Engl 301

Major Writing Project 2

Major Writing Project 2: Entering a Conversation (4 pages)

Instructions: Choose one of the sets of essays listed below (Kelly and Gladstone together make up a “set”; Carr and Thompson together make up a “set,” etc.). Your essay should include summaries of both of the authors’ arguments (“they say”); your argument should point out how the authors agree and disagree; and your argument should include your own response to the issues the two essays raise (“I say”). The “I say” is your own argument concerning the issues.

Make sure you include a naysayer to show possible objections to your own argument, and address the “so what” factor: why does this issue matter?
Make sure you use proper formatting (MLA or APA style, double-spaced, Times or Times New Roman font, 12 point, paragraphs indented).
Make sure you have a proper heading at the top of the first page (name, etc.)
Your paper should be about 4 pages.
Plagiarism will not be tolerated.
I recommend you take a look at the Grading Guide (below), which explains how I will grade your papers.
MWP 2 is due Friday, January 12, by 11:59pm. Click the link below to submit your paper.

Recommended structure: For this paper you have four pages to work with and you need to include, in effect, five major parts:

Introduction: includes basic information about authors, a very brief summary of authors’ ideas (a sentence or two), a brief statement of your argument (or thesis statement), and a brief explanation of why your argument matters
Summary of 2 authors, with quotes as evidence
Summary of how they agree/disagree; provide quotes if necessary
Your own opinion and your reasons for your opinion (which includes at least one naysayer); provide quotes as evidence
Conclusion: includes a return sentence, a restatement of your argument, and a developed explanation of why your argument matters

Note that those are five parts, not paragraphs (exceptions: the introduction and the conclusion are usually one paragraph each). What could this look like? Here’s an example: After the brief introductory paragraph (where you introduce your topic, basic information about your authors with brief summaries of authors’ ideas, a sense of your argument and perhaps why your argument matters), you might have a summary of one author (1 paragraph), then a summary of the second author (1 paragraph). Then you might have one paragraph that explains how they agree or disagree (though you can already allude to that in the summary paragraphs through phrases like “Unlike Turkle, Wortham asserts that…”). Note that the paragraph that explains how the two authors agree or disagree is still “they say,” since you’re not yet putting forward your own opinion on the issues. At that point you’ll have written about 2 pages. Then you write your own argument (“I say”) in relation to what they say (about a page and a half). At that point you’ve written about 3.5 pages. Then you end with one short concluding paragraph, where you wrap it up with a return sentence and again explain why it matters.

Keep in mind: this way of structuring this assignment is only a suggestion; it doesn’t have to be exactly like that. But hopefully this gives you an idea of what this kind of paper could look like.

Sets

Set 1:

Kevin Kelly, “Better than Human: Why Robots Will – and Must – Take Our Jobs” (299)

Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufeld, “The Influencing Machines” (330)

Set 2:

Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (313)

Clive Thompson, “Smarter than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better” (340)

Set 3:

Sherry Turkle, “No Need to Call” (373)

Jenna Wortham, “I Had a Nice Time with You Tonight. On the App.” (393)

Set 4:

Michaela Cullington, “Does Texting Affect Writing?” (361)

Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” (399)

Grading Guide: I will use the following grading guide to grade your papers. Think of it as a “cheat sheet,” but without the “cheating” part. It’ll help you figure out how to get a good grade on MWP 2.

Introduction (10 points)

Includes basic information about the authors as well as the full titles of essays; includes a brief summary statement about essays; includes a clear thesis statement (summary of “I say” in relation to “They Say”).

“They say” inhabits world-view of each author (20 points)

Each summary does not agree or disagree with author (summary inhabits worldview of author); each summary uses sophisticated signal verbs to summarize author’s points; no listing of author’s points or “closest cliché” (pp. 31, 35, 33)

Quoting: Uses quotes correctly and appropriately (20 points)

Quotes used to present “proof of evidence” (p. 42) in summary of authors’ arguments — Quotes should not be “orphans” (p. 43) — Quotes should be framed appropriately (“quotation sandwich”) (p. 46) — Quotes should be Introduced with appropriate verb (p. 47) – Indicates page number of quote (p. 48)

“I say” clearly agrees, disagrees, or combination of agrees and disagrees (20 points)

Clear “I say” statement in introduction, placed in relation to authors – Clear statements of agreement, disagreement, or both (use at least one template per author on pp. 60, 62, 64-66) – Clearly distinguishes “they say” from “I say” – Clearly signals who is saying what: Uses at least one template from pp. 72-75 – “I say” includes clear reasons for argument that are not simply summaries of authors’ arguments – Clearly plants naysayer to support “I say” argument (use at least one template from pp. 82, 83,84-85, 89).

Clearly states why the argument matters (10 points)

Uses at least one “who cares?” template from pp. 95-96; Uses at least one “so what?” template from pp. 98-99, 101 — statement why argument matters should be included in either introductory paragraph or concluding paragraph (or both)

Conclusion (10 points)

Includes at least one “return sentence” in the conclusion to remind reader of what “they say” (p. 27); includes a restatement of thesis or “I say”

Editing and tone (10 points)

No editing errors (spelling, grammar, punctuation, and formatting); Uses proper tone (formal where appropriate, informal where appropriate)

what they’re saying about “they say / i say”

“The best book that’s happened to teaching composition—
ever!” —Karen Gaffney, Raritan Valley Community College

“A brilliant book. . . . It’s like a membership card in the aca-
demic club.” —Eileen Seifert, DePaul University

“This book demystifies rhetorical moves, tricks of the trade that
many students are unsure about. It’s reasonable, helpful, nicely
written . . . and hey, it’s true. I would have found it immensely
helpful myself in high school and college.”

—Mike Rose, University of California, Los Angeles

“The argument of this book is important—that there are
‘moves’ to academic writing . . . and that knowledge of them
can be generative. The template format is a good way to teach
and demystify the moves that matter. I like this book a lot.”

—David Bartholomae, University of Pittsburgh

“A beautifully lucid way to approach argument—different from
any rhetoric I’ve ever seen.”

—Anne-Marie Thomas, Austin Community College, Riverside

“Students need to walk a fine line between their work and that
of others, and this book helps them walk that line, providing
specific methods and techniques for introducing, explaining,
and integrating other voices with their own ideas.”

—Libby Miles, University of Rhode Island

“‘They Say’ with Readings is different from other rhetorics and
readers in that it really engages students in the act of writing
throughout the book. It’s less a ‘here’s how’ book and more of
a ‘do this with me’ kind of book.”

—Kelly Ritter, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

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“It offers students the formulas we, as academic writers, all carry
in our heads.” —Karen Gardiner, University of Alabama

“Many students say that it is the first book they’ve found that
actually helps them with writing in all disciplines.”

—Laura Sonderman, Marshall University

“As a WPA, I’m constantly thinking about how I can help
instructors teach their students to make specific rhetorical
moves on the page. This book offers a powerful way of teach-
ing students to do just that.” —Joseph Bizup, Boston University

“The best tribute to ‘They Say / I Say’ I’ve heard is this, from a
student: ‘This is one book I’m not selling back to the bookstore.’
Nods all around the room. The students love this book.”

—Christine Ross, Quinnipiac University

“What effect has ‘They Say’ had on my students’ writing? They
are finally entering the Burkian Parlor of the university. This
book uncovers the rhetorical conventions that transcend dis-
ciplinary boundaries, so that even freshmen, newcomers to the
academy, are immediately able to join in the conversation.”

—Margaret Weaver, Missouri State University

“It’s the anti-composition text: Fun, creative, humorous, bril-
liant, effective.”

—Perry Cumbie, Durham Technical Community College

“Loved by students, reasonable priced, manageable size, readable.”
—Roxanne Munch, Joliet Junior College

“This book explains in clear detail what skilled writers take for
granted.” —John Hyman, American University

“The ability to engage with the thoughts of others is one of the
most important skills taught in any college-level writing course,
and this book does as good a job teaching that skill as any text I
have ever encountered.” —William Smith, Weatherford College

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T H I R D E D I T I O N

“THEY SAY I SAY”
The Move s Tha t Ma t t e r

i n Academ i c Wr i t i n g

WITH READINGS

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T H I R D E D I T I O N

“THEY SAY !I SAY”
The Move s Tha t Ma t t e r

i n Academ i c Wr i t i n g

WITH READINGS

H
GERALD GRAFF

CATHY BIRKENSTEIN
both of the University of Illinois at Chicago

RUSSEL DURST
University of Cincinnatti

B
w . w . n o r t o n & c o m p a n y

n e w y o r k | l o n d o n

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W. W. Norton & Company has been independent since its founding in 1923, when
William Warder Norton and Mary D. Herter Norton first published lectures delivered
at the People’s Institute, the adult education division of New York City’s Cooper
Union. The firm soon expanded its program beyond the Institute, publishing books by
celebrated academics from America and abroad. By mid-century, the two major pillars of
Norton’s publishing program—trade books and college texts—were firmly established.
In the 1950s, the Norton family transferred control of the company to its employees,
and today—with a staff of four hundred and a comparable number of trade, college,
and professional titles published each year—W. W. Norton & Company stands as the
largest and oldest publishing house owned wholly by its employees.

Permission to use copyrighted material is included in the credits section of this
book, which begins on page 747.

The Library of Congress has cataloged an earlier edition as follows:
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Graff, Gerald, author.
“They say/I say”: the moves that matter in academic writing, with readings / Gerald
Graff, University of Illinois at Chicago ; Cathy Birkenstein, University of Illinois at
Chicago ; Russel Durst, University of Cincinnati.—Third Edition.
p. cm
Previous edition: 3rd. ed. 2014.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-393-93751-0 (pbk.)
1. English language—Rhetoric—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Persuasion
(Rhetoric)—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 3. Report writing—Handbooks, manuals,
etc. 4. Academic writing—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 5. College readers.
I. Birkenstein, Cathy, editor. II. Durst, Russel K., 1954- editor. III. Title.
PE1431.G73 2014
808′.042—dc23 2014033777

This edition: ISBN 978-0-393-61744-3

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

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To the great rhetorician Wayne Booth,
who cared deeply

about the democratic art
of listening closely to what others say.

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i x

contents

preface to the third edition xi i i

preface: Demystifying Academic Conversation xviii

introduction: Entering the Conversation 1

PART 1. “THEY SAY”
1 “they say”: Starting with What Others Are Saying 19

2 “her point is”: The Art of Summarizing 30

3 “as he himself puts it”: The Art of Quoting 42

PART 2. “ I SAY”

4 “yes / no / okay, but”: Three Ways to Respond 55

5 “and yet”: Distinguishing What You Say
from What They Say 68

6 “skeptics may object”:
Planting a Naysayer in Your Text 78

7 “so what? who cares?”: Saying Why It Matters 92

PART 3. TYING IT ALL TOGETHER

8 “as a result”: Connecting the Parts 105

9 “a in’t so / is not”: Academic Writing Doesn’t Always
Mean Setting Aside Your Own Voice 121

10 “but don’t get me wrong”:
The Art of Metacommentary 129

11 “he says contends”: Using the Templates to Revise 139

PART 4 . IN SPECIFIC ACADEMIC CONTEXTS

12 “i take your point”: Entering Class Discussions 163

13 “imho”: Is Digital Communication Good or Bad—or Both? 167

14 “what’s motivating this writer?”:
Reading for the Conversation 173

15 “analyze this”: Writing in the Social Sciences 184

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readings

16 IS COLLEGE THE BEST OPTION? 205

stephanie owen and isabel sawhill,
Should Everyone Go to College? 208

sanford j. ungar, The New Liberal Arts 226

charles murray, Are Too Many People Going
to College? 234

liz addison, Two Years Are Better than Four 255

freeman hrabowski, Colleges Prepare People for Life 259

gerald graff, Hidden Intellectualism 264

mike rose, Blue-Collar Brilliance 272

michelle obama, Bowie State University
Commencement Speech 285

17 ARE WE IN A RACE AGAINST THE MACHINE? 297

Kevin kelly, Better than Human: Why Robots Will—and
Must—Take Our Jobs 299

nicholas carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid? 313

brooke gladstone and josh neufeld,
The Influencing Machines 330

clive thompson, Smarter than You Think: How Technology
Is Changing Our Minds for the Better 340

michaela cullington, Does Texting Affect
Writing? 361

sherry turkle, No Need to Call 373

jenna wortham, I Had a Nice Time with You Tonight.
On the App. 393

malcolm gladwell, Small Change: Why the Revolution
Will Not Be Tweeted 399

C O N T E N T S

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x i

18 WHAT SHOULD WE EAT? 417

michael pollan, Escape from the Western Diet 420

steven shapin, What Are You Buying When You
Buy Organic? 428

mary maxfield, Food as Thought: Resisting the
Moralization of Eating 442

jonathan safran Foer, Against Meat 448

david zinczenko, Don’t Blame the Eater 462

radley balko, What You Eat Is Your Business 466

michael moss, The Extraordinary Science of Addictive
Junk Food 471

marion nestle, The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate 496

david h. freedman, How Junk Food Can End Obesity 506

19 WHAT’S UP WITH THE AMERICAN DREAM? 539

david leonhardt, Inequality Has Been Going on
Forever . . . but That Doesn’t Mean It’s Inevitable 542

edward mcclelland, RIP, the Middle Class:
1946–2013 549

paul krugman, Confronting Inequality 561

gary becker and kevin murphy, The Upside of Income
Inequality 581

monica potts, What’s Killing Poor White Women? 591

brandon king, The American Dream: Dead, Alive, or
on Hold? 610

tim roemer, America Remains the World’s Beacon
of Success 618

shayan zadeh, Bring on More Immigrant
Entrepreneurs 623

pew research team, King’s Dream Remains an
Elusive Goal 627

Contents

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x i i

20 WHAT’S GENDER GOT TO DO WITH IT? 639

sheryl sandberg, Lean In: What Would You Do If You
Weren’t Afraid? 642

bell hooks, Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In 659

anne-marie slaughter, Why Women Still Can’t
Have It All 676

richard dorment, Why Men Still Can’t Have It All 697

stephen mays, What about Gender Roles in
Same-Sex Relationships? 718

dennis baron, Facebook Multiplies Genders but Offers
Users the Same Three Tired Pronouns 721

ellen ullman, How to Be a “Woman Programmer” 726

saul kaplan, The Plight of Young Males 732

penelope eckert and sally mcconnell-ginet,
Learning to Be Gendered 736

credits 747

acknowledgments 753

index of templates 765

index of authors and titles 781

C O N T E N T S

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x i i i

preface
to the third edition

When we first set out to write this book, our goal
was simple: to offer a version of “They Say / I Say”: The Moves
That Matter in Academic Writing with an anthology of readings
that would demonstrate the rhetorical moves “that matter.”
And because “They Say” teaches students that academic writ-
ing is a means of entering a conversation, we looked for read-
ings on topics that would engage students and inspire them to
respond—and to enter the conversations.
The book has been more successful than we ever imagined
possible, which we believe reflects the growing importance of
academic writing as a focus of first-year writing courses, and the
fact that students find practical strategies like the ones offered
in this book to be particularly helpful. In addition, some teach-
ers have told us that this book works well in courses that focus
on argument and research because students find these strategies
easier to grasp than those in the books that teach various kinds
of formal argumentation.
Our purpose in writing “They Say” has always been to offer
students a user-friendly model of writing that will help them
put into practice the important principle that writing is a social
activity. Proceeding from the premise that effective writers enter
conversations of other writers and speakers, this book encour-
ages students to engage with those around them—including
those who disagree with them—instead of just expressing their

x i i i

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ideas “logically.” Our own experience teaching first-year writing
students has led us to believe that to be persuasive, arguments
need not only supporting evidence but also motivation and
exigency, and that the surest way to achieve this motivation
and exigency is to generate one’s own arguments as a response
to those of others—to something “they say.” To help students
write their way into the often daunting conversations of aca-
demia and the wider public sphere, the book provides tem-
plates to help them make sophisticated rhetorical moves that
they might otherwise not think of attempting. And of course
learning to make these rhetorical moves in writing also helps
students become better readers of argument.
That the two versions of “They Say / I Say” are now being
taught at more than 1,500 schools suggests that there is a wide-
spread desire for explicit instruction that is understandable but
not oversimplified, to help writers negotiate the basic moves
necessary to “enter the conversation.” Instructors have told us
how much this book helps their students learn how to write
academic discourse, and some students have written to us saying
that it’s helped them to “crack the code,” as one student put it.
This third edition of “They Say / I Say” with Readings includes
forty-three readings on five compelling and controversial issues.
The readings provide a glimpse into some important conver-
sations of our day—and will, we hope, provoke students to
respond and thus to join in those conversations.

HIGHLIGHTS

Forty-three readings that will prompt students to think—
and write. Taken from a wide variety of sources, including the
New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Salon, the Atlantic, the

P R E FA C E T O T H E T H I R D E D I T I O N

x i v

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Pew Research Center, the New Yorker, Wired magazine, best-
selling trade books, celebrated speeches, and more, the readings
represent a range of perspectives on five important issues:

• Is College the Best Option?
• Are We in a Race against the Machine?
• What Should We Eat?
• What’s Up with the American Dream?
• What’s Gender Got to Do with It?

The readings can function as sources for students’ own writing,
and the study questions that follow each reading focus students’
attention on how each author uses the key rhetorical moves—
and include one question that invites them to write, and often
to respond with their own views.

A chapter on reading (Chapter 14) encourages students to
think of reading as an act of entering conversations. Instead of
teaching students merely to identify the author’s argument, this
chapter shows them how to read with an eye for what arguments
the author is responding to—in other words, to think carefully
about why the writer is making the argument in the first place,
and thus to recognize (and ultimately become a part of) the
larger conversation that gives meaning to reading the text.

Two books in one, with a rhetoric up front and readings
in the back. The two parts are linked by cross-references in
the margins, leading from the rhetoric to specific examples in
the readings and from the readings to the corresponding writ-
ing instruction. Teachers can therefore begin with either the
rhetoric or the readings, and the links will facilitate movement
between one section and the other.

Preface to the Third Edition

x v

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x v i

P R E FA C E T O T H E T H I R D E D I T I O N

what’s new

Two topics are new, two are updated—all addressing impor-
tant conversations taking place today. The chapters on gender
and technology are new. The food chapter now reaches beyond
fast food to address a broader question: what should we eat?
And the education chapter asks not just is college worth the
price but whether it is even the best option.

Thirty-one new readings, including at least one documented
piece and one essay written by a student in each chapter, added
in response to requests from many teachers who wanted more
complex and documented writing.

They Say / I Blog. Updated monthly, this blog provides up-to-
the-minute readings on the issues covered in the book, along
with questions that prompt students to literally join the con-
versation. Check it out at theysayiblog.com.

A new chapter on “Using the Templates to Revise,” which
grew out of our own teaching experience, where we found that
the templates in this book had the unexpected benefit of help-
ing students when they revise.

A new chapter on writing online, exploring the debate about
whether digital technologies improve or degrade the way we
think and write, and whether they foster or impede the meet-
ing of minds.

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x v i i

A complete instructor’s guide, with teaching tips for all the
chapters, syllabi, summaries of the readings, and suggested
answers to the study questions. Go to wwnorton.com/instructors
to access these materials.

We hope that this new edition of “They Say / I Say” with Read-
ings will spark students’ interest in some of the most pressing
conversations of our day and provide them with some of the
tools they need to engage in those conversations with dexterity
and confidence.
Gerald Graff
Cathy Birkenstein
Russel Durst

Preface to the Third Edition

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x v i i i

preface

Demystifying Academic Conversation

Experienced writing instructors have long recognized
that writing well means entering into conversation with others.
Academic writing in particular calls upon writers not simply to
express their own ideas, but to do so as a response to what others
have said. The first-year writing program at our own university,
according to its mission statement, asks “students to partici-
pate in ongoing conversations about vitally important academic
and public issues.” A similar statement by another program
holds that “intellectual writing is almost always composed in
response to others’ texts.” These statements echo the ideas
of rhetorical theorists like Kenneth Burke, Mikhail Bakhtin,
and Wayne Booth as well as recent composition scholars like
David Bartholomae, John Bean, Patricia Bizzell, Irene Clark,
Greg Colomb, Lisa Ede, Peter Elbow, Joseph Harris, Andrea
Lunsford, Elaine Maimon, Gary Olson, Mike Rose, John Swales
and Christine Feak, Tilly Warnock, and others who argue that
writing well means engaging the voices of others and letting
them in turn engage us.
Yet despite this growing consensus that writing is a social,
conversational act, helping student writers actually partici-
pate in these conversations remains a formidable challenge.
This book aims to meet that challenge. Its goal is to demys-
tify academic writing by isolating its basic moves, explaining
them clearly, and representing them in the form of templates.

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Demystifying Academic Conversation

x i x

In this way, we hope to help students become active partici-
pants in the important conversations of the academic world
and the wider public sphere.

highlights

• Shows that writing well means entering a conversation, sum-
marizing others (“they say”) to set up one’s own argument
(“I say”).

• Demystifies academic writing, showing students “the moves
that matter” in language they can readily apply.

• Provides user-friendly templates to help writers make those
moves in their own writing.

• Includes a chapter on reading, showing students how the
authors they read are part of a conversation that they them-
selves can enter—and thus to see reading as a matter not
of passively absorbing information but of understanding and
actively entering dialogues and debates.

how this book came to be

The original idea for this book grew out of our shared interest in
democratizing academic culture. First, it grew out of arguments
that Gerald Graff has been making throughout his career that
schools and colleges need to invite students into the conversa-
tions and debates that surround them. More specifically, it is a
practical, hands-on companion to his recent book, Clueless in
Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind, in which
he looks at academic conversations from the perspective of
those who find them mysterious and proposes ways in which

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P R E FA C E

x x

such mystification can be overcome. Second, this book grew
out of writing templates that Cathy Birkenstein developed in
the 1990s, for use in writing and literature courses she was
teaching. Many students, she found, could readily grasp what it
meant to support a thesis with evidence, to entertain a counter-
argument, to identify a textual contradiction, and ultimately
to summarize and respond to challenging arguments, but they
often had trouble putting these concepts into practice in their
own writing. When Cathy sketched out templates on the board,
however, giving her students some of the language and patterns
that these sophisticated moves require, their writing—and even
their quality of thought—significantly improved.
This book began, then, when we put our ideas together and
realized that these templates might have the potential to open
up and clarify academic conversation. We proceeded from the
premise that all writers rely on certain stock formulas that they
themselves didn’t invent—and that many of these formulas
are so commonly used that they can be represented in model
templates that students can use to structure and even generate
what they want to say.
As we developed a working draft of this book, we began using
it in first-year writing courses that we teach at UIC. In class-
room exercises and writing assignments, we found that students
who otherwise struggled to organize their thoughts, or even to
think of something to say, did much better when we provided
them with templates like the following.

j In discussions of , a controversial issue is whether

. While some argue that , others contend

that .

j This is not to say that .

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Demystifying Academic Conversation

x x i

One virtue of such templates, we found, is that they focus
writers’ attention not just on what is being said, but on the
forms that structure what is being said. In other words, they
make students more conscious of the rhetorical patterns that
are key to academic success but often pass under the classroom
radar.

the centrality of “they say / i say”

The central rhetorical move that we focus on in this book is
the “they say / I say” template that gives our book its title. In our
view, this template represents the deep, underlying structure,
the internal DNA as it were, of all effective argument. Effective
persuasive writers do more than make well-supported claims
(“I say”); they also map those claims relative to the claims of
others (“they say”).
Here, for example, the “they say / I say” pattern structures a
passage from an essay by the media and technology critic Steven
Johnson.

For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption that mass cul-
ture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-
denominator standards, presumably because the “masses” want
dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the
masses what they want. But . . . the exact opposite is happening:
the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less.

Steven Johnson, “Watching TV Makes You Smarter”

In generating his own argument from something “they say,”
Johnson suggests why he needs to say what he is saying: to
correct a popular misconception.

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x x i i

Even when writers do not explicitly identify the views they
are responding to, as Johnson does, an implicit “they say” can
often be discerned, as in the following passage by Zora Neale
Hurston.

I remember the day I became colored.
Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”

In order to grasp Hurston’s point here, we need to be able to
reconstruct the implicit view she is responding to and question-
ing: that racial identity is an innate quality we are simply born
with. On the contrary, Hurston suggests, our race is imposed
on us by society—something we “become” by virtue of how
we are treated.
As these examples suggest, the “they say / I say” model can
improve not just student writing, but student reading compre-
hension as well. Since reading and writing are deeply recipro-
cal activities, students who learn to make the rhetorical moves
represented by the templates in this book figure to become more
adept at identifying these same moves in the texts they read. And
if we are right that effective arguments are always in dialogue
with other arguments, then it follows that in order to understand
the types of challenging texts assigned in college, students need
to identify the views to which those texts are responding.
Working with the “they say / I say” model can also help with
invention, finding something to say. In our experience, students
best discover what they want to say not by thinking about a
subject in an isolation booth, but by reading texts, listening
closely to what other writers say, and looking for an opening
through which they can enter the conversation. In other words,
listening closely to others and summarizing what they have to
say can help writers generate their own ideas.

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the usefulness of templates

Our templates also have a generative quality, prompting stu-
dents to make moves in their writing that they might not oth-
erwise make or even know they should make. The templates
in this book can be particularly helpful for students who are
unsure about what to say, or who have trouble finding enough
to say, often because they consider their own beliefs so
self-evident that they need not be argued for. Students like this
are often helped, we’ve found, when we give them a simple tem-
plate like the following one for entertaining a counterargument
(or planting a naysayer, as we call it in Chapter 6).

j Of course some might object that . Although I concede

that , I still maintain that .

What this particular template helps students do is make the
seemingly counterintuitive move of questioning their own
beliefs, of looking at them from the perspective of those who
disagree. In so doing, templates can bring out aspects of stu-
dents’ thoughts that, as they themselves sometimes remark,
they didn’t even realize were there.
Other templates in this book help students make a host of
sophisticated moves that they might not otherwise make: sum-
marizing what someone else says, framing a quotation in one’s
own words, indicating the view that the writer is responding to,
marking the shift from a source’s view to the writer’s own view,
offering evidence for that view, entertaining and answering
counterarguments, and explaining what is at stake in the first
place. In showing students how to make such moves, templates
do more than organize students’ ideas; they help bring those
ideas into existence.

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okay, but templates?

We are aware, of course, that some instructors may have res-
ervations about templates. Some, for instance, may object that
such formulaic devices represent a return to prescriptive forms
of instruction that encourage passive learning or lead students
to put their writing on automatic pilot.
This is an understandable reaction, we think, to kinds of rote
instruction that have indeed encouraged passivity and drained
writing of its creativity and dynamic relation to the social world.
The trouble is that many students will never learn on their own
to make the key intellectual moves that our templates repre-
sent. While seasoned writers pick up these moves unconsciously
through their reading, many students do not. Consequently, we
believe, students need to see these moves represented in the
explicit ways that the templates provide.
The aim of the templates, then, is not to stifle critical
thinking but to be direct with students about the key rhetori-
cal moves that it comprises. Since we encourage students to
modify and adapt the templates to the particularities of the
arguments they are making, using such prefabricated formulas
as learning tools need not result in writing and thinking that
are themselves formulaic. Admittedly, no teaching tool can
guarantee that students will engage in hard, rigorous thought.
Our templates do, however, provide concrete prompts that can
stimulate and shape such thought: What do “they say” about my
topic? What would a naysayer say about my argument? What
is my evidence? Do I need to qualify my point? Who cares?
In fact, templates have a long and rich history. Public orators
from ancient Greece and Rome through the European Renais-
sance studied rhetorical topoi or “commonplaces,” model passages
and formulas that represented the different strategies available

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to public speakers. In many respects, our templates echo this
classical rhetorical tradition of imitating established models.
The journal Nature requires aspiring contributors to follow
a guideline that is like a template on the opening page of their
manuscript: “Two or three sentences explaining what the main
result [of their study] reveals in direct comparison with what was
thought to be the case previously, or how the main result adds to
previous knowledge.” In the field of education, a form designed
by the education theorist Howard Gardner asks postdoctoral
fellowship applicants to complete the following template: “Most
scholars in the field believe . As a result of my study,

.” That these two examples are geared toward post-
doctoral fellows and veteran researchers shows that it is not
only struggling undergraduates who can use help making these
key rhetorical moves, but experienced academics as well.
Templates have even been used in the teaching of personal
narrative. The literary and educational theorist Jane Tompkins
devised the following template to help student writers make the
often difficult move from telling a story to explaining what it
means: “X tells a story about to make the point that

. My own experience with yields a point
that is similar/different/both similar and different. What I take
away from my own experience with is . As
a result, I conclude .” We especially like this template
because it suggests that “they say / I say” argument need not be
mechanical, impersonal, or dry, and that telling a story and mak-
ing an argument are more compatible activities than many think.

why it’s okay to use “i”

But wait—doesn’t the “I” part of “they say / I say” flagrantly
encourage the use of the first-person pronoun? Aren’t we aware

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x x v i

that some teachers prohibit students from using “I” or “we,”
on the grounds that these pronouns encourage ill-considered,
subjective opinions rather than objective and reasoned argu-
ments? Yes, we are aware of this first-person prohibition, but
we think it has serious flaws. First, expressing ill-considered,
subjective opinions is not necessarily the worst sin beginning
writers can commit; it might be a starting point from which they
can move on to more reasoned, less self-indulgent perspectives.
Second, prohibiting students from using “I” is simply not an
effective way of curbing students’ subjectivity, since one can
offer poorly argued, ill-supported opinions just as easily without
it. Third and most important, prohibiting the first person tends
to hamper students’ ability not only to take strong positions but
to differentiate their own positions from those of others, as we
point out in Chapter 5. To be sure, writers can resort to vari-
ous circumlocutions—“it will here be argued,” “the evidence
suggests,” “the truth is”—and these may be useful for avoid-
ing a monotonous series of “I believe” sentences. But except
for avoiding such monotony, we see no good reason why “I”
should be set aside in persuasive writing. Rather than prohibit
“I,” then, we think a better tactic is to give students practice
at using it well and learning its use, both by supporting their
claims with evidence and by attending closely to alternative
perspectives—to what “they” are saying.

how this book is organized

Because of its centrality, we have allowed the “they say / I say”
format to dictate the structure of this book. So while Part 1
addresses the art of listening to others, Part 2 addresses how
to offer one’s own response. Part 1 opens with a chapter on

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“Starting with What Others Are Saying” that explains why it is
generally advisable to begin a text by citing others rather than
plunging directly into one’s own views. Subsequent chapters
take up the arts of summarizing and quoting what these others
have to say. Part 2 begins with a chapter on different ways of
responding, followed by chapters on marking the shift between
what “they say” and what “I say,” on introducing and answering
objections, and on answering the all-important questions: “so
what?” and “who cares?” Part 3 offers strategies for “Tying It All
Together,” beginning with a chapter on connection and coher-
ence; followed by a chapter on formal and informal language,
arguing that academic discourse is often perfectly compatible
with the informal language that students use outside school;
and concluding with a chapter on the art of metacommentary,
showing students how to guide the way readers understand a
text. Part 4 offers guidance for entering conversations in specific
academic contexts, with chapters on entering class discussions,
writing online, reading, and writing in literature courses, the
sciences, and social sciences. Finally, we provide five readings
and an index of templates.

what this book doesn’t do

There are some things that this book does not try to do. We do
not, for instance, cover logical principles of argument such as
syllogisms, warrants, logical fallacies, or the differences between
inductive and deductive reasoning. Although such concepts
can be useful, we believe most of us learn the ins and outs of
argumentative writing not by studying logical principles in the
abstract, but by plunging into actual discussions and debates,
trying out different patterns of response, and in this way getting

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x x v i i i

a sense of what works to persuade different audiences and what
doesn’t. In our view, people learn more about arguing from
hearing someone say, “You miss my point. What I’m saying
is not , but ,” or “I agree with you that

, and would even add that ,” than they do
from studying the differences between inductive and deductive
reasoning. Such formulas give students an immediate sense of
what it feels like to enter a public conversation in a way that
studying abstract warrants and logical fallacies does not.

engaging with the ideas of others

One central goal of this book is to demystify academic writing
by returning it to its social and conversational roots. Although
writing may require some degree of quiet and solitude, the “they
say / I say” model shows students that they can best develop
their arguments not just by looking inward but by doing what
they often do in a good conversation with friends and family—
by listening carefully to what others are saying and engaging
with other views.
This approach to writing therefore has an ethical dimension,
since it asks writers not simply to keep proving and reasserting
what they already believe but to stretch what they believe by
putting it up against beliefs that differ, sometimes radically,
from their own. In an increasingly diverse, global society, this
ability to engage with the ideas of others is especially crucial
to democratic citizenship.
Gerald Graff
Cathy Birkenstein

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T H I R D E D I T I O N

“THEY SAY I SAY”
The Move s Tha t Ma t t e r

i n Academ i c Wr i t i n g

WITH READINGS

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introduction

Entering the Conversation

Think about an activity that you do particularly well:
cooking, playing the piano, shooting a basketball, even some-
thing as basic as driving a car. If you reflect on this activity, you’ll
realize that once you mastered it you no longer had to give much
conscious thought to the various moves that go into doing it.
Performing this activity, in other words, depends on your having
learned a series of complicated moves—moves that may seem
mysterious or difficult to those who haven’t yet learned them.
The same applies to writing. Often without consciously real-
izing it, accomplished writers routinely rely on a stock of estab-
lished moves that are crucial for communicating sophisticated
ideas. What makes writers masters of their trade is not only
their ability to express interesting thoughts but their mastery
of an inventory of basic moves that they probably picked up
by reading a wide range of other accomplished writers. Less
experienced writers, by contrast, are often unfamiliar with these
basic moves and unsure how to make them in their own writ-
ing. This book is intended as a short, user-friendly guide to the
basic moves of academic writing.
One of our key premises is that these basic moves are so
common that they can be represented in templates that you
can use right away to structure and even generate your own

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

writing. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of this book is
its pre sentation of many such templates, designed to help you
successfully enter not only the world of academic thinking and
writing, but also the wider worlds of civic discourse and work.
Instead of focusing solely on abstract principles of writing,
then, this book offers model templates that help you put those
principles directly into practice. Working with these templates
can give you an immediate sense of how to engage in the kinds
of critical thinking you are required to do at the college level
and in the vocational and public spheres beyond.
Some of these templates represent simple but crucial moves
like those used to summarize some widely held belief.

j Many Americans assume that .

Others are more complicated.

j On the one hand, . On the other hand, .

j Author X contradicts herself. At the same time that she argues

, she also implies .

j I agree that .

j This is not to say that .

It is true, of course, that critical thinking and writing go deeper
than any set of linguistic formulas, requiring that you question
assumptions, develop strong claims, offer supporting reasons
and evidence, consider opposing arguments, and so on. But
these deeper habits of thought cannot be put into practice
unless you have a language for expressing them in clear, orga-
nized ways.

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Entering the Conversation

state your own ideas as a
response to others

The single most important template that we focus on in this
book is the “they say ; I say ” formula that
gives our book its title. If there is any one point that we hope
you will take away from this book, it is the importance not only
of expressing your ideas (“I say”) but of presenting those ideas
as a response to some other person or group (“they say”). For us,
the underlying structure of effective academic writing—and of
responsible public discourse—resides not just in stating our own
ideas but in listening closely to others around us, summarizing
their views in a way that they will recognize, and responding
with our own ideas in kind. Broadly speaking, academic writ-
ing is argumentative writing, and we believe that to argue well
you need to do more than assert your own position. You need
to enter a conversation, using what others say (or might say)
as a launching pad or sounding board for your own views. For
this reason, one of the main pieces of advice in this book is to
write the voices of others into your text.
In our view, then, the best academic writing has one under-
lying feature: it is deeply engaged in some way with other peo-
ple’s views. Too often, however, academic writing is taught as
a process of saying “true” or “smart” things in a vacuum, as if
it were possible to argue effectively without being in conver-
sation with someone else. If you have been taught to write a
traditional five-paragraph essay, for example, you have learned
how to develop a thesis and support it with evidence. This is
good advice as far as it goes, but it leaves out the important
fact that in the real world we don’t make arguments without
being provoked. Instead, we make arguments because some-
one has said or done something (or perhaps not said or done

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

something) and we need to respond: “I can’t see why you like
the Lakers so much”; “I agree: it was a great film”; “That argu-
ment is contradictory.” If it weren’t for other people and our
need to challenge, agree with, or otherwise respond to them,
there would be no reason to argue at all.
To make an impact as a writer, you need to do more than
make statements that are logical, well supported, and consis-
tent. You must also find a way of entering a conversation with
others’ views—with something “they say.” If your own argu-
ment doesn’t identify the “they say” that you’re responding
to, it probably won’t make sense. As the figure above suggests,
what you are saying may be clear to your audience, but why
you are saying it won’t be. For it is what others are saying and
thinking that motivates our writing and gives it a reason for
being. It follows, then, as the figure on the next page suggests,
that your own argument—the thesis or “I say” moment of your
text—should always be a response to the arguments of others.
Many writers make explicit “they say / I say” moves in their
writing. One famous example is Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter

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Entering the Conversation

from Birmingham Jail,” which consists almost entirely of King’s
eloquent responses to a public statement by eight clergymen
deploring the civil rights protests he was leading. The letter—
which was written in 1963, while King was in prison for leading
a demonstration against racial injustice in Birmingham—is
structured almost entirely around a framework of summary and
response, in which King summarizes and then answers their
criticisms. In one typical passage, King writes as follows.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But
your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern
for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations.

Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

King goes on to agree with his critics that “It is unfortunate that
demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham,” yet he hastens

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

to add that “it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white
power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.”
King’s letter is so thoroughly conversational, in fact, that it
could be rewritten in the form of a dialogue or play.

King’s critics:
King’s response:
Critics:
Response:

Clearly, King would not have written his famous letter were
it not for his critics, whose views he treats not as objections
to his already-formed arguments but as the motivating source
of those arguments, their central reason for being. He quotes
not only what his critics have said (“Some have asked: ‘Why
didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?’ ”), but
also things they might have said (“One may well ask: ‘How can
you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?’ ”)—all
to set the stage for what he himself wants to say.
A similar “they say / I say” exchange opens an essay about
American patriotism by the social critic Katha Pollitt, who uses
her own daughter’s comment to represent the national fervor
of post-9/11 patriotism.

My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks
from the former World Trade Center, thinks we should fly the
American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands
for jingoism and vengeance and war. She tells me I’m wrong—the
flag means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no
to terrorism. In a way we’re both right. . . .

Katha Pollitt, “Put Out No Flags”

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Entering the Conversation

As Pollitt’s example shows, the “they” you respond to in
crafting an argument need not be a famous author or someone
known to your audience. It can be a family member like
Pollitt’s daughter, or a friend or classmate who has made a
provocative claim. It can even be something an individual or
a group might say—or a side of yourself, something you once
believed but no longer do, or something you partly believe
but also doubt. The important thing is that the “they” (or
“you” or “she”) represent some wider group with which read-
ers might identify—in Pollitt’s case, those who patriotically
believe in flying the flag. Pollitt’s example also shows that
responding to the views of others need not always involve
unqualified opposition. By agreeing and disagreeing
with her daughter, Pollitt enacts what we call the “yes
and no” response, reconciling apparently incompatible
views.
While King and Pollitt both identify the views they are
responding to, some authors do not explicitly state their views
but instead allow the reader to infer them. See, for instance, if
you can identify the implied or unnamed “they say” that the
following claim is responding to.

I like to think I have a certain advantage as a teacher of literature
because when I was growing up I disliked and feared books.

Gerald Graff, “Disliking Books at an Early Age”

In case you haven’t figured it out already, the phantom “they
say” here is the common belief that in order to be a good
teacher of literature, one must have grown up liking and enjoy-
ing books.

See Chapter
4 for more
on agreeing,
but with a
difference.

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

As you can see from these examples, many writers use the
“they say / I say” format to agree or disagree with others, to chal-
lenge standard ways of thinking, and thus to stir up controversy.
This point may come as a shock to you if you have always had
the impression that in order to succeed academically you need
to play it safe and avoid controversy in your writing, making
statements that nobody can possibly disagree with. Though this
view of writing may appear logical, it is actually a recipe for flat,
lifeless writing and for writing that fails to answer what we call
the “so what?” and “who cares?” questions. “William Shakespeare
wrote many famous plays and sonnets” may be a perfectly true
statement, but precisely because nobody is likely to disagree with
it, it goes without saying and thus would seem pointless if said.

ways of responding

Just because much argumentative writing is driven by disagree-
ment, it does not follow that agreement is ruled out. Although
argumentation is often associated with conflict and opposition,
the type of conversational “they say / I say” argument that we
focus on in this book can be just as useful when you agree as
when you disagree.

j She argues , and I agree because .

j Her argument that is supported by new research

showing that .

Nor do you always have to choose between either simply agree-
ing or disagreeing, since the “they say / I say” format also works
to both agree and disagree at the same time, as Pollitt illustrates
above.

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Entering the Conversation

j He claims that , and I have mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, I agree that . On the other hand,

I still insist that .

This last option—agreeing and disagreeing simultaneously—is
one we especially recommend, since it allows you to avoid a
simple yes or no response and present a more complicated argu-
ment, while containing that complication within a clear “on
the one hand / on the other hand” framework.
While the templates we offer in this book can be used to
structure your writing at the sentence level, they can also be
expanded as needed to almost any length, as the following
elaborated “they say / I say” template demonstrates.

j In recent discussions of , a controversial issue has

been whether . On the one hand, some argue

that . From this perspective, . On the other

hand, however, others argue that . In the words of

, one of this view’s main proponents, “ .”

According to this view, . In sum, then, the issue is

whether or .

My own view is that . Though I concede that

, I still maintain that . For example,

. Although some might object that , I would

reply that . The issue is important because .

If you go back over this template, you will see that it helps you
make a host of challenging moves (each of which is taken up
in forthcoming chapters in this book). First, the template helps
you open your text by identifying an issue in some ongoing
conversation or debate (“In recent discussions of ,

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

1 0

a controversial issue has been ”), and then to map
some of the voices in this controversy (by using the “on the
one hand / on the other hand” structure). The template also
helps you introduce a quotation (“In the words of ”), to explain
the quotation in your own words (“According to this view”),
and—in a new paragraph—to state your own argument (“My
own view is that”), to qualify your argument (“Though I con-
cede that”), and then to support your argument with evidence
(“For example”). In addition, the template helps you make one
of the most crucial moves in argumentative writing, what we
call “planting a naysayer in your text,” in which you summarize
and then answer a likely objection to your own central claim
(“Although it might be objected that , I reply ”).
Finally, this template helps you shift between general, over-
arching claims (“In sum, then”) and smaller-scale, supporting
claims (“For example”).
Again, none of us is born knowing these moves, especially
when it comes to academic writing. Hence the need for this book.

do templates stifle creativity?

If you are like some of our students, your initial response to
templates may be skepticism. At first, many of our students
complain that using templates will take away their originality
and creativity and make them all sound the same. “They’ll turn
us into writing robots,” one of our students insisted. Another
agreed, adding, “Hey, I’m a jazz musician. And we don’t play by
set forms. We create our own.” “I’m in college now,” another
student asserted; “this is third-grade-level stuff.”
In our view, however, the templates in this book, far from
being “third-grade-level stuff,” represent the stock in trade of

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Entering the Conversation

1 1

sophisticated thinking and writing, and they often require a
great deal of practice and instruction to use successfully. As
for the belief that pre-established forms undermine creativity,
we think it rests on a very limited vision of what creativity is
all about. In our view, the above template and the others in
this book will actually help your writing become more original
and creative, not less. After all, even the most creative forms
of expression depend on established patterns and structures.
Most songwriters, for instance, rely on a time-honored verse-
chorus-verse pattern, and few people would call Shakespeare
uncreative because he didn’t invent the sonnet or the dramatic
forms that he used to such dazzling effect. Even the most avant-
garde, cutting-edge artists (like improvisational jazz musicians)
need to master the basic forms that their work improvises on,
departs from, and goes beyond, or else their work will come
across as uneducated child’s play. Ultimately, then, creativity
and originality lie not in the avoidance of established forms
but in the imaginative use of them.
Furthermore, these templates do not dictate the content of
what you say, which can be as original as you can make it, but
only suggest a way of formatting how you say it. In addition,
once you begin to feel comfortable with the templates in this
book, you will be able to improvise creatively on them to fit
new situations and purposes and find others in your reading.
In other words, the templates offered here are learning tools to
get you started, not structures set in stone. Once you get used
to using them, you can even dispense with them altogether,
for the rhetorical moves they model will be at your fingertips
in an unconscious, instinctive way.
But if you still need proof that writing templates do not stifle
creativity, consider the following opening to an essay on the
fast-food industry that we’ve included at the back of this book.

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1 2

David Zinczenko, “Don’t Blame the Eater”

Although Zinczenko relies on a version of the “they say / I
say” formula, his writing is anything but dry, robotic, or uncre-
ative. While Zinczenko does not explicitly use the words
“they say” and “I say,” the template still gives the passage its
underlying structure: “They say that kids suing fast-food com-
panies for making them fat is a joke; but I say such lawsuits
are justified.”

but isn’t this plagiarism?

“But isn’t this plagiarism?” at least one student each year will
usually ask. “Well, is it?” we respond, turning the question
around into one the entire class can profit from. “We are, after
all, asking you to use language in your writing that isn’t your
own—language that you ‘borrow’ or, to put it less delicately,
steal from other writers.”
Often, a lively discussion ensues that raises important
questions about authorial ownership and helps everyone
better understand the frequently confusing line between pla-
giarism and the legitimate use of what others say and how
they say it. Students are quick to see that no one person
owns a conventional formula like “on the one hand . . . on
the other hand . . . ” Phrases like “a controversial issue”

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Entering the Conversation

1 3

are so commonly used and recycled that they are generic—
community property that can be freely used without fear of
committing plagiarism. It is plagiarism, however, if the words
used to fill in the blanks of such formulas are borrowed from
others without proper acknowledgment. In sum, then, while
it is not plagiarism to recycle conventionally used formulas, it
is a serious academic offense to take the substantive content
from others’ texts without citing the author and giving him
or her proper credit.

putting in your oar

Though the immediate goal of this book is to help you become a
better writer, at a deeper level it invites you to become a certain
type of person: a critical, intellectual thinker who, instead of sit-
ting passively on the sidelines, can participate in the debates and
conversations of your world in an active and empowered way.
Ultimately, this book invites you to become a critical thinker
who can enter the types of conversations described eloquently
by the philosopher Kenneth Burke in the following widely cited
passage. Likening the world of intellectual exchange to a never-
ending conversation at a party, Burke writes:

You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you,
and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated
for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. . . . You
listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor
of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you
answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself
against you. . . . The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do
depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

1 4

What we like about this passage is its suggestion that stating
an argument and “putting in your oar” can only be done in
conversation with others; that we all enter the dynamic world
of ideas not as isolated individuals but as social beings deeply
connected to others who have a stake in what we say.
This ability to enter complex, many-sided conversations has
taken on a special urgency in today’s diverse, post-9/11 world,
where the future for all of us may depend on our ability to put
ourselves in the shoes of those who think very differently from
us. The central piece of advice in this book—that we listen
carefully to others, including those who disagree with us, and
then engage with them thoughtfully and respectfully—can
help us see beyond our own pet beliefs, which may not be
shared by everyone. The mere act of crafting a sentence that
begins “Of course, someone might object that ” may
not seem like a way to change the world; but it does have the
potential to jog us out of our comfort zones, to get us thinking
critically about our own beliefs, and perhaps even to change
our minds.

Exercises

1. Read the following paragraph from an essay by Emily Poe, a
student at Furman University. Disregarding for the moment
what Poe says, focus your attention on the phrases she uses
to structure what she says (italicized here). Then write a new
paragraph using Poe’s as a model but replacing her topic,
vegetarianism, with one of your own.

The term “vegetarian” tends to be synonymous with “tree-hugger”
in many people’s minds. They see vegetarianism as a cult that
brainwashes its followers into eliminating an essential part of their

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Entering the Conversation

1 5

daily diets for an abstract goal of “animal welfare.” However, few
vegetarians choose their lifestyle just to follow the crowd. On the
contrary, many of these supposedly brainwashed people are actu-
ally independent thinkers, concerned citizens, and compassionate
human beings. For the truth is that there are many very good reasons
for giving up meat. Perhaps the best reasons are to improve the
environment, to encourage humane treatment of livestock, or to
enhance one’s own health. In this essay, then, closely examining a
vegetarian diet as compared to a meat-eater’s diet will show that
vegetarianism is clearly the better option for sustaining the Earth
and all its inhabitants.

2. Write a short essay in which you first summarize our rationale
for the templates in this book and then articulate your own
position in response. If you want, you can use the template
below to organize your paragraphs, expanding and modifying
it as necessary to fit what you want to say.

In the Introduction to “They Say / I Say”: The Moves That Matter in

Academic Writing, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein provide tem-

plates designed to . Specifically, Graff and Birkenstein

argue that the types of writing templates they offer . As

the authors themselves put it, “ .” Although some people

believe , Graff and Birkenstein insist that .

In sum, then, their view is that .

I [agree/disagree/have mixed feelings]. In my view, the types

of templates that the authors recommend . For

instance, . In addition, . Some might object,

of course, on the grounds that . Yet I would argue

that . Overall, then, I believe —an important

point to make given .

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1
H

“THEY SAY”

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1 9

ONE

“they say”

Starting with What Others Are Saying

Not long ago we attended a talk at an academic conference
where the speaker’s central claim seemed to be that a certain
sociologist—call him Dr. X—had done very good work in a
number of areas of the discipline. The speaker proceeded to
illustrate his thesis by referring extensively and in great detail
to various books and articles by Dr. X and by quoting long pas-
sages from them. The speaker was obviously both learned and
impassioned, but as we listened to his talk we found ourselves
somewhat puzzled: the argument—that Dr. X’s work was very
important—was clear enough, but why did the speaker need to
make it in the first place? Did anyone dispute it? Were there
commentators in the field who had argued against X’s work or
challenged its value? Was the speaker’s interpretation of what
X had done somehow novel or revolutionary? Since the speaker
gave no hint of an answer to any of these questions, we could
only wonder why he was going on and on about X. It
was only after the speaker finished and took questions
from the audience that we got a clue: in response to
one questioner, he referred to several critics who had

The hypo-
thetical
audience in
the figure on
p. 4 reacts
similarly.

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vigorously questioned Dr. X’s ideas and convinced many soci-
ologists that Dr. X’s work was unsound.
This story illustrates an important lesson: that to give writ-
ing the most important thing of all—namely, a point—a writer
needs to indicate clearly not only what his or her thesis is,
but also what larger conversation that thesis is responding to.
Because our speaker failed to mention what others had said about
Dr. X’s work, he left his audience unsure about why he felt the
need to say what he was saying. Perhaps the point was clear to
other sociologists in the audience who were more familiar with
the debates over Dr. X’s work than we were. But even they, we
bet, would have understood the speaker’s point better if he’d
sketched in some of the larger conversation his own claims were
a part of and reminded the audience about what “they say.”
This story also illustrates an important lesson about the order
in which things are said: to keep an audience engaged, a writer
needs to explain what he or she is responding to—either before
offering that response or, at least, very early in the discussion.
Delaying this explanation for more than one or two paragraphs
in a very short essay or blog entry, three or four pages in a longer
work, or more than ten or so pages in a book reverses the natural
order in which readers process material—and in which writers
think and develop ideas. After all, it seems very unlikely that our

conference speaker first developed his defense of Dr. X
and only later came across Dr. X’s critics. As someone
knowledgeable in his field, the speaker surely encoun-
tered the criticisms first and only then was compelled
to respond and, as he saw it, set the record straight.

Therefore, when it comes to constructing an argument
(whether orally or in writing), we offer you the following
advice: remember that you are entering a conversation and
therefore need to start with “what others are saying,” as the

See how an
essay about
community

college opens
by quoting its
critics, p. 255.

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2 1

title of this chapter recommends, and then introduce your own
ideas as a response. Specifically, we suggest that you summarize
what “they say” as soon as you can in your text, and remind
readers of it at strategic points as your text unfolds. Though
it’s true that not all texts follow this practice, we think it’s
important for all writers to master it before they depart from it.
This is not to say that you must start with a detailed list of
everyone who has written on your subject before you offer your
own ideas. Had our conference speaker gone to the opposite
extreme and spent most of his talk summarizing Dr. X’s critics
with no hint of what he himself had to say, the audience probably
would have had the same frustrated “why-is-he-going-on-like-
this?” reaction. What we suggest, then, is that as soon as possible
you state your own position and the one it’s responding to together,
and that you think of the two as a unit. It is generally best to
summarize the ideas you’re responding to briefly, at the start of
your text, and to delay detailed elaboration until later. The point
is to give your readers a quick preview of what is motivating your
argument, not to drown them in details right away.
Starting with a summary of others’ views may seem to con-
tradict the common advice that writers should lead with their
own thesis or claim. Although we agree that you shouldn’t keep
readers in suspense too long about your central argument, we also
believe that you need to present that argument as part of some
larger conversation, indicating something about the arguments
of others that you are supporting, opposing, amending, compli-
cating, or qualifying. One added benefit of summarizing others’
views as soon as you can: you let those others do some of the
work of framing and clarifying the issue you’re writing about.
Consider, for example, how George Orwell starts his famous
essay “Politics and the English Language” with what others are
saying.

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Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the
English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that
we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civiliza-
tion is decadent and our language—so the argument runs—must
inevitably share in the general collapse. . . .
[But] the process is reversible. Modern English . . . is full of
bad habits . . . which can be avoided if one is willing to take the
necessary trouble.

George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”

Orwell is basically saying, “Most people assume that we cannot
do anything about the bad state of the English language. But
I say we can.”
Of course, there are many other powerful ways to begin.
Instead of opening with someone else’s views, you could start
with an illustrative quotation, a revealing fact or statistic, or—
as we do in this chapter—a relevant anecdote. If you choose
one of these formats, however, be sure that it in some way
illustrates the view you’re addressing or leads you to that view
directly, with a minimum of steps.
In opening this chapter, for example, we devote the first para-
graph to an anecdote about the conference speaker and then
move quickly at the start of the second paragraph to the miscon-
ception about writing exemplified by the speaker. In the follow-
ing opening, from an opinion piece in the New York Times Book
Review, Christina Nehring also moves quickly from an anecdote
illustrating something she dislikes to her own claim—that book
lovers think too highly of themselves.

“I’m a reader!” announced the yellow button. “How about you?” I
looked at its bearer, a strapping young guy stalking my town’s Festival
of Books. “I’ll bet you’re a reader,” he volunteered, as though we were

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Starting with What Others Are Saying

2 3

two geniuses well met. “No,” I replied. “Absolutely not,” I wanted to
yell, and fling my Barnes & Noble bag at his feet. Instead, I mumbled
something apologetic and melted into the crowd.
There’s a new piety in the air: the self congratulation of book
lovers.

Christina Nehring, “Books Make You a Boring Person”

Nehring’s anecdote is really a kind of “they say”: book lovers
keep telling themselves how great they are.

templates for introducing
what “they say”

There are lots of conventional ways to introduce what others
are saying. Here are some standard templates that we would
have recommended to our conference speaker.

j A number of sociologists have recently suggested that X’s work

has several fundamental problems.

j It has become common today to dismiss .

j In their recent work, Y and Z have offered harsh critiques of

for .

templates for introducing
“standard views”

The following templates can help you make what we call the
“standard view” move, in which you introduce a view that has
become so widely accepted that by now it is essentially the
conventional way of thinking about a topic.

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j Americans have always believed that individual effort can

triumph over circumstances.

j Conventional wisdom has it that .

j Common sense seems to dictate that .

j The standard way of thinking about topic X has it that .

j It is often said that .

j My whole life I have heard it said that .

j You would think that .

j Many people assume that .

These templates are popular because they provide a quick
and efficient way to perform one of the most common moves
that writers make: challenging widely accepted beliefs, placing
them on the examining table, and analyzing their strengths
and weaknesses.

templates for making what “they say”
something you say

Another way to introduce the views you’re responding to is
to present them as your own. That is, the “they say” that you
respond to need not be a view held by others; it can be one that
you yourself once held or one that you are ambivalent about.

j I’ve always believed that museums are boring.

j When I was a child, I used to think that .

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Starting with What Others Are Saying

2 5

j Although I should know better by now, I cannot help thinking

that .

j At the same time that I believe , I also believe

templates for introducing
something implied or assumed

Another sophisticated move a writer can make is to summarize
a point that is not directly stated in what “they say” but is
implied or assumed.

j Although none of them have ever said so directly, my teachers

have often given me the impression that education will open doors.

j One implication of X’s treatment of is that .

j Although X does not say so directly, she apparently assumes

that .

j While they rarely admit as much, often take for

granted that .

These are templates that can help you think analytically—to
look beyond what others say explicitly and to consider their
unstated assumptions, as well as the implications of their views.

templates for introducing
an ongoing debate

Sometimes you’ll want to open by summarizing a debate
that presents two or more views. This kind of opening

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2 6

demonstrates your awareness that there are conflicting ways
to look at your subject, the clear mark of someone who knows
the subject and therefore is likely to be a reliable, trustworthy
guide. Furthermore, opening with a summary of a debate can
help you explore the issue you are writing about before declar-
ing your own view. In this way, you can use the writing
process itself to help you discover where you stand instead
of having to commit to a position before you are ready to
do so.
Here is a basic template for opening with a debate.

j In discussions of X, one controversial issue has been .

On the one hand, argues . On the other

hand, contends . Others even maintain

. My own view is .

The cognitive scientist Mark Aronoff uses this kind of template
in an essay on the workings of the human brain.

Theories of how the mind/brain works have been dominated
for centuries by two opposing views. One, rationalism, sees the
human mind as coming into this world more or less fully formed—
preprogrammed, in modern terms. The other, empiricism, sees the
mind of the newborn as largely unstructured, a blank slate.

Mark Aronoff, “Washington Sleeped Here”

Another way to open with a debate involves starting with a
proposition many people agree with in order to highlight the
point(s) on which they ultimately disagree.

j When it comes to the topic of , most of us will read-

ily agree that . Where this agreement usually ends,

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Starting with What Others Are Saying

2 7

however, is on the question of . Whereas some are

convinced that , others maintain that .

The political writer Thomas Frank uses a variation on this
move.

That we are a nation divided is an almost universal lament of
this bitter election year. However, the exact property that divides
us—elemental though it is said to be—remains a matter of some
controversy.

Thomas Frank, “American Psyche”

keep what “they say” in view

We can’t urge you too strongly to keep in mind what “they say”
as you move through the rest of your text. After summarizing
the ideas you are responding to at the outset, it’s very impor-
tant to continue to keep those ideas in view. Readers won’t be
able to follow your unfolding response, much less any compli-
cations you may offer, unless you keep reminding them what
claims you are responding to.
In other words, even when presenting your own claims,
you should keep returning to the motivating “they say.”
The longer and more complicated your text, the greater the
chance that readers will forget what ideas originally moti-
vated it—no matter how clearly you lay them out at the
beginning. At strategic moments throughout your text, we
recommend that you include what we call “return sentences.”
Here is an example.

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o n e o n e “ T H E Y S A Y ”

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j In conclusion, then, as I suggested earlier, defenders of

can’t have it both ways. Their assertion that

is contradicted by their claim that .

We ourselves use such return sentences at every opportunity in
this book to remind you of the view of writing that our book
questions—that good writing means making true or smart or
logical statements about a given subject with little or no refer-
ence to what others say about it.
By reminding readers of the ideas you’re responding to,
return sentences ensure that your text maintains a sense of
mission and urgency from start to finish. In short, they help
ensure that your argument is a genuine response to others’ views
rather than just a set of observations about a given subject. The
difference is huge. To be responsive to others and the conver-
sation you’re entering, you need to start with what others are
saying and continue keeping it in the reader’s view.

Exercises

1. The following is a list of arguments that lack a “they say”—
any sense of who needs to hear these claims, who might
think otherwise. Like the speaker in the cartoon on page 4
who declares that The Sopranos presents complex characters,
these one-sided arguments fail to explain what view they
are responding to—what view, in effect, they are trying to
correct, add to, qualify, complicate, and so forth. Your job
in this exercise is to provide each argument with such a
counterview. Feel free to use any of the templates in this
chapter that you find helpful.

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Starting with What Others Are Saying

2 9

a. Our experiments suggest that there are dangerous levels
of chemical X in the Ohio groundwater.

b. Material forces drive history.
c. Proponents of Freudian psychology question standard

notions of “rationality.”
d. Male students often dominate class discussions.
e. The film is about the problems of romantic relationships.
f. I’m afraid that templates like the ones in this book will

stifle my creativity.

2. Below is a template that we derived from the opening of
David Zinczenko’s “Don’t Blame the Eater” (p. 462). Use
the template to structure a passage on a topic of your own
choosing. Your first step here should be to find an idea
that you support that others not only disagree with but
actually find laughable (or, as Zinczenko puts it, worthy of
a Jay Leno monologue). You might write about one of the
topics listed in the previous exercise (the environment,
gender relations, the meaning of a book or movie) or any
other topic that interests you.

If ever there was an idea custom-made for a Jay Leno monologue,

this was it: . Isn’t that like ? Whatever hap-

pened to ?

I happen to sympathize with , though, perhaps

because .

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3 0

TWO

“her point is”

The Art of Summarizing

If it is true, as we claim in this book, that to argue
persuasively you need to be in dialogue with others, then sum-
marizing others’ arguments is central to your arsenal of basic
moves. Because writers who make strong claims need to map
their claims relative to those of other people, it is important
to know how to summarize effectively what those other people
say. (We’re using the word “summarizing” here to refer to any
information from others that you present in your own words,
including that which you paraphrase.)
Many writers shy away from summarizing—perhaps because
they don’t want to take the trouble to go back to the text in
question and wrestle with what it says, or because they fear that
devoting too much time to other people’s ideas will take away
from their own. When assigned to write a response to an article,
such writers might offer their own views on the article’s topic
while hardly mentioning what the article itself argues or says. At
the opposite extreme are those who do nothing but summarize.
Lacking confidence, perhaps, in their own ideas, these writers so
overload their texts with summaries of others’ ideas that their
own voice gets lost. And since these summaries are not animated

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The Art of Summarizing

3 1

by the writers’ own interests, they often read like mere lists of
things that X thinks or Y says—with no clear focus.
As a general rule, a good summary requires balancing what
the original author is saying with the writer’s own focus.
Generally speaking, a summary must at once be true to what
the original author says while also emphasizing those aspects
of what the author says that interest you, the writer. Strik-
ing this delicate balance can be tricky, since it means facing
two ways at once: both outward (toward the author
being summarized) and inward (toward yourself).
Ultimately, it means being respectful of others but
simultaneously structuring how you summarize them
in light of your own text’s central argument.

on the one hand,
put yourself in their shoes

To write a really good summary, you must be able to suspend your
own beliefs for a time and put yourself in the shoes of someone
else. This means playing what the writing theorist Peter Elbow
calls the “believing game,” in which you try to inhabit the world-
view of those whose conversation you are joining—and whom you
are perhaps even disagreeing with—and try to see their argument
from their perspective. This ability to temporarily suspend one’s
own convictions is a hallmark of good actors, who must convinc-
ingly “become” characters whom in real life they may detest. As
a writer, when you play the believing game well, readers should
not be able to tell whether you agree or disagree with the ideas
you are summarizing.
If, as a writer, you cannot or will not suspend your own
beliefs in this way, you are likely to produce summaries that are

See how
Nicholas Carr
summarizes
the mission
of Google on
p. 323, ¶24.

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so obviously biased that they undermine your credibility with
readers. Consider the following summary.

David Zinczenko’s article, “Don’t Blame the Eater,” is nothing
more than an angry rant in which he accuses the fast-food com-
panies of an evil conspiracy to make people fat. I disagree because
these companies have to make money. . . .

If you review what Zinczenko actually says (pp. 462–64), you
should immediately see that this summary amounts to an unfair
distortion. While Zinczenko does argue that the practices of
the fast-food industry have the effect of making people fat, his
tone is never “angry,” and he never goes so far as to suggest
that the fast-food industry conspires to make people fat with
deliberately evil intent.
Another tell-tale sign of this writer’s failure to give
Zinczenko a fair hearing is the hasty way he abandons the sum-
mary after only one sentence and rushes on to his own response.
So eager is this writer to disagree that he not only caricatures
what Zinczenko says but also gives the article a hasty, super-
ficial reading. Granted, there are many writing situations in
which, because of matters of proportion, a one- or two-sentence
summary is precisely what you want. Indeed, as writing profes-
sor Karen Lunsford (whose own research focuses on argument
theory) points out, it is standard in the natural and social sci-
ences to summarize the work of others quickly, in one pithy
sentence or phrase, as in the following example.

Several studies (Crackle, 2012; Pop, 2007; Snap, 2006) suggest that
these policies are harmless; moreover, other studies (Dick, 2011;
Harry, 2007; Tom, 2005) argue that they even have benefits.

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The Art of Summarizing

3 3

But if your assignment is to respond in writing to a single author
like Zinczenko, you will need to tell your readers enough about
his or her argument so they can assess its merits on their own,
independent of you.
When a writer fails to provide enough summary or to engage
in a rigorous or serious enough summary, he or she often falls
prey to what we call “the closest cliché syndrome,” in which
what gets summarized is not the view the author in question has
actually expressed but a familiar cliché that the writer mistakes
for the author’s view (sometimes because the writer believes it
and mistakenly assumes the author must too). So, for example,
Martin Luther King Jr.’s passionate defense of civil disobedi-
ence in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” might be summarized
not as the defense of political protest that it actually is but as
a plea for everyone to “just get along.” Similarly, Zinczenko’s
critique of the fast-food industry might be summarized as a call
for overweight people to take responsibility for their weight.
Whenever you enter into a conversation with others in your
writing, then, it is extremely important that you go back to
what those others have said, that you study it very closely, and
that you not confuse it with something you already believe. A
writer who fails to do this ends up essentially conversing with
imaginary others who are really only the products of his or her
own biases and preconceptions.

on the other hand,
know where you are going

Even as writing an effective summary requires you to temporar-
ily adopt the worldview of another, it does not mean ignoring

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your own view altogether. Paradoxically, at the same time that
summarizing another text requires you to represent fairly what
it says, it also requires that your own response exert a quiet
influence. A good summary, in other words, has a focus or spin
that allows the summary to fit with your own agenda while still
being true to the text you are summarizing.
Thus if you are writing in response to the essay by Zinczenko,
you should be able to see that an essay on the fast-food industry
in general will call for a very different summary than will an
essay on parenting, corporate regulation, or warning labels. If
you want your essay to encompass all three topics, you’ll need
to subordinate these three issues to one of Zinczenko’s general
claims and then make sure this general claim directly sets up
your own argument.
For example, suppose you want to argue that it is parents, not
fast-food companies, who are to blame for children’s obesity.
To set up this argument, you will probably want to compose a
summary that highlights what Zinczenko says about the fast-
food industry and parents. Consider this sample.

In his article “Don’t Blame the Eater,” David Zinczenko blames
the fast-food industry for fueling today’s so-called obesity epidemic,
not only by failing to provide adequate warning labels on its
high-calorie foods but also by filling the nutritional void in chil-
dren’s lives left by their overtaxed working parents. With many
parents working long hours and unable to supervise what their
children eat, Zinczenko claims, children today are easily victimized
by the low-cost, calorie-laden foods that the fast-food chains are all
too eager to supply. When he was a young boy, for instance, and his
single mother was away at work, he ate at Taco Bell, McDonald’s,
and other chains on a regular basis, and ended up overweight.
Zinczenko’s hope is that with the new spate of lawsuits against

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the food industry, other children with working parents will have
healthier choices available to them, and that they will not, like
him, become obese.
In my view, however, it is the parents, and not the food chains,
who are responsible for their children’s obesity. While it is true
that many of today’s parents work long hours, there are still several
things that parents can do to guarantee that their children eat
healthy foods. . . .

The summary in the first paragraph succeeds because it points
in two directions at once—both toward Zinczenko’s own text
and toward the second paragraph, where the writer begins to
establish her own argument. The opening sentence gives a sense
of Zinczenko’s general argument (that the fast-food chains are
to blame for obesity), including his two main supporting claims
(about warning labels and parents), but it ends with an empha-
sis on the writer’s main concern: parental responsibility. In this
way, the summary does justice to Zinczenko’s arguments while
also setting up the ensuing critique.
This advice—to summarize authors in light of your own
arguments—may seem painfully obvious. But writers often
summarize a given author on one issue even though their text
actually focuses on another. To avoid this problem, you need to
make sure that your “they say” and “I say” are well matched. In
fact, aligning what they say with what you say is a good thing
to work on when revising what you’ve written.
Often writers who summarize without regard to their own
interests fall prey to what might be called “list summaries,”
summaries that simply inventory the original author’s various
points but fail to focus those points around any larger overall
claim. If you’ve ever heard a talk in which the points were con-
nected only by words like “and then,” “also,” and “in addition,”

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you know how such lists can put listeners to sleep—as shown
in the figure above. A typical list summary sounds like this.

The author says many different things about his subject. First he
says. . . . Then he makes the point that. . . . In addition he says. . . .
And then he writes. . . . Also he shows that. . . . And then he says. . . .

It may be boring list summaries like this that give summaries
in general a bad name and even prompt some instructors to
discourage their students from summarizing at all.
In conclusion, writing a good summary means not just repre-
senting an author’s view accurately, but doing so in a way that
fits your own composition’s larger agenda. On the one hand,
it means playing Peter Elbow’s believing game and doing jus-
tice to the source; if the summary ignores or misrepresents the

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source, its bias and unfairness will show. On the other hand,
even as it does justice to the source, a summary has to have a
slant or spin that prepares the way for your own claims. Once
a summary enters your text, you should think of it as joint
property—reflecting both the source you are summarizing and
your own views.

summarizing satirically

Thus far in this chapter we have argued that, as a general rule,
good summaries require a balance between what someone else
has said and your own interests as a writer. Now, however, we
want to address one exception to this rule: the satiric summary,
in which a writer deliberately gives his or her own spin to some-
one else’s argument in order to reveal a glaring shortcoming in
it. Despite our previous comments that well-crafted summaries
generally strike a balance between heeding what someone else
has said and your own independent interests, the satiric mode
can at times be a very effective form of critique because it lets
the summarized argument condemn itself without overt edito-
rializing by you, the writer. If you’ve ever watched The Daily
Show, you’ll recall that it often merely summarizes silly things
political leaders have said or done, letting their words or actions
undermine themselves.
Consider another example. In September 2001, then-
President George W. Bush in a speech to Congress urged
the nation’s “continued participation and confidence in the
American economy” as a means of recovering from the terror-
ist attacks of 9/11. The journalist Allan Sloan criticized this
proposal simply by summarizing it, observing that the president

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had equated “patriotism with shopping. Maxing out your credit
cards at the mall wasn’t self indulgence, it was a way to get back
at Osama bin Laden.” Sloan’s summary leaves no doubt where
he stands—he considers Bush’s proposal ridiculous, or at least
too simple.

use signal verbs that fit the action

In introducing summaries, try to avoid bland formulas like “she
says,” or “they believe.” Though language like this is sometimes
serviceable enough, it often fails to reflect accurately what’s been
said. In some cases, “he says” may even drain the passion out of
the ideas you’re summarizing.
We suspect that the habit of ignoring the action in what we
summarize stems from the mistaken belief we mentioned earlier
that writing is about playing it safe and not making waves, a
matter of piling up truths and bits of knowledge rather than
a dynamic process of doing things to and with other people.
People who wouldn’t hesitate to say “X totally misrepresented,”
“attacked,” or “loved” something when chatting with friends
will in their writing often opt for far tamer and even less accu-
rate phrases like “X said.”
But the authors you summarize at the college level seldom
simply “say” or “discuss” things; they “urge,” “emphasize,”
and “complain about” them. David Zinczenko, for example,
doesn’t just say that fast-food companies contribute to obesity;
he complains or protests that they do; he challenges, chastises,
and indicts those companies. The Declaration of Independence
doesn’t just talk about the treatment of the colonies by the
British; it protests against it. To do justice to the authors you cite,

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we recommend that when summarizing—or when introducing
a quotation—you use vivid and precise signal verbs as often as
possible. Though “he says” or “she believes” will sometimes be
the most appropriate language for the occasion, your text will
often be more accurate and lively if you tailor your verbs to
suit the precise actions you’re describing.

templates for introducing
summaries and quotations

j She advocates a radical revision of the juvenile justice system.

j They celebrate the fact that .

j , he admits.

verbs for introducing
summaries and quotations

verbs for making a claim

argue insist
assert observe
believe remind us
claim report
emphasize suggest

verbs for expressing agreement

acknowledge endorse
admire extol
agree praise

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verbs for expressing agreement

celebrate the fact that reaffirm
corroborate support
do not deny verify

verbs for questioning or disagreeing

complain qualify
complicate question
contend refute
contradict reject
deny renounce
deplore the tendency to repudiate

verbs for making recommendations

advocate implore
call for plead
demand recommend
encourage urge
exhort warn

Exercises

1. To get a feel for Peter Elbow’s “believing game,” write a sum-
mary of some belief that you strongly disagree with. Then
write a summary of the position that you actually hold on
this topic. Give both summaries to a classmate or two, and
see if they can tell which position you endorse. If you’ve
succeeded, they won’t be able to tell.

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2. Write two different summaries of David Zinczenko’s “Don’t
Blame the Eater” (pp. 462–64). Write the first one for an
essay arguing that, contrary to what Zinczenko claims, there
are inexpensive and convenient alternatives to fast-food
restaurants. Write the second for an essay that questions
whether being overweight is a genuine medical problem
rather than a problem of cultural stereotypes. Compare your
two summaries: though they are about the same article, they
should look very different.

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4 2

THREE

“as he himself puts it”

The Art of Quoting

A key premise of this book is that to launch an effective
argument you need to write the arguments of others into your
text. One of the best ways to do so is by not only summarizing
what “they say,” as suggested in Chapter 2, but by quoting their
exact words. Quoting someone else’s words gives a tremendous
amount of credibility to your summary and helps ensure that
it is fair and accurate. In a sense, then, quotations function as
a kind of proof of evidence, saying to readers: “Look, I’m not
just making this up. She makes this claim and here it is in her
exact words.”
Yet many writers make a host of mistakes when it comes to
quoting, not the least of which is the failure to quote enough
in the first place, if at all. Some writers quote too little—
perhaps because they don’t want to bother going back to
the original text and looking up the author’s exact words, or
because they think they can reconstruct the author’s ideas from
memory. At the opposite extreme are writers who so overquote
that they end up with texts that are short on commentary of
their own—maybe because they lack confidence in their abil-
ity to comment on the quotations, or because they don’t fully

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understand what they’ve quoted and therefore have trouble
explaining what the quotations mean.
But the main problem with quoting arises when writers
assume that quotations speak for themselves. Because the
meaning of a quotation is obvious to them, many writers assume
that this meaning will also be obvious to their readers, when
often it is not. Writers who make this mistake think that their
job is done when they’ve chosen a quotation and inserted it
into their text. They draft an essay, slap in a few quotations,
and whammo, they’re done.
Such writers fail to see that quoting means more than sim-
ply enclosing what “they say” in quotation marks. In
a way, quotations are orphans: words that have been
taken from their original contexts and that need to be
integrated into their new textual surroundings. This
chapter offers two key ways to produce this sort of
integration: (1) by choosing quotations wisely, with an eye
to how well they support a particular part of your text, and
(2) by surrounding every major quotation with a frame explain-
ing whose words they are, what the quotation means, and how
the quotation relates to your own text. The point we want to
emphasize is that quoting what “they say” must always be con-
nected with what you say.

quote relevant passages

Before you can select appropriate quotations, you need to have
a sense of what you want to do with them—that is, how they
will support your text at the particular point where you insert
them. Be careful not to select quotations just for the sake of

See how
one author
connects what
“they say” to
what he wants
to say, pp. 401,
403, ¶7–8.

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demonstrating that you’ve read the author’s work; you need to
make sure they support your own argument.
However, finding relevant quotations is not always easy. In
fact, sometimes quotations that were initially relevant to your
argument, or to a key point in it, become less so as your text
changes during the process of writing and revising. Given the
evolving and messy nature of writing, you may sometimes think
that you’ve found the perfect quotation to support your argu-
ment, only to discover later on, as your text develops, that your
focus has changed and the quotation no longer works. It can be
somewhat misleading, then, to speak of finding your thesis and
finding relevant quotations as two separate steps, one coming
after the other. When you’re deeply engaged in the writing and
revising process, there is usually a great deal of back-and-forth
between your argument and any quotations you select.

frame every quotation

Finding relevant quotations is only part of your job; you also
need to present them in a way that makes their relevance and
meaning clear to your readers. Since quotations do not speak
for themselves, you need to build a frame around them in which
you do that speaking for them.
Quotations that are inserted into a text without such a
frame are sometimes called “dangling” quotations for the way
they’re left dangling without any explanation. One teacher
we’ve worked with, Steve Benton, calls these “hit-and-run”
quotations, likening them to car accidents in which the driver
speeds away and avoids taking responsibility for the dent in
your fender or the smashed taillights, as in the figure that
follows.

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Here’s a typical hit-and-run quotation by a writer respond-
ing to an essay by the feminist philosopher Susan Bordo,
who laments that media pressures on young women to diet are
spreading to previously isolated regions of the world like the
Fiji islands.

Susan Bordo writes about women and dieting. “Fiji is just one
example. Until television was introduced in 1995, the islands had
no reported cases of eating disorders. In 1998, three years after
programs from the United States and Britain began broadcasting
there, 62 percent of the girls surveyed reported dieting.”
I think Bordo is right. Another point Bordo makes is that. . . .

Since this writer fails to introduce the quotation ade-
quately or explain why he finds it worth quoting, read-
ers will have a hard time reconstructing what Bordo
argued. Besides neglecting to say who Bordo is or even
that the quoted words are hers, the writer does not explain how
her words connect with anything he is saying or even what
she says that he thinks is so “right.” He simply abandons the
quotation in his haste to zoom on to another point.

See how
Anne-Marie
Slaughter
introduces a
long quote on
p. 682, ¶13.

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To adequately frame a quotation, you need to insert it into
what we like to call a “quotation sandwich,” with the statement
introducing it serving as the top slice of bread and the explana-
tion following it serving as the bottom slice. The introductory
or lead-in claims should explain who is speaking and set up what
the quotation says; the follow-up statements should explain
why you consider the quotation to be important and what you
take it to say.

templates for introducing quotations

j X states, “not all steroids should be banned from sports.”

j As the prominent philosopher X puts it, “ .”

j According to X, “ .”

j X himself writes, “ .”

j In her book, , X maintains that “ .”

j Writing in the journal Commentary, X complains that “ .”

j In X’s view, “ .”

j X agrees when she writes, “ .”

j X disagrees when he writes, “ .”

j X complicates matters further when she writes, “ .”

templates for explaining quotations

The one piece of advice about quoting that our students say
they find most helpful is to get in the habit of following every

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major quotation by explaining what it means, using a template
like one of the ones below.

j Basically, X is warning that the proposed solution will only make

the problem worse.

j In other words, X believes .

j In making this comment, X urges us to .

j X is corroborating the age-old adage that .

j X’s point is that .

j The essence of X’s argument is that .

When offering such explanations, it is important to use lan-
guage that accurately reflects the spirit of the quoted
passage. It is quite serviceable to write “Bordo states”
or “asserts” in introducing the quotation about Fiji.
But given the fact that Bordo is clearly alarmed by
the extension of the media’s reach to Fiji, it is far
more accurate to use language that reflects her alarm: “Bordo
is alarmed that” or “is disturbed by” or “complains.”
Consider, for example, how the earlier passage on Bordo
might be revised using some of these moves.

The feminist philosopher Susan Bordo deplores Western media’s
obsession with female thinness and dieting. Her basic complaint is
that increasing numbers of women across the globe are being led to
see themselves as fat and in need of a diet. Citing the islands of Fiji
as a case in point, Bordo notes that “until television was introduced
in 1995, the islands had no reported cases of eating disorders. In
1998, three years after programs from the United States and Britain

See pp. 39–40
for a list of
action verbs for
summarizing
what others
say.

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began broadcasting there, 62 percent of the girls surveyed reported
dieting” (149–50). Bordo’s point is that the Western cult of dieting
is spreading even to remote places across the globe. Ultimately,
Bordo complains, the culture of dieting will find you, regardless
of where you live.
Bordo’s observations ring true to me because, now that I think
about it, many women I know, regardless of where they are from,
worry about their weight. . . .

This framing of the quotation not only better integrates Bordo’s
words into the writer’s text, but also serves to demonstrate the
writer’s interpretation of what Bordo is saying. While “the femi-
nist philosopher” and “Bordo notes” provide information that
readers need to know, the sentences that follow the quotation
build a bridge between Bordo’s words and those of the writer.
The reference to 62 percent of Fijian girls dieting is no longer
an inert statistic (as it was in the flawed passage presented
earlier) but a quantitative example of how “the Western cult
of dieting is spreading . . . across the globe.” Just as impor-
tant, these sentences explain what Bordo is saying in the writ-
er’s own words—and thereby make clear that the quotation is
being used purposefully to set up the writer’s own argument
and has not been stuck in just for padding the essay or the
works-cited list.

blend the author’s words
with your own

The above framing material also works well because it accu-
rately represents Bordo’s words while giving those words the
writer’s own spin. Notice how the passage refers several times

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to the key concept of dieting, and how it echoes Bordo’s refer-
ences to “television” and to U.S. and British “broadcasting” by
referring to “culture,” which is further specified as “Western.”
Instead of simply repeating Bordo word for word, the follow-up
sentences echo just enough of her language while still moving
the discussion in the writer’s own direction. In effect, the fram-
ing creates a kind of hybrid mix of Bordo’s words and those of
the writer.

can you overanalyze a quotation?

But is it possible to overexplain a quotation? And how do you
know when you’ve explained a quotation thoroughly enough?
After all, not all quotations require the same amount of explan-
atory framing, and there are no hard-and-fast rules for knowing
how much explanation any quotation needs. As a general rule,
the most explanatory framing is needed for quotations that may
be hard for readers to process: quotations that are long and
complex, that are filled with details or jargon, or that contain
hidden complexities.
And yet, though the particular situation usually dictates when
and how much to explain a quotation, we will still offer one piece
of advice: when in doubt, go for it. It is better to risk being overly
explicit about what you take a quotation to mean than to leave
the quotation dangling and your readers in doubt. Indeed, we
encourage you to provide such explanatory framing even when
writing to an audience that you know to be familiar with the
author being quoted and able to interpret your quotations on
their own. Even in such cases, readers need to see how you inter-
pret the quotation, since words—especially those of controversial
figures—can be interpreted in various ways and used to support

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different, sometimes opposing, agendas. Your readers need to see
what you make of the material you’ve quoted, if only to be sure
that your reading of the material and theirs is on the same page.

how not to introduce quotations

We want to conclude this chapter by surveying some ways
not to introduce quotations. Although some writers do so,
you should not introduce quotations by saying something like
“Orwell asserts an idea that” or “A quote by Shakespeare says.”
Introductory phrases like these are both redundant and mislead-
ing. In the first example, you could write either “Orwell asserts
that” or “Orwell’s assertion is that,” rather than redundantly
combining the two. The second example misleads readers, since
it is the writer who is doing the quoting, not Shakespeare (as
“a quote by Shakespeare” implies).
The templates in this book will help you avoid such mis-
takes. Once you have mastered templates like “as X puts it,”
or “in X’s own words,” you probably won’t even have to think
about them—and will be free to focus on the challenging ideas
that templates help you frame.

Exercises

1. Find a published piece of writing that quotes something that
“they say.” How has the writer integrated the quotation into
his or her own text? How has he or she introduced the quota-
tion, and what, if anything, has the writer said to explain it
and tie it to his or her own text? Based on what you’ve read
in this chapter, are there any changes you would suggest?

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2. Look at something you have written for one of your classes.
Have you quoted any sources? If so, how have you integrated
the quotation into your own text? How have you introduced
it? Explained what it means? Indicated how it relates to
your text? If you haven’t done all these things, revise your
text to do so, perhaps using the Templates for Introducing
Quotations (p. 46) and Explaining Quotations (pp. 46–47).
If you’ve not written anything with quotations, try revising
some academic text you’ve written to do so.

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2
H

“I SAY”

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FOUR

“yes / no / okay, but”

Three Ways to Respond

The first three chapters of this book discuss the “they
say” stage of writing, in which you devote your attention to the
views of some other person or group. In this chapter we move
to the “I say” stage, in which you offer your own argument as
a response to what “they” have said.
Moving to the “I say” stage can be daunting in academia,
where it often may seem that you need to be an expert in a field
to have an argument at all. Many students have told us that they
have trouble entering some of the high-powered conversations
that take place in college or graduate school because they do not
know enough about the topic at hand, or because, they say, they
simply are not “smart enough.” Yet often these same students,
when given a chance to study in depth the contribution that
some scholar has made in a given field, will turn around and
say things like “I can see where she is coming from, how she
makes her case by building on what other scholars have said.
Perhaps had I studied the situation longer I could have come up
with a similar argument.” What these students came to realize
is that good arguments are based not on knowledge that only
a special class of experts has access to, but on everyday habits

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of mind that can be isolated, identified, and used by almost
anyone. Though there’s certainly no substitute for expertise
and for knowing as much as possible about one’s topic, the
arguments that finally win the day are built, as the title of this
chapter suggests, on some very basic rhetorical patterns that
most of us use on a daily basis.
There are a great many ways to respond to others’ ideas,
but this chapter concentrates on the three most common and
recognizable ways: agreeing, disagreeing, or some combination
of both. Although each way of responding is open to endless
variation, we focus on these three because readers come to any
text needing to learn fairly quickly where the writer stands, and
they do this by placing the writer on a mental map consisting
of a few familiar options: the writer agrees with those he or
she is responding to, disagrees with them, or presents some
combination of both agreeing and disagreeing.
When writers take too long to declare their position relative
to views they’ve summarized or quoted, readers get frustrated,
wondering, “Is this guy agreeing or disagreeing? Is he for what
this other person has said, against it, or what?” For this reason,
this chapter’s advice applies to reading as well as to writing.
Especially with difficult texts, you need not only to find the
position the writer is responding to—the “they say”—but also
to determine whether the writer is agreeing with it, challenging
it, or some mixture of the two.

only three ways to respond?

Perhaps you’ll worry that fitting your own response into one of
these three categories will force you to oversimplify your argu-
ment or lessen its complexity, subtlety, or originality. This is

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certainly a serious concern for academics who are rightly skepti-
cal of writing that is simplistic and reductive. We would argue,
however, that the more complex and subtle your argument is,
and the more it departs from the conventional ways people
think, the more your readers will need to be able to place it
on their mental map in order to process the complex details
you present. That is, the complexity, subtlety, and originality
of your response are more likely to stand out and be noticed
if readers have a baseline sense of where you stand relative to
any ideas you’ve cited. As you move through this chapter, we
hope you’ll agree that the forms of agreeing, disagreeing, and
both agreeing and disagreeing that we discuss, far from being
simplistic or one-dimensional, are able to accommodate a high
degree of creative, complex thought.
It is always a good tactic to begin your response not by
launching directly into a mass of details but by stating
clearly whether you agree, disagree, or both, using a direct,
no-nonsense formula such as: “I agree,” “I disagree,” or “I am
of two minds. I agree that , but I cannot agree
that .” Once you have offered one of these straight-
forward statements (or one of the many variations dis-
cussed below), readers will have a strong grasp of your
position and then be able to appreciate the complica-
tions you go on to offer as your response unfolds.
Still, you may object that these three basic ways of respond-
ing don’t cover all the options—that they ignore interpretive or
analytical responses, for example. In other words, you might think
that when you interpret a literary work you don’t necessarily agree
or disagree with anything but simply explain the work’s meaning,
style, or structure. Many essays about literature and the arts, it
might be said, take this form—they interpret a work’s meaning,
thus rendering matters of agreeing or disagreeing irrelevant.

See p. 21 for
suggestions
on previewing
where you
stand.

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We would argue, however, that the most interesting inter-
pretations in fact tend to be those that agree, disagree, or
both—that instead of being offered solo, the best interpreta-
tions take strong stands relative to other interpretations. In fact,
there would be no reason to offer an interpretation of a work
of literature or art unless you were responding to the interpre-
tations or possible interpretations of others. Even when you
point out features or qualities of an artistic work that others
have not noticed, you are implicitly disagreeing with what
those interpreters have said by pointing out that they missed
or overlooked something that, in your view, is important. In
any effective interpretation, then, you need not only to state
what you yourself take the work of art to mean but to do so
relative to the interpretations of other readers—be they pro-
fessional scholars, teachers, classmates, or even hypothetical
readers (as in, “Although some readers might think that this
poem is about , it is in fact about ”).

disagree—and explain why

Disagreeing may seem like one of the simpler moves a writer can
make, and it is often the first thing people associate with critical
thinking. Disagreeing can also be the easiest way to generate an
essay: find something you can disagree with in what has been
said or might be said about your topic, summarize it, and argue
with it. But disagreement in fact poses hidden challenges. You
need to do more than simply assert that you disagree with a par-
ticular view; you also have to offer persuasive reasons why you
disagree. After all, disagreeing means more than adding “not” to
what someone else has said, more than just saying, “Although
they say women’s rights are improving, I say women’s rights

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5 9

are not improving.” Such a response merely contradicts the
view it responds to and fails to add anything interesting or
new. To turn it into an argument, you need to give reasons to
support what you say: because another’s argument fails to take
relevant factors into account; because it is based on faulty or
incomplete evidence; because it rests on questionable assump-
tions; or because it uses flawed logic, is contradictory, or
overlooks what you take to be the real issue. To move
the conversation forward (and, indeed, to justify your
very act of writing), you need to demonstrate that you
have something to contribute.
You can even disagree by making what we call the “duh”
move, in which you disagree not with the position itself but
with the assumption that it is a new or stunning revelation.
Here is an example of such a move, used to open an essay on
the state of American schools.

According to a recent report by some researchers at Stanford Uni-
versity, high school students with college aspirations “often lack
crucial information on applying to college and on succeeding aca-
demically once they get there.”
Well, duh. . . . It shouldn’t take a Stanford research team to tell
us that when it comes to “succeeding academically,” many students
don’t have a clue.

Gerald Graff, “Trickle-Down Obfuscation”

Like all of the other moves discussed in this book, the “duh”
move can be tailored to meet the needs of almost any writing
situation. If you find the expression “duh” too brash to use with
your intended audience, you can always dispense with the term
itself and write something like “It is true that ; but
we already knew that.”

See p. 582,
¶2 to see
two authors
disagree and
explain why.

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templates for disagreeing, with reasons

j X is mistaken because she overlooks recent fossil discoveries in

the South.

j X’s claim that rests upon the questionable assumption

that .

j I disagree with X’s view that because, as recent

research has shown, .

j X contradicts herself/can’t have it both ways. On the one

hand, she argues . On the other hand, she also

says .

j By focusing on , X overlooks the deeper problem

of .

You can also disagree by making what we call the “twist
it” move, in which you agree with the evidence that someone
else has presented but show through a twist of logic that this
evidence actually supports your own, contrary position. For
example:

X argues for stricter gun control legislation, saying that the crime
rate is on the rise and that we need to restrict the circulation of
guns. I agree that the crime rate is on the rise, but that’s precisely
why I oppose stricter gun control legislation. We need to own guns
to protect ourselves against criminals.

In this example of the “twist it” move, the writer agrees with
X’s claim that the crime rate is on the rise but then argues that
this increasing crime rate is in fact a valid reason for opposing
gun control legislation.

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At times you might be reluctant to express disagreement,
for any number of reasons—not wanting to be unpleasant,
to hurt someone’s feelings, or to make yourself vulnerable to
being disagreed with in return. One of these reasons may in fact
explain why the conference speaker we described at the start of
Chapter 1 avoided mentioning the disagreement he had with
other scholars until he was provoked to do so in the discussion
that followed his talk.
As much as we understand such fears of conflict and have
experienced them ourselves, we nevertheless believe it is better
to state our disagreements in frank yet considerate ways than to
deny them. After all, suppressing disagreements doesn’t make
them go away; it only pushes them underground, where they
can fester in private unchecked. Nevertheless, disagreements
do not need to take the form of personal put-downs. Further-
more, there is usually no reason to take issue with every aspect
of someone else’s views. You can single out for criticism only
those aspects of what someone else has said that are troubling,
and then agree with the rest—although such an approach, as
we will see later in this chapter, leads to the somewhat more
complicated terrain of both agreeing and disagreeing at the
same time.

agree—but with a difference

Like disagreeing, agreeing is less simple than it may appear. Just
as you need to avoid simply contradicting views you disagree
with, you also need to do more than simply echo views you agree
with. Even as you’re agreeing, it’s important to bring something
new and fresh to the table, adding something that makes you
a valuable participant in the conversation.

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There are many moves that enable you to contribute some-
thing of your own to a conversation even as you agree with
what someone else has said. You may point out some unno-
ticed evidence or line of reasoning that supports X’s claims that
X herself hadn’t mentioned. You may cite some corroborating
personal experience, or a situation not mentioned by X that
her views help readers understand. If X’s views are particularly
challenging or esoteric, what you bring to the table could be an
accessible translation—an explanation for readers not already in
the know. In other words, your text can usefully contribute to
the conversation simply by pointing out unnoticed implications
or explaining something that needs to be better understood.
Whatever mode of agreement you choose, the important
thing is to open up some difference or contrast between your
position and the one you’re agreeing with rather than simply
parroting what it says.

templates for agreeing

j I agree that diversity in the student body is educationally valuable

because my experience at Central University confirms it.

j X is surely right about because, as she may not be

aware, recent studies have shown that .

j X’s theory of is extremely useful because it sheds

light on the difficult problem of .

j Those unfamiliar with this school of thought may be interested

to know that it basically boils down to .

Some writers avoid the practice of agreeing almost as much as
others avoid disagreeing. In a culture like America’s that prizes

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originality, independence, and competitive individualism, writ-
ers sometimes don’t like to admit that anyone else has made the
same point, seemingly beating them to the punch. In our view,
however, as long as you can support a view taken by someone
else without merely restating what he or she has said, there is
no reason to worry about being “unoriginal.” Indeed, there is
good reason to rejoice when you agree with others since those
others can lend credibility to your argument. While you don’t
want to present yourself as a mere copycat of someone else’s
views, you also need to avoid sounding like a lone voice in
the wilderness.
But do be aware that whenever you agree with one person’s
view, you are likely disagreeing with someone else’s. It is hard
to align yourself with one position without at least implicitly
positioning yourself against others. The psychologist Carol
Gilligan does just that in an essay in which she agrees with
scientists who argue that the human brain is “hard-wired”
for cooperation, but in so doing aligns herself against any-
one who believes that the brain is wired for selfishness and
competition.

These findings join a growing convergence of evidence across the
human sciences leading to a revolutionary shift in consciousness.
. . . If cooperation, typically associated with altruism and self-
sacrifice, sets off the same signals of delight as pleasures commonly
associated with hedonism and self-indulgence; if the opposition
between selfish and selfless, self vs. relationship biologically makes
no sense, then a new paradigm is necessary to reframe the very
terms of the conversation.

Carol Gilligan, “Sisterhood Is Pleasurable:
A Quiet Revolution in Psychology”

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In agreeing with some scientists that “the opposition between
selfish and selfless . . . makes no sense,” Gilligan implicitly
disagrees with anyone who thinks the opposition does make
sense. Basically, what Gilligan says could be boiled down to a
template.

j I agree that , a point that needs emphasizing since

so many people still believe .

j If group X is right that , as I think they are, then we

need to reassess the popular assumption that .

What such templates allow you to do, then, is to agree with
one view while challenging another—a move that leads into
the domain of agreeing and disagreeing simultaneously.

agree and disagree simultaneously

This last option is often our favorite way of responding. One
thing we particularly like about agreeing and disagreeing simul-
taneously is that it helps us get beyond the kind of “is too” / “is
not” exchanges that often characterize the disputes of young
children and the more polarized shouting matches of talk radio
and TV.

templates for agreeing
and disagreeing simultaneously

“Yes and no.” “Yes, but . . . ” “Although I agree up to a point, I
still insist . . . ” These are just some of the ways you can make your
argument complicated and nuanced while maintaining a clear,

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reader-friendly framework. The parallel structure—“yes
and no”; “on the one hand I agree, on the other I
disagree”—enables readers to place your argument on
that map of positions we spoke of earlier in this chapter
while still keeping your argument sufficiently complex.
Another aspect we like about this option is that it can be
tipped subtly toward agreement or disagreement, depending on
where you lay your stress. If you want to stress the disagreement
end of the spectrum, you would use a template like the one below.

j Although I agree with X up to a point, I cannot accept his over-

riding assumption that religion is no longer a major force today.

Conversely, if you want to stress your agreement more than your
disagreement, you would use a template like this one.

j Although I disagree with much that X says, I fully endorse his

final conclusion that .

The first template above might be called a “yes, but . . . ” move,
the second a “no, but . . . ” move. Other versions include the
following.

j Though I concede that , I still insist that .

j X is right that , but she seems on more dubious ground

when she claims that .

j While X is probably wrong when she claims that , she

is right that .

j Whereas X provides ample evidence that , Y and

Z’s research on and convinces me that

instead.

Clive Thompson
says “yes, but”
to an argument
that technology
rewires our
brains for
the worse,
p. 355, ¶34.

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Another classic way to agree and disagree at the same time
is to make what we call an “I’m of two minds” or a “mixed
feelings” move.

j I’m of two minds about X’s claim that . On the one

hand, I agree that . On the other hand, I’m not sure

if .

j My feelings on the issue are mixed. I do support X’s position

that , but I find Y’s argument about and

Z’s research on to be equally persuasive.

This move can be especially useful if you are responding to new
or particularly challenging work and are as yet unsure where
you stand. It also lends itself well to the kind of speculative
investigation in which you weigh a position’s pros and cons
rather than come out decisively either for or against. But again,
as we suggest earlier, whether you are agreeing, disagreeing, or
both agreeing and disagreeing, you need to be as clear as pos-
sible, and making a frank statement that you are ambivalent
is one way to be clear.

is being undecided okay?

Nevertheless, writers often have as many concerns about
expressing ambivalence as they do about expressing disagree-
ment or agreement. Some worry that by expressing ambivalence
they will come across as evasive, wishy-washy, or unsure of
themselves. Others worry that their ambivalence will end up
confusing readers who require decisive clear-cut conclusions.

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The truth is that in some cases these worries are legitimate.
At times ambivalence can frustrate readers, leaving them
with the feeling that you failed in your obligation to offer the
guidance they expect from writers. At other times, however,
acknowledging that a clear-cut resolution of an issue is impos-
sible can demonstrate your sophistication as a writer. In an
academic culture that values complex thought, forthrightly
declaring that you have mixed feelings can be impressive,
especially after having ruled out the one-dimensional positions
on your issue taken by others in the conversation. Ultimately,
then, how ambivalent you end up being comes down to a judg-
ment call based on different readers’ responses to your drafts,
on your knowledge of your audience, and on the challenges of
your particular argument and situation.

Exercises

1. Read one of the essays in the back of this book or on
theysayiblog.com, identifying those places where the author
agrees with others, disagrees, or both.

2. Write an essay responding in some way to the essay that
you worked with in the preceding exercise. You’ll want to
summarize and/or quote some of the author’s ideas and make
clear whether you’re agreeing, disagreeing, or both agreeing
and disagreeing with what he or she says. Remember that
there are templates in this book that can help you get started;
see Chapters 1–3 for templates that will help you represent
other people’s ideas, and Chapter 4 for templates that will
get you started with your response.

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FIVE

“and yet”

Distinguishing What You Say

from What They Say

If good academic writing involves putting yourself into
dialogue with others, it is extremely important that readers be
able to tell at every point when you are expressing your own
view and when you are stating someone else’s. This chapter
takes up the problem of moving from what they say to what
you say without confusing readers about who is saying what.

determine who is saying what
in the texts you read

Before examining how to signal who is saying what in your
own writing, let’s look at how to recognize such signals when
they appear in the texts you read—an especially important skill
when it comes to the challenging works assigned in school.
Frequently, when students have trouble understanding diffi-
cult texts, it is not just because the texts contain unfamiliar
ideas or words, but because the texts rely on subtle clues to let

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readers know when a particular view should be attributed to
the writer or to someone else. Especially with texts that pres-
ent a true dialogue of perspectives, readers need to be alert to
the often subtle markers that indicate whose voice the writer
is speaking in.
Consider how the social critic and educator Gregory Mant-
sios uses these “voice markers,” as they might be called, to
distinguish the different perspectives in his essay on America’s
class inequalities.

“We are all middle-class,” or so it would seem. Our national con-
sciousness, as shaped in large part by the media and our political
leadership, provides us with a picture of ourselves as a nation of
prosperity and opportunity with an ever expanding middle-class
life-style. As a result, our class differences are muted and our col-
lective character is homogenized.
Yet class divisions are real and arguably the most significant
factor in determining both our very being in the world and the
nature of the society we live in.

Gregory Mantsios, “Rewards and Opportunities:
The Politics and Economics of Class in the U.S.”

Although Mantsios makes it look easy, he is actually making
several sophisticated rhetorical moves here that help him dis-
tinguish the common view he opposes from his own position.
In the opening sentence, for instance, the phrase “or so it
would seem” shows that Mantsios does not necessarily agree
with the view he is describing, since writers normally don’t pres-
ent views they themselves hold as ones that only “seem” to be
true. Mantsios also places this opening view in quotation marks
to signal that it is not his own. He then further distances

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himself from the belief being summarized in the opening para-
graph by attributing it to “our national consciousness, as shaped
in large part by the media and our political leadership,” and
then further attributing to this “consciousness” a negative,
undesirable “result”: one in which “our class differences” get
“muted” and “our collective character” gets “homogenized,”
stripped of its diversity and distinctness. Hence, even before
Mantsios has declared his own position in the second para-
graph, readers can get a pretty solid sense of where he probably
stands.
Furthermore, the second paragraph opens with the word
“yet,” indicating that Mantsios is now shifting to his own view
(as opposed to the common view he has thus far been describ-
ing). Even the parallelism he sets up between the first and
second paragraphs—between the first paragraph’s claim that
class differences do not exist and the second paragraph’s claim
that they do—helps throw into sharp relief the differences
between the two voices. Finally, Mantsios’s use of a direct,
authoritative, declarative tone in the second paragraph also
suggests a switch in voice. Although he does not use the words
“I say” or “I argue,” he clearly identifies the view he holds by
presenting it not as one that merely seems to be true or that
others tell us is true, but as a view that is true or, as Mantsios
puts it, “real.”
Paying attention to these voice markers is an important
aspect of reading comprehension. Readers who fail to notice
these markers often take an author’s summaries of what some-
one else believes to be an expression of what the author himself
or herself believes. Thus when we teach Mantsios’s essay, some
students invariably come away thinking that the statement “we
are all middle-class” is Mantsios’s own position rather than the
perspective he is opposing, failing to see that in writing these

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words Mantsios acts as a kind of ventriloquist, mimicking what
others say rather than directly expressing what he himself is
thinking.
To see how important such voice markers are, consider what
the Mantsios passage looks like if we remove them.

We are all middle-class. . . . We are a nation of prosperity and
opportunity with an ever expanding middle-class life-style. . . .
Class divisions are real and arguably the most significant factor
in determining both our very being in the world and the nature of
the society we live in.

In contrast to the careful delineation between voices in
Mant sios’s original text, this unmarked version leaves
it hard to tell where his voice begins and the voices of
others end. With the markers removed, readers cannot
tell that “We are all middle-class” represents a view the author
opposes, and that “Class divisions are real” represents what the
author himself believes. Indeed, without the markers, especially
the “Yet,” readers might well miss the fact that the second
paragraph’s claim that “Class divisions are real” contradicts the
first paragraph’s claim that “We are all middle-class.”

templates for signaling who is saying what
in your own writing

To avoid confusion in your own writing, make sure that at every
point your readers can clearly tell who is saying what. To do so,
you can use as voice-identifying devices many of the templates
presented in previous chapters.

See how
Marion Nestle
begins with a
view and then
refutes it on
p. 497, ¶2.

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j Although X makes the best possible case for universal,

government-funded health care, I am not persuaded.

j My view, however, contrary to what X has argued, is that

j Adding to X’s argument, I would point out that .

j According to both X and Y, .

j Politicians, X argues, should .

j Most athletes will tell you that .

but i’ve been told not to use “i”

Notice that the first three templates above use the first-person
“I” or “we,” as do many of the templates in this book, thereby
contradicting the common advice about avoiding the first
person in academic writing. Although you may have been
told that the “I” word encourages subjective, self-indulgent
opinions rather than well-grounded arguments, we believe
that texts using “I” can be just as well supported—or just as
self-indulgent—as those that don’t. For us, well-supported argu-
ments are grounded in persuasive reasons and evidence, not in
the use or nonuse of any particular pronouns.
Furthermore, if you consistently avoid the first person in
your writing, you will probably have trouble making the key
move addressed in this chapter: differentiating your views from
those of others, or even offering your own views in the first
place. But don’t just take our word for it. See for yourself how
freely the first person is used by the writers quoted in this book,
and by the writers assigned in your courses.

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Nevertheless, certain occasions may warrant avoiding the
first person and writing, for example, that “she is correct” instead
of “I think that she is correct.” Since it can be monotonous to read
an unvarying series of “I” statements (“I believe . . . I think . . .
I argue”), it is a good idea to mix first-person assertions with ones
like the following.

j X is right that certain common patterns can be found in the

communities .

j The evidence shows that .

j X’s assertion that does not fit the facts.

j Anyone familiar with should agree that .

One might even follow Mantsios’s lead, as in the following
template.

j But are real, and are arguably the most significant

factor in .

On the whole, however, academic writing today,
even in the sciences and social sciences, makes use
of the first person fairly liberally.

another trick for identifying
who is speaking

To alert readers about whose perspective you are describing at
any given moment, you don’t always have to use overt voice
markers like “X argues” followed by a summary of the argu-
ment. Instead, you can alert readers about whose voice you’re

See pp. 361–71
for an example
of the way a
student essay
uses the first
person.

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speaking in by embedding a reference to X’s argument in your
own sentences. Hence, instead of writing:

Liberals believe that cultural differences need to be respected. I
have a problem with this view, however.

you might write:

I have a problem with what liberals call cultural differences.

There is a major problem with the liberal doctrine of so-called
cultural differences.

You can also embed references to something you yourself have
previously said. So instead of writing two cumbersome sen-
tences like:

Earlier in this chapter we coined the term “voice markers.” We
would argue that such markers are extremely important for reading
comprehension.

you might write:

We would argue that “voice markers,” as we identified them earlier,
are extremely important for reading comprehension.

Embedded references like these allow you to economize your
train of thought and refer to other perspectives without any
major interruption.

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templates for embedding voice markers

j X overlooks what I consider an important point about cultural

differences.

j My own view is that what X insists is a is in fact

a .

j I wholeheartedly endorse what X calls .

j These conclusions, which X discusses in , add weight

to the argument that .

When writers fail to use voice-marking devices like the ones
discussed in this chapter, their summaries of others’ views tend to
become confused with their own ideas—and vice versa. When
readers cannot tell if you are summarizing your own views or
endorsing a certain phrase or label, they have to stop and think:
“Wait. I thought the author disagreed with this claim. Has she
actually been asserting this view all along?” or “Hmmm, I thought
she would have objected to this kind of phrase. Is she actually
endorsing it?” Getting in the habit of using voice markers will
keep you from confusing your readers and help alert you to similar
markers in the challenging texts you read.

Exercises

1. To see how one writer signals when she is asserting her
own views and when she is summarizing those of someone
else, read the following passage by the social historian Julie
Charlip. As you do so, identify those spots where Charlip
refers to the views of others and the signal phrases she uses
to distinguish her views from theirs.

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Marx and Engels wrote: “Society as a whole is more and more split-
ting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly
facing each other—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat” (10). If
only that were true, things might be more simple. But in late
twentieth-century America, it seems that society is splitting more
and more into a plethora of class factions—the working class, the
working poor, lower-middle class, upper-middle class, lower uppers,
and upper uppers. I find myself not knowing what class I’m from.
In my days as a newspaper reporter, I once asked a sociology pro-
fessor what he thought about the reported shrinking of the middle
class. Oh, it’s not the middle class that’s disappearing, he said, but
the working class. His definition: if you earn thirty thousand dollars
a year working in an assembly plant, come home from work, open a
beer and watch the game, you are working class; if you earn twenty
thousand dollars a year as a school teacher, come home from work
to a glass of white wine and PBS, you are middle class.
How do we define class? Is it an issue of values, lifestyle, taste?
Is it the kind of work you do, your relationship to the means of
production? Is it a matter of how much money you earn? Are we
allowed to choose? In this land of supposed classlessness, where
we don’t have the tradition of English society to keep us in our
places, how do we know where we really belong? The average
American will tell you he or she is “middle class.” I’m sure that’s
what my father would tell you. But I always felt that we were in
some no man’s land, suspended between classes, sharing similari-
ties with some and recognizing sharp, exclusionary differences
from others. What class do I come from? What class am I in
now? As an historian, I seek the answers to these questions in
the specificity of my past.

Julie Charlip, “A Real Class Act: Searching
for Identity in the Classless Society”

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2. Study a piece of your own writing to see how many perspec-
tives you account for and how well you distinguish your
own voice from those you are summarizing. Consider the
following questions:

a. How many perspectives do you engage?
b. What other perspectives might you include?
c. How do you distinguish your views from the other views

you summarize?
d. Do you use clear voice-signaling phrases?
e. What options are available to you for clarifying who is

saying what?
f. Which of these options are best suited for this particular

text?

If you find that you do not include multiple views or clearly
distinguish between others’ views and your own, revise your
text to do so.

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SIX

“skeptics may object”

Planting a Naysayer in Your Text

The writer Jane Tompkins describes a pattern that repeats
itself whenever she writes a book or an article. For the first
couple of weeks when she sits down to write, things go relatively
well. But then in the middle of the night, several weeks into the
writing process, she’ll wake up in a cold sweat, suddenly real-
izing that she has overlooked some major criticism that readers
will surely make against her ideas. Her first thought, invariably,
is that she will have to give up on the project, or that she will
have to throw out what she’s written thus far and start over.
Then she realizes that “this moment of doubt and panic is where
my text really begins.” She then revises what she’s written in a
way that incorporates the criticisms she’s anticipated, and her
text becomes stronger and more interesting as a result.
This little story contains an important lesson for all writers,
experienced and inexperienced alike. It suggests that even though
most of us are upset at the idea of someone criticizing our work,
such criticisms can actually work to our advantage. Although it’s
naturally tempting to ignore criticism of our ideas, doing so may
in fact be a big mistake, since our writing improves when we not
only listen to these objections but give them an explicit hearing

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in our writing. Indeed, no single device more quickly improves a
piece of writing than planting a naysayer in the text—saying, for
example, that “although some readers may object” to something
in your argument, you “would reply that .”

anticipate objections

But wait, you say. Isn’t the advice to incorporate critical views
a recipe for destroying your credibility and undermining your
argument? Here you are, trying to say something that will hold
up, and we want you to tell readers all the negative things
someone might say against you?
Exactly. We are urging you to tell readers what others
might say against you, but our point is that doing so will actu-
ally enhance your credibility, not undermine it. As we argue
throughout this book, writing well does not mean piling up
uncontroversial truths in a vacuum; it means engaging others
in a dialogue or debate—not only by opening your text with
a summary of what others have said, as we suggest in Chapter 1,
but also by imagining what others might say against your argu-
ment as it unfolds. Once you see writing as an act of entering
a conversation, you should also see how opposing arguments
can work for you rather than against you.
Paradoxically, the more you give voice to your critics’ objec-
tions, the more you tend to disarm those critics, especially if you
go on to answer their objections in convincing ways. When you
entertain a counterargument, you make a kind of preemptive
strike, identifying problems with your argument before oth-
ers can point them out for you. Furthermore, by entertaining
counterarguments, you show respect for your readers, treating
them not as gullible dupes who will believe anything you say

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but as independent, critical thinkers who are aware that your
view is not the only one in town. In addition, by imagining
what others might say against your claims, you come across as
a generous, broad-minded person who is confident enough to
open himself or herself to debate—like the writer in the figure
on the following page.
Conversely, if you don’t entertain counterarguments, you may
very likely come across as closed-minded, as if you think your
beliefs are beyond dispute. You might also leave important ques-
tions hanging and concerns about your arguments unaddressed.
Finally, if you fail to plant a naysayer in your text, you may
find that you have very little to say. Our own students often say
that entertaining counterarguments makes it easier to generate
enough text to meet their assignment’s page-length requirements.
Planting a naysayer in your text is a relatively simple move,
as you can see by looking at the following passage from a book
by the writer Kim Chernin. Having spent some thirty pages
complaining about the pressure on American women to be
thin, Chernin inserts a whole chapter entitled “The Skeptic,”
opening it as follows.

At this point I would like to raise certain objections that have been
inspired by the skeptic in me. She feels that I have been ignoring
some of the most common assumptions we all make about our bod-
ies and these she wishes to see addressed. For example: “You know
perfectly well,” she says to me, “that you feel better when you lose
weight. You buy new clothes. You look at yourself more eagerly in
the mirror. When someone invites you to a party you don’t stop
and ask yourself whether you want to go. You feel sexier. Admit
it. You like yourself better.”

Kim Chernin, The Obsession:
Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness

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The remainder of Chernin’s chapter consists of her answers
to this inner skeptic. In the face of the skeptic’s challenge to
her book’s central premise (that the pressure to diet seriously
harms women’s lives), Chernin responds neither by repressing
the skeptic’s critical voice nor by giving in to it and relinquish-
ing her own position. Instead, she embraces that voice and
writes it into her text. Note too that instead of dispatching
this naysaying voice quickly, as many of us would be tempted
to do, Chernin stays with it and devotes a full paragraph to
it. By borrowing some of Chernin’s language, we can come up
with templates for entertaining virtually any objection.

templates for entertaining objections

j At this point I would like to raise some objections that have been

inspired by the skeptic in me. She feels that I have been ignoring

the complexities of the situation.

j Yet some readers may challenge my view by insisting that

j Of course, many will probably disagree on the grounds that

Note that the objections in the above templates are
attributed not to any specific person or group, but to “skep-
tics,” “readers,” or “many.” This kind of nameless, faceless
naysayer is perfectly appropriate in many cases. But the ideas
that motivate arguments and objections often can—and, where
possible, should—be ascribed to a specific ideology or school
of thought (for example, liberals, Christian fundamentalists,
neopragmatists) rather than to anonymous anybodies. In other

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words, naysayers can be labeled, and you can add precision and
impact to your writing by identifying what those labels are.

templates for naming your naysayers

j Here many feminists would probably object that gender does

influence language.

j But social Darwinists would certainly take issue with the argu-

ment that .

j Biologists, of course, may want to question whether .

j Nevertheless, both followers and critics of Malcolm X will prob-

ably suggest otherwise and argue that .

To be sure, some people dislike such labels and may even
resent having labels applied to themselves. Some feel that
labels put individuals in boxes, stereotyping them and glossing
over what makes each of us unique. And it’s true that labels
can be used inappropriately, in ways that ignore individuality
and promote stereotypes. But since the life of ideas, includ-
ing many of our most private thoughts, is conducted through
groups and types rather than solitary individuals, intellectual
exchange requires labels to give definition and serve as a
convenient shorthand. If you categorically reject all labels,
you give up an important resource and even mislead readers
by presenting yourself and others as having no connection to
anyone else. You also miss an opportunity to generalize the
importance and relevance of your work to some larger con-
versation. When you attribute a position you are summarizing
to liberalism, say, or historical materialism, your argument is
no longer just about your own solitary views but about the

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intersection of broad ideas and habits of mind that many
readers may already have a stake in.
The way to minimize the problem of stereotyping, then, is
not to categorically reject labels but to refine and qualify their
use, as the following templates demonstrate.

j Although not all Christians think alike, some of them will prob-

ably dispute my claim that .

j Non-native English speakers are so diverse in their views that it’s

hard to generalize about them, but some are likely to object on

the grounds that .

Another way to avoid needless stereotyping is to qualify labels
carefully, substituting “pro bono lawyers” for “lawyers” in gen-
eral, for example, or “quantitative sociologists” for all “social
scientists,” and so on.

templates for introducing objections
informally

Objections can also be introduced in more informal ways. For
instance, you can frame objections in the form of questions.

j But is my proposal realistic? What are the chances of its actually

being adopted?

j Yet is it necessarily true that ? Is it always the case,

as I have been suggesting, that ?

j However, does the evidence I’ve cited prove conclusively

that ?

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You can also let your naysayer speak directly.

j “Impossible,” some will say. “You must be reading the research

selectively.”

Moves like this allow you to cut directly to the skeptical voice
itself, as the singer-songwriter Joe Jackson does in the follow-
ing excerpt from a New York Times article complaining about
the restrictions on public smoking in New York City bars and
restaurants.

I like a couple of cigarettes or a cigar with a drink, and like many
other people, I only smoke in bars or nightclubs. Now I can’t go to
any of my old haunts. Bartenders who were friends have turned into
cops, forcing me outside to shiver in the cold and curse under my
breath. . . . It’s no fun. Smokers are being demonized and victim-
ized all out of proportion.
“Get over it,” say the anti-smokers. “You’re the minority.” I
thought a great city was a place where all kinds of minorities could
thrive. . . . “Smoking kills,” they say. As an occasional smoker
with otherwise healthy habits, I’ll take my chances. Health con-
sciousness is important, but so are pleasure and freedom of choice.

Joe Jackson, “Want to Smoke? Go to Hamburg”

Jackson could have begun his second paragraph,
in which he shifts from his own voice to that of
his imagined naysayer, more formally, as follows:
“Of course anti-smokers will object that since we
smokers are in the minority, we should simply stop
complaining and quietly make the sacrifices we are being
called on to make for the larger social good.” Or “Anti-
smokers might insist, however, that the smoking minority

See the essay
on Family Guy
(p. 145) that
addresses
naysayers
throughout.

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should submit to the non-smoking majority.” We think,
though, that Jackson gets the job done in a far more lively
way with the more colloquial form he chooses. Borrowing
a standard move of playwrights and novelists, Jackson cuts
directly to the objectors’ view and then to his own retort, then
back to the objectors’ view and then to his own retort again,
thereby creating a kind of dialogue or miniature play within

his own text. This move works well for Jackson, but
only because he uses quotation marks and other voice
markers to make clear at every point whose voice
he is in.

represent objections fairly

Once you’ve decided to introduce a differing or opposing view
into your writing, your work has only just begun, since you
still need to represent and explain that view with fairness and
generosity. Although it is tempting to give opposing views
short shrift, to hurry past them, or even to mock them, doing
so is usually counterproductive. When writers make the best
case they can for their critics (playing Peter Elbow’s “believ-

ing game”), they actually bolster their credibility with
readers rather than undermine it. They make readers
think, “This is a writer I can trust.”

We recommend, then, that whenever you entertain objec-
tions in your writing, you stay with them for several sentences
or even paragraphs and take them as seriously as possible. We
also recommend that you read your summary of opposing views
with an outsider’s eye: put yourself in the shoes of someone who
disagrees with you and ask if such a reader would recognize
himself in your summary. Would that reader think you have

See Chapter 5
for more

advice on
using voice

markers.

See pp. 31–32
for more on

the believing
game.

