Chasing the Story

“I noted when the organizers said, ‘This is our Vietnam.’ It embodied the story.”

Bowdoin College Spring, Dell Davis-Batt

Sarah Miller is a 24-year-old writer living in Brooklyn. She studied Creative Writing at Middlebury College and currently writes the drawing board.

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When the first of those tents appeared on the College Green, I was determined not to miss the story. Middlebury’s encampment sprang up on a Sunday morning in April. The night before, many of our revolutionaries had donned face paint and swayed to student cover bands at Nocturne, our annual performing arts festival. As part of the program, Middlebury’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter had staged a “die-in,” which despite the wave of student protest sweeping the country, I had brushed off as mere theater (not dissimilar from the attempt at a Boiler Room set by the president of The Otter Nonsense Players, the premier on-campus improv group, which served as the festival’s closing act). We were in the waning months of the Biden administration then, and there was nothing to argue about and no one to argue with.

The next morning, the tents went up; I had underestimated my peers. In solidarity with the national movement, the students demanded the College divest from arms manufacturing and war profiteering and that the College declare its support of a ceasefire. But the encampment at Middlebury differed significantly from campus encampments in the news, in which students warred with counter-protesters and administration crackdowns. Owing to our student population’s much-editorialized lack of diversity, the SJP leadership was mostly composed of white students. Many Jewish students were in key leadership positions, and the student activists tried to cover all their bases by hosting workshops like “Let’s Talk About Anti-Semitism” and “Pinkwashing.” Most of the tents had been rented out from the College’s gear room.

The College began to take more of an interest as the encampment approached the one-week mark; the students had set up the tents where graduation was held, and the College needed to work on trimming the grass. During the middle of that week, the editor-in-chief of our campus newspaper asked if I wanted to cover an SJP-led walkout. This was a baby story, passed off to me because the exec team was doing the real work. Yet I was thrilled: here was a story I could sink my teeth into.

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In a 2011 Fresh Air interview, Joan Didion told Terry Gross, “I myself have always found that if I examine something, it’s less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw — if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn’t going to bite you. And that’s the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.”

I grew up in Philadelphia amongst the fauna of mottled pigeons and flora of scummy rivers, where the only snakes I saw were kept behind panes of glass. Yet when I was a child, I adored a book of snakes I received as a gift and hoped to find them in the wild. I cannot remember why I did not fear them. Now I fear everything: microplastics and radiation, rising temperatures and rising cancer rates, AI, whether I will be able to make a living. I say a prayer every time the plane takes off, though I know, as all anxious fliers do, that I am far more likely to die in a car crash. But over the course of the 2020s, I began to realize that I could look a snake in the eyes; I could access a strange calm when I waded into the emotional fracas with the bulwark of analysis.

If the political chaos of our times has any parallel in American history it is the Sixties, when the collapse of the institutional was symptomatic of a lost sense of shared reality. I intimately understand how reporting on that collapse can grant certain writers the panacea of control. Didion opens Slouching Towards Bethlehem with her typical, stylish method of self-deprecation, declaring, “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests…writers are always selling somebody out.” I cannot count the number of times I’ve seen this quote superimposed over a moody natural landscape on Instagram or Substack. I am not inarticulate, but I am small and clumsy and sometimes say ditzy things. My glasses exist in an almost permanent state of smudginess from how often I push them up my nose, and I wear a lot of skirts. Twice in my 24 years of life, I have accidentally set my hair on fire. While this is not a costume, it is its own type of camouflage. People talk to me.

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To my delight, the encampment organizers made us wear bright orange vests with blue tape to identify us as members of the press. This felt right to me. I held out my phone and recorded the organizers when they spoke. They yelled “Shame!” at the school president’s office, and I took pictures of their backs. The Middlebury Campus newspaper had agreed not to photograph any of the students’ faces. I noted when the organizers said, “This is our Vietnam.” It embodied the story. And after the walkout, I circled through the Green to talk to the protesters. I talked to a Palestinian student who said kindness was a value of his people and a young white woman who said she was willing to put herself on the line for the encampment. This was also part of the story.

