The bicep-enabled young man with the microphone is Charlie, son of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Brad Hall, a walk-on player at Northwestern. He is amusing. But let us take this opportunity to note that his teammate Nathan Taphorn’s unsolicited apology for failing to pass him the ball (Hall did grab the rebound, so no harm done) is good. Taphorn is right: Apologies don’t “make it OK” when you’ve done a bad thing, but they are “the right thing to do.”

Behold an illustration from the brilliant Catherine Newman‘s forthcoming children’s book (for kids 10 to 14), How to Be a Person: 65 Hugely Useful, Super-Important Skills to Learn Before You’re Grown Up. The book is basically a funny and readable graphic novel-style list of instructions on how to be a mensch (and not incidentally, how to be proud of yourself and get others to like you out there in the big world). Comes out in March, 2020. Pre-order at your local indie bookshop or online at Indie Bound, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.

Illustration by Debbie Fong. I like the glass manatee.

Why is this a good apology? It uses the word “sorry,” it takes responsibility, it shows understanding of the impact of the offense, it emphasizes the feelings of the person of the apologizee rather than the apologizer. (In other words, it’s not one of those “I suck, I feel so so terrible, I hate myself, I’m a bad person” apologies that are more about the emotional state of the speaker than the listener and practically beg the listener to reassure the speaker that they’re still a good person.) And this apology clearly went well! Mom is pleased! However, if you know your mother’s gonna be really upset — unlike this Not a Regular Mom, a Cool Mom — you still have to apologize.

For this to be a truly great apology, the kid would have to offer to pay to replace the cost of the manatee either through their savings or by docking their allowance.  If the manatee is irreplaceable or if the mom actually did hate the manatee (Snarly would very much like a glass manatee, but chacun à son goût, she she said Frenchily) and the kid is quite sure of the mom’s taste, they could buy a replacement objet on their own.

SorryWatch, which collectively has four children (all older than the target audience but IT IS NEVER TOO LATE), looks forward to reading the whole book.

Young Adult literature seems to exist in a constant state of social media drama! Much like young adults! Remember that author who literally stalked a reader who gave her novel a bad review on Goodreads? She then turned the act of stalking into a book deal. Or maybe you recall the numerous white journalists who insisted that political correctness was killing literature, being sure to name the politically correct non-white people they blamed for killing literature, thus insuring that those particular non-white people were hounded on Twitter? (Not linking, #sorrynotsorry. )

The latest drama involved apologies, which is why we are addressing it here on SorryWatch, where we are all about staying in our lane.

Our story begins this past Tuesday, when mega-best-selling Young Adult author Sarah Dessen tweeted a screenshot of a news story quoting a college student who was not a Sarah Dessen fan. Here is the snippet Dessen shared:

Dessen blotted out the name in black. Snarly did so in pink, lest NBC News accuse her of lacking pizzazz.

Dessen responded to the putdown in a now deleted tweet:

The tweet was clearly a cri de coeur from someone going through a self-described “really hard time.” Dessen’s friends and fans — among them Jodi Picoult (172K followers), Roxane Gay (657K followers), N.K. Jemisin (110K followers), Dhonielle Clayton (28K followers), Meg Cabot (704K followers), Adam Silvera (49K followers), Celeste Ng (125K followers), Jennifer Weiner (164K followers), Angie Thomas (105K followers), and many more — rushed to her defense, sometimes with PROFANITY. And then, sure as death and taxes, Twitter did what Twitter does: Some of the authors’ followers Googled the news story, found the former college student’s name, publicly shared it, and viciously attacked her on social media.

Snarly’s own reaction to Dessen’s tweet was Aww, that kid is mean! Who joins a university-wide book-selection committee solely and specifically to prevent people from reading one well-regarded Young Adult author? (Not a book. An AUTHOR. And it’s especially odd given that one of the other contenders was by noted homophobe Orson Scott Card.) Snarly’s second reaction was “Clearly this person has never READ Sarah Dessen.” Dessen’s writing is superb. (The student later claimed her quote was taken out of context; she said she did join to advocate for other writers, not just to downvote Dessen. So, spoiler alert, this is going to become a story about journalists doing crappy jobs.) Snarly’s third reaction was “This young woman wants young women to be taken seriously, which in her mind, sadly, requires that girls distance themselves from and disavow YA.”

Hours after Dessen posted her tweet (before the backlash to the backlash that was coming like a horde of lurching B-movie zombies), Northern State posted an apology to Dessen. A good one!

