here is new york essay

This Essay From 1949 Is Still The Greatest Love Letter To New York City

Much has been written on the city of New York. It's the eternal backdrop for rom-coms and financial thrillers, the source of Harlem Renaissance poetry and meandering web-series set in Brooklyn. An endless sea of books, films, and blogs have put forth their opinions on the city, each as contradictory and final as the next (it's overrated, lonely, overcrowded, beautiful, dirty, loud, magnificent, and the damned trains don't work). But if there is an apotheosis of writing on the apotheosis of cities, it has to be E.B. White's aptly titled essay-turned-book Here Is New York .

E.B. White is best known today for his children's books, Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan, or for his writing style guide, The Elements of Style (he's the "White" in "Strunk & White"). He was also an essayist for The New Yorker and other publications for over fifty years, and "Here Is New York" might be his most celebrated essay. It's a straightforward stroll through the streets of Manhattan, the quintessential love letter to New York and New Yorkers. And, despite being published in 1948, it might be one of the most haunting pieces of post 9/11 literature ever written.

New York has changed since 1949, of course. America has changed. But to read "Here Is New York" today, it's impossible to shake the vague feeling that E.B. White was some kind of oracle, that he knew precisely which parts of the city would flourish, which would disappear, and how it might feel to live in New York in 2018, under the existential threat of war.

Here Is New York by E.B. White, $13, Amazon

White's essay begins by getting straight to the heart of New York's character:

On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.

It's not quite that simple, of course. White understands that New York is made up of a latticework of neighborhoods, interwoven pockets of community, and that New Yorkers are not really the cold-hearted creatures that slow walking tourists might see them as.

At the same time, though, White revels in New York's ability to cram in several million people and maintain an air of perfect solitude. There is spectacle and excitement if one wants spectacle and excitement, but every event is optional (with the exception, according to White, of the St. Patrick's Day parade, which "hits every New Yorker on the head").

He also understands that there is no single New York, but rather a number of different, overlapping cities, depending on who's looking:

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something...Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.

All of these conflicting New Yorks manage to meld and coexist, however, in a city that "has been compelled to expand skyward because of the absence of any other direction in which to grow." This cramped profusion of different lives and cultures only adds to the city, in White's opinion:

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.

For all his rhapsodizing on the poetry of New York, though, White admits that the city can impart "a feeling of great forlornness or forsakenness," that it can often be "uncomfortable and inconvenient." But, as he puts it, "New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience — if they did they would live elsewhere.”

After all, "the city makes up for its hazards and deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin: the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty, and unparalleled."

And then there are the last two pages of the essay.

The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

White was writing about New York in the aftermath of World War II, after the introduction of the atomic bomb. But his words land squarely in the gut of any New Yorker who lived through 9/11, and of any American who currently lives under a president willing to make nuclear war the subject of angry tweets.

All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, new York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.

White does not want to comfort his reader or assure the eternal safety of New York. He's not interested in hand-wringing or fear-mongering. He only tries to make sense of the fear. He's here to remind us of the things that must be protected in a time of political turbulence. Turning against each other is not an option for a city build on coexistence.

The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything...

Finally, White compresses his own fear, New York's fear, the world's fear, into one last paragraph:

A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long-suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: "This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree." If it were to go, all would go—this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.

From across the gulf of history, writing in New York of the 1940's, he manages to capture the mingled hope and terror that comes with life in any city today.

Here Is New York

26 pages • 52 minutes read

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Analysis: “Here Is New York”

Content Warning: This section references terrorism and racism.

“Here Is New York” is an ode to the author’s beloved city. White uses descriptive language to evoke the inhabitants, architectural features, and numerous cultures that comprise New York City, using his past experiences and current observations to describe what sets it apart from other large cities.

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The essay sets out to capture the post-World War II age in New York while situating this version of the city in a historical context . White toggles back and forth between his real-time 1948 observations, his knowledge of the city’s past, his own previous experiences in New York, and sociological musings on the city’s culture and inhabitants. This structure, made up of multiple frames of reference, offers numerous entry points and sources of information. White includes factual firsthand accounts, historical retellings, and poetic musings. As White shifts between types of information, the tone changes as well.

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What Makes a Great City: E.B. White on the Poetics of New York

By maria popova.

But what makes a great city? Scholars, social scientists, and urban planners have pondered the question for centuries, pointing to everything from walkability to the social life of small urban spaces . And yet the most timeless answer is a poetic rather than a pragmatic one.

From the 1949 gem Here Is New York ( public library ) — one of the best books about New York ever written, and undoubtedly one of the best books about anything — comes an exquisite articulation by E.B. White (July 11, 1899–October 1, 1985), who captures the singular mesmerism of Gotham and all the “enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.”

In one of the most spectacular passages, he writes:

New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute. … New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along (whether a thousand-foot liner out of the East or a twenty-thousand-man convention out of the West) without inflicting the event on its inhabitants; so that every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul.

But White’s words also emanate the universal exhilaration of any large city that cajoles humanity into a state of constant interaction:

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.

Here Is New York is a sublime read in its entirety, as “miraculously beautiful” itself as the city it serenades. Complement it with White’s moving obituary for his beloved dog Daisy and his beautiful letter to a man who had lost faith in humanity.

— Published July 9, 2014 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/07/09/e-b-white-here-is-new-york/ —

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Book Source: Digital Library of India Item 2015.166056

dc.contributor.author: E. B. White dc.date.accessioned: 2015-07-07T00:11:54Z dc.date.available: 2015-07-07T00:11:54Z dc.date.digitalpublicationdate: 2004-07-26 dc.date.citation: 1949 dc.identifier: RMSC, IIIT-H dc.identifier.barcode: 2999990038253 dc.identifier.origpath: /data/upload/0038/258 dc.identifier.copyno: 1 dc.identifier.uri: http://www.new.dli.ernet.in/handle/2015/166056 dc.description.numberedpages: 54 dc.description.numberedpages: 22 dc.description.scanningcentre: RMSC, IIIT-H dc.description.main: 1 dc.description.tagged: 0 dc.description.totalpages: 76 dc.format.mimetype: application/pdf dc.language.iso: English dc.publisher.digitalrepublisher: Universal Digital Library dc.publisher: Harper Amp Brothers dc.rights: Copyright Protected dc.title: Here Is New York dc.rights.holder: E. B. White

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0 0 Apple of My Eye by Helene Hanff ( lilithcat ) lilithcat : Another love story to New York!
0 0 The Owl Pen by Kenneth McNeill Wells ( edwinbcn ) edwinbcn : Both The Owl Pen by Kenneth McNeill Wells and Here is New York by E. B. White describe living on a farm in the countryside, with nostalgia for the old ways of living that were still around in the 1920s - 1950s, but came under pressure later in the century.

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City room | in the subway, the 3 new yorks of e. b. white, in the subway, the 3 new yorks of e. b. white.

There may be two Americas , but there are three New Yorks (roughly). Or so claims E. B. White, excerpts of whose 1948 essay, “ Here is New York ,” were introduced last month as part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s new Train of Thought literary campaign (which displaced the Poetry in Motion campaign , much to the dismay of poets). The selection, which is supposed to represent a slice of history, seems particularly meaningful on the subway, for Mr. White posits:

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there , who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something ….Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.

The idea of three New Yorks has prompted debates among New Yorkers, non-New Yorkers and people who wish they were New Yorkers.

Can anyone really claim to know New York, a city of eight million , City Room wonders? And just who is a New Yorker anyway? Commuters , settlers and natives ? (Don’t forget the original natives .)

Incidentally, one passage in the “Here is New York” essay struck many for its prescience in the weeks after 9/11:

The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers.

The E. B. White selection will be up for three months. The other selection, focused on science, is by Galileo.

Maybe there are three (or more) New Yorks — but sliced in a different way.

After all, a third of the city’s income is earned by the top 1 percent of its tax filers. For the state overall, every dollar earned by the top fifth of is matched by only 11.5 cents by the bottom fifth — the biggest gap in all the states. In Manhattan, the poor make 2 cents for $1 the rich make (on par with Namibia).

With the rising costs of housing , food , gas and the advent of a what some call the new gilded age , class — not place of origin — might be the true New York divide.

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Thank you for adding the class aspect to E.B.White’s rather dated (it turns out) concept. I’ve always been moved by the White piece but now… I’m more moved and of course appalled by the ever-widening gap between obscenely rich and the vast majority of regular humans. When will something be done to redress this hideous imbalance(if ever)? At least words like yours open the discussion. Again, thanks.

I was born in Brooklyn and have lived here all my life, save for a brief childhood interlude in Coral Gables necessitated by my father’s still-incomprehensible-to-me dream of living in Florida. No “settler” has more passion for NYC than I do. I have never doubted that this is the greatest city in the world. I remember thinking that every day I longed to be back in Brooklyn during my Florida purgatory (which became hell with the hot weather). This native, at least, never takes the City for granted.

While many of us find this idea laudable, it’s also laughable…Over eighty percent of the riders on the MTA NYC subways today are not native Engish speakers, let alone readers…In fact many a time I’m riding in a subway car now and I’m the only one who would be speaking English, if I had someone speaking English to talk to, aside from the realization that I am one of the only English speakers with a native New York accent…. This just shows that the powers that be, never take the subways, and in fact, live in their own cocoons…As the kids would say, get real!

I reread the EB White piece after Sept. 11 and have read it again from time-to-time since. It is an amazing glimpse at New York and, of course, the passage excerpted above is uncanny and prescient. I don’t imagine the MTA will be posting that passage, as it can be upsetting to some intimately touched by the events of Sept. 11.

E.B. White was one of the most brilliant writers who ever put pen to papyrus and wrote for the New Yorker along with James Thurber to make it become one of the great magazines of the twentieth century.

Claiming to be a New Yorker requires more than having a mailing address. One must have amazing resiliency, an abilty to survive, no matter the train delays or unbelieveable high cost of living. A New Yorker is never defeated.

White’s essay on New York has always touched me deeply; it’s the first essay I’ve shared with my son.

I’ll betcha plenty of the immigrants who ride the trains along with Vic would understand a lot more of it than he’d give them credit for.

It’s the “person that was born somewhere else and moved to NYC” that makes this city great. They bring the passion, idealogy, and real-world experience that brings New York alive and gives it its character. I agree with E.B White. Commuters are who they are, they just work here. People who were born and raised here don’t really have a sense of what else is out there, take it for granted, and don’t do much to give the city its life.

There is only one true New Yorker. The one who was born here. I grew up in New Jersey and now live in Lower Manhattan but I will always respect the fact that they can only be one New Yorker..despite the beauty of E.B. White’s words…

As an interesting side note, this beautiful piece is often used as an essay question on the entry test for the excellent Bard Early College HS – a school that has a big middle class and working class immigrant population. I bet reading those essays by the bright 13 year olds who apply would reveal some striking points of view.

There is a fourth kind of New Yorker: the native who leaves. We in exile “know what else is out there” and have chosen it. But we will forever measure all cities against New York. Actually, there’s a fifth kind of New Yorker: those who come and leave, but nonetheless maintain a New York sensibility. Jane Jacobs springs to mind.

It’d take a guy a lifetime to know Brooklyn t’roo an’ t’roo. An’ even den, yuh wouldn’t know it all. Thomas Wolfe

lest we forget the real new yorkers…the pigeons.

I am always irritated at the chauvinistic pride of the “born and bred” New Yorker, as if he/she alone can fully enjoy and appreciate what this city offers. New York is, like all of America, a crossroads of immigrants from all over the world, and Betty from Brooklyn is just as much a New Yorker as is Pedro from Puebla and Dinesh from Dhaka and…

As someone who moved here (relatively unwillingly) for a job, I’ll never understand those who are willing to pay millions of dollars for a tiny apartment when those same millions in a mid-size city (Philadelphia, for example) would fetch a penthouse suite.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (Minnesota), Harold Ross (Colorado), Bob Dylan (Minnesota), Jackson Pollock (Wyoming), Andy Warhol (Pittsburgh). All provided a distinctly New York cultural identity, yet all were from the west or midwest. This is the passion to which White correctly ascribed to the settlers.

I had always been just a little sheepish as a settler in the midst of native New Yorkers but that changed when my two kids were born in (then) Beekman Downtown Hospital. I’ve been outnumbered since then and taken my licks from them and my native wife, so I don’t feel like such an outsider anymore. And I think my kids have gotten something from the story of my migration here, even if they’ve heard it a few times too many.

Too simplistic, E.B. White. Plenty of native-born New Yorkers give it “passion” (defined by whom?); the list is very long. And plenty of non-natives don’t.

There is yet another facet to New Yorkers that is worth remembering (and posting on the trains): our determination. White wrote:

“Mass hysteria is a terrible force, yet New Yorkers seem always to escape it by some tiny margin: they sit in stalled subways without claustrophobia, they extricate themselves from panic situations by some lucky wisecrack, they meet confusion and congestion with patience and grit-a sort of perpetual muddling through.” In the same essay, he also mentioned the commuter calmly “stuck in the mud” beneath the East River.

And we dare not forget another of White’s points – perhaps the one that allows us to tolerate all of the nonsense that we see: “But the city makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin – the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled.”

It’s still that way in New York!

EB-had reason to prefer transplants- he moved here from Mt. Vernon after college.

My favorite description of the class differences change in attitude is in Bonfire of the Vanities, when the protag’s dad takes the local to Wall St, while he takes the private car. In Bloombergville, the gap is even wider.

Time was, you wouldn’t date anyone with a 718 area code (because long distance relationships are just too hard).

Now, I find it hard to confer NYC citizenship on anyone who rode to high school via internal combustion powered conveyance (unless there was a fare involved, and preferrably a transfer). Remember the details of at least one transit, garbage or teachers strike making you late for class, and I’ll buy you a pint. If your journey involved the L train I’ll support your run for Mayor.

For the record, I now live in Morristown, and commute to Flushing.

Vic – “Over eighty percent of the riders on the MTA NYC subways today are not native Engish speakers”?

As they say on Wikipedia, citation needed…

As a native New Yorker (born in Lenox Hill) I am so appreciative when people respect the very special relationship that New Yorkers born in the city have with the city, and so angered when others believe that a few months out of college in new york grants them true new yorker status.

also, whatever passion the settler might bring to the city, it is the native’s devotion that keeps the city alive and vibrant. I remember very well the days after september 11th when people were afraid to enter the city. I remember because I, along with my family and friends, didn’t go anywhere.

the people and the spirit of new york will always remain indestructible.

