Amazon’s data center on the outskirts of New Carlisle, Indiana, is already one of the largest in the United States and is still expanding. The townspeople have so far absorbed this profound transformation of what had been 1,200 acres of farmland.
Then lawyers for an enterprise called Western Hospitality Partners showed up. Despite the company’s reassuring name, WHP is identified online as a developer that focuses on data centers. The lawyers said that WHP intended to purchase 1,300 acres of farmland on the other side of New Carlisle from Amazon’s data center to construct a large data center for a client whose identity was not disclosed.
In March, the bipartisan town and county councils voted to deny zoning approval for the project. But I’ve been told that the lawyers, in their “suits and gold watches,” can still come back and reapply on behalf of the seller. Holding out against a willing seller of the land, farmers who have been in the area for generations, will not be easy.
Robert Bryce, who publishes a widely read Substack on energy issues, reports that since January 1, 2026, he has tracked 275 bans, rejections, restrictions, or moratoriums on data centers across the country. Bryce compares the backlash to what he has seen in opposition to “Big Solar and Big Wind.”
“The simple truth,” he writes, is that people “all across the US and around the world are fighting data centers because these projects are not providing sufficient value to their communities.”
That is his conclusion, as an expert. But based on my experience in New Carlisle, this is not the full story. As I wrote last year, New Carlisle’s experience has been that Amazon has dealt with the community with sufficient care to minimize the disruption of a major industrial development by showing interest in the town’s welfare.
And this has continued. Amazon has provided funding for a STEM program at the local high school, and the company supports community events at Christmas and Hometown Days during the summer. A community relations representative from Amazon has been working with the town to ensure that a cooperative spirit is maintained.
In my conversations with town leaders, they have told me that they recognize that to some extent this relationship is a tradeoff. Given the county’s interest in economic development, the right approach, they say, is to make the best of the new reality.
I chose not to try to contact Western Hospitality Partners for its version of its intention to build a data center, because the issue seemed to be moot. After the rejection by St. Joseph County, where New Carlisle is located, the company pivoted to a site in South Bend, which was already zoned for industrialization, according to the South Bend Tribune.
What made the New Carlisle people so determined to block the plan was the tone of the approach. Whom were the lawyers actually representing? Town officials told me they didn’t know. They said the looming scale of the project clearly threatened New Carlisle’s environment, the town’s proud culture, and its living standards.
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Artificial Intelligence is a very big deal by all accounts, with trillions of dollars being invested. AI is definitely an innovation comparable to electricity, automobiles, aviation, and telephones more than a century ago, and to the internet in the last fifty years.
What remains to be demonstrated is what it means for the people of New Carlisle. This summer’s Hometown Days had its traditional features: the parade down the town’s main street with the high school band, cheerleaders, and floats; the food fair in the town’s park; and a Wiffle Ball competition that attracted competitors from a distance.
The vibe in this corner of the Midwest, northern Indiana and Southwest Michigan, seems remote from the political and economic freneticism elsewhere in the country, in Washington, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and as far away at the Strait of Hormuz.
Michigan’s Democratic senatorial primary was portrayed as a major contest between the progressives, represented by the narrow winner, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, and the “establishment” candidate, Representative Haley Stevens. (Having watched the televised debate between the candidates, El-Sayed was more glamorous than Stevens, who tended to glower; that may have had something to do with the outcome.)
No doubt the United States has deep divisions along ideological lines, and media coverage of issues like the Iran war, support for Israel, the botched work on the Reflecting Pool, and the tirades coming from President Donald Trump are unavoidable.
But what I have particularly admired in the spirit of New Carlisle and the other small towns and cities in the region this summer are their time-honored summer routines and their determination to make the best of the inevitability of challenges and changes to their way of life.
So, for now, there will only be one big data center on the outskirts of New Carlisle, because the people who live there, through their elected representatives from both political parties, want to keep it that way. Grass roots democracy is still very much worth the effort of speaking out and casting your vote.
The next chapters in this series will describe the nonfiction categories I know best: memoir, biography, history, and books based on original reporting and journalism.
A logical place to start with writing books is memoir. Why? Because of all the nonfiction genres, it is far and away the most common. The only requirement is that it is a book written by you, about you, your recollections, what material you can amass to support your story, and your willingness to write knowing that you may reveal things that only those closest to you already know.
Every life story has an arc. Whatever your arc has been, there comes a point when an instinct or an encouragement to record your experiences becomes appealing.
I almost always urge writing a memoir, recognizing the challenges and limitations to be encountered. A memoir is a version of your life, as portrayed as only you can.
In setting up the framing for my own memoir, An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen (published in 2021), I wrote this:
“As an editor and publisher, I have encountered memoirs of all kinds — bracing, illuminating, mean, kind, boring, revelatory. I have published the memoirs of some of the most famous people in the world: presidents of the United States and Russia, first ladies, those responsible for waging war and peace, billionaire philanthropists, advisers to the high and mighty, political prisoners, celebrated athletes, and journalists of every sort. I have encountered authors who were too self-deprecating and others who were comically self-aggrandizing.
“I know from memoirs.”
