Your SorryWatchers have been busy promoting SORRY, SORRY, SORRY: The Case for Good Apologies. Feel free to skip this self-absorbed post.

We had a great time at Kepler’s Books. And Snarly apologizes to anyone who may have gotten COVID from her. She tested positive two days later. Thereby missing the event at P&T Knitwear. Which was ably handled by Sumac and our editor Hannah. Ugh.

Snarly did get to join Sumac on NPR’s “All Things Considered” (on the PHONE) with the fabulous Mary Louise Kelly. We were also on Maine Public Radio for an hour-long interview, and we were on Tavis Smiley’s radio show (here’s a Spotify link, but you can listen wherever you get your podcasts) for an hour; we asked him if there was anyone in his past he’d like to apologize to.

We were quoted in a very readable piece from the NYT by Jessica Grose about teaching kids to apologize. Snarly made (still more) apology bracelets for a Go Fug Yourself reader. SORRY, SORRY, SORRY was reviewed in People magazine (print only! wild!), which called it “a witty, useful guide.” Sumac did an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. Oprah ran an excerpt about the 6.5 steps to a good apology, and LitHub excerpted the “What I Said on My Private Island Was Taken Out of Context” chapter, about bad celebrity apologies. And here’s a little snippet we put together for Readers Digest about how NOT to apologize. Here’s Times Radio (UK), including, spoiler alert, a British political apology IN SONG! Snarly and Sumac were also on the “Smart Bitches, Trashy Books” podcast and Snarly was on “The Secret Life of Cookies” podcast. The host, Marissa Rothkopf, makes a recipe with her guest. This is how Snarly discovered she cannot bake and talk at the same time. The CLUE was the box of baking soda on the counter that did not wind up in the recipe. (Marissa said it was OK to add after all the other ingredients — we made fancy dark chocolate cherry oatmeal cookies, and Snarly had to kind of sprinkle the baking soda like fairy dust on top of everything else and half-assedly mash it into the completed dough — and Marissa was right! Seriously great cookies!)

 

 

Here is Snarly failing to talk and bake at the same time. Also, why does she have GHOST WHISKERS?

The next SORRY SORRY SORRY in-person event is a convo between Snarly and NYT columnist Ron Lieber in Brooklyn, at Congregation Beth Elohim, on Feb 8 at 7pm. Perhaps you know some Brooklynites, or people willing to cross bridges, who might wanna go? Snarly and Sumac will be speaking at the American Booksellers Association conference in Seattle later in the month, and we are super-psyched. We love you, indie booksellers!

Thank you for indulging us with this post. And now, back to your regularly scheduled SorryWatching.

On Tuesday, SorryWatch (or, OK, half of SorryWatch, the Snarly half) was on GMA! Quite a way to kick off our Sorry, Sorry, Sorry publicity doings. The book’s out on Tuesday.

Snarly thanks her fashion consultants Cynthia and Gayle, who advised her to wear the fuchsia tights and black t-strap heels, even though Snarly IGNORED them, choosing instead to go for the black tights and purple Fluevogs, because they were more comfortable. And she thanks everyone who noted the Fluevogs! We fans have a bond.

Snarly has not watched the show because she cannot bear to look or listen to herself, but you should feel free.

Both of us will be at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, CA on Tuesday (where we will be in conversation with radio legend Angie Coiro), and at P&T Knitwear on Manhattan’s Lower East Side on Friday the 13th. Hope to see you!

Publication day for Sorry, Sorry, Sorry; The Case for Good Apologies is nigh!

On January 10, 2023, we’ll have our West Coast launch (that’s Susan/Sumac’s territory) at 7pm at Kepler’s Books & Magazines in Menlo Park, CA. We’ll be interviewed by the great radio host Angie Coiro for Kepler’s Literary Foundation. Info’s on the Kepler’s Foundation website, with tix available on Eventbrite. “Premier Admission” includes an autographed copy of the book.

Not this Kepler. (Also, this is clearly James Brolin.)

On January 13 at 7pm, we’ll have our East Coast launch at P&T Knitwear, a new bookstore (with a podcast space that’s open to the public, so cool) near Marjorie’s East Village, NYC home. Again, you can RSVP at Eventbrite. The reading’s free, or you can pre-order a signed book.

Not this knitwear. But Marjorie loves Rachel Antonoff sweaters.

It’s delightful to get to introduce our book at two indie bookstores, one that’s been around since 1955 and one that’s a newcomer. (Fun fact: The latter is called P&T Knitwear to commemorate a long-ago sweater store by that name in the neighborhood. It was started by the founder’s grandfather, Hymie Tusk, who survived the Holocaust, emigrated to NYC, and set up shop in 1952 with a business partner he’d met in a Displaced Persons camp.)

We’ll also be doing a book-club chat on The Inkwell, which is part of the longtime online community (since 1985!) The Well, where Susan and Marjorie first met in the ‘90s. Most of The Well is subscription-only, but The Inkwell, The Well’s author-interview space, welcomes anyone who wants to hang out. (The old-school interface is part of its charm. You’ll figure it out.) Check the site whenever you like between Feb 28 and March 13, engage with other readers, ask questions, discuss terrible apologies, and get a sense of how pleasant a non-Musk-y, non-Meta-y conversational space can be. Angie Coiro will be leading the conversation there, too.

Not this well. (But man, Julio Torres, co-writer of this short film, is a genius.)

We’ll announce more events as they come along. In the meantime, please enjoy the book trailer our lovely publisher made for us.

Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies (Gallery Books, 2023) is also known as Getting to Sorry (the thrilling new title for the paperback! out January 2, 2024!) and is, in the words of our publisher, “a deeply researched, insightful, hilarious exploration of apologies, why they matter, and the healing power of saying you’re sorry.” It’s also a synthesis of everything we’ve learned from working on this site for the last decade. It takes what we’ve explored here and goes deeper, drawing the sustained argument that good apologies literally have the power to change the world.

