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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There is so much relentless attention now to the perils in virtually every realm of our lives that it is a particular pleasure to highlight two national competitions that prove that talent, ambition, and commitment among the young are doing fine.
These take place annually at about this time of year and are expressions of unadulterated joy and amazing skill among those between ten and eighteen years old all across the country.
They are the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the finals of which took place on May 28 in Washington, D.C., and was broadcast and streamed live in prime time. The other one is the National High School Musical Theater Awards, with the finals taking place in New York on June 22 and streamed live on YouTube.
Known as the Jimmy Awards, they were started in 2009 by the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera and Nederlander Alliances, a division of the Nederlander Organization, and were named after the theater owner James “Jimmy” Nederlander. The idea was based on the Gene Kelly Awards at the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera, honoring the hometown star of stage, screen, and dance.
We spotted an ad in the New York Times in 2018, and as fans of musical theater we bought tickets. The performance is always on a Monday night at the Minskoff Theatre, where The Lion King is staged the rest of the week.
Every seat in the large theater was full, and we quickly realized that the rest of the audience consisted of family and friends who had traveled from around the country to root enthusiastically for someone. We were there rooting for everyone and enjoying the show, which we thoroughly did.
We went back several times (alas, the 2020 performance was cancelled because of Covid-19), and when we could no longer get tickets, we watched from home, which to be honest is less thrilling, but nonetheless impressive.
The competition draws about 180,000 boys and girls from sponsoring theater groups and high schools in regional competitions, and more than one hundred finalists are invited to New York for a week of intensive rehearsals with professional coaches, culminating in a fully staged show consisting of group and ensemble displays of singing and dancing drawn from established musical theater repertoires.
The judges choose about a dozen kids to perform solos, and one boy and one girl are chosen as the champions, with prizes also awarded for best dancer, best performance in an ensemble, and most improved in the week. The two champions each receive a $25,000 scholarship, with smaller awards given to the finalists and other category winners. And two teachers are also honored.
The host is a Broadway star, and previous winners who are currently performing on stages around the nation are guests.
What is amazing is that in the space of a week the show is polished to a spectacular shine. Film clips of the nominees rehearsing and visiting the Great White Way and environs reflect the intensity of the preparation and the fun of being together with other teenagers of consummate talent.
And lest there be any doubt, the high schoolers reflect the full spectrum of the country’s population, an inspiring mélange of sizes, shapes, and colors. This means that there are tens of thousands of kids for whom musical theater is a favored activity.
One thing no one does while performing is look at their phones or other screens.
The spelling bee has a different vibe. The contestants are younger, not yet out of the eighth grade or fifteen years old. In its one-hundred-year history, supported as a nonprofit by the E.W. Scripps Company, the rules have evolved in detail but are essentially the same, with regional bees in the course of the year leading to the finals, where successive rounds winnow the group until there is one champion hoisting a very large trophy and taking home a $50,000 prize.
After the 2019 competition, in which eight contestants tied for the title, a spell-off was designed to determine a single winner. In 2026, the two finalists correctly spelled, respectively, thirty-two and twenty-five words in ninety seconds. This was every bit as exciting as a last-minute three-pointer in a basketball championship or a last-second field goal in football.
Watching these kids handle the pressure in the prime-time two-hour telecast is, to use a term I suspect is familiar to all of them, awesome.
To get to these finals requires prodigious commitment by the contestants and their families. They are at Olympic-level proficiency, which doubtless requires as much training, discipline, and support as the greatest of quadrennial medal champions.
Because the record of winners includes so many South Asians, mainly with Indian backgrounds, there are assumptions about their being naturally gifted. I have no idea whether this is the case, but this year’s nine finalists included a twelve-year-old Irish-American from Texas, a Black speller from Maryland, and a mixture of others, with the spell-off between two boys of demonstrably Indian heritage.
So, my fellow Americans, let’s celebrate how many youths there are doing these astounding things.
And I should add that a favorite social media feature in late spring are those commencement pictures posted by families on Facebook and other sites.
Yes, let us rejoice where we can.