As a visitor here, I’m struck by how quickly I want to be a New Yorker. It’s the very essence of what a cosmopolitan city should be. I’m from Los Angeles and Orange County and nothing back home is as centralized and culturally rich as it is here. The funny response I get from New Yorkers when I say I’d like to move here is kind of like, “why would you want to do that?” But still, I will look forward to my return to New York.

how about a fourth version – the carrie bradshaw wannabes that come from all corners of america that only hang out in the meat packing district and live in the upper east side, believing that being a new yorker is wearing the jimmy choos and eating at tao?

I actually liked what White wrote…I found it poetic and overall true. And as to what makes one a “New Yorker”, I think it has to do with state of mind and personality more than anything. Do you say what’s on your mind in a direct manner? Do you get right to the point and not beat around the bush? Etc. THAT’s a New Yorker. And plenty of these “commuters” can be that way and in fact, were born in NYC and then moved out to Westchester or what have you. I think after you’ve lived here a number of years, you can’t help but become a NYer.

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E.B. White’s Here is New York

Write a post for Sept. 3rd:

Analyze E. B.White’s opening line, “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.”

Discuss White’s prophecy (final pages of the book) about airplanes in the light of 9/11.

About Roz Bernstein

17 responses to e.b. white’s here is new york.

Kamelia Kilawan E.B. White’s Here is New York

The opening line of Here is New York has a clear-cut message: true New Yorkers treasure solitude and their privacy. In today’s times both of these qualities define the way we view not simply the lives of our elected leaders but also every small business owner, immigrant, parent, child, teen, or simply put: any New York resident with a dream.

I believe that E.B. White had a solid idea about the most unique and valuable things New York City can offer. Not simply freedom or an opportunity for those who desire it, but the very qualities that make this city a haven for the “queer.”

White’s eerie omen in the wake of 9/11 about the danger of soaring airplanes in the midst of high skyscrapers makes him not only an amazing writer but one with amazing foresight.

And his prophecy to preserve the one natural, high element of the city, the tree, reminds me of the prophecy we see in environmental activism and films like The Lorax. I, for one, agree with White. Much like the tree in his story, strained in every direction, we all are just the same.

It is important to acknowledge and maintain the natural, because it is the only true example of our own queer desires and the inability we have to pursue all of it in a lonely, private city.

Outside of New York, some people may refer to native New Yorkers as jaded, unconventional and insensible because of their lack of attention and caring for their surroundings. E. B. White opens his iconic poem about New York with “on any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gifts of loneliness and the gift of privacy,” which illustrates that as crowded and crazy the city might be it makes each person feel alone in their own world.

As a commuter, and referred by White as a citizen of the second New York, I welcome those gifts of privacy and loneliness. Within those moments and hours of wandering the city I create my own world and have the ability to find myself. There is so much that occurs within the small island and it breaths the aurora of “it could happen to you,” and success is just inches away. People can feel the loneliness and inadequateness but it also brings a sense of peacefulness that transforms into a communal bond between others, and contradicts the idea of being lonely in this vast city.

White continues his depiction of New York and ends with a disturbing and echoing analogy in the wake of the attacks on September 11th. “The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible,” White wrote. The citizens of Manhattan gave the world a sense of invincibility and immortality, until the day that terrorist attacked the World Trade Center. As White proclaims, “a single flight of planes can quickly end this island fantasy,” it brings New York back to fragile and humane state. We come together in crisis’s, take away prejudices and work to rebuild New York for future generations.

Rebecca Ungarino on E.B. White’s Here is New York

The references of New York establishments both past and present, the still-relevant ideals of New Yorkers, and the descriptions of the “three New Yorks” in E.B. White’s short novel are beautiful features of what comes across as a long essay.

The opening line largely sets the tone for the book. White demonstrates from the first few lines that New York, in its five boroughs, is indeed made up of masses of people – natives, transplants, and commuters – who seek out grand lives (these “queer prizes” that White refers to) in one capacity or another, but all want – and receive – quiet, lonely, private lives at the end of the day. No matter the neighborhood, as White mentions many neighborhoods in his book, New York gives its residence a chance to work, a chance to travel, and a chance to rest.

The first line cuts to the chase. E.B. White casts such a shadow over New York, ironically of course, and describes the boroughs with such New York-style disdain that any non-New Yorker wouldn’t want to step foot onto New York soil.

The disturbing omens concerning planes and destruction that White makes throughout the book lend themselves to White’s accurate (while some may say prophetic) insight about New York’s ruination. Three separate instances – toward the beginning of the book, in the last few pages, and then in the last paragraph – occur where White mentions planes causing tragedy in New York. I think of it has, perhaps E.B. White predicted that New York would be overtaken by commercialized endeavors, technology, and bigger, greater vehicles, or maybe he literally meant planes. Either/or, his prophecies prove to be extremely eerie.

Overall, Here is New York is a gorgeous depiction of the real New York.

Danielle Russell E.B. White’s Here is New York

New York is filled with over 8 million residents today. But somehow you can be surrounded by so many people and still feel alone. New Yorkers are known to be unfriendly, rude, and self-reliant. We are eager to get where we are going without interacting with our surroundings. The city offers a sense of coldness, coldness in the sense that everyone is too focused on themselves to develop relationships with others. People become so entangled with making their dreams come true they forget the point of living. White says that “the quality of New York that insulates its inhabitants from life may simply weaken them as individuals.” That is why many say if you can make it in New York you can make it anywhere. There is so much going on in this city many are amazed how people from different races, religions and social statuses manage to coexist together. E. B. Whites book about New York is still relevant today because we still deal with many of the issues he wrote about.

White’s prophecy about airplanes in the light of 9/11 was head on. It makes me think he had an uncanny knack for predicting how New York will turn out. I think it was completely logical for him to feel New York City is no longer indestructible. Society is always advancing and new technology is being invented. It is now easier to reach different places and get your hands on anything imaginable. With New York also growing and developing into a city bigger than life, no wonder why it would be a target for many. E. B. White brings to light that with greatness there comes a price.

Here is New York Marian Thomas First line means of those who strangely decide to live in New York or be in New York it will bring loneliness despite there being so many people and also privacy in which the people of New York care about theirselves and their personal gain that leads ppl to live private lives. He continued to stress the space of eighteen inches of seperation and connection of those in New York he seemed to meet.

In the final lines, White seemed to predict 9/11 as he went on to say New York is destructible and how planes can crash and burn the towers, alluding to the Twin towers. He seemed to think the city was a target and that the people could be annihilated at any time.

Jennifer Ross E.B. White’s Here is New York

“On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.”

In any other town in this nation, loneliness would not be considered a gift…maybe privacy, but definitely not loneliness. To “bestow” loneliness and privacy on a person, in any other town, big or small, could otherwise be known as shunning an outcast amongst the community, someone so obscure or awkward that the locals deem untrustworthy or scary to be around. Yet, in New York, it is a gift and a glorious one at that.

I imagine a tourist reading E.B. White’s opening line and feeling a deep confusion, a troubled sadness, thinking, “What is wrong with New Yorkers? Who would voluntarily want to live in loneliness and privacy?” They imagine this gift in their town, their environment, a place nothing like New York, be that as it may. Without the gift, New Yorkers could lose all patience within themselves and with their world, eventually becoming, dare I say it – rude. Perhaps after reading this quote, the ordinary tourist can justify calling a New Yorker rude, and calmly return to their world appreciating theirs while demonizing the big “bad” apple.

Airplanes in the light of 9/11

There’s a sense of eeriness in how E.B. White describes the city and its destructibility. “A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers….cremate the millions.” Never had I imagined this could be prophesized so many decades ago, in such a small book. Yet there it is, in black and white. “…cremate the millions.” How horribly truthful those words are. I wonder what E.B. White would have said had he been in the city on that fateful morning. Would he have any words to say; or could the site of the burning trade towers leave him as it left many of us – speechless. As I read his words, mental images flooded my mind of where I was that morning. What was I doing? Who was I with? Did I speak? As terrible as that day was, E.B. White’s “prophesy” was wrong in one matter. We did not destruct. The city may have been badly burned and forever scarred, but it is now much wiser and stronger. The city proudly wears that scar for all to see. No shame on its face, just strength.

Analyze E. B.White’s opening line, “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.”

As Roger Angell expressed in his introduction of E.B White’s work, “It is hard to feel private in the surging daily crowds at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, say, or lonely on a side street packed solid with gridlocked traffic.” (11) Indeed, the opening line of Here is New York seems peculiar when one witnesses the sheer flood of civilization in New York City. People seem to be swarming the streets of the city, each with vibrant passion, excitement and enthusiasm. For most, the ’18 inches’ of separation that New York offers its inhabitants from one another offers a dream come true: a “Fragile participation with destiny.” The city provides a front row seat to “…all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.” (21). However, to those who desire such queer prizes, the enormity and grandeur of New York can make the privacy and loneliness achieved all the more satisfying. As I commute every day to Baruch College, I witness firsthand how the all the commotion, bright lights, and attractions vying for our attention are merely a silent background to most as they race through the agendas of their day. Paradoxically, for those longing for internal quiet, New York is perfect.

Discuss White’s prophecy (final pages of the book) about airplanes in the light of 9/11.

Written in 1949, the scene depicted by E.B White in the final pages of his essay is at once enlightening and startlingly familiar in the aftermath of 9/11. It is important to note that at the time of the writing of the book, the gruesome sights and sounds of war were probably ingrained in the mind of the author after the atrocities of WWII, and of the Holocaust. People around the world saw images of planes flying over civilian neighborhoods in Europe dropping bombs on apartment complexes. It was only natural for White to envision the grand struggle of worldwide conflicting ideologies that would ensue. At the time of the publishing, E.B White witnessed the building of the United Nations on New York soil. There, hundreds of nations would be represented in no other city in the world but Manhattan. Therefore, there is no greater message of hate than to mercilessly attack New York, “the capital of the world” (55) and a symbol of cultural diversity, heterogeneous unity, racial brotherhood and freedom. As White states, “Today Liberty shares the role with Death.” (54) Thankfully Mr. White’s prediction of the annihilation of New York City never occurred. Yet, for those of us who experienced the terror attacks of 9/11/01, White’s message rang true. The world must collectively take a stand against acts of hatred and intolerance, and feverishly support the ideals that hold up this great city today.

“On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” E.B. White’s opening line captures New York City’s character. This further developed in the reading, but the opening line sets the tone by getting the reader to ask why and how the city grants the gift. This opening line is true to every aspect of the city both good and bad. It expresses the feelings of inclusion and exclusion that everyone can feel at a given moment because of people from all walks of life colliding in one place. White’s last line shows that the feeling of fear has been constant in the city because of its esteem. The way White is able to tap into the emotion of the city is what makes this piece timeless. This is why the last line is alarming to a generation that has lived through 9/11. The emotions he felt at the time and the emotions felt now are the same.

Although New York is a city filled with people, it is definitely a place where one can be lonely and private. Especially with todays use of technology, things like social media have replaced social interactions. In a fast paced city filled with people, it is easy for one to get overwhelmed and not be able to keep up.

New Yorkers are known to be in a rush. Following their daily routines, people dash from one place to another without a second glance at those that are around them. Seeking prizes like money and fame can leave a person distant from people. Balance of work and social life is needed unless loneliness and a private life is what you seek.

” A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions.”

This quote describes the tragedy that occurred on 9/11 as if it were written after the fact. New York, a city full of life became a quiet city filled with worried people who would flinch at the sight or sound of a plane in the sky. The “fantasy of an indestructible city was shattered. Those who, in panic, ran into the subways for shelter found themselves trapped in “lethal chambers. Frantic people seeking their way out of the smoking city filled the bridges. The swinging bridges filled over capacity seemed as if they were to fall and crumble, taking everyone with it.

Taxonomizing E.B. White’s Here is New York as simply a description of “the city that never sleeps” is unfair. White aptly expresses, in less than sixty pages of text, what makes a New Yorker, the feelings and emotions, from various perspectives, accompanying that title, neighborhoods in New York, the constant changes of the people, mood, and structure of the City, and, more generally, the paradox that is New York City. White begins by writing, “On any such person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy,” leading readers into his paradoxical characterization of New York. Being a New Yorker, and what White would call a “commuter,” I find myself in numerous situations surrounded by thousands of people, with whom I am only “eighteen inches away from,” feeling totally alone. I enjoy the repose of a subway ride, where I am packed tightly in a steel box with fifty or so people. I embrace the fact that a man can wear a pink bikini while riding a bicycle on crowded Lexington Avenue without question or second glance. White captures paradoxes, such as the “gifts” of loneliness and privacy, on so many levels that it is unfair to call Here is New York simply a description. If anything, Here is New York is foreboding. People living in privacy and loneliness while never being more than eighteen inches away from one another is fragile. The complex system White describes seems to be teetering on destruction– even death. Planes remind White of this fragility; a simple squadron of planes equipped with bombs could end New York. Written in the mid 1900s, White predicts the 9/11 terrorist attacks. However, even such a tumultuous event did not stop New York from beating on, something White also alludes to. Planes may be equipped with bombs, or used as bombs, but New York and New Yorkers come equipped with resiliency and a sense of community.

In an attempt to bring it down to date, I look out into a more remote part of New York in Long Island where I am free from the hustle of the city E.B. White longingly spoke of in “Here is New York.” I travel on the same Long Island Railroad he mentioned as a daily commuter privy to the city’s way when I am there and reserved when I think about it as I return to the suburbs. Across streets and avenues I seldom have a moment to stop and reflect lest I relinquish my own personal space to people maneuvering their way around me. Yet, I can find a space on a bench in Madison Square Park and put my earphones in and there I find solidarity; a slice of the loneliness and privacy that White speaks of. That slice today is much thinner than before as our seasons rarely hold the relaxed air breathed in by die-hards of White’s summer. We look at the growth of New York sometimes with sadness because we do not want it to be marred by another 9/11. New York has risen as an example and as a target. When White wrote this piece he perhaps estimated his prophecy about the “destroying planes” to the conflict with the Soviet Union, at the time a presumable nuclear threat to the United States. We have seen the impact of the planes on 9/11 and today we behold the uncertainty regarding Syria and the U.S.’s position on chemical weapons. When I walk under the shadow of these buildings, I can feel the routine of the trains beneath me or hear innocent shouts or sirens going off here and there and I wonder of the “perverted dreamer” in the midst waiting to “loose the lightning.” At those times I long to steal away in New York’s gifts all the while knowing that even in our privacy there is a charisma about this city that will not hide it as a target; not then and not now.

