Latest news with #J.D.Salinger
CNN
02-05-2025
- General
- CNN
This high school senior reflects on how the pandemic shaped her adolescence
It was the first day that felt like spring in New Hampshire, and college students swarmed the green in front of the colonial buildings on campus to hang out in the longed-for sun. It wasn't even warm yet, at least to me. Back home in South Carolina, the temperatures were already reaching the 80s. But the students on the campus where I will likely attend college littered the grass anyway, and dozens of speakers, all playing different music, created a delightful layering of noise. It was a stark contrast to the first time I had ever visited a college, four years ago, when I was tagging along for my older brother's college tour. Campuses were empty during our car trip up and down the Eastern Seaboard. None offered tours for prospective students. No students laughed outside. Instead, one university had yellow-shirt-clad security guards driving around on golf carts and ensuring that anyone walking around outside wore a paper mask. Another campus had biohazard-orange signs posted around its edges, warning strangers against entering. That was during the 2020-2021 school year. I was in eighth grade, when we ate lunch outside in winter coats at school. We sat alone in assigned spots, two kids on opposite ends of a 6-foot-long (nearly 2-meter-long) picnic table to maximize the distance between us. I carried a battered and fraying paperback copy of J.D. Salinger's 'Franny and Zooey' in my too-big coat's pocket, even after I'd finished reading it. Covid-19 regulations were in full swing that school year. I felt lucky to return to in-person school, yet I was the loneliest I have ever been. It's been five years since the Covid-19 lockdowns began, and we're beginning to see how it affected my generation. In some magical way, I've almost forgotten it ever happened. I have blocked out the absurdity — and the loneliness. That first Covid year was filled with mindfulness exercises in homeroom, encouragement to do yoga, meditate, reflect and journal in the morning announcements. You have the power to improve yourself and your life was their message. I like to think — I sincerely hope — it was because adults understood that the isolation that came with social distancing was hurting us. But no one mentioned another possibility: If you have the power to change yourself for the better, you have the power to screw yourself up, too. How do you know if you're changing for the better if you have little input from peers, if you have no friends around in real life to sort out new ideas, new identities, new interests? There's so much research that says adolescents need to be surrounded by peers, need to have friends, to help shape their identity and feel a sense of belonging. As kids reach adolescence, they become increasingly more independent from their families. It's natural to pull away from our parents. Detachment helps kids to become more autonomous, preparing them for adulthood, when they'll strike out on their own. Friends are there to fill some of the gaps, helping each other grow into new, more independent people. What happens when you place an entire generation, one that's still growing up, under quarantine and social distancing rules? And you do it, not for days or months, but for years? I think about the kids whose schools were closed for a year or more, who were homebound for months. How can you begin to separate from your parents if you're constantly with them? If they're your only companions? When school was shut down in the final few months of seventh grade, I was ecstatic. It had been a hard year. We were all 13 or nearly 13, and all in the throes of puberty. Acne, smelliness, mood swings and massive bodily changes plagued us. Going home for the last eight weeks of school felt like a respite that I treasured. Online school was a drag, but I got through it OK. At home, I bonded with my older brother, with whom I only used to fight. We were once so nasty toward each other that one of my mother's biggest sadnesses was how much we seemed to hate each other. I grew much closer to my parents, too. My friends and I still talked through texting and group chats. There were dozens of chats with dozens of combinations of people. But for me, they didn't feel warm, communal or fun.I felt disconnected, cut off from organic conversations that someone replies to immediately because you're right there in front of them and from conversations being joined by people you don't really know well enough to text or have a group chat with. I guess I was lucky that I was only home for a few months. My time at home was freeing and family-centered. I did miss my friends, but it was an idle, half-thought longing. In August of 2020, I went back to in-person school for my eighth-grade year. At school, my friends were right there in front of me but untouchable and unreachable. Our desks were far apart, and we were all masked. You couldn't whisper to your friends could barely talk, except during a short recess. Even then, we had to be masked and stand far apart. It was hard to read expressions, hear inflections. We all were inhabiting the same space, but I did not feel like we were together. It became our moral duty to be lonely. There were reminders plastered everywhere to stay 6 feet apart. We were told we were 'protecting each other' if we stayed away from other people, that we were empathetic, caring and good members of society. If someone was seen hanging out with people, close and maskless, they must be a bad person. They must be selfish. They must not care about human life. They must not want to protect society. This is what we were told. To feel intense guilt for a basic, once-accepted human desire for companionship hurt. Staying away from people became celebrated, a moral good. It seemed to me that a new expectation permeated