I started considering a memoir years before it was published. I approached the topic as a reporter, which is what I am and always have been by instinct and curiosity. I went back through my own life, compiling as much detail as I could, chronologically and in themes: background, growing up, education, and the evolution of my career as a journalist and then in book publishing. I also wrote about family, community, and a chapter I called “Wrinkles,” in which I reflected on the inevitable aspects of life that are, in one way or another, complicated.
What was surprising and in its way exciting was to discover how much I was learning that I either had not known or had not explored beyond surface, family legends rather than the precise details. My parents, Marta and Jozef (in the U.S. they were Martha and Joseph) were Polish, Jewish, and from well-to-do, well-educated families — and, in my mother’s case, one that was somewhat celebrated.
A majority of American Jews, I had found over the years, tended to assume that they are descended from the parts of Russia and Eastern Europe known as the “Pale of Settlement,” where Jews lived mainly in villages and smaller cities and practiced simple trades. In historical terms, they seemed mostly similar and, to their American descendants, not terribly interesting. (This is a generalization. There were exceptions of course, but not a great deal of exploration in most cases, I believed.)
In this period, when violent pogroms and antisemitism reached a peak, millions of Jews managed to make their way to the United States. Their descendants told the stories from the time of their family’s arrival as immigrants. An upward trajectory in American society was the norm.
This was not the case for me, and with the help of genealogists and several relatives who had embarked on a similar quest, I traced my family back to the 1740s. For example, I found out where my family name, Osnos, came from — it is an Old Testament name derived from Asenat, the wife of the prophet Joseph. This was a revelation that enabled me to understand that other families had versions of the same name (Osnes, Osnoss) but were not related to us and may not even have been Jewish.
My mother’s family was exceptionally colorful, stretching across a spectrum from the founder of the French automobile company Citroen to friendship with the Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin in Zurich. A very gifted Polish cousin, Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, wrote In the Garden of Memory, a brilliant family portrait that became a classic in Poland (I eventually decided to publish it in the U.S.), which was invaluable in providing historical background.
Most important, I was able to explore the story of how my parents managed to leave Poland after the Nazi invasion of 1939 and eventually make it to India, where I was born, and then to the United States. I was four months old and in a basket when they arrived, so I grew up almost entirely in a country that my parents had come to in their late thirties.
I had only known the outlines of that story and had never really made the effort to learn more because my parents, my brother, and I were focused on our lives as they unfolded in the U.S., rather than what had come before.
In some respects, I learned that as close as we were, with the same DNA, we were a family with two different life-framing experiences that I was finally uncovering and the differences that resulted.
My first reader, Lisa Kaufman, a former editorial colleague and friend, told me that the manuscript was anecdotal, by which she meant shallow, when context and judgment were required. I sent the manuscript to a literary agent who had asked to see it, and her dismissive (I thought) opinion was that the book was meant for “family and friends,” and not to be widely read.
This is a frequent trope about memoirs, suggesting that the only people who would care enough to read it already know who you are. And yes, that is a core audience for any memoir. But deeper examination of any life story can unearth detail and emotions that make a difference in depth and potential interest.
I wrote additional drafts, adding as much detail as I could to expand the book’s substance. I would write these drafts in notebooks, with a pen, which felt less intimidating than to do so on a computer — and more personal than they would become on my laptop.
I then sent the manuscript to Paul Golob, another former colleague, whom I acknowledged in the book as having “extraordinary editorial finesse.” He gave the manuscript a thorough going-over, urging more of some things and less of others. Ultimately, I devised a way to publish the memoir, making it available for sale through an imprint my wife and I established called Platform Books LLC.
There are many more ways to distribute books now than is generally understood, and I will explain them later when I describe the publishing phase of the book process.
I made rules of my own: Be especially careful in describing people in the book who will eventually read it. Something as small as a typo in a name can be offensive to the person so misrepresented. Lists of people are tricky because only the people who might have been left off will really care. And, in my case, I avoided vengeance, settling old scores (even where it might have been deserved), by blurring the identifiers of my wrongdoers.
Satisfying as retribution can be, it too often veers into pettiness.
As to describing people’s personal attributes, I learned a lesson when I published a book by Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts called Speaking Frankly. I suggested that he describe the kind of people in the constituency that elected him, and he refused, telling me that few people are comfortable being portrayed in clichés about their class or appearance.
In describing other people, it’s often best to recognize that there are ways of writing that can satisfactorily make your point without overwhelming the story or being elusive, as long as they are, in your own perspective, honest.
I chose not to say things about living people that they did not already know about themselves.
And finally, I solicited a sensitivity read from a younger editor, a woman, recognizing that my terminologies may have become outdated. Terms like “girlish” or “pretty” have a different aura in the twenty-first century than they had in the past, and may seem demeaning rather than descriptive.
Fashion and style in language evolve, and what might once have been acceptable can become offensive.
I often recommend taking notes or keeping a journal, not necessarily for a memoir but because, with the precipitous decline of actual letter writing, preserving experiences for the future is a form of legacy. Consider how much of what we know about history comes from correspondence and diaries. I don’t think email will be anywhere as memorable.
Any self-examination carries the responsibility to be as completely honest as possible, realizing the risks entailed from revealing things that have previously remained private.
