Kathryn Schulz
American journalist and author; staff writer at The New Yorker; won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for an article on earthquake and tsunami risk in the Pacific Northwest, and the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir or Biography.
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗
Kathryn Schulz did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
The line under a date shows how recently it was said: empty within a month, full after three years.
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Their wordsThis vision cannot survive any serious reading of “Walden.”
↗Pond Scum (The New Yorker, published online as “The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau”)newyorker.com 1st of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsBut “Walden” is less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.
↗Pond Scum (The New Yorker, published online as “The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau”)newyorker.com 2nd of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsOnly those with no sense of balance must live in so much fear of the slippery slope.
↗Pond Scum (The New Yorker, published online as “The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau”)newyorker.com 3rd of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsPeople routinely perpetrate wrongs out of obedience to their conscience, even in situations when the law mandates better behavior. (Consider the Kentucky county clerk currently refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples.) Like public institutions, private moral compasses can err, and different ones frequently point in different directions.
↗Pond Scum (The New Yorker, published online as “The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau”)newyorker.com 4th of 7 in this piece
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Our reading
Democracy exists to settle conflicting claims of conscience by means other than decree or force
Their wordsIt is the point of democracy to adjudicate among such conflicting claims through some means other than fiat or force, but Thoreau was not interested in that process.
↗Pond Scum (The New Yorker, published online as “The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau”)newyorker.com 5th of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsAnd that is the second problem with basing one’s beliefs on personal intuition and direct revelation: it justifies the substitution of anecdote and authority for evidence and reason.
↗Pond Scum (The New Yorker, published online as “The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau”)newyorker.com 6th of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsTo reject all certainties but one’s own is the behavior of a zealot; to issue contradictory decrees based on private whim is that of a despot.
↗Pond Scum (The New Yorker, published online as “The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau”)newyorker.com 7th of 7 in this piece
The line under a date fills as the words age, a quarter at a time: past a month, six months, a year, and three years. Empty means said within the last month; full, more than three years ago. It says when, not whether it still holds — a change of mind is marked on the claim itself.
Dashed means we only know the words existed by that date; they may be older.