Early voting in Maryland’s state primaries begins on June 11. We live in Bethesda and this will be our first local election since moving here a year ago. In anticipation and for insight I asked a group of friends whom we know to be civic minded if they could name their member of Congress, state senator, state delegates, county executive, and County Council members.
Who, I wondered, might be their choices among those who were serving?
Representative Jamie Raskin, a formidable House Democrat whose opposition role in the Donald Trump years has been consistently important, was admired by most of those questioned. The other answers were fragmentary to nothing at all — clueless, really.
These are all taxpayers and homeowners; several have children in county schools. They are knowledgeable about national and international issues because of their careers and readership of major publications. Most of them have been voting for decades.
So what did I learn from the quiz?
If, as the late Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill used to say, “All politics is local,” then the reality is that too many of us are essentially disengaged from the politics of where we live. That is, if not a complete surprise, definitely a problem with consequences.
Let’s focus on one aspect of this finding: The lack and depth of meaningful media coverage of the election. The League of Women Voters distributes a Voter’s Guide by mail to people who are registered. We have received a small number of campaign circulars and endorsements. We don’t watch local television news and so are spared the advertising, much of which is meant to disparage candidates anyway.
The Banner is Maryland’s most important statewide news organization and has added coverage of Montgomery County. As the Baltimore Banner it was launched in 2022 by the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, a nonprofit established by Stewart W. Bainum Jr. In its first weeks it produced a state voter guide which got 70,000 page views and hundreds of new subscribers.
The CEO is Bob Cohn, whose impressive resume includes leadership of The Atlantic and The Economist. The editor in chief is Audrey Cooper, who had previously been editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and New York’s public radio station WNYC.
Coverage in the Banner has received a George Polk Award and a Pulitzer Prize. There are now one hundred journalists, with bureaus around the state. Cohn’s numbers for subscribers are 82,000, with revenue coming from philanthropy (primarily the Venetoulis Institute), subscriptions, and advertising, with a smaller amount coming from events.
By every measure, the Banner is off to a great, ambitious, and determined start, with an emphasis on start.
Based on my quiz alone, I can’t claim to know the extent of indifference or ignorance about state and county politics across the broader population. But the truth is that there is little coverage in the major media of anything about Montgomery County.
Missing are stories across the range of what constitutes life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in twenty-first-century America, including education, sports, crime, and culture. We live in a place about which we largely know less than we know about the shenanigans down Pennsylvania Avenue.
I have read what there is on the elections, and I’ll make decisions that will be more guesses than a sense of the candidates, aside from Raskin and the leader of the ticket, Governor Wes Moore, the charismatic Democrat on many lists for the presidential contest in 2028.
Here’s a capsule history of what journalism in Maryland used to be. The Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun were the major state newspapers, with an understanding that they would essentially divide circulation among the counties. In 1968 and 1969, when I was a Maryland reporter for the Post, the county bureaus were well staffed with energized young reporters and the statehouse team was respected and influential. The Washington Star was the afternoon competition.
A major Montgomery County weekly was one of a string of newspapers that surrounded the District of Columbia in Maryland and Virginia. (Bob Woodward scored his first scoops in the Montgomery paper.) Smaller cities and towns had newspapers as well. Peter A. Jay and his wife, Irna, for example, owned the paper in Havre de Grace after leaving the Post, and Peter wrote the Sun’s most admired column for years.
My solution is a notion called “Back to the Future.” I have written that the Washington Post can restore its diminished profile by reframing itself as a global and metro paper, serving the region of 6.5 million people who no longer have any comprehensive news source — this in the capital region of the nation!
Moreover, Maryland’s advertisers, subscribers, and philanthropies should not have to be badgered into supporting the Banner, which can expand only with more money. It is in their interest in every way.
There is more than enough money in this metropolitan area to support the Post, the Banner, and other worthy journalistic efforts that come along. Jeff Bezos sure knows how to make, spend, and lose money. (I wonder what that exploded Blue Origin rocket cost?)
Just for the record, the only full answer I got to my pop quiz came from a friend in my neighborhood. He put the issue of state senator, et al., into the AI program Claude.
