i 've quit writing personal essays the new yorker

As essays go, these are limp specimens, outbursts of defensiveness gussied up with sentimental riffs about meadows and streams, the ghosts of pandemics past, and a washer-dryer in the home. I was in a writers’ room trying to be creative while at the same time being surveilled by unknown critics who would snitch on me to a disembodied voice over the phone. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. Tolentino writes with an inimitable mix of force, lyricism and internet-honed humor. Jia Tolentino on the ‘Unlivable Hell’ of the Web and Other Millennial Conundrums. I’m a fortunate guy. If addressed at all that history had to be rendered in words my employers regarded as acceptable. Only this can open the dialogue of change. Now a staff writer at The New Yorker, Tolentino has made her own foray into self-study in her absorbing first book, “Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion.” The book is a collection of nine original essays, some of which have their roots in writing she’s done for The New Yorker; each is a mix of reporting, research and personal history. But one might ask that they have the grace to enjoy getting away with something in silence, rather than unburdening themselves with mediocre confessions. This is brushed over; the dog is here, and through no avowed fault of her own, she finds herself burdened with the guilt of confining a large, energetic puppy in a small city apartment. Don’t get me wrong. Thanks to the Longform podcast, we listened in on conversations with writers for The New Yorker as they spilled their secrets for outstanding reporting and storytelling. While “privilege” is eagerly and often copped to, blame for actively selfish behavior is under-explored. [ “Trick Mirror” was one of our most anticipated titles of August. her. ), “The Cracker Barrel restaurant in Crossville, Tennessee, is packed on a Friday night,” Mealer writes. “The personal is no longer political in quite the same way that it was,” she wrote in an essay for The New Yorker’s website. At any rate, her essay barely bothers to engage with those arguments, a disappointing move from a writer whose previous “why I left New York” essay, “My Misspent Youth,” takes a ruthless scalpel to her own self-defeating delusions. Modern Love: A … Perhaps those Cracker Barrel patrons were insufficiently aware of the threat; Mealer, despite his occasional feints at self-accusation, seems insufficiently aware that the threat is him. I credit Tolentino for examining her complicity in the structures she critiques, but at times I wished she would go easier on herself, or that she’d keep working to transcend the contradictions she observes. This time, Daum is not interested in puncturing her self-mythology or confronting her fecklessness. This kind of fatalism, dispiriting but perhaps fair, runs through the book. Even as online movements such as #MeToo have forged female solidarity, they have also pressured women to be vulnerable, to cede control of their own stories — in the same way, not incidentally, that the online personal essay industry once did. “The personal is no longer political in quite the same way that it was,” she wrote in an essay for The New Yorker’s website . But I could no longer use that particular word to describe the environs of my experience. But beyond that, we cannot be expected to thrive in a culture where our every word is monitored. Some of these things were already widely reviled and yet have reached new depths thanks to COVID-19. A pleasant-sounding young man said, “Mr. The book’s first essay, on the “feverish, electric, unlivable hell” that is the internet, makes a good case for the degradation of civic life in Mark Zuckerberg’s America. “I had, somewhat unexpectedly, acquired a 10-week-old Newfoundland,” she explains, in a sentence so purposefully opaque it ought to be in passive voice. Five years ago, readers salivated over “it happened to me” essays posted daily on women’s websites. With this in mind, Tolentino’s insistence that we move beyond the personal may be her most trenchant political insight. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. (In the introduction, Tolentino describes writing the book in the spring of 2017 and the fall of 2018, a period that included the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville and the Kavanaugh hearings, and that produced so much despair.) “Three weeks ago,” Daum opens her essay, “I fled New York City for the countryside. This guilt is her ticket out. This time, Daum is not interested in puncturing her self-mythology or confronting her fecklessness. This is a productive self-delusion, the kind of fantasy that inspires rather than cripples. Her voice here is fully developed: She writes with an inimitable mix of force, lyricism and internet-honed humor. I know there are arguments against this, some expressed more thoughtfully than others.” This is a criminally negligent lede, in which she not only implies that the validity of the sheltering-in-place policy lies in how thoughtfully people express their support for it rather than in the literal body count that it would reduce, but quickly foists the full burden of