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How to Write a Short Essay

Last Updated: January 17, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Christopher Taylor, PhD . Christopher Taylor is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Austin Community College in Texas. He received his PhD in English Literature and Medieval Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. There are 12 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 113,543 times.

Essay writing is a common assignment in high school or college courses, especially within the humanities. You’ll also be asked to write essays for college admissions and scholarships. In a short essay (250-500 words), you will need to provide an introduction with a thesis, a body, and a conclusion, as you would with a longer essay. Depending on the essay requirements, you may also need to do academic or online research to find sources to back up your claims.

Picking a Topic and Gathering Research

• If you have any questions about the topic, ask your instructor. If your essay doesn't respond to the prompt, you likely won't receive full credit.

• If you're writing an essay for an in-class test or for an application, tailor the essay to the given prompt and topic. Quickly brainstorm a few ideas; for example, think of positive things you can say about yourself for a college-entrance essay.
• For example, the topic “depression in American literature” is far too broad. Narrow down your topic to something like “Willie Loman’s depression in Death of a Salesman .”
• Or, you could write about a narrow topic like “the increase in the USA’s national debt in the 1950s” rather than a broad topic like “the American economy in the 20th century.”

• Depending on the field in which you’re writing the essay—e.g., hard sciences, sociology, humanities, etc.—your instructor will direct you towards appropriate databases. For example, if you’re writing a high-school or college-level essay for your English class, visit online literary databases like JSTOR, LION, and the MLA Bibliography.
• If you're writing the essay for a college or graduate-school application, it's unlikely that you'll need to include any secondary sources.
• If you're writing a timed or in-class essay, you may not be able to find research articles. But, still do draw information from texts and sources you've studied both in and out of class, and build from points made in any provided reading passages.

• If you’re writing about current events or journalism topics, read articles from well-known news sites like CNN or the BBC.
• Avoid citing unreliable websites like blogs or any sites that have a clear bias about the topic they’re reporting on.

Composing the Essay

• If you write the essay without outlining, the essay will be poorly organized.

• This thesis statement is far too weak: “ Death of a Salesman shows the difficulty of living in America after WWII.”
• Instead, hone your thesis to something like: “Arthur Miller uses Death of a Salesman to show that the American Dream is materialist and impractical.”

• So, avoid beginning the paragraph by writing something like, “Since the beginning of time, all people have been consumed with the desire for their father’s approval.”
• Instead, write something like, “In the play Death of a Salesman , Willie Loman’s sons compete for their father’s approval through various masculine displays."
• Then, you can say, "To examine this topic, I will perform a close reading of several key passages of the play and present analyses by noted Arthur Miller scholars."

• In a short essay, the conclusion should do nothing more than briefly restate your main claim and remind readers of the evidence you provided.

• So, take the example about Death of a Salesman . The first body paragraph could discuss the ways in which Willie’s sons try to impress him.
• The second body paragraph could dive into Willie’s hopelessness and despair, and the third paragraph could discuss how Miller uses his characters to show the flaws in their understanding of the American Dream.

• Always cite your sources so you avoid charges of plagiarism. Check with your instructor (or the essay prompt) and find out what citation style you should use.
• For example, if you’re summarizing the inflation of the American dollar during the 1930s, provide 2 or 3 years and inflation-rate percentages. Don’t provide a full-paragraph summary of the economic decline.
• If you're writing an in-class essay and don't have time to perform any research, you don't need to incorporate outside sources. But, it will impress your teacher if you quote from a reading passage or bring up pertinent knowledge you may have gained during the class.

• If no one agrees to read the essay, read over your own first draft and look for errors or spots where you could clarify your meaning. Reading the essay out loud often helps, as you’ll be able to hear sentences that aren’t quite coherent.
• This step does not apply to essays written during a timed or in-class exam, as you won't be able to ask peers to read your work.

• It’s always a mistake to submit an unrevised first draft, whether for a grade, for admissions, or for a scholarship essay.
• However, if you're writing an essay for a timed exam, it's okay if you don't have enough time to combine multiple drafts before the time runs out.

Condensing Your Essay

• So, if you’re writing about Death of a Salesman , an article about symbolism in Arthur Miller’s plays would be useful. But, an article about the average cost of Midwestern hotels in the 1940s would be irrelevant.
• If you’re writing a scholarship essay, double-check the instructions to clarify what types of sources you’re allowed to use.

• A common cliche you might find in an essay is a statement like, "I'm the hardest working student at my school."
• For example, this sentence is too verbose: “I have been a relentlessly stellar student throughout my entire high school career since I am a seriously dedicated reader and thoroughly apply myself to every assignment I receive in class.”
• Shortened, it could read: “I was a stellar student throughout my high school career since I was a dedicated reader and applied myself to every assignment I received.”

• Avoid writing something like, “Willie Loman can be seen as having achieved little through his life because he is not respected by his sons and is not valued by his co-workers.”
• Instead, write, “Arthur Miller shows readers that Willie’s life accomplishments have amounted to little. Willie’s sons do not look up to him, and his co-workers treat him without respect.”

• For example, if you’re trying to prove that WWII pulled the USA out of the Great Depression, focus strictly on an economic argument.
• Avoid bringing in other, less convincing topics. For example, don’t dedicate a paragraph to discussing how much it cost the USA to build fighter jets in 1944.

Short Essay Template and Example

Expert Q&A

• When composing the text of your essay, resist the temptation to pull words from a thesaurus in an attempt to sound academic or intelligent. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• If your high school or college has an online or in-person writing center, schedule an appointment. Taking advantage of this type of service can improve your essay and help you recognize structural or grammatical problems you would not have noticed otherwise. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/common_writing_assignments/research_papers/choosing_a_topic.html
• ↑ https://monroecollege.libguides.com/c.php?g=589208&p=4072926
• ↑ https://www.utep.edu/extendeduniversity/utepconnect/blog/march-2017/4-ways-to-differentiate-a-good-source-from-a-bad-source.html
• ↑ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/essay-outline/
• ↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/thesis-statements/
• ↑ https://libguides.newcastle.edu.au/how-to-write-an-essay/essay-introduction
• ↑ https://lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/undergraduates/writing-guides/how-do-i-write-an-intro--conclusion----body-paragraph.html
• ↑ https://mlpp.pressbooks.pub/writingsuccess/chapter/8-3-drafting/
• ↑ https://www.trentu.ca/academicskills/how-guides/how-write-university/how-approach-any-assignment/writing-english-essay/using-secondary
• ↑ https://patch.com/michigan/berkley/bp--how-to-shorten-your-college-essay-without-ruining-it
• ↑ https://writing.wisc.edu/handbook/style/ccs_activevoice/
• ↑ https://wordcounter.net/blog/2016/01/26/101025_how-to-reduce-essay-word-count.html

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Tips for writing short essays

Short essays usually involve answering a question related to course content and could be anywhere from 200 words to 750 words long, depending on the professor’s guidelines. The most challenging part of writing a short essay is the length, as you need to select the most important information to cover.

Steps 1-5 Introduction Argument Quotations Conclusion Step 6

Steps 1-5 of 6

1. What are you asked to do?

• Consider the question you have to answer/discuss
•  See if it can be broken into parts; make sure to cover each part in your answer

2. Brainstorm the arguments and points you feel would best answer the question

3. Choose two or three of the strongest points; develop a supporting point/example/reference/argument for each

4. Create an outline to structure these points and link them to the supporting information

5. Write a draft

Introduction

• Get straight to the point
• Introduce your thesis (main argument); incorporate the language of the question to frame your thesis
• Include a sentence that previews the points you will discuss
• Keep it short
• Be specific
• Provide minimal contextual detail
• Stay on topic
• Deal with points in the same order as they are listed in your preview sentence
• Use a clear topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph to introduce and summarize the paragraph’s point
• Ensure that the key words in the topic sentence echo the words used in your preview sentence so that the reader can see where and how your argument is progressing
• Use sentences, not bulleted points
• Choose quotations carefully—only use them if they back up your points, and do not quote too much (5-10% of paper at most)
• Always document your sources, even if they came from class readings
• Briefly sum up your argument and relate it to your thesis

Step 6 - revise and edit your draft:

• Be direct and concise; remove repetition; make every word count
• Stick to your topic: if there is an idea in your paper that does not serve to answer the question, remove it
• Check grammar and punctuation by reading the draft aloud
• Ensure you have documented all sources fully and correctly

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How to Write Short Essays

Receiving an assignment to draft a short essay might sound easier, at least initially. However, writing a short 5 paragraph essay isn’t all as easier as it looks. You still need to follow all the instructions and abide by every principle to produce a high-quality short paper. Fortunately, mastering how to write this assignment is easy and possible.

This post discusses all the details of composing this essay type. Keep reading to perfect your writing skills.

Table of Contents

What Is a Short Essay ?

Let’s define a short essay before examining its related details. A short paper is a brief writing assignment that focuses on one idea or subject and requires brief coverage. You must focus on a single idea and provide further information supporting your arguments. A short essay can focus on any topic. For instance, you can describe an object, process, event, or person.

This essay usually ranges between 400 and 500 words. Your paper can be a minimum of half a page and a maximum of one page using single spacing.

A Short Essay Format

This paper’s format doesn’t significantly differ from its longer counterpart. An average brief essay can have between two and five paragraphs, depending on your teacher’s instructions. Also, the essay’s word count determines its exact number of paragraphs. While it’s short, you still must write it to convey your topic’s essence and meaning clearly.

Succeeding in this essay type requires you to sharpen your summarizing skills. You should be able to be brief without denying your readers clarity. Thus, hone your ability to explain issues clearly and briefly. Learning how to select data and facts to include into, or exclude from, your short assignment would be best.

Writing A Short Essay : How to Go About It

We stated that composing a short paper doesn’t overlook any general academic writing rules. You should follow the same process you do when drafting other long papers. Below are the steps to follow when writing a brief paper that fetches excellent grades.

• Read the prompt

Start by reading the paper’s question to understand what you should do. This stage ensures you don’t miss any instructions that define and confine your assignment. Don’t fear consulting your tutor for clarification if you don’t capture anything.

After being sure of what you must do, start brainstorming for a relevant topic unless your instructor provided one. This stage allows you to determine appropriate and exciting topics you can write about. Once you find the best topic to write on, move to the next stage and start researching.

Researching is necessary for drafting a successful short assignment. Find out all the relevant sources and take notes. This essay type doesn’t require many sources, and two or three are enough to help you advance in the writing task. You can research it using articles from reputable journals or books.

