opposite of loneliness essay

Yale Daily News

KEEGAN: The Opposite of Loneliness

Staff Reporter

The piece below was written by Marina Keegan ’12 for a special edition of the News distributed at the class of 2012’s commencement exercises last week. Keegan died in a car accident on Saturday. She was 22.

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.

It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.

Yale is full of tiny circles we pull around ourselves. A cappella groups, sports teams, houses, societies, clubs. These tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and part of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our computers — partner-less, tired, awake. We won’t have those next year. We won’t live on the same block as all our friends. We won’t have a bunch of group-texts.

This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse – I’m scared of losing this web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now.

But let us get one thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us. They’re part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and away from New York and wish we did or didn’t live in New York. I plan on having parties when I’m 30. I plan on having fun when I’m old. Any notion of THE BEST years comes from clichéd “should haves…” “if I’d…” “wish I’d…”

Of course, there are things we wished we did: our readings, that boy across the hall. We’re our own hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late. Procrastinating. Cutting corners. More than once I’ve looked back on my High School self and thought: how did I do that? How did I work so hard? Our private insecurities follow us and will always follow us.

But the thing is, we’re all like that. Nobody wakes up when they want to. Nobody did all of their reading (except maybe the crazy people who win the prizes…) We have these impossibly high standards and we’ll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves. But I feel like that’s okay.

We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.

When we came to Yale, there was this sense of possibility. This immense and indefinable potential energy – and it’s easy to feel like that’s slipped away. We never had to choose and suddenly we’ve had to. Some of us have focused ourselves. Some of us know exactly what we want and are on the path to get it; already going to med school, working at the perfect NGO, doing research. To you I say both congratulations and you suck.

For most of us, however, we’re somewhat lost in this sea of liberal arts. Not quite sure what road we’re on and whether we should have taken it. If only I had majored in biology…if only I’d gotten involved in journalism as a freshman…if only I’d thought to apply for this or for that…

What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.

In the heart of a winter Friday night my freshman year, I was dazed and confused when I got a call from my friends to meet them at EST EST EST. Dazedly and confusedly, I began trudging to SSS, probably the point on campus farthest away. Remarkably, it wasn’t until I arrived at the door that I questioned how and why exactly my friends were partying in Yale’s administrative building. Of course, they weren’t. But it was cold and my ID somehow worked so I went inside SSS to pull out my phone. It was quiet, the old wood creaking and the snow barely visible outside the stained glass. And I sat down. And I looked up. At this giant room I was in. At this place where thousands of people had sat before me. And alone, at night, in the middle of a New Haven storm, I felt so remarkably, unbelievably safe.

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I’d say that’s how I feel at Yale. How I feel right now. Here. With all of you. In love, impressed, humbled, scared. And we don’t have to lose that.

We’re in this together, 2012. Let’s make something happen to this world.

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

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The opposite of loneliness : essays & stories

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About The Book

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About The Author

Marina Keegan (1989-2012) was an award-winning author, journalist, playwright, poet, actress, and activist. Her nonfiction has been published in The New York Times ; her fiction has been published on NewYorker.com, and read on NPR’s Selected Shorts ; her musical, Independents , was a New York Times Critics’ Pick. Marina’s final essay for The Yale Daily News , “The Opposite of Loneliness,” became an instant global sensation, viewed by more than 1.4 million people from 98 countries. For more information, please visit TheOppositeofLoneliness.com.

Product Details

• Publisher: Scribner (April 14, 2015)
• Length: 256 pages
• ISBN13: 9781476753911