Why is this a good apology? It offers explanation without excuse, something very difficult to do (which is why we often recommend you not even try). It doesn’t name the alum, which would have opened her up to abuse, which lay in wait for her anyway like a monster behind a door in another B movie, but that’s not Northern State’s fault. It gets to the heart of what all the famous authors who supported Dessen were often inartfully pointing out: Genres that speak primarily to women and girls are often dismissed and disrespected. The university wanted to note that they get it. They see the value of YA. They’d brought a YA novelist to campus in 2018! (That YA novelist was one of the authors who came out in support of Dessen, telling Northern State, in a now-deleted tweet, YEAHNO DON’T INVITE ME OR MY BOOKS AGAIN, but oh well.) Northern State wanted to be clear that it does not censor books. The Northern State alum did not censor Dessen’s book because she didn’t have that power; the Common Read is chosen by a committee.

BUT! The alum was quickly under attack. (She’s now a graduate student studying linguistics with a focus on social media bullying, O THE IRONY.)  The authors knew immediately this was not good.

Important: The authors are mostly women who write YA and romance. A large percentage are women of color. One was a gay man of color. Several paragraphs ago (sigh, sorry), Snarly shared only the names of the supporters with vast numbers of Twitter followers, and only shared the names of supporters whose tweets Snarly personally saw. Among them she counts three white women (one of them Jewish), four Black women, one Asian woman, and one Latinx gay man. It is not an accident that almost all of the voices supporting Dessen were all from writers in snarked-at genres or from marginalized communities. (I hear you saying Roxane Gay is well-respected! And she is! But she also is constantly attacked for her appearance and for excess ambition and insufficient kowtowing to superhero movies. Gee, Snarly seems to recall Martin Scorsese snarking at superhero movies but he’s not a fat Black woman.) Dessen’s supporters were people accustomed to their work and their personhood being dismissed. It is not surprising that they responded passionately to Dessen’s hurt feelings.

Now let’s look at the way the media have been reporting this story. (Again, not linking, but Slate and Vulture, look at your life, look at your choices.)

Most of the media coverage made it sound as though Dessen named the college student. She did not. Most of the media coverage made it sound as though the authors urged a pile-on. They did not. Most of the media coverage implied that Dessen dug up a three-year-old tweet (she didn’t; it was a new news story quoting a 2016 alum). Most of the media coverage failed to quote what the student actually said  (one outlet didn’t share her quote but called it “intemperate” — that’s a Choice, media outlet). Most of the media coverage failed to note that the response to Northern State’s apology to Dessen was largely mocking, critical, vicious, accusing the school of craven kowtowing. Most of the media coverage failed to note that there are now lists going around Twitter of the names of all the authors who tweeted in support of Dessen (again, many of them women of color, many who I do not name here because they have under 15K Twitter followers) urging people NEVER TO BUY THEIR BOOKS AGAIN. Most of the media coverage failed to note that the story is now being painted in stark, literal black and white terms: Rich middle-aged white lady author names and attacks Black 19-year-old girl who only wanted the school to read Bryan Stevenson’s (superb!) Just Mercies, the book that was ultimately chosen that year.

The current narrative on Twitter — the one not noted in the media — casts Dessen as a Karen, a cookout-snuffer, a living, typing, let-me-speak-to-the-manager haircut. It casts the authors who supported her as bitchy mean girls; never mind that they a) did not name the grad student on Twitter and b) are a wildly diverse crew who care deeply about social justice. (Again, note the presence of Angie Thomas, whose brilliant book — full disclosure, Snarly wearing a different hat reviewed it for the New York Times — is about an African-American girl struggling with how to respond to her friend’s murder by a policeman; it was chosen as the Northern U Common Read in 2018.) There are people on Twitter now calling for a boycott of Angie Thomas.

And ONCE AGAIN, media leapt like a puppy at a biscuit at the framing of Those Crazy YA Authors and Their Crazy Fans, a superfun narrative that continues to lump disrespect on the genre. (Yes, Snarly capitalized on the tendency in crafting this story’s lede. Drag her.) IT IS NOT YA THAT IS THE PROBLEM; IT IS THE FACT THAT TWITTER FACILITATES BULLYING THAT IS THE PROBLEM. When people write stories about silencing and cancelling on the left, they generally fail to note that these things also occur on the right. Stop the presses: Twitter discourse lacks nuance. (280 characters, people tweeting before they think, tweeting before they have all the facts, people wanting to show they are both funny and righteous on both the left and the right.)