E.B. White poses a hopeful and majestic view of New York that he acknowledges through his descriptive details of the beauty of the city and its people. The opening line promises “the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy” to those finding their way to New York for the very first time. The line is an honest paradox of what one may experience while living in the city. Despite its inviting bright lights and crowded streets, the city can often make one feel isolated in his or her own destination and goal. A common example of this would be the morning commute on the 6 train. Strangers make it their priority to ignore others by covering their eyes with sunglasses, stuffing their ears with earphones, pulling their bags close, and letting their minds wander. White captures this concept perfectly.

The last pages of the book eerily prophesied the events of 9/11 despite being written roughly fifty-three years prior. White describes the “flight of planes” as the sign of the city’s imminent mortality and destruction. The irony in this idea is that the very thing that can destroy the city is the thing that built it: man. The image of the great, thriving city that never sleeps shutting down in silence and annihilation is haunting to this day. Despite this dark prophecy, White keeps a somewhat optimistic view; he states, “This must be saved, this particular thing, this tree.” The battered, willow tree symbolizes the life that exists before the installments of the buildings and the bridges, before New York came to be. To White, this tree may have been a symbol for new growth. But most of all, it is a symbol of strength and hope that must be saved in times of tragedy. It is what drives New York to become the city that it is today.

“On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” This is an interesting opening line. The author E.B. White’s opening line seems to be coming from his own personal experience. It is interesting to see how he uses the term “gift” as a form of reward with words such as loneliness and privacy. It is as if people who encounter success would prefer to be left alone rather than be surrounded all the time with those who always want to be in their presence consistently.

White’s prophecy about airplanes in the light of 9/11, is clearly an idea that led to action. It can be believed that New York is destructible because of the recent events of 9/11. All these new technology’s and infrastructures can destroy human kind because it has. Even when all these things are meant to better the world and ways of living, there can be a reverse effect which has been proven to exist from past events. However, White could be using the planes as an example because during that time, war had just occurred. The city was in amazement with the new surroundings. Buildings were being built taller than trees and planes were new to everyone. White had an idea and it is upsetting that it had to become reality.

E.B. White’s timeless quote “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” is covering the truth of New York, a city of 8 million, that ironically provides a sense of isolation for its people. The ability to be condensed in a town with this amount of humans, and successfully coexist as completely polarized individuals, is a prize in and of itself.

As New Yorkers, we move as loners with our own agendas, directly next to millions of peers, on a daily basis. The negative connotation that goes with a word like “loneliness” is a viewpoint that would be understood from an outsider looking in, but as a native, you have no choice but to be familiar with the underlying value that “loneliness” provides.

The physicality of sharing sidewalks and train cars with so many others can seem paradoxical when remembering the fact that your life path is a completely lonesome entity, who’s paving is exclusively left up to you and the city.

E.B. White’s mention of airplanes is just as much a work of art as his subject matter, New York City. Vivid, descriptive creations, which both make a statement that is left up to the observer to decode.

The man From The Bronx who travels to Staten Island every weekend to help Hurricane Sandy victims with the restoration of their homes and businesses. The rushing college student who’s running late for class and stops to help a tourist correct their mistake of taking the R train into Queens from 59th street, when they actually meant to hop on the uptown 6, destined for the Met Museum. These examples of natives stepping outside of their privacy may not be what is brought up when the general boxed description of a New Yorker is the topic of conversation; but the layers of people and personality types is what makes that box simply too small to be the whole truth.

Our uniqueness has gone through every type of criticism from outsiders, but our inside understanding of the way the city works provides a sense of thick skin. Those who have fantasized about our preconceived “coldness,” probably watched the television in awe the weeks following the September 11, 2001 attack, as New Yorkers supported each other in a time of need.

In times of need, New York stands united. Other parts of the country and world may criticize us for not sharing false smiles and greetings with strangers on a daily basis, but that would only distract us from the privacy and loneliness that gives our city it’s unique character.

From devastating terror attacks, electricity blackouts in the hottest days of summer, and even the wrath of a super storm that paralyzed a large portion of the city for months, New York continues to show it’s strength and ability to live in unison. E.B. White certainly captured a glimpse of that strength in “Here is New York.”

Many may not understand why we wait until times of hardship to show a broad sense of camaraderie. I say it’s New York’s way of doing things, and we’ll continue to do just fine being the one’s who get it.

Really thoughtful comments on E.B. White’s Here Is New York. Worth mentioning, too, is White’s powerful use of language –his voice. Narrative. First person. Engaging. Literary. He is truly a visual writer. We see and we hear what he sees and what he hears. As we write our feature stories this semester, keep White’s voice in your mind.

The first line by E.B White: “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy”. Is a great way to capture the reader’s attention, whether you have lived in New York or not. Why? Because it can be hard to have a sense of privacy in a city filled with different ethnicities and thousands of people from different countries all meshed into one place. However, loneliness can easily be found in the city whether you consider it a gift or a curse. The city that never sleeps is always on the move; people go through one phase of the day to another at the speed of light. This can clearly lead people to feel disconnected with the city itself as well as the people around them. Yet, the final line alluding to 9/11 makes this reading timeless, its alarming to see how he can still connect the city and the feelings of people towards it in today’s generation with such a prediction, while the times change, the city’s vulnerability and the connection to the people in it, do not change. -Abel Ramirez

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Here is New York Kindle Edition

Book 1 of 1 Here is New York
Print length 59 pages
Language English
Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
Publisher Little Bookroom
Publication date March 30, 2011
File size 434 KB
Page Flip Enabled
Word Wise Enabled
Enhanced typesetting Enabled
See all details
In This Series
By Roger Angell
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

Anyone who's ever cherished his essays--or even Charlotte's Web --knows that White is the most elegant of all possible stylists. There's not a sentence here that does not make itself felt right down to the reader's very bones. What would the author make of Giuliani's New York? Or of Times Square, Disney-style? It's hard to say for sure. But not even Planet Hollywood could ruin White's abiding sense of wonder: "The city is like poetry: it compresses all life ... into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines." This lovely new edition marks the 100th anniversary of E.B. White's birth--cause for celebration indeed. --Mary Park

About the Author

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004KZP0WY
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little Bookroom (March 30, 2011)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 30, 2011
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 434 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 59 pages
#2 in Mid Atlantic U.S. Regional Travel
#2 in 90-Minute Travel Short Reads
#21 in 90-Minute Biography & Memoir Short Reads

About the authors

Roger angell.

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E. B. White

E.B. White, the author of twenty books of prose and poetry, was awarded the 1970 Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for his children's books, Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web. This award is now given every three years "to an author or illustrator whose books, published in the United States, have, over a period of years, make a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children." The year 1970 also marked the publication of Mr. White's third book for children, The Trumpet of the Swan, honored by The International Board on Books for Young People as an outstanding example of literature with international importance. In 1973, it received the Sequoyah Award (Oklahoma) and the William Allen White Award (Kansas), voted by the school children of those states as their "favorite book" of the year.

Born in Mount Vernon, New York, Mr. White attended public schools there. He was graduated from Cornell University in 1921, worked in New York for a year, then traveled about. After five or six years of trying many sorts of jobs, he joined the staff of The New Yorker magazine, then in its infancy. The connection proved a happy one and resulted in a steady output of satirical sketches, poems, essays, and editorials. His essays have also appeared in Harper's Magazine, and his books include One Man's Meat, The Second Tree from the Corner, Letters of E.B. White, The Essays of E.B. White and Poems and Sketches of E.B. White. In 1938 Mr. White moved to the country. On his farm in Maine he kept animals, and some of these creatures got into his stories and books. Mr. White said he found writing difficult and bad for one's disposition, but he kept at it. He began Stuart Little in the hope of amusing a six-year-old niece of his, but before he finished it, she had grown up.

For his total contribution to American letters, Mr. White was awarded the 1971 National Medal for Literature. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy named Mr. White as one of thirty-one Americans to receive the Presidential Medal for Freedom. Mr. White also received the National Institute of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal for Essays and Criticism, and in 1973 the members of the Institute elected him to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a society of fifty members. He also received honorary degrees from seven colleges and universities. Mr. White died on October 1, 1985.

Photo by White Literary LLC [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Here is New York

A series of 7 sensory videos filmed in New York City in 2019, accompanied by excerpts from E.B. White's essay "Here is New York" published in 1949.

Foreword from E.B. White

This piece about New York was written in the summer of 1948 during a hot spell. The reader will find certain observations to be no longer true of the city, owing to the passage of time and the swing of the pendulum. But the essential fever of New York has not changed in any particular, and I have not tried to make revisions in the hope of bringing the thing down to date. To bring New York down to date, a man would have to be published with the speed of light. I feel that it is the reader’s, not the author’s, duty to bring New York down to date; and I trust it will prove less a duty than a pleasure.

New York is nothing like Paris; it is nothing like London; and it is not Spokane multiplied by sixty, or Detroit multiplied by four.

It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression. The Empire State Building shot twelve hundred and fifty feet into the air when it was madness to put out as much as six inches of new growth. (The building has a mooring mast that no dirigible has ever tied to; it employs a man to flush toilets in slack times; it has even been hit by an airplane in a fog, struck countless times by lightning, and been jumped off of by so many unhappy people that pedestrians instinctively quicken step when passing Fifth Avenue and 34th Street.)

MANHATTAN • Brooklyn Bridge Park on a warm evening in June

The city is literally a composite of tens of thousands of tiny neighborhood units.

Each neighborhood is virtually self-sufficient. Usually it is no more than two or three blocks long and a couple of blocks wide. Each area is a city within a city within a city. Thus, no matter where you live in New York, you will find within a block or two a grocery store, a barbershop, a newsstand and shoeshine shack, and ice-coal-and-wood cellar, a dry cleaner, a laundry, a delicatessen, a flower shop, an undertaker’s parlor, a movie house, a radio-repair shop, a stationer, a haberdasher, a tailor, a drugstore, a garage, a tearoom, a soon, a hardware store, a liquor store, a shoe-repair shop.

Mass hysteria is a terrible force, yet New Yorkers seem always to escape it by some tiny margin.

They sit in stalled subways without claustrophobia, they extricate themselves from panic situations by some lucky wisecrack, they meet confusion and congestion with patience and grit—a sort of perpetual muddling through. Every facility is inadequate—the hospitals and schools and playgrounds are overcrowded, the express highways are feverish, the unimproved highways and bridges are bottlenecks; there is no enough air and not enough light, and there is usually either too much heat or too little. But the city makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin—the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled.

New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation.

And better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute. New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along (whether a thousand-foot liner out of the East or a twenty-thousand-man convention out of the West) without inflicting the event on its inhabitants; so that every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul. Whatever it means, it is a rather rare gift, and I believe it has a positive effect on the creative capacities of New Yorkers—for creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.

Many people depend on the city’s tremendous variety and sources of excitement for spiritual sustenance and maintenance of morale.

In the country there are a few chances of sudden rejuvenation—a shift in weather, perhaps, or something arriving in the mail. But in New York the chances are endless. I think that although many persons are here from some excess of spirit (which caused them to break away from their small town), some, too, are here from a deficiency of spirit, who find in New York a protection, or an easy substitution.

The collision and the intermingling of millions of foreign-born people representing so many races and creeds make New York a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world.

The citizens of New York are tolerant not only from disposition but from necessity. The city has to be tolerant, otherwise it would explode in a radioactive cloud of hate and rancor and bigotry. If the people were to depart even briefly from the peace of cosmopolitan intercourse, the town would blow up higher than a kite. In New York smolders every race problem there is, but the noticeable thing is not the problem but the inviolate truce.

The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.

The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive. At the feet of the tallest and plushiest offices lie the crummiest slums. The genteel mysteries housed in Riverside Church are only a few blocks from the voodoo charms of Harlem. The merchant princes, riding to Wall Street in their limousines down the East River Drive, pass within a few hundred yards of the gypsy kings; but the princes do not know they are passing kings, and the kings are not up yet anyway—they live a more leisurely life than the princes and get drunk more consistently.

About the Project

New York is a living, breathing organism, which leaves an undeniable impression on its residents. Although the city's hallmark is its unbridled movement, locals tend to forget this because they themselves are in constant motion. This video series captures the sights and sounds of places in New York from a still vantage point. During the editing process, we were reminded of E.B. White's beautiful essay about New York. As we reread it, we thought it was a perfect narration of the visuals. We included relevant excerpts that we found especially moving. We hope residents and visitors alike will enjoy a brief escape onto the streets of New York.

Credits Essay by E.B. White Video, Design, & Website by House of Wallis

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What I’ve Learned From My Students’ College Essays

The genre is often maligned for being formulaic and melodramatic, but it’s more important than you think.

An illustration of a high school student with blue hair, dreaming of what to write in their college essay.

By Nell Freudenberger

Most high school seniors approach the college essay with dread. Either their upbringing hasn’t supplied them with several hundred words of adversity, or worse, they’re afraid that packaging the genuine trauma they’ve experienced is the only way to secure their future. The college counselor at the Brooklyn high school where I’m a writing tutor advises against trauma porn. “Keep it brief , ” she says, “and show how you rose above it.”

I started volunteering in New York City schools in my 20s, before I had kids of my own. At the time, I liked hanging out with teenagers, whom I sometimes had more interesting conversations with than I did my peers. Often I worked with students who spoke English as a second language or who used slang in their writing, and at first I was hung up on grammar. Should I correct any deviation from “standard English” to appeal to some Wizard of Oz behind the curtains of a college admissions office? Or should I encourage students to write the way they speak, in pursuit of an authentic voice, that most elusive of literary qualities?

In fact, I was missing the point. One of many lessons the students have taught me is to let the story dictate the voice of the essay. A few years ago, I worked with a boy who claimed to have nothing to write about. His life had been ordinary, he said; nothing had happened to him. I asked if he wanted to try writing about a family member, his favorite school subject, a summer job? He glanced at his phone, his posture and expression suggesting that he’d rather be anywhere but in front of a computer with me. “Hobbies?” I suggested, without much hope. He gave me a shy glance. “I like to box,” he said.

I’ve had this experience with reluctant writers again and again — when a topic clicks with a student, an essay can unfurl spontaneously. Of course the primary goal of a college essay is to help its author get an education that leads to a career. Changes in testing policies and financial aid have made applying to college more confusing than ever, but essays have remained basically the same. I would argue that they’re much more than an onerous task or rote exercise, and that unlike standardized tests they are infinitely variable and sometimes beautiful. College essays also provide an opportunity to learn precision, clarity and the process of working toward the truth through multiple revisions.