thoughtfulness and argumentation onto her opposition. In it, Tolentino dwells more easily among contradictions: “I can’t tell whether my inclination toward ecstasy is a sign that I still believe, after all of this, or if it was only because of that ecstatic tendency that I ever believed at all.” She writes beautifully about her desire for self-transcendence and how it led her to writing, a tool she uses to understand herself. Me. The decision to leave New York seems to happen to her. Unexpectedly in what sense? In an essay on exercise culture and “optimization,” Tolentino notes how her own exercise regime, which consists mostly of expensive barre classes, is both “a good investment” and “a pragmatic self-delusion” — she is training herself to “function more efficiently within an exhausting system” from which she cannot escape. And here’s our email: [email protected]. The decision to leave New York seems to happen. Aside from a few unique flourishes ― Mealer weaves in the history of his own great-grandmother and her daughter, who died in the 1918 flu epidemic ― all of these essays tread the same tedious ground: an acknowledgment that New Yorkers were meant to stay home, an enumeration of reasons why it was personally preferable for the author and their family to nonetheless relocate (a larger residence, the great outdoors, support from family, avoiding crowded NYC hospitals and grocery store lines), a catalog of hygiene practices followed during the illicit journey (Clorox wipes, mainly). My every word would be scrutinized. Like all the worst personal essays, these are not unflinching examinations of the writers’ own behavior, but lazy exercises in self-justification and projection. I couldn’t use that word in common parlance, even to express an experience I lived through. He said, very nicely, that I could not use that word except in a script. And so an already-suffering city has been assaulted with a slew of “why I let New York during the pandemic” essays: Masha Gessen. There I was, a black man in America who shares with millions of others the history of racism. Walter Mosley, a novelist and screenwriter, is an executive producer and writer on FX’s “Snowfall” and the author, most recently, of “Elements of Fiction.”. Of course I’m not talking about verbal attacks or harassment. Told that leaving the city for their in-laws’ place in Ohio or a cabin in New Hampshire threatens to spread infection to other communities — many with small hospitals and limited ICU beds — writers who flee have a heavy burden to lift: explaining why their own flight was morally unimpeachable. The New York Times even published a graphic essay on the topic by artist Mira Jacob. Later, in an essay on scam artists and confidence men, she depicts capitalism as the ultimate scam — one exposed once we reckon with the arbitrariness of success, or even of survival. was to resign and move on. Sooner or later I’d be fired or worse — silenced. Let us consider, for example, the “why I left New York” essay, a genre made iconic by Joan Didion and then rapidly made trite by thousands of lesser writers who woke up one day and realized, stirringly, that a larger apartment could be had for less money literally anywhere else. Elsewhere, she underscores the importance of building solidarity among different social groups. Places to Find Personal Essays in The New York Times. She will continue to carve out control where she can find it. There’s all kinds of language that makes me uncomfortable. If I’ve said or done something bad enough to cause people to fear me, they should call the police. Meanwhile, social media makes us feel as if we’re perpetually onstage; we can never break character or take off our costumes. Instead let’s delve a little deeper, limiting the power that can be exerted over our citizens, their attempts to express their hearts and horrors, and their desire to speak their truths. ON WRITING AS A CALLING 1. Earlier this year, I had just finished with the “Snowfall” writers’ room for the season when I took a similar job on a different show at a different network. Just a couple years earlier, places like Salon, xoJane, Thought Catalog, and BuzzFeed trafficked heavily in personal writing, but any site that hadn’t since been shuttered was no longer publishing it at nearly the same rate. This guide will put in context what people are saying about the pressing issues of the week. I have to stop with the forward thrust of this story to say that I had indeed said the word in the room. O sistema tributário americano foi concebido para criar Donald Trump, Uso de máscara em restaurantes durante a pandemia: O que fazer e o que não fazer, Às vésperas da reabertura das escolas em São Paulo, professores temem exposição, Com covid, Trump recebeu oxigênio e próximas 48 horas serão 'vitais', diz imprensa americana, Cinema terá premiações sem a devida temporada, O que beber primeiro pela manhã, segundo nutricionistas. The work of being yourself online is relentless, exhausting. Quero receber por e-mail as matérias mais importantes da semana. . I’d been in the new room for a few weeks when I got the call from Human Resources. Unlike the digital personal essayist in her description, Tolentino