My new piece is up at Quillette. Many thanks to Jamie Palmer, the editor who shepherded the story along over a couple of months and did really fine work on smoothing it out. There’s so much more to say than I could put into this 5,000+ piece, but I think the real limitation is the memoir form: it doesn’t lend itself to developing ideas. In one section where I really developed a few of the ideas, Jamie said it created a “pothole” in the piece so he cut it way down and made it into a footnote. He was right. But I hope, with this piece, I can leave the memoir form behind for now and move on to other writing. You can read the article here.