Just over a week after the first tents came up, the school ended the encampment by sending out a communication brief in which they committed to calling for a ceasefire, wrote they were “exploring” ways for Middlebury to support displaced Gazan students, and said they would “discuss and debate openly the complex questions involved in managing an endowment.” The response in the dining hall was muted. Mostly, I think we were relieved that we would finally have a normal graduation. The SJP said it was a good first step, but they would be watching when the school discussed divestment in the fall. They claimed a tentative victory. I couldn’t understand how they failed to see the emptiness of the administration’s language. Could they not see that it was a commitment to nothing? The following fall, Middlebury announced it would not divest from the list of student-defined war profiteering companies, as it had determined it was not profiting from war. Middlebury was famous for one of the many free speech blowups that characterized the 2010s (“the infamous Charles Murray incident”), and a certain ideological inflexibility still strangled our discourse. Legitimate critiques of the encampment were equated with cosigning genocide, neoliberalism, settler colonialism, and the military-industrial complex. I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of campus controversy during the last weeks before graduation. So instead of properly conveying the complexity of the encampment, I wrote a few benign personal essays and accepted my diploma on a cloudless day in May. I knew, however, that I had failed to get the story.

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I wanted to be a Didion. But somehow, in my senior year of college, I wound up a Carrie Bradshaw.

I had begun writing a column for the student newspaper in the first months of my senior year. My first article was an impassioned defense of the English department after news broke of proposed budget cuts. From there, I wrote about getting mugged abroad and affirmative action. After a bruising Halloween return to an on-and-off college fling demonstrated that, barring any sudden plot twists, I would graduate without experiencing a college boyfriend, I wrote an article exploring my real, self-flagellating grief at my realization. It was not my best-written or best-argued piece, but I wrote it to exorcise my feelings. My emotional constitution is such that when I can turn pain or humiliation into material it releases some of its hold on me. Even lying distraught on the floor of my best friend’s dorm room, I thought, “Here’s some material.”

With this piece, my column took off. Many of the accomplished young women on our small campus felt the way I did: insecure about failing to acquire such a hallmark of the college experience and then doubly insecure about the vacuity this want implied. We were ashamed to want male validation and love, even as our fear of being too intellectually superficial, too feminine, was configured again along masculine lines.

After the article was published, my DMs were flooded with enthusiastic praise. Young women came up to me in the library and the local bar; when men approached me, it thrilled me doubly. Here was affirmation that I was a real writer. Next, I wrote about SSRIs, the Western literary canon, and tried to make an argument for the economic cost of body image on female professional advancement.

Then I wrote about a class I took on porn. It was the first such course in the College’s history. Drawing on my course readings, I argued that porn’s potency as an ideological force demanded we discuss it seriously. Over the course of my drafting, I came to believe it was some of my sharpest writing, but I still needed an ending. Naively, I decided to write about a nude project I did as a freshman where I set out to explore the tension between objectification and empowerment by writing the contradictory ways I felt about my body (for example, cellulite on my thighs) on my body in black marker. Then a friend of mine took pictures of me posed in various positions that sought to articulate that tension between objectification and empowerment.

I should have found a different conclusion.

I was stuck answering questions about the project for the rest of the year. Before my “American Women Poets” class, a friend told me, “My house wants to know if you did the project in the nude or if you were being hyperbolic.” I told her I didn’t believe in hyperbole. Instead of questions about the ideology behind Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat or the link between violent porn consumption and attitudes toward rape victims, I fielded queries on how many people had been in the Zoom room when I showed my nudes and what my parents had thought.

“You’re my Carrie Bradshaw,” one girl DM’d me. It was sweet; I wanted to gag.

I wanted to write about books, politics, sex, and the travails of my stupid heart and didn’t see why writing on one topic should constrain me from writing about another. I wanted to be taken seriously. So after the porn piece, I published an evaluation of the student body’s political apathy called “Did we kill debate?” At a pop-up student-run bar, a fellow editor on the paper came up to me and said he liked this new article because, “It was serious. Unlike your last article, it didn’t make me laugh out loud.” Oh, I wanted to say to him, “I’m so glad you think I’m serious,” but I held my tongue. This was copy.

I put the exchange into my final column for The Middlebury Campus, and during Senior Week the editor and I laughed about it some more so I could show I was cool, not one of those overly sensitive women. I resisted the urge to ask if he found the article unserious because a rigorous argument about sex made him uncomfortable. Instead, when he told me that he and his friends had pored over my article for an hour, which, he noted, was more time than they had spent on any other piece, I thanked him. I laughed.