When a topic clicks with a student, an essay can unfurl spontaneously.

Even if writing doesn’t end up being fundamental to their future professions, students learn to choose language carefully and to be suspicious of the first words that come to mind. Especially now, as college students shoulder so much of the country’s ethical responsibility for war with their protest movement, essay writing teaches prospective students an increasingly urgent lesson: that choosing their own words over ready-made phrases is the only reliable way to ensure they’re thinking for themselves.

Teenagers are ideal writers for several reasons. They’re usually free of preconceptions about writing, and they tend not to use self-consciously ‘‘literary’’ language. They’re allergic to hypocrisy and are generally unfiltered: They overshare, ask personal questions and call you out for microaggressions as well as less egregious (but still mortifying) verbal errors, such as referring to weed as ‘‘pot.’’ Most important, they have yet to put down their best stories in a finished form.

I can imagine an essay taking a risk and distinguishing itself formally — a poem or a one-act play — but most kids use a more straightforward model: a hook followed by a narrative built around “small moments” that lead to a concluding lesson or aspiration for the future. I never get tired of working with students on these essays because each one is different, and the short, rigid form sometimes makes an emotional story even more powerful. Before I read Javier Zamora’s wrenching “Solito,” I worked with a student who had been transported by a coyote into the U.S. and was reunited with his mother in the parking lot of a big-box store. I don’t remember whether this essay focused on specific skills or coping mechanisms that he gained from his ordeal. I remember only the bliss of the parent-and-child reunion in that uninspiring setting. If I were making a case to an admissions officer, I would suggest that simply being able to convey that experience demonstrates the kind of resilience that any college should admire.

The essays that have stayed with me over the years don’t follow a pattern. There are some narratives on very predictable topics — living up to the expectations of immigrant parents, or suffering from depression in 2020 — that are moving because of the attention with which the student describes the experience. One girl determined to become an engineer while watching her father build furniture from scraps after work; a boy, grieving for his mother during lockdown, began taking pictures of the sky.

If, as Lorrie Moore said, “a short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage,” what is a college essay? Every once in a while I sit down next to a student and start reading, and I have to suppress my excitement, because there on the Google Doc in front of me is a real writer’s voice. One of the first students I ever worked with wrote about falling in love with another girl in dance class, the absolute magic of watching her move and the terror in the conflict between her feelings and the instruction of her religious middle school. She made me think that college essays are less like love than limerence: one-sided, obsessive, idiosyncratic but profound, the first draft of the most personal story their writers will ever tell.

Nell Freudenberger’s novel “The Limits” was published by Knopf last month. She volunteers through the PEN America Writers in the Schools program.

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Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control

The private and public seductions of the world’s biggest pop neuroscientist..

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

For the past three years, one of the biggest podcasters on the planet has told a story to millions of listeners across half a dozen shows: There was a little boy, and the boy’s family was happy, until one day, the boy’s family fell apart. The boy was sent away. He foundered, he found therapy, he found science, he found exercise. And he became strong.

Today, Andrew Huberman is a stiff, jacked 48-year-old associate professor of neurology and ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is given to delivering three-hour lectures on subjects such as “the health of our dopaminergic neurons.” His podcast is revelatory largely because it does not condescend, which has not been the way of public-health information in our time. He does not give the impression of someone diluting science to universally applicable sound bites for the slobbering masses. “Dopamine is vomited out into the synapse or it’s released volumetrically, but then it has to bind someplace and trigger those G-protein-coupled receptors, and caffeine increases the number, the density of those G-protein-coupled receptors,” is how he explains the effect of coffee before exercise in a two-hour-and-16-minute deep dive that has, as of this writing, nearly 8.9 million views on YouTube.

In This Issue

Falling for dr. huberman.

Millions of people feel compelled to hear him draw distinctions between neuromodulators and classical neurotransmitters. Many of those people will then adopt an associated “protocol.” They will follow his elaborate morning routine. They will model the most basic functions of human life — sleeping, eating, seeing — on his sober advice. They will tell their friends to do the same. “He’s not like other bro podcasters,” they will say, and they will be correct; he is a tenured Stanford professor associated with a Stanford lab; he knows the difference between a neuromodulator and a neurotransmitter. He is just back from a sold-out tour in Australia, where he filled the Sydney Opera House. Stanford, at one point, hung signs (AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY) apparently to deter fans in search of the lab.

With this power comes the power to lift other scientists out of their narrow silos and turn them, too, into celebrities, but these scientists will not be Huberman, whose personal appeal is distinct. Here we have a broad-minded professor puppyishly enamored with the wonders of biological function, generous to interviewees (“I love to be wrong”), engaged in endearing attempts to sound like a normal person (“Now, we all have to eat, and it’s nice to eat foods that we enjoy. I certainly do that. I love food, in fact”).

This is a world in which the soft art of self-care is made concrete, in which Goop-adjacent platitudes find solidity in peer review. “People go, ‘Oh, that feels kind of like weenie stuff,’” Huberman tells Joe Rogan. “The data show that gratitude, and avoiding toxic people and focusing on good-quality social interactions … huge increases in serotonin.” “Hmmm,” Rogan says. There is a kindness to the way Huberman reminds his audience always of the possibilities of neuroplasticity: They can change. He has changed. As an adolescent, he says, he endured the difficult divorce of his parents, a Stanford professor who worked in the tech industry and a children’s-book author. The period after the separation was, he says, one of “pure neglect.” His father was gone, his mother “totally checked out.” He was forced, around age 14, to endure a month of “youth detention,” a situation that was “not a jail,” but harrowing in its own right.

“The thing that really saved me,” Huberman tells Peter Attia, “was this therapy thing … I was like, Oh, shit … I do have to choke back a little bit here. It’s a crazy thing to have somebody say, ‘Listen,’ like, to give you the confidence, like, ‘We’re gonna figure this out. We’re gonna figure this out. ’ There’s something very powerful about that. It wasn’t like, you know, ‘Everything will be okay.’ It was like, We’re gonna figure this out. ”

The wayward son would devote himself to therapy and also to science. He would turn Rancid all the way up and study all night long. He would be tenured at Stanford with his own lab, severing optic nerves in mice and noting what grew back.

Huberman has been in therapy, he says, since high school. He has, in fact, several therapists, and psychiatrist Paul Conti appears on his podcast frequently to discuss mental health. Therapy is “hard work … like going to the gym and doing an effective workout.” The brain is a machine that needs tending. Our cells will benefit from the careful management of stress. “I love mechanism, ” says Huberman; our feelings are integral to the apparatus. There are Huberman Husbands (men who optimize), a phenomenon not to be confused with #DaddyHuberman (used by women on TikTok in the man’s thrall).

A prophet must constrain his self-revelation. He must give his story a shape that ultimately tends toward inner strength, weakness overcome. For Andrew Huberman to become your teacher and mine, as he very much was for a period this fall — a period in which I diligently absorbed sun upon waking, drank no more than once a week, practiced physiological sighs in traffic, and said to myself, out loud in my living room, “I also love mechanism”; a period during which I began to think seriously, for the first time in my life, about reducing stress, and during which both my husband and my young child saw tangible benefit from repeatedly immersing themselves in frigid water; a period in which I realized that I not only liked this podcast but liked other women who liked this podcast — he must be, in some way, better than the rest of us.

Huberman sells a dream of control down to the cellular level. But something has gone wrong. In the midst of immense fame, a chasm has opened between the podcaster preaching dopaminergic restraint and a man, with newfound wealth, with access to a world unseen by most professors. The problem with a man always working on himself is that he may also be working on you.

Some of Andrew’s earliest Instagram posts are of his lab. We see smiling undergraduates “slicing, staining, and prepping brains” and a wall of framed science publications in which Huberman-authored papers appear: Nature, Cell Reports, The Journal of Neuroscience. In 2019, under the handle @hubermanlab, Andrew began posting straightforward educational videos in which he talks directly into the camera about subjects such as the organizational logic of the brain stem. Sometimes he would talk over a simple anatomical sketch on lined paper; the impression was, as it is now, of a fast-talking teacher in conversation with an intelligent student. The videos amassed a fan base, and Andrew was, in 2020, invited on some of the biggest podcasts in the world. On Lex Fridman Podcast, he talked about experiments his lab was conducting by inducing fear in people. On The Rich Roll Podcast, the relationship between breathing and motivation. On The Joe Rogan Experience, experiments his lab was conducting on mice.

He was a fluid, engaging conversationalist, rich with insight and informed advice. In a year of death and disease, when many felt a sense of agency slipping away, Huberman had a gentle plan. The subtext was always the same: We may live in chaos, but there are mechanisms of control.

By then he had a partner, Sarah, which is not her real name. Sarah was someone who could talk to anyone about anything. She was dewy and strong and in her mid-40s, though she looked a decade younger, with two small kids from a previous relationship. She had old friends who adored her and no trouble making new ones. She came across as scattered in the way she jumped readily from topic to topic in conversation, losing the thread before returning to it, but she was in fact extremely organized. She was a woman who kept track of things. She was an entrepreneur who could organize a meeting, a skill she would need later for reasons she could not possibly have predicted. When I asked her a question in her home recently, she said the answer would be on an old phone; she stood up, left for only a moment, and returned with a box labeled OLD PHONES.

Sarah’s relationship with Andrew began in February 2018 in the Bay Area, where they both lived. He messaged her on Instagram and said he owned a home in Piedmont, a wealthy city separate from Oakland. That turned out not to be precisely true; he lived off Piedmont Avenue, which was in Oakland. He was courtly and a bit formal, as he would later be on the podcast. In July, in her garden, Sarah says she asked to clarify the depth of their relationship. They decided, she says, to be exclusive.

Both had devoted their lives to healthy living: exercise, good food, good information. They cared immoderately about what went into their bodies. Andrew could command a room and clearly took pleasure in doing so. He was busy and handsome, healthy and extremely ambitious. He gave the impression of working on himself; throughout their relationship, he would talk about “repair” and “healthy merging.” He was devoted to his bullmastiff, Costello, whom he worried over constantly: Was Costello comfortable? Sleeping properly? Andrew liked to dote on the dog, she says, and he liked to be doted on by Sarah. “I was never sitting around him,” she says. She cooked for him and felt glad when he relished what she had made. Sarah was willing to have unprotected sex because she believed they were monogamous.

On Thanksgiving in 2018, Sarah planned to introduce Andrew to her parents and close friends. She was cooking. Andrew texted repeatedly to say he would be late, then later. According to a friend, “he was just, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll be there. Oh, I’m going to be running hours late.’ And then of course, all of these things were planned around his arrival and he just kept going, ‘Oh, I’m going to be late.’ And then it’s the end of the night and he’s like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry this and this happened.’”

Huberman disappearing was something of a pattern. Friends, girlfriends, and colleagues describe him as hard to reach. The list of reasons for not showing up included a book, time-stamping the podcast, Costello, wildfires, and a “meetings tunnel.” “He is flaky and doesn’t respond to things,” says his friend Brian MacKenzie, a health influencer who has collaborated with him on breathing protocols. “And if you can’t handle that, Andrew definitely is not somebody you want to be close to.” “He in some ways disappeared,” says David Spiegel, a Stanford psychiatrist who calls Andrew “prodigiously smart” and “intensely engaging.” “I mean, I recently got a really nice email from him. Which I was touched by. I really was.”

In 2018, before he was famous, Huberman invited a Colorado-based investigative journalist and anthropologist, Scott Carney, to his home in Oakland for a few days; the two would go camping and discuss their mutual interest in actionable science. It had been Huberman, a fan of Carney’s book What Doesn’t Kill Us, who initially reached out, and the two became friendly over phone and email. Huberman confirmed Carney’s list of camping gear: sleeping bag, bug spray, boots.

When Carney got there, the two did not go camping. Huberman simply disappeared for most of a day and a half while Carney stayed home with Costello. He puttered around Huberman’s place, buying a juice, walking through the neighborhood, waiting for him to return. “It was extremely weird,” says Carney. Huberman texted from elsewhere saying he was busy working on a grant. (A spokesperson for Huberman says he clearly communicated to Carney that he went to work.) Eventually, instead of camping, the two went on a few short hikes.

Even when physically present, Huberman can be hard to track. “I don’t have total fidelity to who Andrew is,” says his friend Patrick Dossett. “There’s always a little unknown there.” He describes Andrew as an “amazing thought partner” with “almost total recall,” such a memory that one feels the need to watch what one says; a stray comment could surface three years later. And yet, at other times, “you’re like, All right, I’m saying words and he’s nodding or he is responding, but I can tell something I said sent him down a path that he’s continuing to have internal dialogue about, and I need to wait for him to come back. ”

Andrew Huberman declined to be interviewed for this story. Through a spokesman, Huberman says he did not become exclusive with Sarah until late 2021, that he was not doted on, that tasks between him and Sarah were shared “based on mutual agreement and proficiency,” that their Thanksgiving plans were tentative, and that he “maintains a very busy schedule and shows up to the vast majority of his commitments.”

In the fall of 2020, Huberman sold his home in Oakland and rented one in Topanga, a wooded canyon enclave contiguous with Los Angeles. When he came back to Stanford, he stayed with Sarah, and when he was in Topanga, Sarah was often with him.

When they fought, it was, she says, typically because Andrew would fixate on her past choices: the men she had been with before him, the two children she had had with another man. “I experienced his rage,” Sarah recalls, “as two to three days of yelling in a row. When he was in this state, he would go on until 11 or 12 at night and sometimes start again at two or three in the morning.”

The relationship struck Sarah’s friends as odd. At one point, Sarah said, “I just want to be with my kids and cook for my man.” “I was like, Who says that? ” says a close friend. “I mean, I’ve known her for 30 years. She’s a powerful, decisive, strong woman. We grew up in this very feminist community. That’s not a thing either of us would ever say.”

Another friend found him stressful to be around. “I try to be open-minded,” she said of the relationship. “I don’t want to be the most negative, nonsupportive friend just because of my personal observations and disgust over somebody.” When they were together, he was buzzing, anxious. “He’s like, ‘Oh, my dog needs his blanket this way.’ And I’m like, ‘Your dog is just laying there and super-cozy. Why are you being weird about the blanket?’”