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Raves and Reviews

“In her brief life Marina Keegan managed to achieve a precocious literary mastery. Her wry, wise, lyrical voice is unforgettable, and her vital, exuberant spirit reminds us powerfully to seize the day. Though every sentence throbs with what might have been, this remarkable collection is ultimately joyful and inspiring, because it represents the wonder that she was.” —J.R. Moehringer, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author of The Tender Bar “I will never cease mourning the loss of my beloved former student Marina Keegan. This book gives partial evidence of the extraordinary promise that departed with her. Throughout she manifests authentic dramatic invention and narrative skill. Beyond all those, she makes a vital appeal to everyone in her generation not to waste their gifts in mere professionalism but instead to invest their youthful pride and exuberance both in self-development and in the improvement of our tormented society.” —Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities and English, Yale University “Many of my students sound forty years old. They are articulate but derivative, their own voices muffled by their desire to skip over their current age and experience, which they fear trivial, and land on some version of polished adulthood without passing Go. Marina was twenty-one and sounded twenty-one: a brainy twenty-one, a twenty-one who knew her way around the English language, a twenty-one who understood that there were few better subjects than being young and uncertain and starry-eyed and frustrated and hopeful. When she read her work aloud around our seminar table, it would make us snort with laughter, and then it would turn on a dime and break our hearts.” —Anne Fadiman, Yale University Professor of English and Francis Writer in Residence and author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down and Ex Libris “Illuminates the optimism and neurosis felt by new grads everywhere. . .Like every millenial who's seen irony elevated to an art form, Keegan brings self-awareness to the collective insecurity of her peers even as she captures it with a precision that only comes from someone who feels it too. How unfortunate that she will never know the value readers will find in her work.” — Publishers Weekly “Funny, poignant, tender, and fiercely alive, The Opposite of Loneliness contains the keen observations of a short lifetime—and the wisdom of a much longer one.” —Jennifer DuBois, author of Cartwheel and A Partial History of Lost Causes “The writing Marina Keegan left behind offers a tantalizing taste of a literary voice still in development, yet already imbued with unusual insight, nuance, humor, and sensitivity.” —Deborah Treisman, Fiction Editor of The New Yorker “Two years after a young writer’s death, her words soar. . . . The Opposite of Loneliness... sparkles with talent, humanity, and youth. The prose, polished but thoroughly unselfconscious, is heartbreaking evidence of what could have been.” — O Magazine "A bittersweet, what-might-have-been book filled with youthful optimism, energy, honesty, and beyond-her-years wisdom.” — Yale Alumni Magazine “ The Opposite of Loneliness captures in both fiction and nonfiction [Keegan's] adventures in love and lust, the weird bliss of being stoned, and, as she writes, what it’s like to see 'everything in the world build up and then everything in the world fall down again.” — Elle “Remarkable... a compelling literary voice... the appeal of this collection is its improvisational quality, its feeling of being unfinished but always questioning.” — Chicago Tribune “How do you mourn the loss of a fiery talent that was barely a tendril before it was snuffed out? Answer: Read this book. A clear-eyed observer of human nature, [Keegan] could take a clever idea...and make it something beautiful.” — People Magazine “A triumph...Keegan was right to prod us all to reflect on what we seek from life.” —Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times “ The Opposite of Loneliness does [Keegan's] talent and memory justice, both as a picture of a generation entering adulthood and as a highly personal portrait of a gifted young woman.” — Pittsburgh-Post Gazette “What a gift Keegan has left behind. Not only in her written words...but also in her legacy of social activism and fierce belief in leading a life of purpose, not privilege.” —Joseph P. Kahn, Boston Globe “Keegan’s fiction… is built around the kind of empathetic extrapolation that makes for all the best realism… Keegan would have been—would have continued to be—a star. She would have been famous, not quietly or vaguely, but really, really famous.” — The New Republic “[Keegan ] was one of the most present, incisive, and hopeful writers.… That’s the gift and the pain of her book. How incredible, how lucky, that we get to read her words, that people who never knew her or her work can find it for themselves, that she was in some way given the chance to speak to the world the way she wanted.” — Buzzfeed “A glimpse of a young woman who is growing as a writer and a person, someone who’s thinking deeply about love and the world around her and the scale of the universe….I have no doubt she would have been great.” — Bustle “In the little time [Keegan] graced the world she created a life’s work many writers could only dream of achieving in decades.” —MariaShriver.com “This posthumous collection of essays and short stories is beautiful and brilliant, young but not childish—just like the author was. Every essay is a gem you want to pick up and put in your pocket, taking it out from time to time to see how it looks in different lights—the lights of promise and potential, yearning and memory. The Opposite of Loneliness will make people cry and hope.” — Rewire Me “The loveliest piece of writing I’ve ever seen from someone so young… Her voice is steady and often very funny, her senses of character and pace are frighteningly good, and the flow of her prose is easy to get carried away by. She wasn't just college-talented; she was talented, period.” —Kevin Roose, New York Magazine “A new voice of her generation.” — The Hartford Courant “Wonderful... Marina Keegan did that thing we all want to do as writers: say what everyone else is thinking, but better.” — Refinery29 “Inspirational.” — The Huffington Post “Full of uncanny wisdom...Marina would not want to be remembered because she was dead. She would want to be remembered because she’s good. No worries there, Marina. You left us aching for more.” — Detroit News “A talented voice, silenced too soon, endures...throughout there are reminders of the talent of this forever-22-year-old.” — The Improper Bostonian

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‘The Opposite of Loneliness’ by Marina Keegan

A keen collection of stories from a light that dimmed too soon.

When Marina Keegan wasn’t tapped to join one of Yale’s secret societies, she gave herself less than two hours to wallow in disappointment, then pledged to spend the time she would have spent “chatting in a tomb” writing a book. Five days after graduation, Keegan was killed in a car accident on Cape Cod. She was 22.

“The Opposite of Loneliness” is a record of that time better spent. The book of nine short stories and nine essays takes its title from Keegan’s last essay to appear in the Yale Daily News, which went viral in the days after her death when it was read by 1.4 million people in 98 countries. In it Keegan writes with an eerie urgency: “We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”

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The introduction, by Anne Fadiman (Keegan’s writing professor at Yale), sets the tone for the collection. She describes Marina’s determination to become a writer, and brings her to life — she was always losing her keys in her bag; she complained when her roommate used the same knife to cut bread and spread Nutella — without ever slipping into sentimentality. This book is not a posthumous vanity project; Keegan’s writing is intimidatingly good. When she died, Keegan was already well on her way to becoming an established writer, earning coveted internships with The New Yorker and The Paris Review. She had a job lined up at The New Yorker after graduation, and an apartment waiting in Brooklyn.

It would be, however, dishonest to say that her death doesn’t add another dimension to these stories. Some seem like chilling premonitions but there is nothing sentimental on these pages. Keegan’s storytelling is so strong that the reader quickly becomes invested in the characters’ struggles, forgetting about their author’s life and death. While unsettling at times (the hair on my arms stood on end more than once), the feeling of being socked in the stomach doesn’t come from remembering Keegan’s death, but instead from the gut-wrenching vulnerability of her characters.

In “I Kill for Money,” Tommy, the obnoxious exterminator who cracks jokes incessantly,confesses that he releases squirrels into the wild, rather than drown them as the law requires. In “Winter Break,” the protagonist watches her mother trudging through the snow alone with her spaniel and later reflects, “I thought of my mother circling suburbia while I drank in dim fraternities or video-chatted with Sam or slept lazily in my dorm while it snowed out my window. I loved her in that moment in a way that twisted my stomach.”

Another strength: Keegan writes her age. A keen observer of the human condition, of herself, and of her generation, she uses the vernacular: “things,” “stuff,” “hooking up,” and “butts.” She writes about smoking weed, red plastic cups, microwaving Thai soup, the pangs of realizing a parent’s mortality, and of first love. She writes about friends who are protective of one another, as well as the failures of friendship, how college kids sometimes try to sound older than they are, and what it’s like to envy those who have already figured out who they want to be.

But Keegan doesn’t rely solely on her perspective as an observant, brilliant, self-aware college student. Some of the strongest stories in the collection take place in Baghdad, or 36,000 feet under the sea, or from the perspective of a hypochondriacal former ballerina. She often places her characters in horribly uncomfortable situations then writes about their efforts to escape. Keegan does not shy away from risk — either in setting, character, or form — and it pays off.