While researching, please pay attention to the sources’ dates to ensure they’re as current as possible. The most recent academic references are always the best support for any topic. If you use academic journals, ensure that the articles are peer-reviewed.

Outlining is the next step you need in your writing process because you have all the details to include in your brief essay. You must outline your ideas to give them a logical flow and structure while writing. This step helps you focus your thoughts and know where to place the right ideas. Otherwise, you could lose some of your most powerful arguments and misplace others.

After completing these steps, write your short essay. You can begin from anywhere you want. For instance, if you aren’t sure what to include in your intro, you may write it last. This approach is excellent because you will know what to include in the body sections and conclusion by then. Thus, telling the reader what to expect in the paper’s subsequent sections becomes easier.

Editing is just as important as writing. The first draft should be your thoughts’ space holder. That means your editing process can chop whole sentences or introduce new ones. You may also rewrite chapters or sentences to make them flow well. In short, you can remove or add whatever is necessary.

Your editing process must also remove all grammar imperfections. All awkward renderings, repetitions, poor styling, and sloppy punctuations should be ousted. Besides, edit your paper with correct referencing and formatting in mind to ensure it abides by your instructor’s styling requirements.

Don’t forget to double-check whether you wrote the paper according to your professor’s full list of instructions. Lastly, check out for spelling errors your word processor didn’t detect. The spell check should come last because you can make other spelling mistakes while editing the paper.

Parts of a Mini Essay

A standard short essay has three main components: the introductory paragraph, three main body paragraphs, and one concluding paragraph. Let’s get the details below.

The Introduction

This section helps you make your first lasting impression. It should attract and retain your reader’s attention by capturing your audience’s interest. So, spice it up with something that will achieve this initial goal. Your hook can be relevant humor, stats, a quote, or anything that welcomes your readers on board.

Your introduction should also provide your audience with your paper’s context and what to expect from it as the story unfolds. However, keep it informative and brief to avoid telling your readers everything at once. Instead, let it only tell them what you want to say to them. We can summarize this section as follows:

• Go straight to your points.
• Introduce your thesis statement to give readers a strategic direction.
• Include a sentence that summarizes the ideas you intend to discuss.
• Shorten everything.
• Be specific.
• Provide minimal contextual details.

The Thesis Statement

This statement comes at your intro’s end. It should focus on the main thought you want to drive home. Your thesis should also be debatable because your entire essay will focus on proving it. It should also allow your opponents to debate your stand on a matter. So, make it as clear as possible so that anyone reading your short paper can easily detect it.

The Main Body

An average short paper has between two and five paragraphs. Using the five-paragraph format requires three paragraphs to prove your thesis. These sections must include the necessary evidence and facts to defend your thesis. Your first paragraph must contain your strongest argument, and your last one should have the weakest idea. This way, you are better placed to neutralize all opposition from the start.

The Conclusion

Your paper will also need a closing paragraph. This final section shows how your main body paragraphs defended your thesis statement. It should synthesize your work and answer the question you raised in the introduction. This closing part seeks to give your readers a fresh perspective on your discussion. It must make readers satisfied with what they read.

Tips for Writing a Great Short Essay

Here are tips to help you write an A+ short assignment.

• Analyze the question

Take enough time to analyze your assignment’s question because your essay should be a response to a specific question. Thus, ensure you fully understand what your tutor expects of you.

• Define your argument

You also have to define your argument before writing. Consider what this argument will be. Thus, take an informed position on the question you received. This way, you will be better positioned to define and present a specific argument.

Planning is critical to your essay’s success. Take time to brainstorm and organize your ideas for easy writing. You should research your paper to get sufficient materials to write about. Also, outline your paper to enjoy smooth writing.

• Make a strong thesis statement

All your essay’s arguments will be as weak or strong as your thesis statement. Thus, make it as strong as possible.

• Utilize evidence and reasoning

It would help if you bolstered your assignment with reasoning and evidence. These two are necessary for convincing your readers to buy into your main argument.

• Cite sources 

Sources make your essay look more resourceful. So, cite the most authoritative references to prove to your readers that you did your homework well. Your sources must be the most recent and authoritative. You should also pay attention to the referencing requirements your instructor gave.

If the instructions require using a specific citation style like APA, you should follow it to the dot. But irrespective of your style, follow the guidelines and stick to them.

The final step is polishing your short essay through thorough and ruthless editing. The process must ensure your paper abides by all its styling requirements and guidelines, and you address all grammar issues to correct spelling or punctuation errors. If you fail here, you can rest assured that you will fetch low grades.

We hope you are up to date with all the details you need about writing a short essay. The ball is in your court to use them to advance your writing skills in this niche.

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, the complete ib extended essay guide: examples, topics, and ideas.

International Baccalaureate (IB)

IB students around the globe fear writing the Extended Essay, but it doesn't have to be a source of stress! In this article, I'll get you excited about writing your Extended Essay and provide you with the resources you need to get an A on it.

If you're reading this article, I'm going to assume you're an IB student getting ready to write your Extended Essay. If you're looking at this as a potential future IB student, I recommend reading our introductory IB articles first, including our guide to what the IB program is and our full coverage of the IB curriculum .

IB Extended Essay: Why Should You Trust My Advice?

I myself am a recipient of an IB Diploma, and I happened to receive an A on my IB Extended Essay. Don't believe me? The proof is in the IBO pudding:

If you're confused by what this report means, EE is short for Extended Essay , and English A1 is the subject that my Extended Essay topic coordinated with. In layman's terms, my IB Diploma was graded in May 2010, I wrote my Extended Essay in the English A1 category, and I received an A grade on it.

What Is the Extended Essay in the IB Diploma Programme?

The IB Extended Essay, or EE , is a mini-thesis you write under the supervision of an IB advisor (an IB teacher at your school), which counts toward your IB Diploma (learn more about the major IB Diploma requirements in our guide) . I will explain exactly how the EE affects your Diploma later in this article.

For the Extended Essay, you will choose a research question as a topic, conduct the research independently, then write an essay on your findings . The essay itself is a long one—although there's a cap of 4,000 words, most successful essays get very close to this limit.

Keep in mind that the IB requires this essay to be a "formal piece of academic writing," meaning you'll have to do outside research and cite additional sources.

The IB Extended Essay must include the following:

• A title page
• Contents page
• Introduction
• Body of the essay
• References and bibliography

Additionally, your research topic must fall into one of the six approved DP categories , or IB subject groups, which are as follows:

• Group 1: Studies in Language and Literature
• Group 2: Language Acquisition
• Group 3: Individuals and Societies
• Group 4: Sciences
• Group 5: Mathematics
• Group 6: The Arts

Once you figure out your category and have identified a potential research topic, it's time to pick your advisor, who is normally an IB teacher at your school (though you can also find one online ). This person will help direct your research, and they'll conduct the reflection sessions you'll have to do as part of your Extended Essay.

As of 2018, the IB requires a "reflection process" as part of your EE supervision process. To fulfill this requirement, you have to meet at least three times with your supervisor in what the IB calls "reflection sessions." These meetings are not only mandatory but are also part of the formal assessment of the EE and your research methods.

According to the IB, the purpose of these meetings is to "provide an opportunity for students to reflect on their engagement with the research process." Basically, these meetings give your supervisor the opportunity to offer feedback, push you to think differently, and encourage you to evaluate your research process.

The final reflection session is called the viva voce, and it's a short 10- to 15-minute interview between you and your advisor. This happens at the very end of the EE process, and it's designed to help your advisor write their report, which factors into your EE grade.

Here are the topics covered in your viva voce :

• A check on plagiarism and malpractice
• Your reflection on your project's successes and difficulties
• Your reflection on what you've learned during the EE process

Your completed Extended Essay, along with your supervisor's report, will then be sent to the IB to be graded. We'll cover the assessment criteria in just a moment.

We'll help you learn how to have those "lightbulb" moments...even on test day!  

What Should You Write About in Your IB Extended Essay?

You can technically write about anything, so long as it falls within one of the approved categories listed above.

It's best to choose a topic that matches one of the IB courses , (such as Theatre, Film, Spanish, French, Math, Biology, etc.), which shouldn't be difficult because there are so many class subjects.

Here is a range of sample topics with the attached extended essay:

• Biology: The Effect of Age and Gender on the Photoreceptor Cells in the Human Retina
• Chemistry: How Does Reflux Time Affect the Yield and Purity of Ethyl Aminobenzoate (Benzocaine), and How Effective is Recrystallisation as a Purification Technique for This Compound?
• English: An Exploration of Jane Austen's Use of the Outdoors in Emma
• Geography: The Effect of Location on the Educational Attainment of Indigenous Secondary Students in Queensland, Australia
• Math: Alhazen's Billiard Problem
• Visual Arts: Can Luc Tuymans Be Classified as a Political Painter?

You can see from how varied the topics are that you have a lot of freedom when it comes to picking a topic . So how do you pick when the options are limitless?

How to Write a Stellar IB Extended Essay: 6 Essential Tips

Below are six key tips to keep in mind as you work on your Extended Essay for the IB DP. Follow these and you're sure to get an A!

#1: Write About Something You Enjoy

You can't expect to write a compelling essay if you're not a fan of the topic on which you're writing. For example, I just love British theatre and ended up writing my Extended Essay on a revolution in post-WWII British theatre. (Yes, I'm definitely a #TheatreNerd.)

I really encourage anyone who pursues an IB Diploma to take the Extended Essay seriously. I was fortunate enough to receive a full-tuition merit scholarship to USC's School of Dramatic Arts program. In my interview for the scholarship, I spoke passionately about my Extended Essay; thus, I genuinely think my Extended Essay helped me get my scholarship.

But how do you find a topic you're passionate about? Start by thinking about which classes you enjoy the most and why . Do you like math classes because you like to solve problems? Or do you enjoy English because you like to analyze literary texts?

Keep in mind that there's no right or wrong answer when it comes to choosing your Extended Essay topic. You're not more likely to get high marks because you're writing about science, just like you're not doomed to failure because you've chosen to tackle the social sciences. The quality of what you produce—not the field you choose to research within—will determine your grade.

Once you've figured out your category, you should brainstorm more specific topics by putting pen to paper . What was your favorite chapter you learned in that class? Was it astrophysics or mechanics? What did you like about that specific chapter? Is there something you want to learn more about? I recommend spending a few hours on this type of brainstorming.