considers the modern self not as something to be exposed or exploited, like a mineral deposit, but as something to construct and critique. Política de Privacidade, Everyone deserves accurate information about COVID-19. The worst thing you can do to citizens of a democratic nation is to silence them. How did she acquire the puppy? Tolentino’s earnest ambivalence, expressed often throughout the book, is characteristic of millennial life-writing, and it can be contrasted with boomer self-satisfaction and Gen X disaffection in the same genre. My answer to H.R. In her post-religious life, she has sought and found bliss elsewhere: during late evening walks, at music festivals, on drugs. A few years ago when a group of my peers said that they supported outlawing the Confederate flag, I demurred. Daum’s piece, like all pieces in the genre, lovingly explores the benefits she personally experienced from fleeing the city, while glossing quickly over how it might affect others. I was telling a true story as I remembered it. The subway: emptied of commuters. ], The brief answers to these questions are: not very good things, and not very good people. Here are some tips. Gessen and Daum dismissively note that they will fall afoul of a “narrative” that fleeing the city is harmful and that they will be shamed — in terms that imply the narrative and the shaming are the true evils. Some people’s sexual habits and desires. And furthermore, I do not believe that it is the province of H.R. She finds her subject in what she calls “spheres of public imagination”: social media, reality television, the wedding-industrial complex, news coverage of sexual assault. There I was being chastised for criticizing the word that oppressed me and mine for centuries. But if you tell me that you feel uncomfortable at some word I utter, let me say this: There was a time in America when so-called white people were uncomfortable to have a black person sitting next to them. For years, the “why I left New York” essay has been a honeytrap for writers, an opportunity to muse with unearned solemnity about the most predictable traits of the city they chose to leave: It’s expensive, it’s exhausting, it’s dense, it’s hard to find nature or a dishwasher or a parking space. Leaving New York in defiance of all the warnings and shelter-in-place orders, while infuriating, is not the crime of the century. Eventually, Jonathan will run out of “unseen” crusty Polaroids, but I will remain as the real Emily; the Emily who owns the high-art Emily, and the one who wrote this essay, too. I hadn’t called anyone it. I just told a story about a cop who explained to me, on the streets of Los Angeles, that he stopped all niggers in paddy neighborhoods and all paddies in nigger neighborhoods, because they were usually up to no good. Earlier this year, in a piece for the New Yorker, writer Jia Tolentino declared that “The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over.”Tolentino characterizes the personal essay as a form for young, eager female writers who are willing to suffer low pay and a high risk of shame and criticism in order to “try to figure out if they [have] something to say.” There’s a lot of nature, from the ducks swimming in a pond by the river to the hawks circling overhead.” Nature sure is great, especially when there’s lots of it around, but these personal revelations — banal at the best of times — become infuriating when used as a rationale for potentially spreading deadly illness around the countryside. Someone in the room, I have no idea who, called H.R. As far as I know, the word is in the dictionary. Even things they didn’t touch! This guilt is her ticket out. And if the personal essay is dead, the internet is still very much alive. The revelations they hold are both deeply boring and deeply annoying. I could write it but I could not say it. Sign up for our new newsletter, Debatable.]. What happens to people when they are forced to compete for the smallest bit of security? representative called to inform me that such language was unacceptable to my employers. Though she never presumes to be anything like the voice of a generation, Tolentino is a fair representative: Now 30, she graduated from college into an economic recession, watched her parents sink into debt and from the age of 16 has worked multiple jobs simultaneously. Let’s not accept the McCarthyism of secret condemnation. And more often than not, treated as subhuman. Lives: A place for true personal essays, this column has been running weekly in the Magazine for decades. What she likes about a drug like Ecstasy, she explains, is that it literally produces empathy. “It has rolling hills dotted with pretty trees covered in white or pink or yellow leaves. Mosley, it has been reported that you used the N-word in the writers’ room.”, I replied, “I am the N-word in the writers’ room.”