Allow Snarly to repeat: SOCIAL MEDIA YELLING HAPPENS ON BOTH SIDES OF EVERY ISSUE. What is retained, like an aura in your eyeball after you stare directly at the sun, is an impression of “Jeez, the YA community is full of snowflakes.” Right now the narrative is: Sarah Dessen had wah-wah hurt feelings and attacked a child. Now it’s the truth, even if it isn’t.

Snarly needs to mop her fevered brow.

Here is Dessen’s apology:

See that ratio of comments to likes? It means many people do not accept her apology. It means the media framing is wrong. However, it’s a fine apology. Dessen apologized for what she was responsible for: Bad judgment. She didn’t urge anyone to attack the grad student, who she rightly doesn’t name. SorryWatch hopes she’s reaching out to the grad student personally as well. (If she is, that fact doesn’t belong in the tweet, since it would be grandstanding.) Many of the writers apologized for their role in the brouhaha, though some have since deleted their apologies as well as their initial pro-Dessen tweets, which is kinda chickenshit but also kinda understandable because Twitter.

The takeaway: Dessen is a human being; she was feeling vulnerable; she posted something she shouldn’t have given the way other human beings act on Twitter. She should have known that, as she herself says. It’s Writing 101: Authors should not respond publicly to non-writers’ scorn. Never ends well. Doesn’t even make you feel better. If you are a writer who gets bummed when someone hates your work (or even slams you without reading your work, as I suspect the Northern grad did to Dessen), do not read your Amazon or Goodreads reviews, do not respond when someone tags you in a snotty tweet, do not read the comments. Here is Snarly’s bracelet that she wears almost every day:

If you are an author who feels sad and defeated and disrespected, as so many of us do so very often, which is often why we are writers, text a friend. Call your mom. Pet a cat. Go for a walk. Understand that social media may seem alluring as a place to unload…but it likes to bite.

Here is another apology from an author for tweeting in support of Dessen. It is from N.K. Jemisin, who is very accustomed to  abuse, in her case from white male speculative fiction fans.

Snarly enjoys the JESUS CHRIST, EVERYBODY tone. Wish Jemisin hadn’t thrown Dessen under the bus (surely she read Dessen’s tweet before responding with support? and if she didn’t, that’s on her, not Dessen) but the point here is CAN’T EVERYONE BE A FUCKING GROWNUP AND NOT ATTACK PEOPLE EVERYBODY PLEASE CHILL THE HELL OUT. Which really is a philosophy to live by. And do the research. On Twitter, in journalism (*cough*), and in life.

PS. Update from Snarly after talking to Twitter friend with a zillion followers: “I love you but you failed to convey just how much all these adults should have known better. With that many followers, they should understand how Twitter works. Sarah Dessen could’ve tweeted generically about having her feelings hurt. Which I think shows she is human. And that would have been fine. But the specific ways she and all these other grown-ass women responded was utterly wrongheaded. They acted like middle school bullies and I am very disappointed in them.” Snarly does not apologize for this post, but she acknowledges that it came from a non-famous-person perspective. And famous people need to understand the extend of their power and be responsible in wielding it.

Why do people collect souvenirs? We’re not sure, but we’ve felt that mysterious urge. Surely the important thing is the experience and the memory, not an object? And yet…

If you buy a cheerful ashtray in Sicily to support their hand-painted pottery industry, that’s harmless. It celebrates the cool place you went. But what if you took a rock or a shell or a bit of mosaic or dug up a plant? You went to a cool place and made a bit less cool. You’re a cool-killer.

When Sumac was in first grade she was told Plymouth Rock was vanishing, because so many people chipped off pieces of it for souvenirs. She had to have “Plymouth Rock” explained. Later she learned the story of Plymouth Rock was sheer hooey, but it’s still obnoxious behavior on the part of credulous vandals.

Recently SorryWatch was tipped off to a book of letters from people returning things they’d stolen from a national park. Most apologized, some badly, some well. They didn’t have to face anyone, so there was less pressure from others. We wondered if that would make the apologies better.

The book is Bad Luck, Hot Rocks: Conscience Letters and Photographs from the Petrified Forest, by Ryan Thompson and Phil Orr.

For many years the museum at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona had a big exhibit which promoted the legend that stealing pieces of petrified wood for souvenirs was BAD LUCK. It featured letters from people who had, over the years, stolen petrified wood and later returned it. Many of these letters stressed the terrible luck that had befallen people, and their hope that they could escape the CURSE by returning the booty.

The museum doesn’t do this now. Probably because it’s not true that stealing petrified wood causes bad luck. Possibly because it wasn’t really an “Indian legend.” But a Smithsonian article about archaeological work at Pompeii shows the “steal-and-be-cursed” meme is alive. “I told a newspaper about the curse on objects stolen from Pompei,” the site’s general director Massimo Osanna said. In response they’ve received hundreds of stolen tiles, bricks, and fresco fragments – and letters bemoaning the thieves’ misfortunes.