One last note: if you're truly stumped on what to research, pick a topic that will help you in your future major or career . That way you can use your Extended Essay as a talking point in your college essays (and it will prepare you for your studies to come too!).

#2: Select a Topic That Is Neither Too Broad nor Too Narrow

There's a fine line between broad and narrow. You need to write about something specific, but not so specific that you can't write 4,000 words on it.

You can't write about WWII because that would be a book's worth of material. You also don't want to write about what type of soup prisoners of war received behind enemy lines, because you probably won’t be able to come up with 4,000 words of material about it. However, you could possibly write about how the conditions in German POW camps—and the rations provided—were directly affected by the Nazis' successes and failures on the front, including the use of captured factories and prison labor in Eastern Europe to increase production. WWII military history might be a little overdone, but you get my point.

If you're really stuck trying to pinpoint a not-too-broad-or-too-narrow topic, I suggest trying to brainstorm a topic that uses a comparison. Once you begin looking through the list of sample essays below, you'll notice that many use comparisons to formulate their main arguments.

I also used a comparison in my EE, contrasting Harold Pinter's Party Time with John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in order to show a transition in British theatre. Topics with comparisons of two to three plays, books, and so on tend to be the sweet spot. You can analyze each item and then compare them with one another after doing some in-depth analysis of each individually. The ways these items compare and contrast will end up forming the thesis of your essay!

When choosing a comparative topic, the key is that the comparison should be significant. I compared two plays to illustrate the transition in British theatre, but you could compare the ways different regional dialects affect people's job prospects or how different temperatures may or may not affect the mating patterns of lightning bugs. The point here is that comparisons not only help you limit your topic, but they also help you build your argument.

Comparisons are not the only way to get a grade-A EE, though. If after brainstorming, you pick a non-comparison-based topic and are still unsure whether your topic is too broad or narrow, spend about 30 minutes doing some basic research and see how much material is out there.

If there are more than 1,000 books, articles, or documentaries out there on that exact topic, it may be too broad. But if there are only two books that have any connection to your topic, it may be too narrow. If you're still unsure, ask your advisor—it's what they're there for! Speaking of advisors...

Don't get stuck with a narrow topic!

#3: Choose an Advisor Who Is Familiar With Your Topic

If you're not certain of who you would like to be your advisor, create a list of your top three choices. Next, write down the pros and cons of each possibility (I know this sounds tedious, but it really helps!).

For example, Mr. Green is my favorite teacher and we get along really well, but he teaches English. For my EE, I want to conduct an experiment that compares the efficiency of American electric cars with foreign electric cars.

I had Ms. White a year ago. She teaches physics and enjoyed having me in her class. Unlike Mr. Green, Ms. White could help me design my experiment.

Based on my topic and what I need from my advisor, Ms. White would be a better fit for me than would Mr. Green (even though I like him a lot).

The moral of my story is this: do not just ask your favorite teacher to be your advisor . They might be a hindrance to you if they teach another subject. For example, I would not recommend asking your biology teacher to guide you in writing an English literature-based EE.

There can, of course, be exceptions to this rule. If you have a teacher who's passionate and knowledgeable about your topic (as my English teacher was about my theatre topic), you could ask that instructor. Consider all your options before you do this. There was no theatre teacher at my high school, so I couldn't find a theatre-specific advisor, but I chose the next best thing.

Before you approach a teacher to serve as your advisor, check with your high school to see what requirements they have for this process. Some IB high schools require your IB Extended Essay advisor to sign an Agreement Form , for instance.

Make sure that you ask your IB coordinator whether there is any required paperwork to fill out. If your school needs a specific form signed, bring it with you when you ask your teacher to be your EE advisor.

#4: Pick an Advisor Who Will Push You to Be Your Best

Some teachers might just take on students because they have to and aren't very passionate about reading drafts, only giving you minimal feedback. Choose a teacher who will take the time to read several drafts of your essay and give you extensive notes. I would not have gotten my A without being pushed to make my Extended Essay draft better.

Ask a teacher that you have experience with through class or an extracurricular activity. Do not ask a teacher that you have absolutely no connection to. If a teacher already knows you, that means they already know your strengths and weaknesses, so they know what to look for, where you need to improve, and how to encourage your best work.

Also, don't forget that your supervisor's assessment is part of your overall EE score . If you're meeting with someone who pushes you to do better—and you actually take their advice—they'll have more impressive things to say about you than a supervisor who doesn't know you well and isn't heavily involved in your research process.

Be aware that the IB only allows advisors to make suggestions and give constructive criticism. Your teacher cannot actually help you write your EE. The IB recommends that the supervisor spends approximately two to three hours in total with the candidate discussing the EE.

#5: Make Sure Your Essay Has a Clear Structure and Flow

The IB likes structure. Your EE needs a clear introduction (which should be one to two double-spaced pages), research question/focus (i.e., what you're investigating), a body, and a conclusion (about one double-spaced page). An essay with unclear organization will be graded poorly.

The body of your EE should make up the bulk of the essay. It should be about eight to 18 pages long (again, depending on your topic). Your body can be split into multiple parts. For example, if you were doing a comparison, you might have one third of your body as Novel A Analysis, another third as Novel B Analysis, and the final third as your comparison of Novels A and B.

If you're conducting an experiment or analyzing data, such as in this EE , your EE body should have a clear structure that aligns with the scientific method ; you should state the research question, discuss your method, present the data, analyze the data, explain any uncertainties, and draw a conclusion and/or evaluate the success of the experiment.

#6: Start Writing Sooner Rather Than Later!

You will not be able to crank out a 4,000-word essay in just a week and get an A on it. You'll be reading many, many articles (and, depending on your topic, possibly books and plays as well!). As such, it's imperative that you start your research as soon as possible.

Each school has a slightly different deadline for the Extended Essay. Some schools want them as soon as November of your senior year; others will take them as late as February. Your school will tell you what your deadline is. If they haven't mentioned it by February of your junior year, ask your IB coordinator about it.

Some high schools will provide you with a timeline of when you need to come up with a topic, when you need to meet with your advisor, and when certain drafts are due. Not all schools do this. Ask your IB coordinator if you are unsure whether you are on a specific timeline.

Below is my recommended EE timeline. While it's earlier than most schools, it'll save you a ton of heartache (trust me, I remember how hard this process was!):

• January/February of Junior Year: Come up with your final research topic (or at least your top three options).
• February of Junior Year: Approach a teacher about being your EE advisor. If they decline, keep asking others until you find one. See my notes above on how to pick an EE advisor.
• April/May of Junior Year: Submit an outline of your EE and a bibliography of potential research sources (I recommend at least seven to 10) to your EE advisor. Meet with your EE advisor to discuss your outline.
• Summer Between Junior and Senior Year: Complete your first full draft over the summer between your junior and senior year. I know, I know—no one wants to work during the summer, but trust me—this will save you so much stress come fall when you are busy with college applications and other internal assessments for your IB classes. You will want to have this first full draft done because you will want to complete a couple of draft cycles as you likely won't be able to get everything you want to say into 4,000 articulate words on the first attempt. Try to get this first draft into the best possible shape so you don't have to work on too many revisions during the school year on top of your homework, college applications, and extracurriculars.
• August/September of Senior Year: Turn in your first draft of your EE to your advisor and receive feedback. Work on incorporating their feedback into your essay. If they have a lot of suggestions for improvement, ask if they will read one more draft before the final draft.
• September/October of Senior Year: Submit the second draft of your EE to your advisor (if necessary) and look at their feedback. Work on creating the best possible final draft.
• November-February of Senior Year: Schedule your viva voce. Submit two copies of your final draft to your school to be sent off to the IB. You likely will not get your grade until after you graduate.

Remember that in the middle of these milestones, you'll need to schedule two other reflection sessions with your advisor . (Your teachers will actually take notes on these sessions on a form like this one , which then gets submitted to the IB.)

I recommend doing them when you get feedback on your drafts, but these meetings will ultimately be up to your supervisor. Just don't forget to do them!

The early bird DOES get the worm!

How Is the IB Extended Essay Graded?

Extended Essays are graded by examiners appointed by the IB on a scale of 0 to 34 . You'll be graded on five criteria, each with its own set of points. You can learn more about how EE scoring works by reading the IB guide to extended essays .

• Criterion A: Focus and Method (6 points maximum)
• Criterion B: Knowledge and Understanding (6 points maximum)
• Criterion C: Critical Thinking (12 points maximum)
• Criterion D: Presentation (4 points maximum)
• Criterion E: Engagement (6 points maximum)

How well you do on each of these criteria will determine the final letter grade you get for your EE. You must earn at least a D to be eligible to receive your IB Diploma.

Although each criterion has a point value, the IB explicitly states that graders are not converting point totals into grades; instead, they're using qualitative grade descriptors to determine the final grade of your Extended Essay . Grade descriptors are on pages 102-103 of this document .

Here's a rough estimate of how these different point values translate to letter grades based on previous scoring methods for the EE. This is just an estimate —you should read and understand the grade descriptors so you know exactly what the scorers are looking for.

Here is the breakdown of EE scores (from the May 2021 bulletin):

How Does the Extended Essay Grade Affect Your IB Diploma?

The Extended Essay grade is combined with your TOK (Theory of Knowledge) grade to determine how many points you get toward your IB Diploma.

To learn about Theory of Knowledge or how many points you need to receive an IB Diploma, read our complete guide to the IB program and our guide to the IB Diploma requirements .

This diagram shows how the two scores are combined to determine how many points you receive for your IB diploma (3 being the most, 0 being the least). In order to get your IB Diploma, you have to earn 24 points across both categories (the TOK and EE). The highest score anyone can earn is 45 points.

Let's say you get an A on your EE and a B on TOK. You will get 3 points toward your Diploma. As of 2014, a student who scores an E on either the extended essay or TOK essay will not be eligible to receive an IB Diploma .

Prior to the class of 2010, a Diploma candidate could receive a failing grade in either the Extended Essay or Theory of Knowledge and still be awarded a Diploma, but this is no longer true.

Figuring out how you're assessed can be a little tricky. Luckily, the IB breaks everything down here in this document . (The assessment information begins on page 219.)

40+ Sample Extended Essays for the IB Diploma Programme

In case you want a little more guidance on how to get an A on your EE, here are over 40 excellent (grade A) sample extended essays for your reading pleasure. Essays are grouped by IB subject.