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Joan Didion is enshrined in the public imagination for “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” the titular essay in the collection that made her famous. Often read as critical, if not downright contemptuous, of the Sixties’ “flower children,” the essay ends with a description of a 5-year-old on acid. In an interview with KPFR, Didion said, “Usually on a piece there comes a day when you know you never have to do another interview. You can go home, you’ve gotten it. Well, that day never came on that piece…That piece is a blank for me still.”

Over the course of a storied career, Didion’s style evolved from the shiny pyrotechnics of New Journalism to masterful essays in which she excavated political mythologies. Published under the legendary New York Review of Books (NYRB) editor Robert Silvers, Didion believed these political essays represented the best work of her career. Yet these are the essays for which she’s least remembered.

Didion got her start writing pithy self-help essays for Vogue with titles like “On Self-Respect” and “Take No For An Answer.” The essays from this period address the issues young women wrestle with as they come of age: self-actualization and heartbreak, leaving New York, and growing older. However, Didion is careful not to write about sex or the specifics. Her forensic self-reflections are always delivered from the safety of the retrospective; Didion writes after the disaster has been assessed and surveyed, after she has conquered the pain.

In Lili Anolik’s deliciously trashy study of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, Didion & Babitz, Anolik writes, “That Joan wasn’t straitjacketed into the role of Woman writer was neither luck nor chance. She did it being very, very good…a masculine kind of good.” The book seethes with resentment for Didion. And while Anolik openly admits her partiality for the fun-loving, unabashedly feminine Babitz, the very conceit of her book relies on a binary of female success. Either you’re a prude or a party girl, either you’re a master or a mess. You’re either Didion or Babitz.

But even Didion couldn’t escape her gender. After her death, journalists began to link Didion’s name to a (mostly forgotten) former giant of mid-century writing, Noel Parmental Jr. He is alternatively figured as “the man Joan Didion left behind” and her “first and searing love.” I can’t deny that I avidly followed this coverage. The part of me that looked to Didion as a guide (my junior and senior year dorm rooms were decorated with the famous Julian Wassner picture of Didion posed before the Corvette — you know the one) was gratified to learn she was mortal. If she’d had her heart broken by a raging alcoholic who refused to marry her, and then went on to so eclipse his career that his obituaries were linked to her name, then maybe I could outrun the girl who bubbled up on drunk walks home, the girl who asked her friends if anyone would ever love her. If I couldn’t extinguish that girl, I would overpower and outmaster her emotions, her tremendous need, through language. Still, I recognized a grubby impulse in these biographical excavations that sought to essentialize Didion by reducing her to a lovelorn girl trailing after a great man. At last, the immortal Didion, flung from her perch!

Didion & Babitz epitomizes the lazy misogyny threaded through this line of criticism. She quotes from lengthy interviews with Parmental in which he says, “Without me, there might not have been a Joan Didion. I invented Joan Didion.” Anolik takes him at face value. That she fails to interrogate why a writer of middling stature might be motivated to claim responsibility for one of the 20th century’s greatest illustrates the eagerness which even women writers will demonstrate to subordinate another woman’s career to a man’s. Nobody dares try this trick on Ernest Hemingway or Philip Roth: “I invented Hemingway?” Please.

In my teenage years, I read a short piece Zadie Smith wrote for Oprah Magazine where she cited Middlemarch as “a work of genius. But — more important — and from a purely selfish point of view — a woman wrote it. This might seem ridiculous, but a man never has to think twice about the gender of genius.”

Though women now make up the majority of published authors, most intellectual heavyweights — most of those whom society considers geniuses — remain male. And when a woman is a genius, she is “a woman genius,” degraded by the condition of her gender. When I confess my admiration for George Eliot, Edith Wharton, Toni Morrison, or Zadie Smith, I do so with what I know is an unworthy self-consciousness. I try to explain that I don’t like them because they are women writers but because they are geniuses, pure and simple.

Didion’s 2001 anthologized collection of political writing, Political Fictions, begins with a foreword in which she describes her trepidation when Robert Silvers asked her to cover the 1988 political campaign: “A presidential election was a ‘serious story,’ and no one had before solicited my opinions on one.”