But the museum at the Petrified Forest kept the letters in an archive, used for the book. It’s a great book, with photos of the rocks and of the letters. The letters are diverse – hand-written, typed, or printed with vanished computer technologies.

One 1984 letter is hand-printed on a prison letter form. “…since I took these pieces of wood from the forest it seems my life has gone down hill ever since. No matter how hard I try to make things right. I’ve been in jail most of the time, since I’ve been to the forest and my poor wife, who I dearly love, is ready to give birth to our third child. I hope by returning these pieces of wood my life will straighten out and got the way my wife and I want it to. I truly belive it will. If it does my wife and three children will be back to read this letter and see these pieces of wood in your case….”

How did the wood DO THAT? Because obviously it’s not the guy’s fault.

A scrawled cursive note from 1983 reads “Please put this back so my husband can get well. I tried to keep him from taking it.” and is signed “Distrout Wife”

An undated printout, all caps, says “The final straw was when I stepped thru the ceiling of our new house. That’s when I told my wife. I’ve had enough. I am sending it back.” Signed “Sorry in Texas.”

Also undated: “found this in my room you can have it back. It’s bad luck I got busted the other night”

In 1988, a typed letter detailed a family’s angst. “Enclosed are the causes of very bad luck,” it begins bitterly. No sooner had the writer and her father stolen some rocks en route to her sister’s house, than the father was bitten by the sister’s cat. The bites got infected. While at the emergency room, the sister got a call saying she was laid off. The next morning the handle broke off the toaster! Then they all had a “family fight.” Then the sister pointed out that stealing petrified wood was said to bring a curse. “I feel bad for taking my findings from the Petrified Forest, and I apologize for their removal. PLEASE return them to their rightful place in the crystalized forest.” Signed “Tracie.” (“My findings.” Yeesh.)

Toaster-breaking, passive-aggressive sister-blaming Tracie isn’t the only writer issuing instructions on exactly where to replace loot. (To its “rightful spawning ground,” as one person says.)

One astonishing letter includes sketches. Captions: “Replace here…” The writer says, “Enclosed you will find a few small pieces of petrified wood that I thoughtlessly took while there in the park this past August. Call it superstition or whatever but I feel that it belongs there and nowhere else.

“I am now writing a paper on Indian rock paintings and realize that the removal of these pieces goes against the Indians’ sense of oneness and harmony with their surroundings. I would very much like to return them to the spot personally but I dont’ know when I’ll be through that way again. So I would appreciate it if you would return them to the very spot from where they came: the Puerco Indian ruins. If you were to walk up from the lowest rock paintings it would be [between] the rocks and the two pueblo ruins would be appx. one hundred yards ahead on both sides. There is one small piece of wood embedded there with loose pieces all around, these pieces enclosed were among them.

“I hope that you will return them to the same spot and not just anywhere in the park…”

Yeah, no. The rangers don’t DO that. “Because of their unknown provenance, these specimens can not be scattered back in the park; to do so would be to spoil those sites for research purposes. They are instead added to the… ‘conscience pile,’ which sits alongside a private gravel service road,” the book explains.

Some letters seem aggrieved. “My parents visited there last summer and… my mother purchased 3 petrified rocks. During that trip, my father picked one up from the grounds.

“Since that time, my father has lost his dad to cancer and my mother has had surgery for cancer. We have just found out my father has cancer of the brain and cancer of the lungs (he never smoked in his life). My mother feels the rock he took has brought bad luck on our family therefore, she has requested that I return all 4 rocks.

“Please see that they are replaced where they rightfully belong.”

A 1980 note, written in cursive with a red felt pen, says:

Here are your rock’s

nothing but trouble

Los Angeles

That’s blame-y but eloquent. A blame poem.

Other people have a firmer grip on why it’s bad to take stuff from parks, reasons other than “I can’t catch a break, why does this always happen to ME? Whoa – what if it’s a CURSE? Let’s BARGAIN!”

“A Guilty Traveler” wrote “I did not see your note on your brochure about a ‘few small pieces‘ until I returned home and now realise the effect of everyone took a ‘few small pieces.‘”

“…I stole some pieces of wood. I knew while I was doing it that I was stealing from the future & that if everyone did as I did there would be no more of those beautiful little broken pieces to shine in the sun… Sorry.”