Your address in Bethesda, MD places you in U.S. Congressional District 8, Maryland Legislative District 16, and Montgomery County Council District 1.
Federal Level
Congressional Representative: Jamie Raskin (D)
State Level (Maryland General Assembly)
State Senator: Sara Love (D)
State Delegates: Marc Korman (D), Sarah Wolek (D), and Teresa Woorman (D)
Local Level (Montgomery County)
County Executive: Marc Elrich (D)
District Council Member: Andrew Friedson (D) (District 1)
At-Large Council Members: You are concurrently represented by the four county-wide at-large members:
Gabe Albornoz (D)
Shebra Evans (D)
Evan Glass (D)
Will Jawando (D)
That is the right answer.
But it is useless data unless you know something worth knowing about these folks when you cast your vote.
What is happening at and to “60 Minutes” is a moment for journalism unlike any other. The greatest news program in broadcast history is being taken over by two people who have never worked in television news to reinvent CBS’s most honored and successful program in ratings, profit and quality, all the ways that count. My own engagement with Hewitt and his stellar team was very close. Aside from publishing Don’s memoir described below, I did Morely Safer’s Vietnam memoir, Andy Rooney’s World War II memoir and many of his later books. I had an epic shouting match with Don and Mike Wallace when they said they would not run the interview they had done with a Chinese man who had smuggled out secret transcripts of Politiburo meetns leading to the 1989 student massacre at Tiananmen Square which I was publishing as a book. The piece did run and Don and after it aired Sunday night called to tell me it was “the lowest rated piece in the history of the show.” We had a good laugh.
Reposting this piece is a tribute to all that the program represents and why the evisceration of it is so infuriating.
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The deaths of Don Hewitt, producer extraordinaire, and earlier this summer of Walter Cronkite highlight from both sides of the camera the passing of broadcasters who epitomized the best in television news: great storytelling that combined journalism with showmanship of the sort that television, from its earliest days, has always demanded. It is striking and sad that both men in their later years talked openly of their disappointment with how news on the airwaves had been degraded in favor of profit. In fact, these frustrations were nothing new. Their predecessors in the superstar pantheon of CBS, Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly, were already warning of the corrupting values of television news in the 1960s, when Hewitt and Cronkite’s brilliant careers were on the upswing.
News on television has always been caught in the vortex of the competing pressures of journalism, entertainment, and money. Cronkite’s currency was credibility and prestige from his role on the nightly news. But in 1981, when he was 65, CBS bumped him for Dan Rather and never used him in any significant way again, for all the fulsome tributes the network offered after his demise. Hewitt continued as executive producer of 60 Minutes into his eighties, but in the last few years of his tenure, in particular, he was considered a problem by CBS management because of his prideful, willful stubbornness when it came to accepting mandates for cuts in staff and expenses. Don once told me that he even offered to give up a portion of his salary if the money would be used to support the show. I never heard the outcome in that instance. But 60 Minutes, the most successful, probably the most honored, and certainly the most profitable program in the history of television news did endure several rounds of significant cutbacks (while it needs to be said, maintaining quality under Hewitt’s successor, Jeff Fager).
I came to know Don Hewitt in a variety of ways. His wife, Marilyn Berger, an accomplished journalist herself, was a friend of long-standing and a colleague at The Washington Post. As a book editor and publisher, I pitched stories to Don and his staff, about which more in a moment. And finally, in 2001, PublicAffairs, which I founded, published his memoir Tell Me a Story: Fifty Years and 60 Minutes in Television, a wonderful, bracing book that to Don’s chagrin only became a modest national bestseller. After all, his television program was consistently in the top tier of ratings by any and all measures.
