I Have Two Bad Opinions Out Today!

Hi, everyone. Sorry I’m so bad at keeping up with this—I’m trying my best to write essays for my book that are deeply considered and researched and also very long, and it’s sucking up all my energy and soul and attention as the September 1 first-draft deadline approaches. I’ve taken the dramatic and Franzenesque step of buying a 2012 Macbook for $150 and having my technically savvy partner remove the internet-accessing apparatus (I don’t actually know what it’s called, lol) so that I can write without even the POSSIBILITY of losing myself in an internet wormhole. So far it’s working. Hopefully when my book is done I’ll post more “stacks.”

Anyway, I have two pieces out today, both of them expressing bad opinions that I completely stand by.

The first, at Gawker, is about how writers shouldn’t talk: https://www.gawker.com/culture/writers-shouldnt-talk

The second, at the Yale Review, is in defense of high school debate, an opinion to which just about everyone has enormous amounts of reflexive aversion. But it’s really more of a personal essay about how debate helped me, given a less-than-ideal family situation I’ve never written about before and that it sort of scared me to write about: https://yalereview.org/article/becca-rothfeld-debate.

Hope you don’t hate them too much!