In “Challenger Deep” five people trapped at the bottom of the ocean in a submarine in total darkness await rescue. The story opens and concludes with the protagonist, Patrick, waiting by the periscope for schools of florescent jellyfish to float by and illuminate the blackness (the jellyfish may also indicate an ascent to the surface). The philosophical and psychological nature of being isolated in the dark brings to mind “Moby-Dick” (which Keegan alludes to in an essay titled “Why We Care About Whales”) and like Melville’s masterpiece, “Challenger Deep” works on multiple levels.

“The Emerald City” is told through a series of e-mails from William, a Coalition Provisional Authority officer working in Iraq’s Green Zone, to his girlfriend, Laura, back home in the States. Through his letters, he gradually becomes disillusioned by the US presence in Iraq, and we learn that he accidentally aids a coordinated mortar attack on the Green Zone, killing dozens, including one of his friends. The e-mails end after William confides in Laura that he and his Iraqi translator have decided to escape to the desert in order to avoid a lengthy sentence for conspiracy. Even though the drama accelerates gradually and is crafted through a series of one-sided letters, the story is gripping.

As Fadiman points out in the introduction, “When a young person dies, much of the tragedy lies in her promise: what she would have done. But Marina left what she had already done: an entire body of writing, far more than could fit between these covers.” So it isn’t a question of whether Keegan would have made it as a writer, but rather, what we have lost. What more might she have done had she lived for another 50 years?

In “Song for the Special,” Keegan writes that she once attended an arts conference in which everyone was “scrambling to meet everyone, asserting their individuality like sad salesmen” and she was the only person without business cards. “I read somewhere that radio waves just keep traveling outward, flying into the universe with eternal vibrations. Sometime before I die I think I’ll find a microphone and climb to the top of a radio tower. I’ll take a deep breath and close my eyes because it will start to rain right when I reach the top. Hello, I’ll say to outer space, this is my card.” Through these stories and essays readers can feel the powerful reverberations of Keegan’s singular voice.

Sophie Flack, author of “Bunheads,” has contributed to The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, and O Magazine. Follow her on twitter @sophieflack.

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The Opposite of Loneliness review – Marina Keegan's life cut short

W hen Marina Keegan graduated from Yale in 2012 her CV already boasted internships at the Paris Review and the New Yorker (at which a much-coveted staff job awaited her) and a stint as a research assistant for literary critic Harold Bloom. She had had a play selected for a major theatre festival, and an essay published in the New York Times inspired by a piece she wrote for the Yale Daily News , Even Artichokes Have Doubts, in which she lamented the fact that a quarter of her Yale peers would be lured away from their artistic aspirations by lucrative contracts offered by consultancy and financial firms: "Maybe I'm ignorant and idealistic but I just feel like we can do something really cool to this world," she wrote. As her writing clearly demonstrates, Keegan certainly wasn't ignorant. The tragedy, though, is that she never had the chance to lose her youthful idealism: five days after graduation, she was killed in a car accident.

This collection brings together her published and unpublished work: nine stories and nine essays, including the final essay she wrote for the Yale Daily News , The Opposite of Loneliness , a meditation on the future awaiting her and her classmates on the eve of their graduation, which subsequently went viral. "We're so young," she writes. "We're so young. We're twenty-two years old. We have so much time."

In some ways Keegan's life reads like a tragic novella, her finite body of work inextricably and forever after bound up in the tragedy of her death, lending an understandable poignancy to much of the writing. Stability in Motion, for example, her elegiac essay about her first car, a vehicle "crowded" with the "physical manifestations" of her high school memories; or the short story Winter Break, in which a female college student's calming words to her mother are now loaded with hidden meaning – "Don't worry, I'm driving," she tells her as she and her boyfriend head off to a New Year's Eve party. Keegan wasn't driving, incidentally, it was her boyfriend, who fell asleep at the wheel. Sentences written lightheartedly are piercingly loud reminders of what will never be: "I plan on having parties when I'm thirty. I plan on having fun when I'm old"; throwaway comments about the children she'll one day have; a mouth-watering list of all the forbidden foods and drink she'll indulge in on her deathbed (Keegan was allergic to gluten).

However, rather than this being a collection of juvenilia, with an underlying theme of promise and potential, and despite Keegan being only at the beginning of her career, this book shows her prodigious talent already in full bloom. As befits her age and experience, she excels in capturing what it feels like to be on the cusp of adult life – from the daughter in Winter Break, who realises her own youthful romance has made her mother, a woman in whom the young girl now sees "a frailty to her posture, a thinness to her cheeks", comprehend the failures of her own marriage; to the undergraduate in Cold Pastoral, who has to deal with the death of the student she's been hooking up with, forced to reassess their relationship in the light of her loss.

But Keegan is just as eloquent and insightful when she looks beyond the horizon of the near-familiar. Who would have thought a profile of a bug and rodent exterminator, I Kill for Money, could provoke such pathos? While Challenger Deep, an account of five people trapped in a pitch-black submarine 36,000 feet underwater, is an accomplished horror story, deeply and fundamentally disturbing. Keegan may have died before her time, but she was a writer who demonstrated a gift beyond her years.

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The Opposite of Loneliness

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Caption: Marina Keegan, was a member of the Class of 2012 at Yale and wrote this essay for a special commencement edition of the Yale Daily News, before tragically passing away just days later. Her essay beautifully touches on themes of belonging and what she calls the opposite of loneliness, feelings that she experienced during her time at Yale. Marina's words are memorialized in the online archives of the Yale Daily News and in a book of her writings published posthumously by her parents. (Since the 90s, back-issues of the YDN have been stored online, and I have not been able to access a print version of this edition.) The images here are screenshots of the online archive page that features her essay. One interesting aspect of this webpage method of archiving is that the comments section is not closed, meaning that, if people wanted to, they could continue to comment on the essay years after she wrote it. Another aspect of the images I uploaded I would like to draw your attention to is the italicized note added beneath the photo of Marina ("The piece below was written by Marina Keegan ’12 for a special edition of the News distributed at the class of 2012’s commencement exercises last week. Keegan died in a car accident on Saturday. She was 22.") This note was added by a member of the Yale Daily News as a message to readers about Marina to contextualize the piece and its author.

