There’s a new, lengthy Atlantic article by David Brooks on college teachers and programs that address longstanding questions about the good life and the good society. Against the backdrop of everything going wrong in universities, Brooks writes, these teachers “are a part of what’s going right … the part that critics (like me) don’t write about enough.”

When I read the article, my first thought was, But some of us have been writing about this! In the last few years, even as I assessed the problems with learning in the post-Covid and AI-saturated university, I reported on rigorous, humanistic, even emotionally-moving classes at the University of Dallas and Austin Community College. I showed that the picture of the universally-woke, dogmatic student population was a caricature by visiting college civics classes and reading hundreds of op-eds in student newspapers. I spoke with dozens of students and recent graduates at all sorts of colleges, mostly in Texas and Oklahoma, states whose colleges don’t get much attention from national news outlets.

Brooks mentions Ted Hadzi-Antich Jr., who developed the Great Questions program at Austin Community College and then started a foundation to train community college faculty in the program’s classic-text, discussion-based pedagogy.

If I may speak on my own behalf (this is my newsletter, so, yes, I can), I don’t just know about Ted’s work; I observed his class and wrote about it in the Hedgehog Review last year. I intervieved his students. I sat in on one of his colleagues’ online classes, to see how this approach translates to Zoom.

In one chunk of the article, Brooks highlights a few newish institutes focused on character formation and civic education. Some of these initiatives are, no doubt, defensive moves toward “intellectual diversity” prompted by fear of the Trump Administration and Republican state legislatures. Regardless, the relative newness of these institutes allows Brooks to make the case that “the tide is turning” against a model of education that rejects humanism and moral formation.

But the kind of education Brooks favors never went away.

St. Mary’s University (Texas) professor Jason King’s forthcoming book, The Soul of Catholic Higher Education, will show how Catholic colleges and universities reliably form students’ character in positive ways. (Look for the book early next year.) In an essay on his research last year, Jason wrote, “The [2024 Holistic Impact Report] found that graduates of Catholic colleges report greater meaning in their lives, stronger community engagement, and a deeper commitment to ethical decision making,” compared to graduates of other colleges. Not only that, but graduates of Catholic colleges out-earned other graduates! Jason continues:

Catholic higher education already shows that money and work belong within a larger vision of what a life is for. The Holistic Impact Report makes this unmistakable. Graduates do well financially, but they also become people who find purpose, form communities, and commit themselves to the good of others. That combination is not accidental. It is the soul of Catholic higher education. Catholic college should hold fast to this view, strengthen it when they can. If they do, they will do more than survive. They will remind all of us that work is part of a life, not its purpose, and that an education worthy of the name prepares people to live fully.

This phenomenon is not new. I saw it happen all the time at the small, underalded Catholic college where I taught for eleven years. My former colleagues are still carrying out this mission today, far from the spotlight.

The transformative approach to education is personal, which is to say, it happens between persons. (This is not the same as “personalized,” which means, “algorithmically adapted to promote what we think you’ll buy.”) And so it is under threat from universities’ and students’ embrace of impersonal artificial intelligence.

I have to admit: It’s frustrating to me to have reported (in prominent venues! for several years!) on what’s actually been happening in American college classrooms and for that not to have been noticed by leading observers of higher education.

But my frustration is ultimately misguided. David Brooks is read by many — myself quite obviously included. And even if he is a bit late to see all the people who are committed to an education that changes students’ lives, he is nevertheless now making countless readers much more aware of the possibilities college actually offers. That’s a good thing, in objective terms.

It’s also where my next book, Dear Student: Letters on Life and Learning in College, comes in. The message of the book is that a humanistic, morally- and intellectually-transformative education is widely available in college. Dear Student will invite students to this sort of education, show them its value, and, in the voice of a caring mentor, guide them through how to attain it. It won’t just be a theoretical exercise, either: It will tell the stories of many students I have taught and met who changed their lives for the better and became remarkable people. Some have become genuinely heroic. The book will make clear to new students: If they did this, then you can, too.

If you want to know more about this project, stick with me. If you want to make it more widely known, please share this message.

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I recently delivered the manuscript for my next book, Dear Student: Letters on Life and Learning in College, to its publisher, Princeton University Press. I’m proud of the work I did. And I’m not finished; the manuscript will go out to peer readers who will write reports, then I will write a response and make revisions, the publisher will (I hope) formally accept the manuscript, and then there will be additional rounds of editing, plus design, marketing, publicity, etc. Don’t ask me when it will be published. I don’t know yet. No one does. But if you continue reading these newsletter posts, you will be among the first to know.

A quick note to readers who crave burnout content: I was recently a guest on Vox’s “Explain It to Me” podcast, talking about burnout. The host and producers made me sound so smart! I think they did a nice job turning my rambling thoughts about burnout into a tight intro to what burnout actually is, what it feels like, what its cultural history is, and what we might do about it.

Now that I have written two “trade” manuscripts for academic publishers, I feel like I can, with some authority, share my process for writing a nonfiction book. Step One is to think about something for a long time. Step Two is to publish articles on the topic (and perhaps discover you don’t have a book’s worth of things to say on the topic, which is fine). Now I want to say how to do the actual writing.

I am skipping a step: Writing a book proposal.