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taken his views seriously, as beliefs that reasonable people might
hold? Or would he detect a mocking tone or an oversimplifica-
tion of his views?
There will always be certain objections, to be sure, that you
believe do not deserve to be represented, just as there will be
objections that seem so unworthy of respect that they inspire
ridicule. Remember, however, that if you do choose to mock a
view that you oppose, you are likely to alienate those readers
who don’t already agree with you—likely the very readers you
want to reach. Also be aware that in mocking another’s view
you may contribute to a hostile argument culture in which
someone may ridicule you in return.

answer objections

Do be aware that when you represent objections successfully,
you still need to be able to answer those objections persuasively.
After all, when you write objections into a text, you take the
risk that readers will find those objections more convincing
than the argument you yourself are advancing. In the edito-
rial quoted above, for example, Joe Jackson takes the risk that
readers will identify more with the anti-smoking view he sum-
marizes than with the pro-smoking position he endorses.
This is precisely what Benjamin Franklin describes hap-
pening to himself in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
(1793), when he recalls being converted to Deism (a religion
that exalts reason over spirituality) by reading anti-Deist books.
When he encountered the views of Deists being negatively
summarized by authors who opposed them, Franklin explains,
he ended up finding the Deist position more persuasive.
To avoid having this kind if unintentional reverse effect on

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readers, you need to do your best to make sure that any counter-
arguments you address are not more convincing than your own
claims. It is good to address objections in your writing, but only
if you are able to overcome them.
One surefire way to fail to overcome an objection is to dis-
miss it out of hand—saying, for example, “That’s just wrong.”
The difference between such a response (which offers no sup-
porting reasons whatsoever) and the types of nuanced responses
we’re promoting in this book is the difference between bullying
your readers and genuinely persuading them.
Often the best way to overcome an objection is not to try
to refute it completely but to agree with part of it while chal-
lenging only the part you dispute. In other words, in answer-
ing counterarguments, it is often best to say “yes, but” or “yes

and no,” treating the counterview as an opportunity to
revise and refine your own position. Rather than build
your argument into an impenetrable fortress, it is often

best to make concessions while still standing your ground, as
Kim Chernin does in the following response to the counter-
argument quoted above. While in the voice of the “skeptic,”
Chernin writes: “Admit it. You like yourself better when you’ve
lost weight.” In response, Chernin replies as follows.

Can I deny these things? No woman who has managed to lose
weight would wish to argue with this. Most people feel better about
themselves when they become slender. And yet, upon reflection,
it seems to me that there is something precarious about this well-
being. After all, 98 percent of people who lose weight gain it back.
Indeed, 90 percent of those who have dieted “successfully” gain
back more than they ever lost. Then, of course, we can no longer
bear to look at ourselves in the mirror.

See pp. 61–64
for more on

agreeing, with
a difference.

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In this way, Chernin shows how you can use a counterview to
improve and refine your overall argument by making a conces-
sion. Even as she concedes that losing weight feels good in the
short run, she argues that in the long run the weight always
returns, making the dieter far more miserable.

templates for making concessions
while still standing your ground

j Although I grant that the book is poorly organized, I still maintain

that it raises an important issue.

j Proponents of X are right to argue that . But they

exaggerate when they claim that .

j While it is true that , it does not necessarily follow

that .

j On the one hand, I agree with X that . But on the

other hand, I still insist that .

Templates like these show that answering naysayers’ objec-
tions does not have to be an all-or-nothing affair in which you
either definitively refute your critics or they definitively refute
you. Often the most productive engagements among differing
views end with a combined vision that incorporates elements
of each one.
But what if you’ve tried out all the possible answers you can
think of to an objection you’ve anticipated and you still have
a nagging feeling that the objection is more convincing than
your argument itself? In that case, the best remedy is to go
back and make some fundamental revisions to your argument,

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even reversing your position completely if need be. Although
finding out late in the game that you aren’t fully convinced by
your own argument can be painful, it can actually make your
final text more intellectually honest, challenging, and serious.
After all, the goal of writing is not to keep proving that what-
ever you initially said is right, but to stretch the limits of your
thinking. So if planting a strong naysayer in your text forces
you to change your mind, that’s not a bad thing. Some would
argue that that is what the academic world is all about.

Exercises

1. Read the following passage by the cultural critic Eric
Schlosser. As you’ll see, he hasn’t planted any naysayers
in this text. Do it for him. Insert a brief paragraph stating
an objection to his argument and then responding to the
objection as he might.

The United States must declare an end to the war on drugs. This
war has filled the nation’s prisons with poor drug addicts and small-
time drug dealers. It has created a multibillion-dollar black market,
enriched organized crime groups and promoted the corruption of
government officials throughout the world. And it has not stemmed
the widespread use of illegal drugs. By any rational measure, this
war has been a total failure.
We must develop public policies on substance abuse that are
guided not by moral righteousness or political expediency but by
common sense. The United States should immediately decriminal-
ize the cultivation and possession of small amounts of marijuana for
personal use. Marijuana should no longer be classified as a Sched-
ule I narcotic, and those who seek to use marijuana as medicine

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should no longer face criminal sanctions. We must shift our entire
approach to drug abuse from the criminal justice system to the
public health system. Congress should appoint an independent
commission to study the harm-reduction policies that have been
adopted in Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands. The
commission should recommend policies for the United States based
on one important criterion: what works.
In a nation where pharmaceutical companies advertise powerful
antidepressants on billboards and where alcohol companies run amus-
ing beer ads during the Super Bowl, the idea of a “drug-free society”
is absurd. Like the rest of American society, our drug policy would
greatly benefit from less punishment and more compassion.

Eric Schlosser, “A People’s Democratic Platform”

2. Look over something you’ve written that makes an argu-
ment. Check to see if you’ve anticipated and responded to
any objections. If not, revise your text to do so. If so, have
you anticipated all the likely objections? Who if anyone
have you attributed the objections to? Have you represented
the objections fairly? Have you answered them well enough,
or do you think you now need to qualify your own argu-
ment? Could you use any of the language suggested in this
chapter? Does the introduction of a naysayer strengthen your
argument? Why, or why not?

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9 2

SEVEN

“so what? who cares?”

Saying Why It Matters

Baseball is the national pastime. Bernini was the best
sculptor of the baroque period. All writing is conversational.
So what? Who cares? Why does any of this matter?
How many times have you had reason to ask these ques-
tions? Regardless of how interesting a topic may be to you as a
writer, readers always need to know what is at stake in a text
and why they should care. All too often, however, these ques-
tions are left unanswered—mainly because writers and speakers
assume that audiences will know the answers already or will
figure them out on their own. As a result, students come away
from lectures feeling like outsiders to what they’ve just heard,
just as many of us feel left hanging after talks we’ve attended.
The problem is not necessarily that the speakers lack a clear,
well-focused thesis or that the thesis is inadequately supported
with evidence. Instead, the problem is that the speakers don’t
address the crucial question of why their arguments matter.
That this question is so often left unaddressed is unfortunate
since the speakers generally could offer interesting, engaging
answers. When pressed, for instance, most academics will tell
you that their lectures and articles matter because they address

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some belief that needs to be corrected or updated—and because
their arguments have important, real-world consequences. Yet
many academics fail to identify these reasons and consequences
explicitly in what they say and write. Rather than assume that
audiences will know why their claims matter, all writers need
to answer the “so what?” and “who cares?” questions up front.
Not everyone can claim to have a cure for cancer or a solution
to end poverty. But writers who fail to show that others should
care or already do care about their claims will ultimately lose
their audiences’ interest.
This chapter focuses on various moves that you can make to
answer the “who cares?” and “so what?” questions in your own
writing. In one sense, the two questions get at the same thing: the
relevance or importance of what you are saying. Yet they get at this
significance in different ways. Whereas “who cares?” literally asks
you to identify a person or group who cares about your claims, “so
what?” asks about the real-world applications and consequences of
those claims—what difference it would make if they were accepted.
We’ll look first at ways of making clear who cares.

“who cares?”

To see how one writer answers the “who cares?” question,
consider the following passage from the science writer Denise
Grady. Writing in the New York Times, she explains some of
the latest research into fat cells.

Scientists used to think body fat and the cells it was made of
were pretty much inert, just an oily storage compartment. But
within the past decade research has shown that fat cells act like
chemical factories and that body fat is potent stuff: a highly active

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tissue that secretes hormones and other substances with profound
and sometimes harmful effects. . . .
In recent years, biologists have begun calling fat an “endocrine
organ,” comparing it to glands like the thyroid and pituitary, which
also release hormones straight into the bloodstream.

Denise Grady, “The Secret Life of a Potent Cell”

Notice how Grady’s writing reflects the central advice we
give in this book, offering a clear claim and also framing that
claim as a response to what someone else has said. In so doing,
Grady immediately identifies at least one group with a stake
in the new research that sees fat as “active,” “potent stuff ”:
namely, the scientific community, which formerly believed
that body fat is inert. By referring to these scientists, Grady
implicitly acknowledges that her text is part of a larger con-
versation and shows who besides herself has an interest in
what she says.
Consider, however, how the passage would read had Grady
left out what “scientists used to think” and simply explained
the new findings in isolation.

Within the past few decades research has shown that fat cells act
like chemical factories and that body fat is potent stuff: a highly
active tissue that secretes hormones and other substances. In recent
years, biologists have begun calling fat an “endocrine organ,” com-
paring it to glands like the thyroid and pituitary, which also release
hormones straight into the bloodstream.

Though this statement is clear and easy to follow, it lacks any
indication that anyone needs to hear it. Okay, one nods while
reading this passage, fat is an active, potent thing. Sounds plau-
sible enough; no reason to think it’s not true. But does anyone
really care? Who, if anyone, is interested?

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templates for indicating who cares

To address “who cares?” questions in your own writing, we
suggest using templates like the following, which echo Grady
in refuting earlier thinking.

j Parents used to think spanking was necessary. But recently

[or within the past few decades] experts suggest that it can be

counterproductive.

j This interpretation challenges the work of those critics who have

long assumed that .

j These findings challenge the work of earlier researchers, who

tended to assume that .

j Recent studies like these shed new light on , which

previous studies had not addressed.

Grady might have been more explicit by writing the “who cares?”
question directly into her text, as in the following template.

j But who really cares? Who besides me and a handful of recent

researchers has a stake in these claims? At the very least, the

researchers who formerly believed should care.

To gain greater authority as a writer, it can help to name spe-
cific people or groups who have a stake in your claims and to
go into some detail about their views.

j Researchers have long assumed that . For instance,

one eminent scholar of cell biology, , assumed

in , her seminal work on cell structures and functions,

that fat cells . As herself put it, “ ”

(2012). Another leading scientist, , argued that fat

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cells “ ” (2011). Ultimately, when it came to the nature

of fat, the basic assumption was that .

But a new body of research shows that fat cells are far more

complex and that .

In other cases, you might refer to certain people or groups who
should care about your claims.

j If sports enthusiasts stopped to think about it, many of them

might simply assume that the most successful athletes

. However, new research shows .

j These findings challenge neoliberals’ common assumption

that .

j At first glance, teenagers might say . But on closer

inspection .

As these templates suggest, answering the “who cares?” question
involves establishing the type of contrast between what others
say and what you say that is central to this book. Ultimately,
such templates help you create a dramatic tension or clash of
views in your writing that readers will feel invested in and want
to see resolved.

“so what?”

Although answering the “who cares?” question is crucial, in
many cases it is not enough, especially if you are writing for
general readers who don’t necessarily have a strong investment
in the particular clash of views you are setting up. In the case of
Grady’s argument about fat cells, such readers may still wonder
why it matters that some researchers think fat cells are active,

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while others think they’re inert. Or, to move to a different field
of study, American literature, so what if some scholars disagree
about Huck Finn’s relationship with the runaway slave Jim
in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Why should
anyone besides a few specialists in the field care about such
disputes? What, if anything, hinges on them?
The best way to answer such questions about the larger con-
sequences of your claims is to appeal to something that your
audience already figures to care about. Whereas the “who cares?”
question asks you to identify an interested person or group, the
“so what?” question asks you to link your argument to some larger
matter that readers already deem important. Thus in analyzing
Huckleberry Finn, a writer could argue that seemingly narrow
disputes about the hero’s relationship with Jim actually shed light
on whether Twain’s canonical, widely read novel is a critique of
racism in America or is itself marred by it.
Let’s see how Grady invokes such broad, general concerns
in her article on fat cells. Her first move is to link researchers’
interest in fat cells to a general concern with obesity and health.

Researchers trying to decipher the biology of fat cells hope to find
new ways to help people get rid of excess fat or, at least, prevent
obesity from destroying their health. In an increasingly obese world,
their efforts have taken on added importance.

Further showing why readers should care, Grady’s next move
is to demonstrate the even broader relevance and urgency of
her subject matter.

Internationally, more than a billion people are overweight. Obesity
and two illnesses linked to it, heart disease and high blood pressure,
are on the World Health Organization’s list of the top 10 global health
risks. In the United States, 65 percent of adults weigh too much,

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9 8

compared with about 56 percent a decade ago, and government
researchers blame obesity for at least 300,000 deaths a year.

What Grady implicitly says here is “Look, dear reader, you may
think that these questions about the nature of fat cells I’ve been
pursuing have little to do with everyday life. In fact, however,
these questions are extremely important—particularly in our
‘increasingly obese world’ in which we need to prevent obesity
from destroying our health.”
Notice that Grady’s phrase “in an increasingly world”

can be adapted as a strategic move to address the “so
what?” question in other fields as well. For example, a
sociologist analyzing back-to-nature movements of the
past thirty years might make the following statement.

In a world increasingly dominated by cellphones and sophisticated
computer technologies, these attempts to return to nature appear
futile.

This type of move can be readily applied to other disciplines
because no matter how much disciplines may differ from one
another, the need to justify the importance of one’s concerns
is common to them all.

templates for establishing
why your claims matter

j Huckleberry Finn matters/is important because it is one of the

most widely taught novels in the American school system.

j Although X may seem trivial, it is in fact crucial in terms of today’s

concern over .

Ellen Ullman
uses the “so

what” move on
p. 729, ¶13–15.

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Saying Why It Matters

9 9

j Ultimately, what is at stake here is .

j These findings have important implications for the broader

domain of .

j If we are right about , then major consequences fol-

low for .

j These conclusions/This discovery will have significant applica-

tions in as well as in .

Finally, you can also treat the “so what?” question as a related
aspect of the “who cares?” question.

j Although X may seem of concern to only a small group

of , it should in fact concern anyone who cares

about .

All these templates help you hook your readers. By suggesting
the real-world applications of your claims, the templates not only
demonstrate that others care about your claims but also tell your
readers why they should care. Again, it bears repeating that simply
stating and proving your thesis isn’t enough. You also need to
frame it in a way that helps readers care about it.

what about readers who already
know why it matters?

At this point, you might wonder if you need to answer the
“who cares?” and “so what?” questions in everything you write.
Is it really necessary to address these questions if you’re propos-
ing something so obviously consequential as, say, a treatment
for autism or a program to eliminate illiteracy? Isn’t it obvious

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that everyone cares about such problems? Does it really need
to be spelled out? And what about when you’re writing for
audiences who you know are already interested in your claims
and who understand perfectly well why they’re important? In
other words, do you always need to address the “so what?” and
“who cares?” questions?
As a rule, yes—although it’s true that you can’t keep
answering them forever and at a certain point must say enough
is enough. Although a determined skeptic can infinitely ask why

something matters—“Why should I care about earning
a salary? And why should I care about supporting a fam-
ily?”—you have to stop answering at some point in your
text. Nevertheless, we urge you to go as far as possible
in answering such questions. If you take it for granted

that readers will somehow intuit the answers to “so what?” and
“who cares?” on their own, you may make your work seem less
interesting than it actually is, and you run the risk that read-
ers will dismiss your text as irrelevant and unimportant. By
contrast, when you are careful to explain who cares and why,
it’s a little like bringing a cheerleading squad into your text.
And though some expert readers might already know why your
claims matter, even they need to be reminded. Thus the safest
move is to be as explicit as possible in answering the “so what?”
question, even for those already in the know. When you step
back from the text and explain why it matters, you are urging
your audience to keep reading, pay attention, and care.

See how
Monica Potts
explains why
one woman’s
life reflects a

greater societal
problem on

p. 593, ¶7.

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Exercises

1. Find several texts (scholarly essays, newspaper articles,
emails, memos, blogs, etc.) and see whether they answer
the “so what?” and “who cares?” questions. Probably some do,
some don’t. What difference does it make whether they do
or do not? How do the authors who answer these questions
do so? Do they use any strategies or techniques that you
could borrow for your own writing? Are there any strategies
or techniques recommended in this chapter, or that you’ve
found or developed on your own, that you’d recommend to
these authors?

2. Look over something you’ve written yourself. Do you indi-
cate “so what?” and “who cares”? If not, revise your text to
do so. You might use the following template to get started.

My point here (that ) should interest those who

. Beyond this limited audience, however, my point

should speak to anyone who cares about the larger issue of

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3
H

TYING IT ALL TOGETHER

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EIGHT

“as a result”

Connecting the Parts

We once had a student named Bill, whose characteristic
sentence pattern went something like this.

Spot is a good dog. He has fleas.

“Connect your sentences,” we urged in the margins of Bill’s
papers. “What does Spot being good have to do with his fleas?”
“These two statements seem unrelated. Can you connect them
in some logical way?” When comments like these yielded no
results, we tried inking in suggested connections for him.

Spot is a good dog, but he has fleas.
Spot is a good dog, even though he has fleas.

But our message failed to get across, and Bill’s disconnected
sentence pattern persisted to the end of the semester.
And yet Bill did focus well on his subjects. When he men-
tioned Spot the dog (or Plato, or any other topic) in one sen-
tence, we could count on Spot (or Plato) being the topic of
the following sentence as well. This was not the case with

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some of Bill’s classmates, who sometimes changed topic from
sentence to sentence or even from clause to clause within a
single sentence. But because Bill neglected to mark his con-
nections, his writing was as frustrating to read as theirs. In all
these cases, we had to struggle to figure out on our own how
the sentences and paragraphs connected or failed to connect
with one another.
What makes such writers so hard to read, in other words,
is that they never gesture back to what they have just said or
forward to what they plan to say. “Never look back” might be
their motto, almost as if they see writing as a process of think-
ing of something to say about a topic and writing it down, then
thinking of something else to say about the topic and writing
that down too, and on and on until they’ve filled the assigned
number of pages and can hand the paper in. Each sentence
basically starts a new thought, rather than growing out of or
extending the thought of the previous sentence.
When Bill talked about his writing habits, he acknowl-
edged that he never went back and read what he had written.
Indeed, he told us that, other than using his computer software
to check for spelling errors and make sure that his tenses were
all aligned, he never actually reread what he wrote before turn-
ing it in. As Bill seemed to picture it, writing was something one
did while sitting at a computer, whereas reading was a separate
activity generally reserved for an easy chair, book in hand. It
had never occurred to Bill that to write a good sentence he had
to think about how it connected to those that came before and
after; that he had to think hard about how that sentence fit
into the sentences that surrounded it. Each sentence for Bill
existed in a sort of tunnel isolated from every other sentence
on the page. He never bothered to fit all the parts of his essay

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together because he apparently thought of writing as a matter
of piling up information or observations rather than building
a sustained argument. What we suggest in this chapter, then,
is that you converse not only with others in your writing but
with yourself: that you establish clear relations between one
statement and the next by connecting those statements.
This chapter addresses the issue of how to connect all the
parts of your writing. The best compositions establish a sense
of momentum and direction by making explicit connections
among their different parts, so that what is said in one sentence
(or paragraph) both sets up what is to come and is clearly
informed by what has already been said. When you write a
sentence, you create an expectation in the reader’s mind that
the next sentence will in some way echo and extend it, even
if—especially if—that next sentence takes your argument in a
new direction.
It may help to think of each sentence you write as having arms
that reach backward and forward, as the figure below suggests.
When your sentences reach outward like this, they establish con-
nections that help your writing flow smoothly in a way readers
appreciate. Conversely, when writing lacks such connections and
moves in fits and starts, readers repeatedly have to go back over
the sentences and guess at the connections on their own. To pre-
vent such disconnection and make your writing flow, we advise

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following a “do it yourself ” principle, which means that it is your
job as a writer to do the hard work of making the connections
rather than, as Bill did, leaving this work to your readers.
This chapter offers several strategies you can use to put this
principle into action: (1) using transition terms (like “there-
fore” and “as a result”); (2) adding pointing words (like “this”
or “such”); (3) developing a set of key terms and phrases for
each text you write; and (4) repeating yourself, but with a
difference—a move that involves repeating what you’ve said,
but with enough variation to avoid being redundant. All these
moves require that you always look back and, in crafting any
one sentence, think hard about those that precede it.
Notice how we ourselves have used such connecting devices
thus far in this chapter. The second paragraph of this chapter,
for example, opens with the transitional “And yet,” signaling
a change in direction, while the opening sentence of the third
includes the phrase “in other words,” telling you to expect a
restatement of a point we’ve just made. If you look through this
book, you should be able to find many sentences that contain
some word or phrase that explicitly hooks them back to some-
thing said earlier, to something about to be said, or both. And
many sentences in this chapter repeat key terms related to the
idea of connection: “connect,” “disconnect,” “link,” “relate,”
“forward,” and “backward.”

use transitions

For readers to follow your train of thought, you need not only
to connect your sentences and paragraphs to each other, but
also to mark the kind of connection you are making. One of
the easiest ways to make this move is to use transitions (from

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the Latin root trans, “across”), which help you cross from one
point to another in your text. Transitions are usually placed
at or near the start of sentences so they can signal to readers
where your text is going: in the same direction it has been
moving, or in a new direction. More specifically, transitions
tell readers whether your text is echoing a previous sentence or
paragraph (“in other words”), adding something to it (“in addi-
tion”), offering an example of it (“for example”), generalizing
from it (“as a result”), or modifying it (“and yet”).
The following is a list of commonly used transitions, catego-
rized according to their different functions.

addition

also indeed
and in fact
besides moreover
furthermore so too
in addition

elaboration

actually to put it another way
by extension to put it bluntly
in other words to put it succinctly
in short ultimately
that is

example

after all for instance
as an illustration specifically
consider to take a case in point
for example

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cause and effect

accordingly so
as a result then
consequently therefore
hence thus
since

comparison

along the same lines likewise
in the same way similarly

contrast

although nevertheless
but nonetheless
by contrast on the contrary
conversely on the other hand
despite regardless
even though whereas
however while yet
in contrast

concession

admittedly naturally
although it is true of course
granted to be sure

conclusion

as a result in sum
consequently therefore
hence thus
in conclusion to sum up
in short to summarize

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Ideally, transitions should operate so unobtrusively in a piece
of writing that they recede into the background and readers
do not even notice that they are there. It’s a bit like what
happens when drivers use their turn signals before turning
right or left: just as other drivers recognize such signals almost
unconsciously, readers should process transition terms with
a minimum of thought. But even though such terms should
function unobtrusively in your writing, they can be among the
most powerful tools in your vocabulary. Think how your heart
sinks when someone, immediately after praising you, begins a
sentence with “but” or “however.” No matter what follows, you
know it won’t be good.
Notice that some transitions can help you not only to move
from one sentence to another, but to combine two or more sen-
tences into one. Combining sentences in this way helps prevent
the choppy, staccato effect that arises when too many short sen-
tences are strung together, one after the other. For instance, to
combine Bill’s two choppy sentences (“Spot is a good dog. He
has fleas.”) into one, better-flowing sentence, we suggested that
he rewrite them as “Spot is a good dog, even though he has fleas.”
Transitions like these not only guide readers through the
twists and turns of your argument but also help ensure that you
have an argument in the first place. In fact, we think of words
like “but,” “yet,” “nevertheless,” “besides,” and others as argu-
ment words, since it’s hard to use them without making some
kind of argument. The word “therefore,” for instance, commits
you to making sure that the claims preceding it lead logically to
the conclusion that it introduces. “For example” also assumes an
argument, since it requires the material you are introducing to
stand as an instance or proof of some preceding generalization.
As a result, the more you use transitions, the more you’ll be able
not only to connect the parts of your text but also to construct

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a strong argument in the first place. And if you draw on them
frequently enough, using them should eventually become sec-
ond nature.
To be sure, it is possible to overuse transitions, so take time
to read over your drafts carefully and eliminate any transitions

that are unnecessary. But following the maxim that you
need to learn the basic moves of argument before you
can deliberately depart from them, we advise you not to

forgo explicit transition terms until you’ve first mastered their
use. In all our years of teaching, we’ve read countless essays that
suffered from having few or no transitions, but cannot recall
one in which the transitions were overused. Seasoned writers
sometimes omit explicit transitions, but only because they rely
heavily on the other types of connecting devices that we turn
to in the rest of this chapter.
Before doing so, however, let us warn you about inserting tran-
sitions without really thinking through their meanings—using
“therefore,” say, when your text’s logic actually requires “nev-
ertheless” or “however.” So beware. Choosing transition terms
should involve a bit of mental sweat, since the whole point of
using them is to make your writing more reader-friendly, not less.
The only thing more frustrating than reading Bill-style passages
like “Spot is a good dog. He has fleas” is reading mis-connected
sentences like “Spot is a good dog. For example, he has fleas.”

use pointing words

Another way to connect the parts of your argument is by using
pointing words—which, as their name implies, point or refer
backward to some concept in the previous sentence. The most
common of these pointing words include “this,” “these,” “that,”

See how Mary
Maxfield uses
transitions on

p. 443.

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“those,” “their,” and “such” (as in “these pointing words” near
the start of this sentence) and simple pronouns like “his,” “he,”
“her,” “she,” “it,” and “their.” Such terms help you create the
flow we spoke of earlier that enables readers to move effortlessly
through your text. In a sense, these terms are like an invisible
hand reaching out of your sentence, grabbing what’s needed in
the previous sentences and pulling it along.
Like transitions, however, pointing words need to be used
carefully. It’s dangerously easy to insert pointing words into
your text that don’t refer to a clearly defined object, assuming
that because the object you have in mind is clear to you it will
also be clear to your readers. For example, consider the use of
“this” in the following passage.

Alexis de Tocqueville was highly critical of democratic societ-
ies, which he saw as tending toward mob rule. At the same time,
he accorded democratic societies grudging respect. This is seen in
Tocqueville’s statement that . . .

When “this” is used in such a way it becomes an ambiguous or
free-floating pointer, since readers can’t tell if it refers to Tocque-
ville’s critical attitude toward democratic societies, his grudging
respect for them, or some combination of both. “This what?”
readers mutter as they go back over such passages and try to
figure them out. It’s also tempting to try to cheat with pointing
words, hoping that they will conceal or make up for conceptual
confusions that may lurk in your argument. By referring to a
fuzzy idea as “this” or “that,” you might hope the fuzziness will
somehow come across as clearer than it is.
You can fix problems caused by a free-floating pointer by
making sure there is one and only one possible object in the
vicinity that the pointer could be referring to. It also often helps

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to name the object the pointer is referring to at the same time
that you point to it, replacing the bald “this” in the example
above with a more precise phrase like “this ambivalence toward
democratic societies” or “this grudging respect.”

repeat key terms and phrases

A third strategy for connecting the parts of your argument is
to develop a constellation of key terms and phrases, including
their synonyms and antonyms, that you repeat throughout your
text. When used effectively, your key terms should be items
that readers could extract from your text in order to get a solid
sense of your topic. Playing with key terms also can be a good
way to come up with a title and appropriate section headings
for your text.
Notice how often Martin Luther King Jr. uses the key words
“criticism,” “statement,” “answer,” and “correspondence” in the
opening paragraph of his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Dear Fellow Clergymen:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across
your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and
untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and
ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk,
my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such
correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time
for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine
good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to
try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and
reasonable terms.

Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

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Even though King uses the terms “criticism” and “answer” three
times each and “statement” twice, the effect is not overly repeti-
tive. In fact, these key terms help build a sense of momentum
in the paragraph and bind it together.
For another example of the effective use of key terms, con-
sider the following passage, in which the historian Susan Doug-
las develops a constellation of sharply contrasting key terms
around the concept of “cultural schizophrenics”: women like
herself who, Douglas claims, have mixed feelings about the
images of ideal femininity with which they are constantly bom-
barded by the media.

In a variety of ways, the mass media helped make us the cultural
schizophrenics we are today, women who rebel against yet submit
to prevailing images about what a desirable, worthwhile woman
should be. . . . [T]he mass media has engendered in many women a
kind of cultural identity crisis. We are ambivalent toward feminin-
ity on the one hand and feminism on the other. Pulled in opposite
directions—told we were equal, yet told we were subordinate; told
we could change history but told we were trapped by history—we
got the bends at an early age, and we’ve never gotten rid of them.
When I open Vogue, for example, I am simultaneously infu-
riated and seduced. . . . I adore the materialism; I despise the
materialism. . . . I want to look beautiful; I think wanting to look
beautiful is about the most dumb-ass goal you could have. The
magazine stokes my desire; the magazine triggers my bile. And this
doesn’t only happen when I’m reading Vogue; it happens all the
time. . . . On the one hand, on the other hand—that’s not just
me—that’s what it means to be a woman in America.
To explain this schizophrenia . . .

Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are:
Growing Up Female with the Mass Media

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In this passage, Douglas establishes “schizophrenia” as a key
concept and then echoes it through synonyms like “identity
crisis,” “ambivalent,” “the bends”—and even demonstrates it
through a series of contrasting words and phrases:

rebel against / submit
told we were equal / told we were subordinate
told we could change history / told we were trapped by history
infuriated / seduced
I adore / I despise
I want / I think wanting . . . is about the most dumb-ass goal
stokes my desire / triggers my bile
on the one hand / on the other hand

These contrasting phrases help flesh out Douglas’s claim that
women are being pulled in two directions at once. In so doing,
they bind the passage together into a unified whole that, despite
its complexity and sophistication, stays focused over its entire
length.

repeat yourself—but with a difference

The last technique we offer for connecting the parts of your
text involves repeating yourself, but with a difference—which
basically means saying the same thing you’ve just said, but in
a slightly different way that avoids sounding monotonous. To
effectively connect the parts of your argument and keep it mov-
ing forward, be careful not to leap from one idea to a different
idea or introduce new ideas cold. Instead, try to build bridges
between your ideas by echoing what you’ve just said while
simultaneously moving your text into new territory.

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Several of the connecting devices discussed in this chapter
are ways of repeating yourself in this special way. Key terms,
pointing terms, and even many transitions can be used in a
way that not only brings something forward from the previous
sentence but in some way alters it. When Douglas, for instance,
uses the key term “ambivalent” to echo her earlier reference
to schizophrenics, she is repeating herself with a difference—
repeating the same concept, but with a different word that adds
new associations.
In addition, when you use transition phrases like “in other
words” and “to put it another way,” you repeat yourself with a
difference, since these phrases help you restate earlier claims but
in a different register. When you open a sentence with “in other
words,” you are basically telling your readers that in case they
didn’t fully understand what you meant in the last sentence,
you are now coming at it again from a slightly different angle,
or that since you’re presenting a very important idea, you’re
not going to skip over it quickly but will explore it further to
make sure your readers grasp all its aspects.
We would even go so far as to suggest that after your first
sentence, almost every sentence you write should refer back
to previous statements in some way. Whether you are writing
a “furthermore” comment that adds to what you have just said
or a “for example” statement that illustrates it, each sentence
should echo at least one element of the previous sentence in
some discernible way. Even when your text changes direction
and requires transitions like “in contrast,” “however,” or “but,”
you still need to mark that shift by linking the sentence to
the one just before it, as in the following example.

Cheyenne loved basketball. Nevertheless, she feared her height
would put her at a disadvantage.

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These sentences work because even though the second sen-
tence changes course and qualifies the first, it still echoes key
concepts from the first. Not only does “she” echo “Cheyenne,”
since both refer to the same person, but “feared” echoes “loved”
by establishing the contrast mandated by the term “neverthe-
less.” “Nevertheless,” then, is not an excuse for changing sub-
jects radically. It too requires repetition to help readers shift
gears with you and follow your train of thought.
Repetition, in short, is the central means by which you can
move from point A to point B in a text. To introduce one last
analogy, think of the way experienced rock climbers move up a
steep slope. Instead of jumping or lurching from one handhold
to the next, good climbers get a secure handhold on the position
they have established before reaching for the next ledge. The
same thing applies to writing. To move smoothly from point to
point in your argument, you need to firmly ground what you say
in what you’ve already said. In this way, your writing remains
focused while simultaneously moving forward.
“But hold on,” you may be thinking. “Isn’t repetition pre-
cisely what sophisticated writers should avoid, on the grounds
that it will make their writing sound simplistic—as if they are
belaboring the obvious?” Yes and no. On the one hand, writers
certainly can run into trouble if they merely repeat themselves
and nothing more. On the other hand, repetition is key to creat-
ing continuity in writing. It is impossible to stay on track in a
piece of writing if you don’t repeat your points throughout the
length of the text. Furthermore, writers would never make an
impact on readers if they didn’t repeat their main points often
enough to reinforce those points and make them stand out above
subordinate points. The trick therefore is not to avoid repeating
yourself but to repeat yourself in varied and interesting enough
ways that you advance your argument without sounding tedious.

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Exercises

1. Read the following opening to Chapter 2 of The Road to
Wigan Pier, by George Orwell. Annotate the connecting
devices by underlining the transitions, circling the key
terms, and putting boxes around the pointing terms.

Our civilisation . . . is founded on coal, more completely than
one realises until one stops to think about it. The machines that
keep us alive, and the machines that make the machines, are
all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism
of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance
only to the man who ploughs the soil. He is a sort of grimy cary-
atid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy
is supported. For this reason the actual process by which coal is
extracted is well worth watching, if you get the chance and are
willing to take the trouble.
When you go down a coal-mine it is important to try and get
to the coal face when the “fillers” are at work. This is not easy,
because when the mine is working visitors are a nuisance and
are not encouraged, but if you go at any other time, it is possible
to come away with a totally wrong impression. On a Sunday, for
instance, a mine seems almost peaceful. The time to go there
is when the machines are roaring and the air is black with coal
dust, and when you can actually see what the miners have to
do. At those times the place is like hell, or at any rate like my
own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in
hell are there—heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and,
above all, unbearably cramped space. Everything except the fire,
for there is no fire down there except the feeble beams of Davy
lamps and electric torches which scarcely penetrate the clouds
of coal dust.

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When you have finally got there—and getting there is a job in
itself: I will explain that in a moment—you crawl through the last
line of pit props and see opposite you a shiny black wall three or
four feet high. This is the coal face. Overhead is the smooth ceiling
made by the rock from which the coal has been cut; underneath is
the rock again, so that the gallery you are in is only as high as the
ledge of coal itself, probably not much more than a yard. The first
impression of all, overmastering everything else for a while, is the
frightful, deafening din from the conveyor belt which carries the
coal away. You cannot see very far, because the fog of coal dust
throws back the beam of your lamp, but you can see on either side
of you the line of half-naked kneeling men, one to every four or
five yards, driving their shovels under the fallen coal and flinging
it swiftly over their left shoulders. . . .

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

2. Read over something you’ve written with an eye for the
devices you’ve used to connect the parts. Underline all
the transitions, pointing terms, key terms, and repetition.
Do you see any patterns? Do you rely on certain devices
more than others? Are there any passages that are hard to
follow—and if so, can you make them easier to read by trying
any of the other devices discussed in this chapter?

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NINE

“ain’t so / is not”

Academic Writing Doesn’t Always Mean

Setting Aside Your Own Voice

Have you ever gotten the impression that writing well in
college means setting aside the kind of language you use in
everyday conversation? That to impress your instructors you
need to use big words, long sentences, and complex sentence
structures? If so, then we’re here to tell you that it ain’t neces-
sarily so. On the contrary, academic writing can—and in our
view should—be relaxed, easy to follow, and even a little bit
fun. Although we don’t want to suggest that you avoid using
sophisticated, academic terms in your writing, we encourage
you to draw upon the kinds of expressions and turns of phrase
that you use every day when texting or conversing with family
and friends. In this chapter, we want to show you how you can
write effective academic arguments while holding on to some
of your own voice.
This point is important, since you may well become turned
off from writing if you think your everyday language practices
have to be checked at the classroom door. You may end up
feeling like a student we know who, when asked how she felt

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about the writing she does in college, answered, “I do it because
I have to, but it’s just not me!”
This is not to suggest that any language you use among
friends has a place in academic writing. Nor is it to suggest
that you may fall back on colloquial usage as an excuse for not
learning more rigorous forms of expression. After all, learning
these more rigorous forms of expression and developing a more
intellectual self is a major reason for getting an education. We
do, however, wish to suggest that relaxed, colloquial language
can often enliven academic writing and even enhance its rigor
and precision. Such informal language also helps you connect
with readers in a personal as well as an intellectual way. In our
view, then, it is a mistake to assume that the academic and the
everyday are completely separate languages that can never be
used together.

mix academic and colloquial styles

Many successful writers blend academic, professional language
with popular expressions and sayings. Consider, for instance, the
following passage from a scholarly article about the way teachers
respond to errors in student writing.

Marking and judging formal and mechanical errors in student
papers is one area in which composition studies seems to have
a multiple-personality disorder. On the one hand, our mellow,
student-centered, process-based selves tend to condemn mark-
ing formal errors at all. Doing it represents the Bad Old Days.
Ms. Fidditch and Mr. Flutesnoot with sharpened red pencils, spill-
ing innocent blood across the page. Useless detail work. Inhumane,
perfectionist standards, making our students feel stupid, wrong,

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trivial, misunderstood. Joseph Williams has pointed out how arbi-
trary and context-bound our judgments of formal error are. And
certainly our noting of errors on student papers gives no one any
great joy; as Peter Elbow says, English is most often associated
either with grammar or with high literature—“two things designed
to make folks feel most out of it.”

Robert Connors and Andrea Lunsford,
“Frequency of Formal Errors in Current College Writing,

or Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research”

This passage blends writing styles in several ways. First, it places
informal, relaxed expressions like “mellow,” “the Bad Old
Days,” and “folks” alongside more formal, academic phrases like
“multiple-personality disorder,” “student-centered,” “process-
based,” and “arbitrary and context-bound.” Even the title of
the piece, “Frequency of Formal Errors in Current College
Writing, or Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research,” blends formal,
academic usage on the left side of the comma with a popular-
culture reference to the fictional movie characters Ma and
Pa Kettle on the right. Second, to give vivid, concrete form
to their discussion of grading disciplinarians, Connors and
Lunsford conjure up such archetypal, imaginary figures as the
stuffy, old-fashioned taskmasters Ms. Fidditch and Mr. Flutes-
noot. Through such imaginative uses of language, Connors and
Lunsford inject greater force into what might otherwise have
been dry, scholarly prose.
Formal/informal mixings like this can be found in countless
other texts, though more frequently in the humanities than the
sciences, and more frequently still in journalism. Notice how
the food industry critic Eric Schlosser describes some changes
in the city of Colorado Springs in his best-selling book on fast
foods in the United States.

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The loopiness once associated with Los Angeles has come full
blown to Colorado Springs—the strange, creative energy that crops
up where the future’s consciously being made, where people walk
the fine line separating a visionary from a total nutcase.

Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation

Schlosser could have played it safe and referred not to the
“loopiness” but to the “eccentricity” associated with Los Ange-
les, or to “the fine line separating a visionary from a lunatic”
instead of “ . . . a total nutcase.” His decision, however, to go
with the more adventuresome, colorful terms gives a liveliness
to his writing that would have been lacking with the more
conventional terms.
Another example of writing that blends the informal with
the formal comes from an essay on the American novelist Willa
Cather by the literary critic Judith Fetterley. Discussing “how
very successful Cather has been in controlling how we think
about her,” Fetterley, building on the work of another scholar,
writes as follows.

As Merrill Skaggs has put it, “She is neurotically controlling and
self-conscious about her work, but she knows at all points what she
is doing. Above all else, she is self-conscious.”
Without question, Cather was a control freak.

Judith Fetterley, “Willa Cather and the
Question of Sympathy: The Unofficial Story”

This passage demonstrates not only that specialized phrases
from psychology like “self-conscious” and “neurotically control-
ling” are compatible with everyday, popular expressions like
“control freak,” but also that translating the one type of lan-
guage into the other, the specialized into the everyday, can help

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drive home a point. By translating Skaggs’s polysyllabic
description of Cather as “neurotically controlling and
self-conscious” into the succinct, if blunt, claim that
“Without question, Cather was a control freak,” Fetter-
ley suggests that one need not choose between rarified,
academic ways of talking and the everyday language of casual con-
versation. Indeed, her passage offers a simple recipe for blending
the high and the low: first make your point in the language of a
professional field, and then make it again in everyday language—a
great trick, we think, for underscoring a point.
While one effect of blending languages like this is to give your
writing more punch, another is to make a political statement—
about the way, for example, society unfairly overvalues some
dialects and devalues others. For instance, in the titles of two of
her books, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America
and Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen
Corner, the language scholar Geneva Smitherman mixes African
American vernacular phrases with more scholarly language in
order to suggest, as she explicitly argues in these books, that
black English vernacular is as legitimate a variety of language
as “standard” English. Here are three typical passages.

In Black America, the oral tradition has served as a fundamen-
tal vehicle for gittin ovuh. That tradition preserves the Afro-
American heritage and reflects the collective spirit of the race.

Blacks are quick to ridicule “educated fools,” people who done
gone to school and read all dem books and still don’t know nothin!

. . . it is a socially approved verbal strategy for black rappers to talk
about how bad they is.

Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin:
The Language of Black America

See p. 264
for an essay
that mixes
colloquial
and academic
styles.

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In these examples, Smitherman blends the standard written
English of phrases like “oral tradition” and “fundamental vehi-
cle” with black oral vernacular like “gittin ovuh,” “dem books,”
and “how bad they is.” Indeed, she even blends standard English
spelling with that of black English variants like “dem” and
“ovuh,” thus mimicking what some black English vernacular
actually sounds like. Although some scholars might object to
these unconventional practices, this is precisely Smitherman’s
point: that our habitual language practices need to be opened
up, and that the number of participants in the academic con-
versation needs to be expanded.
Along similar lines, the writer and activist Gloria Anzaldúa
mixes standard English with Tex-Mex, a hybrid blend of
English, Castilian Spanish, a North Mexican dialect, and the
Indian language Nahuatl, to make a political point about the
suppression of the Spanish language in the United States.

From this racial, ideological, cultural, and biological cross-
pollinization, an “alien” consciousness is presently in the making—
a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer.

Gloria Anzaldúa,
Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza

Like Smitherman, Anzaldúa gets her point across not only
through what she says but through the way she says it, liter-
ally showing that the new hybrid, or mestiza, consciousness that
she describes is, as she puts it, “presently in the making.”
Ultimately, these passages suggest that blending languages—
what Vershawn Ashanti Young calls “code meshing”—can call
into question the very idea that the languages are distinct and
separate.

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when to mix styles?
consider your audience and purpose

Because there are so many options in writing, you should never
feel limited in your choice of words, as if such choices are set
in stone. You can always experiment with your language and
improve it. You can always dress it up, dress it down, or some
combination of both. In dressing down your language, for exam-
ple, you can make the claim that somebody “failed to notice”
something by saying instead that it “flew under the radar.” Or
you can state that the person was “unaware” of something by
saying that he was “out to lunch.” You could even recast the
title of this book, “They Say / I Say,” as a teenager might say it:
“She Goes / I’m Like.”
But how do you know when it is better to play things straight
and stick to standard English, and when to be more adventure-
some and mix things up? When, in other words, should you
write “failed to notice” and when is it okay (or more effective)
to write “flew under the radar”? Is it always appropriate to mix
styles? And when you do so, how do you know when enough
is enough?
In all situations, think carefully about your audience and
purpose. When you write a letter applying for a job, for instance,
or submit a grant proposal, where your words will be weighed by
an official screening body, using language that’s too colloquial
or slangy may well jeopardize your chances of success. On such
occasions, it is usually best to err on the safe side, conforming
as closely as possible to the conventions of standard written
English. In other situations for other audiences, however, there
is room to be more creative—in this book, for example. Ulti-
mately, your judgments about the appropriate language for the

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situation should always take into account your likely audience
and your purpose in writing.
Although it may have been in the past, academic writing in
most disciplines today is no longer the linguistic equivalent of a
black-tie affair. To succeed as a writer in college, then, you need
not always limit your language to the strictly formal. Although
academic writing does rely on complex sentence patterns and
on specialized, disciplinary vocabularies, it is surprising how
often such writing draws on the languages of the street, popular
culture, our ethnic communities, and home. It is by blending
these languages that what counts as “standard” En glish changes
over time and the range of possibilities open to academic writers
continues to grow.

Exercises

1. Take a paragraph from this book and dress it down, rewrit-
ing it in informal colloquial language. Then rewrite the same
paragraph again by dressing it up, making it much more for-
mal. Then rewrite the paragraph one more time in a way that
blends the two styles. Share your paragraphs with a classmate,
and discuss which versions are most effective and why.

2. Find something you’ve written for a course, and study it to see
whether you’ve used any of your own everyday expressions,
any words or structures that are not “academic.” If by chance
you don’t find any, see if there’s a place or two where shifting
into more casual or unexpected language would help you make
a point, get your reader’s attention, or just add liveliness to
your text. Be sure to keep your audience and purpose in mind,
and use language that will be appropriate to both.

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TEN

“but don’t get me wrong”

The Art of Metacommentary

When we tell people that we are writing a chapter on the
art of metacommentary, they often give us a puzzled look and
tell us that they have no idea what “metacommen tary” is. “We
know what commentary is,” they’ll sometimes say, “but what
does it mean when it’s meta?” Our answer is that whether or
not they know the term, they practice the art of metacommen-
tary on a daily basis whenever they make a point of explain-
ing something they’ve said or written: “What I meant to say
was ,” “My point was not , but ,”
or “You’re probably not going to like what I’m about to say,
but .” In such cases, they are not offering new points
but telling an audience how to interpret what they have already
said or are about to say. In short, then, metacommentary is a
way of commenting on your claims and telling others how—and
how not—to think about them.
It may help to think of metacommentary as being like
the chorus in a Greek play that stands to the side of the
drama unfolding on the stage and explains its meaning to the
audience—or like a voice-over narrator who comments on

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and explains the action in a television show or movie. Think
of metacommentary as a sort of second text that stands along-
side your main text and explains what it means. In the main
text you say something; in the metatext you guide your readers
in interpreting and processing what you’ve said.
What we are suggesting, then, is that you think of your text
as two texts joined at the hip: a main text in which you make
your argument and another in which you “work” your ideas,
distinguishing your views from others they may be confused
with, anticipating and answering objections, connecting one
point to another, explaining why your claim might be contro-
versial, and so forth. The figure below demonstrates what we
mean.

ALLALL
WRITING ISWRITING IS

CONVERSATIONAL.CONVERSATIONAL.

THE MAIN TEXT SAYS SOMETHING, THETHE MAIN TEXT SAYS SOMETHING, THE
METATEXT TELLS READERS HOMETATEXT TELLS READERS HOW—AW—AND HOWND HOW

NONOT—TT—TO THINK ABOUT IT.O THINK ABOUT IT.

NOW, DON’T GET MENOW, DON’T GET ME
WRONG. I’M WRONG. I’M

SAYING…SAYING…
NOTNOT

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use metacommentary to clarify
and elaborate

But why do you need metacommentary to tell readers what you
mean and guide them through your text? Can’t you just clearly
say what you mean up front? The answer is that, no matter how
clear and precise your writing is, readers can still fail to under-
stand it in any number of ways. Even the best writers can provoke
reactions in readers that they didn’t intend, and even
good readers can get lost in a complicated argument
or fail to see how one point connects with another.
Readers may also fail to see what follows from your
argument, or they may follow your reasoning and examples yet
fail to see the larger conclusion you draw from them. They may
fail to see your argument’s overall significance, or mistake what
you are saying for a related argument that they have heard before
but that you want to distance yourself from. As a result, no mat-
ter how straightforward a writer you are, readers still need you to
help them grasp what you really mean. Because the written word
is prone to so much mischief and can be interpreted in so many
different ways, we need metacommentary to keep misinterpreta-
tions and other communication misfires at bay.
Another reason to master the art of metacommentary is that
it will help you develop your ideas and generate more text. If you
have ever had trouble producing the required number of pages
for a writing project, metacommentary can help you add both
length and depth to your writing. We’ve seen many students
who try to produce a five-page paper sputter to a halt at two or
three pages, complaining they’ve said everything they can think
of about their topic. “I’ve stated my thesis and presented my
reasons and evidence,” students have told us. “What else is there
to do?” It’s almost as if such writers have generated a thesis and

Jonathan Safran
Foer uses lots of
metacommentary;
see, e.g., p. 457,
¶45.

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don’t know what to do with it. When these students learn to use
metacommentary, however, they get more out of their ideas and
write longer, more substantial texts. In sum, metacommentary
can help you extract the full potential from your ideas, draw-
ing out important implications, explaining ideas from different
perspectives, and so forth.
So even when you may think you’ve said everything pos-
sible in an argument, try inserting the following types of
metacommentary.

j In other words, she doesn’t realize how right she is.

j What really means is .

j My point is not but .

j Ultimately, then, my goal is to demonstrate that .

Ideally, such metacommentary should help you recognize some
implications of your ideas that you didn’t initially realize were
there.
Let’s look at how the cultural critic Neil Postman uses meta-
commentary in the following passage describing the shift in
American culture when it began to move from print and read-
ing to television and movies.

It is my intention in this book to show that a great . . . shift has
taken place in America, with the result that the content of much
of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense. With this
in view, my task in the chapters ahead is straightforward. I must,
first, demonstrate how, under the governance of the printing
press, discourse in America was different from what it is now—
generally coherent, serious and rational; and then how, under the

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governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd.
But to avoid the possibility that my analysis will be interpreted as
standard-brand academic whimpering, a kind of elitist complaint
against “junk” on television, I must first explain that . . . I appreci-
ate junk as much as the next fellow, and I know full well that the
printing press has generated enough of it to fill the Grand Canyon
to overflowing. Television is not old enough to have matched
printing’s output of junk.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

To see what we mean by metacommentary, look at the phrases
above that we have italicized. With these moves, Postman
essentially stands apart from his main ideas to help readers
follow and understand what he is arguing.

He previews what he will argue: It is my intention in this book
to show . . .

He spells out how he will make his argument: With this in
view, my task in these chapters . . . is. . . . I must, first, dem-
onstrate . . . and then . . .

He distinguishes his argument from other arguments it may
easily be confused with: But to avoid the possibility that my
analysis will be interpreted as . . . I must first explain that . . .

titles as metacommentary

Even the title of Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, functions as a form
of metacommentary since, like all titles, it stands apart from

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the text itself and tells readers the book’s main point: that
the very pleasure provided by contemporary show business is
destructive.
Titles, in fact, are one of the most important forms of
metacommentary, functioning rather like carnival barkers
telling passersby what they can expect if they go inside. Sub-
titles, too, function as metacommentary, further explaining
or elaborating on the main title. The subtitle of this book,
for example, not only explains that it is about “the moves
that matter in academic writing,” but indicates that “they
say / I say” is one of these moves. Thinking of a title as
metacommentary can actually help you develop sharper
titles, ones that, like Postman’s, give readers a hint of what
your argument will be. Contrast such titles with unhelpfully
open-ended ones like “Shakespeare” or “Steroids” or “English
Essay,” or essays with no titles at all. Essays with vague titles
(or no titles) send the message that the writer has simply
not bothered to reflect on what he or she is saying and is
uninterested in guiding or orienting readers.

use other moves as metacommentary

Many of the other moves covered in this book function as
metacommentary: entertaining objections, adding transitions,
framing quotations, answering “so what?” and “who cares?”
When you entertain objections, you stand outside of your text
and imagine what a critic might say; when you add transitions,
you essentially explain the relationship between various claims.
And when you answer the “so what?” and “who cares?” ques-
tions, you look beyond your central argument and explain who
should be interested in it and why.

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templates for introducing
metacommentary

to ward off potential misunderstandings

The following moves help you differentiate certain views from
ones they might be mistaken for.

j Essentially, I am arguing not that we should give up the policy,

but that we should monitor effects far more closely.

j This is not to say , but rather .

j X is concerned less with than with .

to elaborate on a previous idea

The following moves elaborate on a previous point, saying to
readers: “In case you didn’t get it the first time, I’ll try saying
the same thing in a different way.”

j In other words, .

j To put it another way, .

j What X is saying here is that .

to provide a roadmap to your text

This move orients readers, clarifying where you have been and
where you are going—and making it easier for them to process
and follow your text.

j Chapter 2 explores , while Chapter 3 examines

j Having just argued that , I want now to complicate the

point by .

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to move from a general claim to a specific example

These moves help you explain a general point by providing a
concrete example that illustrates what you’re saying.

j For example, .

j , for instance, demonstrates .

j Consider , for example.

j To take a case in point, .

to indicate that a claim is more, less, or equally important

The following templates help you give relative emphasis to the
claim that you are introducing, showing whether that claim is
of more or less weight than the previous one, or equal to it.

j Even more important, .

j But above all, .

j Incidentally, we will briefly note, .

j Just as important, .

j Equally, .

j Finally, .

to explain a claim when you anticipate objections

Here’s a template to help you anticipate and respond to pos-
sible objections.

j Although some readers may object that , I would

answer that .

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to guide readers to your most general point

These moves show that you are wrapping things up and
tying up various subpoints previously made.

j In sum, then, .

j My conclusion, then, is that .

j In short, .

In this chapter we have tried to show that the most persuasive
writing often doubles back and comments on its own claims in
ways that help readers negotiate and process them. Instead of
simply piling claim upon claim, effective writers are constantly
“stage managing” how their claims will be recieved. It’s true of
course that to be persuasive a text has to have strong claims
to argue in the first place. But even the strongest arguments
will flounder unless writers use metacommentary to prevent
potential misreadings and make their arguments shine.

Exercises

1. Read an essay or article and annotate it to indicate the
different ways the author uses metacommentary. Use the
templates on pp. 135–37 as your guide. For example, you
may want to circle transitional phrases and write “trans” in
the margins, to put brackets around sentences that elaborate
on earlier sentences and mark them “elab,” or underline
sentences in which the author sums up what he or she has
been saying, writing “sum” in the margins.

How does the author use metacommentary? Does the
author follow any of the templates provided in this book

Chapter 6
has more
templates for
anticipating
objections.

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word for word? Did you find any forms of metacommentary
not discussed in this chapter? If so, can you identify them,
name them, and perhaps devise templates based on them for
use in your own writing? And finally, how do you think the
author’s use of metacommentary enhances (or harms) his or
her writing?

2. Complete each of the following metacommentary templates
in any way that makes sense.

j In making a case for the medical use of marijuana, I am not

saying that .

j But my argument will do more than prove that one particular

industrial chemical has certain toxic properties. In this article,

I will also .

j My point about the national obsessions with sports reinforces

the belief held by many that .

j I believe, therefore, that the war is completely unjustified.

But let me back up and explain how I arrived at this conclu-

sion: . In this way, I came to believe that this war is

a big mistake.

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ELEVEN

“he says contends”

Using the Templates to Revise

One of the most important stages of the writing process
is revision, when you look at a draft with an eye for how well
you’ve made your argument and what you need to do to make
it better. The challenge is to figure out what needs work—and
then what exactly you need to do.
Sometimes you’ll have specific comments and suggestions
from a teacher, noting that you need to state your position more
explicitly, that your point is unclear, that you’ve misunderstood
an author you’re summarizing, and so forth. But what if you
don’t have any such guidance, or aren’t sure what to do with
it? The list of guidelines below offers help and points you back
to relevant advice and templates in this book.
Do you present your argument as a response to what others
say? Do you make reference to other views besides your own? Do
you use voice markers to distinguish clearly for readers between
your views and those of others? In order to make your argument
as convincing as possible, would it help to add more concessions
to opposing views, using “yes but” templates?

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Asking yourself these large-scale revision questions will
help you see how well you’ve managed the “they say / I say”
framework and this in turn should help you see where further
revisions are needed. The checklist below follows the order of
chapters in this book.

How Do You Represent What Others Say?

Do you start with what others say? If not, try revising to do so.
See pp. 23–26 for templates that can help.

Do you summarize or paraphrase what they’ve said? If so, have you
represented their views accurately—and adequately?

Do you quote others? Do you frame each quotation successfully,
integrating it into your text? Does the quotation support your
argument? Have you introduced each quotation adequately,
naming the person you’re quoting (and saying who that per-
son is if your readers won’t know)? Do you explain in your own
words what the quotation means? Do you then clearly indicate
how the quotation bears on your own argument? See pp. 44–46
for tips on creating a “quotation sandwich.”

Check the verbs you use to introduce any summaries and quo-
tations: do they express accurately what was said? If you’ve
used common signal phrases such as “X said” or “Y believes,”
is there a verb that reflects more accurately what was said?
See pp. 39–40 for a list of verbs for introducing summaries
and quotations.

Have you documented all summaries and quotations, both with
parenthetical documentation in your text and a references or
works cited list?

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Do you remind readers of what others say at various points
throughout your text? If not, see pp. 27–28 for help revising
in order to do so.

What Do You Say?

Do you agree, disagree, or both with those you’re responding to?
Have you said so explicitly?

If you disagree, do you give reasons why you disagree? If you
agree, what more have you added to the conversation? If you
both agree and disagree, do you do so without confusing readers
or seeming evasive?

Have you stated your position and the one it responds to as a
connected unit?

What reasons and evidence do you offer to support your “I say”?
In other words, do your argument and the argument you are
responding to—your “I say” and “they say”—address the same
topic or issue, or does a switch occur that takes you on a tan-
gent that will confuse readers? One way to ensure that your
“I say” and “they say” are aligned rather than seeming like ships
passing in the night is to use the same key terms in both. See
Chapter 8 for tips on how to do so.

Will readers be able to distinguish what you say from what
others say? See Chapter 5 for advice about using voice
markers to make that distinction clear, especially at moments
when you are moving from your view to someone else’s view
or back.

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Have You Introduced Any Naysayers?

Have you acknowledged likely objections to your argument?
If so, have you represented these views fairly—and responded
to them persuasively? See Chapter 6 for tips on how to do so.

If not, think about what other perspectives exist on your topic,
and incorporate them into your draft.

Have You Used Metacommentary to Clarify What You
Do or Don’t Mean?

No matter how clearly you’ve explained your points, it’s a good
idea to explain what you mean—or don’t mean—with phrases
like “in other words” or “don’t get me wrong.” See Chapter 10
for examples of how to do so.

Do you have a title? If so, does it tell readers what your main
point or issue is, and does it do so in a lively manner? Should
you add a subtitle to elaborate on the title?

Have You Tied It All Together?

Can readers follow your argument from one sentence and para-
graph to the next and see how each successive point supports
your overall argument?

Check your use of transitions, words like “however” and “therefore.”
Such words make clear how your ideas relate to one another; if
you need to add transitions, see pp. 109–10 for a complete list.

Check your use of pointing words. Do you use common pointers
like “this” and “that,” which help lead readers from one sentence

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to the next? If so, is it always clear what “this” and “that” refer
to, or do you need to add nouns in order to avoid ambiguity?
See pp. 112–14 for help working with pointing words.

Have you used what we call “repetition with a difference” to help
connect parts of your argument? See pp. 114–18 for examples
of how to do so.

Have You Shown Why Your Argument Matters?

Don’t assume that readers will see why your argument is
important—or why they should care. Be sure that you have
told them why. See Chapter 7 if you need help.

a revised student essay

Here is an example of how one student, Antonia Peacocke,
used this book to revise an essay. Starting with an article she’d
written for her high school newspaper, Peacocke then followed
the advice in our book as she turned her article into a college
level academic essay. Her original article was a brief account of
why she liked Family Guy, and her first step in revising was to
open with a “they say” and an “I say,” previewing her overall
argument in brief form at the essay’s beginning. While her
original version had acknowledged that many find the show
“objectionable,” she hadn’t named these people or indicated
why they didn’t like the show. In her revised version, after
doing further research, Peacocke identified those with whom
she disagreed and responded to them at length, as the essay
itself illustrates.

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In addition, Peacocke strengthened existing transitions,
added new ones, and clarified the stakes of her argument, saying
more explicitly why readers should care about whether Family
Guy is good or bad. In making these revisions she gave her own
spin to several templates in this book.
We’ve annotated Peacocke’s essay in the margins to point
out particular rhetorical moves discussed in our book and the
chapters in which those discussions appear. We hope studying
her essay and our annotations will suggest how you might craft
and revise your own writing.
Antonia Peacocke wrote this essay in the summer between
high school and her first year at Harvard. She is now a
PhD student in philosophy at the University of California at
Berkeley.

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Family Guy and Freud: Jokes and
Their Relation to the Unconscious

A N T O N I A P E A C O C K E

While slouching in front of the television after a
long day, you probably don’t think a lot about famous
psychologists of the twentieth century. Somehow, these
figures don’t come up often in prime-time—or even
daytime—TV programming. Whether you’re watching
Living Lohan or the NewsHour, the likelihood is that you
are not thinking of Sigmund Freud, even if you’ve heard
of his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.
I say that you should be.

What made me think of Freud in the first place,
actually, was Family Guy, the cartoon created by Seth
MacFarlane. (Seriously—stay with me here.) Any of
my friends can tell you that this program holds endless
fascination for me; as a matter of fact, my high school
rag-sheet “perfect mate” was the baby Stewie Griffin, a
character on the show (see Fig. 1). Embarrassingly enough,
I have almost reached the point at which I can perform

Responds to
what they say
(Chapter 4)

Metacomment-
ary wards
off potential
skepticism
(Chapter 10)

Starts with
what others
are saying
(Chapter 1)

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one-woman versions of several episodes. I know every
website that streams the show for free, and I still refuse to
return the five Family Guy DVDs a friend lent me in 2006.
Before I was such a devotee, however, I was adamantly
opposed to the program for its particular brand of humor.

It will come as no surprise that I was not alone in this
view; many still denounce Family Guy as bigoted and crude.
New York Times journalist Stuart Elliott claimed just this
year that “the characters on the Fox television series Family
Guy . . . purposely offen[d] just about every group of people

Quotes and
summarizes
what others

say (Chapters
2 and 3)

Fig 1. Peter and Stewie Griffin (Everett Collection)

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you could name.” Likewise Stephen Dubner, co-author of
Freakonomics, called Family Guy “a cartoon comedy that
packs more gags per minute about race, sex, incest, bestiality,
etc. than any other show [he] can think of.” Comparing its
level of offense to that of Don Imus’s infamous comments
about the Rutgers women’s basketball team in the same year,
comments that threw the popular CBS radio talk-show host
off the air, Dubner said he wondered why Imus couldn’t get
away with as much as Family Guy could.

Dubner did not know about all the trouble Family Guy
has had. In fact, it must be one of the few television shows
in history that has been canceled not just once, but twice.
After its premiere in April 1999, the show ran until August
2000, but was besieged by so many complaints, some of
them from MacFarlane’s old high school headmaster, Rev.
Richardson W. Schell, that Fox shelved it until July 2001
(Weinraub). Still afraid of causing a commotion, though,
Fox had the cartoon censored and irregularly scheduled;
as a result, its ratings fell so low that 2002 saw its second
cancellation (Weinraub). But then it came back with a
vengeance—I’ll get into that later.

Family Guy has found trouble more recently, too. In
2007, comedian Carol Burnett sued Fox for 6 million dol-
lars, claiming that the show’s parody of the Charwoman,
a character that she had created for The Carol Burnett
Show, not only violated copyright but also besmirched the

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character’s name in revenge for Burnett’s refusal to grant
permission to use her theme song (“Carol Burnett Sues”).
The suit came after MacFarlane had made the Charwoman
into a cleaning woman for a pornography store in one
episode of Family Guy. Burnett lost, but U.S. district judge
Dean Pregerson agreed that he could “fully appreciate how
distasteful and offensive the segment [was] to Ms. Burnett”
(qtd. in Grossberg).

I must admit, I can see how parts of the show might
seem offensive if taken at face value. Look, for example,
at the mock fifties instructional video that features in the
episode “I Am Peter, Hear Me Roar.”

[The screen becomes black and white. Vapid music
plays in the background. The screen reads “WOMEN IN
THE WORKPLACE ca. 1956,” then switches to a shot of
an office with various women working on typewriters.
A businessman speaks to the camera.]

businessman : Irrational and emotionally fragile by
nature, female coworkers are a peculiar animal. They
are very insecure about their appearance. Be sure to
tell them how good they look every day, even if they’re
homely and unkempt. [He turns to an unattractive female
typist.] You’re doing a great job, Muriel, and you’re
prettier than Mamie van Doren! [She smiles. He grins
at the camera, raising one eyebrow knowingly, and winks.]

Represents
a naysayer’s

objections
fairly

(Chapter 6)

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And remember, nothing says “Good job!” like a firm
open-palm slap on the behind. [He walks past a woman
bent over a file cabinet and demonstrates enthusiastically.
She smiles, looking flattered. He grins at the camera again
as the music comes to an end.]

Laughing at something so blatantly sexist could cause
anyone a pang of guilt, and before I thought more about
the show this seemed to be a huge problem. I agreed with
Dubner, and I failed to see how anyone could laugh at such
jokes without feeling at least slightly ashamed.

Soon, though, I found myself forced to give Family Guy
a chance. It was simply everywhere: my brother and many of
my friends watched it religiously, and its devoted fans relent-
lessly proselytized for it. In case you have any doubts about
its immense popularity, consider these facts. On Facebook,
the universal forum for my generation, there are currently
23 separate Family Guy fan groups with a combined member-
ship of 1,669 people (compared with only 6 groups protesting
against Family Guy, with 105 members total). Users of the
well-respected Internet Movie Database rate the show 8.8
out of 10. The box-set DVDs were the best-selling television
DVDs of 2003 in the United States (Moloney). Among the
public and within the industry, the show receives fantastic
acclaim; it has won eight awards, including three prime-
time Emmys (IMDb). Most importantly, each time it was
cancelled fans provided the brute force necessary to get it

Agrees,
but with a
difference
(Chapter 4)

Anticipates
a naysayer’s
skepticism
(Chapter 6)

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back on the air. In 2000, online campaigns did the trick; in
2002, devotees demonstrated outside Fox Studios, refused to
watch the Fox network, and boycotted any companies that
advertised on it (Moloney). Given the show’s high profile,
both with my friends and family and in the world at large, it
would have been more work for me to avoid the Griffin fam-
ily than to let myself sink into their animated world.

With more exposure, I found myself crafting a more pos-
itive view of Family Guy. Those who don’t often watch the
program, as Dubner admits he doesn’t, could easily come to
think that the cartoon takes pleasure in controversial humor
just for its own sake. But those who pay more attention and
think about the creators’ intentions can see that Family Guy
intelligently satirizes some aspects of American culture.

Some of this satire is actually quite obvious. Take, for
instance, a quip Brian the dog makes about Stewie’s liter-
ary choices in a fourth-season episode, “PTV.” (Never mind
that a dog and a baby can both read and hold lengthy
conversations.)

[The Griffins are in their car. Brian turns to Stewie, who
sits reading in his car seat.]

brian : East of Eden? So you, you, you pretty much do
whatever Oprah tells you to, huh?
stewie : You know, this book’s been around for fifty
years. It’s a classic.

Distinguishes
between what
others say and
what she says

(Chapter 5)

Mixes
academic and

colloquial
styles

(Chapter 9)

Uses a
quotation
sandwich

to explicate
this excerpt
(Chapter 3)

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brian : But you just got it last week. And there’s a giant
Oprah sticker on the front.
stewie : Oh—oh—oh, is that what that is? Oh, lemme
just peel that right off.
brian : So, uh, what are you gonna read after that one?
stewie : Well, she hasn’t told us yet—damn!

Brian and Stewie demonstrate insightfully and comically
how Americans are willing to follow the instructions of a
celebrity blindly—and less willing to admit that they are
doing so.

The more off-color jokes, though, those that give
Family Guy a bad name, attract a different kind of viewer.
Such viewers are not “rats in a behaviorist’s maze,” as
Slate writer Dana Stevens labels modern American televi-
sion consumers in her article “Thinking Outside the Idiot
Box.” They are conscious and critical viewers, akin to the
“screenagers” identified by Douglas Rushkoff in an essay
entitled “Bart Simpson: Prince of Irreverence” (294). They
are not—and this I cannot stress enough, self-serving as it
may seem—immoral or easily manipulated people.

Rushkoff’s piece analyzes the humor of The Simpsons, a
show criticized for many of the same reasons as Family Guy.
“The people I call ‘screenagers,’ ” Rushkoff explains, “. . .
speak the media language better than their parents do and
they see through clumsy attempts to program them into
submission” (294). He claims that gaming technology has

Distinguishes
what others
say from what
she says
(Chapter 5)

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made my generation realize that television is programmed
for us with certain intentions; since we can control
characters in the virtual world, we are more aware that
characters on TV are similarly controlled. “Sure, [these
‘screenagers’] might sit back and watch a program now and
again,” Rushkoff explains, “but they do so voluntarily, and
with full knowledge of their complicity. It is not an invol-
untary surrender” (294). In his opinion, our critical eyes
and our unwillingness to be programmed by the program-
mers make for an entirely new relationship with the shows
we watch. Thus we enjoy The Simpsons’ parodies of mass
media culture since we are skeptical of it ourselves.

Rushkoff’s argument about The Simpsons actually
applies to Family Guy as well, except in one dimen-
sion: Rushkoff writes that The Simpsons’ creators do “not
comment on social issues as much as they [do on] the
media imagery around a particular social issue” (296).
MacFarlane and company seem to do the reverse. Trusting
in their viewers’ ability to analyze what they are watch-
ing, the creators of Family Guy point out the weaknesses
and defects of US society in a mocking and sometimes
intolerant way.

Taken in this light, the “instructional video” quoted
above becomes not only funny but also insightful. In its sat-
ire, viewers can recognize the sickly sweet and falsely sensi-
tive sexism of the 1950s in observing just how conveniently

Uses
transitions
to connect

the parts
(Chapter 8)

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self-serving the speaker of the video appears. The message
of the clip denounces and ridicules sexism rather than
condoning it. It is an excerpt that perfectly exemplifies the
bold-faced candor of the show, from which it derives a lot of
its appeal.

Making such comically outrageous remarks on the air
also serves to expose certain prejudiced attitudes as outra-
geous themselves. Taking these comments at face value
would be as foolish as taking Jonathan Swift’s “Modest
Proposal” seriously. Furthermore, while they put bigoted
words into the mouths of their characters, the show’s
writers cannot be accused of portraying these characters
positively. Peter Griffin, the “family guy” of the show’s
title, probably says and does the most offensive things of
all—but as a lazy, overweight, and insensitive failure of a
man, he is hardly presented as someone to admire. Nobody
in his or her right mind would observe Peter’s behavior and
deem it worth emulation.

Family Guy has its own responses to accusations
of crudity. In the episode “PTV,” Peter sets up his own
television station broadcasting from home and the Griffin
family finds itself confronting the Federal Communications
Commission directly (see Fig. 2 for a picture of the whole
family). The episode makes many tongue-in-cheek jabs
at the FCC, some of which are sung in a rousing musical
number, but also sneaks in some of the creator’s own

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opinions. The plot comes to a climax when the FCC
begins to censor “real life” in the town of Quahog; officials
place black censor bars in front of newly showered Griffins
and blow foghorns whenever characters curse. MacFarlane
makes an important point: that no amount of television
censorship will ever change the harsh nature of reality—
and to censor reality is mere folly. Likewise, he puts explicit
arguments about censorship into lines spoken by his

Fig 2. The Griffin Family Watches TV. (Everett Collection)

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characters, as when Brian says that “responsibility lies with
the parents [and] there are plenty of things that are much
worse for children than television.”

It must be said too that not all of Family Guy’s humor
could be construed as offensive. Some of its jokes are more
tame and insightful, the kind you might expect from The
New Yorker. The following light commentary on the useful-
ness of high school algebra from “When You Wish Upon a
Weinstein” could hardly be accused of upsetting anyone—
except, perhaps, a few high school math teachers.

[Shot of Peter on the couch and his son Chris lying at his
feet and doing homework.]

chris : Dad, can you help me with my math? [My
teacher] says if I don’t learn it, I won’t be able to func-
tion in the real world.

[Shot of Chris standing holding a map in a run-down gas
station next to an attendant in overalls and a trucker cap
reading “PUMP THIS.” The attendant speaks with a
Southern accent and gestures casually to show the different
road configurations.]

attendant : Okay, now what you gotta do is go down
the road past the old Johnson place, and you’re gonna
find two roads, one parallel and one perpendicular.
Now keep going until you come to a highway that

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bisects it at a 45-degree angle. [Crosses his arms.] Solve
for x.

[Shot of Chris lying on the ground next to the attendant in
fetal position, sucking his thumb. His map lies abandoned
near him.]

In fact, Family Guy does not aim to hurt, and its creators
take certain measures to keep it from hitting too hard.
In an interview on Access Hollywood, Seth MacFarlane
plainly states that there are certain jokes too upsetting to
certain groups to go on the air. Similarly, to ensure that
the easily misunderstood show doesn’t fall into the hands
of those too young to understand it, Fox will not license
Family Guy rights to any products intended for children
under the age of fourteen (Elliott).

However, this is not to say that MacFarlane’s mission
is corrective or noble. It is worth remembering that he
wants only to amuse, a goal for which he was criticized
by several of his professors at the Rhode Island School of
Design (Weinraub). For this reason, his humor can be dan-
gerous. On the one hand, I don’t agree with George Will’s
reductive and generalized statement in his article “Reality
Television: Oxymoron” that “entertainment seeking a mass
audience is ratcheting up the violence, sexuality, and deg-
radation, becoming increasingly coarse and trying to be . . .
shocking in an unshockable society.” I believe Family Guy

Uses
transitions
to connect

the parts
(Chapter 8)

Agrees and
disagrees;

makes
concessions

while standing
her ground
(Chapters 4

and 6)

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has its intelligent points, and some of its seemingly “coarse”
scenes often have hidden merit. I must concede, though,
that a few of the show’s scenes seem to be doing just what
Will claims; sometimes the creators do seem to cross—or,
perhaps, eagerly race past—the line of indecency. In one
such crude scene, an elderly dog slowly races a paraplegic
and Peter, who has just been hit by a car, to get to a sev-
ered finger belonging to Peter himself (“Whistle While
Your Wife Works”). Nor do I find it particularly funny
when Stewie physically abuses Brian in a bloody fight over
gambling money (“Patriot Games”).

Thus, while Family Guy can provide a sort of relief by
breaking down taboos, we must still wonder whether or not
these taboos exist for a reason. An excess of offensive jokes,
especially those that are often misconstrued, can seem to
grant tacit permission to think offensively if it’s done for
comedy— and laughing at others’ expense can be cruel,
no matter how funny. Jokes all have their origins, and the
funniest ones are those that hit home the hardest; if we
listen to Freud, these are the ones that let our animalistic
and aggressive impulses surface from the unconscious. The
distinction between a shamelessly candid but insightful joke
and a merely shameless joke is a slight but important one.
While I love Family Guy as much as any fan, it’s important
not to lose sight of what’s truly unfunny in real life—even
as we appreciate what is hilarious in fiction.

Concludes by
showing who
cares and why
her argument
matters
(Chapter 7)

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Works Cited
“Carole Burnett Sues over Family Guy Parody.” CBC, 16 Mar.

2007, www.cbc.ca/news/arts/carol-burnett-sues-over-
family-guy-parody-1.693570. Accessed 14 July 2008.

Dubner, Stephen J. “Why Is Family Guy Okay When
Imus Wasn’t?” Freakonomics Blog, 3 Dec. 2007,
freakonomics.com. Accessed 14 July 2008.

Elliott, Stuart. “Crude? So What? These Characters Still
Find Work in Ads.” New York Times, 19 June 2008,
nyti.ms/2bZWSAs. Accessed 14 July 2008.

Facebook search for Family Guy under “Groups.” www
.facebook.com. Accessed 14 July 2008.

Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.
1905. Translated by James Strachey, W. W. Norton, 1989.

Grossberg, Josh. “Carole Burnett Can’t Stop Stewie.”
E! News, Entertainment Television, 5 June 2007,
www.eonline.com. Accessed 14 July 2008.

“I Am Peter, Hear Me Roar.” Family Guy, season 2, episode 8,
20th Century Fox, 28 Mar. 2000. Hulu, www.hulu.com/
watch/171050. Accessed 14 July 2008.

“Family Guy.” IMDb, IMDb, 1999–2016, www.imdb.com/
title/tt0182576. Accessed 14 July 2008.

MacFarlane, Seth. Interview. Access Hollywood, NBC
Universal, 8 May 2007. YouTube, www.youtube.com/
watch?v=rKURWCicyQU. Accessed 14 July 2008.

Moloney, Ben Adam. “Family Guy.” BBC.com, 30 Sept.
2004, www.bbc.com. Accessed 14 July 2008.

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“Patriot Games.” Family Guy, season 4, episode 20,
20th Century Fox, 29 Jan. 2006. Hulu, www.hulu.com/
watch/171089. Accessed 22 July 2008.

“PVT.” Family Guy, season 4, episode 14, 20th Century Fox,
6 Nov. 2005. Hulu, www.hulu.com/watch/171083.
Accessed 14 July 2008.

Rushkoff, Douglas. “Bart Simpson: Prince of Irreverence.”
Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of
Oppositional Culture, edited by John Alberti, Wayne
State UP, 2004, pp. 292–301.

Stevens, Dana. “Thinking Outside the Idiot Box.” Slate,
25 Mar. 2005, www.slate.com/articles/news_and_
politics/surfergirl/2005/04/thinkingoutside_the_
idiot_box.html. Accessed 14 July 2008.

Weinraub, Bernard. “The Young Guy of ‘Family Guy’: A
30-Year-Old’s Cartoon Hit Makes an Unexpected
Comeback.” New York Times, 7 July 2004, nyti.ms/
1IEBiUA. Accessed 14 July 2008.

“When You Wish Upon a Weinstein.” Family Guy, season 3,
episode 22, 20th Century Fox, 9 Nov. 2003. Hulu,
www.hulu.com/watch/171136. Accessed 22 July 2008.

“Whistle While Your Wife Works.” Family Guy, season 5,
episode 5, 20th Century Fox, 12 Nov. 2006. Hulu,
www.hulu.com/watch/171160. Accessed 22 July 2008.

Will, George F. “Reality Television: Oxymoron.” Washington
Post, 21 June 2001, p. A25.

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4
H

IN SPECIFIC
ACADEMIC CONTEXTS

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TWELVE

“i take your point”

Entering Class Discussions

Have you ever been in a class discussion that feels less like
a genuine meeting of the minds than like a series of discrete,
disconnected monologues? You make a comment, say, that
seems provocative to you, but the classmate who speaks after
you makes no reference to what you said, instead going off in
an entirely different direction. Then, the classmate who speaks
next makes no reference either to you or to any one else, making
it seem as if everyone in the conversation is more interested in
their own ideas than in actually conversing with anyone else.
We like to think that the principles this book advances can
help improve class discussions, which increasingly include various
forms of online communication. Particularly important for class
discussion is the point that our own ideas become more cogent
and powerful the more responsive we are to others, and the more
we frame our claims not in isolation but as responses to what
others before us have said. Ultimately, then, a good face-to-face
classroom discussion (or online communication) doesn’t just hap-
pen spontaneously. It requires the same sorts of disciplined moves
and practices used in many writing situations, particularly that of
identifying to what and to whom you are responding.

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frame your comments as a response
to something that has already been said

The single most important thing you need to do when joining a
class discussion is to link what you are about to say to something
that has already been said.

j I really liked Aaron’s point about the two sides being closer than

they seem. I’d add that both seem rather moderate.

j I take your point, Nadia, that . Still . . .

j Though Sheila and Ryan seem to be at odds about ,

they may actually not be all that far apart.

In framing your comments this way, it is usually best to name
both the person and the idea you’re responding to. If you name
the person alone (“I agree with Aaron because ”),
it may not be clear to listeners what part of what Aaron
said you are referring to. Conversely, if you only summa-
rize what Aaron said without naming him, you’ll probably
leave your classmates wondering whose comments you’re
referring to.
But won’t you sound stilted and deeply redundant in
class if you try to restate the point your classmate just made?
After all, in the case of the first template above, the entire
class will have just heard Aaron’s point about the two sides
being closer than they seem. Why then would you need to
restate it?
We agree that in oral situations, it does often sound artificial
to restate what others just said precisely because they just said
it. It would be awkward if, on being asked to pass the salt at

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lunch, one were to reply: “If I understand you correctly, you
have asked me to pass the salt. Yes, I can, and here it is.” But
in oral discussions about complicated issues that are open to
multiple interpretations, we usually do need to resummarize
what others have said to make sure that everyone is on the
same page. Since Aaron may have made several points when
he spoke and may have been followed by other commentators,
the class will probably need you to summarize which point of his
you are referring to. And even if Aaron made only one point,
restating that point is helpful, not only to remind the group
what his point was (since some may have missed or forgotten it)
but also to make sure that he, you, and others have interpreted
his point in the same way.

to change the subject,
indicate explicitly that you are doing so

It is fine to try to change the conversation’s direction. There’s
just one catch: you need to make clear to listeners that this is
what you are doing. For example:

j So far we have been talking about the characters in the film. But

isn’t the real issue here the cinematography?

j I’d like to change the subject to one that hasn’t yet been

addressed.

You can try to change the subject without indicating that you
are doing so. But you risk that your comment will come across as
irrelevant rather than as a thoughtful contribution that moves
the conversation forward.

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be even more explicit
than you would be in writing

Because listeners in an oral discussion can’t go back and reread
what you just said, they are more easily overloaded than are
readers of a print text. For this reason, in a class discussion you
will do well to take some extra steps to help listeners follow
your train of thought. (1) When you make a comment, limit
yourself to one point only though you can elaborate on this
point, fleshing it out with examples and evidence. If you feel
you must make two points, either unite them under one larger
umbrella point, or make one point first and save the other for
later. Trying to bundle two or more claims into one comment
can result in neither getting the attention it deserves. (2) Use
metacommentary to highlight your key point so that listeners
can readily grasp it.

j In other words, what I’m trying to get at here is .

j My point is this: .

j My point, though, is not , but .

j This distinction is important because .

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THIRTEEN

“imho”

Is Digital Communication

Good or Bad—or Both?

You may wonder what our advice in this book about enter-
ing conversations and debates has to do with one of the major
innovations in our society, the online technologies through
which we now do much of our reading and writing. You may
have heard parents and journalists complain that smartphones,
iPads, and other electronic devices that seem almost wired into
our brains are destroying our ability to think, communicate,
and interact with others. At the same time, you’ve also prob-
ably heard counterarguments to the effect that, on the con-
trary, these digital technologies actually stretch the mind, bring
people together, and even make us better writers.
These arguments are part of a set of interrelated debates
that are taking place today, sometimes in the blogosphere itself,
among journalists, academic researchers, and other commenta-
tors. In some of these debates, those who extol their virtues
argue that today’s new online technologies make us smarter by

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t h i r t e e n t h i r t e e n “ I M H O ”

exposing us to a wide range of perspectives and giving us instant
access to massive stores of new information. Whereas once we
would have had to spend hours burrowing through dusty library
shelves to find the information we need, today we can access
the same information with a click of a mouse in the comfort
of our homes. Thanks to the internet, our potential knowledge
is now thousands of times greater than ever before. How could
such a development not be a huge plus for any writer?
The critics, however, retort that, far from making us smarter,
online technologies are actually making us dumber, even in
our capacity as writers. According to these critics, many online
researchers end their investigations at the first entry that comes
up in a Google search (often in Wikipedia), and the constraints
of email, text messaging, and tweeting force us to communicate
in reductive sound bites and inane abbreviations (OMG! LOL!
IMHO!). The critics also charge that the very volume of new
information that the web makes so easily available overwhelms
us and prevents us from thinking clearly. So much comes at
us so fast from electronic sources that we can no longer think
straight or organize our thoughts into clear writing. The greater
the mountain of information we have at our fingertips, say the
critics, the less chance there is that we will find the fraction of
it that is most valuable and useful to focus on and respond to.
As a result, according to one critic, researcher Clifford Nass,
the multitasking encouraged by the web and other digital tech-
nologies is making student writers less able to sustain a “big
idea” in an essay and more prone to write in “little bursts and
snippets.”
Yet many challenge this pessimistic view. Rhetoric and
composition professor Andrea Lunsford rejects the notion
that “Google is making us stupid,” that “Facebook is frying our

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brains,” and that the web is depriving students of the ability to
express ideas (qtd. in Haven). According to Lunsford, reporting
on a five-year research project, the Stanford Study of Writing,
student writers today are remarkably “adept at crafting messages
that will reach their intended audience because of their con-
stant use of social media” (Lunsford). That is, today’s students
are proficient “at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their
audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get
their point across” (Thompson).
There is also disagreement over whether online technolo-
gies create or undermine genuine conversation and commu-
nity. On the one hand, some praise the web for its ability to
bring people from distant places together who otherwise would
remain strangers, enabling them to interact more easily with
others through such mediums as email, blogs, videochat, and
social networking sites. Those who make this argument might
claim that our advice in this book to present your ideas as a
response to the ideas of others lends itself well to online com-
munication. After all, the internet allows us to post something
and then get quick, even instantaneous responses. It also allows
us more easily to access multiple perspectives on any topic and
then directly insert the voices of others into our text in links
that readers can click on.
Critics, on the other hand, question the quality of the conver-
sations that take place online, arguing that these conversations
are rarely genuine meetings of minds and noting that online
writers often speak past rather than to or with one another.
Because online writers can hit “send” before reflecting, as writ-
ers more likely would using slower and more deliberate print
media, these critics charge that true debate in which the vari-
ous parties really listen to one another is exceedingly rare on

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t h i r t e e n t h i r t e e n “ I M H O ”

the web. In other words, communicating online tends to under-
mine true conversation because writers can too easily dismiss
or ignore other points of view, and thus are more likely to
engage in egotistical monologues in which they use what others
say as a pretext for expounding their own already established
opinions.
So go some of the arguments pro and con about the impact
of online technologies on our thinking and our communicative
habits, including our writing. Though we agree that the internet
has given us access to previously unimaginable stores of infor-
mation and greatly expanded our range of communication—
and that it potentially broadens our perspectives—we think
the critics have a point in noting that many conversations on
the web are not exchanges so much as monologues in which
writers pass one another without intersecting. We ourselves
have been dismayed when our own online articles have drawn
comments that begin, “I haven’t read Graff and Birkenstein’s
article, but in my opinion. . . .” In our view, the best remedy
for such failures of communication is to improve the listening
and summarizing skills we emphasize in this book, whether
these skills are practiced online, offline, or even on a stone
tablet.
As for how these digital technologies have influenced stu-
dent writing, our own view, based on the writing we have seen
in our combined seventy years of teaching, is that that this
influence is neither disastrous, as the critics fear, nor won-
derfully revolutionary, as the proponents claim. Contrary to
Nass, student writers found it challenging to sustain a “big idea”
long before the advent of the worldwide web, and, contrary to
Lunsford, we see no evidence that tweeting and posting have
made writers more adept at reaching audiences. As we see it,

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online technologies only recycle any difficulties writers have
reaching audiences; if a writer has trouble reaching audiences
in one medium, he or she will have it in another. A student
of ours, for example, writing to an audience of his classmates
on a course listserv, began a post in the following way:

“Going off what Meg said, I would argue…”

His audience was mystified, since nobody, including Meg
herself, could remember what she had said. As this incident
illustrates, the immediacy of online writing—not just in course
listservs, but in emails, social media, and so forth—makes it
appear so much like oral communication that we are seduced
into forgetting that it is still a form of writing and therefore very
often requires the mastery of formal conventions, in this case
that of summarizing what has previously been said. It is hard
to imagine any writer, as we have already suggested, who does
not struggle with the rhetorical moves of argument, from sum-
marizing, explaining, and quoting what others say to responding
to what they say, and the myriad other competencies covered
in this book.
Our purpose in this brief chapter, however, is not to try
to settle these debates, but to invite you to think about how
digital technologies affect your work as a reader and writer.
Do these technologies make it easier to join conversations?
Do they improve or degrade your thinking and writing? What
is your opinion and why? To help you answer these questions,
we conclude, then, with a couple of exercises that invite you
to pick up where we have left off—and, as Kenneth Burke said,
to put in your own oar.

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t h i r t e e n t h i r t e e n “ I M H O ”

Works Cited

Haven, Cynthia. “The New Literacy: Stanford Study Finds Richness and
Complexity in Students’ Writing.” Stanford Report, Stanford University,
12 Oct. 2009, news.stanford.edu/pr/2009/pr-lunsford-writing-101209
.html. Accessed 14 Nov. 2013.

Lunsford, Andrea. “Everyone’s an Author.” W. W. Norton Sales Conference,
5 Aug. 2012, Park City.

Nass, Clifford. Interview. Frontline, WBGH, 1 Dec. 2009. PBS, www.pbs.org/
wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/interviews/nass.html. Accessed
14 Nov. 2013.

Thompson, Clive. “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy.” Wired, 24 Aug.
2009, www.wired.com/2009/08/st-thompson-7. Accessed 14 Nov. 2013.

Exercises

1. Have we formulated the debatable issues above in a useful
way? Have we left out anything important? Write an essay
in which you summarize some of our commentary as your
“they say” and offer your own response, whether to disagree,
agree with a difference, or reframe the issues in some way.

2. As a test case for thinking about the questions raised in
this chapter, go to the blog that accompanies this book,
theysayiblog.com. Examine some of the exchanges that
appear there and evaluate the quality of the responses. For
example, how well do the participants in these exchanges
summarize one another’s claims before making their own
responses? How would you characterize any discussion? Is
there a true meeting of the minds or are writers sometimes
caricatured or treated as straw men? How do these online dis-
cussions compare with the face-to-face discussions you have
in class? What advantages does each offer? Go to other blogs
on topics that interest you and ask these same questions.

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FOURTEEN

“what’s motivating this writer?”

Reading for the Conversation

“What is the author’s argument? What is he or she
trying to say?” For many years, these were the first questions we
would ask our classes in a discussion of an assigned reading. The
discussion that resulted was often halting, as our students strug-
gled to get a handle on the argument, but eventually, after some
awkward silences, the class would come up with something we
could all agree was an accurate summary of the author’s main
thesis. Even after we’d gotten over that hurdle, however, the
discussion would often still seem forced, and would limp along
as we all struggled with the question that naturally arose next:
Now that we had determined what the author was saying, what
did we ourselves have to say?
For a long time we didn’t worry much about these halting
discussions, justifying them to ourselves as the predictable result
of assigning difficult, challenging readings. Several years ago,
however, as we started writing this book and began thinking
about writing as the art of entering conversations, we latched
onto the idea of leading with some different questions: “What
other argument(s) is the writer responding to?” “Is the writer

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disagreeing or agreeing with something, and if so what?” “What
is motivating the writer’s argument?” “Are there other ideas
that you have encountered in this class or elsewhere that might
be pertinent?” The results were often striking. The discussions
that followed tended to be far livelier and to draw in a greater
number of students. We were still asking students to look for
the main argument, but we were now asking them to see that
argument as a response to some other argument that provoked
it, gave it a reason for being, and helped all of us see why we
should care about it.
What had happened, we realized, was that by changing
the opening question, we changed the way our students
approached reading, and perhaps the way they thought about
academic work in general. Instead of thinking of the argu-
ment of a text as an isolated entity, they now thought of that
argument as one that responded to and provoked other argu-
ments. Since they were now dealing not with one argument
but at least two (the author’s argument and the one[s] he or
she was responding to), they now had alternative ways of see-
ing the topic at hand. This meant that, instead of just trying
to understand the view presented by the author, they were
more able to question that view intelligently and engage in
the type of discussion and debate that is the hallmark of a
college education. In our discussions, animated debates often
arose between students who found the author’s argument con-
vincing and others who were more convinced by the view it
was challenging. In the best of these debates, the binary posi-
tions would be questioned by other students, who suggested
each was too simple, that both might be right or that a third
alternative was possible. Still other students might object that
the discussion thus far had missed the author’s real point and

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suggest that we all go back to the text and pay closer attention
to what it actually said.
We eventually realized that the move from reading for the
author’s argument in isolation to reading for how the author’s
argument is in conversation with the arguments of others helps
readers become active, critical readers rather than passive recip-
ients of knowledge. On some level, reading for the conversa-
tion is more rigorous and demanding than reading for what
one author says. It asks that you determine not only what the
author thinks, but how what the author thinks fits with what
others think, and ultimately with what you yourself think. Yet
on another level, reading this way is a lot simpler and more
familiar than reading for the thesis alone, since it returns writ-
ing to the familiar, everyday act of communicating with other
people about real issues.

deciphering the conversation

We suggest, then, that when assigned a reading, you imagine
the author not as sitting alone in an empty room hunched
over a desk or staring at a screen, but as sitting in a crowded
coffee shop talking to others who are making claims that he
or she is engaging with. In other words, imagine the author as
participating in an ongoing, multisided, conversation in which
everyone is trying to persuade others to agree or at least to take
his or her position seriously.
The trick in reading for the conversation is to figure out
what views the author is responding to and what the author’s own
argument is—or, to put it in the terms used in this book, to
determine the “they say” and how the author responds to it.

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One of the challenges in reading for the “they say” and “I say”
can be figuring out which is which, since it may not be obvious
when writers are summarizing others and when they are speak-
ing for themselves. Readers need to be alert for any changes in
voice that a writer might make, since instead of using explicit
road-mapping phrases like “although many believe,” authors
may simply summarize the view that they want to engage with
and indicate only subtly that it is not their own.
Consider again the opening to the selection by David
Zinczenko on p. 462.

If ever there were a newspaper headline custom made for Jay Leno’s
monologue, this was it. Kids taking on McDonald’s this week, suing
the company for making them fat. Isn’t that like middle-aged men
suing Porsche for making them get speeding tickets? Whatever
happened to personal responsibility?
I tend to sympathize with these portly fast-food patrons, though.
Maybe that’s because I used to be one of them.

David Zinczenko, “Don’t Blame the Eater”

Whenever we teach this passage, some students inevitably
assume that Zinczenko must be espousing the view expressed

in his first paragraph: that suing McDonald’s is ridicu-
lous. When their reading is challenged by their class-
mates, these students point to the page and reply,

“Look. It’s right here on the page. This is what Zinczenko
wrote. These are his exact words.” The assumption these stu-
dents are making is that if something appears on the page,
the author must endorse it. In fact, however, we ventrilo-
quize views that we don’t believe in, and may in fact pas-
sionately disagree with, all the time. The central clues that
Zinczenko disagrees with the view expressed in his opening

See Chapter 6
for more

discussion of
naysayers.

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paragraph come in the second paragraph, when he finally
offers a first-person declaration and uses a constrastive transi-
tion, “though,” thereby resolving any questions about where
he stands.

when the “they say” is unstated

Another challenge can be identifying the “they say” when it is
not explicitly identified. Whereas Zinczenko offers an up-front
summary of the view he is responding to, other writers assume
that their readers are so familiar with these views that they need
not name or summarize them. In such cases, you the reader
have to reconstruct the unstated “they say” that is motivating
the text through a process of inference.
See, for instance, if you can reconstruct the position that
Tamara Draut is challenging in the opening paragraph of her
essay “The Growing College Gap.”

“The first in her family to graduate from college.” How many times
have we heard that phrase, or one like it, used to describe a success-
ful American with a modest background? In today’s United States, a
four-year degree has become the all-but-official ticket to middle-class
security. But if your parents don’t have much money or higher edu-
cation in their own right, the road to college—and beyond—looks
increasingly treacherous. Despite a sharp increase in the proportion of
high school graduates going on to some form of postsecondary educa-
tion, socio-economic status continues to exert a powerful influence on
college admission and completion; in fact, gaps in enrollment by class
and race, after declining in the 1960s and 1970s, are once again as
wide as they were thirty years ago, and getting wider, even as college
has become far more crucial to lifetime fortunes.

Tamara Draut, “The Growing College Gap”

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You might think that the “they say” here is embedded in the
third sentence: They say (or we all think) that a four-year
degree is “the all-but-official ticket to middle-class security,”
and you might assume that Draut will go on to disagree.
If you read the passage this way, however, you would be
mistaken. Draut is not questioning whether a college degree has
become “the ticket to middle-class security,” but whether most
Americans can obtain that ticket, whether college is within the
financial reach of most American families. You may have been
thrown off by the “but” following the statement that college
has become a prerequisite for middle-class security. However,
unlike the “though” in Zinczenko’s opening, this “but” does
not signal that Draut will be disagreeing with the view she has
just summarized, a view that in fact she takes as a given. What
Draut disagrees with is that this ticket to middle-class security
is still readily available to the middle and working classes.
Were one to imagine Draut in a room talking with others
with strong views on this topic, one would need to picture her
challenging not those who think college is a ticket to financial
security (something she agrees with and takes for granted), but
those who think the doors of college are open to anyone willing
to put forth the effort to walk through them. The view that
Draut is challenging, then, is not summarized in her opening.
Instead, she assumes that readers are already so familiar with
this view that it need not be stated.
Draut’s example suggests that in texts where the central “they
say” is not immediately identified, you have to construct it your-
self based on the clues the text provides. You have to start by
locating the writer’s thesis and then imagine some of the argu-
ments that might be made against it. What would it look like
to disagree with this view? In Draut’s case, it is relatively easy
to construct a counterargument: it is the familiar faith in the

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American Dream of equal opportunity when it comes to access
to college. Figuring out the counterargument not only reveals
what motivated Draut as a writer but helps you respond to her
essay as an active, critical reader. Constructing this counter-
argument can also help you recognize how Draut challenges
your own views, questioning opinions that you previously took
for granted.

when the “they say” is about something
“nobody has talked about”

Another challenge in reading for the conversation is that writ-
ers sometimes build their arguments by responding to a lack
of discussion. These writers build their case not by playing off
views that can be identified (like faith in the American Dream
or the idea that we are responsible for our body weight), but by
pointing to something others have overlooked. As the writing
theorists John M. Swales and Christine B. Feak point out, one
effective way to “create a research space” and “establish a niche”
in the academic world is “by indicating a gap in . . . previous
research.” Much research in the sciences and humanities takes
this “Nobody has noticed X” form.
In such cases, the writer may be responding to scientists,
for example, who have overlooked an obscure plant that offers
insights into global warming, or to literary critics who have been
so busy focusing on the lead character in a play that they have
overlooked something important about the minor characters.

reading particularly challenging texts

Sometimes it is difficult to figure out the views that writers
are responding to not because these writers do not identify

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those views but because their language and the concepts they
are dealing with are particularly challenging. Consider, for
instance, the first two sentences of Gender Trouble: Feminism
and the Subversion of Identity, a book by the feminist philosopher
and literary theorist Judith Butler, thought by many to be a
particularly difficult academic writer.

Contemporary feminist debates over the meaning of gender lead
time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy
of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism.
Perhaps trouble need not carry such a negative valence.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

There are many reasons readers may stumble over this relatively
short passage, not the least of which is that Butler does not
explicitly indicate where her own view begins and the view
she is responding to ends. Unlike Zinczenko, Butler does not
use the first-person “I” or a phrase such as “in my own view” to
show that the position in the second sentence is her own. Nor
does Butler offer a clear transition such as “but” or “however” at
the start of the second sentence to indicate, as Zinczenko does
with “though,” that in the second sentence she is questioning
the argument she has summarized in the first. And finally, like
many academic writers, Butler uses abstract, unfamiliar words
that many readers may need to look up, like “gender” (sexual
identity, male or female), “indeterminacy” (the quality of being
impossible to define or pin down), “culminate” (finally result
in), and “negative valence” (a term borrowed from chemistry,
roughly denoting “negative significance” or “meaning”). For all

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these reasons, we can imagine many readers feeling intimidated
before they reach the third sentence of Butler’s book.
But readers who break down this passage into its essential
parts will find that it is actually a lucid piece of writing that
conforms to the classic “they say / I say” pattern. Though it can
be difficult to spot the clashing arguments in the two sentences,
close analysis reveals that the first sentence offers a way of
looking at a certain type of “trouble” in the realm of feminist
politics that is being challenged in the second.
To understand difficult passages of this kind, you need to
translate them into your own words—to build a bridge, in effect,
between the passage’s unfamiliar terms and ones more familiar
to you. Building such a bridge should help you connect what
you already know to what the author is saying—and will then
help you move from reading to writing, providing you with
some of the language you will need to summarize the text. One
major challenge in translating the author’s words into your own,
however, is to stay true to what the author is actually saying,
avoiding what we call “the closest cliché syndrome,” in which
one mistakes a commonplace idea for an author’s more complex
one (mistaking Butler’s critique of the concept of “woman,” for
instance, for the common idea that women must have equal
rights). The work of complex writers like Butler, who frequently
challenge conventional thinking, cannot always be
collapsed into the types of ideas most of us are already
familiar with. Therefore, when you translate, do not
try to fit the ideas of such writers into your preexisting beliefs,
but instead allow your own views to be challenged. In building
a bridge to the writers you read, it is often necessary to meet
those writers more than halfway.
So what, then, does Butler’s opening say? Translating But-
ler’s words into terms that are easier to understand, we can

For more on the
closest cliché
syndrome,
see Chapter 2.

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see that the first sentence says that for many feminists today,
“the indeterminacy of gender”—the inability to define the
essence of sexual identity—spells the end of feminism; that
for many feminists the inability to define “gender,” presumably
the building block of the feminist movement, means serious
“trouble” for feminist politics. In contrast, the second sen-
tence suggests that this same “trouble” need not be thought of
in such “negative” terms, that the inability to define feminin-
ity, or “gender trouble” as Butler calls it in her book’s title,
may not be such a bad thing—and, as she goes on to argue
in the pages that follow, may even be something that femi-
nist activists can profit from. In other words, Butler suggests,
highlighting uncertainties about masculinity and femininity
can be a powerful feminist tool.
Pulling all these inferences together, then, the opening sen-
tences can be translated as follows: “While many contempo-
rary feminists believe that uncertainty about what it means to
be a woman will undermine feminist politics, I, Judith Butler,
believe that this uncertainty can actually help strengthen femi-
nist politics.” Translating Butler’s point into our own book’s
basic move: “They say that if we cannot define ‘woman,’ femi-
nism is in big trouble. But I say that this type of trouble is
precisely what feminism needs.” Despite its difficulty, then,
we hope you agree that this initially intimidating passage does
make sense if you stay with it.
We hope it is clear that critical reading is a two-way street.
It is just as much about being open to the way that writers
can challenge you, maybe even transform you, as it is about
questioning those writers. And if you translate a writer’s argu-
ment into your own words as you read, you should allow the
text to take you outside the ideas that you already hold and
to introduce you to new terms and concepts. Even if you end

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up disagreeing with an author, you first have to show that you
have really listened to what he or she is saying, have fully
grasped his or her arguments, and can accurately summarize
those arguments. Without such deep, attentive listening, any
critique you make will be superficial and decidedly uncritical.
It will be a critique that says more about you than about the
writer or idea you’re supposedly responding to.
In this chapter we have tried to show that reading for the
conversation means looking not just for the thesis of a text in
isolation but for the view or views that motivate that thesis—
the “they say.” We have also tried to show that reading for
the conversation means being alert for the different strategies
writers use to engage the view(s) that are motivating them,
since not all writers engage other perspectives in the same way.
Some writers explicitly identify and summarize a view they are
responding to at the outset of their text and then return to it
frequently as their text unfolds. Some refer only obliquely to
a view that is motivating them, assuming that readers will be
able to reconstruct that view on their own. Other writers may
not explicitly distinguish their own view from the views they
are questioning in ways that all of us find clear, leaving some
readers to wonder whether a given view is the writer’s own or
one that he or she is challenging. And some writers push off
against the “they say” that is motivating them in a challeng-
ing academic language that requires readers to translate what
they are saying into more accessible, everyday terms. In sum,
then, though most persuasive writers do follow a conversational
“they say / I say” pattern, they do so in a great variety of ways.
What this means for readers is that they need to be armed with
various strategies for detecting the conversations in what they
read, even when those conversations are not self-evident.

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FIFTEEN

“analyze this”

Writing in the Social Sciences

E R I N A C K E R M A N

Social science is the study of people—how they behave
and relate to one another, and the organizations and institu-
tions that facilitate these interactions. People are complicated,
so any study of human behavior is at best partial, taking into
account some elements of what people do and why, but not
always explaining those actions definitively. As a result, it is
the subject of constant conversation and argument.
Consider some of the topics studied in the social sciences:
minimum wage laws, immigration policy, health care, employ-
ment discrimination. Got an opinion on any of these topics?
You aren’t alone. But in the writing you do as a student of
the social sciences, you need to write about more than just

Erin Ackerman is the Social Sciences Librarian at the College of
New Jersey and formerly taught political science at John Jay College,
City University of New York. Her research and teaching interests
include women and American law, the law and politics of reproductive
health, and information literacy in the social sciences.

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your opinions. Good writing in the social sciences, as in other
academic disciplines, requires that you demonstrate that you
have thought about what it is you think. The best way to do that
is to bring your views into conversation with those expressed by
others and to test what you and others think against a review
of data. In other words, you’ll need to start with what others
say and then present what you say as a response.
Consider the following example from a book about contem-
porary American political culture:

Claims of deep national division were standard fare after the
2000 elections, and to our knowledge few commentators have
publicly challenged them. . . . In sum, contemporary observers of
American politics have apparently reached a new consensus around
the proposition that old disagreements about economics now pale
in comparison to new divisions based on sexuality, morality, and
religion, divisions so deep as to justify fears of violence and talk of
war in describing them.
This short book advocates a contrary thesis: the sentiments
expressed in the previously quoted pronouncements of scholars,
journalists, and politicos range from simple exaggeration to sheer
nonsense. . . . Many of the activists in the political parties and vari-
ous cause groups do, in fact, hate each other and regard themselves
as combatants in a war. But their hatreds and battles are not shared
by the great mass of the American people. . . .

Morris P. Fiorina, Culture War?
The Myth of a Polarized America

In other words, “they” (journalists, pundits, other political
scientists) say that the American public is deeply divided,
whereas Fiorina replies that they have misinterpreted the
evidence—specifically, that they have generalized from a few

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exceptional cases (activists). Even the title of the book calls into
question an idea held by others, one Fiorina labels a “myth.”
This chapter explores some of the basic moves social sci-
ence writers make. In addition, writing in the social sciences
generally includes several core components: a strong intro-
duction and thesis, a literature review, and the writer’s own
analysis, including presentation of data and consideration of
implications. Much of your own writing will include one or
more of these components as well. The introduction sets out the
thesis, or point, of the paper, briefly explaining what you will
say in your text and how it fits into the preexisting conversa-
tion. The literature review summarizes what has already been
said on your topic. Your analysis allows you to present data—the
information about human behavior you are measuring or test-
ing against what other people have said—and to explain the
conclusions you have drawn based on your investigation. Do
you agree, disagree, or some combination of both, with what
has been said by others? What reasons can you give for why
you feel that way? And so what? Who should be interested in
what you have to say, and why?

the introduction and thesis:
“this paper challenges . . .”

Your introduction sets forth what you plan to say in your
essay. You might evaluate the work of earlier scholars or cer-
tain widely held assumptions and find them incorrect when
measured against new data. Alternatively, you might point out
that an author’s work is largely correct, but that it could use
some qualifications or be extended in some way. Or you might
identify a gap in our knowledge—we know a great deal about

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topic X but almost nothing about some other closely related
topic. In each of these instances, your introduction needs to
cover both “they say” and “I say” perspectives. If you stop after
the “they say,” your readers won’t know what you are bringing
to the conversation. Similarly, if you were to jump right to the
“I say” portion of your argument, readers might wonder why
you need to say anything at all.
Sometimes you join the conversation at a point where the
discussion seems settled. One or more views about a topic have
become so widely accepted among a group of scholars or society
at large that these views are essentially the conventional way of
thinking about the topic. You may wish to offer new reasons to
support this interpretation, or you may wish to call these standard
views into question. To do so, you must first introduce and iden-
tify these widely held beliefs and then pre sent your own view. In
fact, much of the writing in the social sciences takes the form
of calling into question that which we think we already know.
Consider the following example from an article in The Journal
of Economic Perspectives:

Fifteen years ago, Milton Friedman’s 1957 treatise A Theory of the
Consumption Function seemed badly dated. Dynamic optimization
theory had not been employed much in economics when Fried-
man wrote, and utility theory was still comparatively primitive, so
his statement of the “permanent income hypothesis” never actu-
ally specified a formal mathematical model of behavior derived
explicitly from utility maximization . . . [W]hen other economists
subsequently found multiperiod maximizing models that could be
solved explicitly, the implications of those models differed sharply
from Friedman’s intuitive description of his “model.” Furthermore,
empirical tests in the 1970s and 1980s often rejected these rigor-
ous versions of the permanent income hypothesis in favor of an

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alternative hypothesis that many households simply spent all of
their current income.
Today, with the benefit of a further round of mathematical (and
computational) advances, Friedman’s (1957) original analysis looks
more prescient than primitive . . .

Christopher D. Carroll, “A Theory of Consumption
Function, With and Without Liquidity Constraints,”

The Journal of Economic Perspectives

This introduction makes clear that Carroll will defend Milton
Friedman against some major criticisms of his work. Carroll
mentions what has been said about Friedman’s work and then
goes on to say that the critiques turn out to be wrong and to
suggest that Friedman’s work reemerges as persuasive. A tem-
plate of Carroll’s introduction might look something like this:
Economics research in the last fifteen years suggested Fried-
man’s 1957 treatise was because . In other
words, they say that Friedman’s work is not accurate because
of , , and . Recent research
convinces me, however, that Friedman’s work makes sense.
In some cases, however, there may not be a strong consensus
among experts on a topic. You might enter the ongoing debate
by casting your vote with one side or another or by offering an
alternative view. In the following example, Shari Berman iden-
tifies two competing accounts of how to explain world events
in the twentieth century and then puts forth a third view.

Conventional wisdom about twentieth-century ideologies rests on
two simple narratives. One focuses on the struggle for dominance
between democracy and its alternatives. . . . The other narrative
focuses on the competition between free-market capitalism and
its rivals. . . . Both of these narratives obviously contain some

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truth. . . . Yet both only tell part of the story, which is why their
common conclusion—neoliberalism as the “end of History”—is
unsatisfying and misleading.
What the two conventional narratives fail to mention is that
a third struggle was also going on: between those ideologies that
believed in the primacy of economics and those that believed in
the primacy of politics.

Shari Berman, “The Primacy of Economics versus the
Primacy of Politics: Understanding the Ideological Dynamics

of the Twentieth Century,” Perspectives on Politics

After identifying the two competing narratives, Berman sug-
gests a third view—and later goes on to argue that this third
view explains current debates over globalization. A template
for this type of introduction might look something like this:
In recent discussions of , a controversial aspect has
been . On the one hand, some argue that .
On the other hand, others argue that . Neither of
these arguments, however, considers the alternative view
that .
Given the complexity of many of the issues studied in the
social sciences, however, you may sometimes agree and disagree
with existing views—pointing out things that you believe
are correct or have merit, while disagreeing with or refin-
ing other points. In the example below, anthropologist
Sally Engle Merry agrees with another scholar about something
that is a key trait of modern society but argues that this trait has
a different origin than the other author identifies.

Although I agree with Rose that an increasing emphasis on
governing the soul is characteristic of modern society, I see the

For more on
different ways
of responding,
see Chapter 4.

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transformation not as evolutionary but as the product of social
mobilization and political struggle.

Sally Engle Merry, “Rights, Religion, and Community:
Approaches to Violence against Women in the

Context of Globalization,” Law and Society Review

Here are some templates for agreeing and disagreeing:

j Although I agree with X up to a point, I cannot accept his overall

conclusion that .

j Although I disagree with X on and , I agree

with her conclusion that .

j Political scientists studying have argued that it

is caused by . While contributes to the

problem, is also an important factor.

In the process of examining people from different angles,
social scientists sometimes identify gaps—areas that have not
been explored in previous research. In an article on African
American neighborhoods, sociologist Mary Pattillo identifies
such a gap.

The research on African Americans is dominated by inquiries into
the lives of the black poor. Contemporary ethnographies and jour-
nalistic descriptions have thoroughly described deviance, gangs,
drugs, intergender relations and sexuality, stymied aspiration, and
family patterns in poor neighborhoods (Dash 1989; Hagedorn 1988;
Kotlowitz 1991; Lemann 1991; MacLeoad 1995; Sullivan 1989;
Williams 1989). Yet, the majority of African Americans are not

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poor (Billingsley 1992). A significant part of the black experience,
namely that of working and middle-class blacks, remains unex-
plored. We have little information about what black middle-class
neighborhoods look like and how social life is organized within
them. . . . this article begins to fill this empirical and theoretical
gap using ethnographic data collected in Groveland, a middle-class
black neighborhood in Chicago.

Mary E. Pattillo,
“Sweet Mothers and Gangbangers: Managing Crime

in a Black Middle-Class Neighborhood,” Social Forces

Pattillo explains that much has been said about poor African
American neighborhoods. But, she says, we have little infor-
mation about the experience of working-class and middle-class
black neighborhoods—a gap that her article will address.
Here are some templates for introducing gaps in the existing
research:

j Studies of X have indicated . It is not clear, however,

that this conclusion applies to .

j often take for granted that . Few have

investigated this assumption, however.

j X’s work tells us a great deal about . Can this work

be generalized to ?

Again, a good introduction indicates what you have to say in
the larger context of what others have said. Throughout the
rest of your paper, you will move back and forth between the
“they say” and the “I say,” adding more details.

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the literature review:
“prior research indicates . . .”

In the literature review, you explain what “they say” in more
detail, summarizing, paraphrasing, or quoting the viewpoints
to which you are responding. But you need to balance what
they are saying with your own focus. You need to characterize
someone else’s work fairly and accurately but set up the points
you yourself want to make by selecting the details that are
relevant to your own perspective and observations.
It is common in the social sciences to summarize several
arguments at once, identifying their major arguments or find-
ings in a single paragraph.

How do employers in a low-wage labor market respond to an increase
in the minimum wage? The prediction from conventional economic
theory is unambiguous: a rise in the minimum wage leads perfectly
competitive employers to cut employment (George J. Stigler, 1946).
Although studies in the 1970’s based on aggregate teenage employ-
ment rates usually confirmed this prediction, earlier studies based
on comparisons of employment at affected and unaffected establish-
ments often did not (e.g., Richard A. Lester, 1960, 1964). Several
recent studies that rely on a similar comparative methodology have
failed to detect a negative employment effect of higher minimum
wages. Analyses of the 1990–1991 increases in the federal minimum
wage (Lawrence F. Katz and Krueger, 1992; Card, 1992a) and of an
earlier increase in the minimum wage in California (Card, 1992b)
find no adverse employment impact.

David Card and Alan Krueger,
“Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the

Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania,”
The American Economic Review

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Card and Krueger cite the key findings and conclusions of works
that are relevant to the question they are investigating and
the point they plan to address, asking “How do employers in
a low-wage labor market respond to an increase in the mini-
mum wage?” They go on, as good writers should, to answer the
question they ask. And they do so by reviewing others who
have answered that question, noting that this question has been
answered in different, sometimes contradictory, ways.
Such summaries are brief, bringing together relevant argu-
ments by several scholars to provide an overview of scholarly
work on a particular topic. In writing such a summary, you need
to ask yourself how the authors themselves might describe their
positions and also consider what in their work is relevant for
the point you wish to make. This kind of summary is especially
appropriate when you have a large amount of research material
on a topic and want to identify the major strands of a debate or
to show how the work of one author builds on that of another.
Here are some templates for overview summaries:

j In addressing the question of , political scientists

have considered several explanations for . X argues

that . According to Y and Z, another plausible expla-

nation is .

j What is the effect of on ? Previous work

on by X and by Y and Z supports .

Sometimes you may need to say more about the works you
cite. On a midterm or final exam, for example, you may need
to demonstrate that you have a deep familiarity with a par-
ticular work. And in some disciplines of the social sciences,
longer, more detailed literature reviews are the standard. Your
instructor and the articles he or she has assigned are your best

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guides for the length and level of detail of your literature review.
Other times, the work of certain authors is especially important
for your argument, and therefore you need to provide more
details to explain what these authors have said. See how Martha
Derthick summarizes an argument that is central to her book
about the politics of tobacco regulation.

The idea that governments could sue to reclaim health care costs
from cigarette manufacturers might be traced to “Cigarettes and
Welfare Reform,” an article published in the Emory Law Journal
in 1977 by Donald Gasner, a law professor at the University of
Southern Illinois. Garner suggested that state governments could
get a cigarette manufacturer to pay the direct medical costs “of
looking after patients with smoking diseases.” He drew an analogy
to the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, under which coal
mine operators are required to pay certain disability benefits for
coal miners suffering from pneumoconiosis, or black lung disease.

Martha Derthick, Up In Smoke:
From Legislation to Litigation in Tobacco Politics

Note that Derthick identifies the argument she is summariz-
ing, quoting its author directly and then adding details about
a precedent for the argument.
You may want to include direct quotations of what others
have said, as Derthick does. Using an author’s exact words
helps you demonstrate that you are representing him or her
fairly. But you cannot simply insert a quotation; you need to
explain to your readers what it means for your point. Consider
the following example drawn from a political science book on
the debate over tort reform.

The essence of agenda setting was well enunciated by E. E.
Schattschneider: “In politics as in everything else, it makes a great

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difference whose game we play” (1960, 47). In short, the ability to
define or control the rules, terms, or perceived options in a contest
over policy greatly affects the prospects for winning.

William Haltom and Michael McCann,
Distorting the Law: Politics, Media, and the Litigation Crisis

Notice how Haltom and McCann first quote Schattschneider
and then explain in their own words how political agenda set-
ting can be thought of as a game, with winners and losers.
Remember that whenever you summarize, quote, or paraphrase
the work of others, credit must be given in the form of a citation
to the original work. The words may be your own, but if the idea
comes from someone else you must give credit to the original
work. There are several formats for documenting sources. Consult
your instructor for help choosing which citation style to use.

the analysis

The literature review covers what others have said on your
topic. The analysis allows you to present and support your own
response. In the introduction you indicate whether you agree,
disagree, or some combination of both with what others have
said. You will want to expand on how you have formed your
opinion and why others should care about your topic.

“The Data Indicate . . .”

The social sciences use data to develop and test explanations.
Data can be quantitative or qualitative and can come from a
number of sources. You might use statistics related to GDP
growth, unemployment, voting rates, or demographics. Or you
could use surveys, interviews, or other first-person accounts.

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Regardless of the type of data used, it is important to do
three things: define your data, indicate where you got the data,
and then say what you have done with your data. In a journal
article, political scientist Joshua C. Wilson examines a court
case about protests at an abortion clinic and asks whether each
side of the conflict acts in a way consistent with their general
views on freedom of speech.

[T]his paper relies on close readings of in-person, semi-structured
interviews with the participants involved in the real controversy
that was the Williams case.
Thirteen interviews ranging in length from 40 minutes to
1 hour and 50 minutes were conducted for this paper. Of those
interviewed, all would be considered “elites” in terms of political
psychology / political attitude research—six were active members
of Solano Citizens for Life . . . ; two were members of Planned
Parenthood Shasta-Diablo management; one was the lawyer who
obtained the restraining order, temporary injunction, and perma-
nent injunction for Planned Parenthood; one was the lawyer for
the duration of the case for Solano Citizens for Life; two were
lawyers for Planned Parenthood on appeal; and one was the Supe-
rior Court judge who heard arguments for, and finally crafted, the
restraining order and injunctions against Solano Citizens for Life.
During the course of the interviews, participants were asked a range
of questions about their experiences and thoughts in relation to
the Williams case, as well as their beliefs about the interpretation
and limits of the First Amendment right to free speech—both in
general, and in relation to the Williams case.

Joshua C. Wilson. “When Rights Collide:
Anti-Abortion Protests and the Ideological Dilemma
in Planned Parenthood Shasta-Diablo, Inc. v. Williams,”

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society

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Wilson identifies and describes his qualitative data—interviews
conducted with key parties in the conflict—and explains the
nature of the questions he asked.
If your data are quantitative, you will need to explain them
similarly. See how political scientist Brian Arbour explains the
quantitative data he used to study for an article in The Forum
how a change of rules might have affected the outcome of the
2008 Democratic primary contest between Hillary Clinton and
Barack Obama.

