told me. “They know that they don’t have interpretability solved—that they can’t rigorously check the internal goals, or rigorously predict how the A.I. systems will behave in the future. But they’re moving ahead anyway.” “AI 2027” is partly a tech scenario, and partly a people scenario. It suggests that it’s the A.I. companies that are misaligned.

Unlike “AI 2027,” “AI as Normal Technology” has an East Coast sensibility. It’s a dry, conservative white paper, and draws much of its authority from knowledge of the past. Narayanan and Kapoor aren’t too concerned about superintelligence or a possible intelligence explosion. They believe that A.I. faces “speed limits” that will prevent hyper-rapid progress, and argue that, even if superintelligence is possible, it will take decades to invent, giving us plenty of time to pass laws, institute safety measures, and so on. To some extent, the speed limits they discern have to do with A.I. in particular—they flow from the high cost of A.I. hardware, the dwindling supply of training data, and the like. But Kapoor and Narayanan also think they’re inherent to technology in general, which typically changes the world more slowly than people predict.

The understandable focus of A.I. researchers on “intelligence,” Kapoor and Narayanan argue, has been misleading. A harsh truth is that intelligence alone is of limited practical value. In the real world, what matters is power—“the ability to modify one’s environment.” They note that, in the history of innovation, many technologies have possessed astonishing capabilities but failed to deliver much power to their inventors or users. It’s incredible, for instance, that some cars can drive themselves. But, in the United States, driverless cars are confined to a handful of cities and operated, as robo-taxis, by a small number of companies. The technology is capable, but not powerful. It will probably transform transportation—someday.

Artificial-intelligence researchers often worry about A.I., in itself, becoming too powerful. But Kapoor and Narayanan prefer a human-centered way of thinking: the point of technology is not to become powerful but to empower us. “Humans have always used technology to increase our ability to control our environment,” they write, and even wildly capable technologies have empowered us only slowly. New inventions take a long time to “diffuse” through society, from labs outward. “AI 2027” entertains the possibility of “cures for most diseases” arriving as soon as 2029. But, according to Kapoor and Narayanan’s view, even if the intellectual work of creating those cures could be rapidly accelerated through A.I., we would still have to wait a long time before enjoying them. Similarly, if an A.I. system speeds the invention of a lifesaving medical device, that device must still be approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Suppose that a superintelligent A.I. solves fusion power—the technology must still be tested, and a site for a proposed plant must be located, with willing neighbors. (The nuclear power plant constructed most recently in the United States, in Waynesboro, Georgia, took fourteen years to build and ran nearly twenty billion dollars over budget.) “My favorite example is Moderna,” Kapoor told me, referring to the pharmaceutical company. After Chinese researchers sequenced the genome of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, it took Moderna “less than a week to come up with the vaccine. But then it took about a year to roll it out.” Perhaps A.I. could design vaccines even faster—but clinical trials, which depend on human biological processes, simply take time.

The view that increases in intelligence will lead quickly and directly to technological outcomes, Narayanan told me, reflects a general underestimation, among coders, of “domain-specific” complexity and expertise. “Software engineering, even though it has engineering in the name, has a history of being disconnected from the rest of engineering,” he said. This means that A.I.-safety researchers might also be undervaluing the systems that are already keeping us safe. Kapoor and Narayanan concentrate in particular on the practices of industrial safety, which have been developed and proved over decades. In a factory, fail-safes and circuit breakers insure that systems default to harmless behaviors when they malfunction. (Machines, for instance, may shut down if carbon-monoxide levels rise, or if they detect a person inside them.) Redundancy allows managers to see when a single widget is producing an unusual result. Processes like “formal verification”—in which systems are subjected to carefully designed rules that promote safety—are often used when human beings work alongside complex machines.
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The world, in this view, is already a pretty well-regulated place—and artificial intelligence will have to be integrated slowly into its web of rules. One question to ask is, Do we believe that those in charge of A.I. will have to follow the rules? Kapoor and Narayanan note “one important caveat” to their analysis: “We explicitly exclude military AI . . . as it involves classified capabilities and unique dynamics that require a deeper analysis.” “AI 2027,” meanwhile, is almost entirely focussed on the militarization of artificial intelligence, which unfolds quickly once its defense implications (“What if AI undermines nuclear deterrence?”) make themselves known. The two reports, taken together, suggest that we should keep a close watch on military applications of A.I. “AI as Normal Technology,” for its part, offers concrete advice for those in charge in many areas of society. Don’t wait, passively, for A.I. firms to “align” their models. Instead, start monitoring the use of A.I. in your field. Find ways to track evidence of its risks and failures. And shore up, or create, rules that will make people and institutions more resilient as the technology spreads.