• Business Management 1
• Chemistry 1
• Chemistry 2
• Chemistry 3
• Chemistry 4
• Chemistry 5
• Chemistry 6
• Chemistry 7
• Computer Science 1
• Economics 1
• Design Technology 1
• Design Technology 2
• Environmental Systems and Societies 1
• Geography 1
• Geography 2
• Geography 3
• Geography 4
• Geography 5
• Geography 6
• Literature and Performance 1
• Mathematics 1
• Mathematics 2
• Mathematics 3
• Mathematics 4
• Mathematics 5
• Philosophy 1
• Philosophy 2
• Philosophy 3
• Philosophy 4
• Philosophy 5
• Psychology 1
• Psychology 2
• Psychology 3
• Psychology 4
• Psychology 5
• Social and Cultural Anthropology 1
• Social and Cultural Anthropology 2
• Social and Cultural Anthropology 3
• Sports, Exercise and Health Science 1
• Sports, Exercise and Health Science 2
• Visual Arts 1
• Visual Arts 2
• Visual Arts 3
• Visual Arts 4
• Visual Arts 5
• World Religion 1
• World Religion 2
• World Religion 3

What's Next?

Trying to figure out what extracurriculars you should do? Learn more about participating in the Science Olympiad , starting a club , doing volunteer work , and joining Student Government .

Studying for the SAT? Check out our expert study guide to the SAT . Taking the SAT in a month or so? Learn how to cram effectively for this important test .

Not sure where you want to go to college? Read our guide to finding your target school . Also, determine your target SAT score or target ACT score .

As an SAT/ACT tutor, Dora has guided many students to test prep success. She loves watching students succeed and is committed to helping you get there. Dora received a full-tuition merit based scholarship to University of Southern California. She graduated magna cum laude and scored in the 99th percentile on the ACT. She is also passionate about acting, writing, and photography.

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Teaching Writing with Mini Lessons: A How-to

Every year, teachers are asked to do more–close the gap, make learning fun, use technology, encourage independence, provide quality feedback, collaborate, and so on. It’s not easy finding a class structure that perfectly meets the needs of students, administrators, and classroom evaluators. When it comes to teaching writing with mini lessons, however, you can get pretty close.

How I Discovered Mini Lessons

During my first year of teaching, I tried really hard to create long, dynamic lectures. My favorite teacher in high school had been able to lecture for hours at a time without losing my interest; I wanted to be able to do the same.

But no matter how interesting or well-planned I thought my lessons were, my students always eventually lost interest. Plus, they didn’t have any time in class to put their new knowledge to use. And I was spending a ton of time outside of class grading and providing comments.

When I discovered mini lessons, many of these issues disappeared!

Mini lessons are now one of my favorite structures for lesson planning (especially for creative writing ). When done well, I believe they lead to more independence and confidence in students and they get this introverted teacher out of the spotlight–wins all around. 

In this post, I’ll cover the benefits of using mini lessons, especially for writing, and how to structure your own.

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that earn me a small commission, at no additional cost to you. I only recommend products that I personally use and love, or think my readers will find useful.

What are Mini Lessons?

If you pick up any number of professional development books on mini lessons, you’ll find many definitions.

Some say that mini lessons have to cover a certain topic or content areas.

Others give strict requirements for time limits.

Here, I’ll give you my own definition of mini lessons.

Mini lessons are exactly what they sound like–short (mini) lessons or lectures. Those little lectures are followed by activities that let students immediately implement what they’ve learned. 

A mini lesson includes a short period of direct instruction followed by independent practice for students. Within this framework, the direct instruction and practice components can vary greatly, but this will be our general working definition for now. 

How “Mini” is Mini?

The term “mini” will vary depending on your class structure and time . I teach in ninety-minute blocks, so my mini lessons can go on for up to forty-five minutes sometimes. 

A teacher with a forty-five minute class time, however, will probably find that fifteen to twenty minutes for direct instruction is the sweet spot. 

The independent practice portion can be anything from a worksheet to working on a project. Typically, mini lessons involve more creative thinking activities–writing, 

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Why Use Mini Lessons When Teaching Writing?

There are many reasons that mini lessons are effective. Mini lessons provide:

• Direct instruction
• Gradual release of responsibility

Scaffolding

• Guided practice

There are benefits for the instructor, as well. 

Direct Instruction

Direct instruction is an essential part of teaching. I think it gets a bad rap–there’s always a new activity, a new fad, or new technology that tries to replace it.

But sometimes in order to teach, you just have to get up there and, well, teach .

Mini lessons allow for direct instruction, but limit the instruction time to prevent lectures from becoming stale, boring, or losing students.

Gradual Release of Responsibility

My students tend to be very dependent. They wait for me to go over the answer, approve of a response before they write it down, or ask questions they already know the answer too.

For some, it’s laziness. For others, it’s the fear of getting it wrong or disappointing their teacher. With mini lessons, students are eased into working on their own.

This might not be true with every mini lesson from every teacher, but it’s how I run my mini lessons usually. For example, in my “Show. Don’t Tell” mini lesson , I give examples on how to turn a telling sentence into a showing paragraph.

Then, we work as a whole class to turn a telling sentence into a showing paragraph.

Students randomly draw a telling sentence. They brainstorm details that could show rather than tell than sentence.

And then, finally, they write a showing paragraph.

Each step is built to build the student’s confidence. By the time we get to the activity, the know the expectations and what success will look like. They don’t need my approval.

Scaffolding ties in with the gradual release of responsibility. It is the scaffolding that allows for the release.

Again, this isn’t true of every mini lesson from every teacher, but I think it’s easy to build scaffolding into a lesson. Usually, you show an example and you do some modeling.

You may also provide a graphic organizer, a handout, or some other support for students to use as they work.

I do this in my tone mini lesson .

In this lesson, students randomly pick a strip of paper with a neutral situation on it like “eating in the cafeteria” and then they pick a random strip with a tone word like “humorous”. They would have to combine the two to write a paragraph about eating in the cafeteria in a humorous tone.

But before that, they write shorter practice situations that aren’t random. I also give them a tone handout, should they forget what tone is in the process.

Here’s more about scaffolding techniques in another post . I also talk about scaffolding specifically for creative writing classes here .

Guided Practice

This, to me, is the biggest instructional benefit to using mini lessons.

If I only teach for, say, twenty minutes, that gives students more time to actually do the work, practice, critique one another, get feedback, and make revisions.

When students are working on a writing activity, I always walk around the room. Sometimes, I’m aimless and wander, giving unsolicited feedback.

Other times, I let students work for a bit before purposely sitting and chatting with each student about their writing so far.

What is important, however, is that students get immediate, in-the-moment feedback. They can quickly course correct or revise. That’s where the learning happens.

Additional Benefits

Personally, as an introverted teacher, I love mini lessons because they take the focus away from me. I do my thing for just a short amount of time, and then the focus is on the students. Walking around, checking in, and giving one-on-one feedback is way better than trying to entertain twenty teenagers at a time. 

I believe my students prefer shorter lectures, too. I see so much learning happening while students grapple during independent practice. 

When students are able to engage in guided practice, they’re forced to try new skills. Instead of bailing out when concepts become challenging–like they might be tempted to do with homework–I’m there to help them get unstuck. 

How Do You Structure Writing Mini Lessons? 

Again, every instructor will have his or her own style for mini lessons. This is how I do mine.

Structuring Writing Mini Lessons Step 1: Identify the Goal

First, you need to know what you’re teaching of course. I love mini lessons for teaching or reinforcing skills. I love mini lessons for grammar and writing especially. 

It’s important to narrow down your focus. One of the hardest parts about creating a mini lesson is keeping it, well, mini .

Writing an essay is way too much content for a mini lesson. How to write a thesis statement, however, is perfect. 

When planning your class, it’s nice to know what your end goals are. Are students writing a speech? A short story? A poem? Use that end goal and work backwards, breaking apart the skills students will need to be successful. 

Structuring Writing Mini Lessons Step 2: Choose the Student Task

Wait, wait! Why plan the student task before I map out the lesson? Isn’t that backwards?

Well, yes it is! I love backwards design!

Knowing what we want students to be able to do by the end of class or by the end of the lesson will force us to really concentrate our short lesson on only what students absolutely need to know. 

You don’t have to do it this way–you could certainly plan your lesson first and then create an assignment to go with it. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t done that, too. But I do think working backwards almost always yields better results. 

So, what kind of task would you like students to perform? 

Notice that I used the work “task”. We want students to do or create something here. That rules out quizzes and worksheets as the end goal. 

(You can totally use quizzes and worksheets! I use these as an intermediary step sometimes, like in my dialogue mini lesson . But ultimately, students should have a small performance task.)

Earlier, I used the example of a mini lessons on writing thesis statements. If that was your topic, you’d obviously want to students to write a thesis statement by the end of class. 

If you want to teach students how to properly punctuate and construct a dialogue between characters, you’ll probably want them to actually write a conversation between two characters. 

Keep these tasks short . They’re practice, after all, not a major assessment. 

Structuring Writing Mini Lessons Step 3: Create Your Lesson

You know the end goal. You know what students are going to have to complete by the end of class.

Now, what will the need to know in order to do task?

My mini lessons are usually pretty straightforward presentations. When the lesson is short, you don’t have to do as much to keep students engaged. 

Generally, my lessons follow the same structure:

• Introduce the topic, along with any need-to-know definitions or terms
• Provide or model an example
• Do an example with the class
• Go over the assignment

For our thesis creation example, you can see how this would work. You’d first tell students what a thesis statement is and why we’d use it. You would show students an example of one and talk about it. 

Then, you might work with the class to create a thesis for an example question. 

Lastly, you’d have students write a thesis statement for their own papers. As they work, you’d walk around, checking on their work, and offering feedback. 

In my “Show. Don’t Tell” mini lesson , I have students select a random “telling” sentence and then turn it into a “showing” paragraph. (It’s a really fun activity!)

Teaching the Mini Lesson

Once you have your goal, your lesson, and the student task all worked out, you’re good to go! I do have some tips for you, though. 

First, there is an art to the mini lesson. The first time I teach any mini lesson, I usually end up running long. It’s way, way too easy to create a lesson that is just too long. 

If you find that your mini lesson is not-so-mini, that’s ok! Take note and adjust for next time. 

I recommend having students do at least some practice in class immediately after the mini lesson. That way you can help them course correct if they don’t understand the skill or concept at first. 

But in a pinch, if your lesson runs long you can always assign the task as homework or leave it for the next day. 

Giving Feedback

I also recommend touching base with each student as they work, if possible. While students work, walk around and look over their shoulders. Give lots of praise for work well done or concepts mastered. Give gentle suggestions to students who haven’t quite mastered the skill yet. 