American life: We should be OK with being alone. If we were not, we were weak or even bad people. But what does it do when children internalize the idea that they are bad, careless people if they want to spend time with friends? Young Americans (18-29 years old) are still struggling with profound social effects five years later, according to a March 2025 poll from the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One in five became more socially isolated. Of those young Americans who reported social isolation during the pandemic, 55% also reported depressive symptoms. Even among those who said the pandemic had no long-term effects on their friendships, 38% still reported depressive symptoms. Fewer than half of all surveyed said they felt a sense of community in their current life. The study also showed that present-day isolation rates vary by age. Researchers found the highest levels of isolation were reported among those who were entering their first years of high school or college during the lockdowns. Those kids, now 19 and 23 years old, had isolation rates of 38% and 40%, respectively. Among 20-year-olds, only one year older, only 23% reported social isolation. Looking back, five years later, I don't know who I would've been now, without the Covid restrictions. I don't know what might have happened if I, and the rest of my generation, had experienced a more typical path to adulthood. What would we be like if we had been surrounded by peers to help form our growing selves in those crucial years of early adolescence? I feel like I've missed something essential about growing up, but I don't know what. And I am aware that I was actually one of the luckiest of my generation: I have kind parents, I was happy at home, my school reopened as soon as possible, and the teachers and staff there cared deeply about our well-being and did all they could to support us students. I carried that book in my jacket pocket as something of a talisman. I saw myself in the main character Franny. She was older and cooler than me, but she was also trying to figure out her place in the world and who she was. What I loved about Franny was that when she tried to change her life for the better, she utterly failed. She sent herself spiraling into an emotional meltdown of spiritual pain and confusion. She was a warning that I remember as I prepare to enter college in a few short months. I reread 'Franny and Zooey' every year, and I will pack it for college wherever I go. Franny may have started my love of the book, but what made me carry it in my pocket like a religious medal was her brother Zooey's advice to her: You cannot forget the value of humanity, no matter what happens. You cannot view yourself as separate, as other. You cannot let your sadness at the state of the world grow personal. To cut yourself off from people is to lose your connection and way in a glorious, terrifying world. In those depressive and lonely days of Covid, that idea was a lifeline.
CNN
02-05-2025
- General
- CNN
It became my moral duty to be lonely. What to do now?
It was the first day that felt like spring in New Hampshire, and college students swarmed the green in front of the colonial buildings on campus to hang out in the longed-for sun. It wasn't even warm yet, at least to me. Back home in South Carolina, the temperatures were already reaching the 80s. But the students on the campus where I will likely attend college littered the grass anyway, and dozens of speakers, all playing different music, created a delightful layering of noise. It was a stark contrast to the first time I had ever visited a college, four years ago, when I was tagging along for my older brother's college tour. Campuses were empty during our car trip up and down the Eastern Seaboard. None offered tours for prospective students. No students laughed outside. Instead, one university had yellow-shirt-clad security guards driving around on golf carts and ensuring that anyone walking around outside wore a paper mask. Another campus had biohazard-orange signs posted around its edges, warning strangers against entering. That was during the 2020-2021 school year. I was in eighth grade, when we ate lunch outside in winter coats at school. We sat alone in assigned spots, two kids on opposite ends of a 6-foot-long (nearly 2-meter-long) picnic table to maximize the distance between us. I carried a battered and fraying paperback copy of J.D. Salinger's 'Franny and Zooey' in my too-big coat's pocket, even after I'd finished reading it. Covid-19 regulations were in full swing that school year. I felt lucky to return to in-person school, yet I was the loneliest I have ever been. It's been five years since the Covid-19 lockdowns began, and we're beginning to see how it affected my generation. In some magical way, I've almost forgotten it ever happened. I have blocked out the absurdity — and the loneliness. That first Covid year was filled with mindfulness exercises in homeroom, encouragement to do yoga, meditate, reflect and journal in the morning announcements. You have the power to improve yourself and your life was their message. I like to think — I sincerely hope — it was because adults understood that the isolation that came with social distancing was hurting us. But no one mentioned another possibility: If you have the power to change yourself for the better, you have the power to screw yourself up, too. How do you know if you're changing for the better if you have little input from peers, if you have no friends around in real life to sort out new ideas, new identities, new interests? There's so much research that says adolescents need to be surrounded by peers, need to have friends, to help shape their identity and feel a sense of belonging. As kids reach adolescence, they become increasingly more independent from their families. It's natural to pull away from our parents. Detachment helps kids to