In the years since writing my memoir, and as a result of having done it, my understanding of character and temperament, including my own, has continued to develop and deepen. My sense is that this is often the case with those who write memoirs.
A memoir is a legacy rendered on your terms.
A reality that had been developing for years has become viral in the aftermath of the events of October 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis, precipitating a war in which tens of thousands of people in Gaza died and the territory was almost completely destroyed.
Israel, the nation established after the Holocaust, settled by remnants of the Jewish populations from Europe and, later, by Jews expelled from the Arab countries and immigrants from the Soviet Union and the United States, has achieved a reputation so contentious that it has become a toxic topic whenever and wherever it is encountered.
For decades, efforts to reconcile the policies and objectives pursued by the Israelis and the Palestinians have led inexorably to failure. Is it possible to find a reasonable way forward?
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It seems that every ethnic group, nationality, race, religion, and gender identity can claim to have suffered periods of harassment, bigotry, violence, and repression. But the Jews have experienced an especially well-defined history of antisemitism, culminating in the twentieth century with Adolf Hitler’s determination to eliminate them altogether, wherever they lived. In 1939, a majority of the global Jewish population, roughly 9.5 million people, lived in Europe. By 1945, that number had dropped to 3.8 million, after the systematic annihilation across Europe that came to be known as the Holocaust.
In 1948, the State of Israel was established in a region where Jews had historically lived until they were defeated and nearly all of them dispersed by the Romans almost two thousand years ago. Over the centuries, the population of the region became primarily Arab, Muslims and Christian.
Before World War I, the Ottoman Empire ruled this land, and following the war Palestine came under a British mandate from the League of Nations. A minority Jewish population had made its way to Palestine over time, but the numbers were soon restricted by Britain’s policy of tightly limiting Jewish emigration where Arabs were in the majority.
After Hitler took power in 1933 and demonized Jews as part of official state policy, hundreds of thousands of Jews tried to leave or were expelled from Germany and, later, Austria. But no country was willing to take them in any numbers, including the United States.
In the mid-1930s, confronted with Arab revolts against the British, a royal commission concluded that the mandate would have to end and proposed a division of Palestine into an Arab-led country with a separate space and administration for Jews living there. A similar formula was adopted by the United Nations in November 1947, when Resolution 181 established two states, one Arab and one Jewish, in the land that the British would soon vacate. The Jewish population of Palestine accepted the partition plan, and Israel became a state on May 14, 1948. The United States immediately recognized Israel’s independence, followed three days later by the Soviet Union, but the Arab world unanimously rejected the new state and any Jewish political presence in the Middle East. Five Arab nations declared war on Israel.
In the chaos that followed, about 750,000 people, about half of the Palestinians living in the territory of the British Mandate, were displaced, an event known in Arabic as the Nakba. This in turn ingrained enmities that to this day define Israeli-Palestinian relations, leading to violence that has had a profound impact there, along with consequences far from the land itself.
In 1967, following another major regional war, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, bringing millions of Palestinians directly under Israeli military rule and opening the door to Israeli settlements. Since then, recurring surges of violence, including Intifada uprisings and terrorism, were offset by what at the time seemed to be diplomatic breakthroughs. The Camp David Accords, the Oslo Accords, and Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan raised hopes that a general settlement of the abiding disputes was possible. None have achieved this goal.
In this summer of 2026, there no longer seems to be any meaningful momentum toward an agreement that could or would change the corrosive dynamics between Israel and the Palestinians.
So, what might actually make a difference in which the indisputable interests of the Israeli and Palestinian people take precedence over rhetoric and polemic?
New Leadership: The Camp David Accords were negotiated in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (who was assassinated three years later) and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, whose background in anti-British militancy and prominent position in the right wing of Israeli politics gave him the leeway to make peace with Israel’s most formidable enemy.
King Hussein of Jordan was pragmatic enough to make peace in 1994 with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by an Israeli right-winger a year later.
By contrast, Egypt’s current authoritarian president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, is a former military chief with no apparent urge to be a legendary peacemaker, as Sadat wanted to be.
The Palestinian administration on the West Bank, itself established as a result of the Oslo Accords, is now led by Mahmoud Abbas, who is too compromised and sclerotic to make history at this point. And Hamas (and its affiliates in the region) are battered but still refuse to concede defeat and agree to any form of disarmament.
Israel has been led for years by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has shifted the country’s government to the far right, supporting significant encroachments on Palestinian land by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. And since the 2023 Hamas attacks, the Israel Defense Forces have virtually destroyed Gaza, where about two million Palestinians live.
An upcoming Israeli election on October 27 might wrest power from Netanyahu and the far right because their dominance is less reflective of Israeli public opinion than their policies make it appear. (As a comparison, think of the Trump presidency and how much of the American electorate it really represents.) Deciphering the intricacies of Israeli politics beyond Netanyahu demands expertise that I do not have. In The New Yorker’s August 3 issue, the editor David Remnick, deploying exhaustive depth and knowledge, identifies Gadi Eisenkot, a retired chief of the Israel Defense Forces as having “the best chance of unseating” Netanyahu in the election. A paywall limits access to the piece to subscribers, but that is its main takeaway.