Sorry, Sorry, Sorry aka Getting to Sorry (whew) delves deep into history and into academic studies of apology in psychology, sociology, law, and medicine. It looks at how gender and race affect both apologies and forgiveness. It discusses how to and how not to teach children to apologize. It examines why corporations, celebrities, law enforcement, and governments seldom apologize well, and how we regular humans can generally do better. It delves into reasons not to apologize and reasons not to forgive. It explores the role of apology in cultural accountability. And most important of all, it talks about why good apologies are so powerful and restorative. (And fret not, it also gives you the Bad Apology Bingo cards and evisceration of vile celebrity, corporate, and political apologies you’ve come to love on SorryWatch.com.)

The book received rave-y blurbs from folks as diverse as psychologist Harriet Lerner, Ph.D. (author of The Dance of Anger and Why Won’t You Apologize), legal scholar Martha Minow (author of When Should Law Forgive and Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence), journalist Farai Chideya (host of the Our Body Politic podcast and author of The Color of Our Future), futurist Cory Doctorow (author of How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism), feminist thinker Peggy Orenstein (author of Boys & Sex and Girls & Sex), and parenting expert Michelle Borba, Ed.D. (author of Building Moral Intelligence). You can read their blurbs here.

The reviews are great (we say modestly). Booklist says our work is “fascinating” and concludes, “this book, at its core, could change lives.” People Magazine called it “witty” and “useful.” Kirkus—aka The Mean One—called it “essential protocol for those seeking to hone their apology skills.” Library Journal said it was “useful, helpful, and full of relevant examples.” And Publishers Weekly called it “lucid…an accessible and well-informed resource for navigating difficult conversations.”

Here’s the paperback cover, fyi.

You can buy the book from your favorite independent bookstore, from Bookshop.org, from Barnes & Noble, from Books-a-Million, or from Amazon. Or ask your library to order a copy! We love libraries and the librarians who work there.

And thanks for always tipping us off to great and terrible apologies…and for helping us help others to apologize better.

We appreciate the shout-out to SorryWatch and our forthcoming book in this week’s New Yorker. (That featured image is not of this week’s New Yorker; we just like cats and William Steig.)

SorryWatch agrees with author Jill Lepore that ugh, Twitter.

More precisely: We agree that the process in which some people clamor for apologies on social media while others invariably insist on rejecting those apologies while still others holler that the person being called on to apologize DOES NOT OWE ANYONE AN APOLOGY FUCK THOSE SNOWFLAKES DO NOT APOLOGIZE DAMMIT is loud and exhausting.

But we’d also argue that this is a social media problem, not an apology problem. People act like assholes on social media because social media, as we write in our book, is designed to turn people into assholes. Being infuriated = engagement! Being infuriated = clicks!

Managing to give a good public apology in spite of all this shrieking and snarking is truly commendable. But good public apologies do exist! They are rare; and no matter how good they are, they won’t be accepted by all parties. But that’s no reason not to deliver them. You give a good apology because it’s the right thing to do, not because you know how it’ll be received.

Truthfully, our book Sorry, Sorry, Sorry focuses less on public statements and more on private apologies, apologies that take place between non-famous humans, because we feel there’s more to learn and more to gain from being generous to each other in real life than by demanding that someone like, oh, say, Arizona Senator Wendy Rogers publicly apologize for making fun, oh ho ho, of the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi. Neither SorryWatch nor the Pelosi family will ever get the kind of apology we want from Arizona Senator Wendy Rogers.

Lepore notes, “a culture of forced, performed remorse…has elevated wrath and loathing” and  “demeaned sorrow, grief, and consolation.” Yes! That’s why we say, over and over, that you shouldn’t apologize if you’re not sorry. When you’re not sorry, you apologize badly. Pretty much invariably. Whether that apology is public or private. And bad apologies make everything worse. If you’re not sorry, say nothing. Because another truth about the social-media whirl is that it never stops moving. If you’re not sorry, and you opt not to apologize, Twitter will almost always move on. (For, uh, as long as Twitter continues to exist.) The folks who are angry at you will be distracted by another bright shiny apology-shaped object before too long. OMG, verified fake Eli Lilly says that insulin should be free! Chappelle’s an antisemite! Jorts the labor movement cat infuriated some people with disabilities by criticizing personal-shopper apps!

God, it’s exhausting. Social media demands an immediate response (to everything!). But a good apology almost always requires sitting with what you did. We’ve mentioned the research on this, and go into it more deeply in the book. You have to parse why someone’s mad at you, wrestle with your own ego, determine whether you want to apologize…and if so, how.

So, forthwith: Here are some good public apologies. (There are some more good celeb apologies in an earlier post, should you crave more.)

Actress Ellie Kemper apologized on social media for participating in a debutante ball, twenty years earlier, established by a white supremacist group. When the story broke, she initially said nothing. Social media calls for her to apologize got louder and louder. Instead of reacting defensively (by blaming her youth, which was essentially the way Mark Wahlberg apologized for his racist history) she took responsibility.

Florence Pugh apologized for her history of culturally appropriative wardrobe choices in an imperfectly expressed but sincere Instagram post that sounded like it was written by an actual human, not a team of crisis management advisors and publicists. She wrote that she initially didn’t understand why her red-carpet sporting of box braids and cornrows was problematic, but she educated herself. She wrote that at first, “I was defensive and confused, white fragility coming out, plain and simple,” but then she listened to a friend who explained that “when Black girls do it they’re mocked and judged, but when white girls do it, it’s only then perceived as cool.”

