5 signs of false modesty that make you look worse to editors than honestly owning your achievements — Bestselling authors are among the most modest people I’ve interviewed as journalist. No matter how famous they are, they typically had a lot of rejection before they struck gold, and they remember all their panning in icy waters for acceptances. Compared with politicians and star athletes, writers are a reporter’s…

An old hate group has found a new target in LGBTQ rights, and I learned why after it hit my street — One morning seven years ago, an ugly sight greeted residents of my small Alabama town, which journalists often call one of the prettiest in the South. During the night, the Ku Klux Klan had tossed hundreds — perhaps thousands — of anti-transgender flyers into our driveways and onto our well-tended…

Why Peter Rabbit’s creator deserves a get-out-of-jail-free card — Poor Beatrix Potter. Until recently, the creator of Peter Rabbit has avoided getting hauled into court by the academic police who patrol the literary highways, looking to arrest long-dead authors who violate cultural norms that didn’t exist in their day. But no more. A few months ago, a postcolonial studies…

Ronan Farrow shows why we needed the #MeToo movement in a book based on Pulitzer-winning stories — Harvey Weinstein was Hollywood’s apex predator, the man at the top of a food chain that sparked the #MeToo movement. He ate young women alive, figuratively speaking: actresses, employees, and others unlucky enough to cross his path during his long career as a producer and studio head. All of it…

Five alternatives to two words that are worse than none at all — Certain phrases in queries are red flags for editors. One is “published author,” as in “I’m a published author.” Every buying editor I know has seen it — and groaned — at some point. The obvious problem with “I’m a published author” is that it’s redundant. To editors at major…

What ‘60 Minutes,’ a Nobel laureate and others learned — When I was in elementary school, my family went on Sundays to Our Lady of Lourdes, a stately red brick church in a New Jersey suburb. My religious education was so haphazard that I had only a dim notion that its name referred to the French town where in 1858…

5 ways creators can make strange incidents believable by learning from authors like Jane Austen — Once when I was just starting out as a writer, a magazine was a few days late in sending a check, and I wasn’t sure how I’d eat until it arrived. To burn off my frustrations, I went for walk in Carl Schurz Park, near my apartment in Manhattan, and…

A new book about the first black president of South Africa and his wife reconsiders their shifting legacy — This is the third in a series of occasional posts about new or classic books I’m reading and why I chose them. On My Nightstand The book: Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage (Knopf, 2023) The author: Jonny Steinberg, a leading South African journalist and former professor of African studies at Oxford…

10 questions that can help you tell if you were born into the right generation — Not long ago, a boomer friend sent along Kathie Farnell’s amusing memoir of growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, Duck and Cover. She hoped I’d review it, but I hesitated. Would I do boomers any favors by reminding the world of the youthful excesses Farnell recalls? Does anybody really…