President Donald Trump’s engagement in the region has veered from dealmaking that provides financial benefit to his political allies and his own family to waging war against Iran in a complicated alliance with Netanyahu. In classic Trump style, his Board of Peace is more grandiose than meaningful.
Pecuniary Peace: In the first Trump term, the Abraham Accords normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco, with the expectation that the benefits of trade and commerce might deliver peace and prosperity to all sides.
Whatever else the Abraham Accords may have achieved, they showed that the prospect of financial and economic benefits to the parties could overcome ideological and religious divisions. Or, as Trump would argue, it demonstrated “The Art of the Deal.”
But the subsequent wars in Gaza, Iran, and southern Lebanon have undermined a trajectory of security that would be based on the traditional Middle Eastern interest in the making of money.
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The road to reason has become as rocky as the path to peace because of the scale of vituperation and violence. Can new leadership or lucrative trade actually make headway? Clearly, the current strategies are making matters worse.
On behalf of those of us with Jewish heritage I’d like to make this point: Out of the horrors of World War II, millions of Jews around the world, especially in the United States, earned a largely safe place in the societies where they lived and were accepted in ways they never really were before. How Jews have felt about Israel was always a consideration for them, with varying degrees of connection, depending on multiple aspects of family history, their experience in the United States, and the complexities of decades of religious intermarriage. In today’s circumstances, with Israel an unequivocal warrior state accused of war crimes and persecutions, discussion about Israel and Palestine invariably involves expletives and excoriation.
History has shown that while patterns persist, they can change. There were times in recent decades when that seemed possible in Israel and Palestine.
The first step toward reason is to recover our senses and recognize that outright victory for either of the antagonists would mean unfathomable suffering for peoples and a region that have already suffered far more than enough.
The essential point for all aspiring book writers to remember is that writing itself has no rules or guaranteed formulas. The only way for it to happen is by putting words together until they take form into sentences, paragraphs, and pages.
This is less obvious than it sounds.
As a publisher and now a demonstrably available adviser, I am often approached by would-be book writers who have set conditions for themselves before they plunge in fully. “I’ll write a proposal and see if I can get an agent,” is one version. This is a trap — and, at some level, a stall or an excuse.
If you have an idea, a vision, an instinct, or an urge, the best thing to do is to accept the prompt and start to write. If you set an objective and limit the excuses (for example, not starting because you need some initial validation from friends, family, agents, publishers, or other writers), you will recognize that there is nothing to lose by just forging ahead.
The water may be turbulent, but you need to jump in to find out. There is no reason to avoid those first tentative, uncertain, insecure emotions.
Years ago, I had a revelation when I encountered a prominent journalist I admired, who confessed: “Every time I put a piece of paper into the typewriter, I say, ‘Oh no, this time they will find me out.’”
This is known as the “imposter syndrome.” It is routine and in its way a reminder not to underestimate the effort necessary to write. My related version of this insight is to realize that if I consider something I have written to be as good as it can be, that is almost certainly not the case.
Nonfiction writing is an extremely broad category that includes just about everything that has a basis in facts, from silly to solemn, from the trivial to the magisterial. Anyone can write nonfiction, just as anyone can draw a picture. There has to be a place to start, the initial foray in which every writer is equal.
If your objective is to write a book, the place to start is to ask yourself, “What is this book about?” Try to summarize its intent in a possible title and a few summary paragraphs. This is the writer’s equivalent of an “elevator pitch.” The pitch by no means guarantees what the book will actually become. But it will help you focus. Staring at a blank page without knowing what you intend to say is a significant obstacle.
Books are defined by genre, “a category of composition.” My experience is mainly in memoirs, autobiographies (there is a difference), biographies, histories, reporting, investigation, and essays. Joan Didion’s books were combinations of memoir, reporting, and essays. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was investigative and revelatory about the environment. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men described an investigation into the Watergate affair that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation as president. It was also their memoir of the experience.
Writers like David McCullough, Ron Chernow, and Doris Kearns Goodwin have published immersive bestselling biographies that combine the consummate detail of the best historians with narrative momentum and accessibility.
Journalists generally investigate current or recent events and interpret the news, politics, wars, business, celebrity, sports, all of which provide endless material. And most of these subjects evolve over time. So, when writing about a subject and wondering whether it will remain topical, it helps to remember that it can be placed into the context of the time and still make sense.
One of the most venerable topics is scandal. Scandals are enticing because something or someone is getting comeuppance. Many years ago, I was publishing a book called Scandal, about Washington. The author thought we were taking too long to get it from manuscript to sale. She was concerned that there would be no more scandals. I assured her that there will always be scandals.
In fact, over the years since the book was published, in the early 1990s, the pace of scandals has quickened almost to a frenzy.
The author and I have laughed about her fret ever since.
While every writer will eventually devise a strategy of how best to get the words written, it is worth taking the time to develop a strategy based on the experience of others. Brian Lamb, the estimable founder of C-SPAN, hosted a Sunday night program for many years called Booknotes, in which he would interview authors of nonfiction for an uninterrupted hour and would query his guests about their writing process. I found it fascinating and instructive.