I love my walking feedback. Not only does it help students learn and make corrections in the moment, but it gives me time to make connections with them, too. I’ll often note some cool new shoes or ask about their weekends while passing by. 

You’ll have to be careful, of course, to make sure conversation doesn’t dominate the whole class, but getting some casual conversation going sometimes encourages my students to talk to another about the assignment. 

I might remark on a student’s creative approach to a poem, which will then lead another student to ask to read the poem. They end up trading work and giving one another feedback–all without much from me. 

For this alone, I love mini lessons. It takes instruction out of my hands and puts it back into the students. I prefer being a facilitator and a coach than a boss.

Learn More About Mini Lessons

I use mini lessons routinely in my classroom, but I’m no expert! 

I mention several times in this post that every teacher’s style of mini lesson is going to vary. If you’re truly interested in diving deep into mini lessons, there are some fantastic professional development books on this topic.

Mini lessons are a must-have in your teaching arsenal! They include a little bit of everything–direct instruction, guided practice, and opportunities for meaningful feedback. 

Plus, they keep you from talking nonstop for eight hours, which my voice box totally appreciates. 

I have some great mini lessons right here if you’d like to save time by using someone else’s!

I also encourage you to grab this FREE Mood and Tone Student Handout to help you with any future mini lessons on those topics.

The Art of the Travel Essay EGL 145, Winter 2007 Jonah Willihnganz Stanford University

The condition of motion produces a structure of experience with its own logic and order; distinct from the logic and order of place.                                                                                                      —Eric Leed

Guidelines for Writing the Mini Essay / Scene

The purpose of this initial writing assignment is to have you practice distinguishing and putting into relation two separate components that appear in nearly all essays—(a) a vividly rendered, concrete encounter and (b) a careful, acute exploration of an question or issue it raises for you. There are several reasons why, after we do some prewriting /brainstorming , it is helpful to break down an essay into these two components. One reason is that each requires a different kind of attention (wonder vs. examination) and writing (dramatization vs. analysis)

Write a scene that dramatizes and reflects on a moment when an opinion of yours changed. The scene should be an encounter with something/someone new to you, whether far-away or near-by. The changed opinion can be about a particular place or people but this usually has limited appeal. Aim instead for an insight that is occasioned by the encounter but which is itself more general. As we will see in the essays we read, the insight or changed mind is not about the place/people itself. For example, you might describe and reflect on a moment on a camping trip when you realize that the idea of "nature" you have been carrying around in your head is inaccurate. Or you might describe and reflect on a moment in a Japanese subway station when you realize that your sense of body space has conditioned how you interact in the world.

Please write about 2-3 pages, double-spaced (500-750 words or so). This is not much space, so every sentence counts.

A little help:

(1) Remember that your essay is an occasion to take the reader along on a journey of some discovery that may interest him/her and that what tends to most interest us is the subjective (vs. objective) knowledge that is produces by this journey.

(2) There are many, many ways to describe a scene. Choose a manner that will help you dramatize—make us feel—the experience that you have had. You can refer to the list of ways to describe something in the Course Materials section.

(3) In class we will discuss 15 principles of writing strong dramatization. These principles can help you render your scene powerfully. The list of these is also in the Course Materials section.

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How Long Mini Literature Review for your Short or Long Essay

• by Joseph Kenas
• November 30, 2023
• Custom Essay writing

A literature review is a descriptive summary of past research on a particular topic. A literature review’s goal is to teach readers about important knowledge and ideas that have been established on a given topic.

Its goal is to compare, contrast, and/or link findings discovered while analyzing other people’s work. Literature reviews are frequently produced to place a study in the context of what is currently known about a subject in order to lay a foundation for the topic (or question) being investigated.

As part of their research, every Ph.D. student is obliged to conduct a literature review. The goal of a literature review is to place your summer study in the context of past work in your field. Keep in mind that science is a social and collaborative endeavor.

When you write a research paper, you’re contributing to an ongoing conversation. The purpose of a literature review is to assist you in obtaining information a sense of what’s going on in that conversation and how you might contribute by adding your own voice

What is a Mini Literature Review?

A mini-review is merely a thorough description of a single issue, including supporting arguments and key points. Reading articles, taking notes, brainstorming, and creative writing are all common phases in writing a full-length review article. However, the mini-review may just cover one topic or answer one question. 

The Mini Literature Review was created to help young researchers to submit their work fast and simply. It is also intended that by using this approach, the quality of literature reviews in other published works will increase.

In particular, the Mini Literature Review should include papers from conference proceedings and workshops, as well as industry or trade journals and research. Current research sources should also be covered and included.

What is the Purpose of a Mini Literature Review?

The purpose of the Mini Literature Review article is to quickly and easily showcase a specific issue or set of related topics, as well as to emphasize where there are gaps in the literature and possibilities for further research.

A literary review is not a book report where you rate a book by giving it a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.”

It is a survey of published work in a given topic or subfield, sometimes with the goal of establishing a research agenda for future studies.

A literature review is not a random list of prior work; rather, it evaluates previous work in order to suggest future research.

The purpose of the literature review you’re producing is to show why your current work (or any other study) is important.

Why Should You Write a Mini-Review?

1) You’re trying to find out the answer to a specific question/topic, and you don’t need to go over every detail.

2) Because a review part in a research publication is usually limited to two pages, you can publish it as a stand-alone mini-review piece.

How Long Should a Mini Literature Review Be

Writing a mini literature review is easier compared to a typical full review. However, the length differs from project to project. What should the length of the Mini Literature Review be?

Generally, a mini literature review should be around 5 pages, depending on the type of project or the length of the project. The maximum length of a Mini Literature Review article, including references, should be less than 5 pages.

However, this length might vary depending on the subject of the instructions of your professor.

Difference Between a Mini Literature Review and a Literature Review

A Literature review paper combines the findings of multiple primary literature studies to form a logical argument or detailed overview of an area. A review paper’s objective is to summarize recent accomplishments in a given field.

The report presents the current state of knowledge on the subject in general.

It gives the reader a better knowledge of the subject by discussing the findings of recent research publications.

On the other hand, the purpose of the Mini Literature Review article is to quickly and easily showcase a specific issue or set of related topics. It also emphasizes where there are gaps in the literature and possibilities for further research. 

Read more about the best length for literature review to understand more about the difference with full reviews.

What Makes a Mini Literature Review Long or Short

Generally, a mini literature review is shorter than the main literature review. This is because, while a literature review focuses on combining findings from multiple papers to draw conclusions on a large area of study, a mini literature review deals with a specific issue or topic.

It is important to note that both literature review and mini literature review follow the same format. The only difference is that one is broader and the other one is narrow.

Check out the guide on how to write term papers for more insight.

Steps to Follow in Mini Literature Review

Begin by reading and taking notes on three to four reference articles, review articles, or essential research publications that your research mentor has provided or recommended.

In light of your summer research project, consider how your work is informed by, built on, or responds to this body of work. This is why, in the stepwise guide to writing essays , we took you through several steps.

• As you get more knowledge about your field, such searches will become more crucial; consult your research. When browsing library databases, talk to your mentor about what keywords would be appropriate. Briefly describe your research field and the specific problem or subject you’ll be addressing.
• Summarize how the writers addressed this area of study using around 3-4 important studies- Why it is significant to the field, or how it is relevant to the field. 
• Researcher discoveries and methodologies and how they connect to your own planned work. Clarify how you intend to confirm prior work, attempt a new method, or expand existing work in new ways. In other words, your assessment of earlier work should establish the relevance and significance of your own work. Your review of the literature should address the following question: how am I standing on the shoulders of others?
• Include a reference list in an approved format (This list will serve as the beginning of your bibliography for your entire study).
• The length of your literature review should be between 3 and 4 pages – double-spaced

Joseph is a freelance journalist and a part-time writer with a particular interest in the gig economy. He writes about schooling, college life, and changing trends in education. When not writing, Joseph is hiking or playing chess.

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In 1960, when my world turned upside down

The demise of Bill Domjan's Plymouth just starts his story. He explains in his reader essay. Credit: Charles Thompson

After recently being hired as an engineer at the Sperry Gyroscope Company in Lake Success, I owned a new car for the first time. And there it was, my practically brand new 1959 Plymouth sedan, lying upside down on the shoulder of the Long Island Expressway.

My friend Charlie was there, camera in hand, saying, “Willy, you gotta do a handstand — it will make a great picture.” Then, two older women from streets adjoining the construction area walked over to ask if anybody had been hurt. When I said there were no injuries, one woman nodded knowingly and said, “Ah, they must have been good Catholics.” Well, not true.

Let’s turn back the calendar. It’s September 1960. The previous night, I had bought a bottle of vodka and planned to drink screwdrivers (orange juice and vodka) at a party in Forest Hills with my date, Jan.

However, unfamiliar with the effects of orange-flavored vodka, I became a “screwed driver” when we left the affair for our homes in Floral Park in my unseat-belted car. (Seat belts were not required then.)

Then it happened. While driving near the Grand Central Parkway exit, my eyes slowly closed, and my beautiful car hurtled up an immense pile of recently excavated earth (the LIE was still under construction). It rolled over in midair and came crashing down on the roof, the windshield shattering before my bloodshot and now wide-open eyes.

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Jan and I were left lying upside down inside on the ceiling, amazingly unscathed. We crawled from the wreck, and soon the police arrived, requesting my license and registration. Unfortunately, my wallet was in the trunk, and when it was opened — it now opened down — my basketball also fell out and I had to chase it down the LIE. (It seemed important at the time.) I gave the police the requested documents, and they gave me a ticket for “Failure to maintain control of a motor vehicle.”

Later that night, about 1 a.m., Jan and I got a ride home from a passerby. My car was left there, not blocking traffic and safely off the road, resting on its roof.

And now, not many hours after the accident, Charlie drove me back to the wreck and set about taking “the picture.” Ironically, lying near the car was a booklet that came with my vodka bottle: “How to Have a Vodka Party.”

A few days later, the car was junked, and although my car’s story ended, the picture’s story had just begun. I would periodically ask Charlie about it, and he’d say, “Yeah, I’ll find it one of these days.”

Eventually, I got married, had kids, and when they were grown, I told them of my misadventure and of the picture taken but never seen. After that, whenever my daughter, Bobbi, saw “Uncle Charlie,” she would ask about the picture, and he would tell her what he always told me, “Yeah, one of these days.”