In our book, we discuss Questlove’s public apology for Instagram posts that mocked Japanese people’s accents and intonations. Like Pugh, he wrote his apology in his own voice, so he did not sound like an Edelman global communications professional in a blunt-angled lob and a St. John knit blazer. “[G]iven that black culture consistently finds itself at the butt end of so many offensive ‘outsider’ jokes, I should be way, way more sensitive (after all, who’s zooming who),” he wrote. “I for one, should never allow my cultural bias to take precedence over my ‘examined life’ (clunkers be damned).”

As our six-point apology blueprint notes, a good apology isn’t just words. Emory University and Stanford University have both apologized for their histories of keeping out (or kicking out) Jewish students. Are these apologies extremely belated? Yes. Did the universities lie and dissemble for years about what they did? Also yes. We’d argue, though, that even apologies that are years late and produced under pressure are worth considering. No one ever has to accept an apology. But there is also no expiration date on the chance to apologize. We like to say “apologies are mandatory; forgiveness isn’t.” Full and public disclosure of the historic record, and transparent consideration of how to build a better future are also part of the act of apology. Apologies are acts as well as statements.

How could antisemitism & racism thrive on such a lovely campus? Mmmphh. 

Oh, and though President Trump made it clear that he believes apologies are a sign of weakness (good ones are actually a sign of strength, but go off) (no really, go off), some Republicans are capable of apologizing well, when they choose to. Here’s a good one: Utah pol Spencer Cox apologizing for past homophobia. BTW, not only was this Lieutenant Governor not punished by voters for apologizing well, he went on to be elected Governor.

Just something to think about.

PS. Thank you to Publishers Weekly (link requires a subscription, sorry sorry sorry), which just featured a roundup of 12 forthcoming helpful books that “ditch the traditional resolution model…in favor of achievable change.” Sorry, Sorry, Sorry led the pack; the article echoed PW’s review that called our book “an accessible and well-informed resource for navigating difficult conversations.” Good apologies are achievable, friends!

When thinking about the climate crisis – or when not thinking about the climate crisis, just minding your business – it can be hard to remember that despite the personalized nature of weather, we all have just the one climate. When people in cold places fire up their furnaces or people in hot places flick on the AC, all greenhouse gases they produce go into our one and only atmosphere. The effects of climate chaos are as variable as weather. Carbon dioxide levels bumped up by my furnace on a cold day may contribute to blazing-hot days and prolonged drought thousands of miles away.

This is especially important to remember when planning actions to fight climate change.

SorryWatch recently read Vanessa Nakate’s book The Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis, and was reminded of a certain journalistic fiasco Nakate was, unhappily, involved in. This fiasco demonstrated a lack of comprehension – on several levels – about climate chaos and climate action.

Nakate, born and raised in Uganda, began doing climate activism in 2019. She was a studious young person with a business degree, working in her father’s shop and thinking of going for an MBA. But she was increasingly alarmed by the impacts of climate change in Uganda, such as flooding, unprecedented heat waves, and droughts that drastically hurt agriculture and people reliant on their crops. As she told an interviewer later, “Literally, in my county, a lack of rain means starvation and death for the less privileged.”

Climate activist Vanessa Nakate.

The example of young activists in other countries inspired her to take part in School Strike for Climate, also called Fridays for Future. No one else in Uganda was doing this. Without telling her parents, she stood outside Parliament with a sign, the first of many signs on the first of many Fridays. This was inspired by Greta Thunberg’s [school strike], which began outside the Swedish Parliament in 2018 “I posted a few photos and videos taken by my brother Paul Christian to my 500 or so followers on social media. When I checked my phone again, I was happy to discover that some friends had liked my posts, and a few had even added supportive comments.” She’d put a Fridays for Future hashtag on her post. She looked again before she went to bed, and saw “Greta Thunberg had retweeted the photos I’d uploaded, and suddenly my post had more than one thousand likes. My past posts had never received more than ten!” By morning, people all over the world were liking and retweeting her posts. “I’d started something. And I knew I couldn’t stop.”

After a few months, more young people joined her on her Friday strikes. She founded the groups Youth for Future Africa and the Rise Up Movement. She spoke at the 2019 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP25) in Spain.

In 2020, she was one of five of youth activists who attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, invited by a group called Arctic Basecamp. The other activists were Greta Thunberg from Sweden, Isabelle Axelsson from Sweden, Luisa-Marie Neubauer from Germany, and Loukina Tille from Switzerland. They spoke at a press conference, where Nakate was the only African person there.

Screenshot of all 5 youth climate activists from press conference at Davos 2020.

The activists’ presence was covered by press from many countries, including the Associated Press (AP), which distributes stories to newspapers and broadcasters in many places and is therefore a big deal. They took photos of the young climate activists, lining them up outdoors with buildings and mountains in the background. Then the AP sent out its story and photo – without Nakate. They had cropped her out of the photograph they sent out, and they left her out of the story completely.

“[T]he AP had not only removed my photo but removed me from the list of participants. It hadn’t included a single one of my comments from the press conference where the five of us had spoken. This was deeply ironic, since, at that press conference, in addition to urging the delegates to break out of our comfortable addiction to fossil fuels, I’d asked journalists to reach beyond the comforts of their normal reporting. ‘It is time to report stories from every part of the world,’ I’d said, ‘because people are suffering from every corner of the world.’ Greta, too, had urged the journalists there to direct questions not only to her but also to the rest of us.” (Oh, ha ha, Greta, we know who’s the star here. Tell us about being autistic!)

Comparisons of photos from Davos 2020 with and without Nakate, screen shot from Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

Nakate did not hesitate to point out her erasure. She streamed a ten-minute video that day, asking “Does that mean I have no value as an activist or the people from Africa don’t have any value at all? …We don’t deserve this. Africa is the least emitter of carbons, but we are the most affected by the climate crisis.”