I evaluate these five concerns about the Democratic system of
delegate allocation by “rerunning” the Obama-Clinton contest
with a different set of allocation rules, those in effect for the 2008
Republican presidential contest. . . . Republicans allow each state
to make their own rules, leading to “a plethora of selection plans”
(Shapiro & Bello 2008, 5) . . . To “rerun” the Democratic pri-
mary under Republican rules, I need data on the results of the
Democratic primary for each state and congressional district and
on the Republican delegate allocation rules for each state. The
Green Papers (www.thegreenpapers.com), a website that serves as
an almanac of election procedures, rules, and results, provides each
of these data sources. By “rerunning” the Democratic primaries and
caucuses, I use the exact results of each contest.

Brian Arbour, “Even Closer, Even Longer: What If the 2008
Democratic Primary Used Republican Rules?” The Forum

Note that Arbour identifies his data as primary voting results
and the rules for Republican primaries. In the rest of the paper,
Arbour shows how his use of these data suggests that political
commentators who thought Republican rules would have clari-
fied the close race between Clinton and Obama were wrong
and the race would have been “even closer, even longer.”

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f i f t e e n f i f t e e n “ A N A LY Z E T H I S ”

1 9 8

Here are some templates for discussing data:

j In order to test the hypothesis that , we assessed

. Our calculations suggest .

j I used to investigate . The results of this

investigation indicate .

“But Others May Object . . .”

No matter how strongly your data support your argument, there
are almost surely other perspectives (and thus other data) that
you need to acknowledge. By considering possible objections
to your argument and taking them seriously, you demonstrate
that you’ve done your work and that you’re aware of other
perspectives—and most important, you present your own argu-
ment as part of an ongoing conversation.
See how economist Christopher Carroll acknowledges that
there may be objections to his argument about how people
allocate their income between consumption and savings.

I have argued here that the modern version of the dynamically opti-
mizing consumption model is able to match many of the important
features of the empirical data on consumption and saving behavior.
There are, however, several remaining reasons for discomfort with
the model.

Christopher D. Carroll, “A Theory of Consumption
Function, With and Without Liquidity Constraints,”

The Journal of Economic Perspectives

Carroll then goes on to identify the possible limitations of his
mathematical analysis.

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Writing in the Social Sciences

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Someone may object because there are related phenomena
that your analysis does not explain or because you do not have
the right data to investigate a particular question. Or perhaps
someone may object to assumptions underlying your argument
or how you handled your data. Here are some templates for
considering naysayers:

j might object that .

j Is my claim realistic? I have argued , but readers may

question .

j My explanation accounts for but does not explain

. This is because .

“Why Should We Care?”

Who should care about your research, and why? Since the
social sciences attempt to explain human behavior, it is
important to consider how your research affects the assump-
tions we make about human behavior. In addition, you might
offer recommendations for how other social scientists might
continue to explore an issue, or what actions policymakers
should take.
In the following example, sociologist Devah Pager identi-
fies the implications of her study of the way having a criminal
record affects a person applying for jobs.

[I]n terms of policy implications, this research has troubling con-
clusions. In our frenzy of locking people up, our “crime control”
policies may in fact exacerbate the very conditions that lead to
crime in the first place. Research consistently shows that finding

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2 0 0

quality steady employment is one of the strongest predictors of
desistance from crime (Shover 1996; Sampson and Laub 1993;
Uggen 2000). The fact that a criminal record severely limits
employment opportunities—particularly among blacks—suggests
that these individuals are left with few viable alternatives.

Devah Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record,”
The American Journal of Sociology

Pager’s conclusion that a criminal record negatively affects
employment chances creates a vicious circle, she says: steady
employment discourages recidivism, but a criminal record
makes it harder to get a job.
In answering the “so what?” question, you need to explain
why your readers should care. Although sometimes the impli-
cations of your work may be so broad that they would be
of interest to almost anyone, it’s never a bad idea to iden-
tify explicitly any groups of people who will find your work
important.
Templates for establishing why your claims matter:

j X is important because .

j Ultimately, what is at stake here is .

j The finding that should be of interest to

because .

As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the complexity of
people allows us to look at their behavior from many different
viewpoints. Much has been, and will be, said about how and
why people do the things they do. As a result, we can look
at writing in the social sciences as an ongoing conversation.

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When you join this conversation, the “they say / I say” frame-
work will help you figure out what has already been said (they
say) and what you can add (I say). The components of social
science writing presented in this chapter are tools to help you
join that conversation.

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READINGS

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2 0 5

SIXTEEN

is college the best option?

American society may be divided in many ways, but
not when it comes to college. From a very early age, we get the
message that going to college is a crucial step in life. We hear
this message regularly from our families, our schools, our com-
munities. We see it constantly in the media: movies, television
shows, sports broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, and websites
all show the allure and advantages of going to college. Even on
the highways, billboards portray attractive, smiling, confident,
intelligent-looking students on tree-lined campuses promoting
the virtues of particular colleges: strong academics, excellent
career opportunities, affordable tuition. Indeed, most young
people in the United States grow up to see college as inevitable.
But in addition to the success stories, we see occasional
glimpses of another side of the college story: graduates unable
to find good jobs, or any job at all; students with large college
debts that can take years, even decades, to pay off; uncaring pro-
fessors, huge classes, maze-like bureaucracies, distracted advi-
sors; students who for a variety of reasons find themselves in
academic trouble. As with all paths in life, it’s possible to take

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2 0 6

I S C O L L E G E T H E B E S T O P T I O N ?

a wrong turn in college, so it’s advisable for anyone who’s con-
templating attending college to have specific, well-considered
reasons for pursuing a so-called higher education, as well as a
plan, regularly checked and updated, for how best to succeed.
The readings in this chapter focus on the present state of
higher education in the United States and examine the poten-
tial benefits and pitfalls of going to college. The chapter begins
with a report on a study showing that while college graduates
on average make significantly more money than high-school
graduates do, there is large variation in the return on invest-
ment based on such factors as college attended, major, whether
or not the student graduates, and occupation. This report is fol-
lowed by an essay by Sanford Ungar, a former college president,
about the value of a college education steeped in the liberal arts,
as opposed to the preprofessional training that many students
now prefer. Political scientist Charles Murray advances the
view that far too many American students currently go on to
college but would be better off attending a vocational program
or going right to work after high school. Liz Addison, drawing
upon her own experience, articulates the often underappreci-
ated value of a community college education.
Several other authors focus on ways that the faculty and
the institution as a whole can support student success. Col-
lege president Freeman Hrabowski argues that while it’s easy
to lament how expensive and dubious a college degree is, that
degree ultimately prepares people not just for a career, but for
life. And First Lady Michelle Obama pays tribute to the gradu-
ates of one university for their commitment to education and
to helping others find opportunities to succeed.

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Is College the Best Option?

Finally, two pieces argue that education can take place in
settings other than college and about topics other than “aca-
demic” ones. Gerald Graff suggests that it matters less whether
we read Macbeth or a Marvel comic book, as long as we approach
what we read with a critical eye and question it in analytical,
intellectual ways. And Mike Rose makes the case that people in
blue-collar occupations who never attend college nonetheless
develop sophisticated knowledge of how to do their work.
As a college student yourself, you’ll find plenty to think about
in this chapter—and on its companion blog, theysayiblog.com.

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Should Everyone Go to College?

S T E P H A N I E O W E N A N D I S A B E L S A W H I L L

Summary

For the past few decades, it has been widely argued that
a college degree is a prerequisite to entering the middle class

in the United States. Study after study reminds us that
higher education is one of the best investments we can
make, and President Obama has called it “an economic

imperative.” We all know that, on average, college graduates
make significantly more money over their lifetimes than those
with only a high school education. What gets less attention

Stephanie Owen and Isabel Sawhill are the authors of Should
Everyone Go to College?, a report published in 2013 by the Brook-
ings Institution, a centrist think tank in Washington, D.C. Owen
was a senior research assistant at Brookings’ Center on Children
and Families at the time of the report’s publication and currently
serves as a research associate at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan
center for research on the problems of urban communities. Sawhill is
codirector of the Center on Children and Families and a senior fellow
in economic studies at Brookings.

See pp. 25–27
on introducing

an ongoing
debate.

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is the fact that not all college degrees or college graduates
are equal. There is enormous variation in the so-called return
to education depending on factors such as institution attended,
field of study, whether a student graduates, and post-graduation
occupation. While the average return to obtaining a college
degree is clearly positive, we emphasize that it is not universally
so. For certain schools, majors, occupations, and individuals,
college may not be a smart investment. By telling all young
people that they should go to college no matter what, we are
actually doing some of them a disservice.

The Rate of Return on Education

One way to estimate the value of education is to look at the
increase in earnings associated with an additional year of
schooling. However, correlation is not causation, and getting
at the true causal effect of education on earnings is not so
easy. The main problem is one of selection: if the smartest,
most motivated people are both more likely to go to college
and more likely to be financially successful, then the observed
difference in earnings by years of education doesn’t measure
the true effect of college.
Researchers have attempted to get around this problem of
causality by employing a number of clever techniques, includ-
ing, for example, comparing identical twins with different levels
of education. The best studies suggest that the return to an
additional year of school is around 10 percent. If we apply this
10 percent rate to the median earnings of about $30,000 for
a 25- to 34-year-old high school graduate working full time
in 2010, this implies that a year of college increases earnings
by $3,000, and four years increases them by $12,000. Notice
that this amount is less than the raw differences in earnings

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between high school graduates and bachelor’s degree holders
of $15,000, but it is in the same ballpark. Similarly, the raw
difference between high school graduates and associate’s degree
holders is about $7,000, but a return of 10% would predict the
causal effect of those additional two years to be $6,000.
There are other factors to consider. The cost of college mat-
ters as well: the more someone has to pay to attend, the lower
the net benefit of attending. Furthermore, we have to factor in
the opportunity cost of college, measured as the foregone earn-
ings a student gives up when he or she leaves or delays entering
the workforce in order to attend school. Using average earn-
ings for 18- and 19-year-olds and 20- and 21-year-olds with
high school degrees (including those working part-time or not
at all), Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of Brookings’
Hamilton Project calculate an opportunity cost of $54,000 for
a four-year degree.
In this brief, we take a rather narrow view of the value of
a college degree, focusing on the earnings premium. However,
there are many non-monetary benefits of schooling which are
harder to measure but no less important. Research suggests that
additional education improves overall wellbeing by affecting
things like job satisfaction, health, marriage, parenting, trust,
and social interaction. Additionally, there are social benefits
to education, such as reduced crime rates and higher political
participation. We also do not want to dismiss personal prefer-
ences, and we acknowledge that many people derive value from
their careers in ways that have nothing to do with money. While
beyond the scope of this piece, we do want to point out that
these noneconomic factors can change the cost-benefit calculus.
As noted above, the gap in annual earnings between young
high school graduates and bachelor’s degree holders working full
time is $15,000. What’s more, the earnings premium associated

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with a college degree grows over a lifetime. Hamilton Project
research shows that 23- to 25-year-olds with bachelor’s degrees
make $12,000 more than high school graduates but by age 50,
the gap has grown to $46,500 (Figure 1). When we look at
lifetime earnings—the sum of earnings over a career—the total
premium is $570,000 for a bachelor’s degree and $170,000 for
an associate’s degree. Compared to the average up-front cost of
four years of college (tuition plus opportunity cost) of $102,000,
the Hamilton Project is not alone in arguing that investing in
college provides “a tremendous return.”
It is always possible to quibble over specific calculations,
but it is hard to deny that, on average, the benefits of a college
degree far outweigh the costs. The key phrase here is “on aver-
age.” The purpose of this brief is to highlight the reasons why,

$0
22 24 26 28 30 32 34 36 38 40

Age

A
ve

ra
ge

A
nn

ua
l E

ar
ni

ng
s

42 44 46 48 50 52 54 56 58 60 62 64

$10,000

$20,000

$30,000

$40,000

$50,000

$60,000

$70,000

$80,000 High School Diploma
Bachelor’s Degree

$90,000

Figure 1. Earning Trajectories
by Educational Attainment

Source: Greenstone and Looney (2011).
Note: Sample includes all civilian U.S. citizens, excluding those in school.
Annual earnings are averaged over the entire sample, including those without
work. Source: March CPS 2007–2010.

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for a given individual, the benefits may not outweigh the costs.
We emphasize that a 17- or 18-year-old deciding whether and
where to go to college should carefully consider his or her own
likely path of education and career before committing a consid-
erable amount of time and money to that degree. With tuitions
rising faster than family incomes, the typical college student is
now more dependent than in the past on loans, creating serious
risks for the individual student and perhaps for the system as a
whole, should widespread defaults occur in the future. Federal
student loans now total close to $1 trillion, larger than credit
card debt or auto loans and second only to mortgage debt on
household balance sheets.

Variation in the Return to Education

It is easy to imagine hundreds of dimensions on which college
degrees and their payoffs could differ. Ideally, we’d like to be
able to look into a crystal ball and know which individual
school will give the highest net benefit for a given student
with her unique strengths, weaknesses, and interests. Of course,
we are not able to do this. What we can do is lay out several
key dimensions that seem to significantly affect the return to
a college degree. These include school type, school selectiv-
ity level, school cost and financial aid, college major, later
occupation, and perhaps most importantly, the probability of
completing a degree.

Variation by School Selectivity

Mark Schneider of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and
the American Institutes for Research (AIR) used longitudinal

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Should Everyone Go to College?

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data from the Baccalaureate and Beyond survey to calculate
lifetime earnings for bachelor’s earners by type of institution
attended, then compared them to the lifetime earnings of high
school graduates. The difference (after accounting for tuition
costs and discounting to a present value) is the value of a bach-
elor’s degree. For every type of school (categorized by whether
the school was a public institution or a nonprofit private insti-
tution and by its selectivity) this value is positive, but it varies
widely. People who attended the most selective private schools
have a lifetime earnings premium of over $620,000 (in 2012
dollars). For those who attended a minimally selective or open
admission private school, the premium is only a third of that.
Schneider performed a similar exercise with campus-level data
on college graduates (compiled by the online salary information
company PayScale), calculating the return on investment
(ROI) of a bachelor’s degree (Figure 2). These calculations sug-
gest that public schools tend to have higher ROIs than private
schools, and more selective schools offer higher returns than
less selective ones. Even within a school type and selectivity
category, the variation is striking. For example, the average
ROI for a competitive public school in 2010 is 9 percent, but
the highest rate within this category is 12 percent while the
lowest is 6 percent.
Another important element in estimating the ROI on a col-
lege education is financial aid, which can change the expected
return dramatically. For example, Vassar College is one of the
most expensive schools on the 2012 list and has a relatively
low annual ROI of 6%. But when you factor in its generous aid
packages (nearly 60% of students receive aid, and the average
amount is over $30,000), Vassar’s annual ROI increases 50%,
to a return of 9% (data available at http://www.payscale.com/
college-education-value-2012).

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10%

12%
Public
Private, not-for-profit

14%

Most
competitive

Highly
competitive

Very
competitive

Competitive Less
competitive

Non-
competitive

Figure 2. Return on Investment of a Bachelor’s
Degree by Institution Type

Source: Schneider (2010).
Note: Data uses PayScale return on investment data and Barron’s index of
school selectivity.

One of the most important takeaways from the PayScale
data is that not every bachelor’s degree is a smart investment.
After attempting to account for in-state vs. out-of-state tuition,
financial aid, graduation rates, years taken to graduate, wage
inflation, and selection, nearly two hundred schools on the
2012 list have negative ROIs. Students may want to think twice
about attending the Savannah College of Art and Design in
Georgia or Jackson State University in Mississippi. The prob-
lem is compounded if the students most likely to attend these
less selective schools come from disadvantaged families.

Variation by Field of Study and Career

Even within a school, the choices a student makes about his or
her field of study and later career can have a large impact on

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Should Everyone Go to College?

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what he or she gets out of her degree. It is no coincidence that
the three schools with the highest 30-year ROIs on the 2012
PayScale list—Harvey Mudd, Caltech, and MIT—specialize in
the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and math.
Recent analysis by the Census Bureau also shows that the lifetime
earnings of workers with bachelor’s degrees vary widely by college
major and occupation. The highest paid major is engineering, fol-
lowed by computers and math. The lowest paid major, with barely
half the lifetime earnings of engineering majors, is education, fol-
lowed by the arts and psychology (Figure 3). The highest-earning

Engin
eer

ing

Com
puter

s a
nd m

ath

Sc
ien

ce
an

d en
gin

eer
ing-r

ela
ted

Busin
ess

Physi
cal

sc
ien

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cia

l sc
ien

Com
munica

tio
ns

Biol
og

ica
l sc

ien
ces

Lite
rat

ure

Libe
ral

ar
ts

Psyc
holo

gy Arts

Educat
ion

Bach
elo

r’s
degr

ee
(al

l m
ajo

rs)

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sc

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rad
uate

0.5

1.5

2.5

W
or

k-
Li

fe
E

ar
ni

ng
s,

in
$

M
ill

io
ns

3.5

Figure 3. Work-Life Earnings of Bachelor’s Degree
Holders by College Major

Source: Julian (2012).
Note: Synthetic work-life earnings estimates are calculated by finding median
earnings for each 5-year age group between 25 and 64 (25–29, 30–34, etc.).
Earnings for each group is multiplied by 5 to get total earnings for that period,
then aggregated to get total lifetime earnings. This is done for high school
graduates, bechelor’s degree holders, and bachelor’s degree holders by major.

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occupation category is architecture and engineering, with comput-
ers, math, and management in second place. The lowest-earning
occupation for college graduates is service (Figure 4). According
to Census’s calculations, the lifetime earnings of an education or
arts major working in the service sector are actually lower than
the average lifetime earnings of a high school graduate.
When we dig even deeper, we see that just as not all col-
lege degrees are equal, neither are all high school diplomas.

Arch
ite

ctu
re

an
d en

gin
eer

ing

Com
puter

an
d m

ath

Man
age

men
t

Busin
ess

an
d fin

an
cia

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rac

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on

ers
an

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ch

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an

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les

an
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lat
ed

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ien

Arts
an

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ed

Natu
ral

re
sou

rce
s, c

on
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on

, a
nd m

ain
ten

an
ce

Prod
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on
, tr

an
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ati
on

, a
nd m

ate
ria

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ov

ing

Educat
ion

Com
munity

se
rvi

ce
an

d le
gal

Se
rvi

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e s

upport

Bach
elo

r’s
degr

ee
(al

l o
ccu

pati
on

High
sc

hoo
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rad
uate

0.5

1.5

2.5

W
or

k-
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ar
ni

ng
s,

in
$

M
ill

io
ns

3.5

Figure 4. Work-Life Earnings of Bachelor’s Degree
Holders by Occupation

Source: Julian (2012).
Note: Synthetic work-life earnings estimates are calculated by finding median
earnings for each 5-year age group between 25 and 64 (25–29, 30–34, etc.).
Earnings for each group is multiplied by 5 to get total earnings for that period,
then aggregated to get total lifetime earnings. This is done for high school grad-
uates, bechelor’s degree holders, and bachelor’s degree holders by occupation.

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Anthony Carnevale and his colleagues at the Georgetown
Center on Education and the Workforce use similar method-
ology to the Census calculations but disaggregate even further,
estimating median lifetime earnings for all education levels by
occupation. They find that 14 percent of people with a high
school diploma make at least as much as those with a bachelor’s
degree, and 17 percent of people with a bachelor’s degree make
more than those with a professional degree. The authors argue
that much of this finding is explained by occupation. In every
occupation category, more educated workers earn more.
But, for example, someone working in a STEM job with only
a high school diploma can expect to make more over a lifetime
than someone with a bachelor’s degree working in education,
community service and arts, sales and office work, health sup-
port, blue collar jobs, or personal services.
The numbers above are for full-time workers in a given field.
In fact, choice of major can also affect whether a college graduate
can find a job at all. Another recent report from the Georgetown
Center on Education and the Workforce breaks down unemploy-
ment rates by major for both recent (age 22–26) and experienced
(age 30–54) college graduates in 2009–2010. People who majored
in education or health have very low unemployment—even
though education is one of the lowest-paying majors. Architecture
graduates have particularly high unemployment, which may simply
reflect the decline of the construction industry during the Great
Recession. Arts majors don’t fare too well, either. The expected
earnings (median full-time earnings times the probability of being
employed) of a young college graduate with a theater degree are
about $6,000 more than the expected earnings of a young high
school graduate. For a young person with a mechanical engineering
degree, the expected earnings of the college graduate is a staggering
$35,000 more than that of a typical high school graduate.

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Variation in Graduation Rates

Comparisons of the return to college by highest degree attained
include only people who actually complete college. Students
who fail to obtain a degree incur some or all of the costs of a
bachelor’s degree without the ultimate payoff. This has major
implications for inequalities of income and wealth, as the stu-
dents least likely to graduate—lower-income students—are also
the most likely to take on debt to finance their education.
Fewer than 60 percent of students who enter four-year
schools finish within six years, and for low-income students
it’s even worse. Again, the variation in this measure is huge.
Just within Washington, D.C., for example, six-year graduation
rates range from a near-universal 93 percent at Georgetown
University to a dismal 19 percent at the University of D.C. Of
course, these are very different institutions, and we might expect
high-achieving students at an elite school like Georgetown to
have higher completion rates than at a less competitive school
like UDC. In fact, Frederick Hess and his colleagues at AEI
have documented that the relationship between selectivity and
completion is positive, echoing other work that suggests that
students are more likely to succeed in and graduate from col-
lege when they attend more selective schools (Figure 5). At the
most selective schools, 88 percent of students graduate within
six years; at non-competitive schools, only 35 percent do. Fur-
thermore, the range of completion rates is negatively correlated
with school ranking, meaning the least selective schools have
the widest range. For example, one non-competitive school,
Arkansas Baptist College, graduates 100 percent of its students,
while only 8 percent of students at Southern University at
New Orleans finish. Not every student can get into Harvard,
where the likelihood of graduating is 97 percent, but students

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can choose to attend a school with a better track record within
their ability level.
Unfortunately, recent evidence by Caroline Hoxby of
Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard shows that most
high-achieving low-income students never even apply to the
selective schools that they are qualified to attend—and at
which they would be eligible for generous financial aid. There
is clearly room for policies that do a better job of matching
students to schools.

Policy Implications

All of this suggests that it is a mistake to unilaterally tell
young Americans that going to college—any college—is the
best decision they can make. If they choose wisely and attend

35%

100%

90%

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

40%
49%

62%

75%

Maximum

Minimum

88%

Most
competitive

Highly
competitive

Very
competitive

Competitive Less
competitive

Non-
competitive

Figure 5. Average Six-Year Graduation Rates
by School Selectivity

Source: Hess et al. (2009).

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a school with generous financial aid and high expected earn-
ings, and if they don’t just enroll but graduate, they can greatly
improve their lifetime prospects. The information needed to
make a wise decision, however, can be difficult to find and
hard to interpret.
One solution is simply to make the type of information dis-
cussed above more readily available. A study by Andrew Kelly
and Mark Schneider of AEI found that when parents were asked
to choose between two similar public universities in their state,
giving them information on the schools’ graduation rates caused
them to prefer the higher-performing school.
The PayScale college rankings are a step in the right direc-
tion, giving potential students and their parents information
with which to make better decisions. Similarly, the Obama
Administration’s new College Scorecard is being developed to
increase transparency in the college application process. As
it operates now, a prospective student can type in a college’s
name and learn its average net price, graduation rate, loan
default rate, and median borrowed amount. The Department
of Education is working to add information about the earnings
of a given school’s graduates. There is also a multi-dimensional
search feature that allows users to find schools by location, size,
and degrees and majors offered. The Student Right to Know
Before You Go Act, sponsored by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR)
and Marco Rubio (R-FL), also aims to expand the data avail-
able on the costs and benefits of individual schools, as well as
programs and majors within schools.
The College Scorecard is an admirable effort to help students
and parents navigate the complicated process of choosing a
college. However, it may not go far enough in improving trans-
parency and helping students make the best possible decisions.
A recent report by the Center for American Progress (CAP)

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showed a draft of the Scorecard to a focus group of college-
bound high school students and found, among other things,
that they are frequently confused about the term “net price”
and give little weight to six-year graduation rates because they
expect to graduate in four. It appears that the White House
has responded to some of these critiques, for example showing
median amount borrowed and default rates rather than the
confusing “student loan repayment.” Nevertheless, more infor-
mation for students and their parents is needed.
There is also room for improvement in the financial aid
system, which can seem overwhelmingly complex for families
not familiar with the process. Studies have shown that stu-
dents frequently underestimate how much aid they are eligible
for, and don’t claim the tax incentives that would save them
money. Since 2009, the Administration has worked to simplify
the FAFSA, the form that families must fill out to receive fed-
eral aid—but more could be done to guide low-income families
through the process.
In the longer run, colleges need to do more to ensure that
their students graduate, particularly the lower-income students
who struggle most with persistence and completion. Research
suggests that grants and loans increase enrollment but that aid
must be tied to performance in order to affect persistence. Cur-
rently, we spend over $100 billion on Pell Grants and federal
loans, despite a complete lack of evidence that this money
leads to higher graduation rates. Good research on programs
like Georgia’s HOPE scholarships or West Virginia’s PROM-
ISE scholarships suggest that attaching strings to grant aid can
improve college persistence and completion.
Finally, we want to emphasize that the personal character-
istics and skills of each individual are equally important. It
may be that for a student with poor grades who is on the fence

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about enrolling in a four-year program, the most bang-for-the-
buck will come from a vocationally-oriented associate’s degree
or career-specific technical training. Indeed, there are many
well-paid job openings going unfilled because employers can’t
find workers with the right skills—skills that young potential
workers could learn from training programs, apprenticeships,
a vocational certificate, or an associate’s degree. Policymak-
ers should encourage these alternatives at the high school as
well as the postsecondary level, with a focus on high-demand
occupations and high-growth sectors. There has long been
resistance to vocational education in American high schools,
for fear that “tracking” students reinforces socioeconomic (and
racial) stratification and impedes mobility. But if the default
for many lower-achieving students was a career-focused training
path rather than a path that involves dropping out of tradi-
tional college, their job prospects would probably improve. For
example, Career Academies are high schools organized around
an occupational or industry focus, and have partnerships with
local employers and colleges. They have been shown by gold
standard research to increase men’s wages, hours worked, and
employment stability after high school, particularly for those
at high risk of dropping out.

Conclusions

In this brief, we have corralled existing research to make the
point that while on average the return to college is highly
positive, there is a considerable spread in the value of going to
college. A bachelor’s degree is not a smart investment for every
student in every circumstance. We have outlined three impor-
tant steps policymakers can take to make sure every person
does make a smart investment in their choice of postsecondary

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education. First, we must provide more information in a com-
prehensible manner. Second, the federal government should
lead the way on performance-based scholarships to incentivize
college attendance and persistence. Finally, there should be
more good alternatives to a traditional academic path, includ-
ing career and technical education and apprenticeships.

Additional Reading

Anthony P. Carnevale, Ban Cheah, and Jeff Strohl, “Hard Times: College
Majors, Unemployment, and Earnings: Not All College Degrees Are
Created Equal,” (Washington, D.C.: The Georgetown University Center
on Education and the Workforce, January 2012).

Anthony P. Carnevale, Stephen J. Rose, and Ban Cheah, “The College
Payoff: Education, Occupations, Lifetime Earnings,” (Washington, D.C.:
The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce,
August 2011).

Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney, “Where is the Best Place to Invest
$102,000—In Stocks, Bonds, or a College Degree?” (Washington, D.C.:
The Brookings Institution, June 2011).

Frederick M. Hess, Mark Schneider, Kevin Carey, and Andrew P. Kelly,
“Diplomas and Dropouts: Which Colleges Actually Graduate Their
Students (and Which Don’t),” (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise
Institute for Public Policy Research, June 2009).

Harry J. Holzer and Robert I. Lerman, “The Future of Middle-Skill Jobs,”
(Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, February 2009).

Caroline M. Hoxby and Christopher Avery, “The Missing ‘One-Offs’: The
Hidden Supply of High-Achieving, Low Income Students,” (Cambridge,
MA, Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2012).

Tiffany Julian, “Work-Life Earnings by Field of Degree and Occupation for
People With a Bachelor’s Degree: 2011,” (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Census Bureau, October 2012).

Andrew P. Kelly and Mark Schneider, “Filling In the Blanks: How Information
Can Affect Choice in Higher Education,” (Washington, D.C.: American
Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, January 2011).

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Julie Margetta Morgan and Gadi Dechter, “Improving the College
Scorecard: Using Student Feedback to Create an Effective Disclosure,”
(Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, November 2012).

Mark Schneider, “How Much Is That Bachelor’s Degree Really Worth? The
Million Dollar Misunderstanding,” (Washington, D.C.: American
Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, May 2009).

Mark Schneider, “Is College Worth the Investment?” (Washington, D.C.:
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, October
2010).

Joining the Conversation

1. Stephanie Owen and Isabel Sawhill announce the “they
say” in their second sentence—“Study after study reminds
us that higher education is one of the best investments we
can make”—and then proceed to report on how the return
on that investment varies. What factors do they say make
college a questionable investment?

2. This report draws upon quite a bit of quantitative data on
the economic effects of graduating from college. Look care-
fully at one of the graphs that Owen and Sawhill provide,
and explain in your own words what the data say.

3. Owen and Sawhill’s analysis seems to favor baccalaure-
ate degree programs as conferring the greatest advantages
upon students. How might essayist Liz Addison, whose essay
appears on pp. 255–58, respond to their argument?

4. In the essay’s concluding paragraphs, the authors note
information that students and parents should know before
choosing a college. What information do they consider most
important? What did you know and what did you not know
about colleges you were considering as you were deciding

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which school to attend? How might additional knowledge
have helped you make a more informed choice?

5. The questions Owen and Sawhill explore are not new ones.
Go to theysayiblog.com and read what Lawrence Mishel of
the Economic Policy Institute wrote in 2012. (Enter Law-
rence Mishel, “College and Then What?” in the search box
and press “search” to access the article.) Read what he wrote
and think about your own reasons for being in college. Then
click on “Join the Conversation” and write out a response
to Mishel.

6. According to Owen and Sawhill, “For certain schools,
majors, occupations, and individuals, college may not be a
smart investment.” Taking this statement as a “they say,”
write a short essay responding with what you think. Dis-
cuss your own reasons for attending college, and refer to
the authors’ argument and data about the pros and cons of
attending college.

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The New Liberal Arts

S A N F O R D J . U N G A R

Hard economic times inevitably bring scrutiny of all
accepted ideals and institutions, and this time around liberal-arts
education has been especially hard hit. Something that has long
been held up as a uniquely sensible and effective approach to
learning has come under the critical gaze of policy makers and
the news media, not to mention budget-conscious families.
But the critique, unfortunately, seems to be fueled by reli-
ance on common misperceptions. Here are a few of those
misperceptions, from my vantage point as a liberal-arts college
president, and my reactions to them:

Sanford J. Ungar was the president of Goucher College in
Baltimore, Maryland, from 2001 to 2014. He is the author of Fresh
Blood: The New American Immigrants (1998) and Africa: The People
and Politics of an Emerging Continent (1986). Ungar has also worked in
broadcast journalism both at National Public Radio and at the Voice
of America, the U.S. government–funded broadcast network for a
global audience. His extensive print journalism work includes articles
in Newsweek, the Economist, and the Washington Post. This article first
appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a publication read by
college faculty and administrators, on March 5, 2010.

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Misperception No. 1: A liberal-arts degree is a luxury that most
families can no longer afford. “Career education” is what we
now must focus on. Many families are indeed struggling, in the
depths of the recession, to pay for their children’s college edu-
cation. Yet one could argue that the traditional, well-rounded
preparation that the liberal arts offer is a better investment than
ever—that the future demands of citizenship will require not
narrow technical or job-focused training, but rather a subtle
understanding of the complex influences that shape the world
we live in.
No one could be against equipping oneself for a career. But
the “career education” bandwagon seems to suggest that short-
cuts are available to students that lead directly to high-paying
jobs—leaving out “frills” like learning how to write and speak
well, how to understand the nuances of literary texts and sci-
entific concepts, how to collaborate with others on research.
Many states and localities have officials or task forces in
charge of “work-force development,” implying that business and
industry will communicate their needs and educational institu-
tions will dutifully turn out students who can head straight to
the factory floor or the office cubicle to fulfill them. But history
is filled with examples of failed social experiments that treated
people as work units rather than individuals capable of inspi-
ration and ingenuity. It is far wiser for students to prepare for
change—and the multiple careers they are likely to have—than
to search for a single job track that might one day become a
dead end.
I recently heard Geoffrey Garin, president of Hart Research
Associates, suggest that the responsibility of higher education
today is to prepare people “for jobs that do not yet exist.” It
may be that studying the liberal arts is actually the best form
of career education.

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Misperception No. 2: College graduates are finding it harder
to get good jobs with liberal-arts degrees. Who wants to hire
somebody with an irrelevant major like philosophy or French?
Yes, recent graduates have had difficulty in the job market, but

the recession has not differentiated among major fields
of study in its impact. A 2009 survey for the Association
of American Colleges and Universities actually found

that more than three-quarters of our nation’s employers recom-
mend that collegebound students pursue a “liberal education.”
An astounding 89 percent said they were looking for more
emphasis on “the ability to effectively communicate orally and
in writing,” and almost as many urged the development of bet-
ter “critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills.” Seventy
percent said they were on the lookout for “the ability to inno-
vate and be creative.”
It is no surprise, then, that a growing number of corpora-
tions, including some in highly technical fields, are headed
by people with liberal-arts degrees. Plenty of philosophy and
physics majors work on Wall Street, and the ability to analyze
and compare literature across cultures is a skill linked to many
other fields, including law and medicine. Knowledge of foreign
languages is an advantage in all lines of work. What seemed
a radical idea in business education 10 years or so ago—that
critical and creative thinking is as “relevant” as finance or
accounting—is now commonplace.

Misperception No. 3: The liberal arts are particularly irrelevant
for low-income and first-generation college students. They,
more than their more-affluent peers, must focus on something
more practical and marketable. It is condescending to imply
that those who have less cannot understand and appreciate
the finer elements of knowledge—another way of saying, really,

See Chapter 4
for tips on

explaining why
you disagree.

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that the rich folks will do the important thinking, and the lower
classes will simply carry out their ideas. That is just a form of
prejudice and cannot be supported intellectually.
Perhaps students who come with prior acquaintance with
certain fields and a reservoir of experience have an advantage at
the start of college. But in my experience, it is often the people
who are newest to certain ideas and approaches who are the
most original and inventive in the discussion and application
of those ideas. They catch up quickly.
We should respect what everyone brings to the table and
train the broadest possible cross section of American society
to participate in, and help shape, civil discourse. We cannot
assign different socioeconomic groups to different levels or types
of education. This is a country where a mixed-race child raised
overseas by a stuggling single mother who confronts impossible
odds can grow up to be president. It is precisely a liberal educa-
tion that allowed him to catch up and move ahead.

Misperception No. 4: One should not, in this day and age,
study only the arts. The STEM fields—science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics—are where the action is. The
liberal arts encompass the broadest possible range of disci-
plines in the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social
sciences. In fact, the historical basis of a liberal education is in
the classical artes liberales, comprising the trivium (grammar,
logic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy, and music). Another term sometimes substituted for
liberal arts, for the sake of clarity, is “the arts and sciences.”
Thus, many universities have colleges, divisions, or schools of
arts and sciences among their academic units.
To be sure, there is much concern about whether America
is keeping up with China and other rising economies in the

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STEM disciplines. No evidence suggests, however, that success
in scientific and technical fields will be greater if it comes at the
expense of a broad background in other areas of the liberal arts.

Misperception No. 5: It’s the liberal Democrats who got this
country into trouble in recent years, so it’s ridiculous to con-
tinue indoctrinating our young people with a liberal education.
A liberal education, as properly defined above, has nothing
whatsoever to do with politics—except insofar as politics is
one of the fields that students often pursue under its rubric.
On the contrary, because of its inclusiveness and its respect for
classical traditions, the liberal arts could properly be described
as a conservative approach to preparation for life. It promotes
the idea of listening to all points of view and not relying on
a single ideology, and examining all approaches to solving
a problem rather than assuming that one technique or per-
spective has all the answers. That calm and balanced sort of
dialogue may be out of fashion in the American public arena
today, when shouting matches are in vogue and many people
seek information only from sources they know in advance they
agree with. But it may be only liberal education that can help
lead the way back to comity and respectful conversation about
issues before us.

Misperception No. 6: America is the only country in the
world that clings to such an old-fashioned form of postsecond-
ary education as the liberal arts. Other countries, with more
practical orientations, are running way ahead of us. It is often
difficult to explain the advantages of a liberal-arts education
to people from other cultures, where it is common to special-
ize early. In many places, including Europe, the study of law
or medicine often begins directly after high school, without

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any requirement to complete an undergraduate degree first.
We should recognize, however, that a secondary education in
some systems—say, those that follow the model of the German
Gymnasium—often includes much that is left out of the typi-
cal high-school curriculum in America. One need only look
in on a student preparing for the baccalaureat examination in
France to understand the distinction: Mastery of philosophical
and scientific concepts is mandatory.
Further, in recent years delegations from China have been
visiting the United States and asking pointed questions about
the liberal arts, seemingly because they feel there may be good
reason to try that approach to education. The Chinese may be
coming around to the view that a primary focus on technical
training is not serving them adequately—that if they aspire to
world leadership, they will have to provide young people with
a broader perspective. Thus, it is hardly a propitious moment to
toss out, or downgrade, one element of higher education that
has served us so well.

Misconception No. 7: The cost of American higher education
is spiraling out of control, and liberal-arts colleges are becoming
irrelevant because they are unable to register gains in productiv-
ity or to find innovative ways of doing things. There is plenty
wrong with American higher education, including the runaway
costs. But the problem of costs goes beyond individual institutions.
Government at all levels has come nowhere close to supporting
colleges in ways that allow them to provide the kind of access and
affordability that’s needed. The best way to understand genuine
national priorities is to follow the money, and by that standard,
education is really not all that important to this country.
Many means exist to obtain a liberal education, including
at some large universities, public and private. The method

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I happen to advocate, for obvious reasons, is the small, resi-
dential liberal-arts college, usually independent, where there
is close interaction between faculty members and students
and, at its best, a sense of community emerges that prepares
young people to develop high standards for themselves and
others.
Efficiency is hardly the leading quality of liberal-arts col-
leges, and indeed, their financial model is increasingly com-
ing into question. But because of their commitment to expand
need-based financial aid, the net cost of attending a small
liberal-arts college can be lower than that of a large public
university. One can only hope that each institution will find
ways to cut costs and develop distinguishing characteristics that
help it survive through the tough times ahead.
The debate over liberal education will surely continue
through the recession and beyond, but it would be helpful to put
these misperceptions aside. Financial issues cannot be ignored,
but neither can certain eternal verities: Through immersion
in liberal arts, students learn not just to make a living, but
also to live a life rich in values and character. They come
to terms with complexity and diversity, and otherwise devise
means to solve problems—rather than just complaining about
them. They develop patterns that help them understand how
to keep learning for the rest of their days.

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Joining the Conversation

1. Summarize in a few sentences the seven misperceptions that
Sanford Ungar discusses. These of course are all things that
“they say”—and that he uses to launch what he wants to
say. How does calling them “misperceptions” affect the way
you read his argument? Would you read it any differently if
he instead called them “common assumptions”?

2. See paragraph 6, where Geoffrey Garin suggests that “the
responsibility of higher education today is to prepare people
‘for jobs that do not yet exist.’ ” Thus, according to Ungar,
“It may be that studying the liberal arts is actually the best
form of career education.” How would you respond to this
claim?

3. Misperception 5 relates liberal education to political affilia-
tion. What does Ungar have to say on this issue, and what
do you think about his response?

4. On what specific points do you think Ungar would agree
with Charles Murray (pp. 234–54)? On what points would
he be likely to disagree?

5. Write your own essay listing and explaining five assumptions
about college education. Follow Ungar’s essay as a model,
and use the “they say / I say” pattern to organize your essay,
with each assumption as a “they say” that sets up what you
want to say.

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Are Too Many People Going to College?

C H A R L E S M U R R A Y

To ask whether too many people are going to college requires
us to think about the importance and nature of a liberal edu-
cation. “Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge
required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their
livelihood,” John Stuart Mill told students at the University
of St. Andrews in 1867. “Their object is not to make skillful
lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated
human beings.” If this is true (and I agree that it is), why say that
too many people are going to college? Surely a mass democracy
should encourage as many people as possible to become “capable
and cultivated human beings” in Mill’s sense. We should not
restrict the availability of a liberal education to a rarefied intel-
lectual elite. More people should be going to college, not fewer.

Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.,
and describes himself as a libertarian. He is the coauthor, with Richard
Herrnstein, of The Bell Curve (1994) and author, most recently, of
Coming Apart (2012). This essay, adapted from his book, Real Educa-
tion: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality
(2008), first appeared on September 8, 2008, in The American, the
journal of the American Enterprise Institute.

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Yes and no. More people should be getting the basics of a
liberal education. But for most students, the places to provide
those basics are elementary and middle school. E. D. Hirsch Jr.
is the indispensable thinker on this topic, beginning with his
1987 book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs
to Know. Part of his argument involves the importance
of a body of core knowledge in fostering reading speed
and comprehension. With regard to a liberal education, Hirsch
makes three points that are germane here:

Full participation in any culture requires familiarity with a
body of core knowledge. To live in the United States and not
recognize Teddy Roosevelt, Prohibition, the Minutemen, Wall
Street, smoke-filled rooms, or Gettysburg is like trying to read
without knowing some of the ten thousand most commonly
used words in the language. It signifies a degree of cultural
illiteracy about America. But the core knowledge transcends
one’s own country. Not to recognize Falstaff, Apollo, the Sistine
Chapel, the Inquisition, the twenty-third Psalm, or Mozart sig-
nifies cultural illiteracy about the West. Not to recognize the
solar system, the Big Bang, natural selection, relativity, or the
periodic table is to be scientifically illiterate. Not to recognize
the Mediterranean, Vienna, the Yangtze River, Mount Everest,
or Mecca is to be geographically illiterate.

This core knowledge is an important part of the glue that
holds the culture together. All American children, of whatever
ethnic heritage, and whether their families came here 300 years
ago or three months ago, need to learn about the Pilgrims,
Valley Forge, Duke Ellington, Apollo 11, Susan B. Anthony,
George C. Marshall, and the Freedom Riders. All students need
to learn the iconic stories. For a society of immigrants such as

See Chapter 4
for ways to
agree, but with
a difference.

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ours, the core knowledge is our shared identity that makes us
Americans together rather than hyphenated Americans.

K–8 are the right years to teach the core knowledge, and the
effort should get off to a running start in elementary school.
Starting early is partly a matter of necessity: There’s a lot to
learn, and it takes time. But another reason is that small children
enjoy learning myths and fables, showing off names and dates
they have memorized, and hearing about great historical figures
and exciting deeds. The educational establishment sees this kind
of curriculum as one that forces children to memorize boring
facts. That conventional wisdom is wrong on every count. The
facts can be fascinating (if taught right); a lot more than memo-
rization is entailed; yet memorizing things is an indispensable
part of education, too; and memorizing is something that chil-
dren do much, much better than adults. The core knowledge
is suited to ways that young children naturally learn and enjoy
learning. Not all children will be able to do the reading with
the same level of comprehension, but the fact-based nature of
the core knowledge actually works to the benefit of low-ability
students—remembering facts is much easier than making infer-
ences and deductions. The core knowledge curriculum lends
itself to adaptation for students across a wide range of academic
ability.

In the 20 years since Cultural Literacy was published, Hirsch and
his colleagues have developed and refined his original formula-
tion into an inventory of more than 6,000 items that approxi-
mate the core knowledge broadly shared by literate Americans.
Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation has also developed a
detailed, grade-by-grade curriculum for K–8, complete with
lists of books and other teaching materials.

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The Core Knowledge approach need not stop with eighth
grade. High school is a good place for survey courses in the
humanities, social sciences, and sciences taught at a level below
the demands of a college course and accessible to most students
in the upper two-thirds of the distribution of academic ability.
Some students will not want to take these courses, and it can
be counterproductive to require them to do so, but high school
can put considerable flesh on the liberal education skeleton for
students who are still interested.

Liberal Education in College

Saying “too many people are going to college” is not the same
as saying that the average student does not need to know about
history, science, and great works of art, music, and literature.
They do need to know—and to know more than they are cur-
rently learning. So let’s teach it to them, but let’s not wait for
college to do it.
Liberal education in college means taking on the tough
stuff. A high-school graduate who has acquired Hirsch’s core
knowledge will know, for example, that John Stuart Mill was
an important 19th-century English philosopher who was associ-
ated with something called Utilitarianism and wrote a famous
book called On Liberty. But learning philosophy in college,
which is an essential component of a liberal education, means
that the student has to be able to read and understand the
actual text of On Liberty. That brings us to the limits set by
the nature of college-level material. Here is the first sentence
of On Liberty: “The subject of this essay is not the so-called
liberty of the will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed
doctrine of philosophical necessity; but civil, or social liberty:

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the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately
exercised by society over the individual.” I will not burden you
with On Liberty’s last sentence. It is 126 words long. And Mill is
one of the more accessible philosophers, and On Liberty is one
of Mill’s more accessible works. It would be nice if everyone
could acquire a fully formed liberal education, but they cannot.
Specifically: When College Board researchers defined “col-
lege readiness” as the SAT score that is associated with a
65 percent chance of getting at least a 2.7 grade point average
in college during the freshman year, and then applied those
criteria (hardly demanding in an era of soft courses and grade
inflation) to the freshmen in a sample of 41 major colleges and
universities, the threshold “college readiness” score was found
to be 1180 on the combined SAT math and verbal tests. It is
a score that only about 10 percent of American 18-year-olds
would achieve if they all took the SAT, in an age when more
than 30 percent of 18-year-olds go to college.
Should all of those who do have the academic ability to absorb
a college-level liberal education get one? It depends. Suppose
we have before us a young woman who is in the 98th percentile
of academic ability and wants to become a lawyer and eventu-
ally run for political office. To me, it seems essential that she
spend her undergraduate years getting a rigorous liberal educa-
tion. Apart from a liberal education’s value to her, the nation
will benefit. Everything she does as an attorney or as an elected
official should be informed by the kind of wisdom that a rigorous
liberal education can encourage. It is appropriate to push her
into that kind of undergraduate program.
But the only reason we can get away with pushing her is
that the odds are high that she will enjoy it. The odds are high
because she is good at this sort of thing—it’s no problem for her
to read On Liberty or Paradise Lost. It’s no problem for her to

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come up with an interesting perspective on what she’s read and
weave it into a term paper. And because she’s good at it, she is
also likely to enjoy it. It is one of Aristotle’s central themes in
his discussion of human happiness, a theme that John Rawls later
distilled into what he called the Aristotelian Principle: “Other
things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of the irrealized
capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment
increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its
complexity.” And so it comes to pass that those who take the
hardest majors and who enroll in courses that look most like an
old fashioned liberal education are concentrated among the stu-
dents in the top percentiles of academic ability. Getting a liberal
education consists of dealing with complex intellectual material
day after day, and dealing with complex intellectual material is
what students in the top few percentiles are really good at, in the
same way that other people are really good at cooking or making
pottery. For these students, doing it well is fun.
Every percentile down the ability ladder—and this applies
to all abilities, not just academic—the probability that a person
will enjoy the hardest aspects of an activity goes down as well.
Students at the 80th percentile of academic ability are still
smart kids, but the odds that they will respond to a course that
assigns Mill or Milton are considerably lower than the odds
that a student in the top few percentiles will respond. Virtue
has nothing to do with it. Maturity has nothing to do with it.
Appreciation of the value of a liberal education has nothing
to do with it. The probability that a student will enjoy Paradise
Lost goes down as his linguistic ability goes down, but so does
the probability that he works on double acrostic puzzles in his
spare time or regularly plays online Scrabble, and for the identi-
cal reason. The lower down the linguistic ladder he is, the less
fun such activities are.

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And so we return to the question: Should all of those who
have the academic ability to absorb a college-level liberal edu-
cation get one? If our young woman is at the 80th percentile
of linguistic ability, should she be pushed to do so? She has
enough intellectual capacity, if she puts her mind to it and
works exceptionally hard.
The answer is no. If she wants to, fine. But she probably
won’t, and there’s no way to force her. Try to force her (for
example, by setting up a demanding core curriculum), and she
will transfer to another school, because she is in college for
vocational training. She wants to write computer code. Start
a business. Get a job in television. She uses college to take
vocational courses that pertain to her career interests. A large
proportion of people who are theoretically able to absorb a
liberal education have no interest in doing so.
And reasonably so. Seen dispassionately, getting a tradi-
tional liberal education over four years is an odd way to enjoy
spending one’s time. Not many people enjoy reading for hour
after hour, day after day, no matter what the material may be.
To enjoy reading On Liberty and its ilk—and if you’re going
to absorb such material, you must in some sense enjoy the
process—is downright peculiar. To be willing to spend many
more hours writing papers and answers to exam questions about
that material approaches masochism.
We should look at the kind of work that goes into acquiring
a liberal education at the college level in the same way that
we look at the grueling apprenticeship that goes into becom-
ing a master chef: something that understandably attracts only
a few people. Most students at today’s colleges choose not to
take the courses that go into a liberal education because the
capabilities they want to develop lie elsewhere. These students
are not lazy, any more than students who don’t want to spend

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hours learning how to chop carrots into a perfect eighth-inch
dice are lazy. A liberal education just doesn’t make sense for
them.

For Learning How to Make a Living,
the Four-Year Brick-and-Mortar Residential College
Is Increasingly Obsolete

We now go from one extreme to the other, from the ideal
of liberal education to the utilitarian process of acquiring
the knowledge that most students go to college to acquire—
practical and vocational. The question here is not whether
the traditional four-year residential college is fun or valuable
as a place to grow up, but when it makes sense as a place
to learn how to make a living. The answer is: in a sensible
world, hardly ever.
Start with the time it takes—four years. Assuming a semes-
ter system with four courses per semester, four years of class
work means 32 semester-long courses. The occupations for
which “knowing enough” requires 32 courses are exceedingly
rare. For some professions—medicine and law are the obvious
examples—a rationale for four years of course work can be con-
cocted (combining pre-med and pre-law undergraduate courses
with three years of medical school and law school), but for every
other occupation, the body of knowledge taught in classrooms
can be learned more quickly. Even Ph.D.s don’t require four
years of course work. The Ph.D. is supposed to signify expertise,
but that expertise comes from burrowing deep in to a specialty,
not from dozens of courses.
Those are the jobs with the most stringent academic require-
ments. For the student who wants to become a good hotel
manager, software designer, accountant, hospital administrator,

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farmer, high-school teacher, social worker, journalist, optome-
trist, interior designer, or football coach, four years of class work
is ridiculous. Actually becoming good in those occupations
will take longer than four years, but most of the competence
is acquired on the job. The two-year community college and
online courses offer more flexible options for tailoring course
work to the real needs of the job.
A brick-and-mortar campus is increasingly obsolete. The
physical infrastructure of the college used to make sense for
three reasons. First, a good library was essential to higher learn-
ing, and only a college faculty and student body provided the
economies of scale that made good libraries affordable. Second,
scholarship flourishes through colleagueships, and the college
campus made it possible to put scholars in physical proximity
to each other. Third, the best teaching requires interaction
between teachers and students, and physical proximity was
the only way to get it. All three rationales for the brick-and-
mortar campus are fading fast.
The rationale for a physical library is within a few years of
extinction. Even now, the Internet provides access, for a price,
to all the world’s significant technical journals. The books are
about to follow. Google is scanning the entire text of every
book in the libraries of Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford,
the New York Public Library, the Bavarian State Library,
Ghent University Library, Keio Library (Tokyo), the National
Library of Catalonia, University of Lausanne, and an expand-
ing list of others. Collectively, this project will encompass close
to the sum total of human knowledge. It will be completely
searchable. Everything out of copyright will be free. Everything
still under copyright will be accessible for a fee. Libraries will
still be a selling point for colleges, but as a place for students
to study in pleasant surroundings—an amenity in the same

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way that an attractive student union is an amenity. Colleges
and universities will not need to exist because they provide
libraries.
The rationale for colleges based on colleagueships has
eroded. Until a few decades ago, physical proximity was impor-
tant because correspondence and phone calls just weren’t as
good. As email began to spread during the 1980s, physical prox-
imity became less important. As the capacity of the Internet
expanded in the 1990s, other mechanisms made those inter-
actions richer. Now, regular emails from professional groups
inform scholars of the latest publications in their field of inter-
est. Specialized chat groups enable scholars to bounce new ideas
off other people working on the same problems. Drafts are
exchanged effortlessly and comments attached electronically.
Whether physical proximity still has any advantages depends
mostly on the personality of the scholar. Some people like being
around other people during the workday and prefer face-to-face
conversations to emails. For those who don’t, the value of being
on a college campus instead of on a mountaintop in Montana
is nil. Their electronic access to other scholars is incompara-
bly greater than any scholar enjoyed even within the world’s
premier universities before the advent of the Internet. Like
the library, face-to-face colleagueships will be an amenity that
colleges continue to provide. But colleges and universities will
not need to exist because they provide a community of scholars.
The third rationale for the brick-and-mortar college is that
it brings teachers together with students. Working against that
rationale is the explosion in the breadth and realism of what
is known as distance learning. The idea of distance learning
is surprisingly old—Isaac Pitman was teaching his shorthand
system to British students through the postal service in the
1840s, and the University of London began offering degrees for

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correspondence students in 1858—but the technology of dis-
tance learning changed little for the next century. The advent
of inexpensive videocassettes in the 1980s opened up a way for
students to hear and see lectures without being in the class-
room. By the early 1990s, it was possible to buy college-level
courses on audio or videotape, taught by first-rate teaching
professors, on a wide range of topics, for a few hundred dollars.
But without easy interaction between teacher and student,
distance learning remained a poor second-best to a good col-
lege seminar.
Once again, the Internet is revolutionizing everything. As
personal computers acquired the processing power to show
high-definition video and the storage capacity to handle big
video files, the possibilities for distance learning expanded by
orders of magnitude. We are now watching the early expres-
sion of those possibilities: podcasts and streaming videos in real
time of professors’ lectures, online discussions among students
scattered around the country, online interaction between stu-
dents and professors, online exams, and tutorials augmented by
computer-aided instruction software.
Even today, the quality of student-teacher interactions in a
virtual classroom competes with the interactions in a brick-and-
mortar classroom. But the technology is still in its early stages
of development and the rate of improvement is breathtaking.
Compare video games such as Myst and SimCity in the 1990s to
their descendants today; the Walkman you used in the 1990s to
the iPod you use today; the cell phone you used in the 1990s
to the BlackBerry or iPhone you use today. Whatever technical
limitations might lead you to say, “Yes, but it’s still not the
same as being there in the classroom,” are probably within a
few years of being outdated.

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College Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

College looms so large in the thinking of both parents and
students because it is seen as the open sesame to a good job.
Reaping the economic payoff for college that shows up in econo-
metric analyses is a long shot for large numbers of young people.
When high-school graduates think that obtaining a B.A.
will help them get a higher-paying job, they are only narrowly
correct. Economists have established beyond doubt that people
with B.A.s earn more on average than people without them.
But why does the B.A. produce that result? For whom does the
B.A. produce that result? For some jobs, the economic premium
for a degree is produced by the actual education that has gone
into getting the degree. Lawyers, physicians, and engineers can
earn their high incomes only by deploying knowledge and skills
that take years to acquire, and degrees in law, medicine, and
engineering still signify competence in those knowledges and
skills. But for many other jobs, the economic premium for the
B.A. is created by a brutal fact of life about the American job
market: Employers do not even interview applicants who do
not hold a B.A. Even more brutal, the advantage conferred
by the B.A. often has nothing to do with the content of the
education. Employers do not value what the student learned,
just that the student has a degree.
Employers value the B.A. because it is a no-cost (for them)
screening device for academic ability and perseverance. The
more people who go to college, the more sense it makes for
employers to require a B.A. When only a small percentage
of people got college degrees, employers who required a B.A.
would have been shutting themselves off from access to most
of the talent. With more than a third of 23-year-olds now get-
ting a B.A., many employers can reasonably limit their hiring

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pool to college graduates because bright and ambitious high-
school graduates who can go to college usually do go to college.
An employer can believe that exceptions exist but rationally
choose not to expend time and money to identify them. Know-
ing this, large numbers of students are in college to buy their
admission ticket—the B.A.
But while it is true that the average person with a B.A.
makes more than the average person without a B.A., getting
a B.A. is still going to be the wrong economic decision for
many high-school graduates. Wages within occupations form
a distribution. Young people with okay-but-not-great academic
ability who are thinking about whether to go after a B.A. need
to consider the competition they will face after they graduate.
Let me put these calculations in terms of a specific example,
a young man who has just graduated from high school and is
trying to decide whether to become an electrician or go to
college and major in business, hoping to become a white-collar
manager. He is at the 70th percentile in linguistic ability and
logical mathematical ability—someone who shouldn’t go to
college by my standards, but who can, in today’s world, easily
find a college that will give him a degree. He is exactly average
in interpersonal and intrapersonal ability. He is at the 95th
percentile in the small-motor skills and spatial abilities that
are helpful in being a good electrician.
He begins by looking up the average income of electricians
and managers on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, and
finds that the mean annual income for electricians in 2005 was
$45,630, only about half of the $88,450 mean for management
occupations. It looks as if getting a B.A. will buy him a huge wage
premium. Should he try to get the B.A. on economic grounds?
To make his decision correctly, our young man must start
by throwing out the averages. He has the ability to become

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an excellent electrician and can reasonably expect to be near
the top of the electricians’ income distribution. He does not
have it in him to be an excellent manager, because he is
only average in interpersonal and intrapersonal ability and
only modestly above average in academic ability, all of which
are important for becoming a good manager, while his com-
petitors for those slots will include many who are high in
all of those abilities. Realistically, he should be looking at
the incomes toward the bottom of the distribution of man-
agers. With that in mind, he goes back to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics website and discovers that an electrician at
the 90th percentile of electricians’ incomes made $70,480
in 2005, almost twice the income of a manager at the 10th
percentile of managers’ incomes ($37,800). Even if our young
man successfully completes college and gets a B.A. (which is
far from certain), he is likely to make less money than if he
becomes an electrician.
Then there is job security to consider. A good way to make
sure you always can find work is to be among the best at what
you do. It also helps to have a job that does not require you
to compete with people around the globe. When corporations
downsize, they lay off mediocre managers before they lay off
top electricians. When the economy gets soft, top electricians
can find work when mediocre managers cannot. Low-level
management jobs can often be outsourced to India, whereas
electricians’ jobs cannot.
What I have said of electricians is true throughout the
American job market. The income for the top people in a
wide variety of occupations that do not require a college degree
is higher than the average income for many occupations that
require a B.A. Furthermore, the range and number of such jobs
are expanding rapidly. The need for assembly-line workers in

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factories (one of the most boring jobs ever invented) is fall-
ing, but the demand for skilled technicians of every kind—in
healthcare, information technology, transportation networks,
and every other industry that relies on high-tech equipment—
is expanding. The service sector includes many low-skill, low-
paying jobs, but it also includes growing numbers of specialized
jobs that pay well (for example, in healthcare and the enter-
tainment and leisure industries). Construction offers an array
of high-paying jobs for people who are good at what they do.
It’s not just skilled labor in the standard construction trades
that is in high demand. The increase in wealth in American
society has increased the demand for all sorts of craftsman-
ship. Today’s high-end homes and office buildings may entail
the work of specialized skills in stonework, masonry, glazing,
painting, cabinetmaking, machining, landscaping, and a dozen
other crafts. The increase in wealth is also driving an increased
demand for the custom-made and the exquisitely wrought,
meaning demand for artisans in everything from pottery to
jewelry to metalworking. There has never been a time in his-
tory when people with skills not taught in college have been
in so much demand at such high pay as today, nor a time when
the range of such jobs has been so wide. In today’s America,
finding a first-rate lawyer or physician is easy. Finding first-rate
skilled labor is hard.

Intrinsic Rewards

The topic is no longer money but job satisfaction—intrinsic
rewards. We return to our high-school graduate trying to decide
between going to college and becoming an electrician. He knows
that he enjoys working with his hands and likes the idea of not
being stuck in the same place all day, but he also likes the idea

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of being a manager sitting behind a desk in a big office, telling
people what to do and getting the status that goes with it.
However, he should face facts that he is unlikely to know
on his own, but that a guidance counselor could help him face.
His chances of getting the big office and the status are slim.
He is more likely to remain in a cubicle, under the thumb of
the boss in the big office. He is unlikely to have a job in which
he produces something tangible during the course of the day.
If he becomes a top electrician instead, he will have an
expertise that he exercises at a high level. At the end of a
workday, he will often be able to see that his work made a dif-
ference in the lives of people whose problems he has solved. He
will not be confined to a cubicle and, after his apprenticeship,
will be his own supervisor in the field. Top electricians often
become independent contractors who have no boss at all.
The intrinsic rewards of being a top manager can be just as
great as those of a top electrician (though I would not claim
they are greater), but the intrinsic rewards of being a mediocre
manager are not. Even as people in white-collar jobs lament the
soullessness of their work, the intrinsic rewards of exercising
technical skills remain undiminished.
Finally, there is an overarching consideration so important it
is hard to express adequately: the satisfaction of being good at
what one does for a living (and knowing it), compared to the
melancholy of being mediocre at what one does for a living (and
knowing it). This is another truth about living a human life that
a 17-year-old might not yet understand on his own, but that a
guidance counselor can bring to his attention. Guidance coun-
selors and parents who automatically encourage young people
to go to college straight out of high school regardless of their
skills and interests are being thoughtless about the best interests
of young people in their charge.

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The Dark Side of the B.A. as Norm

It is possible to accept all that I have presented as fact and still
disagree with the proposition that too many people are going
to college. The argument goes something like this:
The meaning of a college education has evolved since the
19th century. The traditional liberal education is still available
for students who want it, but the curriculum is appropriately
broader now, and includes many courses for vocational prepa-
ration that today’s students want. Furthermore, intellectual
requirements vary across majors. It may be true that few stu-
dents can complete a major in economics or biology, but larger
proportions can handle the easier majors. A narrow focus on
curriculum also misses the important nonacademic functions of
college. The lifestyle on today’s campuses may leave something
to be desired, but four years of college still give youngsters in
late adolescence a chance to encounter different kinds of peo-
ple, to discover new interests, and to decide what they want to
make of their lives. And if it is true that some students spend
too much of their college years partying, that was also true of
many Oxford students in the 18th century. Lighten up.
If the only people we had to worry about were those who are
on college campuses and doing reasonably well, this position
would have something to be said for it. It does not address the
issues of whether four years makes sense or whether a residential
facility makes sense; nevertheless, college as it exists is not an
intrinsically evil place for the students who are there and are
coping academically. But there is the broader American soci-
ety to worry about as well. However unintentionally, we have
made something that is still inaccessible to a majority of the
population—the B.A.—into a symbol of first-class citizenship.
We have done so at the same time that other class divisions are

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becoming more powerful. Today’s college system is implicated
in the emergence of class-riven America.
The problem begins with the message sent to young peo-
ple that they should aspire to college no matter what. Some
politicians are among the most visible offenders, treating every
failure to go to college as an injustice that can be remedied by
increasing government help. American educational administra-
tors reinforce the message by instructing guidance counselors to
steer as many students as possible toward a college-prep track
(more than 90 percent of high-school students report that
their guidance counselors encouraged them to go to college).
But politicians and educators are only following the lead of
the larger culture. As long as it remains taboo to acknowledge
that college is intellectually too demanding for most young
people, we will continue to create crazily unrealistic expecta-
tions among the next generation. If “crazily unrealistic” sounds
too strong, consider that more than 90 percent of high school
seniors expect to go to college, and more than 70 percent of
them expect to work in professional jobs.
One aspect of this phenomenon has been labeled misaligned
ambitions, meaning that adolescents have career ambitions that
are inconsistent with their educational plans. Data from the
Sloan Study of Youth and Social Development conducted dur-
ing the 1990s indicate that misaligned ambitions characterized
more than half of all adolescents. Almost always, the misalign-
ment is in the optimistic direction, as adolescents aspire to be
attorneys or physicians without understanding the educational
hurdles they must surmount to achieve their goals. They end up
at a four-year institution not because that is where they can take
the courses they need to meet their career goals, but because
college is the place where B.A.s are handed out, and everyone
knows that these days you’ve got to have a B.A. Many of them

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drop out. Of those who entered a four-year college in 1995,
only 58 percent had gotten their B.A. five academic years later.
Another 14 percent were still enrolled. If we assume that half
of that 14 percent eventually get their B.A.s, about a third of
all those who entered college hoping for a B.A. leave without
one.
If these numbers had been produced in a culture where the
B.A. was a nice thing to have but not a big deal, they could
be interpreted as the result of young adults deciding that they
didn’t really want a B.A. after all. Instead, these numbers were
produced by a system in which having a B.A. is a very big deal
indeed, and that brings us to the increasingly worrisome role
of the B.A. as a source of class division. The United States has
always had symbols of class, and the college degree has always
been one of them. But through the first half of the 20th century,
there were all sorts of respectable reasons a person might not
go to college—not enough money to pay for college; needing
to work right out of high school to support a wife, parents,
or younger siblings; or the commonly held belief that going
straight to work was better preparation for a business career
than going to college. As long as the percentage of college
graduates remained small, it also remained true, and everybody
knew it, that the majority of America’s intellectually most able
people did not have B.A.s.
Over the course of the 20th century, three trends gath-
ered strength. The first was the increasing proportion of jobs
screened for high academic ability due to the advanced level
of education they require—engineers, physicians, attorneys,
college teachers, scientists, and the like. The second was the
increasing market value of those jobs. The third was the open-
ing up of college to more of those who had the academic ability
to go to college, partly because the increase in American wealth

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meant that more parents could afford college for their children,
and partly because the proliferation of scholarships and loans
made it possible for most students with enough academic ability
to go.
The combined effect of these trends has been to overturn
the state of affairs that prevailed through World War II. Now
the great majority of America’s intellectually most able peo-
ple do have a B.A. Along with that transformation has come
a downside that few anticipated. The acceptable excuses for
not going to college have dried up. The more people who go
to college, the more stigmatizing the failure to complete col-
lege becomes. Today, if you do not get a B.A., many people
assume it is because you are too dumb or too lazy. And all this
because of a degree that seldom has an interpretable substan-
tive meaning.
Let’s approach the situation from a different angle. Imagine
that America had no system of postsecondary education and
you were made a member of a task force assigned to create one
from scratch. Ask yourself what you would think if one of your
colleagues submitted this proposal:
First, we will set up a common goal for every young person
that represents educational success. We will call it a B.A. We
will then make it difficult or impossible for most people to
achieve this goal. For those who can, achieving the goal will
take four years no matter what is being taught. We will attach
an economic reward for reaching the goal that often has little
to do with the content of what has been learned. We will lure
large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability
or motivation to try to achieve the goal and then fail. We will
then stigmatize everyone who fails to achieve it.
What I have just described is the system that we have in
place. There must be a better way.

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C H A R L E S M U R R A Y

2 5 4

Joining the Conversation

1. The “I say” here is explicit: “too many people are going to
college.” We know what Charles Murray thinks. But why
does he think this? In the rest of his essay, he tells us why.
Summarize his argument, noting all the reasons and evi-
dence he gives to support his claim.

2. Is Murray right—are too many people going to college? If
you disagree, why? Whether or not you agree with him, do
you find his argument persuasive?

3. In the middle of the essay is a lengthy narrative about some-
one who is trying to decide what to be when he grows up,
an electrician or a manager. What does this narrative con-
tribute to Murray’s argument? Where would the argument
be without the narrative?

4. Compare Murray’s argument that college is a waste of time
for many with Sanford J. Ungar’s argument (pp. 226–33)
that anyone can benefit from a college education. Which
one do you find more convincing?

5. In one or two paragraphs, reflect on why you chose your
current school. Did you consider, first and foremost, how
your college would help you “learn how to make a living,” as
Murray would recommend? Did you consider other poten-
tial benefits of your college education? If you could have a
well-paying job without a college education, would you go
to college anyway?

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2 5 5

Two Years Are Better than Four

L I Z A D D I S O N

Oh, the hand wringing. “College as America used to
understand it is coming to an end,” bemoans Rick Perlstein and
his beatnik friend of fallen face. Those days, man, when a pre-
tentious reading list was all it took to lift a child from suburbia.
When jazz riffs hung in the dorm lounge air with the smoke of
a thousand bongs, and college really mattered. Really mattered?
Rick Perlstein thinks so. It mattered so much to him that
he never got over his four years at the University of Privilege.
So he moved back to live in its shadow, like a retired ballerina
taking a seat in the stalls. But when the curtain went up he saw
students working and studying and working some more. Adults

Liz Addison attended Piedmont Virginia Community College and
Southern Maine Community College, where she graduated with a
degree in biology in 2008. She received a graduate degree from the
Royal Veterinary College in London in 2014 and now works as a
veterinarian in Virginia. This essay, published in 2007, was a runner-
up in a New York Times Magazine college essay contest. The essay
responds to Rick Perlstein’s opinion piece “What’s the Matter With
College?,” in which he argues that universities no longer matter as
much as they once did.

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before their time. Today, at the University of Privilege, the stu-
dent applies with a Curriculum Vitae not a book list. Shudder.
Thus, Mr. Perlstein concludes, the college experience—a
rite of passage as it was meant it to be—must have come to an
end. But he is wrong. For Mr. Perlstein, so rooted in his own
nostalgia, is looking for himself—and he would never think to
look for himself in the one place left where the college experi-
ence of self-discovery does still matter to those who get there.
My guess, reading between the lines, is that Mr. Perlstein has
never set foot in an American community college.
The philosophy of the community college, and I have been
to two of them, is one that unconditionally allows its students to
begin. Just begin. Implicit in this belief is the understanding
that anything and everything is possible. Just follow any one of
the 1,655 road signs, and pop your head inside—yes, they let
anyone in—and there you will find discoveries of a first inde-
pendent film, a first independent thought, a first independent
study. This college experience remains as it should. This college
brochure is not marketing for the parents—because the parents,
nor grandparents, probably never went to college themselves.
Upon entry to my first community college I had but one
O’level to my name. These now disbanded qualifications once
marked the transition from lower to upper high school in
the Great British education system. It was customary for the
average student to proceed forward with a clutch of O’levels,
say eight or nine. On a score of one, I left school hurriedly at
sixteen. Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “Everybody should have
an education proportional to their life.” In my case, my life
became proportional to my education. But, in doing so, it had
the good fortune to land me in an American community college
and now, from that priceless springboard, I too seek admission
to the University of Privilege. Enter on empty and leave with

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a head full of dreams? How can Mr. Perlstein say college does
not matter anymore?
The community college system is America’s hidden public
service gem. If I were a candidate for office I would campaign
from every campus. Not to score political points, but simply to
make sure that anyone who is looking to go to college in this
country knows where to find one. Just recently, I read an article
in the New York Times describing a “college application essay”
workshop for low-income students. I was strangely disturbed
that those interviewed made no mention of community college.
Mr. Perlstein might have been equally disturbed, for the thrust
of the workshop was no different to that of an essay coach to
the affluent. “Make Life Stories Shine,” beams the headline.
Or, in other words, prove yourself worldly, insightful, cultured,
mature, before you get to college.
Yet, down at X.Y.C.C. it is still possible to enter the college
experience as a rookie. That is the understanding—that you
will grow up a little bit with your first English class,
a bit more with your first psychology class, a whole
lot more with your first biology, physics, chemistry.
That you may shoot through the roof with calculus,
philosophy, or genetics. “College is the key,” a young African
American student writes for the umpteenth torturous revision
of his college essay, “as well as hope.” Oh, I wanted desperately
to say, please tell him about community college. Please tell him
that hope can begin with just one placement test.
When Mr. Perlstein and friends say college no longer holds
importance, they mourn for both the individual and society.
Yet, arguably, the community college experience is more criti-
cal to the nation than that of former beatnik types who, lest we
forget, did not change the world. The community colleges of
America cover this country college by college and community

See Chapter
9 on mixing
academic and
colloquial
styles.

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by community. They offer a network of affordable future, of
accessible hope, and an option to dream. In the cold light of
day, is it perhaps not more important to foster students with
dreams rather than a building take-over?
I believe so. I believe the community college system to be
one of America’s uniquely great institutions. I believe it should
be celebrated as such. “For those who find it necessary to go to
a two-year college,” begins one University of Privilege admis-
sions paragraph. None too subtle in its implication, but very
true. For some students, from many backgrounds, would never
breathe the college experience if it were not for the community
college. Yes, it is here that Mr. Perlstein will find his college
years of self-discovery, and it is here he will find that college
does still matter.

Joining the Conversation

1. What view is Liz Addison responding to? Write out a sen-
tence or two summarizing the “they say.”

2. Addison discusses her own educational experience as part of
her argument. What role does this use of autobiographical
narrative play in her argument?

3. How does Addison make clear that her topic is really impor-
tant—and that it should matter to readers?

4. In closing, Addison writes of community colleges: “It is
here that Mr. Perlstein will find his college years of self-
discovery, and it is here he will find that college does still
matter.” Do you think college still matters? Write an essay
responding to this point from your own perspective as a
college student.

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2 5 9

Colleges Prepare People for Life

F R E E M A N H R A B O W S K I

Those Who Claim Education Is a Waste of Time
Are Missing the Bigger Picture

A recent New York Times illustration read, “College Is
for Suckers.”
The words were emblazoned across the sweatshirts of four
students, and the accompanying article made essentially that
point. It echoed an increasingly common refrain that college
is expensive, that students are taking on unmanageable debt
and that they too often graduate unprepared for the world of
work.

Freeman Hrabowski has been the president of the University of
Maryland, Baltimore County, since 1992. In 2012, President Obama
named him chair of the President’s Advisory Commission on Educa-
tional Excellence for African Americans. Hrabowski is the coauthor
of the books Beating the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African
American Males (1998) and Overcoming the Odds: Raising Academically
Successful African American Young Women (2001). This article first
appeared in the Baltimore Sun on December 22, 2013.

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In contrast, many economists and educators point to data
showing that the fastest growing job categories require at least
a college degree. College graduates are much more likely to be
employed than those with only a high school diploma and earn
substantially higher salaries. According to this viewpoint, col-
lege graduates aren’t suckers; they’re the winners in a globally
competitive economy.
Both sides have points. However, the first argument
treats colleges as monolithic, and the second turns individual
students into averages. The reality is far more nuanced. Too
often, our current system fails to help students identify the insti-
tutions best suited to them—based on their academic prepara-
tion, aspirations and resources. When we focus so heavily on
monetary inputs and outputs, we ignore the question of what it
truly means to be educated, such as contributing to the public
good.
Yes, colleges prepare people for jobs, but more critically, they
prepare people for life. A job may be the starting point for the
good life, but it shouldn’t be the end point.
One strength of American higher education is the diversity
of missions among our 4,700 colleges and universities. Students
can find institutions—public and private, two-year and four-
year—for just about any educational niche and budget. Stu-
dents and families should learn as much as possible about each
institution they are considering. They should also estimate the
net costs, looking carefully at expenses and anticipated grants
and loans.
Colleges and universities must also be more transparent.
President Barack Obama has called on higher education to
standardize the information given to students and families
about costs, financial aid packages, students’ debt at gradua-
tion and graduation rates. The University System of Maryland

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was one of the first systems to sign on to that initiative, and
campuses now provide new details in a revised financial aid
award letter sent to families.
Maryland families are fortunate. Thanks to the support of
Gov. Martin O’Malley and the Maryland General Assembly,
tuition at our public colleges and universities has increased only
3 percent each year for the past three years, following four years
of tuition freezes. In addition, our public and private institu-
tions have an impressive record of admitting and educating a
broad range of students who have become leaders in Maryland
and beyond. Enrollments at our institutions are healthy because
families have seen that our graduates succeed.
Even so, students need strong counseling to identify the best
possible options. Lack of counseling is one reason that fewer
than 10 percent of Americans from the lowest income quartile
have earned a college degree by age 24, compared to 80 percent
of those in the top quartile.
My colleagues spend countless hours advising prospective
students, some of whom ultimately choose UMBC, while others
decide we’re not the best fit. That type of counseling is critical,
but it is time consuming and expensive for both colleges and
high schools.
College preparatory initiatives such as Way2go Maryland,
led by the University System of Maryland, have proven promis-
ing. So, too, have programs run by such private organizations as
the CollegeBound Foundation in Baltimore and CollegeTracks
in Montgomery County. However, adequate funding continues
to be a challenge, and much work remains in educating students
about their options. Higher education must continue to partner
with school systems to prepare more students for college. At
stake isn’t just a clearer path to financial stability, but the path
to limitless possibilities.

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I’m reminded of that each day when I walk past a statue of
the late Walter Sondheim that stands in the heart of our cam-
pus and reminds us of the power of education each day. When
Sondheim graduated from college, he took a job at Hochschild,
Kohn & Company in Baltimore and had no idea what else he
wanted to do with his life. Fortunately, college had given him
a strong grounding in the liberal arts and the ability to think
broadly. That uncertain young man became the most admired
civic leader in Maryland. He advised mayors and governors, led
desegregation of the city schools, and was an active leader for
decades.
Sondheim’s education helped him get a job. More impor-
tant, it helped him change Maryland—and we all are the
beneficiaries.

Joining the Conversation

1. After reading Freeman Hrabowski’s essay carefully, pick the
one sentence that you think expresses its main idea, and be
prepared to explain your choice.

2. In what way does Hrabowski use a “they say / I say” format
to structure his argument? What oth er points might he have
included in his “I say’” response?

3. Hrabowski stresses the role of college in preparing leaders
who help their communities. What counterarguments could
you present to his emphasis on college as a place to learn
how to help others?

4. How do you think Hrabowski might respond to Charles Mur-
ray’s argument (pp. 234−54) that not everyone should go to
college?

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5. “Higher education as we know it is about to come to an
end.” That’s the opening line of an article by two other
college presidents. Go to theysayiblog.com and enter “Give
Colleges More Credit” in the search box. How does this
article’s argument compare with Hrabowski’s? Which piece
do you find more persuasive, and why?

6. This piece appeared as an op-ed essay in the Baltimore Sun,
a newspaper read primarily by people living in that city and
its surrounding areas. In what ways did Hrabowski tailor his
essay to this particular audience? How might he revise it to
address a national audience?

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2 6 4

Hidden Intellectualism

G E R A L D G R A F F

Everyone knows some young person who is impressively
“street smart” but does poorly in school. What a waste, we
think, that one who is so intelligent about so many things in
life seems unable to apply that intelligence to academic work.
What doesn’t occur to us, though, is that schools and colleges
might be at fault for missing the opportunity to tap into such
street smarts and channel them into good academic work.
Nor do we consider one of the major reasons why schools and
colleges overlook the intellectual potential of street smarts: the
fact that we associate those street smarts with anti-intellectual
concerns. We associate the educated life, the life of the mind,
too narrowly and exclusively with subjects and texts that we
consider inherently weighty and academic. We assume that

Gerald Graff, one of the coauthors of this book, is a professor of
English and education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He
is a past president of the Modern Language Association, the world’s
largest professional association of university scholars and teachers.
This essay is adapted from his 2003 book, Clueless in Aca deme: How
Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind.

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it’s possible to wax intellectual about Plato, Shakespeare, the
French Revolution, and nuclear fission, but not about cars,
dating, fashion, sports, TV, or video games.
The trouble with this assumption is that no necessary connec-
tion has ever been established between any text or subject
and the educational depth and weight of the discussion
it can generate. Real intellectuals turn any subject, how-
ever lightweight it may seem, into grist for their mill through
the thoughtful questions they bring to it, whereas a dullard will
find a way to drain the interest out of the richest subject. That’s
why a George Orwell writing on the cultural meanings of penny
postcards is infinitely more substantial than the cogitations of
many professors on Shakespeare or globalization.
Students do need to read models of intellectually challeng-
ing writing—and Orwell is a great one—if they are to become
intellectuals themselves. But they would be more prone to take
on intellectual identities if we encouraged them to do so at first
on subjects that interest them rather than ones that interest us.
I offer my own adolescent experience as a case in point.
Until I entered college, I hated books and cared only for sports.
The only reading I cared to do or could do was sports maga-
zines, on which I became hooked, becoming a regular reader
of Sport magazine in the late forties, Sports Illustrated when
it began publishing in 1954, and the annual magazine guides
to professional baseball, football, and basketball. I also loved
the sports novels for boys of John R. Tunis and Clair Bee and
autobiographies of sports stars like Joe DiMaggio’s Lucky to Be
a Yankee and Bob Feller’s Strikeout Story. In short, I was your
typical teenage anti-intellectual—or so I believed for a long
time. I have recently come to think, however, that my prefer-
ence for sports over schoolwork was not anti-intellectualism so
much as intellectualism by other means.

See pp. 58–61
for tips on
disagreeing,
with reasons.

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In the Chicago neighborhood I grew up in, which had
become a melting pot after World War II, our block was solidly
middle class, but just a block away—doubtless concentrated
there by the real estate companies—were African Americans,
Native Americans, and “hillbilly” whites who had recently fled
postwar joblessness in the South and Appalachia. Negotiating
this class boundary was a tricky matter. On the one hand, it was
necessary to maintain the boundary between “clean-cut” boys
like me and working-class “hoods,” as we called them, which
meant that it was good to be openly smart in a bookish sort
of way. On the other hand, I was desperate for the approval
of the hoods, whom I encountered daily on the playing field
and in the neighborhood, and for this purpose it was not at all
good to be book-smart. The hoods would turn on you if they
sensed you were putting on airs over them: “Who you lookin’
at, smart ass?” as a leather-jacketed youth once said to me as
he relieved me of my pocket change along with my self-respect.
I grew up torn, then, between the need to prove I was smart
and the fear of a beating if I proved it too well; between the
need not to jeopardize my respectable future and the need to
impress the hoods. As I lived it, the conflict came down to a
choice between being physically tough and being verbal. For
a boy in my neighborhood and elementary school, only being
“tough” earned you complete legitimacy. I still recall endless,
complicated debates in this period with my closest pals over
who was “the toughest guy in the school.” If you were less than
negligible as a fighter, as I was, you settled for the next best
thing, which was to be inarticulate, carefully hiding telltale
marks of literacy like correct grammar and pronunciation.
In one way, then, it would be hard to imagine an adolescence
more thoroughly anti-intellectual than mine. Yet in retrospect,
I see that it’s more complicated, that I and the 1950s themselves

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were not simply hostile toward intellectualism, but divided and
ambivalent. When Marilyn Monroe married the playwright
Arthur Miller in 1956 after divorcing the retired baseball star
Joe DiMaggio, the symbolic triumph of geek over jock suggested
the way the wind was blowing. Even Elvis, according to his
biographer Peter Guralnick, turns out to have supported Adlai
over Ike in the presidential election of 1956. “I don’t dig the
intellectual bit,” he told reporters. “But I’m telling you, man,
he knows the most.”
Though I too thought I did not “dig the intellectual bit,” I
see now that I was unwittingly in training for it. The germs had
actually been planted in the seemingly philistine debates about
which boys were the toughest. I see now that in the interminable
analysis of sports teams, movies, and toughness that my friends
and I engaged in—a type of analysis, needless to say, that the
real toughs would never have stooped to—I was already betray-
ing an allegiance to the egghead world. I was practicing being
an intellectual before I knew that was what I wanted to be.
It was in these discussions with friends about toughness and
sports, I think, and in my reading of sports books and magazines,
that I began to learn the rudiments of the intellectual life:
how to make an argument, weigh different kinds of evidence,
move between particulars and generalizations, summarize the
views of others, and enter a conversation about ideas. It was in
reading and arguing about sports and toughness that I experi-
enced what it felt like to propose a generalization, restate and
respond to a counterargument, and perform other intellectual-
izing operations, including composing the kind of sentences I
am writing now.
Only much later did it dawn on me that the sports world
was more compelling than school because it was more intellec-
tual than school, not less. Sports after all was full of challenging

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arguments, debates, problems for analysis, and intricate statis-
tics that you could care about, as school conspicuously was not.
I believe that street smarts beat out book smarts in our culture
not because street smarts are nonintellectual, as we generally
suppose, but because they satisfy an intellectual thirst more
thoroughly than school culture, which seems pale and unreal.
They also satisfy the thirst for community. When you entered
sports debates, you became part of a community that was not
limited to your family and friends, but was national and public.
Whereas schoolwork isolated you from others, the pennant race
or Ted Williams’s .400 batting average was something you could
talk about with people you had never met. Sports introduced
you not only to a culture steeped in argument, but to a public
argument culture that transcended the personal. I can’t blame
my schools for failing to make intellectual culture resemble the
Super Bowl, but I do fault them for failing to learn anything
from the sports and entertainment worlds about how to organize
and represent intellectual culture, how to exploit its gamelike
element and turn it into ar-resting public spectacle that might
have competed more successfully for my youthful attention.
For here is another thing that never dawned on me and is
still kept hidden from students, with tragic results: that the
real intellectual world, the one that existed in the big world
beyond school, is organized very much like the world of team
sports, with rival texts, rival interpretations and evaluations
of texts, rival theories of why they should be read and taught,
and elaborate team competitions in which “fans” of writers,
intellectual systems, methodologies, and -isms contend against
each other.
To be sure, school contained plenty of competition, which
became more invidious as one moved up the ladder (and has
become even more so today with the advent of high-stakes

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testing). In this competition, points were scored not by making
arguments, but by a show of information or vast reading, by grade-
grubbing, or other forms of oneupmanship. School competition,
in short, reproduced the less attractive features of sports culture
without those that create close bonds and community.
And in distancing themselves from anything as enjoyable and
absorbing as sports, my schools missed the opportunity to capi-
talize on an element of drama and conflict that the intellectual
world shares with sports. Consequently, I failed to see the parallels
between the sports and academic worlds that could have helped
me cross more readily from one argument culture to the other.
Sports is only one of the domains whose potential for literacy
training (and not only for males) is seriously underestimated by
educators, who see sports as competing with academic develop-
ment rather than a route to it. But if this argument suggests
why it is a good idea to assign readings and topics that are
close to students’ existing interests, it also suggests the limits
of this tactic. For students who get excited about the chance
to write about their passion for cars will often write as poorly
and unreflectively on that topic as on Shakespeare or Plato.
Here is the flip side of what I pointed out before: that there’s
no necessary relation between the degree of interest a student
shows in a text or subject and the quality of thought or expres-
sion such a student manifests in writing or talking about it.
The challenge, as college professor Ned Laff has put it, “is not
simply to exploit students’ nonacademic interests, but to get
them to see those interests through academic eyes.”
To say that students need to see their interests “through aca-
demic eyes” is to say that street smarts are not enough. Making
students’ nonacademic interests an object of academic study is
useful, then, for getting students’ attention and overcoming
their boredom and alienation, but this tactic won’t in itself

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write about cars, sports, or clothing fashions does not have to
be a pedagogical cop-out as long as students are required to see
these interests “through academic eyes,” that is, to think and
write about cars, sports, and fashions in a reflective, analytical
way, one that sees them as microcosms of what is going on in
the wider culture.
If I am right, then schools and colleges are missing an
opportunity when they do not encourage students to take their
nonacademic interests as objects of academic study. It is self-
defeating to decline to introduce any text or subject that figures
to engage students who will otherwise tune out academic work
entirely. If a student cannot get interested in Mill’s On Liberty
but will read Sports Illustrated or Vogue or the hip-hop magazine
Source with absorption, this is a strong argument for assigning
the magazines over the classic. It’s a good bet that if students get
hooked on reading and writing by doing term papers on Source,
they will eventually get to On Liberty. But even if they don’t,
the magazine reading will make them more literate and reflec-
tive than they would be otherwise. So it makes pedagogical
sense to develop classroom units on sports, cars, fashions, rap
music, and other such topics. Give me the student anytime who
writes a sharply argued, sociologically acute analysis of an issue
in Source over the student who writes a lifeless explication of
Hamlet or Socrates’ Apology.

Works Cited

Cramer, Richard Ben. Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life. Simon & Schuster, 2000.
DiMaggio, Joe. Lucky to Be a Yankee. Bantam, 1949.
Feller, Bob. Strikeout Story. Bantam, 1948.
Guralnick, Peter. Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley. Little,

Brown, 1994.
Orwell, George. A Collection of Essays. Harcourt, 1953.

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Joining the Conversation

1. Gerald Graff begins his essay with the view that we gen-
erally associate “book smarts” with intellectualism and
“street smarts” with anti-intellectualism. Graff then provides
an extended example from his early life to counter this view-
point. What do you think of his argument that boyhood
conversations about sports provided a solid foundation for
his later intellectual life? What support does he provide, and
how persuasive is it?

2. Graff argues in paragraph 13 that the intellectual world is
much like the world of team sports, with “rival texts . . . ,
rival theories . . . , and elaborate team competitions.” Can
you think of any examples from your own experience that
support this assertion? In what ways do you think “the real
intellectual world” is different from the world of team sports?

3. Imagine a conversation between Graff and Mike Rose
(pp. 272–84) on the intellectual skills people can develop
outside the realm of formal education and the benefits of
these skills.

4. So what? Who cares? Graff does not answer these questions
explicitly. Do it for him: write a brief paragraph saying why
his argument matters, and for whom.

5. Graff argues that schools should encourage students to think
critically, read, and write about areas of personal interest
such as cars, fashion, or music—as long as they do so in an
intellectually serious way. What do you think? Write an
essay considering the educational merits of such a proposal,
taking Graff’s argument as a “they say.”

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Blue-Collar Brilliance

M I K E R O S E

My mother, Rose Meraglio Rose (Rosie), shaped her adult
identity as a waitress in coffee shops and family restaurants.
When I was growing up in Los Angeles during the 1950s, my
father and I would occasionally hang out at the restaurant until
her shift ended, and then we’d ride the bus home with her.
Sometimes she worked the register and the counter, and we sat
there; when she waited booths and tables, we found a booth in
the back where the waitresses took their breaks.
There wasn’t much for a child to do at the restaurants, and
so as the hours stretched out, I watched the cooks and waitresses
and listened to what they said. At mealtimes, the pace of the
kitchen staff and the din from customers picked up. Weaving
in and out around the room, waitresses warned behind you in
impassive but urgent voices. Standing at the service window

Mike Rose is a professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education
and Information Studies. He is well known for his writing on issues of
literacy, including the books Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and
Achievements of America’s Underprepared (1989) and Back to School:
Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education (2012). This
article originally appeared in 2009 in the American Scholar, a magazine
published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

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facing the kitchen, they called out abbreviated orders. Fry four
on two, my mother would say as she clipped a check onto
the metal wheel. Her tables were deuces, four-tops, or six-tops
according to their size; seating areas also were nicknamed. The
racetrack, for instance, was the fast-turnover front section.
Lingo conferred authority and signaled know-how.
Rosie took customers’ orders, pencil poised over pad, while
fielding questions about the food. She walked full tilt through the
room with plates stretching up her left arm and two cups of coffee
somehow cradled in her right hand. She stood at a table or booth
and removed a plate for this person, another for that person,
then another, remembering who had the hamburger, who had

Rosie solved technical problems and human problems on the fly.

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the fried shrimp, almost always getting it right. She would haggle
with the cook about a returned order and rush by us, saying, He
gave me lip, but I got him. She’d take a minute to flop down in
the booth next to my father. I’m all in, she’d say, and whisper
something about a customer. Gripping the outer edge of the table
with one hand, she’d watch the room and note, in the flow of our
conversation, who needed a refill, whose order was taking longer
to prepare than it should, who was finishing up.
I couldn’t have put it in words when I was growing up, but
what I observed in my mother’s restaurant defined the world of
adults, a place where competence was synonymous with physical
work. I’ve since studied the working habits of blue-collar work-
ers and have come to understand how much my mother’s kind
of work demands of both body and brain. A waitress acquires
knowledge and intuition about the ways and the rhythms of the
restaurant business. Waiting on seven to nine tables, each with
two to six customers, Rosie devised memory strategies so that
she could remember who ordered what. And because she knew
the average time it took to prepare different dishes, she could
monitor an order that was taking too long at the service station.
Like anyone who is effective at physical work, my mother
learned to work smart, as she put it, to make every move count.
She’d sequence and group tasks: What could she do first, then
second, then third as she circled through her station? What tasks
could be clustered? She did everything on the fly, and when
problems arose—technical or human—she solved them within
the flow of work, while taking into account the emotional state
of her co-workers. Was the manager in a good mood? Did the
cook wake up on the wrong side of the bed? If so, how could she
make an extra request or effectively return an order?
And then, of course, there were the customers who entered
the restaurant with all sorts of needs, from physiological ones,

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including the emotions that accompany hunger, to a sometimes
complicated desire for human contact. Her tip depended on
how well she responded to these needs, and so she became adept
at reading social cues and managing feelings, both the custom-
ers’ and her own. No wonder, then, that Rosie was intrigued by
psychology. The restaurant became the place where she studied
human behavior, puzzling over the problems of her regular cus-
tomers and refining her ability to deal with people in a difficult
world. She took pride in being among the public, she’d say.
There isn’t a day that goes by in the restaurant that you don’t
learn something.
My mother quit school in the seventh grade to help raise her
brothers and sisters. Some of those siblings made it through high
school, and some dropped out to find work in railroad yards,
factories, or restaurants. My father finished a grade or two in
primary school in Italy and never darkened the schoolhouse
door again. I didn’t do well in school either. By high school I
had accumulated a spotty academic record and many hours of
hazy disaffection. I spent a few years on the vocational track,
but in my senior year I was inspired by my English teacher and
managed to squeak into a small college on probation.
My freshman year was academically bumpy, but gradually
I began to see formal education as a means of fulfillment and
as a road toward making a living. I studied the humanities
and later the social and psychological sciences and taught for
ten years in a range of situations—elementary school, adult
education courses, tutoring centers, a program for Vietnam
veterans who wanted to go to college. Those students had
socio economic and educational backgrounds similar to mine.
Then I went back to graduate school to study education and
cognitive psychology and eventually became a faculty member
in a school of education.

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Intelligence is closely associated with formal education—
the type of schooling a person has, how much and how

long—and most people seem to move comfortably
from that notion to a belief that work requiring less
schooling requires less intelligence. These assumptions
run through our cultural history, from the post-Revo-
lutionary War period, when mechanics were character-

ized by political rivals as illiterate and therefore incapable of
participating in government, until today. More than once I’ve
heard a manager label his workers as “a bunch of dummies.”
Generalizations about intelligence, work, and social class
deeply affect our assumptions about ourselves and each other,
guiding the ways we use our minds to learn, build knowledge,
solve problems, and make our way through the world.
Although writers and scholars have often looked at the work-
ing class, they have generally focused on the values such work-
ers exhibit rather than on the thought their work requires—a
subtle but pervasive omission. Our cultural iconography pro-
motes the muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but
no brightness behind the eye, no image that links hand and
brain.
One of my mother’s brothers, Joe Meraglio, left school in the
ninth grade to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad. From there
he joined the Navy, returned to the railroad, which was already
in decline, and eventually joined his older brother at General
Motors where, over a 33-year career, he moved from working
on the assembly line to supervising the paint-and-body depart-
ment. When I was a young man, Joe took me on a tour of the
factory. The floor was loud—in some places deafening—and
when I turned a corner or opened a door, the smell of chemicals
knocked my head back. The work was repetitive and taxing,
and the pace was inhumane.

See Chapter 1
for ways to

introduce
something
implied or
assumed.

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Still, for Joe the shop floor provided what school did not;
it was like schooling, he said, a place where you’re constantly
learning. Joe learned the most efficient way to use his body by
acquiring a set of routines that were quick and preserved energy.
Otherwise he would never have survived on the line.
As a foreman, Joe constantly faced new problems and
became a consummate multi-tasker, evaluating a flurry of
demands quickly, parceling out physical and mental resources,
keeping a number of ongoing events in his mind, returning to
whatever task had been interrupted, and maintaining a cool
head under the pressure of grueling production schedules. In
the midst of all this, Joe learned more and more about the auto
industry, the technological and social dynamics of the shop
floor, the machinery and production processes, and the basics
of paint chemistry and of plating and baking. With further
promotions, he not only solved problems but also began to find
problems to solve: Joe initiated the redesign of the nozzle on a
paint sprayer, thereby eliminating costly and unhealthy over-
spray. And he found a way to reduce energy costs on the baking
ovens without affecting the quality of the paint. He lacked
formal knowledge of how the machines under his supervision
worked, but he had direct experience with them, hands-on
knowledge, and was savvy about their quirks and operational
capabilities. He could experiment with them.
In addition, Joe learned about budgets and management.
Coming off the line as he did, he had a perspective of workers’
needs and management’s demands, and this led him to think of
ways to improve efficiency on the line while relieving some of
the stress on the assemblers. He had each worker in a unit learn
his or her co-workers’ jobs so they could rotate across stations to
relieve some of the monotony. He believed that rotation would
allow assemblers to get longer and more frequent breaks. It was

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an easy sell to the people on the line. The union, however, had
to approve any modification in job duties, and the managers
were wary of the change. Joe had to argue his case on a number
of fronts, providing him a kind of rhetorical education.
Eight years ago I began a study of the thought processes
involved in work like that of my mother and uncle. I catalogued
the cognitive demands of a range of blue-collar and service jobs,
from waitressing and hair styling to plumbing and welding. To
gain a sense of how knowledge and skill develop, I observed
experts as well as novices. From the details of this close exami-
nation, I tried to fashion what I called “cognitive biographies”
of blue-collar workers. Biographical accounts of the lives of
scientists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and other professionals are
rich with detail about the intellectual dimension of their work.

With an eighth-grade education, Joe (hands together) advanced to supervisor
of a G.M. paint-and-body department.

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But the life stories of working-class people are few and are typi-
cally accounts of hardship and courage or the achievements
wrought by hard work.
Our culture—in Cartesian fashion—separates the body from
the mind, so that, for example, we assume that the use of a
tool does not involve abstraction. We reinforce this notion
by defining intelligence solely on grades in school and num-
bers on IQ tests. And we employ social biases pertaining to
a person’s place on the occupational ladder. The distinctions
among blue, pink, and white collars carry with them attribu-
tions of character, motivation, and intelligence. Although we
rightly acknowledge and amply compensate the play of mind
in white-collar and professional work, we diminish or erase it
in considerations about other endeavors—physical and service
work particularly. We also often ignore the experience of every-
day work in administrative deliberations and policymaking.
But here’s what we find when we get in close. The plumber
seeking leverage in order to work in tight quarters and the hair
stylist adroitly handling scissors and comb manage their bodies
strategically. Though work-related actions become routine with
experience, they were learned at some point through observa-
tion, trial and error, and, often, physical or verbal assistance
from a co-worker or trainer. I’ve frequently observed novices
talking to themselves as they take on a task, or shaking their
head or hand as if to erase an attempt before trying again. In
fact, our traditional notions of routine performance could keep
us from appreciating the many instances within routine where
quick decisions and adjustments are made. I’m struck by the
thinking-in-motion that some work requires, by all the mental
activity that can be involved in simply getting from one place
to another: the waitress rushing back through her station to
the kitchen or the foreman walking the line.

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The use of tools requires the studied refinement of stance,
grip, balance, and fine-motor skills. But manipulating tools is
intimately tied to knowledge of what a particular instrument
can do in a particular situation and do better than other similar
tools. A worker must also know the characteristics of the mate-
rial one is engaging—how it reacts to various cutting or com-
pressing devices, to degrees of heat, or to lines of force. Some
of these things demand judgment, the weighing of options,
the consideration of multiple variables, and, occasionally, the
creative use of a tool in an unexpected way.
In manipulating material, the worker becomes attuned to
aspects of the environment, a training or disciplining of per-
ception that both enhances knowledge and informs perception.
Carpenters have an eye for length, line, and angle; mechanics
troubleshoot by listening; hair stylists are attuned to shape,
texture, and motion. Sensory data merge with concept, as when
an auto mechanic relies on sound, vibration, and even smell to
understand what cannot be observed.
Planning and problem solving have been studied since the
earliest days of modern cognitive psychology and are considered
core elements in Western definitions of intelligence. To work
is to solve problems. The big difference between the psycholo-
gist’s laboratory and the workplace is that in the former the
problems are isolated and in the latter they are embedded in
the real-time flow of work with all its messiness and social
complexity.
Much of physical work is social and interactive. Movers
determining how to get an electric range down a flight of stairs
require coordination, negotiation, planning, and the establish-
ing of incremental goals. Words, gestures, and sometimes a
quick pencil sketch are involved, if only to get the rhythm
right. How important it is, then, to consider the social and

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communicative dimension of physical work, for it provides the
medium for so much of work’s intelligence.
Given the ridicule heaped on blue-collar speech, it might
seem odd to value its cognitive content. Yet, the flow of talk
at work provides the channel for organizing and distributing
tasks, for troubleshooting and problem solving, for learning new
information and revising old. A significant amount of teaching,
often informal and indirect, takes place at work. Joe Meraglio
saw that much of his job as a supervisor involved instruction.
In some service occupations, language and communication are
central: observing and interpreting behavior and expression,
inferring mood and motive, taking on the perspective of oth-
ers, responding appropriately to social cues, and knowing when
you’re understood. A good hair stylist, for instance, has the
ability to convert vague requests (I want something light and
summery) into an appropriate cut through questions, pictures,
and hand gestures.
Verbal and mathematical skills drive measures of intelli-
gence in the Western Hemisphere, and many of the kinds of
work I studied are thought to require relatively little proficiency
in either. Compared to certain kinds of white-collar occupa-
tions, that’s true. But written symbols flow through physical
work.
Numbers are rife in most workplaces: on tools and gauges,
as measurements, as indicators of pressure or concentration
or temperature, as guides to sequence, on ingredient labels,
on lists and spreadsheets, as markers of quantity and price.
Certain jobs require workers to make, check, and verify calcu-
lations, and to collect and interpret data. Basic math can be
involved, and some workers develop a good sense of numbers
and patterns. Consider, as well, what might be called material
mathematics: mathematical functions embodied in materials

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and actions, as when a carpenter builds a cabinet or a flight of
stairs. A simple mathematical act can extend quickly beyond
itself. Measuring, for example, can involve more than record-
ing the dimensions of an object. As I watched a cabinetmaker
measure a long strip of wood, he read a number off the tape
out loud, looked back over his shoulder to the kitchen wall,
turned back to his task, took another measurement, and
paused for a moment in thought. He was solving a problem
involving the molding, and the measurement was important
to his deliberation about structure and appearance.
In the blue-collar workplace, directions, plans, and refer-
ence books rely on illustrations, some representational and
others, like blueprints, that require training to interpret. Eso-
teric symbols—visual jargon—depict switches and receptacles,
pipe fittings, or types of welds. Workers themselves often make
sketches on the job. I frequently observed them grab a pencil
to sketch something on a scrap of paper or on a piece of the
material they were installing.
Though many kinds of physical work don’t require a high
literacy level, more reading occurs in the blue-collar workplace
than is generally thought, from manuals and catalogues to work
orders and invoices, to lists, labels, and forms. With routine
tasks, for example, reading is integral to understanding produc-
tion quotas, learning how to use an instrument, or applying
a product. Written notes can initiate action, as in restaurant
orders or reports of machine malfunction, or they can serve as
memory aids.
True, many uses of writing are abbreviated, routine, and repet-
itive, and they infrequently require interpretation or analysis. But
analytic moments can be part of routine activities, and seem-
ingly basic reading and writing can be cognitively rich. Because
workplace language is used in the flow of other activities, we

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can overlook the remarkable coordination of words, numbers,
and drawings required to initiate and direct action.
If we believe everyday work to be mindless, then that will
affect the work we create in the future. When we devalue the
full range of everyday cognition, we offer limited educational
opportunities and fail to make fresh and meaningful instructional
connections among disparate kinds of skill and knowledge. If
we think that whole categories of people—identified by class or
occupation—are not that bright, then we reinforce social separa-
tions and cripple our ability to talk across cultural divides.
Affirmation of diverse intelligence is not a retreat to a
softhearted definition of the mind. To acknowledge a broader
range of intellectual capacity is to take seriously the concept
of cognitive variability, to appreciate in all the Rosies and Joes
the thought that drives their accomplishments and defines who
they are. This is a model of the mind that is worthy of a demo-
cratic society.

Joining the Conversation

1. This essay begins with a fairly detailed description of Mike
Rose’s mother at her work as a waitress in the 1950s, when
he was a child. How is this description related to his argu-
ment? Is it an effective opening? Why or why not?

2. How would you summarize Rose’s overall argument? What
evidence does he offer as support? How convincing is his
argument?

3. Where does Rose mention differing views, and what is his
reason for bringing them up? What are these other views,
and who holds them?

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4. How do you think Rose would respond to Charles Murray’s
argument (pp. 234–54) that many students lack the intel-
lectual potential to succeed in college?

5. Write an essay in which you consider the intellectual
demands of a kind of work that you have done or are
interested in.

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Bowie State University
Commencement Speech

M I C H E L L E O B A M A

Well, thank you. (Applause.) Oh, my goodness. Thank
you so much. (Applause.) Oh, my goodness. It is such a—you
all, rest yourselves. You’ve got a long day ahead. It is beyond a
pleasure and an honor for me to be here with all of you today.
Of course, I want to start by thanking President Bernim
for that very kind introduction, for this wonderful degree, and
for his outstanding leadership here at Bowie State University.
I also want to recognize Chancellor Kirwan, Provost Jackson,

Michelle Obama, First Lady of the United States, has been assis-
tant commissioner of planning and development in Chicago, dean of
student services at the University of Chicago, and vice president of
community and external affairs for the University of Chicago Medical
Center. In 2014, Obama started the “Reach Higher” initiative, which
encourages young people to continue their education after high school
by completing another degree, whether through vocational training,
community college, or a four-year college or university. This text
comes from a commencement speech Obama made in 2013 at Bowie
State University in Maryland.

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Michelle Obama delivering the commencement speech at Bowie State.

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Executive Vice President and General Counsel Karen Johnson
Shaheed, Vice Chair Barry Gossett. And of course, I want to
thank the BSU Madrigal Singers—they did a great job—the
university choir, and DeMarcus Franklin for their wonderful
performances here today. You all are amazing. I just wish I
could sing. Can’t sing a lick.
I also want to recognize today’s Presidential Medal of Excel-
lence recipient, Professor Freeman Hrabowski, who’s a for-real
brother as well. (Applause.) And I want to thank him for his
tremendous work as the Chair of the President’s Advisory Com-
mission on Educational Excellence for African Americans. He
has done some magnificent work, but we have so much more
work to do.
And let’s take another moment to thank all of the beautiful
people sitting all around us today—the folks who have loved
you and pushed you and put up with you every step of the way.
(Applause.) Give another round of applause to all the family
members who are here today. (Applause.) Yes, indeed. This is
your day, too.
But most of all, to the Bowie State University class of 2013,
congratulations. (Applause.) Oh, congratulations. You don’t
know how proud we all are of you. Just look at you.
We’re so proud of how hard you worked, all those long
hours in the classroom, in the library. Oh, yeah. Amen.
(Laughter.) All those jobs you worked to help pay your tui-
tion. Many of you are the first in your families to get a college
degree. (Applause.) Some of you are balancing school with
raising families of your own. (Applause.) So I know this journey
hasn’t been easy. I know you’ve had plenty of moments of doubt
and frustration and just plain exhaustion.
But listen, you dug deep and you kept pushing forward to
make it to this magnificent day. (Applause.) And in doing so,

See Chapter 9
for tips on
considering
your audience.

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you didn’t just complete an important chapter in your own
story, you also became part of the story of this great university—
a story that began nearly 150 years ago, not far from where we
all sit today. As you all know, this school first opened its doors
in January of 1865, in an African Baptist church in Baltimore.
And by 1866, just a year later, it began offering education
courses to train a new generation of African American teachers.
Now, just think about this for a moment: For generations, in
many parts of this country, it was illegal for black people to get
an education. Slaves caught reading or writing could be beaten
to within an inch of their lives. Anyone—black or white—who
dared to teach them could be fined or thrown into jail. And yet,
just two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed,
this school was founded not just to educate African Americans,
but to teach them how to educate others. It was in many ways an
act of defiance, an eloquent rebuttal to the idea that black people
couldn’t or shouldn’t be educated. And since then, generations
of students from all backgrounds have come to this school to be
challenged, inspired, and empowered. And they have gone on to
become leaders here in Maryland and across this country, run-
ning businesses, educating young people, leading the high-tech
industries that will power our economy for decades to come.
That is the story of Bowie State University, the commitment
to educating our next generation and building ladders of opportu-
nity for anyone willing to work for it. All of you are now part of
that story. And with that tremendous privilege comes an impor-
tant set of responsibilities—responsibilities that you inherit the
moment you leave this stadium with that diploma in your hand.
And that’s what I want to talk with you about today. I want
to talk about the obligations that come with a Bowie State
education, and how you can fulfill those obligations by how
you live your lives.

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10 So let’s return, for a moment, to the time when the school
and others like it were founded. Many of these schools were
little more than drafty log cabins with mud floors, leaky roofs
and smoke-wood stoves in the corner. Blackboards, maps, and
even books were considered luxuries. And both students and
teachers faced constant threats from those who refused to
accept freedom for African Americans.
In one Eastern Shore town, a teacher reported to work one
morning to find that someone had smashed the windows of her
schoolhouse. Other black schools across Maryland were burned
to the ground. Teachers received death threats. One was even
beaten by an angry mob. But despite the risks, understand,
students flocked to these schools in droves, often walking as
many as eight to ten miles a day to get their education. In fact,
the educational association that founded Bowie State wrote in
their 1864 report that—and this is a quote—“These people are
coming in beyond our ability to receive them.” Desperately poor
communities held fundraisers for these schools, schools which
they often built with their own hands. And folks who were
barely scraping by dug deep into their own pockets to donate
money.
You see, for these folks, education was about more than just
learning to read or write. As the abolitionist Frederick Douglass
put it, “Education means emancipation,” he said. He said, “It
means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of
man into the glorious light of truth, the only light by which
men can be free.” You hear that? The only light by which men
can be free. (Applause.)
So to the folks who showed up to your school on that January
day back in 1865, education meant nothing less than freedom.
It meant economic independence, a chance to provide for their
families. It meant political empowerment, the chance to read

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the newspaper and articulate an informed opinion and take
their rightful place as full citizens of this nation.
So back then, people were hungry to learn. Do you hear me?
Hungry to get what they needed to succeed in this country. And
that hunger did not fade over time. If anything, it only grew
stronger. I mean, think about the century-long battle that so
many folks waged to end the evil of segregation. Think about
civil rights icons like Thurgood Marshall, Dr. King, who argued
groundbreaking school integration cases, led historic marches,
protests, and boycotts. As you know, Dr. King’s house was
bombed. A police chief pulled a gun on Thurgood Marshall.
They both received piles of hate mail and countless death
threats, but they kept on fighting.
Think about those nine young men and women who faced
down an angry mob just to attend school in Little Rock, Arkan-
sas. And that was just the first day. For months afterwards, they
were spat on, jeered at, punched, and tripped as they walked
down the halls. Their classmates threw food at them in the
cafeteria and hurled ink at them during class. But they kept
on showing up. They kept claiming their rightful place at that
school.
And think about little Ruby Bridges, who was just six years
old when she became one of the first black children in New
Orleans to attend an all-white school. Parents actually pulled
their children out of that school in protest. People retaliated
against her family. Her father lost his job. And only one teacher
at that entire school would agree to teach her. But the Bridges
family refused to back down. So for an entire year, little Ruby
sat all alone, a class of one, dutifully learning her lessons.
See, that is the sacrifice that those folks and so many others
have made. That is the hunger they felt. For them and so many
others, getting an education was literally a matter of life or death.

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Bowie State University Commencement Speech

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But today, more than 150 years after the Emancipation
Proclamation, more than 50 years after the end of “separate
but equal,” when it comes to getting an education, too many
of our young people just can’t be bothered. Today, instead of
walking miles every day to school, they’re sitting on couches
for hours playing video games, watching TV. Instead of dream-
ing of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they’re
fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper. (Applause.) Right
now, one in three African American students are dropping out
of high school. Only one in five African Americans between
the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine has gotten a college
degree—one in five.
But let’s be very clear. Today, getting an education is as
important if not more important than it was back when this
university was founded. Just look at the statistics. (Applause.)
People who earn a bachelor’s degree or higher make nearly
three times more money than high school dropouts, and they’re
far less likely to be unemployed. A recent study even found that
African American women with a college degree live an aver-
age of six-and-a-half years longer than those without. And for
men, it’s nearly ten years longer. So yes, people who are more
educated actually live longer.
So I think we can agree, and we need to start feeling that
hunger again, you know what I mean? (Applause.) We need
to once again fight to educate ourselves and our children like
our lives depend on it, because they do.
We need to dig deep and find the same kind of grit and
determination that drove those first students at this school
and generations of students who came after them. I am talk-
ing about the kind of grit and determination displayed by
folks right here at Bowie State. Folks like Ariel Williams-
Edwards, one of today’s graduates. (Applause.) Yeah, Ariel!

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M I C H E L L E O B A M A

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Ariel’s mother struggled with substance abuse, and Ariel and
her sister were removed from her care and sent to live with
their grandmother.
But Ariel decided to draw inspiration from her struggle—she
majored in social work so she could help families like hers.
(Applause.) Yes! She became a member of the Phi Alpha
national honor society. And she’s been accepted to graduate
school to get her master’s degree in social work starting in
September. Yes, indeed. (Applause.)
And then there’s Audrey Marie Lugmayer, another one of
this year’s graduates. Audrey is the daughter of a single father,
and her dad has struggled with some serious health issues. So
after graduating from high school, Audrey worked full time for a
year, because she couldn’t bear the thought of putting any more
financial burdens on her father. She kept on working here at
Bowie State, even while juggling a full course load. And today,
she is graduating with a perfect 4.0 GPA. (Applause.) Yes. God
is very good.
It is that kind of unwavering determination—that relent-
less focus on getting an education in the face of obstacles—
that’s what we need to reclaim, as a community and as a
nation. That was the idea at the very heart of the founding
of this school.
It’s even in the words of your school song: “Oh Bowie State,
dear Bowie State, may you forever be the flame of faith, the
torch of truth to guide the steps of youth.” And that’s not just
a lyric—it is a call to action. Many of you will answer that call
by carrying on the proud Bowie State tradition of serving as
teachers, devoting your careers to guiding the steps of the next
generation.
But for those of you who aren’t going into education, you’re
not off the hook. Oh, no. Oh, no. No matter what career you

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Bowie State University Commencement Speech

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pursue, every single one of you has a role to play as educators
for our young people. So if you have friends or cousins or
siblings who are not taking their education seriously, shake
them up. Go talk some sense into them. Get them back on
track. (Applause.)
If the school in your neighborhood isn’t any good, don’t just
accept it. Get in there, fix it. Talk to the parents. Talk to the
teachers. Get business and community leaders involved as well,
because we all have a stake in building schools worthy of our
children’s promise.
And when it comes to your own kids, if you don’t like what
they’re watching on TV, turn it off. (Applause.) If you don’t like
the video games they’re playing, take them away. (Applause.)
Take a stand against the media that elevates today’s celebrity
gossip instead of the serious issues of our time. Take a stand
against the culture that glorifies instant gratification instead of
hard work and lasting success.
And as my husband has said often, please stand up and reject
the slander that says a black child with a book is trying to act
white. Reject that. (Applause.)
In short, be an example of excellence for the next genera-
tion and do everything you can to help them understand the
power and purpose of a good education. See, that’s what my
own parents did for me and my brother.
See, my parents didn’t go to college, but they were deter-
mined to give us that opportunity. My dad was a pump operator
at the city water plant, diagnosed with MS in his early thirties.
And every morning I watched him struggle to get out of bed
and inch his way to his walker, and painstakingly button his
uniform, but never once did I hear him complain. Not once.
He just kept getting up, day after day, year after year, to do
whatever he could to give our family a better shot at life.

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So when it came time for my brother and I to go to college,
most of our tuition came from student loans and grants. But
my dad still had to pay a small portion of that tuition each
semester, and he was always determined to pay his share right
on time—even taking out loans when he fell short, because he
couldn’t bear the thought of us missing a registration deadline
because his check was late.
And there is not a day that goes by when I don’t think about
the sacrifices that my mom and dad made for me. There is not
a day that goes by when I don’t think about living up to the
example they set, and how I must do everything in my power
to make them proud of the daughter they raised. (Applause.)
And today, I am thinking about all the mothers and fathers
just like my parents, all the folks who dug into their pockets for
that last dime, the folks who built those schools brick by brick,
who faced down angry mobs just to reach those schoolhouse
doors. I am thinking about all the folks who worked that extra
shift and took that extra job, and toiled and bled and prayed
so that we could have something better. (Applause.)
The folks who, as the poet Alice Walker once wrote, “Knew
what we must know without knowing a page of it themselves.”
Their sacrifice is your legacy. Do you hear me? And now it is
up to all of you to carry that legacy forward, to be that flame
of fate, that torch of truth to guide our young people toward a
better future for themselves and for this country.
And if you do that, and I know that you will, if you uphold
that obligation, then I am confident we will build an even bet-
ter future for the next generation of graduates from this fine
school and for all of the children in this country—because our
lives depend on it.
I wish you Godspeed, good luck. I love you all. Do good
things. God bless. (Applause.)

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Bowie State University Commencement Speech

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Joining the Conversation

1. One purpose of this speech was to celebrate the achieve-
ments of the graduates. But at the same time, Michelle
Obama is making an argument about some things she hopes
those graduates will do. What’s her main point, and how
does she support that point?

2. Throughout her address, Obama explains why her argument
matters, but she does not, as this book advises, start with
what others are saying and then introduce her own ideas as
a response. What do you think her “they say” would be?

3. Obama addresses much of the speech to the graduates and
their families. Find some specific examples of her references
to this audience, and discuss the ways in which she tries to
make a connection with them.

4. Obama refers to college president Freeman Hrabowski in
paragraph 3 of her speech. What parallels, if any, can you find
between her speech and Hrabowski’s op-ed (pp. 259–63)?

5. Imagine you were in the audience that day at Bowie State.
Write a tweet summarizing something Obama said—and
then responding in some way. You may need to write two
tweets.

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SEVENTEEN

are we in a race
against the machine?

Do we need to worry about technology? Many com-
mentators worry that constant technological changes have
serious repercussions for our brains, our bodies, and our soci-
eties. Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield argues that our brains
are “under threat” from “an ever-expanding world of new
technology: multichannel television, video games, MP3 play-
ers, the Internet, wireless networks, Bluetooth links” and that
“attention spans are shorter, personal communication skills are
reduced and there’s a marked reduction in the ability to think
abstractly.” Scientists used to believe that the human brain
changed up through adolescence but was relatively stable after
that until it began to decline in old age. Now, however, there
is strong evidence for what Greenfield calls “the malleability
of the adult brain,” with alterations in brain structure caused
by the devices we have come to rely upon—and even some
indications that we are losing important mental skills.
A number of experts argue that such claims are seriously over-
stated. In their view, as we adapt to new technologies, we are
actually becoming smarter, happier, and more productive. Clive
Thompson, for example, highlights the growing role of com-
puters in chess playing in arguing that technology is changing

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A R E W E I N A R A C E A G A I N S T T H E M A C H I N E ?

our minds—and our lives—for the better. Similarly, Kevin Kelly
asserts that robots will inevitably take over virtually all work
now done by people but, at the same time, will allow us to
develop rewarding careers that we presently can’t even imagine.
Using a graphic format, Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufeld
show that new technologies have been a source of anxiety since
at least the fourth century bce, when Greek philosopher Plato
warned in the Phaedrus that reading and writing would harm
people’s memories. Responding to concerns that digital com-
munication is leading to a decline in face-to-face interaction,
Jenna Wortham writes about several smartphone applications
that she claims can actually enhance relationships. Along these
same lines, college student Michaela Cullington discusses her
own research study, which found that, contrary to widespread
belief, text messaging is a practical form of communication and
does not weaken students’ academic writing skills.
These optimistic views are countered by those of several
other commentators. Nicholas Carr, for example, believes that
extensive use of the internet is hurting our capacity for deep
thought. Once a strong proponent of digital technologies,
Sherry Turkle now argues that they are leading to a decline
in intimacy and a move away from self-reflection. Malcolm
Gladwell questions the potential of Twitter and other social
media to play more than a superficial role in fostering political
activism.
The readings in this chapter give us much to think about,
raising a number of complex problems and providing no easy
solutions. And while some commentators may paint a rosy pic-
ture of technology while others contemplate doomsday sce-
narios, there’s a little bit of optimism and pessimism in each
piece, which is one of the factors that make this conversation
one worth joining.