Then at my son Stephen’s wedding reception in 1996, Charlie made a presentation — not to Stephen and his wife, Pamela — but to Bobbi, of a poster-size blowup of her father standing on his hands in front of his 1959 Plymouth resting on its roof.

The photo had been taken 36 years earlier, and I wasn’t sure it ever existed. But it did and now it hangs in my den, reminding me of that crazy night from the distant past.

Reader Bill Domjan lives in Melville.

SEND AN ESSAY about life on Long Island (about 550 words) to [email protected] . Essays will be edited and may be republished in all media. Include your full name, address and telephone numbers.

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Guest Essay

How Iran and Israel Are Unnatural Adversaries

By Karim Sadjadpour

Mr. Sadjadpour is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“History is littered,” the British writer and politician Enoch Powell said, “with the wars which everybody knew would never happen.”

A full-blown conflict between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israel once seemed implausible. But last month, the long-running shadow war between the two nations burst into the open in a series of unprecedented drone and missile strikes, raising the specter of a fight that would contain enough advanced technology, paramilitary forces and mutual acrimony to incinerate large parts of the Middle East, collapse the global economy and entangle the United States and other major powers.

Now the two sides appear to have hit pause, but for how long? As long as Iran is ruled by an Islamist government that puts its revolutionary ideology before the national interest, the two countries will never know peace, and the Middle East will never know meaningful stability.

Iran and Israel are not natural adversaries. In contrast to other modern conflicts — between Israel and Palestine, Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan — Iran and Israel have no bilateral land or resource disputes. Their national strengths — Iran is an energy titan and Israel is a tech innovator — are more complementary than competitive. The nations also have a historical affinity dating back over 2,500 years, when the Persian King Cyrus the Great freed the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity. Iran was the second Muslim nation, after Turkey, to recognize Israel after its founding in 1948.

Their modern animosity is best understood through the lens of ideology, not geopolitics. It began with the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the dogmatic Shiite cleric who led the 1979 revolution that transformed Iran from a U.S.-allied monarchy into an anti-American theocracy. Khomeini’s 1970 treatise “ Islamic Government ,” which became the basis of the constitution that governs the Islamic Republic, is laced with tirades and threats against “wretched” and “satanic” Jews. Then, as now, antisemitism often lurked below the surface of anti-imperialism.

“We must protest and make the people aware that the Jews and their foreign backers are opposed to the very foundations of Islam and wish to establish Jewish domination throughout the world,” Khomeini wrote. “Since they are a cunning and resourceful group of people, I fear that — God forbid — they may one day achieve their goal and that the apathy shown by some of us may allow a Jew to rule over us one day.”

In the same manifesto, Khomeini casually advocates what in modern parlance is best understood as ethnic cleansing. “Islam,” he wrote, “has rooted out numerous groups that were a source of corruption and harm to human society.” He went on to cite the case of a “troublesome” Jewish tribe in Medina that he said was “eliminated” by the Prophet Muhammad.

Very few of the Iranian revolutionaries and Western progressives who backed Khomeini in 1979 — some of whom compared him with Mohandas K. Gandhi — had bothered to scrutinize his vision for Iran. Once in power, he built his newfound theocracy on three ideological pillars: death to America, death to Israel and the subjugation of women.

Over four decades later, the worldview of Iran’s current rulers has evolved little. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khomeini’s 85-year-old successor and now one of the world’s longest-serving dictators, denounces Zionism in virtually every speech and was one of the few world leaders to publicly praise Hamas’s “epic” Oct. 7 attack on Israel. “We will support and assist any nation or any group anywhere,” Ayatollah Khamenei said in 2020, “who opposes and fights the Zionist regime.”

As Ayatollah Khamenei’s words make plain, the Islamic Republic of Iran is one of the few governments in the world more dedicated to abolishing another nation than advancing its own. “Death to Israel” is the regime’s rallying cry — not “Long live Iran.”

Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime has backed this language with action. Iran has spent tens of billions of dollars arming, training and financing proxy militias in five failing nations: Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Iraq and Yemen. Together these groups constitute its so-called Axis of Resistance against America and Israel. These groups are elbow-deep in corruption and repression in their own societies, including illicit drug dealing and piracy , while pledging that they seek justice for Palestinians.

Hostility toward Israel is a useful tool for predominantly Shiite, Persian Iran to vie for leadership in the predominantly Sunni, Arab Middle East. But it should not be confused with concern for the well-being of Palestinians. In contrast to American, European and Arab governments that fund Palestinian human welfare initiatives, Iran has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into arming and financing Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Iran’s goal is not to build a Palestine but to demolish Israel.

And yet as much as the Islamic Republic is committed to its ideology, it is even more committed to staying in power. As the German American philosopher Hannah Arendt once put it, “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.” As its careful response to Israel’s recent military strikes on Iran showed, when faced with the possibility of full-blown war or existential economic pressure, Tehran tactically retreats.

After decades of living under an economically failing, socially repressive police state, Iran’s people long ago recognized that the greatest obstacle between themselves and a normal life is their own leadership, not America or Israel. In a 2021 public opinion poll conducted from Europe, only around one-fifth of Iranians approved of their government’s support of Hamas and “Death to Israel” slogan. Few nations have Iran’s combination of natural resource wealth, human capital, geographic size and ancient history. This enormous gap between Iran’s potential and its citizens’ reality is one reason the country has experienced numerous mass uprisings over the past two decades.

Iran’s Axis of Resistance has empowered right-wing Israeli politicians far more than Palestinians over the past two decades. The threat of a Holocaust-denying Iranian regime with regional and nuclear ambitions has stoked Israeli anxieties, diverted attention from Palestinian suffering and facilitated normalization agreements between Israel and Arab governments equally fearful of Iran. Indeed, Iran and its proxies were such a useful adversary that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu helped prop up Hamas’s rule in Gaza until the deadly attacks of Oct. 7.

“The dream of Israeli leaders,” a retired Israeli general, Amos Yadlin, told me recently, “is to one day restore normal relations with an Iranian government.”

The dream of Iran’s Islamist leaders, on the other hand, is to end Israel’s existence. Israel’s conflict with Iran has been a war of necessity, but Iran’s conflict with Israel has been a war of choice. It won’t be over until Iran has leaders who put Iranians’ interests over Israel’s destruction.

Karim Sadjadpour is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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Detroit Lions rookie Gio Manu reflects on long journey from Tonga to NFL draft pick

Gio Manu woke up at 4 a.m. Friday and couldn't go back to sleep, too excited about his first NFL practice to catch more shut-eye.

On the bus ride from the player's hotel to the Detroit Lions ' Allen Park training facility, Manu sat in the last row and got choked up thinking about how far he'd come.

"I was really emotional," Manu said. "I was tearing up because it’s been such a long journey, man, and just to see me here competing with the best and putting on this jersey, I kind of like find myself looking back at my journey and I tell myself it’s only going to be up from here, so this is just the start."

A fourth-round pick in last month's draft, Manu was one of 42 players and six draft picks on the field Friday for the first day of Lions rookie minicamp.

COLLEGE COACH: 'No one even came close to challenging' new Lions OL Giovanni Manu

He played left tackle. He took a few team reps against the most experienced player in camp, last year's CFL sack leader , Mathieu Betts. And when it was all done, he reflected on his life-altering opportunity.

Born on the small South Pacific island of Tonga, Manu moved to the Vancouver, Canada, area when he was 11 in search of a better life. His mother sent him and his two siblings to live with her sister, who first introduced him to American football.

A rugby player in Tonga, Manu spent five seasons at the University of British Columbia, including a COVID year when the school did not field a team, before emerging this spring as one of the most intriguing developmental projects in the draft.

The Lions traded a future third-round pick to take Manu early on Day 3, and assistant general manager Ray Agnew gushed Friday about Manu's upside.

"What a talented young man," Agnew said. "Here’s a guy that, he’s got a ways to go as a football player but what better place to come in and learn how to be an offensive tackle in the National Football League than playing behind Penei Sewell and Taylor Decker. I mean, he's got time to learn — being coached by Hank Fraley. So, excited about this young man, and it’s more than just his athletic ability. If you meet this young man, he is an outstanding human being first of all. He’s not entitled. He’s appreciative of everything."

MISSING SOMEBODY? Lions coach Dan Campbell to miss rookie camp for personal reasons

Manu, whose voice cracked at times when he talked Friday, said his motivation to succeed in the NFL is "my family and my will to just get better every day."

His parents have never seen him play football in person, and he said he hopes to bring them to America this summer for the Lions' first preseason game.

"One thing about me is I refuse to get outworked by my peers and my opponents," he said. "That’s one thing I carry myself because the way I look at is if someone outworks me, it stops me from feeding my family and my family means everything to me, so if you’re stopping me from feeding my family that’s just going to add more fuel to my fire. So that’s just the way I approach this."

After practice Friday, Manu said he asked Fraley, the Lions' well-respected offensive line coach, if he could stay on the field and work on some blocking fundamentals.

When Fraley had to head inside to watch film, Manu and the rest of the Lions' linemen stayed back to work on their own.

While veterans are not present at rookie camp and Agnew admitted the competition Manu faced in college was far below NFL level, Manu said his first impression Friday was that "it is definitely not a major jump" to the NFL and would only be "a little jump" for him.

"Guys like (Betts), those are the guys that I found were a little bit more advanced to go against," he said. "But to me it’s — I didn’t feel like I was getting worked. For me, I’m going to continue to come out here every day and keep working hard and it’s going to get to a point where guys like that, I’ll be able to keep up with them."

Manu said he's anxious to face more experienced NFL players like Aidan Hutchinson once organized team activities start later this month, and to learn from veterans such as Sewell and Decker, the Lions' returning starters at right and left tackle.

Sewell, like Manu, is Polynesian, and Manu said he picked No. 59 as his jersey in part because it was one number away from Sewell's 58.

ALL EYES ON THEM: Lions rookies Ennis Rakestraw, Terrion Arnold hope to be 'force to be reckoned with'

"I want to be next up," he said. "I want to be the next great Polynesian to come on this O-line. Penei’s 58 and I want to be 59 and one day it’d be sick if I could be 59 on that left side and he’d be 58 on that right side, but also, I picked 59 because it’s my dad’s birth year and it’s his birthday today."

Agnew said the Lions will cross-train Manu to play guard and tackle, though at 6 feet 7 and 354 pounds, Manu has the size and athletic ability to stay on the edge. That's where Manu said he sees his future, and where Agnew expects him to eventually make an impact, too.