From 1970, carefully printed on widely lined paper: “I AM SORRY I TOOK THIS. I AM ONLY 5 YEARS OLD AND MADE A BAD MISTAKE. ANDY”

One person wrote about some rocks they swiped 15 years before: “Taking it was wrong and I’m sorry I took it. This sample would make it impossible for me to honestly teach my children how wrong it is to take what isn’t yours. Hence, I must return it.”

Some explained why the thefts took place. “I rationalized that a few small pieces would not hurt.” “My youthful enthusiasm for a souvenir and my selfishness exceeded my understanding…” “[M]y boyfriend stole this… PS: I dumped my boyfriend not too long after that.” “I was so excited that I could be a part of something that took [place] millions of years ago…” “I was a grumpy teenage girl… I felt quite the rebel…”

Some argued that what they did wasn’t so bad – a rock was only removed “temporarily.”

One letter, hand-printed on small binder paper, bristles with issues. “I am writing this letter in hopes of easing my conscience and saving the most important thing of my life, my marriage. Against my better judgement, I removed three rocks which my husband discovered hidden in my brassiere. Since then, being a true christian, he has constantly told me of my wrong doing. I’m afraid that our marriage is on the rocks. I want all of my eight children to see your park in the same condition that I saw it in.

“I am keeping one rock to remind me of the lesson I learned the hard way. I am enclosing twenty cents for you to buy another rock to replace the one I am keeping as a token of my guilt. I would appreciate it if you would buy one to replace the other very much. It would so ease my burdened conscience. Also enclosed are the other two rocks.

“please forgive me, and keep up the good work.”

The letter probably had no return address – most didn’t. Anyway, rangers are not marriage counselors.

Incidentally, if you have become fired up about owning petrified wood, you can buy pieces of various sizes and appearance which were collected on private land. Some have been made into bookends, paperweights, trays, pendants, statuettes of kangaroos… Probably budget more than twenty cents.

Did the fact that people didn’t have to face the rangers make the apologies any better? It’s unclear. Maybe a little. But as one person said, “This is a hard note to write. It’s not easy to admit an error even after nearly 15 years.”

And people keep writing that it was just a few small pieces. (I found them on the ground! Just lying there!)

There’s a lot of whining. It’s not completely fair to criticize the “it’s all about me and my bad luck” tone of some letters, when that’s exactly what the park once put forward. But just because they said it, doesn’t mean you had to believe it. The erstwhile grumpy teenager wrote “I can’t say I’ve had bad luck, I believe you make your own, but I do believe in Karma, and after nearly 20 years I want to return these two pieces back to you. …hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I want to right the wrong.”

So about that urge to get souvenirs. Recently Sumac had the great good luck to visit the Galápagos Islands. Souvenirs were available, and not ALL of them were Tshirts making lewd puns about boobies. The Galápagos are one of Ecuador’s amazing national parks, and they are carefully protected. Visitors were repeatedly warned that it’s illegal to take anything at all. No leaf, no lava chunk, no tortoise bone. This was explained, rightly, as a matter of conservation, not as some nonsensical “curse”.

Sumac’s fellow-voyagers were mostly photographers (very very good photographers), so it was obvious what they’d be bringing back. But not everyone is a photographer.

On the astonishing island of Española, where waved albatrosses breed, Sumac saw a rare piece of trash on the beach. A cap from a Coke bottle had washed up. She picked it up to dispose of properly. Instantly a fearless Española mockingbird hurtled onto her hand and tried to drink from the bottle cap. Alas, there was neither cola nor fresh water in it, so the thirsty bird was disappointed. (They know very well that humans carry water, and regularly investigate water bottles in case they’ve been left open.)

That’s a great souvenir. It’s a memento to the tameness and boldness of animals who expect no harm from human beings. And the islands are better off without it.

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.

Belated Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2019 good wishes from SorryWatch!

Perhaps you’ve seen the video going around social media (and written about in Saturday’s New York Post  and Daily News) depicting three white female students at Brooklyn’s elite Poly Prep Country Day School wearing blackface, jumping around giggling, and making monkey noises. (SorryWatch sees no need to share the video here. It is what it sounds like.) This is the second example of privileged white teens doing blackface in the news this week — hiya, Covington Catholic! — and it’s only Tuesday.

There’s a good opportunity for apology-pondering here. 

Poly Prep’s Black Student affinity group, Umoja (the name refers to the Swahili word for unity) wrote a letter to the school community, published on Friday in the school newspaper and read aloud at the day’s Martin Luther King Jr. assembly. The apology-related requests made by the Umoja students are not only reasonable, but also a blueprint for how people who’ve done wrong should apologize.