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Label: Marina Keegan (Yale Class of 2012) was 22 years old when she wrote her essay “The Opposite of Loneliness” for a special 2012 commencement edition of the Yale Daily News. Tragically, Marina died in a car accident just days after commencement. Yet, the memory of her spirit and the legacy of her beautiful prose live on in her written works, shared both via the print and online editions of the News as well as a collection of her essays, poems, and stories published by her parents in 2014. I first encountered “The Opposite of Loneliness” in high school. Although she writes specifically to a Yale audience, Marina’s words burrowed into my mind for days, weeks, months after I read them. She captures so eloquently feelings which I had felt but could not name: that feeling of comfort, safety, and warmth found in relationship and company with others – that opposite of loneliness. Marina writes: “It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together.” Inspired, I described my reactions to her essay in a letter I wrote to her in 2016 for a contest called Letters About Literature. There, I told her: “Thank you, Marina, for giving me the hope, inspiration, and determination to become the writer I one day hope to be.” Marina’s words can speak to all of us, for no matter where we are in life, we all long for that “opposite of loneliness.”

Marina Keegan

Yale Daily News, https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/05/27/keegan-the-opposite-of-loneliness/

Yale Daily News

May 27, 2012

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Marina Keegan was a writer of short stories, personal essays, social commentary, poems, and plays: a literary pentathlete.

What Is the Opposite of Loneliness?

Sometimes the opposite of loneliness has nothing to do with social interaction.

Posted February 27, 2021 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

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On the eve of her graduation from Yale in 2012, Marina Keegan wrote an essay that, within about a week, would be read by well over a million people from 98 nations. It was called " The Opposite of Loneliness ."

But what is the opposite of loneliness ? Keegan opened her essay by noting that we don't have a word for it, but whatever it is, she found it at Yale:

"It is not quite love and it's not quite community; it's just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it's four A.M. and no one goes to bed… "Yale is full of tiny circles we pull around ourselves. A cappella groups, sports teams, houses, societies, clubs. These tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and part of something even on our loneliest nights…"

That essay opens a collection of Keegan's writings published under the same title, " The Opposite of Loneliness ." (Here is my review of it.) The question it poses, what is the opposite of loneliness, still resonates. I think people who are single at heart might answer that question in a way that would seem counterintuitive to others.

The single at heart are people who live their best, most meaningful, and most authentic lives as single people. I'm one of them. I rarely feel lonely, and when I do, it is usually when I'm with other people. One time, when I was living in Charlottesville, Virginia, I was walking the downtown mall with a friend I always loved talking to – she's smart, wryly funny, and great at getting to matters of depth. We happened upon a big table of colleagues who were laughing and talking. She wanted to join them. I sat for a while, but their conversation was so superficial and so inane, it made me feel lonely. I made an excuse and left.

Another time, two couples wanted to treat me for my birthday. I looked forward to it. But they spent the night talking about babies and daycare. The whole night. (I have no kids.) That, rather spending my birthday home alone, is the definition of loneliness.

I like the examples Keegan gives of the opposite of loneliness. But I'd add to them the experiences of being all by yourself and feeling so engaged in whatever you are doing that you don't even notice how much time has passed or that you're actually pretty tired. (I think that is an example of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls " flow .") The opposite of loneliness is realizing the answer to what you were puzzling over when you weren't trying to figure it out – during a long walk, for instance, or in the shower or just as you are falling asleep or waking up. The opposite of loneliness is feeling grateful for all of the people in your life you cherish, even (especially?) when you don't see them all the time.

The opposite of loneliness is JOMO – the Joy of Missing Out . For me, that's when I'm delighted not to feel obligated to participate in social events that don't interest me. I stay home and revel in my solitude or pursue the social engagements that really do engage me.

Alone is not lonely. Alone is a neutral description of a state that can be experienced any number of ways. Loneliness is, by definition, painful. The opposite of loneliness is contentment or joy. It is living your most meaningful life, the life you want to live rather than the life you think you should be living. For me, the opposite of loneliness is living single.

Facebook image: mavo/Shutterstock

Bella DePaulo, Ph.D. , an expert on single people, is the author of Single at Heart and other books. She is an Academic Affiliate in Psychological & Brain Sciences, UCSB.

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The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories Hardcover – April 8, 2014

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• Print length 240 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Scribner
• Publication date April 8, 2014
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review, about j. r. moehringer.

J. R. Moehringer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2000, is a former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Author of the bestselling memoir, The Tender Bar, he is also the co-author of Open by Andre Agassi. His most recent publication is Sutton , published in 2012.

J. R. Moehringer on Marina Keegan

I never met Marina Keegan, but when I learned of her death I felt as if I'd known her well. We belonged to several of the same tribes. We were both Yalies. We were both from the Northeast. Both Irish, both writers. We walked some of the same paths, probably sat in the same chairs. So it was as if I’d lost a close cousin, or even a kid sister.

Then I read her work. In that terrible week, as media outlets posted her essays, as people around the world reposted them, I read every word with a sinking, quickening heart. The first news reports, I felt, had been wrong - this wasn’t simply a promising young writer, this was a prodigy, a rare rare talent, still raw, still evolving, but shockingly mature. From the few things she’d published in her brief life I could project a remarkable career, a line of words stretching far into the future, words that would have thrilled and enlightened, words that might have changed people’s lives. As I grieved for her family, her friends, her boyfriend, I also grieved for the global community of readers who would never know the pleasure and excitement of a brand new book by Marina Keegan.

All of which made me think there should be, there must be, at least one book with Marina’s name on the spine. Publishers aren’t eager to take chances these days, but I hoped that one would have the guts, the heart, to make a slim, posthumous collection of Marina’s stories and essays and poems. I could actually see the book in my mind, stacked on the front table of a sunlit bookstore, perhaps the Yale bookstore, where I’m sure Marina dreamed about her work appearing one day.