“Deep differences in worldviews”: that seems about right. But what is a world view, ultimately? World views are often reactive. We formulate them in response to provocations. Artificial intelligence has been unusually provocative. It has prompted reflections on the purpose of technology, the nature of progress, and the relationship between inventors and the rest of us. It’s been a Rorschach test. And it’s also arrived at a particular moment, in a particular discursive world, in which opinions are strong, objections are instant, and differences are emphasized. The dynamics of intellectual life lead to doubling down and digging in. We have feedback loops, too.

Is there a single world view that could encompass the perspectives in “AI 2027” and “AI as Normal Technology?” I suspect there could be. Imagine walking onto a factory floor. A sign reads “Safety first!” Workers wear hard hats and high-viz safety gear. The machines don’t run the factory; instead, the workers manipulate the machines, which have been designed with both productivity and workers’ safety in mind. In this cognitive factory, serious thought has gone into best practices. A lot of emphasis is placed on quality control. A well-funded maintenance team inspects the machines and modifies them as necessary, to meet the factory’s requirements. Over in the R. & D. department, scientists sometimes invent promising upgrades. But, before those upgrades are integrated into the production line, they are thoroughly vetted, and the workers are consulted. The factory, moreover, has a mission. Its workers know what they’re trying to produce. They don’t just ship out whatever the machines happen to make. They steer the machines toward a well-understood goal.

A lot of us may soon find ourselves working on cognitive factory floors. Whatever we do, we could be doing it alongside, or with, machines. Since the machines can automate some of our thinking, it will be tempting to take our hands off the controls. But in such a factory, if a workplace accident occurs, or if a defective product is sold, who will be accountable? Conversely, if the factory is well run, and if its products are delightful, then who will get the credit?

The arrival of A.I. can’t mean the end of accountability—actually, the reverse is true. When a single person does more, that person is responsible for more. When there are fewer people in the room, responsibility condenses. A worker who steps away from a machine decides to step away. It’s only superficially that artificial intelligence seems to relieve us of the burdens of agency. In fact, A.I. challenges us to recognize that, at the end of the day, we’ll always be in charge. ♦





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Joshua Rothman, a staff writer, authors the weekly column Open Questions. He has been with the magazine since 2012.
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Can Trauma Help You Grow? | The New Yorker

Can Trauma Help You Grow? | The New Yorker


Annals of Technology
Can Trauma Help You Grow?
By David KushnerMarch 15, 2016
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Studies show that many trauma survivors experience some form of post-traumatic growth—a psychological phenomenon in which trauma deepens life’s meaning.Illustration by Wesley Allsbrook

When I tell people that I had a brother who was kidnapped and murdered, I’m often asked how my parents survived. I was only four when Jon died, so for a long time I had the same question. My family suffered an unfathomable loss. Yet I grew up as free as most kids in the nineteen-seventies: my friends and I biked around town for hours, losing ourselves in the woods, the lakes, the arcades, with no cell phones to find us. When I finally had children of my own, I wondered more than ever how my mom and dad had done it. How had they found the strength not only to survive but to let me go?

A few years ago, I began exploring this question while reporting and writing my memoir, “Alligator Candy,” about the murder and its aftermath. During that research, I found a new way to contextualize my family’s experience: a psychological phenomenon called post-traumatic growth. Psychologists have long studied resilience—the ability to bounce back and move on. But post-traumatic growth, which has been documented in hundreds of studies, is different; it’s what happens when trauma changes and deepens life’s meaning. In his recent book on the phenomenon, “What Doesn’t Kill Us_,”_ Stephen Joseph, a psychologist at the University of Nottingham, describes victims of trauma experiencing enhanced relationships, greater self-acceptance, and a heightened appreciation of life. “To only look at the dark side and negative side is to miss out on something very important,” Joseph told me recently.