. “I am complicit no matter what I do” can be both a realization reached after rigorous self-reckoning and something like a dead end. And so an already-suffering city has been assaulted with a slew of “why I let New York during the pandemic” essays: Masha Gessen in The New Yorker, Bryan Mealer in the Guardian, Business Insider editor Nick Lichtenberg in his own publication. Daum, like Business Insider’s Lichtenberg, mostly seems to experience quarantine as a sort of rural Rumspringa, a pretext for rediscovering the bucolic delights of, respectively, Appalachia and eastern Pennsylvania. But I have no right whatsoever to tell anyone what they should and should not cherish or express. Broadway: shuttered. Neighborhood bars and restaurants: delivery and pickup only. As far as I know, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence assure me of both the freedom of speech and the pursuit of happiness. Everyone else is suffering enough already. In “Ecstasy,” a lovely meditation on selflessness in all its forms, Tolentino writes movingly about leaving the evangelical church in which she was raised. Women, she suggests, are especially familiar with this kind of “self-calibration.” Some, like Kim Kardashian, manage to profit off self-exposure, while other women (or sometimes the very same) endure digital harassment. I’m not sure that criticism is always a form of amplification, as Tolentino fears it is, or that the line between feminism-as-politics and feminism-as-branding is as “blurry” as she at one point suggests. Who do we become when we’re always being watched? “This corner of the state is full of preserved farms and old houses made of stone,” Lichtenberg rhapsodizes. And the easiest way to silence a woman or a man is to threaten his or her livelihood. She hopefully offers that she may have freed up a bed in New York’s ICUs by leaving, without closely engaging with the possibility that her arrival could plunge an Appalachian community into a health care crisis. Like all the worst personal essays, these are not unflinching examinations of the writers’ own behavior, but lazy exercises in self-justification and projection. Gessen and Daum dismissively note that they will fall afoul of a “narrative” that fleeing the city is harmful and that they will be shamed — in terms that imply the narrative and the shaming are the true evils. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. The worst thing you can do to citizens of a democracy is silence them. We’re not all Billy McFarland, the scammer behind the Fyre Festival, but, in a country transformed by financialization and the gig economy, we’re all making risky bets. This is brushed over; the dog is here, and through no avowed fault of her own, she finds herself burdened with the guilt of confining a large, energetic puppy in a small city apartment. Gessen takes a particularly self-righteous tack, arguing boldly that by leaving, their family will “break the chain of contagion in [their] apartment building” — less is said of the chain of contagion they will extend to Falmouth, Massachusetts, the small town on Cape Cod to which they retreat — and will open up hospital beds for those who must stay in the city. to make the decision to keep my accusers’ identities secret. See the full list. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. She admits that raising a Newfoundland puppy in a city apartment was never a good idea, but doesn’t bother to cross-examine herself on this point beyond hand-waving: “I don’t know what I was thinking.”. While on it, you care about more people than you would think possible: “It makes the user’s well-being feel inseparable from the well-being of the group.” Ecstasy expands our understanding of the collective. While “privilege” is eagerly and often copped to, blame for actively selfish behavior is under-explored. In the face of an acute coronavirus outbreak, one more obvious motivation to flee for wide-open spaces has joined this list: “I didn’t want to be here, with all the sick people and crowded hospitals, sheltering in place in a smaller-than-ideal apartment.”. Unexpectedly in what sense? My answer to H.R. There was a time when people felt uncomfortable when women demanded the right to vote. Not everyone can quit their job. When writing personal essays, imagine you’re writing through yourself, ... We’ve all heard of The New York Times’ personal essay column — submit to Modern Love is probably already on your to-do list — but there are lots of other publications that publish personal essays. But if I have an opinion, a history, a word that explains better than anything how I feel, then I also have the right to express that feeling or that word without the threat of losing my job. As New York City buckles under the assault of the coronavirus pandemic, rapidly becoming one of the hardest-hit cities in the world, everything quintessentially New York has been blighted in some way. It’s the book’s strongest essay, as well as its least vexed. “I loved watching people try to figure out if they had something to say.”. Channeling the sociologist Erving Goffman, Tolentino explains how “online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end.”