There was an outcry. Other mainstream media turned to the AP and asked them why they handled the story that way, when other news outlets and agencies had managed to include the images and words of all the activists.

The AP’s director of photography said that the photographer had been under time pressure, and had simply cropped Nakate out of the picture on “composition grounds.” There was a building behind her that was distracting!

Nakate didn’t buy it. “[A]side from the fact that the cropped photo still contained two other buildings, the question is, Distracting from what or whom? The Alps in the distance? My four white, European colleagues who were standing in front of the mountains? Or Greta herself?

“No, it was as if someone had determined I was the odd one out, an aberration, and that the photo wasn’t satisfactory if I remained in it, Five of us were standing in a row; but there were two ‘ends” of that row and only one was shortened.”

The Guardian interviewed Robert Bullard, called “the father of environmental justice in the US,” who said that youth climate activism is seen by the larger society as a “white thing.” (You know, a Swedish thing.) “The un-cropped photo didn’t fit the model,” he said.

Nakate mentions an article that came out later that year in the Journal of Sustainability Education. The author, Chelsea McFadden, argued the photo-cropping was an example of white saviorism. “The idea of the white savior is that there are people suffering in the world, which is codified as third world and racialized in the context of climate change, and that the only ones who can fix it are white people.”

What with one thing and another, the AP dropped the distracting building defense. The AP’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, put out a statement:

“We regret publishing a photo this morning that cropped out Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate, the only person of color in the photo. As a news organization, we care deeply about accurately representing the world that we cover. We train our journalists to be sensitive to issues of inclusion and omission. We have spoken internally with our journalists and we will learn from this error in judgment.”

Buzbee also tweeted an apology to Nakate from her personal Twitter account. The AP discovered they had other photos in which Nakate hadn’t been cropped out, including some from a session at the press conference, in which she was in the middle of the five activists. They released those.

Nakate wasn’t happy with that apology – “I never received a formal message of apology, just a tweet” – and neither are we.

Buzbee and the AP did apologize to Nakate for what they did, but did not show they understood the impact. They almost got to it with “accurately representing the world that we cover,” but “be[ing] sensitive to issues of inclusion and omission” misses the point. This was not merely a matter of whether Nakate was “included,” it was a matter of journalistic correctness. Leaving Nakate’s image and words and name and nation out of the story created an unbalanced story. It was inaccurate. It was wrong.

Nakate writes, “By cropping me out, the AP added to the mistaken belief that… ‘African climate activists were absent from Davos; that Africans weren’t active in the climate change movement; and that there wasn’t a global youth climate movement that included people like me and many others in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.’”

A glance at the Fridays for Future Twitter stream shows posts from youth in African, Asian, and Latin American countries, not to mention MAPA, the Most Affected People and Areas, including island nations. It’s not just Greta Thunberg.

In addition to raising awareness, one issue being addressed by youth in Uganda and Tanzania right now is the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP). This proposed pipeline would transport fossil fuel from Ugandan oil fields across Uganda and Tanzania, snaking around Lake Victoria, to a port on the Indian Ocean, enabling the fossil fuel to be shipped all over the world to be burned, thus emitting more carbon dioxide and worsening the climate crisis. Construction has begun on the 1,410-kilometer-long (880 miles) pipeline, which will displace a hundred thousand people from small farms. (As someone who has responded to oil spills, Sumac has a particularly visceral horror at the risks to Lake Victoria and the Indian Ocean.)

Map of route of proposed East African Crude Oil Pipeline.

Principal funding is from France’s TotalEnergies and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. Recently Nakate, Diana Nabiruma from the Africa Institute for Energy Governance, and Maxwell Atuhura from Tasha Research Institute Africa Limited, met with Pope Francis to ask for his help in stopping EACOP.

Finally, consider this tweeted video in which Nakate politely asks two questions at [a 2022 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) meeting. Watch for physical theater, a laugh, and an eloquent response.

Does an apology erase the past? Of course not. But an apology still has value. A good one can help people who are hurt and angry feel better. That’s not nothing. The word “heal” is wildly overused (often by people who apologize badly, who use the idea of healing as shorthand for “hey, let’s all move on and talk about something other than my behavior!”) but a good apology actually can be restorative: to those hurt, to bystanders, to the person who did wrong, and even to the wider world.

In a grand sense, healing from the revelations of the recent college admissions payoff scandal is impossible.

Anyone who didn’t know how incredibly corrupt college admissions can be, how un-level the playing field is, how many “side doors” there are for those who know how to look for them, how much harder the path to college is for those without money or connections or white steamroller parents…well, they know now. It’s a deeply messed-up system. And for high schoolers with disadvantages of one kind or another — poor kids, kids of color, first-generation students, undocumented students, kids with disabilities — the scandal rubs their faces in something they already knew: that fancy people can work the system and circumvent the system in ways that are utterly beyond their reach. This particular incidence — involving paid-off proctors, fake test-takers, wealthy kids flown to special cheating-friendly test centers, thrilling fake action shots of non-athletic wealthy youth on athletic equipment, and little cut-out rich-kid heads digitally glued onto Olympic athlete bodies — probably showed less privileged kids that the truth is even uglier than they’d thought. There is nothing anyone can say to make this OK. (Particularly since many Americans would prefer to kvetch about affirmative action than acknowledge the huge, unfair weight that legacies, rich people, and athletes have on admissions and college life.)

So I’m not saying we should forgive Felicity Huffman for delivering a good apology last week. I’m saying that her good apology nonetheless has the power to help people feel a bit better. If they choose to. No one is obligated to accept any apology. Apologies for wrongs are morally mandatory; forgiveness is not.

