and have a strong narrative.
We appreciate when an essay
moves beyond the personal to
tell us something new about
the world.
From the Editors
Fifty-eight thousand Americans died in Viet Nam. At the time we are going to press, nearly 320,000 have died from the COVID-19 pandemic. Personal responsibility just doesn’t work. Our hospitals are crowded, our nurses and doctors placed in harm’s way, while too many people refuse to wear masks across the state. Why?
Our mythologies, the narratives our country tells about itself, are governed by a central contradiction of the American psyche: the belief in rugged individualism versus the call to collective duty. During the Great Depression, civics textbooks claimed the trait most admired by teenagers was self-sacrifice: people surrendering their own needs to the larger good. Crime stories and gangster films often feature individuals who climb the crooked rungs of the ladder to success and are punished for their acquisitiveness,