And here is one of the reasons the show was so good, with an apology for the opaqueness of the anecdotal fine points: In the winter of 1998, 60 Minutes was preparing to broadcast an interview with a notable personality who was also a PublicAffairs author. I happened to overhear Don telling people at a cocktail party that the interview contained a revelation about the author’s past. When I gingerly reported to our author what Don had said, it was clear from his reaction that something might have happened in the way the interview was edited. I chased down Don on a Saturday morning and shared the author’s concern as contained in a letter faxed to me. Amazingly, although the program had already closed, ready for airing the next night, Don went to the studio, viewed the raw footage, and added 18 seconds, changing the tone of the revelation from a scandal to a youthful mishap. Over the decades, scores of subjects in 60 Minutes pieces have squirmed over the way they appeared on the show and my access to Don was highly unusual. Nonetheless, what that incident demonstrated to me was the incredible attention to detail that Don applied to every aspect of his program and why he should get the credit for making it so compelling
Don maintained that audiences tuned into 60 Minutes because they wanted to see what the correspondents–Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, et al–were up to each week. And that was certainly true. But Don’s unique gift was in shaping stories, honing them to maximize their impact. Frontline, PBS’s signature hour-long documentary series whose executive producer, David Fanning, is a creative force comparable in many respects to Hewitt, tends to use anonymous narrators to carry the story. Hewitt favored putting correspondents in the limelight and devised the magazine format. Like everything else about 60 Minutes, this choice reflected Don’s vision. Before the debut of the show in 1968, there was nothing really like it on television, and no producer has ever come close to matching it again, although many have tried.
In the mid-1980s, CBS went through an upheaval of ownership and management and ended up with Laurence Tisch, a billionaire investor whose family controlled the vast Loews Corporation, as CEO. It quickly became clear that Tisch was not the steward of journalism values that Hewitt and others had hoped he would be, and his tenure marked the beginning of the cost-cutting of CBS News’ admittedly well-funded operations, cutting that has continued ever since. In Tell Me a Story, Hewitt acknowledged a paradox: He and others wanted the networks “to push back the walls that separated news from entertainment, but (were) not above climbing over the rubble each week to take an entertainment sized paycheck for broadcasting news.”
Don had an idea, which his colleagues and friends could attest happened frequently. He proposed rounding up the capital to buy CBS News from the network and then selling back the programming, which would assure that decisions would be made by journalists and not remote network executives. The concept had much in common with Ted Turner’s plans for CNN, then in its early years. Time has shown that while CNN makes money from advertising and cable fees, its claims to be the world leader in news is under constant challenge from the polemics, hysterics, and ratings of other cable news outlets. Instead of pursuing that entrepreneurial urge, Don stayed with CBS–and in all the ways he could, preserved the integrity and dazzle of the great program that was his life’s work.
(Photo: Peter Kramer/Getty Images)
Donald Trump had lots of admiring things to say about Xi Jinping after their recent summit meeting in Beijing. Xi was much less effusive about his visitor. Trump had barely returned to the U.S. when Xi welcomed Vladimir Putin and extolled China’s closeness and friendship with Russia. As the host, Xi had decisively reached primus inter pares among global autocrats.
What is the meaning of these summits?
Let’s look back on the superpower summits between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, the Cold War years. Global tensions were great, especially over the status of Berlin, divided by a wall and considered the potential trigger for a nuclear confrontation. In time Berlin receded as a threat, but arms control remained the main focus of negotiations, with human rights a continuing issue for the U.S. side.
Never much discussed at these summits was trade or business. The fact is, there was barely any to consider: some grain sales, a Pepsi-Cola franchise, and Most Favored Nation status for the Soviets, which was predicated on the level of Jewish emigration.
Trump’s state visit to China in May, already a fading memory in our maelstrom of events, was mostly about business — or, more pointedly, about money. Tech moguls accompanied the president to Beijing. Whatever deals were agreed matter little in the great scheme of things, in which Trump and Xi parried over tariffs, chips, and rare earth materials, in search of advantage.
The United States, Russia, and increasingly China are fully armed with weapons that can demolish the globe in minutes. The consensus seems to be that the seemingly intractable wars in Ukraine and the Middle East can be essentially overlooked because it turns out that Xi, Putin, and Trump can’t figure out how or whether to resolve them.
So they default to other issues, rather than consider the possible annihilation of the human race.