Huffman’s statement:

 I am in full acceptance of my guilt, and with deep regret and shame over what I have done, I accept full responsibility for my actions and will accept the consequences that stem from those actions. I am ashamed of the pain I have caused my daughter, my family, my friends, my colleagues and the educational community. I want to apologize to them and, especially, I want to apologize to the students who work hard every day to get into college, and to their parents who make tremendous sacrifices to support their children and do so honestly. My daughter knew absolutely nothing about my actions, and in my misguided and profoundly wrong way, I have betrayed her. This transgression toward her and the public I will carry for the rest of my life. My desire to help my daughter is no excuse to break the law or engage in dishonesty.

Why is this a good apology? It uses the word “apologize” (not “regret”; as we’ve said before here, regret is about your own feelings; apologies are about other people’s feelings), acknowledges and owns the offense, recognizes the harm caused, makes no excuses. A perfect apology involves making amends and offering reparations, but those things don’t belong in this statement and she was wise to keep them out of it. At this moment, we don’t want to hear about her starting a scholarship for poor kids or making a giant donation to an educational foundation; that would seem manipulative and opportunistic and cheesy as all get out. What she should be doing is working like hell behind the scenes to make amends and rebuild trust with her kids (both of them: the one she essentially called stupid and the one she essentially called smart and hard-working and not in need of subterranean parental cheating help) and considering ways down the road to help other students in a quiet, non-self-aggrandizing way, as a form of doing penance.

One of the kids swept up in the scandal also issued a good apology. Jack Buckingham, whose mother Jane Buckingham, to put it baldly, bought him an ACT proctor, gave a statement to the The Hollywood Reporter last month:

I have been advised not to speak on the matter at hand but what I will say is this: I know there are millions of kids out there both wealthy and less fortunate who grind their ass off just to have a shot at the college of their dreams. I am upset that I was unknowingly involved in a large scheme that helps give kids who may not work as hard as others an advantage over those who truly deserve those spots. For that I am sorry though I know my word does not mean much to many people at the moment. While the situation I am going through is not a pleasant one, I take comfort in the fact that this might help finally cut down on money and wealth being such a heavy factor in college admissions. Instead, I hope colleges may prioritize [looking at] an applicants’ character, intellect and other qualities over everything else. It was probably not a smart idea to say anything but I needed to get that off my chest.

This is a kid who, unlike the kids who posed on rowing machines and lied about their athletic affiliations, did not know what his mom was up to. (Many of the kids didn’t. Read the whole indictment.) Buckingham paid $50K for her son, who lived with her in Los Angeles, to take the ACT at a test center in Houston, where a proctor was being bought off. But shortly before the scheduled test, Jack developed tonsillitis and his pediatrician said he shouldn’t fly. Jack wanted to go anyway. His mother was recorded telling William Singer, owner of The Edge College & Career Network, “According to [Jack], he’s like, ‘I really don’t feel that bad.” But Jack was scheduled for surgery, and Jane was worried about him flying against doctor’s orders; Jack also wouldn’t be able to fly for two weeks after the surgery. But Jack wanted to take the test! So Singer and Jane Buckingham conspired to have a ringer take the test for him in Houston, and to give Jack a test that he was told he had permission to take at home. (Why would Jack believe that tonsillitis meant he could take the test at home? Well, no one claimed he was a rocket scientist. And kids who’ve had parents smoothing the way for them their entire lives tend to believe what those parents tell them.)

Regardless of Jack’s intellectual heft, his emotional and empathetic smarts seem good. His statement to the Hollywood Reporter indicates that he gets why the Varsity Blues scheme was morally wrong. He understands fundamental social inequities; he understands his own privilege. He apologizes even though he didn’t actually know he was part of the scheme. It’s a graceful statement; he manages not to throw his mother under the bus even though she deserves it.

Of course, it may not be his statement at all, even though the voice really sounds like that of a teenage boy. At least one family caught up in Operation Varsity Blues has hired a crisis manager, Juda Engelmayer, who works at “distancing the student from the alleged criminal activity of the parent.” Engelmayer works to create a different narrative for the kid (“online reputation management and search engine optimization”), pushing the scandal down in Internet searches on the kid’s name and making sure their hobbies, charitable work, and wholesome photos show up on Instagram and Facebook apart from any mention of the parents’ actions. He charges $15-30K a month. He works for all kinds of rich people getting bad PR — one of his clients is Harvey Weinstein. If Engelmayer wrote Jack Buckingham’s statement, he’s really good at his job. This is demoralizing.

Or maybe Jack Buckingham actually wrote the statement himself! Who knows! Anyway, here is something that is factual and not demoralizing: De-emphasizing testing seems to be the way of the collegiate future. The University of Chicago, Bowdoin, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Bates, Colby, GW, Holy Cross, Clark, the New School, Emerson, Bard, Middlebury, Sarah Lawrence, Lewis & Clark, NYU, Mt. Holyoke, Brandeis, Worcester Polytechnic, Pitzer, Whitman, Franklin & Marshall, Temple, Loyola, Connecticut College, Fairfield, Mills, CalArts, Bennington, and many more are now SAT- and ACT-optional. More schools are joining that list every year. There are still a zillion inequities in education to wrestle with, from pre-K to grad school, but one hopes that soon ultra-wealthy people with non-academically-inclined children will go back to buying buildings and making huge unrestricted Kushner-esque donations as in days of yore. Something they’ve never apologized for.

Are you bummed by the humungous number of insincere, self-serving, clueless, defensive “sorry if”s you’ve heard of late? Join us, won’t you, on a journey of thoughtful apologies! We have for your delectation a knitting magazine, a rapper, a rapist, and a humorist. Let’s begin!

#1: Here’s a well-crafted one from Laine Magazine! Who knew there was “a high-quality Nordic knit & lifestyle magazine“? Obviously there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our fiber philosophy.

This appeared on both FB and Instagram.