A year later, it came in the mail, the very book I’d seen in my mind, with the only possible title: The Opposite of Loneliness . I studied the striking cover photo and felt a wave of sorrow and joy. Then I sat down and read it and that sorrow-joy feeling became my constant companion over the next several days.

This is a book full of wonders. This is a book full of sentences that any writer, 21 or 101, would be proud to have authored. This is a book that will speak to young readers, because it expresses some of that inexpressible anxiety of starting out, of making life's first momentous choices, of wanting and fearing and needing and hoping and dreading everything at the same time. It will also speak to older readers, because it’s an inspiring reminder of youth’s brimming energy, its quivering sense of possibility.

Young people get a bad rap for thinking they’re immortal, and acting accordingly, but Marina dwelled on the end. Hers, civilization’s, the sun’s. “And time, that takes survey of all the world, must have a stop.” She must have heard her beloved adviser Harold Bloom expound many times on Hotspur’s line, and clearly she took it to heart, personalized it. Savor every half-second, she seemed to be saying, to herself, to her readers, and her meditations on death, once charmingly precocious, now feel breathtakingly premonitory. Describing a group of fifty whales beached near her house on Cape Cod, she laments that their songs don’t transmit on land, and thus they can’t communicate their final thoughts. “I imagined dying slowly next to my mother or a lover, helplessly unable to relay my parting message.”

Such was her fate. And yet it wasn't, not really. This book is her parting message, exquisitely relayed.

And it’s not a mournful message. There’s so much light and humor here. In the title essay alone I hear glimmers of Lorrie Moore, Ann Beattie, Fran Lebowitz. For example, when Marina worries that other kids are sprinting ahead of her, embarking on fabulous careers while she’s still clinging to the cocoon of Yale. “Some of us have focused ourselves. Some of us know exactly what we want and are on the path to get it; already going to med school, working at the perfect NGO, doing research. To you I say both congratulations and you suck.”

My favorite passage might be this gorgeous burst of nostalgia, this prose poem about the bright college years. “When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.”

The hats. That tiny sentence was the first raindrop before the deluge, a tickling hint of all that was to come. How many 21-year-olds are capable of a line so sure-handed, so precisely and comically placed? The only other two-word sentence I can think of that had me laughing aloud and shaking my head was in Lolita. (Humbert summarizing his mother’s demise: “Picnic, lightning. ”)

If I’d met Marina, I’d have urged her to keep these first hopeful essays handy, cherish their energy, refer to them whenever beset by despair and doubt. Instead I’ll have to give that advice to her readers.

I also might have told Marina that we do have a word for the opposite of loneliness. It’s called reading. Again, I’ll have to tell her readers. This book reminds us: as long as there are books, we’re never completely alone. Open it anywhere and Marina’s voice leaps off the page, uncommonly honest, forever present. With this lovely book always at hand, we and Marina will never be completely apart.

About the Author

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Marina Evelyn Keegan (October 25, 1989 – May 26, 2012) was an American author, playwright, and journalist. She is best known for her essay "The Opposite of Loneliness," which went viral and was viewed over 1.4 million times in ninety-eight different countries after her death in a car crash just five days after she graduated magna cum laude from Yale University.

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• NEWS FEATURE
• 03 April 2024

Why loneliness is bad for your health

• Saima May Sidik 0

Saima May Sidik is a freelance science journalist based in Somerville, Massachusetts.

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Some data challenge the popular notion that older people experience the highest rates of loneliness. Credit: Richard Baker/In Pictures Ltd/Corbis via Getty

You have full access to this article via your institution.

In 2010, Theresa Chaklos was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia — the first in a series of ailments that she has had to deal with since. She’d always been an independent person, living alone and supporting herself as a family-law facilitator in the Washington DC court system. But after illness hit, her independence turned into loneliness .

Loneliness, in turn, exacerbated Chaklos’s physical condition. “I dropped 15 pounds in less than a week because I wasn’t eating,” she says. “I was so miserable, I just would not get up.” Fortunately a co-worker convinced her to ask her friends to help out, and her mood began to lift. “It’s a great feeling” to know that other people are willing to show up, she says.

Many people can’t break out of a bout of loneliness so easily. And when acute loneliness becomes chronic, the health effects can be far-reaching. Chronic loneliness can be as detrimental as obesity, physical inactivity and smoking according to a report by Vivek Murthy , the US surgeon general. Depression, dementia, cardiovascular disease 1 and even early death 2 have all been linked to the condition. Worldwide, around one-quarter of adults feel very or fairly lonely, according to a 2023 poll conducted by the social-media firm Meta, the polling company Gallup and a group of academic advisers (see go.nature.com/48xhu3p ). That same year, the World Health Organization launched a campaign to address loneliness, which it called a “pressing health threat” .

But why does feeling alone lead to poor health? Over the past few years, scientists have begun to reveal the neural mechanisms that cause the human body to unravel when social needs go unmet. The field “seems to be expanding quite significantly”, says cognitive neuroscientist Nathan Spreng at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. And although the picture is far from complete, early results suggest that loneliness might alter many aspects of the brain, from its volume to the connections between neurons.

Subjective and contagious

Loneliness is a slippery concept. It’s not the same as social isolation, which occurs when someone has few meaningful social relationships, although “they’re two sides of the same coin”, says old-age psychiatrist Andrew Sommerlad at University College London. Rather, loneliness is a person’s subjective experience of being unsatisfied with their social relationships.

The list of health conditions linked to loneliness is long and sobering 1 (see ‘Loneliness and health’). Some of these make intuitive sense — people who feel lonely are often depressed, for example, sometimes to the point of being at risk of suicide. Other links are more surprising. Lonely people are at greater risk of high blood pressure and immune-system dysfunction compared with those who do not feel lonely, for example. There’s also a startling connection between loneliness and dementia, with one study reporting that people who feel lonely are 1.64 times more likely to develop this type of neurodegeneration than are those who do not 3 .