At this point, Didion was 54 years old, the author of four celebrated essay collections and four well-regarded novels. She was one of the most famous figures in American letters, but she still wasn’t sure if she was serious enough to cover politics. Didion procrastinated the assignment for several months, prompting new deadlines and panicked calls from her editors, until there “seemed, finally, no real excuse” for her not to write about the California primary. This essay would become “Insider Baseball,” a sharp critique of the increasingly Hollywood-like showmanship of political campaigns.

Originally a staunch, Barry Goldwater Republican, Didion was revolted by the party’s capitulation to the socially invasive preoccupations of the religious right by the 1980s. That she saw herself as alienated from political parties granted her the rare ability to privilege criticism over ideological allegiance. In a 1998 essay, published two weeks after the release of the Starr Report, she derides Bill Clinton’s “familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent,” while in another essay, she condemns his critics for their self-interested moralizing. She saves some of her most impassioned criticisms for Reagan, the Republican she blames for the degradation of the party. Throughout Political Fictions, Didion’s most damning indictments often come from her own subjects. In the collection’s final essay, “God’s Country,” she warns that “the distinct possibility that an entire generation of younger voters might see no point in choosing between two candidates retelling the same remote story could benefit only one campaign, the Republican.”

Twenty days after I read this sentence, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and, 29 minutes later, appointed his chosen successor, Kamala Harris. The press breathlessly covered Harris’s rise and declared “Kamalot,” but I worried about a candidate solely built on desperate anti-Trump fervor and hallucinatory memes. Many of the people I talked to in Philadelphia felt only marginally better about Harris than Biden. Some asked me if it wasn’t a little suspicious about the way the Democratic Party rushed to nominate her without a primary. If Harris couldn’t win the youth vote in Pennsylvania, she was in trouble. As we approached November, my fury mounted at Biden, the craven Democratic Party elders, and a press who had abdicated their responsibility to scrutinize the political class. I was not surprised when Harris lost.

After Trump’s election in 2016, the legacy press criticized the racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, et al. that lingered in the middle of the country. These were interrupted by occasional sympathetic profiles of “forgotten America,” of which the glossy movie adaptation of future Vice President JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy is a symptom. When Trump won again in 2024 with large gains from men of color and gen z men, I was forced to concede his appeal was not an aberration: Trumpism, whatever that meant, was now part of the American program. So it was my obligation to try to understand it. I diversified my media diet. I switched between podcasts across the political spectrum. Recently, I read a mammoth biography of William F. Buckley Jr. by Sam Tanenhaus, annotating furiously in the margins. And I’ve tried to talk to people who think differently from me.

A few months ago, I met a young Trump supporter at a bar. I was accompanying my friend there on her quest to get over her ex. When she started talking to a shaggy-haired guy with a cross necklace, I mostly tuned out, until I heard him say, “I’m a Republican, don’t hate me.” Again, because I am from Philadelphia, the young men in bars who admit to voting Republican are the young men who swayed the election. I asked him why he had voted for Trump.

“Immigration,” he told me. “And unchecked capitalism.” He was concerned by Blackstone buying out homes from the American consumer. Swiftly, he added he wasn’t such a big fan of Trump anymore. “Trump’s not America-first.”

“Interesting,” I said. “Tell me more.”

He mentioned Israel, he mentioned foreign involvement abroad, he mentioned Nick Fuentes.

“You know Nick Fuentes is an anti-semite,” I said. “And he hates women.”

The guy told me he had sisters and that he trusted them more than anything. He insisted the prejudice was a character Fuentes played up. Sure, I thought: here’s the story.

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In a 2006 interview with Hilton Als in The Paris Review, Didion explained her mid-career turn toward political writing by remarking, “I was bored. I didn’t want to become Miss Lonelyhearts.”

I didn’t, either.

Writing about the Middlebury encampment showed me the kinds of stories I wanted to follow after graduating. The encampment presented the kind of intellectually knotty, emotionally explosive issue in which each side was determined to flatten the story. Students, taught to close-read, jettisoned nuanced analysis for binaries and channeled their anger over the devastation in Gaza into colleges with no say in foreign policy. This disconnect was especially acute at Middlebury, as the administration did not invest in arms manufacturing. Consequently, the SJP arrived at a broad definition of war profiteering — any companies that helped or profited from the war effort — largely meaning any companies that did business in Israel.