The two letter-writers, both seniors, noted that the video wasn’t an isolated incident, but an indication of a larger problematic climate at Poly. Credence is lent to this notion by one response from Poly Prep leadership: “We do not tolerate racism or prejudice in our school or in our communities. We took immediate action as soon as we learned of a highly offensive video, taken years ago, being circulated on our campus.” (Nope. The incident happened two years ago, not waaaay back in the mists of time, the way the phrase “years ago” makes it sound. The two students who are still at the school were never actually disciplined. So this sure does sound as though racism and prejudice have been tolerated pretty well! Let’s see if bad publicity has any impact. The principal of Poly Prep has promised to meet with Umoja reps tomorrow.)

Please read the students’ letter here. We’ll come back to it.

Turning from Brooklyn westward, it seemed at first as though there might be a meaningful apology for the behavior of Covington Catholic students in Washington DC this weekend. (Just for the taunting of Native activist Nathan Phillips. Not for the blackface. Jeez, SorryWatch is so demanding.) On Sunday the school and diocese apologized in a joint statement to the media and in a pop-up message on the school web site. Which has since been taken down. Both the message and the web site (as of Tuesday). Here’s the statement for posterity (yay, shift-command-4):

Alas, in the wake of right-wing responses to the boys’ actions (they were PROVOKED by a loud and unpleasant member of a DIFFERENT minority group! they were only attempting to defuse tensions! they are victims! THE LIBERAL RUSH TO JUDGMENT!), the school issued a new statement to parents, this one without that unpleasant word “expulsion”:

The incident that took place at the March for Life in Washington, D.C. is being fully investigated by an independent third-party investigator. Based upon and following an investigation, we will be taking the appropriate action regarding this matter.

The statement goes on to ask that families report any threats to the police, and concludes, “Please continue to pray for our community.” School was closed today, what with people being desirous of screaming at the students and faculty. (Here’s a thought. Not to engage in “what-about-ism” and/or “both-sides-ism” or anything, but how about we all refrain from screaming and threatening?)

The boys insist that they did nothing wrong. The diocese issued another statement today: “This is a very serious matter that has already permanently altered the lives of many people,” it said. “It is important for us to gather the facts that will allow us to determine what corrective actions, if any, are appropriate.”

Here’s another thought, issued with not a ton of hopefulness: Both the Covington adults and the Poly Prep adults would do well to ponder the demands of the Poly Prep Umoja members. They are “only kids,” but their list shows that they understand what constitutes a meaningful apology. Here’s what they asked for:

— For the administration, faculty, and student body to view the situation as what it is: the most recent in a series of racist and intolerable acts that have alienated a large portion of Poly’s community rather than as an isolated event.

— For a public apology from the girls who participated in the video and the making thereof.

— For acknowledgment that the school has not taken steps to protect students of color in this latest episode

— For an email sent out to parents, students, and alumni clearly addressing the content of the video (specifying that it was blackface) as well as what steps are being taken to ensure that incidents like this do not happen again.

— For the implementation of a required civics/ethics/empathy course(s).

— For more faculty of color to help and support us.

— For a new section of the Poly Code of Conduct which specifically addresses hateful actions and hateful speech, whether it takes place on or off campus.

— For a greater emphasis and employment of our zero-tolerance policy.

— For equal repercussions for all students that violate policy and no statute of limitations for those violations.

Why is this list good? It ticks all of SorryWatch’s good-apology boxes: The words “I’m sorry” or “I apologize”; a statement of exactly what the apology is for (not “the incident” or “what was depicted in a video shared on social media”); an acknowledgment of the harm done; reparations; and a list of concrete steps that will be taken to ensure that similar problems won’t recur.

Fingers crossed — but not a lot of optimism felt — for teachable moments in Brooklyn, and in DC, and in Kentucky.

It’s a good apology! Hallelujah!

The current (Aug/Sept) print issue of BUST features an article called “Shoplifters of the World.” It turns out to have been lifted (see what I did there) from a 2016 article in Good. (FULL DISCLOSURE! Snarly has written for BUST. MORE FULL DISCLOSURE! SorryWatch learned about this incident through a reader pointing us to Jezebel’s comprehensive reporting on it. ATTRIBUTION, BUBBELEHS.)

A sophomore at the University of Chicago pitched a piece to BUST on young women who steal stuff from big stores and frame their actions in anti-capitalist, activist language. Interesting! Bust assigned her the piece. After it was published, though, a friend of writer Tasbeeh Herwees noticed its similarity to Herwees’s Good article. So much similarity! Read the Jezebel article to see how much.