Is the room well-lit or subdued to avoid distraction? Should phones be put in a locked drawer? Does it make sense to take a break every hour? One of my writer friends would stay at work until a thousand words were written, ready for revision the next morning before setting out for the next thousand.
Carl Sandburg, the great poet and biographer of Abraham Lincoln, lived for years in southwest Michigan, where his wife raised goats. When the weather permitted, he would write outside in the nude. Whatever works.
Everyone can write, but technique and talent are the key components. Talent is usually inherent, but it can be developed and honed through commitment and acquired confidence. Greatness often reflects decades of very hard work.
Over many years, I have devised a strategy for myself of drafting on paper the point I intend to make and then assembling the material I need to fulfill the objective. If I don’t know where I’m going, I’m unlikely to get there.
On the other hand, ideas can take form or adjust shape as they are expressed. Like sculpture, writing can be molded once the basic ingredients are gathered.
The historian and journalist Rick Atkinson, whose multivolume histories of World War II and the American revolution have been blockbusters, described in a C-SPAN interview his prodigious outlining process: he amasses and organizes thousands of facts and references that in turn become the narrative. This makes the writing process much more efficient, he says.
Technique is also what drafts are about. A “rough” draft gets material to a starting line or beyond. I urge writers to separate in their minds the published outcome from the drafting. If your focus is on impressing an agent, securing a publisher, or basking in acclaim, you are adding pressure to the process that is both unhelpful and unrealistic.
The best way to write is to write for the explicit purpose (and initially the sole purpose) of putting what you have to say into a form where it can be read.
If you are among the hundreds of thousands of people who have read Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, or the millions more who have heard about the devastating and infallible portrait it presents, then an account of life in a corner of southwest Michigan may seem too remote from the center to be truly relevant. The fact is that most Americans’ lives are far removed from events in and around the White House. But they do have to deal with the consequences and the aftermath.
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Flag Day is a documentary about what the people of Three Oaks, a town in southwest Michigan’s Berrien County, call the “largest Flag Day celebration in the world.” A Wall Street Journal review of the film said it is a “literally . . . flag-waving” tribute to the “immensely pleasing nature of small-town pride.”
As it happens, I saw Flag Day in a screening at the Vickers Theatre in Three Oaks, a few miles from where my family gathers for vacation on Lake Michigan. Coming from Washington, D.C., I had to reconcile the spirit on display with Donald Trump’s expropriation of June 14 as his birthday and red-white-and-blue banners adorning a bloody UFC cage fight on the White House lawn.
Oh well.
The documentary captures the array of locals: farmers on tractors, bearded veterans and bikers, baton twirlers and bagpipers, Miss Three Oaks, the gay shopkeeper who emigrated from Peru, the all-Black “Soul Stompers” from nearby Michigan City, and the onlookers of all ages and sizes in well-worn beach chairs waving small flags of their own.
The continuity of the celebration was reassuring. But reflecting on it later, I was thinking of something else. Berrien County is actually a composite of multiple strands of America’s fabric, communities of ethnic, racial, and income disparity with varying political preferences. There are families who settled on farms in the mid-1800s and those known locally as FIPs (F*&^0$% Illinois People), who have bought up the multi-million-dollar architecturally designed homes along the lake.
My wife’s family, originally from Chicago, has come here for a century and now numbers about one hundred across four generations, most of whom arrive in early August for “Peak Week.” (I was admitted more than fifty years ago and have managed to hang on.)
Much about Berrien County is enduring. Lake Michigan is forever spectacular, with water rising and falling a bit each year, as it has for millennia. The public beach in New Buffalo and the adjoining marina have been recognized as one of the country’s best inland resort destinations. The lines around Oink’s, the main ice cream parlor in “New Buff,” never seem to diminish the excitement of choosing from dozens of flavors.
Camp Sokol on the lake is one of the last remaining collection of cabins and shared facilities that draw families with Slavic and Baltic ancestry who came to Chicago long ago but still recognize their originating identities.
On the whole, the economic, political, and social spectrum of Berrien County reflects American norms. The median family income of about $65,000 is in line with the national number, spanning from hardscrabble farming and urban stresses in the small city of Benton Harbor to the waterfront wealth. On the Zillow real estate site, the top price for a home on the water is $9.975 million.
In 2024, Donald Trump won 53 percent of the vote in Berrien County, but my guess is that many of the FIP voters might have reduced that margin. This is an election year in Michigan, with the contests for governor, senator, the House, and state legislators mostly close enough to be of national interest. Primaries are August 4.
The additions in recent years of cannabis outlets, breweries, wineries, and the Pokagon tribe’s Four Winds Casino have doubtless added to county revenues and recreational choices. As elsewhere, there are local disputes over the impact of short-term rentals and the looming possibility of AI data centers, which have so far been held off.
As in most parts of the country, there are those in the county with less than they need, and that is where the impact of what is happening in Washington probably matters most.
Benton Harbor is a small majority-Black city in Berrien County that has an ingrained history of troubles that continue to defy improvement. Here is what I wrote about the school system, where virtual teachers are replacing the ones in classrooms. In less than a year, the latest superintendent has resigned, after clashes with the school board and students, adding to the sense of disarray.