become more autonomous, preparing them for adulthood, when they'll strike out on their own. Friends are there to fill some of the gaps, helping each other grow into new, more independent people. What happens when you place an entire generation, one that's still growing up, under quarantine and social distancing rules? And you do it, not for days or months, but for years? I think about the kids whose schools were closed for a year or more, who were homebound for months. How can you begin to separate from your parents if you're constantly with them? If they're your only companions? When school was shut down in the final few months of seventh grade, I was ecstatic. It had been a hard year. We were all 13 or nearly 13, and all in the throes of puberty. Acne, smelliness, mood swings and massive bodily changes plagued us. Going home for the last eight weeks of school felt like a respite that I treasured. Online school was a drag, but I got through it OK. At home, I bonded with my older brother, with whom I only used to fight. We were once so nasty toward each other that one of my mother's biggest sadnesses was how much we seemed to hate each other. I grew much closer to my parents, too. My friends and I still talked through texting and group chats. There were dozens of chats with dozens of combinations of people. But for me, they didn't feel warm, communal or fun.I felt disconnected, cut off from organic conversations that someone replies to immediately because you're right there in front of them and from conversations being joined by people you don't really know well enough to text or have a group chat with. I guess I was lucky that I was only home for a few months. My time at home was freeing and family-centered. I did miss my friends, but it was an idle, half-thought longing. In August of 2020, I went back to in-person school for my eighth-grade year. At school, my friends were right there in front of me but untouchable and unreachable. Our desks were far apart, and we were all masked. You couldn't whisper to your friends could barely talk, except during a short recess. Even then, we had to be masked and stand far apart. It was hard to read expressions, hear inflections. We all were inhabiting the same space, but I did not feel like we were together. It became our moral duty to be lonely. There were reminders plastered everywhere to stay 6 feet apart. We were told we were 'protecting each other' if we stayed away from other people, that we were empathetic, caring and good members of society. If someone was seen hanging out with people, close and maskless, they must be a bad person. They must be selfish. They must not care about human life. They must not want to protect society. This is what we were told. To feel intense guilt for a basic, once-accepted human desire for companionship hurt. Staying away from people became celebrated, a moral good. It seemed to me that a new expectation permeated American life: We should be OK with being alone. If we were not, we were weak or even bad people. But what does it do when children internalize the idea that they are bad, careless people if they want to spend time with friends? Young Americans (18-29 years old) are still struggling with profound social effects five years later, according to a March 2025 poll from the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One in five became more socially isolated. Of those young Americans who reported social isolation during the pandemic, 55% also reported depressive symptoms. Even among those who said the pandemic had no long-term effects on their friendships, 38% still reported depressive symptoms. Fewer than half of all surveyed said they felt a sense of community in their current life. The study also showed that present-day isolation rates vary by age. Researchers found the highest levels of isolation were reported among those who were entering their first years of high school or college during the lockdowns. Those kids, now 19 and 23 years old, had isolation rates of 38% and 40%, respectively. Among 20-year-olds, only one year older, only 23% reported social isolation. Looking back, five years later, I don't know who I would've been now, without the Covid restrictions. I don't know what might have happened if I, and the rest of my generation, had experienced a more typical path to adulthood. What would we be like if we had been surrounded by peers to help form our growing selves in those crucial years of early adolescence? I feel like I've missed something essential about growing up, but I don't know what. And I am aware that I was actually one of the luckiest of my generation: I have kind parents, I was happy at home, my school reopened as soon as possible, and the teachers and staff there cared deeply about our well-being and did all they could to support us students. I carried that book in my jacket pocket as something of a talisman. I saw myself in the main character Franny. She was older and cooler than me, but she was also trying to figure out her place in the world and who she was. What I loved about Franny was that when she tried to change her life for the better, she utterly failed. She sent herself spiraling into an emotional meltdown of spiritual pain and confusion. She was a warning that I remember as I prepare to enter college in a few short months. I reread 'Franny and Zooey' every year, and I will pack it for college wherever I go. Franny may have started my love of the book, but what made me carry it in my pocket like a religious medal was her brother Zooey's advice to her: You cannot forget the value of humanity, no matter what happens. You cannot view yourself as separate, as other. You cannot let your sadness at the state of the world grow personal. To cut yourself off from people is to lose your connection and way in a glorious, terrifying world. In those depressive and lonely days of Covid, that idea was a lifeline.