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Better than Human:
Why Robots Will—and Must—Take Our Jobs

K E V I N K E L LY

Imagine that 7 out of 10 working Americans got fired
tomorrow. What would they all do?

It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you
gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—
in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the
workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago,
70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today auto-
mation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replac-
ing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the
displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created
hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who

Kevin Kelly was a founding member of Wired and served as its execu-
tive editor for six years. He is now “senior maverick” at Wired and
the editor of the Cool Tools website. His books include Cool Tools:
A Catalog of Possibilities (2013), What Technology Wants (2010), and
New Rules for the New Economy (1998). This essay first appeared on
the Wired website on December 24, 2012.

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once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that
churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial prod-
ucts. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have
arrived—appliance repairman, offset printer, food chemist,
photographer, web designer—each building on previous auto-
mation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no
farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.

It may be hard to believe, but before the end of this
century, 70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be
replaced by automation. Yes, dear reader, even you will
have your job taken away by machines. In other words,

robot replacement is just a matter of time. This upheaval is being
led by a second wave of automation, one that is centered on arti-
ficial cognition, cheap sensors, machine learning, and distributed
smarts. This deep automation will touch all jobs, from manual
labor to knowledge work.
First, machines will consolidate their gains in already-
automated industries. After robots finish replacing assembly
line workers, they will replace the workers in warehouses.
Speedy bots able to lift 150 pounds all day long will retrieve
boxes, sort them, and load them onto trucks. Fruit and veg-
etable picking will continue to be robotized until no humans
pick outside of specialty farms. Pharmacies will feature a single
pill-dispensing robot in the back while the pharmacists focus on
patient consulting. Next, the more dexterous chores of cleaning
in offices and schools will be taken over by late-night robots,
starting with easy-to-do floors and windows and eventually get-
ting to toilets. The highway legs of long-haul trucking routes
will be driven by robots embedded in truck cabs.
All the while, robots will continue their migration into
white-collar work. We already have artificial intelligence in
many of our machines; we just don’t call it that. Witness one

For more on
ways to address

a skeptical
reader, see
Chapter 6.

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Better than Human

piece of software by Narrative Science . . . that can write
newspaper stories about sports games directly from the games’
stats or generate a synopsis of a company’s stock performance
each day from bits of text around the web. Any job dealing
with reams of paperwork will be taken over by bots, including
much of medicine. Even those areas of medicine not defined by
paperwork, such as surgery, are becoming increasingly robotic.
The rote tasks of any information-intensive job can be auto-
mated. It doesn’t matter if you are a doctor, lawyer, architect,
reporter, or even programmer: The robot takeover will be epic.
And it has already begun.

Here’s why we’re at the inflection point: Machines are acquir-
ing smarts.
We have preconceptions about how an intelligent robot
should look and act, and these can blind us to what is already
happening around us. To demand that artificial intelligence be
humanlike is the same flawed logic as demanding that artificial
flying be birdlike, with flapping wings. Robots will think dif-
ferent. To see how far artificial intelligence has penetrated our
lives, we need to shed the idea that they will be humanlike.
Consider Baxter, a revolutionary new workbot from Rethink
Robotics. Designed by Rodney Brooks, the former MIT profes-
sor who invented the best-selling Roomba vacuum cleaner and
its descendants, Baxter is an early example of a new class of
industrial robots created to work alongside humans. Baxter does
not look impressive. It’s got big strong arms and a flatscreen
display like many industrial bots. And Baxter’s hands perform
repetitive manual tasks, just as factory robots do. But it’s dif-
ferent in three significant ways.
First, it can look around and indicate where it is looking by
shifting the cartoon eyes on its head. It can perceive humans

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Baxter, a workbot created to work alongside humans.

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working near it and avoid injuring them. And workers can see
whether it sees them. Previous industrial robots couldn’t do
this, which means that working robots have to be physically
segregated from humans. The typical factory robot is impris-
oned within a chain-link fence or caged in a glass case. They are
simply too dangerous to be around, because they are oblivious
to others. This isolation prevents such robots from working in a
small shop, where isolation is not practical. Optimally, workers
should be able to get materials to and from the robot or to tweak
its controls by hand throughout the workday; isolation makes
that difficult. Baxter, however, is aware. Using force-feedback
technology to feel if it is colliding with a person or another
bot, it is courteous. You can plug it into a wall socket in your
garage and easily work right next to it.
Second, anyone can train Baxter. It is not as fast, strong,
or precise as other industrial robots, but it is smarter. To train
the bot you simply grab its arms and guide them in the cor-
rect motions and sequence. It’s a kind of “watch me do this”
routine. Baxter learns the procedure and then repeats it. Any
worker is capable of this show-and-tell; you don’t even have
to be literate. Previous workbots required highly educated
engineers and crack programmers to write thousands of lines
of code (and then debug them) in order to instruct the robot
in the simplest change of task. The code has to be loaded in
batch mode, i.e., in large, infrequent batches, because the robot
cannot be reprogrammed while it is being used. Turns out the
real cost of the typical industrial robot is not its hardware but
its operation. Industrial robots cost $100,000-plus to purchase
but can require four times that amount over a lifespan to pro-
gram, train, and maintain. The costs pile up until the average
lifetime bill for an industrial robot is half a million dollars or
more.

Better than Human

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The third difference, then, is that Baxter is cheap. Priced at
$22,000, it’s in a different league compared with the $500,000
total bill of its predecessors. It is as if those established robots,
with their batch-mode programming, are the mainframe com-
puters of the robot world, and Baxter is the first PC robot. It is
likely to be dismissed as a hobbyist toy, missing key features like
sub-millimeter precision, and not serious enough. But as with
the PC, and unlike the mainframe, the user can interact with it
directly, immediately, without waiting for experts to mediate—
and use it for nonserious, even frivolous things. It’s cheap enough
that small-time manufacturers can afford one to package up their
wares or custom paint their product or run their 3-D printing
machine. Or you could staff up a factory that makes iPhones.
Baxter was invented in a century-old brick building near the
Charles River in Boston. In 1895 the building was a manufactur-
ing marvel in the very center of the new manufacturing world.
It even generated its own electricity. For a hundred years the
factories inside its walls changed the world around us. Now the
capabilities of Baxter and the approaching cascade of superior
robot workers spur Brooks to speculate on how these robots will
shift manufacturing in a disruption greater than the last revo-
lution. Looking out his office window at the former industrial
neighborhood, he says, “Right now we think of manufacturing
as happening in China. But as manufacturing costs sink because
of robots, the costs of transportation become a far greater factor
than the cost of production. Nearby will be cheap. So we’ll get
this network of locally franchised factories, where most things
will be made within 5 miles of where they are needed.”
That may be true of making stuff, but a lot of jobs left in
the world for humans are service jobs. I ask Brooks to walk
with me through a local McDonald’s and point out the jobs
that his kind of robots can replace. He demurs and suggests it

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might be 30 years before robots will cook for us. “In a fast food
place you’re not doing the same task very long. You’re always
changing things on the fly, so you need special solutions. We are
not trying to sell a specific solution. We are building a general-
purpose machine that other workers can set up themselves and
work alongside.” And once we can cowork with robots right
next to us, it’s inevitable that our tasks will bleed together, and
soon our old work will become theirs—and our new work will
become something we can hardly imagine.

To understand how robot replacement will happen, it’s useful
to break down our relationship with robots into four categories,
as summed up in this chart:

HUMAN

NEW
JOBS

EXISTING
JOBS

MACHINE

Robot jobs
that we can’t even

imagine yet.

Jobs that only
humans will be able

to do—at first.

Jobs today that
humans do—but

machines will
eventually do better.

Current jobs that
humans can’t do but

machines can.

Better than Human

The rows indicate whether robots will take over existing jobs
or make new ones, and the columns indicate whether these jobs
seem (at first) like jobs for humans or for machines.

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Let’s begin with quadrant A: jobs humans can do but robots
can do even better. Humans can weave cotton cloth with great
effort, but automated looms make perfect cloth, by the mile,
for a few cents. The only reason to buy handmade cloth today
is because you want the imperfections humans introduce. We
no longer value irregularities while traveling 70 miles per hour,
though—so the fewer humans who touch our car as it is being
made, the better.
And yet for more complicated chores, we still tend to believe
computers and robots can’t be trusted. That’s why we’ve been
slow to acknowledge how they’ve mastered some conceptual
routines, in some cases even surpassing their mastery of physical
routines. A computerized brain known as the autopilot can fly
a 787 jet unaided, but irrationally we place human pilots in the
cockpit to babysit the autopilot “just in case.” In the 1990s,
computerized mortgage appraisals replaced human appraisers
wholesale. Much tax preparation has gone to computers, as
well as routine x-ray analysis and pretrial evidence-gathering—
all once done by highly paid smart people. We’ve accepted
utter reliability in robot manufacturing; soon we’ll accept it in
robotic intelligence and service.
Next is quadrant B: jobs that humans can’t do but robots
can. A trivial example: Humans have trouble making a
single brass screw unassisted, but automation can produce
a thousand exact ones per hour. Without automation, we
could not make a single computer chip—a job that requires
degrees of precision, control, and unwavering attention that
our animal bodies don’t possess. Likewise no human, indeed
no group of humans, no matter their education, can quickly
search through all the web pages in the world to uncover the
one page revealing the price of eggs in Katmandu yesterday.
Every time you click on the search button you are employ-

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ing a robot to do something we as a species are unable to
do alone.
While the displacement of formerly human jobs gets all the
headlines, the greatest benefits bestowed by robots and auto-
mation come from their occupation of jobs we are unable to
do. We don’t have the attention span to inspect every square
millimeter of every CAT scan looking for cancer cells. We
don’t have the millisecond reflexes needed to inflate molten
glass into the shape of a bottle. We don’t have an infallible
memory to keep track of every pitch in Major League Baseball
and calculate the probability of the next pitch in real time.
We aren’t giving “good jobs” to robots. Most of the time we
are giving them jobs we could never do. Without them, these
jobs would remain undone.
Now let’s consider quadrant C, the new jobs created by
automation—including the jobs that we did not know we
wanted done. This is the greatest genius of the robot takeover:
With the assistance of robots and computerized intelligence, we
already can do things we never imagined doing 150 years ago.
We can remove a tumor in our gut through our navel, make a
talking-picture video of our wedding, drive a cart on Mars, print
a pattern on fabric that a friend mailed to us through the air.
We are doing, and are sometimes paid for doing, a million new
activities that would have dazzled and shocked the farmers of
1850. These new accomplishments are not merely chores that
were difficult before. Rather they are dreams that are created
chiefly by the capabilities of the machines that can do them.
They are jobs the machines make up.
Before we invented automobiles, air-conditioning, flatscreen
video displays, and animated cartoons, no one living in ancient
Rome wished they could watch cartoons while riding to Ath-
ens in climate-controlled comfort. Two hundred years ago not

Better than Human

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a single citizen of Shanghai would have told you that they
would buy a tiny slab that allowed them to talk to faraway
friends before they would buy indoor plumbing. Crafty AIs
embedded in first-person-shooter games have given millions
of teenage boys the urge, the need, to become professional game
designers—a dream that no boy in Victorian times ever had. In
a very real way our inventions assign us our jobs. Each successful
bit of automation generates new occupations—occupations we
would not have fantasized about without the prompting of the
automation.
To reiterate, the bulk of new tasks created by automation
are tasks only other automation can handle. Now that we have
search engines like Google, we set the servant upon a thou-
sand new errands. Google, can you tell me where my phone is?
Google, can you match the people suffering depression with the
doctors selling pills? Google, can you predict when the next viral
epidemic will erupt? Technology is indiscriminate this way, pil-
ing up possibilities and options for both humans and machines.
It is a safe bet that the highest-earning professions in the
year 2050 will depend on automations and machines that have
not been invented yet. That is, we can’t see these jobs from
here, because we can’t yet see the machines and technologies
that will make them possible. Robots create jobs that we did
not even know we wanted done.

Finally, that leaves us with quadrant D, the jobs that only
humans can do—at first. The one thing humans can do that
robots can’t (at least for a long while) is to decide what it is
that humans want to do. This is not a trivial trick; our desires
are inspired by our previous inventions, making this a circular
question.

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25 When robots and automation do our most basic work, mak-
ing it relatively easy for us to be fed, clothed, and sheltered,
then we are free to ask, “What are humans for?” Industrializa-
tion did more than just extend the average human lifespan.
It led a greater percentage of the population to decide that
humans were meant to be ballerinas, full-time musicians, math-
ematicians, athletes, fashion designers, yoga masters, fan-fiction
authors, and folks with one-of-a kind titles on their business
cards. With the help of our machines, we could take up these
roles; but of course, over time, the machines will do these as
well. We’ll then be empowered to dream up yet more answers
to the question “What should we do?” It will be many genera-
tions before a robot can answer that.
This postindustrial economy will keep expanding, even
though most of the work is done by bots, because part of
your task tomorrow will be to find, make, and complete new
things to do, new things that will later become repetitive
jobs for the robots. In the coming years robot-driven cars and
trucks will become ubiquitous; this automation will spawn
the new human occupation of trip optimizer, a person who
tweaks the traffic system for optimal energy and time usage.
Routine robo-surgery will necessitate the new skills of keep-
ing machines sterile. When automatic self-tracking of all your
activities becomes the normal thing to do, a new breed of
professional analysts will arise to help you make sense of the
data. And of course we will need a whole army of robot nan-
nies, dedicated to keeping your personal bots up and running.
Each of these new vocations will in turn be taken over by
robots later.
The real revolution erupts when everyone has personal
workbots, the descendants of Baxter, at their beck and call.

Better than Human

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Imagine you run a small organic farm. Your fleet of worker bots
do all the weeding, pest control, and harvesting of produce, as
directed by an overseer bot, embodied by a mesh of probes in
the soil. One day your task might be to research which variety
of heirloom tomato to plant; the next day it might be to update
your custom labels. The bots perform everything else that can
be measured.
Right now it seems unthinkable: We can’t imagine a bot that
can assemble a stack of ingredients into a gift or manufacture
spare parts for our lawn mower or fabricate materials for our
new kitchen. We can’t imagine our nephews and nieces run-
ning a dozen workbots in their garage, churning out inverters
for their friend’s electric-vehicle startup. We can’t imagine our
children becoming appliance designers, making custom batches
of liquid-nitrogen dessert machines to sell to the millionaires in
China. But that’s what personal robot automation will enable.
Everyone will have access to a personal robot, but simply
owning one will not guarantee success. Rather, success will go
to those who innovate in the organization, optimization, and
customization of the process of getting work done with bots and
machines. Geographical clusters of production will matter, not
for any differential in labor costs but because of the differential
in human expertise. It’s human-robot symbiosis. Our human
assignment will be to keep making jobs for robots—and that
is a task that will never be finished. So we will always have at
least that one “job.”

In the coming years our relationships with robots will become
ever more complex. But already a recurring pattern is emerg-
ing. No matter what your current job or your salary, you will
progress through these Seven Stages of Robot Replacement,
again and again:

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1. A robot/computer cannot possibly do the tasks I do.

[Later.]

2. OK, it can do a lot of them, but it can’t do everything I do.
[Later.]

3. OK, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when it
breaks down, which is often.

[Later.]

4. OK, it operates flawlessly on routine stuff, but I need to train
it for new tasks.

[Later.]

5. OK, it can have my old boring job, because it’s obvious that
was not a job that humans were meant to do.

[Later.]

6. Wow, now that robots are doing my old job, my new job is
much more fun and pays more!

[Later.]

7. I am so glad a robot/computer cannot possibly do what I do
now.

This is not a race against the machines. If we race against
them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid
in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety
percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of
what you do will not be possible without them. And there will
be a blurry line between what you do and what they do. You
might no longer think of it as a job, at least at first, because
anything that seems like drudgery will be done by robots.
We need to let robots take over. They will do jobs we have
been doing, and do them much better than we can. They will
do jobs we can’t do at all. They will do jobs we never imagined

Better than Human

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even needed to be done. And they will help us discover new
jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will
let us focus on becoming more human than we were.
Let the robots take the jobs, and let them help us dream up
new work that matters.

Joining the Conversation

1. Kevin Kelly argues that machines will eventually take over
many of the jobs that we now perform. This scenario may
seem dire, yet he doesn’t appear at all worried. To the con-
trary, in fact. Why not? Find statements in the article that
explain his attitude.

2. This article appeared in Wired, a magazine for people who
know and care about digital technology. How is the article
geared toward a pro-technology audience? How might Kelly
have presented his argument for a readership that was less
enthusiastic about technology?

3. Though he acknowledges that some of his ideas are “hard
to believe,” Kelly does not begin by saying explicitly what
other ideas or assumptions he’s responding to. How does
he begin, and how does that beginning set the stage for his
argument?

4. Nicholas Carr (pp. 313−29) is less optimistic than Kelly
about the future impact of technology. Who do you find
more persuasive, and why?

5. Kelly concludes by saying that robots will help us find “new
work that matters.” Does that outcome seem likely? Write
an essay responding to that assertion, perhaps focusing on
one profession that interests you.

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“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop,
Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable
astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene
toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the
malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the
memory circuits that control its artificial “brain.” “Dave, my
mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncom-
fortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering
with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming
the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but
it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can

Nicholas Carr writes frequently on issues of technology and culture.
His books include Does IT Matter? (2004), The Big Switch: Rewiring the
World, from Edison to Google (2008), The Shallows: What the Internet Is
Doing to Our Brains (2010), and The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
(2014). Carr also has written for periodicals including the Guardian,
the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Wired, and he blogs
at roughtype.com. This essay appeared originally as the cover article
in the July/August 2008 issue of the Atlantic.

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feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a
book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get
caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and
I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s
rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts
to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread,
begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always
dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading
that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now,
I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing
and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.
The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that
once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of librar-
ies can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some
quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy
quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely
as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets reading and
writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching
videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to

Dave (Keir Dullea) removes HAL’s “brain” in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes
likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they
propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal
medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows
through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages
of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of
information are many, and they’ve been widely described and
duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s
Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to
thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theo-
rist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are
not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff
of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And
what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity
for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to
take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly
moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea
of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with
reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of
them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more
they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on
long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also
begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a
blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped
reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used
to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?”
He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on
the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e.
I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I think has
changed?”

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Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of com-
puters in medicine, also has described how the Internet has
altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the
ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in
print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long
been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical
School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone
conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a
“staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short
passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War
and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do
that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is
too much to absorb. I skim it.”
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the
long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will
provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cogni-
tion. But a recently published study of online research habits,
conducted by scholars from University College London, sug-
gests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the
way we read and think. As part of the five-year research pro-
gram, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the
behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated
by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consor-
tium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other
sources of written information. They found that people using
the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from
one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d
already visited. They typically read no more than one or two
pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to
another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s
no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The
authors of the study report:

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It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense;
indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging
as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages
and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go
online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to men-
tion the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may
well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s,
when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different
kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—
perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what
we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist
at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The
Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.”
Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net,
a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else,
may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading
that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press,
made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When
we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders
of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich
mental connections that form when we read deeply and without
distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human
beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We
have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic char-
acters we see into the language we understand. And the media
or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the
craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural
circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers
of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry

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for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in
those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The
variations extend across many regions of the brain, including
those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory
and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can
expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net
will be different from those woven by our reading of books and
other printed works.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—
a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was
failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become
exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches.
He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that
he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him,
at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was

Friedrich Nietzsche and his Malling-Hansen Writing Ball.

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able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his
fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of
Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style
of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter,
more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument
even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting
that, in his own work, his “ ‘thoughts’ in music and language
often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment
takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of
the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A.
Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to apho-
risms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used
to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections
formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls,
was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain
researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds,
a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute
for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that
even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely
break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” accord-
ing to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly,
altering the way it functions.”
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our
“intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental
rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take
on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock,
which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a
compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian
and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock

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“disassociated time from human events and helped create the
belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable
sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became
“the point of reference for both action and thought.”
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being
the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took
something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph
Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and
Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the concep-
tion of the world that emerged from the widespread use of
timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version
of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct
experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted,
the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep,
to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying
the clock.
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is
reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves
to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began
thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in
the age of software, we have come to think of them as operat-
ing “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go
much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity,
the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects
on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathema-
tician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the
time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to
perform the function of any other information-processing device.
And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasur-
ably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other
intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock,

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our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our tele-
phone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created
in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyper-
links, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds
the content with the content of all the other media it has
absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce
its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a news-
paper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse
our concentration.
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer
screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy
quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to
the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text
crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten
their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their
pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of
this year, the New York Times decided to devote the second
and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design
director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would
give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing
them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages
and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to
play by the new-media rules.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in
our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—
as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about
the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s
reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his type-
writer, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor

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carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Phila-
delphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at
improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the
approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory
hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines,
and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the
operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into
a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different
ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise
instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how
each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about
the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little
more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.
More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam
engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy

A testing engineer (possibly Taylor) observes a Midvale Steel worker c. 1885.

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and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his
“system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufactur-
ers throughout the country and, in time, around the world.
Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum
output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to orga-
nize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The
goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The
Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt,
for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to
effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb
throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to
all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would
bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society,
creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has
been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the
ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the
growing power that computer engineers and software coders
wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning
to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a
machine designed for the efficient and automated collection,
transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions
of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—
the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of
what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the
Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion
practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief
executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around
the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize
everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data

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it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries
out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard
Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms
that increasingly control how people find information and
extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the
hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize
the world’s information and make it universally accessible and
useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it
defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean
and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view,
information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that
can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more
pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can
extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted
young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral
degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of
their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelli-
gence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to

The Googleplex.

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our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as
people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For
us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.”
In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you
had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain,
or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be
better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that
Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to
do it on a large scale.”
Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one,
for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their
disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ.
A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by
a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve
problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial
intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t
Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off ” if
our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial
intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is
the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that
can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world,
the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for
the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for
insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated
computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-
processing machines is not only built into the workings of the
Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well.
The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click
and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other
companies gain to collect information about us and to feed

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us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial
Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data
we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs,
the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage
leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their
economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glo-
rify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect
the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus,
Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that,
as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the
knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in
the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise
their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would
be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper
instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when
they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled
with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates
wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects
he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the
many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread
information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge
(if not wisdom).
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century,
set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist
Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of
books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less stu-
dious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply
printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious
authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread
sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor

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Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against
the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But,
again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myr-
iad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps
those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostal-
gists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-
stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery
and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet,
and although it may replace the printing press, it produces
something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a
sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the
knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intel-
lectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.
In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted
reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that
matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences
and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne
Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,”
we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves
but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard
Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my
ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of
the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman
who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique
version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within
us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density
with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information
overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

See p. 31 for
tips on putting
yourself in their
shoes.

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As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural
inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into
“ ‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with
that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch
of a button.”
I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poi-
gnant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to
the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after
another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—
“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final rever-
sion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s
outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that
characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their
business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts
and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of
an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so
machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a
machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we
come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of
the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial
intelligence.

Joining the Conversation

1. “Is Google making us stupid?” How does Nicholas Carr
answer this question, and what evidence does he provide
to support his answer?

2. What possible objections to his own position does Carr
introduce—and why do you think he does so? How effec-
tively does he counter these objections?

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3. Carr begins this essay by quoting an exchange between HAL
and Dave, a supercomputer and an astronaut in the film
2001: A Space Odyssey—and he concludes by reflecting on
that scene. What happens to HAL and Dave, and how does
this outcome support his argument?

4. How does Carr use transitions to connect the parts of his
text and to help readers follow his train of thought? (See
Chapter 8 to help you think about how transitions help
develop an argument.)

5. In his essay on pp. 340−60, Clive Thompson reaches a dif-
ferent conclusion than Carr does, saying that “At their best,
today’s digital tools help us see more, retain more, com-
municate more. At their worst, they leave us prey to the
manipulation of the toolmakers. But on balance . . . what
is happening is deeply positive.” Write a paragraph or two
discussing how Carr might respond. What would he agree
with, and what would he disagree with?

6. This article sparked widespread debate and conversation
when it first appeared in 2008, and the discussion contin-
ues today. Go to theysayiblog.com and click on “Are We in
a Race against the Machine?” to read some of what’s been
written on the topic recently.

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The Influencing Machines

B R O O K E G L A D S T O N E A N D J O S H N E U F E L D

Brooke Gladstone is a media analyst and host of NPR’s On the Media.
She has received two Peabody awards, and her work also has appeared
in periodicals such as the Boston Globe, London Observer, and Wash-
ington Post. Josh Neufeld is a cartoonist whose work has appeared in
the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. He is
the author of the graphic narrative A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge
(2009). This selection is from Gladstone and Neufeld’s collaboration,
The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media (2011).

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Joining the Conversation

1. What is Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufeld’s argument, and
how do they support their position?

2. What “they say” has motivated her argument? How do you
know?

3. Gladstone quotes or paraphrases a number of writers across
time. Some support her position and some do not, but she
is very much in conversation with many thinkers on the
subject of technology. Choose four and explain what they
contribute to her argument.

4. See the “hint” Gladstone adds on p. 332. How does it func-
tion as metacommentary? (See Chapter 10 for a reminder
about how writers use metacommentary.)

5. Write a response to Gladstone and Neufeld presenting your
views in graphic form. Or if you prefer, choose one page of
her piece and summarize it using words alone.

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Smarter than You Think:
How Technology Is Changing

Our Minds for the Better

C L I V E T H O M P S O N

Who’s better at chess—computers or humans?
The question has long fascinated observers, perhaps because
chess seems like the ultimate display of human thought: the
players sit like Rodin’s Thinker, silent, brows furrowed, mak-
ing lightning-fast calculations. It’s the quintessential cognitive
activity, logic as an extreme sport.
So the idea of a machine outplaying a human has always
provoked both excitement and dread. In the eighteenth cen-
tury, Wolfgang von Kempelen caused a stir with his clockwork
Mechanical Turk—an automaton that played an eerily good
game of chess, even beating Napoleon Bonaparte. The spec-
tacle was so unsettling that onlookers cried out in astonishment

Clive Thompson is a freelance journalist and blogger who writes for
the New York Times Magazine and Wired. He was awarded a 2002
Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT. He blogs at collision-
detection.net. This essay is adapted from his book, Smarter Than You
Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (2013).

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Smarter than You Think

The Thinker, by French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917).

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when the Turk’s gears first clicked into motion. But the gears,
and the machine, were fake; in reality, the automaton was con-
trolled by a chess savant cunningly tucked inside the wooden
cabinet. In 1915, a Spanish inventor unveiled a genuine,
honest-to-goodness robot that could actually play chess—a
simple endgame involving only three pieces, anyway. A writer
for Scientific American fretted that the inventor “Would Sub-
stitute Machinery for the Human Mind.”
Eighty years later, in 1997, this intellectual standoff clanked
to a dismal conclusion when world champion Garry Kasparov
was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer in a tourna-
ment of six games. Faced with a machine that could calcu-
late two hundred million positions a second, even Kasparov’s
notoriously aggressive and nimble style broke down. In its final
game, Deep Blue used such a clever ploy—tricking Kasparov
into letting the computer sacrifice a knight—that it trounced
him in nineteen moves. “I lost my fighting spirit,” Kasparov
said afterward, pronouncing himself “emptied completely.”
Riveted, the journalists announced a winner. The cover of
Newsweek proclaimed the event “The Brain’s Last Stand.”
Doom-sayers predicted that chess itself was over. If machines
could out-think even Kasparov, why would the game remain
interesting? Why would anyone bother playing? What’s the
challenge?
Then Kasparov did something unexpected.

The truth is, Kasparov wasn’t completely surprised by Deep
Blue’s victory. Chess grand masters had predicted for years that
computers would eventually beat humans, because they under-
stood the different ways humans and computers play. Human
chess players learn by spending years studying the world’s best
opening moves and endgames; they play thousands of games,

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slowly amassing a capacious, in-brain library of which strategies
triumphed and which flopped. They analyze their opponents’
strengths and weaknesses, as well as their moods. When they
look at the board, that knowledge manifests as intuition—a
eureka moment when they suddenly spy the best possible move.
In contrast, a chess-playing computer has no intuition at all.
It analyzes the game using brute force; it inspects the pieces
currently on the board, then calculates all options. It prunes
away moves that lead to losing positions, then takes the prom-
ising ones and runs the calculations again. After doing this a
few times—and looking five or seven moves out—it arrives
at a few powerful plays. The machine’s way of “thinking” is
fundamentally unhuman. Humans don’t sit around crunching
every possible move, because our brains can’t hold that much
information at once. If you go eight moves out in a game of
chess, there are more possible games than there are stars in
our galaxy. If you total up every game possible? It outnumbers
the atoms in the known universe. Ask chess grand masters,
“How many moves can you see out?” and they’ll likely deliver
the answer attributed to the Cuban grand master José Raúl
Capablanca: “One, the best one.”
The fight between computers and humans in chess was, as
Kasparov knew, ultimately about speed. Once computers could
see all games roughly seven moves out, they would wear humans
down. A person might make a mistake; the computer wouldn’t.
Brute force wins. As he pondered Deep Blue, Kasparov mused
on these different cognitive approaches.
It gave him an audacious idea. What would happen if,
instead of competing against one another, humans and com-
puters collaborated? What if they played on teams together—
one computer and a human facing off against another human
and a computer? That way, he theorized, each might benefit

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from the other’s peculiar powers. The computer would bring
the lightning-fast—if uncreative—ability to analyze zillions of
moves, while the human would bring intuition and insight, the
ability to read opponents and psych them out. Together, they
would form what chess players later called a centaur: a hybrid
beast endowed with the strengths of each.
In June 1998, Kasparov played the first public game of
human-computer collaborative chess, which he dubbed
“advanced chess,” against Veselin Topalov, a top-rated grand
master. Each used a regular computer with off-the-shelf chess
software and databases of hundreds of thousands of chess games,
including some of the best ever played. They considered what
moves the computer recommended, they examined historical
databases to see if anyone had ever been in a situation like
theirs before. Then they used that information to help plan.
Each game was limited to sixty minutes, so they didn’t have
infinite time to consult the machines; they had to work swiftly.
Kasparov found the experience “as disturbing as it was excit-
ing.” Freed from the need to rely exclusively on his memory,
he was able to focus more on the creative texture of his play.
It was, he realized, like learning to be a race-car driver: He had
to learn how to drive the computer, as it were—developing a
split-second sense of which strategy to enter into the computer
for assessment, when to stop an unpromising line of inquiry,
and when to accept or ignore the computer’s advice. “Just as a
good Formula One driver really knows his own car, so did we
have to learn the way the computer program worked,” he later
wrote. Topalov, as it turns out, appeared to be an even better
Formula One “thinker” than Kasparov. On purely human terms,
Kasparov was a stronger player; a month before, he’d trounced
Topalov 4–0. But the centaur play evened the odds. This time,
Topalov fought Kasparov to a 3–3 draw.

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In 2005, there was a “freestyle” chess tournament in which
a team could consist of any number of humans or comput-
ers, in any combination. Many teams consisted of chess grand
masters who’d won plenty of regular, human-only tournaments,
achieving chess scores of 2,500 (out of 3,000). But the winning
team didn’t include any grand masters at all. It consisted of
two young New England men, Steven Cramton and Zackary
Stephen (who were comparative amateurs, with chess rankings
down around 1,400 to 1,700), and their computers.
Why could these relative amateurs beat chess players with far
more experience and raw talent? Because Cramton and Stephen
were expert at collaborating with computers. They knew when
to rely on human smarts and when to rely on the machine’s
advice. Working at rapid speed—these games, too, were limited

Garry Kasparov (right) plays Veselin Topalov (left) in Sofia, Bulgaria, on
May 3, 1998.

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to sixty minutes—they would brainstorm moves, then check to
see what the computer thought, while also scouring databases
to see if the strategy had occurred in previous games. They
used three different computers simultaneously, running five
different pieces of software; that way they could cross-check
whether different programs agreed on the same move. But they
wouldn’t simply accept what the machine accepted, nor would
they merely mimic old games. They selected moves that were
low-rated by the computer if they thought they would rattle
their opponents psychologically.
In essence, a new form of chess intelligence was emerging.
You could rank the teams like this: (1) a chess grand master was
good; (2) a chess grand master playing with a laptop was better.
But even that laptop-equipped grand master could be beaten
by (3) relative newbies, if the amateurs were extremely skilled
at integrating machine assistance. “Human strategic guidance
combined with the tactical acuity of a computer,” Kasparov
concluded, “was overwhelming.”
Better yet, it turned out these smart amateurs could even
outplay a supercomputer on the level of Deep Blue. One of the
entrants that Cramton and Stephen trounced in the freestyle
chess tournament was a version of Hydra, the most powerful
chess computer in existence at the time; indeed, it was prob-
ably faster and stronger than Deep Blue itself. Hydra’s owners
let it play entirely by itself, using raw logic and speed to fight
its opponents. A few days after the advanced chess event,
Hydra destroyed the world’s seventh-ranked grand master in a
man-versus-machine chess tournament.
But Cramton and Stephen beat Hydra. They did it using
their own talents and regular Dell and Hewlett-Packard com-
puters, of the type you probably had sitting on your desk in
2005, with software you could buy for sixty dollars. All of which

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brings us back to our original question here: Which is smarter
at chess—humans or computers?
Neither.
It’s the two together, working side by side.

We’re all playing advanced chess these days. We just haven’t
learned to appreciate it.
Our tools are everywhere, linked with our minds, working
in tandem. Search engines answer our most obscure questions;
status updates give us an ESP-like awareness of those around
us; online collaborations let far-flung collaborators tackle prob-
lems too tangled for any individual. We’re becoming less like
Rodin’s Thinker and more like Kasparov’s centaurs. This trans-
formation is rippling through every part of our cognition—
how we learn, how we remember, and how we act upon that
knowledge emotionally, intellectually, and politically. As with
Cramton and Stephen, these tools can make even the amateurs
among us radically smarter than we’d be on our own, assuming
(and this is a big assumption) we understand how they work.
At their best, today’s digital tools help us see more, retain
more, communicate more. At their worst, they leave us prey
to the manipulation of the toolmakers. But on balance, I’d
argue, what is happening is deeply positive. . . .
In a sense, this is an ancient story. The “extended mind”
theory of cognition argues that the reason humans are so intel-
lectually dominant is that we’ve always outsourced bits of cogni-
tion, using tools to scaffold our thinking into ever-more-rarefied
realms. Printed books amplified our memory. Inexpensive paper
and reliable pens made it possible to externalize our thoughts
quickly. Studies show that our eyes zip around the page while
performing long division on paper, using the handwritten digits
as a form of prosthetic short-term memory. “These resources

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enable us to pursue manipulations and juxtapositions of ideas
and data that would quickly baffle the unaugmented brain,” as
Andy Clark, a philosopher of the extended mind, writes.
Granted, it can be unsettling to realize how much thinking
already happens outside our skulls. Culturally, we revere the
Rodin ideal—the belief that genius breakthroughs come from
our gray matter alone. The physicist Richard Feynman once got
into an argument about this with the historian Charles Weiner.
Feynman understood the extended mind; he knew that writing
his equations and ideas on paper was crucial to his thought.
But when Weiner looked over a pile of Feynman’s notebooks,
he called them a wonderful “record of his day-to-day work.”
No, no, Feynman replied testily. They weren’t a record of his
thinking process. They were his thinking process:

“I actually did the work on the paper,” he said.
“Well,” Weiner said, “the work was done in your head, but the

record of it is still here.” ‘
“No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on

paper and this is the paper. Okay?”

Every new tool shapes the way we think, as well as what we
think about. The printed word helped make our cognition linear
and abstract, along with vastly enlarging our stores of knowledge.
Newspapers shrank the world; then the telegraph shrank it even
more dramatically. With every innovation, cultural prophets
bickered over whether we were facing a technological apocalypse
or a utopia. Depending on which Victorian-age pundit you asked,
the telegraph was either going usher in an era of world peace (“It is
impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist,”
as Charles F. Briggs and Augustus Maverick intoned) or drown us
in a Sargasso of idiotic trivia (“We are eager to tunnel under the

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Atlantic . . . but perchance the first news that will leak through
into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess
Adelaide has the whooping cough,” as Thoreau opined). Neither
prediction was quite right, of course, yet neither was quite wrong.
The one thing that both apocalyptics and utopians understand
and agree upon is that every new technology pushes us toward
new forms of behavior while nudging us away from older, familiar
ones. Harold Innis—the lesser-known but arguably more interest-
ing intellectual midwife of Marshall McLuhan—called this the
bias of a new tool. Living with new technologies means under-
standing how they bias everyday life.
What are the central biases of today’s digital tools? There are
many, but I see three big ones that have a huge impact on our
cognition. First, they allow for prodigious external memory: smart-
phones, hard drives, cameras, and sensors routinely record more
information than any tool before them. We’re shifting from a
stance of rarely recording our ideas and the events of our lives to
doing it habitually. Second, today’s tools make it easier for us to
find connections—between ideas, pictures, people, bits of news—
that were previously invisible. Third, they encourage a superfluity
of communication and publishing. This last feature has many
surprising effects that are often ill understood. Any economist
can tell you that when you suddenly increase the availability of
a resource, people do more things with it, which also means they
do increasingly unpredictable things. As electricity became cheap
and ubiquitous in the West, its role expanded from things you’d
expect—like night-time lighting—to the unexpected and seem-
ingly trivial: battery-driven toy trains, electric blenders, vibrators.
The superfluity of communication today has produced everything
from a rise in crowd-organized projects like Wikipedia to curious
new forms of expression: television-show recaps, map-based story-
telling, discussion threads that spin out of a photo posted to a

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smartphone app, Amazon product-review threads wittily hijacked
for political satire. Now, none of these three digital biases is immu-
table, because they’re the product of software and hardware, and
can easily be altered or ended if the architects of today’s tools
(often corporate and governmental) decide to regulate the tools
or find they’re not profitable enough. But right now, these big
effects dominate our current and near-term landscape.
In one sense, these three shifts—infinite memory, dot
connecting, explosive publishing—are screamingly obvious
to anyone who’s ever used a computer. Yet they also some-
how constantly surprise us by producing ever-new “tools for
thought” (to use the writer Howard Rheingold’s lovely phrase)
that upend our mental habits in ways we never expected and
often don’t apprehend even as they take hold. Indeed, these
phenomena have already woven themselves so deeply into the
lives of people around the globe that it’s difficult to stand back
and take account of how much things have changed and why.
While [here I map] out what I call the future of thought, it’s also
frankly rooted in the present, because many parts of our future
have already arrived, even if they are only dimly understood.
As the sci-fi author William Gibson famously quipped: “The
future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
This is an attempt to understand what’s happening to us right
now, the better to see where our augmented thought is headed.
Rather than dwell in abstractions, like so many marketers and
pundits—not to mention the creators of technology, who are
often remarkably poor at predicting how people will use their
tools—I focus more on the actual experiences of real people.

To provide a concrete example of what I’m talking about, let’s
take a look at something simple and immediate: my activities
while writing the pages you’ve just read.

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As I was working, I often realized I couldn’t quite remember
a detail and discovered that my notes were incomplete. So I’d
zip over to a search engine. (Which chess piece did Deep Blue
sacrifice when it beat Kasparov? The knight!) I also pushed some
of my thinking out into the open: I blogged admiringly about
the Spanish chess-playing robot from 1915, and within min-
utes commenters offered smart critiques. (One pointed out that
the chess robot wasn’t that impressive because it was playing an
endgame that was almost impossible to lose: the robot started
with a rook and a king, while the human opponent had only
a mere king.) While reading Kasparov’s book How Life Imitates
Chess on my Kindle, I idly clicked on “popular highlights” to
see what passages other readers had found interesting—and
wound up becoming fascinated by a section on chess strategy
I’d only lightly skimmed myself. To understand centaur play
better, I read long, nuanced threads on chess-player discus-
sion groups, effectively eavesdropping on conversations of
people who know chess far better than I ever will. (Chess
players who follow the new form of play seem divided—some
think advanced chess is a grim sign of machines’ taking over
the game, and others think it shows that the human mind is
much more valuable than computer software.) I got into a long
instant-messaging session with my wife, during which I realized
that I’d explained the gist of advanced chess better than I had
in my original draft, so I cut and pasted that explanation into
my notes. As for the act of writing itself? Like most writers,
I constantly have to fight the procrastinator’s urge to meander
online, idly checking Twitter links and Wikipedia entries in
a dreamy but pointless haze—until I look up in horror and
realize I’ve lost two hours of work, a missing-time experience
redolent of a UFO abduction. So I’d switch my word processor
into full-screen mode, fading my computer desktop to black so

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I could see nothing but the page, giving me temporary mental
peace.
[Let’s] explore each of these trends. First off, there’s the
emergence of omnipresent computer storage, which is upend-
ing the way we remember, both as individuals and as a cul-
ture. Then there’s the advent of “public thinking”: the ability
to broadcast our ideas and the catalytic effect that has both
inside and outside our minds. We’re becoming more conversa-
tional thinkers—a shift that has been rocky, not least because
everyday public thought uncorks the incivility and prejudices
that are commonly repressed in face-to-face life. But at its best
(which, I’d argue, is surprisingly often), it’s a thrilling develop-
ment, reigniting ancient traditions of dialogue and debate. At
the same time, there’s been an explosion of new forms of expres-
sion that were previously too expensive for everyday thought—
like video, mapping, or data crunching. Our social awareness
is shifting, too, as we develop ESP-like “ambient awareness,” a
persistent sense of what others are doing and thinking. On a
social level, this expands our ability to understand the people
we care about. On a civic level, it helps dispel traditional politi-
cal problems like “pluralistic ignorance,” catalyzing political
action, as in the Arab Spring.
Are these changes good or bad for us? If you asked me twenty
years ago, when I first started writing about technology, I’d have
said “bad.” In the early 1990s, I believed that as people migrated
online, society’s worst urges might be uncorked: pseudonymity
would poison online conversation, gossip and trivia would domi-

nate, and cultural standards would collapse. Certainly
some of those predictions have come true, as anyone
who’s wandered into an angry political forum knows.

But the truth is, while I predicted the bad stuff, I didn’t fore-
see the good stuff. And what a torrent we have: Wikipedia, a

See p. 66 for
ways to make

the “I’m of two
minds” move.

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global forest of eloquent bloggers, citizen journalism, political
fact-checking—or even the way status-update tools like Twitter
have produced a renaissance in witty, aphoristic, haikuesque
expression. If [I accentuate] the positive, that’s in part because
we’ve been so flooded with apocalyptic warnings of late. We
need a new way to talk clearly about the rewards and pleasures
of our digital experiences—one that’s rooted in our lived experi-
ence and also detangled from the hype of Silicon Valley.
The other thing that makes me optimistic about our cog-
nitive future is how much it resembles our cognitive past. In
the sixteenth century, humanity faced a printed-paper wave
of information overload—with the explosion of books that
began with the codex and went into overdrive with Gutenberg’s
movable type. As the historian Ann Blair notes, scholars were
alarmed: How would they be able to keep on top of the flood of
human expression? Who would separate the junk from what was
worth keeping? The mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
bemoaned “that horrible mass of books which keeps on grow-
ing,” which would doom the quality writers to “the danger of
general oblivion” and produce “a return to barbarism.” Thank-
fully, he was wrong. Scholars quickly set about organizing the
new mental environment by clipping their favorite passages
from books and assembling them into huge tomes—florilegia,
bouquets of text—so that readers could sample the best parts.
They were basically blogging, going through some of the same
arguments modern bloggers go through. (Is it enough to clip
a passage, or do you also have to verify that what the author
wrote was true? It was debated back then, as it is today.) The
past turns out to be oddly reassuring, because a pattern emerges.
Each time we’re faced with bewildering new thinking tools, we
panic—then quickly set about deducing how they can be used
to help us work, meditate, and create.

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History also shows that we generally improve and refine our
tools to make them better. Books, for example, weren’t always
as well designed as they are now. In fact, the earliest ones were,
by modern standards, practically unusable—often devoid of the
navigational aids we now take for granted, such as indexes,
paragraph breaks, or page numbers. It took decades—centuries,
even—for the book to be redesigned into a more flexible cogni-
tive tool, as suitable for quick reference as it is for deep reading.
This is the same path we’ll need to tread with our digital tools.
It’s why we need to understand not just the new abilities our
tools give us today, but where they’re still deficient and how
they ought to improve.

I have one caveat to offer. If you were hoping to read about the
neuroscience of our brains and how technology is “rewiring”
them, [I] will disappoint you.
This goes against the grain of modern discourse, I real-
ize. In recent years, people interested in how we think have
become obsessed with our brain chemistry. We’ve marveled at
the ability of brain scanning—picturing our brain’s electrical
activity or blood flow—to provide new clues as to what parts
of the brain are linked to our behaviors. Some people panic
that our brains are being deformed on a physiological level
by today’s technology: spend too much time flipping between
windows and skimming text instead of reading a book, or
interrupting your conversations to read text messages, and
pretty soon you won’t be able to concentrate on anything—
and if you can’t concentrate on it, you can’t understand it
either. In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr eloquently
raised this alarm, arguing that the quality of our thought, as a
species, rose in tandem with the ascendance of slow-moving,
linear print and began declining with the arrival of the zingy,

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flighty Internet. “I’m not thinking the way I used to think,”
he worried.
I’m certain that many of these fears are warranted. It has
always been difficult for us to maintain mental habits of con-
centration and deep thought; that’s precisely why societies have
engineered massive social institutions (everything from univer-
sities to book clubs and temples of worship) to encourage us to
keep it up. It’s part of why only a relatively small subset of people
become regular, immersive readers, and part of why an even
smaller subset go on to higher education. Today’s multitasking
tools really do make it harder than before to stay focused during
long acts of reading and contemplation. They require a high
level of “mindfulness’’—paying attention to your own atten-
tion. While I don’t dwell on the perils of distraction [here], the
importance of being mindful resonates throughout these pages.
One of the great challenges of today’s digital thinking tools is
knowing when not to use them, when to rely on the powers of
older and slower technologies, like paper and books.
That said, today’s confident talk by pundits and journalists
about our “rewired” brains has one big problem: it is very prema-
ture. Serious neuroscientists agree that we don’t really know how
our brains are wired to begin with. Brain chemistry is particularly
mysterious when it comes to complex thought, like memory,
creativity, and insight. “There will eventually be neuroscientific
explanations for much of what we do; but those explanations
will turn out to be incredibly complicated,” as the neuroscientist
Gary Marcus pointed out when critiquing the popular fascina-
tion with brain scanning. “For now, our ability to understand
how all those parts relate is quite limited, sort of like trying
to understand the political dynamics of Ohio from an airplane
window above Cleveland.” I’m not dismissing brain scanning;
indeed, I’m confident it’ll be crucial in unlocking these mysteries

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in the decades to come. But right now the field is so new that it
is rash to draw conclusions, either apocalyptic or Utopian, about
how the Internet is changing our brains. Even Carr, the most
diligent explorer in this area, cited only a single brain-scanning
study that specifically probed how people’s brains respond to
using the Web, and those results were ambiguous.
The truth is that many healthy daily activities, if you scanned
the brains of people participating in them, might appear outright
dangerous to cognition. Over recent years, professor of psychiatry
James Swain and teams of Yale and University of Michigan scien-
tists scanned the brains of new mothers and fathers as they listened
to recordings of their babies’ cries. They found brain circuit activ-
ity similar to that in people suffering from obsessive-compulsive
disorder. Now, these parents did not actually have OCD. They
were just being temporarily vigilant about their newborns. But
since the experiments appeared to show the brains of new par-
ents being altered at a neural level, you could write a pretty scary
headline if you wanted: becoming a parent erodes your brain
function! In reality, as Swain tells me, it’s much more benign.
Being extra fretful and cautious around a newborn is a good thing
for most parents: Babies are fragile. It’s worth the tradeoff. Simi-
larly, living in cities—with their cramped dwellings and pounding
noise—stresses us out on a straightforwardly physiological level
and floods our system with cortisol, as I discovered while research-
ing stress in New York City several years ago. But the very urban
density that frazzles us mentally also makes us 50 percent more
productive, and more creative, too, as Edward Glaeser argues in
Triumph of the City, because of all those connections between
people. This is “the city’s edge in producing ideas.” The upside of
creativity is tied to the downside of living in a sardine tin, or, as
Glaeser puts it, “Density has costs as well as benefits.” Our digital
environments likely offer a similar push and pull. We tolerate

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their cognitive hassles and distractions for the enormous upside
of being connected, in new ways, to other people.
I want to examine how technology changes our mental hab-
its, but for now, we’ll be on firmer ground if we stick to what’s
observably happening in the world around us: our cognitive
behavior, the quality of our cultural production, and the social
science that tries to measure what we do in everyday life. In any
case, I won’t be talking about how your brain is being “rewired.”
Almost everything rewires it. . . .
The brain you had before you read this paragraph? You don’t
get that brain back. I’m hoping the trade-off is worth it.

The rise of advanced chess didn’t end the debate about man
versus machine, of course. In fact, the centaur phenomenon
only complicated things further for the chess world—raising
questions about how reliant players were on computers and
how their presence affected the game itself. Some worried that
if humans got too used to consulting machines, they wouldn’t
be able to play without them. Indeed, in June 2011, chess
master Christoph Natsidis was caught illicitly using a mobile
phone during a regular human-to-human match. During tense
moments, he kept vanishing for long bathroom visits; the ref-
eree, suspicious, discovered Natsidis entering moves into a piece
of chess software on his smartphone. Chess had entered a phase
similar to the doping scandals that have plagued baseball and
cycling, except in this case the drug was software and its effect
cognitive.
This is a nice metaphor for a fear that can nag at us in our
everyday lives, too, as we use machines for thinking more and
more. Are we losing some of our humanity? What happens
if the Internet goes down: Do our brains collapse, too? Or is
the question naive and irrelevant—as quaint as worrying about

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whether we’re “dumb” because we can’t compute long division
without a piece of paper and a pencil?
Certainly, if we’re intellectually lazy or prone to cheating
and shortcuts, or if we simply don’t pay much attention to how
our tools affect the way we work, then yes—we can become,
like Natsidis, overreliant. But the story of computers and chess
offers a much more optimistic ending, too. Because it turns out
that when chess players were genuinely passionate about learn-
ing and being creative in their game, computers didn’t degrade
their own human abilities. Quite the opposite: it helped them
internalize the game much more profoundly and advance to
new levels of human excellence.
Before computers came along, back when Kasparov was
a young boy in the 1970s in the Soviet Union, learning
grand-master-level chess was a slow, arduous affair. If you
showed promise and you were very lucky, you could find a
local grand master to teach you. If you were one of the tiny
handful who showed world-class promise, Soviet leaders would
fly you to Moscow and give you access to their elite chess
library, which contained laboriously transcribed paper records
of the world’s top games. Retrieving records was a painstaking
affair; you’d contemplate a possible opening, use the catalog to
locate games that began with that move, and then the librarians
would retrieve records from thin files, pulling them out using
long sticks resembling knitting needles. Books of chess games
were rare and incomplete. By gaining access to the Soviet elite
library, Kasparov and his peers developed an enormous advan-
tage over their global rivals. That library was their cognitive
augmentation.
But beginning in the 1980s, computers took over the
library’s role and bested it. Young chess enthusiasts could buy
CD-ROMs filled with hundreds of thousands of chess games.

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Chess-playing software could show you how an artificial oppo-
nent would respond to any move. This dramatically increased
the pace at which young chess players built up intuition. If you
were sitting at lunch and had an idea for a bold new opening
move, you could instantly find out which historic players had
tried it, then war-game it yourself by playing against software.
The iterative process of thought experiments—“If I did this,
then what would happen?”—sped up exponentially.
Chess itself began to evolve. “Players became more creative
and daring,” as Frederic Friedel, the publisher of the first popu-
lar chess databases and software, tells me. Before computers,
grand masters would stick to lines of attack they’d long stud-
ied and honed. Since it took weeks or months for them to
research and mentally explore the ramifications of a new move,
they stuck with what they knew. But as the next generation
of players emerged, Friedel was astonished by their unusual
gambits, particularly in their opening moves. Chess players
today, Kasparov has written, “are almost as free of dogma as
the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn’t
good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn’t been
done that way before. It’s simply good if it works and bad if it
doesn’t.”
Most remarkably, it is producing players who reach grand
master status younger. Before computers, it was extremely rare
for teenagers to become grand masters. In 1958, Bobby Fischer
stunned the world by achieving that status at fifteen. The feat
was so unusual it was over three decades before the record was
broken, in 1991. But by then computers had emerged, and in
the years since, the record has been broken twenty times, as
more and more young players became grand masters. In 2002,
the Ukrainian Sergey Karjakin became one at the tender age
of twelve.

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So yes, when we’re augmenting ourselves, we can be smarter.
We’re becoming centaurs. But our digital tools can also leave
us smarter even when we’re not actively using them.

Joining the Conversation

1. Clive Thompson lists three shifts—infinite memory, dot
connecting, and explosive publishing—that he believes
have strongly affected our cognition. What exactly does he
mean by these three shifts, and in what ways does he think
they have changed our thinking?

2. Thompson starts paragraph 20 by saying “Our tools are
everywhere, linked with our minds, working in tandem.”
What do you think? Does his statement reflect your own
experience with technology?

3. In paragraphs 33−35, Thompson cites Nicholas Carr, whose
views about technology differ from his. How does he respond
to Carr—and how does acknowledging views he disagrees
with help support his own position?

4. So what? Has Thompson convinced you that his topic mat-
ters? If so, how and where does he do so?

5. Write an essay reflecting on the ways digital technologies
have influenced your own intellectual development, drawing
from Thompson’s text and other readings in this chapter—
and on your own experience as support for your argument.
Be sure to acknowledge views other than your own.

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Does Texting Affect Writing?

M I C H A E L A C U L L I N G T O N

It’s taking over our lives. We can do it almost
anywhere—walking to class, waiting in line at the grocery store,
or hanging out at home. It’s quick, easy, and convenient. It
has become a concern of doctors, parents, and teachers alike.
What is it? It’s texting!
Text messaging—or texting, as it’s more commonly called—
is the process of sending and receiving typed messages via a
cellular phone. It is a common means of communication among
teenagers and is even becoming popular in the business world
because it allows quick messages to be sent without people
having to commit to a telephone conversation. A person is
able to say what is needed, and the other person will receive
the information and respond when it’s convenient to do so.
In order to more quickly type what they are trying to say,
many people use abbreviations instead of words. The language
created by these abbreviations is called textspeak. Some people

Michaela Cullington was a student at Marywood University in
Pennsylvania when she wrote this essay, which originally appeared
in Young Scholars in Writing, an undergraduate journal of writing pub-
lished by the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She received a mas-
ters degree in speech and language pathology from Marywood in 2014.

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believe that using these abbreviations is hindering the
writing abilities of students, and others argue that tex-
ting is actually having a positive effect on writing. In
fact, it seems likely that texting has no significant effect
on student writing.

Concerns about Textspeak

A September 2008 article in USA Today entitled “Texting, Test-
ing Destroys Kids’ Writing Style” summarizes many of the most
common complaints about the effect of texting. It states that
according to the National Center for Education Statistics, only
25% of high school seniors are “proficient” writers. The article
quotes Jacquie Ream, a former teacher and author of K.I.S.S .—
Keep It Short and Simple, a guide for writing more effectively.
Ream states, “[W]e have a whole generation being raised with-
out communication skills.” She blames the use of acronyms and
shorthand in text messages for students’ inability to spell and ulti-
mately to write well. Ream also points out that students struggle
to convey emotion in their writing because, as she states, in text
messages “emotions are always sideways smiley faces.”
This debate became prominent after some teachers began
to believe they were seeing a decline in the writing abilities of
their students. Many attributed this perceived decline to the
increasing popularity of text messaging and its use of abbrevia-
tions. Naomi Baron, a linguistics professor at American Univer-
sity, blames texting for what she sees as the fact that “so much of
American society has become sloppy and laissez faire about the
mechanics of writing” (“Should We Worry or LOL?”). Teachers
report finding “2” for “to,” “gr8” for “great,” “dat” for “that,”
and “wut” for “what,” among other examples of textspeak, in
their students’ writing. A Minnesota teacher of the seventh

Here’s the
summary of
an ongoing

debate. For tips
on this move,

see Chapter 1.

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and ninth grades says that she has to spend extra time in class
editing papers and must “explicitly” remind her students that it
is not acceptable to use text slang and abbreviations in writing
(Walsh). Another English teacher believes that text language
has become “second nature” to her students (Carey); they are
so used to it that they do not even catch themselves doing it.
Many also complain that because texting does not stress the
importance of punctuation, students are neglecting it in their
formal writing. Teachers say that their students are forgetting
commas, apostrophes, and even capital letters to begin sen-
tences. Another complaint is that text messages lack emotion.
Many argue that texts lack feeling because of their tendency
to be short, brief, and to the point. Because students are not
able to communicate emotion effectively through texts, some
teachers worry, they may lose the ability to do so in writing.
To get a more personal perspective on the question of how
teachers perceive texting to be influencing student writing,
I interviewed two of my former high school teachers—my junior-
year English teacher and my senior-year theology teacher. Both
teachers stress the importance of writing in their courses. They
maintain that they notice text abbreviations in their students’
writing often. To correct this problem, they point it out when it
occurs and take points off for its use. They also remind their stu-
dents to use proper sentence structure and complete sentences.
The English teacher says that she believes texting inhibits good
writing—it reinforces simplistic writing that may be acceptable
for conversation but is “not so good for critical thinking or analy-
sis.” She suggests that texting tends to generate topic sentences
without emphasizing the following explanation. According to
these teachers, then, texting is inhibiting good writing. How-
ever, their evidence is limited, based on just a few personal
experiences rather than on a significant amount of research.

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Responses to Concerns about Textspeak

In response to these complaints that texting is having a nega-
tive impact on student writing, others insist that texting should
be viewed as beneficial because it provides students with
motivation to write, practice in specific writing skills, and an
opportunity to gain confidence in their writing. For example,
Sternberg, Kaplan, and Borck argue that texting is a good way
to motivate students: teens enjoy texting, and if they frequently
write through texts, they will be more motivated to write for-
mally. Texting also helps to spark students’ creativity, these
authors argue, because they are always coming up with new
ways to express their ideas (417).
In addition, because they are engaging in written commu-
nication rather than oral speech, texting teens learn how to
convey their message to a reader in as few words as possible. In
his book Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, David Crystal discusses a study
that concludes that texting actually helps foster “the ability
to summarize and express oneself concisely” in writing (168).
Furthermore, Crystal explains that texting actually helps people
to “sharpen their diplomatic skills . . . [because] it allows more
time to formulate their thoughts and express them carefully”
(168). One language arts teacher from Minnesota believes that
texting helps students develop their own “individual voice”
(qtd. in Walsh). Perfecting such a voice allows the writer to
offer personal insights and express feelings that will interest
and engage readers.
Supporters of texting also argue that it not only teaches
elements of writing but provides extra practice to those who
struggle with the conventions of writing. As Crystal points out,
children who struggle with literacy will not choose to use a
technology that requires them to do something that is difficult

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for them. However, if they do choose to text, the experience
will help them “overcome their awkwardness and develop their
social and communication skills” (Txtng 171). Shirley Holm, a
junior high school teacher, describes texting as a “comfortable
form of communication” (qtd. in Walsh). Teenagers are used
to texting, enjoy doing so, and as a result are always writing.
Through this experience of writing in ways they enjoy, they
can learn to take pleasure in writing formally. If students are
continually writing in some form, they will eventually develop
better skills.
Furthermore, those who favor texting explain that with prac-
tice comes the confidence and courage to try new things, which
some observers believe they are seeing happen with writing as
a result of texting. Teenagers have, for example, created an
entirely new language—one that uses abbreviations and sym-
bols instead of words, does not require punctuation, and uses
short, incomplete phrases throughout the entire conversation.
It’s a way of speaking that is a language in and of itself. Crystal,
among others, sees this “language evolution” as a positive effect
of texting; he seems, in fact, fascinated that teenagers are capa-
ble of creating such a phenomenon, which he describes as the
“latest manifestation of the human ability” (Txtng 175). David
Warlick, a teacher and author of books about technology in
the classroom, would agree with Crystal. He believes students
should be given credit for “inventing a new language ideal for
communicating in a high-tech world” (qtd. in Carey).

Methods

I decided to conduct my own research into this controversy.
I wanted to get different, more personal, perspectives on the
issue. First, I surveyed seven students on their opinions about

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the impact of texting on writing. Second, I questioned two
high school teachers, as noted above. Finally, in an effort to
compare what students are actually doing to people’s percep-
tions of what they are doing, I analyzed student writing samples
for instances of textspeak.1

To let students speak for themselves, I created a list of ques-
tions for seven high school and college students, some of my
closest and most reliable friends. Although the number of
respondents was small, I could trust my knowledge of them to
help me interpret their responses. In addition, these students
are very different from one another, and I believed their differ-
ences would allow for a wide array of thoughts and opinions on
the issue. I was thus confident in the reliability and diversity of
their answers but was cautious not to make too many assump-
tions because of the small sample size.
I asked the students how long they had been texting; how
often they texted; what types of abbreviations they used most
and how often they used them; and whether they noticed them-
selves using any type of textspeak in their formal writing. In
analyzing their responses, I looked for commonalities to help
me draw conclusions about the students’ texting habits and if /
how they believed their writing was affected.
I created a list of questions for teachers similar to the one
for the students and asked two of my high school teachers to
provide their input. I asked if they had noticed their students
using textspeak in their writing assignments and, if so, how
they dealt with it. I also asked if they believed texting had a
positive or negative effect on writing. Next, I asked if they
were texters themselves. And, finally, I solicited their opin-
ions on what they believed should be done to prevent teens
from using text abbreviations and other textspeak in their
writing.

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I was surprised at how different the students’ replies and
opinions were from the teachers’. I decided to find out for myself
whose impressions were more accurate by comparing some stu-
dents’ actual writing with students’ and teachers’ perceptions of
that writing. To do this I looked at twenty samples of student
writing—end-of-semester research arguments written in two
first-year college writing courses with different instructors. The
topics varied from increased airport security after September 11
to the weapons of the Vietnam War to autism, and lengths
ranged from eight to ten pages. To analyze the papers for the
presence of textspeak, I looked closely for use of abbreviations
and other common slang terms, especially those usages which
the students had stated in their surveys were most common.
These included “hbu” (“How about you?”); “gtg” (“Got to go”);
and “cuz” (“because”). I also looked for the numbers 2 and 4
used instead of the words “to” and “for.”

Discussion of Findings

My research suggests that texting actually has a minimal effect
on student writing. It showed that students do not believe
textspeak is appropriate in formal writing assignments. They
recognize the difference between texting friends and writing
formally and know what is appropriate in each situation. This
was proven true in the student samples, in which no examples
of textspeak were used. Many experts would agree that there
is no harm in textspeak, as long as students continue to be
taught and reminded that occasions where formal language
is expected are not the place for it. As Crystal explains, the
purpose of the abbreviations used in text messages is not
to replace language but rather to make quick communica-
tions shorter and easier, since in a standard text message,

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the texter is allowed only 160 characters for a communication
(“Texting” 81).
Dennis Baron, an English and linguistics professor at the
University of Illinois, has done much research on the effect of
technology on writing, and his findings are aligned with those
of my own study. In his book A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers,
and the Digital Revolution, he concludes that students do not
use textspeak in their writing. In fact, he suggests students do
not even use abbreviations in their text messages very often.
Baron says that college students have “put away such childish
things, and many of them had already abandoned such signs of
middle-school immaturity in high school” (qtd. in Golden).
In surveying the high school and college students, I found
that most have been texting for a few years, usually starting
around ninth grade. The students said they generally text
between thirty and a hundred messages every day but use abbre-
viations only occasionally, with the most common being “lol”
(“Laugh out loud”), “gtg” (“Got to go”), “hbu” (“How about
you?”), “cuz” (“because”), and “jk” (“Just kidding”). None of
them believed texting abbreviations were acceptable in for-
mal writing. In fact, research has found that most students
report that they do not use textspeak in formal writing. As
one Minnesota high school student says, “[T]here is a time
and a place for everything,” and formal writing is not the place
for communicating the way she would if she were texting her
friends (qtd. in Walsh). Another student admits that in writing
for school she sometimes finds herself using these abbrevia-
tions. However, she notices and corrects them before handing
in her final paper (Carey). One teacher reports that, despite
texting, her students’ “formal writing remains solid.” She occa-
sionally sees an abbreviation; however, it is in informal, “warm-
up” writing. She believes that what students choose to use in

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everyday types of writing is up to them as long as they use
standard English in formal writing (qtd. in Walsh).
Also supporting my own research findings are those from a
study which took place at a midwestern research university. This
study involved eighty-six students who were taking an Intro-
duction to Education course at the university. The participants
were asked to complete a questionnaire that included questions
about their texting habits, the spelling instruction they had
received, and their proficiency at spelling. They also took a
standardized spelling test. Before starting the study, the research-
ers had hypothesized that texting and the use of abbreviations
would have a negative impact on the spelling abilities of the
students. However, they found that the results did not support
their hypothesis. The researchers did note that text messaging is
continuing to increase in popularity; therefore, this issue should
continue to be examined (Shaw et al.).
I myself am a frequent texter. I chat with my friends from
home every day through texting. I also use texting to commu-
nicate with my school friends, perhaps to discuss what time we
are going to meet for dinner or to ask quick questions about
homework. According to my cell phone bill, I send and receive
around 6,400 texts a month. In the messages I send, I rarely
notice myself using abbreviations. The only time I use them is if
I do not have time to write out the complete phrase. However,
sometimes I find it more time-consuming to try to figure out
how to abbreviate something so that my message will still be
comprehensible.
Since I rarely use abbreviations in my texting, I never use
them in my formal writing. I know that they are unacceptable
and that it would make me look unintelligent if I included
acronyms and symbols instead of proper and formal language.
I also have not noticed an effect on my spelling as a result

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of texting. I am confident in my spelling abilities, and even
when I use an abbreviation, I know how to spell the word(s)
it stands for.
On the basis of my own research, expert research, and per-
sonal observations, I can confidently state that texting is not
interfering with students’ use of standard written English and
has no effect on their writing abilities in general. It is inter-
esting to look at the dynamics of the arguments over these
issues. Teachers and parents who claim that they are seeing a
decline in the writing abilities of their students and children
mainly support the negative-impact argument. Other teachers
and researchers suggest that texting provides a way for teens to
practice writing in a casual setting and thus helps prepare them
to write formally. Experts and students themselves, however,
report that they see no effect, positive or negative. Anecdotal
experiences should not overshadow the actual evidence.

Note

1. All participants in the study have given permission for their responses
to be published.

Works Cited

Baron, Dennis. A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution.
Oxford UP, 2009.

Carey, Bridget. “The Rise of Text, Instant Messaging Vernacular Slips into
Schoolwork.” Miami Herald, 6 Mar. 2007. Academic Search Elite, www
.ebscohost.com/academic/academic-search-elite. Accessed 27 Oct. 2009.

Crystal, David. “Texting.” ELT Journal, vol. 62, no. 1, Jan. 2008, pp. 77–83.
WilsonWeb, doi: 10.1093/elt/ccm080. Accessed 8 Nov. 2009.

. Txting: The Gr8 Db8. Oxford UP, 2008.

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Does Texting Affect Writing?

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Golden, Serena. Review of A Better Pencil, by Dennis Baron. Inside Higher
Ed, 18 Sept. 2009, www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/18/barron.
Accessed 9 Nov. 2009.

Shaw, Donita M., et al. “An Exploratory Investigation into the Relationship
between Text Messaging and Spelling.” New England Reading Association
Journal, vol. 43, no. 1, June 2007, pp. 57–62. EbscoHOST, connection
.ebscohost.com/c/articles/25648081/exploratory-investigation-
relationship-between-text-messaging-spelling. Accessed 8 Nov. 2009.

“Should We Worry or LOL?” NEA Today, vol. 22, no. 6, Mar. 2004, p. 12.
EbscoHOST, connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/12405267/should-we-
worry-lol. Accessed 27 Oct. 2009.

Sternberg, Betty, et al. “Enhancing Adolescent Literacy Achievement
through Integration of Technology in the Classroom.” Reading
Research Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 3, July–Sept. 2007, pp. 416–20. ERIC,
eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ767777. Accessed 8 Nov. 2009.

“Texting, Testing Destroys Kids’ Writing Style.” USA Today, vol. 137,
no. 2760, Sept. 2008, p. 8. EbscoHOST, connection.ebscohost.com/c/
articles/34214935/texting-testing-destroys-kids-writing-style. Accessed
9 Nov. 2009.

Walsh, James. “Txt Msgs Creep in2 class—Some Say That’s gr8.” Star
Tribune, 23 Oct. 2007. Academic Search Elite, www.ebscohost.com/
academic/academic-search-elite. Accessed 27 Oct. 2009.

Joining the Conversation

1. Michaela Cullington makes clear in her first paragraph what
viewpoint she’s responding to. What is this view (her “they
say”), and what is her view (her “I say”)? What kinds of
evidence does she offer in support of her argument?

2. Cullington acknowledges the views of quite a few naysayers,
including teachers who believe that texting has a negative
effect on their students’ writing. How—and where in her
essay—does she respond to this criticism? Is her response
persuasive—and if not, why not?

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4. Cullington focuses on how texting affects on writing,
whereas Sherry Turkle is concerned with the way it affects
communication more broadly (pp. 373−92). How do you
think Cullington would respond to Turkle’s concerns?

5. Cullington “send[s] and receive[s] around 6,400 texts a
month” (paragraph 21). About how many do you send and
receive? Write a paragraph reflecting on how your texting
affects your other writing. First write it as a text, and then
revise it to meet the standards of academic writing. How do
the two differ?

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No Need to Call

S H E R R Y T U R K L E

“So many people hate the telephone,” says Elaine,
seventeen. Among her friends at Roosevelt High School, “it’s
all texting and messaging.” She herself writes each of her six
closest friends roughly twenty texts a day. In addition, she says,
“there are about forty instant messages out, forty in, when I’m
at home on the computer.” Elaine has strong ideas about how
electronic media “levels the playing field” between people like
her—outgoing, on the soccer team, and in drama club—and
the shy: “It’s only on the screen that shy people open up.” She
explains why: “When you can think about what you’re going
to say, you can talk to someone you’d have trouble talking to.
And it doesn’t seem weird that you pause for two minutes to

Sherry Turkle teaches in the program in science, technology, and
society at MIT and directs the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.
She has been described as the “Margaret Mead of digital culture.” Her
books include Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology
and Less from Each Other (2011), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age
of the Internet (1995), and The Second Self: Computers and the Human
Spirit (1984). This essay is from Alone Together.

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think about what you’re going to say before you say it, like it
would be if you were actually talking to someone.”
Elaine gets specific about the technical designs that help
shy people express themselves in electronic messaging. The
person to whom you are writing shouldn’t be able to see your
process of revision or how long you have been working on the
message. “That could be humiliating.” The best communica-
tion programs shield the writer from the view of the reader.
The advantage of screen communication is that it is a place
to reflect, retype, and edit. “It is a place to hide,” says Elaine.
The notion that hiding makes it easier to open up is not new.
In the psychoanalytic tradition, it inspired technique. Classical
analysis shielded the patient from the analyst’s gaze in order to
facilitate free association, the golden rule of saying whatever
comes to mind. Likewise, at a screen, you feel protected and
less burdened by expectations. And, although you are alone, the
potential for almost instantaneous contact gives an encourag-
ing feeling of already being together. In this curious relational
space, even sophisticated users who know that electronic com-
munications can be saved, shared, and show up in court, suc-
cumb to its illusion of privacy. Alone with your thoughts, yet
in contact with an almost tangible fantasy of the other, you feel
free to play. At the screen, you have a chance to write yourself
into the person you want to be and to imagine others as you
wish them to be, constructing them for your purposes.1 It is a
seductive but dangerous habit of mind. When you cultivate
this sensibility, a telephone call can seem fearsome because it
reveals too much.
Elaine is right in her analysis: teenagers flee the telephone.
Perhaps more surprisingly, so do adults. They claim exhaustion
and lack of time; always on call, with their time highly lever-
aged through multitasking, they avoid voice communication

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outside of a small circle because it demands their full attention
when they don’t want to give it.
Technologies live in complex ecologies. The meaning of
any one depends on what others are available. The telephone
was once a way to touch base or ask a simple question. But
once you have access to e-mail, instant messaging, and texting,
things change. Although we still use the phone to keep up with
those closest to us, we use it less outside this circle.2 Not only do
people say that a phone call asks too much, they worry it will be
received as demanding too much. Randolph, a forty-six-year-old
architect with two jobs, two young children, and a twelve-year-
old son from a former marriage, makes both points. He avoids the
telephone because he feels “tapped out. . . . It promises more than
I’m willing to deliver.” If he keeps his communications to text
and e-mail, he believes he can “keep it together.” He explains,
“Now that there is e-mail, people expect that a call will be more
complicated. Not about facts. A fuller thing. People expect it to
take time—or else you wouldn’t have called.”
Tara, a fifty-five-year-old lawyer who juggles children, a job,
and a new marriage, makes a similar point: “When you ask for
a call, the expectation is that you have pumped it up a level.
People say to themselves: ‘It’s urgent or she would have sent
an e-mail.’” So Tara avoids the telephone. She wants to meet
with friends in person; e-mail is for setting up these meetings.
“That is what is most efficient,” she says. But efficiency has its
downside. Business meetings have agendas, but friends have
unscheduled needs. In friendship, things can’t always wait. Tara
knows this; she feels guilty and she experiences a loss: “I’m at
the point where I’m processing my friends as though they were
items of inventory . . . or clients.”
Leonora, fifty-seven, a professor of chemistry, reflects on
her similar practice: “I use e-mail to make appointments to

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see friends, but I’m so busy that I’m often making an appoint-
ment one or two months in the future. After we set things up
by e-mail, we do not call. Really. I don’t call. They don’t call.
They feel that they have their appointment. What do I feel?
I feel I have ‘taken care of that person.’” Leonora’s pained
tone makes it clear that by “taken care of ” she means that
she has crossed someone off a to-do list. Tara and Leonora
are discontent but do not feel they have a choice. This is
where technology has brought them. They subscribe to a new
etiquette, claiming the need for efficiency in a realm where
efficiency is costly.

Audrey: A Life on the Screen

. . . Audrey, sixteen, a Roosevelt junior[,] talked about her
Facebook profile as “the avatar of me.” She’s one of Elaine’s shy
friends who prefers texting to talking. She is never without her
phone, sometimes using it to text even as she instant-messages
at an open computer screen. Audrey feels lonely in her fam-
ily. She has an older brother in medical school and a second,
younger brother, just two years old. Her parents are divorced,
and she lives half time with each of them. Their homes are
about a forty-five-minute drive apart. This means that Audrey
spends a lot of time on the road. “On the road,” she says.
“That’s daily life.” She sees her phone as the glue that ties her
life together. Her mother calls her to pass on a message to her
father. Her father does the same. Audrey says, “They call me to
say, ‘Tell your mom this. . . . Make sure your dad knows that.’
I use the cell to pull it together.” Audrey sums up the situa-
tion: “My parents use me and my cell like instant messenger.
I am their IM.”

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Like so many other children who tell me similar stories,
Audrey complains of her mother’s inattention when she picks
her up at school or after sports practice. At these times, Audrey
says, her mother is usually focused on her cell phone, either
texting or talking to her friends. Audrey describes the scene:
she comes out of the gym exhausted, carrying heavy gear. Her
mother sits in her beaten-up SUV, immersed in her cell, and
doesn’t even look up until Audrey opens the car door. Some-
times her mother will make eye contact but remain engrossed
with the phone as they begin the drive home. Audrey says, “It
gets between us, but it’s hopeless. She’s not going to give it
up. Like, it could have been four days since I last spoke to her,
then I sit in the car and wait in silence until she’s done.”3

Audrey has a fantasy of her mother, waiting for her, expect-
ant, without a phone. But Audrey is resigned that this is not
to be and feels she must temper her criticism of her mother
because of her own habit of texting when she is with her friends.
Audrey does everything she can to avoid a call.4 “The phone,
it’s awkward. I don’t see the point. Too much just a recap and
sharing feelings. With a text . . . I can answer on my own time.
I can respond. I can ignore it. So it really works with my mood.
I’m not bound to anything, no commitment. . . . I have control
over the conversation and also more control over what I say.”
Texting offers protection:

Nothing will get spat at you. You have time to think and prepare
what you’re going to say, to make you appear like that’s just the way
you are. There’s planning involved, so you can control how you’re
portrayed to this person, because you’re choosing these words,
editing it before you send it. . . . When you instant-message you
can cross things out, edit what you say, block a person, or sign off.
A phone conversation is a lot of pressure. You’re always expected

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to uphold it, to keep it going, and that’s too much pressure. . . .
You have to just keep going . . . “Oh, how was your day?” You’re
trying to think of something else to say real fast so the conversa-
tion doesn’t die out.

Then Audrey makes up a new word. A text, she argues, is
better than a call because in a call “there is a lot less bound-
ness to the person.” By this she means that in a call, she could
learn too much or say too much, and things could get “out of
control.” A call has insufficient boundaries. She admits that
“later in life I’m going to need to talk to people on the phone.
But not now.” When texting, she feels at a reassuring distance.
If things start to go in a direction she doesn’t like, she can eas-
ily redirect the conversation—or cut it off: “In texting, you get
your main points off; you can really control when you want the
conversation to start and end. You say, ‘Got to go, bye.’ You

Teenagers plugged into their devices but not each other.

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just do it . . . much better than the long drawn-out good-byes,
when you have no real reason to leave, but you want to end
the conversation.” This last is what Audrey likes least—the
end of conversations. A phone call, she explains, requires the
skill to end a conversation “when you have no real reason to
leave. . . . It’s not like there is a reason. You just want to. I
don’t know how to do that. I don’t want to learn.”
Ending a call is hard for Audrey because she experiences
separation as rejection; she projects onto others the pang of
abandonment she feels when someone ends a conversation with
her. Feeling unthreatened when someone wants to end a con-
versation may seem a small thing, but it is not. It calls upon a
sense of self-worth; one needs to be at a place where Audrey
has not arrived. It is easier to avoid the phone; its beginnings
and endings are too rough on her.
Audrey is not alone in this. Among her friends, phone
calls are infrequent, and she says, “Face-to-face conversations
happen way less than they did before. It’s always, ‘Oh, talk
to you online.”’ This means, she explains, that things happen
online that “should happen in person. . . . Friendships get bro-
ken. I’ve had someone ask me out in a text message. I’ve had
someone break up with me online.’’ But Audrey is resigned to
such costs and focuses on the bounties of online life.
One of Audrey’s current enthusiasms is playing a more
social, even flirtatious version of herself in online worlds. “I’d
like to be more like I am online,” she says. As we’ve seen, for
Audrey, building an online avatar is not so different from writ-
ing a social-networking profile. An avatar, she explains, “is a
Facebook profile come to life.” And avatars and profiles have
a lot in common with the everyday experiences of texting and
instant messaging. In all of these, as she sees it, the point is to
do “a performance of you.”

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Making an avatar and texting. Pretty much the same. You’re cre-
ating your own person; you don’t have to think of things on the
spot really, which a lot of people can’t really do. You’re creating
your own little ideal person and sending it out. Also on the Inter-
net, with sites like MySpace and Facebook, you put up the things
you like about yourself, and you’re not going to advertise the bad
aspects of you.
You’re not going to post pictures of how you look every day.
You’re going to get your makeup on, put on your cute little outfit,
you’re going to take your picture and post it up as your default, and
that’s what people are going to expect that you are every day, when
really you’re making it up for all these people. . . . You can write
anything about yourself; these people don’t know. You can create
who you want to be. You can say what kind of stereotype mold you
want to fit in without . . . maybe in real life it won’t work for you,
you can’t pull it off. But you can pull it off on the Internet.

Audrey has her cell phone and its camera with her all day; all
day she takes pictures and posts them to Facebook. She boasts
that she has far more Facebook photo albums than any of her
friends. “I like to feel,” she says, “that my life is up there.” But,
of course, what is up on Facebook is her edited life. Audrey is
preoccupied about which photographs to post. Which put her
in the best light? Which show her as a “bad” girl in potentially
appealing ways? If identity play is the work of adolescence,
Audrey is at work all day: “If Facebook were deleted, I’d be
deleted. . . . All my memories would probably go along with
it. And other people have posted pictures of me. All of that
would be lost. If Facebook were undone, I might actually freak
out. . . . That is where I am. It’s part of your life. It’s a second
you.” It is at this point that Audrey says of a Facebook avatar:
“It’s your little twin on the Internet.”

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Since Audrey is constantly reshaping this “twin,” she won-
ders what happens to the elements of her twin that she edits
away. “What does Facebook do with pictures you put on and
then take off?” She suspects that they stay on the Internet
forever, an idea she finds both troubling and comforting. If
everything is archived, Audrey worries that she will never be
able to escape the Internet twin. That thought is not so nice.
But if everything is archived, at least in fantasy, she will never
have to give her up. That thought is kind of nice.
On Facebook, Audrey works on the twin, and the twin
works on her. She describes her relationship to the site as a
“give-and-take.” Here’s how it works: Audrey tries out a “flirty”
style. She receives a good response from Facebook friends, and
so she ramps up the flirtatious tone. She tries out “an ironic,
witty” tone in her wall posts. The response is not so good, and
she retreats. Audrey uses the same kind of tinkering as she
experiments with her avatars in virtual worlds. She builds a first
version to “put something out there.” Then comes months of
adjusting, of “seeing the new kinds of people I can hang with”
by changing how she represents herself. Change your avatar,
change your world.

. . .

Overwhelmed across the Generations

The teenagers I studied were born in the late 1980s and early
1990s. Many were introduced to the Internet through America
Online when they were only a little past being toddlers. Their
parents, however, came to online life as grown-ups. In this
domain, they are a generation that, from the beginning, has been
playing catch-up with their children. This pattern continues:
the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook is adults from

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thirty-five to forty-four.5 Conventional wisdom stresses
how different these adults are from their children—lay-
ing out fundamental divides between those who migrated
to digital worlds and those who are its “natives.” But the

migrants and natives share a lot: perhaps above all, the feeling
of being overwhelmed. If teenagers, overwhelmed with demands
for academic and sexual performance, have come to treat online
life as a place to hide and draw some lines, then their parents,
claiming exhaustion, strive to exert greater control over what
reaches them. And the only way to filter effectively is to keep
most communications online and text based.
So, they are always on, always at work, and always on call.
I remember the time, not many years ago, when I celebrated
Thanksgiving with a friend and her son, a young lawyer, who
had just been given a beeper by his firm. At the time, everyone
at the table, including him, joked about the idea of his “legal
emergencies.” By the following year, he couldn’t imagine not
being in continual contact with the office. There was a time
when only physicians had beepers, a “burden” shared in rota-
tion. Now, we have all taken up the burden, reframed as an
asset—or as just the way it is.
We are on call for our families as well as our colleagues.
On a morning hike in the Berkshires, I fall into step with
Hope, forty-seven, a real estate broker from Manhattan. She
carries her BlackBerry. Her husband, she says, will probably
want to be in touch. And indeed, he calls at thirty-minute
intervals. Hope admits, somewhat apologetically, that she is
“not fond” of the calls, but she loves her husband, and this is
what he needs. She answers her phone religiously until finally
a call comes in with spotty reception. “We’re out of range,
thank goodness,” she says, as she disables her phone. “I need
a rest.”

“Conventional
wisdom” is the

“standard view.”
For more on

this move, see
pp. 23−24.

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Increasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason
for taking time alone, a reason not to be available for calls. It is
poignant that people’s thoughts turn to technology when they
imagine ways to deal with stresses that they see as having been
brought on by technology. They talk of filters and intelligent
agents that will handle the messages they don’t want to see. Hope
and Audrey, though thirty years apart in age, both see texting as
the solution to the “problem” of the telephone. And both rede-
fine “stress” in the same way—as pressure that happens in real
time. With this in mind, my hiking partner explains that she is
trying to “convert” her husband to texting. There will be more
messages; he will be able to send more texts than he can place
calls. But she will not have to deal with them “as they happen.”
Mixed feelings about the drumbeat of electronic communi-
cation do not suggest any lack of affection toward those with
whom we are in touch. But a stream of messages makes it impos-
sible to find moments of solitude, time when other people are
showing us neither dependency nor affection. In solitude we
don’t reject the world but have the space to think our own
thoughts. But if your phone is always with you, seeking solitude
can look suspiciously like hiding.
We fill our days with ongoing connection, denying ourselves
time to think and dream. Busy to the point of depletion, we make
a new Faustian* bargain. It goes something like this: if we are
left alone when we make contact, we can handle being together.

. . .

The barrier to making a call is so high that even when people
have something important to share, they hold back. Tara, the
lawyer who admits to “processing” her friends by dealing with

*Faustian Relating to Faust, a character of German folklore, and used to
describe something or someone that is concerned only with present gain and
not future consequences.

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them on e-mail, tells me a story about a friendship undermined.
About four times a year, Tara has dinner with Alice, a classmate
from law school. Recently, the two women exchanged multiple
e-mails trying to set a date. Finally, after many false starts, they
settled on a time and a restaurant. Alice did not come to the
dinner with good news. Her sister had died. Though they lived
thousands of miles apart, the sisters had spoken once a day.
Without her sister, without these calls, Alice feels ungrounded.
At dinner, when Alice told Tara about her sister’s death,
Tara became upset, close to distraught. She and Alice had been
e-mailing for months. Why hadn’t Alice told her about this?
Alice explained that she had been taken up with her family,
with arrangements. And she said, simply, “I didn’t think it was
something to discuss over e-mail.” Herself in need of support,
Alice ended up comforting Tara.
As Tara tells me this story, she says that she was ashamed
of her reaction. Her focus should have been—and should now
be—on Alice’s loss, not on her own ranking as a confidant. But
she feels defensive as well. She had, after all, “been in touch.’’
She’d e-mailed; she’d made sure that their dinner got arranged.
Tara keeps coming back to the thought that if she and Alice
had spoken on the telephone to set up their dinner date, she
would have learned about her friend’s loss. She says, “I would
have heard something in her voice. I would have suspected. I
could have drawn her out.” But for Tara, as for so many, the
telephone call is for family. For friends, even dear friends, it is
close to being off the menu.
Tara avoids the voice but knows she has lost something. For
the young, this is less clear. I talk with Meredith, a junior at
Silver Academy who several months before had learned of a
friend’s death via instant message and had been glad that she
didn’t have to see or speak to anyone. She says, “It was a day

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off, so I was at home, and I hadn’t seen anyone who lives around
me, and then my friend Rosie IM’ed me and told me my friend
died. I was shocked and everything, but I was more okay than I
would’ve been if I saw people. I went through the whole thing
not seeing anyone and just talking to people online about it,
and I was fine. I think it would’ve been much worse if they’d
told me in person.”
I ask Meredith to say more. She explains that when bad news
came in an instant message, she was able to compose herself.
It would have been “terrible,” she says, to have received a call.
“I didn’t have to be upset in front of someone else.” Indeed,
for a day after hearing the news, Meredith only communicated
with friends by instant message. She describes the IMs as fre-
quent but brief: “Just about the fact of it. Conversations like,
‘Oh, have you heard?’ ‘Yeah, I heard.’ And that’s it.” The IMs
let her put her emotions at a distance. When she had to face
other people at school, she could barely tolerate the rush of
feeling: “The second I saw my friends, it got so much worse.”
Karen and Beatrice, two of Meredith’s friends, tell similar sto-
ries. Karen learned about the death of her best friend’s father
in an instant message. She says, “It was easier to learn about
it on the computer. It made it easier to hear. I could take it
in pieces. I didn’t have to look all upset to anyone.” Beatrice
reflects, “I don’t want to hear bad things, but if it is just texted
to me, I can stay calm.”
These young women prefer to deal with strong feelings from
the safe haven of the Net. It gives them an alternative to pro-
cessing emotions in real time. Under stress, they seek compo-
sure above all. But they do not find equanimity. When they
meet and lose composure, they find a new way to flee: often
they take their phones out to text each other and friends not
in the room. I see a vulnerability in this generation, so quick

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to say, “Please don’t call.” They keep themselves at a distance
from their feelings. They keep themselves from people who
could help.

Voices

When I first read how it is through our faces that we call each
other up as human beings, I remember thinking I have always
felt that way about the human voice. But like many of those
I study, I have been complicit with technology in removing
many voices from my life.
I had plans for dinner with a colleague, Joyce. On the day
before we were to meet, my daughter got admitted to college.
I e-mailed Joyce that we would have much to celebrate. She
e-mailed back a note of congratulations. She had been through
the college admissions process with her children and under-
stood my relief. At dinner, Joyce said that she had thought of
calling to congratulate me, but a call had seemed “intrusive.”
I admitted that I hadn’t called her to share my good news for
the same reason. Joyce and I both felt constrained by a new
etiquette but were also content to follow it. “I feel more in
control of my time if I’m not disturbed by calls,” Joyce admit-
ted.
Both Joyce and I have gained something we are not happy
about wanting. License to feel together when alone, comforted
by e-mails, excused from having to attend to people in real
time. We did not set out to avoid the voice but end up denying
ourselves its pleasures. For the voice can be experienced only
in real time, and both of us are so busy that we don’t feel we
have it to spare.
Apple’s visual voicemail for the iPhone was welcomed
because it saves you the trouble of having to listen to a message

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to know who sent it. And now there are applications that auto-
matically transcribe voicemail into text. I interview Maureen,
a college freshman, who is thrilled to have discovered one of
these programs. She says that only her parents send her voice-
mail: “I love my parents, but they don’t know how to use the
phone. It’s not the place to leave long voice messages. Too
long to listen to. Now, I can scroll through the voicemail as
text messages. Great.”
Here, in the domain of connectivity, we meet the narra-
tive of better than nothing becoming simply better. People
have long wanted to connect with those at a distance. We
sent letters, then telegrams, and then the telephone gave us a
way to hear their voices. All of these were better than noth-
ing when you couldn’t meet face-to-face. Then, short of time,
people began to use the phone instead of getting together. By
the 1970s, when I first noticed that I was living in a new regime
of connectivity, you were never really “away” from your phone
because answering machines made you responsible for any call
that came in. Then, this machine, originally designed as a way
to leave a message if someone was not at home, became a
screening device, our end-of-millennium Victorian calling card.
Over time, voicemail became an end in itself, not the result
of a frustrated telephone call. People began to call purposely
when they knew that no one would be home. People learned
to let the phone ring and “let the voicemail pick it up.”
In a next step, the voice was taken out of voicemail because
communicating with text is faster. E-mail gives you more con-
trol over your time and emotional exposure. But then, it, too,
was not fast enough. With mobile connectivity (think text
and Twitter), we can communicate our lives pretty much at
the rate we live them. But the system backfires. We express
ourselves in staccato texts, but we send out a lot and often to

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large groups. So we get even more back—so many that the idea
of communicating with anything but texts seems too exhaust-
ing. Shakespeare might have said, we are “consumed with that
which we are nourished by.”6

I sketched out this narrative to a friend for whom it rang true
as a description but seemed incredible all the same. A professor
of poetry and a voracious reader, she said, “We cannot all write
like Lincoln or Shakespeare, but even the least gifted among of
us has this incredible instrument, our voice, to communicate
the range of human emotion. Why would we deprive ourselves
of that?”
The beginning of an answer has become clear: in text mes-
saging and e-mail, you hide as much as you show. You can
present yourself as you wish to be “seen.” And you can “process”
people as quickly as you want to. Listening can only slow you
down. A voice recording can be sped up a bit, but it has to
unfold in real time. Better to have it transcribed or avoid it
altogether. We work so hard to give expressive voices to our
robots but are content not to use our own.
Like the letters they replace, e-mail, messaging, texting,
and, more recently, Tweeting carry a trace of the voice. When
Tara regretted that she had not called her friend Alice—on the
phone she would have heard her friend’s grief—she expressed
the point of view of someone who grew up with the voice and
is sorry to have lost touch with it. Hers is a story of trying
to rebalance things in a traditional framework. Trey, her law
partner, confronts something different, something he cannot
rebalance.

My brother found out that his wife is pregnant and he put it on
his blog. He didn’t call me first. I called him when I saw the blog
entry. I was mad at him. He didn’t see why I was making a big

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deal. He writes his blog every day, as things happen, that’s how he
lives. So when they got home from the doctor—bam, right onto
the blog. Actually, he said it was part of how he celebrated the
news with his wife—to put it on the blog together with a picture of
him raising a glass of champagne and she raising a glass of orange
juice. Their idea was to celebrate on the blog, almost in real time,
with the photos and everything. When I complained they made
me feel like such a girl. Do you think I’m old-school?7

Trey’s story is very different from Tara’s. Trey’s brother was
not trying to save time by avoiding the telephone. His brother
did not avoid or forget him or show preference to other family
members. Blogging is part of his brother’s intimate life. It is
how he and his wife celebrated the most important milestone
in their life as a family. In a very different example of our
new genres of online intimacy, a friend of mine underwent
a stem cell transplant. I felt honored when invited to join
her family’s blog. It is set up as a news feed that appears on
my computer desktop. Every day, and often several times a
day, the family posts medical reports, poems, reflections, and
photographs. There are messages from the patient, her hus-
band, her children, and her brother, who donated his stem
cells. There is progress and there are setbacks. On the blog,
one can follow this family as it lives, suffers, and rejoices
for a year of treatment. Inhibitions lift. Family members tell
stories that would be harder to share face-to-face. I read every
post. I send e-mails. But the presence of the blog changes
something in my behavior. I am grateful for every piece of
information but feel strangely shy about calling. Would it be
an intrusion? I think of Trey. Like him, I am trying to get
my bearings in a world where the Net has become a place of
intimate enclosure.

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Notes

1. In the object relations tradition of psychoanalysis, an object is that
which one relates to. Usually, objects are people, especially a significant person
who is the object or target of another’s feelings or intentions. A whole object
is a person in his or her entirety. It is common in development for people to
internalize part objects, representations of others that are not the whole person.
Online life provides an environment that makes it easier for people to relate
to part objects. This puts relationships at risk. On object relations theory, see,
for example, Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. Black, Freud and Beyond:
A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

2. See Stefana Broadbent, “How the Internet Enables Intimacy,” Ted.com,
www.ted.com/talks/stefana_broadbent_how_the_internet_enables_intimacy.
html (accessed August 8, 2010). According to Broadbent, 80 percent of calls
on cell phones are made to four people, 80 percent of Skype calls are made to
two people, and most Facebook exchanges are with four to six people.

3. This mother is being destructive to her relationship with her daughter.
Research shows that people use the phone in ways that surely undermine rela-
tionships with adult partners as well. In one striking finding, according to Dan
Schulman, CEO of cell operator Virgin Mobile, one in five people will interrupt
sex to answer their phone. David Kirkpatrick, “Do You Answer Your Cellphone
During Sex?” Fortune, August 28, 2006, http://money.cnn.com/2006/08/25/
technology/fastforward_kirpatrick.fortune/index.htm (accessed November 11,
2009).

4. See Amanda Lenhart et al., “Teens and Mobile Phones,” The Pew
Foundation, April 20, 2010, www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Teens-and-
Mobile-Phones.aspx?r=i (accessed August 10, 2010).

5. “Number of US Facebook Users over 35 Nearly Doubles in Last 60
Days,” Inside Facebook, March 25, 2009, www.insidefacebookcom/2009/03/25/
number-of-us-facebook-users-over-35-nearly-doubles-in-last-60-days (accessed
October 19, 2009).

6. This paraphrases a line from Sonnet 73: “Consum’d with that which it
was nourish’d by . . .”

7. The author of a recent blog post titled “I Hate the Phone” would not
call Trey old-school, but nor would she want to call him. Anna-Jane Grossman
admits to growing up loving her pink princess phone, answering machine, and
long, drawn-out conversations with friends she had just seen at school. Now she

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http://www.Ted.com

http://www.insidefacebookcom/2009/03/25/number-of-us-facebook-users-over-35-nearly-doubles-in-last-60-days

http://money.cnn.com/2006/08/25/technology/fastforward_kirpatrick.fortune/index.htm

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hates the phone: “I feel an inexplicable kind of dread when I hear a phone ring,
even when the caller ID displays the number of someone I like. . . . My dislike
for the phone probably first started to grow when I began using Instant Mes-
senger. Perhaps phone-talking is a skill that one has to practice, and the more
IMing I’ve done, the more my skills have dwindled to the level of a modern
day 13-year-old who never has touched a landline. . . . I don’t even listen to
my [phone] messages any more: They get transcribed automatically and then
are sent to me via e-mail or text.” The author was introduced to Skype and
sees its virtues; she also sees the ways in which it undermines conversation:
“It occurs to me that if there’s one thing that’ll become obsolete because of
video-chatting, it’s not phones: it’s natural flowing conversations with people
far away.” See Grossman, “I Hate the Phone.”

In my experience with Skype, pauses seem long and awkward, and it is
an effort not to look bored. Peggy Ornstein makes this point in “The Over-
extended Family,” New York Times Magazine, June 25, 2009, ww.nytimes.
com/2009/06/28/magazine/28fob-wwln-t.html (accessed October 17, 2009).
Ornstein characterizes Skype as providing “too much information,” something
that derails intimacy: “Suddenly I understood why slumber-party confessions
always came after lights were out, why children tend to admit the juicy stuff
to the back of your head while you’re driving, why psychoanalysts stay out of
a patient’s sightline.”

Joining the Conversation

1. Sherry Turkle was once optimistic about the potential for
technology to improve human lives but now takes a more
complex view. What does she mean here by the title, “No
Need to Call”? What pitfalls does she see in our increasing
reluctance to talk on the phone or face-to-face?

2. This reading consists mainly of stories about how people
communicate on social media, on the phone, and face-to-
face. Summarize the story about Audrey (pp. 376−81) in
one paragraph.

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3. According to Turkle, we “hide as much as [we] show” in
text messages and email, presenting ourselves “as [we] wish
to be ‘seen’” (paragraph 38). Is this so different from what
we do in most of our writing? How do you present yourself
in your academic writing, and how does that presentation
differ from what you do in text messages or email?

4. Is digital communication good or bad—or both? Read
Chapter 13, which summarizes both sides of that discus-
sion. Which side (or sides) do you come down on? Where
do you think Turkle stands?

5. Turkle says she sees “a vulnerability” in those who prefer
social media to phone calls or face-to-face communication:
“I see a vulnerability in this generation, so quick to say,
‘Please don’t call’” (paragraph 30). Write an essay about
your own views on communicating with social media, draw-
ing upon this and other readings in the chapter for ideas to
consider, to question, and to support your view.

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I Had a Nice Time with You Tonight.
On the App.

J E N N A W O R T H A M

Last Sunday, I spent a lazy afternoon with my boyfriend.
We chatted while I made brunch, discussed the books we were
reading, laughed at some cat pictures and then settled down
with dinner, before bidding each other good night.
We did all of this despite living more than 3,000 miles apart,
thanks to smartphone applications and services that helped to
collapse time and space. Video chat apps like Google Hangouts,
FaceTime and Skype, of course, already make it possible to see
and talk to one another in real time. But those formats can be
awkward and require both parties to coordinate a time to talk
and find someplace quiet with a decent Internet connection—a
challenge with busy schedules in different time zones.
I prefer to use applications that already figure into my daily
routine, like Google’s instant-messaging application, Gchat, as

Jenna Wortham writes about technology for the New York Times.
Her work also has appeared in Bust magazine, Vogue, and Wired,
and she is a cofounder of the zine Girl Crush. Her Twitter handle
is @jennydeluxe. This column first appeared in the New York Times
on April 6, 2014.

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well as Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat.
This way, we can talk about travel plans while I’m waiting for
the train or talk about what he’s making for dinner while I’m
at work.
I’ve found that all of my conversational habits have matured
beyond the static phone dates of yore. We are now in constant
and continuous communication with our friends, co-workers
and family over the course of a day. These interactions can help
us feel physically close, even if they happen through a screen.
And because this kind of communication is less formal than
a phone call or an email, it feels more like the kind of casual
conversation you might have over a meal or while watching
television together. These conversations can also be infused
with a lot more fun than a regular text message, because they
often include cutesy features that let you add digital doodles to
video messages, or send virtual kisses or cartoon characters.
The downside is that it can be hard to juggle all the various
ways to communicate. But a modern kind of application, includ-
ing one that we were experimenting with on that lazy Sunday,
combines all those interactions—and is designed with couples
in mind. This focus on couples is relatively new. The online and
mobile dating industry has built many tools and services for single
people who are looking for romantic partners and new friends.
They’ve evolved from websites like Match.com and OKCupid to
mobile apps like Tinder that let people swipe through potential
dates and select the ones that pique their interest.
But in recent months, several entrepreneurs have been shift-
ing their attention to people after they meet a mate.
“Tech entrepreneurs, long obsessed with making apps to help
you find a relationship, have now begun trying to solve the
problem of staying happy in one,” wrote Ann Friedman on
The Cut, a blog of New York magazine. Ms. Friedman points to

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apps like Avocado, Couple and Bet ween as smartphone apps
that “keep you close with your partner through the power of a
smartphone alone.”
The application that my boyfriend and I were using, called
You & Me, is scheduled for public release in early May. It was
created by the founders of the online dating site HowAboutWe,
which initially built its business around people proposing dates—
as in, “How about we go to a trivia night?”—as a means for
finding matches. The original HowAboutWe dating service was
started in 2010 and has attracted two million users to date.
But it had a business-model problem, said Aaron Schildkrout,
one of the founders of HowAboutWe. The site lost users—and
potential customers—once they were in a relationship. “The
couples market is huge,” he said. He and his business partner
were getting feedback from “couples who had met on the service
but couldn’t use it anymore” and decided to build an application
“to facilitate communication and interaction.”
The new You & Me application lets two people send pho-
tographs and voice messages and play a selfie-exchanging game
called “Halfsie.”
I tested an early version for a few weeks. When I described
it to others, they often furrowed their brows and asked me
whether people really needed yet another application to talk
to people they are closest to.
Sherry Turkle, the author of Alone Together, says she believes
that using an application in place of real-world, face-to-face
interactions is having a detrimental effect on how we prioritize
offline communication and, potentially, on our ability to inter-
act even when we aren’t relying on technology as a mediator.
“We’ve given ourselves something so gratifying that we can
forget other ways we can communicate,” she said. “What starts
out being better than nothing becomes better than anything.”

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15 Ms. Turkle, who is researching the impact of technol-
ogy on communication, said technology-saturated types
could “forget what a face-to-face interaction can do.”
She says she is not opposed to messaging applications,

but she cautions that their most frequent users should be aware
of the potential impact.
In my experience, however, I’ve found the opposite to be
true, especially as more and more of my daily interactions with
friends, colleagues and family happen through a screen. If any-
thing, the pervasiveness of technology in my life has heightened
my desire for actual one-on-one meetings.
Anyone who spends much time online and on a smartphone
knows that it’s no substitute for the real thing—it’s just an appe-
tizer that can delight and satisfy until the main course arrives.
But that satisfaction is real. Although I am using a vast array of
apps to deal with a real challenge—trying to date someone who
lives on a different continent—they still hold their appeal when
that distance is erased. Even when we’re both in the same city
for an extended time, we still use them, albeit to a lesser degree
and not to the detriment of spending actual time together.
In many cases, adding the Internet to the mix can strengthen
a relationship over all, because online interactions have their
own kind of entertaining rapport that can coexist with their
offline counterparts.
In her blog post, Ms. Friedman pointed to a February study
from the Pew Research Center’s Internet Research project that
surveyed 2,252 adults about their digital habits in relationships.
Seventy-four percent of the couples surveyed reported that the
Internet had had a positive impact on their relationship. In
addition, 41 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds in serious relation-
ships said they felt closer to their partner because of online or
text-message conversations.

See
Chapter 2 for

ways to blend
the author’s
words with
your own.

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20 Mr. Schildkrout, at You & Me, hopes to appeal to people
who want to build their relationships through the screen as well
as beyond it. Although the couples app will be free, he says, the
company may eventually add features that let their users ask
each other out on prepackaged evenings or events sold through
the application. “At the end of the day,” Mr. Schildkrout said,
“technology is where some of the most beautiful interactions
happen and deepen.”
The jury is still out on whether You & Me will replace the
swath of services we already use, but for what it’s worth, I think
that Mr. Schildkrout is right. I’ve had some of my most emo-
tionally intimate and honest conversations with friends and
romantic partners on mobile devices. And while virtual chats
and hugs will never be the same as their real-world counterparts,
they can come awfully close in a pinch.

“I Had a Nice Time with You Tonight. On the App,” by Jenna Wortham.
From The New York Times, April 6, 2014. © 2014 The New York Times. All
rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of
the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of
this Content without express written permission is prohibited.

Joining the Conversation

1. How would you summarize Jenna Wortham’s attitude about
using apps to communicate with her boyfriend and others?
What benefits does she see, and what limitations?

2. Wortham begins her piece with a short narrative about “a lazy
afternoon” with her boyfriend. Why is this an effective way
to begin this essay? How else might the piece have begun?

3. So what? Who cares? Where in this piece does Wortham
explain why her argument matters? Has she persuaded you—
and if not, why not?

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4. Sherry Turkle writes (pp. 373−92) that young women often
“prefer to deal with strong feelings from the safe haven of the
Net” and that doing so provides “an alternative to processing
emotions in real time.” What do you think Wortham would
say to that?

5. What if Romeo and Juliet had to communicate using only
an app? What about Samson and Delilah? Or Roosevelt and
Churchill? How would the technology have affected their
conversations? Write an essay developing your own argu-
ment about the larger effects of digital media, citing your
experiences as well as ideas from readings in this chapter.

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3 9 9

Small Change: Why the Revolution
Will Not Be Tweeted

M A L C O L M G L A D W E L L

At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February
1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter
at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina.
They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college
a mile or so away.
“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair,
said to the waitress.
“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.
The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar
that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one
end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks.
Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam

Malcolm Gladwell writes for the New Yorker and was named one of
Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2005. His best-selling
books include The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Differ-
ence (2000), Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (2005),
Outliers: The Story of Success (2008), and David and Goliath: Underdogs,
Misfits, and the Art of Battling (2013). This essay first appeared in the
New Yorker on October 14, 2010.

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table, approached the students and tried to warn them away.
“You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move.
Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked.
The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door.
Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer
from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A.
& T. College,” one of the students said.
By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven
men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the orig-
inal four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students
had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the
counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro”
secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of
protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters num-
bered three hundred, including three white women, from the
Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By
Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled
out onto the street. White teenagers waved Confederate flags.
Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football
team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white
students shouted.
By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-
Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away.
The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers Col-
lege and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined
in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s
College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and
Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton
and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and
in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there
were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked
every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had

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Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted

4 0 1

been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer
wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was
like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ’’ Some seventy thousand
students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and
untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early
sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the
rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting,
Facebook, or Twitter.

The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The
new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With
Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship
between political authority and popular will has been upended,
making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate,
and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protest-
ers took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to
protest against their country’s Communist government, the
action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the
means by which the demonstrators had been brought together.
A few months after that, when student protests rocked
Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step
of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance
of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such
a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the
demonstrations. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would
not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for free-
dom and democracy,” Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security
adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the
Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined by their
causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors
go online to push for change. “You are the best hope for us all,”
James K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official,

See Chapter 3
for tips on
incorporating
quotations.

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Social media can’t provide what social change has always required.

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told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored
by Facebook, A.T.&T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like
Facebook, Glassman said, “give the U.S. a significant competi-
tive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al
Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer
the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now
about interactivity and conversation.”
These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter
who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who
log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As
for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a
scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital
evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant inter-
nal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter
accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution,
not least because the protests—as Anne Applebaum suggested
in the Washington Post—may well have been a bit of stagecraft
cooked up by the government. (In a country paranoid about
Romanian revanchism, the protesters flew a Romanian flag over
the Parliament building.) In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the
people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in
the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran
right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign
Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside
Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan,
who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari
continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists
who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the
ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language
tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all,
no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate pro-
tests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

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Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. Innovators tend to
be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and expe-
rience into their new model. As the historian Robert Darnton
has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the
present have produced a false consciousness about the past—
even a sense that communication has no history, or had noth-
ing of importance to consider before the days of television and
the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the
outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of
the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American
history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.

Greensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place
where racial insubordination was routinely met with violence.
The four students who first sat down at the lunch counter were
terrified. “I suppose if anyone had come up behind me and yelled
‘Boo,’ I think I would have fallen off my seat,” one of them said
later. On the first day, the store manager notified the police chief,
who immediately sent two officers to the store. On the third
day, a gang of white toughs showed up at the lunch counter and
stood ostentatiously behind the protesters, ominously muttering
epithets such as “burr-head nigger.” A local Ku Klux Klan leader
made an appearance. On Saturday, as tensions grew, someone
called in a bomb threat, and the entire store had to be evacuated.
The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi Freedom
Summer Project of 1964, another of the sentinel campaigns of
the civil-rights movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinat-
ing Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, largely white
unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black vot-
ers, and raise civil-rights awareness in the Deep South. “No one
should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an automobile
and certainly not at night,” they were instructed. Within days of

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arriving in Mississippi, three volunteers—Michael Schwerner,
James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped and
killed, and during the rest of the summer, thirty-seven black
churches were set on fire and dozens of safe houses were bombed;
volunteers were beaten, shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup
trucks full of armed men. A quarter of those in the program
dropped out. Activism that challenges the status quo—that
attacks deeply rooted problems—is not for the faint of heart.
What makes people capable of this kind of activism? The
Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam compared the Freedom
Summer dropouts with the participants who stayed, and dis-
covered that the key difference wasn’t, as might be expected,
ideological fervor. “All of the applicants—participants and
withdrawals alike—emerge as highly committed, articulate
supporters of the goals and values of the summer program,”
he concluded. What mattered more was an applicant’s degree
of personal connection to the civil-rights movement. All the
volunteers were required to provide a list of personal contacts—
the people they wanted kept apprised of their activities—and
participants were far more likely than dropouts to have close
friends who were also going to Mississippi. High-risk activism,
McAdam concluded, is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.
This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the
Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-
seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least
one good friend already in the organization. The same is true
of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Even
revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demon-
strations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall,
are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement
in East Germany consisted of several hundred groups, each with
roughly a dozen members. Each group was in limited contact

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with the others: at the time, only thirteen per cent of East
Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday
nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, peo-
ple gathered to voice their anger at the state. And the primary
determinant of who showed up was “critical friends”—the more
friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely
you were to join the protest.
So one crucial fact about the four freshman at the Greensboro
lunch counter—David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair,
and Joseph McNeil—was their relationship with one another.
McNeil was a roommate of Blair’s in A. & T.’s Scott Hall dormi-
tory. Richmond roomed with McCain one floor up, and Blair,
Richmond, and McCain had all gone to Dudley High School.
The four would smuggle beer into the dorm and talk late into the
night in Blair and McNeil’s room. They would all have remem-
bered the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the Montgomery bus
boycott that same year, and the showdown in Little Rock in 1957.
It was McNeil who brought up the idea of a sit-in at Woolworth’s.
They’d discussed it for nearly a month. Then McNeil came into
the dorm room and asked the others if they were ready. There was
a pause, and McCain said, in a way that works only with people
who talk late into the night with one another, “Are you guys
chicken or not?” Ezell Blair worked up the courage the next day
to ask for a cup of coffee because he was flanked by his roommate
and two good friends from high school.

The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this
at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties.
Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you
may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently manag-
ing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you
would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why

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you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never
could in real life.
This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength
in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed.
Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source
of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the
power of these kinds of distant connections with marvelous
efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, inter-
disciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and
sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But
weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.
In a new book called The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective,
and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,
the business consultant Andy Smith and the Stanford Busi-
ness School professor Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer
Bhatia, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down
with acute myelogenous leukemia. It’s a perfect illustration of
social media’s strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow trans-
plant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and
friends. The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and
there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow data-
base. So Bhatia’s business partner sent out an e-mail explaining
Bhatia’s plight to more than four hundred of their acquaint-
ances, who forwarded the e-mail to their personal contacts;
Facebook pages and YouTube videos were devoted to the Help
Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty-five thousand new
people were registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia
found a match.
But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up?
By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can
get someone you don’t really know to do something on your
behalf. You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor

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registry, because doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a
cheek swab and—in the highly unlikely event that your bone
marrow is a good match for someone in need—spend a few
hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial mat-
ter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t
mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup
trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched
norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that
will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.
The evangelists of social media don’t understand this dis-
tinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the
same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry
in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting
at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social
networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,”
Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks
are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level
of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page
of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who
have donated an average of nine cents apiece. The next biggest
Darfur charity on Facebook has 22,073 members, who have
donated an average of thirty-five cents. Help Save Darfur has
2,797 members, who have given, on average, fifteen cents. A
spokesperson for the Save Darfur Coalition told Newsweek,
“We wouldn’t necessarily gauge someone’s value to the advo-
cacy movement based on what they’ve given. This is a powerful
mechanism to engage this critical population. They inform
their community, attend events, volunteer. It’s not something
you can measure by looking at a ledger.” In other words, Face-
book activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a
real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that
people do when they are not motivated enough to make a

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real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of
Greensboro.

The students who joined the sit-ins across the South during the
winter of 1960 described the movement as a “fever.” But the
civil-rights movement was more like a military campaign than
like a contagion. In the late nineteen-fifties, there had been
sixteen sit-ins in various cities throughout the South, fifteen of
which were formally organized by civil-rights organizations like
the N.A.A.C.P. and core. Possible locations for activism were
scouted. Plans were drawn up. Movement activists held training
sessions and retreats for would-be protesters. The Greensboro
Four were a product of this groundwork: all were members of the
N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council. They had close ties with the head
of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. They had been briefed on the
earlier wave of sit-ins in Durham, and had been part of a series
of movement meetings in activist churches. When the sit-in
movement spread from Greensboro throughout the South, it
did not spread indiscriminately. It spread to those cities which
had preexisting “movement centers”—a core of dedicated and
trained activists ready to turn the “fever” into action.
The civil-rights movement was high-risk activism. It was
also, crucially, strategic activism: a challenge to the establish-
ment mounted with precision and discipline. The N.A.A.C.P.
was a centralized organization, run from New York according
to highly formalized operating procedures. At the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King, Jr., was
the unquestioned authority. At the center of the movement
was the black church, which had, as Aldon D. Morris points
out in his superb 1984 study, The Origins of the Civil Rights
Movement, a carefully demarcated division of labor, with various
standing committees and disciplined groups. “Each group was

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task-oriented and coordinated its activities through authority
structures,” Morris writes. “Individuals were held accountable
for their assigned duties, and important conflicts were resolved
by the minister, who usually exercised ultimate authority over
the congregation.”
This is the second crucial distinction between traditional
activism and its online variant: social media are not about this
kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are
tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure
and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their
rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single
central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and
the ties that bind people to the group are loose.
This structure makes networks enormously resilient and
adaptable in low-risk situations. Wikipedia is a perfect example.
It doesn’t have an editor, sitting in New York, who directs
and corrects each entry. The effort of putting together each
entry is self-organized. If every entry in Wikipedia were to be
erased tomorrow, the content would swiftly be restored, because
that’s what happens when a network of thousands spontane-
ously devote their time to a task.
There are many things, though, that networks don’t do
well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their
hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one
believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy
is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system.
Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure
and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching
consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they
are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make
difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direc-
tion when everyone has an equal say?

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25 The Palestine Liberation Organization originated as a net-
work, and the international-relations scholars Mette Eilstrup-
Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones argue in a recent essay in
International Security that this is why it ran into such trouble as
it grew: “Structural features typical of networks—the absence of
central authority, the unchecked autonomy of rival groups, and
the inability to arbitrate quarrels through formal mechanisms—
made the P.L.O. excessively vulnerable to outside manipulation
and internal strife.”
In Germany in the nineteen-seventies, they go on, “the far
more unified and successful left-wing terrorists tended to orga-
nize hierarchically, with professional management and clear
divisions of labor. They were concentrated geographically in
universities, where they could establish central leadership,
trust, and camaraderie through regular, face-to-face meet-
ings.” They seldom betrayed their comrades in arms during
police interrogations. Their counterparts on the right were
organized as decentralized networks, and had no such disci-
pline. These groups were regularly infiltrated, and members,
once arrested, easily gave up their comrades. Similarly, Al
Qaeda was most dangerous when it was a unified hierarchy.
Now that it has dissipated into a network, it has proved far
less effective.
The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network
isn’t interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten
or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn’t need to think
strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized
establishment you have to be a hierarchy. The Montgomery
bus boycott required the participation of tens of thousands of
people who depended on public transit to get to and from work
each day. It lasted a year. In order to persuade those people
to stay true to the cause, the boycott’s organizers tasked each

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local black church with maintaining morale, and put together
a free alternative private carpool service, with forty-eight dis-
patchers and forty-two pickup stations. Even the White Citi-
zens Council, King later said, conceded that the carpool system
moved with “military precision.” By the time King came to
Birmingham, for the climactic showdown with Police Com-
missioner Eugene (Bull) Connor, he had a budget of a million
dollars, and a hundred full-time staff members on the ground,
divided into operational units. The operation itself was divided
into steadily escalating phases, mapped out in advance. Support
was maintained through consecutive mass meetings rotating
from church to church around the city.
Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations—which
were the weapons of choice for the civil-rights movement—
are high-risk strategies. They leave little room for conflict
and error. The moment even one protester deviates from the
script and responds to provocation, the moral legitimacy of
the entire protest is compromised. Enthusiasts for social media
would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birming-
ham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able
to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and
contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. But
networks are messy: think of the ceaseless pattern of correc-
tion and revision, amendment and debate, that characterizes
Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King Jr. had tried to do a wiki-
boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered
by the white power structure. And of what use would a digi-
tal communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per
cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday
morning at church? The things that King needed in Birming-
ham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social
media cannot provide.