"You watched his feet and his athletic ability, the way he competed, the way he finished blocks and it’s like, 'Man, this guy’s got some stuff,'" Agnew said. "He’s a Lion. He’s a Lions football player. He’s built the way we want. He’s the type of player, he’s wired right. I mean, this kid is going to work his butt off.

"Very excited about that young man. Can’t wait to see where he’s going to go in his career. He’s got some development to do, but he’s got a chance to be a really good player in the National Football League."

Contact Dave Birkett at  [email protected] . Follow him on X and Instagram at  @davebirkett.

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The Hidden-Pregnancy Experiment

By Jia Tolentino

Shortly after I became pregnant with my second child, in the fall of 2022, I decided to try a modest experiment. I wanted to see whether I could hide my pregnancy from my phone. After spending my twenties eagerly surveilling and sharing the details of my life online, I had already begun trying to erect some walls of technological privacy: I’d deleted most apps on my phone and turned off camera, location, and microphone access for nearly all of the ones that I did have; I had disabled Siri—I just found it annoying—and I didn’t have any smart devices. For the experiment, I would abide by some additional restrictions. I wouldn’t Google anything about pregnancy nor shop for baby stuff either online or using a credit card, and neither would my husband, because our I.P. addresses—and thus the vast, matrixed fatbergs of personal data assembled by unseen corporations to pinpoint our consumer and political identities—were linked. I wouldn’t look at pregnancy accounts on Instagram or pregnancy forums on Reddit. I wouldn’t update my period tracker or use a pregnancy app.

Nearly every time we load new content on an app or a Web site, ad-exchange companies—Google being the largest among them—broadcast data about our interests, finances, and vulnerabilities to determine exactly what we’ll see; more than a billion of these transactions take place in the U.S. every hour. Each of us, the data-privacy expert Wolfie Christl told me, has “dozens or even hundreds” of digital identifiers attached to our person; there’s an estimated eighteen-billion-dollar industry for location data alone. In August, 2022, Mozilla reviewed twenty pregnancy and period-tracking apps and found that fifteen of them made a “buffet” of personal data available to third parties, including addresses, I.P. numbers, sexual histories, and medical details. In most cases, the apps used vague language about when and how this data could be shared with law enforcement. (A 2020 FOIA lawsuit filed by the A.C.L.U. revealed that the Department of Homeland Security had purchased access to location data for millions of people in order to track them without a warrant. ICE and C.B.P. subsequently said they would stop using such data.) The scholar Shoshana Zuboff has called this surveillance capitalism , “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.” Through our phones, we are under perpetual surveillance by companies that buy and sell data about what kind of person we are, whom we might vote for, what we might purchase, and what we might be nudged into doing.

A decade ago, the sociology professor Janet Vertesi conducted a more rigorous form of the hidden-pregnancy experiment. Using an elaborate system of code words and the anonymous browser Tor, she managed to digitally hide her pregnancy all the way up to the birth of her child. In an article about the experience, for Time , she pointed to a Financial Times report, which found that identifying a single pregnant woman is as valuable to data brokers as knowing the age, gender, and location of more than two hundred nonpregnant people, because of how much stuff new parents tend to buy. She also noted that simply attempting to evade market detection—by, for example, purchasing stacks of gift cards in order to buy a stroller—made her and her husband look as though they were trying to commit fraud.

I wasn’t going to do anything so strict or elaborate. I’d allow myself to text and send e-mails about my pregnancy, and to talk about it with my phone nearby. I assumed that, eventually, it would notice; I’d just wait and see when a diaper ad popped up on Instagram. I liked the idea of establishing a buffer zone between my psyche and the object that most closely monitors it. I found it almost shocking to remember that this was possible.

Pregnancy tends to erode both your freedom and your privacy. Past a certain point in your second trimester, strangers will begin reaching toward your stomach and telling you about the real difference between boys and girls. But I had eluded this during my first pregnancy, because COVID hit before I started showing. In the months that followed, I began to feel the difference between witnessing something and surveilling it, and to recognize that the most pleasurable moments in my life had occurred out of the reach of any oversight. I had felt then an almost psychedelic sense of autonomy; time was dilating, and the slow bloom inside me was beyond anyone’s reach. I wanted to see if I could feel anything like that again.

During pregnancy, and in the early days of parenthood, one is both the object and the conductor of intense surveillance. Last year, the artist and filmmaker Sophie Hamacher co-edited an anthology of writing on the subject, called “ Supervision ,” which was published by M.I.T. Press. “As I became absorbed with tracking and monitoring my child,” Hamacher writes in the preface, “I was increasingly aware that I was a subject of tracking and monitoring by others: advertisers, medical professionals, government entities, people on the street. I began to wonder about the relationship between the way I watched her and the ways we were being watched.” Surveillance encompasses both policing and caretaking, Hamacher notes. In practice, its polarized qualities—“beneficial and harmful, intimate and distanced”—intertwine. Baby monitors use technology developed for the military. Many contemporary models run on CCTV.

Most American households with young children use baby monitors or trackers; two recent surveys put market penetration at seventy-five and eighty-three per cent, respectively. (Both surveys were conducted by companies that make these devices.) And there are now countless other ways that technology will help you to observe and scrutinize your child: nanny-cam Teddy bears, G.P.S. stroller accessories, scales that track your baby’s weight over time, disks that can be affixed to diapers and which will notify you if your baby rolls onto his stomach while he’s asleep. Increasingly, such products use A.I. to detect signs of distress. “The need to know whether a child is safe and well is perfectly natural, which makes the nature of such surveillance appear innocent,” the writer and scholar Hannah Zeavin notes in “Family Scanning,” one of the essays in “Supervision.” But, she adds, “these technologies conceal the possibility of false positives, disrupted emergency services, and of collaboration with state forces—wittingly or unwittingly—all in the name of keeping children safe.” As a general rule, these devices don’t lead to better outcomes for the babies they monitor. More often—like social media, which promises connection as a salve for the loneliness created by social media—parenting tech exacerbates, even calls into existence, the parental anxieties that it pledges to soothe.

This has become a common pattern in contemporary life. Nearly a fifth of U.S. households are estimated to use doorbell cameras, many of them from Ring, the Amazon-owned company that has expanded its reach through police partnerships and a dedicated app that encourages users to post footage of strangers. Ring cameras haven’t made neighborhoods measurably safer, but they have made users measurably more paranoid, and placed more people, sometimes with grave outcomes, in contact with the police. Until recently, police could readily access surveillance footage from the Ring network without a warrant by posting requests on the app. It also gave its own employees and third-party contractors “ ‘ free range ’ access” to view and download videos from users’ homes.

In 2015, the company Owlet started selling a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar Smart Sock, which monitored babies’ heart rates and oxygen levels, and alerted parents if these figures were abnormal. Although the company insists that it has made clear that the product is not intended to “treat or diagnose” sudden infant death syndrome—and there is no evidence that it reduces the risk of SIDS occurring—such devices are sometimes referred to as “ SIDS monitors.” But, in 2017, an opinion piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association cautioned physicians against recommending the product. “There are no medical indications for monitoring healthy infants at home,” the authors wrote. The device, they noted, could “stimulate unnecessary fear, uncertainty, and self-doubt in parents about their abilities to keep their infants safe.” The following year, a study in the same journal found “concerning” inaccuracies in oxygen readings. When Owlet went public, in February, 2021, the company had a valuation of more than a billion dollars; later that year, the F.D.A. issued a warning letter that the Smart Sock wasn’t an authorized medical device, and the company pulled it off the market. A million units had already been sold. The following year, Owlet launched a new version, called the Dream Sock, which would receive F.D.A. approval. Most of the reviews for the Dream Sock exude profound gratitude. Parents write about the peace of mind that comes from knowing the baby is being constantly monitored, about not knowing what they would do if the device didn’t exist.

Surveillance capitalism, Zuboff writes, “aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty.” But little is certain when it comes to babies. The control that we feel when we’re engaged in surveillance almost always proves illusory, though the control, or at least the influence, that others exert on us through surveillance is real.

It is not a coincidence that Roe v. Wade, a ruling grounded in the right to privacy, was overturned at a time when privacy in the U.S was on its conceptual deathbed. There are other legal principles that might have served as a stronger foundation for abortion rights: the right to equal protection, or the right to bodily integrity. As Christyne Neff wrote, in 1991, the physical effects of an ordinary pregnancy and delivery resemble those of a severe beating—flesh lacerated, organs rearranged, half a quart of blood lost. Can the state, she asked, rightfully compel a person to undergo this?

Since Roe fell, two years ago, fourteen states have claimed that power in absolute terms, banning abortion almost completely. Two states have successfully passed abortion-vigilante laws, which confer the power of carceral supervision on the public. Indiana’s attorney general has argued that abortion records should be publicly available, like death records; Kansas recently passed a law that would require abortion providers to collect details about the personal lives of their patients and make that information available to the government. Birth control and sex itself may be up next for criminal surveillance: the Heritage Foundation , last year, insisted, on Twitter, that “conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to its true purpose, & ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills.”

For many women in America, pregnancy was a conduit to state surveillance long before the end of Roe. Poor women, especially poor nonwhite women, are often drug-tested during pregnancy, and sometimes during labor and delivery, without their informed consent. Women who take drugs during pregnancy have been charged with child abuse or neglect, including in cases in which the drugs were legal; women who have miscarried after taking drugs have been charged with manslaughter, even homicide, even when no causal link was proved. Sometimes this happens because the woman in question had responded to billboards and service announcements promising to help pregnant people who are struggling with substance use. In multiple states, women have been taken into custody when the safety of the fetus was called into question. “To be pregnant and poor in the United States is to play a game of roulette with one’s privacy, presumed confidential relationship with medical providers, and basic constitutional and medical rights,” the law professor Michele Goodwin writes in “ Policing the Womb ,” from 2020.

Goodwin describes the case of a woman in Iowa named Christine Taylor, who, in 2010, as a twenty-two-year-old mother of two, was accused of attempted feticide after she fell down the stairs while pregnant. Part of the evidence cited by the police was that she reportedly told a nurse that she hadn’t wanted the baby. (Ultimately, prosecutors decided not to press charges.) The carceral surveillance of pregnancy entails the criminalization of ambivalence, the inspection of these innermost desires. But the deepest truths about motherhood seem to me to be rooted in conflicting, coexisting emotions: nightmare and rapture in the same moment during labor, the love and despair that box each other at night in the weeks that follow, the joy of cuddling my nine-month-old undergirded by the horror of knowing that other babies are starving and dying in rubble. Before I had my first child, I had badly wanted to get pregnant. I had planned for it, prepared for it, hoped for it. Still, when I saw the positive test result, I cried.