New York Times
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Weighty and Whimsical Century of The New Yorker's Archives
The archives of The New Yorker, housed at the New York Public Library, consist of more than 2,500 boxes of manuscripts, letters, page proofs, cartoons, art, photographs and memos. They are studded with the celebrated names — E.B. White, J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Rachel Carson — that filled this most mythologized of magazines, and helped transform American literary life. And then there are the 'Distasteful Ads.' A folder with that label holds examples like one for 'wonderfully expensive children's knits from Italy,' or another for men's socks, with a mildly racy illustration and the tagline 'Go to Any Length.' That one struck William Shawn, the magazine's famously fastidious longtime editor, as inappropriate innuendo, and it never appeared. But it's now on view at the library as part of a new exhibition, 'A Century of The New Yorker.' The show, which runs until February 2026, fills two upstairs galleries at the library's flagship building on Fifth Avenue. It mixes the weighty and the whimsical and is designed to appeal to New Yorker devotees and casual browsers alike. 'The magazine's own style and ethos became an inspiration to us in the way we laid out the show,' Julie Golia, one of the curators, said during a recent tour. 'We really wanted the walls to feel like a page of the magazine.' To prepare the show, Golia, the library's associate director of manuscripts, archives and rare books, and Julie Carlsen, an assistant curator, spent nearly two years going through the archive and dozens of related collections. They also interviewed past and current New Yorker staff members. 'I was stunned by how much they knew about the magazine's history,' David Remnick, the magazine's editor since 1998, said in an interview. 'I thought I was one of the only lunatics who had read all the books.' Remnick said he was particularly delighted by surprises like the marked-up sock ad, which he called 'a whisper from a distant past.' So he doesn't similarly pore over such details, rooting out the Not Safe for The New Yorker? He laughed. 'Not as much as you might think.' From its founding in 1925, the magazine aimed to be something fresh, irreverent, experimental — 'a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life,' as its first editor, Harold Ross, declared in a prospectus. 'It will be what is commonly called sophisticated,' Ross continued. And 'it will hate bunk.' The show includes a generous sampling of covers, starting with Rea Irvin's original artwork for the now-famous first cover, with the dandy Eustace Tilley peering at a butterfly through his monocle. (Look closely, and you'll notice that the hand-drawn version of the now-familiar typeface he created is a bit wobbly.) The curators also dug deep into the archive's 48 boxes of 'spots' (those tiny drawings that have leavened the pages since the magazine's founding), researching some of their uncredited creators. Many, they note, were women and people of color, like E. Simms Campbell, the first known Black artist to contribute to the magazine. Today, the magazine is an institution, but its early years were precarious. In 1928, when E.B. White expressed reluctance at continuing to contribute, Ross sent him a stern telegram: 'This thing is a movement and you can't resign from movement.' During World War II, when many staff members were overseas, it had to fight for manpower and even paper. But it was in those years, the exhibition argues, that the magazine established itself as a cultural force, with wartime reportage that flowered most indelibly in John Hershey's 30,000-word story on Hiroshima, which filled an entire issue in August 1946. The show includes the only known surviving copy with the original white cover band, warning readers about the content behind the seemingly pastoral cover illustration. It's displayed along with a photograph of an early atomic bomb test and a 19th-century woodcut print of Nagasaki. 'This isn't just a story that changed journalism,' Golia said. 'It's a story about a bomb that killed hundreds of thousands of people.' There are artifacts relating to the magazine's most celebrated contributors and articles: a poster inspired by Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring'; the complete manuscript for Hannah Arendt's 'Eichmann in Jerusalem'; reader mail responding (sometimes angrily) to James Baldwin's 'Letter From a Region of My Mind'; a page of Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood,' marked up by Shawn. But there are also items bearing traces of the often anonymous clerks, typists, page designers, illustrators and fact-checkers who kept the enterprise humming. 