Source: The Cigna Group

A number of physiological effects, including the ability to sleep, increased stress-hormone levels and increased susceptibility to infections, could link loneliness with health problems. But the way in which these factors interact with one another makes it difficult to disentangle the effects of loneliness from the causes, cautions cognitive neuroscientist Livia Tomova at Cardiff University, UK. Do people’s brains start functioning differently when they become lonely, or do some people have differences in their brains that make them prone to loneliness? “We don’t really know which one is true,” she says.

Whatever the cause, loneliness seems to have the biggest effect on people who are in disadvantaged groups. In the United States, Black and Hispanic adults, as well as people who earn less than US$50,000 per year, have higher rates of loneliness than do other demographic groups by at least 10 percentage points, according to a 2021 survey by the Cigna Group, a US health-care and insurance company (see go.nature.com/43eakds ). That’s not surprising because “loneliness, by definition, is an emotional distress that wants us to adapt our social situations”, says geriatrician and palliative-care physician Ashwin Kotwal at the University of California, San Francisco. Without financial resources, adapting is harder.

The COVID-19 pandemic might have exacerbated loneliness by forcing people to isolate for months or years, although “that data is still emerging”, Kotwal says. Older adults have long been thought of as the demographic most heavily affected by loneliness, and indeed it is a major problem faced by many of the older people that Kotwal works with. But the Cigna Group’s data suggest that loneliness is actually highest in young adults — 79% of those between the ages of 18 and 24 reported feeling lonely, compared with 41% of people aged 66 and older.

Loneliness eats at you

A growing amount of research is exploring what happens in the brain when people feel lonely. Lonely people tend to view the world differently from those who aren’t, says cognitive neuroscientist Laetitia Mwilambwe-Tshilobo at Princeton University in New Jersey. In a 2023 study, researchers asked participants to watch videos of people in a variety of situations — for example, playing sports or on a date — while inside an magnetic resonance imaging scanner 4 . People who did not report being lonely all had similar neural responses to each other, whereas the responses in people who felt lonely were all different — from the other group and from each other. The authors hypothesized that lonely people pay attention to different aspects of situations from non-lonely people, which causes those who feel lonely to perceive themselves as being different from their peers.

Feeling lonely in research? You’re not alone

This would mean that loneliness can feed back on itself, becoming worse over time. “It’s almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Mwilambwe-Tshilobo says. “If you think that you’re lonely, you’re perceiving or interpreting your social world more negatively. And that makes you move further and further away.” Some studies have shown that this effect can spread through social networks, giving loneliness a contagious quality 5 .

Historically, staying close to others was probably a good survival strategy for humans. That’s why scientists think that temporary loneliness evolved — to motivate people to seek company, just as hunger and thirst evolved to motivate people to seek food and water.

In fact, the similarities between hunger and loneliness go right down to the physiological level. In a 2020 study, researchers deprived people of either food or social connections for ten hours. They then used brain imaging to identify areas that were activated by images of either food — such as a heaping plate of pasta — or social interactions, such as friends laughing together. Some of the activated regions were unique to images either of food or of people socializing, but a region in the midbrain known as the substantia nigra lit up when hungry people saw pictures of food and when people who felt lonely saw pictures of social interactions 6 . That’s “a key region for motivation — it’s known to be active whenever we want something”, says Tomova, who is an author on the study.

More links are emerging between loneliness and how the brain processes feelings of reward. In mice, loneliness sensitizes certain midbrain neurons to a neurotransmitter called dopamine 7 , which can also cause people to cave in to cravings, such as for food and drugs. Likewise, isolation might make humans more sensitive to rewards and more eager to seek them out. In 2023, Tomova and her colleagues published a preprint 8 for a study in which they isolated adolescents from social contact for up to four hours. After isolation, participants were offered the chance to earn a monetary reward. The isolated participants agreed more quickly than did those who were not isolated, suggesting that isolation had made them more responsive to rewarding actions.

Loneliness and health

Although research on dopamine and loneliness is still emerging, scientists have also long recognized the connection between loneliness and another type of chemical signal — stress hormones called glucocorticoids. Humans need some level of glucocorticoids “to function; to wake up”, says neurophysiologist John-Ioannis Sotiropoulos at the National Centre for Scientific Research ‘Demokritos’ in Athens. But persistent loneliness leads to chronically high levels.

These chemicals could provide a link between loneliness and dementia. In a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease, for example, glucocorticoids increased the levels of two proteins that are involved in the main hallmark of the condition, the protein plaques that tangle around neurons and interfere with memory and cognition 9 .

Stress is an extra assault on brains that are already wearing out as people get older, Mwilambwe-Tshilobo says, but she wants to see more research before committing to an opinion on exactly what part stress-related chemicals play in neurodegeneration. “It could accelerate the rate of ageing, but there hasn’t been work that explicitly looks at that,” she says.

Tomova says that although high levels of stress hormones probably contribute to dementia, it’s also likely that people who feel lonely miss out on the mental exercise that social interactions provide. And just as a muscle needs exercise to stay fit, so does the brain. In fact, loneliness has been associated with a smaller volume of grey matter in the brain 10 . “This is all hypothesis, really, at this stage,” Sommerlad says, but the idea is that socializing maintains neural connections that might otherwise be lost.

Turning inward

Researchers looking for the neural signature of loneliness have also found differences that could help to explain some of the correlations between loneliness and dementia. Previous research has suggested that there are changes in the connectivity between brain areas in people who feel lonely 11 . A 2020 study 12 examined an area of the brain called the default network — so called because it’s active by default when a person isn’t engaged in a particular task and turns their attention inward — in older people who reported being lonely.

The hurt of loneliness and social isolation

Previous work had suggested that young people who feel lonely have high neural cross-talk between the default network and other networks associated with vision, attention and executive control 13 , possibly because they’re on high alert for social cues, says Spreng, one of the authors on the 2020 study of older people. But his team found the opposite in brain scans from the UK Biobank cohort of people aged 40 to 69. Loneliness weakened connections between the default network and the visual system and instead strengthened connections within the default network.