Sarah was not the only person who experienced the extent of Andrew’s anger. In 2019, Carney sent Huberman materials from his then-forthcoming book, The Wedge, in which Huberman appears. He asked Huberman to confirm the parts in which he was mentioned. For months, Huberman did not respond. Carney sent a follow-up email; if Huberman did not respond, he would assume everything was accurate. In 2020, after months of saying he was too busy to review the materials, Huberman called him and, Carney says, came at him in a rage. “I’ve never had a source I thought was friendly go bananas,” says Carney. Screaming, Huberman threatened to sue and accused Carney of “violating Navy OpSec.”

It had become, by then, one of the most perplexing relationships of Carney’s life. That year, Carney agreed to Huberman’s invitation to swim with sharks on an island off Mexico. First, Carney would have to spend a month of his summer getting certified in Denver. He did, at considerable expense. Huberman then canceled the trip a day before they were set to leave. “I think Andrew likes building up people’s expectations,” says Carney, “and then he actually enjoys the opportunity to pull the rug out from under you.”

In January 2021, Huberman launched his own podcast. Its reputation would be directly tied to his role as teacher and scientist. “I’d like to emphasize that this podcast,” he would say every episode, with his particular combination of formality and discursiveness, “is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.”

“I remember feeling quite lonely and making some efforts to repair that,” Huberman would say on an episode in 2024. “Loneliness,” his interviewee said, “is a need state.” In 2021, the country was in the later stages of a need state: bored, alone, powerless. Huberman offered not only hours of educative listening but a plan to structure your day. A plan for waking. For eating. For exercising. For sleep. At a time when life had shifted to screens, he brought people back to their corporeal selves. He advised a “physiological sigh” — two short breaths in and a long one out — to reduce stress. He pulled countless people from their laptops and put them in rhythm with the sun. “Thank you for all you do to better humanity,” read comments on YouTube. “You may have just saved my life man.” “If Andrew were science teacher for everyone in the world,” someone wrote, “no one would have missed even a single class.”

Asked by Time last year for his definition of fun, Huberman said, “I learn and I like to exercise.” Among his most famous episodes is one in which he declares moderate drinking decidedly unhealthy. As MacKenzie puts it, “I don’t think anybody or anything, including Prohibition, has ever made more people think about alcohol than Andrew Huberman.” While he claims repeatedly that he doesn’t want to “demonize alcohol,” he fails to mask his obvious disapproval of anyone who consumes alcohol in any quantity. He follows a time-restricted eating schedule. He discusses constraint even in joy, because a dopamine spike is invariably followed by a drop below baseline; he explains how even a small pleasure like a cup of coffee before every workout reduces the capacity to release dopamine. Huberman frequently refers to the importance of “social contact” and “peace, contentment, and delight,” always mentioned as a triad; these are ultimately leveraged for the one value consistently espoused: physiological health.

In August 2021, Sarah says she read Andrew’s journal and discovered a reference to cheating. She was, she says, “gutted.” “I hear you are saying you are angry and hurt,” he texted her the same day. “I will hear you as much as long as needed for us.”

Andrew and Sarah wanted children together. Optimizers sometimes prefer not to conceive naturally; one can exert more control when procreation involves a lab. Sarah began the first of several rounds of IVF. (A spokesperson for Huberman denies that he and Sarah had decided to have children together, clarifying that they “decided to create embryos by IVF.”)

In 2021, she tested positive for a high-risk form of HPV, one of the variants linked to cervical cancer. “I had never tested positive,” she says, “and had been tested regularly for ten years.” (A spokesperson for Huberman says he has never tested positive for HPV. According to the CDC, there is currently no approved test for HPV in men.) When she brought it up, she says, he told her you could contract HPV from many things.

“I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about truth-telling and deception,” Andrew told evolutionary psychologist David Buss on a November 2021 episode of Huberman Lab called “How Humans Select & Keep Romantic Partners in Short & Long Term.” They were talking about regularities across cultures in mate preferences.

“Could you tell us,” Andrew asked, “about how men and women leverage deception versus truth-telling and communicating some of the things around mate choice selection?”

“Effective tactics for men,” said a gravel-voiced, 68-year-old Buss, “are often displaying cues to long-term interest … men tend to exaggerate the depths of their feelings for a woman.”

“Let’s talk about infidelity in committed relationships,” Andrew said, laughing. “I’m guessing it does happen.”

“Men who have affairs tend to have affairs with a larger number of affair partners,” said Buss. “And so which then by definition can’t be long-lasting. You can’t,” added Buss wryly, “have the long-term affairs with six different partners.”

“Yeah,” said Andrew, “unless he’s, um,” and here Andrew looked into the distance. “Juggling multiple, uh, phone accounts or something of that sort.”

“Right, right, right, and some men try to do that, but I think it could be very taxing,” said Buss.

By 2022, Andrew was legitimately famous. Typical headlines read “I tried a Stanford professor’s top productivity routine” and “Google CEO Uses ‘Nonsleep Deep Rest’ to Relax.” Reese Witherspoon told the world that she was sure to get ten minutes of sunlight in the morning and tagged Andrew. When he was not on his own podcast, Andrew was on someone else’s. He kept the place in Topanga, but he and Sarah began splitting rent in Berkeley. In June 2022, they fully combined lives; Sarah relocated her family to Malibu to be with him.

According to Sarah, Andrew’s rage intensified with cohabitation. He fixated on her decision to have children with another man. She says he told her that being with her was like “bobbing for apples in feces.” “The pattern of your 11 years, while rooted in subconscious drives,” he told her in December 2021, “creates a nearly impossible set of hurdles for us … You have to change.”

Sarah was, in fact, changing. She felt herself getting smaller, constantly appeasing. She apologized, again and again and again. “I have been selfish, childish, and confused,” she said. “As a result, I need your protection.” A spokesperson for Huberman denies Sarah’s accounts of their fights, denies that his rage intensified with cohabitation, denies that he fixated on Sarah’s decision to have children with another man, and denies that he said being with her was like bobbing for apples in feces. A spokesperson said, “Dr. Huberman is very much in control of his emotions.”

The first three rounds of IVF did not produce healthy embryos. In the spring of 2022, enraged again about her past, Andrew asked Sarah to explain in detail what he called her bad choices, most especially having her second child. She wrote it out and read it aloud to him. A spokesperson for Huberman denies this incident and says he does not regard her having a second child as a bad choice.

I think it’s important to recognize that we might have a model of who someone is,” says Dossett, “or a model of how someone should conduct themselves. And if they do something that is out of sync with that model, it’s like, well, that might not necessarily be on that person. Maybe it’s on us. Our model was just off.”

Huberman’s specialty lies in a narrow field: visual-system wiring. How comfortable one feels with the science propagated on Huberman Lab depends entirely on how much leeway one is willing to give a man who expounds for multiple hours a week on subjects well outside his area of expertise. His detractors note that Huberman extrapolates wildly from limited animal studies, posits certainty where there is ambiguity, and stumbles when he veers too far from his narrow realm of study, but even they will tend to admit that the podcast is an expansive, free (or, as he puts it, “zero-cost”) compendium of human knowledge. There are quack guests, but these are greatly outnumbered by profound, complex, patient, and often moving descriptions of biological process.

Huberman Lab is premised on the image of a working scientist. One imagines clean white counters, rodents in cages, postdocs peering into microscopes. “As scientists,” Huberman says frequently. He speaks often, too, of the importance of mentorship. He “loves” reading teacher evaluations. On the web, one can visit the lab and even donate. I have never met a Huberman listener who doubted the existence of such a place, and this appears to be by design. In a glowing 2023 profile in Stanford magazine, we learn “Everything he does is inspired by this love,” but do not learn that Huberman lives 350 miles and a six-hour drive from Stanford University, making it difficult to drop into the lab. Compounding the issue is the fact that the lab, according to knowledgeable sources, barely exists.

“Is a postdoc working on her own funding, alone, a ‘lab?’” asks a researcher at Stanford. There had been a lab — four rooms on the second floor of the Sherman Fairchild Science Building. Some of them smelled of mice. It was here that researchers anesthetized rodents, injected them with fluorescence, damaged their optic nerves, and watched for the newly bright nerves to grow back.

The lab, says the researcher, was already scaling down before COVID. It was emptying out, postdocs apparently unsupervised, a quarter-million-dollar laser-scanning microscope gathering dust. Once the researcher saw someone come in and reclaim a $3,500 rocker, a machine for mixing solutions.

Shortly before publication, a spokesperson for Stanford said, “Dr. Huberman’s lab at Stanford is operational and is in the process of moving from the Department of Neurobiology to the Department of Ophthalmology,” and a spokesperson for Huberman says the equipment in Dr. Huberman’s lab remained in use until the last postdoc moved to a faculty position.

On every episode of his “zero-cost” podcast, Huberman gives a lengthy endorsement of a powder formerly known as Athletic Greens and now as AG1. It is one thing to hear Athletic Greens promoted by Joe Rogan; it is perhaps another to hear someone who sells himself as a Stanford University scientist just back from the lab proclaim that this $79-a-month powder “covers all of your foundational nutritional needs.” In an industry not noted for its integrity, AG1 is, according to writer and professional debunker Derek Beres, “one of the most egregious players in the space.” Here we have a powder that contains, according to its own marketing, 75 active ingredients, far more than the typical supplement, which would seem a selling point but for the inconveniences of mass. As performance nutritionist Adam McDonald points out, the vast number of ingredients indicates that each ingredient, which may or may not promote good health in a certain dose, is likely included in minuscule amounts, though consumers are left to do the math themselves; the company keeps many of the numbers proprietary. “We can be almost guaranteed that literally every supplement or ingredient within this proprietary blend is underdosed,” explains McDonald; the numbers, he says, don’t appear to add up to anything research has shown to be meaningful in terms of human health outcomes. And indeed, “the problem with most of the probiotics is they’re typically not concentrated enough to actually colonize,” one learns from Dr. Layne Norton in a November 2022 episode of Huberman Lab. (AG1 argues that probiotics are effective and that the 75 ingredients are “included not only for their individual benefit, but for the synergy between them — how ingredients interact in complex ways, and how combinations can lead to additive effects.”) “That’s the good news about podcasts,” Huberman said when Wendy Zukerman of Science Vs pointed out that her podcast would never make recommendations based on such tenuous research. “People can choose which podcast they want to listen to.”

Whenever Sarah had suspicions about Andrew’s interactions with another woman, he had a particular way of talking about the woman in question. She says he said the women were stalkers, alcoholics, and compulsive liars. He told her that one woman tore out her hair with chunks of flesh attached to it. He told her a story about a woman who fabricated a story about a dead baby to “entrap” him. (A spokesperson for Huberman denies the account of the denigration of women and the dead-baby story and says the hair story was taken out of context.) Most of the time, Sarah believed him; the women probably were crazy. He was a celebrity. He had to be careful.

It was in August 2022 that Sarah noticed she and Andrew could not go out without being thronged by people. On a camping trip in Washington State that same month, Sarah brought syringes and a cooler with ice packs. Every day of the trip, he injected the drugs meant to stimulate fertility into her stomach. This was round four.

Later that month, Sarah says she grabbed Andrew’s phone when he had left it in the bathroom, checked his texts, and found conversations with someone we will call Eve. Some of them took place during the camping trip they had just taken.

“Your feelings matter,” he told Eve on a day when he had injected his girlfriend with hCG. “I’m actually very much a caretaker.” And later: “I’m back on grid tomorrow and would love to see you this weekend.”

Caught having an affair, Andrew was apologetic. “The landscape has been incredibly hard,” he said. “I let the stress get to me … I defaulted to self safety … I’ve also sat with the hardest of feelings.” “I hear your insights,” he said, “and honestly I appreciate them.”

Sarah noticed how courteous he was with Eve. “So many offers,” she pointed out, “to process and work through things.”

Eve is an ethereally beautiful actress, the kind of woman from whom it is hard to look away. Where Sarah exudes a winsome chaotic energy, Eve is intimidatingly collected. Eve saw Andrew on Raya in 2020 and messaged him on Instagram. They went for a swim in Venice, and he complimented her form. “You’re definitely,” he said, “on the faster side of the distribution.” She found him to be an extraordinary listener, and she liked the way he appeared to be interested in her internal life. He was busy all the time: with his book, and eventually the podcast; his dog; responsibilities at Stanford. “I’m willing to do the repair work on this,” he said when she called him out for standing her up, or, “This sucks, but doesn’t deter my desire and commitment to see you, and establish clear lines of communication and trust.” Despite his endless excuses for not showing up, he seemed, to Eve, to be serious about deepening their relationship, which lasted on and off for two years. Eve had the impression that he was not seeing anyone else: She was willing to have unprotected sex.

As their relationship intensified over the years, he talked often about the family he one day wanted. “Our children would be amazing,” he said. She asked for book recommendations and he suggested, jokingly, Huberman: Why We Made Babies. “I’m at the stage of life where I truly want to build a family,” he told her. “That’s a resounding theme for me.” “How to mesh lives,” he said in a voice memo. “A fundamental question.” One time she heard him say, on Joe Rogan, that he had a girlfriend. She texted him to ask about it, and he responded immediately. He had a stalker, he said, and so his team had decided to invent a partner for the listening public. (“I later learned,” Eve tells me with characteristic equanimity, “that this was not true.”)

In September 2022, Eve noticed that Sarah was looking at her Instagram stories; not commenting or liking, just looking. Impulsively, Eve messaged her. “Is there anything you’d rather ask me directly?” she said. They set up a call. “Fuck you Andrew,” she messaged him.

Sarah moved out in August 2023 but says she remained in a committed relationship with Huberman. (A spokesperson for Huberman says they were separated.) At Thanksgiving that year, she noticed he was “wiggly” every time a cell phone came out at the table — trying to avoid, she suspected, being photographed. She says she did not leave him until December. According to Sarah, the relationship ended, as it had started, with a lie. He had been at her place for a couple of days and left for his place to prepare for a Zoom call; they planned to go Christmas shopping the next day. Sarah showed up at his house and found him on the couch with another woman. She could see them through the window. “If you’re going to be a cheater,” she advises me later, “do not live in a glass house.”