Benton Harbor has a poverty rate of 40 percent, more than triple the national average, which means that deep funding cuts and tightened eligibility for SNAP, Medicaid, and other benefits will be especially felt there as they are take effect.
On the outskirts of Benton Harbor is La Perla, a grocery/restaurant hub for the local Hispanic community, which is about 5 percent of the county population. Virtually every product for sale comes from Mexico or Central America. You probably won’t get more authentic Mexican food anywhere else this side of the border. The walls are adorned with schedules for buses to destinations across Mexico. The only flags on display are Mexican.
A June report in the local Harbor Country News said that more than sixty people had been picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement this year after being held in the county jail under an agreement with the Sheriff’s Department.
At a town hall meeting about ICE, an attendee said (speaking through a translator), “Friends are scared to go to work, to go to restaurants to be out in public,” adding, “We just want to work.”
So, while the celebrations of “small town pride” in Berrien County resonate in this 250th year of the United States of America, for those who for one reason or another are aware of the depredations prevalent at the center of American power, the mood carries some shadows.
This is the first of a series that will run biweekly, intended to describe, explain, and unravel myths and mysteries about the process of writing a book — from vision to completion and the all-important means of reaching readers in today’s enormous array of options. The focus is nonfiction, because that is my background, but there should be useful insights about the process for writers of fiction also.
Books are ubiquitous and elusive. Everyone who can do so has read books, either by choice or obligation. Almost everyone with enough space has books on shelves. Books have been part of human life, as long as there have been people creating and reading them. Scrolls were followed by codex manuscripts, the format that still exists today, with pages to turn, alongside digital, audio, and a variety of graphic formats.
Books are resilient. If discarded, they can be replaced as long as the words or pictures have been saved.
Books are also elusive because the making of them, especially the writing, defies easy explanation or description. Every book is the property of a writer; while artificial intelligence programs can conjure book-length texts, their output is derived from words and ideas that originated with a person who has put them together.
There was a long-held belief that by putting a finger on almost any address in a phone book, you would encounter someone with a story about his or her life or experiences that is worth sharing. Phone books are no longer the popular registry they once were. But the principle remains that if prompted or motivated, every person can write a book.
This is why books are ubiquitous and why they are elusive. They are everywhere and as different from one another as each of us chooses to compose them.
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As an editor, publisher, and writer myself, I am regularly asked about how to write a book. My answer is that if you write one page a day for 365 days you will have a book. There is no such quip for what should be in the book and what to do with it once you have the pages in hand.
That is what this series is meant to be: a guide based on decades of experience in every aspect of the process, from inception to completion, one that reflects insights and wisdom from the scores of people I have worked with and learned from.
And here is a caveat. While from childhood I was an avid reader, my focus was almost always nonfiction. At the Saint Agnes branch of the New York Public Library in the 1950s, my favorites were Random House’s admirable Landmark history series, notable because the books were written by established authors in versions accessible to children on the brink of adolescence.
I have read fiction over the years but never felt qualified to edit novels or short stories, although I published a number of such books edited by colleagues of mine. And I have never tried to write from just my imagination.
Still, there is considerable overlap in how genres are published, publicized, and marketed, so to that extent there should be insights worth considering from my experience as a publisher. The mysteries of creating fiction are best explored and explained by the people who understand them far better than I do.
I am a journalist by background. I became a newspaper editor, a book editor, a publisher, an author, and then a publishing entrepreneur. I am not an academic, a scholar, an economist, or a philosopher. If I show a bias toward journalists as writers, that is because I have found that writing well for a general audience is challenging, and many specialists could do well by remembering that.
I will not presume to tell specialists how to become sufficiently expert to write books in their respective fields. But no matter who the writer is, every book starts with a blank page and then through stages toward the goal of reaching readers. What surprises me is how often I encounter writers of experience who do not understand the publishing process, which results in frustration, confusion, and disappointment.
Inevitably, there will be publishers, agents, editors, and booksellers who may disagree with my descriptions and prescriptions about how this process unfolds. By nature, such descriptions will always be in some measure a matter of considered opinion.
These, then, are mine.
The writing of a book is not inherently technical (like building, say, a computer), although there are many ways of researching and committing thoughts to words — on screens or, as so many writers do first, in notebooks with favorite pens or pencils. Each writer needs to decide what works for himself or herself, knowing that strategies will evolve through time.
There are morning writers (I am one), nighttime writers. Writers who spend hours in the process. Others (or as I heard the biographer Stacy Schiff say) who write until the caffeine wears off. What is a good day’s work? That depends. The novelist Hortense Calisher, who was the college professor who managed to engage me with fiction as no one else ever had, said she would set a daily goal of one good paragraph. Nonfiction writers in full gear can turn out thousands of words at a sitting. The work of editing your own work and then revising, based on editorial mandates, is again widely variable.
There is no one formula to accomplishing the writing challenge.
The point is that each of us starts out as a beginner and over time, with effort, can develop the means to produce pages, using the technique that seems to work best for each person, some that come instinctively and some with guidance and support.