That could be because older people remedy loneliness by retreating into memories of past social experiences, Spreng says. In doing so, they strengthen the default network.

The default network is one of many networks in the brain that accrues damage during Alzheimer’s disease. Spreng and his colleagues are investigating whether strong default networks can indeed be linked to neurodegeneration — and if so, why. He wonders whether robust neural connections might allow pathologies to spread more readily in the network. The idea is far from proven, but it’s a plausible explanation and “an interesting hypothesis”, says cognitive neuroscientist Anastasia Benedyk at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany.

The study “lays the foundation for us to be able to test some hypotheses a little bit more empirically”, says Mwilambwe-Tshilobo, who was also involved in the work linking the default network with loneliness.

Finding solutions

Some remedies for loneliness will come as no surprise. Increasing access to social activities, for example by housing people in communities with common areas, can help, Sommerlad says. Some researchers are also finding ways to tap into the neural mechanisms underlying loneliness directly, through exercise, for instance.

Walking 4–5 kilometres over the course of an hour completely reversed feelings of low mood associated with loneliness in some people, Benedyk and her colleagues found 14 . What’s more, people with high connectivity in their default networks — the same area Spreng studied, which is also known to be affected by depression — were among those who benefited from exercise the most.

One possible explanation for this observation is that people with depression are “stuck in rumination” — a behaviour that draws heavily on the default network, Benedyk says. Exercise could force them to use other parts of their brain by interrupting neural processes that are associated with self-reflection and shifting activity to areas associated with physical activities — freeing them from a cycle of negative thoughts.

Exercising is also a great excuse to socialize. These days, Chaklos is retired, but she now leads the Boston branch of a US programme called ‘Walk with a Doc’, in which physicians invite community members to walk with them. At the group’s February walk, about 14 people chatted and strolled inside the Prudential Center mall in Boston, Massachusetts, where they could avoid New England’s winter weather. The activity “just uplifts a person’s mood”, Chaklos says. “Even if you’re still going back home to be by yourself, you don’t feel totally alone any more.”

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Frank Bruni

The high-i.q. nonsense of robert f. kennedy jr..

By Frank Bruni

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

The hubris. The narcissism. The convenient and fraudulent anti-elitism . The out-of-his-mind theories presented as out-of-the-box thinking.

Many of us have noted how these fetching traits and tics connect Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is in some ways Trump with better manners, fewer lawyers and discernible pecs.

But we underplay another commonality. Like Trump when he made his 2016 presidential bid, Kennedy has zero experience — none at all — in elected office, a fact made comically clear in his interview last summer with the New Yorker editor David Remnick, who did focus on Kennedy’s lack of preparation for the presidency, asking the candidate about his credentials.

“I’ve been around government and studying government since I was a little boy,” Kennedy said, not so subtly stressing his bloodline — he’s a septuagenarian nepo baby — and casting proximity as seasoning. It’s not. I’ve been “around” many physicians in my life. You do not want me performing your appendectomy.

Kennedy added that he has attended most of the Democratic Party’s conventions since 1960, that he has visited every country in Latin America and that he “began writing about foreign policy” as a teenager. I began writing about movies as an adolescent. You do not want me directing another “Manchurian Candidate” remake.

I bring this up for three reasons. One, Kennedy exemplifies the degree to which family connections can act as distraction and shield, protecting someone from a kind of scrutiny that a person without a storied surname would receive. Two, his announcement of his running mate last week underscored his utterly cavalier attitude about experience. Three, he’s not going away. Recent developments, including that running-mate announcement, are reminders that he really could be a spoiler in this election.

Although Kennedy is officially on the 2024 ballot only in Utah so far, his campaign this week said that he’d collected enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in four additional states — including, God help me, my home state, North Carolina, which President Biden’s re-election campaign has been eyeing with at least a sliver of hope. Kennedy’s naming of a running mate makes him potentially eligible for the ballot in states that require a two-person ticket, and that running mate — the fantastically wealthy tech entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan — promises to be the kind of cash spigot and fund-raiser that’s hugely helpful to signature collection.

Her riches are her credential, though perhaps — I don’t know — she wrote a paper about vice presidents in the fifth grade. Defending her in an interview with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation, Kennedy led with this : “I’m guessing she probably has a higher I.Q. than almost anybody who I’ve seen in public life today.”

I won’t press to see the results of an actual intelligence test, but I will recall Trump’s boast, just before his 2017 inauguration, that “we have by far the highest I.Q. of any cabinet ever assembled.” And I’ll observe that one of the contenders Shanahan beat out to become Kennedy’s running mate was the quarterback Aaron Rodgers, whom Kennedy has proudly identified as a regular confidant and consultant. A man who sees Rodgers as a plausible vice president is a profoundly and dangerously unserious person.

I understand the impulse to open government to people who aren’t mired in conventional thinking, who aren’t bound by party loyalties, who promise truly fresh perspectives, who can inspire us by surprising us. I support it — within reason.

But while a steep learning curve is fine for a House member and perhaps a senator, the White House is no school. Trump demonstrated that by turning it into a kindergarten. And while Kennedy may be educated in some ways, he lacks the crucial lessons in leadership and accountability that we should not just desire but demand in someone seeking the American presidency.

He also lacks so much as a scintilla of humility, a failing that the rest of us could spend the next four years paying for.

For the Love of Sentences

All the righteous attention to the Trump-branded Bible pre-empted rightful attention to a Trump-branded fragrance, Victory 47. But in the Dean’s Report newsletter, Dean Obeidallah defined the scent’s market: “That cologne apparently is for the man who wants to smell like a cross between cheeseburgers and victimhood.” (Thanks to Stephen L. Mathewson of Albuquerque, N.M., for spotting this.)

In The Washington Post, Carolyn Hax turned philosophical : “Every life has some element of frustration, loneliness, rejection, mistreatment, misunderstanding, raw deals, disappointment, disaster and dream-crushing. And after that comes Tuesday.” (Bob Rappaport, Arlington, Va.)