My modest experiment went surprisingly smoothly. Because I’d had my first child not long before, this time I didn’t need to buy anything, and I didn’t want to learn anything. I smooth-brained my way to three months, four months, five; no diaper ads. I called up a lawyer and data-privacy specialist named Dominique Shelton Leipzig to get her perspective. Globally, she told me, we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes—that’s eighteen zeroes—of data per day. “The short answer is, you probably haven’t hidden what you think you have,” she said. I told her about the rules I’d set for myself, that I didn’t have many apps and had bought nothing but prenatal vitamins, and that Instagram did not appear to have identified me as pregnant. She paused. “I’m amazed,” she told me. “If you didn’t see any ads, I think you might have succeeded.” I congratulated myself by instantly dropping the experiment and buying maternity pants; ads for baby carriers popped up on my Instagram within minutes.

I had felt little satisfaction hiding from the ad trackers—if anything, I’d only become more conscious of how much surveillance I was engaged in, as both subject and object, and how much more insidious the problem was becoming. We rarely have a clear understanding of what we’re doing when we engage in surveillance of ourselves or others. Life360, an app that’s used by more than sixty million people and is marketed as an easy way to track your child’s location via their smartphone, was found in 2021 to be selling raw location information to data brokers. (The company said it now sells only aggregate data.) In a Pew survey from 2023, seventy-seven per cent of Americans said they had very little to no trust in how social-media executives handle user data, and seventy-one per cent were concerned about how the government uses it. In another survey, ninety-three per cent of Americans said they wouldn’t buy a doorbell camera if it sold data about their family. People just want to be safer. I had wanted security, too, and affirmation—and I had wanted to be a writer. I had disclosed so much of my life to people I’ll never know.

My husband and I had not bought a baby monitor for our first child, a choice that satisfied his desire to not buy things and my desire to insist that certain aspects of experience are fundamentally ungovernable. But shortly after the second child was born she developed eczema, and started scratching her sweet, enormous cheeks in her sleep. One morning, my husband went to her and found that she’d clawed her face open, leaving blood smudged all over her sleep sack and smeared all over her face. “We need a video monitor!” I wailed, already Googling options. “We need to buy a video monitor today.”

We didn’t buy one, but for weeks I regretted it and second-guessed myself. And I surveilled the baby with technology in other ways all the time. In the early weeks, I relied on an app to tell me how much milk she’d drunk and how many soiled diapers she’d had that day—activities that I myself had witnessed just hours before. I felt like a Biblical angel with a thousand eyes, somehow unable to see anything. I took pictures because I knew I would have no memory of the precise contours of this exact baby in a month. When she didn’t seem hungry enough, I panicked, obsessing over every feed.

“What’s the line between pathological self-surveillance and care for a newborn? Is there one?” Sarah Blackwood, an English professor at Pace University, asks, in “Supervision.” Blackwood contrasts the “fantasy of efficiency and sterility” built into parenting tech with the “psychic state of watchfulness so many mothers find themselves in”—a state that is “metastatic, fecund, beyond.” One afternoon, my husband took the baby from me: she was sobbing, and I was incoherently frantic, trying to get her to eat. She was O.K., he told me; she’d eat when she needed to. But I know what’s good for her, and it’s my job to make her do it, I thought, furious. Around the fringes of my consciousness, I felt a flicker of understanding about how this idea that everything was controllable had become so ubiquitous, how we had confused coercion with care. ♦

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By Kyle Chayka

By Françoise Mouly

By Jennifer Wilson

Joseph Epstein, conservative provocateur, tells his life story in full

In two new books, the longtime essayist and culture warrior shows off his wry observations about himself and the world

Humorous, common-sensical, temperamentally conservative, Joseph Epstein may be the best familiar — that is casual, personal — essayist of the last half-century. Not, as he might point out, that there’s a lot of competition. Though occasionally a scourge of modern society’s errancies, Epstein sees himself as essentially a serious reader and “a hedonist of the intellect.” His writing is playful and bookish, the reflections of a wry observer alternately amused and appalled by the world’s never-ending carnival.

Now 87, Epstein has just published his autobiography, “ Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life: Especially if You’ve Had a Lucky Life ,” in tandem with “ Familiarity Breeds Content: New and Selected Essays .” This pair of books brings the Epstein oeuvre up to around 30 volumes of sophisticated literary entertainment. While there are some short-story collections (“The Goldin Boys,” “Fabulous Small Jews”), all the other books focus on writers, observations on American life, and topics as various as ambition, envy, snobbery, friendship, charm and gossip. For the record, let me add that I own 14 volumes of Epstein’s views and reviews and would like to own them all.

Little wonder, then, that Epstein’s idea of a good time is an afternoon spent hunched over Herodotus’s “Histories,” Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Memoirs of Hadrian” or almost anything by Henry James, with an occasional break to enjoy the latest issue of one of the magazines he subscribes to. In his younger days, there were as many as 25, and most of them probably featured Epstein’s literary journalism at one time or another. In the case of Commentary, he has been contributing pieces for more than 60 years.

As Epstein tells it, no one would have predicted this sort of intellectual life for a kid from Chicago whose main interests while growing up were sports, hanging out, smoking Lucky Strikes and sex. A lackadaisical C student, Myron Joseph Epstein placed 169th in a high school graduating class of 213. Still, he did go on to college — the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — because that’s what was expected of a son from an upper-middle-class Jewish family. But Urbana-Champaign wasn’t a good fit for a jokester and slacker: As he points out, the president of his college fraternity “had all the playfulness of a member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers.” No matter. Caught peddling stolen copies of an upcoming accounting exam for $5 a pop, Epstein was summarily expelled.

Fortunately, our lad had already applied for a transfer to the University of Chicago, to which he was admitted the next fall. Given his record, this shows a surprising laxity of standards by that distinguished institution, but for Epstein the move was life-changing. In short order, he underwent a spiritual conversion from good ol’ boy to European intellectual in the making. In the years to come, he would count the novelist Saul Bellow and the sociologist Edward Shils among his close friends, edit the American Scholar, and teach at Northwestern University. His students, he recalls, were “good at school, a skill without any necessary carry-over, like being good at pole-vaulting or playing the harmonica.”

Note the edge to that remark. While “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life” is nostalgia-laden, there’s a hard nut at its center. Epstein feels utter contempt for our nation’s “radical change from a traditionally moral culture to a therapeutic one.” As he explains: “Our parents’ culture and that which came long before them was about the formation of character; the therapeutic culture was about achieving happiness. The former was about courage and honor, the latter about self-esteem and freedom from stress.” This view of America’s current ethos may come across as curmudgeonly and reductionist, but many readers — whatever their political and cultural leanings — would agree with it. Still, such comments have sometimes made their author the focus of nearly histrionic vilification.

Throughout his autobiography, this lifelong Chicagoan seems able to remember the full names of everyone he’s ever met, which suggests Epstein started keeping a journal at an early age. He forthrightly despises several older writers rather similar to himself, calling Clifton Fadiman, author of “The Lifetime Reading Plan,” pretentious, then quite cruelly comparing Mortimer J. Adler, general editor of the “Great Books of the Western World” series, with Sir William Haley, one of those deft, widely read English journalists who make all Americans feel provincial. To Epstein, “no two men were more unalike; Sir William, modest, suave, intellectually sophisticated; Mortimer vain, coarse, intellectually crude.” In effect, Fadiman and Adler are both presented as cultural snake-oil salesmen. Of course, both authors were popularizers and adept at marketing their work, but helping to enrich the intellectual lives of ordinary people doesn’t strike me as an ignoble purpose.

In his own work, Epstein regularly employs humor, bits of slang or wordplay, and brief anecdotes to keep his readers smiling. For instance, in a chapter about an editorial stint at the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Epstein relates this story about a colleague named Martin Self:

“During those days, when anti-Vietnam War protests were rife, a young woman in the office wearing a protester’s black armband, asked Martin if he were going to that afternoon’s protest march. ‘No, Naomi,’ he said, ‘afternoons such as this I generally spend at the graveside of George Santayana.’”

Learned wit, no doubt, but everything — syntax, diction, the choice of the philosopher Santayana for reverence — is just perfect.

But Epstein can be earthier, too. Another colleague “was a skirt-chaser extraordinaire," a man "you would not feel safe leaving alone with your great-grandmother.” And of himself, he declares: “I don’t for a moment wish to give the impression that I live unrelievedly on the highbrow level of culture. I live there with a great deal of relief.”

In his many essays, including the sampling in “Familiarity Breeds Content,” Epstein is also markedly “quotacious,” often citing passages from his wide reading to add authority to an argument or simply to share his pleasure in a well-turned observation. Oddly enough, such borrowed finery is largely absent from “Never Say You’ve Had a Happy Life.” One partial exception might be the unpronounceable adjective “immitigable,” which appears all too often. It means unable to be mitigated or softened, and Epstein almost certainly stole it from his friend Shils, who was fond of the word.

Despite his autobiography’s jaunty title, Epstein has seen his share of trouble. As a young man working for an anti-poverty program in Little Rock, he married a waitress after she became pregnant with his child. When they separated a decade later, he found himself with four sons to care for — two from her previous marriage, two from theirs. Burt, the youngest, lost an eye in an accident while a toddler, couldn’t keep a job, fathered a child out of wedlock and eventually died of an opioid overdose at 28. Initially hesitant, Epstein came to adore Burt’s daughter, Annabelle, as did his second wife, Barbara, whom he married when they were both just past 40.

Some pages of “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life” will be familiar to inveterate readers of Epstein’s literary journalism, all of which carries a strong first-person vibe. Not surprisingly, however, the recycled anecdotage feels less sharp or witty the second time around. But overall, this look back over a long life is consistently entertaining, certainly more page-turner than page-stopper. To enjoy Epstein at his very best, though, you should seek out his earlier essay collections such as “The Middle of My Tether,” “Partial Payments” and “A Line Out for a Walk.” Whether he writes about napping or name-dropping or a neglected writer such as Somerset Maugham, his real subject is always, at heart, the wonder and strangeness of human nature.

Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life

Especially if You’ve Had a Lucky Life

By Joseph Epstein

Free Press. 304 pp. $29.99

Familiarity Breeds Content

New and Selected Essays

Simon & Schuster. 464 pp. $20.99

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