Why is it a good apology? It uses the word “sorry.” It takes responsibility. It acknowledges the effect of what it did wrong. It promises action, and in the right way (reaching out more to designers of color, and noting that people of color should not be expected to do the work of educating white people). Alas, the comments on the FB post are unfortunate but unsurprising; not everyone will appreciate an apology or get why it’s important. Yet we’re obligated to apologize for our screw-ups. No one else is obligated to accept them. The only thing that would have made this apology better was a recap of what led to the apology — what’s the backstory here? Otherwise, it’s very good.

#2. Chance the Rapper’s apology for working with R. Kelly. In the wake of Lifetime’s series, Surviving R. Kelly, Chance tells interviewer Jamilah Lemieux, “Making a song with R. Kelly was a mistake. I didn’t value the accusers’ stories because they were black women,” he said. “I made a mistake.” To Snarly, a white woman, this comment was sufficient; he seemed to be honestly critical of his past decisions. Snarly, however, is not the demo. It’s more important to listen to the voices of Black women. And in great numbers, Black women did not accept this. Chance then said that his quote was taken out of context, which is almost always a cop-out. (And why it is a square in Bad Apology Bingo.)

pic.twitter.com/bqbKlsDA9l

— Chance The Rapper (@chancetherapper) January 6, 2019

However, in context, his quote WAS clearer!  

pic.twitter.com/0J46S5YOkW — Chance The Rapper (@chancetherapper) January 6, 2019  

The quote: “We’re programed to really be hypersensitive to black male oppression. It’s just prevalent in all media. And when you see n****s getting beat up by the police, it’s men…Slavery, for a lot of people, they envision men in chains, but black women are, you know, exponentially a higher oppressed and violated group of people. Like, just in comparison to the whole world, you know? Maybe I didn’t care because I didn’t value the accusers’ stories because they were black women.”

This is a fine apology. Uses the word “apologize” rather than “regret,” takes responsibility, offers an explanation that is not an excuse (he’s CLEARLY being self-critical) — he’s pointing out a historical, longterm problem that he has been part of: Failing to believe Black women, and/or failing to support them, because the voices and experiences of Black men have been given more credence, volume, and primacy. SorryWatch gathers that Chance is often viewed as a problematic figure. But we are an apology blog, and this is a good apology.

#3. A rapist apologizes to his victim. In a piece for The Atlantic, Deborah Copaken (who is, full disclosure, a friend of SorryWatch) writes about confronting her college rapist, 30 years later, in the wake of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation mishegas. Read the story here. The upshot: Copaken wrote the man a letter. He called her a half-hour later and said, “Oh, Deb. Oh my god. I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I’m filled with shame.”

We spoke for a long time, maybe 20 minutes. He had no recollection of raping me, just of the party where we’d met. He’d blacked out that night from excessive drinking and soon thereafter entered Alcoholics Anonymous. But that, he said, was no excuse. The fact that he’d done this to me and that I’d been living with the resulting trauma for 30 years was horrifying to him. He was so sorry, he said. He just kept repeating those words, “I’m so sorry,” over and over.

Suddenly, 30 years of pain and grief fell out of me. I cried. And I cried. And I kept crying for the next several hours, as I prepared for Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday of forgiveness. And then, suddenly, I was cleansed. Reborn. The trauma was gone. All because of a belated apology.

Snarly was also sexually assaulted in college (three years after Deb, at the same school), by a then-sophomore. When Snarly reported the incident to a college administrator, the administrator said, “Well, it’s your word against his.” She advised not reporting him to the Administrative Board. So Snarly didn’t. The administrator ruled that the sophomore was no longer allowed to come into Snarly’s residential suite; Snarly’s roommates, who were also friends with the sophomore, were annoyed at Snarly. Didn’t she understand that he was damaged, that he was only expressing affection in his messed-up way, that he had been a childhood victim of sexual assault? The sophomore filled her voicemail with taunting messages and stood with his toes on her doorjamb as she entered and exited, gently crooning, “Marjorie haaaaates meeeeee! I’m not allowed to come iiiiiiiin!” The next year, Snarly petitioned to move to a different house (an uncommon request) and it was granted. She never spoke to the sophomore again. He reportedly committed suicide several years after graduation. The administrator, on the other hand, is now a full professor at another university. As #metoo turned into a crescendo, Snarly wrote an email to her, saying, “I hope if a student ever comes to you today with a report of being sexually assaulted, you’ll do better.” Snarly never heard back. All of this is a longwinded way to say that Snarly understands how powerful an apology like the one Deb got can be; Snarly yearned, ached, for such an apology. A good apology can be a huge help in facilitating forgiveness, and the mental and even physical health benefits of forgiveness are huge. ACCORDING TO SCIENCE. Again, though, you should not feel guilty if you can’t forgive. Be proud that you’re still here.

#4: A completely fictional apology from Louis CK! Many of us (Snarly included) have written off this gross wanker. Others — including comic Sarah Silverman — have not. To each their own! We repeat: No one is owed redemption! And people who do horrid things over and over (thinking of Harvey Weinstein here) are unlikely to deliver a great apology. The same monstrous ego and amorality that let them do the bad things in the first place generally prevent them from having the compassion to see things from their victim’s point of view. For profoundly vile people, an apology is only an attempt to get out of trouble. Personally, given his earlier apology (which some folks thought was good, but let’s just say SorryWatch disagreed), Snarly finds it hard to imagine Louis CK apologizing well enough for her to grant him absolution. But writer Nell Scovell managed to write a pretend stand-up set for Louis that MIGHT, if it were real, make Snarly think about forgiving him. It’s even funny! That quite an accomplishment, though not altogether surprising from the author of Just The Funny Parts, a very sharp and often bitter account of Scovell’s 30-odd years in the trenches of male writing rooms.