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The bible of the social-media movement is Clay Shirky’s Here
Comes Everybody. Shirky, who teaches at New York Univer-
sity, sets out to demonstrate the organizing power of the Inter-
net, and he begins with the story of Evan, who worked on
Wall Street, and his friend Ivanna, after she left her smart
phone, an expensive Sidekick, on the back seat of a New York
City taxicab. The telephone company transferred the data on
Ivanna’s lost phone to a new phone, whereupon she and Evan
discovered that the Sidekick was now in the hands of a teen-
ager from Queens, who was using it to take photographs of
herself and her friends.
When Evan e-mailed the teenager, Sasha, asking for the
phone back, she replied that his “white ass” didn’t deserve to
have it back. Miffed, he set up a Web page with her picture
and a description of what had happened. He forwarded the
link to his friends, and they forwarded it to their friends.
Someone found the MySpace page of Sasha’s boyfriend, and
a link to it found its way onto the site. Someone found her
address online and took a video of her home while driving by;
Evan posted the video on the site. The story was picked up by
the news filter Digg. Evan was now up to ten e-mails a min-
ute. He created a bulletin board for his readers to share their
stories, but it crashed under the weight of responses. Evan
and Ivanna went to the police, but the police filed the report
under “lost,” rather than “stolen,” which essentially closed the
case. “By this point millions of readers were watching,” Shirky
writes, “and dozens of mainstream news outlets had covered
the story.” Bowing to the pressure, the N.Y.P.D. reclassified
the item as “stolen.” Sasha was arrested, and Evan got his
friend’s Sidekick back.
Shirky’s argument is that this is the kind of thing that
could never have happened in the pre-Internet age—and he’s

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right. Evan could never have tracked down Sasha. The story
of the Sidekick would never have been publicized. An army of
people could never have been assembled to wage this fight. The
police wouldn’t have bowed to the pressure of a lone person who
had misplaced something as trivial as a cell phone. The story,
to Shirky, illustrates “the ease and speed with which a group
can be mobilized for the right kind of cause” in the Internet
age.
Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it
is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie con-
nections that give us access to information over the strong-tie
connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It
shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic
and disciplined activity and toward those which promote
resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to
express themselves, and harder for that expression to have
any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to
making the existing social order more efficient. They are not
a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion
that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges,
this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are
still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought
to give you pause.
Shirky ends the story of the lost Sidekick by asking, por-
tentously, “What happens next?”—no doubt imagining future
waves of digital protesters. But he has already answered the
question. What happens next is more of the same. A networked,
weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get
phones back from teenage girls. Viva la revolución.

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Joining the Conversation

1. What claims about the power of social media to create
large-scale social change is Malcolm Gladwell responding
to? What does he say, and where in his text does he bring
up the views he disagrees with?

2. What is Gladwell’s view of the relationship between social
media and social change? What are the main arguments he
presents to support his position? How does his discussion
of the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in of 1960, which he
threads through his article, fit into his argument?

3. How does Gladwell define activism? How does he distinguish
between “strong tie” and “weak tie” social activism? Explain
this distinction and its relevance to Gladwell’s argument.

4. Read Dennis Baron’s blog post on theysayiblog.com. How
do his views compare with Gladwell’s—how are they similar,
and how do they differ?

5. Write an essay responding to Gladwell, drawing on your own
experience using social media and framing your argument
as a response to something specific that Gladwell says. (See
Chapter 2 for templates for responding in this way.)

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EIGHTEEN

what should we eat?
H

What should we eat? The answer may seem obvious: food,
what else? But today we have more choices than ever before
about what we eat. An increasing number of ethnic foods,
regional dishes, and unfamiliar ingredients appear on menus in
fast-food places and so-called fancy restaurants alike. TV cook-
ing shows have never been so numerous—or so widely watched.
Supermarkets have entire aisles of specialty, organic, and glu-
ten-free foods. Recipes of all types are only a few clicks away
online, typically accompanied by mouth-watering photographs.
And yet, as our food choices grow in number, we, too, are
expanding. Obesity, often beginning in early childhood, has
become a national concern and, with it, diabetes, high blood
pressure, and hypertension. Medical costs for these illnesses are
skyrocketing.
With tantalizing foods readily available, we need to learn
how to make wise choices—but that can be easier said than
done. Some civic leaders and public-health experts believe the
government should step in to ensure that healthy foods are
available for everyone, to educate us about our options, and
to tax or even to outlaw the most unhealthy items, as former
mayor Michael Bloomberg tried (but failed) to do in his bid
to ban extra-large soft drinks in New York City. Meanwhile,
civil libertarians, food and beverage producers, and those who

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W H A T S H O U L D W E E A T ?

enjoy the unhealthy items strongly oppose such governmental
efforts. So, what should we eat? The readings in this chapter
answer this question from various perspectives.
The chapter opens with an essay by food activist Michael
Pollan outlining his rationale for ending our reliance on pro-
cessed foods and moving to a diet of local, organic foods, espe-
cially vegetables. Steven Shapin, a professor of the history of
science, argues that the health benefits of organic food are in
many cases dubious. Mary Maxfield challenges the assumption
that overeating is a social problem that needs to be fixed and
suggests that Michael Pollan and other critics exaggerate its
dangers. Fiction writer Jonathan Safran Foer explores his own
family history to explain why he and his wife became vegetarian
and are raising their children not to eat meat.
On the issue of government intervention versus personal
responsibility, David Zinczenko blames the fast-food industry
for the growing rate of obesity in the United States and argues
that this industry should be regulated by the government. In
contrast, libertarian commentator Radley Balko argues that
what we eat should remain a matter of personal responsibility
and that staying trim is a matter of individual willpower.
Next come two arguments about the effects of research and
marketing on what we eat. Michael Moss provides a fascinating
look at ways in which fast-food companies make their products
difficult to resist. Similarly, professor Marion Nestle reveals
how supermarkets design stores in order to maximize profits,
to the detriment of customers’ health and budget concerns.
The chapter concludes with an essay by David H. Freedman
arguing that Pollan and those who share his views should not
consider fast food the enemy; rather, he suggests, fast-food
companies may be the best vehicle for making millions of
Americans healthier.

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What Should We Eat?

So read on for a wide range of opinions on food and eating
today. You’ll likely find plenty to agree with, and just as much
to disagree with. But whatever you think, this conversation
matters. The arguments in this chapter will challenge you to
think about what you believe and why.
And you’ll find even more readings on theysayiblog.com,
along with a space where you respond with what you think—
and literally add your own voice to the conversation.

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Escape from the Western Diet

M I C H A E L P O L L A N

The undertow of nutritionism is powerful. . . . Much
nutrition science qualifies as reductionist science, focusing as
it does on individual nutrients (such as certain fats or carbo-
hydrates or antioxidants) rather than on whole foods or dietary
patterns. . . . But using this sort of science to try to figure out
what’s wrong with the Western diet is probably unavoidable.
However imperfect, it’s the sharpest experimental and explana-
tory tool we have. It also satisfies our hunger for a simple,
one-nutrient explanation. Yet it’s one thing to entertain such
explanations and quite another to mistake them for the whole
truth or to let any one of them dictate the way you eat.
[And] many of the scientific theories put forward to account
for exactly what in the Western diet is responsible for Western
diseases conflict with one another. The lipid hypothesis cannot

Michael Pollan has written many books on food and eating,
including The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
(2006), Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (2010), Cooked: A Natural
History of Transformation (2013), and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s
Manifesto (2008), from which this essay was excerpted. He was named
one of Time magazine’s top 100 Most Influential People in 2010 and
teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.

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be reconciled with the carbohydrate hypothesis, and the theory
that a deficiency of omega-3 fatty acids (call it the neolipid
hypothesis) is chiefly to blame for chronic illness is at odds with
the theory that refined carbohydrates are the key. And while
everyone can agree that the flood of refined carbohydrates has
pushed important micronutrients out of the modern diet, the
scientists who blame our health problems on deficiencies of
these micro nutrients are not the same scientists who see a sugar-
soaked diet leading to metabolic syndrome and from there to
diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. It is only natural for sci-
entists no less than the rest of us to gravitate toward a single,
all-encompassing explanation. That is probably why you now
find some of the most fervent critics of the lipid hypothesis
embracing the carbohydrate hypothesis with the same absolut-
ist zeal that they once condemned in the Fat Boys. In the course
of my own research into these theories, I have been specifically
warned by scientists allied with the carbohydrate camp not to
“fall under the spell of the omega-3 cult.” Cult? There is a lot
more religion in science than you might expect.
So here we find ourselves . . . lost at sea amid the
cross-currents of conflicting science.
Or do we?
Because it turns out we don’t need to declare our allegiance
to any one of these schools of thought in order to figure out
how best to eat. In the end, they are only theories, scientific
explanations for an empirical phenomenon that is not itself in
doubt: People eating a Western diet are prone to a complex of
chronic diseases that seldom strike people eating more tradi-
tional diets. Scientists can argue all they want about the bio-
logical mechanisms behind this phenomenon, but whichever
it is, the solution to the problem would appear to remain very
much the same: Stop eating a Western diet.

See
pp. 84–86
for tips on
introducing
objections
informally.

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In truth the chief value of any and all theories of nutrition,
apart from satisfying our curiosity about how things work, is
not to the eater so much as it is to the food industry and the
medical community. The food industry needs theories so it can
better redesign specific processed foods; a new theory means a
new line of products, allowing the industry to go on tweaking
the Western diet instead of making any more radical change to
its business model. For the industry it’s obviously preferable to
have a scientific rationale for further processing foods—whether
by lowering the fat or carbs or by boosting omega-3s or fortify-
ing them with antioxidants and probiotics—than to entertain
seriously the proposition that processed foods of any kind are
a big part of the problem.
For the medical community too scientific theories about diet
nourish business as usual. New theories beget new drugs to treat
diabetes, high blood pressure, and cholesterol; new treatments
and procedures to ameliorate chronic diseases; and new diets
organized around each new theory’s elevation of one class of
nutrient and demotion of another. Much lip service is paid to
the importance of prevention, but the health care industry,
being an industry, stands to profit more handsomely from new
drugs and procedures to treat chronic diseases than it does from
a wholesale change in the way people eat. Cynical? Perhaps.
You could argue that the medical community’s willingness to
treat the broad contours of the Western diet as a given is a
reflection of its realism rather than its greed. “People don’t
want to go there,” as Walter Willett responded to the critic
who asked him why the Nurses’ Health Study didn’t study the
benefits of more alternative diets. Still, medicalizing the whole
problem of the Western diet instead of working to overturn it
(whether at the level of the patient or politics) is exactly what
you’d expect from a health care community that is sympathetic

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to nutritionism as a matter of temperament, philosophy, and
economics. You would not expect such a medical community
to be sensitive to the cultural or ecological dimensions of the
food problem—and it isn’t. We’ll know this has changed when
doctors kick the fast-food franchises out of the hospitals.
So what would a more ecological or cultural approach to the
food problem counsel us? How might we plot our escape from
nutritionism and, in turn, from the most harmful effects of the
Western diet? To Denis Burkitt, the English doctor stationed
in Africa during World War II who gave the Western diseases
their name, the answer seemed straightforward, if daunting.
“The only way we’re going reduce disease,” he said, “is to go
backwards to the diet and lifestyle of our ancestors.” This sounds
uncomfortably like the approach of the diabetic Aborigines
who went back to the bush to heal themselves. But I don’t
think this is what Burkitt had in mind; even if it was, it is not
a very attractive or practical strategy for most of us. No, the
challenge we face today is figuring out how to escape the worst
elements of the Western diet and lifestyle without going back
to the bush.
In theory, nothing could be simpler: To escape the Western
diet and the ideology of nutritionism, we have only to stop
eating and thinking that way. But this is harder to do in prac-
tice, given the treacherous food environment we now inhabit
and the loss of cultural tools to guide us through it. Take the
question of whole versus processed foods, presumably one of
the simpler distinctions between modern industrial foods and
older kinds. Gyorgy Scrinis, who coined the term “nutrition-
ism,” suggests that the most important fact about any food is not
its nutrient content but its degree of processing. He writes that
“whole foods and industrial foods are the only two food groups
I’d consider including in any useful food ‘pyramid.’ ” In other

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words, instead of worrying about nutrients, we should simply
avoid any food that has been processed to such an extent that
it is more the product of industry than of nature.
This sounds like a sensible rule of thumb until you real-
ize that industrial processes have by now invaded many whole
foods too. Is a steak from a feedlot steer that consumed a diet
of corn, various industrial waste products, antibiotics, and hor-
mones still a “whole food”? I’m not so sure. The steer has itself
been raised on a Western diet, and that diet has rendered its
meat substantially different—in the type and amount of fat in
it as well as its vitamin content—from the beef our ancestors
ate. The steer’s industrial upbringing has also rendered its meat
so cheap that we’re likely to eat more of it more often than our
ancestors ever would have. This suggests yet another sense in
which this beef has become an industrial food: It is designed
to be eaten industrially too—as fast food.
So plotting our way out of the Western diet is not going
to be simple. Yet I am convinced that it can be done, and
in the course of my research, I have collected and devel-
oped some straightforward (and distinctly unscientific) rules
of thumb, or personal eating policies, that might at least point
us in the right direction. They don’t say much about specific
foods—about what sort of oil to cook with or whether you
should eat meat. They don’t have much to say about nutrients
or calories, either, though eating according to these rules
will perforce change the balance of nutrients and amount of
calories in your diet. I’m not interested in dictating anyone’s
menu, but rather in developing what I think of as eating
algorithms—mental programs that, if you run them when
you’re shopping for food or deciding on a meal, will produce
a great many different dinners, all of them “healthy” in the
broadest sense of that word.

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And our sense of that word stands in need of some broaden-
ing. When most of us think about food and health, we think
in fairly narrow nutritionist terms—about our personal physi-
cal health and how the ingestion of this particular nutrient or
rejection of that affects it. But I no longer think it’s possible to
separate our bodily health from the health of the environment
from which we eat or the environment in which we eat or, for
that matter, from the health of our general outlook about food
(and health). If my explorations of the food chain have taught
me anything, it’s that it is a food chain, and all the links in it
are in fact linked: the health of the soil to the health of the
plants and animals we eat to the health of the food culture
in which we eat them to the health of the eater, in body as
well as mind. [So you will find rules here] concerning not only
what to eat but also how to eat it as well as how that food is
produced. Food consists not just in piles of chemicals; it also
comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching
back to the land and outward to other people. Some of these
rules may strike you as having nothing whatever to do with
health; in fact they do.
Many of the policies will also strike you as involving more
work—and in fact they do. If there is one important sense in
which we do need to heed Burkitt’s call to “go backwards”
or follow the Aborigines back into the bush, it is this one:
In order to eat well we need to invest more time, effort, and
resources in providing for our sustenance, to dust off a word,
than most of us do today. A hallmark of the Western diet is
food that is fast, cheap, and easy. Americans spend less than
10 percent of their income on food; they also spend less than
a half hour a day preparing meals and little more than an hour
enjoying them.1 For most people for most of history, gathering
and preparing food has been an occupation at the very heart

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of daily life. Traditionally people have allocated a far greater
proportion of their income to food—as they still do in several
of the countries where people eat better than we do and as a
consequence are healthier than we are.2 Here, then, is one way
in which we would do well to go a little native: backward, or
perhaps it is forward, to a time and place where the gathering
and preparing and enjoying of food were closer to the center
of a well-lived life.

[I’d like to propose] three rules—“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly
plants.”—that I now need to unpack, providing some elabora-
tion and refinement in the form of more specific guidelines,
injunctions, subclauses, and the like. Each of these three main
rules can serve as category headings for a set of personal policies
to guide us in our eating choices without too much trouble or
thought. The idea behind having a simple policy like “avoid
foods that make health claims” is to make the process simpler
and more pleasurable than trying to eat by the numbers and
nutrients, as nutritionism encourages us to do.
So under “Eat Food,” I propose some practical ways to
separate, and defend, real food from the cascade of foodlike
products that now surround and confound us, especially in the
supermarket. Many of the tips under this rubric concern shop-
ping and take the form of filters that should help keep out the
sort of products you want to avoid. Under “Mostly Plants,” I’ll
dwell more specifically, and affirmatively, on the best types of
foods (not nutrients) to eat. Lest you worry, there is, as the
adverb suggests, more to this list than fruits and vegetables.
Last, under “Not Too Much,” the focus shifts from the foods
themselves to the question of how to eat them—the manners,
mores, and habits that go into creating a healthy, and pleasing,
culture of eating.

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Notes

1. David M. Cutler, et al., “Why Have Americans Become More Obese?,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Summer, 2003), pp. 93–118. In
1995 Americans spent twenty-seven minutes preparing meals and four minutes
cleaning up after them; in 1965 the figure was forty-four minutes of prepara-
tion and twenty-one minutes of cleanup. Total time spent eating has dropped
from sixty-nine minutes to sixty-five, all of which suggests a trend toward
prepackaged meals.

2. Compared to the 9.9 percent of their income Americans spend on food,
the Italians spend 14.9 percent, the French 14.9 percent, and the Spanish
17.1 percent.

Joining the Conversation

1. What does Michael Pollan mean when he refers to the
“Western diet”? Why does he believe Americans need to
“escape” from it?

2. Pollan begins with a “they say,” citing a variety of scientific
theories known as nutritionism. Summarize his response to
these views. What is his objection to such views, and to the
business and research interests that promote them?

3. If Pollan were to read Mary Maxfield’s response to this article
(pp. 442–47), how might he, in turn, respond to her?

4. It’s likely that Pollan favors (and shops at) local farmers’
markets. Go to theysayiblog.com and search for “Mark
Bittman on Farmers’ Markets.” What does he say about
them: who, according to Bittman, do they most benefit?

5. Write an essay that begins where Pollan’s piece ends,
perhaps by quoting from paragraph 14: “Eat food. Not too
much. Mostly plants.” You’ll need to explain his argument,
and then respond with your own views.

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What Are You Buying
When You Buy Organic?

S T E V E N S H A P I N

The plastic package of Earthbound Farm baby arugula in
Whole Foods was grown without synthetic fertilizers; no toxic
pesticides or fumigants were used to control insect predators;
no herbicides were applied to deal with weeds; no genes from
other species were introduced into its genome to increase yield
or pest resistance; no irradiation was used to extend its shelf life.
It complies with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National
Organic Program, a set of standards that came into full effect
in 2002 to regulate the commercial use of the word “organic.”
So what’s the problem?

Steven Shapin teaches at Harvard University and is the author of
several books on the history and sociology of science, including The
Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (2008). He
also writes for the London Review of Books and the New Yorker and is
a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This essay
first appeared with the title “Paradise Sold” in the New Yorker on
May 15, 2006.

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It all depends on what you think you’re buying when you
buy organic. If the word conjures up the image of a small,
family-owned, local operation, you may be disappointed. Like
Whole Foods, Earthbound Farm is a very big business. Earth-
bound’s founders, Drew and Myra Goodman, Manhattanites
who went to college in the Bay Area, and then started a two-
and-a-half-acre raspberry-and-baby-greens farm near Carmel
to produce food they “felt good about,” are now the nation’s
largest grower of organic produce, with revenues for this year
projected at more than $450 million. Their greens, includ-
ing the arugula, are produced on giant farms in six different
counties in California, two in Arizona, one in Colorado,
and in three Mexican states. Earthbound grows more than
seventy per cent of all the organic lettuce sold in America; big
organic retailers like Whole Foods require big organic suppli-
ers. (Earthbound actually dropped the “organic” specification
when it started its mass-distribution program, in 1993—even
though the stuff was organic—because its first client, Costco,
thought it might put customers off.) By 2004, Earthbound was
farming twenty-six thousand acres; its production plants in
California and Arizona total four hundred thousand square
feet, and its products are available in supermarkets in every
state of the Union. The Carmel Valley farm stand is still there,
largely for public-relations purposes, and is as much an icon
of California’s entrepreneurial roots as the Hewlett-Packard
garage in downtown Palo Alto.
Success is not necessarily a sin, of course, and, for many
people, buying organic is a way of being environmentally
sensitive. Earthbound notes that its farming techniques
annually obviate the use of more than a quarter of a million
pounds of toxic chemical pesticides and almost 8.5 million
pounds of synthetic fertilizers, which saves 1.4 million gallons

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of the petroleum needed to produce those chemicals. Their
tractors even use biodiesel fuel.
Yet the net benefit of all this to the planet is hard to assess.
Michael Pollan, who thinks that we ought to take both a
wider and a deeper view of the social, economic, and physical
chains that deliver food to fork, cites a Cornell scientist’s
estimate that growing, processing, and shipping one calorie’s
worth of arugula to the East Coast costs fifty-seven calories
of fossil fuel. The growing of the arugula is indeed organic,
but almost everything else is late-capitalist business as usual.
Earthbound’s compost is trucked in; the salad-green farms
are models of West Coast monoculture, laser-levelled fields
facilitating awesomely efficient mechanical harvesting; and
the whole supply chain from California to Manhattan is only

Peter Harrington grows organic vegetables on two acres at Ten Barn Farm in
Ghent, New York, and sells them at farmers’ markets.

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four per cent less gluttonous a consumer of fossil fuel than
that of a conventionally grown head of iceberg lettuce—though
Earthbound plants trees to offset some of its carbon footprint.
“Organic,” then, isn’t necessarily “local,” and neither “organic”
nor “local” is necessarily “sustainable.”
Earthbound and other large-scale organic growers have
embraced not only the logic of capitalism but the specific logic
of California agribusiness. As the geographer Julie Guthman
shows in Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in
California, ever since the gold rush, the state’s growers have
aimed at maximizing monetary yield per acre. First, it was
wheat to feed the influx of gold miners and those dependent
on the mining industry; then, after railways and refrigerated cars
enabled the delivery of shining fresh produce across the country,

Myra and Drew Goodman began Earthbound Farm with two and half acres
of raspberries and baby greens, and it’s now the largest grower of organic
produce in the nation.

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it was orchard fruit. Later still, tract housing and mini-malls
proved more profitable, which is why you’ll have a hard time
finding orange groves in Orange County. Guthman writes that
big, concentrated, high-value organic agriculture in California
is “the legacy of the state’s own style of agrarian capitalism.”
You saw this style in action when, in 1989, a 60 Minutes exposé
about residues of the carcinogenic pesticide Alar found on apples
caused a consumer stampede to the organic-produce bins. “Don’t
panic, buy organic,” was the mantra, and growers responded by
borrowing heavily to expand their organic enterprises. When
the scare subsided, supply outstripped demand, and, in the
inevitable shakeout, some small-scale organic farmers had to
sell out to larger players in the food industry. Washington State’s
Cascadian Farm was one such. Its founder, a “onetime hippie”
named Gene Kahn, sold a majority holding to Welch’s, and
now it is a division of the $17.8 billion giant General Mills. He
hasn’t the least regret: “We’re part of the food industry now.”
The investors bankrolling Big Organic have no reason to fear
the vestigial hippie rhetoric: it’s not so much a counterculture
as a bean-counter culture.
According to the business writer Samuel Fromartz in
Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew, 90 percent
of “frequent” organic buyers think they’re buying better “health
and nutrition.” They may be right. If, for any reason, you
don’t want the slightest pesticide residue in your salad, or you
want to insure that there are no traces of recombinant bovine
somatotropin hormone (rbST) in your children’s milk, you’re
better off spending the extra money for organically produced
food. But scientific evidence for the risks of such residues is
iffy, as it is, too, for the benefits of the micro-nutrients that
are said to be more plentiful in an organic carrot than in its
conventional equivalent.

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Other people are buying taste, but there’s little you can
say about other people’s taste in carrots and not much more
you can intelligibly articulate about your own. The taste of an
heirloom carrot bought five years ago from the Chino family
farm in Rancho Santa Fe, California, sticks indelibly in my
memory, though at the time I hadn’t any idea whether artificial
fertilizers or pesticides had been applied to it. (I later learned
that they had not.) For many fruits and vegetables, freshness,
weed control, and the variety grown may be far more important
to taste than whether the soil in which they were grown was
dosed with ammonium nitrate. Pollan did his own taste test by
shopping at Whole Foods for an all-organic meal: everything
was pretty good, except for the six-dollar bunch of organic
asparagus, which had been grown in Argentina, air-freighted
six thousand miles to the States, and immured for a week in
the distribution chain. Pollan shouldn’t have been surprised
that it tasted like “cardboard.”

The twentieth-century origins of the organic movement can
be traced to the writings of the English agronomist Sir Albert
Howard, particularly his 1940 book An Agricultural Testament.
Howard was a critic of the rise of scientific agriculture. In the
mid-nineteenth century, following the work of the German
chemist Justus von Liebig, it was thought that all plants really
needed from the soil was the correct quantities and propor-
tions of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium: the N-P-K ratios
that you see on bags of garden fertilizer. For many crops, it is
the availability of nitrogen that limits growth. Legumes apart,
plants cannot extract nitrogen directly from the practically
unlimited stores of the gas in the atmosphere, so farmers in
the nineteenth century routinely enhanced soil fertility using
animal manures, guano, or mined nitrates. But, just before the

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First World War, the German chemist Fritz Haber and the
industrialist Carl Bosch devised a way of synthesizing ammo-
nia from atmospheric nitrogen. From there, the commercial
production of enormous quantities of nitrogenous fertilizers was
a relatively easy matter. The result was a technological revolu-
tion in agriculture.
But Howard had worked in India as “Imperial Economic
Botanist” to the government of the Raj at Pusa, and his
experiences there convinced him that traditional Indian
farming techniques were in many respects superior to those of
the modern West. Howard was a pragmatist—the criterion of
agricultural success was what worked—but he was also a holist
and a taker of the long view. The health of the soil, the health
of what grew in it, and the health of those who ate what grew
in it were “one great subject.” To reduce this intricacy to a
simple set of chemical inputs, as Liebig’s followers did, was
reductionist science at its worst. Soils treated this way would
ultimately collapse, and so would the societies that abused
them: “Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition,
artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men
and women,” racked with disease and physically stunted.
You could indeed get short-term boosts in yield through the
generous application of synthetic fertilizers, but only by robbing
future generations of their patrimony. Soil, Howard wrote,
is “the capital of the nations which is real, permanent, and
independent of everything except a market for the products of
farming.” We have no choice but to go “back to nature” and
to “safeguard the land of the Empire from the operations of
finance.” The “supremacy of the West” depends upon it.
Howard’s ideas reached America largely through J. I. Rodale’s
magazine Organic Gardening and Farming, and, later, through
a widely read essay by Wendell Berry in The Last Whole Earth

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Catalogue. The organic movement that sprang up in America
during the postwar years, manured by the enthusiasm of both
the hippies and their New Age successors, supplemented
Howard’s ideas of soil health with the imperative that the scale
should be small and the length of the food chain from farm to
consumer short. You were supposed to know who it was that
produced your food, and to participate in a network of trust in
familiar people and transparent agricultural practices. A former
nutritionist at Columbia, who went on to grow produce upstate,
recalls, “When we said organic, we meant local. We meant
healthful. We meant being true to the ecologies of regions. We
meant mutually respectful growers and eaters. We meant social
justice and equality.”
There is no way to make food choices without making moral
choices as well, and anthropologists have had much to say about
the inevitable link between what’s good to eat and what’s good
to think. Decisions about how we want our food produced and
delivered are decisions about what counts as social virtue. One
of the founding texts of modern social theory, Émile Durkheim’s
The Division of Labor in Society, drew a distinction between
what he called mechanical and organic solidarity. In societies
characterized by mechanical solidarity, each person knew pretty
much what every other person did and each social unit encom-
passed pretty much all the functions it needed in order to sur-
vive. Mechanical solidarity, in Durkheim’s scheme, was largely
a premodern form. By contrast, organic solidarity flowed from
the division of labor. Individuals depended upon one another
for the performance of specialized tasks, and, as modernity pro-
ceeded, the networks of dependence that bound them together
became increasingly anonymous. You didn’t know who grew
the food at the end of your fork, or, indeed, who made the
fork. But, then, the original English sense of “organ” was an

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instrument or a machine made up of interdependent specialized
parts, as in the musical pipe organ. The application to living
things came only later, by way of analogy with machines; the
eye, for example, is the “organ of seeing.” And so, by semantic
inversion, champions of organic farming actually seek virtue
not in organic but in mechanical solidarity.

The quest for the shortest possible chain between producer
and consumer is the narrative dynamic of Michael Pollan’s
book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four
Meals, which is cleverly structured around four meals, each
representing a different network of relations between produc-
ers, eaters, and the environment, and each an attempt at
greater virtue than the last. Pollan’s first meal is fast food,
and he follows a burger back to vast monocultural industrial

blocs of Iowan corn, planted by G.P.S.-guided tractors
and dosed with tons of synthetic fertilizer, whose mas-
sive runoff into the Mississippi River—as much as
1.5 million tons of nitrogen a year—winds up feeding

algal blooms and depleting the oxygen needed by other forms
of life in the Gulf of Mexico. Pollan then follows the corn
to enormous feedlots in Kansas, where a heifer that he bought
in South Dakota is speed-fattened—fourteen pounds of corn
for each pound of edible beef—for which its naturally grass-
processing rumen was not designed, requiring it to be dosed
with antibiotics, which breed resistant strains of bacteria.
Pollan would have liked to follow his heifer through the
industrial slaughterhouse, but the giant beef-packing com-
pany was too canny to let him in, and so we are spared the
stomach-churning details, which, in any case, were minutely
related a few years ago in Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation.
Pollan also follows the American mountains of industrial

See Chapter 2
for tips on

summarizing
what others

say.

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corn into factories, where the wonders of food technology
transform it into the now ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup,
which sweetens the soda that, consumed in super-sized
quantities across the nation, contributes to the current epi-
demic of type 2 diabetes. All very bad things.
The second meal is the Big Organic one that he bought at his
local Whole Foods store in California, featuring an “organic”
chicken whose “free-range” label was authorized by U.S.D.A.
statutes, but which actually shared a shed with twenty thou-
sand other genetically identical birds. Two small doors in the
shed opened onto a patch of grass, but they remained shut
until the birds were five or six weeks old, and two weeks later
Pollan’s “free range” chicken was a $2.99-a-pound package in
his local Whole Foods. This meal was better—the corn-and-
soybean chicken feed was certified organic and didn’t contain
antibiotics—but still not perfect. Pollan’s third meal was even
more virtuous. After spending several weeks doing heavy lifting
on a polycultural, sustainable smallholding in the Shenandoah
Valley, Pollan cooked a meal wholly made up of ingredients
that he himself had a hand in producing: eggs from (genuinely)
free-range, grub-eating hens, corn grown with compost from
those happy birds, and, finally, a chicken whose throat he had
slit himself. Very good, indeed—and no nitrogenous runoff,
and no massive military machine to protect America’s supplies
of Middle East oil and the natural gas needed to make the
synthetic fertilizer.
Finally, Pollan decides to eat a meal—“the perfect meal”—
for which he had almost total personal responsibility: wild
morels foraged in the Sierra foothills, the braised loin and
leg of a wild pig he had shot himself in Sonoma County, a
chamomile tisane made from herbs picked in the Berkeley
Hills, salad greens from his own garden, cherries taken by right

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of usufruct from a neighbor’s tree, sea salt scraped from a pond
at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, and—O.K., strict
perfection is unobtainable—a bottle of California Petite Sirah,
presumably organic. This was not a way of eating that Pollan
thinks is realistic on a routine basis, but he wanted to test what
it felt like to have “a meal that is eaten in full consciousness
of what it took to make it.” That consciousness, for Pollan, is
more religious than political—every meal a sacrament. “We
eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating
is never anything more or less than the body of the world,”
he says.
Pollan winds up demanding that we know much more about
what we’re putting into our mouths: “What it is we’re eating.
Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And
what, in a true accounting, it really cost.” The “naked lunch,”
William Burroughs wrote, is the “frozen moment when every-
one sees what is on the end of every fork.” Burroughs meant it
metaphorically; Pollan means it literally. He wants to know his
farmer’s name, and to know that his hamburger was once part
of the muscles of a particular cow. He wants to do his bit to
save the planet. That means he wants to eat locally, within a
network of familiarity. But, even so, the knowledge required is
potentially infinite. What particular bacteria, fungi, and trace
elements lurk in the soil of your sustainable community farm?
Does your friendly local farmer use a tractor or a horse? If a
tractor, does it use fuel made from biomass? If a horse, are the
oats it eats organic? If the oats are organic, does the manure
with which they were grown come from organically fed animals?
How much of this sort of knowledge can you digest?

Pollan seems aware of the contradictions entailed in trying to
eat in this rigorously ethical spirit, but he doesn’t give much

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What Are You Buying When You Buy Organic?

4 3 9

space to the most urgent moral problem with the organic ideal:
how to feed the world’s population. At the beginning of the
twentieth century, there was a serious scare about an imminent
Malthusian crisis: the world’s rapidly expanding population
was coming up against the limits of agricultural productivity.
The Haber-Bosch process averted disaster, and was largely
responsible for a fourfold increase in the world’s food supply
during the twentieth century. Earl Butz, Nixon’s Secretary of
Agriculture, was despised by organic farmers, but he might
not have been wrong when he said, in 1971, that if America
returned to organic methods “someone must decide which fifty
million of our people will starve!” According to a more recent
estimate, if synthetic fertilizers suddenly disappeared from the
face of the earth, about two billion people would perish.
Supporters of organic methods maintain that total food-
energy productivity per acre can be just as high as with con-
ventional agriculture, and that dousings of N-P-K are made
necessary only by the industrial scale of modern agriculture and
its long-chain systems of distribution. Yet the fact remains that,
to unwind conventional agriculture, you would have to unwind
some highly valued features of the modern world order. Given
the way the world now is, sustainably grown and locally pro-
duced organic food is expensive. Genetically modified, industri-
ally produced monocultural corn is what feeds the victims of
an African famine, not the gorgeous organic technicolor Swiss
chard from your local farmers’ market. Food for a “small planet”
will, for the foreseeable future, require a much smaller human
population on the planet.
Besides, for most consumers that Earthbound Farm organic
baby arugula from Whole Foods isn’t an opportunity to disman-
tle the infrastructures of the modern world; it’s simply salad.
Dressed with a little Tuscan extra-virgin olive oil, a splash

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S T E V E N S H A P I N

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of sherry vinegar, some shavings of Parmigiano Reggiano, and
fleur de sel from the Camargue, it makes a very nice appetizer.
To insist that we are consuming not just salad but a vision of
society isn’t wrong, but it’s biting off more than most people
are able and willing to chew. Cascadian Farm’s Gene Kahn,
countering the criticism that by growing big he had sold out,
volunteered his opinion on the place that food has in the aver-
age person’s life: “This is just lunch for most people. Just lunch.
We can call it sacred, we can talk about communion, but it’s
just lunch.”

Joining the Conversation

1. Steven Shapin focuses on Earthbound Farm and other such
companies to illustrate some of the practices of organic food
companies and their effects on society. What does he say
about the overall impact these companies and others like
them have on the environment?

2. Shapin lists the four meals Michael Pollan discusses in
his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, ranging from factory-
farm-raised fast food to a “perfect meal” for which he had
“almost total personal responsibility,” and notes that Pollan
“wants to eat locally” and “to do his bit to save the planet.”
How does Shapin respond to what Pollan says?

3. Shapin claims that Earthbound Farms is not a small opera-
tion but rather “a very big business” that is no more sustain-
able than any other food company. With this in mind, visit
theysayiblog.com and read Elizabeth Weiss’s article “What
Does ‘The Scarecrow’ Tell Us about Chipotle?” Do you
think Shapin would characterize Chipotle in the same way?

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Why or why not? Cite examples from Weiss’s article to sup-
port your response.

4. Shapin concludes by suggesting that, while a small number
of people may believe that eating organic arugula is a matter
of great importance, for most people, “it’s simply salad.”
What do you think he means by this statement? How might
Michael Pollan (pp. 420–27) respond to this assertion?

5. Visit a grocery store, look closely at the organic foods there,
and then examine the nonorganic versions of the same prod-
ucts. Write an essay comparing organic and nonorganic
items in terms of price, calories, ingredients, packaging, loca-
tion in the store, and other factors that you find significant.
You might frame your essay as a response to Shapin, using
something he says as a “they say.”

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Food as Thought:
Resisting the Moralization of Eating

M A R Y M A X F I E L D

How do French people eat so unhealthily—famously
indulging in cheese, cream, and wine—but stay, on average,
healthier than Americans? Journalist Michael Pollan offers
readers a simple solution: quit obsessing over this French
paradox and start obsessing over the french fry. Pointing
to what he considers the American paradox—“a notably
unhealthy population preoccupied with . . . the idea of eating
healthy” (9)—Pollan contends that our definition of healthy
eating is driven by a well-funded corporate machine. According
to Pollan, the food industry, along with nutrition science and
journalism, is capitalizing on our confusion over how to eat.

Mary Maxfield is a graduate student in American Studies at
Bowling Green State University. She graduated from Fontbonne
University in 2010 with a degree in creative social change and minors
in sociology, American culture studies, and women’s and gender
studies. Her academic interests include bodies, gender, sexuality,
politics, and rhetoric. Read her blog at missmarymax.wordpress.com,
or follow her on Twitter @missmarymax.

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While Pollan implicates his own profession in this critique,
he simultaneously contributes to our cultural anxiety over food.
The same critic who argues that “any and all theories of nutri-
tion [serve] not the eater [but] the food industry,” nevertheless
proposes his own theory: the elimination of processed foods
(141). Likewise, even after noting that the connections between
diet and health that we take as gospel apparently aren’t, Pollan
nevertheless adheres to contemporary common-sense science,
making assumptions about diet, health, and weight that under-
pin the very food industry he critiques.
Thus as he attempts to dismantle one paradox, Pollan
embodies another: he’s a critic of nutrition and food science
who nevertheless bolsters the American investment in those
industries. After publishing In Defense of Food (and its equally
successful predecessor, The Omnivore’s Dilemma), Pollan
released Food Rules, a pocket-sized manual for better
eating. Of course, Pollan contends that his guidelines
function differently than the prescriptions (and
proscriptions) of food scientists, because his rules
function as “eating algorithms” that “produce many different
dinners” (144) rather than specifying a concrete menu. Yet no
matter how many meals fit Pollan’s formula—“Eat food, not too
much, mostly plants” (1)—it remains a dictate provided by an
expert to those who apparently can’t properly nourish themselves.
Pollan and other like-minded nutrition hawks consistently
back up their claims with concerns over American health.
Although acknowledging that eating primarily for health
represents a departure from the historical purpose of food—fuel
for our bodies—these gastronomical philosophers nevertheless
position themselves as protectors of health. Americans need
this protection, we are told, because we’re a nation stricken
by heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. According to this line

See
pp. 33–36 for
tips on how
to summarize
and know
where you’re
going.

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of thought, each of these maladies is tied to our diet and
essentially to our weight. As a culture, we no longer discuss
healthy eating without also discussing unhealthy weights.
Linking nutrition and body type, voices like Pollan’s warn us
against eating too much—often without any parallel warnings
against eating too little. Pollan himself insists that overeating
constitutes “the greatest threat” to our survival (7), and our
government concurs, pouring resources into a fight against
the obesity epidemic, that plague of fatness that supposedly
threatens our national health.
The problem is that our understanding of health is as based
in culture as it is in fact. Despite some doubt in academic
circles over connections between diet, health, and weight,
common-sense reportage continues to presume that they are
directly connected. Pollan, for example, twice notes that our
diet of processed foods makes us “sick and fat” (10), and then—
without evidence to support that claim—conflates health with
weight and condemns fatness out of hand. Later, he refers to
obesity as a Western disease (11)—again presuming a corre-
lation between weight and health—and even cites statistics
on eating habits from a study entitled “Why Have Americans
Become More Obese?” (145).
A growing group of academics who have examined the
research on obesity at length have discovered fundamental flaws
behind perceptions of fatness, diet, and health. Law professor
and journalist Paul Campos notes that “lies about fat, fitness, and
health . . . not coincidentally serve the interests of America’s
$50-billion-per-year diet industry,” and fat-acceptance activist
Kate Harding elaborates on this point, observing that “if you
scratch an article on the obesity crisis, you will almost always
find a press release from a company that’s developing a weight
loss drug—or from a ‘research group’ . . . funded by such

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companies.” Harding and Campos both belong to a school that
has repeatedly challenged the validity of the body mass index
(BMI), a tool that uses height and weight measurements to
calculate body fat. Originally developed by a mathematician as
a purely statistical tool, the BMI has become medicine’s go-to
means for predicting heart disease and other maladies, despite
research that suggests a low BMI presents a greater mortality risk
than a high one and that, in general, BMI cannot accurately
predict one’s health (Campos).
Culturally, however, we resist these scientific findings in
favor of a perspective that considers fatness fatal and thinness
immortal. Our skewed views of fatness then facilitate skewed
views of food. We continue to believe in a “right” or “healthy” way
of eating that involves eating less and eating differently than we
instinctively would, despite evidence to the contrary provided
both by scholars like Harding and Campos, and by Health at
Every Size (HAES) nutritionists like Michelle Allison. HAES
advocates challenge our cultural misconceptions, suggesting
that—outside of specific medical conditions like celiac disease
and anorexia—“what a person eats [rarely] takes primacy over
how they eat it” (Allison, “Eating”). In essence, we can eat
as we always have—which includes eating for emotional and
social reasons—and still survive or even thrive.
Few of us, however, manage to think about eating this way.
As Allison notes, “there are a lot of pressures and barriers in
this world that get in our way, that confuse us, that distract us
and attempt to control us in counterproductive ways” (“Rules
vs. Trust”). In this context, “health” functions moralistically.
It results from making decisions like choosing fresh mozzarella
over spray cheese, the “right” foods over the “wrong” ones.
Experts offer science to substantiate those designations, yet
science—as Campos, Harding, and Allison show—does not

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actually support these systems. Instead, as even Pollan notes,
there remains “a lot [of ] religion in science” (140).
That “religion” presents itself in the moralizing of food, the
attempt—in how we eat—to rise above our beastly natures. As
a culture, when we imagine eating like animals, we visualize
a feeding frenzy. Allison observes that when she says “Adult
human beings are allowed to eat whatever and however much
they want,” what people actually hear is: “Go out and cram
your face with Twinkies!” (“Eat Food”). (Indeed, for Pollan,
the total elimination of American anxiety about food trans-
lates to a laissez-faire policy of “let them eat Twinkies” [9].)
Yet Allison and other HAES nutritionists suggest that adult
humans will eat in a way that is good for them, given the
opportunity (“Eat Food”). When we attempt to rise above our
animal nature through the moralization of food, we unneces-
sarily complicate the practice of eating. Food—be it french fry
or granola bar, Twinkie or brown rice—isn’t moral or immoral.
Inherently, food is ethically neutral; notions of good and bad,
healthy and unhealthy are projected onto it by culture. Staying
mindful of that culture (and critical of the hidden interests that
help guide it) can free us each to follow a formula we have
long known but recently forgotten: Trust yourself. Trust your
body. Meet your needs.

Works Cited

Allison, Michelle. “Eat Food. Stuff You Like. As Much As You Want.”
The Fat Nutritionist, 15 Feb. 2010, www.fatnutritionist.com/index.php/
eat-food-stuff-you-like-as-much-as-you-want. Accessed 19 Jan. 2011.

. “Eating—the WHAT or the HOW?” The Fat Nutritionist, 17 Aug.
2009, www.fatnutritionist.com/index.php/eating-the-what-or-the-how.
Accessed 19 Jan. 2011.

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. “Rules vs. Trust in Eating.” The Fat Nutritionist, 15 Dec. 2009,
www.fatnutritionist.com/index.php/rules-vs-trust-in-eating. Accessed
19 Jan. 2011.

Campos, Paul. ”Being Fat Is OK.” Jewish World Review, 23 Apr. 2001,
www.jewishworldreview.com/0501/campos042301.asp. Accessed
25 Mar. 2011.

Harding, Kate. “Don’t You Realize Fat Is Unhealthy?” Shapely Prose, 20 June
2007, kateharding.net/faq/but-dont-you-realize-fat-is-unhealthy.
Accessed 19 Jan. 2011.

Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Penguin, 2008.

Joining the Conversation

1. In what ways does Mary Maxfield disagree with Michael
Pollan (pp. 420–27) and other critics of the Western diet?
What is her “they say,” and what does she say?

2. What supporting evidence does Maxfield offer to counter
the views of Michael Pollan and other critics?

3. Read Jonathan Safran Foer’s article (pp. 448–61), and
compare what he says with what Maxfield says. Which of
them is more convincing and why?

4. Maxfield concludes by offering a formula for eating: “Trust
yourself. Trust your body. Meet your needs.” This formula
contrasts with Michael Pollan’s “Eat food. Not too much.
Mostly plants.” Write an essay responding to these argu-
ments and presenting your own formula for eating.

5. Go to theysayiblog.com and click on “What Should We
Eat?” Read the article by Stuart Elliott about the ad cam-
paign promoting Whole Foods as “America’s Healthiest
Grocery Store.” How do you think Maxfield would respond
to this message? How do you respond?

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Against Meat

J O N A T H A N S A F R A N F O E R

The Fruits of Family Trees

When I was young, I would often spend the weekend at my
grandmother’s house. On my way in, Friday night, she would lift
me from the ground in one of her fire-smothering hugs. And on
the way out, Sunday afternoon, I was again taken into the air.
It wasn’t until years later that I realized she was weighing me.
My grandmother survived World War II barefoot,
scavenging Eastern Europe for other people’s inedibles:
rotting potatoes, discarded scraps of meat, skins and the bits
that clung to bones and pits. So she never cared if I colored
outside the lines, as long as I cut coupons along the dashes.
I remember hotel buffets: while the rest of us erected Golden

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of the best-selling novels
Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly
Close (2005), both of which were adapted into films. He has been
named one of Rolling Stone’s “People of the Year” and Esquire’s “Best
and Brightest,” and his writing has appeared in the New Yorker’s “20
Under 40” issue, among other places. He currently teaches at New
York University. This essay—adapted from his book Eating Animals
(2009)—appeared in the New York Times on October 11, 2009.

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Calves of breakfast, she would make sandwich upon sandwich
to swaddle in napkins and stash in her bag for lunch. It was
my grandmother who taught me that one tea bag makes as
many cups of tea as you’re serving, and that every part of the
apple is edible.
Her obsession with food wasn’t an obsession with money.
(Many of those coupons I clipped were for foods she would
never buy.)
Her obsession wasn’t with health. (She would beg me to
drink Coke.)
My grandmother never set a place for herself at family
dinners. Even when there was nothing more to be done—no
soup bowls to be topped off, no pots to be stirred or ovens
checked—she stayed in the kitchen, like a vigilant guard (or
prisoner) in a tower. As far as I could tell, the sustenance she
got from the food she made didn’t require her to eat it.
We thought she was the greatest chef who ever lived. My
brothers and I would tell her as much several times a meal.
And yet we were worldly enough kids to know that the greatest
chef who ever lived would probably have more than one recipe
(chicken with carrots), and that most great recipes involved
more than two ingredients.
And why didn’t we question her when she told us that dark
food is inherently more healthful than light food, or that the
bulk of the nutrients are found in the peel or crust? (The sand-
wiches of those weekend stays were made with the saved ends
of pumpernickel loaves.) She taught us that animals that are
bigger than you are very good for you, animals that are smaller
than you are good for you, fish (which aren’t animals) are fine
for you, then tuna (which aren’t fish), then vegetables, fruits,
cakes, cookies and sodas. No foods are bad for you. Sugars are
great. Fats are tremendous. The fatter a child is, the fitter it

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is—especially if it’s a boy. Lunch is not one meal, but three,
to be eaten at 11, 12:30 and 3. You are always starving.
In fact, her chicken with carrots probably was the most deli-
cious thing I’ve ever eaten. But that had little to do with how
it was prepared, or even how it tasted. Her food was delicious
because we believed it was delicious. We believed in our grand-
mother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.
More stories could be told about my grandmother than
about anyone else I’ve ever met—her otherwordly childhood,
the hairline margin of her survival, the totality of her loss, her
immigration and further loss, the triumph and tragedy of her
assimilation—and while I will one day try to tell them to my
children, we almost never told them to one another. Nor did
we call her by any of the obvious and earned titles. We called
her the Greatest Chef.
The story of her relationship to food holds all of the other
stories that could be told about her. Food, for her, is not food.
It is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joy, humiliation, reli-
gion, history and, of course, love. It was as if the fruits she
always offered us were picked from the destroyed branches of
our family tree.

Possible Again

When I was 2, the heroes of all my bedtime books were animals.
The first thing I can remember learning in school was how to
pet a guinea pig without accidentally killing it. One summer
my family fostered a cousin’s dog. I kicked it. My father told me
we don’t kick animals. When I was 7, I mourned the death of
a goldfish I’d won the previous weekend. I discovered that my
father had flushed it down the toilet. I told my father—using
other, less familial language—we don’t flush animals down

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the toilet. When I was 9, I had a baby sitter who didn’t want
to hurt anything. She put it just like that when I asked her
why she wasn’t having chicken with my older brother and me.
“Hurt anything?” I asked.
“You know that chicken is chicken, right?”
Frank shot me a look: Mom and Dad entrusted this stupid
woman with their precious babies?
Her intention might or might not have been to convert us,
but being a kid herself, she lacked whatever restraint it is that
so often prevents a full telling of this particular story. Without
drama or rhetoric, skipping over or euphemizing, she shared
what she knew.
My brother and I looked at each other, our mouths full of
hurt chickens, and had simultaneous how-in-the-world-could-
I-have-never-thought-of-that-before-and-why-on-earth-
didn’t-someone-tell-me? moments. I put down my fork.
Frank finished the meal and is probably eating a chicken
as I type these words.
What our baby sitter said made sense to me, not only because
it seemed so self-evidently true, but also because it was the
extension to food of everything my parents had taught me. We
don’t hurt family members. We don’t hurt friends or strang-
ers. We don’t even hurt upholstered furniture. My not hav-
ing thought to include farmed animals in that list didn’t make
them the exceptions to it. It just made me a child, ignorant of
the world’s workings. Until I wasn’t. At which point I had to
change my life.
Until I didn’t. My vegetarianism, so bombastic and unyield-
ing in the beginning, lasted a few years, sputtered and quietly
died. I never thought of a response to our baby sitter’s code
but found ways to smudge, diminish and ignore it. Generally
speaking, I didn’t cause hurt. Generally speaking, I strove to do

See Chapter 9
for tips on
mixing formal
and informal
language.

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the right thing. Generally speaking, my conscience was clear
enough. Pass the chicken, I’m starving.
Mark Twain said that quitting smoking is among the easiest
things you can do; he did it all the time. I would add vegetarian-
ism to the list of easy things. In high school I became vegetarian
more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort
to claim a bit of identity in a world of people whose identities
seemed to come effortlessly. I wanted a slogan to distinguish
my mom’s Volvo’s bumper, a bake-sale cause to fill the self-
conscious half-hour of school break, an occasion to get closer
to the breasts of activist women. (And I continued to think it
was wrong to hurt animals.) Which isn’t to say that I refrained
from eating meat. Only that I refrained in public. Many din-
ners of those years began with my father asking, “Any dietary
restrictions I need to know about tonight?”
When I went to college, I started eating meat more ear-
nestly. Not “believing in it”—whatever that would mean—but

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willfully pushing the questions out of my mind. It might well
have been the prevalence of vegetarianism on campus that
discouraged my own—I find myself less likely to give money
to a street musician whose case is overflowing with bills.
But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a
philosophy major and started doing my first seriously preten-
tious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of active
forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxi-
cal to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I didn’t know
the details of factory farming, but like most everyone, I knew
the gist: it is miserable for animals, the environment, farmers,
public health, biodiversity, rural communities, global poverty
and so on. I thought life could, should and must conform to
the mold of reason, period. You can imagine how annoying this
made me.
When I graduated, I ate meat—lots of every kind of meat—
for about two years. Why? Because it tasted good. And because
more important than reason in shaping habits are the stories

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we tell ourselves and one another. And I told a forgiving story
about myself to myself: I was only human.
Then I was set up on a blind date with the woman who
would become my wife. And only a few weeks later we found
ourselves talking about two surprising topics: marriage and
vegetarianism.
Her history with meat was remarkably similar to mine: there
were things she believed while lying in bed at night, and there
were choices made at the breakfast table the next morning.
There was a gnawing (if only occasional and short-lived) dread
that she was participating in something deeply wrong, and there
was the acceptance of complexity and fallibility. Like me, she
had intuitions that were very strong, but apparently not strong
enough.
People marry for many different reasons, but one that
animated our decision to take that step was the prospect of
explicitly marking a new beginning. Jewish ritual and symbolism
strongly encourage this notion of demarcating a sharp division
with what came before—the most well-known example being
the smashing of the glass at the end of the wedding ceremony.
Things were as they were, but they will be different now. Things
will be better. We will be better.
Sounds and feels great, but better how? I could think of end-
less ways to make myself better (I could learn foreign languages,
be more patient, work harder), but I’d already made too many
such vows to trust them anymore. I could also think of ways
to make “us” better, but the meaningful things we can agree
on and change in a relationship are few.
Eating animals, a concern we’d both had and had both for-
gotten, seemed like a place to start. So much intersects there,
and so much could flow from it. In the same week, we became
engaged and vegetarian.

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Of course our wedding wasn’t vegetarian, because we persuaded
ourselves that it was only fair to offer animal protein to our guests,
some of whom traveled from great distances to share our joy. (Find
that logic hard to follow?) And we ate fish on our honeymoon,
but we were in Japan, and when in Japan. . . . And back in our
new home, we did occasionally eat burgers and chicken soup and
smoked salmon and tuna steaks. But only whenever we felt like it.
And that, I thought, was that. And I thought that was just
fine. I assumed we’d maintain a diet of conscientious inconsis-
tency. Why should eating be different from any of the other
ethical realms of our lives? We were honest people who occa-
sionally told lies, careful friends who sometimes acted clumsily.
We were vegetarians who from time to time ate meat.
But then we decided to have a child, and that was a different
story that would necessitate a different story.
About half an hour after my son was born, I went into the
waiting room to tell the gathered family the good news.
“You said ‘he’! So it’s a boy?”
“What’s his name?
“Who does he look like?”
“Tell us everything!”
I answered their questions as quickly as I could, then went
to the corner and turned on my cellphone.
“Grandma,” I said. “We have a baby.”
Her only phone is in the kitchen. She picked up halfway into
the first ring. It was just after midnight. Had she been clipping
coupons? Preparing chicken with carrots to freeze for someone
else to eat at some future meal? I’d never once seen or heard
her cry, but tears pushed through her words as she asked, “How
much does it weigh?”
A few days after we came home from the hospital, I sent a
letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some first

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impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, “Everything is
possible again.” It was the perfect thing to write, because that
was exactly how it felt. The world itself had another chance.

Eating Animals

Seconds after being born, my son was breast-feeding. I watched
him with an awe that had no precedent in my life. Without
explanation or experience, he knew what to do. Millions of
years of evolution had wound the knowledge into him, as it
had encoded beating into his tiny heart and expansion and
contraction into his newly dry lungs.
Almost four years later, he is a big brother and a remark-
ably sophisticated little conversationalist. Increasingly the food
he eats is digested together with stories we tell. Feeding my
children is not like feeding myself: it matters more. It matters
because food matters (their physical health matters, the plea-
sure they take in eating matters), and because the stories that
are served with food matter.
Some of my happiest childhood memories are of sushi “lunch
dates” with my mom, and eating my dad’s turkey burgers with
mustard and grilled onions at backyard celebrations, and of
course my grandmother’s chicken with carrots. Those occasions
simply wouldn’t have been the same without those foods—
and that is important. To give up the taste of sushi, turkey or
chicken is a loss that extends beyond giving up a pleasurable
eating experience. Changing what we eat and letting tastes fade
from memory create a kind of cultural loss, a forgetting. But per-
haps this kind of forgetfulness is worth accepting—even worth
cultivating (forgetting, too, can be cultivated). To remember
my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles
for the memories that they once helped me carry.

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My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as
vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made
a different decision. But the realities of our present moment
compelled us to make that choice. According to an analysis of
U.S.D.A. data by the advocacy group Farm Forward, factory
farms now produce more than 99 percent of the animals eaten
in this country. And despite labels that suggest otherwise,
genuine alternatives—which do exist, and make many of the
ethical questions about meat moot—are very difficult for even
an educated eater to find. I don’t have the ability to do so with
regularity and confidence. (“Free range,” “cage free,” “natural”
and “organic” are nearly meaningless when it comes to animal
welfare.)
According to reports by the Food and Agriculture Orga-
nization of the U.N. and others, factory farming has made
animal agriculture the No. 1 contributor to global warming
(it is significantly more destructive than transportation alone),
and one of the Top 2 or 3 causes of all of the most seri-
ous environmental problems, both global and local: air and
water pollution, deforestation, loss of biodiversity. . . . Eating
factory-farmed animals—which is to say virtually every piece
of meat sold in supermarkets and prepared in restaurants—is
almost certainly the single worst thing that humans do to the
environment.
Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in
ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat. Turkeys
have been so genetically modified they are incapable of natural
reproduction. To acknowledge that these things matter is not
sentimental. It is a confrontation with the facts about animals
and ourselves. We know these things matter.
Meat and seafood are in no way necessary for my family—
unlike some in the world, we have easy access to a wide variety

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of other foods. And we are healthier without it. So our choices
aren’t constrained.
While the cultural uses of meat can be replaced—my mother
and I now eat Italian, my father grills veggie burgers, my grand-
mother invented her own “vegetarian chopped liver”—there is
still the question of pleasure. A vegetarian diet can be rich and
fully enjoyable, but I couldn’t honestly argue, as many vegetar-
ians try to, that it is as rich as a diet that includes meat. (Those
who eat chimpanzee look at the Western diet as sadly deficient
of a great pleasure.) I love calamari, I love roasted chicken,
I love a good steak. But I don’t love them without limit.
This isn’t animal experimentation, where you can imagine
some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This
is what we feel like eating. Yet taste, the crudest of our senses,
has been exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other
senses. Why? Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim
to raping an animal as a hungry one does to confining, kill-
ing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to
respond to it. Try to imagine any end other than taste for which
it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.
Children confront us with our paradoxes and dishonesty,
and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every
why—Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that?—and often
there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell
a story that you know isn’t true. And whether or not your face
reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood—which is a good
shame—is that we want our children to be more whole than we
are, to have satisfactory answers. My children not only inspired
me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but
also shamed me into reconsideration.
And then, one day, they will choose for themselves. I don’t
know what my reaction will be if they decide to eat meat. (I don’t

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know what my reaction will be if they decide to renounce their
Judaism, root for the Red Sox or register Republican.) I’m not
as worried about what they will choose as much as my ability
to make them conscious of the choices before them. I won’t
measure my success as a parent by whether my children share
my values, but by whether they act according to their own.
In the meantime, my choice on their behalf means they
will never eat their great-grandmother’s singular dish. They
will never receive that unique and most direct expression of
her love, will perhaps never think of her as the greatest chef
who ever lived. Her primal story, our family’s primal story, will
have to change.
Or will it? It wasn’t until I became a parent that I under-
stood my grandmother’s cooking. The greatest chef who ever
lived wasn’t preparing food, but humans. I’m thinking of those
Saturday afternoons at her kitchen table, just the two of us—
black bread in the glowing toaster, a humming refrigerator that
couldn’t be seen through its veil of family photographs. Over
pumpernickel ends and Coke, she would tell me about her
escape from Europe, the foods she had to eat and those she
wouldn’t. It was the story of her life—“Listen to me,” she would
plead—and I knew a vital lesson was being transmitted, even
if I didn’t know, as a child, what that lesson was. I know, now,
what it was.

Listen to Me

“We weren’t rich, but we always had enough. Thursday we baked
bread, and challah and rolls, and they lasted the whole week.
Friday we had pancakes. Shabbat we always had a chicken, and
soup with noodles. You would go to the butcher and ask for a
little more fat. The fattiest piece was the best piece. It wasn’t

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like now. We didn’t have refrigerators, but we had milk and
cheese. We didn’t have every kind of vegetable, but we had
enough. The things that you have here and take for granted. . . .
But we were happy. We didn’t know any better. And we took
what we had for granted, too.
“Then it all changed. During the war it was hell on earth,
and I had nothing. I left my family, you know. I was always
running, day and night, because the Germans were always right
behind me. If you stopped, you died. There was never enough
food. I became sicker and sicker from not eating, and I’m not
just talking about being skin and bones. I had sores all over
my body. It became difficult to move. I wasn’t too good to eat
from a garbage can. I ate the parts others wouldn’t eat. If you
helped yourself, you could survive. I took whatever I could find.
I ate things I wouldn’t tell you about.
“Even at the worst times, there were good people, too. Some-
one taught me to tie the ends of my pants so I could fill the legs
with any potatoes I was able to steal. I walked miles and miles
like that, because you never knew when you would be lucky
again. Someone gave me a little rice, once, and I traveled two
days to a market and traded it for some soap, and then traveled
to another market and traded the soap for some beans. You had
to have luck and intuition.
“The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right
at the end, and I didn’t know if I could make it another day. A
farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he
went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me.”
“He saved your life.”
“I didn’t eat it.”
“You didn’t eat it?”
“It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.”
“Why?”

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“What do you mean why?”
“What, because it wasn’t kosher?”
“Of course.”
“But not even to save your life?”
“If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

Joining the Conversation

1. Jonathan Safran Foer spends a lot of time talking about his
relationship with his grandmother and the role that her cook-
ing and her ideas about food had in the development of his
own attitudes toward food. How do you think Foer’s grand-
mother influenced his eventual embrace of vegetarianism?
Cite passages in his text to support your answer.

2. In writing about his move to vegetarianism, a topic he
takes very seriously, Foer injects humor at times. How do
his humorous comments affect the way you read his essay?

3. So what? Foer explains why being vegetarian matters to him.
Has he convinced you that you should care? If so, how has
he done so? If not, help him out: how could he do better?

4. Compare Foer’s narrative of how and why he became a
vegetarian to Mary Maxfield’s essay (pp. 442–47) arguing
against treating food as a moral issue. What does each author
say about the role of food in our lives?

5. Write an essay about how you have developed an ethical
view you hold strongly. Make clear to your readers why the
issue matters to you—and why it should matter to others.

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Don’t Blame the Eater

D A V I D Z I N C Z E N K O

If ever there were a newspaper headline custom-made for
Jay Leno’s monologue, this was it. Kids taking on McDonald’s
this week, suing the company for making them fat. Isn’t that
like middle-aged men suing Porsche for making them get speed-
ing tickets? Whatever happened to personal responsibility?
I tend to sympathize with these portly fast-food patrons,
though. Maybe that’s because I used to be one of them.
I grew up as a typical mid-1980s latchkey kid. My parents
were split up, my dad off trying to rebuild his life, my mom
working long hours to make the monthly bills. Lunch and
dinner, for me, was a daily choice between McDonald’s, Taco
Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken or Pizza Hut. Then as now, these
were the only available options for an American kid to get an

David Zinczenko, who was for many years the editor-in-chief of
the fitness magazine Men’s Health, is president of Galvanized Brands, a
global health and wellness media company. Zinczenko is the author of
numerous best-selling books, including the Eat This, Not That and the
Abs Diet series. He has contributed op-ed essays to the New York Times,
the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today and has appeared on Dr. Oz,
Oprah, Ellen, and Good Morning America. This piece was first published
on the op-ed page of the New York Times on November 23, 2002.

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affordable meal. By age 15, I had packed 212 pounds of torpid
teenage tallow on my once lanky 5-foot-10 frame.
Then I got lucky. I went to college, joined the Navy Reserves
and got involved with a health magazine. I learned how to
manage my diet. But most of the teenagers who live, as I once
did, on a fast-food diet won’t turn their lives around:
They’ve crossed under the golden arches to a likely fate
of lifetime obesity. And the problem isn’t just theirs—
it’s all of ours.
Before 1994, diabetes in children was generally caused by a
genetic disorder—only about 5 percent of childhood cases were
obesity-related, or Type 2, diabetes. Today, according to the
National Institutes of Health, Type 2 diabetes accounts for at
least 30 percent of all new childhood cases of diabetes in this
country.
Not surprisingly, money spent to treat diabetes has skyrock-
eted, too. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention esti-
mate that diabetes accounted for $2.6 billion in health care costs
in 1969. Today’s number is an unbelievable $100 billion a year.
Shouldn’t we know better than to eat two meals a day in
fast-food restaurants? That’s one argument. But where, exactly,
are consumers—particularly teenagers—supposed to find alter-
natives? Drive down any thoroughfare in America, and I
guarantee you’ll see one of our country’s more than 13,000
McDonald’s restaurants. Now, drive back up the block and try
to find someplace to buy a grapefruit.
Complicating the lack of alternatives is the lack of informa-
tion about what, exactly, we’re consuming. There are no calorie
information charts on fast-food packaging, the way there are
on grocery items. Advertisements don’t carry warning labels
the way tobacco ads do. Prepared foods aren’t covered under
Food and Drug Administration labeling laws. Some fast-food

For tips on
saying why it
matters, see
Chapter 7.

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purveyors will provide calorie information on request, but even
that can be hard to understand.
For example, one company’s Web site lists its chicken salad
as containing 150 calories; the almonds and noodles that come
with it (an additional 190 calories) are listed separately. Add
a serving of the 280-calorie dressing, and you’ve got a healthy
lunch alternative that comes in at 620 calories. But that’s not
all. Read the small print on the back of the dressing packet and
you’ll realize it actually contains 2.5 servings. If you pour what
you’ve been served, you’re suddenly up around 1,040 calories,
which is half of the government’s recommended daily calorie
intake. And that doesn’t take into account that 450-calorie
super-size Coke.
Make fun if you will of these kids launching lawsuits against
the fast-food industry, but don’t be surprised if you’re the next
plaintiff. As with the tobacco industry, it may be only a mat-
ter of time before state governments begin to see a direct line
between the $1 billion that McDonald’s and Burger King spend
each year on advertising and their own swelling health care
costs.
And I’d say the industry is vulnerable. Fast-food compa-
nies are marketing to children a product with proven health
hazards and no warning labels. They would do well to protect
themselves, and their customers, by providing the nutrition
information people need to make informed choices about their
products. Without such warnings, we’ll see more sick, obese
children and more angry, litigious parents. I say, let the deep-
fried chips fall where they may.

“Don’t Blame the Eater.” From The New York Times, November 23, 2002.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

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Joining the Conversation

1. Summarize Zinczenko’s arguments (his “I say”) against the
practices of fast-food companies. How persuasive are these
arguments?

2. One important move in all good argumentative writing
is to introduce voices raising possible objections to the
position being argued—what this book calls naysayers.
What objections does Zinczenko introduce, and how does
he respond? Can you think of other objections that he might
have noted?

3. How does the story that Zinczenko tells about his own expe-
rience in paragraphs 3 and 4 support or fail to support his
argument? How could the same story be used to support an
argument opposed to Zinczenko’s?

4. So what? Who cares? How does Zinczenko make clear to
readers why his topic matters? Or, if he does not, how might
he do so?

5. Write an essay responding to Zinczenko, using your own
experience and knowledge as part of your argument. You may
agree, disagree, or both, but be sure to represent Zinczenko’s
views near the beginning of your text, both summarizing and
quoting from his arguments.

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What You Eat Is Your Business

R A D L E Y B A L K O

This June, Time magazine and ABC News will host a three-
day summit on obesity. ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, who
last December anchored the prime-time special “How to Get
Fat Without Really Trying,” will host. Judging by the scheduled
program, the summit promises to be a pep rally for media, nutri-
tion activists, and policy makers—all agitating for a panoply
of government anti-obesity initiatives, including prohibiting
junk food in school vending machines, federal funding for new
bike trails and sidewalks, more demanding labels on foodstuffs,
restrictive food marketing to children, and prodding the food
industry into more “responsible” behavior. In other words,
bringing government between you and your waistline.

Radley Balko writes a blog about civil liberties and the criminal
justice system for the Washington Post. He was once an editor at the
Huffington Post and Reason magazine and a columnist for FoxNews.com.
A self-described libertarian, Balko is the author of the book Rise of
the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (2013).
This essay was first published on May 23, 2004, on the website of
the Cato Institute, which aims to promote the principles of “limited
government, individual liberty, free markets, and peace.”

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Politicians have already climbed aboard. President Bush
earmarked $200 million in his budget for anti-obesity meas-
ures. State legislatures and school boards across the country
have begun banning snacks and soda from school campuses
and vending machines. Senator Joe Lieberman and Oakland
Mayor Jerry Brown, among others, have called for a “fat tax” on
high-calorie foods. Congress is now considering menu-labeling
legislation, which would force restaurants to send every menu
item to the laboratory for nutritional testing.
This is the wrong way to fight obesity. Instead of manipu-
lating or intervening in the array of food options available to
American consumers, our government ought to be working to
foster a sense of responsibility in and ownership of our own
health and well-being. But we’re doing just the opposite.
For decades now, America’s health care system has been
migrating toward socialism. Your well-being, shape, and
condition have increasingly been deemed matters of “public
health,” instead of matters of personal responsibility. Our
lawmakers just enacted a huge entitlement that requires some
people to pay for other people’s medicine. Senator Hillary
Clinton just penned a lengthy article in the New York Times
Magazine calling for yet more federal control of health care. All
of the Democratic candidates for president boasted plans to push
health care further into the public sector. More and more, states
are preventing private health insurers from charging overweight
and obese clients higher premiums, which effectively removes
any financial incentive for maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
We’re becoming less responsible for our own health, and
more responsible for everyone else’s. Your heart attack drives
up the cost of my premiums and office visits. And if the gov-
ernment is paying for my anti-cholesterol medication, what
incentive is there for me to put down the cheeseburger?

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This collective ownership of private health then paves the
way for even more federal restrictions on consumer choice and
civil liberties. A society where everyone is responsible for every-
one else’s well-being is a society more apt to accept government
restrictions, for example—on what McDonald’s can put on its
menu, what Safeway or Kroger can put on grocery shelves,
or holding food companies responsible for the bad habits of
unhealthy consumers.
A growing army of nutritionist activists and food industry foes
are egging the process on. Margo Wootan of the Center for
Science in the Public Interest has said, “We’ve got to move
beyond ‘personal responsibility.’” The largest organization of trial
lawyers now encourages its members to weed jury pools of
candidates who show “personal responsibility bias.” The title of

Jennings’s special from last December—“How to Get Fat
Without Really Trying”—reveals his intent, which is to
relieve viewers of responsibility for their own condition.
Indeed, Jennings ended the program with an impassioned
plea for government intervention to fight obesity.

The best way to alleviate the obesity “public health” cri-
sis is to remove obesity from the realm of public health. It
doesn’t belong there anyway. It’s difficult to think of anything
more private and of less public concern than what we choose to
put into our bodies. It only becomes a public matter when we
force the public to pay for the consequences of those choices.
If policymakers want to fight obesity, they’ll halt the creep-
ing socialization of medicine, and move to return individual
Americans’ ownership of their own health and well-being back
to individual Americans.
That means freeing insurance companies to reward healthy
lifestyles, and penalize poor ones. It means halting plans to
further socialize medicine and health care. Congress should

For tips on
distinguishing
what you say

from what
others say, as

Balko does here,
see Chapter 5.

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also increase access to medical and health savings accounts,
which give consumers the option of rolling money reserved for
health care into a retirement account. These accounts intro-
duce accountability into the health care system, and encourage
caution with one’s health care dollar. When money we spend
on health care doesn’t belong to our employer or the govern-
ment, but is money we could devote to our own retirement,
we’re less likely to run to the doctor at the first sign of a cold.
We’ll all make better choices about diet, exercise, and
personal health when someone else isn’t paying for the
consequences of those choices.

Joining the Conversation

1. What does Radley Balko claim in this essay? How do you
know? What position is he responding to? Cite examples
from the text to support your answer.

2. Reread the last sentence of paragraph 1: “In other words,
bringing government between you and your waistline.” This
is actually a sentence fragment, but it functions as metacom-
mentary, inserted by Balko to make sure that readers see his
point. Imagine that this statement were not there, and reread
the first three paragraphs. Does it make a difference in how
you read this piece?

3. Notice the direct quotations in paragraph 7. How has Balko
integrated these quotations into his text—how has he intro-
duced them, and what, if anything, has he said to explain
them and tie them to his own text? Are there any changes
you might suggest? How do key terms in the quotations echo
one another? (See Chapter 3 for advice on quoting, and
pp. 114–16 for help on identifying key terms.)

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4. Balko makes his own position about the so-called obesity
crisis very clear, but does he consider any of the objections
that might be offered to his position? If so, how does he deal
with those objections? If not, what objections might he have
raised?

5. Write an essay responding to Balko, agreeing, disagreeing,
or both agreeing and disagreeing with his position. You
might want to cite some of David Zinczenko’s arguments (see
pp. 462–65)—depending on what stand you take, Zinczenko’s
ideas could serve as support for what you believe or as the
source of one possible objection.

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The Extraordinary Science
of Addictive Junk Food

M I C H A E L M O S S

On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars
and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury
and discharged 11 men who controlled America’s largest food
companies. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco,
General Mills and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars.
Rivals any other day, the C.E.O.’s and company presidents had
come together for a rare, private meeting. On the agenda was
one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with
it. While the atmosphere was cordial, the men assembled were
hardly friends. Their stature was defined by their skill in fighting
one another for what they called “stomach share”—the amount

Michael Moss is a New York Times investigative reporter who won a
2010 Pulitzer Prize for “The Burger That Shattered Her Life,” an article
about a young dance instructor who was paralyzed after contracting an
E. coli infection. Moss has reported for the Wall Street Journal, New
York Newsday, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and taught at the
Columbia University School of Journalism. This selection, adapted
from his book, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (2013),
first appeared in the New York Times Magazine on February 24, 2013.

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of digestive space that any one company’s brand can grab from
the competition.
James Behnke, a 55-year-old executive at Pillsbury, greeted
the men as they arrived. He was anxious but also hopeful about
the plan that he and a few other food-company executives
had devised to engage the C.E.O.’s on America’s growing
weight problem. “We were very concerned, and rightfully so,
that obesity was becoming a major issue,” Behnke recalled.
“People were starting to talk about sugar taxes, and there was
a lot of pressure on food companies.” Getting the company
chiefs in the same room to talk about anything, much less a
sensitive issue like this, was a tricky business, so Behnke and his
fellow organizers had scripted the meeting carefully, honing the
message to its barest essentials. “C.E.O.’s in the food industry
are typically not technical guys, and they’re uncomfortable
going to meetings where technical people talk in technical
terms about technical things,” Behnke said. “They don’t want
to be embarrassed. They don’t want to make commitments.
They want to maintain their aloofness and autonomy.”
A chemist by training with a doctoral degree in food
science, Behnke became Pillsbury’s chief technical officer
in 1979 and was instrumental in creating a long line of hit
products, including microwaveable popcorn. He deeply admired
Pillsbury but in recent years had grown troubled by pictures of
obese children suffering from diabetes and the earliest signs of
hypertension and heart disease. In the months leading up to
the C.E.O. meeting, he was engaged in conversation with a
group of food-science experts who were painting an increasingly
grim picture of the public’s ability to cope with the industry’s
formulations—from the body’s fragile controls on overeating
to the hidden power of some processed foods to make people
feel hungrier still. It was time, he and a handful of others felt,

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to warn the C.E.O.’s that their companies may have gone too
far in creating and marketing products that posed the greatest
health concerns.
The discussion took place in Pillsbury’s auditorium. The first
speaker was a vice president of Kraft named Michael Mudd.
“I very much appreciate this opportunity to talk to you about
childhood obesity and the growing challenge it presents for
us all,” Mudd began. “Let me say right at the start, this is
not an easy subject. There are no easy answers—for what the
public health community must do to bring this problem under
control or for what the industry should do as others seek to
hold it accountable for what has happened. But this much is
clear: For those of us who’ve looked hard at this issue, whether
they’re public health professionals or staff specialists in your
own companies, we feel sure that the one thing we shouldn’t
do is nothing.”
As he spoke, Mudd clicked through a deck of slides—114
in all—projected on a large screen behind him. The figures
were staggering. More than half of American adults were now
considered overweight, with nearly one-quarter of the adult
population—40 million people—clinically defined as obese.
Among children, the rates had more than doubled since
1980, and the number of kids considered obese had shot past
12 million. (This was still only 1999; the nation’s obesity rates
would climb much higher.) Food manufacturers were now being
blamed for the problem from all sides—academia, the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Heart
Association and the American Cancer Society. The secretary
of agriculture, over whom the industry had long held sway, had
recently called obesity a “national epidemic.”
Mudd then did the unthinkable. He drew a connection to
the last thing in the world the C.E.O.’s wanted linked to their

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products: cigarettes. First came a quote from a Yale University
professor of psychology and public health, Kelly Brownell,
who was an especially vocal proponent of the view that the
processed-food industry should be seen as a public health
menace: “As a culture, we’ve become upset by the tobacco
companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the
food companies do the very same thing. And we could make
a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a poor diet
rivals that taken by tobacco.”
“If anyone in the food industry ever doubted there was
a slippery slope out there,” Mudd said, “I imagine they are
beginning to experience a distinct sliding sensation right about
now.”
Mudd then presented the plan he and others had devised
to address the obesity problem. Merely getting the executives
to acknowledge some culpability was an important first step,
he knew, so his plan would start off with a small but crucial
move: the industry should use the expertise of scientists—its
own and others—to gain a deeper understanding of what was
driving Americans to overeat. Once this was achieved, the
effort could unfold on several fronts. To be sure, there would
be no getting around the role that packaged foods and drinks
play in overconsumption. They would have to pull back on
their use of salt, sugar and fat, perhaps by imposing industrywide
limits. But it wasn’t just a matter of these three ingredients;
the schemes they used to advertise and market their products
were critical, too. Mudd proposed creating a “code to guide the
nutritional aspects of food marketing, especially to children.”
“We are saying that the industry should make a sincere effort
to be part of the solution,” Mudd concluded. “And that by
doing so, we can help to defuse the criticism that’s building
against us.”

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What happened next was not written down. But according
to three participants, when Mudd stopped talking, the one
C.E.O. whose recent exploits in the grocery store had awed
the rest of the industry stood up to speak. His name was
Stephen Sanger, and he was also the person—as head of
General Mills—who had the most to lose when it came to
dealing with obesity. Under his leadership, General Mills had
overtaken not just the cereal aisle but other sections of the
grocery store. The company’s Yoplait brand had transformed
traditional unsweetened breakfast yogurt into a veritable
dessert. It now had twice as much sugar per serving as
General Mills’ marshmallow cereal Lucky Charms. And yet,
because of yogurt’s well-tended image as a wholesome snack,

Traditional unsweetened breakfast yogurt transformed into a veritable dessert.

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sales of Yoplait were soaring, with annual revenue topping
$500 million. Emboldened by the success, the company’s
development wing pushed even harder, inventing a Yoplait
variation that came in a squeezable tube—perfect for kids.
They called it Go-Gurt and rolled it out nationally in the
weeks before the C.E.O. meeting. (By year’s end, it would hit
$100 million in sales.)
According to the sources I spoke with, Sanger began by
reminding the group that consumers were “fickle.” (Sanger
declined to be interviewed.) Sometimes they worried about
sugar, other times fat. General Mills, he said, acted responsibly to
both the public and shareholders by offering products to satisfy
dieters and other concerned shoppers, from low sugar to added
whole grains. But most often, he said, people bought what they
liked, and they liked what tasted good. “Don’t talk to me about
nutrition,” he reportedly said, taking on the voice of the typical
consumer. “Talk to me about taste, and if this stuff tastes better,
don’t run around trying to sell stuff that doesn’t taste good.”
To react to the critics, Sanger said, would jeopardize the
sanctity of the recipes that had made his products so successful.
General Mills would not pull back. He would push his people
onward, and he urged his peers to do the same. Sanger’s response
effectively ended the meeting.
“What can I say?” James Behnke told me years later. “It didn’t
work. These guys weren’t as receptive as we thought they would
be.” Behnke chose his words deliberately. He wanted to be fair.
“Sanger was trying to say, ‘Look, we’re not going to screw around
with the company jewels here and change the formulations because
a bunch of guys in white coats are worried about obesity.’ ”
The meeting was remarkable, first, for the insider admissions
of guilt. But I was also struck by how prescient the organizers of
the sit-down had been. Today, one in three adults is considered

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clinically obese, along with one in five kids, and 24 million
Americans are afflicted by type 2 diabetes, often caused by
poor diet, with another 79 million people having pre-diabetes.
Even gout, a painful form of arthritis once known as “the rich
man’s disease” for its associations with gluttony, now afflicts
eight million Americans.
The public and the food companies have known for decades
now—or at the very least since this meeting—that sugary, salty,
fatty foods are not good for us in the quantities that we consume
them. So why are the diabetes and obesity and hypertension
numbers still spiraling out of control? It’s not just a matter
of poor willpower on the part of the consumer and a give-
the-people-what-they-want attitude on the part of the food
manufacturers. What I found, over four years of research and
reporting, was a conscious effort—taking place in labs and mar-
keting meetings and grocery-store aisles—to get people hooked
on foods that are convenient and inexpensive. I talked to more
than 300 people in or formerly employed by the processed-food
industry, from scientists to marketers to C.E.O.’s. Some were
willing whistle-blowers, while others spoke reluctantly when
presented with some of the thousands of pages of secret memos
that I obtained from inside the food industry’s operations. What
follows is a series of small case studies of a handful of characters
whose work then, and perspective now, sheds light on how the
foods are created and sold to people who, while not powerless,
are extremely vulnerable to the intensity of these companies’
industrial formulations and selling campaigns.

“In This Field, I’m a Game Changer.”

John Lennon couldn’t find it in England, so he had cases of it
shipped from New York to fuel the Imagine sessions. The Beach

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Boys, ZZ Top and Cher all stipulated in their contract riders
that it be put in their dressing rooms when they toured. Hillary
Clinton asked for it when she traveled as first lady, and ever
after her hotel suites were dutifully stocked.
What they all wanted was Dr Pepper, which until 2001
occupied a comfortable third-place spot in the soda aisle behind
Coca-Cola and Pepsi. But then a flood of spinoffs from the
two soda giants showed up on the shelves—lemons and limes,
vanillas and coffees, raspberries and oranges, whites and blues
and clears—what in food-industry lingo are known as “line
extensions,” and Dr Pepper started to lose its market share.
Responding to this pressure, Cadbury Schweppes created its
first spin off, other than a diet version, in the soda’s 115-year
history, a bright red soda with a very un-Dr Pepper name: Red
Fusion. “If we are to re-establish Dr Pepper back to its historic
growth rates, we have to add more excitement,” the company’s
president, Jack Kilduff, said. One particularly promising market,
Kilduff pointed out, was the “rapidly growing Hispanic and
African-American communities.”
But consumers hated Red Fusion. “Dr Pepper is my all-
time favorite drink, so I was curious about the Red Fusion,”
a California mother of three wrote on a blog to warn other
Peppers away. “It’s disgusting. Gagging. Never again.”
Stung by the rejection, Cadbury Schweppes in 2004
turned to a food-industry legend named Howard Moskowitz.
Moskowitz, who studied mathematics and holds a Ph.D. in
experimental psychology from Harvard, runs a consulting firm
in White Plains, where for more than three decades he has
“optimized” a variety of products for Campbell Soup, General
Foods, Kraft and PepsiCo. “I’ve optimized soups,” Moskowitz
told me. “I’ve optimized pizzas. I’ve optimized salad dressings
and pickles. In this field, I’m a game changer.”

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In the process of product optimization, food engineers alter
a litany of variables with the sole intent of finding the most
perfect version (or versions) of a product. Ordinary consum-
ers are paid to spend hours sitting in rooms where they touch,
feel, sip, smell, swirl and taste whatever product is in question.
Their opinions are dumped into a computer, and the data are
sifted and sorted through a statistical method called conjoint
analysis, which determines what features will be most attractive
to consumers. Moskowitz likes to imagine that his computer is
divided into silos, in which each of the attributes is stacked. But
it’s not simply a matter of comparing Color 23 with Color 24.
In the most complicated projects, Color 23 must be combined
with Syrup 11 and Packaging 6, and on and on, in seemingly
infinite combinations. Even for jobs in which the only concern
is taste and the variables are limited to the ingredients, endless
charts and graphs will come spewing out of Moskowitz’s com-
puter. “The mathematical model maps out the ingredients to the
sensory perceptions these ingredients create,” he told me, “so I
can just dial a new product. This is the engineering approach.”

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I first met Moskowitz on a crisp day in the spring of 2010 at
the Harvard Club in Midtown Manhattan. As we talked, he
made clear that while he has worked on numerous projects
aimed at creating more healthful foods and insists the industry
could be doing far more to curb obesity, he had no qualms
about his own pioneering work on discovering what industry
insiders now regularly refer to as “the bliss point” or any of the
other systems that helped food companies create the greatest
amount of crave. “There’s no moral issue for me,” he said. “I did
the best science I could. I was struggling to survive and didn’t
have the luxury of being a moral creature. As a researcher,
I was ahead of my time.”

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Moskowitz’s path to mastering the bliss point began in
earnest not at Harvard but a few months after graduation,
16 miles from Cambridge, in the town of Natick, where the
U.S. Army hired him to work in its research labs. The military
has long been in a peculiar bind when it comes to food: how
to get soldiers to eat more rations when they are in the field.
They know that over time, soldiers would gradually find their
meals-ready-to-eat so boring that they would toss them away,
half-eaten, and not get all the calories they needed. But what
was causing this M.R.E.-fatigue was a mystery. “So I started
asking soldiers how frequently they would like to eat this
or that, trying to figure out which products they would find
boring,” Moskowitz said. The answers he got were inconsistent.
“They liked flavorful foods like turkey tetrazzini, but only at
first; they quickly grew tired of them. On the other hand,
mundane foods like white bread would never get them too
excited, but they could eat lots and lots of it without feeling
they’d had enough.”
This contradiction is known as “sensory-specific satiety.” In
lay terms, it is the tendency for big, distinct flavors to over-
whelm the brain, which responds by depressing your desire to
have more. Sensory-specific satiety also became a guiding prin-
ciple for the processed-food industry. The biggest hits—be they
Coca-Cola or Doritos—owe their success to complex formulas
that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have
a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop
eating.
Thirty-two years after he began experimenting with the bliss
point, Moskowitz got the call from Cadbury Schweppes asking
him to create a good line extension for Dr Pepper. I spent
an afternoon in his White Plains offices as he and his vice
president for research, Michele Reisner, walked me through the

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Dr Pepper campaign. Cadbury wanted its new flavor to have
cherry and vanilla on top of the basic Dr Pepper taste. Thus,
there were three main components to play with. A sweet cherry
flavoring, a sweet vanilla flavoring and a sweet syrup known as
“Dr Pepper flavoring.”
Finding the bliss point required the preparation of 61 subtly
distinct formulas—31 for the regular version and 30 for diet.
The formulas were then subjected to 3,904 tastings organized in
Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago and Philadelphia. The Dr Pepper
tasters began working through their samples, resting five
minutes between each sip to restore their taste buds. After
each sample, they gave numerically ranked answers to a set of
questions: How much did they like it overall? How strong is
the taste? How do they feel about the taste? How would they
describe the quality of this product? How likely would they be
to purchase this product?
Moskowitz’s data—compiled in a 135-page report for the soda
maker—is tremendously fine-grained, showing how different
people and groups of people feel about a strong vanilla taste
versus weak, various aspects of aroma and the powerful sensory
force that food scientists call “mouth feel.” This is the way a
product interacts with the mouth, as defined more specifically
by a host of related sensations, from dryness to gumminess to
moisture release. These are terms more familiar to sommeliers,
but the mouth feel of soda and many other food items, especially
those high in fat, is second only to the bliss point in its ability
to predict how much craving a product will induce.
In addition to taste, the consumers were also tested on their
response to color, which proved to be highly sensitive. “When
we increased the level of the Dr Pepper flavoring, it gets darker
and liking goes off,” Reisner said. These preferences can also
be cross-referenced by age, sex and race.

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On page 83 of the report, a thin blue line represents the
amount of Dr Pepper flavoring needed to generate maximum
appeal. The line is shaped like an upside-down U, just like the
bliss-point curve that Moskowitz studied 30 years earlier in
his Army lab. And at the top of the arc, there is not a single
sweet spot but instead a sweet range, within which “bliss” was
achievable. This meant that Cadbury could edge back on its
key ingredient, the sugary Dr Pepper syrup, without falling out
of the range and losing the bliss. Instead of using 2 milliliters
of the flavoring, for instance, they could use 1.69 milliliters
and achieve the same effect. The potential savings is merely a
few percentage points, and it won’t mean much to individual
consumers who are counting calories or grams of sugar. But
for Dr Pepper, it adds up to colossal savings. “That looks like
nothing,” Reisner said. “But it’s a lot of money. A lot of money.
Millions.”
The soda that emerged from all of Moskowitz’s variations
became known as Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper, and it proved
successful beyond anything Cadbury imagined. In 2008, Cadbury
split off its soft-drinks business, which included Snapple and
7-Up. The Dr Pepper Snapple Group has since been valued in
excess of $11 billion.

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“It’s Called Vanishing Caloric Density.”

At a symposium for nutrition scientists in Los Angeles on
February 15, 1985, a professor of pharmacology from Helsinki
named Heikki Karppanen told the remarkable story of
Finland’s effort to address its salt habit. In the late 1970s,
the Finns were consuming huge amounts of sodium, eating
on average more than two teaspoons of salt a day. As a
result, the country had developed significant issues with high

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blood pressure, and men in the eastern part of Finland had
the highest rate of fatal cardiovascular disease in the world.
Research showed that this plague was not just a quirk of
genetics or a result of a sedentary lifestyle—it was also owing
to processed foods. So when Finnish authorities moved to
address the problem, they went right after the manufacturers.
(The Finnish response worked. Every grocery item that was
heavy in salt would come to be marked prominently with the
warning “High Salt Content.” By 2007, Finland’s per capita
consumption of salt had dropped by a third, and this shift—
along with improved medical care—was accompanied by a
75 percent to 80 percent decline in the number of deaths
from strokes and heart disease.)
Karppanen’s presentation was met with applause, but one
man in the crowd seemed particularly intrigued by the presen-
tation, and as Karppanen left the stage, the man intercepted
him and asked if they could talk more over dinner. Their con-
versation later that night was not at all what Karppanen was
expecting. His host did indeed have an interest in salt, but from
quite a different vantage point: the man’s name was Robert
I-San Lin, and from 1974 to 1982, he worked as the chief sci-
entist for Frito-Lay, the nearly $3-billion-a-year manufacturer
of Lay’s, Doritos, Cheetos and Fritos.
Lin’s time at Frito-Lay coincided with the first attacks by
nutrition advocates on salty foods and the first calls for federal
regulators to reclassify salt as a “risky” food additive, which
could have subjected it to severe controls. No company took
this threat more seriously—or more personally—than Frito-
Lay, Lin explained to Karppanen over their dinner. Three
years after he left Frito-Lay, he was still anguished over his
inability to effectively change the company’s recipes and
practices.

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By chance, I ran across a letter that Lin sent to Karppanen
three weeks after that dinner, buried in some files to which
I had gained access. Attached to the letter was a memo
written when Lin was at Frito-Lay, which detailed some
of the company’s efforts in defending salt. I tracked Lin
down in Irvine, California, where we spent several days
going through the internal company memos, strategy papers
and handwritten notes he had kept. The documents were
evidence of the concern that Lin had for consumers and of the
company’s intent on using science not to address the health
concerns but to thwart them. While at Frito-Lay, Lin and
other company scientists spoke openly about the country’s
excessive consumption of sodium and the fact that, as Lin
said to me on more than one occasion, “people get addicted
to salt.”
Not much had changed by 1986, except Frito-Lay found
itself on a rare cold streak. The company had introduced a
series of high-profile products that failed miserably. Toppels,
a cracker with cheese topping; Stuffers, a shell with a variety
of fillings; Rumbles, a bite-size granola snack—they all came
and went in a blink, and the company took a $52 million
hit. Around that time, the marketing team was joined by
Dwight Riskey, an expert on cravings who had been a fellow
at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, where
he was part of a team of scientists that found that people
could beat their salt habits simply by refraining from salty
foods long enough for their taste buds to return to a normal
level of sensitivity. He had also done work on the bliss point,
showing how a product’s allure is contextual, shaped partly
by the other foods a person is eating, and that it changes
as people age. This seemed to help explain why Frito-Lay
was having so much trouble selling new snacks. The largest

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single block of customers, the baby boomers, had begun hit-
ting middle age. According to the research, this suggested
that their liking for salty snacks—both in the concentration
of salt and how much they ate—would be tapering off. Along
with the rest of the snack-food industry, Frito-Lay anticipated
lower sales because of an aging population, and marketing
plans were adjusted to focus even more intently on younger
consumers.
Except that snack sales didn’t decline as everyone had
projected, Frito-Lay’s doomed product launches notwith-
standing. Poring over data one day in his home office, trying
to understand just who was consuming all the snack food,
Riskey realized that he and his colleagues had been misreading
things all along. They had been measuring the snacking habits
of different age groups and were seeing what they expected to
see, that older consumers ate less than those in their 20s. But
what they weren’t measuring, Riskey realized, is how those
snacking habits of the boomers compared to themselves when
they were in their 20s. When he called up a new set of sales
data and performed what’s called a cohort study, following a
single group over time, a far more encouraging picture—for
Frito-Lay, anyway—emerged. The baby boomers were not
eating fewer salty snacks as they aged. “In fact, as those people
aged, their consumption of all those segments—the cookies,
the crackers, the candy, the chips—was going up,” Riskey
said. “They were not only eating what they ate when they
were younger, they were eating more of it.” In fact, everyone
in the country, on average, was eating more salty snacks than
they used to. The rate of consumption was edging up about
one-third of a pound every year, with the average intake of
snacks like chips and cheese crackers pushing past 12 pounds
a year.

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Riskey had a theory about what caused this surge: Eating
real meals had become a thing of the past. Baby boomers,
especially, seemed to have greatly cut down on regular meals.
They were skipping breakfast when they had early-morning
meetings. They skipped lunch when they then needed to catch
up on work because of those meetings. They skipped dinner
when their kids stayed out late or grew up and moved out of
the house. And when they skipped these meals, they replaced
them with snacks. “We looked at this behavior, and said, ‘Oh,
my gosh, people were skipping meals right and left,’ ” Riskey
told me. “It was amazing.” This led to the next realization, that
baby boomers did not represent “a category that is mature, with
no growth. This is a category that has huge growth potential.”
The food technicians stopped worrying about inventing
new products and instead embraced the industry’s most reliable
method for getting consumers to buy more: the line extension.
The classic Lay’s potato chips were joined by Salt & Vinegar,
Salt & Pepper and Cheddar & Sour Cream. They put out Chili-
Cheese-flavored Fritos, and Cheetos were transformed into 21
varieties. Frito-Lay had a formidable research complex near
Dallas, where nearly 500 chemists, psychologists and techni-
cians conducted research that cost up to $30 million a year,
and the science corps focused intense amounts of resources on
questions of crunch, mouth feel and aroma for each of these
items. Their tools included a $40,000 device that simulated a
chewing mouth to test and perfect the chips, discovering things
like the perfect break point: people like a chip that snaps with
about four pounds of pressure per square inch.
To get a better feel for their work, I called on Steven
Witherly, a food scientist who wrote a fascinating guide
for industry insiders titled, “Why Humans Like Junk Food.”
I brought him two shopping bags filled with a variety of chips

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to taste. He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. “This,” Witherly
said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on
the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.” He ticked off a dozen
attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But
the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability
to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,”
Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain
thinks that there’s no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating
it forever.”
As for their marketing troubles, in a March 2010 meeting,
Frito-Lay executives hastened to tell their Wall Street investors
that the 1.4 billion boomers worldwide weren’t being neglected;
they were redoubling their efforts to understand exactly what

The industry’s most reliable method for getting consumers to buy more: the
line extension.

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it was that boomers most wanted in a snack chip. Which was
basically everything: great taste, maximum bliss but minimal
guilt about health and more maturity than puffs. “They snack
a lot,” Frito-Lay’s chief marketing officer, Ann Mukherjee,
told the investors. “But what they’re looking for is very dif-
ferent. They’re looking for new experiences, real food experi-
ences.” Frito-Lay acquired Stacy’s Pita Chip Company, which
was started by a Massachusetts couple who made food-cart
sandwiches and started serving pita chips to their customers
in the mid-1990s. In Frito-Lay’s hands, the pita chips aver-
aged 270 milligrams of sodium—nearly one-fifth a whole day’s
recommended maximum for most American adults—and were
a huge hit among boomers.
The Frito-Lay executives also spoke of the company’s ongo-
ing pursuit of a “designer sodium,” which they hoped, in the
near future, would take their sodium loads down by 40 percent.
No need to worry about lost sales there, the company’s C.E.O.,
Al Carey, assured their investors. The boomers would see less
salt as the green light to snack like never before.
There’s a paradox at work here. On the one hand,
reduction of sodium in snack foods is commendable. On the
other, these changes may well result in consumers eating

more. “The big thing that will happen here is
removing the barriers for boomers and giving them
permission to snack,” Carey said. The prospects
for lower-salt snacks were so amazing, he added,

that the company had set its sights on using the designer
salt to conquer the toughest market of all for snacks: schools.
He cited, for example, the school-food initiative championed
by Bill Clinton and the American Heart Association, which
is seeking to improve the nutrition of school food by limiting
its load of salt, sugar and fat. “Imagine this,” Carey said.

See Chapter 4
for ways to
agree and

disagree
simultaneously.

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“A potato chip that tastes great and qualifies for the
Clinton-A.H.A. alliance for schools. . . . We think we have
ways to do all of this on a potato chip, and imagine getting
that product into schools, where children can have this
product and grow up with it and feel good about eating it.”
Carey’s quote reminded me of something I read in the early
stages of my reporting, a 24-page report prepared for Frito-Lay
in 1957 by a psychologist named Ernest Dichter. The company’s
chips, he wrote, were not selling as well as they could for one
simple reason: “While people like and enjoy potato chips, they
feel guilty about liking them. . . . Unconsciously, people expect
to be punished for ‘letting themselves go’ and enjoying them.”
Dichter listed seven “fears and resistances” to the chips: “You
can’t stop eating them; they’re fattening; they’re not good for
you; they’re greasy and messy to eat; they’re too expensive; it’s
hard to store the leftovers; and they’re bad for children.” He
spent the rest of his memo laying out his prescriptions, which
in time would become widely used not just by Frito-Lay but
also by the entire industry. Dichter suggested that Frito-Lay
avoid using the word “fried” in referring to its chips and adopt
instead the more healthful-sounding term “toasted.” To coun-
teract the “fear of letting oneself go,” he suggested repacking
the chips into smaller bags. “The more-anxious consumers, the
ones who have the deepest fears about their capacity to control
their appetite, will tend to sense the function of the new pack
and select it,” he said.
Dichter advised Frito-Lay to move its chips out of the realm
of between-meals snacking and turn them into an ever-present
item in the American diet. “The increased use of potato chips
and other Lay’s products as a part of the regular fare served
by restaurants and sandwich bars should be encouraged in a
concentrated way,” Dichter said, citing a string of examples:

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“potato chips with soup, with fruit or vegetable juice appetiz-
ers; potato chips served as a vegetable on the main dish; potato
chips with salad; potato chips with egg dishes for breakfast;
potato chips with sandwich orders.”
In 2011, The New England Journal of Medicine published
a study that shed new light on America’s weight gain. The
subjects—120,877 women and men—were all professionals in
the health field, and were likely to be more conscious about
nutrition, so the findings might well understate the overall trend.
Using data back to 1986, the researchers monitored everything
the participants ate, as well as their physical activity and smoking.
They found that every four years, the participants exercised
less, watched TV more and gained an average of 3.35 pounds.
The researchers parsed the data by the caloric content of the
foods being eaten, and found the top contributors to weight
gain included red meat and processed meats, sugar-sweetened
beverages and potatoes, including mashed and French fries.
But the largest weight-inducing food was the potato chip. The
coating of salt, the fat content that rewards the brain with instant
feelings of pleasure, the sugar that exists not as an additive but
in the starch of the potato itself—all of this combines to make
it the perfect addictive food. “The starch is readily absorbed,”
Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition
at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the study’s
authors, told me. “More quickly even than a similar amount of
sugar. The starch, in turn, causes the glucose levels in the blood
to spike”—which can result in a craving for more.
If Americans snacked only occasionally, and in small
amounts, this would not present the enormous problem that it
does. But because so much money and effort has been invested
over decades in engineering and then relentlessly selling these
products, the effects are seemingly impossible to unwind. More

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than 30 years have passed since Robert Lin first tangled with
Frito-Lay on the imperative of the company to deal with the
formulation of its snacks, but as we sat at his dining-room table,
sifting through his records, the feelings of regret still played on
his face. In his view, three decades had been lost, time that he
and a lot of other smart scientists could have spent searching
for ways to ease the addiction to salt, sugar and fat. “I couldn’t
do much about it,” he told me. “I feel so sorry for the public.”

“These People Need a Lot of Things,
But They Don’t Need a Coke.”

The growing attention Americans are paying to what they
put into their mouths has touched off a new scramble by the
processed-food companies to address health concerns. Pressed
by the Obama administration and consumers, Kraft, Nestlé,
Pepsi, Campbell and General Mills, among others, have begun
to trim the loads of salt, sugar and fat in many products. And
with consumer advocates pushing for more government inter-
vention, Coca-Cola made headlines in January by releasing
ads that promoted its bottled water and low-calorie drinks as a
way to counter obesity. Predictably, the ads drew a new volley
of scorn from critics who pointed to the company’s continuing
drive to sell sugary Coke.
One of the other executives I spoke with at length was Jeffrey
Dunn, who, in 2001, at age 44, was directing more than half of
Coca-Cola’s $20 billion in annual sales as president and chief
operating officer in both North and South America. In an effort
to control as much market share as possible, Coke extended its
aggressive marketing to especially poor or vulnerable areas of the
U.S., like New Orleans—where people were drinking twice as
much Coke as the national average—or Rome, Georgia, where

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the per capita intake was nearly three Cokes a day. In Coke’s
headquarters in Atlanta, the biggest consumers were referred
to as “heavy users.” “The other model we use was called ‘drinks
and drinkers,’ ” Dunn said. “How many drinkers do I have?
And how many drinks do they drink? If you lost one of those
heavy users, if somebody just decided to stop drinking Coke,
how many drinkers would you have to get, at low velocity, to
make up for that heavy user? The answer is a lot. It’s more
efficient to get my existing users to drink more.”
One of Dunn’s lieutenants, Todd Putman, who worked at
Coca-Cola from 1997 to 2001, said the goal became much larger
than merely beating the rival brands; Coca-Cola strove to out-
sell every other thing people drank, including milk and water.
The marketing division’s efforts boiled down to one question,
Putman said: “How can we drive more ounces into more bod-
ies more often?” (In response to Putman’s remarks, Coke said
its goals have changed and that it now focuses on providing
consumers with more low- or no-calorie products.)
In his capacity, Dunn was making frequent trips to Brazil,
where the company had recently begun a push to increase
consumption of Coke among the many Brazilians living in
[the slums known as] favelas. The company’s strategy was to
repackage Coke into smaller, more affordable 6.7-ounce bottles,
just 20 cents each. Coke was not alone in seeing Brazil as a
potential boon; Nestlé began deploying battalions of women to
travel poor neighborhoods, hawking American-style processed
foods door to door. But Coke was Dunn’s concern, and on one
trip, as he walked through one of the impoverished areas, he had
an epiphany. “A voice in my head says, ‘These people need a
lot of things, but they don’t need a Coke.’ I almost threw up.”
Dunn returned to Atlanta, determined to make some
changes. He didn’t want to abandon the soda business, but

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he did want to try to steer the company into a more healthful
mode, and one of the things he pushed for was to stop market-
ing Coke in public schools. The independent companies that
bottled Coke viewed his plans as reactionary. A director of one
bottler wrote a letter to Coke’s chief executive and board asking
for Dunn’s head. “He said what I had done was the worst thing
he had seen in 50 years in the business,” Dunn said. “Just to
placate these crazy leftist school districts who were trying to
keep people from having their Coke. He said I was an embar-
rassment to the company, and I should be fired.” In February
2004, he was.
Dunn told me that talking about Coke’s business today was
by no means easy and, because he continues to work in the food
business, not without risk. “You really don’t want them mad at
you,” he said. “And I don’t mean that, like, I’m going to end
up at the bottom of the bay. But they don’t have a sense of
humor when it comes to this stuff. They’re a very, very aggres-
sive company.”
When I met with Dunn, he told me not just about his years at
Coke but also about his new marketing venture. In April 2010,
he met with three executives from Madison Dearborn Partners,
a private-equity firm based in Chicago with a wide-ranging
portfolio of investments. They recently hired Dunn to run one
of their newest acquisitions—a food producer in the San Joaquin
Valley. As they sat in the hotel’s meeting room, the men listened
to Dunn’s marketing pitch. He talked about giving the product a
personality that was bold and irreverent, conveying the idea that
this was the ultimate snack food. He went into detail on how he
would target a special segment of the 146 million Americans who
are regular snackers—mothers, children, young professionals—
people, he said, who “keep their snacking ritual fresh by trying a
new food product when it catches their attention.”

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He explained how he would deploy strategic storytelling in
the ad campaign for this snack, using a key phrase that had
been developed with much calculation: “Eat ’Em Like Junk
Food.”
After 45 minutes, Dunn clicked off the last slide and thanked
the men for coming. Madison’s portfolio contained the largest
Burger King franchise in the world, the Ruth’s Chris Steak
House chain and a processed-food maker called AdvancePierre
whose lineup includes the Jamwich, a peanut-butter-and-jelly
contrivance that comes frozen, crustless and embedded with
four kinds of sugars.
The snack that Dunn was proposing to sell: carrots. Plain,
fresh carrots. No added sugar. No creamy sauce or dips. No salt.
Just baby carrots, washed, bagged, then sold into the deadly dull
produce aisle.
“We act like a snack, not a vegetable,” he told the investors.
“We exploit the rules of junk food to fuel the baby-carrot con-
versation. We are pro-junk-food behavior but anti-junk-food
establishment.”
The investors were thinking only about sales. They had
already bought one of the two biggest farm producers of baby
carrots in the country, and they’d hired Dunn to run the whole
operation. Now, after his pitch, they were relieved. Dunn had
figured out that using the industry’s own marketing ploys would
work better than anything else. He drew from the bag of tricks
that he mastered in his 20 years at Coca-Cola, where he learned
one of the most critical rules in processed food: The selling of
food matters as much as the food itself.
Later, describing his new line of work, Dunn told me he was
doing penance for his Coca-Cola years. “I’m paying my karmic
debt,” he said.

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Joining the Conversation

1. Michael Moss provides three examples of scientific research
on junk food and its effects. What common denominator
links these examples? What makes the science of addictive
junk food so extraordinary?

2. Moss opens this essay by describing a meeting that the lead-
ers of several major food companies held to discuss the obe-
sity epidemic and how to respond to it. Why do you think
he begins with this story? How does it set the stage for the
rest of the piece?

3. Moss is able to present complex technical information so
that nonscientists can understand it. One way he does this
is by using colloquial language to explain technical terms
such as “product optimization,” “bliss point,” and “sensory-
specific satiety.” This technique helps us understand his
topic, but how also does it make his argument interesting—
and persuasive?

4. Moss reports that the major food companies hire experts to
make their products as appealing as possible. Similarly, on
pp. 496–505, Marion Nestle discusses ways that psychologists
and marketing specialists help supermarkets arrange items to
increase their appeal and boost sales. Now that you know
about these tactics, what are some specific actions you can
take to guard against manipulation when you shop for food?

5. If Jeffrey Dunn could turn carrots into “the ultimate snack
food” (paragraph 53) what other healthy foods could be simi-
larly transformed? Beets? Kale? What else? Write an essay
proposing such a product. Use the “they say/I say” format,
perhaps quoting or summarizing something said in Moss’s
essay as your “they say.”

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The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate

M A R I O N N E S T L E

A visit to a large supermarket can be a daunting experience:
so many aisles, so many brands and varieties, so many prices to
keep track of and labels to read, so many choices to make. No
wonder. To repeat: An astonishing 320,000 edible products are
for sale in the United States, and any large supermarket might
display as many as 40,000 of them. You are supposed to feel
daunted—bewildered by all the choices and forced to wander
through the aisles in search of the items you came to buy. The
big companies that own most supermarkets want you to do as
much searching as you can tolerate. It is no coincidence that
one supermarket is laid out much like another: breathtaking
amounts of research have gone into designing these places.

Marion Nestle teaches in the department of nutrition, food
studies, and public health at New York University. She writes a
monthly column on food for the San Francisco Chronicle and blogs
at foodpolitics.com. Her many books include Food Politics: How the
Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (2003) and What to Eat:
An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating (2006),
from which this essay is taken.

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There are precise reasons why milk is at the back of the store
and the center aisles are so long. You are forced to go past
thousands of other products on your way to get what you need.
Supermarkets say they are in the business of offering “choice.”
Perhaps, but they do everything possible to make the choice
theirs, not yours. Supermarkets are not social service agencies
providing food for the hungry. Their job is to sell food, and
more of it. From their perspective, it is your problem if what
you buy makes you eat more food than you need, and more of
the wrong kinds of foods in particular.
And supermarket retailers know more than you could
possibly imagine about how to push your “buy” buttons. Half
a century ago, Vance Packard revealed their secrets in his
book The Hidden Persuaders. His most shocking revelation?
Corporations were hiring social scientists to study unconscious

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human emotions, not for the good of humanity but to help
companies manipulate people into buying products. Packard’s
chapter on supermarket shopping, “Babes in Consumerland,”
is as good a guide as anything that has been written since to
methods for getting you—and your children—to “reach out,
hypnotically . . . and grab boxes of cookies, candies, dog food,
and everything else that delights or interests [you].”
More recent research on consumer behavior not only
confirms his observations but continues to be awe-inspiring in
its meticulous attention to detail. Your local library has entire
textbooks and academic journals devoted to investigations of
consumer behavior and ways to use the results of that research to
sell products. Researchers are constantly interviewing shoppers
and listening carefully to what they are told. Because of scanners,
supermarkets can now track your purchases and compare what
you tell researchers to what you actually buy. If you belong to
a supermarket discount “shoppers club,” the store gains your
loyalty but gets to track your personal buying habits in exchange.
This research tells food retailers how to lay out the stores, where
to put specific products, how to position products on shelves, and
how to set prices and advertise products. At the supermarket,
you exercise freedom of choice and personal responsibility every
time you put an item in your shopping cart, but massive efforts
have gone into making it more convenient and desirable for you
to choose some products rather than others.
As basic marketing textbooks explain, the object of the
game is to “maximize sales and profit consistent with customer
convenience.” Translated, this means that supermarkets want
to expose you to the largest possible number of items that you

can stand to see, without annoying you so much that
you run screaming from the store. This strategy is based
on research proving that “the rate of exposure is

See Chapter 3
for tips on

how to frame
quotations.

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directly related to the rate of sale of merchandise.” In other
words, the more you see, the more you buy. Supermarkets
dearly wish they could expose you to every single item they
carry, every time you shop. Terrific as that might be for your
walking regimen, you are unlikely to endure having to trek
through interminable aisles to find the few items you came
in for—and retailers know it. This conflict creates a serious
dilemma for the stores. They have to figure out how to get
you to walk up and down those aisles for as long as possible,
but not so long that you get frustrated. To resolve the dilemma,
the stores make some compromises—but as few as possible.
Overall, supermarket design follows fundamental rules, all of
them based firmly on extensive research.

• Place the highest-selling food departments in the parts of
the store that get the greatest flow of traffic—the periphery.
Perishables—meat, produce, dairy, and frozen foods—generate
the most sales, so put them against the back and side walls.

• Use the aisle nearest the entrance for items that sell especially
well on impulse or look or smell enticing—produce, flowers,
or freshly baked bread, for example. These must be the first
things customers see in front or immediately to the left
or right (the direction, according to researchers, doesn’t
matter).

• Use displays at the ends of aisles for high-profit, heavily
advertised items likely to be bought on impulse.

• Place high-profit, center-aisle food items sixty inches above
the floor where they are easily seen by adults, with or without
eyeglasses.

• Devote as much shelf space as possible to brands that generate
frequent sales; the more shelf space they occupy, the better
they sell.

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• Place store brands immediately to the right of those high-
traffic items (people read from left to right), so that the name
brands attract shoppers to the store brands too.

• Avoid using “islands.” These make people bump into each
other and want to move on. Keep the traffic moving, but
slowly.

• Do not create gaps in the aisles that allow customers to
cross over to the next one unless the aisles are so long that
shoppers complain. If shoppers can escape mid-aisle, they
will miss seeing half the products along that route.

Additional principles, equally well researched, guide every
other aspect of supermarket design: product selection, place-
ment on shelves, and display. The guiding principle of super-
market layout is the same: products seen most sell best. Think
of the supermarket as a particularly intense real estate market
in which every product competes fiercely against every other for
precious space. Because you can see products most easily at eye
level, at the ends of aisles, and at the checkout counters, these
areas are prime real estate. Which products get the prime space?
The obvious answer: the ones most profitable for the store.
But store profitability is not simply a matter of the price
charged for a product compared to its costs. Stores also col-
lect revenue by “renting” real estate to the companies whose
products they sell. Product placement depends on a system of
“incentives” that sometimes sound suspiciously like bribes. Food
companies pay supermarkets “slotting fees” for the shelf space
they occupy. The rates are highest for premium, high-traffic
space, such as the shelves near cash registers. Supermarkets
demand and get additional sources of revenue from food compa-
nies in “trade allowances,” guarantees that companies will buy
local advertising for the products for which they pay slotting

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fees. The local advertising, of course, helps to make sure that
products in prime real estate sell quickly.
This unsavory system puts retail food stores in firm control
of the marketplace. They make the decisions about which
products to sell and, therefore, which products you buy. This
system goes beyond a simple matter of supply and demand.
The stores create demand by putting some products where
you cannot miss them. These are often “junk” foods full of
cheap, shelf-stable ingredients like hydrogenated oils and corn
sweeteners, made and promoted by giant food companies that
can afford slotting fees, trade allowances, and advertising. This
is why entire aisles of prime supermarket real estate are devoted
to soft drinks, salty snacks, and sweetened breakfast cereals, and
why you can always find candy next to cash registers. Any new
product that comes into a store must come with guaranteed
advertising, coupons, discounts, slotting fees, and other such
incentives.
Slotting fees emerged in the 1980s as a way for stores to
cover the added costs of dealing with new products: shelving,
tracking inventory, and removing products that do not sell.
But the system is so corrupt and so secret that Congress held
hearings about it in 1999. The industry people who testified at
those hearings were so afraid of retribution that they wore hoods
and used gadgets to prevent voice recognition. The General
Accounting Office, the congressional watchdog agency (now
called the Government Accountability Office), was asked to do
its own investigation but got nowhere because the retail food
industry refused to cooperate.
The defense of the current system by both the retailers who
demand the fees and the companies that agree to pay them
comes at a high cost—out of your pocket. You pay for this
system in at least three ways: higher prices at the supermarket;

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taxes that in part compensate for business tax deductions
that food companies are allowed to t ake for slotting fees and
advertising; and the costs of treating illnesses that might result
from consuming more profitable but less healthful food products.
In 2005, supermarkets sold more than $350 billion worth of
food in the United States, but this level of sales does not stop
them from complaining about low after-tax profit margins—
just 1 to 3 percent of sales. One percent of $350 billion is
$3.5 billion, of course, but by some corporate standards that
amount is too little to count. In any case, corporations have
to grow to stay viable, so corporate pressures on supermarkets
to increase sales are unrelenting. The best way to expand sales,
say researchers, is to increase the size of the selling area and
the number of items offered. Supermarkets do both. In the
last de cade, mergers and acquisitions have turned the top-
ranking supermarkets—Kroger, Albertsons, and Safeway—
into companies with annual sales of $56, $40, and $36 billion,
respectively. Small chains, like Whole Foods and Wegmans,
have sales in the range of just $4 billion a year.
But sales brought in by these small chains are peanuts
compared to those of the store that now dominates the entire
retail food marketplace: Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart sold $284 billion
worth of goods in 2005. Groceries accounted for about one-
quarter of that amount, but that meant $64 billion, and rising.
Many food companies do a third of their business with this one
retailer. Wal-Mart does not have to demand slotting fees. If
a food company wants its products to be in Wal-Mart, it has
to offer rock-bottom prices. Low prices sound good for people
without much money, but nutritionally, there’s a catch. Low
prices encourage everyone to buy more food in bigger packages.
If you buy more, you are quite likely to eat more. And if you eat
more, you are more likely to gain weight and become less healthy.

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Food retailers argue that if you eat too much it is your prob-
lem, not theirs. But they are in the business of encouraging you
to buy more food, not less. Take the matter of package size and
price. I often talk to business groups about such matters and at a
program for food executives at Cornell University, I received a
barrage of questions about where personal responsibility fits into
this picture. One supermarket manager insisted that his store does
not force customers to buy Pepsi in big bottles. He also offers Pepsi
in 8-ounce cans. The sizes and prices are best shown in a Table.

Price of Pepsi-Cola, P&C Market,
Ithaca, New York, July 2005

Container Size Total Ounces Price Price per Quart

2-liter bottle 67 $1.49 $0.71

24-ounce bottles (6-pack) 144 $3.00* $0.67

16-ounce bottles (6-pack) 96 $2.99 $1.00

12-ounce cans (12-pack) 144 $4.49 $1.00

8-ounce cans (6-pack) 48 $2.25 $1.50

*This is with a P&C store membership “Wild Card.”

In this store, the 2-liter container and the special-for-
members 6-pack of 24-ounce bottles were less than half the
cost of the equivalent volume in 8-ounce cans. Supermarket
managers tell me that this kind of pricing is not the store’s
problem. If you want smaller sizes, you should be willing to pay
more for them. But if you care about how much you get for
a price, you are likely to pick the larger sizes. And if you buy
the larger sizes, you are likely to drink more Pepsi and take in
more calories; the 8-ounce cans of Pepsi contain 100 calories
each, but the 2-liter bottle holds 800 calories.
Sodas of any size are cheap because they are mostly water
and corn sweeteners—water is practically free, and your taxes

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pay to subsidize corn production. This makes the cost of the
ingredients trivial compared to labor and packaging, so the
larger sizes are more profitable to the manufacturer and to
the stores. The choice is yours, but anyone would have a hard
time choosing a more expensive version of a product when a
cheaper one is right there. Indeed, you have to be strong and
courageous to hold out for healthier choices in the supermarket
system as it currently exists.
You could, of course, bring a shopping list, but good luck
sticking to it. Research says that about 70 percent of shoppers
bring lists into supermarkets, but only about 10 percent adhere
to them. Even with a list, most shoppers pick up two additional
items for every item on it. The additions are “in-store decisions,”
or impulse buys. Stores directly appeal to your senses to distract
you from worrying about lists. They hope you will:

• Listen to the background music. The slower the beat, the
longer you will tarry.

• Search for the “loss leaders” (the items you always need, like
meat, coffee, or bananas, that are offered at or below their
actual cost). The longer you search, the more products you
will see.

• Go to the bakery, prepared foods, and deli sections; the sights
and good smells will keep you lingering and encourage sales.

• Taste the samples that companies are giving away. If you like
what you taste, you are likely to buy it.

• Put your kids in the play areas; the longer they play there,
the more time you have to walk those tempting aisles.

If you find yourself in a supermarket buying on impulse and
not minding it a bit, you are behaving exactly the way store
managers want you to. You will be buying the products they

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have worked long and hard to make most attractive and con-
venient for you—and most profitable for them.

Joining the Conversation

1. The title of this essay tells us the topic: supermarkets. The
subtitle adds some metacommentary, telling us Nestle’s main
point. What is the main point?

2. Why, according to Nestle, do supermarket chains invest so
heavily in consumer research? What does she claim are the
results of this research? Give two or three examples from her
text.

3. Writers often use metacommentary to explain something
they’ve said, to elaborate on an idea, or to offer other such
guidance. Paragraph 5 includes two examples of metacom-
mentary, in the second and fourth sentences. What purposes
do these sentences serve? Find several other instances of
metacommentary in this essay and explain their purposes.
See Chapter 10 for more on metacommentary.

4. According to Nestle, food retailers say that if we eat too
much, it’s our problem, “not theirs.” What do you think
David Zinczenko would say to that (pp. 462−65)?