And then!

BUST apologized very, very well!

Go read. Now, why this such a good apology? Let’s review:

1. It uses the words “sorry” and “apologize” — not the pallid and non-ownership-taking “regret.”
2. It states precisely what the apology is for. It does not make vague, hand-wavey pronouncements.
3. It takes responsibility. It does not throw the plagiarist under the bus, but rather addresses the magazine’s lack of diligence in allowing plagiarized material to be published.  (In fact, BUST does not even name the plagiarist. It would have been ok to name her, but not to have made it ALL HER FAULT. She screwed up, but not in a vacuum.)
4. It tries to make amends. BUST apologizes to the writer of the Good piece publicly, and the statement notes that the editor-in-chief also apologized privately. And BUST offered the writer of the Good piece the fee she would have received had she written the piece for BUST.
5. It explains the steps being taken to ensure that this doesn’t happen again: BUST will implement more diligent fact-checking procedures and vet prospective writers more carefully.

Well done.

The young writer, alas, has not apologized. When Jezebel reached out to her for comment, she emailed back:

The “plagiarism accusations” arose out of a failure to cite the source of some quotations properly within the story. As soon as I realized that the quotations weren’t credited properly, I reached out to the author of the piece I quoted. We’ve already discussed how we can fix the issue and she was very understanding about the mistakes.

This was the first article I’ve ever written for a print publication. I didn’t know the proper protocol for citation in this type of writing, and as a result, I failed to credit Tasbeeh properly, which I now regret terribly and am trying to fix.

“Plagiarism accusations” should not be in quotes. Failing to cite sources properly is plagiarism. It doesn’t matter if the actual author is understanding; it is still plagiarism. This takes no responsibility whatsoever. It also minimizes the offense: The idea, the sources, and the quotes all came from the Good piece; the author also paraphrased some of the Good writer’s own phrasing.

All this said, the writer is young. High schools and colleges (even good ones, like the University of Chicago!) are not always great at teaching kids what plagiarism is. We could choose to give her the benefit of the doubt and hope this becomes a teachable moment for lots of young folks.

Young folks: Here’s the University of Chicago’s page on plagiarism in the student handbook. There are some great resources, including a book published by the University of Chicago Press called Doing Honest Work in College: How to Prepare Citations, Avoid Plagiarism, and Achieve Real Academic Success. There’s also a link to the Purdue Writing Lab — it is broken, U Chicago pals! Fix it! Here is what I think you wanted to point to, because it is excellent and chattily written and offers really helpful suggestions about notetaking, managing drafts, using best practices when it comes to quotations and others’ ideas, and much more.

I am pretty confident that in my mediocre public high school, no one extensively explained plagiarism to me. And this was back in the olden days when there was no World Wide Web, which meant the odds of getting caught were way smaller. I am also pretty sure that no professor ever talked to me about plagiarism in college — not even my expository writing teacher, who admittedly looked like he’d rather be oh, ANYWHERE ELSE. And yet I did not plagiarize. So I feel many things here: Sympathy for the young writer, impatience with the young writer, annoyance at a system that does not make abundantly clear what plagiarism is, and also rue for my professor friends who have told me that they aren’t allowed to fail anybody even for egregious plagiarism. But hey, I AM HAPPY FOR BUST’S GOOD APOLOGY!

And this must suffice.

Snarly’s children had a flashback to their toddlerdom watching Yo Gabba Gabba on Nickelodeon, so we listened to a bunch of the show’s songs in the car. (Some highlights: The Roots loving their family, Eryka Badu offering strategies for when she feels down, Solange telling us that momma loves baby, Devo assuring us that they can work it out, MGMT pointing out that art is everywhere, and The Flaming Lips asking whether we could be a bat or a helicopter. Good times. But Nickelodeon, why is there no official version of Weezer’s “All My Friends are Insects“? That song slaps.)

Anyway: When Snarly’s children were toddlers, there was no SorryWatch. Now that we have been edified by SorryWatch, Muno’s song “I’m So Sorry” does not hold up well!

It doesn’t matter if you MEANT to do it, Muno. You did it. Rather than repeatedly assuring Toodee that you’ll make it better, MAKE IT BETTER. Less pleading, more action. Foofa forgives Muno immediately, but it wasn’t her castle! It was Toodee’s castle! Toodee needs a little time. Ultimately she does forgive — good on her — but it should not be on HER to say “we’ll fix it together.” Muno should have offered to rebuild the castle himself. Then she could have volunteered to help out or opted to make him do it.