On January 11, a woman we’ll call Alex began liking all of Sarah’s Instagram posts, seven of them in a minute. Sarah messaged her: “I think you’re friends with my ex, Andrew Huberman. Are you one of the woman he cheated on me with?” Alex is an intense, direct, highly educated woman who lives in New York; she was sleeping with Andrew; and she had no idea there had been a girlfriend. “Fuck,” she said. “I think we should talk.” Over the following weeks, Sarah and Alex never stopped texting. “She helped me hold my boundary against him,” says Sarah, “keep him blocked. She said, ‘You need to let go of the idea of him.’” Instead of texting Andrew, Sarah texted Alex. Sometimes they just talked about their days and not about Andrew at all. Sarah still thought beautiful Eve, on the other hand, “might be crazy,” but they talked some more and brought her into the group chat. Soon there were others. There was Mary: a dreamy, charismatic Texan he had been seeing for years. Her friends called Andrew “bread crumbs,” given his tendency to disappear. There was a fifth woman in L.A., funny and fast-talking. Alex had been apprehensive; she felt foolish for believing Andrew’s lies and worried that the other women would seem foolish, therefore compounding her shame. Foolish women were not, however, what she found. Each of the five was assertive and successful and educated and sharp-witted; there had been a type, and they were diverse expressions of that type. “I can’t believe how crazy I thought you were,” Mary told Sarah. No one struck anyone else as a stalker. No one had made up a story about a dead baby or torn out hair with chunks in it. “I haven’t slept with anyone but him for six years,” Sarah told the group. “If it makes you feel any better,” Alex joked, “according to the CDC,” they had all slept with one another.

The women compared time-stamped screenshots of texts and assembled therein an extraordinary record of deception.

There was a day in Texas when, after Sarah left his hotel, Andrew slept with Mary and texted Eve. They found days in which he would text nearly identical pictures of himself to two of them at the same time. They realized that the day before he had moved in with Sarah in Berkeley, he had slept with Mary, and he had also been with her in December 2023, the weekend before Sarah caught him on the couch with a sixth woman.

They realized that on March 21, 2021, a day of admittedly impressive logistical jujitsu, while Sarah was in Berkeley, Andrew had flown Mary from Texas to L.A. to stay with him in Topanga. While Mary was there, visiting from thousands of miles away, he left her with Costello. He drove to a coffee shop, where he met Eve. They had a serious talk about their relationship. They thought they were in a good place. He wanted to make it work.

“Phone died,” he texted Mary, who was waiting back at the place in Topanga. And later, to Eve: “Thank you … For being so next, next, level gorgeous and sexy.”

“Sleep well beautiful,” he texted Sarah.

“The scheduling alone!” Alex tells me. “I can barely schedule three Zooms in a day.”

In the aggregate, Andrew’s therapeutic language took on a sinister edge. It was communicating a commitment that was not real, a profound interest in the internality of women that was then used to manipulate them.

“Does Huberman have vices?” asks an anonymous Reddit poster.

“I remember him saying,” reads the first comment, “that he loves croissants.”

While Huberman has been criticized for having too few women guests on his podcast, he is solicitous and deferential toward those he interviews. In a January 2023 episode, Dr. Sara Gottfried argues that “patriarchal messaging” and white supremacy contribute to the deterioration of women’s health, and Andrew responds with a story about how his beloved trans mentor, Ben Barres, had experienced “intense suppression/oppression” at MIT before transitioning. “Psychology is influencing biology,” he says with concern. “And you’re saying these power dynamics … are impacting it.”

In private, he could sometimes seem less concerned about patriarchy. Multiple women recall him saying he preferred the kind of relationship in which the woman was monogamous but the man was not. “He told me,” says Mary, “that what he wanted was a woman who was submissive, who he could slap in the ass in public, and who would be crawling on the floor for him when he got home.” (A spokesperson for Huberman denies this.) The women continued to compare notes. He had his little ways of checking in: “Good morning beautiful.” There was a particular way he would respond to a sexy picture: “Mmmmm hi there.”

A spokesperson for Huberman insisted that he had not been monogamous with Sarah until late 2021, but a recorded conversation he had with Alex suggested that in May of that year he had led Sarah to believe otherwise. “Well, she was under the impression that we were exclusive at that time,” he said. “Women are not dumb like that, dude,” Alex responded. “She was under that impression? Then you were giving her that impression.” Andrew agreed: “That’s what I meant. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to put it on her.”

The kind of women to whom Andrew Huberman was attracted; the kind of women who were attracted to him — these were women who paid attention to what went into their bodies, women who made avoiding toxicity a central focus of their lives. They researched non-hormone-disrupting products, avoided sugar, ate organic. They were disgusted by the knowledge that they had had sex with someone who had an untold number of partners. All of them wondered how many others there were. When Sarah found Andrew with the other woman, there had been a black pickup truck in the driveway, and she had taken a picture. The women traced the plates, but they hit a dead end and never found her.

Tell us about the dark triad,” he had said to Buss in November on the trip in which he slept with Mary.

“The dark triad consists of three personality characteristics,” said Buss. “So narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.” Such people “feign cooperation but then cheat on subsequent moves. They view other people as pawns to be manipulated for their own instrumental gains.” Those “who are high on dark-triad traits,” he said, “tend to be good at the art of seduction.” The vast majority of them were men.

Andrew told one of the women that he wasn’t a sex addict; he was a love addict. Addiction, Huberman says, “is a progressing narrowing of things that bring you joy.” In August 2021, the same month Sarah first learned of Andrew’s cheating, he released an episode with Anna Lembke, chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. Lembke, the author of a book called Dopamine Nation, gave a clear explanation of the dopaminergic roots of addiction.

“What happens right after I do something that is really pleasurable,” she says, “and releases a lot of dopamine is, again, my brain is going to immediately compensate by downregulating my own dopamine receptors … And that’s that comedown, or the hangover or that aftereffect, that moment of wanting to do it more.” Someone who waits for the feeling to pass, she explained, will reregulate, go back to baseline. “If I keep indulging again and again and again,” she said, “ultimately I have so much on the pain side that I’ve essentially reset my brain to what we call anhedonic or lacking-in-joy type of state, which is a dopamine deficit state.” This is a state in which nothing is enjoyable: “Everything sort of pales in comparison to this one drug that I want to keep doing.”

“Just for the record,” Andrew said, smiling, “Dr. Lembke has … diagnosed me outside the clinic, in a playful way, of being work addicted. You’re probably right!”

Lembke laughed. “You just happen to be addicted,” she said gently, “to something that is really socially rewarded.”

What he failed to understand, he said, was people who ruined their lives with their disease. “I like to think I have the compassion,” he said, “but I don’t have that empathy for taking a really good situation and what from the outside looks to be throwing it in the trash.”

At least three ex-girlfriends remain friendly with Huberman. He “goes deep very quickly,” says Keegan Amit, who dated Andrew from 2010 to 2017 and continues to admire him. “He has incredible emotional capacity.” A high-school girlfriend says both she and he were “troubled” during their time together, that he was complicated and jealous but “a good person” whom she parted with on good terms. “He really wants to get involved emotionally but then can’t quite follow through,” says someone he dated on and off between 2006 and 2010. “But yeah. I don’t think it’s …” She hesitates. “I think he has such a good heart.”

Andrew grew up in Palo Alto just before the dawn of the internet, a lost city. He gives some version of his origin story on The Rich Roll Podcast ; he repeats it for Tim Ferriss and Peter Attia. He tells Time magazine and Stanford magazine. “Take the list of all the things a parent shouldn’t do in a divorce,” he recently told Christian bowhunter Cameron Hanes. “They did them all.” “You had,” says Wendy Zukerman in her bright Aussie accent, “a wayward childhood.” “I think it’s very easy for people listening to folks with a bio like yours,” says Tim Ferriss, “to sort of assume a certain trajectory, right? To assume that it has always come easy.” His father and mother agree that “after our divorce was an incredibly hard time for Andrew,” though they “do not agree” with some of his characterization of his past; few parents want to be accused of “pure neglect.”

Huberman would not provide the name of the detention center in which he says he was held for a month in high school. In a version of the story Huberman tells on Peter Attia’s podcast, he says, “We lost a couple of kids, a couple of kids killed themselves while we were there.” ( New York was unable to find an account of this event.)

Andrew attended Gunn, a high-performing, high-pressure high school. Classmates describe him as always with a skateboard; they remember him as pleasant, “sweet,” and not particularly academic. He would, says one former classmate, “drop in on the half-pipe,” where he was “encouraging” to other skaters. “I mean, he was a cool, individual kid,” says another classmate. “There was one year he, like, bleached his hair and everyone was like, ‘Oh, that guy’s cool.’” It was a wealthy place, the kind of setting where the word au pair comes up frequently, and Andrew did not stand out to his classmates as out of control or unpredictable. They do not recall him getting into street fights, as Andrew claims he did. He was, says Andrew’s father, “a little bit troubled, yes, but it was not something super-serious.”

What does seem certain is that in his adolescence, Andrew became a regular consumer of talk therapy. In therapy, one learns to tell stories about one’s experience. A story one could tell is: I overcame immense odds to be where I am. Another is: The son of a Stanford professor, born at Stanford Hospital, grows up to be a Stanford professor.

I have never,” says Amit, “met a man more interested in personal growth.” Andrew’s relationship to therapy remains intriguing. “We were at dinner once,” says Eve, “and he told me something personal, and I suggested he talk to his therapist. He laughed it off like that wasn’t ever going to happen, so I asked him if he lied to his therapist. He told me he did all the time.” (A spokesperson for Huberman denies this.)

“People high on psychopathy are good at deception,” says Buss. “I don’t know if they’re good at self-deception.” With repeated listening to the podcast, one discerns a man undergoing, in public, an effort to understand himself. There are hours of talking about addiction, trauma, dopamine, and fear. Narcissism comes up consistently. One can see attempts to understand and also places where those attempts swerve into self-indulgence. On a recent episode with the Stanford-trained psychiatrist Paul Conti, Andrew and Conti were describing the psychological phenomenon of “aggressive drive.” Andrew had an example to share: He once canceled an appointment with a Stanford colleague. There was no response. Eventually, he received a reply that said, in Andrew’s telling, “Well, it’s clear that you don’t want to pursue this collaboration.”

Andrew was, he said to Conti, “shocked.”

“I remember feeling like that was pretty aggressive,” Andrew told Conti. “It stands out to me as a pretty salient example of aggression.”

“So to me,” said Huberman, “that seems like an example of somebody who has a, well, strong aggressive drive … and when disappointed, you know, lashes back or is passive.”

“There’s some way in which the person doesn’t feel good enough no matter what this person has achieved. So then there is a sense of the need and the right to overcontrol.”

“Sure,” said Huberman.

“And now we’re going to work together, right, so I’m exerting significant control over you, right? And it may be that he’s not aware of it.”

“In this case,” said Andrew, “it was a she.”

This woman, explained Conti, based entirely on Andrew’s description of two emails, had allowed her unhealthy “excess aggression” to be “eclipsing the generative drive.” She required that Andrew “bowed down before” her “in the service of the ego” because she did not feel good about herself.

This conversation extends for an extraordinary nine minutes, both men egging each other on, diagnosis after diagnosis, salient, perhaps, for reasons other than those the two identify. We learn that this person lacks gratitude, generative drive, and happiness; she suffers from envy, low “pleasure drive,” and general unhappiness. It would appear, at a distance, to be an elaborate fantasy of an insane woman built on a single behavior: At some point in time, a woman decided she did not want to work with a man who didn’t show up.

There is an argument to be made that it does not matter how a helpful podcaster conducts himself outside of the studio. A man unable to constrain his urges may still preach dopaminergic control to others. Morning sun remains salutary. The physiological sigh, employed by this writer many times in the writing of this essay, continues to effect calm. The large and growing distance between Andrew Huberman and the man he continues to be may not even matter to those who buy questionable products he has recommended and from which he will materially benefit, or listeners who imagined a man in a white coat at work in Palo Alto. The people who definitively find the space between fantasy and reality to be a problem are women who fell for a podcaster who professed deep, sustained concern for their personal growth, and who, in his skyrocketing influence, continued to project an image of earnest self-discovery. It is here, in the false belief of two minds in synchronicity and exploration, that deception leads to harm. They fear it will lead to more.

“There’s so much pain,” says Sarah, her voice breaking. “Feeling we had made mistakes. We hadn’t been enough. We hadn’t been communicating. By making these other women into the other, I hadn’t really given space for their hurt. And let it sink in with me that it was so similar to my own hurt.”

Three of the women on the group text met up in New York in February, and the group has only grown closer. On any given day, one of the five can go into an appointment and come back to 100 texts. Someone shared a Reddit thread in which a commenter claimed Huberman had a “stable full a hoes,” and another responded, “I hope he thinks of us more like Care Bears,” at which point they assigned themselves Care Bear names. “Him: You’re the only girl I let come to my apartment,” read a meme someone shared; under it was a yellow lab looking extremely skeptical. They regularly use Andrew’s usual response to explicit photos (“Mmmmm”) to comment on pictures of one another’s pets. They are holding space for other women who might join.

“This group has radicalized me,” Sarah tells me. “There has been so much processing.” They are planning a weekend together this summer.

“It could have been sad or bitter,” says Eve. “We didn’t jump in as besties, but real friendships have been built. It has been, in a strange and unlikely way, quite a beautiful experience.”

Additional reporting by Amelia Schonbek and Laura Thompson.

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The Last Thing My Mother Wanted

Healthy at age 74, she decided there was nothing on earth still keeping her here, not even us..

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

Do you know how many grams of Nembutal it takes to put an elephant to sleep?” asks the anesthesiologist from Pegasos, a voluntary-assisted-death organization in Switzerland, after an evaluative look at my mother.

We — my 74-year-old mother, my younger sister, and I — are sitting on a couch in the suite of a charming hotel near the center of Basel. Thin, contained, elegant, with a neat bob of white hair, Mom is at attention. The doctor seems at ease. As he tucks his hat under a red-and-gold Louis XV–style chair, he tells us that many people who avail themselves of Pegasos’s service, which costs more than $10,000, will sell their car or antique books to spend their last few nights at this hotel.

It is September 28, 2022, the day before my mother is scheduled to inject herself with 15 grams of Nembutal — enough to sedate three and a half elephants, the doctor says. She would not need to worry about waking up or being cremated alive. This was a relief to her, Mom says with a smile.

In June, my sister and I had learned, almost by accident, that she was seeking an assisted suicide. I was on the phone with Mom, listening to her complain about an annoying bureaucrat at the New York County Clerk’s Office, when she mentioned it. “I am putting in an application to Pegasos,” she said impassively, “so I was getting some documents for them.” I texted my sister while we were on the phone: “What the fuck? Why didn’t you tell me about Mom applying to die?” Three little dots. “Wait,” My sister wrote back. “What. What is she doing?”