'It makes the magazine so much more relatable when you understand how it's put together,' Carlsen said. Over the years, some unsung heroes have gotten their flowers, including Eleanor Gould, the magazine's longtime copy editor and grammarian, who once claimed to have identified four grammatical errors in a single three-word sentence. (Some writers took the ministrations of 'Miss Gould' in stride. 'Overruled (and schooled!)/ by Gould!' Cynthia Ozick wrote in a poem mailed back to the magazine. 'In the annals of Disgrace / I take my chastened place.') But the curators also hail the nameless 'office girls' of 1944, who were overwhelmed by a requirement that they log and describe each of the thousands of manuscripts passing through the mailroom every year. 'Something will have to be done about it immediately, today, or we will lose two of our best girls who are threatening to quit,' Katharine White (the first — and for decades only — female editor on staff) wrote to Ross. The exhibition includes plenty of amusing evidence of the eternal trench warfare between editors and writers. 'The average contributor to this magazine is semiliterate,' the editor Wolcott Gibbs wrote around 1937, in a tongue-in-cheek memo titled 'Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles.' (Among their failings: 'too damn many adverbs.') The writers could give as good as they got. In a riposte to Ross's voluminous queries on one article, Margaret Case Harriman defended the word 'brooding' from the charge that it was a mannered 'New Yorker word.' 'Think Abe Lincoln brooded before New Yorker invented the word,' she quipped. Vladimir Nabokov, writing to Katharine White in 1947, was more absolute. 'It is the principle itself of editing that distresses me,' he wrote. But some writers were less high-minded. 'I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money…,' the fiction writer John O'Hara wrote to Ross in 1939. (O'Hara, Ross noted in pencil at the bottom, 'is the highest paid author on a word basis.') Alongside the actual journalism, the exhibition also digs into another of the magazine's contributions to literary culture: New Yorker drama. In 1987, after Shawn was forced out as editor by S.I. Newhouse Jr., the magazine's owner, more than 150 of the magazine's writers and cartoonists signed a letter imploring his replacement, Robert Gottlieb, not to take the job. The copy in the exhibition came from the papers of Joseph Mitchell, which are also at the library. 'This is not something you find in the magazine's own archives,' Golia noted dryly. Tina Brown, who succeeded Gottlieb in 1992, appears in a Saul Steinberg caricature (power suit, giant shoulder pads), which hangs above one of her old Rolodexes — open to a contact for the Beastie Boys. At the time, some of the old guard saw her arrival as the second coming of Genghis Khan. But 'it's fair to say that Tina Brown saved the magazine,' Golia said. The 'Tina Revolution,' as the show puts it, brought a pop-savvy spirit, cheeky covers, regular photography, new voices (including Remnick, whom Brown hired as a staff writer in 1992) and new themes, including some the magazine had only fitfully engaged. The show includes the cover for her 1996 'Black in America' issue, produced with the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., and featuring writers like Stanley Crouch, Anna Deavere Smith, Rita Dove and Sapphire. Directly opposite: a marked-up draft from 'Brokeback Mountain,' E. Annie Proulx's 1997 story about two closeted gay cowboys. In the 21st century, The New Yorker has grown beyond just a print magazine to include a website, a radio show, a festival, podcasts and an Oscar-winning video department. It has also diversified its staff, the show notes, and 'grappled with its own questions of equity.' The final item is the original art for 'Say Their Names,' Kadir Nelson's cover from June 2020, featuring a silhouette of George Floyd. That may seem a long way from Eustace Tilley. But the show, Golia noted, ends where it started: with a man on a magazine cover. 'We want to leave visitors with a question,' she said. 'What is a New Yorker? Is it still the same?'