To be fair, this is a show for preschoolers. Snarly does know this. Given the audience, merely modeling the saying of  “I’m sorry” is good…but modeling what to do after you apologize (don’t make excuses; make it right) would be even better. That said, the rest of the gang should probably be patient with Muno because with only one eye he lacks depth perception, and unlike some celebrities who apologize for their actions, he really didn’t mean to do it.

SorryWatch usually advocates the media* principle of putting apologies in the same place as the thing you’re apologizing for. For example, if you broadcast an absolute lie on “Fox & Friends,” the clarification and apology should also be on “Fox & Friends,” not in some talking head’s Twitter account. (*Clearly, when we say “media” we mean “some media.”)

But. If you feel bad about spray-painting graffiti, should you go back and spray-paint an apology? (If you regret shooting up the bar, should you go back and outline the words “THAT WAS UNFORTUNATE” in bullet holes behind the pool table?)

And by the way: When you go into your newly fixed-up church offices in the morning and discover that vandals have spray-painted all the walls and discharged a fire extinguisher – why assume it was “kids”? Why couldn’t it have been a gang from the assisted living place, maddened by ennui? Why not a posse of new parents, influenced by the evil behavior of their toddlers? Why not a fed-up bunch of those people of indeterminate age, sick and tired of being treated as invisible? Why not a multi-generational family group of Satanists?

No, people say, “kids.” For whatever reasons.

People tried not to say “kids” when talking about the spray paint-wielding individuals who broke into the newly-renovated building at the Woodside Community Church in Greenwood, Indiana, and then expressed themselves with tags, “vulgar pictures,” stars both 5- and 6-pointed, “curse words,” arrows, the legend “420,” shocking abbreviations like “WTF,” and – in what is surmised to be their last action – “Sorry, Just Realized This wuz A Church!”

The church’s youth leader, Julie Petty, said “We prayed for the kids that did this – or whoever did this.” Pastor Mark Petty spoke of forgiveness and said “We love ’em. As a church, we’d love to have ’em come back and do the right thing. We would take ’em into our youth group.”

Which might be a sure way of stopping them from coming back and doing the right thing.

How did the invaders not realize they were in a church? Well, it doesn’t look like a classic Christian church – no steeple, no stained glass, no pews. It’s not actually the church, it’s a building that the church had just finished fixing up to be a community center and offices – the chapel is next door, and even that’s not obviously churchy.

Also, until recently, the former barn was something else, a “hot spot for teens and violence.”

The pastor would like everyone to know that “This is not a rave club. This is a church now.” The sign out front is kind of a tip-off. If you’re the kind of person that reads signs.

Was that a good apology? No. It just made one more wall that has to be repainted. It’s both a tiny bit better than no apology, and also worse, because TOTALLY MISSING THE POINT.  It’s probably the reason the story made local TV news. Causing neighbors to come forward and say they saw “three teens” near the church on the day of the vandalism. Kids.

Whatever the age of the Greenwood miscreants, they are unlikely to reveal themselves, for fear of the youth group. (In their favor, the pastor notes the intruders didn’t steal the computer or the new TV.

SorryWatch recalls a graffiti apology last year in Speke, Liverpool. Vandals spray-painted anti-Pakistani and anti-Muslim graffiti on the outside of a house being prepared for new occupants, and also broke some of the windows. Media covered the story, noting that those new occupants were not from Pakistan. They were from Sri Lanka.

One member of the family said, “We are not even Muslims, we are Hindu, and we hate the terrorists also. I am very upset and scared now. I have a wife and three young children, but we are still going to move in.”

The vandals sneaked back to the house, where smashed windows had been boarded up and the graffiti had been whitewashed over. Dismayed by their earlier mistake, they spray-painted “SORRY” on the house.

No. No no no, God no.

That’s a whole new misdemeanor count. If you’re really burning to apologize, really afraid of the law, why not paint your apology on a BOARD and leave it at the scene? So they don’t have to drag out the whitewash AGAIN? And do we have to say this whole thing would not have been okay if they were Muslims from Pakistan? That it would still be a hate crime?

IDIOTS.

Also, if the whole neighborhood is angry about your loud party last night, the thing to do is not to parade around under their windows with a megaphone yelling “SORRY ABOUT THAT! WE GOT CARRIED AWAY! WE REGRET THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS, DUDES! MOVING FORWARD, WE’LL INVITE YOU NEXT TIME!”

 

(Thanks to Candy C., who knows the difference between an abbreviation and an acronym.)

It’s very sweet. Snarly saw it on Pinterest. We can’t read the signature and Googling did not turn up the maker.