Needless to say, no one wants to go through trauma, or suggests it’s a good thing. I’d rather have Jon here with me now—watching Louis C.K., eating a bowl of pho, hearing about his kid’s messy room—than be writing this essay. But, as Rabbi Harold Kushner (no relation) wrote after the loss of his son, “I cannot choose.” The existence of post-traumatic growth suggests that, while the pain never vanishes, something new and powerful is likely to come. As my mother once told my other brother, Andy, and me, “It’s like, after a spring gets pushed all the way down, it rises even higher.”

For my family, tragedy came on a Sunday morning in the fall of 1973. We lived in the suburbs of Tampa, where my father chaired the anthropology department at the University of South Florida. Jon, a spry eleven-year-old with wavy red hair, biked to a nearby 7-Eleven for candy and didn’t return. He was missing for a week. Farmers, bikers, hippies, professors, the Air Force, and others from across town joined together to search. This was long before abductions became a national obsession, fueled by the Internet and the 24/7 news cycle. Things like this didn’t seem to happen.

Just as we were giving up hope, a woman told the police that her husband, John Paul Witt, had drunkenly confessed to kidnapping and killing my brother. He and a teen-age accomplice, Gary Tillman, had chosen Jon at random after, as they put it, “hunting” for victims over the course of a few weeks. Witt was executed in 1985, and Tillman is serving a life sentence. “The way some longtime residents remember it,” the St. Petersburg Times wrote, “the murder of 11-year-old Jonathan Kushner was when Tampa seemed to lose its small-town innocence.”



How could such a loss lead to any sort of growth? In the upheaval following my brother’s murder, that possibility was inconceivable. Our focus was on surviving the horror of what had happened. But, eventually, the experience began to shift. Many years later, in a journal entry, my father reflected on the change. “There’s something built-in that enables most human beings, not all, to be sure, but most, to get thru this…. It is built-in to enable us to get thru, force us, to survive, to stay alive,” he wrote. “After you’ve understood that it WILL be different, less raw, that the death can not be undone, that you will continue to live,” he continued, “the question becomes … ‘What shall I do with the rest of my life?’ ”


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A few years after Jon’s death, my parents met a man named John Brantner. He was a psychologist from the University of Minnesota Medical School who had been lecturing around the country on what he called “positive approaches to dying.” In the wake of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s pioneering book “On Death and Dying,” published a few years earlier, in 1969, educators such as Brantner were part of a social movement that aimed to challenge the taboos of what he called “our death-denying culture.” “What do we know of the ones who have made a positive approach to separation, catastrophe, and death?” Brantner asked, during a presentation, in 1977. These “splendid people,” as he called them, “have come through great tribulation, are open, lack defensiveness, display intensity, purpose, passion in their lives…. They show wisdom, serenity, a kind of wholeness, a curious lighthearted and optimistic participation.”

He was talking, in essence, about post-traumatic growth—a term that wouldn’t be coined until nearly twenty years later, in 1995, by the University of North Carolina psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun. Tedeschi and Calhoun had spent a decade surveying bereaved parents. Despite their pain and suffering, the couples consistently reported that they had undergone positive personal transformations, too. “One common theme,” Calhoun told me, “is that they say, ‘I still miss my child, I yearn for my child and get depressed, but I’m a different person—more compassionate and empathetic.’ ” That’s what my parents experienced. They launched one of the country’s first chapters of Compassionate Friends, a support group that had begun in England for bereaved parents. They helped start the Tampa area’s first hospice, organized conferences on death and dying, and conferred with Kübler-Ross, Elie Wiesel, and others. In the nineteen-fifties, my parents had been social activists who had participated in sit-ins; my mother had empowered women in childbirth as one of the country’s first Lamaze educators. Now, helping others who were suffering to survive their losses became crucial to helping them through their own.
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Before he died, my father alluded in an e-mail to this period of their lives. He suggested that I read Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s memoir about the kidnapping and murder of her baby. “Lindbergh said that suffering alone doesn't make for wisdom,” he wrote. “One has to remain vulnerable, open to more suffering and to more love.” My father drew my attention to a portion of the book where Lindbergh attributes her survival to the support she received from others. She expressed the idea that, as my dad put it, “you gotta have at least one person whom you love and who loves you, and talk to that person and be supported by that person.”

Not everyone experiences growth after trauma. In recent years, psychologists have studied survivors of cancer, war, and terrorist attacks and found that there are certain traits that increase its likelihood, such as optimism, extroversion, and openness to new experience. Clinical treatment can also facilitate progress. In my family, all these factors played a role. The public nature of our saga, moreover, had the effect of convening around us an unusually supportive community.