5. Reread Nestle’s article and then do some of your own field
research. Visit a supermarket and see if Nestle’s observations
hold true: what’s the first thing you see? What products are
at the end of the aisles? Which ones are at eye level? Is there
music with a slow beat—and if so, does it make you linger?
Then write an essay agreeing, disagreeing, or both agreeing
and disagreeing with Nestle. If you agree, you’ll still need
to bring something new to the conversation, drawing from
your own observations or insights.

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How Junk Food Can End Obesity

D A V I D H . F R E E D M A N

Demonizing processed food may be dooming many to obesity and
disease. Could embracing the drive-thru make us all healthier?

Late last year, in a small health-food eatery called
Cafe Sprouts in Oberlin, Ohio, I had what may well have
been the most wholesome beverage of my life. The friendly
server patiently guided me to an apple-blueberry-kale-carrot
smoothie-juice combination, which she spent the next several
minutes preparing, mostly by shepherding farm-fresh produce
into machinery. The result was tasty, but at 300 calories (by my
rough calculation) in a 16-ounce cup, it was more than my diet
could regularly absorb without consequences, nor was I about
to make a habit of $9 shakes, healthy or not.

David H. Freedman is the author of Wrong: Why Experts Keep
Failing Us—and How to Know When Not to Trust Them (2010) and
the coauthor, with Eric Abrahamson, of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden
Benefits of Disorder (2007). He is a contributing editor at the Atlantic
and Inc. magazines and is widely published on issues relating to science,
technology, and health care. He blogs at fatandskinner.org. This essay
first appeared in the July/August 2013 issue of the Atlantic.

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Inspired by the experience nonetheless, I tried again two
months later at L.A.’s Real Food Daily, a popular vegan res-
taurant near Hollywood. I was initially wary of a low-calorie
juice made almost entirely from green vegetables, but the server
assured me it was a popular treat. I like to brag that I can eat
anything, and I scarf down all sorts of raw vegetables like candy,
but I could stomach only about a third of this oddly foamy,
bitter concoction. It smelled like lawn clippings and tasted like
liquid celery. It goes for $7.95, and I waited 10 minutes for it.
I finally hit the sweet spot just a few weeks later, in Chicago,
with a delicious blueberry-pomegranate smoothie that rang in
at a relatively modest 220 calories. It cost $3 and took only
seconds to make. Best of all, I’ll be able to get this concoction
just about anywhere. Thanks, McDonald’s!
If only the McDonald’s smoothie weren’t, unlike the first two,
so fattening and unhealthy. Or at least that’s what the most-prom-
inent voices in our food culture today would have you believe.

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An enormous amount of media space has been dedicated
to promoting the notion that all processed food, and only
processed food, is making us sickly and overweight. In this
narrative, the food-industrial complex—particularly the fast-
food industry—has turned all the powers of food-processing
science loose on engineering its offerings to addict us to fat,
sugar, and salt, causing or at least heavily contributing to the
obesity crisis. The wares of these pimps and pushers, we are
told, are to be universally shunned.
Consider the New York Times. Earlier this year, the Times
Magazine gave its cover to a long piece based on Michael
Moss’s about-to-be-best-selling book, Salt Sugar Fat: How the
Food Giants Hooked Us. Hitting bookshelves at about the same
time was the former Times reporter Melanie Warner’s Pandora’s
Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal,
which addresses more or less the same theme. Two years ago
the Times Magazine featured the journalist Gary Taubes’s “Is
Sugar Toxic?,” a cover story on the evils of refined sugar and
high-fructose corn syrup. And most significant of all has been
the considerable space the magazine has devoted over the years
to Michael Pollan, a journalism professor at the University of
California at Berkeley, and his broad indictment of food pro-
cessing as a source of society’s health problems.
“The food they’re cooking is making people sick,” Pollan has
said of big food companies. “It is one of the reasons that we
have the obesity and diabetes epidemics that we do. . . . If you’re
going to let industries decide how much salt, sugar and fat is
in your food, they’re going to put [in] as much as they possibly
can. . . . They will push those buttons until we scream or die.”
The solution, in his view, is to replace Big Food’s engineered,
edible evil—through public education and regulation—with
fresh, unprocessed, local, seasonal, real food.

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Pollan’s worldview saturates the public conversation on
healthy eating. You hear much the same from many scientists,
physicians, food activists, nutritionists, celebrity chefs, and
pundits. Foodlike substances, the derisive term Pollan uses
to describe processed foods, is now a solid part of the elite
vernacular. Thousands of restaurants and grocery stores, most
notably the Whole Foods chain, have thrived by answering the
call to reject industrialized foods in favor of a return to natural,
simple, nonindustrialized—let’s call them “wholesome”—foods.

Michael Pollan

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The two newest restaurants in my smallish Massachusetts town
both prominently tout wholesome ingredients; one of them is
called the Farmhouse, and it’s usually packed.
A new generation of business, social, and policy entrepre-
neurs is rising to further cater to these tastes, and to challenge
Big Food. Silicon Valley, where tomorrow’s entrepreneurial
and social trends are forged, has spawned a small ecosystem
of wholesome-friendly venture-capital firms (Physic Ventures,
for example), business accelerators (Local Food Lab), and Web
sites (Edible Startups) to fund, nurture, and keep tabs on young
companies such as blissmo (a wholesome-food-of-the-month
club), Mile High Organics (online wholesome-food shop-
ping), and Wholeshare (group wholesome-food purchasing),
all designed to help reacquaint Americans with the simpler
eating habits of yesteryear.
In virtually every realm of human existence, we turn to
technology to help us solve our problems. But even in Silicon
Valley, when it comes to food and obesity, technology—or
at least food-processing technology—is widely treated as if it
is the problem. The solution, from this viewpoint, necessarily
involves turning our back on it.
If the most-influential voices in our food culture today get
their way, we will achieve a genuine food revolution. Too bad it
would be one tailored to the dubious health fantasies of a small,
elite minority. And too bad it would largely exclude the obese
masses, who would continue to sicken and die early. Despite the
best efforts of a small army of wholesome-food heroes, there is
no reasonable scenario under which these foods could become
cheap and plentiful enough to serve as the core diet for most
of the obese population—even in the unlikely case that your
typical junk-food eater would be willing and able to break life-
long habits to embrace kale and yellow beets. And many of

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the dishes glorified by the wholesome-food movement are, in
any case, as caloric and obesogenic as anything served in a
Burger King.
Through its growing sway over health-conscious consumers
and policy makers, the wholesome-food movement is imped-
ing the progress of the one segment of the food world that is
actually positioned to take effective, near-term steps to reverse
the obesity trend: the processed-food industry. Popular food
producers, fast-food chains among them, are already applying
various tricks and technologies to create less caloric and more
satiating versions of their junky fare that nonetheless retain
much of the appeal of the originals, and could be induced to
go much further. In fact, these roundly demonized companies
could do far more for the public’s health in five years than
the wholesome-food movement is likely to accomplish in the
next 50. But will the wholesome-food advocates let them?

Michael Pollan Has No Clothes

Let’s go shopping. We can start at Whole Foods Market, a criti-
cal link in the wholesome-eating food chain. There are three
Whole Foods stores within 15 minutes of my house—we’re big
on real food in the suburbs west of Boston. Here at the largest of
the three, I can choose from more than 21 types of tofu, 62 bins
of organic grains and legumes, and 42 different salad greens.
Much of the food isn’t all that different from what I can get in
any other supermarket, but sprinkled throughout are items that
scream “wholesome.” One that catches my eye today, sitting
prominently on an impulse-buy rack near the checkout counter,
is Vegan Cheesy Salad Booster, from Living Intentions, whose
package emphasizes the fact that the food is enhanced with spiru-
lina, chlorella, and sea vegetables. The label also proudly lets me

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know that the contents are raw—no processing!—and that they
don’t contain any genetically modified ingredients. What the stuff
does contain, though, is more than three times the fat content
per ounce as the beef patty in a Big Mac (more than two-thirds
of the calories come from fat), and four times the sodium.
After my excursion to Whole Foods, I drive a few minutes
to a Trader Joe’s, also known for an emphasis on wholesome
foods. Here at the register I’m confronted with a large display
of a snack food called “Inner Peas,” consisting of peas that are
breaded in cornmeal and rice flour, fried in sunflower oil, and
then sprinkled with salt. By weight, the snack has six times as
much fat as it does protein, along with loads of carbohydrates.
I can’t recall ever seeing anything at any fast-food restaurant
that represents as big an obesogenic crime against the vegetable
kingdom. (A spokesperson for Trader Joe’s said the company
does not consider itself a “ ‘wholesome food’ grocery retailer.”
Living Intentions did not respond to a request for comment.)
This phenomenon is by no means limited to packaged food
at upscale supermarkets. Back in February, when I was at Real
Food Daily in Los Angeles, I ordered the “Sea Cake” along
with my green-vegetable smoothie. It was intensely delicious
in a way that set off alarm bells. RFD wouldn’t provide precise
information about the ingredients, but I found a recipe online
for “Tofu ‘Fish’ Cakes,” which seem very close to what I ate.
Essentially, they consist of some tofu mixed with a lot of refined
carbs (the RFD version contains at least some unrefined carbs)
along with oil and soy milk, all fried in oil and served with a
soy-and-oil-based tartar sauce. (Tofu and other forms of soy are
high in protein, but per 100 calories, tofu is as fatty as many cuts
of beef.) L.A. being to the wholesome-food movement what
Hawaii is to Spam, I ate at two other mega-popular wholesome-
food restaurants while I was in the area. At Café Gratitude

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I enjoyed the kale chips and herb-cornmeal-crusted eggplant
parmesan, and at Akasha I indulged in a spiced-lamb-sausage
flatbread pizza. Both are pricey orgies of fat and carbs.
I’m not picking out rare, less healthy examples from these
establishments. Check out their menus online: fat, sugar, and
other refined carbs abound. (Café Gratitude says it uses only
“healthy” fats and natural sweeteners; Akasha says its focus is
not on “health food” but on “farm to fork” fare.) In fact, because
the products and dishes offered by these types of establishments
tend to emphasize the healthy-sounding foods they contain, I
find it much harder to navigate through them to foods that go
easy on the oil, butter, refined grains, rice, potatoes, and sugar
than I do at far less wholesome restaurants. (These dishes also
tend to contain plenty of sea salt, which Pollanites hold up as
the wholesome alternative to the addictive salt engineered by
the food industry, though your body can’t tell the difference.)
One occasional source of obesogenic travesties is the New
York Times Magazine’s lead food writer, Mark Bittman, who
now rivals Pollan as a shepherd to the anti-processed-food flock.
(Salon, in an article titled “How to Live What Michael Pollan
Preaches,” called Bittman’s 2009 book, Food Matters, “both a
cookbook and a manifesto that shows us how to eat better—and
save the planet.”) I happened to catch Bittman on the Today
show last year demonstrating for millions of viewers four ways
to prepare corn in summertime, including a lovely dish of corn
sautéed in bacon fat and topped with bacon. Anyone who thinks
that such a thing is much healthier than a Whopper just hasn’t
been paying attention to obesity science for the past few decades.
That science is, in fact, fairly straightforward. Fat carries
more than twice as many calories as carbohydrates and proteins
do per gram, which means just a little fat can turn a serving of
food into a calorie bomb. Sugar and other refined carbohydrates,

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like white flour and rice, and high-starch foods, like corn and
potatoes, aren’t as calorie-dense. But all of these “problem carbs”
charge into the bloodstream as glucose in minutes, providing an
energy rush, commonly followed by an energy crash that can
lead to a surge in appetite.
Because they are energy-intense foods, fat and sugar and
other problem carbs trip the pleasure and reward meters placed
in our brains by evolution over the millions of years during
which starvation was an ever-present threat. We’re born enjoy-
ing the stimulating sensations these ingredients provide, and
exposure strengthens the associations, ensuring that we come
to crave them and, all too often, eat more of them than we
should. Processed food is not an essential part of this story:
recent examinations of ancient human remains in Egypt, Peru,
and elsewhere have repeatedly revealed hardened arteries, sug-
gesting that pre-industrial diets, at least of the affluent, may not
have been the epitome of healthy eating that the Pollanites

Mark Bittman demonstrates cooking on the Today show.

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make them out to be. People who want to lose weight and keep
it off are almost always advised by those who run successful
long-term weight-loss programs to transition to a diet high in
lean protein, complex carbs such as whole grains and legumes,
and the sort of fiber vegetables are loaded with. Because these
ingredients provide us with the calories we need without the
big, fast bursts of energy, they can be satiating without pushing
the primitive reward buttons that nudge us to eat too much.
(A few words on salt: Yes, it’s unhealthy in large amounts,
raising blood pressure in many people; and yes, it makes food
more appealing. But salt is not obesogenic—it has no
calories, and doesn’t specifically increase the desire
to consume high-calorie foods. It can just as easily be
enlisted to add to the appeal of vegetables. Lumping it in with
fat and sugar as an addictive junk-food ingredient is a confused
proposition. But let’s agree we want to cut down on it.)
To be sure, many of Big Food’s most popular products are
loaded with appalling amounts of fat and sugar and other prob-
lem carbs (as well as salt), and the plentitude of these ingre-
dients, exacerbated by large portion sizes, has clearly helped
foment the obesity crisis. It’s hard to find anyone anywhere who
disagrees. Junk food is bad for you because it’s full of fat and
problem carbs. But will switching to wholesome foods free us
from this scourge? It could in theory, but in practice, it’s hard
to see how. Even putting aside for a moment the serious ques-
tions about whether wholesome foods could be made accessible
to the obese public, and whether the obese would be willing to
eat them, we have a more immediate stumbling block: many of
the foods served up and even glorified by the wholesome-food
movement are themselves chock full of fat and problem carbs.
Some wholesome foodies openly celebrate fat and problem
carbs, insisting that the lack of processing magically renders

See Chapter 6
for ways to
anticipate
objections.

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them healthy. In singing the praises of clotted cream and lard-
loaded cookies, for instance, a recent Wall Street Journal article
by Ron Rosenbaum explained that “eating basic, earthy, fatty
foods isn’t just a supreme experience of the senses—it can actu-
ally be good for you,” and that it’s “too easy to conflate eating
fatty food with eating industrial, oil-fried junk food.” That’s
right, we wouldn’t want to make the same mistake that all the
cells in our bodies make. Pollan himself makes it clear in his
writing that he has little problem with fat—as long as it’s not
in food “your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize.”
Television food shows routinely feature revered chefs tossing
around references to healthy eating, “wellness,” and farm-fresh
ingredients, all the while spooning lard, cream, and sugar over
everything in sight. (A study published last year in the British
Medical Journal found that the recipes in the books of top TV
chefs call for “significantly more” fat per portion than what’s
contained in ready-to-eat supermarket meals.) Corporate well-
ness programs, one of the most promising avenues for getting
the population to adopt healthy behaviors, are falling prey
to this way of thinking as well. Last November, I attended a
stress-management seminar for employees of a giant consulting
company, and listened to a high-powered professional wellness
coach tell the crowded room that it’s okay to eat anything as
long as its plant or animal origins aren’t obscured by processing.
Thus, she explained, potato chips are perfectly healthy, because
they plainly come from potatoes, but Cheetos will make you
sick and fat, because what plant or animal is a Cheeto? (For
the record, typical potato chips and Cheetos have about equally
nightmarish amounts of fat calories per ounce; Cheetos have
fewer carbs, though more salt.)
The Pollanites seem confused about exactly what benefits
their way of eating provides. All the railing about the fat, sugar,

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and salt engineered into industrial junk food might lead one
to infer that wholesome food, having not been engineered,
contains substantially less of them. But clearly you can take
in obscene quantities of fat and problem carbs while eating
wholesomely, and to judge by what’s sold at wholesome stores
and restaurants, many people do. Indeed, the more converts
and customers the wholesome-food movement’s purveyors seek,
the stronger their incentive to emphasize foods that light up
precisely the same pleasure centers as a 3 Musketeers bar. That
just makes wholesome food stealthily obesogenic.
Hold on, you may be thinking. Leaving fat, sugar, and salt
aside, what about all the nasty things that wholesome foods do
not, by definition, contain and processed foods do? A central
claim of the wholesome-food movement is that wholesome is
healthier because it doesn’t have the artificial flavors, preserva-
tives, other additives, or genetically modified ingredients found
in industrialized food; because it isn’t subjected to the physical
transformations that processed foods go through; and because
it doesn’t sit around for days, weeks, or months, as industrial-
ized food sometimes does. (This is the complaint against the
McDonald’s smoothie, which contains artificial flavors and
texture additives, and which is pre-mixed.)
The health concerns raised about processing itself—rather
than the amount of fat and problem carbs in any given dish—
are not, by and large, related to weight gain or obesity. That’s
important to keep in mind, because obesity is, by an enormous
margin, the largest health problem created by what we eat. But
even putting that aside, concerns about processed food have
been magnified out of all proportion.
Some studies have shown that people who eat wholesomely
tend to be healthier than people who live on fast food and
other processed food (particularly meat), but the problem with

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such studies is obvious: substantial nondietary differences exist
between these groups, such as propensity to exercise, smoking
rates, air quality, access to health care, and much more. (Some
researchers say they’ve tried to control for these factors, but
that’s a claim most scientists don’t put much faith in.) What’s
more, the people in these groups are sometimes eating entirely
different foods, not the same sorts of foods subjected to differ-
ent levels of processing. It’s comparing apples to Whoppers,
instead of Whoppers to hand-ground, grass-fed-beef burgers
with heirloom tomatoes, garlic aioli, and artisanal cheese. For
all these reasons, such findings linking food type and health
are considered highly unreliable, and constantly contradict one
another, as is true of most epidemiological studies that try to
tackle broad nutritional questions.
The fact is, there is simply no clear, credible evidence that
any aspect of food processing or storage makes a food uniquely
unhealthy. The U.S. population does not suffer from a critical
lack of any nutrient because we eat so much processed food.
(Sure, health experts urge Americans to get more calcium,
potassium, magnesium, fiber, and vitamins A, E, and C, and
eating more produce and dairy is a great way to get them, but
these ingredients are also available in processed foods, not to
mention supplements.) Pollan’s “foodlike substances” are regu-
lated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (with some
exceptions, which are regulated by other agencies), and their
effects on health are further raked over by countless scien-
tists who would get a nice career boost from turning up the
hidden dangers in some common food-industry ingredient or
technique, in part because any number of advocacy groups and
journalists are ready to pounce on the slightest hint of risk.
The results of all the scrutiny of processed food are hardly
scary, although some groups and writers try to make them

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appear that way. The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Food Additives
Project, for example, has bemoaned the fact that the FDA
directly reviews only about 70 percent of the ingredients found
in food, permitting the rest to pass as “generally recognized
as safe” by panels of experts convened by manufacturers. But
the only actual risk the project calls out on its Web site or
in its publications is a quote from a Times article noting that
bromine, which has been in U.S. foods for eight decades, is
regarded as suspicious by many because flame retardants con-
taining bromine have been linked to health risks. There is no
conclusive evidence that bromine itself is a threat.
In Pandora’s Lunchbox, Melanie Warner assiduously catalogs
every concern that could possibly be raised about the health
threats of food processing, leveling accusations so vague, weakly
supported, tired, or insignificant that only someone already con-
vinced of the guilt of processed food could find them troubling.
While ripping the covers off the breakfast-cereal conspiracy, for
example, Warner reveals that much of the nutritional value
claimed by these products comes not from natural ingredients
but from added vitamins that are chemically synthesized, which
must be bad for us because, well, they’re chemically synthesized.
It’s the tautology at the heart of the movement: processed foods
are unhealthy because they aren’t natural, full stop.
In many respects, the wholesome-food movement veers
awfully close to religion. To repeat: there is no hard evidence
to back any health-risk claims about processed food—evidence,
say, of the caliber of several studies by the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention that have traced food poisoning to raw
milk, a product championed by some circles of the wholesome-
food movement. “Until I hear evidence to the contrary, I think
it’s reasonable to include processed food in your diet,” says
Robert Kushner, a physician and nutritionist and a professor

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at Northwestern University’s medical school, where he is the
clinical director of the Comprehensive Center on Obesity.
There may be other reasons to prefer wholesome food to
the industrialized version. Often stirred into the vague stew of
benefits attributed to wholesome food is the “sustainability”
of its production—that is, its long-term impact on the planet.
Small farms that don’t rely much on chemicals and heavy
industrial equipment may be better for the environment than
giant industrial farms—although that argument quickly becomes
complicated by a variety of factors. For the purposes of this article,
let’s simply stipulate that wholesome foods are environmentally
superior. But let’s also agree that when it comes to prioritizing
among food-related public-policy goals, we are likely to save and
improve many more lives by focusing on cutting obesity—through
any available means—than by trying to convert all of industrial
agriculture into a vast constellation of small organic farms.
The impact of obesity on the chances of our living long, pro-
ductive, and enjoyable lives has been so well documented at
this point that I hate to drag anyone through the grim statistics
again. But let me just toss out one recent dispatch from the world
of obesity-havoc science: a study published in February in the
journal Obesity found that obese young adults and middle-agers in
the U.S. are likely to lose almost a decade of life on average, as
compared with their non-obese counterparts. Given our obesity
rates, that means Americans who are alive today can collectively
expect to sacrifice 1 billion years to obesity. The study adds to a
river of evidence suggesting that for the first time in modern his-
tory—and in spite of many health-related improvements in our
environment, our health care, and our nondietary habits—our
health prospects are worsening, mostly because of excess weight.
By all means, let’s protect the environment. But let’s not rule
out the possibility of technologically enabled improvements to

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our diet—indeed, let’s not rule out any food—merely because
we are pleased by images of pastoral family farms. Let’s first pick
the foods that can most plausibly make us healthier, all things
considered, and then figure out how to make them environ-
mentally friendly.

4 4 4

The Food Revolution We Need

The one fast-food restaurant near a busy East L.A. intersection
otherwise filled with bodegas was a Carl’s Jr. I went in and saw
that the biggest and most prominent posters in the store were
pushing a new grilled-cod sandwich. It actually looked pretty
good, but it wasn’t quite lunchtime, and I just wanted a cup of
coffee. I went to the counter to order it, but before I could say
anything, the cashier greeted me and asked, “Would you like to
try our new Charbroiled Atlantic Cod Fish Sandwich today?”
Oh, well, sure, why not? (I asked her to hold the tartar sauce,
which is mostly fat, but found out later that the sandwich is

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normally served with about half as much tartar sauce as the
notoriously fatty Filet-O-Fish sandwich at McDonald’s, where
the fish is battered and fried.) The sandwich was delicious. It was
less than half the cost of the Sea Cake appetizer at Real Food
Daily. It took less than a minute to prepare. In some ways, it was
the best meal I had in L.A., and it was probably the healthiest.
We know perfectly well who within our society has developed
an extraordinary facility for nudging the masses to eat certain
foods, and for making those foods widely available in cheap and
convenient forms. The Pollanites have led us to conflate the
industrial processing of food with the adding of fat and sugar in
order to hook customers, even while pushing many faux-healthy
foods of their own. But why couldn’t Big Food’s processing and
marketing genius be put to use on genuinely healthier foods,
like grilled fish? Putting aside the standard objection that the
industry has no interest in doing so—we’ll see later that in fact
the industry has plenty of motivation for taking on this chal-
lenge—wouldn’t that present a more plausible answer to Amer-
ica’s junk-food problem than ordering up 50,000 new farmers’
markets featuring locally grown organic squash blossoms?
According to Lenard Lesser, of the Palo Alto Medical Foun-
dation, the food industry has mastered the art of using in-store
and near-store promotions to shape what people eat. As Lesser
and I drove down storied Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and
into far less affluent Oakland, leaving behind the Whole Foods
Markets and sushi restaurants for gas-station markets and bar-
becued-rib stands, he pointed out the changes in the billboards.
Whereas the last one we saw in Berkeley was for fruit juice,
many in Oakland tout fast-food joints and their wares, includ-
ing several featuring the Hot Mess Burger at Jack in the Box.
Though Lesser noted that this forest of advertising may simply
reflect Oakland residents’ preexisting preference for this type of

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food, he told me lab studies have indicated that the more signs
you show people for a particular food product or dish, the more
likely they are to choose it over others, all else being equal.
We went into a KFC and found ourselves traversing a maze
of signage that put us face-to-face with garish images of vari-
ous fried foods that presumably had some chicken somewhere
deep inside them. “The more they want you to buy something,
the bigger they make the image on the menu board,” Lesser
explained. Here, what loomed largest was the $19.98 fried-
chicken-and-corn family meal, which included biscuits and
cake. A few days later, I noticed that McDonald’s places large
placards showcasing desserts on the trash bins, apparently cal-
culating that the best time to entice diners with sweets is when
they think they’ve finished their meals.
Trying to get burger lovers to jump to grilled fish may already
be a bit of a stretch—I didn’t see any of a dozen other cus-
tomers buy the cod sandwich when I was at Carl’s Jr., though
the cashier said it was selling reasonably well. Still, given
the food industry’s power to tinker with and market food, we
should not dismiss its ability to get unhealthy eaters—slowly,
incrementally—to buy better food.
That brings us to the crucial question: Just how much
healthier could fast-food joints and processed-food companies
make their best-selling products without turning off customers?
I put that question to a team of McDonald’s executives, sci-
entists, and chefs who are involved in shaping the company’s
future menus, during a February visit to McDonald’s surprisingly
bucolic campus west of Chicago. By way of a partial answer, the
team served me up a preview tasting of two major new menu
items that had been under development in their test kitchens
and high-tech sensory-testing labs for the past year, and which
were rolled out to the public in April. The first was the Egg

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White Delight McMuffin ($2.65), a lower-calorie, less fatty
version of the Egg McMuffin, with some of the refined flour
in the original recipe replaced by whole-grain flour. The other
was one of three new Premium McWraps ($3.99), crammed
with grilled chicken and spring mix, and given a light coating
of ranch dressing amped up with rice vinegar. Both items tasted
pretty good (as do the versions in stores, I’ve since confirmed,
though some outlets go too heavy on the dressing). And they
were both lower in fat, sugar, and calories than not only many
McDonald’s staples, but also much of the food served in whole-
some restaurants or touted in wholesome cookbooks.

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In fact, McDonald’s has quietly been making healthy changes
for years, shrinking portion sizes, reducing some fats, trimming
average salt content by more than 10 percent in the past couple
of years alone, and adding fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy, and
oatmeal to its menu. In May, the chain dropped its Angus third-
pounders and announced a new line of quarter-pound burgers,
to be served on buns containing whole grains. Outside the core
fast-food customer base, Americans are becoming more health-
conscious. Public backlash against fast food could lead to regulatory
efforts, and in any case, the fast-food industry has every incentive
to maintain broad appeal. “We think a lot about how we can bring
nutritionally balanced meals that include enough protein, along
with the tastes and satisfaction that have an appetite-tiding effect,”
said Barbara Booth, the company’s director of sensory science.
Such steps are enormously promising, says Jamy Ard, an
epidemiology and preventive-medicine researcher at Wake
Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North
Carolina, and a co-director of the Weight Management Center
there. “Processed food is a key part of our environment, and
it needs to be part of the equation,” he explains. “If you can
reduce fat and calories by only a small amount in a Big Mac, it
still won’t be a health food, but it wouldn’t be as bad, and that
could have a huge impact on us.” Ard, who has been working for
more than a decade with the obese poor, has little patience with
the wholesome-food movement’s call to eliminate fast food in
favor of farm-fresh goods. “It’s really naive,” he says. “Fast food
became popular because it’s tasty and convenient and cheap.
It makes a lot more sense to look for small, beneficial changes
in that food than it does to hold out for big changes in what
people eat that have no realistic chance of happening.”
According to a recent study, Americans get 11 percent of
their calories, on average, from fast food—a number that’s

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almost certainly much higher among the less affluent over-
weight. As a result, the fast-food industry may be uniquely
positioned to improve our diets. Research suggests that calorie
counts in a meal can be trimmed by as much as 30 percent
without eaters noticing—by, for example, reducing portion sizes
and swapping in ingredients that contain more fiber and water.
Over time, that could be much more than enough to literally
tip the scales for many obese people. “The difference between
losing weight and not losing weight,” says Robert Kushner, the
obesity scientist and clinical director at Northwestern, “is a few
hundred calories a day.”
Which raises a question: If McDonald’s is taking these sorts
of steps, albeit in a slow and limited way, why isn’t it more
loudly saying so to deflect criticism? While the company has
heavily plugged the debut of its new egg-white sandwich and
chicken wraps, the ads have left out even a mention of health,
the reduced calories and fat, or the inclusion of whole grains.
McDonald’s has practically kept secret the fact that it has also
begun substituting whole-grain flour for some of the less healthy
refined flour in its best-selling Egg McMuffin.
The explanation can be summed up in two words that surely
strike fear into the hearts of all fast-food executives who hope
to make their companies’ fare healthier: McLean Deluxe.
Among those who gleefully rank such things, the McLean
Deluxe reigns as McDonald’s worst product failure of all time,
eclipsing McPasta, the McHotdog, and the McAfrica (don’t
ask). When I brought up the McLean Deluxe to the innovation
team at McDonald’s, I faced the first and only uncomfortable
silence of the day. Finally, Greg Watson, a senior vice president,
cleared his throat and told me that neither he nor anyone else
in the room was at the company at the time, and he didn’t
know that much about it. “It sounds to me like it was ahead

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of its time,” he added. “If we had something like that in the
future, we would never launch it like that again.”
Introduced in 1991, the McLean Deluxe was perhaps the
boldest single effort the food industry has ever undertaken to
shift the masses to healthier eating. It was supposed to be a
healthier version of the Quarter Pounder, made with extra-lean
beef infused with seaweed extract. It reportedly did reasonably
well in early taste tests—for what it’s worth, my wife and I were
big fans—and McDonald’s pumped the reduced-fat angle to the
public for all it was worth. The general reaction varied from
lack of interest to mockery to revulsion. The company gamely
flogged the sandwich for five years before quietly removing it
from the menu.
The McLean Deluxe was a sharp lesson to the industry, even
if in some ways it merely confirmed what generations of parents
have well known: if you want to turn off otherwise eager eaters
to a dish, tell them it’s good for them. Recent studies suggest that
calorie counts placed on menus have a negligible effect on food
choices, and that the less-health-conscious might even use the
information to steer clear of low-calorie fare—perhaps assuming
that it tastes worse and is less satisfying, and that it’s worse value
for their money. The result is a sense in the food industry that
if it is going to sell healthier versions of its foods to the general
public—and not just to that minority already sold on healthier
eating—it is going to have to do it in a relatively sneaky way,
emphasizing the taste appeal and not the health benefits. “People
expect something to taste worse if they believe it’s healthy,” says
Charles Spence, an Oxford University neuroscientist who spe-
cializes in how the brain perceives food. “And that expectation
affects how it tastes to them, so it actually does taste worse.”
Thus McDonald’s silence on the nutritional profiles of
its new menu items. “We’re not making any health claims,”

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Watson said. “We’re just saying it’s new, it tastes great, come
on in and enjoy it. Maybe once the product is well seated with
customers, we’ll change that message.” If customers learn that
they can eat healthier foods at McDonald’s without even real-
izing it, he added, they’ll be more likely to try healthier foods
there than at other restaurants. The same reasoning presumably
explains why the promotions and ads for the Carl’s Jr. grilled-
cod sandwich offer not a word related to healthfulness, and
why there wasn’t a whiff of health cheerleading surrounding
the turkey burger brought out earlier this year by Burger King
(which is not yet calling the sandwich a permanent addition).
If the food industry is to quietly sell healthier products to
its mainstream, mostly non-health-conscious customers, it must
find ways to deliver the eating experience that fat and problem
carbs provide in foods that have fewer of those ingredients.
There is no way to do that with farm-fresh produce and whole-
some meat, other than reducing portion size. But processing
technology gives the food industry a potent tool for trimming
unwanted ingredients while preserving the sensations they
deliver.
I visited Fona International, a flavor-engineering company
also outside Chicago, and learned that there are a battery of
tricks for fooling and appeasing taste buds, which are prone
to notice a lack of fat or sugar, or the presence of any of the
various bitter, metallic, or otherwise unpleasant flavors that
vegetables, fiber, complex carbs, and fat or sugar substitutes can
impart to a food intended to appeal to junk-food eaters. Some
5,000 FDA-approved chemical compounds—which represent
the base components of all known flavors—line the shelves
that run alongside Fona’s huge labs. Armed with these ingredi-
ents and an array of state-of-the-art chemical-analysis and test-
ing tools, Fona’s scientists and engineers can precisely control

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flavor perception. “When you reduce the sugar, fat, and salt in
foods, you change the personality of the product,” said Robert
Sobel, a chemist, who heads up research at the company. “We
can restore it.”
For example, fat “cushions” the release of various flavors
on the tongue, unveiling them gradually and allowing them
to linger. When fat is removed, flavors tend to immediately
inundate the tongue and then quickly flee, which we register as
a much less satisfying experience. Fona’s experts can reproduce
the “temporal profile” of the flavors in fattier foods by adding
edible compounds derived from plants that slow the release of
flavor molecules; by replacing the flavors with similarly fla-
vored compounds that come on and leave more slowly; or by
enlisting “phantom aromas” that create the sensation of certain
tastes even when those tastes are not present on the tongue.
(For example, the smell of vanilla can essentially mask reduc-
tions in sugar of up to 25 percent.) One triumph of this sort
of engineering is the modern protein drink, a staple of many
successful weight-loss programs and a favorite of those trying to
build muscle. “Seven years ago they were unpalatable,” Sobel
said. “Today we can mask the astringent flavors and eggy aromas
by adding natural ingredients.”
I also visited Tic Gums in White Marsh, Maryland, a
company that engineers textures into food products. Texture
hasn’t received the attention that flavor has, noted Greg Andon,
Tic’s boyish and ebullient president, whose family has run the
company for three generations. The result, he said, is that even
people in the food industry don’t have an adequate vocabulary
for it. “They know what flavor you’re referring to when you
say ‘forest floor,’ but all they can say about texture is ‘Can
you make it more creamy?’ ” So Tic is inventing a vocabulary,
breaking textures down according to properties such as “mouth

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coating” and “mouth clearing.” Wielding an arsenal of some
20 different “gums”—edible ingredients mostly found in tree
sap, seeds, and other plant matter—Tic’s researchers can make
low-fat foods taste, well, creamier; give the same full body that
sugared drinks offer to sugar-free beverages; counter chalkiness
and gloopiness; and help orchestrate the timing of flavor bursts.
(Such approaches have nothing in common with the ill-fated
Olestra, a fat-like compound engineered to pass undigested
through the body, and billed in the late 1990s as a fat substitute
in snack foods. It was made notorious by widespread anecdotal
complaints of cramps and loose bowels, though studies seemed
to contradict those claims.)
Fona and Tic, like most companies in their industry, won’t
identify customers or product names on the record. But both
firms showed me an array of foods and beverages that were under
construction, so to speak, in the name of reducing calories, fat,
and sugar while maintaining mass appeal. I’ve long hated the
taste of low-fat dressing—I gave up on it a few years ago and just
use vinegar—but Tic served me an in-development version of
a low-fat salad dressing that was better than any I’ve ever had.
Dozens of companies are doing similar work, as are the big food-
ingredient manufacturers, such as ConAgra, whose products are
in 97 percent of American homes, and whose whole-wheat flour
is what McDonald’s is relying on for its breakfast sandwiches.
Domino Foods, the sugar manufacturer, now sells a low-calorie
combination of sugar and the nonsugar sweetener stevia that
has been engineered by a flavor company to mask the sort of
nonsugary tastes driving many consumers away from diet bever-
ages and the like. “Stevia has a licorice note we were able to
have taken out,” explains Domino Foods CEO Brian O’Malley.
High-tech anti-obesity food engineering is just warming up.
Oxford’s Charles Spence notes that in addition to flavors and

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textures, companies are investigating ways to exploit a stream
of insights that have been coming out of scholarly research
about the neuroscience of eating. He notes, for example, that
candy companies may be able to slip healthier ingredients into
candy bars without anyone noticing, simply by loading these
ingredients into the middle of the bar and leaving most of the fat
and sugar at the ends of the bar. “We tend to make up our minds
about how something tastes from the first and last bites, and
don’t care as much what happens in between,” he explains. Some
other potentially useful gimmicks he points out: adding weight
to food packaging such as yogurt containers, which convinces
eaters that the contents are rich with calories, even when they’re
not; using chewy textures that force consumers to spend more
time between bites, giving the brain a chance to register satiety;
and using colors, smells, sounds, and packaging information to
create the belief that foods are fatty and sweet even when they
are not. Spence found, for example, that wine is perceived as
50 percent sweeter when consumed under a red light.
Researchers are also tinkering with food ingredients to boost
satiety. Cargill has developed a starch derived from tapioca that
gives dishes a refined-carb taste and mouthfeel, but acts more
like fiber in the body—a feature that could keep the appetite
from spiking later. “People usually think that processing leads
to foods that digest too quickly, but we’ve been able to use
processing to slow the digestion rate,” says Bruce McGoogan,
who heads R&D for Cargill’s North American food-ingredient
business. The company has also developed ways to reduce fat in
beef patties, and to make baked goods using half the usual sugar
and oil, all without heavily compromising taste and texture.
Other companies and research labs are trying to turn
out healthier, more appealing foods by enlisting ultra-high
pressure, nanotechnology, vacuums, and edible coatings. At

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the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Center for Foods
for Health and Wellness, Fergus Clydesdale, the director of
the school’s Food Science Policy Alliance—as well as a spry
70-something who’s happy to tick off all the processed food
in his diet—showed me labs where researchers are looking
into possibilities that would not only attack obesity but also
improve health in other significant ways, for example by
isolating ingredients that might lower the risk of cancer and
concentrating them in foods. “When you understand foods at
the molecular level,” he says, “there’s a lot you can do with
food and health that we’re not doing now.”

The Implacable Enemies of Healthier Processed Food

What’s not to like about these developments? Plenty, if you’ve
bought into the notion that processing itself is the source of the
unhealthfulness of our foods. The wholesome-food movement is
not only talking up dietary strategies that are unlikely to help
most obese Americans; it is, in various ways, getting in the way
of strategies that could work better.
The Pollanites didn’t invent resistance to healthier popular
foods, as the fates of the McLean Deluxe and Olestra demon-
strate, but they’ve greatly intensified it. Fast food and junk food
have their core customer base, and the wholesome-food gurus
have theirs. In between sit many millions of Americans—the
more the idea that processed food should be shunned no matter
what takes hold in this group, the less incentive fast-food joints
will have to continue edging away from the fat- and problem-
carb-laden fare beloved by their most loyal customers to try to
broaden their appeal.
Pollan has popularized contempt for “nutritionism,” the idea
behind packing healthier ingredients into processed foods. In

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his view, the quest to add healthier ingredients to food isn’t a
potential solution, it’s part of the problem. Food is healthy not
when it contains healthy ingredients, he argues, but when it
can be traced simply and directly to (preferably local) farms. As
he resonantly put it in The Times in 2007: “If you’re concerned
about your health, you should probably avoid food products that
make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food
product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food
is what you want to eat.”
In this way, wholesome-food advocates have managed to pre-
damn the very steps we need the food industry to take, placing
the industry in a no-win situation: If it maintains the status quo,
then we need to stay away because its food is loaded with fat
and sugar. But if it tries to moderate these ingredients, then it is
deceiving us with nutritionism. Pollan explicitly counsels avoid-
ing foods containing more than five ingredients, or any hard-to-
pronounce or unfamiliar ingredients. This rule eliminates almost
anything the industry could do to produce healthier foods that
retain mass appeal—most of us wouldn’t get past xanthan gum—
and that’s perfectly in keeping with his intention.
By placing wholesome eating directly at odds with healthier
processed foods, the Pollanites threaten to derail the reformation
of fast food just as it’s starting to gain traction. At McDonald’s,
“Chef Dan”—that is, Dan Coudreaut, the executive chef and
director of culinary innovation—told me of the dilemma the
movement has caused him as he has tried to make the menu
healthier. “Some want us to have healthier food, but others
want us to have minimally processed ingredients, which can
mean more fat,” he explained. “It’s becoming a balancing act
for us.” That the chef with arguably the most influence in the
world over the diet of the obese would even consider adding
fat to his menu to placate wholesome foodies is a pretty good

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sign that something has gone terribly wrong with our approach
to the obesity crisis.
Many people insist that the steps the food industry has
already taken to offer less-obesogenic fare are no more than cyn-
ical ploys to fool customers into eating the same old crap under
a healthy guise. In his 3,500-word New York Times Magazine
article on the prospects for healthier fast food, Mark Bittman
lauded a new niche of vegan chain restaurants while devoting
just one line to the major “quick serve” restaurants’ contribu-
tion to better health: “I’m not talking about token gestures,
like the McDonald’s fruit-and-yogurt parfait, whose calories are
more than 50 percent sugar.” Never mind that 80 percent of
a farm-fresh apple’s calories come from sugar; that almost any
obesity expert would heartily approve of the yogurt parfait as a
step in the right direction for most fast-food-dessert eaters; and
that many of the desserts Bittman glorifies in his own writing
make the parfait look like arugula, nutrition-wise. (His recipe
for corn-and-blueberry crisp, for example, calls for adding two-
thirds of a cup of brown sugar to a lot of other problem carbs,
along with five tablespoons of butter.)
Bittman is hardly alone in his reflexive dismissals. No sooner
had McDonald’s and Burger King rolled out their egg-white
sandwich and turkey burger, respectively, than a spate of arti-
cles popped up hooting that the new dishes weren’t healthier
because they trimmed a mere 50 and 100 calories from their
standard counterparts, the Egg McMuffin and the Whopper.
Apparently these writers didn’t understand, or chose to ignore,
the fact that a reduction of 50 or 100 calories in a single dish
places an eater exactly on track to eliminate a few hundred calo-
ries a day from his or her diet—the critical threshold needed for
long-term weight loss. Any bigger reduction would risk leaving
someone too hungry to stick to a diet program. It’s just the sort

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of small step in the right direction we should be aiming for,
because the obese are much more likely to take it than they
are to make a big leap to wholesome or very-low-calorie foods.
Many wholesome foodies insist that the food industry won’t
make serious progress toward healthier fare unless forced to by
regulation. I, for one, believe regulation aimed at speeding the
replacement of obesogenic foods with appealing healthier foods
would be a great idea. But what a lot of foodies really want is
to ban the food industry from selling junk food altogether. And
that is just a fantasy. The government never managed to keep
the tobacco companies from selling cigarettes, and banning
booze (the third-most-deadly consumable killer after cigarettes
and food) didn’t turn out so well. The two most health-
enlightened, regulation-friendly major cities in America, New
York and San Francisco, tried to halt sales of two of the most
horrific fast-food assaults on health—giant servings of sugared
beverages and kids’ fast-food meals accompanied by toys,
respectively—and neither had much luck. Michelle Obama is
excoriated by conservatives for asking schools to throw more
fruits and vegetables into the lunches they serve. Realistically,
the most we can hope for is a tax on some obesogenic foods.
The research of Lisa Powell, a University of Illinois professor,
suggests that a 20 percent tax on sugary beverages would
reduce consumption by about 25 percent. (As for fatty foods,
no serious tax proposal has yet been made in the U.S., and if
one comes along, the wholesome foodies might well join the
food industry and most consumers in opposing it. Denmark did
manage to enact a fatty-food tax, but it was deemed a failure
when consumers went next door into Germany and Sweden
to stock up on their beloved treats.)
Continuing to call out Big Food on its unhealthy offerings,
and loudly, is one of the best levers we have for pushing it

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toward healthier products—but let’s call it out intelligently,
not reflexively. Executives of giant food companies may be
many things, but they are not stupid. Absent action, they risk
a growing public-relations disaster, the loss of their more afflu-
ent and increasingly health-conscious customers, and the threat
of regulation, which will be costly to fight, even if the new
rules don’t stick. Those fears are surely what’s driving much of
the push toward moderately healthier fare within the industry
today. But if the Pollanites convince policy makers and the
health-conscious public that these foods are dangerous by virtue
of not being farm-fresh, that will push Big Food in a different
direction (in part by limiting the profit potential it sees in
lower-fat, lower-problem-carb foods), and cause it to spend its
resources in other ways.
Significant regulation of junk food may not go far, but we
have other tools at our disposal to prod Big Food to intensify
and speed up its efforts to cut fat and problem carbs in its
offerings, particularly if we’re smart about it. Lenard Lesser
points out that government and advocacy groups could start
singling out particular restaurants and food products for praise or
shaming—a more official version of “eat this, not that”—rather
than sticking to a steady drumbeat of “processed food must
go away.” Academia could do a much better job of producing
and highlighting solid research into less obesogenic, high-mass-
appeal foods, and could curtail its evidence-light anti-food-
processing bias, so that the next generation of social and policy
entrepreneurs might work to narrow the gap between the poor
obese and the well-resourced healthy instead of inadvertently
widening it. We can keep pushing our health-care system to
provide more incentives and support to the obese for losing
weight by making small, painless, but helpful changes in their
behavior, such as switching from Whoppers to turkey burgers,

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from Egg McMuffins to Egg White Delights, or from blueberry
crisp to fruit-and-yogurt parfaits.
And we can ask the wholesome-food advocates, and those
who give them voice, to make it clearer that the advice they
sling is relevant mostly to the privileged healthy—and to start
getting behind realistic solutions to the obesity crisis.

Joining the Conversation

1. Early in this essay, David Freedman explicitly lays out a “they
say” that frames his argument. Summarize the position that
he then sets out to refute.

2. What is Freedman’s argument, and how does he support it?
Why do you think he cites his own personal experiences?
What do they contribute to his argument—and to his essay
as a whole?

3. Paragraphs 30 and 31 introduce opinions that differ from
Freedman’s views. How fairly does he represent these
opposing views, and how persuasively does he respond to
what they say?

4. Freedman is particularly critical of the views of Michael
Pollan (pp. 420–27). What are his specific criticisms? How
do you think Pollan might respond?

5. What do you think? Could “embracing the drive-thru make
us all healthier”? Write an essay responding to Freedman,
saying what you think—and why. Draw from your own expe-
rience as well as from information in his essay in arguing for
what you say.

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NINETEEN

what’s up with
the american dream?

What is more fundamental to most Americans than the
belief that we are the authors of our own fate—that we are in
control, particularly when it comes to our economic success?
We go to school, study, get jobs, and work hard, all with the
assumption that doing so will allow us to achieve financial
security, rise up the economic ladder, and perhaps even achieve
great wealth. This faith in the American Dream, in the United
States as a land of opportunity, was alive and well in 1867 when
Horatio Alger Jr. published his first “rags-to-riches” novel fea-
turing Ragged Dick, a penniless young man who works his way
up from poverty to a position of respectability. But in recent
times, many have wondered whether the American Dream is
still achievable. Consider the image on the facing page, which
originally accompanied “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” an
Atlantic Monthly article by the Nobel Prize–winning economist
Joseph Stiglitz. Would Ragged Dick be able to work his way up
into the larger of the two houses today?
Political scientist Robert Putnam wrote in 2013, “My
hometown—Port Clinton, Ohio, population 6,050—was in the
1950s a passable embodiment of the American Dream, a place
that offered decent opportunity for the children of bankers and

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W H A T ’ S U P W I T H T H E A M E R I C A N D R E A M ?

factory workers alike. But a half-century later, wealthy kids park
BMW convertibles in the Port Clinton High School lot next
to decrepit ‘junkers’ in which homeless classmates live. The
American Dream has turned into a split-screen nightmare.” His
critique and those of others raise the question of whether or
not the American Dream, which has sustained us for so long,
is truly in trouble.
Several of the writers in this chapter echo Putnam’s con-
cerns: in their view, the American Dream has been undermined
by a combination of global economic developments and gov-
ernment policies that have perilously widened the gulf between
the very rich and the rest of us. Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize–
winning economist, expresses a classic liberal position, highlight-
ing the fact that the incomes of the wealthiest Americans have
increased greatly in recent decades while middle-class incomes
have remained stagnant, and offers policy recommendations to
increase opportunities for all. Journalist Monica Potts looks at
studies showing a significant recent decrease in life expectancy
among white women lacking high-school degrees in order to
raise questions about economic prospects among the rural poor.
Edward McClelland examines the role of industrial decline in
the loss of middle-class American jobs. Though several of these
writers question whether the dream of equal opportunity ever
delivered for most Americans in the way that Alger and oth-
ers suggested, they all argue that the last two decades have so
shifted the balance of wealth and power to large corporations
and the privileged few that even the humble financial security
that average Americans dream about is becoming just that: a
dream with little chance of realization.
Other writers in this unit take a more conservative position,
suggesting that alarmist critiques are unwarranted and that the
American Dream is alive and well. Tim Roemer, a former U.S.

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What’s Up with the American Dream?

congressman and ambassador to India, points out that count-
less people still wish to come to this country, expecting—and
finding—a chance at prosperity for themselves and their fami-
lies. Entrepreneur Shayan Zadeh, one such immigrant who
built a successful business here, argues that immigration laws
should be changed to allow entrepreneurs to more easily enter
the country and start businesses. Student Brandon King argues
that opportunities for advancement still exist in the United
States and that the economic situation of the average person
would improve if taxes were lowered and government support
for Wall Street increased. Finally, economists Gary S. Becker
(also a Nobel Prize winner) and Kevin M. Murphy concede the
existence of income inequality but assert that such inequality
is actually good for the economy as a whole.
While these two camps argue over possibilities for upward
mobility, others take a middle-ground position. New York Times
economics writer David Leonhardt takes a balanced view, argu-
ing that while the income gap is widening in the United States,
the potential for increasing broad-based prosperity still exists
and can be realized with a few straightforward shifts in eco-
nomic policy. And a Pew Research report discusses the pes-
simism many Americans feel concerning progress made toward
racial equality, along with persistent disparities among the races
in terms of income, education, and other measures of “well-
being and civic engagement.”
As you read this chapter, you will have a chance to make
your own contribution to this ongoing discussion.

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Inequality Has Been Going on Forever . . .
but That Doesn’t Mean It’s Inevitable

D A V I D L E O N H A R D T

We have been living with rising income inequality for
so long—in good times and bad, under Republican presidents
and Democratic ones—that it has come to seem inevitable. It
is no longer news that the affluent did better than everyone
else during the booms of the 1980s and ’90s and through the
mediocre growth of this century’s first years. Or that the rich
have recovered from the financial crisis far better than the rest
of country.
But with exquisite timing, one of the most ambitious (and
best-reviewed) books on the subject in years—Thomas
Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”—appeared

David Leonhardt is the managing editor of The Upshot, a New York
Times site that “presents news, analysis and data visualization about
politics and policy.” He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commen-
tary for his columns about economic issues for the Times, where he
served as Washington bureau chief. He is also the author of an e-book,
Here’s the Deal: How Washington Can Solve the Deficit and Spur Growth
(2013). This article first appeared in the New York Times Magazine on
May 4, 2014.

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Inequality Has Been Going on Forever . . .

this spring to argue that rising inequality wasn’t merely a fea-
ture of our times. It has been the historical norm, writes
Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics. Inequal-
ity has risen throughout much of modern history, he writes,
with the notable exceptions of wars, depressions and their
aftermath, when everyone was forced to rebuild from a more
equal place. And inequality is likely to continue
increasing for decades, he says. Ultimately, we could
end up with a society in which the rich separate them-
selves from everyone else, perpetuating their wealth from one
generation to the next, as nobility of past centuries did.
That prospect sounds depressing, but it doesn’t necessarily
have to turn out that way. To say that something is likely, or
even natural, is not to say that it is inevitable. Not so long ago,
the rich owned a much smaller share of this country’s resources
and made a smaller share of its income than many of their
predecessors. Perhaps more important, even though inequality
has risen abroad, it has done so far less rapidly. Other developed
economies . . . are not more equal simply because they lack
success stories, like Warren Buffett, or have fewer investment
bankers or hedge-fund executives. Instead, their middle class
and poor have enjoyed more aggressively rising incomes, all
while their economies grow as rapidly as this country’s in recent
years. A more equal society does not mean a less dynamic one.
(Germany is notably alone among wealthy European countries
in having broad-based income trends nearly as weak as the
United States.)
Inequality, then, is less an inevitability than a choice. Just as
societies have conquered many of the challenges of the natural
world—making childbirth safe for women or beating back com-
mon illnesses that once were frequent killers—we can alter the
course of inequality, too.

See Chapter 2
for tips on
summarizing
an argument.

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5 4 4

For all of the clarity of Piketty’s historical analysis, I emerged
from the book not quite grasping the mechanics of rising
inequality. What is it about market economies that typically
cause the assets and incomes of the rich to rise more rapidly
than those of everyone else? So I called Piketty at his office in
Paris, and he agreed to walk me through it.
He suggested imagining a hypothetical village from centuries
ago in which neither the population nor the economy was grow-
ing. Every year, the village produced the same amount of goods
for the same number of people to divide—a reality that was typi-
cal before the Enlightenment, when material living standards
and human longevity barely rose. (The peasants of the 15th
century were not better off than peasants in ancient Rome.)
Even in a zero-growth society, however, assets that helped peo-
ple produce goods—also known as capital—had value. Capital,
Piketty told me, counts as anything “useful, any kind of equip-
ment. Basic tools. Stones in prehistorical times.” Anything, in
other words, that “makes people more productive.”
In our hypothetical village, a large farm might produce
$10,000 worth of crops in a year and yield $1,000 in profit for
its owner. A small farm might have the same 10 percent rate of
return: $1,000 in annual crop sales, yielding $100 in profit. If
the large farmer and small farmer each spent all of their money
every year, the situation could continue ad infinitum, Piketty
said, and the rate of inequality in the village would not change.
But one of capital’s great advantages is that its owners can
make enough income to spend some of their money and sock
the rest of it away. If the large farmer saved $500 of that $1,000
profit, he could buy more capital, which would bring more
profit. Perhaps a few owners of smaller farms had debts to pay,
and one of the large farmers bought them out. Eventually, the
owner of the expanding farm might find himself owning land

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5 4 5

that yielded $1,500 or $2,000 in annual profit, allowing him
to put aside more and more for future capital acquisitions.
Less-stylized versions of this story have been playing out for
centuries.
I have come to think of this idea as Piketty’s First Law of
Inequality. The fact that the rich earn enough money to save
money allows them to make investments that other people
simply cannot afford. And investments—whether stones, land,
corporate stock or education—tend to bring a positive return.
Piketty describes the relationship formally as r > g: the rate of
return on capital usually exceeds economic growth.
Piketty, however, notes that certain things can disrupt this
relationship. When a war destroys farms, the big farmers are
no longer much richer than anyone else. A depression can play
the same role. When income or wealth is taxed at high rates,
the rich are not able to save and accumulate as much. It’s no
accident that in the decades after World War II, when middle-
class incomes were rising even more rapidly than the incomes of
the rich, the top marginal income-tax rates were exceptionally
high. In the 1950s, the top rate exceeded 90 percent. Today, it
is 39.6 percent, and only because President Obama finally won
a yearslong battle with Republicans in early 2013 to increase it
from 35 percent.
Piketty advocates a global wealth tax aimed more directly
at capital inequality than income taxes currently are. It would
apply to anyone with more than about $1.4 million in net worth
and become steeper on higher fortunes than moderate ones. It’s
an interesting idea, but it has little, if any, chance of passing the
current legislative environment. Yet Piketty mentions another,
more politically plausible force that can disrupt his first law of
inequality: education. When a society becomes more educated,
many of its less-wealthy citizens quickly acquire an ephemeral

Inequality Has Been Going on Forever . . .

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D A V I D L E O N H A R D T

5 4 6

but nonetheless crucial form of capital—knowledge—that can
bring enormous returns. They learn to make objects and accom-
plish tasks more efficiently, and they sometimes create entirely
new objects (or services). They become those children in the
small village who attended school, went off to work in a factory,
became managers and made bigger economic leaps above their
parents than those of the large farmer did.
The great income gains for the American middle class and
poor in the mid-to-late 20th century came after this country
made high school universal and turned itself into the most edu-
cated nation in the world. As the economists Claudia Goldin
and Lawrence Katz have written, “The 20th century was the
American century because it was the human-capital century.”
Education continues to pay today, despite the scare stories to
the contrary. The pay gap between college graduates and eve-
ryone else in this country is near its all-time high. The coun-
tries that have done a better job increasing their educational
attainment, like Canada and Sweden, have also seen bigger
broad-based income gains than the United States.
Yet the debate over our schools and colleges tends to exist in
a separate political universe from our debate over inequality. Lib-
erals often shy away from making the connection because they
worry it holds the struggling middle class and poor responsible
for their plight and distracts from income redistribution. Many
conservatives fear the implicit government spending involved.
And so, our once-large international lead in educational attain-
ment has vanished, and our lead in inequality has grown.
There are some reasons for optimism in education. Char-
ter schools and school systems that have tried to introduce
more accountability offer some lessons about what works and
doesn’t in K–12. The total number of college graduates has
begun rising again. That said, the changes in education—not

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5 4 7

to mention the tax code—are not nearly large enough to coun-
teract the forces pushing in the other direction. A true attack
on inequality would require that the country move the issue
to the center of every political debate: how we tax wealth,
how we tax the income of the middle class and poor (often
stealthily through the payroll tax), how we finance schools and
measure their results, how we tolerate income-sapping waste in
health care, how we build roads, transit systems and broadband
networks. These are precisely the sort of policies pursued by
countries with better recent middle-class income growth than
the United States.
The closest thing to an antihero in Piketty’s book is an
economist named Simon Kuznets, who argued in the decades
after World War II that inequality was destined to decline. His
soothing prediction grew out the experience of the previous few
decades, but he and many others confused a trend with destiny.
We are now making that same mistake in the opposite direc-
tion. Rising inequality is a trend, but it is one we have helped
create and one we can still change.

“Inequality Has Been Going on Forever . . . but That Doesn’t Mean It’s Inevi-
table,” by David Leonhardt. From The New York Times, May 2, 2014. © 2014
The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected
by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistri-
bution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission
is prohibited.

Joining the Conversation

1. The first two paragraphs of this essay offer a “they say” on
the subject of inequality. What is the argument that David
Leonhardt wants to discuss, and what is his “I say” in the
remainder of the essay?

Inequality Has Been Going on Forever . . .

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D A V I D L E O N H A R D T

5 4 8

2. Leonhardt discusses the views of French economist Thomas
Piketty throughout this piece. In one paragraph, summarize
Piketty’s views.

3. Leonhardt published this piece in the New York Times and
thus could assume that many of his readers were generally
informed about his topic. How might he have written it
differently for an audience of first-year college students?

4. Monica Potts’s essay (pp. 591−609) examines the effects of
poverty, lack of education, and scarce job opportunities on
rural Americans. How might some of the material discussed
in her essay be incorporated in Leonhardt’s essay to help him
support his argument about inequality?

5. In paragraph 14, Leonhardt suggests policies that could
reduce inequality: “how we tax wealth, how we tax the
income of the middle class and poor (often stealthily through
the payroll tax), how we finance schools and measure their
results, how we tolerate income-sapping waste in health
care, how we build roads, transit systems and broadband
networks . . . precisely the sort of policies pursued by coun-
tries with better recent middle-class income growth than
the United States.” Write an essay in which you first quote
or summarize and explain what he means and then present
your own views on this subject, drawing from readings in
this chapter.

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RIP, the Middle Class: 1946–2013

E D W A R D M C C L E L L A N D

I know I’m dating myself by writing this, but I remember
the middle class.
I grew up in an automaking town in the 1970s, when it was
still possible for a high school graduate—or even a high school
dropout—to get a job on an assembly line and earn more money
than a high school teacher.
“I had this student,” my history teacher once told me, “a
real chucklehead. Just refused to study. Dropped out of school,
a year or so later, he came back to see me. He pointed out
the window at a brand-new Camaro and said, ‘That’s my car.’
Meanwhile, I was driving a beat-up station wagon. I think he
was an electrician’s assistant or something. He handed light
bulbs to an electrician.”

Edward McClelland is a journalist and the author of several books,
including Nothin’ But Blue Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times, and Hopes
of America’s Industrial Heartland (2013) and Young Mr. Obama: Chicago
and the Making of a Black President (2010). His articles have appeared
in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and Slate—and you can
follow him on Twitter @tedmcclelland. This article first appeared on
September 20, 2013, in Salon, an online news site that often publishes
“fearless commentary and criticism.”

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E D W A R D M C C L E L L A N D

In our neighbors’ driveways, in their living rooms, in their
backyards, I saw the evidence of prosperity distributed equally
among the social classes: speedboats, Corvette Stingrays, water-
beds, snowmobiles, motorcycles, hunting rifles, RVs, CB radios.
I’ve always believed that the ’70s are remembered as the Decade
That Taste Forgot because they were a time when people with-
out culture or education had the money to not only indulge
their passions, but flaunt them in front of the entire nation.
It was an era, to use the title of a 1975 sociological study of a
Wisconsin tavern, of blue-collar aristocrats.
That all began to change in the 1980s. The recession at the
beginning of that decade—America’s first Great Recession—
was the beginning of the end for the bourgeois proletariat.

Steelworkers showed up for first shift to find padlocks
on mill gates. Autoworkers were laid off for years. The
lucky ones were transferred to plants far from home.
The unlucky never built another car.
When I was growing up, it was assumed that Ameri-

ca’s shared prosperity was the natural endpoint of our econo-
my’s development, that capitalism had produced the workers
paradise to which Communism unsuccessfully aspired. Now,
with the perspective of 40 years, it’s obvious that the nonstop
economic expansion that lasted from the end of World War II
to the Arab oil embargo of 1973 was a historical fluke, made
possible by the fact that the United States was the only coun-
try to emerge from that war with its industrial capacity intact.
Unfortunately, the middle class—especially the blue-collar
middle class—is also starting to look like a fluke, an interlude
between Gilded Ages that more closely reflect the way most
societies structure themselves economically. For the majority
of human history—and in the majority of countries today—
there have been only two classes: aristocracy and peasantry.

See p. 25 for
more ways

to introduce
something
implied or
assumed.

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5 5 1

It’s an order in which the many toil for subsistence wages
to provide luxuries for the few. Twentieth century America
temporarily escaped this stratification, but now, as statistics
on economic inequality demonstrate, we’re slipping back in
that direction. Between 1970 and today, the share of the
nation’s income that went to the middle class—households
earning two-thirds to double the national median—fell from
62 percent to 45 percent. Last year, the wealthiest 1 percent
took in 19 percent of America’s income—their highest share
since 1928. It’s as though the New Deal and the modern labor
movement never happened.
Here’s the story of a couple whose working lives began dur-
ing the Golden Age of middle-class employment, and are end-
ing in this current age of inequality. Gary Galipeau was born
in Syracuse, N.Y., in the baby boom sweet spot of 1948. At age
19, he hired in at his hometown’s flagship business, the Carrier
Corp., which gave Syracuse the title “Air-Conditioning Capital

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E D W A R D M C C L E L L A N D

of the World.” Starting at $2.37 an hour, Galipeau worked
his way into the skilled trades, eventually becoming a metal
fabricator earning 10 times his original wage.
“Understand,” he said, “in the mid-’60s, you could figura-
tively roll out of bed and find a manufacturing job.”
Voss joined Carrier after dropping out of Syracuse Univer-
sity, and getting laid off from an industrial laundry.
“It was 1978,” she said. “You could still go from factory to
factory. One day, a friend and I were looking for a job. We
saw this big building. We said, ‘Must be jobs in there.’ In those
days, you could fill out an application and get an interview the
same day. I was offered a job within three or four days, making
window units. I sprayed glue on fiberglass insulation, stuck it
inside units—400 a day, nearly one a minute. I was told, ‘After
five years, you’ll have a job for life. You’ll be golden.’ ”
Galipeau and Voss, who met working at Carrier, lost their
jobs in 2004, when the company moved the last of its Syracuse
manufacturing operations to Singapore. There, even the most
skilled workers were paid half the $27 an hour Galipeau had
earned as a metalworker. The corporation they’d expected to
spend their careers with divorced them in middle age, and now
they had to bridge the years until Social Security and Medicare.
Eligible for Trade Adjustment Assistance, because her job had
moved overseas, Voss earned a two-year degree in health infor-
mation technology—“a fancy way of saying medical records.”
Even with the degree, Voss couldn’t find decent-paying work
in healthcare, so she took a job with a sump pump manufac-
turer, for $12.47 an hour—a substantial drop from Carrier, but
decent money for Central New York in the A.D. of A/C. (The
No. 1 employer of ex-Carrier workers is an Iroquois casino.)
Less than two weeks into the new job, a thread on Voss’ work
glove wrapped itself around a drill press, taking Voss’ finger

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RIP, the Middle Class: 1946–2013

5 5 3

with it. The digit was torn off at the first knuckle. When Voss
returned to work, two months later, she found the factory so
distressing that she soon took a medical records job in a hos-
pital, paying $2.50 an hour less.
After earning a degree in human resources management,
Galipeau found that 56 was too old to start a new career. Fortu-
nate enough to draw a full pension from Carrier, Galipeau took
a part-time job at a supermarket meat counter, for the health
insurance. Syracuse’s leading vocations are now education and
medicine—the training of the young and the preservation of
the old. Where nothing is left for the middle-aged, or the mid-
dle class, it’s difficult to be both.
The shrinking of the middle class is not a failure of capital-
ism. It’s a failure of government. Capitalism has been doing
exactly what it was designed to do: concentrating wealth in
the ownership class, while providing the mass of workers with
just enough wages to feed, house and clothe themselves. Young
people who graduate from college to $9.80 an hour jobs as
sales clerks or data processors are giving up on the concept of
employment as a vehicle for improving their financial fortunes:
In a recent survey, 24 percent defined the American dream as
“not being in debt.” They’re not trying to get ahead. They’re
just trying to get to zero.
That’s the natural drift of the relationship between capital
and labor, and it can only be arrested by an activist government
that chooses to step in as a referee. The organizing victories that
founded the modern union movement were made possible by
the National Labor Relations Act, a piece of New Deal legisla-
tion guaranteeing workers the right to bargain collectively. The
plotters of the 1936–37 Flint Sit Down Strike, which gave birth
to the United Auto Workers, tried to time their action to coin-
cide with the inauguration of Frank Murphy, Michigan’s newly

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E D W A R D M C C L E L L A N D

elected New Deal governor. Murphy dispatched the National
Guard to Flint, but instead of ordering his guardsmen to throw
the workers out of the plants, as he legally could have done,
he ordered them to ensure the workers remained safely inside.
The strike resulted in a nickel an hour raise and an end to
arbitrary firings. It guaranteed the success of the UAW, whose
high wages and benefits set the standard for American work-
ers for the next 45 years. (I know a Sit Down Striker who
died on September 17, at 98 years old, an age he might not
have attained without the lifetime health benefits won by the
UAW.)
The United States will never again be as wealthy as it was
in the 1950s and ’60s. Never again will 18-year-olds graduate
directly from high school to jobs that pay well enough to buy a
house and support a family. (Even the auto plants now demand
a few years in junior college.) That was inevitable, due to the
recovery of our World War II enemies, and automation that
enables 5,000 workers to build the same number of cars that
once required 25,000 hands. What was not inevitable was the
federal government withdrawing its supervision of the economy
at the precise moment Americans began to need it more than
at any time since the Great Depression.
The last president who had a plan for protecting American
workers from the vicissitudes of the global economy was Richard
Nixon, who was in office when foreign steel and foreign cars
began seriously competing with domestic products. The most
farsighted politician of his generation, Nixon realized that
America’s economic hegemony was coming to an end, and was
determined to cushion the decline by (a) preventing foreign
manufacturers from overrunning our markets and (b) teaching
Americans to live within their new limits. When the United
States began running a trade deficit, Nixon tried to reverse the

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RIP, the Middle Class: 1946–2013

5 5 5

trend with a 10 percent tariff on imported products. After the
1973 Arab Oil Embargo suddenly increased the price of gaso-
line from 36 cents to 53 cents a gallon (and just as suddenly
increased the demand for fuel-efficient German and Japanese
cars), Nixon lowered the speed limit to 55 miles an hour and
introduced the Corporate Average Fuel Economy law, which
gave automakers until 1985 to double their fleetwide fuel effi-
ciency to 27.5 miles per gallon.
Had Nixon survived Watergate, he might have set the
nation on a course that emphasized government regulation of
the economy, and trade protection as a response to globalism.
We might also have preserved more of the manufacturing base
necessary for a strong middle class. But his successors disman-
tled that vision, beginning with Jimmy Carter, an economically
conservative Southern planter. Nixon’s answer to inflation had
been wage and price controls, an intrusion into the free mar-
ket that would be unimaginable today. Carter deregulated the
airline, rail and trucking industries, hoping that competition
would result in lower prices. It didn’t, but it gave the newly
liberated companies more leverage against their unions. When
inflation nonetheless reached 14 percent, Carter’s hand-picked
Federal Reserve Board chairman, Paul Volcker, responded by
tightening the money supply, raising interest rates so high that
Americans could not afford loans for cars or houses. Ronald
Reagan also chose low prices over employment, refusing to
free up money until inflation declined. Car sales hit a 20-year
low. In the fall of 1982, the national unemployment rate was
10.8 percent, the highest since the Great Depression. Walter
Mondale accused Reagan of turning the Midwest into “a rust
bowl”—a term reformulated to Rust Belt. Buffalo, Cleveland,
Flint and Detroit still haven’t recovered. Neither has the
middle class.

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E D W A R D M C C L E L L A N D

“You can’t grow an economy, grow a middle class, without
making things, producing stuff,” says Mike Stout, a steelworker
who lost his job when Pennsylvania’s Homestead Works closed
in 1986. “It’s just impossible. I haven’t seen it anywhere.”
Reagan also fired the striking members of the Professional
Air Traffic Controllers Organization [PATCO]. He argued that
he was simply trying to end an illegal strike by public employees,
but his action encouraged private employers to use the same
tactic. Once workers realized they could lose their jobs by join-
ing a picket line, the number of strikes dropped tenfold, from
300 a year before 1981, to 30 a year today.
Pre-PATCO, 21 percent of workers belonged to unions (still
down from the all-time high of 30 percent). Now, fewer than
12 percent do. Union membership is at 14.7 million, the low-
est total since just before World War II. There’s a well-known
graph that shows middle-class income share declining along the
same axis as unionization.
Bill Clinton continued down the same deregulatory path,
signing the North American Free Trade Agreement and the
repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which prohibited commercial
banks from owning investment firms.
NAFTA, which resulted in hundreds of small manufacturers
moving to Mexico, was passed over the vehement objections
of labor.
In 1994, Rep. Glenn Poshard of Illinois tried to persuade the
Labor Department to intervene in a lockout at the A.E. Staley
Mfg. Co., a Decatur corn starch manufacturer that had been
bought by Tate and Lyle, a London-based food conglomerate.
Poshard considered the dispute the “flashpoint” for the new
economic globalism of the 1990s, but when he took a group of
workers to meet Labor Secretary Robert Reich, the secretary

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5 5 7

gave no indication the federal government would try to settle
the matter.
After two-and-a-half years, the union capitulated, settling
for a third of its pre-lockout jobs.
Only in 2008, after the bubble of false prosperity created by
easy credit and inflated housing values blew up, did two presi-
dents finally take an active role in the economy. George W.
Bush decided he didn’t want to be remembered as the president
who allowed American automakers to fall apart, and sent them
$17.4 billion of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout money.
Barack Obama finished the job, setting up an auto task force
to guide General Motors and Chrysler through bankruptcy. (He
did so over the objections of his house Clintonite, Chief of Staff
Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel’s response to the prospect of tens of
thousands of autoworkers losing their jobs: “Fuck the UAW”).
Even so, new autoworkers now start at $14 an hour—hardly a
middle-class wage.
Obama also passed the Affordable Care Act, the most
significant piece of social welfare legislation since the Great
Society, but author Peter Beinart still thinks Obama belongs
to the modern tradition of small government presidents, call-
ing his politics “pro-capitalist, anti-bureaucratic, Reaganized
liberalism.”
The lesson of the last 40 years is that we can’t depend on
the free market to sustain a middle class. It’s not going to hap-
pen without government intervention. Even when American
industry dominated the world, one reason workers prospered
was that the economy operated on New Deal underpinnings,
which included legal protections for labor unions, govern-
ment regulation of industry and high marginal income tax
rates.

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E D W A R D M C C L E L L A N D

It’s time to declare an end to the deregulatory experiment
that has resulted in the greatest disparity between the top earn-
ers and the middle earners in nearly a century. Now that the
New Deal has been vanquished—a goal conservatives have
cherished since before Robert Taft went extinct—we need a
Newer Deal that will raise the minimum wage, reduce obsta-
cles to union organizing, levy higher taxes on passive wealth
such as investments and inheritances, and provide benefits for
workers unable to obtain it at their jobs, perhaps by lowering
Medicaid eligibility or instituting a single-payer health system.
The demand for such reforms is brewing. We heard from the
middle class during the Occupy movement of 2011, and from
the lower class in this year’s fast food strikes.
Not long ago, I was in Flint, Michigan, to meet with its
new congressman, Dan Kildee. No American city has suffered
more during the Age of Deregulation than Flint. In 1978,
Flint had 80,000 automaking jobs, and the highest per capita
income in the nation. Today, it has 6,000 automaking jobs,
and the highest murder rate in the English-speaking world.
Instead of Corvettes and speedboats, the yards are filled with
mean dogs, “This Property Protected by Smith & Wesson”
signs, and weeds. So far, Kildee’s biggest achievement has
been securing federal funding to tear down 2,000 abandoned
houses. In Flint, where the average home sale price is $15,000,
eliminating blight increases property values. Having seen the
consequences of government indifference, Kildee wants to
return to the days of government activism. As county treasurer,
he founded a public land bank that helped revive downtown
Flint by purchasing and renovating a hotel that had sat empty
since 1973.
“It is a myth that there is any market that is not supported or
affected by the structure of government in one way or another,”

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5 5 9

he said. “We’re picking winners and losers right now, and we’re
picking the wrong ones. We’re making matters worse by not
intervening in these communities. It’s not fine for Flint to be
one of the losers, as far as I’m concerned.”
As far as I’m concerned, it’s not fine for the middle class to
be one of the losers, either.

Joining the Conversation

1. Edward McClelland opens this article with a discussion of
the industrial heyday of the United States, from the late
1940s through the 1970s, when blue-collar workers had their
choice of well-paying jobs. What evidence does he give for
this period of “shared prosperity”? What exactly does he
mean by this term? Why, in his view, did the prosperity end,
and what steps are required to bring it back?

2. This selection comes from Salon, a progressive online news
site that boasts of publishing “fearless commentary and
criticism.” Where in the article do you find evidence of
such writing, and of the author’s own political position? Cite
specific examples from the text.

3. McClelland offers a lot of evidence for his own views, but he
does not say much about any other viewpoints. What objec-
tions might be raised to what he says, and where would you
introduce them in his essay? How would doing so improve
his argument?

4. Brandon King, in his essay on the American Dream
(pp. 610−17), argues that “supporting the richest sectors of
the American economy will bring economic stability and
a full recovery.” How might McClelland respond to King?
What evidence might he provide to prove King wrong?

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E D W A R D M C C L E L L A N D

5. Develop an argument of your own that responds to
McClelland’s argument about the decline of the American
middle class, agreeing with him, disagreeing, or both. How-
ever you choose to argue, be sure to consider other positions
in addition to your own, including those of other authors in
this chapter.

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5 6 1

Confronting Inequality

PA U L K R U G M A N

The America I grew up in was a relatively equal middle-
class society. Over the past generation, however, the country
has returned to Gilded Age levels of inequality. In this chapter
I’ll outline policies that can help reverse these changes. I’ll
begin with the question of values. Why should we care about
high and rising inequality?
One reason to care about inequality is the straightforward
matter of living standards. The lion’s share of economic growth
in America over the past thirty years has gone to a small,
wealthy minority, to such an extent that it’s unclear whether
the typical family has benefited at all from technological prog-
ress and the rising productivity it brings. The lack of clear
economic progress for lower- and middle-income families is in
itself an important reason to seek a more equal distribution of
income.

Paul Krugman teaches economics at Princeton and the City Uni-
versity of New York and writes an op-ed column in the New York Times.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008. Krugman is
the author of many books, most recently End This Depression Now!
(2012). “Confronting Inequality” is a chapter from his 2007 book, The
Conscience of a Liberal.

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Beyond that, however, is the damage extreme inequality
does to our society and our democracy. Ever since America’s
founding, our idea of ourselves has been that of a nation with-
out sharp class distinctions—not a leveled society of perfect
equality, but one in which the gap between the economic elite
and the typical citizen isn’t an unbridgeable chasm. That’s why
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The small landholders are the most
precious part of a state.”1 Translated into modern terms as an
assertion that a broad middle class is the most precious part
of a state, Jefferson’s statement remains as true as ever. High
inequality, which has turned us into a nation with a much-
weakened middle class, has a corrosive effect on social rela-
tions and politics, one that has become ever more apparent as
America has moved deeper into a new Gilded Age.

The Costs of Inequality

One of the best arguments I’ve ever seen for the social costs of
inequality came from a movement conservative trying to argue
the opposite. In 1997 Irving Kristol, one of the original neocon-
servative intellectuals, published an article in the Wall Street
Journal called “Income Inequality Without Class Conflict.”
Kristol argued that we shouldn’t worry about income inequal-
ity, because whatever the numbers may say, class distinctions
are, in reality, all but gone. Today, he asserted,

income inequality tends to be swamped by even greater social
equality. . . . In all of our major cities, there is not a single restaurant
where a CEO can lunch or dine with the absolute assurance that
he will not run into his secretary. If you fly first class, who will be
your traveling companions? You never know. If you go to Paris, you
will be lost in a crowd of young people flashing their credit cards.2

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By claiming that income inequality doesn’t matter because
we have social equality, Kristol was in effect admitting
that income inequality would be a problem if it led to
social inequality. And here’s the thing: It does. Kristol’s
fantasy of a world in which the rich live just like you
and me, and nobody feels socially inferior, bears no
resemblance to the real America we live in.
Lifestyles of the rich and famous are arguably the least impor-
tant part of the story, yet it’s worth pointing out that Kristol’s
vision of CEOs rubbing shoulders with the middle class is totally
contradicted by the reporting of Robert Frank of the Wall Street
Journal, whose assigned beat is covering the lives of the wealthy.
In his book Richistan Frank describes what he learned:

Today’s rich had formed their own virtual country. . . . [T]hey had
built a self-contained world unto themselves, complete with their
own health-care system (concierge doctors), travel network (Net
Jets, destination clubs), separate economy. . . . The rich weren’t
just getting richer; they were becoming financial foreigners, creat-
ing their own country within a country, their own society within
a society, and their economy within an economy.3

The fact is that vast income inequality inevitably brings
vast social inequality in its train. And this social inequality
isn’t just a matter of envy and insults. It has real, negative
consequences for the way people live in this country. It may
not matter much that the great majority of Americans can’t
afford to stay in the eleven-thousand-dollar-a-night hotel suites
popping up in luxury hotels around the world.4 It matters a
great deal that millions of middle-class families buy houses they
can’t really afford, taking on more mortgage debt than they can
safely handle, because they’re desperate to send their children

See p. 60
on using
someone
else’s
evidence to
support your
position.

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to a good school—and intensifying inequality means that the
desirable school districts are growing fewer in number, and more
expensive to live in.
Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School expert in bank-
ruptcy, and Amelia Warren Tyagi, a business consultant, have
studied the rise of bankruptcy in the United States. By 2005,
just before a new law making it much harder for individuals to
declare bankruptcy took effect, the number of families filing
for bankruptcy each year was five times its level in the early
1980s. The proximate reason for this surge in bankruptcies
was that families were taking on more debt—and this led to
moralistic pronouncements about people spending too much
on luxuries they can’t afford. What Warren and Tyagi found,
however, was that middle-class families were actually spend-
ing less on luxuries than they had in the 1970s. Instead the
rise in debt mainly reflected increased spending on housing,

A couple and their two dogs board a private jet in Aspen, Colorado.

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largely driven by competition to get into good school districts.
Middle-class Americans have been caught up in a rat race, not
because they’re greedy or foolish but because they’re trying to
give their children a chance in an increasingly unequal society.5
And they’re right to be worried: A bad start can ruin a child’s
chances for life.
Americans still tend to say, when asked, that individuals
can make their own place in society. According to one survey
61 percent of Americans agree with the statement that “people
get rewarded for their effort,” compared with 49 percent in
Canada and only 23 percent in France.6 In reality, however,
America has vast inequality of opportunity as well as results.
We may believe that anyone can succeed through hard work
and determination, but the facts say otherwise.
There are many pieces of evidence showing that Horatio
Alger stories are very rare in real life. One of the most strik-
ing comes from a study published by the National Center for

Crowds of passengers at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago.

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Education Statistics, which tracked the educational experience
of Americans who were eighth graders in 1988. Those eighth
graders were sorted both by apparent talent, as measured by
a mathematics test, and by the socioeconomic status of their
parents, as measured by occupations, incomes, and education.
The key result is shown in Table 1. Not surprisingly,
both getting a high test score and having high-status parents
increased a student’s chance of finishing college. But family
status mattered more. Students who scored in the bottom fourth
on the exam, but came from families whose status put them
in the top fourth—what we used to call RDKs, for “rich dumb
kids,” when I was a teenager—were more likely to finish col-
lege than students who scored in the top fourth but whose
parents were in the bottom fourth. What this tells us is that
the idea that we have anything close to equality of opportunity
is clearly a fantasy. It would be closer to the truth, though
not the whole truth, to say that in modern America, class—
inherited class—usually trumps talent.
Isn’t that true everywhere? Not to the same extent. Interna-
tional comparisons of “intergenerational mobility,” the extent
to which people can achieve higher status than their parents,
are tricky because countries don’t collect perfectly comparable

Table 1. Percentage of
1988 Eighth Graders Finishing College

Score in Score in
Bottom Quartile Top Quartile

Parents in Bottom Quartile 3 29

Parents in Top Quartile 30 74

Source: National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of Education
2003, 47.

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data. Nonetheless it’s clear that Horatio Alger has moved to
someplace in Europe: Mobility is highest in the Scandinavian
countries, and most results suggest that mobility is lower in the
United States than it is in France, Canada, and maybe even
Britain. Not only don’t Americans have equal opportunity,
opportunity is less equal here than elsewhere in the West.
It’s not hard to understand why. Our unique lack of universal
health care, all by itself, puts Americans who are unlucky in
their parents at a disadvantage: Because American children
from low-income families are often uninsured, they’re more
likely to have health problems that derail their life chances.
Poor nutrition, thanks to low income and a lack of social sup-
port, can have the same effect. Life disruptions that affect a
child’s parents can also make upward mobility hard—and the
weakness of the U.S. social safety net makes such disruptions
more likely and worse if they happen. Then there’s the highly
uneven quality of U.S. basic education, and so on. What it all
comes down to is that although the principle of “equality of
opportunity, not equality of results” sounds fine, it’s a largely
fictitious distinction. A society with highly unequal results is,
more or less inevitably, a society with highly unequal oppor-
tunity, too. If you truly believe that all Americans are entitled
to an equal chance at the starting line, that’s an argument for
doing something to reduce inequality.
America’s high inequality, then, imposes serious costs on
our society that go beyond the way it holds down the purchas-
ing power of most families. And there’s another way in which
inequality damages us: It corrupts our politics. “If there are
men in this country big enough to own the government of
the United States,” said Woodrow Wilson in 1913, in words
that would be almost inconceivable from a modern president,
“they are going to own it.”7 Well, now there are, and they do.

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Not completely, of course, but hardly a week goes by without
the disclosure of a case in which the influence of money has
grotesquely distorted U.S. government policy.
As this book went to press, there was a spectacular example:
The way even some Democrats rallied to the support of hedge
fund managers, who receive an unconscionable tax break.
Through a quirk in the way the tax laws have been inter-
preted, these managers—some of whom make more than a bil-
lion dollars a year—get to have most of their earnings taxed
at the capital gains rate, which is only 15 percent, even as
other high earners pay a 35 percent rate. The hedge fund tax
loophole costs the government more than $6 billion a year in
lost revenue, roughly the cost of providing health care to three
million children.8 Almost $2 billion of the total goes to just
twenty-five individuals. Even conservative economists believe
that the tax break is unjustified, and should be eliminated.9

Yet the tax break has powerful political support—and not
just from Republicans. In July 2007 Senator Charles Schumer
of New York, the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign
Committee, let it be known that he would favor eliminating
the hedge fund loophole only if other, deeply entrenched tax
breaks were eliminated at the same time. As everyone under-
stood, this was a “poison pill,” a way of blocking reform without
explicitly saying no. And although Schumer denied it, everyone
also suspected that his position was driven by the large sums
hedge funds contribute to Democratic political campaigns.10

The hedge fund loophole is a classic example of how the con-
centration of income in a few hands corrupts politics. Beyond
that is the bigger story of how income inequality has reinforced
the rise of movement conservatism, a fundamentally undemo-
cratic force. Rising inequality has to an important extent been
caused by the rightward shift of our politics, but the causation

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also runs the other way. The new wealth of the rich has increased
their influence, sustaining the institutions of movement conser-
vatism and pulling the Republican Party even further into the
movement’s orbit. The ugliness of our politics is in large part a
reflection of the inequality of our income distribution.
More broadly still, high levels of inequality strain the bonds
that hold us together as a society. There has been a long-term
downward trend in the extent to which Americans trust either
the government or one another. In the sixties, most Americans
agreed with the proposition that “most people can be trusted”;
today most disagree.11 In the sixties, most Americans believed
that the government is run “for the benefit of all”; today, most
believe that it’s run for “a few big interests.”12 And there’s
convincing evidence that growing inequality is behind our
growing cynicism, which is making the United States seem
increasingly like a Latin American country. As the political
scientists Eric Uslaner and Mitchell Brown point out (and sup-
port with extensive data), “In a world of haves and have-nots,
those at either end of the economic spectrum have little reason
to believe that ‘most people can be trusted’ . . . social trust rests
on a foundation of economic equality.”13

The Arithmetic of Equalization

Suppose we agree that the United States should become more
like other advanced countries, whose tax and benefit systems do
much more than ours to reduce inequality. The next question
is what that decision might involve.
In part it would involve undoing many of the tax cuts for
the wealthy that movement conservatives have pushed through
since 1980. Table 2 shows what has happened to three tax rates
that strongly affect the top 1 percent of the U.S. population,

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while having little effect on anyone else. Between 1979 and
2006 the top tax rate on earned income was cut in half; the
tax rate on capital gains was cut almost as much; the tax rate
on corporate profits fell by more than a quarter. High incomes
in America are much less taxed than they used to be. Thus
raising taxes on the rich back toward historical levels can pay
for part, though only part, of a stronger safety net that limits
inequality.
The first step toward restoring progressivity to the tax system
is to let the Bush tax cuts for the very well off expire at the
end of 2010, as they are now scheduled to. That alone would
raise a significant amount of revenue. The nonpartisan Urban-
Brookings Joint Tax Policy Center estimates that letting the
Bush tax cuts expire for people with incomes over two hundred
thousand dollars would be worth about $140 billion a year start-
ing in 2012. That’s enough to pay for the subsidies needed to
implement universal health care. A tax-cut rollback of this kind,
used to finance health care reform, would significantly reduce
inequality. It would do so partly by modestly reducing incomes at
the top: The Tax Policy Center estimates that allowing the Bush
tax cuts to expire for Americans making more than two hundred
thousand dollars a year would reduce the aftertax incomes of

Table 2. Three Top Rates (Percentage)

Top Tax on Top Tax on Top Tax on
Earned Long-Term Corporate
Income Capital Gains Profits

1979 70 28 48

2006 35 15 35

Source: Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center .

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the richest 1 percent of Americans by about 4.5 percent com-
pared with what they would be if the Bush tax cuts were made
permanent. Meanwhile middle- and lower-income Americans
would be assured of health care—one of the key aspects of being
truly middle class.14

Another relatively easy move from a political point of view
would be closing some of the obvious loopholes in the U.S.
system. These include the rule described earlier that allows
financial wheeler-dealers, such as hedge fund managers, to clas-
sify their earnings as capital gains, taxed at a 15 percent rate
rather than 35 percent. The major tax loopholes also include
rules that let corporations, drug companies in particular, shift
recorded profits to low-tax jurisdictions overseas, costing bil-
lions more; one recent study estimates that tax avoidance by
multinationals costs about $50 billion a year.15

Going beyond rolling back the Bush cuts and closing obvious
loopholes would be a more difficult political undertaking. Yet
there can be rapid shifts in what seems politically realistic. At
the end of 2004 it seemed all too possible that Social Secu-
rity, the centerpiece of the New Deal, would be privatized and
effectively phased out. Today Social Security appears safe, and
universal health care seems within reach. If universal health
care can be achieved, and the New Deal idea that government
can be a force for good is reinvigorated, things that now seem
off the table might not look so far out.
Both historical and international evidence show that there
is room for tax increases at the top that go beyond merely roll-
ing back the Bush cuts. Even before the Bush tax cuts, top tax
rates in the United States were low by historical standards—
the tax rate on the top bracket was only 39.6 percent during
the Clinton years, compared with 70 percent in the seventies
and 50 percent even after Reagan’s 1981 tax cut. Top U.S. tax

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rates are also low compared with those in European countries.
For example, in Britain, the top income tax rate is 40 percent,
seemingly equivalent to the top rate of the Clinton years. How-
ever, in Britain employers also pay a social insurance tax—
the equivalent of the employer share of FICA* here—that
applies to all earned income. (Most of the U.S. equivalent
is levied only on income up to a maximum of $97,500.) As
a result very highly paid British employees face an effective
tax rate of almost 48 percent. In France effective top rates
are even higher. Also, in Britain capital gains are taxed as
ordinary income, so that the effective tax rate on capital gains
for people with high income is 40 percent, compared with
15 percent in the United States.16 Taxing capital gains as
ordinary income in the United States would yield significantly
more revenue, and also limit the range of tax abuses like the
hedge fund loophole.
Also, from the New Deal until the 1970s it was considered
normal and appropriate to have “super” tax rates on very-high-
income individuals. Only a few people were subject to the
70 percent top bracket in the 70s, let alone the 90 percent-plus
top rates of the Eisenhower years. It used to be argued that a
surtax on very high incomes serves no real purpose other than
punishing the rich because it wouldn’t raise much money, but
that’s no longer true. Today the top 0.1 percent of Americans,
a class with a minimum income of about $1.3 million and an
average income of about $3.5 million, receives more than 7 per-
cent of all income—up from just 2.2 percent in 1979.17 A surtax
on that income would yield a significant amount of revenue,
which could be used to help a lot of people. All in all, then, the

*FICA Federal Insurance Contributions Act, an employment tax that helps
fund Social Security and Medicare.

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next step after rolling back the Bush tax cuts and implementing
universal health care should be a broader effort to restore the
progressivity of U.S. taxes, and use the revenue to pay for more
benefits that help lower- and middle-income families.
Realistically, however, this would not be enough to pay for
social expenditures comparable to those in other advanced
countries, not even the relatively modest Canadian level. In
addition to imposing higher taxes on the rich, other advanced
countries also impose higher taxes on the middle class, through
both higher social insurance payments and value-added taxes—
in effect, national sales taxes. Social insurance taxes and VATs
are not, in themselves, progressive. Their effect in reducing
inequality is indirect but large: They pay for benefits, and these
benefits are worth more as a percentage of income to people
with lower incomes.
As a political matter, persuading the public that middle-
income families would be better off paying somewhat higher
taxes in return for a stronger social safety net will be a hard
sell after decades of antitax, antigovernment propaganda. Much
as I would like to see the United States devote another 2 or
3 percent of GDP* to social expenditure beyond health care, it’s
probably an endeavor that has to wait until liberals have estab-
lished a strong track record of successfully using the govern-
ment to make peoples’ lives better and more secure. This is one
reason health care reform, which is tremendously important in
itself, would have further benefits: It would blaze the trail for
a wider progressive agenda. This is also the reason movement
conservatives are fiercely determined not to let health care
reform succeed.

*GDP Gross domestic product. One measure of income and output
for a country’s economy.

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Reducing Market Inequality

Aftermarket policies can do a great deal to reduce inequality.
But that should not be our whole focus. The Great Compres-
sion* also involved a sharp reduction in the inequality of market
income. This was accomplished in part through wage controls
during World War II, an experience we hope won’t be repeated.
Still, there are several steps we can take.
The first step has already been taken: In 2007 Congress
passed the first increase in the minimum wage within a decade.
In the 1950s and 1960s the minimum wage averaged about half
of the average wage. By 2006, however, the purchasing power
of the minimum wage had been so eroded by inflation that in
real terms it was at its lowest point since 1955, and was only
31 percent of the average wage. Thanks to the new Democratic
majority in Congress, the minimum is scheduled to rise from
its current $5.15 an hour to $7.25 by 2009. This won’t restore
all the erosion, but it’s an important first step.
There are two common but somewhat contradictory
objections often heard to increasing the minimum wage.
On one hand, it’s argued that raising the minimum wage
will reduce employment and increase unemployment. On the
other it’s argued that raising the minimum will have little or
no effect in raising wages. The evidence, however, suggests
that a minimum wage increase will in fact have modest posi-
tive effects.
On the employment side, a classic study by David Card of
Berkeley and Alan Krueger of Princeton, two of America’s
best labor economists, found no evidence that minimum wage
increases in the range the United States has experienced led
to job losses.18 Their work has been furiously attacked both

*See paragraph 40.

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because it seems to contradict Econ 101 and because it was
ideologically disturbing to many. Yet it has stood up very well
to repeated challenges, and new cases confirming its results
keep coming in. For example, the state of Washington has a
minimum wage almost three dollars an hour higher than its
neighbor Idaho; business experiences near the state line seem
to indicate that, if anything, Washington has gained jobs at Ida-
ho’s expense. “Small-business owners in Washington,” reported
the New York Times, “say they have prospered far beyond their
expectation. . . . Idaho teenagers cross the state line to work in
fast-food restaurants in Washington.”
All the empirical evidence suggests that minimum wage
increases in the range that is likely to take place do not lead to
significant job losses. True, an increase in the minimum wage
to, say, fifteen dollars an hour would probably cause job losses,
because it would dramatically raise the cost of employment in
some industries. But that’s not what’s on—or even near—the
table.
Meanwhile minimum wage increases can have fairly signifi-
cant effects on wages at the bottom end of the scale. The Eco-
nomic Policy Institute estimates that the worst-paid 10 percent
of the U.S. labor force, 13 million workers, will gain from the
just-enacted minimum wage increase. Of these, 5.6 million are
currently being paid less than the new minimum wage, and
would see a direct benefit. The rest are workers earning more
than the new minimum wage, who would benefit from ripple
effects of the higher minimum.
The minimum wage, however, matters mainly to low-paid
workers. Any broader effort to reduce market inequality will
have to do something about incomes further up the scale. The
most important tool in that respect is likely to be an end to
the thirty-year tilt of government policy against unions.

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The drastic decline in the U.S. union movement was not,
as is often claimed, an inevitable result of globalization and
increased competition. International comparisons show that
the U.S. union decline is unique, even though other countries
faced the same global pressures. Again, in 1960 Canada and
the United States had essentially equal rates of unionization,
32 and 30 percent of wage and salary workers, respectively. By
1999 U.S. unionization was down to 13 percent, but Canadian
unionization was unchanged. The sources of union decline in
America lie not in market forces but in the political climate
created by movement conservatism, which allowed employers
to engage in union-busting activities and punish workers for
supporting union organizers. Without that changed political
climate, much of the service economy—especially giant retail-
ers like Wal-Mart—would probably be unionized today.
A new political climate could revitalize the union move-
ment—and revitalizing unions should be a key progressive
goal. Specific legislation, such as the Employee Free Choice
Act, which would reduce the ability of employers to intimi-
date workers into rejecting a union, is only part of what’s
needed. It’s also crucial to enforce labor laws already on the
books. Much if not most of the antiunion activity that led to
the sharp decline in American unionization was illegal even
under existing law. But employers judged, correctly, that they
could get away with it.
The hard-to-answer question is the extent to which a newly
empowered U.S. union movement would reduce inequality.
International comparisons suggest that it might make quite
a lot of difference. The sharpest increases in wage inequality
in the Western world have taken place in the United States
and in Britain, both of which experienced sharp declines in
union membership. (Britain is still far more unionized than

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America, but it used to have more than 50 percent unioniza-
tion.) Canada, although its economy is closely linked to that
of the United States, appears to have had substantially less
increase in wage inequality—and it’s likely that the persis-
tence of a strong union movement is an important reason
why. Unions raise the wages of their members, who tend to
be in the middle of the wage distribution; they also tend to
equalize wages among members. Perhaps most important, they
act as a countervailing force to management, enforcing social
norms that limit very high and very low pay even among
people who aren’t union members. They also mobilize their
members to vote for progressive policies. Would getting the
United States back to historical levels of unionization undo
a large part of the Great Divergence? We don’t know—but it
might, and encouraging a union resurgence should be a major
goal of progressive policy.
A reinvigorated union movement isn’t the only change that
could reduce extreme inequalities in pay. A number of other
factors discouraged very high paychecks for a generation after
World War II. One was a change in the political climate: Very
high executive pay used to provoke public scrutiny, congres-
sional hearings, and even presidential intervention. But that
all ended in the Reagan years.
Historical experience still suggests that a new progressive
majority should not be shy about questioning private-sector
pay when it seems outrageous. Moral suasion was effective in
the past, and could be so again.

Another Great Compression?

The Great Compression, the abrupt reduction in economic
inequality that took place in the United States in the 1930s

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P A U L K R U G M A N

5 7 8

and 1940s, took place at a time of crisis. Today America’s state
is troubled, but we’re not in the midst of a great depression or
a world war. Correspondingly, we shouldn’t expect changes as
drastic or sudden as those that took place seventy years ago.
The process of reducing inequality now is likely to be more of
a Great Moderation than a Great Compression.
Yet it is possible, both as an economic matter and in terms
of practical politics, to reduce inequality and make America a
middle-class nation again. And now is the time to get started.

Notes

1. Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, 28 Oct. 1785 .

2. Irving Kristol, “Income Inequality Without Class Conflict,” Wall Street
Journal 18 Dec. 1997: A22.

3. Robert Frank, Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom
and the Lives of the New Rich (Crown, 2007) 3–4.

4. “Suites for the Sweet,” Newsweek International July 2–9 , part of a special report on
“Secret Habits of the Super Rich.”

5. Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, “What’s Hurting the
Middle Class,” Boston Review (Sept./Oct. 2005) .

6. Tom Hertz, Understanding Mobility in America (Center for American
Progress, 2006) .

7. Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (Doubleday, 1913), Project Guten-
berg .

8. “Tax Breaks for Billionaires,” Economic Policy Institute Policy Memo-
randum no. 120 .

9. See, for example, Jessica Holzer, “Conservatives Break with GOP Lead-
ers on a Tax Bill,” The Hill 18 July 2007 .

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10. “In Opposing Tax Plan, Schumer Supports Wall Street Over Party,”
New York Times 30 July 2007: A1.

11. Eric M. Uslaner and Mitchell Brown, “Inequality, Trust, and Civic
Engagement,” American Politics Research 33.6 (2005): 868–94.

12. The ANES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior, table 5A.2
.

13. Uslaner and Brown, “Inequality, Trust, and Civic Engagement.”
14. Tax Policy Center, “Options to Extend the 2001–2006 Tax Cuts,

Static Impact on Individual Income and Estate Tax Liability and Revenue
($ billions), 2008–17,” Table T07-0126 .

15. Kimberly A. Clausing, “Multinational Firm Tax Avoidance and U.S.
Government Revenue” (working paper, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA,
2007).

16. OECD Tax Database .
17. Piketty and Saez, 2005 preliminary estimates .
18. David Card and Alan B. Krueger, “Minimum Wages and Employment:

A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania,”
American Economic Review 84.4 (1994): 772–93.

Joining the Conversation

1. Paul Krugman begins by asking the “so what?” question in
paragraph 1: “Why should we care about high and rising
inequality?” How does he answer this question?

2. What evidence does Krugman provide for the prevalence
of economic inequality in U.S. society? How convincing is
this evidence to you?

3. Notice how many direct quotations Krugman includes. Why
do you think he includes so many? What, if anything, do the
quotations contribute that a summary or paraphrase would
not?

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4. In paragraph 4 Krugman quotes someone whose views he
does not agree with, but then uses those views to support
his own argument. How do you know he is quoting a view
that he disagrees with?

5. Write an essay responding to Krugman, agreeing with him
on some points and disagreeing with him on others. Start by
summarizing his arguments before moving on to give your
own views. See guidelines on pp. 64–66 that will help you
to agree and disagree simultaneously.

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5 8 1

The Upside of Income Inequality

G A R Y S . B E C K E R A N D K E V I N M . M U R P H Y

Income inequality in China substantially widened, particu-
larly between households in the city and the countryside, after
China began its rapid rate of economic development around
1980. The average urban resident now makes 3.2 times as much
as the average rural resident, and among city dwellers alone,
the top 10 percent makes 9.2 times as much as the bottom 10
percent.1 But at the same time that inequality rose, the number
of Chinese who live in poverty fell—from 260 million in 1978
to 42 million in 1998.2 Despite the widening gap in incomes,
rapid economic development dramatically improved the lives
of China’s poor.

Gary S. Becker (1930–2014), a Nobel laureate in economics, taught
at the University of Chicago and wrote a column for BusinessWeek.
Kevin M. Murphy, a professor at the University of Chicago, was the
recipient of a 2005 MacArthur “genius” fellowship. Together, Becker
and Murphy wrote Social Economics: Market Behavior in a Social Envi-
ronment (2001). This article first appeared in the May/June 2007 issue
of the American, the magazine of the American Enterprise Institute, a
group “committed to expanding liberty, increasing individual oppor-
tunity, and strengthening free enterprise.”

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Politicians and many others in the United States have
grown concerned that earnings inequality has increased among
Americans. But as the example of China—or India, for that
matter—illustrates, the rise in inequality does not occur in a
vacuum. In the case of China and India, the rise in inequality
came along with an acceleration of economic growth that raised
the standard of living for both the rich and the poor. In the
United States, the rise in inequality accompanied a rise in the
payoff to education and other skills. We believe that the rise
in returns on investments in human capital is beneficial and
desirable, and policies designed to deal with inequality must
take account of its cause.
To show the importance to inequality of the increased
return to human capital, consider Figure 1, which shows the
link between earnings and education by displaying the wage
premium received by college-educated workers compared with
high school graduates. In 1980, an American with a college
degree earned about 30 percent more than an American who

30%
1970

Pe
rc

en
ta

ge
P

re
m

iu
m

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

College Graduates
Graduate School

130%

110%

90%

70%

50%

Figure 1. Higher Education Equals
Much Higher Wages

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stopped education at high school. But, in recent years, a per-
son with a college education earned roughly 70 percent more.
Meanwhile, the premium for having a graduate degree increased
from roughly 50 percent in 1980 to well over 100 percent today.
The labor market is placing a greater emphasis on education,
dispensing rapidly rising rewards to those who stay in school
the longest.
This trend has contributed significantly to the growth in
overall earnings inequality in the United States. And just as in
China and India, this growing inequality gap is associated with
growing opportunity—in this case, the opportunity to advance
through education. The upward trend in the returns to educa-
tion is not limited to one segment of the population. Education
premiums for women and African Americans have increased as
much as, or more than, the premiums for all workers.
Figure 2 shows that the growth in returns to education for
women has paralleled that for men over the past 25 years, but
has remained at a somewhat higher level. Figure 3 shows that
returns for blacks have increased as much as those for whites.
As these two figures show, the potential to improve one’s labor-
market prospects through higher education is greater now than
at any time in the recent past, and this potential extends across
gender and racial lines.
The growth in returns to college has generated a predictable
response: as the education earnings gap increased, a larger frac-
tion of high school graduates went on to college. As Figure 4
shows, the proportion of men and women ages 20 to 25 who
attended college jumped by about half over the past 40 years,
tracking the rise in the wage premium. When returns fell in
the 1970s, the fraction going on to college declined. The rise
in returns since 1980 has been accompanied by a significant
rise in the fraction going on to college.3

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20%
1970

Pe
rc

en
ta

ge
P

re
m

iu
m

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

Men
Women

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

1970

Pe
rc

en
ta

ge
P

re
m

iu
m

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

Whites
Blacks

70%

80%

60%

50%

40%

30%

Figure 2. Women Gain More from College . . .

Figure 3. . . . And So Do African Americans

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This increase in the proportion of persons going on to higher
education is found among all racial and ethnic groups, but it is
particularly important for women, who, in 2004, outnumbered
men as students in degree-granting institutions of higher educa-
tion by 33 percent.
Women have also shifted toward higher-earnings fields, such
as business, law, and medicine: the number of women in graduate
schools rose 66 per cent between 1994 and 2004, while the num-
ber of men rose just 25 percent.4 And the greater education
achievement of women compared to men is particularly promi-
nent among blacks and Latinos: the proportion of black women
who attend colleges and universities jumped from 24 percent
to 43 percent between 1974 and 2003, while the proportion of
white men rose only from 41 percent to 49 percent.5

The potential generated by higher returns to education
extends from individuals to the economy as a whole. Growth
in the education level of the population has been a significant
source of rising wages, productivity, and living standards over

1970

%
o

f 2
0-

25
-Y

ea
r-O

ld
s w

ith
S

om
e

C
ol

le
ge

Percentage P
rem

ium

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

Attendance
Wage Premium

50%
70%

60%

50%

40%

45%

35% 30%

40%

Figure 4. As College Offers Higher Wages,
More Americans Attend

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G A R Y S . B E C K E R A N D K E V I N M . M U R P H Y

5 8 6

the past century. Higher returns to education will accelerate
growth in living standards as existing investments have a higher
return, and additional investments in education will be made in
response to the higher returns. Gains from the higher returns
will not be limited to GDP and other measures of economic
activity; education provides a wide range of benefits not cap-
tured in GDP, and these will grow more rapidly as well due to
the additional investments in schooling.
Why is the earnings gap widening? Because the demand for
educated and other skilled persons is growing. That is hardly
surprising, given developments in computers and the Internet,
advances in biotechnology, and a general shift in economic
activity to more education-intensive sectors, such as finance
and professional services. Also, globalization has encouraged
the importing of products using relatively low-skilled labor from
abroad. At the same time, world demand has risen for the kinds of
products and services that are provided by high-skilled employees.
When calculating the returns to education, we look at the
costs of education as well. And even accounting for the rise
in university tuition (it more than doubled, on average, in
constant dollars between 1980 and 2005), overall returns to
college and graduate study have increased substantially. Indeed,
it appears that the increases in tuition were partly induced by
the greater return to college education. Pablo Peña, in a Ph.D.
dissertation in progress at the University of Chicago, argues
convincingly that tuition rose in part because students want
to invest more in the quality of their education, and increased
spending per student by colleges is partly financed by higher
tuition levels.6 More investment in the quality and quantity of
schooling will benefit both individuals and society.
This brings us to our punch line. Should an increase in
earnings inequality due primarily to higher rates of return on

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5 8 7

education and other skills be considered a favorable
rather than an unfavorable development? We think
so. Higher rates of return on capital are a sign of
greater productivity in the economy, and that infer-
ence is fully applicable to human capital as well as to physical
capital. The initial impact of higher returns to human cap ital
is wider inequality in earnings (the same as the initial effect of
higher returns on physical capital), but that impact becomes
more muted and may be reversed over time as young men and
women invest more in their human capital.
We conclude that the forces raising earnings inequality in
the United States are beneficial to the extent that they reflect
higher returns to investments in education and other human
capital. Yet this conclusion should not produce complacency,
for the response so far to these higher returns has been dis-
turbingly limited. For example, why haven’t more high school
graduates gone on to a college education when the benefits are
so apparent? Why don’t more of those who go to college finish
a four-year degree? (Only about half do so.)7 And why has the
proportion of American youth who drop out of high school,
especially African-American and Hispanic males, remained
fairly constant?
The answers to these and related questions lie partly in the
breakdown of the American family, and the resulting low skill
levels acquired by many children in elementary and second-
ary school—particularly individuals from broken households.
Cognitive skills tend to get developed at very early ages while,
as our colleague James Heckman has shown, noncognitive
skills—such as study habits, getting to appointments on time,
and attitudes toward work—get fixed at later, although still
relatively young, ages. Most high school dropouts certainly
appear to be seriously deficient in the noncognitive skills that

See p. 137 for
other ways to
guide readers
to your main
point.

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5 8 8

would enable them to take advantage of the higher rates of
return to education and other human capital.
So instead of lamenting the increased earnings gap caused by
education, policymakers and the public should focus attention
on how to raise the fraction of American youth who complete
high school and then go on for a college education. Solutions
are not cheap or easy. But it will be a disaster if the focus
remains so much on the earnings inequality itself that Congress
tries to interfere directly with this inequality rather than trying
to raise the education levels of those who are now being left
behind.
For many, the solution to an increase in inequality is to make
the tax structure more progressive—raise taxes on high-income
households and reduce taxes on low-income households. While
this may sound sensible, it is not. Would these same individuals
advocate a tax on going to college and a subsidy for dropping
out of high school in response to the increased importance of
education? We think not. Yet shifting the tax structure has
exactly this effect.
A more sensible policy is to try to take greater advan-
tage of the opportunities afforded by the higher returns to
human capital and encourage more human capital invest-
ment. Attempts to raise taxes and impose other penalties on
the higher earnings that come from greater skills could greatly
reduce the productivity of the world’s leading economy by dis-
couraging investments in its most productive and precious form
of capital—human capital.

Notes

1. Dexter Roberts, “China’s Widening Income Gap,” BusinessWeek,
February 16, 2007.

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2. “China: Two Decades of Poverty Reduction,” Overcoming Human Poverty:
UNDP Poverty Report 2000, United Nations Development Programme, 2000.

3. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.
4. Ibid.
5. “Postsecondary Participation Rates by Sex and Race/Ethnicity: 1974–

2003,” Issue Brief, March 2005, National Center for Education Statistics.
6. Pablo A. Peña, “What is the Effect of Colleges’ Wealth on Tuition

Fees?” Introduction to “Tuition and Wealth at American Colleges,” University
of Chicago, 2006.

7. Associated Press, “U.S. College Drop-out Rate Sparks Concern,”
September 27, 2006.

Joining the Conversation

1. Why, according to Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy, has
income inequality in the United States increased signifi-
cantly since 1980? In what ways do they believe that this
change is “beneficial and desirable”?

2. According to the authors, “Growth in the education level of
the population has been a significant source of rising wages,
productivity, and living standards over the past century”
(paragraph 9). Which groups have benefited from these
developments, and which ones have not? What do Becker
and Murphy say about what can be done to improve the
situation of the less advantaged?

3. This article appeared in a magazine published by an insti-
tute “committed to expanding liberty, increasing individ-
ual opportunity, and strengthening free enterprise.” What
aspects of the authors’ argument seem consistent with those
goals? What other views do they mention, and how per-
suasively do they respond? What other objections could be
raised?

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5 9 0

4. Paul Krugman offers a different perspective on economic
inequality (pp. 561−80). How might he respond to Becker
and Murphy’s argument that earnings inequality should
be considered “a favorable rather than an unfavorable
development”?

5. Becker and Murphy conclude by saying that “Attempts to
raise taxes and impose other penalties on the higher earn-
ings that come from greater skills could greatly reduce the
productivity of the world’s leading economy by discourag-
ing investments in its most productive and precious form of
capital—human capital.” Summarize this conclusion in your
own words, and see if you can think of some examples that
would help demonstrate what they’re saying.

6. Go to theysayiblog.com and read “Of the 1%, by the 1%,
for the 1%” by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-winning economist
who does not believe that inequality in the United States is
at all “beneficial.” Imagine that Stiglitz wrote his article for
the kind of politically conservative audience in favor of free
enterprise that Becker and Murphy were writing for. How
might Stiglitz have developed his argument differently to
appeal to such readers? Consider his title, for example, and
suggest a title that would be more likely to appeal to such
an audience. What in Becker and Murphy’s article might he
quote as a “they say”—and what then might he say?

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What’s Killing Poor White Women?

M O N I C A P O T T S

For most Americans, life expectancy continues to rise—
but not for uneducated white women. They have lost five
years, and no one understands why.

On the night of May 23, 2012, which turned out to be
the last of her life, Crystal Wilson baby-sat her infant grand-
daughter, Kelly. It was how she would have preferred to spend
every night. Crystal had joined Facebook the previous year,
and the picture of her daughter cradling the newborn in the
hospital bed substituted for a picture of herself. Crystal’s entire
wall was a catalog of visits from her nieces, nephews, cousins’
kids, and, more recently, the days she baby-sat Kelly. She was

Monica Potts writes for the American Prospect, a magazine whose
website says, “We’re liberal, progressive, lefty—call it what you want,
we’re proud of it.” Her work also has appeared in the Connecticut
Post, the Stamford Advocate, and the New York Times. She blogs at
postbourgie.com. This article first appeared in the July/August 2013
issue of the American Prospect.

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M O N I C A P O T T S

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a mother hen, people said of Crystal. She’d wanted a house full
of children, but she’d only had one.
The picture the family chose for her obituary shows Crystal
and her husband holding the infant. Crystal leans in from the
side, with dark, curly hair, an unsmiling round face, and black
eyebrows knit together. She was 38 and bore an unhealthy heft,
more than 200 pounds. Crystal had been to the doctor, who
told her she was overweight and diabetic. She was waiting to
get medicine, but few in her family knew it, and no one thought
she was near death.
Crystal’s 17-year-old daughter, Megan, split her time between
her parents’ house in Cave City, Arkansas, and that of her
boyfriend, Corey, in nearby Evening Shade. Megan made sure
that each set of grandparents could spend time with the baby.
The night before Crystal’s death, Megan and Corey were moving
with his parents to a five-acre patch near Crystal. Megan and
Corey were running late, so they didn’t pick the baby up until
11 P.M. Crystal seemed fine. “You couldn’t tell she was sick,”
Megan says. “She never felt sick.” They went back home, and
Megan got a text from her mom around midnight. “She said she
loved me, give Kelly kisses, and give Corey hugs and tell him
to take care of her girls and she’d see me in the morning. I was
supposed to drop Kelly off at ten o’clock and finish moving.”
Instead, at around 9:30 the next morning, when Megan was
getting ready to leave, Corey’s grandfather called and said Crys-
tal was dead. Megan didn’t believe him. If one of her parents
passed, it had to be her dad. “I thought it was my dad that
died because he was always the unhealthy one.” Megan left
Kelly with her mother-in-law and raced with Corey and his dad
in the truck, hazards on, laying on the horn, and pulled into
the dirt driveway outside her parents’ tan-and-brown single-
wide trailer. “Daddy was sitting there in the recliner crying,”

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What’s Killing Poor White Women?

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Megan says. “It was Momma gone, not him.” Crystal had died
in her bed early in the morning.
Just after 10 A.M., nearly every relative Crystal had was
in the rutted driveway in front of the trailer. Crystal was the
last of six children and considered the baby of the family.
She was the third sibling to die. Her brother Terry, the “Big
Man,” who hosted all the holiday dinners and coached the
family softball team, had died three months earlier at age 47,
and her sister Laura, whom everybody called Pete, died at age
45 in 2004. The police—dozens, it seemed, from the county
and from the town—had arrived and blocked off the bedroom
where she lay and were interviewing people to figure out what
had killed her.
The coroner arrived and pronounced Crystal dead at 11:40.
Her body was rolled out on a gurney and shipped to the state
lab in Little Rock. One of the officers, Gerald Traw, later told
me an autopsy is routine when someone dies without a doctor
present. “We like to know why somebody died,” he says.

Everything about Crystal’s life was ordinary, except for her
death. She is one of a demographic—white women who don’t
graduate from high school—whose life expectancy has declined
dramatically over the past 18 years. These women can now
expect to die five years earlier than the generation before them.
It is an unheard-of drop for a wealthy country in the age of
modern medicine. Throughout history, technological and sci-
entific innovation have put death off longer and longer, but
the benefits of those advances have not been shared equally,
especially across the race and class divides that characterize
21st-century America. Lack of access to education, medical
care, good wages, and healthy food isn’t just leaving the worst-
off Americans behind. It’s killing them.

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The journal Health Affairs reported the five-year drop last
August. The article’s lead author, Jay Olshansky, who studies
human longevity at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with
a team of researchers looked at death rates for different groups
from 1990 to 2008. White men without high-school diplomas
had lost three years of life expectancy, but it was the decline for
women like Crystal that made the study news. Previous studies
had shown that the least-educated whites began dying younger in
the 2000s, but only by about a year. Olshansky and his colleagues
did something the other studies hadn’t: They isolated high-school
dropouts and measured their outcomes instead of lumping them
in with high-school graduates who did not go to college.
The last time researchers found a change of this magnitude,
Russian men had lost seven years after the fall of the Soviet
Union, when they began drinking more and taking on other
risky behaviors. Although women generally outlive men in the
U.S., such a large decline in the average age of death, from
almost 79 to a little more than 73, suggests that an increasing
number of women are dying in their twenties, thirties, and
forties. “We actually don’t know the exact reasons why it’s
happened,” Olshansky says. “I wish we did.”
Most Americans, including high-school dropouts of other
races, are gaining life expectancy, just at different speeds.
Absent a war, genocide, pandemic, or massive governmental
collapse, drops in life expectancy are rare. “If you look at the
history of longevity in the United States, there have been no
dramatic negative or positive shocks,” Olshansky says. “With
the exception of the 1918 influenza pandemic, everything has
been relatively steady, slow changes. This is a five-year drop in
an 18-year time period. That’s dramatic.”
Researchers had known education was linked to longer life
since the 1960s, but it was difficult to tell whether it was a proxy

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What’s Killing Poor White Women?

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for other important factors—like coming from a wealthy family
or earning a high income as an adult. In 1999, a Columbia eco-
nomics graduate student named Adriana Lleras-Muney decided
to figure out if education was the principal cause. She found
that each additional year of schooling added about a year of life.
Subsequent studies suggested the link was less direct. Education
is strongly associated with a longer life, but that doesn’t mean
that every year of education is an elixir. “It is the biggest asso-
ciation, but it is also the thing that we measure about people
the best,” Lleras-Muney says. “It is one of those things that we
can collect data on. There could be other things that matter a
lot more, but they’re just very difficult to measure.”
As is often the case when researchers encounter something
fuzzy, they start suggesting causes that sound decidedly unscien-
tific. Their best guess is that staying in school teaches people to
delay gratification. The more educated among us are better at
forgoing pleasurable and possibly risky behavior because we’ve
learned to look ahead to the future. That connection isn’t new,
however, and it wouldn’t explain why the least-educated whites
like Crystal are dying so much younger today than the same
group was two decades ago.