Mom didn’t have cancer or Lou Gehrig’s disease or any of the illnesses that typically qualify you for assisted death. A cataract in her left eye had deteriorated, and though she had some foot pain and had gotten a pacemaker, all of which weighed on her, she was quite healthy for her age. She had completed a marathon just a few years before at 68.

But her long-term partner had been diagnosed with an incurable glioblastoma in February 2020 and had taken advantage of California’s “death with dignity” laws to die that May. Soon after, Mom left San Francisco, a city she hated for the 20 years she lived there, and moved back to her beloved New York. She bought an apartment near her childhood home on Fifth Avenue; reconnected with old friends; saw plays, art exhibits, and movies; ate good food; and traveled — and did not care about any of it. “Oh, I have nothing interesting to say,” she would say when I called, her voice animated only when she was describing a plan to smite anyone responsible for a grievance by writing a furious email or leaving an angry Yelp review. My mother had always been a flashlight of a person — shining a small but intense beam on things she wanted to explore — but now the radius had shrunk, the light weakened. She used to be curious about my husband’s hobbies, our children, my sister’s career, but those topics, like everything else, were now of only vague interest. She would come down to Virginia to see my family and go up to Connecticut to see my sister’s, but she wouldn’t play with the kids and didn’t seem to enjoy the trips, just expressed relief when they were over. In the last months of her life, the only thing that appeared to give her real joy was the hope that she would be ending it.

In the U.S., ten states allow physician-assisted death, which is available only to residents who are terminally ill with no more than six months to live. In Canada, the laws are more expansive, but citizens still need a diagnosis — if not a terminal condition, then an incurable one with intolerable suffering and an advanced state of decline. In Switzerland, where a foreigner can go to receive aid in dying, there are fewer restrictions on who is eligible. Pegasos is one of the only organizations that will help elderly people who have not been diagnosed with a terminal illness but who are tired of life. Its website notes that “old age is rarely kind” and that “for a person to be in the headspace of considering ending their lives, their quality of life must be qualitatively poor.”

My mother had pinned her hopes on this “tired of life” catchall. She had a three-pronged rationale, she told us over the phone: The world was going to hell, and she did not want to see more; she did not get joy out of the everyday pleasures of life or her relationships; and she did not want to face the degradations of aging.

My sister and I immediately believed she would go through with it. A lifelong libertarian, my mother believed firmly in maintaining her independence. Since she was 21, she had a living will with significant restrictions on when she wanted to be resuscitated. Mom had been brought up with a strict sense of what was appropriate, which was essentially a list of rules on how to avoid imposing on others (thank-you notes had to be sent within a week; navy is the safest color). As she aged, she was desperately afraid of deteriorating and becoming a burden — on taxpayers funding Medicaid, on the medical system, on us.

Our husbands, and our friends who had spent time with her, weren’t so sure about her resolve. Mom had a history of starting projects and then abandoning them. Over the years, her Farsi and Japanese had stayed at a beginner level, her massage-therapy degree went essentially unused, the beginning of her dissertation for an anthropology Ph.D. on upper-class lesbians sat in a stack of neatly filed index cards. And she often made threats she didn’t keep. Once, furious in the middle of an argument, she went to her filing cabinet, got out her will, and crossed out my name in the relevant sections, then initialed and dated every change. The next time she sent us a copy of her will, I was, without comment, back in it.

This uncertainty cast a strange shadow on the long, humid days of that Virginia summer. I wrote down memories, questions in case it was my last chance to ask them. Mostly, I hoped a deadline might compel her to give me the thing I’d been seeking for years: some accounting of who she was as a parent, some sign that she had thought about all the nicks and bangs she had given my sister and me.

In mid-June, my mother begins to gather the required documents: the birth and marriage certificates, the name changes, the medical records. None of her medical records have any documentation of any mental illness, which would prompt a closer review from Pegasos; Mom had refused therapy her entire life, believing it to be for the weak. But it had long been clear to the few people she had kept in her life and the many who had been excised or distanced themselves that something was not right.

When I was in preschool and my parents were still married and living together on the Upper East Side, my mother started an affair with the mother of one of my friends. I found out in kindergarten when my friend and I walked in on them in the bath. Once that secret was out, no secrets would be kept. My mother told me that my friend’s parents liked to have another mutual friend watch them have sex. This was unfathomable to me. I had only ever seen this voyeur — a kind, chubby woman — in slightly scuffed Ferragamos with a silk scarf draped dowdily around her neck. Now I imagined her in a bedroom I knew well, watching my friend’s parents do whatever noisy, naked thing made my parents lock the door at night sometimes.

When I was about 8, my mother started up with a professor of anthropology at Columbia, where she had begun the Ph.D. she wouldn’t finish. He smoked cigars and was fat. Mom was entranced. By his intellect, she said. One Sunday in late fall, my mother, my sister, and I were on our way back to the city from East Hampton when Mom decided to stop to get a poinsettia for the professor. When my father asked why we were late, my sister told him, innocently, that we stopped to buy a plant for “Mommy’s lover.” My father was not an arguer, but his face rearranged itself into fury and humiliation while my mother screeched at my sister, “How could you tell your father that?!” I grabbed my sister, and we hid under the mahogany dining table. My sister was shivering. I sat beside her, silent, a little resentful we were witnessing something that maybe should have stayed between grown-ups.

Some years later, after my parents had started and stopped divorce proceedings, my mother and I took a trip to India to hike for six weeks in Ladakh. It was, she said, a way for us to get to know each other in an environment where, unlike New York or Paris, she wasn’t the expert. To mark my turning 16 and the evolution of our relationship. When we crossed the threshold of the guesthouse in Delhi where the dozen or so travelers would be meeting, she saw a woman with bright-blue eyes and a subtle mullet, grabbed my hand, and said, “Fuck. I didn’t need to fall in love right now.” The trip became about that love — every night my mother would tell me every detail about her conversations with the woman and the growing lust she felt for her.

One night, there was an almost biblical storm and we heard someone outside our tent asking to come in. It was the blue-eyed woman, who would become my mother’s partner of 25 years. Her tent had blown away. We welcomed her into our two-person tent and within an hour, I was huddled on one side, trying desperately not to touch the wet polyester sidewall, singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” silently with my fingers in my ears so I could muffle the wet sounds of their lovemaking. I knew I wouldn’t get an apology the next morning, but I didn’t expect pure triumph. My mother had now won this woman from her partner, the trip operator, and she was entirely focused on her.

Later, in high school, I was on the phone with a friend while heating something up in the kitchen. I was an absent-minded kid, and my mother had warned me before about the danger of not monitoring the stove. When I saw the flames, I ran to get my father, who was reading in his room. Twenty-three years before, he had lost his first wife and son in a freak house fire. He was 70 years old when our kitchen went ablaze, but I have never seen a human move that quickly. I was paralyzed. Not because of the fire but because I knew how angry my mother would be. When she came home, she didn’t ask my father how he was feeling. She told me to go to my room. I didn’t sleep. I was terrified and wrote a poem about how much I loved her. In the morning, I gave her the poem and she gave me my punishment. I would not be going on spring break with her and my sister, I needed to get a job to help pay for the damage, and I wasn’t allowed to say “I love you” to her for three months. I pushed back, telling her I did love her and had just made a mistake, but hit a wall of silence.

It was decades later, when I was in a healthy marriage with three children of my own, that I started to see how wrong it all was. Back then, I couldn’t let myself feel angry at my mother; it was too dangerous. Any hint of disapproval could be the moment she cut you off, and once out, there was no way back in. When she was 71, without warning, she stopped talking to her only sibling, apparently because an email her sister had sent related to the family business was the final straw in a lifetime of annoyance. The abandonment was total. Despite my aunt’s efforts, my mother never spoke to her again.

I struggle briefly with whether to email Pegasos and tell them the part of the story I knew, but I decide not to. Maybe, I think, it would be best for my mother to end her life. I love her, and in addition to the reasons she articulated, she seems terribly lonely. I don’t want to take from her the choice of a civilized, painless death. And I fear what would happen if she found out I had thrown roadblocks in her way. Even now, she has an enormous amount of power over me. When I was a teenager, my mother, after a fight with my father, forbade me from speaking to my youngest half-sister again. It took me until I was 40 to work up the courage to contact her, and even then, I did so in secret.

In July, Mom sends Pegasos the documents and gets conditional approval. She wires the money for the fee, and it takes far too much time, and many visits to her bank, to clear. “I can’t believe I have to go through this crap to not go through this crap anymore,” she texts.

The days in August are long. Pegasos has said it will get back to her with potential dates, and time drips by as my sister, my mother, and I wait. Her anxiety seems to increase with every day. Always goal-oriented, she is now determined to die. That month, I am visiting my mother-in-law when my mother calls. “I just want to hear back from them,” she says, her stress palpable. “They said it would be two weeks. If they don’t accept me, I am going to kill myself. I’ve been thinking about it.” She has been. She has stockpiled Valium and Ambien, bought over the internet, and has a few Zofrans left over from trips. She is going to rent a hotel room, take the anti-nausea medication and the Ambien, get into a bath, take a few Valium, and slit her arteries with a knife. She wants to do it in a hotel room because she doesn’t want her apartment to be difficult to sell, though, she says, she would prefer to die at home. The image of her tiny body, the curve of her lower stomach and the age spots on her chest, lying in a pool of pinkish water flashes into my brain. I try to shake it. She wouldn’t do that. I can’t imagine she would.

If I’m being honest, I am glad she has a backup plan, even if I hate the specifics. Though the idea of cutting ties with her has crossed my mind, I’ve refrained, more out of a sense of duty to her and my sister than from any joy I get from our relationship. The decades have refused to soften her, and on visits, I’d watch as she snapped at the children and then wondered why they retreated to their rooms to read. In the weeks leading up to those trips, I’d repeat the same thing I used to tell myself on flights with a toddler: You can get through anything in six-minute increments. It would be a struggle, I know, to care for her as she aged. But the anticipation of relief is accompanied by the guilt of knowing that my mother, on a microchimeric level, can sense my ambivalence and is feeling out how strongly my sister and I will fight to persuade her to stay on this earth. After she told us about her application to Pegasos, I called her. “What would make you happy this summer, Mom?” I asked. I suggested a girls’ weekend with her, my sister, and me; she declined. Later, she tells my sister that part of the reason she has decided to kill herself is that my sister does not love her enough. In August, she sends me a final birthday card. On the front, it reads MAY ALL YOUR VENGEFUL WISHES COME TRUE. She has written on the inside, “Dear Pussycat, I think this is the best birthday wish ever. xxoo. Mommy.”

I can see it clearly — the special brand of narcissistic sadism she has perfected. Still, in my bountiful moments, I think perhaps she is consciously attempting a last act of parenting: doing me the favor of severing the connection that has defined much of my life and that I am too scared to break.

On September 2, Pegasos offers my mother a slot on September 29. Time declares war on my sanity. Paucity and abundance. There are too many hours and definitely not enough. I get through every day: cooking, volunteering at school, taking one child to the orthodontist, then the next to a guitar lesson. The rhythms of life become unnatural. In my head is a clock: “Mom may be dead in two weeks and three days. Two weeks and two days.”

I stop sleeping almost entirely. I am pretty certain I am not going to miss her, but she is my mother. Two weeks. I can’t decide if I am more frightened of watching her die or of the week we will spend with her beforehand. What if my last memories are of her being cruel, even inadvertently?

Thirteen days. I’ve been calling her more frequently, panning for any evidence that we could speak truthfully. She tells me every time that she has nothing interesting to say. Once, my call goes to voice-mail and she texts an explanation; she’s getting her legs waxed. Twelve days. She’s having good-bye dinners and lunches. Some participants know, but some don’t.

I call her the Monday before we leave for Switzerland. I note that in two weeks I won’t be able to hear her voice and I am just calling to say “hi.” This seems to be an emotional curiosity for her; I can almost hear her rolling it around in her head. Finally, she advises me, chipper, that I should record her voice. I tell her I love her as we say good-bye and realize that she stopped saying “I love you” sometime in July.

In the meantime, I’ve continued to write down moments I think she would enjoy reliving — mostly from when my sister and I were young, when she was still tender and affectionate with us. Games of tickle monster on the stairs of our apartment, the half-hour every day she would read to us while we lay sprawled on the floor coloring or building houses of cards. Our summers spent as a trio on Long Island — jumping waves, catching crabs in the bay, eating dinner in the backyard before falling asleep in her bed, nut brown and worn out from the sun. On one of my first plane rides, she told me about the 1973 Rome-airport terrorist attacks ten years earlier. “Pussycat,” she said somberly, “if I fall on top of you and you hear gunshots, don’t move, even if I am not answering you.”

The school year begins. As I sit by the pool in the evenings watching my children swim, I debate forcing a conversation about who she was as a mother. Then old reflexes kick in: What if she gets angry and bans me from coming to Switzerland? I couldn’t make my little sister be the sole witness to her death. I start to fantasize that, at the least, we’ll talk in Basel. That she’ll tell us that she remembers how my breath always smelled like apple juice as a child and what joy that gave her, that she loved the weight of our bodies when we sat on her lap, that she is proud of raising women like us and enjoys the squeals of our children and the solicitousness of our husbands mixing her cocktails when she visits. After my sister and I approve of the hotel she wants to stay in in Basel, she writes us an email, telling us “I really appreciate the two of you :-). I am lucky that you are my daughters.” Though I should probably know better, I imagine finding a long note from her in the hotel telling us how much she cares, how even though the decision was the right one for her, it was hard to make.

Monday ends. Then Tuesday. Vicious eczema erupts on my chin. I lie in bed awake every night from midnight until 5 a.m. My husband still isn’t convinced she’ll go through with it. My sister and I contemplate how things will shift if she changes her mind at the last minute. We decide that, for this year, we’d just skip the holidays as a family.

There’s a strike at the Paris airport, and my mother is worried that her flight to Switzerland, which stops at Charles de Gaulle, will be affected. As backup, I buy refundable tickets directly to Zurich from New York. She’s effusively grateful. She tells a friend this purchase is the thing she has most loved about me. On Tuesday, when I call a week before she is scheduled to die, she tells me she is going to clean her apartment and wash her sheets in case my sister and I want to stay there (we don’t) and then pack. In the middle of our conversation, she says, “I just wish it was next week.” Then she remembers that she needs to buy razors in case there is a last-minute hitch with Pegasos. She tells me she plans to send my sister and me away and then kill herself in the hotel bathroom. Even in context, this seems histrionic: She shouldn’t put my sister and me in the position of flying to Switzerland to watch her kill herself and then ask us to leave and walk around Basel knowing she is taking her life in a painful way — and then I feel ungenerous for noting that.