Also in The Post, George F. Will skewered the MAGA darlings Kari Lake and Bernie Moreno, Republican candidates in U.S. Senate races in Arizona and Ohio: “The new breed of anti-conservative Republicans think persuasion, and the patience of politics, is for ‘squishes,’ a favorite epithet of proudly loutish Trumpkins, who, like Lake and Moreno, seem to think the lungs are the location of wisdom.” (Jim Gray, Phoenix) Will also wrote that Lake “has the sheen of Limoges porcelain, and the manners of Al Capone.” (Michael Greason, Toronto, and Amy Helfman, Cambridge, Mass., among others)

And Amy Nicholson reviewed “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” taking a charitable tack: “Part of the film’s charm is that the humans are often flummoxed; they tend to know where the creatures are headed, but rarely why or what they can do to help, a relatable frustration for anyone who has ever dragged their pet to the vet and gotten a diagnosis of stress.” She also endorsed the palette chosen by Adam Wingard, the movie’s director: “Let James Cameron give his ‘Avatar’ organisms biological plausibility. Wingard just wants to tint one monster hot pink, another one gold and another the opalescent shimmer of a 12-year-old’s first bottle of nail polish.” (Melissa France, Flemington, N.J.)

In The Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch honored the six construction workers, all immigrants from Latin America, killed in the Baltimore bridge collapse: “They were doing a backbreaking job at a wretched hour, one many other Americans simply can’t or won’t do — all so their neighbors could drive safely to their warm, comfortable office cubicles in the dawn’s early light.” (Alan Stamm, Birmingham, Mich.)

In The Hartford Courant, Dom Amore celebrated the basketball star Paige Bueckers’s characteristically dazzling play in the final minute and a half of the University of Connecticut’s win over Syracuse University in the women’s college basketball tournament, noting that Bueckers “took over and saved the day in her own way, which is every way imaginable.” (Elayne Cree, Simsbury, Conn.)

In The Athletic, Matthew Futterman probed the rooting section for the tennis player Danielle Collins at the recent Miami Open: “And then there’s Quincy, her poodle mix who came with her for the tournament and has been keeping her on an even keel in a service dog kind of way. ‘Mr. Q.’ she calls him. She’s been sticking ‘Mr. Q.’ in doggy day care during her matches and has some videos of him watching her play. Quincy is apparently very confused by it all, she said. He sees his mom. He sees a ball. He seems not to understand why he is not there and involved.” (Joaquín Viñas, Miami)

In The Times, A.O. Scott mulled the allure of allusions: “If our brains are foundries, they are also warehouses, crammed full of clichés, advertising slogans, movie catchphrases, song lyrics, garbled proverbs and jokes we heard on the playground at recess in third grade. Also great works of literature. There are those who sift through this profusion with the fanatical care of mushroom hunters, collecting only the most palatable and succulent specimens. Others crash through the thickets, words latching onto us like burrs on a sweater. If we tried to remove them, the whole garment — our consciousness, in this unruly metaphor — might come unraveled.” (Saritha Prabhu, Clarksville, Tenn.)

Also in The Times, Jess Bidgood observed that before a recent abortion ruling with potentially huge political consequences, Florida “seemed like it would basically sit this election out, like a retiree with a cocktail watching pickleball from the sidelines.” (Tom Brandt, Minneapolis, and Bettina Hansel, Athens, N.Y., among others)

In The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik pondered our love of spectator sports: “There are passions that have to be private to be felt, and others that have to be communal to be real.” (Rich Moche, Brookline, Mass.)

And in The Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi sketched a pastime of sorts to which I can very much relate: “One of my favorite things to do in my middle age is lie on the sofa eating crisps while Googling low-effort ways to optimize my life.” (Tom Powell, Vestavia Hills, Ala.)

To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.

On a Personal (By Which I Mean Regan) Note

I’m accustomed to “where’s Regan?” emails from faithful newsletter readers when I haven’t given you news about or a picture of her for a month or more. But a few of you recently sent me new variations on that theme, prompted by my mention of my recent two-week trip to New Zealand: Who took care of Regan?

As if I might just dump her at a random boarding facility before flying into the night.

You know me better! Queen Regan stayed in her own home, by which I mean our home. Queen Regan slept in one of her own beds or on the bed where her dog sitter — she had one and then another, both of whom she already knew — also slumbered. She went to her doggy day care three times weekly, per usual. Also, per usual, she occasionally met up with her best dog buddy, Indie, who lives four doors down, for a woodland walk.

Her dog sitters honored her routine because they’re lovely humans and, when it comes to my furry beloved, I’m an anxious and irredeemable control freak.

I’m deeply ashamed to report that I didn’t leave them a short note about Regan care. I didn’t leave them a medium-size note. I left them the “Ulysses” of dog-care Google docs, detailing Regan’s relationship with her treats, cataloging where various supplements and emergency medicines are stored, mapping her sleeping habits, charting her moods. Then, so that they’d never have to dig up these operating instructions, I left printouts in multiple places around the house.

I often scoff at the helicopter parents all around me, then I find ways to hover over my dog even when I’m oceans away. Even when I’m on the opposite side of the Equator.

Love is generous and love is kind and love is all those gooey virtues and verities that are spelled out in swirling fonts on Hallmark cards and sung about in ballads on Easy Listening channels. Love is also meddling and invasive and paranoid, and it leads an otherwise sensible man to worry that the deletion or compression of just a few details in his epic dog-care manual might result in an unconscionable twinge of canine discomfort.

When I returned, Regan hurled herself at me, squealed ecstatically and took a perch on my bed to watch me unpack (or, probably, to make sure I unpacked and would be staying put for a while). That’s what she’s doing in the picture above, and maybe she’d be that happy and grateful to have me back even if I weren’t so attentive to her needs, so obsessive about her welfare.

But I’m not taking any chances.

Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book "The Age of Grievance" and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter .   Instagram   • Threads •  @ FrankBruni • Facebook