Cave City gives itself the low-stakes title of “Home of the World’s
Sweetest Watermelons.” Beneath the ground, the Crystal River
carves out the caverns that lend the town its name. Above it,
1,900 people live in single-wides in neighborhoods dotted with
fenced lawns or along spindly red-dirt trails off the main highway.
In this part of Arkansas, the Ozark Plateau flattens to meet the
Mississippi embayment, and the hills give way to rice paddies.
About 17,000 people live in Sharp County, a long string of small
towns with Cave City at the bottom and the Missouri border at
the top. Most of the residents are white—96 percent—with a

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median household income of $29,590. Nearly a quarter live in
poverty, and Crystal was among them; for most of her married
life, she relied on income from her husband’s disability checks.
For work, people drive to the college town of Batesville, about
20 minutes south, which has a chicken-processing plant that
periodically threatens to close and an industrial bakery with
12-hour shifts that make it hard for a mother to raise children.
Less than 13 percent of county residents have a bachelor’s degree.
Society is divided into opposites: Godly folk go to church and
sinners chase the devil, students go to college and dropouts seek
hard labor, and men call the shots and women cook for them.
Crystal’s parents, Junior and Martha Justice, had moved to
the area when her three oldest siblings were still toddlers. “My
aunt told my dad that he could make better money up here, but
it wasn’t so,” says Linda Holley, one of Crystal’s sisters. Junior
farmed, which fed his family and brought in a little money. He
found a piece of land on a country road called Antioch and
bought a prefabricated home from the Jim Walters company.
It was on this land they had their next three children. Crystal,
born July 6, 1973, was the sixth and youngest.
Their life was old-school country. They raised chickens and
goats and grew their own vegetables. The house was small,
with only three bedrooms. Crystal’s closest sibling, Terry, was
7 years older. Linda was a full 15 years older than Crystal, which
made her more like a second mom than a sister. When Crystal
was two, Linda’s twin sister, Pete, began having children and,
fleeing a string of abusive relationships, turned over custody to
her parents. Having four slightly younger nieces and nephews
in the house gave Crystal playmates her own age.
It was Linda, the doting older sister and aunt, who would
take all the kids to Dogpatch, a creaky little Ozarks amusement
park based on the comic strip, with actors playing Daisy Mae

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and Li’l Abner. Linda keeps Polaroids of Crystal from that time.
They show her with long, curly blond hair and often half-
clothed, happy, covered in clay and mud. “Grandpa used to
call her his little Shirley Temple,” says Crystal’s niece, Lori.
When Crystal was starting out in elementary school, the
family moved to a trailer to be closer to town. Her dad worked
occasionally for lumber companies, and the proximity made
jobs easier to find. Crystal was well behaved in school, and
teachers would ask Lori, only two years behind, “Why aren’t
you like her, she was so quiet and shy?” Crystal loved basketball
and, especially, softball, which she played in summer clubs even
as an adult. As she got older, her hair darkened and she became
stocky and muscular. She played ball like a bulldozer and was
aggressive on the field and mouthy off. The whole family would
play and bicker and joke. Crystal would smack people across
the butt with the bat if they weren’t moving fast enough.
“It wasn’t until we got in high school that I realized she
was struggling so bad in school,” Lori says. “I was in the sev-
enth grade, and she was in the ninth, and I wasn’t really smart
myself. But I could help her do some of her work.” In 1988,
Junior died from lung cancer at age 55. Both he and Martha
were smokers. The next year Crystal met Carl Wilson, whom
everybody called Possum. He was related to a cousin through
marriage and, at 28, was 12 years her senior. They kept their
relationship secret for a few months. “He came up to see her
at the school,” Lori says. “So I pretty much put two and two
together. I was the one that told my grandmother.” Lori thought
that would put an end to it; instead, Martha let them marry.
According to Linda, Martha had one admonition for Possum:
“Momma said, ‘As long as you take care of her and don’t hit
her, you have my permission.’ He done what he could do for
her. They was mates.”

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Possum moved in with the family in the trailer. He and
Crystal had one room, Martha another, and the four nephews
and nieces shared two bunk beds in the third. Crystal dropped
out in the tenth grade because she had married. That was the
way things were. None of Crystal’s siblings finished high school.
Instead, they became adults when they were teenagers. Crystal
would spend the rest of her years as a housewife to a husband
who soon became ill and as a mother to a daughter who would
grow up as fast as she did.

Researchers have long known that high-school dropouts like
Crystal are unlikely to live as long as people who have gone
to college. But why would they be slipping behind the genera-
tion before them? James Jackson, a public-health researcher at
the University of Michigan, believes it’s because life became
more difficult for the least-educated in the 1990s and 2000s.
Broad-scale shifts in society increasingly isolate those who don’t
finish high school from good jobs, marriageable partners, and
healthier communities. “Hope is lowered. If you drop out of
school, say, in the last 20 years or so, you just had less hope
for ever making it and being anything,” Jackson says. “The
opportunities available to you are very different than what they
were 20 or 30 years ago. What kind of job are you going to get
if you drop out at 16? No job.”
In May, Jennifer Karas Montez of the Harvard University
Center for Population and Development Studies co-authored
the first paper investigating why white women without high-
school diplomas might be dying. Most research has looked at
which diseases are the cause of death, but Montez and her co-
author wanted to tease out quality of life: economic indicators
like employment and income, whether women were married
and how educated their spouses were, and health behaviors

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like smoking and alcohol abuse. It is well known that smok-
ing shortens life; in fact, smoking led to the early deaths of
both of Crystal’s parents and her sister and brother. Crystal,
though, never smoke or drank. But the researchers discovered
something else that was driving women like her to early graves:
Whether the women had a job mattered, and it mattered more
than income or other signs of financial stability, like homeown-
ership. In fact, smoking and employment were the only two
factors of any significance.
At first, Montez and her co-author suspected that women
who are already unhealthy are less able to work and so are
already more likely to die. When they investigated that hypoth-
esis, however, it didn’t hold up. Jobs themselves contributed
something to health. But what? It could be, the authors sug-
gested, that work connects women to friends and other social
networks they otherwise wouldn’t have. Even more squishy
sounding, Montez wrote that jobs might give women a “sense
of purpose.”
Better-educated women are the most likely to work and to
achieve parity with men: Seventy-two percent are in the work-
force, compared with 81 percent of their male counter-parts.
Women without high-school diplomas are the least likely to
work. Only about a third are in the workforce, compared to
about half of their male counterparts. If they do find work,
women are more likely than men to have minimum-wage
jobs. They account for most workers in the largest low-paying
occupations—child-care providers, housecleaners, food servers.
Even if they do have minimum-wage jobs, this group of women
is more likely to leave the labor force to take care of young
children because child care is prohibitively expensive.
Montez’s joblessness study, however, raised more questions.
Would any job do? What does giving women a “sense of purpose”

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mean? And why would joblessness hit white women harder than
other groups? Overall, men lost more jobs during the Great
Recession. Why are women losing years at a faster rate?

Cave City life revolves around its rivers, thick with runoff from
the mountains and barreling toward the Mississippi. Crystal
loved the area, but she also didn’t know anything else. She
hunted squirrels and rabbits in the fall, but spring was filled
with what she loved most. School ends, and softball season
begins. It is a brief, lovely time, before humidity and mosqui-
toes, when the world smells of wildflowers and dirt and storms.
Every year, one of Crystal’s brothers made sure she had a fishing
license for the spring-swollen White River and the less touristy
Black River, where they had better hauls. People come from
around the state to float lazily, drunkenly down the rivers in
canoes and rafts. Songbirds come too—buntings, mockingbirds,
whippoorwills, woodpeckers—settling in for the season near the
quieter streams, ponds, and water-filled rice paddies. Deer fill
the kudzu-covered woods. Copperhead snakes awakened from
hibernation nest in muddy puddles.
Crystal wanted to start a family as soon as she was mar-
ried but couldn’t. Her first three pregnancies, in the early ’90s,
ended in miscarriages. The first two occurred so late she gave
the babies names, Justin and Crystal; the last was a set of twins.
None of her relatives knew if she ever went to a doctor to find
out why she miscarried. “I just thought maybe it was one of
those things, you know, some people can have them and carry
them and some can’t,” Lori says. Megan said her mother had
had “female cancer,” a catchall phrase for cervical cancer and
the infections and dysplasia leading up to it.
When Lori’s son was born, Crystal teased her about stealing
him. She was always volunteering to baby-sit the kids in the

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family. When Crystal finally got pregnant with Megan, no one
was sure she would make it, least of all Crystal and Possum.
“They ended up just praying for me,” Megan says. She was born
July 20, 1994, and became the center of Crystal’s world.
By the time Megan was born, Crystal and Possum were
living in their own trailer but were struggling financially.
Possum had worked the first four years of their marriage at
the chicken-processing plant before quitting for good because
of health problems. An accident on an oil rig when he was
a teenager had left him with a plate in his skull. Chicken-
processing plants are tough places to work, and besides, he
qualified for disability. Crystal spent her life taking him to
specialists—he was covered by Medicaid—but the problems
piled up. He had a congenital heart condition and a bad back.
A young-old man.
When Megan was 12, Crystal worked for a brief spell as a
housekeeper at a nursing home in Cave City, where Linda and
Lori worked. Mostly, though, she stayed home to take care of
Possum and Megan. Baby-sitting brought in small amounts of
cash, but she and Possum relied on disability, which was about
$1,000 a month. Outside of a brief trip to Texas after Megan
was born to show her off to Possum’s family, and a trip to a
small town near St. Louis to visit a niece after one of the trail-
ers they lived in burned down, Crystal passed her entire life in
Cave City.
Crystal spent what money she had on Megan. She gave
her any new toy she wanted and, later, name-brand clothes,
a four-wheeler, a laptop, and a phone. When Megan started
playing softball, Crystal spent money on shoes, gloves, and club
fees. “Crystal was a super mom,” says Steve Green, the school
superintendent and Megan’s softball coach. “They didn’t have
a lot of revenue, but they put everything they had into Megan.”

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Crystal and Possum made it to every practice and every game,
even if it meant driving for an hour, deep into the mountains.
They brought snacks and sports drinks for Megan’s teammates.
Crystal would watch her nieces, nephews, and cousins’ kids play,
and she still played for her family team in Batesville. Crystal went
with Linda to a missionary Baptist church near the family road in
Antioch, but she and Possum weren’t every-Sunday Christians—
it was the softball field her spring weekends revolved around.
But when Terry was diagnosed with cancer in 2009, the family
stopped playing, and Crystal lost her favorite activity.
When her relatives look back, they think Crystal was probably
lonely. Her mother had died three years after Megan was born.
Although she and Possum had a Ford Contour, Crystal seldom
drove, relying on relatives to come by to take her to the grocery
store. It was a chance to visit. When Linda’s daughter took her
truck-driver husband to pick up his 18-wheeler for his next haul,
Crystal would always want to go with them. She would call her
family members throughout the day, gossiping. She didn’t stir
up trouble, but she reveled in drama. Crystal would often go to
Linda’s for homemade biscuits and gravy for breakfast, and she’d
ask Linda to buy her liter bottles of Dr Pepper whenever she
ran out. She was addicted to Dr Pepper. Sometimes, relatives
paid for Possum’s medicine; Linda’s daughter remembers paying
as much as $64 in one visit. Crystal’s nieces and nephews had
gotten older and started their own families, and now she relied
on them as much as she had her older siblings.

Another mystery emerged from the lifespan study: Black women
without a high-school diploma are now outliving their white
counterparts.
As a group, blacks are more likely to die young, because the
factors that determine well-being—income, education, access

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to health care—tend to be worse for blacks. Yet blacks on the
whole are closing the life–expectancy gap with whites. In a
country where racism still plays a significant role in all that
contributes to a healthier, longer life, what could be affecting
whites more than blacks?
One theory is that low-income white women smoke and
drink and abuse prescription drugs like OxyContin and street
drugs like meth more than black women. Despite Crystal’s
weight and diabetes, those problems are more common among
black women and usually kill more slowly. Meth and alcohol
kill quickly. It could be that white women, as a group, are better
at killing themselves.
Still, why would white women be more likely to engage in
risky behaviors? Another theory is that the kind of place people
live in, who is around them, and what those neighbors are doing
play a central role. Health is also a matter of place and time.
In March, two researchers from the University of Wiscon-
sin reported that women in nearly half of 3,140 counties in
the United States saw their death rates rise during the same
time period that Olshansky studied. The researchers colored
the counties with an increase in female mortality a bright red,
and the red splashed over Appalachia, down through Kentucky
and Tennessee, north of the Cotton Belt, and across the
Ozarks—the parts of the South where poor white people live.
Location seemed to matter more than other indicators, like
drug use, which has been waning. The Wisconsin researchers
recommended more studies examining “cultural, political, or
religious factors.”
Something less tangible, it seems, is shaping the lives of
white women in the South, beyond what science can measure.
Surely these forces weigh on black women, too, but perhaps
they are more likely to have stronger networks of other women.

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Perhaps after centuries of slavery and Jim Crow, black women
are more likely to feel like they’re on an upward trajectory.
Perhaps they have more control relative to the men in their
communities. In low-income white communities of the South,
it is still women who are responsible for the home and for raising
children, but increasingly they are also raising their husbands.
A husband is a burden and an occasional heartache rather than
a helpmate, but one women are told they cannot do without.
More and more, data show that poor women are working the
hardest and earning the most in their families but can’t take
the credit for being the breadwinners. Women do the emotional
work for their families, while men reap the most benefits from
marriage. The rural South is a place that often wants to remain
unchanged from the 1950s and 1960s, and its women are now
dying as if they lived in that era, too.

Crystal’s world was getting smaller and smaller and more sed-
entary. Everyone was worried about Possum, but Crystal’s own
health was bad. She’d had a cystic ovary removed when Megan
was 13, and about a year before her death she had a hyster-
ectomy. The surgery was necessary after Crystal had started
hemorrhaging, which was brought on by another miscarriage—
something her family didn’t know about until the autopsy.
It’s unclear when she learned she was a diabetic. Megan thinks
her mom might have heard it for the first time when she was
pregnant with her, but Crystal never had regular medical care
because she didn’t qualify for Medicaid as Possum did.
Megan started spending more time away from her mom in
the tenth grade, when Corey and his family moved to town.
Crystal consented to their high-school romance, though she
warned Corey that if he ever hit her daughter, she’d put him
in the ground herself. Within a year of going out with Corey,

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Megan was pregnant. She swears she didn’t know it until she
was seven and a half months along, when Corey’s mother made
her take a pregnancy test. They had a short time to prepare for
Kelly’s birth in February 2012, but Crystal was happy about the
new baby. It was a way for her to have another child. But after
Kelly’s birth, Crystal and Megan argued; Megan was worried
her mother would spoil Kelly. Because Corey’s father worked,
his family had a bit more money, and they bought more baby
clothes than Crystal could, which only made her feel worse.
In the final months of her life, Crystal complained of chest
aches, but when she went to the emergency room, the doctors
assured her it wasn’t a heart attack. She said that she felt like
she had the flu or allergies. In hindsight, it was after Terry’s
death—he died a week after Kelly was born—when Crystal
really began to suffer. He had been the linchpin of the fam-
ily, and now they were breaking apart. After he died, Crys-
tal would call Linda’s daughter and say, “I wish God would
have took me instead of Terry.” Crystal posted regularly about
Terry on her Facebook page. Crystal had stopped coming to
Linda’s for breakfast, too, because Possum was growing sicker
and had started falling when he tried to walk on his own. He
was diagnosed with cancer about a week before Crystal’s death.
“I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe some of it might have
been attributed to her system just being drug down from having
to take care of Carl and Megan,” says Steve Green, the school
superintendent. “Just everyday stress.”
The night before she died, Crystal made herself a peanut-
butter-and-jelly sandwich for dinner. After Megan took Kelly
home, she went to bed and fell asleep, but Possum said she woke
up at 1 A.M., said she was thirsty, and went to the kitchen.
She was a fitful sleeper, and she returned to bed. When Crystal
wasn’t up before him the next morning, it struck Possum as odd,

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but he let her sleep. Crystal usually called her relatives around
6 or 7 A.M. to see what their plans were for the day. They
wondered if something was wrong when their phones didn’t
beep. Finally, Possum sent in his brother, who’d been staying
with them, to wake Crystal up; they were always going after each
other, and he thought the teasing would spur her out of bed.
Crystal’s funeral was small, mostly attended by family, and
held at the funeral home in Cave City. They buried her in a
tiny graveyard next to a little white chapel on Antioch Road,
near the land where Crystal was born. Megan went to stay with
Corey’s family, and they offered to buy Possum a prefabricated
barn so he could come live near them, but there was no need.
He spent most of the next four weeks in and out of the hospi-
tal, until he died of massive heart failure on June 22. Possum
was buried right beside Crystal. Both graves are marked with
temporary notices. Linda has promised Megan she will help buy
tombstones.
The medical examiner’s investigation into Crystal’s death
was closed because it was determined she died of natural causes.
The police report lists no official cause. With untreated, unman-
aged diabetes, her blood would have been thick and sticky—the
damage would have been building for years—and it could have
caused cardiac arrest or a stroke. Linda has her own explana-
tion: “Her heart exploded.” And, in a way, it had.

After her mom’s death, Megan was 17, hitched, and living on
the same land where Crystal had given birth to her. Was it
going to be the same life over again?
At school, a number of administrators and teachers stepped
in to make sure Megan felt supported; one of them was the tech-
nology coordinator for the Cave City schools, Julie Johnson.
With big gray eyes and a neat gray bob, she seems younger than

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46. When I visited the school this spring, Julie showed me a
picture of Megan with Kelly, Corey, and his family that Megan
copied and gave to her. They became close last winter when
Julie walked into one of Megan’s classrooms and the teacher
asked, “Have you congratulated Megan?” Julie turned to her
and said, “What have you done, sister?” Megan told her that
she’d given birth only a week before but that she’d wanted to
come back to school. Julie said, “Dang, you’re tough!”
Julie has seen a lot of teen mothers. Arkansas ranks No. 1
in the country in teenage births. About a month before Megan
gave birth to Kelly, another young woman from the school
had gotten married and had a baby, then died mysteriously.
Nobody knew what had caused it, and the girl, Bethany, was
in the back of Julie’s mind when she saw Megan. “I’ve been
in education for 25 years. I kind of got a good eye and sensed
where she was coming from. And I was troubled because, as I
kept thinking, OK, if a teacher here at school has a baby, they
have a big shower for her, and if somebody at church has a
baby, they have a shower for her, but if you have a child as a
child, we don’t do anything.”
She prayed on what to do, and prayed some more. It led her
to start the Bethany Project, a donation program that would
give Megan and other young mothers baby clothes, school sup-
plies, and community support. Megan was only in the spring
of her junior year when she had Kelly. Megan told Julie she’d
promised her mother she’d stay in school—Megan told me
Crystal wanted her to have a good job so she could take care of
Kelly and spoil her rotten—and Julie thinks Megan’s mother-
in-law helped her uphold her promise. “Corey’s mother, I
think she would have fought the devil to make sure those
two finished school.” They did. Megan and Corey finished
school on May 3 of this year, were married eight days later

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on May 11, and then graduated on May 18, just a few days
shy of the anniversary of Crystal’s death. Megan found a job
at Wendy’s and plans to enroll in the community college in
Batesville. Finishing college would give her the best chance
to escape her mother’s fate.
Julie knows a lot of young women who will never break the
cycle. She has her own thoughts about what might be dragging
down their life expectancy. “Desperation,” she says. “You look
at the poverty level in this county—I love this place. It’s where
I’m from. I don’t want you to think I’m being negative about
it.” But she gestures toward the highway and notes how little is
there: a few convenience stores, a grocery, and a nursing home.
You have to drive north to the county seat in Ash Flat for a
Walmart, or you can negotiate traffic in Batesville, where you
might get a job at the chicken plant or a fast-food restaurant.
“If you are a woman, and you are a poorly educated woman,
opportunities for you are next to nothing. You get married and
you have kids. You can’t necessarily provide as well as you’d like
to for those kids. Oftentimes, the way things are, you’re better
off if you’re not working. You get more help. You get better care
for your kids if you’re not working. It’s a horrible cycle.
“You don’t even hear about women’s lib, because that’s come
and gone. But you hear about glass ceilings, and I think girls,
most especially girls, have to be taught that just because they’re
girls doesn’t mean they can’t do something. That they are just
as smart, that they are just as valuable as males. And we have
to teach boys that girls can be that way, too. They all need the
love, nurturing, and support from somebody from their family
or who’s not their family. Somebody who’s willing to step up.
There has to be something to inspire kids to want more, to want
better. And they have to realize that they’re going to have to
work hard to get it. I don’t know how you do that.

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“It’s just horrible, you know? I don’t know if ‘horrible’ is the
right word.” Julie puts her face into her hands. “The desperation
of the times. I don’t know anything about anything, but that’s
what kills them.”

Joining the Conversation

1. Monica Potts concludes by quoting a school administrator in
rural Arkansas: “The desperation of the times . . . that’s what
kills them.” Based on what you’ve learned in this article,
what factors might she be referring to when she talks about
“desperation”?

2. This article appeared in the American Prospect, a political
magazine whose editors say, “We’re liberal, progressive,
lefty—call it what you want, we’re proud of it.” In what
respects does Potts’s article reflect this political perspective?

3. So what? Who cares? How does Potts show us why this
topic matters? How might she make that point even more
persuasively?

4. How do you think Potts would respond to Radley Balko’s
argument (pp. 466−70) that choices about eating, lifestyle,
and health are largely matters of personal responsibility and
should not be considered the government’s responsibility?

5. This article is written primarily as a narrative about the
life and death of Crystal Wilson. Rewrite the article as an
argument about creating more government programs to help
people like Crystal. You can write in favor of such programs,
against them, or both, but be sure to consider arguments
other than your own.

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The American Dream:
Dead, Alive, or on Hold?

B R A N D O N K I N G

What is the true state of the so-called “American
Dream” today? Is it still around, waiting to be achieved by
those who work hard enough, or is it effectively dead, killed
off by the Great Recession and the economic hardships that
many Americans have come to face? Statistics reveal alarm-
ing facts, including trillions of dollars lost in the stock market
(Paradis, 2009). While these losses, combined with admittedly
high unemployment in the past few years, have contributed to
seemingly dismal prospects for prosperity in the United States,
I believe that the ideals and values of the American Dream
are still very much alive. In fact, the original term “American
Dream” was coined during the Great Depression by James Trus-
low Adams, who wrote that the American dream “is that dream
of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller
for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability

Brandon King is a law student at Indiana University. He majored in
political science at the University of Cincinnati. He has always enjoyed
writing on the topics of economic inequality and political structures in
the United States and wrote this essay in 2011, for this book.

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and achievement, regardless of social class or circumstances of
birth” (1931). I would redefine the American Dream today as
the potential to work for an honest, secure way of life and save
for the future. Many liberal economists and activists say that
the American Dream is dead, but I say that it’s more alive and
important than ever—and that it is the key to climbing out
of the Great Recession, overcoming inequality, and achieving
true prosperity.
Despite the harshness of the Great Recession, a 2009 New
York Times survey found that 72 percent of Americans still
believed it was possible to start poor, work hard, and become
rich in America (Seelye, 2009). In the same survey, Americans
were also asked questions about what they believed constituted
being “successful,” with the majority naming things such as a
steady job, financial security for the future, being able to retire
without struggling, and having a secure place of residence. Less
common were responses about owning a home or car and being
able to buy other expensive goods, implying a subtle shift from
the American Dream of the past to a more modest one today.
In many ways, the American Dream of today is a trimmed down
version of its former self. The real sign of success in our society
used to be owning expensive items, namely cars and homes, and
acquiring more material wealth. Living the American Dream
meant going from dirt poor to filthy rich and becoming more
than you could have ever imagined. Today, most people do
not strive for a rags-to-riches transition, and instead prefer a
stable, middle-class lifestyle, one in which they can focus on
saving money for the future and having secure employment. For
example, more and more people now rent their homes instead
of buying; a recent study showed a decrease in home ownership
from 69% in 2005 to about 66.5% in 2010, and an increase in
renter households of 1.1 million (Hoak, 2011). Americans are

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scrutinizing their spending habits more intensely, as shown in
a survey completed in 2009 showing that approximately two-
thirds of Americans have permanently changed their spending
habits as a result of the Great Recession and that one-fourth
hope to save more money for the future (Frietchen, 2009).
Looking at the fragile economy today, it is tempting to
focus on the unevenness of the recovery: the stock market has
made impressive rebounds in recent months, but the unem-
ployment rate remains high. Thanks to bailouts for large cor-
porations and stimulus measures intended to generate growth,
economic activity seems to be on its way towards pre-recession
levels, but the economy remains fragile. Weak national real
estate markets, sluggish job growth, and the slow recovery of
liquid assets lost during the recession are obstacles to a full
recovery.
To many, the most worrisome problem is inequality: that
wealth is concentrated into the hands of a rich minority. One
economist, Robert Reich, even says that “As long as income
and wealth keep concentrating at the top, and the great divide
between America’s have-mores and have-lesses continues to
widen, the Great Recession won’t end, at least not in the real
economy” (Reich, 2009). The essence of Reich’s argument is
that Wall Street will effectively deter any meaningful recovery
on Main Street. Another economist, Paul Krugman, holds a
similar position, writing that “The lion’s share of economic
growth in America over the past thirty years has gone to a
small, wealthy minority,” and that “the lack of clear economic
progress for lower and middle income families is in itself an
important reason to seek a more equal distribution of income”
(2007). Krugman believes that the American Dream is no
longer possible for most Americans, and that the government
should enact policies to close the income gap.

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We may have genuine inequality issues and a sizable divide
between the rich and poor, and we might have an economy
that is recovering too slowly for public interest. The American
Dream, however, is based on perception, on the way some-
one imagines how to be successful. How can anyone claim that
because there are more poor people than rich, or more power
and wealth concentrated at the top, that the entire premise
of the American Dream is dead? In fact, the safeguards of the
welfare system, including the minimum wage and unemploy-
ment benefits, were long ago put in place to protect the poorest
Americans. During the Great Recession, the federal government
decided that raising the minimum wage would stimulate worker
productivity and help close the income gap. In reality, however,
it has done little to make the poor richer. In fact, raising the
minimum wage, which makes labor more expensive, could force
companies to cut back and hire fewer workers.
With a different approach to fixing the economy, some
economists and politicians argue that supporting the richest
sectors of the American economy will bring economic stability
and a full recovery. They claim that a sizable income gap does
not necessarily prevent individuals in the lower and middle
classes from achieving the American Dream. I agree: govern-
ment funding for Wall Street and struggling businesses makes
the economy healthier. I believe that we should keep in mind
the ways in which large businesses and financial insti-tutions
enable many others to attain economic stability and security.
For example, providing money to businesses may encourage
them to hire more people, thereby increasing job opportu-
nities. Just last year, President Obama presented a proposal,
later passed by Congress, establishing a $33 billion tax credit
to provide incentives for businesses to hire more workers and
increase existing wages (Gomstyn, 2010). Increased support

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for Wall Street could in this way make the overall economy
healthier so that everyone has increased opportunities.
Some, however, argue that raising taxes on the rich and on
America’s wealthy businesses is an effective means of closing
the income gap. For New York Times columnist Bob Herbert,
our economic problems are the result of bad policy decisions
that have led to the rapid migration of American jobs over-
seas, the degradation of the American education system, and
continuous costly wars. His primary point in a recent New York
Times column was that America “does not have the common

sense to raise taxes,” his solution to solving inequality
issues and achieving greater economic security (2010).
Robert Reich and Paul Krugman concur with Herbert’s
analysis and recommend raising taxes (Krugman, 2007).

My question for Herbert is, “Given the Great Recession and
the tough economic climate that we continue to live in, would
raising taxes still be the prudent thing to do?” Maybe Herbert
believes that higher taxes for the rich would help solve the issue
of inequality, but in reality, it would not help people achieve
the American Dream at all. According to writer Dana Golden
(2009), the more wealth the rich accumulate, the more they
will spend it, thereby stimulating the economy. She also points
out that the creation of wealth and its subsequent use is one
way jobs are created, even in difficult economic times. Taxing
the rich only decreases their spending potential and thus their
ability to stimulate the economy.
In contrast to Herbert’s bleak view, economist Cal Thomas
responds to arguments about inequality issues by arguing
that “The rules for achieving the American Dream may no
longer be taught and supported by culture, but that doesn’t
mean that they don’t work” (2010). Indeed, the media inun-
date us with countless images and stories of struggling workers

See Chapter 5
for tips on

distinguishing
what you say

from what
they say.

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and the growing ranks of the poor while suggesting that the
American Dream is simply beyond the grasp of the vast major-
ity of Americans. Thomas’s response is that only because of
“unrestrained liberalism” are the true means of realizing the
American Dream being more and more eroded in our soci-
ety. Despite the recent recession, Thomas and others like him
have faith that as long as people believe they have a chance
of becoming better off than they are today, then the American
Dream is intact. Instead of trying to interfere with the enterprise
that creates jobs and growth, we should rely on the values of the
American Dream: that anybody can climb out of hardship and
achieve success. Only then will the American Dream remain
alive for future generations.
Just last year, a newspaper editor in Atlanta stated that,
“the Great Recession didn’t kill the American Dream. But the
promise of a good life in exchange for hard, honest work has
been bruised and frayed for millions of middle class Americans”
(Chapman, 2010). The idea of the American Dream has in
fact suffered in recent years, although it is my belief that this
is not new. As a nation, we have dealt with economic down-
turns in the past, and the American Dream has faced trials
and tests before. The economic panics of the late 1970s and
after the 9/11 terrorist attacks are both prime examples. Even
since the height of the Great Recession, however, we have
adapted the values contained within the American Dream to
meet new challenges. Of course, some will be quick to say
that these changes have only come about as a result of the
greed and corruption of the rich and powerful. Like laissez-
faire economists and Wall Street supporters, however, I believe
that it is necessary and imperative to continue supporting the
business mechanisms that sustain our economy. The American
Dream will continue to exist as part of the American psyche,

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not artificially stimulated by government regulations to change
income distribution. If the Great Recession has taught us any-
thing, it is that planning for the future by saving more and
enacting policies that sustain economic growth are what will
keep the American Dream alive.

References*

Adams, J. T. (1931). Epic of America. Boston: Little, Brown.
Chapman, D. (2010, December 10). American dream deferred, not dead.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Retrieved from http://www.ajc.com/
Frietchen, C. (2009, October 24). Imagining yourself post-recession: Survey

shows spending-habit changes [Web log post]. Productopia: A World
Without Buyer’s Remorse. Retrieved from http://www.consumersearch.
com/blog/imagining-yourself-post-recession-survey-shows-spending-
habit-changes#

Golden, D. (2009, January 10). The economy, credit and trickle down
economics (the ripple effect). EzineArticles. Retrieved from http://
ezinearticles.com/?The-Economy,-Credit-and-Trickle-Down-Economics-
(The-Ripple-Effect)&id=1865774

Gomstyn, A. (2010, January 29). Obama announces $33B hiring tax credit.
ABC News. Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/

Herbert, B. (2010). Hiding from reality. The New York Times. Retrieved from
http://www.nytimes.com/

Hoak, A. (2011, February 8). More people choosing to rent, not buy, their
home. MarketWatch. Retrieved from http://www.marketwatch.com/

Krugman, P. (2007). The conscience of a liberal. New York, NY: Norton.
Paradis, T. (2009, October 10). The statistics of the great recession. Huffington

Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
Reich, R. (2009, December 27). 2009: The year Wall Street bounced back

and Main Street got shafted. Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.
huffingtonpost.com/

Seelye, K. (2009, May 7). What happens to the American Dream in a
recession? The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/

*Based on the APA style of documentation.

10_GRA_93584_Readings_538_637.indd 616 11/8/14 3:43 PM

http://www.consumersearch.com/blog/imagining-yourself-post-recession-survey-shows-spendinghabit-changes#

http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Economy,-Credit-and-Trickle-Down-Economics-(The-Ripple-Effect)&id=1865774

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

The American Dream: Dead, Alive, or on Hold?

6 1 7

Thomas, C. (2010, November 23). Is the American Dream over? Townhall.
Retrieved from http://townhall.com/columnists/CalThomas/2010/11/23
/is_the_american_dream_over

Joining the Conversation

1. How does Brandon King redefine the American Dream?
How does the redefinition affect his argument?

2. Summarize King’s argument in this essay. What reasons and
evidence does he use to support his views? How persuasive
do you find his argument?

3. How does King connect the various parts of his essay? Look
in particular at the beginnings and endings of paragraphs.
What sorts of transitions and other connecting devices does
King use? If you find places where he needs a transition or
other device, supply it and explain why you think it improves
the essay.

4. How well does King introduce and explain Paul Krugman’s
views on inequality and taxation (pp. 561–80)? How thor-
oughly does he respond?

5. Write an essay responding to King’s argument about the
American Dream from your own perspective—as a student,
as a worker, or both.

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http://townhall.com/columnists/CalThomas/2010/11/23/is_the_american_dream_over

6 1 8

America Remains the World’s
Beacon of Success

T I M R O E M E R

When I went to serve as U.S. ambassador to India in 2009,
I hoped to learn more about that country’s vibrant democracy
and our shared values. I gained an additional benefit while
overseas: I learned that America is still deeply admired around
the world and the place where many people want to live out
their dreams. Consequently, I have been appalled by the gloom
of those predicting that America’s greatest days are behind us.
These sentiments seep through our society, from pundits to
parents at my daughter’s basketball game, as people complain
they are “despondent” and “depressed” that our children will
be left behind by the United States’ “decline.”
Frustration at current conditions is understandable. Millions
of Americans are out of work. Our trade deficit runs about

Tim Roemer served in Congress as a Democrate from Indiana and as
ambassador to India from 2009 to 2011. He also has been a scholar
at the Mercatus Center, a conservative think tank at George Mason
University, and served on the 9/11 Commission. He has written exten-
sively on policy issues for publications such as the New York Times,
Time magazine, and the Wall Street Journal. This essay first appeared
as an op-ed in the Washington Post on January 20, 2012.

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$44 billion per month. The news is filled with stories of
greed and corruption. Congress is paralyzed by partisanship.
Meanwhile, we hear that India and China are outpacing us in
infrastructure, technology and manufacturing capability, and
investment.
But living overseas, I saw that ours is not the only country
facing profound challenges. Most major powers are experienc-
ing similar or bigger problems. True, we feel the pain of our
setbacks and fear that we are losing ground. Yet when I met
Indian students at schools or living in slums, they consistently
told me America is the place where they most want to study.
Rather than underselling our historical record and natural resil-
iency, we must build on these assets.
The United States has the largest and most technologically
powerful economy in the world, a per capita gross domestic
product of $47,200 and a gross national purchasing power that
equals those of China and Japan. Our national economy is
bigger than those of Russia, Britain, Brazil, France and Italy
combined.
Our huge GDP is no accident. We have a market-oriented
economy where most decisions are made independently by
individuals and individual businesses. From Robert Fulton to
Thomas Edison to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, inventions spring
from our labs, universities and garages, and eventually propel
world growth. Meanwhile, in China, government still peers
over the shoulder of inventors and ordinary Internet users.
India still fights a legacy of corruption in too many places, at
too many levels. In Europe, red tape has stifled many small
businesses.
During a meeting in Mumbai with three dozen business
millionaires in their twenties and thirties, I asked a simple
question: Which market would you most like to access?

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T I M R O E M E R

6 2 0

Almost unanimously, the answer was the United States. U.S.
companies remain world leaders in information technology,
bioscience, nanotechnology and aerospace. The evidence is
clear not only in the development of products such as the iPad
and iPhone but also in new patents. Last year, U.S. firms cap-
tured more than 50 percent of all U.S. patents; they received
twice as many corporate patents as Japan, which came in
second.
Yes, our high schools need to do better, as reading and
math scores and dropout rates show. But when it comes to

higher education, we remain a beacon of success. Four
of the world’s top five universities, and seven of the
top 10, listed in last year’s Times Global Higher Educa-

tion Rankings are in the United States. Americans have won
333 Nobel prizes, almost triple the number of Britons, the
runner-up. In the past three years, Americans have won Nobel
prizes in such critical fields as economics, physics, medicine
and chemistry.
Even immigration, a topic of some tension, continues to
enhance our competitiveness. Highly capable and legal immi-
grants flock to our country—aiming not for Ellis Island but
Silicon Valley and the Research Triangle Park. As researchers
at Duke and the University of California at Berkeley showed
in 2007, 25 percent of U.S. tech and engineering start-ups
between 1995 and 2005 had one or more immigrant key found-
ers, whose companies collectively generated an estimated $52
billion in 2005 sales and created nearly 450,000 jobs.
Since the time of railroads and canals, our often-maligned
federal government has invested in vital research in early phases
for developing technologies, such as the Internet and energy
technology, helping build a head start for the next generation
of U.S. industry.

Here’s a “yes,
but” move—

see p. 65.

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6 2 1

Other advantages include our positive demographic growth
pattern, our environmental protections of water and natural
resources, and, as demonstrated by the smooth operation that
took out Osama bin Laden, incredible military skill.
This country faces real challenges, including a growing deficit,
crumbling infrastructure and unsustainable entitlement spending.
Addressing these issues will require leadership to meet the times, as
happened during the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War
II and the civil rights era. Leaders need to exhibit the spirit cap-
tured by Theodore Roosevelt when he reminded us that “aggres-
sive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.”
My experience in India reinforced the perspective of
America’s image as a country of tomorrow. We should be heart-
ened, not distressed, by the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street
movements. These activists remind us our country is worth
fighting for. During this election year, we have the renewed
opportunity to channel our feelings about country—love, fear,
anger and hope—into action to transform problems into solu-
tions and move closer toward a more perfect union.

Joining the Conversation

1. In this article, Tim Roemer focuses primarily on the strengths
and potential of the United States today. Which positive
factors in particular does he emphasize, and why do you
think he chooses these as opposed to other factors?

2. Roemer is careful to acknowledge some possible objections
to his views. Name three objections that he mentions, and
explain how he attempts to answer them.

3. What’s Roemer’s main point, and how well do you think he
argues for it?

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6 2 2

4. Roemer states that he has “been appalled by the gloom of
those predicting that America’s greatest days are behind us”
(paragraph 1). He might have been talking about Edward
McClelland, the author of “RIP, the Middle Class:
1946− 2013” (pp. 549−60). Compare the arguments and
evidence that each writer provides. What, if anything, do
they agree about?

5. Write an essay summarizing the arguments made by Roemer
and McClelland and then saying what you think—and why.

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Bring on More Immigrant Entrepreneurs

S H A Y A N Z A D E H

My response to the claim that immigrants drain the economy?
I’ve created 150 new jobs.

American citizens may find it hard to imagine having
to sneak into Canada to get permission to study in another
country, or being told you can’t start your own business because
you weren’t born within particular borders. But this has been
my reality for 13 years—and it is the reality faced by untold
numbers of would-be American entrepreneurs.
I was born in Urmia, Iran, to a Kurdish middle-class family.
Because my hometown sits at the border of Turkey and Iraq, I
was exposed to instability and war from an early age. I dreamed
of moving away and doing something great with my life.
When I was 17 years old, I moved to Tehran to study
computer science at the well-respected Sharif University of
Technology, where I met my friend and future business partner

Shayan Zadeh is the cofounder and CEO of Zoosk, an online dating
website, and an investor in and adviser to startup companies. Previ-
ously, he was a program manager and software engineer for Microsoft.
This essay first appeared as an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal
on November 6, 2013.

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Alex Mehr. We both aspired to be academics, and we were
both accepted to Ph.D. programs in mechanical engineering
and computer science at the University of Maryland.
There was only one obstacle: We had to obtain F1 visas to
attend the school we’d worked so hard to get into.
In another country, this might mean a trip to the American
Embassy, but the U.S. does not have an embassy in Iran. The
closest embassy was in Turkey, but there were no flights at the
time because of political tensions. So we took buses, walked
and hitchhiked into Ankara to get visas. It made the college
application process look like a breeze by comparison.
While we were at Maryland, Alex and I changed our minds
about becoming academics. Instead, we wanted to create a
company using our technical skills. Our goal would have to
be put on hold: The Office of International Affairs at the
University of Maryland told us that they didn’t think it was
possible to start a business on a student visa. The university
referred us to a lawyer in Washington, D.C., who confirmed
that we couldn’t move forward, and added that any company
we founded as nonpermanent residents could not sponsor an
H1B work visa for us. He suggested that if we wanted to create
Zoosk, our online dating site, we should build it in another
country.
Alex and I considered ourselves American, and we wanted
access to the talent, financial backing and opportunities that
the U.S. provides. So we decided to postpone our entrepre-
neurial dreams and try to become citizens. By going to work
for Microsoft instead, I learned a great deal about building a
technology company, and I became a permanent resident in
2008, a process that took over five years. Shortly after, I left
my job at Microsoft, drove a U-Haul to Berkeley to meet up
with Alex, and we founded Zoosk.

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During the 13 years that I was in immigration limbo, I was
consistently discouraged from accepting professional opportuni-
ties that could set back my bid for citizenship. While working
for Microsoft, the company’s immigration legal team and out-
side counsel regularly advised me not to change roles within
the company while my Labor Certificate was in progress, since
this would lead to a restart of the more than two-year long
process. I was warned against traveling internationally, even
for prestigious conferences, because the company feared I would
not be granted re-entry because I am from Iran.
At Zoosk, we continue to face such issues. Of our 150
employees, dozens are not American, and we have sponsored
them for visas, shepherding them through the same, frustrating
immigration process.
My story has a happy ending: I finally became a U.S. citi-
zen in April. But it also shows how easy it is to lose skilled
talent to other countries. I chose to stay and put up with the
restrictions because there is nowhere better to build a tech
company. But many young, educated and ambitious friends of
mine decided it was too difficult here, especially when countries
like Canada and United Kingdom welcomed their expertise. It’s
not a surprise that Microsoft and Google have set up offices in
Vancouver to work around U.S. visa quotas.
We hear a lot from some quarters about the fear that immi-
grants will take jobs from Americans, or drain the U.S. econ-
omy. Nonsense. Granting legal status to illegal
immigrants alone would create 121,000 jobs per year
over the next 10 years according to the Center for
American Progress. The U.S. economy would grow by
$1.4 trillion over the next 20 years if the Senate’s proposed
immigration-reform legislation was adopted, according to the
Congressional Budget Office.

See Chapter 6
for more ways
to introduce
objections.

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S H A Y A N Z A D E H

6 2 6

As an American by choice, I am proud of our country’s
history of welcoming the tired, the poor and the “huddled
masses” who were starving or persecuted and came here create
a better life. But I’m baffled by the fact that we are turning
away the skilled masses that are hungry only for work, even as
our economy remains stagnant.

Joining the Conversation

1. Shayan Zadeh tells the story of how he, an immigrant to this
country, was able to overcome significant obstacles, includ-
ing some that resulted from U.S. laws, to become a successful
entrepreneur and employer here. What’s his point, and how
does the story he relates support that point?

2. This article appeared as an opinion piece in the Wall Street
Journal, a national newspaper focusing on business and the
economy. Why do you think Zadeh chose to publish his
piece in this particular newspaper? What are two or three
ways in which the text is specifically geared for the Wall
Street Journal’s audience?

3. Most op-ed pieces are relatively short. If you were revising
this one to be a longer essay, which strategies taught in this
book could help? What naysayers might you include? Where
would you add metacommentary? How would you say more
explicitly than Zadeh does why the argument matters?

4. Tim Roemer’s op-ed (pp. 618−22) argues that this country is
still viewed around the world as a land of opportunity. How
does Zadeh’s piece relate to Roemer’s? How could Roemer
incorporate Zadeh’s story into his own text? Write a para-
graph telling Zadeh’s story as support for Roemer’s argument.

5. Write a short response to Zadeh’s op-ed in which you give your
own reasons for supporting his argument, opposing it, or both.

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King’s Dream Remains an Elusive Goal;
Many Americans See Racial Disparities

P E W R E S E A R C H T E A M

Five decades after Martin Luther King’s historic “I Have
a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C., a new survey by the
Pew Research Center finds that fewer than half (45%) of all
Americans say the country has made substantial progress toward
racial equality and about the same share (49%) say that “a lot
more” remains to be done.
Blacks are much more downbeat than whites about the pace
of progress toward a color-blind society. They are also more
likely to say that blacks are treated less fairly than whites by
police, the courts, public schools and other key community
institutions.

The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan think tank in Washington,
D.C., that “conducts public opinion polling, demographic research,
media content analysis and other empirical social science research.”
This report was written collaboratively by thirteen members of the staff
of Pew’s Social & Demographic Trends Project and the Pew Research
Center for the People & the Press. This excerpt is the overview to the
report, which was published on August 22, 2013.

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P E W R E S E A R C H T E A M

45 36 15

48 38 11

43 28 23

39 27

All

How much progress toward Martin Luther King’s dream of racial equality
do you think the U.S. has made over the last 50 years? % saying . . .

How much more needs to be done in order to achieve racial equality?
% saying . . .

Whites

Blacks

Hispanics

A lot Some A little/None

163149

44 35 17

48 29 15

12 8

All

Whites

Blacks

Hispanics

A lot Some A little/Nothing

Despite Progress, Many Say Racial Equality
Still Not a Reality

Notes: Based on full sample, N=2,231. Blacks and whites include only non-
Hispanics. Hispanics may be of any race.
Source: Pew Research Center Race Survey conducted Aug. 1–11, 2013. Unless
otherwise noted, survey findings in this report are from this poll.

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King’s Dream Remains an Elusive Goal

While these differences by race are large, significant minori-
ties of whites agree that blacks receive unequal treatment when
dealing with the criminal justice system.
For example, seven-in-ten blacks and about a third of whites
(37%) say blacks are treated less fairly in their dealings with
the police.
Similarly, about two-thirds of black respondents (68%) and
a quarter of whites (27%) say blacks are not treated as fairly as
whites in the courts.
The survey also finds that large majorities of blacks (73%)
and whites (81%) say the two races generally get along either
“very well” or “pretty well.”

69 16

Blacks and whites

Blacks and Hispanics

Whites and Hispanics

Among whites

Among blacks

Among Hispanics

Among whites

Among Hispanics

Very well Pretty well Not too/Not at all well

% saying these groups get along . . .

How Well Do Racial and Ethnic Groups
Get Along These Days

Notes: “Don’t know/Refused” responses not shown.

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P E W R E S E A R C H T E A M

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Similarly, large majorities of Hispanics and whites say the
same thing about relations between their groups (74% and
77%, respectively). A substantial majority of blacks (78%) and
smaller share of Hispanics (61%) say their groups get along.
Still, about a third of all blacks (35%) say they had been
discriminated against or treated unfairly because of their race
in the past year, as do 20% of Hispanics and 10% of whites.
The nationally representative survey of 2,231 adults, includ-
ing 376 blacks and 218 Hispanics, was conducted by telephone
Aug. 1–11.

50 Years of Change

The mixed views on progress toward racial equality found in
the survey results are echoed in the findings of a Pew Research
Center analysis of U.S. government data on indicators of well-
being and civic engagement, including personal finance, life
expectancy, educational attainment and voter participation.
These data look at equality of outcomes rather than equality
of opportunity.
The analysis finds that the economic gulf between blacks
and whites that was present half a century ago largely remains.

When it comes to household income and household
wealth, the gaps between blacks and whites have wid-
ened. On measures such as high school completion and

life expectancy, they have narrowed. On other measures, includ-
ing poverty and homeownership rates, the gaps are roughly the
same as they were 40 years ago.

Finances

Between 1967 and 2011 the median income of a black house-
hold of three rose from about $24,000 to nearly $40,000.1

See Chapter 13
for tips on
analyzing

data.

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6 3 1

Median Household Income
Household of three, in 2012 dollars

Marriage Rate
Ages 18 and older

Median Household Wealth
In 2012 dollars

Gap: $19,360

Gap: 13 pts

Gap: $75,224

Gap: $27,414

Gap: 24 pts

Whites

Blacks

$80K

Whites

Blacks

80%

0
1960 1980 2000 2011

1960 1980 2000 2011

Gap: $84,960
Whites

Blacks

$120K

100

Where Gaps Have Widened

Source: Based on Pew Research Center analysis of government data.

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P E W R E S E A R C H T E A M

6 3 2

Source: Based on Pew Research Center analysis of government data.

Expressed as a share of white income, black households earn
about 59% of what white households earn, a small increase from
55% in 1967. But when expressed as dollars, the black-white
income gap widened, from about $19,000 in the late 1960s to
roughly $27,000 today. The race gap on household wealth has
increased from $75,224 in 1984 to $84,960 in 2011.
Other indicators of financial well-being have changed little
in recent decades, including homeownership rates and the

Whites
Above Poverty Line

Gap: 23 pts Gap: 18 pts

Blacks

80%

0
1960 1980 2000 2011

Whites

Homeownership

Gap: 25 pts Gap: 30 pts

Blacks

80%

0
1960 1980 2000 2012

Where Gaps Are Little Changed

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King’s Dream Remains an Elusive Goal

share of each race that live above the poverty line. The black
unemployment rate also has consistently been about double
that of whites since the 1950s.

Education

High school completion rates have converged since the 1960s,
and now about nine-in-ten blacks and whites have a high school
diploma. The trend in college completion rates tell a more
nuanced story. Today, white adults 25 and older are significantly
more likely than blacks to have completed at least a bachelor’s
degree (34% vs. 21%, a 13 percentage point difference). Fifty
years ago, the completion gap between whites and blacks was
about 6 percentage points (10% vs. 4%). But expressed a differ-
ent way, the black completion rate as a percentage of the white
rate has improved from 42% then to 62% now.

Family Formation

The analysis finds growing disparities in key measures of fam-
ily formation. Marriage rates among whites and blacks have
declined in the past 50 years, and the black-white difference
has nearly doubled. Today about 55% of whites and 31% of
blacks ages 18 and older are married. In 1960, 74% of whites
and roughly six-in-ten blacks (61%) were married. The share
of births to unmarried women has risen sharply for both groups;
in 2011, more than seven-in-ten births to black women were
to unmarried mothers, compared with about three-in-ten births
to white women (72% vs. 29%).

Incarceration

Black men were more than six times as likely as white men
in 2010 to be incarcerated in federal and state prisons, and

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6 3 4

High School Completion
Ages 25 and older

Life Expectancy
At birth

Voter Turnout
In presidential election years

Gap: 24 pts

Gap: 7 yrs

Gap: 7 pts

Gap: 4 yrs

Whites

Blacks

80%

0
1960 1980 2000 2012

Whites

Blacks

80 yrs

0
1960 1980 2000 2010

Gap: 12 pts Gap: –3 pts

Whites

Blacks

80%

0
1960 1980 2000 2012

Where Gaps Have Narrowed

Source: Based on Pew Research Center analysis of government data.

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King’s Dream Remains an Elusive Goal

local jails, the last year complete data are available. That is an
increase from 1960, when black men were five times as likely
as whites to be incarcerated.

Voter Turnout

Participation rates for blacks in presidential elections has lagged
behind those of whites for most of the past half century but has
been rising since 1996. Buoyed by the historic candidacies of
Barack Obama, blacks nearly caught up with whites in 2008
and surpassed them in 2012, when 67% of eligible blacks cast
ballots, compared with 64% of eligible whites.

Life Expectancy

The gap in life expectancy rates among blacks and whites has
narrowed in the past five decades from about seven years to four.

Looking Back Five Years

While demographic change happens slowly, attitudes can
change quickly. The Pew Research Center survey finds that
since 2009, there has been a fading of the heightened sense
of progress that blacks felt immediately after Obama’s election
in 2008.
Today, only about one-in-four African Americans (26%) say
the situation of black people in this country is better now than
it was five years ago, down sharply from the 39% who said the
same in a 2009 Pew Research Center survey.
Among whites, the share that sees improvement in situation
of blacks also fell, from 49% to 35%, in the last four years.
For both blacks and whites, the latest finding on this question
is returning to the levels recorded in a Pew Research Center
poll in 2007 on the eve of the Great Recession.

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P E W R E S E A R C H T E A M

6 3 6

Whites

3537
39

20
26

Blacks

60%

Percentage saying the situation of black people is better today,
compared with five years ago

0
2007 2009 2013

Sense of Black Progress Down Sharply from 2009

In the latest survey, opinions about black progress vary con-
siderably by educational attainment among blacks, a change
from the 2009 survey when there was no gap by education
among blacks.
In the current poll, only 22% of blacks who have attended at
least some college say the situation of black people in this country
is better today than it was five years ago. Among those with a high
school education or less, roughly one-third say things are better.

Note

1. 1967 and 2011 median household income figures expressed in 2012
dollars.

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King’s Dream Remains an Elusive Goal

Joining the Conversation

1. The Pew researchers examined white, black, and Hispanic
Americans’ views on racial equality and then looked at what
the actual economic data show on the subject. What are
their main findings, and how closely do people’s perceptions
appear to match the realities?

2. The Pew Research Center describes itself as “a nonparti-
san fact tank that informs the public about the issues, atti-
tudes, and trends shaping America and the world.” What
audience(s) do you think would be most interested in a report
such as this one? How is the information the report provides
relevant for you and for others who are not policymakers?

3. This report includes many charts to show research findings.
Study one such chart and then read what the authors say
to explain its findings. Which is easier to understand, the
chart or the author’s explanation?

4. Given his argument about increasing the economic dispari-
ties in the United States (pp. 561–80), how do you think
Paul Krugman would interpret the results of the Pew report?

5. This document does not take a position on the findings it
reports, but the data could certainly be used in an argumen-
tative essay. Write an argument about some aspect of the
current state of the American Dream, using the data in this
report as well as your own observations and experiences to
support your points.

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6 3 9

TWENTY

what’s gender got
to do with it?

What’s gender got to do with it? Everything—or so it
might seem. Gender, in the words of Kate Gilles, a policy ana-
lyst at the Population Reference Bureau, “is a social construct—
that is, a society’s assumptions about the way a man or woman
should look and behave.” Gender roles in our society have
changed considerably in recent decades: there are more women
in the workforce, many doing jobs once held exclusively or
primarily by men, and a growing number of men who choose
to stay home with the kids while their partner works outside
the home.
Still, many writers in this chapter argue that while women
have made substantial progress in the United States, serious
obstacles remain. Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former government
official, observes that women who aspire to rise to the top of
their fields find it difficult to also raise children—and that it’s
not possible to really “have it all.” Computer programmer Ellen
Ullman further discusses gender inequities, reminding us that
women in her field are underrepresented and “held to higher
standards” than their male counterparts.
Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, while acknowledging
the gender discrimination that Slaughter and Ullman describe,

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W H A T ’ S G E N D E R G O T T O D O W I T H I T ?

urges young women to “lean in” by actively pursuing leadership
roles and dividing home responsibilities with their partners.
Meanwhile, feminist writer bell hooks, while agreeing that
women should aspire to positions of leadership, questions Sand-
berg’s focus on wealthy, privileged women and urges women
not to replicate what she calls “imperialist white supremacist
capitalist patriarchy” but instead work for equality and oppor-
tunity for all.
In response to such critiques, others argue that the situa-
tion for American men is in many ways just as problematic.
Journalist, husband, and father Richard Dorment writes about
the increasing difficulty men have in balancing work and home
life. And business executive Saul Kaplan raises concerns about
the growing achievement gap among young people, with girls
now outpacing boys in both school and the workplace.
But discussions of gender take place outside the confines
of an office and beyond the walls of a family’s home. On a
daily basis, pressure still exists for people, particularly chil-
dren, to maintain traditional gender roles—for males, playing
sports, acting tough, and not showing emotion; and for females,
maintaining their physical appearance, being sensitive to other
people’s feelings, and not acting “too aggressive.”
Stephen Mays, a student at the University of Georgia, finds
that gender stereotypes are often present in same-sex relation-
ships as well, and he argues against these limiting stereotypes.
Dennis Baron, a linguist who regularly blogs on issues of lan-
guage and society, considers Facebook’s recent decision to allow
users the opportunity to select from fifty-eight different terms
for gender identification, while still offering the same “three
tired pronouns” to refer to those they identify. And Penelope
Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet, scholars of language and
gender, describe the ways parents, teachers, and even doctors

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What’s Gender Got to Do with It?

in the delivery room reinforce gender distinctions in ways that
steer children into what societies deem as normal gender roles.
Gender is personal, part of everyone’s developing identity
and web of relationships, but it is also political, related to ques-
tions of equity, fairness, and civil rights. As you read this chap-
ter, you will encounter a range of perspectives and perhaps be
challenged to consider or reconsider your own views—and have
the opportunity to add your voice to an important conversation
that affects all members of society.

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6 4 2

Lean In:
What Would You Do If You

Weren’t Afraid?

S H E R Y L S A N D B E R G

My grandmother Rosalind Einhorn was born exactly fifty-
two years before I was, on August 28, 1917. Like many poor
Jewish families in the boroughs of New York City, hers lived in
a small, crowded apartment close to their relatives. Her parents,
aunts, and uncles addressed her male cousins by their given
names, but she and her sister were referred to only as “Girlie.”
During the Depression, my grandmother was pulled out of
Morris High School to help support the household by sewing
fabric flowers onto undergarments that her mother could
resell for a tiny profit. No one in the community would have
considered taking a boy out of school. A boy’s education was

Sheryl Sandberg is the chief operating officer of Facebook and the
first woman member of its board of directors. She has also served as
a vice president at Google and as chief of staff for the U.S. Secretary
of the Treasury. This selection is the first chapter of her book Lean
In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

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Lean In: What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?

the family’s hope to move up the financial and social ladder.
Education for girls, however, was less important both financially,
since they were unlikely to contribute to the family’s income,
and culturally, since boys were expected to study the Torah
while girls were expected to run a “proper home.” Luckily for
my grandmother, a local teacher insisted that her parents put
her back into school. She went on not only to finish high school
but to graduate from U.C. Berkeley.
After college, “Girlie” worked selling pocketbooks and
accessories at David’s Fifth Avenue. When she left her job
to marry my grandfather, family legend has it that David’s
had to hire four people to replace her. Years later, when my
grandfather’s paint business was struggling, she jumped in and
took some of the hard steps he was reluctant to take, helping
to save the family from financial ruin. She displayed her
business acumen again in her forties. After being diagnosed
with breast cancer, she beat it and then dedicated herself
to raising money for the clinic that treated her by selling
knockoff watches out of the trunk of her car. Girlie ended
up with a profit margin that Apple would envy. I have never
met anyone with more energy and determination than my
grandmother. When Warren Buffett talks about competing
against only half of the population, I think about her and
wonder how different her life might have been if she had been
born half a century later.
When my grandmother had children of her own—my
mother and her two brothers—she emphasized education for all
of them. My mother attended the University of Pennsylvania,
where classes were coed. When she graduated in 1965 with a
degree in French literature, she surveyed a workforce that she
believed consisted of two career options for women: teaching
or nursing. She chose teaching. She began a Ph.D. program,

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S H E R Y L S A N D B E R G

6 4 4

got married, and then dropped out when she became pregnant
with me. It was thought to be a sign of weakness if a husband
needed his wife’s help to support their family, so my mother
became a stay-at-home parent and an active volunteer. The
centuries-old division of labor stood.
Even though I grew up in a traditional home, my parents
had the same expectations for me, my sister, and my brother.
All three of us were encouraged to excel in school, do equal
chores, and engage in extracurricular activities. We were all
supposed to be athletic too. My brother and sister joined sports
teams, but I was the kid who got picked last in gym. Despite
my athletic shortcomings, I was raised to believe that girls
could do anything boys could do and that all career paths
were open to me.
When I arrived at college in the fall of 1987, my class-
mates of both genders seemed equally focused on academics.
I don’t remember thinking about my future career differently
from the male students. I also don’t remember any conversa-
tions about someday balancing work and children. My friends
and I assumed that we would have both. Men and women
competed openly and aggressively with one another in classes,
activities, and job interviews. Just two generations removed
from my grandmother, the playing field seemed to be level.
But more than twenty years after my college graduation, the
world has not evolved nearly as much as I believed it would.
Almost all of my male classmates work in professional settings.
Some of my female classmates work full-time or part-time out-
side the home, and just as many are stay-at-home mothers and
volunteers like my mom. This mirrors the national trend. In
comparison to their male counterparts, highly trained women
are scaling back and dropping out of the workforce in high
numbers. In turn, these diverging percentages teach institutions

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Lean In: What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?

6 4 5

and mentors to invest more in men, who are statistically more
likely to stay.
Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation
and the first woman to serve as president of an Ivy League
university, once remarked to an audience of women my age,
“My generation fought so hard to give all of you choices.
We believe in choices. But choosing to leave the workforce
was not the choice we thought so many of you would make.”
So what happened? My generation was raised in an era
of increasing equality, a trend we thought would continue.

Sheryl Sandberg

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S H E R Y L S A N D B E R G

6 4 6

In retrospect, we were naïve and idealistic. Integrating profes-
sional and personal aspirations proved far more challenging
than we had imagined. During the same years that our careers
demanded maximum time investment, our biology demanded
that we have children. Our partners did not share the housework
and child rearing, so we found ourselves with two full-time
jobs. The workplace did not evolve to give us the flexibility we
needed to fulfill our responsibilities at home. We anticipated
none of this. We were caught by surprise.
If my generation was too naïve, the generations that have
followed may be too practical. We knew too little, and now
girls know too much. Girls growing up today are not the first
generation to have equal opportunity, but they are the first to
know that all that opportunity does not necessarily translate
into professional achievement. Many of these girls watched
their mothers try to “do it all” and then decide that something
had to give. That something was usually their careers.
There’s no doubt that women have the skills to lead in the
workplace. Girls are increasingly outperforming boys in the class-
room, earning about 57 percent of the undergraduate and 60 per-
cent of the master’s degrees in the United States. This gender gap
in academic achievement has even caused some to worry about
the “end of men.” But while compliant, raise-your-hand-and-
speak-when-called-on behaviors might be rewarded in school,
they are less valued in the workplace. Career progression often
depends upon taking risks and advocating for oneself—traits that
girls are discouraged from exhibiting. This may explain why girls’
academic gains have not yet translated into significantly higher
numbers of women in top jobs. The pipeline that supplies the
educated workforce is chock-full of women at the entry level, but
by the time that same pipeline is filling leadership positions, it
is overwhelmingly stocked with men.

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Lean In: What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?

6 4 7

There are so many reasons for this winnowing out, but one
important contributor is a leadership ambition gap. Of course,
many individual women are as professionally ambitious as any
individual man. Yet drilling down, the data clearly indicate that
in field after field, more men than women aspire to the most
senior jobs. A 2012 McKinsey survey of more than four thou-
sand employees of leading companies found that 36 percent
of the men wanted to reach the C-suite, compared to only 18
percent of the women. When jobs are described as powerful,
challenging, and involving high levels of responsibility, they
appeal to more men than women. And while the ambition
gap is most pronounced at the highest levels, the underlying
dynamic is evident at every step of the career ladder. A survey
of college students found that more men than women chose
“reaching a managerial level” as a career priority in the first
three years after graduating. Even among highly educated pro-
fessional men and women, more men than women describe
themselves as “ambitious.”
There is some hope that a shift is starting to occur in the
next generation. A 2012 Pew study found for the first time that
among young people ages eighteen to thirty-four, more young
women (66 percent) than young men (59 percent) rated “success
in a high-paying career or profession” as important to their lives.
A recent survey of Millennials found that women were just as
likely to describe themselves as ambitious as men. Although this
is an improvement, even among this demographic, the leader-
ship ambition gap remains. Millennial women are less likely
than Millennial men to agree that the statement “I aspire to
a leadership role in whatever field I ultimately work” describes
them very well. Millennial women were also less likely than their
male peers to characterize themselves as “leaders,” “visionaries,”
“self-confident,” and “willing to take risks.”

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S H E R Y L S A N D B E R G

6 4 8

Since more men aim for leadership roles, it is not surprising
that they obtain them, especially given all the other obstacles
that women have to overcome. This pattern starts long before
they enter the workforce. Author Samantha Ettus and her hus-
band read their daughter’s kindergarten yearbook, where each
child answered the question “What do you want to be when
you grow up?” They noted that several of the boys wanted to
be president. None of the girls did. (Current data suggest that
when these girls become women, they will continue to feel
the same way.) In middle school, more boys than girls aspire
to leadership roles in future careers. At the top fifty colleges,
less than a third of student government presidents are women.
Professional ambition is expected of men but is optional—or
worse, sometimes even a negative—for women. “She is very
ambitious” is not a compliment in our culture. Aggressive and
hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable
social conduct. Men are continually applauded for being ambi-
tious and powerful and successful, but women who display these
same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments
come at a cost.
And for all the progress, there is still societal pressure for
women to keep an eye on marriage from a young age. When
I went to college, as much as my parents emphasized academic
achievement, they emphasized marriage even more. They told me
that the most eligible women marry young to get a “good man”
before they are all taken. I followed their advice and throughout
college, I vetted every date as a potential husband (which, trust
me, is a sure way to ruin a date at age nineteen).
When I was graduating, my thesis advisor, Larry Summers, sug-
gested that I apply for international fellowships. I rejected the idea
on the grounds that a foreign country was not a likely place to
turn a date into a husband. Instead, I moved to Washington, D.C.,

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Lean In: What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?

6 4 9

which was full of eligible men. It worked. My first year out of col-
lege, I met a man who was not just eligible, but also wonderful,
so I married him. I was twenty-four and convinced that marriage
was the first—and necessary—step to a happy and productive life.
It didn’t work out that way. I was just not mature enough to
have made this lifelong decision, and the relationship quickly
unraveled. By the age of twenty-five, I had managed to get
married . . . and also divorced. At the time, this felt like a
massive personal and public failure. For many years, I felt that
no matter what I accomplished professionally, it paled in com-
parison to the scarlet letter D stitched on my chest. (Almost ten
years later, I learned that the “good ones” were not all taken,
and I wisely and very happily married Dave Goldberg.)
Like me, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, deputy director of the
Council on Foreign Relations’ Women and Foreign Policy Pro-
gram, was encouraged to prioritize marriage over career. As she
described in The Atlantic, “When I was 27, I received a posh
fellowship to travel to Germany to learn German and work at
the Wall Street Journal. . . . It was an incredible opportunity for
a 20-something by any objective standard, and I knew it would
help prepare me for graduate school and beyond. My girlfriends,
however, expressed shock and horror that I would leave my
boyfriend at the time to live abroad for a year. My relatives
asked whether I was worried that I’d never get married. And
when I attended a barbecue with my then-beau, his boss took
me aside to remind me that ‘there aren’t many guys like that
out there.’ ” The result of these negative reactions, in Gayle’s
view, is that many women “still see ambition as a dirty word.”
Many have argued with me that ambition is not the problem.
Women are not less ambitious than men, they insist, but more
enlightened with different and more meaningful goals. I do not
dismiss or dispute this argument. There is far more to life than

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S H E R Y L S A N D B E R G

6 5 0

climbing a career ladder, including raising children, seeking
personal fulfillment, contributing to society, and improving the
lives of others. And there are many people who are deeply com-
mitted to their jobs but do not—and should not have to—aspire
to run their organizations. Leadership roles are not the only way
to have profound impact.
I also acknowledge that there are biological differences
between men and women. I have breast-fed two children and

noted, at times with great disappointment, that this
was simply not something my husband was equipped
to do. Are there characteristics inherent in sex differ-
ences that make women more nurturing and men more

assertive? Quite possibly. Still, in today’s world, where we no
longer have to hunt in the wild for our food, our desire for
leadership is largely a culturally created and reinforced trait.
How individuals view what they can and should accomplish is
in large part formed by our societal expectations.
From the moment we are born, boys and girls are treated
differently. Parents tend to talk to girl babies more than boy
babies. Mothers overestimate the crawling ability of their sons
and underestimate the crawling ability of their daughters. Reflect-
ing the belief that girls need to be helped more than boys, moth-
ers often spend more time comforting and hugging infant girls
and more time watching infant boys play by themselves.
Other cultural messages are more blatant. Gymboree once
sold onesies proclaiming “Smart like Daddy” for boys and
“Pretty like Mommy” for girls. The same year, J. C. Penney
marketed a T-shirt to teenage girls that bragged, “I’m too pretty
to do homework so my brother has to do it for me.” These
things did not happen in 1951. They happened in 2011.
Even worse, the messages sent to girls can move beyond
encouraging superficial traits and veer into explicitly discouraging

See p. 89 for
tips on making

concessions
while still

standing your
ground.

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leadership. When a girl tries to lead, she is often labeled bossy.
Boys are seldom called bossy because a boy taking the role of a
boss does not surprise or offend. As someone who was called this
for much of my childhood, I know that it is not a compliment.
The stories of my childhood bossiness are told (and retold)
with great amusement. Apparently, when I was in elementary
school, I taught my younger siblings, David and Michelle, to
follow me around, listen to my monologues, and scream the
word “Right!” when I concluded. I was the eldest of the neigh-
borhood children and allegedly spent my time organizing shows
that I could direct and clubs that I could run. People laugh at
these accounts, but to this day I always feel slightly ashamed
of my behavior (which is remarkable given that I have now
written an entire book about why girls should not be made to
feel this way, or maybe this partially explains my motivation).
Even when we were in our thirties, pointing out this behav-
ior was still the best way for my siblings to tease me. When
Dave and I got married, David and Michelle gave a beautiful,
hilarious toast, which kicked off with this: “Hi! Some of you
think we are Sheryl’s younger siblings, but really we were
Sheryl’s first employees—employee number one and employee
number two. Initially, as a one-year-old and a three-year-old,
we were worthless and weak. Disorganized, lazy. We would
just as soon spit up on ourselves as read the morning paper.
But Sheryl could see that we had potential. For more than
ten years, Sheryl took us under her wing and whipped us into
shape.” Everyone laughed. My siblings continued, “To the best
of our knowledge Sheryl never actually played as a child, but
really just organized other children’s play. Sheryl supervised
adults as well. When our parents went away on vacation, our
grandparents used to babysit. Before our parents left, Sheryl
protested, ‘Now I have to take care of David and Michelle and

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Grandma and Grandpa too. It’s not fair!’ ” Everyone laughed
even louder.
I laughed too, but there is still some part of me that feels
it was unseemly for a little girl to be thought of as so . . .
domineering. Cringe.
From a very early age, boys are encouraged to take charge
and offer their opinions. Teachers interact more with boys, call
on them more frequently, and ask them more questions. Boys
are also more likely to call out answers, and when they do,
teachers usually listen to them. When girls call out, teachers
often scold them for breaking the rules and remind them to
raise their hands if they want to speak.
I was recently reminded that these patterns persist even when
we are all grown up. Not long ago, at a small dinner with other
business executives, the guest of honor spoke the entire time
without taking a breath. This meant that the only way to ask
a question or make an observation was to interrupt. Three or
four men jumped in, and the guest politely answered their ques-
tions before resuming his lecture. At one point, I tried to add
something to the conversation and he barked, “Let me finish!
You people are not good at listening!” Eventually, a few more
men interjected and he allowed it. Then the only other female
executive at the dinner decided to speak up—and he did it
again! He chastised her for interrupting. After the meal, one of
the male CEOs pulled me aside to say that he had noticed that
only the women had been silenced. He told me he empathized,
because as a Hispanic, he has been treated like this many times.
The danger goes beyond authority figures silencing female
voices. Young women internalize societal cues about what defines
“appropriate” behavior and, in turn, silence themselves. They
are rewarded for being “pretty like Mommy” and encouraged to
be nurturing like Mommy too. The album Free to Be . . . You and

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Me was released in 1972 and became a staple of my childhood.
My favorite song, “William’s Doll,” is about a five-year-old boy
who begs his reluctant father to buy him a traditional girl’s toy.
Almost forty years later, the toy industry remains riddled with
stereotypes. Right before Christmas 2011, a video featuring a
four-year-old girl named Riley went viral. Riley paces in a toy
store, upset because companies are trying to “trick the girls into
buying the pink stuff instead of stuff that boys want to buy,
right?” Right. As Riley reasons, “Some girls like superheroes,
some girls like princesses. Some boys like superheroes, some
boys like princesses. So why do all the girls have to buy pink
stuff and all the boys have to buy different color stuff ?” It takes
a near act of rebellion for even a four-year-old to break away
from society’s expectations. William still has no doll, while
Riley is drowning in a sea of pink. I now play Free to Be . . .
You and Me for my children and hope that if they ever play it
for their children, its message will seem quaint.
The gender stereotypes introduced in childhood are
reinforced throughout our lives and become self-fulfilling
prophesies. Most leadership positions are held by men, so
women don’t expect to achieve them, and that becomes one of
the reasons they don’t. The same is true with pay. Men generally
earn more than women, so people expect women to earn less.
And they do.
Compounding the problem is a social-psychological
phenomenon called “stereotype threat.” Social scientists have
observed that when members of a group are made aware of a
negative stereotype, they are more likely to perform according
to that stereotype. For example, stereotypically, boys are better
at math and science than girls. When girls are reminded of their
gender before a math or science test, even by something as
simple as checking off an M or F box at the top of the test, they

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perform worse. Stereotype threat discourages girls and women
from entering technical fields and is one of the key reasons that
so few study computer science. As a Facebook summer intern
once told me, “In my school’s computer science department,
there are more Daves than girls.”
The stereotype of a working woman is rarely attractive.
Popular culture has long portrayed successful working women
as so consumed by their careers that they have no personal life
(think Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl and Sandra Bullock
in The Proposal). If a female character divides her time between
work and family, she is almost always harried and guilt ridden
(think Sarah Jessica Parker in I Don’t Know How She Does
It). And these characterizations have moved beyond fiction.
A study found that of Millennial men and women who work
in an organization with a woman in a senior role, only about
20 percent want to emulate her career.
This unappealing stereotype is particularly unfortunate since
most women have no choice but to remain in the workforce.
About 41 percent of mothers are primary breadwinners and
earn the majority of their family’s earnings. Another 23 percent
of mothers are co-breadwinners, contributing at least a quarter
of the family’s earnings. The number of women supporting
families on their own is increasing quickly; between 1973 and
2006, the proportion of families headed by a single mother grew
from one in ten to one in five. These numbers are dramatically
higher in Hispanic and African-American families. Twenty-
seven percent of Latino children and 52 percent of African-
American children are being raised by a single mother.
Our country lags considerably behind others in efforts to
help parents take care of their children and stay in the work-
force. Of all the industrialized nations in the world, the United
States is the only one without a paid maternity leave policy.

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As Ellen Bravo, director of the Family Values @ Work consor-
tium, observed, most “women are not thinking about ‘having it
all,’ they’re worried about losing it all—their jobs, their chil-
dren’s health, their families’ financial stability—because of the
regular conflicts that arise between being a good employee and
a responsible parent.”
For many men, the fundamental assumption is that they
can have both a successful professional life and a fulfilling
personal life. For many women, the assumption is that trying
to do both is difficult at best and impossible at worst. Women
are surrounded by headlines and stories warning them that they
cannot be committed to both their families and careers. They
are told over and over again that they have to choose, because
if they try to do too much, they’ll be harried and unhappy.
Framing the issue as “work-life balance”—as if the two were
diametrically opposed—practically ensures work will lose out.
Who would ever choose work over life?
The good news is that not only can women have both fami-
lies and careers, they can thrive while doing so. In 2009, Sharon
Meers and Joanna Strober published Getting to 50/50, a com-
prehensive review of governmental, social science, and original
research that led them to conclude that children, parents, and
marriages can all flourish when both parents have full careers.
The data plainly reveal that sharing financial and child-care
responsibilities leads to less guilty moms, more involved dads,
and thriving children. Professor Rosalind Chait Barnett of
Brandeis University did a comprehensive review of studies on
work-life balance arid found that women who participate in
multiple roles actually have lower levels of anxiety and higher
levels of mental well-being. Employed women reap rewards
including greater financial security, more stable marriages, bet-
ter health, and, in general, increased life satisfaction.

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It may not be as dramatic or funny to make a movie about a
woman who loves both her job and her family, but that would be
a better reflection of reality. We need more portrayals of women
as competent professionals and happy mothers—or even happy
professionals and competent mothers. The current negative
images may make us laugh, but they also make women unnec-
essarily fearful by presenting life’s challenges as insurmountable.
Our culture remains baffled: I don’t know bow she does it.
Fear is at the root of so many of the barriers that women
face. Fear of not being liked. Fear of making the wrong choice.
Fear of drawing negative attention. Fear of overreaching. Fear
of being judged. Fear of failure. And the holy trinity of fear:
the fear of being a bad mother/wife/daughter.
Without fear, women can pursue professional success and
personal fulfillment—and freely choose one, or the other, or
both. At Facebook, we work hard to create a culture where
people are encouraged to take risks. We have posters all around
the office that reinforce this attitude. In bright red letters, one
declares, “Fortune favors the bold.” Another insists, “Proceed
and be bold.” My favorite reads, “What would you do if you
weren’t afraid?”
In 2011, Debora Spar, president of Barnard College, an all-
women’s liberal arts school in New York City, invited me to
deliver its commencement address. This speech was the first
time I openly discussed the leadership ambition gap. Standing on
the podium, I felt nervous. I told the members of the graduating
class that they should be ambitious not just in pursuing their
dreams but in aspiring to become leaders in their fields. I knew
this message could be misinterpreted as my judging women for
not making the same choices that I have. Nothing could be
farther from the truth. I believe that choice means choice for all
of us. But I also believe that we need to do more to encourage

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women to reach for leadership roles. If we can’t tell women to
aim high at a college graduation, when can we?
As I addressed the enthusiastic women, I found myself fighting
back tears. I made it through the speech and concluded with this:

You are the promise for a more equal world. So my hope for every-
one here is that after you walk across this stage, after you get your
diploma, after you go out tonight and celebrate hard—you then
will lean way in to your career. You will find something you love
doing and you will do it with gusto. Find the right career for you
and go all the way to the top.

As you walk off this stage today, you start your adult life. Start
out by aiming high. Try—and try hard.

Like everyone here, I have great hopes for the members of this
graduating class. I hope you find true meaning, contentment, and
passion in your life. I hope you navigate the difficult times and
come out with greater strength and resolve. I hope you find what-
ever balance you seek with your eyes wide open. And I hope that
you—yes, you—have the ambition to lean in to your career and
run the world. Because the world needs you to change it. Women
all around the world are counting on you.

So please ask yourself: What would I do if I weren’t afraid?
And then go do it.

As the graduates were called to the stage to collect their diplo-
mas, I shook every hand. Many stopped to give me a hug. One
young woman even told me I was “the baddest bitch” (which,
having checked with someone later, actually did turn out to
be a compliment).
I know my speech was meant to motivate them, but they
actually motivated me. In the months that followed, I started
thinking that I should speak up more often and more publicly

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about these issues. I should urge more women to believe in
themselves and aspire to lead. I should urge more men to become
part of the solution by supporting women in the workforce and
at home. And I should not just speak in front of friendly crowds
at Barnard. I should seek out larger, possibly less sympathetic
audiences. I should take my own advice and be ambitious.

Joining the Conversation

1. Sheryl Sandberg argues that women are on the whole still
raised to be less ambitious than men and that they should be
encouraged to aim more for leadership roles. What evidence
does she provide for this so-called “leadership ambition gap”?
What factors does she say cause this gap?

2. Sandberg mentions her grandmother, who was a successful
businesswoman, as well as her mother, who dropped out of a
Ph.D. program to be a “stay-at-home parent.” How do these
personal details support her argument?

3. According to Sandberg, the media stereotype of a working
woman is “rarely attractive” (paragraph 33). Do you agree?
Think of some examples of successful working women in
movies and television. How do these examples support or
contradict Sandberg’s claim?

4. How do you think Sandberg might respond to Saul Kaplan’s
argument in “The Plight of Young Males” (pp. 732−35)?

5. According to Sandberg, most American girls are led to have
modest career expectations and to focus more on having a
family, while boys are typically raised to aim for leadership posi-
tions. Has this been your experience? Write an essay respond-
ing to what she says, drawing from your own experience and
the readings in this chapter as support for what you say.

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Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In

B E L L H O O K S

A year ago, few folks were talking about Sheryl Sandberg.
Her thoughts on feminism were of little interest. More
significantly, there was next-to-no public discussion of feminist
thinking and practice. Rarely, if ever, was there any feminist
book mentioned as a bestseller and certainly not included on
the New York Times Best Seller list. Those of us who have
devoted lifetimes to teaching and writing theory, explaining to
the world the ins and outs of feminist thinking and practice,
have experienced that the primary audience for our work is an
academic sub-culture. In recent years, discussions of feminism
have not evoked animated passion in audiences. We were far
more likely to hear that we are living in a post-feminist society

bell hooks is an author and activist who teaches at Berea College, in
Kentucky. She has written numerous books, including Feminism Is for
Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000), Teaching to Transgress: Education
as the Practice of Freedom (1994), and Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women
and Feminism (1981). Born Gloria Jean Watkins, she changed her
name to honor her mother and grandmother. She says she chose not
to capitalize the name because “it is the substance of my books, not
who is writing them, that is important.” This essay, a response to
Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, appeared on the blog The Feminist
Wire on October 28, 2013.

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than to hear voices clamoring to learn more about feminism. This
seems to have changed with Sandberg’s book Lean In, holding
steady on the Times bestseller list for more than sixteen weeks.
No one was more surprised than long-time advocates of
feminist thinking and practice to learn via mass media that
a new high priestess of feminist movement was on the rise.
Suddenly, as if by magic, mass media brought into public con-
sciousness conversations about feminism, reframing the scope
and politics through an amazing feat of advertising. At the
center of this drama was a young, high-level corporate execu-
tive, Sheryl Sandberg, who was dubbed by Oprah Winfrey and
other popular culture pundits as “the new voice of revolutionary
feminism.” Forbes Magazine proclaimed Sandberg to be one of
the most influential women in the world, if not the most. Time
Magazine ranked her one of a hundred of the most powerful and
influential world leaders. All over mass media, her book Lean
In has been lauded as a necessary new feminist manifesto.
Yet Sandberg confesses to readers that she has not been a
strong advocate of feminist movement; that like many women
of her generation, she hesitated when it came to aligning herself
with feminist concerns. She explains:

I headed into college believing that the feminists of the sixties and
seventies had done the hard work of achieving equality for my gen-
erations. And yet, if anyone had called me a feminist I would have
quickly corrected that notion. . . . On one hand, I started a group to
encourage more women to major in economics and government. On
the other hand, I would have denied being in any way, shape, or form
a feminist. None of my college friends thought of themselves as femi-
nists either. It saddens me to admit that we did not see the backlash
against women around us. . . . In our defense, my friends and I truly,
if naively, believed that the world did not need feminists anymore.

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Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In

Although Sandberg revised her perspective on feminism,
she did not turn towards primary sources (the work of feminist
theorists) to broaden her understanding. In her book, she offers
a simplistic description of the feminist movement based on
women gaining equal rights with men. This construction of
simple categories (women and men) was long ago challenged
by visionary feminist thinkers, particularly individual black
women/women of color. These thinkers insisted that everyone
acknowledge and understand the myriad ways race, class,
sexuality, and many other aspects of identity and difference
made explicit that there was never and is no simple homogenous
gendered identity that we could call “women” struggling to be
equal with men. In fact, the reality was and is that privileged
white women often experience a greater sense of solidarity with
men of their same class than with poor white women or women
of color.

bell hooks

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Sandberg’s definition of feminism begins and ends with the
notion that it’s all about gender equality within the existing
social system. From this perspective, the structures of imperialist
white supremacist capitalist patriarchy need not be challenged.
And she makes it seem that privileged white men will eagerly
choose to extend the benefits of corporate capitalism to white
women who have the courage to “lean in.” It almost seems as if
Sandberg sees women’s lack of perseverance as more the prob-
lem than systemic inequality. Sandberg effectively uses her race
and class power and privilege to promote a narrow definition
of feminism that obscures and undermines visionary feminist
concerns.
Contrast her definition of feminism with the one I offered
more than twenty years ago in Feminist Theory From Margin To
Center and then again in Feminism Is For Everybody. Offering
a broader definition of feminism, one that does not conjure up
a battle between the sexes (i.e. women against men), I state:
“Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist
exploitation, and oppression.” No matter their standpoint, any-
one who advocates feminist politics needs to understand the
work does not end with the fight for equality of opportunity
within the existing patriarchal structure. We must understand
that challenging and dismantling patriarchy is at the core of
contemporary feminist struggle—this is essential and necessary
if women and men are to be truly liberated from outmoded
sexist thinking and actions.
Ironically, Sandberg’s work would not have captured the
attention of progressives, particularly men, if she had not
packaged the message of “lets go forward and work as equals
within white male corporate elites” in the wrapping paper
of feminism. In the “one hundred most influential people in
the world” issue of Time Magazine, the forty-three-year old

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Facebook COO was dubbed by the doyen of women’s liberation
movement Gloria Steinem in her short commentary with the
heading “feminism’s new boss.” That same magazine carried
a full page ad for the book Lean In: Women, Work, and The
Will to Lead that carried the heading “Inspire the Graduate in
Your Life” with a graduating picture of two white females and
one white male. The ad included this quote from Sandberg’s
commencement speech at Barnard College in 2011: “I hope
that you have the ambition to lean in to your career and run
the world. Because the world needs you to change it.” One can
only speculate whether running the world is a call to support
and perpetuate first world imperialism. This is precisely the
type of feel good declaration Sandberg makes that in no way
clarifies the embedded agenda she supports.
Certainly, her vision of individual women leaning in at
the corporate table does not include any clear statements of
which group of women she is speaking to and about, and the
“lean in” woman is never given a racial identity. If Sandberg
had acknowledged that she was primarily addressing privileged
white women like herself (a small group working at the top
of the corporate hierarchy), then she could not have por-
trayed herself as sharing a message, indeed a life lesson, for all
women. Her basic insistence that gender equality should be
important to all women and men is an insight that all folks
involved in feminist movement agree is a central agenda. And
yes, who can dispute the facts Sandberg offers as evidence;
despite the many gains in female freedom, implicit gender bias
remains the norm throughout our society. Patriarchy supports
and affirms that bias. But Sandberg offers readers no under-
standing of what men must do to unlearn sexist thinking. At
no point In Lean In does she let readers know what would
motivate patriarchal white males in a corporate environment

Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In

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to change their belief system or the structures that support
gender inequality.
Readers who only skim the surface of Sheryl Sandberg’s book
Lean In will find much they can agree with. Very few if any
professional women will find themselves at odds with a fellow
female who champions the cause gender equality, who shares
with us all the good old mother wisdom that one of the most
important choices any of us will make in life is who we will
partner with. And she shares that the best partner is one who
she tells readers will be a helpmeet—one who cares and shares.
Sandberg’s insistence that men participate equally in parenting
is no new clarion call. From its earliest inception, the feminist
movement called attention to the need for males to participate
in parenting; it let women and men know that heteronormative
relationships where there was gender quality not only lasted but
were happier than the sexist norm.
Sandberg encourages women to seek high-level corporate
jobs and persevere until they reach the top. For many individual
women, Sandberg telling them that they would not be betray-
ing family if they dedicated themselves to work was affirming.
It is positive in that it seemed to be a necessary response to
popular anti-feminist backlash, which continually suggests that
the feminist push to place more women in the workforce was
and is a betrayal of marriage and family.
Unfortunately her voice is powerful, yet Sandberg is for the
most part not voicing any new ideas. She is simply taking old
ideas and giving them a new twist. When the book Lean In
began its meteoric rise, which continues to bring fame and
notoriety to Sandberg, many prominent feminists and/or pro-
gressive women denounced the work, vehemently castigating
Sandberg. However, there was just one problematic issue at the
core of the anti-Sandberg movement; very few folks attacking

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the work had actually read the book. Some of them had heard
sound bites on television or had listened to her Ted Talk pres-
entation. Still others had seen her interviewed. Many of these
older female feminist advocates blatantly denounced the work
and boldly announced their refusal to read the book.
As a feminist cultural critic, I found the eagerness with
which Sandberg was viciously attacked disheartening. These
critiques seem to emerge from misplaced rage not based solely
on contempt for her ideas, but a rage bordering on envy. The
powerful white male-dominated mass media was giving her and
those ideas so much attention. There was no in-depth discussion
of why this was the case. In the book Sandberg reminds readers
that, “men still run the world.” However, she does not discuss
white male supremacy. Or the extent to which globalization
has changed the makeup of corporate elites. In Mark Mizruchi’s
book The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite, he describes
a corporate world that is made up of a “more diverse crowd,”
one that is no longer white and male “blue chip dudes.” He
highlights several examples: “The CEO of Coca-Cola is Muhtar
Kent, who was born in the United States but raised in Turkey;
PepsiCo is run by Indra Nooyi, an Indian woman who came
to America in her twenties. Burger King’s CEO is Brazilian,
Chryslers’s CEO is Italian, and Morgan Stanley’s CEO is
Australian. Forget about influencing policy; many of today’s
leading US CEO’s can’t even vote here.” Perhaps, even in
the corporate world, imperialist white supremacist capitalist
patriarchy is ready to accept as many white women as necessary
to ensure white dominance. Race is certainly an invisible
category in Sandberg’s corporate fantasy world.
Sandberg is most seductive when sharing personal
anecdotes. It is these true-life stories that expose the convenient
lies underlying most of her assertions that as more women are

Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In

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at the top, all women will benefit. She explains: “Conditions
for all women will improve when there are more women in
leadership roles giving strong and powerful voice to their needs
and concerns.” This unsubstantiated truism is brought to us
by a corporate executive who does not recognize the needs of
pregnant women until it’s happening to her. Is this a case of
narcissism as a potential foundation for female solidarity? No
behavior in the real world of women relating to women proves
this to be true. In truth, Sandberg offers no strategies for the
building of feminist solidarity between women.
She makes light of her ambivalence towards feminism.
Even though Sandberg can humorously poke fun at herself and
her relationship to feminism, she tells readers that her book
“is not a feminist manifesto.” Adding as though she is in a
friendly conversation with herself, “okay, it is sort of a feminist
manifesto.” This is just one of the “funny” folksy moments in
the book, which represent her plain and ordinary approach—
she is just one of the girls. Maybe doing the book and talking
about it with co-writer Nell Scovell provides the basis for the
conversational tone. Good humor aside, cute quips and all, it
is when she is taking about feminism that many readers would
have liked her to go deeper. How about just explaining what she
means by “feminist manifesto,” since the word implies “a full
public declaration of intentions, opinions or purposes.” Of
course, historically the best feminist manifestos emerged from
collective consciousness raising and discussion. They were not
the voice of one individual. Instead of creating a space of female
solidarity, Sandberg exists as the lone queen amid millions of
admires. And no one in her group dares to question how she
could be heralded as the “voice of revolutionary feminism.”
How feminist, how revolutionary can a powerful rich woman
be when she playfully admits that she concedes all money

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management and bill paying to her husband? As Sandberg con-
fesses, she would rather not think about money matters when she
could be planning little Dora parties for her kids. This anecdote,
like many others in the book, works to create the personal image
of Sandberg. It is this “just plain folks” image that has been
instrumental in her success, for it shows her as vulnerable.
This is not her only strategy. When giving filmed lectures,
she wears clothes with sexy deep V-necks and stiletto heels and
this image creates the aura of vulnerable femininity. It reminds
one of the popular television advertisement from years ago
wherein a sexy white woman comes home and dances around
singing: “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan and
never let you forget you’re a man . . . cause I’m a w-o-m-a-n!”
Sandberg’s constructed image is not your usual sexist misogynist
media portrayal of a feminist. She is never depicted as a man-
hating ball-busting feminist nag.
Instead, she comes across both in her book and when per-
forming on stages as a lovable younger sister who just wants to
play on the big brother’s team. It would be more in keeping
with this image to call her brand of women’s liberation faux
feminism. A billionaire, one of the richest women in
the world, Sandberg deflects attention from this reality.
To personify it might raise critical questions. It might
even have created the conditions for other women to
feel threatened by her success. She solves that little problem by
never speaking of money in Lean In; she uses the word once.
And if that reality does not bring to her persona enough
I’m everywoman appeal, she tells her audiences: “I truly believe
that the single most important career decision that a woman
makes is whether she will have a life partner or who that part-
ner is.” Even though most women, straight or gay, have not
seen choosing a life partner as a “career decision,” anyone who

Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In

See pp. 114−16
for ways to
repeat key
terms and
phrases.

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advocates feminist politics knows that the choice of a partner
matters. However, Sandberg’s convenient use of the word part-
ner masks the reality that she is really speaking about heter-
onormative partnerships, and even more specifically marriages
between white women and white men. She shares: “Contrary
to the popular notion that only unmarried women can make it
to the top, the majority of the more successful female business
leaders have partners.” Specifically, though not directly, she
is talking about white male husbands. For after telling read-
ers that the most successful women at the top are partnered,
she highlights the fact that “of the twenty-eight women who
have served as CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies, twenty-six
were married, one was divorced and only one was never mar-
ried.” Again, no advocates of feminism would disagree with the
notion that individual women should choose partners wisely.
Good partners as defined by old style women’s liberation move-
ment and reiterated by Sandberg (who makes it seem that this
is a new insight) are those who embrace equality, who care
and share. One of the few radical arguments in Lean In is that
men should come to the table—“the kitchen table.” This is
rarely one of the points Sandberg highlights in her media per-
formances.
Of course, the vast majority of men in our society, irrespective
of race, embrace patriarchal values; they do not embrace a vision
or practice of gender equality either at work or in the domestic
household. Anyone who acts as though women just need to
make right choices is refusing to acknowledge the reality that
men must also be making the right choice. Before females even
reach the stage of life where choosing partners is important, we
should all be developing financial literacy, preparing ourselves
to manage our money well, so that we need not rely on
finding a sharing partner who will manage our finances fairly.

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According to More Magazine, American women are expected
to control 23 trillion dollars by the end of the decade, which is
“nearly twice the current amount.” But what will this control
mean if women lack financial literacy? Acquiring money and
managing money are not the same actions. Women need to
confront the meaning and uses of money on all levels. This
is knowledge Sandberg the Chief Operating Officer possesses
even if she coyly pretends otherwise.
In her 2008 book The Comeback, Emma Gilbey Keller exam-
ines many of the issues Sandberg addresses. Significantly, and
unlike Sandberg, she highlights the need for women to take
action on behalf of their financial futures. One chapter in the
book begins with the epigram: “A woman’s best production is
a little money of her own.” Given the huge amounts of money
Sandberg has acquired, ostensibly by paying close attention to her
financial future, her silence on the subject of money in Lean In
undermines the call for genuine equality. Without the ability to
be autonomous, in control of self and finances, women will not
have the strength and confidence to “lean in.”
Mass media (along with Sandberg) is telling us that by sheer
strength of will and staying power, any woman so inclined can
work hard and climb the corporate ladder all the way to the top.
Shrewdly, Sandberg acknowledges that not all women desire
to rise to the top, asserting that she is not judging women who
make different choices. However, the real truth is that she is
making judgments about the nature of women and work—that
is what the book is fundamentally about. Her failure to confront
the issue of women acquiring wealth allows her to ignore con-
crete systemic obstacles most women face inside the workforce.
And by not confronting the issue of women and wealth, she
need not confront the issue of women and poverty. She need
not address the ways extreme class differences make it difficult

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for there to be a common sisterhood based on shared struggle
and solidarity.
The contemporary feminist movement has not concen-
trated meaningful attention on the issue of women and wealth.
Rightly, however, the movement highlighted the need for
gender equity in the workforce—equal pay for equal work.
This economic focus exposed the reality that race was a seri-
ous factor over-determining women’s relationship to work and
money. Much feminist thought by individual visionary women
of color (especially black women thinkers) and white female
allies called for a more accurate representation of female iden-
tity, one that would consider the reality of intersectionality.
This theory encouraged women to see race and class as well as
gender as crucial factors shaping female destiny. Promoting a
broader insight, this work lay the groundwork for the formation
of genuine female solidarity—a solidarity based on awareness of
difference as well as the all-too-common gendered experiences
women share. It has taken many years of hard work to create
basic understandings of female identity; it will take many more
years for solidarity between women to become reality.
It should surprise no one that women and men who advocate
feminist politics were stunned to hear Sandberg promoting her
trickle-down theory: the assumption that having more women
at the top of corporate hierarchies would make the work world
better for all women, including women on the bottom. Taken
at face value, this seem a naive hope given that the imperialist
white supremacist capitalist patriarchal corporate world Sand-
berg wants women to lean into encourages competition over
cooperation. Or as Kate Losse, author of Boy Kings: A Journey
into the Heart of the Social Network, which is an insider look
at the real gender politics of Facebook, contends: “By argu-
ing that women should express their feminism by remaining

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in the workplace at all costs, Sandberg encourages women to
maintain a commitment to the work place without encourag-
ing the workplace to maintain a commitment to them.” It is as
though Sandberg believes a subculture of powerful elite women
will emerge in the workplace, powerful enough to silence male
dominators.
Yet Sandberg spins her seductive fantasy of female solidarity
as though comradely support between women will magically
occur in patriarchal work environments. Since patriarchy has
no gender, women “leaning in” will not automatically think
in terms of gender equality and solidarity. Like the issue of
money, patriarchy is another subject that receives little atten-
tion in Sandberg’s book and in her many talks. This is ironic,
since the vision of gender quality she espouses is most radically
expressed when she is delineating what men need to do to work
for change. It is precisely her avoidance of the difficult questions
(like how will patriarchal thinking change) that empowers her
optimism and the overall enthusiastic spirit she exudes. Her
optimism is so affably intense, it encourages readers to bypass
the difficulties involved in challenging and changing patriarchy
so that a just moral and ethical foundation for gender equality
would become the norm.
Women, and our male allies in struggle, who have been
on the frontlines of feminist thinking and practice, see clearly
the fairytale evocation of harmonious solidarity is no easy task.
Given all the forces that separate women and pit us against one
another, solidarity is not an inevitable outcome. Sandberg’s
refusal to do anything but give slight mention to racialized class
differences undercuts the notion that she has a program that
speaks to and for all women. Her unwillingness to consider a
vision that would include all women rather than white women
from privileged classes is one of the flaws in the representation

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of herself as a voice for feminism. Certainly she is a powerful
mentor figure for fiscally conservative white female elites. The
corporate infusion of gender equality she evokes is a “whites
only” proposition.
To women of color young and old, along with anti-racist
white women, it is more than obvious that without a call to
challenge and change racism as an integral part of class mobility
she is really investing in top level success for highly educated
women from privileged classes. The call for gender equality in
the corporate American is undermined by the practice of exclu-
sivity, and usurped by the heteronormative white supremacist
bonding of marriage between white women and men. Founded
on the principles of white supremacy and structured to maintain
it, the rites of passage in the corporate world mirror this aspect
of our nation. Let it be stated again and again that race, and
more importantly white supremacy, is a taboo subject in the
world according to Sandberg.
At times Sandberg reminds readers of the old stereotypes
about used car salesmen. She pushes her product and she pushes
it well. Her shpiel is so good, so full of stuff that is obviously true,
that one is inclined to overlook all that goes unspoken, unex-
plained. For example, she titles a chapter “You Can’t Have It
All,” warning women that this idea is one of the most dangerous
concepts from the early feminist movement. But the real deal is
that Sandberg has it all, and in a zillion little ways she flaunts it.
Even though she epitomizes the “have it all kinda girl”—white,
rich, and married to a wonderful husband (like the television
evangelist Joyce Meyer, Sandberg is constantly letting read-
ers know how wonderful her husband is lest we forget)—she
claims women can’t have it all. She even dedicated the book
to her husband “for making everything possible”—what doesn’t
she have? Sandberg confesses that she has a loving family

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and children, more helpers in daily life than one can count.
Add this to the already abundant list, she is deemed by the
larger conservative media to be one of “the most influential,”
most powerful women in the world. If this is not another version
of the old game show “queen for a day,” what is? Remember
that the women on the show are puppets and white men behind
the scenes are pulling the strings.
Even though many advocates of feminist politics are angered
by Sandberg’s message, the truth is that alone, individually she
was no threat to feminist movement. Had the conservative
white male dominated world of mass media and advertising not
chosen to hype her image, this influential woman would not
be known to most folks. It is this patriarchal male dominated
re-framing of feminism, which uses the body and personal
success of Sheryl Sandberg, that is most disturbing and yes
threatening to the future of visionary feminist movement.
The model Sandberg represents is all about how women can
participate and “run the world.” But of course the kind of world
we would be running is never defined. It sounds at times like
benevolent patriarchal imperialism. This is the reason it seemed
essential for feminist thinkers to respond critically, not just to
Sandberg and her work, but to the conservative white male
patriarchy that is using her to let the world know what kind
of woman partner is acceptable among elites, both in the home
and in the workplace.
Feminism is just the screen masking this reframing. Angela
McRobbie offers an insightful take on this process in her
book, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social
Change, explaining: “Elements of feminism have been taken
into account and have been absolutely incorporated into
political and institutional life. Drawing on a vocabulary that
includes words like ‘empowerment’ and ‘choice,’ these elements

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are then converted into a much more individualistic discourse
and they are deployed in this new guise, particularly in media
and popular culture, but also by agencies of the state, as a kind
of substitute for feminism. These new and seemingly modern
ideas about women and especially young women are then dis-
seminated more aggressively so as to ensure that a new women’s
movement will not re-emerge.” This is so obviously the strategy
Sandberg and her supporters have deployed. McRobbie then
contends that “feminism is instrumentalized. It is brought forth
and claimed by Western governments, as a signal to the rest of
the world that this is a key part of what freedom now means.
Freedom is revitalized and brought up to date with this faux
feminism.” Sandberg uses feminist rhetoric as a front to cover
her commitment to western cultural imperialism, to white
supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
Clearly, Sandberg, with her website and her foundation,
has many female followers. Long before she was chosen by
conservative mass media as the new face of faux feminism, she
had her followers. This is why I chose to call my response “dig
deep,” for it is only as we place her in the overall frame of female
cultural icons that we can truly unpack and understand why she
has been chosen and lifted up in the neoliberal marketplace.
Importantly, whether feminist or not, we all need to remember
that visionary feminist goal which is not of a women running
the world as is, but a women doing our part to change the
world so that freedom and justice, the opportunity to have
optimal well-being, can be equally shared by everyone—female
and male.

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Joining the Conversation

1. This essay is a response to Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In
(excerpted here on pp. 642−58), which encourages women to
aim for positions of leadership and power. What is bell hooks’s
overall assessment of that book, both positive and negative?

2. What does hooks mean by her title, “Dig Deep: Beyond Lean
In”? The subtitle tells us that the essay is about Lean In;
what does “Dig Deep” add, and why do you think hooks
phrased it that way?

3. Even as hooks quotes and summarizes Sandberg and others,
she makes her own views clear. How does she signal when
she’s asserting her own views and when she’s summarizing
those of someone else? (See Chapter 5 for this book’s advice
on distinguishing what you say from what others say.)

4. According to hooks, “Sandberg uses feminist rhetoric
as a front to cover her commitment to western cultural
imperialism, to white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy”
(paragraph 29). What exactly does she mean by these criti-
cisms? How do you think Sandberg would respond to these
charges?

5. Write an essay summarizing briefly the arguments made by
Sheryl Sandberg and bell hooks and then saying what you
think and why.

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Why Women Still Can’t Have It All

A N N E – M A R I E S L A U G H T E R

Redefining the Arc of a Successful Career

Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director
of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy
dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found
myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage
of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a
Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glam-
orous reception at the American Museum of Natural History.
I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled.
But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who
had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already
resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework,

Anne-Marie Slaughter is the president and CEO of the New
America Foundation, “a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute,”
according to its website. In the past, she has taught at Princeton
University and Harvard Law School and worked as director of policy
planning for the U.S. State Department. She is also the author and
editor of several books, most recently The Idea That Is America: Keeping
Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World (2007). This essay first
appeared in the July/August 2012 issue of the Atlantic.

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disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who
tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to
each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me.
And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone
calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that
required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C.,
where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived.
My husband, who has always done everything possible to sup-
port my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother
during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came
home only on weekends.
As the evening wore on, I ran into a colleague who held a
senior position in the White House. She has two sons exactly
my sons’ ages, but she had chosen to move them from California
to D.C. when she got her job, which meant her husband com-
muted back to California regularly. I told her how difficult I was
finding it to be away from my son when he clearly needed me.
Then I said, “When this is over, I’m going to write an op-ed
titled ‘Women Can’t Have It All.’ ”
She was horrified. “You can’t write that,” she said. “You, of
all people.” What she meant was that such a statement, coming
from a high-profile career woman—a role model—would be a
terrible signal to younger generations of women. By the end of
the evening, she had talked me out of it, but for the remainder
of my stint in Washington, I was increasingly aware that the
feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were
shifting under my feet. I had always assumed that if I could
get a foreign-policy job in the State Department or the White
House while my party was in power, I would stay the course as
long as I had the opportunity to do work I loved. But in January
2011, when my two-year public-service leave from Princeton
University was up, I hurried home as fast as I could.

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A rude epiphany hit me soon after I got there. When people
asked why I had left government, I explained that I’d come
home not only because of Princeton’s rules (after two years of
leave, you lose your tenure), but also because of my desire to
be with my family and my conclusion that juggling high-level
government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not
possible. I have not exactly left the ranks of full-time career
women: I teach a full course load; write regular print and online
columns on foreign policy; give 40 to 50 speeches a year; appear
regularly on TV and radio; and am working on a new academic
book. But I routinely got reactions from other women my age
or older that ranged from disappointed (“It’s such a pity that
you had to leave Washington”) to condescending (“I wouldn’t
generalize from your experience. I’ve never had to compromise,
and my kids turned out great”).
The first set of reactions, with the underlying assumption
that my choice was somehow sad or unfortunate, was irksome
enough. But it was the second set of reactions—those implying
that my parenting and /or my commitment to my profession were
somehow substandard—that triggered a blind fury. Suddenly,
finally, the penny dropped. All my life, I’d been on the other side
of this exchange. I’d been the woman smiling the faintly superior
smile while another woman told me she had decided to take
some time out or pursue a less competitive career track so that
she could spend more time with her family. I’d been the woman
congratulating herself on her unswerving commitment to the
feminist cause, chatting smugly with her dwindling number of
college or law-school friends who had reached and maintained
their place on the highest rungs of their profession. I’d been the
one telling young women at my lectures that you can have it all
and do it all, regardless of what field you are in. Which means
I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making millions of women

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feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the
ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home
life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).
Last spring, I flew to Oxford to give a public lecture. At
the request of a young Rhodes Scholar I know, I’d agreed to
talk to the Rhodes community about “work-family balance.”
I ended up speaking to a group of about 40 men and women in
their mid-20s. What poured out of me was a set of very frank
reflections on how unexpectedly hard it was to do the kind of
job I wanted to do as a high government official and be the
kind of parent I wanted to be, at a demanding time for my
children (even though my husband, an academic, was willing
to take on the lion’s share of parenting for the two years I was in
Washington). I concluded by saying that my time in office had
convinced me that further government service would be very
unlikely while my sons were still at home. The audience was
rapt, and asked many thoughtful questions. One of the first
was from a young woman who began by thanking me for “not
giving just one more fatuous ‘You can have it all’ talk.” Just
about all of the women in that room planned to combine
careers and family in some way. But almost all assumed and
accepted that they would have to make compromises that the
men in their lives were far less likely to have to make.
The striking gap between the responses I heard
from those young women (and others like them) and
the responses I heard from my peers and associates
prompted me to write this article. Women of my gen-
eration have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with,
even as our ranks have been steadily thinned by unresolvable
tensions between family and career, because we are determined
not to drop the flag for the next generation. But when many
members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on

See p. 136
for tips on
indicating the
importance of
a claim.

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the grounds that glibly repeating “you can have it all” is simply
airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.
I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and
that men can too). I believe that we can “have it all at the
same time.” But not today, not with the way America’s econ-
omy and society are currently structured. My experiences over
the past three years have forced me to confront a number of
uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—
and quickly changed.

Before my service in government, I’d spent my career in
academia: as a law professor and then as the dean of Princeton’s
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
Both were demanding jobs, but I had the ability to set my own
schedule most of the time. I could be with my kids when I needed
to be, and still get the work done. I had to travel frequently,
but I found I could make up for that with an extended period
at home or a family vacation.
I knew that I was lucky in my career choice, but I had
no idea how lucky until I spent two years in Washington
within a rigid bureaucracy, even with bosses as understanding
as Hillary Clinton and her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills. My
workweek started at 4:20 on Monday morning, when I got up
to get the 5:30 train from Trenton to Washington. It ended
late on Friday, with the train home. In between, the days were
crammed with meetings, and when the meetings stopped, the
writing work began—a never-ending stream of memos, reports,
and comments on other people’s drafts. For two years, I never
left the office early enough to go to any stores other than those
open 24 hours, which meant that everything from dry cleaning
to hair appointments to Christmas shopping had to be done
on weekends, amid children’s sporting events, music lessons,

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family meals, and conference calls. I was entitled to four hours
of vacation per pay period, which came to one day of vacation
a month. And I had it better than many of my peers in D.C.;
Secretary Clinton deliberately came in around 8 a.m. and left
around 7 p.m., to allow her close staff to have morning and
evening time with their families (although of course she worked
earlier and later, from home).
In short, the minute I found myself in a job that is typical
for the vast majority of working women (and men), working
long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be
both the parent and the professional I wanted to be—at least
not with a child experiencing a rocky adolescence. I realized
what should have perhaps been obvious: having it all, at least
for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had.
The flip side is the harder truth: having it all was not possible
in many types of jobs, including high government office—at
least not for very long.
I am hardly alone in this realization. Michèle Flournoy
stepped down after three years as undersecretary of defense
for policy, the third-highest job in the department, to spend
more time at home with her three children, two of whom are
teenagers. Karen Hughes left her position as the counselor to
President George W. Bush after a year and a half in Washington
to go home to Texas for the sake of her family. Mary Matalin,
who spent two years as an assistant to Bush and the counselor
to Vice President Dick Cheney before stepping down to spend
more time with her daughters, wrote: “Having control over
your schedule is the only way that women who want to have
a career and a family can make it work.”
Yet the decision to step down from a position of power—
to value family over professional advancement, even for a
time—is directly at odds with the prevailing social pressures

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on career professionals in the United States. One phrase says it
all about current attitudes toward work and family, particularly
among elites. In Washington, “leaving to spend time with your
family” is a euphemism for being fired. This understanding is so
ingrained that when Flournoy announced her resignation last
December, The New York Times covered her decision as follows:

Ms. Flournoy’s announcement surprised friends and a number of
Pentagon officials, but all said they took her reason for resigna-
tion at face value and not as a standard Washington excuse for an
official who has in reality been forced out. “I can absolutely and
unequivocally state that her decision to step down has nothing to
do with anything other than her commitment to her family,” said
Doug Wilson, a top Pentagon spokesman. “She has loved this job
and people here love her.

Think about what this “standard Washington excuse” implies:
it is so unthinkable that an official would actually step down to
spend time with his or her family that this must be a cover for
something else. How could anyone voluntarily leave the circles of
power for the responsibilities of parenthood? Depending on one’s
vantage point, it is either ironic or maddening that this view
abides in the nation’s capital, despite the ritual commitments to
“family values” that are part of every political campaign. Regard-
less, this sentiment makes true work-life balance exceptionally
difficult. But it cannot change unless top women speak out.
Only recently have I begun to appreciate the extent to which
many young professional women feel under assault by women
my age and older. After I gave a recent speech in New York,
several women in their late 60s or early 70s came up to tell me
how glad and proud they were to see me speaking as a foreign-
policy expert. A couple of them went on, however, to contrast

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my career with the path being traveled by “younger women
today.” One expressed dismay that many younger women “are
just not willing to get out there and do it.” Said another,
unaware of the circumstances of my recent job change: “They
think they have to choose between having a career and having
a family.”
A similar assumption underlies Facebook Chief Operating
Officer Sheryl Sandberg’s widely publicized 2011 commence-
ment speech at Barnard, and her earlier TED talk, in which she
lamented the dismally small number of women at the top and
advised young women not to “leave before you leave.” When
a woman starts thinking about having children, Sandberg
said, “she doesn’t raise her hand anymore . . . She starts
leaning back.” Although couched in terms of encouragement,
Sandberg’s exhortation contains more than a note of reproach.
We who have made it to the top, or are striving to get there,
are essentially saying to the women in the generation behind
us: “What’s the matter with you?”
They have an answer that we don’t want to hear. After the
speech I gave in New York, I went to dinner with a group of
30-somethings. I sat across from two vibrant women, one of whom
worked at the UN and the other at a big New York law firm. As
nearly always happens in these situations, they soon began asking
me about work-life balance. When I told them I was writing this
article, the lawyer said, “I look for role models and can’t find any.”
She said the women in her firm who had become partners and
taken on management positions had made tremendous sacrifices,
“many of which they don’t even seem to realize. . . . They take two
years off when their kids are young but then work like crazy to get
back on track professionally, which means that they see their kids
when they are toddlers but not teenagers, or really barely at all.”
Her friend nodded, mentioning the top professional women she

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knew, all of whom essentially relied on round-the-clock nannies.
Both were very clear that they did not want that life, but could
not figure out how to combine professional success and satisfac-
tion with a real commitment to family.
I realize that I am blessed to have been born in the late 1950s
instead of the early 1930s, as my mother was, or the beginning
of the 20th century, as my grandmothers were. My mother built
a successful and rewarding career as a professional artist largely
in the years after my brothers and I left home—and after being
told in her 20s that she could not go to medical school, as her
father had done and her brother would go on to do, because, of
course, she was going to get married. I owe my own freedoms
and opportunities to the pioneering generation of women ahead
of me—the women now in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who faced
overt sexism of a kind I see only when watching Mad Men, and
who knew that the only way to make it as a woman was to act
exactly like a man. To admit to, much less act on, maternal
longings would have been fatal to their careers.
But precisely thanks to their progress, a different kind of
conversation is now possible. It is time for women in leadership
positions to recognize that although we are still blazing trails
and breaking ceilings, many of us are also reinforcing a false-
hood: that “having it all” is, more than anything, a function
of personal determination. As Kerry Rubin and Lia Macko, the
authors of Midlife Crisis at 30, their cri de coeur for Gen-X and
Gen-Y women, put it:

What we discovered in our research is that while the empower-
ment part of the equation has been loudly celebrated, there has
been very little honest discussion among women of our age about
the real barriers and flaws that still exist in the system despite the
opportunities we inherited.

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I am well aware that the majority of American women face
problems far greater than any discussed in this article. I am
writing for my demographic—highly educated, well-off women
who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place.
We may not have choices about whether to do paid work, as
dual incomes have become indispensable. But we have choices
about the type and tempo of the work we do. We are the women
who could be leading, and who should be equally represented
in the leadership ranks.
Millions of other working women face much more difficult life
circumstances. Some are single mothers; many struggle to find
any job; others support husbands who cannot find jobs. Many
cope with a work life in which good day care is either unavail-
able or very expensive; school schedules do not match work
schedules; and schools themselves are failing to educate their
children. Many of these women are worrying not about having
it all, but rather about holding on to what they do have. And
although women as a group have made substantial gains in wages,
educational attainment, and prestige over the past three decades,
the economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson have shown
that women are less happy today than their predecessors were in
1972, both in absolute terms and relative to men.
The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for clos-
ing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—meas-
ured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership
gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure
that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate
executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power
in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works
for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.

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Rediscovering the Pursuit of Happiness

One of the most complicated and surprising parts of my jour-
ney out of Washington was coming to grips with what I really
wanted. I had opportunities to stay on, and I could have tried
to work out an arrangement allowing me to spend more time
at home. I might have been able to get my family to join me
in Washington for a year; I might have been able to get clas-
sified technology installed at my house the way Jim Steinberg
did; I might have been able to commute only four days a week
instead of five. (While this last change would have still left
me very little time at home, given the intensity of my job,
it might have made the job doable for another year or two.)
But I realized that I didn’t just need to go home. Deep down,
I wanted to go home. I wanted to be able to spend time with
my children in the last few years that they are likely to live
at home, crucial years for their development into responsible,
productive, happy, and caring adults. But also irreplaceable
years for me to enjoy the simple pleasures of parenting—base-
ball games, piano recitals, waffle breakfasts, family trips, and
goofy rituals. My older son is doing very well these days, but
even when he gives us a hard time, as all teenagers do, being
home to shape his choices and help him make good decisions
is deeply satisfying.
The flip side of my realization is captured in Rubin and
Macko’s ruminations on the importance of bringing the differ-
ent parts of their lives together as 30-year-old women:

If we didn’t start to learn how to integrate our personal, social, and
professional lives, we were about five years away from morphing
into the angry woman on the other side of a mahogany desk who
questions her staff’s work ethic after standard 12-hour workdays,
before heading home to eat moo shoo pork in her lonely apartment.

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Women have contributed to the fetish of the one-
dimensional life, albeit by necessity. The pioneer generation
of feminists walled off their personal lives from their profes-
sional personas to ensure that they could never be discriminated
against for a lack of commitment to their work. When I was a
law student in the 1980s, many women who were then climbing
the legal hierarchy in New York firms told me that they never
admitted to taking time out for a child’s doctor appointment or
school performance, but instead invented a much more neutral
excuse.
Today, however, women in power can and should change
that environment, although change is not easy. When I became
dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, in 2002, I decided that
one of the advantages of being a woman in power was that I
could help change the norms by deliberately talking about my
children and my desire to have a balanced life. Thus, I would
end faculty meetings at 6 p.m. by saying that I had to go home
for dinner; I would also make clear to all student organiza-
tions that I would not come to dinner with them, because I
needed to be home from six to eight, but that I would often
be willing to come back after eight for a meeting. I also once
told the Dean’s Advisory Committee that the associate dean
would chair the next session so I could go to a parent-teacher
conference.
After a few months of this, several female assistant professors
showed up in my office quite agitated. “You have to stop talking
about your kids,” one said. “You are not showing the gravitas
that people expect from a dean, which is particularly damaging
precisely because you are the first woman dean of the school.”
I told them that I was doing it deliberately and continued my
practice, but it is interesting that gravitas and parenthood don’t
seem to go together.

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Ten years later, whenever I am introduced at a lecture or
other speaking engagement, I insist that the person introducing
me mention that I have two sons. It seems odd to me to list
degrees, awards, positions, and interests and not include the
dimension of my life that is most important to me—and takes
an enormous amount of my time. As Secretary Clinton once
said in a television interview in Beijing when the interviewer
asked her about Chelsea’s upcoming wedding: “That’s my real
life.” But I notice that my male introducers are typically uncom-
fortable when I make the request. They frequently say things
like “And she particularly wanted me to mention that she has
two sons”—thereby drawing attention to the unusual nature of
my request, when my entire purpose is to make family references
routine and normal in professional life.
This does not mean that you should insist that your col-
leagues spend time cooing over pictures of your baby or listen-
ing to the prodigious accomplishments of your kindergartner.
It does mean that if you are late coming in one week, because
it is your turn to drive the kids to school, that you be honest
about what you are doing. Indeed, Sheryl Sandberg recently
acknowledged not only that she leaves work at 5:30 to have
dinner with her family, but also that for many years she did
not dare make this admission, even though she would of course
make up the work time later in the evening. Her willingness
to speak out now is a strong step in the right direction.
Seeking out a more balanced life is not a women’s issue;
balance would be better for us all. Bronnie Ware, an Australian
blogger who worked for years in palliative care and is the author
of the 2011 book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, writes that
the regret she heard most often was “I wish I’d had the cour-
age to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of
me.” The second-most-common regret was “I wish I didn’t work

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so hard.” She writes: “This came from every male patient that
I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s
companionship.”
Juliette Kayyem, who several years ago left the Department
of Homeland Security soon after her husband, David Barron,
left a high position in the Justice Department, says their joint
decision to leave Washington and return to Boston sprang from
their desire to work on the “happiness project,” meaning quality
time with their three children. (She borrowed the term from
her friend Gretchen Rubin, who wrote a best-selling book and
now runs a blog with that name.)
It’s time to embrace a national happiness project. As a
daughter of Charlottesville, Virginia, the home of Thomas
Jefferson and the university he founded, I grew up with the
Declaration of Independence in my blood. Last I checked, he
did not declare American independence in the name of life,
liberty, and professional success. Let us rediscover the pursuit
of happiness, and let us start at home.

Innovation Nation

As I write this, I can hear the reaction of some readers to many
of the proposals in this essay: It’s all fine and well for a ten-
ured professor to write about flexible working hours, investment
intervals, and family-comes-first management. But what about
the real world? Most American women cannot demand these
things, particularly in a bad economy, and their employers have
little incentive to grant them voluntarily. Indeed, the most
frequent reaction I get in putting forth these ideas is that when
the choice is whether to hire a man who will work whenever
and wherever needed, or a woman who needs more flexibility,
choosing the man will add more value to the company.