We have two more good apologies in our pocket. But this post is already long, so we’ll save them for a rainy day when we need a little humans-don’t-always-suck sunshine.

Oh, Will Shortz, no. SorryWatch loves the New York Times Crossword. SorryWatch does not love the  apology for the use of an ethnic slur in a recent puzzle.

Here’s editor Shortz’s apology:

I’m very sorry for the distraction about BEANER (2D) in today’s fine puzzle by Gary Cee.

Neither Joel nor I had ever heard the slur before — and I don’t know anyone who would use it. Maybe we live in rarefied circles.

In researching this puzzle, we discovered the other meaning of the word as a slur. Later, Jeff Chen over at XwordInfo brought it to our attention as well.

My feeling, rightly or wrongly, is that any benign meaning of a word is fair game for a crossword. This is an issue that comes up occasionally with entries like GO O.K. (which we clued last April as “Proceed all right,” but which as a solid word is a slur), CHINK (benign in the sense as a chink in one’s armor), etc. These are legitimate words.

Perhaps I need to rethink this opinion, if enough solvers are bothered. I want your focus to be on the puzzle rather than being distracted by side issues. But I assure you this viewpoint is expressed with a pure heart.

Meanwhile, for any solver who was offended by 2-Down in today’s puzzle, I apologize.

 

1. We do not say “sorry for the distraction.” That blames others for making a fuss. We apologize for our actions, not the responses to them.
2. “Fine puzzle” immediately negates anything resembling an apology. A slur renders the puzzle not-fine, even if the puzzle is as beautifully constructed as a fine apse, nave, or ewer.
3. Saying “we never heard it before” is no excuse. Type the word into Google. GUESS WHAT COMES UP. IMMEDIATELY.

4. “Maybe we live in rarefied circles” is a horrifying excuse for ignorance. And rarefied circles are NOT RELEVANT! Even if Sumac and I (who both are moderately rareficationated and knew that the word was a slur, btw) lived in in a cloud palace surrounded by pinky-white Renaissance cherubim holding Tom Hiddleston aloft to breathe Eton-scented rarefied Ancient Greek verse into our very mouths while wearing a Saville Row suit, it would NOT MAKE IT OK TO USE AN ETHNIC SLUR. (But Tom, call me.)

Also, HOW THE HELL DO YOU GUYS NOT KNOW THIS IS AN ETHNIC SLUR? A scant few months ago a barista at Starbucks wrote the word on a customer’s cup! It was all over the news! (Unfortunately here in NYC that news was covered by the proles at the New York Post and not by the top-lofty spats-wearers of the Newspaper of Record.)

5. Fact: The only people who use “beaner” as a baseball term are people who make crosswords. Ask baseball fans. (Ask Snarly, who was the only girl on her Little League team in Rhode Island back in the day. #girlpower) A pitch thrown at a batter’s head is a beanball or a bean. In cricket, it’s a “beamer.” So, still no. If “beaner” were a common baseball term, known by every Boy and Girl of Summer, you MIGHT have an argument. You do not.)

6. And no, it is not the same as “a chink in one’s armor.” That is an actual existing expression that exists. “Go OK” is two different words put together. (Will, if I said, “It’s time for Tashlich, so I’m going to meet my mom, who is also a Jew, down by the Seekonk River so we can toss our metaphorical sins into the water,” I did not just use the slur “JEW DOWN.” You see, Will?)

7. “I want your focus to be on the puzzle rather than being distracted by side issues.” Mmm, who is the “your” here? If you’re (your) Latinx, it’s not a side issue or a distraction. Your privilege is showing. Would you use the same argument for “GYP,” defining it as “racehorse owner” or for “CHRIST KILLER,” defining it as “Roman Governor Pilate”?

8. A “pure heart” is no excuse for a bad decision. My lovely, warm, elderly relatives threw around the term “faygele” (literally “little bird” in Yiddish, but in usage, a gay slur), and sure, they were a product of their time, and sure, they loved my brother both before and after he came out. And yet! It’s not OK to say “faygele”! (Today, some queer Yiddishist Jews are reclaiming the word. That’s their prerogative. It is not OK for straight people, Jewish or not, to use it.)

9. The conclusion of the statement is a “sorry if” masquerading (in the way of crossword fave Erato, Greek goddess of mime) as a “sorry.” Apologize to everyone, not just “any solver who was offended.”

Fortunately, there are many, many words left for the inveterate crossword constructor. Apse! Dodo! Enos! Asta! Smee! Aioli! Enya! Pho! Ouse! Ural! Alee! Ewer! SO MANY WORDS.

We can dump beaner.

Rarefied beans as depicted by acclaimed Caucasian artist Andy Warhol

Atone for errata.

Freelance writer Selene Nelson wrote to William Sitwell, the editor of Waitrose Food magazine, suggesting a series on vegan cooking.

Her query followed a standard format, with extra exclamation points to make her stand out:

Hi William,

…I’m a freelance food and travel writer for Town & Country, Huff Post, Food Republic, SUITCASE Magazine etc., and I wanted to pitch an idea for a regular feature in Waitrose Food.

Recently there’s been a huge rise in veganism, with people increasingly interested in its health and environmental benefits, as well as issues surrounding animal welfare. The popularity of the movement is likely to continue to skyrocket, and I think there’s a great opportunity for Waitrose Food to introduce a series on vegan cooking… In January the ‘Veganuary’ incentive is expected to be more popular than ever, and people will be keen to discover plant-based meal ideas. Even for people not looking to change their diet, I think having some more healthy, eco-friendly meals won’t go amiss, particularly in the New Year!….

I have lots of ideas for this but don’t want to bombard you! …I strongly believe this would be a welcome, and timely, new addition to Waitrose Food. …let me know if you have any questions or want to see any further writing samples. Many thanks and I look forward to hearing from you!…

A decent job, although an editor might have asked for some numbers to back up “huge rise,” “skyrocket,” and “more popular than ever.”