At the same time, the legacy media’s analysis disappointed me with its insistence on figuring the students as either intrepid heroes or, more often, kids too dumb and too privileged to know their history. Every side was beset by hysterical one-dimensionality. Of the few professional journalists who deigned to enter the encampments, no one seemed to listen critically to what the students had to say. As I saw it, the legacy press failed to credit the opening salvo of a generation born between foreign wars whose anger was as much rooted in America’s imperial creep as it was in the fact that this generation was projected to be less successful than their parents.

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In the winter of 1991, Didion took on the case of the Central Park Five for The New York Review of Books in a magisterial essay that deconstructs the myths underpinning both the case and New York City. Didion is forensic from the jump as she notes that the jogger’s anonymity allowed her to become “a sacrificial player in the sentimental narrative that is New York public life.” She notes the slew of dog whistle and outright racist headlines that defined the case, and she reminds readers of all the other reported rapes (particularly of black women) that did not receive mainstream coverage. As always, Didion is laser-focused on the ways in which illusions reinforce and rely on one another in the service of convenient narratives. The essay is often framed as a defense of the Central Park Five — a willful misreading, as Didion questions the evidence against the boys but does not defend them. To advocate would violate the distance that was the source of so much of her authority; in the ruthless pursuit of meaning, Didion is disinterested in sympathy.

As a fiction writer, I am overly interested in sympathy. My preoccupation with moral complexity equips me less to write about the baldness of evil than to search for nuance. There’s a privilege inherent to this remove; when a writer imposes distance, they protect themselves at some level from the horror of the subject. In a scathing book review published in Vulture in 2023, the critic Andrea Long Chu, who seems to have made a career target out of Zadie Smith, accuses Smith of “an almost involuntary tendency to reframe all political questions as ‘human’ ones.” In a later piece, written in the context of the war in Gaza, Chu condemns Smith’s “enforced literarity.”

I see Chu’s point. The essay she takes specific issue with is one Smith wrote for The New Yorker. In it, Smith praises the bravery of the national student protest movement while critiquing the rigid emptiness of their rhetoric. Smith argues for what she sees as the only concrete action: a ceasefire. Until a ceasefire is achieved, she repeats, nothing else matters. Zigzagging between defending and critiquing the protests, commenting on the slippery nature of “ethical zones of interest” in which, on many liberal campuses, Jewish students might be the oppressed political minority, and then once again calling for a ceasefire, Smith’s essay feels contradictory at times. It lacks Chu’s cogency or moral clarity.

And yet I still find Smith’s piece more resonant. While her style is different from Didion’s, both writers share the forensic attention to narrative construction that puts them at odds with simpler moral readings. Smith attributes her “ideological inconsistency” to her biraciality. Perhaps because I’m biracial, perhaps because I’m a novelist, I can only see a thing from multiple sides, too. This is both a strength and a limitation.

Most of our able political writers are polemicists, essayists, or necessary fact-gatherers. The two most talked-about political releases last year were Alex Thompson’s and Jake Tapper’s Original Sin, a work of reporting that has all the prose strength of a PowerPoint, and Olivia Nuzzi’s American Canto — the former Washington correspondent at New York Magazine not only committed the cardinal sin of sleeping with a source (over Facetime) but also doubled down on her sin by writing turgid, elliptical prose that still protected her former lover.

Nuzzi’s downfall is a cautionary tale for writers who love Didion too much. In a media ecosystem saturated with op-ed writers, there is no shortage of voices eager to stake out some bold new take. Didion stands apart for her radical curiosity about her subjects’ interior lives. It’s the combination of this curiosity with her tremendous voice that curses her to a league of shallow imitators.

I know what it’s like to fall under Didion’s spell. In college, I tried to imitate her concise, emotionally fraught sentences until enough feedback from my writing workshop convinced me to change course. What I tried to skillfully restrain came across as dull and lacking insight. Didion remains my high watermark for a sentence, and I am tormented by the fact that my own will never achieve her irresistible gothic intelligence and observation told with cowboy flair. But the Didion instinct can be a trap. Her voice tells me to aim higher — revise, revise, revise — but it also tells me to bottle it up, to feel if you must, but keep it safely confined to the sentence. Keep it tight. In Didion, these tactics make for an American genius. In my own writing, they represent elaborate cowardice, a way of getting half the story. I couldn’t be Joan Didion if I tried.