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In fact, while many of these issues are hard to quantify
and measure precisely, the statistics seem to tell a different
story. A seminal study of 527 U.S. companies, published in
the Academy of Management Journal in 2000, suggests that
“organizations with more extensive work-family policies have
higher perceived firm-level performance” among their industry
peers. These findings accorded with a 2003 study conducted by
Michelle Arthur at the University of New Mexico. Examin-
ing 130 announcements of family-friendly policies in The Wall
Street Journal, Arthur found that the announcements alone
significantly improved share prices. In 2011, a study on flex-
ibility in the workplace by Ellen Galinsky, Kelly Sakai, and
Tyler Wigton of the Families and Work Institute showed that
increased flexibility correlates positively with job engagement,
job satisfaction, employee retention, and employee health.
This is only a small sampling from a large and growing lit-
erature trying to pin down the relationship between family-
friendly policies and economic performance. Other scholars
have concluded that good family policies attract better talent,
which in turn raises productivity, but that the policies them-
selves have no impact on productivity. Still others argue that
results attributed to these policies are actually a function of
good management overall. What is evident, however, is that
many firms that recruit and train well-educated professional
women are aware that when a woman leaves because of bad
work-family balance, they are losing the money and time they
invested in her.
Even the legal industry, built around the billable hour, is
taking notice. Deborah Epstein Henry, a former big-firm liti-
gator, is now the president of Flex-Time Lawyers, a national
consulting firm focused partly on strategies for the retention of
female attorneys. In her book Law and Reorder, published by the

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American Bar Association in 2010, she describes a legal profes-
sion “where the billable hour no longer works”; where attor-
neys, judges, recruiters, and academics all agree that this system
of compensation has perverted the industry, leading to brutal
work hours, massive inefficiency, and highly inflated costs.
The answer—already being deployed in different corners of the
industry—is a combination of alternative fee structures, virtual
firms, women-owned firms, and the outsourcing of discrete legal
jobs to other jurisdictions. Women, and Generation X and Y
lawyers more generally, are pushing for these changes on the
supply side; clients determined to reduce legal fees and increase
flexible service are pulling on the demand side. Slowly, change
is happening.
At the core of all this is self-interest. Losing smart and moti-
vated women not only diminishes a company’s talent pool; it
also reduces the return on its investment in training and men-
toring. In trying to address these issues, some firms are finding
out that women’s ways of working may just be better ways of
working, for employees and clients alike.
Experts on creativity and innovation emphasize the value of
encouraging nonlinear thinking and cultivating randomness by
taking long walks or looking at your environment from unusual
angles. In their new book, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating
the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, the innovation
gurus John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas write, “We believe
that connecting play and imagination may be the single most
important step in unleashing the new culture of learning.”
Space for play and imagination is exactly what emerges when
rigid work schedules and hierarchies loosen up. Skeptics should
consider the “California effect.” California is the cradle of
American innovation—in technology, entertainment, sports,
food, and lifestyles. It is also a place where people take leisure

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as seriously as they take work; where companies like Google
deliberately encourage play, with Ping-Pong tables, light sabers,
and policies that require employees to spend one day a week
working on whatever they wish. Charles Baudelaire wrote:
“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at
will.” Google apparently has taken note.
No parent would mistake child care for childhood. Still,
seeing the world anew through a child’s eyes can be a power-
ful source of stimulation. When the Nobel laureate Thomas
Schelling wrote The Strategy of Conflict, a classic text applying
game theory to conflicts among nations, he frequently drew on
child-rearing for examples of when deterrence might succeed
or fail. “It may be easier to articulate the peculiar difficulty of
constraining [a ruler] by the use of threats,” he wrote, “when
one is fresh from a vain attempt at using threats to keep a small
child from hurting a dog or a small dog from hurting a child.”
The books I’ve read with my children, the silly movies I’ve
watched, the games I’ve played, questions I’ve answered, and
people I’ve met while parenting have broadened my world.
Another axiom of the literature on innovation is that the
more often people with different perspectives come together,
the more likely creative ideas are to emerge. Giving workers
the ability to integrate their non-work lives with their work—
whether they spend that time mothering or marathoning—will
open the door to a much wider range of influences and ideas.

Enlisting Men

Perhaps the most encouraging news of all for achieving the sorts
of changes that I have proposed is that men are joining the
cause. In commenting on a draft of this article, Martha Minow,
the dean of the Harvard Law School, wrote me that one change

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she has observed during 30 years of teaching law at Harvard
is that today many young men are asking questions about how
they can manage a work-life balance. And more systematic
research on Generation Y confirms that many more men than
in the past are asking questions about how they are going to
integrate active parenthood with their professional lives.
Abstract aspirations are easier than concrete trade-offs, of
course. These young men have not yet faced the question of
whether they are prepared to give up that more prestigious
clerkship or fellowship, decline a promotion, or delay their
professional goals to spend more time with their children and
to support their partner’s career.
Yet once work practices and work culture begin to evolve,
those changes are likely to carry their own momentum. Kara
Owen, a British foreign-service officer who worked a London
job from Dublin, wrote me in an e-mail:

I think the culture on flexible working started to change the minute
the Board of Management (who were all men at the time) started
to work flexibly—quite a few of them started working one day a
week from home.

Men have, of course, become much more involved parents
over the past couple of decades, and that, too, suggests broad
support for big changes in the way we balance work and family.
It is noteworthy that both James Steinberg, deputy secretary of
state, and William Lynn, deputy secretary of defense, stepped
down two years into the Obama administration so that they
could spend more time with their children (for real).
Going forward, women would do well to frame work-family
balance in terms of the broader social and economic issues
that affect both women and men. After all, we have a new

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generation of young men who have been raised by full-time
working mothers. Let us presume, as I do with my sons, that
they will understand “supporting their families” to mean more
than earning money.

I have been blessed to work with and be mentored by some
extraordinary women. Watching Hillary Clinton in action
makes me incredibly proud—of her intelligence, expertise,
professionalism, charisma, and command of any audience. I
get a similar rush when I see a front-page picture of Christine
Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary
Fund, and Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, deep
in conversation about some of the most important issues on
the world stage; or of Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the
United Nations, standing up forcefully for the Syrian people
in the Security Council.
These women are extraordinary role models. If I had a
daughter, I would encourage her to look to them, and I want
a world in which they are extraordinary but not unusual. Yet
I also want a world in which, in Lisa Jackson’s* words, “to
be a strong woman, you don’t have to give up on the things
that define you as a woman.” That means respecting, enabling,
and indeed celebrating the full range of women’s choices.
“Empowering yourself,” Jackson said in a speech at Princeton,
“doesn’t have to mean rejecting motherhood, or eliminating
the nurturing or feminine aspects of who you are.”
I gave a speech at Vassar last November and arrived in time
to wander the campus on a lovely fall afternoon. It is a place
infused with a spirit of community and generosity, filled with

*Jackson From 2009 until 2013, Administrator of the United States
Environmental Protection Agency.

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benches, walkways, public art, and quiet places donated by
alumnae seeking to encourage contemplation and connection.
Turning the pages of the alumni magazine (Vassar is now coed),
I was struck by the entries of older alumnae, who greeted
their classmates with Salve (Latin for “hello”) and wrote witty
remembrances sprinkled with literary allusions. Theirs was a
world in which women wore their learning lightly; their news
is mostly of their children’s accomplishments. Many of us look
back on that earlier era as a time when it was fine to joke that
women went to college to get an “M.R.S.” And many women
of my generation abandoned the Seven Sisters as soon as the
formerly all-male Ivy League universities became coed. I would
never return to the world of segregated sexes and rampant
discrimination. But now is the time to revisit the assumption
that women must rush to adapt to the “man’s world” that our
mothers and mentors warned us about.
I continually push the young women in my classes to speak
more. They must gain the confidence to value their own insights
and questions, and to present them readily. My husband agrees,
but he actually tries to get the young men in his classes to act
more like the women—to speak less and listen more. If women
are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to
stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default
and the ideal. We must insist on changing social policies and
bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too. We
have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many
men standing beside us.
We’ll create a better society in the process, for all women.
We may need to put a woman in the White House before
we are able to change the conditions of the women work-
ing at Walmart. But when we do, we will stop talking about
whether women can have it all. We will properly focus on

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how we can help all Americans have healthy, happy, pro-
ductive lives, valuing the people they love as much as the
success they seek.

Joining the Conversation

1. According to Anne-Marie Slaughter, women can “ ‘have it
all.’ . . . But not today, not with the way America’s economy
and society are currently structured” (paragraph 8). Summa-
rize her “I say,” noting the reasons and evidence she gives
to support her claims.

2. In paragraph 19, Slaughter entertains a possible objection to
her argument, saying that she is “well aware that a majority
of American women face problems far greater than any dis-
cussed in this article.” How does she answer this objection?

3. This essay consists of four sections: Redefining the Arc of a
Successful Career, Rediscovering the Pursuit of Happiness,
Innovation Nation, and Enlisting Men. Summarize each
section in a sentence or two. Put yourself in Slaughter’s
shoes; your summary should be true to what she says. (See
pp. 31−33 for guidance in writing this kind of summary.)

4. Slaughter claims that most young men today have not yet
had to decide between accepting a promotion or other pro-
fessional opportunity and delaying their own goals “to spend
more time with their children and to support their part-
ner’s career” (paragraph 42). What would Richard Dorment
(pp. 697−717) say to that?

5. Write a paragraph stating your own thoughts and percep-
tions on mixing family and career. Given Slaughter’s argu-
ments, how do you think she’d respond to what you say?

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Why Men Still Can’t Have It All

R I C H A R D D O R M E N T

Lately, the raging debate about issues of “work-life balance” has
focused on whether or not women can “have it all.” Entirely
lost in this debate is the growing strain of work-life balance on
men, who today are feeling the competing demands of work and
home as much or more than women. And the truth is as shock-
ing as it is obvious: No one can have it all. Any questions?

The baby has a heartbeat. The ultrasound shows ten
fuzzy fingers and ten fuzzy toes and a tiny crescent-moon mouth
that will soon let out the first of many wails. We have chosen
not to find out the gender, and when the question comes, as it
does every day, we say we have no preference. Ten fingers, ten
toes. A wail in the delivery room would be nice. But in private,
just us, we talk. About the pros and cons of boys versus girls,
and about whether it would be better, more advantageous, to

Richard Dorment is an editor at Esquire magazine. He has been
a guest on television and radio programs including the Today Show,
CNN Newsroom, Here and Now, and Upfront and Straightforward. This
essay first appeared in the June/July 2013 issue of Esquire.

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be born a boy or a girl right now. It’s a toss-up, or maybe just
a draw—impossible to say that a boy or a girl born in America
in 2013 has any conspicuous advantages because of his or her
gender.
Consider the facts: Nearly 60 percent of the bachelor’s
degrees in this country today go to women. Same number for
graduate degrees. There are about as many women in the work-
force as men, and according to Hanna Rosin’s 2012 book, The
End of Men, of the fifteen professions projected to grow the
fastest over the coming years, twelve are currently dominated
by women. Per a 2010 study by James Chung of Reach Advisors,
unmarried childless women under thirty and with full-time jobs
earn 8 percent more than their male peers in 147 out of 150
of the largest U. S. cities. The accomplishments that underlie
those numbers are real and world-historic, and through the
grueling work of generations of women, men and women are as
equal as they have ever been. Adding to that the greater male
predisposition to adhd, alcoholism, and drug abuse, women
have nothing but momentum coming out of young adulthood—
the big mo!—and then . . .
Well, what exactly? Why don’t women hold more than
15 percent of Fortune 500 executive-officer positions in
America? Why are they stalled below 20 percent of Congress?
Why does the average woman earn only seventy-seven pennies
for every dollar made by the average man? Childbirth plays a
role, knocking ambitious women off their professional stride
for months (if not years) at a time while their male peers go
chug-chug-chugging along, but then why do some women still
make it to the top while others fall by the wayside? Institutional
sexism and pay discrimination are still ugly realities, but with the
millions in annual penalties levied on offending businesses . . .
they have become increasingly, and thankfully, uncommon.

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College majors count (women still dominate education, men
engineering), as do career choices, yet none of these on their
own explains why the opportunity gap between the sexes has
all but closed yet a stark achievement gap persists.
For a fuller explanation, the national conversation of late
has settled on a single issue—work-life balance—with two
voices in particular dominating: The first belongs to former
State Department policy chief Anne-Marie Slaughter, whose
essay “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” was the most
widely read story ever on the Atlantic’s web site and landed
her a book deal and spots on Today and Colbert. Slaughter’s
twelve-thousand-word story relies on personal anecdotes mixed
with wonk talk: “I still strongly believe that women can ‘have
it all’ (and that men can too). I believe that we can ‘have it all
at the same time.’ But not today, not with the way America’s
economy and society are currently structured.” The scarcity of

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female leaders to effect public and corporate change on behalf of
women; the inflexibility of the traditional workday; the preva-
lence of what she calls “ ‘time macho’—a relentless competition
to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around
the world and bill the extra hours that the international date
line affords you.” All these factors conspire to deprive women
of “it all.” (The “it” in question being like Potter Stewart’s
definition of pornography: You know it when you have it.)
The second, and altogether more grown-up, voice belongs
to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whose “sort of feminist”
manifesto Lean In urges women to command a seat at any table
of their choosing. Like Slaughter, Sandberg references the usual
systemic challenges, but what it really boils down to, Sandberg
argues, is what Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox prescribed
back in the eighties: Sisters Doin’ It for Themselves. Sandberg
encourages women to negotiate harder, be more assertive, and
forget about being liked and concentrate instead on letting ’er rip.
She believes that women can, and should, determine the pace
and scope of their own careers, and for her audacity in assigning
some agency to the women of America, her critics (Slaughter
among them) say she blames women for their failure to rise far-
ther, faster, rather than the real culprits: society, corporations,
and men (which is to say: men, men, and men). Commenting
on the Lean In debate in a blog for The New York Times, Gail
Collins asked, “How do you give smart, accomplished, ambitious
women the same opportunities as men to reach their goals? What
about universal preschool and after-school programs? What
about changing the corporate mind-set about the time commit-
ment it takes to move up the ladder? What about having more
husbands step up and take the major load?”
Her questions echo a 2010 Newsweek cover story, “Men’s Lib,”
which ended with an upper: “If men embraced parental leave,

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women would be spared the stigma of the ‘mommy track’—and
the professional penalties (like lower pay) that come along with
it. If men were involved fathers, more kids might stay in school,
steer clear of crime, and avoid poverty as adults. And if the
country achieved gender parity in the workplace—an optimal
balance of fully employed men and women—the gross domestic
product would grow by as much as 9 percent. . . . Ultimately,
[it] boils down to a simple principle: in a changing world, men
should do whatever it takes to contribute their fair share at
home and at work.”
Two men wrote that, incidentally, which must make it true,
and among those who traffic in gender studies, it is something
of a truth universally acknowledged: Men are to blame for
pretty much everything. And I freely admit, we do make for a
compelling target. Men have oppressed their wives and sisters
and daughters for pretty much all of recorded history, and now
women are supposed to trust us to share everything 50-50?

Allow me to paint another picture. One in which women are
asked to make the same personal sacrifices as men past and
present—too much time away from home, too many weekends
at the computer, too much inconvenient travel—but then claim
some special privilege in their hardship. One in which universal
preschool and after-school programs would be a boon to all parents
(and not, as Collins suggests, simply to women). In which men
spend more time with their children, and are more involved with
their home lives, than ever before. In which men work just as
hard at their jobs, if not harder, than ever before. In which men
now report higher rates of work-life stress than women do. In
which men are tormented by the lyrics of “Cat’s in the Cradle.”
In which men are being told, in newspapers and books, on web
sites and TV shows, that they are the problem, that they need to

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help out, when, honestly folks, they’re doing the best they can.
In which men like me, and possibly you, open their eyes in the
morning and want it all—everything!—only to close their eyes at
night knowing that only a fool could ever expect such a thing.

My wife makes more money than I do. We majored in the
same thing at the same college at the same time, and when I
chose to go into journalism, she chose to go to law school. She
works longer hours, shoulders weightier responsibilities, and
faces greater (or at least more reliable) prospects for long-term
success, all of which are direct results of choices that we made in
our early twenties. She does more of the heavy lifting with our
young son than I do, but I do as much as I can. (Someone else
watches him while we are at work.) I do a lot of cooking and
cleaning around our house. So does she. I don’t keep score (and
she says she doesn’t), and it’s hard to imagine how our life would
work if we weren’t both giving every day our all.
According to a study released in March by the Pew Research
Center, household setups like ours are increasingly the norm:
60 percent of two-parent homes with kids under the age of
eighteen are made up of dual-earning couples (i.e., two working
parents). On any given week in such a home, women put in
more time than men doing housework (sixteen hours to nine)
and more time with child care (twelve to seven). These statis-
tics provoke outrage among the “fair share” crowd, and there is
a sense, even among the most privileged women, that they are
getting a raw deal. (In April, Michelle Obama referred to herself
as a “single mother” before clarifying: “I shouldn’t say single—
as a busy mother, sometimes, you know, when you’ve got a
husband who is president, it can feel a little single.” Because
really: The president should spend more time making sure the
First Lady feels supported.)

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But the complete picture reveals a more complex and
equitable reality.
Men in dual-income couples work outside the home eleven
more hours a week than their working wives or partners do
(forty-two to thirty-one), and when you look at the total weekly
workload, including paid work outside the home and unpaid
work inside the home, men and women are putting in roughly
the same number of hours: fifty-eight hours for men and fifty-
nine for women.
How you view those numbers depends in large part on your
definition of work, but it’s not quite as easy as saying men aren’t
pulling their weight around the house. (Spending eleven fewer
hours at home and with the kids doesn’t mean working dads are
freeloaders any more than spending eleven fewer hours at work
makes working moms slackers.) These are practical accommo-
dations that reflect real-time conditions on the ground, and
rather than castigate men, one might consider whether those
extra hours on the job provide the financial cover the family
needs so that women can spend more time with the kids.
Also, according to women in the Pew study, it seems to be
working out well. Working mothers in dual-earning couples are
more likely to say they’re very or pretty happy with life right
now than their male partners are (93 percent to 87 percent); if
anything, it’s men who are twice as likely to say they’re unhappy.
(Pew supplied Esquire with data specific to dual-income couples
that is not part of its published report. There is plenty of data
relating to other household arrangements—working father
and stay-at-home mom; working mother and stay-at-home
dad; same-sex households—but since the focus of Slaughter,
Sandberg, et al. is on the struggles of working mothers, and
most working mothers are coupled with working fathers, the
dual-income data set seems most relevant to examine here.)

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Ellen Galinsky has been studying the American workplace
for more than thirty years. A married mother of two grown
kids with a background in child education and zero tolerance
for bullshit, she cofounded the Families and Work Institute
in part to chart how the influx of women in American offices
and factories would affect family dynamics. “In 1977,” she says,
“there was a Department of Labor study that asked people, ‘How
much interference do you feel between your work and your fam-
ily life?’ and men’s work-family conflict was a lot lower than
women’s.” She saw the numbers begin to shift in the late 1990s,
and “by 2008, 60 percent of fathers in dual-earning couples
were experiencing some or a lot of conflict compared to about
47 percent of women. I would go into meetings with business
leaders and report the fact that men’s work-family conflict was
higher than women’s, and people in the room—who were so
used to being worried about women’s advancement—couldn’t
believe it.”
What they couldn’t believe was decades of conventional
wisdom—men secure and confident in the workplace, women
somewhat less so—crumbling away as more and more fathers
began to invest more of their time and energy into their home
lives. Though they still lag behind women in hours clocked at
the kitchen sink, men do more than twice as much cooking
and cleaning as they did fifty years ago, which probably comes
as a shock to older women who would famously come home
from work to a “second shift” of housework. In reporting her
book, Big Girls Don’t Cry, a study of women’s roles in the 2008
election, Rebecca Traister interviewed dozens of high-achieving
women who were in the thick of second-wave feminism and
encountered the generation gap for herself. “I remember one
day, right before Thanksgiving, a woman who had grown chil-
dren said something like ‘I would love to keep talking to you but

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I have to start my two-day slog to Thanksgiving.’ And I said very
lightly, ‘Oh, my husband does the cooking in our house.’ This
woman then got very serious, as if she had never heard of such
a thing. For people [in their thirties], isn’t it totally normal for
guys to do a lot of cooking? In fact it’s one of the things about
today—dudes love food, right? But it was so foreign to her.”
In speaking with a variety of men for this article, I found
that most men say they share responsibilities as much as cir-
cumstances allow. One of the men who spoke with me, Dave
from Atherton, California, runs a successful business, and both
he and his wife (a fellow technology executive) say that they
split their family duties 50-50. “We have a Google calendar
that we share so that everyone is on the same page, and on
the weekend, we plan out our week: who’s doing what, who’s
driving the kids which day, what dinner looks like each night
during the week.”
Yet Dave still considers himself an anomaly. “There is still
this expectation that women are going to do the majority of
the housework, and deal with schools and stuff, while men can
just make it home for dinner and show up at sporting events
and be like, ‘Wow, I’m being a great father.’ It is a real issue,
and it is something you really have to work at. You have to
try and make sure that you’re doing the other stuff around the
house in a way that’s fair and equal.”
He makes a valid point, and in trying to figure out why men
don’t do more around the house, we could discuss any number
of factors—men generally spend more time at work, out of the
home, than women do, so they don’t have as much time for
chores; women are inherently more fastidious; men are lazy
and/or have a higher threshold for living in filth—but the most
compelling argument comes from writer Jessica Grose in The
New Republic. “Women are more driven to keep a clean house

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because they know they—before their male partners—will be
judged for having a dirty one.” Rather than confront or ignore
paternalistic expectations, some women seem willing to cede to
them, and this whiff of put-upon-ness recalls something Slaugh-
ter acknowledged in an online chat with readers following her
article’s publication: “so much of this is about what we feel,
or rather what we are made to feel by the reactions of those
around us.” Between the all-caps (hers) and the sentiments
expressed, this writing wouldn’t be out of place on a teenage
blog, and as anyone who’s ever argued with a teenager knows,
it’s hard to reason with feelings.
However, I will try. The validation of one’s feelings is the lan-
guage of therapy, which is to say that it is how we all talk now.

This is not to denigrate the language or the feelings; it
is only to say that to use one’s feelings as evidence of
an injury is no way to advance a serious cause. And to
imply that one has been made to feel any way at all—

well, no grown man has ever won that argument before.
A final point about housework: It is not always as simple
as men volunteering to do what needs to be done. To give
a small, vaguely pitiful example from my own life: We share
laundry duty in my house, and yet whenever I’m through folding
a pile of clothes, my wife will then refold everything, quietly
and without comment. This used to annoy me—why do I even
bother? or, conversely, Is this the Army?—but now it mostly
amuses me. When I press her on it, she tells me that I’m doing
it wrong, and this too used to annoy me, until I realized that it
wasn’t really about me. “If I’ve talked to one group of people
about this, I’ve talked to hundreds,” says Galinsky. “Women
will say ‘Support me more,’ and men will say ‘But you’re telling
me I’m doing it wrong.’ I wouldn’t say it’s biological, because
I’m not a biologist, but it feels biological to me in that it’s very

See p. 135 for
ways to ward
off potential

misunder-
standings.

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hard to let someone else do something different, because it
might mean that the way you’re doing it isn’t right.” When I
asked Galinsky if this could explain why a wife would refold a
pile of laundry that her husband had just done a perfectly good
job folding, she laughed. “Exactly.”

What you’re about to read is a passage from “Why Women
Still Can’t Have It All,” and though it’s long and windy, I
feel the need to quote from as much of it as possible. You will
understand why:

The proposition that women can have high-powered careers as
long as their husbands or partners are willing to share the parenting
load equally (or disproportionately) assumes that most women will
feel as comfortable as men do about being away from their children,
as long as their partner is home with them. . . . From years of
conversations and observations . . . I’ve come to believe that men
and women respond quite differently when problems at home force
them to recognize that their absence is hurting a child, or at least
that their presence would likely help. I do not believe fathers love
their children any less than mothers do, but men do seem more
likely to choose their job at a cost to their family, while women
seem more likely to choose their family at a cost to their job.

(Dr. Slaughter, you had me at “I do not believe fathers love
their children any less than mothers do. . . .”)
Since Slaughter doesn’t provide any evidence to support her
claim, it’s impossible to say whether the men she’s referring to are
the sole breadwinners in the family (meaning: the ones who feel
the intense weight and pressure of being what one writer described
as “one job away from poverty”) or are in two-income households,
or what, but it’s worth keeping in mind that this comes from a

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person whose husband, by her own admission, sacrificed much
in his own academic career to do the heavy lifting with their
children, all so she could pursue her dream job and then complain
about it, bitterly, in the pages of a national magazine.
The trouble with probing men’s and women’s emotional rela-
tionships with their children is that the subject is fraught with
stereotypes and prone to specious generalities (see above), but
here goes: In my own experience as both son and father, I’ve
learned that one parent’s relationship with a child (and vice
versa) isn’t inherently richer or deeper than the other parent’s.
It’s just different, and with more and more fathers spending
more and more time with their kids today—nearly three times as
much as they did in 1965—that has become more true than ever.
“There is a dramatic cultural shift among millennial and Gen
X-ers in wanting to be involved fathers,” says Galinsky. “And
I don’t just think it’s just women who are telling men they need
to share. Men want a different relationship with their children
than men have had in the past. . . . They don’t want to be stick
figures in their children’s lives. They don’t want it on their
tombstone how many hours they billed. That ‘Cat’s Cradle’ song
is very much alive and well in the male psyche.”
“Men are being judged as fathers now in a way that I think
they never have been before,” says Traister, and just as women
are historically new to the workplace, men are new to the car-
pool and negotiating these fresh expectations (their own and
others’) as they go along. Not only do working fathers from
dual-income homes spend just as much time at work as their
fathers and grandfathers did (all while putting in many, many
more hours with kids and chores), they also spend more time
at work than non-fathers. Seven hours more a week, according
to Pew, a trend that Galinsky has noticed in her own research
and that she attributes to the unshakable, if often illusory, sense

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of being the breadwinner. “There are these expectations, even
among men whose wives bring in 45 percent of family income,
that they were still responsible for the family.”
There is the matter of guilt and whether women find it
harder than men to be away from their children—which, if
that’s the case, would mean that women looking to advance
in the workplace would have heavier emotional baggage than
their male peers. Any husband who’s watched his wife cry before
taking a business trip (and wondering—silently, I hope—to
himself, why?) will tell you that men and women have different
ways of experiencing and expressing ambivalence, frustration,
and, yes, guilt. “I have no idea if it’s societal or genetic or what-
ever,” says Dave, the California businessman, “but it’s certainly
real that I think my wife feels more guilty than I do when she’s
gone from the kids. There’s no question.” I can’t claim to speak
for Men Everywhere, but in the interviews I conducted for this
article, nearly every subject admitted to missing his kids on late
nights at the office or aching for home while on a business trip,
yet they couch any guilt or regret in the context of sacrifice.
Chalk this up to social conditioning (men are raised to be
the providers, so it’s easier for them to be absent) or genetic
predisposition (men are not naturally nurturing) or emotional
shallowness (men aren’t as in touch with their feelings), but
there is the sense, down to the man, that missing their kids is
the price of doing business.
And so we all do the best we can. Dave and his wife make
weekends sacrosanct and family dinners a priority. “My wife
famously said she leaves her office at 5:30 so we can be home
at 6:00 for dinner, and I do the same thing, though we’re both
back online doing work after the kids go to bed.”
(Dave’s last name, by the way, is Goldberg, and his wife is
Sheryl Sandberg, and thanks to Lean In, she is famous. Goldberg

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is the CEO of a company named SurveyMonkey, which provides
interactive survey tools for the masses, and he helped build it
from a twelve-person operation to a staff of more than two
hundred and a $1.35 billion valuation. All while splitting
parenting responsibilities 50-50 with a really busy wife. They
have the means, certainly, but more importantly, the will.)

Speaking of: In her commencement speech for Harvard
Business School in 2012, Sandberg addressed an issue that
comes up often—men need to do more to support women in the
workplace. “It falls upon the men who are graduating today just
as much or more than the women not just to talk about gender
but to help these women succeed. When they hear a woman
is really great at her job but not liked, take a deep breath and
ask why. We need to start talking openly about the flexibility
all of us need to have both a job and a life.”
Among the various ways men can help women, paternity
leave is sometimes mentioned as a good place to start, the idea
being that if more men took a few weeks off following the birth
of a child, they would help remove the professional stigma sur-
rounding maternity leave and level the playing field. Anyone
who has watched any woman, much less one with a full-time
job, endure third-term pregnancy, delivery, and the long, lonely
nights of postpartum life would tell you how necessary a national
paid maternity-leave policy is. Expectant and new mothers are
put through the physical and emotional ringer, and they need
that time to heal without worrying about losing their job or
paying the bills. There are really no two ways about it.
Dads, however, are a different and more complicated story.
In California, the first state to fund up to six weeks of paid
leave for new moms and dads, only 29 percent of those who
take it are men, and there have been numerous studies lately

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exploring why more men aren’t taking greater advantage of
the ability to stay home. The general consensus is reflected in
a paper out of Rutgers University: “Women who ask for family
leave are behaving in a more gender normative way, compared
with men who request a family leave. . . . Because the concept
of work-life balance is strongly gendered, men who request a
family leave may also suffer a femininity stigma, whereby ‘acting
like a woman’ deprives them of masculine agency (e.g., com-
petence and assertiveness) and impugns them with negative
feminine qualities (e.g., weakness and uncertainty).” This is
some paleolithic thinking here, starting, for instance, with the
idea that “acting like a woman” means anything at all, much
less weakness and uncertainty.
I’m lucky enough to work for a company that provides paid
paternity leave, but a few days after my son was born, I was
back in the office. It’s not because I was scared about appear-
ing weak to my mostly male coworkers or employers, and it’s
not because I was any more wary of losing my job than usual.
At work, I had a purpose—things needed to be done, people
needed me to do them. At home, watching my wife feed and
swaddle our son and then retreat to our bed to get some sleep of
her own, I learned what many first-time fathers learn: assuming
an absence of any health issues related to child or mother, the
first six weeks of a child’s life are fairly uneventful for men. A
baby eats (with about 80 percent of women today choosing to
breast-feed); he poops; he sleeps. There is potential for valu-
able bonding time, and a new mother could almost certainly
use another pair of hands, but a man’s presence is not strictly
necessary. Baby book after baby book warns parents that new
fathers typically feel “left out,” and there’s a reason for that:
because they are typically left out. More and more companies
offer paid and unpaid paternity leave, and a man should feel

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proud to exercise that option if that’s what is best for him and
his family. Maybe with the next baby I will. Maybe I won’t. But
when the doctor delivers a newborn to my exhausted, elated
wife, I won’t kid myself thinking that I, of all people, really
deserve a little time off.
In her Harvard speech, Sandberg also evoked the specter of
good old-fashioned sexism by claiming that ambitious, assertive
women are generally less well liked than ambitious, assertive
men. (In her book, she cites a now famous study conducted by
a team of Columbia and NYU professors in which two groups
were asked to assess two hard-charging executives, a man named
Howard and a woman named Heidi, who were identical in
every way except their names. Howard was considered the Man.
Heidi, the Shrew.) It’s a compelling and convincing study,
and Sandberg is persuasive when she argues that too many
women too often get an eye roll when they open their mouths.
Two things I would hasten to add, though. One: Productivity,
profitability, drive, and talent trump all. (I’m reminded of Tina
Fey’s defense of Hillary Clinton in 2008: “She is [a bitch]. So
am I . . . . Bitches get stuff done.”) Women might suspect that
men don’t like assertive, confrontational women, which is only
half the truth, leading to my next point: that nobody wants to
work with a nightmare of either gender. While the Howard-
Heidi problem suggests that some men may get a longer leash
than some women, the workplace is not every man’s for the
shitting all over.
“Advertising is a very small world and when you do some-
thing like malign the reputation of a girl from the steno pool
on her first day, you make it even smaller. Keep it up, and
even if you do get my job, you’ll never run this place. You’ll
die in that corner office, a midlevel executive with a little bit
of hair who women go home with out of pity. Want to know

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why? ‘Cause no one will like you.” Don Draper said that. Not
me. And the wisdom he drops on Pete Campbell in the pilot
of Mad Men shows that men can be just as vulnerable to office
politics as women.
Finally, there is the issue of flex time, with some suggesting
that men should demand more options for when and where
they can do their work so that women alone aren’t penalized
for requesting it. It has never been easier to work remotely
for many professionals, yet many jobs—and in particular the
top jobs, the leadership roles that history (men) has deprived
women of in the past—don’t have much give to them. Marissa
Mayer at Yahoo was dragged into the flex-time debate when
she decided that in order to save a struggling business with
abysmal morale, she would do away with the company’s
generous work-from-home policy and require her employees
to show up to an office. She was immediately painted as elitist
and antiwoman, and it’s easy to see why. Even though men
and women are equally likely to telecommute, they typically
don’t place the same value on being able to do so. According
to the Pew study, 70 percent of working mothers say a flexible
schedule is extremely important to them, compared with just
48 percent of working fathers, and for many of those women
(including my wife, who often works well past midnight at a
crowded desk in our bedroom), the opportunity to do some
work from home is the critical difference between a life that
works and one that doesn’t. That’s what Mayer was messing
with when she ordered all hands on deck, and it’s what any
employer faces when trying to balance family-friendly policies
with the sometimes soul-destroying demands of a competitive
marketplace.
When Barack Obama entered the White House, he talked
about how he wanted his administration to be family-friendly,

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offering up Sasha and Malia’s swing set to staffers so they could
bring their own kids to work on the weekends. Rahm Emanuel
famously assured him that it would be—”family-friendly to your
family.”
It was classic Obama—well-meaning, forward-thinking,
mindful of the struggles of the common man—undermined
by classic Emanuel, which is to say reality. The White House
staff would be working at the highest levels of government,
investing their love and labor into what can only be described
as dream jobs at a time that can only be described as a national
nightmare, and if that meant kids and partners had to take the
backseat for a year or two, so be it. Man, woman, whoever: Get
a shovel and start digging.
Slaughter, a tenured professor at Princeton, came on board
as Hillary Clinton’s head of policy planning at State, and in
her Atlantic piece, she describes her grueling workweek in D.C.,
her weekend commute back to New Jersey, and her ultimate
conclusion that “juggling high-level government work with the
needs of two teenage boys was not possible.” She talked about
her struggles to a fellow wonk, Jolynn Shoemaker of Women in
International Security, and Shoemaker offered her two cents on
high-level foreign-policy positions: “Inflexible schedules, unre-
lenting travel, and constant pressure to be in the office are
common features of these jobs.” Slaughter acknowledges that
it needn’t be as difficult as all that: “Deputy Secretary of State
James Steinberg, who shares the parenting of his two young
daughters equally with his wife, made getting [secured access to
confidential material] at home an immediate priority so that he
could leave the office at a reasonable hour and participate in
important meetings via videoconferencing if necessary. I won-
der how many women in similar positions would be afraid to
ask, lest they be seen as insufficiently committed to their jobs.”

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Slaughter makes an important point here, though probably
not the one she intended to make. Steinberg did what he had to
do to make a difficult situation work better for him; Slaughter’s
contention that a woman wouldn’t feel as comfortable making
the same request may or may not be true, but it doesn’t matter.
The option was apparently on the table. Fight for it, don’t fight
for it—it’s entirely up to the individual. But don’t complain
that you never had a choice.
In the end, isn’t this what feminism was supposed to be
about? Not equality for equality’s sake—half of all homes run
by men, half of all corporations run by women—but to give
each of us, men and women, access to the same array of choices
and then the ability to choose for ourselves? And who’s to
say, whether for reasons biological or sociological, men and
women would even want that? When the Pew Research
Center asked working mothers and fathers to picture their
ideal working situation, 37 percent of women would opt for
full time; 50 percent part time; and 11 percent wouldn’t have
a job at all. (Compare this with men’s answers: 75 percent say
full time, 15 percent say part time, and 10 percent wouldn’t
work at all.) Assuming that women had all the flexibility in
the world, one of every two working mothers would choose to
work part time. Perhaps with guaranteed paid maternity leave,
universal daycare, and generous after-school programs, more
women would be freed from the constraints of child care and
would want to work full time. Or, possibly, they’re just happy
working part time, one foot in the workplace and one foot in
the home. Hard to say.
“I can’t stand the kind of paralysis that some people fall
into because they’re not happy with the choices they’ve made.
You live in a time when there are endless choices. . . . Money
certainly helps, and having that kind of financial privilege goes

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R I C H A R D D O R M E N T

7 1 6

a long way, but you don’t even have to have money for it. But
you have to work on yourself. . . . Do something!”
Hillary Clinton said that. Not me. And while she wasn’t
referring to Slaughter in her interview with Marie Claire, she
offers valuable advice to anyone who’s looking to blame some-
one, or something, for the challenges they face in life. Getting
ahead in the workplace is really hard. Getting to the top is
really, really hard. And unless you are very fortunate indeed,
there will always be somebody smarter, faster, tougher, and
ready and willing to take a job if you’re not up to the task. It’s
a grown-up truth, and it bites the big one, but for anyone to
pretend otherwise ignores (or simply wishes away) what genera-
tions of working men learned the hard way while their wives
did the backbreaking work of raising kids and keeping house.
Hearing Gail Collins grumble about changing the corporate
mind-set (as if competition weren’t the soul of capitalism, and
capitalism weren’t the coin of the realm) or reading Slaughter
complain that our society values hard work over family (as if a
Puritan work ethic weren’t in our national DNA) makes me feel
like channeling Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own: There’s
no crying in baseball! If you don’t want a high-pressure, high-
power, high-paying job that forces you to make unacceptable
sacrifices in the rest of your life, don’t take the job. Or get
another job that doesn’t require those sacrifices. And if you
can’t get another job, take comfort knowing that the guy who
sits across from you, the one with kids the same age as yours
and a partner who’s busting his or her ass to make it work, is
probably in the very same boat. We are all equals here.
Then again, I would say that. I’m a man, with a working
wife and a busy schedule and a little boy and another baby on
the way, and I live with the choices that I’ve made. That is all
I’ve ever asked for, and it is all I will ever need.

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Why Men Still Can’t Have It All

7 1 7

Joining the Conversation

1. Why, in Richard Dorment’s view, can men still not “have it
all”? What in particular does he mean by “it all,” and what
evidence does he provide to support his position?

2. This article is a response to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “Why
Women Still Can’t Have It All” (pp. 676−96), and Dor-
ment summarizes and quotes from that piece extensively.
How fairly do you think he represents Slaughter’s views?
Cite specific examples from his article in your answer.

3. Dorment published this article in Esquire, which calls itself
“the magazine for men.” How can you tell that he has writ-
ten his article primarily for a male audience? How might
he revise the article, keeping the same basic argument, to
appeal to an audience of women?

4. Imagine you have a chance to speak with Dorment about
this article. Write out what you’d say, remembering to frame
your statement as a response to what he has said. (See Chap-
ter 12 for advice on entering class discussions.)

5. Dorment’s writing is quite informal—colorful and in places
even irreverent. How does this informality suit his audience
and purpose? How does it affect your response? Choose a
paragraph in his article and dress it up, rewriting it in more
formal, academic language. Which version do you find more
appealing, and why?

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7 1 8

What about Gender Roles
in Same-Sex Relationships?

s T E P H E N M A Y S

Imposing gender roles on gay couples is even more ridiculous
than doing so with straight couples.

I recently overheard someone comment to her friend
about a gay male couple walking ahead of them on the sidewalk.
The girl said, “Who do you think is the girl in the relation-
ship?” I couldn’t help but frown at the girl and shake my head.
As clear as you would think it is to see, I’ll spell it out for you:
neither of them is the girl. They’re both boys.
Not to say that traditional ideas of gender roles don’t play a
part in a gay relationship, but they’re a little more diluted, I would
say. A gay man may show effeminate qualities, but that doesn’t
make him the “woman” of the relationship. Just like the muscled,
bearded gay man doesn’t have to be the “man” of the relationship.

Stephen Mays is a student at the University of Georgia, majoring in
English and journalism. He is the editor in chief of the Red & Black,
an independent, student-run newspaper covering campus news and
Ampersand Magazine, a UGA lifestyle magazine. This piece appeared
in the Red & Black in on September 24, 2013.

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What about Gender Roles in Same-Sex Relationships?

7 1 9

One huge aspect of the gay male relationship that I appreci-
ate is the more leveled playing field that we have. We’re both
men. If one of us opens the door for the other on a whim of affec-
tion or chivalry, it wasn’t expected because he was the “man.”
It was simply a nice gesture. If one of us cooks dinner once, or
every night for that matter, it isn’t because he’s the “woman” of
the relationship. He’s probably just better at it than his partner.
I have noticed, however, here in the South that a good
number of gay men claim to be seeking “masc” or “masculine”
partners. They want a boyfriend who likes the outdoors, is
in good physical condition, plays sports and all those other
standard characteristics for “men.” I have no idea why this is,
other than perhaps personal preference, because there’s nothing
wrong with the guys who like wearing skinny jeans, putting
highlights in their hair, or shopping all the time. We simply
associate certain actions with very classic ideas of masculinity or
femininity. There are few actions or characteristics that classify
as gender-neutral.
Why does caring about your appearance, cooking dinner, or
enjoying shopping for new clothes have to be considered fem-
inine? Why does hiking, playing football, or working out
a lot have to be considered masculine? When it boils
down to it, all of us, gay and straight alike, comprise
many characteristics—some are considered masculine,
and some are considered feminine.
Despite sexual orientation, some people simply demonstrate
more masculine qualities or more feminine qualities. In the
case of a gay male relationship, however, the key point is that
neither of us is the girl of the relationship, no matter which
side of the scale we fall on. We’re both boys. Neither sexual
preferences in the bedroom nor our daily characteristics have
any effect on that biology.

Chapter 4
shows ways
to agree and
disagree
simultaneously.

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S T E P H E N M A Y S

7 2 0

Joining the Conversation

1. Stephen Mays begins by literally quoting what someone
said, which he then uses as a way to launch what he says
in response. He could have summarized what was said; why
do you think he quoted it instead? What argument does he
offer in response?

2. Mays obviously cares a lot about this topic, but does he
explain why we should care? If not, do it for him. Write
a paragraph—perhaps it could be a new concluding
paragraph—discussing explicitly why this topic matters and
who should care. (See Chapter 7 for guidance.)

3. This short piece was written as a newspaper column. What
strategies in this book could Mays use to revise his article
as an academic essay? (See the tips in Chapter 11 for using
the templates to revise.)

4. Read Eckert and McConnell-Ginet’s essay (pp. 736−46) on
the ways that society inscribes and enforces gender distinc-
tions. How does their argument relate to Mays’s views on
gender roles in same-sex relationships?

5. Mays critiques various gender stereotypes, including ones
affecting gay people and straight people, both men and
women. What do you think? Write an essay in which you
agree, disagree, or both with what he says.

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7 2 1

Facebook Multiplies Genders but Offers
Users the Same Three Tired Pronouns

D E N N I S B A R O N

For years Facebook has allowed users to mark their relation-
ship status as “single,” “married,” and “it’s complicated.” They
could identify as male or female or keep their gender private.
Now, acknowledging that gender can also be complicated, the
social media giant is letting users choose among male, female,
and 56 additional custom genders, including agender, cis, gender
variant, intersex, trans person, and two-spirit.
Facebook users now have so many gender choices that a
single drop-down box can’t hold them all. And they’re free
to pick more than one. But to refer to this set of 58 genders
Facebook offers only three tired pronouns: he, she, and they.

Dennis Baron teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign. He has written numerous books and articles on language,
literacy, and the technologies of communication, most recently A Better
Pencil: Reading, Writing, and the Digital Revolution (2009). Baron has
been a commentator for CNN, BBC, National Public Radio, and other
television and radio shows discussing issues of language use. He is a
regular blogger on language topics on his website, The Web of Language,
where the piece included here was first published in February 2014.

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D E N N I S B A R O N

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A Facebook user can now identify as a genderqueer, neutrois,
cis male, androgynous other, but Facebook friends can only
wish him, her, or them a happy birthday.
The persons at Facebook are enlightened enough to
acknowledge gender as fluid, but when it comes to grammar,

their thinking rigidifies into masculine, feminine,
and neuter. Mess with gender words and Facebook
might get a few emails from bible thumpers reminding
them about Adam and Eve or from godless humanists

complaining, “Hey, you left my gender out.” But deploy a
string of invented pronouns to match the new genders and
at best there’s a Distributed Denial of Service attack, at worst
the server is struck by thunderbolts from the grammar gods,
because gender may be socially constructed, but grammar is
sacred.
The linguist Mark Liberman lists Facebook’s new custom
gender options on LanguageLog, and I copy them below:

Agender, Androgyne, Androgynous, Bigender, Cis, Cis Female,
Cis Male, Cis Man, Cis Woman, Cisgender, Cisgender Female,
Cisgender Male, Cisgender Man, Cisgender Woman, Female
to Male, FTM, Gender Fluid, Gender Nonconforming, Gender
Questioning, Gender Variant, Genderqueer, Intersex, Male
to Female, MTF, Neither, Neutrois, Non-binary, Other,
Pangender, Trans, Trans Female, Trans Male, Trans Man, Trans
Person, Trans Woman, Trans*, Trans* Female, Trans* Male,
Trans* Man, Trans* Person, Trans* Woman, Transfeminine,
Transgender, Transgender Female, Transgender Male,
Transgender Man, Transgender Person, Transgender Woman,
Transmasculine, Transsexual, Transsexual Female, Transsexual
Male, Transsexual Man, Transsexual Person, Transsexual
Woman, Two-spirit.

Chapter 9 has
tips on using

colloquial
language in

academic
writing.

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7 2 3

Facebook Multiplies Genders but Offers Three Tired Pronouns

But where are all the pronouns? Facebook may play fast and
loose with our private parts, but they’re reluctant to tinker with
the parts of speech. Fortunately, grammarians have no such
scruples. They have repeatedly proposed new pronouns to fill
linguistic gaps. They even beat Facebook in the race for new
genders.
In 1792 the Scottish grammarian James Anderson argued
that English would be better served if we sorted our words
into more than the traditional masculine, feminine, and neuter.
Anderson added ten new genders: indefinite, imperfect (or
soprana), matrimonial, masculine imperfect, feminine imperfect,
mixt imperfect, masculine mixt, feminine mixt, united, and
universally indefinite.
And that’s not all. Currently only the third person singular
English pronouns have gender: he, she, and it. Anderson wanted
all of our first and second person pronouns, both singular and
plural, and the third person plural, to express all of the thir-
teen genders (so, seventy-eight pronouns instead of the current
eight), and he preferred each pronoun to have two alternates,
for the times when the same pronoun must refer to different
people. For example, the first male referred to would be he, the
second, hei, the third, ho. That makes 234 pronouns (and that’s
just counting the nominative case; if you add the possessives
and accusatives, which every pronoun needs, well, you do the
math).
Anderson thought up some minor genders as well, but for-
tunately he kept them to himself “to avoid the appearance of
unnecessary refinement.”
Anderson also suggested that we need a true common-
gender pronoun, one equivalent to he or she, his or her, him
or her. But he offered no examples. Other grammarians have
been less reticent. Some eighty common-gender pronouns have

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D E N N I S B A R O N

7 2 4

been coined between 1850 and the present. Two of them, thon
and hesh, even made it into dictionaries. Subtracting duplicates
coined multiple times by different people, the list shrinks to
fifty-five:

ae, alaco, de, e, E, em, en, et, ey, fm, ghach, ha, han, hann, he’er,
heesh, herm, hes, hesh, heshe, hey, hi, hir, hizer, ho, hse, ip, ir, ith,
j/e, jhe, le, mef, na, ne, one, ons, po, s/he, sap, se, shem, sheme,
shey, shis, ta, tey, thir, thon, ton, ve, ws, xe, z, ze.

But if we add the current he, she, and they to the fifty-five
coinages above, we get one pronoun for every Facebook
gender. 58 genders, 58 pronouns. It’s uncanny. It’s irresistible.
It’s pictures of cats. Of course, Facebook could go in the
opposite direction and slash the pronoun choices down to one.
Sometimes it’s better to simplify language than complicate it.
But whatever Facebook does about pronouns—and my guess
is it will do nothing in order to avoid those grammar-god-hurled
thunderbolts—I’m keeping my Facebook gender private, and
my pronoun choice is thon. Or maybe ip. Or E. I don’t know.
It’s complicated.

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7 2 5

Facebook Multiplies Genders but Offers Three Tired Pronouns

Joining the Conversation

1. Why, according to Dennis Baron, does Facebook now pro-
vide a list of fifty-eight terms for gender but still limit its
use of pronouns to three?

2. This piece was written for Baron’s blog, The Web of Lan-
guage, a “go-to site for language and technology in the news”
followed by linguists and others interested in those topics.
With that context in mind, what do you think his point is?
How can you tell?

3. Baron quotes and discusses a proposal by an eighteenth-
century Scottish grammarian to add many new pronouns to
the English language. What does this example add to Baron’s
argument?

4. Read “Learning to Be Gendered,” by Penelope Eckert and
Sally McConnell-Ginet (pp. 736−46). What do you think
Eckert and McConnell-Ginet would have to say about Face-
book’s policy on gender terms?

5. Consider Baron’s statement that “gender may be socially
constructed, but grammar is sacred” (paragraph 3). What
do you think he means by this statement? Write a short
essay summarizing what Baron says in his blog post and then
responding with your own views.

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7 2 6

How to Be a “Woman Programmer”

E L L E N U L L M A N

I was an ordinary computer programmer. I wrote code
that ran at the levels between flashy human interfaces and the
deep cores of operating systems, like the role of altos in a chorus,
who provide the structure without your taking much notice
of their melodic lines. I made realistic schedules and met my
deadlines. Those were decent accomplishments.
But none of it qualified me as extraordinary in the great pro-
grammer scheme of things. What seems to have distinguished
me is the fact that I was a “woman programmer.” The questions
I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on
how one learns to code but how a woman does.
Let me separate the two words and begin with what it means
to become a programmer.

Ellen Ullman is a computer programmer and the author of the
novels By Blood (2012) and The Bug (2003) and a memoir, Close to the
Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents (2001), which describes her
experiences as one of the few female programmers in the 1980s. She
has been a technology commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered
and written for Harper’s, Wired, and Salon. This essay first appeared as
an op-ed column in the New York Times on May 19, 2013.

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How to Be a “Woman Programmer”

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The first requirement for programming is a passion for the
work, a deep need to probe the mysterious space between
human thoughts and what a machine can understand; between
human desires and how machines might satisfy them.
The second requirement is a high tolerance for failure.
Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of
debugging errant code. In the words of the great John Backus,
inventor of the Fortran programming language: “You need the
willingness to fail all the time. You have to generate many ideas
and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they
don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you
find one that does work.”
Now to the “woman” question.
I broke into the ranks of computing in the early 1980s, when
women were just starting to poke their shoulder pads through
crowds of men. There was no legal protection against “hostile
environments for women.” I endured a client—a sweaty man
with pendulous earlobes—who stroked my back as I worked to
fix his system. At any moment I expected him to snap my bra.
I considered installing a small software bomb but understood,
right then, what was more important to me than revenge: the
desire to create good systems.
I had a boss who said flatly, “I hate to hire all you girls but
you’re too damned smart.” By “all” he meant three but, at the
time, it was rare to find even one woman in a well-placed
technical position. At a meeting, he kept interrupting me to
say, “Gee, you sure have pretty hair.” By then I realized he
was teaching me a great deal about computing. It would be a
complicated professional relationship, in which his occasional
need for male dominance would surface.
So, on that day of my pretty hair, I leaned to one side and
said, “I’m just going to let that nonsense fly over my shoulder.”

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E L L E N U L L M A N

7 2 8

The meeting went on. We discussed the principles of relational
databases, which later led me to explore deeper reaches of
programming, closer to operating systems and networks, where
I would find my real passion for the work. My leaning to one
side, not confronting him, letting him be the flawed man he
was, changed the direction of my technical life.
Over the 20 years that followed, I found that being a woman
put me at one remove from the general society of programmers.
I resented that distance, but I liked to think that it was in some
way fortunate—that my standing back gave me a clearer view
of our profession and its effects on society at large.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women comprise
29.4 percent of people working in “Computer and Software,”
a subcategory of “Commercial Equipment.” Since this broad

(and vague) designation might include everyone from
system designers to office assistants, it tells us nothing
about the participation of women at the deeper

technical and theoretical levels. By “deeper” I mean computer
science, hardware and software engineering, the creation of
operating systems and deep algorithms—in short, the levels at
which the future of technology is being defined.
I touched those fundamental levels as a software engineer
but never plumbed their depths. Yet I could see that, at the deeper
reaches, it was as if some plague had specialized in the killing of
females. I looked around and wondered, “Where are all the other
women?” We women found ourselves nearly alone, outsiders
in a culture that was sometimes boyishly puerile, sometimes
rigorously hierarchical, occasionally friendly and welcoming.
This strange illness meanwhile left the female survivors with
an odd glow that made them too visible, scrutinized too closely,
held to higher standards. It placed upon them the terrible burden
of being not only good but the best.

To elaborate on
a previous idea,

see p. 135.

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How to Be a “Woman Programmer”

7 2 9

Women today face a new, more virile and virulent sexism.
The definition of success has somehow become running your
own start-up. And venture capitalists decide who will get fund-
ing, who will get a chance for that success. Venture capitalists
are all but explicit in their search: they want a couple of guys
who can write an app over a weekend.
If hired by start-ups, younger women find themselves sorely
underrepresented. One woman told me that in her growing,
24-person company there were four women, which is “consid-
ered a good ratio.” And, as always, our ranks thin at the deeper
technical levels. We get stalled at marketing and customer sup-
port, writing scripts for Web pages. Yet coding, looking into the
algorithmic depths, getting close to the machine, is the driver
of technology; and technology, in turn, is driving fundamental
changes in personal, social and political life.
The question is how we react to this great prejudice against
women. The rule of law and social activism certainly are crucial.
But no matter how strong the social structure, there is always
that cheek-slapped moment when you are alone with the anti-
woman prejudice: the joke, the leer, the disregard, the invis-
ibility, the inescapable fact that the moment you walk through
the door you are seen as lesser, no matter what your credentials.
I have no guidance for women who want to rise through
the ranks into technical management. I have led a peripatetic
life, moving on when a project was done or the next thing
intrigued me.
And I am not advising younger women (or any woman) to
tough it out. You can lash back, which I have done too often
and which has rarely served me well. You can quit and look
for other jobs, which is sometimes a very good idea.
But the prejudice will follow you. What will save you is
tacking into the love of the work, into the desire that brought

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E L L E N U L L M A N

7 3 0

you there in the first place. This creates a suspension of time,
opens a spacious room of your own* in which you can walk
around and consider your response. Staring prejudice in the face
imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a
certain dignity, an angry dignity.

room of your own An allusion to an essay by Virginia Woolf argu-
ing for the need to make space for women writers in a literary field
dominated by men.

“How to Be a ‘Woman Programmer,’” by Ellen Ullman. From The New York
Times, May 18, 2013. © 2013 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used
by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The
printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without
express written permission is prohibited.

Joining the Conversation

1. In the first two paragraphs of this essay, Ellen Ullman char-
acterizes her accomplishments as a programmer as “ordinary”
and says that what most distinguished her was the fact that
she was “a woman programmer.” How does she assess the
nature of opportunities for women in the programming
world? What impediments does she say still exist? What
advice does she offer for women interested in going into
that field?

2. According to Ullman, women today “face a new, more virile
and virulent sexism” (paragraph 13). What does she mean
by this strong claim, and what evidence does she provide to
support it? What other supporting points might strengthen
her argument?

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How to Be a “Woman Programmer”

7 3 1

3. Ullman does not include any viewpoints other than her own.
How might adding other perspectives, even those of naysay-
ers, improve her argument? Name two or three objections
she might have considered.

4. This op-ed was written shortly after the publication of Sheryl
Sandberg’s Lean In, a best-seller that encourages women to
aim for leadership positions. In paragraph 9, when Ullman
writes about “leaning to one side” rather than confronting
a “flawed” boss, do you think she was referring to that book
(excerpted here on pp. 642−58)? How do you think Ullman
might respond to Sandberg’s advice, with regard to the field
of programming, and what might Sandberg say to Ullman?

5. This essay appeared in the New York Times. How would you
advise Ullman to revise her text to make the same basic
argument to an audience of undergraduate computer science
majors, both men and women? Make a list of ways you think
she could better appeal to such an audience.

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7 3 2

The Plight of Young Males

S A U L K A P L A N

I am proud of my bona fides on supporting the advancement
of women. It angers me to think how slow executive suites and
boardrooms are to welcome more qualified females. Stubborn
gender wage gaps for comparable work are unacceptable and
must be closed.
However, with all of the attention and focus on supporting
equal opportunities for women, we have taken our eyes off an
alarming trend. Young men in the United States are in trouble
by any measure of educational attainment. It’s a big deal and,
for reasons of political correctness, we aren’t talking enough
about this growing national problem.
I refuse to believe the support of young American’s progress
is a zero-sum game—that somehow if we call attention to the

Saul Kaplan is the founder of the Business Innovation Factory,
which designs and tests new business models, and the author of The
Business Model Innovation Factory: How to Stay Relevant When the World Is
Changing (2012). He blogs at It’s Saul Connected. This essay first appeared
on the Harvard Business Review blog on March 9, 2011, and included a
link to a trailer with information about the work done by the Business
Innovation Factory.

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The Plight of Young Males

7 3 3

problem and take a different approach to improve the experi-
ence and outcomes of boys it would come at the expense of
celebrating and enabling continued advancement of girls. We
can and must recognize the unique challenges of young men
and we had better start doing something about it now.
Have you taken a stroll on a college campus recently? Where
have the men gone? In the latest census, males comprise 51% of
the total U.S. population between the ages of 18–24. Yet, just
over 40% of today’s college students are men. In fact, in
each year since 1982, more American women than men
have received bachelor’s degrees Over the last decade two
million more women graduated from college than men.
And the gap continues to grow. Michael Thompson, author of
Raising Cain, a great book on the plight of young males, illustrates
the path we are going down with a startling extrapolation. He
notes that if today’s trends continue unaltered, the last young man
in the US to get a college degree will do so in 2068. Scary stuff.
The gender achievement gap is astounding. The average
11th grade boy writes at the level of the average 8th grade girl.
Men are significantly underperforming women. According to a
recent NBC news report, women dominate high school honor
rolls and now make up more than 70% of class valedictorians.
Again, I am happy to see women succeeding. But can we
really afford for our country’s young men to fall so far behind? A
growing education attainment gap has profound consequences
for the economy.
It mattered far less during the industrial era when young
men in this country could find good high-wage jobs in the
manufacturing sector without a college degree or post-secondary
credential. In a post-industrial economy, the social contract has
changed. The deal used to be that college was only for a narrow
segment of our population. Everyone else willing to work hard

See Chapter 8
for tips on how
to transition
within a
paragraph.

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could make enough money to raise a family and achieve the
American dream of owning a home, without higher education.
With the disappearance of those industrial era jobs, the rug got
pulled out from under that assumption. We replaced it with a
new social contract by which a college degree, or at least some
form of post-secondary credential, was a necessity for anyone
hoping to make a decent living. The numbers on this are clear.
According to census data, annual earnings for high-school
dropouts average $18,900; for high-school graduates, $25,900;
for college graduates, $45,400. Add up those numbers over a
lifetime and the importance of education comes into focus.
And that’s if there is a job at all. Take a look at how hard
the current recession has hit men. Of the jobs lost over the last
four years 78% of them were held by men. That leaves 20% of
working age men out of work. These jobs are not coming back
and men are ill prepared for the 21st century workplace.
If you dig deeper and examine these trends for young men of
color, it will make you cry. At the Business Innovation Factory,
our team has been working with the College Board to explore
the experience of young men of color in the United States. The
statistics are staggering. Only 26% of African American, 18%
of Latino American, and 24% of Native American and Pacific
Islander young men ages 24–34 have attained at least an Associ-
ates Degree. BIF and the College Board are bringing the voice and
experience of young men of color to the center of an innovation
conversation on how to turn these disturbing trends around.
We think equal progress will only come when the United States
has transformed its education system from a one-size-fits-all pipe-
line responding to the learning needs of all young men and women
in the same way to an individualized approach where every student
can find his or her own pathway. We must go from a system geared
toward enrollment to one designed around the goal of completion.

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The Plight of Young Males

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In some way, we must turn schools into places that recognize
the specific learning needs of young men and help them prepare
for 21st century jobs—and we must do so urgently, or leave an
entire generation foundering.

Joining the Conversation

1. What exactly is Saul Kaplan arguing in this essay, and what
evidence does he provide to support his argument? What are
his credentials for making this argument?

2. Kaplan posted this article on the Harvard Business Review
blog, where it included a link to a trailer about what his
company, the Business Innovation Factory, has been doing
“to turn these disturbing trends around” (paragraph 9). Why
do you think he chose this venue for publication? What has
motivated him to write this article?

3. Kaplan cares about the future of young men, but does he
convince you that you should care as well? Why, or why
not? What, if anything, might he add or change to make
his point more powerfully?

4. Like Kaplan, Edward McClelland (pp. 549−60) laments the
dramatic loss of industrial jobs that do not require a college
degree—but he discusses the effects of these job losses on
both men and women. Consider both arguments. Which
one do you find more persuasive, and why?

5. Kaplan paints a bleak picture of the situation many young
males face in the United States today, implying that young
women are doing much better. Write a letter to the editor
of the Harvard Business Review responding to this essay from
the perspective of a women’s rights advocate.

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7 3 6

Learning to Be Gendered

P E N E L O P E E C K E R T

A N D S A L LY M c C O N N E L L – G I N E T

In the famous words of Simone de Beauvoir,* “women
are not born, they are made.” The same is true of men. The
making of a man or a woman is a never-ending process that
begins before birth—from the moment someone begins to
wonder if the pending child will be a boy or a girl. And the
ritual announcement at birth that it is in fact one or the other
instantly transforms an “it” into a “he” or a “she” (Butler 1993),
standardly assigning it to a lifetime as a male or as a female. 1
This attribution is further made public and lasting through the
linguistic event of naming. In some times and places, the state

*Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) French philosopher and novelist.
Beauvoir’s 1953 book, The Second Sex, explores women’s need for
independence.

Penelope Eckert is a professor of linguistics and anthropology at
Stanford University. Her books include Jocks and Burnouts (1989)
and Linguistic Variation as Social Practice (2003). Sally McConnell-
Ginet is an emeritus professor of linguistics at Cornell University.
This selection comes from Language and Gender (2013), a book that
Eckert and McConnell-Ginet coauthored.

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Learning to Be Gendered

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or religious institutions disallow sex-ambiguous given names.
Finland, for example, has lists of legitimate female and legiti-
mate male names that must be consulted before the baby’s name
becomes official. In English-speaking societies, not all names
are sex-exclusive (e.g., Chris, Kim, Pat) and sometimes names
change their gender classification. For example, Evelyn was
available as a male name in Britain long after it had become
an exclusively female name in America, and Whitney, once
exclusively a surname or a male first name in America, is now
bestowed on baby girls. But these changes do nothing to miti-
gate the fact that English names are gendered.
Thus the dichotomy of male and female is the ground upon
which we build selves from the moment of birth. These early
linguistic acts set up a baby for life, launching a gradual process
of learning to be a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, and to see
all others as boys or girls, men or women as well. There are cur-
rently no other readily available ways to think about ourselves
and others—and we will be expected to pattern all kinds of
things about ourselves as a function of that initial dichotomy.
In the beginning, adults will do the child’s gender work, treating
it as a boy or as a girl, and interpreting its every move as that
of a boy or of a girl. Then over the years, the child will learn
to take over its part of the process, doing its own gender work
and learning to support the gender work of others. The first
thing people want to know about a baby is its sex, and social
convention provides a myriad of props to reduce the necessity
of asking—and it becomes more and more important, as the
child develops, not to have to ask. At birth, many hospital
nurseries provide pink caps for girls and blue caps for boys,
or in other ways provide some visual sign of the sex that has
been assigned to the baby. While this may seem quite natural
to members of the society, in fact this color coding points out

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no difference that has any bearing on the medical treatment
of the infants. Go into a store in the United States to buy a
present for a newborn baby, and you will immediately be asked
“boy or girl?” Overalls for a girl may be OK (though they are
“best” if pink or flowered or in some other way marked as “femi-
nine”) but gender liberalism goes only so far. You are unlikely
to buy overalls with vehicles printed on them for a girl, and
even more reluctant to buy a frilly dress with puffed sleeves or
pink flowered overalls for a boy. And if you’re buying clothing
for a baby whose sex you do not know, sales people are likely
to counsel you to stick with something that’s plain yellow or
green or white. Colors are so integral to our way of thinking
about gender that gender attributions have bled into our view
of the colors, so that people tend to believe that pink is a more
“delicate” color than blue (and not just any blue, but baby blue).
This is a prime example of the naturalization of what is in fact
an arbitrary sign. In America in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000) reports, blue
was favored for girls and bright pink for boys.
If gender flowed naturally from sex, one might expect the
world to sit back and simply allow the baby to become male or
female. But in fact, sex determination sets the stage for a life-
long process of gendering, as the child becomes, and learns how
to be, male or female. Names and clothing are just a small part
of the symbolic resources used to support a consistent ongoing
gender attribution even when children are clothed. That we
can speak of a child growing up as a girl or as a boy suggests that
initial sex attribution is far more than just a simple observation
of a physical characteristic. Being a girl or being a boy is not a
stable state but an ongoing accomplishment, something that
is actively done both by the individual so categorized and by
those who interact with it in the various communities to which

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it belongs. The newborn initially depends on others to do its
gender, and they come through in many different ways, not just
as individuals but as part of socially structured communities that
link individuals to social institutions and cultural ideologies. It
is perhaps at this early life stage that it is clearest that gender
is a collaborative affair—that one must learn to perform as a
male or a female, and that these performances require support
from one’s surroundings.
Indeed, we do not know how to interact with another human
being (or often members of other species), or how to judge them
and talk about them, unless we can attribute a gender to them.
Gender is so deeply engrained in our social practice, in our
understanding of ourselves and of others, that we almost cannot
put one foot in front of the other without taking gender into
consideration. People even, it seems, apply gender stereotypes
to computer-generated speech depending on whether they per-
ceive the computer’s voice as male or female (Nass et al. 1997).
Although most of us rarely notice this overtly in everyday life,
most of our interactions are colored by our performance of our
own gender, and by our attribution of gender to others.
From infancy, male and female children are interpreted dif-
ferently, and inter acted with differently. Experimental evidence
suggests that adults’ perceptions of babies are affected by their
beliefs about the babies’ sex. John and Sandra Condry (1976)
found that adults watching a film of a crying infant were more
likely to hear the cry as angry if they believed the infant was a
boy, and as plaintive or fearful if they believed the infant was a
girl. In a similar experiment, adults judged a 24-hour-old baby
as bigger if they believed it to be a boy, and finer-featured if
they believed it to be a girl (Rubin et al. 1974). Such judgments
then enter into the way people interact with infants and small
children. People handle infants more gently when they believe

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P E N E L O P E E C K E R T A N D S A L LY M C C O N N E L L – G I N E T

them to be female, more playfully when they believe them to
be male.
And they talk to them differently. Parents use more diminu-
tives (kitty, doggie) when speaking to girls than to boys (Gleason
et al. 1994), they use more inner state words (happy, sad) when
speaking to girls (Ely et al. 1995), and they use more direct
prohibitives (don’t do that!) and more emphatic prohibitives
(no! no! no!) to boys than to girls (Bellinger & Gleason 1982).
Perhaps, one might suggest, the boys need more prohibitions
because they tend to misbehave more than the girls. But Bell-
inger and Gleason found this pattern to be independent of
the actual nature of the children’s activity, suggesting that the
adults and their beliefs about sex difference are far more impor-
tant here than the children’s behavior.
With differential treatment, boys and girls do learn to be
different. Apparently, male and female infants cry the same
amount (Maccoby & Jacklin 1974), but as they mature, boys
cry less and less. There is some evidence that this differ ence
emerges primarily from differential adult response to the crying.
Qualitative differences in behavior come about in the same
way. A study of 13-month-old children in day care (Fagot
et al. 1985) showed that teachers responded to girls when they
talked, babbled, or gestured, while they responded to boys when
they whined, screamed, or demanded physical attention. Nine
to eleven months later, the same girls talked more than the
boys, and the boys whined, screamed, and demanded atten-
tion more than the girls. Children’s eventual behavior, which
seems to look at least statistically different across the sexes, is
the product of adults’ differential responses to ways of acting
that are in many (possibly most) cases very similar indeed. The
kids do indeed learn to do gender for themselves, to produce
sex-differentiated behavior—although even with considerable

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differ ential treatment they do not end up with dichotomizing
behavioral patterns.
Voice, which we have already mentioned, provides a dramatic
example of children’s coming to perform gender. At the ages of
four to five years, in spite of their identical vocal apparatus, girls
and boys begin to differentiate the fundamen tal frequency of
their speaking voice. Boys tend to round and extend their lips,
lengthening the vocal tract, whereas girls are tending to spread
their lips (with smiles, for example), shortening the vocal tract.
Girls are raising their pitches, boys lowering theirs. It may well
be that adults are more likely to speak to girls in a high-pitched
voice. It may be that they reward boys and girls for differential
voice productions. It may also be that children simply observe
this difference in older people, or that their differential partici-
pation in games (for example play acting) calls for different voice
productions. Elaine Andersen (1990, pp. 24–25), for example,
shows that children use high pitch when using baby talk or
“teacher register” in role play. Some children speak as the other
sex is expected to and thus, as with other aspects of doing gen-
der, there is not a perfect dichotomization in voice pitch (even
among adults, some voices are not consistently classified). None-
theless, there is a striking production of mostly different pitched
voices from similar vocal equipment.
There is considerable debate among scholars about
the extent to which adults actually do treat boys and
girls differently, and many note that the similarities far
outweigh the differences. Research on early gender develop-
ment—in fact the research in general on gender differences—
is almost exclusively done by psychologists. As a result, the
research it reports on largely involves observations of behavior
in limited settings—whether in a laboratory or in the home
or the preschool. Since these studies focus on limited settings

See p. 25
for ways to
introduce
an ongoing
debate.

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and types of interaction and do not follow children through a
normal day, they quite possibly miss the cumulative effects of
small differences across many different situations. Small differ-
ences here and there are probably enough for children to learn
what it means in their community to be male or female.
The significance of the small difference can be appreciated
from another perspective. The psychological literature tends
to treat parents, other adults, and peers as the primary social-
izing agents. Only relatively recently have investigators begun
to explore children’s own active strategies for figuring out the
social world. Eleanor Maccoby (2002) emphasizes that children
have a very clear knowledge of their gender (that is, of whether
they are classified as male or female) by the time they are three
years old. Given this knowledge, it is not at all clear how much
differential treatment children need in order to learn how to do
their designated gender. What they mainly need is the message
that male and female are supposed to be different, and that
message is everywhere around them.
It has become increasingly clear that children play a very
active role in their own development. From the moment they
see themselves as social beings, they begin to focus on the enter-
prise of growing up. And to some extent, they probably experi-
ence many of the gendered developmental dynamics we discuss
here not so much as gender-appropriate, but as grown-up. The
greatest taboo is being “a baby,” but the developmental impera-
tive is gendered. Being grown-up, leaving babyhood, means
very different things for boys than it does for girls. And the
fact that growing up involves gender differentiation is encoded
in the words of assessment with which progress is monitored—
kids do not behave as good or bad people, but as good boys or
good girls, and they develop into big boys and big girls.2 In other
words, they do not have the option of growing into just people,

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but into boys or girls. This does not mean that they see what
they’re doing in strictly gendered terms. It is probable that when
boys and girls alter the fundamental frequency of their voices
they are not trying to sound like girls or like boys, but that they
are aspiring for some quality that is itself gendered—cuteness,
authority. And the child’s aspiration is not simply a matter of
reasoning, but a matter of desire—a projection of the self into
desired forms of participation in the social world. Desire is a
tremendous force in projecting oneself into the future—in the
continual remaking of the self that constitutes growing up.
Until about the age of two, boys and girls exhibit the same
play behaviors. After that age, play in boys’ and girls’ groups
begins to diverge as they come to select different toys and
engage in different activities, and children begin to monitor
each other’s play, imposing sanctions on gender-inappropriate
play. Much is made of the fact that boys become more agonis-
tic than girls, and many attribute this to hormonal and even
evolutionary differences (see Maccoby 2000 for a brief review
of these various perspectives). But whatever the workings of
biology may be, it is clear that this divergence is supported and
exaggerated by the social system. As children get older, their
play habits are monitored and differentiated, first by adults,
and eventually by peers. Parents of small children have been
shown to reward their children’s choice of gender-appropriate
toys (trucks for boys, dolls for girls) (Langlois & Downs 1980).
And while parents’ support of their children’s gendered behav-
ior is not always and certainly not simply a conscious effort at
gender socialization, their behavior is probably more powerful
than they think. Even parents who strive for gender equality,
and who believe that they do not constrain their children’s
behavior along gender lines, have been observed in experimen-
tal situations to do just that.

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Notes

1. Nowadays, with the possibility of having this information before birth,
wanting to know in advance or not wanting to know can become
ideologically charged. Either way, the sex of the child is frequently as
great a preoccupation as its health.

2. Thorne (1993) and others have observed teachers urging children to
act like “big boys and girls.” Very rarely is a child told “don’t act like a
baby—you’re a big kid now.”

References*

Andersen, E. S. (1990). Speaking with style: The sociolinguistic skills of children.
London: Routledge.

Bellinger, D., & Gleason, J. B. (1982). Sex differences in parental directives to
young children. Journal of Sex Roles, 8, 1123–1139.

Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. New York
and London: Routledge.

Condry, J., and Condry, S. (1976). Sex differences: a study in the eye of the
beholder. Child Development, 47, 812–819.

Ely, R., Gleason, J. B., Narasimhan, B., & McCabe, A. (1995). Family talk
about talk: Mothers lead the way. Discourse Processes, 9 (2), 201–218.

Fagot, B. I., Hagan, R., Leinbach, M. D., & Kronsberg, S. (1985). Differential
reactions to assertive and communicative acts of toddler boys and girls.
Child Development, 56, 1499–1505.

Fausto-Sterling, A. (2000). Sexing the body: Gender politics and the construction
of sexuality. New York: Basic Books.

Gleason, J. B., Perlmann, R. Y., Ely, D., & Evans, D. (1994). The baby talk
register: Parents’ use of diminutives. In J. L. Sokolov & C. E. Snow
(Eds.), Handbook of research in language development using CHILDES
(pp. 50–76). Hillsdale; NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Langlois, J. H., & Downs, A. C. (1980). Mothers, fathers, and peers as
socialization agents of sex-typed play behaviors in young children. Child
Development, 62, 1217–1247.

*Based on the APA style of documentation.

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Maccoby, E. E. (2000). Perspectives on gender development. International
Journal of Behavioural Development, 24(4), 398–406.

Maccoby, E. E. (2002). Gender and social exchange: A developmental
perspective. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development,
2002(95), 87–106.

Maccoby, E. E., and Jacklin, C. N. (1974). The psychology of sex differences.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Nass, C., Moon, Y., and Green, N. (1997). Are machines gender neutral?
Gender-stereotypic responses to computers with voices. Journal of
Language and Social Psychology, 27, 864–876.

Rubin, J. Z., Provenzano, F. J., & Luria, Z. (1974). The eye of the beholder:
Parents’ view on sex of newborns. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry,
44, 512–519.

Joining the Conversation

1. This selection opens by saying that women “are not born,
they are made”—and that “the same is true for men.” How,
according to Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet,
does language contribute to our gender identities, and what
evidence do they provide to support their argument?

2. The authors start by quoting Simone de Beauvoir. How do
they then frame the quotation? In other words, how do they
explain whose words these are, what the quotation means,
and how it relates to their own text?

3. Notice how these authors handle gender references in their
own writing: they don’t use “he” to refer to both males and
females, nor do they use the often awkward “he or she.”
What do they do instead? Cite some specific examples from
their text in your answer.

4. Read the short op-ed by Stephen Mays on pp. 718–20. How
do you think Mays would respond to this piece on learning
to be gendered?

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7 4 6

5. Write an essay on the topic of gender in which you consider
your own masculine and/or feminine personality traits and
behaviors. What memories do you have of your own gender
formation? You might start with this sentence from Eckert
and McConnell-Ginet as a “they say”: “Being a girl or being
a boy is not a stable state but an ongoing accomplishment,
something that is actively done both by the individual . . .
and by those . . . in the various communities to which it
belongs” (paragraph 3).

P E N E L O P E E C K E R T A N D S A L LY M C C O N N E L L – G I N E T

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credits

text

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reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the
United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this
Content without express written permission is prohibited.

Radley Balko: “What You Eat Is Your Business.” The Cato Institute, May 23,
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Nicholas Carr: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr. From The
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first published in The Atlantic Magazine. All rights reserved. Distributed by
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From Esquire, June/July 2013. Used by permission of Esquire Magazine.

Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet: Excerpts from Language
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McConnell-Ginet. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University
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C R E D I T S

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David Freedman: Excerpts from “How Junk Food Can End Obesity,” by David
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Credits

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C R E D I T S

Monica Potts: “What’s Killing Poor White Women?” by Monica Potts. From
The American Prospect, Volume 24, Number 4: July 2013. www.Prospect.org.
Used with the permission of The American Prospect. All rights reserved.

Tim Roemer: “America Remains the World’s Beacon of Success,” by Tim
Roemer. From The Washington Post, January 20, 2012. Used by permission of
the author.

Mike Rose: “Blue-Collar Brilliance: Questions Assumptions about Intelligence,
Work and Social Class.” Reprinted from The American Scholar, Volume 78, No. 3,
Summer 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Mike Rose. Reprinted with permission.

Sheryl Sandberg: “Chapter 1 – The Leadership Ambition Gap,” from Lean
In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg with Nell Scovell,
copyright © 2013 by Lean In Foundation. Used by permission of Alfred A.
Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of
Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Steven Shapin: Excerpts from “Paradise Sold,” by Steven Shapin. From The
New Yorker, May 15, 2006. © The New Yorker/Steven Shapin/Condé Nast.
Used by permission of Condé Nast.

Anne-Marie Slaughter: “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” by Anne-
Marie Slaughter. From The Atlantic, July/August 2012. Copyright © 2012 The
Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic Magazine. All rights
reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Clive Thompson: “Rise of the Centaurs” from Smarter Than You Think: How
Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson, Copyright
© 2013 by Clive Thompson. Used by permission of The Penguin Press, a divi-
sion of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

Ellen Ullman: “How to Be a ‘Woman Programmer,’” by Ellen Ullman. From
The New York Times, May 18, 2013. © 2013 The New York Times. All rights
reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the
United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this
Content without express written permission is prohibited.

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7 5 1

Credits

Sanford J. Ungar: Originally published as “7 Major Misconceptions about the
Liberal Arts,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 5, 2010. Reprinted with
the permission of the author.

Jenna Wortham: “I Had a Nice Time with You Tonight. On the App,” by
Jenna Wortham. From The New York Times, April 6, 2014. © 2014 The New
York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the
Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or
retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.

Shayan Zadeh: “Bring on More Immigrant Entrepreneurs,” by Shayan Zadeh.
From The Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2013. Used by permission of the
author.

David Zinczenko: “Don’t Blame the Eater.” From The New York Times, Novem-
ber 23, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author

photographs

Chapter 16: p. 204: iStock/Getty Images; pp. 273, 278: Photo courtesy of
Mike Rose; p. 286: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. Chapter 17: p. 296:
iStock/Getty Images; p. 302: SIPA USA/Rethink Robotics via Sipa USA/
Newscom; p. 314: Courtesy of The Everett Collection; p. 318 (left): Gustav
Schultze, Naumburg, 1882/Wikimedia Commons; p. 318 (right): akg images/
Newscom; p. 322: Midvale Company Photographs (1883–1953)/Flickr; https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0; p. 324: Sebastian Bergmann/Wikimedia
Commons; pp. 330–38: from The Influencing Machines by Brooke Gladstone,
W. W. Norton, 2012; p. 341: Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY; p. 345: AP Photo;
p. 378: Creatista/Shutterstock; p. 402: Seymour Chwast. Chapter 18: p. 416:
Marilyn Moller; p. 430: Marilyn Moller; p. 431: AP Photo/Tony Avelar;
p. 451:Tim Hill/Alamy; p. 452 Predrage/Getty Images; p. 475: iStockphoto;
p. 487: Shutterstock; p. 497: Shutterstock; p. 507: iStock/Getty Images; p. 509:
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images; p. 513: Peter Kramer/
NBC/NBC NewsWire via Getty Images; p. 521: iStock/Getty Images; p. 524:
AP Photo/Reed Saxon. Chapter 19: p. 538: © 2012 Doyle Partners; p. 550:
iStock/Getty Images; p. 563: Michael Brands/The New York Times/Redux;
p. 564: AP Photo. Chapter 20: p. 638: Getty Images; p. 645: Partha Sarkar
Xinhua/Eyevine/Redux; fig. p. 661: Margaret Thomas/The Washington Post/
Getty Images; p. 669: Thodoris Tibilis/Shutterstock.

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7 5 3

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Like the previous two editions, this one would never have
seen print if it weren’t for Marilyn Moller, our superb editor at
Norton, and the extraordinary job she has done of inspiring,
commenting on, rewriting (and then rewriting and rewriting
again) our many drafts. Our friendship with Marilyn is one of
the most cherished things to have developed from this project.
Our thanks go as well to Ariel la Foss, associate editor,
for offering a wealth of helpful suggestions throughout; to
Rebecca Homiski, Andy Ensor, and Kurt Wildermuth for
managing the editing and production of this edition; and to
Michal Brody, Cliff Landesman, and Claire Wallace for curat-
ing and producing the fabulous blog that accompanies this
book, theysayiblog.
We thank John Darger, our Norton representative, who
offered early encouragement to write this book, to Debra
Morton Hoyt for her excellent work on the cover—and give
special thanks to Lib Triplett and all the Norton travelers for
the superb work they’ve done on behalf of our book.
Thanks to Lisa Ampleman, a prize-winning poet and doc-
toral graduate in English from the University of Cincinnati, for
her invaluable aid in fi nding effective readings for the book and
for writing the instructor’s notes that accompany the book.
We owe special thanks to our colleagues in the English
department at the University of Illinois at Chicago: Mark
Canuel, our former department head, for supporting our earlier

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

7 5 4

efforts overseeing the university’s Writing in the Disciplines
requirement; Walter Benn Michaels, our current department
head; and Ann Feldman, former Director of University Writing
Programs, for encouraging us to teach fi rst-year composition
courses at UIC in which we could try out ideas and drafts of our
manuscript; Tom Moss, Diane Chin, Vainis Aleksa, and Matt
Pavesich, who have also been very supportive of our efforts; and
Matt Oakes, our former research assistant. We are also grateful
to Ann, Diane, and Mark Bennett for bringing us into their
graduate course on the teaching of writing, and to Lisa Freeman,
John Huntington, Walter Benn Michaels, and Ralph Cintron,
for inviting us to present our ideas in the keynote lecture at
UIC’s 2013 “Composition Matters” conference.
We are also especially grateful to Steve Benton and Nadya
Pittendrigh, who taught a section of composition with us using
an early draft of this book. Steve made many helpful sugges-
tions, particularly regarding the exercises. We are grateful to
Andy Young, a lecturer at UIC who has tested our book in
his courses and who gave us extremely helpful feedback. And
we thank Vershawn A. Young, whose work on code-meshing
infl uenced our argument in Chapter 9, and Hillel Crandus,
whose classroom handout inspired the chapter on “Entering
Classroom Discussions.”
We are grateful to the many colleagues and friends who’ve
let us talk our ideas out with them and given extremely helpful
responses. UIC’s former dean, Stanley Fish, has been central in
this respect, both in personal conversations and in his incisive
articles calling for greater focus on form in the teaching of
writing. Our conversations with Jane Tompkins have also been
integral to this book, as was the composition course that Jane co-
taught with Gerald entitled “Can We Talk?” Lenny Davis, too,
offered both intellectual insight and emotional support, as did

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Acknowledgments

7 5 5

Heather Arnet, Jennifer Ashton, Janet Atwill, Kyra Auslander,
Noel Barker, Jim Benton, Jack Brereton, Tim Cantrick, Marsha
Cassidy, David Chinitz, Lisa Chinitz, Pat Chu, Duane Davis,
Bridget O’Rourke Flisk, Steve Flisk, Judy Gardiner, Howard
Gardner, Rich Gelb, Gwynne Gertz, Jeff Gore, Bill Haddad,
Ben Hale, Scott Hammerl, Patricia Harkin, Andy Hoberek,
John Huntington, Joe Janangelo, Paul Jay, David Jolliffe, Nancy
Kohn, Don Lazere, Jo Liebermann, Steven Mailloux, Deirdre
McCloskey, Maurice J. Meilleur, Alan Meyers, Greg Meyerson,
Anna Minkov, Chris Newfi eld, Jim Phelan, Paul Psilos, Bruce
Robbins, Charles Ross, Eileen Seifert, Evan Seymour, David
Shumway, Herb Simons, Jim Sosnoski, David Steiner, Harold
Veeser, Chuck Venegoni, Marla Weeg, Jerry Wexler, Joyce
Wexler, Virginia Wexman, Jeffrey Williams, Lynn Woodbury,
and the late Wayne Booth, whose friendship we dearly miss.
We are grateful for having had the opportunity to present
our ideas to a number of schools: University of Arkansas at
Little Rock, Augustana College, Brandeis University, Brigham
Young University, Bryn Mawr College, Case Western Uni-
versity, Columbia University, Community College of Phila-
delphia, California State University at Bakersfi eld, California
State University at Northridge, University of California at
Riverside, University of Delaware, DePauw University, Drew
University, Duke University, Duquesne University, Elmhurst
College, Emory University, Fontbonne University, Furman
University, Gettysburg College, Harper College, Harvard Uni-
versity, Haverford College, Hawaii Offi ce of Secondary School
Curriculum Instruction, Hunter College, University of Illinois
College of Medicine, Illinois State University, John Carroll
University, Kansas State University, Lawrence University, the
Lawrenceville School, University of Louisiana at Lafayette,
MacEwan University, University of Maryland at College Park,

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Memphis,
Miami University, University of Missouri at Columbia, New
Trier High School, State University of New York at Geneseo,
State University of New York at Stony Brook, North Carolina
A&T University, University of North Florida, Northern Michi-
gan University, Norwalk Community College, Northwestern
University Division of Continuing Studies, University of Notre
Dame, Ohio Wesleyan University, Oregon State University,
University of Portland, University of Rochester, St. Ambrose
University, St. Andrew’s School, St. Charles High School,
Seattle University, Southern Connecticut State University,
South Elgin High School, University of South Florida, Uni-
versity of Southern Mississippi, Swarthmore College, Teachers
College, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, University of
Texas at Arlington, Tulane University, Union College, Ursinus
College, Wabash College, Washington College, University of
Washington, Western Michigan University, Westinghouse/
Kenwood High Schools, University of West Virginia at
Morgantown, Wheaton Warrenville English Chairs, and the
University of Wisconsin at Whitewater.
We particularly thank those who helped arrange these
visits and discussed writing issues with us: Jeff Abernathy,
Herman Asarnow, John Austin, Greg Barnheisel, John Bean,
Crystal Benedicks, Joe Bizup, Sheridan Blau, Dagne Bloland,
Chris Breu, Mark Brouwer, Joan Johnson Bube, John Cald-
well, Gregory Clark, Irene Clark, Dean Philip Cohen, Cathy
D’Agostino, Tom Deans, Gaurav Desai, Lisa Dresdner, Kath-
leen Dudden-Rowlands, Lisa Ede, Alexia Ellett, Emory Elliott,
Anthony Ellis, Kim Flachmann, Ronald Fortune, Rosanna
Fukuda, George Haggerty, Donald Hall, Joe Harris, Gary Hatch,
Elizabeth Hatmaker, Harry Hellenbrand, Nicole Henderson,
Donna Heiland, Doug Hesse, Van Hillard, Andrew Hoberek,

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Acknowledgments

7 5 7

Michael Hustedde, Sara Jameson, T. R. Johnson, David Jones,
Ann Kaplan, Don Kartiganer, Linda Kinnahan, Dean Georg
Kleine, Albert Labriola, Craig Lawrence, Lori Lopez, Tom Liam
Lynch, Hiram Maxim, Michael Mays, Thomas McFadden,
Sean Meehan, Connie Mick, Joseph Musser, Margaret Oakes,
John O’Connor, Gary Olson, Tom Pace, Les Perelman, Emily
Poe, Dominick Randolph, Clancy Ratliff, Monica Rico, Kelly
Ritter, Jack Robinson, Warren Rosenberg, Laura Rosenthal,
Dean Howard Ross, Deborah Rossen-Knill, Paul Schacht, Petra
Schatz, Evan Seymour, Rose Shapiro, Mike Shea, Cecilia M.
Shore, Erec Smith, Nancy Sommers, Stephen Spector, Timo-
thy Spurgin, Ron Strickland, Trig Thoreson, Josh Toth, Judy
Trost, Aiman Tulamait, Charles Tung, John Webster, Robert
Weisbuch, Sandi Weisenberg, Karin Westman, Martha Wood-
mansee, and Lynn Worsham.
We also wish to extend particular thanks to two Chicago
area educators who have worked closely with us: Les Lynn of the
Chicago Debate League and Eileen Murphy of CERCA. Lastly,
we wish to thank two high school teachers for their excellent
and inventive adaptations of our work: Mark Gozonsky in his
YouTube video clip, “Building Blocks,” and Dave Stuart, Jr.,
in his blog, “Teaching the Core.”
For inviting us to present our ideas at their conferences we
are grateful to John Brereton and Richard Wendorf at the Bos-
ton Athenaeum; Wendy Katkin of the Reinvention Center of
State University of New York at Stony Brook; Luchen Li of the
Michigan English Association; Lisa Lee and Barbara Ransby of
the Public Square in Chicago; Don Lazere of the University
of Tennessee at Knoxville; Dennis Baron of the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Alfi e Guy of Yale Univer-
sity; Irene Clark of the California State University at North-
ridge; George Crandell and Steve Hubbard, co-directors of the

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

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ACETA conference at Auburn University; Mary Beth Rose
of the Humanities Institute at the University of Illinois at
Chicago; Diana Smith of St. Anne’s Belfi eld School and the
University of Virginia; Jim Maddox and Victor Luftig of the
Bread Loaf School of English; Jan Fitzsimmons and Jerry Ber-
beret of the Associated Colleges of Illinois; and Rosemary Feal,
Executive Director of the Modern Language Association.
We are very grateful to those who reviewed the new read-
ings for this third edition. Our thanks goes to Elias Dominguez
Barajas (University of Arkansas), Christine Berni (Austin Com-
munity College), Wanda Fries (Somerset Community College),
Leigh Hancock (Germanna Community College), Jennie Joiner
(Keuka College), Elizabeth Kalbfl eisch (Southern Connecticut
State University), Jeanne McDonald (Waubonsee Community
College), Roxanne Munch (Joliet Junior College), Michael
O’Connor (Onondaga Community College), Kelly Ritter
(University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Gail Suberbielle
(Baton Rouge Community College), Eleanor Welsh (Chesa-
peake College), and Debbie J. Williams (Abilene Christian
University).
A very special thanks goes to those who reviewed materials
for the third edition: Carrie Bailey (Clark College); Heather
Barrett (Boston University); Amy Bennett-Zendzian (Boston
University); Seth Blumenthal (Boston University); Ron Brooks
(Oklahoma State University); Jonathan Cook (Durham Tech-
nical Community College); Tessa Croker (Boston University);
Perry Cumbie (Durham Technical Community College);
Robert Danberg (Binghamton University); Elias Dominguez
Barajas (University of Arkansas); Nancy Enright (Seton Hall
University); Jason Evans (Prairie State College); Ted Fitts
(Boston University); Karen Gaffney (Raritan Valley Com-
munity College); Karen Gardiner (University of Alabama);

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Acknowledgments

7 5 9

Stephen Hodin (Boston University); Michael Horwitz (Uni-
versity of Hartford); John Hyman (American University);
Claire Kervin (Boston University); Melinda Kreth (Central
Michigan University); Heather Marcovitch (Red Deer Col-
lege); Christina Michaud (Boston University); Marisa Milan-
ese (Boston University); Theresa Mooney (Austin Community
College); Roxanne Munch (Joliet Junior College); Sarah Quirk
(Waubonsee Community College); Lauri Ramey (California
State University, Los Angeles); David Shawn (Boston Uni-
versity); Jennifer Sia (Boston University); Laura Sonderman
(Marshall University); Katherine Stebbins McCaffrey (Boston
University); K. Sullivan (Lane Community College); Anne-
Marie Thomas (Austin Community College at Riverside); Eliot
Treichel (Lane Community College); Rosanna Walker (Lane
Community College); Mary Erica Zimmer (Boston University).
A very special thanks goes to those who reviewed materials
for the second edition: Kathy Albertson (Georgia Southern
Univer sity); Joseph Aldinger (State University of New York,
Buffalo); Nicolette Amann (Humboldt State University);
Sonja Andrus (Collin College); Gail Arnoff (John Carroll
University); Lisa Siefker Bailey (Indiana University-Purdue
University Indianapolis); John Berteaux (California State
University, Monterey Bay); Sonya Blades (University of North
Carolina, Greensboro); Elyse Blankley (California State Uni-
versity, Long Beach); Andrew Bodenrader (Manhattanville
College); Rachel Bowman (University of North Carolina,
Greensboro); Eric Branscomb (Salem State College); Harryette
Brown (Eastfi eld College); Elena Brunn (Borough of Manhat-
tan Community College/City University of New York); Rita
Carey (Clark College); Julie Cassidy (Borough of Manhattan
Community College); Catherine Chaterdon (The University
of Arizona); Amy Lea Clemons (Francis Marion University);

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

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Tracey Clough (University of Texas, Arlington); Julie Colish
(University of Michigan, Flint); Matt Copeland (San Diego
State University); Christopher Cowley (State University of
New York, Buffalo); Angela Crow (Georgia Southern Univer-
sity); Susie Crowson (Del Mar College); Sean Curran (Califor-
nia State University, Northridge); Kate Dailey (Bowling Green
State University, Firelands); Jill Darley-Vanis (Clark College);
Virginia Davidson (Mount Saint Mary College); Page Delano
(Borough of Manhattan Community College); Elisabeth Divis
(University of Michigan); Will Dodson (University of North
Carolina, Greensboro); Patricia Dowcett (Quinnipiac Univer-
sity); Laura Dubek (Middle Tennessee State University); Wil-
liam Duffy (University of North Carolina, Greensboro); Gary
Eberle (Aquinas College); Alycia Ehlert (Darton College);
Sarah Farrell (University of Texas, Arlington); Joseph Fasano
(Manhattanville College); Benjamin Fischer (Northwest Naz-
arene University); Joan Forbes (Kean University); Courtney
Fowler (California State University, Long Beach); Caimeen
Garrett (American University); William Griswold (California
State University, Long Beach); Deborah Greenhut (New Jersey
City University); Charles Guy-McAlpin (University of North
Carolina, Greensboro); Katalin Gyurian (Kean University);
Jami Hemmenway (Eureka College); Jane Hikel (University
of Hartford); Erin Houlihan (University of North Carolina,
Greensboro); Erik Hudak (University of Texas, Arlington);
Chris Hurst (State University of New York, Buffalo); Kris-
topher Jansma (Manhattanville College); Michael Jauchen
(Colby-Sawyer College); Jeanine Jewell (Southeast Community
College); Antonnet Johnson (University of Arizona); Donald
Johnson (Santa Monica College); Lou Ann Karabel (Indiana
University Northwest); Rod Kessler (Salem State College);
Kristi Key (Newberry College); Kelly Kinney (Binghamton

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Acknowledgments

7 6 1

University); Francia Kissel (Indiana University-Purdue Uni-
versity Indianapolis); Geoff Klock, Debra S. Knutson (Shawnee
State University); Morani Kornberg-Weiss (State University
of New York, Buffalo); David LaPierre (Central Connecticut
State University); Ann-Gee Lee (St. Cloud State University);
Jerry Lee (University of Arizona); Jessica Lee (University of
Arizona); Eric Leuschner (Fort Hays State University); Brian
Lewis (Century College); Damon Kraft (Missouri Southern
State University); Amy Losi (Hamburg Central School Dis-
trict); Aimee Lukas (Central Connecticut State University);
Jaclyn Lutzke (Indiana University-Purdue University India-
napolis); John McBratney (John Carroll University); Heather
McPherson (University of Minnesota); Cruz Medina (Univer-
sity of Arizona); Dawn Mendoza (Dean College); Rae Ann
Meriwether (University of North Carolina, Greensboro); Cath-
erine Merritt (University of Alabama); Gina Miller (Alaska
Pacifi c University); Tomas Q. Morin (Texas State University);
Jenny Mueller (McKendree University); Matt Mullins (Uni-
versity of North Carolina, Greensboro); Roxanne F. Munch
(Joliet Junior College); Charles Nelson (Kean University);
Pauline Newton (Southern Methodist University); Pat Nor-
ton (University of Alabama); Marsha Nourse (Dean College);
Anne-Marie Obilade (Alcorn State University); Adair Olson
(Black Hills State University); Nancy Pederson (University
of Minnesota, Morris); Christine Pipitone-Herron (Raritan
Valley Community College); D. Pothen (Multnomah Uni-
versity); Sarah A. Quirk (Waubonsee Community College);
Clancy Ratliff (University of Louisiana, Lafayette); Kelly
Ritter (University of North Carolina, Greensboro); Stepha-
nie Roach (University of Michigan, Flint); Jeffrey Roessner
(Mercyhurst College); Scott Rogers (Weber State Univer-
sity); Suzanne Ross (St. Cloud State University); Keidrick

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

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Roy; Myra Salcedo (University of Texas, Arlington); Ronit
Sarig (California State University, Northridge); Samantha
Seamans (Central Connecticut State University); Rae Schipke
(Central Connecticut State University); Michael Schoen-
feldt (University of Michigan); Pat Sherbert (National Math
and Science Initiative); Joyce Shrimplin (Miami University
of Ohio); Leticia Slabaugh (Texas A&M, Galveston); Lars
Soderlund (Purdue University); Summar Sparks (University
of North Carolina, Greensboro); David Squires (State Uni-
versity of New York, Buffalo); Alice Stephens (Oldenburg
Academy of the Immaculate Conception); Mary Stroud (The
University of Arizona); Kimberly Sullivan (Clark College);
Doug Swartz (Indiana University Northwest); William Tate
(Covenant College); James Tolan (Borough of Manhattan
Community College); Dawn Trettin-Moyer (University of
Washington, Oshkosh); Clementina Verge (Central Con-
necticut State University); Norma Vogel (Dean College);
Nhu Vu (Seattle Central Community College); Christie Ward
(Central Connecticut State University); Stephanie Wardrop
(Western New England College); Rachael Wendler (Univer-
sity of Arizona); Cara Williams (University of North Carolina,
Greensboro); Todd Williams (Kutztown University); Robert
Wilson (Cedar Crest College); Courtney Wooten (Univer-
sity of North Carolina, Greensboro); Chuck Venegoni (John
Hersey High School); William Younglove (California State
University, Long Beach).
We also thank those who reviewed materials for the
fi rst edition: Marie Elizabeth Brockman (Central Michigan
University); Ronald Clark Brooks (Oklahoma State Univer-
sity); Beth Buyserie (Washington State University); Michael
Donnelly (University of Tampa); Karen Gardiner (University
of Alabama); Greg Glau (Northern Arizona University); Anita

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Acknowledgments

7 6 3

Helle (Oregon State University); Michael Hennessy (Texas
State University); Asao Inoue (California State University at
Fresno); Sara Jameson (Oregon State University); Joseph Jones
(University of Memphis); Amy S. Lerman (Mesa Community
College); Marc Lawrence MacDonald (Central Michigan
University); Andrew Manno (Raritan Valley Community
College); Sylvia Newman (Weber State University); Carole
Clark Papper (Hofstra University); Eileen Seifert (DePaul Uni-
versity); Evan Seymour (Community College of Philadelphia);
Renee Shea (Bowie State University); Marcy Taylor (Central
Michigan University); Rita Treutel (University of Alabama at
Birmingham); Margaret Weaver (Missouri State University);
Leah Williams (University of New Hampshire); and Tina Žigon
(State University of New York at Buffalo).
Finally, a special thank you to David Bartholomae for
suggesting the phrase that became the subtitle of the book.

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7 6 5

INDEX OF TEMPLATES

introducing what “they say”
(p. 23)

j A number of have recently suggested that

j It has become common today to dismiss .

j In their recent work, Y and Z have offered harsh critiques of

for .

introducing “standard views”

(pp. 23– 24)

j Americans today tend to believe that .

j Conventional wisdom has it that .

j Common sense seems to dictate that .

j The standard way of thinking about topic X has it that .

j It is often said that .

j My whole life I have heard it said that .

j You would think that .

j Many people assume that .

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I N D E X O F T E M P L A T E S

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making what “they say” something you say

(pp. 24–25)

j I’ve always believed that .

j When I was a child, I used to think that .

j Although I should know better by now, I cannot help thinking

that .

j At the same time that I believe , I also believe

introducing something implied or assumed
(p. 25)

j Although none of them have ever said so directly, my teachers

have often given me the impression that .

j One implication of X’s treatment of is that

j Although X does not say so directly, she apparently assumes

that .

j While they rarely admit as much, often take for

granted that .

introducing an ongoing debate

(pp. 25–28)

j In discussions of X, one controversial issue has been .

On the one hand, argues . On the other

14_GRA_93584_Index_765_780.indd 766 11/8/14 3:44 PM

Index of Templates

7 6 7

hand, contends . Others even maintain

. My own view is .

j When it comes to the topic of , most of us will read-

ily agree that . Where this agreement usually ends,

however, is on the question of . Whereas some are

convinced that , others maintain that .

j In conclusion, then, as I suggested earlier, defenders of

can’t have it both ways. Their assertion that

is contradicted by their claim that .

capturing authorial action

(pp. 38–40)

j X acknowledges that .

j X agrees that .

j X argues that .

j X believes that .

j X denies/does not deny that .

j X claims that .

j X complains that .

j X concedes that .

j X demonstrates that .

j X deplores the tendency to .

j X celebrates the fact that .

j X emphasizes that .

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I N D E X O F T E M P L A T E S

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j X insists that .

j X observes that .

j X questions whether .

j X refutes the claim that .

j X reminds us that .

j X reports that .

j X suggests that .

j X urges us to .

introducing quotations

(p. 46)

j X states, “ .”

j As the prominent philosopher X puts it, “ .”

j According to X, “ .”

j X himself writes, “ .”

j In her book, , X maintains that “ .”

j Writing in the journal , X complains that

“ .”

j In X’s view, “ .”

j X agrees when she writes, “ .”

j X disagrees when he writes, “ .”

j X complicates matters further when he writes, “ .”

14_GRA_93584_Index_765_780.indd 768 11/8/14 3:44 PM

Index of Templates

7 6 9

explaining quotations

(pp. 46–47)

j Basically, X is saying .

j In other words, X believes .

j In making this comment, X urges us to .

j X is corroborating the age-old adage that .

j X’s point is that .

j The essence of X’s argument is that .

disagreeing, with reasons

(p. 60)

j I think X is mistaken because she overlooks .

j X’s claim that rests upon the questionable assump-

tion that .

j I disagree with X’s view that because, as recent

research has shown, .

j X contradicts herself/can’t have it both ways. On the one

hand, she argues . On the other hand, she also

says .

j By focusing on , X overlooks the deeper problem

of .

14_GRA_93584_Index_765_780.indd 769 11/8/14 3:44 PM

I N D E X O F T E M P L A T E S

7 7 0

agreeing—with a difference

(pp. 61–64)

j I agree that because my experience con-

firms it.

j X surely is right about because, as she may not be

aware, recent studies have shown that .

j X’s theory of is extremely useful because it sheds

insight on the difficult problem of .

j Those unfamiliar with this school of thought may be interested

to know that it basically boils down to .

j I agree that , a point that needs emphasizing since

so many people believe .

j If group X is right that , as I think they are, then we

need to reassess the popular assumption that .

agreeing and disagreeing simultaneously

(pp. 64–66)

j Although I agree with X up to a point, I cannot accept his overall

conclusion that .

j Although I disagree with much that X says, I fully endorse his

final conclusion that .

j Though I concede that , I still insist that .

j Whereas X provides ample evidence that , Y and

Z’s research on and convinces me that

instead.

14_GRA_93584_Index_765_780.indd 770 11/8/14 3:44 PM

Index of Templates

7 7 1

j X is right that , but she seems on more dubious

ground when she claims that .

j While X is probably wrong when she claims that ,

she is right that .

j I’m of two minds about X’s claim that . On the one

hand, I agree that . On the other hand, I’m not sure

if .

j My feelings on the issue are mixed. I do support X’s position that

, but I find Y’s argument about and Z’s

research on to be equally persuasive.

signaling who is saying what
(pp. 71–73)

j X argues .

j According to both X and Y, .

j Politicians , X argues, should .

j Most athletes will tell you that .

j My own view, however, is that .

j I agree, as X may not realize, that .

j But are real and, arguably, the most significant fac-

tor in .

j But X is wrong that .

j However, it is simply not true that .

j Indeed, it is highly likely that .

j X’s assertion that does not fit the facts.

14_GRA_93584_Index_765_780.indd 771 11/8/14 3:44 PM

I N D E X O F T E M P L A T E S

7 7 2

j X is right that .

j X is wrong that .

j X is both right and wrong that .

j Yet a sober analysis of the matter reveals .

j Nevertheless, new research shows .

j Anyone familiar with should agree that .

embedding voice markers

(pp. 74–75)

j X overlooks what I consider an important point about .

j My own view is that what X insists is a is in fact

a .

j I wholeheartedly endorse what X calls .

j These conclusions, which X discusses in , add weight

to the argument that .

entertaining objections

(p. 82)

j At this point I would like to raise some objections that have been

inspired by the skeptic in me. She feels that I have been ignor-

ing . “ ,” she says to me, “ .”

j Yet some readers may challenge the view that .

j Of course, many will probably disagree with this assertion

that .

14_GRA_93584_Index_765_780.indd 772 11/8/14 3:44 PM

Index of Templates

7 7 3

naming your naysayers

(pp. 83–84)

j Here many would probably object that .

j But social would certainly take issue with the argu-

ment that .

j , of course, may want to question whether

j Nevertheless, both followers and critics of will prob-

ably argue that .

j Although not all think alike, some of them will prob-

ably dispute my claim that .

j are so diverse in their views that it’s hard to gener-

alize about them, but some are likely to object on the grounds

that .

introducing objections informally

(pp. 84–85)

j But is my proposal realistic? What are the chances of its actually

being adopted?

j Yet is it always true that ? Is it always the case, as

I have been suggesting, that ?

j However, does the evidence I’ve cited prove conclusively that

j “Impossible,” some will say. “You must be reading the research

selectively.”

14_GRA_93584_Index_765_780.indd 773 11/8/14 3:44 PM

I N D E X O F T E M P L A T E S

7 7 4

making concessions while still
standing your ground (p. 89)

j Although I grant that , I still maintain that .

j Proponents of X are right to argue that . But they

exaggerate when they claim that .

j While it is true that , it does not necessarily follow

that .

j On the one hand, I agree with X that . But on the

other hand, I still insist that .

indicating who cares

(pp. 95–96)

j used to think . But recently [or within

the past few decades] suggests that .

j These findings challenge the work of earlier researchers, who

tended to assume that .

j Recent studies like these shed new light on , which

previous studies had not addressed.

j Researchers have long assumed that . For instance,

one eminent scholar of cell biology, , assumed in

, her seminal work on cell structures and func-

tions, that fat cells . As herself put it,

“ ” (2012). Another leading scientist, ,

argued that fat cells “ ” (2011). Ultimately, when it came

to the nature of fat, the basic assumption was that .

14_GRA_93584_Index_765_780.indd 774 11/8/14 3:44 PM

Index of Templates

7 7 5

But a new body of research shows that fat cells are far more

complex and that .

j If sports enthusiasts stopped to think about it, many of them might

simply assume that the most successful athletes .

However, new research shows .

j These findings challenge neoliberals’ common assumptions

that .

j At first glance, teenagers appear to . But on closer

inspection .

establishing why your claims matter

(pp. 98–99)

j X matters/is important because .

j Although X may seem trivial, it is in fact crucial in terms of today’s

concern over .

j Ultimately, what is at stake here is .

j These findings have important consequences for the broader

domain of .

j My discussion of X is in fact addressing the larger matter

of .

j These conclusions/This discovery will have significant applica-

tions in as well as in .

j Although X may seem of concern to only a small group of

, it should in fact concern anyone who cares about

14_GRA_93584_Index_765_780.indd 775 11/8/14 3:44 PM

I N D E X O F T E M P L A T E S

7 7 6

commonly used transitions
(pp. 108–10)

addition

also in fact

and indeed

besides moreover

furthermore so too

in addition

elaboration

actually to put it another way

by extension to put it bluntly

in short to put it succinctly

that is ultimately

in other words

example

after all for instance

as an illustration specifi cally

consider to take a case in point

for example

cause and effect

accordingly since

as a result so

consequently then

hence therefore

it follows, then thus

14_GRA_93584_Index_765_780.indd 776 11/8/14 3:44 PM

Index of Templates

7 7 7

comparison

along the same lines likewise

in the same way similarly

contrast

although nevertheless

but nonetheless

by contrast on the contrary

conversely on the other hand

despite regardless

even though whereas

however while

in contrast yet

concession

admittedly of course

although it is true that naturally

granted to be sure

I concede that

conclusion

as a result so

consequently the upshot of all this is that

hence therefore

in conclusion, then thus

in short to sum up

in sum, then to summarize

it follows, then

14_GRA_93584_Index_765_780.indd 777 11/8/14 3:44 PM

I N D E X O F T E M P L A T E S

7 7 8

adding metacommentary

(pp. 131–37)

j In other words, .

j What really means by this is .

j Ultimately, my goal is to demonstrate that .

j My point is not , but .

j To put it another way, .

j In sum, then, .

j My conclusion, then, is that, .

j In short, .

j What is more important, .

j Incidentally, .

j By the way, .

j Chapter 2 explores , while Chapter 3 examines

j Having just argued that , let us now turn our atten-

tion to .

j Although some readers may object that , I would

answer that .

14_GRA_93584_Index_765_780.indd 778 11/8/14 3:44 PM

Index of Templates

7 7 9

introducing gaps in the existing research
(p. 191)

j Studies of X have indicated . It is not clear, however,

that this conclusion applies to .

j often take for granted that . Few have

investigated this assumption, however.

j X’s work tells us a great deal about . Can this work

be generalized to ?

14_GRA_93584_Index_765_780.indd 779 11/8/14 3:44 PM

14_GRA_93584_Index_765_780.indd 780 11/8/14 3:44 PM

7 8 1

index of authors and titles

Addison, Liz, 255–58

Against Meat, 448–61

America Remains the World’s Beacon of Success, 618–22

The American Dream: Dead, Alive, or on Hold?, 610–17

Are Too Many People Going to College?, 234–54

Balko, Radley, 466–70

Baron, Dennis, 721–25

Becker, Gary, 581–90

Better than Human: Why Robots Will—and Must—Take Our Jobs,
299–312

Blue-Collar Brilliance, 272–84

Bowie State University Commencement Speech, 285–95

Bring on More Immigrant Entrepreneurs, 623–26

Carr, Nicholas, 313–29

Colleges Prepare People for Life, 259–62

Confronting Inequality, 561–80

Cullington, Michaela, 361–72

15_GRA_93584_AuTitlnd_781-785.indd 781 11/8/14 4:36 PM

7 8 2

I N D E X O F A U T H O R S A N D T I T L E S

Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In, 659–75

Does Texting Affect Writing?, 361–72

Don’t Blame the Eater, 462–65

Dorment, Richard, 697–717

Eckert, Penelope, 736–46

Escape from the Western Diet, 420–27

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food, 471–95

Facebook Multiplies Genders but Offers Users the Same Three
Tired Pronouns, 721–25

Foer, Jonathan Safran, 448–61

Food as Thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating, 442–47

Freedman, David H., 506–37

Gladstone, Brooke, 330–39

Gladwell, Malcolm, 399–415

Graff, Gerald, 264–71

Hidden Intellectualism, 264–71

hooks, bell, 659–75

How Junk Food Can End Obesity, 506–37

How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, 340–60

How to Be a “Woman Programmer,” 726–31

Hrabowski, Freeman, 259–26

15_GRA_93584_AuTitlnd_781-785.indd 782 11/8/14 4:36 PM

Index of Authors and Titles

7 8 3

I Had a Nice Time with You Tonight. On the App., 393–98

Inequality Has Been Going on Forever . . . but That Doesn’t Mean
It’s Inevitable, 542–48

The Influencing Machines, 330–39

Is Google Making Us Stupid?, 313–29

Kaplan, Saul, 732–35

Kelly, Kevin, 299–312

King, Brandon, 610–17

King’s Dream Remains an Elusive Goal, 627–37

Krugman, Paul, 561–80

Lean In: What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?, 642–58

Learning to Be Gendered, 736–46

Leonhardt, David, 542–48

Maxfield, Mary, 442–47

Mays, Stephen, 718–20

McClelland, Edward, 549–60

McConnell-Ginet, Sally, 736–46

Moss, Michael, 471–95

Murphy, Kevin, 581–90

Murray, Charles, 234–54

Neufeld, Josh, 330–39

Nestle, Marion, 496–505

The New Liberal Arts, 226–33

No Need to Call, 373–92

15_GRA_93584_AuTitlnd_781-785.indd 783 11/8/14 4:36 PM

I N D E X O F A U T H O R S A N D T I T L E S

7 8 4

Obama, Michelle, 285–95

Owen, Stephanie, 208–25

Pew Research Team, 627–37

The Plight of Young Males, 732–35

Pollan, Michael, 420–27

Potts, Monica, 591–609

RIP, the Middle Class: 1946–2013, 549–60

Roemer, Tim, 618–22

Rose, Mike, 272–84

Sandberg, Sheryl, 642–58

Sawhill, Isabel, 208–25

Shapin, Steven, 428–41

Should Everyone Go to College?, 208–25

Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 676–96

Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted, 399–415

The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate, 496–505

Thompson, Clive, 340–60

Turkle, Sherry, 373–92

Two Years Are Better than Four, 255–58

Ullman, Ellen, 726–31

Ungar, Sanford J., 226–33

The Upside of Income Inequality, 581–90

15_GRA_93584_AuTitlnd_781-785.indd 784 11/8/14 4:36 PM

Index of Authors and Titles

7 8 5

What about Gender Roles in Same-Sex Relationships?, 718–20

What Are You Buying When You Buy Organic?, 428–41

What You Eat Is Your Business, 466–70

What’s Killing Poor White Women?, 591–609

Why Men Still Can’t Have It All, 697–717

Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, 676–96

Wortham, Jenna, 393–98

Zadeh, Shayan, 623–26

Zinczenko, David, 462–65

15_GRA_93584_AuTitlnd_781-785.indd 785 11/8/14 4:36 PM

7 8 6

GERALD GRAFF, a professor of English and
education at the University of Illinois at Chicago
and the 2008 president of the Modern Language
Association of America, has had a major impact
on teachers through such books as Professing
Literature: An Institutional History, Beyond the
Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can
Revitalize American Education, and, most recently, Clueless in Academe:
How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind.

CATHY BIRKENSTEIN is a lecturer in English
at the University of Illinois at Chicago and
co-director of the Writing in the Disciplines
program. She has published essays on writing,
most recently in College English, and, with
Gerald Graff, in The Chronicle of Higher
Education, Academe, and College Composition and
Communication. She has also given talks and workshops with Gerald
at numerous colleges and is currently working on a study of common
misunderstandings surrounding academic discourse.

RUSSEL DURST, who edited the readings
in this book, is a professor of English at the
University of Cincinnati, where he teaches
courses in composition, writing pedagogy and
research, English linguistics, and the Hebrew
Bible as literature. A past president of the
National Conference on Research in Language
and Literacy, he is the author of several books, including Collision
Course: Conflict, Negotiation, and Learning in College Composition.

16_GRA_93584_AboutAuth_786.indd 786 11/19/14 4:58 PM

Cover (They say / I say)

Front Matter

Title Page

Contents

Preface to the Third Edition

Preface: Demystifying Academic Conversation

Introduction: Entering the Conversation

Part 1: “THEY SAY”

1 “They Say” Starting with What Others are Saying

2. “Her Point Is”: The Art of Summarizing

3 “As He Himself Puts It”: The Art of Quoting

Part 2: “I SAY”

4 “Yes / No / Okay, But”: Three Ways to Respond

5 “And Yet”: Distinguishing What You Say from What They Say

6 “Skeptics May Object”: Planting a Naysayer in Your Text

7 “So What? Who Cares?”: Saying Why It Matters

Part 3: TYING IT ALL TOGETHER

8 “As a Result”: Connecting the Parts

9 “A In’t So / Is Not”: Academic Writing Doesn’t Always Mean Setting Aside Your Own Voice

10 “But Don’t Get Me Wrong”: The Art of Metacommentary

11 “He Says Contends”: Using the Templates to Revise

Part 4: IN SPECIFIC ACADEMIC CONTEXTS

12 “I Take Your Point”: Entering Class Discussions

13 “Imho”: Is Digital Communication Good or Bad—or Both?

14 “What’s Motivating This Writer?”: Reading for the Conversation

15 “Analyze This”: Writing in the Social Sciences

Readings

16 Is College the Best Option

Stephanie Owen And Isabel Sawhill, Should Everyone Go to College?

Sanford j. Ungar, The New Liberal Arts

Charles Murray, Are Too Many People Going

Liz Addison, Two Years Are Better than Four

Freeman Hrabowski, Colleges Prepare People for Life

Gerald Graff, Hidden Intellectualism

Mike Rose, Blue-Collar Brilliance

Michelle Obama, Bowie State University

17 Are We in A Race Against the Machine?

Kevin kelly, Better than Human: Why Robots Will—and Must—Take Our Jobs

Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufeld, The Influencing Machines

Clive Thompson, Smarter than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

Michaela Cullington, Does Texting Affect Writing?

Sherry Turkle, No Need to Call

Jenna Wortham, I Had a Nice Time with You Tonight. On the App

Malcolm Gladwell, Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted

18 What Should We Eat?

Michael Pollan, Escape from the Western Diet

Steven Shapin, What Are You Buying When You

Mary Maxfield, Food as Thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating

Jonathan Safran Foer, Against Meat

David Zinczenko, Don’t Blame the Eater

Radley Balko, What You Eat Is Your Business

Michael Moss, The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

Marion Nestle, The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate

David h. Freedman, How Junk Food Can End Obesity

19 What’s up with the American Dream?

David Leonhardt, Inequality Has Been Going on Forever . . . But That Doesn’t Mean It’s Inevitable

Edward Mcclelland, RIP, the Middle Class: 1946–2013

Paul Krugman, Confronting Inequality

Gary Becker and kevin murphy, The Upside of Income Inequality

Monica Potts, What’s Killing Poor White Women?

Brandon King, The American Dream: Dead, Alive, or on Hold?

Tim Roemer, America Remains the World’s Beacon

Shayan Zadeh, Bring on More Immigrant Entrepreneurs

Pew Research Team, King’s Dream Remains an Elusive Goal

20 What’s Gender Got to Do with it?

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?

Bell Hooks, Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Why Women Still Can’t Have It All

Richard Dorment, Why Men Still Can’t Have It All

Stephen Mays, What about Gender Roles in Same-Sex Relationships?

Dennis Baron, Facebook Multiplies Genders but Offers Users the Same Three Tired Pronouns

Ellen Ullman, How to Be a “Woman Programmer”

Saul Kaplan, The Plight of Young Males

Penelope Eckert and Sally Mcconnell-ginet, Learning to be Gendered

Credits

Acknowledgments

Index of Templates

Index of Authors and Titles

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