Ultimately, the quality of written work comes down to inherent skill, talent, and commitment and is going to be judged by other people, who will be knowledgeable or ignorant, supportive or hostile. Writing for others to read delivers a considerable range of criticism and acclaim. And the writer needs to be aware of this inevitability and accept it.
When it comes to the publishing process itself, many writers — too many, I think — don’t understand or misunderstand what is happening to their book, which is why I so often hear expressions of this kind:
I can’t find an agent.
I can’t find a publisher.
The publisher didn’t promote my book.
I got great reviews, but the book didn’t sell.
Why didn’t the publicist get me more bookings?
Everyone says I should hire an outside publicist because the publisher doesn’t know how to get the attention I want.
Why don’t I get reports I understand from the publisher (or my agent)?
Why can’t my friends and my family find my book in stores?
Why is my book on a remainder table?
And there is the issue of remuneration, the crucial matter of getting paid for your effort and performance. Questions like these: What is an advance? How are royalties calculated? Is it true that most books sell fewer than a thousand copies? Is it possible to live on what most writers earn? Can you make money if you self-publish?
For as many of these issues as possible, I will explain the process and answer the questions. Undoubtedly, some answers will raise more questions.
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Anticipating that not every question will be addressed in the chapters to come, I am adding a new feature to the Substack, a subscriber chat:
This is meant to be a conversation space accessible to subscribers — a place for comments, questions, and the kind of observations we all have and might want to express if there were a place to do that. Comments are fine, but I’ve observed that over time comments sections tend to become more for denunciation than discussion. The principle of the chat is to engage less publicly than X, Bluesky, Threads, or the other social media platforms and to do so with people who have shown enough interest to follow or subscribe.
I came to Substack after decades writing in and for many other places. This is different because only people who have asked for it will get it. This suggests that we have common interests and instincts, and here is a means of sharing them.
Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.
Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.
That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.
One great conundrum of this era has to be what level of depredation is disqualifying for public recognition or approval.
Would contemporary social order have been better served if Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez had not been the effective advocates of profound social change that they certainly were?
No.
Yet both men, from confirmed accounts, were womanizers whose courage and leadership went along with behavior that was reprehensible but never so widely rumored or public that they had to deny what was actually true.
I had this thought driving past MLK and Cesar Chavez Boulevards in the Northwest recently, knowing that across the country Chavez’s name has been coming down from pillars and posts this year.
More than a half century ago King was the object of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s vengeful surveillance and has nonetheless endured as a symbol of civil rights and justice in the United States. While not absolved, King is very much an icon.
Chavez’s stature has been irreparably damaged by recent revelations in the New York Times that he abused women and girls in the 1960s while winning acclaim for leading the United Farm Workers’ campaign for reforms. I was surprised to see his name still adorning a major thoroughfare in Oregon.
In rendering judgment on politicians and male public figures, in particular, standards can be confounding. These days, private and unofficial misbehavior seems to have more impact when exposed after the fact, rather than when encountered and even visible firsthand.
Despite what we have learned since, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez were heroic in most other respects. By contrast, the current president of the United States is demonstrably compromised. He is a convicted felon for falsifying business records, has been found liable for sexual abuse, and was twice impeached by the House of Representatives.
Will history eventually provide a retrospective verdict on Donald Trump, as it has with King and Chavez and so many other notables whose sins were tolerated in their eras of renown?
When Trump finally descends into ignominy, what will happen to his triumphal arch and the other celebrations of his life that he is demanding to have built and displayed?
Ironies abound. Bill Clinton’s legacy was diminished by his affair with the twenty-two-year-old Monica Lewinsky while he was president. In his 1992 campaign Clinton was mocked for saying he did not “inhale” marijuana in his younger days. Partly as a result of this deflection, he earned a reputation for being undisciplined and devious after he falsely denied a relationship with Lewinsky.
Clinton eventually acknowledged his mistakes, paid the fines, and accepted the punishments he received. His reputation has never really recovered, and I suspect he knows that this will be a permanent historic stain.
The paradox of Trump’s character is how disciplined he has proved to be in certain respects. Should Trump ever have to say he does not “inhale” cannabis or tobacco, there is actually no evidence that he ever has smoked anything.
And having watched his brother die of alcoholism, he has never, to anyone’s knowledge, had a drink.
Donald Trump defiantly trashes norms of propriety and talks to and about women in ways that are astonishingly vulgar. Somehow his refusal to acknowledge any flaw in his behavior or to apologize for any verified failure of judgment has, perversely, been a form of self-discipline and apparently a source of his lasting strengths.
Putting the noble aspirations of King and Chavez and the political values of Bill Clinton in the same sentences with the egregious public presence of Trump raises this so far unanswerable question: How does he get away with it?
Are insistent denials and outright lies the way to avoid retribution? Will Trump ever — in our times or in the conclusions of history — be fully held to account?
Denial was Richard Nixon’s strategy as the Watergate scandal unfolded (memorably asserting, “I am not a crook”), but denial became impossible after he was heard on his own White House tapes authorizing criminal activity.
The irony of Trump’s inviolability so far is especially striking because of our fascination with revelation and exposure. Trump is openly ignoring the law and accepted practice; maybe by being so blatant he can actually get away with more than what he is doing in secret.