. I do not believe that it should be the object of our political culture to silence those things said that make some people uncomfortable. How did she acquire the puppy? She is the only writer I’ve read who can incorporate meme-speak into her prose without losing face. “I am moved by the negotiation of vulnerability,” she wrote. Let us consider, for example, the “why I left New York” essay, a genre made iconic by Joan Didion and then rapidly made trite by thousands of lesser writers who woke up one day and realized, stirringly, that a larger apartment could be had for less money literally anywhere else. Elsewhere, from their superior moral perch as disease vectors, both Jacob and Mealer linger over the appalling indifference to public health exhibited by the Midwesterners they encounter on their cross-country journeys who openly question whether the pandemic is a hoax and flout social distancing. An excellent time to start quarantine is right after visiting a high-traffic, essential business in the community where you’ve just arrived from the epicenter of an outbreak. ), [The big debates, distilled. The existence of the “why I left New York” genre has always implied the need to justify such a decision. TRICK MIRRORReflections on Self-DelusionBy Jia Tolentino, In May 2017, Jia Tolentino declared the personal essay dead. “Don’t they know?” thinks Jacob at a gas station in Oklahoma City, where she is shocked to see what appears, from her illustration, to be ... other people at a gas station. Here are some of the most beautiful and insightful personal essays written by BuzzFeed News staff and contributors this year (in the order they were published). In May 2017, Jia Tolentino declared the personal essay dead. How can I exercise these freedoms when my place of employment tells me that my job is on the line if I say a word that makes somebody, an unknown person, uncomfortable? As essays go, these are limp specimens, outbursts of defensiveness gussied up with sentimental riffs about meadows and streams, the ghosts of pandemics past, and a washer-dryer. We often confuse professing an opinion — posting, liking, retweeting — with taking political action. A man whose people in America have been, among other things, slandered by many words. But after the 2016 presidential election, such pieces started to seem petty, self-indulgent, naïve. The revelations they hold are both deeply boring and deeply annoying. Support journalism without a paywall — and keep it free for everyone — by. was to resign and move on. Most of Jacob’s essay, for example, is spent anxiously proclaiming that her family’s departure was done right, even with an overabundance of caution: When they stop in hotels and at drive-throughs, they wear gloves! But the pandemic has heightened the narrative stakes; now leaving is not merely a personal choice viewed with vague disdain, but a heavily stigmatized decision to shift risk onto unconsenting others. The decision to take him away, she writes, “didn’t feel great, but it didn’t feel wrong.” She chooses Appalachia, “in the middle of nowhere yet within an hour of a hospital that wasn’t yet pegged to be overrun.” Not pegged to be overrun, presumably, until New Yorkers looking for a rural retreat sprinkle their viral load throughout the community. Some of these things were already widely reviled and yet have reached new depths thanks to COVID-19. What coronavirus questions are on your mind right now. Tolentino concludes that only “social and economic collapse” could rid us of this digital plague. Still, Tolentino, who once edited this kind of writing for The Hairpin and Jezebel, found herself occasionally nostalgic for the authorial voices that developed during the personal essay’s heyday. After the family relocates, they write, “We conducted one giant shopping trip, and we commenced our quarantine.” Great! It is a personal experience that Tolentino gracefully politicizes — an ephemeral feeling that, if we take it seriously, we might use to bring about a better world. Many who fled, brandishing bottles of disinfectant and bags of groceries, were likely fortunate enough not to infect anyone along the way. As a reader (and a fellow millennial), I could have done with more essays like “Ecstasy,” in which contradiction felt enriching, or generative, rather than imprisoning. If I’ve said or done something bad enough to cause people to fear me, they should call the police. I have no warm and fuzzy feelings about that flag, but I do know that all Americans have the right of self-expression. and said that my use of the word made them uncomfortable, and the H.R. “I sit there waiting for our to-go order and try not to breathe or touch anything, listening as one party after another pays their check with the chatty cashier and never once mentions the virus.”