Studies show that, in the end, somewhere between thirty-five and seventy-five per cent of trauma survivors experience some form of post-traumatic growth. “We say that, if you do experience traumatic events, it is quite possible you will experience one or more elements of growth,” Calhoun told me, before adding, “Our wish for you is that you don’t experience trauma at all.” For my family and me, that wish remains. But we know it’s one that will never be granted—and so we must, as my father wrote, decide every day the manner in which we want to live. My brother Andy and I have been shaped by that way of thinking, too. We’ve always been haunted by Jon’s death, but, perhaps for that reason, we share a drive to get the most out of the lives we have. For Andy, that meant becoming a musician. I pursued my own adventures and, eventually, a career in journalism.

In 1975, three years after my brother died, my mother took to her journal to reflect on what she had found for herself: a way of living with death that brought new meaning to life. “I treasure what I treasure,” she wrote. “I am aware of the temporariness of relationships and life itself. I am aware of what matters and turns me on. Did Jon give me this gift? I believe so. My sweet, sweet, sweetness. I thank you for that. I carry you with me forever unseen now, just as I did when you were snuggling in my uterus … unseen but filling my belly and my mind, part of our family even before you were born, part of our family now after your life. Thank you for this capacity to love and understand. Do you still know that you are loved?”




David Kushner is the author of the memoir “Alligator Candy” and other books.
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Yoga for Finding Inner Calm in L.A. Right Now | The New Yorker

Yoga for Finding Inner Calm in L.A. Right Now | The New Yorker
Shouts & Murmurs
Yoga for Finding Inner Calm in L.A. Right Now

By Jena FriedmanJune 25, 2025



Photograph from Getty

Today’s practice is designed to help you relax, reset, and build strength for the impending American civil war. Let’s begin by getting off social media. Please—it’s not helping. O.K., fine, go ahead and post one more flying cat meme. I’ll wait.

Now sit tall, with your legs crossed, or remain curled up in the fetal position—sorry, the unborn person position, as I’m now legally required to call it. Close your eyes and draw your attention inward. Notice your breath. Is it shallow and panicked? That’s O.K. It’s just your body reacting naturally to the rapid erosion of civil liberties in real time.

Breathe in through your nose, and exhale out through your mouth, releasing any tension you may still be holding after watching footage of a sitting U.S. senator being forcefully dragged out of a press conference by the Department of Homeland Security.

Feel your breath as it flows in and out. Let your shoulders melt. You are safe here, as long as you’re a white, natural-born, English-speaking U.S. citizen who has never publicly or privately (don’t forget we live in a digital-surveillance state!) criticized the U.S. government under President Trump.

Now drop your right ear to your right shoulder. Roll your chin slowly over to your left shoulder. It’ll help muffle the sound of military helicopters overhead.


Next, come onto your knees, hips about a shoulder-width apart. Let your arms drift behind you, as if they’re cuffed—elbows drawn gently toward one another, like you’re a Mexican grandmother being detained by anonymous masked men for the crime of waiting for a bus without carrying proof of citizenship. Pause here. Feel that stretch in your shoulders, and in your capacity to still be shocked, six months into Trump’s second term.

Pause in child’s pose. Forehead on the mat, arms extended forward. Remember when we all thought the problem was plastic straws?

Now sit up and let your hips sink back. Feel the ground beneath you, which I’m told has been sold by the federal government to private entities for mineral rights. Also, I hope you’re vaccinated because I just found out that someone in the last class has tested positive for measles.

Slowly lower yourself onto your back, legs extended, head on the mat, arms by your sides, and palms facing up for savasana. This is a posture of total inaction—it’s also called “corpse pose,” or “Congress.” Take a deep breath in, and, as you exhale, allow your body to collapse into the floor like a peaceful protester who just took a rubber bullet to the head. Stay here for as long as you like living in a proto-fascist police state.

Now open your eyes. Great work, everybody. You showed up! That’s half the battle, the other half is being fought by seven hundred marines and two thousand National Guardsmen deployed to downtown L.A. “for your safety.”

When you’re ready, gently return to a seated position. Place your hands on your heart—or instead, let’s keep them visible. ICE is at the door. We’re being raided. I gotta run. Namas—Actually, I’m not sure I feel safe speaking another language in public right now. ♦
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