I feel ungenerous often. In her recounting, my mother had a gilded but emotionally difficult early life. An apartment across from the Met in a building her family owned, skiing in Megève, summers in East Hampton. And then parents who left her and her sister in the care of a Swedish nanny to go on a round-the-world cruise when she was only 2 and a half, returning to find their offspring now spoke only Swedish, which neither of them did. A father who cheated on her mother, who returned the favor. A mother who literally thought she was Marie Antoinette reincarnated and then was hospitalized when my mother was 10.

My mother will tell us in Switzerland that, in the hospital, my grandmother was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Later, one of my half-sisters will mention that when I was a toddler, my mother told her, outraged, that her doctor had suggested my mother, too, had BPD. I had been trying to understand her for years, and the diagnosis finally makes the puzzle pieces fit: The illness is characterized by dichotomous thinking, impulsive actions without regard for the feelings of others, and trouble maintaining stable relationships. Still, there is no way to corroborate it.

Less than one week left. For the first time in my life, real rage. It bubbles up as dreams in which I shake her violently and only sawdust comes out. How can she value my sister and me — and our beautiful, kind, sparkly children — so little as to choose to leave us? And is she really going to go without any kind of reckoning with the person and parent she was, with the damage she has done? It feels horribly cyclical. When my grandmother died, my mother went through her apartment, searching for clues as to her personality, or perhaps some proof that her mother had loved and cherished her, and found a series of locked diaries dating back years. Hours later, she found the keys and was full of anticipation. All the diaries were blank.

My mother-in-law arrives on Friday, two days before I am scheduled to leave for Switzerland, to help my husband take care of our three children. She has been caring and unobtrusive throughout the summer, and seeing how easily she and my husband co-parent, and their affection for each other, is too painful. I avoid them and my kids all weekend. Saturday, my sister goes to New York to accompany my mother to the airport. She has to pee when she arrives, but my mother will not let her into her apartment as she has already cleaned it. She’s anxious about getting to the airport in time, though they end up arriving three and a half hours early.

We haven’t told the kids what is happening, and neither have my sister and her husband. We have a tentative plan to tell them when they are older. My mother would like us to. She feels her choice is ethical and brave — and, I think, wants us to honor that in our recounting.

I am not sure that I live the three days in Switzerland so much as watch them pass through leaded windows. Nothing seems solid. My mother certainly doesn’t. We walk around Basel, a charming city with a river flowing through it, on Monday. Tuesday and Wednesday are gray and rainy. We have lunch. We take the train to France. We talk about the music she listened to with her cousin when she was young and pull up a video of “Running Bear” on YouTube. I try to take advantage of the fact that she has her faculties to talk about our life, but I quickly realize there is no point. When I ask why she thinks our relationship has always been tenser than hers with my sister, she tells me, “You just became so nasty and difficult at 8.” She hands us no letters.

The night before she is scheduled to kill herself, we have a sumptuous dinner at the Brasserie au Violon, the site of a former prison; my mother chose the venue as a joke.

The procedure, or the appointment — none of us seem to want to say the word death — has been moved from Thursday morning to the early afternoon. Another lifetime of waiting. By 9 a.m., the clouds have broken, and my mother is already dressed, her hair in curlers. She is sitting on the bed, looking at her computer. My sister and I suggest a walk. My mother declines: “I’m doing emails. Just unsubscribing from Politico.” “Mom!” We splutter. “We can do that! It’s your last day on earth!” Which it is, and so we desist. Around noon, we go down to the hotel bar. My mother orders a whiskey-soda, ice cream, and a glass of Barolo. She enjoys the wine so much that I suggest she could just not go through with it and stay in this exact hotel and drink herself into oblivion for the rest of her life. Like Bartleby, she’d prefer not to.

At one, her internal alarm goes off. We get the check, the hotel gets a cab, and the three of us, together for the last time, get in. The 20-minute ride to an industrial suburb of the city passes in silence; we are all holding hands.

The head of the organization, dressed in an off-white linen top and flowing pants, greets us kindly as the car arrives and leads us into the Pegasos bay in the industrial park. Next to it is a place that appears to repair tire rims and then one that mixes paint. In the waiting room, to the left, large-scale photos of a beach frame a desk; on the right there is a seating area. All the colors are neutral, and there is an abundance of bottled waters and chocolates.

The train is in motion. We hand over our passports; the Swiss police, I think we are told, will need them so they can confirm our identities once we identify the body. My mother is nervous, the way she has been my whole life while traveling. The anesthesiologist is there, typing briskly. The head of the organization tells us there is no rush, but we can start if we are ready. My sister and I look at each other. We’ll never be ready, but when my mother says she is set, we follow her back to the second room. It’s the last time we will be her goslings. The air seems to have turned into corn syrup, and I waddle behind her, weighed down by hundreds of tiny memories, grievances, and love notes. This is it. This is it. My mother climbs into a queen-size hospital bed. The director comes in and my mother reminds him that she has a pacemaker and they should take it out before they cremate her so the crematorium will not explode. He laughs gently and says they will be sure to. “Don’t worry. We know. We already had that happen once.” I can’t tell if he is kidding.

Mom has opted to have an IV and not take the oral medication, as apparently the latter tastes terrible and has a tendency to make people vomit. The anesthesiologist begins a saline drip and asks Mom to experiment with the proprietary switch that will initiate the IV, and she has no problem; the doctor reminds us that we cannot get our fingerprints on the switch or there could be trouble with the Swiss authorities. My mother seems tiny in the big bed. We get the CD she wants us to play as she is dying — a recording of “Ave Maria.” We hand her the photo of her partner that has been on her bedside table for years, and she tucks it under her shirt, next to her heart. She puts some stuffed animals that they cherished as totems around her stomach.

The anesthesiologist puts the Nembutal into the drip and leaves the room. My sister and I climb into the bed, one on either side of her. Mom has the switch in her hand, and as “Ave Maria” starts to swell, my sister and I whisper softly, “I love you. I love you. Go in peace. I love you.” Mom pushes the switch and her breathing starts to slow. Her eyes lose focus, and in less than a minute and a half she is gone. My sister and I sit there for a few moments, petting her head, until it feels somehow untoward to continue. And then one of her eyes jumps. I get the anesthesiologist since Mom was terrified of being cremated alive, and he confirms it is normal for some muscles to twitch after the moment of death. The director tells us we have a little while before the police arrive, and my sister and I take a walk past the industrial noises and into a quiet park with a stream running through it. My sister cries; I want a cigarette. We walk back to Pegasos just as the Swiss police show up. They are quiet and efficient and don’t make eye contact.

When they have finished, my sister and I call an Uber and go back into Basel. In the hotel, we sit together in one of the tasteful, heavy studies to call my aunt to tell her. My aunt, shocked, has trouble breathing but manages to ask, “How could she leave you?” Facing my second motherless Mother’s Day, I still don’t know.

Evelyn Jouvenet is a pseudonym.

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 for free, anonymous support and resources.

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E.B. White's Essay 'Here Is New York' Is Almost 70 Years Old ...
Here Is New York by E.B. White, $13, Amazon. White's essay begins by getting straight to the heart of New York's character: On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the ...
Here Is New York Summary and Study Guide
In his essay "Here Is New York" (1948), American author E. B. White shares his observations about the inhabitants, culture, and history of New York City. White, born in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1899, is best known as an author of children's books, most notably Charlotte's Web (1952), Stuart Little (1945), and The Trumpet and the Swan (1970). ...
Here Is New York by E.B. White
January 8, 2016. "Here Is New York" is an essay E.B. White—yes, of Charlotte's Web fame—wrote in 1948 for Holiday, a long-since defunct travel magazine. The essay reads as you would expect up until its last few pages. White is crisp and concise, and, as far as essays go, "Here Is New York" is enjoyable.
Here Is New York Essay Analysis
Subscribe for $3 a Month. The essay sets out to capture the post-World War II age in New York while situating this version of the city in a historical context. White toggles back and forth between his real-time 1948 observations, his knowledge of the city's past, his own previous experiences in New York, and sociological musings on the city ...
What is a brief summary of E. B. White's essay "Here is New York" and
Basically, the text is about the New York E. B. White knew when he was growing up as compared to the New York he revisits much later (1948). White gives great detail to the things he remembers and ...
Here is New York Hardcover
"E. B. White's love letter to New York." — AMNY 's "Books Every New Yorker Should Read" "Just to dip into this miraculous essay—to experience the wonderful lightness and momentum of its prose, its supremely casual air and surprisingly tight knit—is to find oneself going ahead and rereading it all. White's homage feels as fresh now as fifty years ago." —John Updike ...
What Makes a Great City: E.B. White on the Poetics of New York
From the 1949 gem Here Is New York (public library) — one of the best books about New York ever written, and undoubtedly one of the best books about anything — comes an exquisite articulation by E.B. White (July 11, 1899-October 1, 1985), who captures the singular mesmerism of Gotham and all the "enormous and violent and wonderful ...
Here is New York
Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, E. B. White's stroll around Manhattan remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America's foremost literary figures. The New York Times has named Here is New York one of the ten best books ever written about the metropolis, and The New Yorker calls it "the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city.
Here is New York
Here is New York. In the summer of 1948, E.B. White sat in a New York City hotel room and, sweltering in the heat, wrote a remarkable pristine essay, Here is New York. Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, the author's stroll around Manhattan—with the reader arm-in-arm—remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of ...
Here Is New York : E. B. White : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming
dc.title: Here Is New York dc.rights.holder: E. B. White. Addeddate 2017-01-19 15:59:11 Identifier in.ernet.dli.2015.166056 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t0zp9bc77 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 11.0 Ppi 600 Scanner Internet Archive Python library 1.1.0 . plus-circle Add Review. comment. Reviews There are no reviews yet. ...
Here is New York
The New York Times has named Here is New York one of the ten best books ever written about the metropolis, and The New Yorker calls it "the wittiest essay, ... E.B. White sat in a New York City hotel room and, sweltering in the heat, wrote a remarkable pristine essay, Here is New York. Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, the author's stroll ...
Here is New York by E. B. White
19. 19,762. (4.17) 37. Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, E.B. White's stroll around Manhattan remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America's foremost literary figures. The New York Times has named Here is New York one of the ten best books ever written about the metropolis, and The New Yorker calls it "the ...
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Here Is New York, E. B. White (1949) There may be no more quoted piece of prose about New York City than E. B. White's 1949 essay, Here Is New York. White had been commissioned by Roger Angell (who was also White's stepson) to write a piece for Holiday magazine, and what he produced captured his love of the city in fairv tale style. "New
E.B. White, "Here Is New York" (1949)
To honor today's seminar, here is an excerpt from the famous essay by E.B. White, "Here is New York" (1949): There are three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts it size and its turbulence s natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the ...
E.B White's "Here is New York"
Posted on February 9, 2013 by aq143586. After reading E.B. White's "Here is New York," I wanted to talk about a couple of paragraphs that I found significant. There is so much in his essay that every New Yorker can relate to and even some that we didn't really think about before. His essay may have been long, but I didn't have a hard ...
E. B. White Questions and Answers
What is a brief summary of E. B. White's essay "Here is New York" and its main idea? In "Once More to the Lake," there is a reference to the chill of death in the last paragraph. What brings this ...
Here is New York
Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, E.B. White's stroll around Manhattan remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America's foremost literary figures. The New York Times has named Here is New York one of the ten best books ever written about the metropolis, and The New Yorker calls it "the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city.
In the Subway, the 3 New Yorks of E. B. White
There may be two Americas, but there are three New Yorks (roughly).Or so claims E. B. White, excerpts of whose 1948 essay, "Here is New York," were introduced last month as part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's new Train of Thought literary campaign (which displaced the Poetry in Motion campaign, much to the dismay of poets).
E.B. White's Here is New York
Overall, Here is New York is a gorgeous depiction of the real New York. Danielle Russell says: September 3, 2013 at 2:03 am Danielle Russell ... Written in 1949, the scene depicted by E.B White in the final pages of his essay is at once enlightening and startlingly familiar in the aftermath of 9/11. It is important to note that at the time of ...
Literary Devices in Here Is New York ️
Introduction "Here Is New York" is a stunning essay written by E.B. White, who captures the essence of New York City through his eyes. Published in 1949, this piece is not just a mere essay but a deep reflection on the city's unique dynamic during the mid-20th century. 🏙️
Here is New York
What is most amazing about E.B. White's "Here Is New York," This book written in 1948 says: "A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions." The city is both the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence.
Here is New York Kindle Edition
Here is New York. Kindle Edition. by E.B. White (Author), Roger Angell (Introduction) Format: Kindle Edition. 4.6 953 ratings. Book 1 of 1: Here is New York. See all formats and editions. In the summer of 1948, E.B. White sat in a New York City hotel room and, sweltering in the heat, wrote a remarkable pristine essay, Here is New York ...
Here is New York
Here isNew York. Here is. New York. A series of 7 sensory videos filmed in New York City in 2019, accompanied by excerpts from E.B. White's essay "Here is New York" published in 1949. This piece about New York was written in the summer of 1948 during a hot spell. The reader will find certain observations to be no longer true of the city, owing ...
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May 14, 2024. Most high school seniors approach the college essay with dread. Either their upbringing hasn't supplied them with several hundred words of adversity, or worse, they're afraid ...
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Assisted Suicide Was My Healthy Mother's Last Wish
By his intellect, she said. One Sunday in late fall, my mother, my sister, and I were on our way back to the city from East Hampton when Mom decided to stop to get a poinsettia for the professor. When my father asked why we were late, my sister told him, innocently, that we stopped to buy a plant for "Mommy's lover.".
Weekend Edition Saturday for May 11, 2024 : NPR
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Here is New York

Foreword from E.B. White

New York is nothing like Paris; it is nothing like London; and it is not Spokane multiplied by sixty, or Detroit multiplied by four.

The city is literally a composite of tens of thousands of tiny neighborhood units.

Mass hysteria is a terrible force, yet New Yorkers seem always to escape it by some tiny margin.

New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation.

Many people depend on the city’s tremendous variety and sources of excitement for spiritual sustenance and maintenance of morale.

The collision and the intermingling of millions of foreign-born people representing so many races and creeds make New York a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world.

The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.

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