“Or two by two. How about killing them two by two?”

Editor Sitwell did not ask for grubby numbers. He simply wrote:

Hi Selene

Thanks for this.

How about a series on killing vegans, one by one. Ways to trap them? How to interrogate them properly? Expose their hypocrisy? Force-feed them meat? Make them eat steak and drink red wine?

Gulp, what?

Gamely, Nelson replied:

Hi William,

Thanks for your interesting response. I drank some delicious (vegan) red wine last night so I’m sure a feature on that would appeal… I’m not quite sure what you mean by ‘exposing their hypocrisy’, but I’m certainly interested in exploring why just the mention of veganism makes some people so hostile. It sounds like you have some opinions on this? I’d love to know more!

He responded flippantly “I like the idea of a column called The Honest Vegan; a millennial’s diary of earnest endeavour and bacon sandwiches…”

Nelson seems to have sensed Sitwell would not be taking up her idea of a series on vegan cooking. If she’d read his piece for The Times on “foodie trends of 2018,” Sitwell’s reaction might have startled her less.

“The vegan wants to know our thoughts? Have her come lunch with us!”

That’s a jocular piece which he says you should heed unless you’re a “non-drinking, chickpea residue-drenched, personalised diet-loving vegan.” According to Buzzfeed, he also referred to a “vegan snowball,” which “had slow beginnings among shampoo-averse hippies in the 1970s, but now vegans are parking their tanks on all of our lawns and their instruction manuals are coming like propaganda pamphlets dropping from the sky.”

(Since the real shampoo problem caused by 1970s hippies was them using up all the Herbal Essence with constant showers, we’d say Sitwell is not striving for objectivity.)

“Turnip recipes – yes, turnips! – from around the world would make a gala holiday issue.”

Persevering, Nelson queried Buzzfeed about writing a story on hostility toward vegans. (She’d been vegan for only a year, so this was new to her.) She used Sitwell’s email as an example. Buzzfeed was interested – not in giving Nelson a gig, but in writing their own story about the Nelson-Sitwell correspondence. (Hint: no money for Nelson. Further hint: don’t read the comments.)

Nelson went along, telling Buzzfeed “I’ve written about many divisive topics, like capital punishment and murder cases and domestic violence, and I’ve never had a response like that to any of my articles or pitches.”

After Buzzfeed inquired, Sitwell stated:

I love and respect people of all appetites be they vegan, vegetarian or meat eaters, which I show week in week out through my writing, editing and broadcasting. I apologise profusely to anyone who has been offended or upset by this.

Not good. “I show…” is a form of “People who know me won’t be fooled by what I say.”

Not good enough for Waitrose Food, which said, “Even though this was a private email William’s gone too far and his words are extremely inappropriate, insensitive and absolutely do not represent our views.” Then they… accepted his resignation. No wonder Sitwell finds vegans menacing.

Worried about the feelings of vegans versus the feelings of funloving editors? Please spare a thought for the feelings of freelancers. Sitwell’s emails were a joke, but also a rude brushoff.

The New York Times, reporting on this, gives actual numbers for the rise in British vegans, and notes that Waitrose grocery stores recently introduced a line of vegan and vegetarian products. Bad timing, Mr. Sitwell. Let us hope that things go more smoothly at Sitwell’s other writing gigs, and his appearances on MasterChef UK.

He put forth another apology:

Today I just want to make two points.

Firstly, to reiterate my apology to any food- and life-loving vegan who was genuinely offended by remarks written by me as an ill-judged joke in a private email and now widely reported.

Second, a word about my team on Waitrose & Partners Food. For two amazing decades I’ve worked with simply the best crew in the business. There is no more talented art director than Kerry Wakefield, my lovely deputy Jess, PA Morgan, Dr Lucy heading food, Ashleigh on features, Kat and the fab art and subbing team. Thank you – we never stopped laughing (til now!)….

He supplies a picture of a January 2017 “Eat Veg” Waitrose Food issue to show his veggie cred. “We even refused advertising from those proffering meat-based products.”

Yow, an even worse apology. Packed with oxidants. It’d be poison to accept it.

“reiterate” = I already apologized.

“food- and life-loving vegan” = as opposed to vegans who don’t love food, who hate meat just because it is so tasty, and who therefore obviously hate life itself

“genuinely” = most of the people complaining are dishonest show-offs

“private” = why can’t people mind their own business and let me attack freelancers in secrecy?

“widely reported” = this is the damned social media hounding life-loving carnivores like me – like us, because don’t we really all feel like me?

“we never stopped laughing (til now)!” = humorless fucking vegans have ruined everyfuckingthing. Sitwell may never laugh again.

As for the vegetarian issue, that’s interesting – was that experience what turned him against vegans? Why does he claim vegans are hypocrites? While working on the special issue, did he have a series of working lunches with people gnawing on bones with one hand and grabbing bacon sandwiches with the other, while saying he couldn’t run ads that proffered meat?

Hypocrite? Not at all — these boots are synthetic leather.

As for Nelson, to the extent she promotes being a vegan as an environmentally beneficial choice that lessens one’s carbon footprint – which it does – she is vulnerable to the charge that it’s hypocritical for her to aim at a career “travel[ing] the world” to “search for delicious vegan food in every country I visit” as described in her blog “Fork on the Road.” We suspect she takes a lot of flights, emitting greenhouse gases all the way. Yet that didn’t seem to be Sitwell’s issue.

No, he just doesn’t like vegans. He doesn’t like their style (“earnest”). It may have something to do with his curious view that vegans don’t drink. Perhaps the only hope to patch things up is for vegans to take Sitwell on an epic pub crawl.