In an interview from the late 1970s, Didion professes her skepticism that human problems can be resolved by politics. “I’m hardly ever conscious of issues,” Didion says. “I mean they seem to me like ripples on an ocean.”

Unlike Didion, I am highly conscious of “issues,” which to me are only like ripples in the ocean insomuch as ripples lead to waves. I lack both the nihilism and the kind of romantic naivete to believe a world without government would be a utopia. Perhaps I could adopt this attitude if I hadn’t cried when Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election in 2016 or watched my state elect a self-identified progressive who now consistently votes in favor of the Trump administration’s war apparatus.

As it is, I am not a cowboy or a protester. I am only a writer.

*What follows is an excerpt from a conversation between Sarah Miller, Charlotte Hampton, and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is a supplement to Sarah’s essay.

Charlotte is the editor-in-chief of The Dartmouth for the next five days.

In our conversation, we discuss the journalist’s exploitative and indexical urges, Charlotte’s 2024 arrest while covering Hanover’s encampment for The Dartmouth, and the seriousness and salaciousness of running a campus newspaper.

Below is just a taste.*

ELAN Charlotte, tell us the story of your arrest.

CHARLOTTE Yeah. On May 1st, 2024, there was national upheaval on college campuses. Nothing had happened really at Dartmouth yet, but a small group of pro-Palestinian students set up an encampment — about 10 students on the Green. I was the head of the news section for The Dartmouth, our campus newspaper, at the time. So I was reporting on the encampment and working with some more junior reporters leading the coverage, and we were texting updates to the executive editors who were in the newsroom across the street. The night escalated because the police were called, and they told everyone to get off the Green, and there was a big showdown between this group of protesters and police officers who arrived on the scene. And it really escalated because probably hundreds of people eventually showed up and created a massive circle around a couple tents with the students inside.

They formed a line of protesters opposite this line of police officers and the College called in state troopers as well, which also escalated the situation because there were guns and massive armed vehicles. I talked with the editor-in-chief at the time, Emily Fagell, about what we wanted to do about this escalation — because they were telling everyone to get off the Green — and we decided that I would be the one reporter who stuck around with my photographer, Alesandra Gonzales. The school’s communications department also had a rep there, and she told me it was fine for me to be on the Green with her, so I was part of this small group of journalists — national journalists, too — there was a Boston Globe reporter there and a Valley News reporter, our local paper. My photographer at some point was lying down on the ground filming a history professor, Annelise Orleck, be brutalized by the police, and when Gonzales stood up, she got too close to the police officers, and they started to take her. Because she was my photographer, and she was younger than me, and she was my reporter, I said to the police, Don’t take her, she’s a member of the press, and that’s when they took me, too, because I was moving forward or engaging with them.

So we were both arrested despite the fact that we were wearing press identification — we were very clearly identifiable as press — and, yeah, we were taken to jail in zip ties. We were taken to the station, and we got our mugshots taken, and I used a prison bathroom, which has no mirror, and no seat, and no soap — evocative little details that live in my brain — and our editor came and picked us up and paid our bail, which was 40 bucks a piece, or 20 bucks a piece, I can’t remember.

Then the College did not drop our charges. Instead they released a statement saying, We understand the student journalists from The Dartmouth feel they were wrongly arrested, and we stand by their right to vindicate that belief through the legal process. That felt like a bit of a screw you to us at the time, even though their comms person had said we could be there with her.

We didn’t hear anything from the administration directly. I got a lawyer, and I went to meet with my lawyer in Norwich — I biked my little bike over to Norwich to meet with my lawyer to try to get my criminal trespass charges dropped — and as I was sitting with him, he actually got a call from the prosecutor saying my charges had been dropped. So the College dropped my charges after a little more than a week —after national free speech groups kind of rallied around me and my photographer and advocated for our charges to be dropped…

*Our essays are always online and always free, but we rely on individual donors to support the magazine.

Postscript, our interview series, can be accessed with a paid subscription. The $30 annual rate costs as much as a couple paperbacks or movie tickets. Our $250 founding members are our most ardent patrons, those who wish to advance our wildest editorial ambitions. If you read The New Critic and take any delight or solace in our project, please consider a paid subscription to this flesh-and-blood gen z magazine.*

THE YOUNG AMERICANS