There have always been explorations of famous lives in which invariably human flaws are present. What is different now is that scrutiny is so intense and that the punishments are so variable.
When rationalizations and fumbling explanations are offered in response to allegations, they do not generally prevail. Trump doesn’t even bother to make them.
In recent decades, revelations about prominent men’s mistreatment of women have undone reputations and livelihoods, most famously the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and the financier Jeffrey Epstein. Yet even though credible allegations of sexual abuse by Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh were, briefly, sensations, both men were confirmed to the Supreme Court after insisting angrily that these allegations were false.
Donald Trump was elected president a second time in 2024, by a wider margin than his first victory in 2016, after juries in criminal and civil cases while he was out of office determined that he was guilty of or liable for the charges against him. Now, as president, the Supreme Court has given him almost complete immunity from prosecution for his actions in office.
Trump has convinced voters to support him with emphatic denials and has managed to turn the viciousness and violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 — one of the most examined episodes in history — into an anomaly in which rioters are, in his terms, “beautiful” people.
The outrageous daring of these rejections of reality has proved to be a superpower for Trump.
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Coming in September is Kai Bird’s brilliant biographical dissection (written with Susan Goldmark) of the lawyer Roy Cohn, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump. The book shows how Cohn also used an extraordinary ability to deny, deny, deny until he could no longer do so and died in disgrace.
Roberta Rubin has just published Turning Pages: The Life and Times of a Bookseller, an entertaining memoir that gives particular attention to her years as the proprietor of The Book Stall, an independent bookstore in Winnetka, Illinois, outside Chicago.
Roberta was on my personal team of “All Stars,” the booksellers around the country whom I have considered among the most important people in publishing for me to know and nurture. A listing would not be sufficient to express my admiration, so let me put it this way:
If there is a bookstore near you where you browse and buy, attend author talks or book groups, and, these days, have coffee, Roberta and her national compañeros are for you.
Roberta writes that when her children were grown and moving out, she bought into a local bookstore and began to learn the eccentric business of connecting books to readers while also being able to pay the rent.
In 1987, she became the sole owner of The Book Stall and moved the store to downtown Winnetka, what is known in the publishing world as a “carriage trade” community, where classic retail holds its own against the dominance of national chains. By the 1990s the store was being recognized for its quality, and in 2012 it was named Publishers Weekly’s “Bookstore of the Year.”
In 2013, Roberta sold the store and turned it over to a new owner, Stephanie Hochschild, after she was confident that the character and commitments of the store she had built and cherished would be maintained. And, from all accounts, it has been.
Roberta then went on to be a founder of the American Writers Museum in Chicago and was honored with a room named for her. She was abashed but not above recognizing — as those of us who have been around for so long finally do — that we like not being overlooked as we age into seniority.
Owning an independent bookstore has a noble and romanticized aura. It is very hard work. I recently profiled Politics and Prose, my local independent store in Northwest Washington, D.C. My praise was expansive, but I did not really reflect how the owners Bradley Graham and Lissa Muscatine cannot ever take for granted — not for one day — the store’s success.
The margins in bookstores are tight and always will be. You will not become rich being virtuous, but what Roberta’s book makes so emphatically clear is the joy and satisfaction that comes with bringing books to readers of all ages.
I have written many times about the evolving way books are being sold, repeating my mantra, “Good Books. Any Way You Want Them. Now.” What this means is that contemporary publishing provides books in print, digital, and increasingly audio versions. Every print book with an ISBN, the universal identifier, can be bought in any store by ordering it, even if it is not on the shelves. This is a major improvement over the frustration of not finding a book you want to read.
The thousands of independent bookstores around the country — as distinct from Amazon’s online ordering — emphasize print books. Their specialty is experience, the pleasures of a welcoming venue, a helpful staff, and a destination where authors come to talk about their books.
Roberta’s description of store appearances by, among many others, Robert Parker, Jimmy Carter, and Isabel Allende, offers a glimpse of how much this experience can add to the writer’s sense of accomplishment and the connection to readers.
I published a number of Andy Rooney’s books. He originally resisted doing events, insisting that his policy was “I write them. You sell them.” But I persuaded him that he might enjoy the effort, and we traveled to Chicago together and did a sold-out event, hosted by The Book Stall at the Union League Club.
Roberta charmed Andy, as she doubtless did so many other authors.
Coming Soon
The team at Platform Books LLC, our small enterprise that publishes this Substack as Peter Osnos Public Affairs Press, is preparing a major continuing project to be called “Books! Writing, Editing, Publishing, and Reaching Readers.” We will launch a biweekly series in a matter of weeks, taking on the subject from an author’s early vision and ambition through the process of reaching a reader.
When that’s done, and with material reflecting the feedback that the series receives, it will become a book (in print and ebook editions) to be distributed nationally by Rivertowns Books. We will also launch an accompanying website from Deena Warner Design, which will include newsy updates from publishers and authors on nonfiction books and, importantly, a way to ask questions about process and get helpful (we hope) answers.
By making this announcement, we are committed to having the project take shape over the next year. Please let us know what will be useful.
Books are an eternal part of civilization. Publishing evolves and, oh yes, it is also a business.
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