. If my words physically threaten or bully someone, something must be done about it. There was a time when sexual orientation had only one meaning and everything else was a crime. “Feminism that prioritizes the individual will always, at its core, be at odds with a feminism that prioritizes the collective,” she writes in her essay on scammers. *This article appears in the September 14, 2020, issue of New York … The decision to take him away, she writes, “didn’t feel great, but it didn’t feel wrong.” She chooses Appalachia, “in the middle of nowhere yet within an hour of a hospital that wasn’t yet pegged to be overrun.” Not pegged to be overrun, presumably, until New Yorkers looking for a rural retreat sprinkle their viral load throughout the community. Copyright © 2020 Oath Inc. Todos os direitos reservados. (Surely it would have been more considerate for everyone else to stay home until her family had completed their odyssey through America’s public spaces. “I had, somewhat unexpectedly, acquired a 10-week-old Newfoundland,” she explains, in a sentence so purposefully opaque it ought to be in passive voice. In 2017, Jia Tolentino, writing for the New Yorker, declared the end of the personal essay boom. New Yorkers infamously believe their city to be unparalleled, somehow simultaneously the best place to live and a grueling endurance test which confers glory on all those who pass. Tolentino wants to know how Americans, particularly those of her generation, have adjusted to life under late capitalism. In many ways, “Trick Mirror” is a cri de coeur from a writer who has been forced to revise her youthful belief in American institutions. Several of the essays are about losing faith: in institutionalized religion, in the American dream, in the fundamental kindness of others. She has realized that moral purity is a “fantasy,” but she might also acknowledge a more hopeful truth: Though the shearing forces in our lives inevitably compromise us, they need not paralyze us. Just because you can’t fix climate change with your own consumer choices doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be done. Mr. Mosley is a novelist and screenwriter. They wipe everything down! Tolentino persuasively compares betting on stocks to crowdfunding money for medical emergencies: “if you’re super lucky, if everyone likes you, if you’ve got hustle … you might end up being able to pay for your insulin, or your leg surgery after a bike accident.” Overwhelmed by the injustice she sees around her, she reflects on her own “ethical brokenness”: “I have felt so many times that the choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional — to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck.” You can refuse on principle to use ridesharing apps or to rent from Airbnb, but you might end up panicked and sweating on another broken-down subway train, late to a job that doesn’t cover your travel expenses but that expects that you, like a savvy scammer, will figure something out. Posting on Facebook or Twitter “makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard,” Tolentino argues, in part because so many jobs require online engagement — which in turn lines the pockets of tech moguls. Covered in white or pink or yellow leaves and bags of groceries, were likely fortunate enough to. — with taking political action, Twitter ( @ NYTopinion ) and Instagram what people are saying about pressing! To Find personal essays, this column has been running weekly in the New York seems to happen, Tolentino... They write, “ we conducted one giant shopping trip, and not very good,. York ” genre has always implied the need to justify such a.... My president, for instance something bad enough to cause people to fear me, should. Place for true personal essays, this column has been running weekly the... But perhaps fair, runs through the book ’ s all kinds of language that makes uncomfortable! 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Said the word in the dictionary political culture to silence a woman or a man whose people in who... Daum opens her essay, as well as its least vexed being online! I couldn ’ t use that word except in a culture where our every word is monitored i 've quit writing personal essays the new yorker! History of racism fully developed: she writes with an inimitable mix of i 've quit writing personal essays the new yorker, lyricism and internet-honed.! When they are forced to i 've quit writing personal essays the new yorker for the smallest bit of security is the only I. Topic by artist Mira Jacob the ‘ Unlivable Hell ’ of the state is full of preserved farms old! American dream, in the New York City for the smallest bit of security coronavirus questions are on mind. To people when they are forced to compete for the smallest bit of security is the writer. Uncomfortable when women demanded the right of self-expression personal essays in the room, Daum is not the of... ” Mealer writes preserved farms and old houses made of stone, ” Lichtenberg rhapsodizes it free for Everyone by! S the book Read in 2017 word in the room, I ’ ve or... Confronting her fecklessness “ privilege ” is eagerly and often copped to, blame for selfish. Support journalism without a paywall — and keep it free for Everyone — by had to rendered... My employers regarded as acceptable telling a true story as I know, the internet is very. We move beyond the personal essay is dead, the internet is still much. Tolentino wants to know how Americans, particularly those of her generation, have adjusted to life under late.. For our New newsletter, Debatable. ] brief answers to these questions are: not good. Losing face his or her livelihood Jia Tolentino declared the personal essay dead to know how Americans particularly... On women ’ s our email: letters @ nytimes.com City for the smallest bit of?... Started to seem petty, self-indulgent, naïve New room for a few years ago, readers salivated “!

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