In the 1970s, the U.S. and the Soviets achieved what was called détente, which meant that the depredations of the superpowers — the war in Vietnam and Soviet forays of various kinds around the world — could be tolerated. China was not competitive yet, and Washington and Moscow were content to let Beijing evolve in its own way, without interference of any consequential kind.
Now China is genuinely powerful. Russia is diminished in most respects but all the more dangerous because of Putin’s messianic aggression and those nuclear weapons he has, no longer being monitored by treaties.
There is also the matter of Donald Trump’s peculiar attitude toward Putin and Xi. He wants to be accepted in their realms of power, but the real dictators seem to doubt he will ever succeed. The result is Trump’s pirouettes, his challenges and flattery, and his threats and then backing down, which actually have little lasting impact on the great subjects of the day: technology, economic competition, and modern versions of war, especially in cyberspace.
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There was one significant development in Trump’s sojourn to China. In his confusing, contradictory, and ignorant way, he exacerbated the most contentious U.S.-China issue: the future of Taiwan.
Berlin was the potential flashpoint of the Cold War. Had the Soviets moved to take over West Berlin, conflagration would have definitely resulted. This did not happen because strategic and diplomatic decisions by successive leaders, on both sides, gradually reduced the likelihood.
When I visited Taiwan in 2023, my conclusion was that the issue was simmering but would not explode because of the clarity of the U.S. position in defense of the island — a laboriously devised message of support for Taiwan and signals to China that a takeover attempt would be more trouble for Xi than he needed to have at that time.
A New York Times headline in 2026 summarized the new reality:
“U.S. Support for Taiwan Now a ‘Negotiating Chip’ with Beijing.”
The gist is that Trump was evasive about Taiwan’s outstanding request for $14 billion worth of air defense systems, anti-drone equipment, and missiles critical to the island’s defense.
From his pinnacle of power, Xi has left no doubt how much he wants Taiwan to be reunited with China, sooner rather than later. How would he accomplish this? His record of triumph over Hong Kong — a combination of pressure, patience, and global acquiescence — could be his ultimate means.
But what if he decides that Donald Trump would bob-and-weave at Chinese aggression, as he has done with Russia in Ukraine and with Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. The twenty-first-century version of Mutual Assured Destruction in a nuclear war has become MAD from an economic collapse, the stabilizing factor in maintaining a superpower balance.
I have a friend who is an expert on Taiwan, with decades of experience in both Republican and Democratic administrations. To preserve what access is possible now, I’ll quote him without further identification:
Trump’s handling of Taiwan during his Beijing trip was a major setback for US Asia policy, worrisome not only for Taiwan but also for allies including Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines.
Xi spent hours feeding Trump his view on Taiwan. Now Trump has bought it and repeats it as doctrine: “China has controlled Taiwan for thousands of years; Lai Ching-te is actively moving toward declaring Taiwan independence; all cross-strait tension is the fault of the separatists in Taiwan.”
After being brainwashed Trump now says these things publicly as the facts about Taiwan. He says he is delaying a decision on the latest arms purchase as a very good bargaining chip. In reality it may not be true leverage since Beijing insists we agreed to phase out arms sales in the unfortunate 1982 joint policy communique.
Using Taiwan arms sales as a chip with Beijing is unprecedented and violates the commitments of the Taiwan Relations Act. This administration has been quietly asking our Asian allies to be clear on what they would do in the event of an attack or blockade on Taiwan. Now they will wonder if we are committed to Taiwan.
Xi has framed our new relationship as “constructive strategic stability.” Trump seems to have embraced that slogan. The classic Chinese negotiating strategy is to get your opponent to agree to a framework concept. The opponent soon realizes that he has stepped into quicksand. The Chinese use the framework to veto everything they dislike. In this case, Beijing will use it to veto arms sales and other interactions with Taiwan they dislike.
The only solace is the senior figures in the administration with any influence and most of the Congress will in many ways continue to operate as if nothing has changed. Even the arms package could (probably will) be cut up and notified to Congress piecemeal by the State Department. And everyone including Xi Jinping knows that Trump can change his mind tomorrow. But the damage has been done.