Writing a proposal is tedious work that often gets rewarded with months of rejection and, possibly, an offer of a book contract. In writing a proposal, there aren’t even the intrinsic rewards of writing an essay that may never be published, because the proposal has to have a lot of extremely boring elements like chapter summaries, a marketing plan, and comparison titles. None of that is fun to write.

But if you do want to know how to write a nonfiction book proposal, there is no better guide than ch. 3 of Take It From Me: An Agent’s Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch, by Alia Hanna Habib, the best agent in the business. In that chapter, she walks you through the elements of a proposal, showing how several actual successful proposals worked. Invaluable advice.

So, assuming you follow Alia’s advice and the proposal step goes well: Congrats, you have a contract. Now get to work.

1. Write one chapter a week (at first)

Refer to your proposal and note how many chapters you said the book would have. Then spend one week per chapter spewing out everything you currently know about the chapter topic. Don’t go into the archives, don’t do a series of extensive reporting expeditions. Write what you know based on the eight or ten or twenty years you’ve already spent thinking about the topic. I bet you already have a lot of notes you can rely on. Copy and paste into the chapter any relevant sections of the essays you have already published (and make a note that you did so).

I landed on the “one week per chapter” method during the early work on The End of Burnout. I told myself I would read for a month before I wrote anything. After a couple weeks, I realized how stupid this was. I had already been reading on this topic for years! And without writing more, I wouldn’t know what else I actually needed to read. I realized that if my goal was to write a book, I needed to write it.

Resist the temptation to get into your “craft” and try to write great and beautiful sentences. This is not the time for beautiful sentences. It isn’t really even the time for complete sentences. Just get anything down. No one but you is ever going to read this.

You don’t even need to worry quite how much you get down. If you produce 5,000 words that week, great. If you produce five words, that’s equally great. Either way, you have important information that will help you in the next steps.

Remember that a week of work is no more than seven days. (Ideally, you will spend five days, then take two off, but that never happens.) Do not spend eight days. Do not spend fourteen on a single chapter because you’re “on a roll.” You could be on a roll writing absolute garbage. You can’t get that week back. You’re on a deadline. You need to keep moving forward, because you need to finish this draft and get to the fun part (revision) as quickly as possible. (If you do not think revision is fun, then are you sure you’re a writer?)

2. Do something else for a month

Feel free to write; just don’t write another word of your book until a solid month has passed. Try not to even think about your manuscript during this time. For me, this period after writing my garbage draft is very generative. Last fall, on my hiatus from Dear Student, I wrote two essays and gave talks at three universities. I was excited to work on something else while I gained some distance from the main project.1

3. Read the manuscript and plan your second draft

Print out your first draft and read it slowly over a couple weeks. Make assessments. Figure out what chapters aren’t really chapters. Figure out which chapters are actually two chapters. Figure out what topics are missing, where you need more research or reporting. Wince a bit at the dumbest passages, but then consider why they’re so bad and how they can become better.

The goal here is to come up with a plan for the next draft: What will be the new order of chapters, how much time to spend on each one, where you need more info. It might help to write a brief memo to yourself about your plan.

4. Write your second draft

This is the longest stage. (Though in the case of Dear Student, which has fourteen short chapters, stage one was nearly as long.) Here you can do all the things you put off when you wrote your first draft. You can craft elegant sentences. You can go back to your key sources. You can think about the structure of your chapters. This stage will take as much time as you have until your deadline, minus a month or two, because you need time for the last few steps.

The goal is to produce not a perfect draft, but a draft you would not be embarrassed to show someone. If a few sections are a bit incomplete, it’s fine. If you have “REF TK” all over the place, it’s OK. But your sentences should be complete at this point. This is a draft that, were you to die before you got a chance to revise it, a good developmental editor could figure out what you were trying to do and finish the job. (Maybe make friends with such an editor now.)

5. Get feedback

If you are in a position to get a nonfiction book contract, then you already know the value of good feedback. Once you have a non-embarrassing draft, it’s time to get some.

I didn’t get a ton of feedback on The End of Burnout at this stage; no one read the entire thing, for instance. But it was spring 2020, and it seemed like it might be a lot to ask. I got more feedback on the second draft of Dear Student. Several friends read at least one chapter. Some read three or four. Two very dear friends read the whole thing. These generous people were enormously helpful.

Know also: there is such a thing as too much feedback. At some point, you have to trust the people who’ve already read it and especially yourself.

6. Write your third draft

If you got helpful feedback, this probably won’t take too long. At this point, you may be sick of the project anyway. It was around this point I took another week or two away from the book, because I was indeed sick of it and had the opportunity to do something really fun that was unrelated to the project. I came back from that week eager to get back to work.

7. Polish everything (or, write your third-and-a-half draft)

Print out the whole thing again, and read it one more time to make smaller changes. You may find things to cut you hadn’t previously noticed. You can look for your own verbal tics (like mine: overuse of “that” and “huge impact”) and cut them out. Don’t fret too much about grammatical things, deciding whether “dumpster” is a proper noun, etc.; you or a copyeditor can fix them later. But I think it’s good to turn in a reasonably clean manuscript as a point of professional pride.

8. Enjoy yourself

Bask in the feeling of having fulfilled your duty and not having something new hanging over your head. There’s nothing like it, and it doesn’t last.

I am currently writing my third nonfiction book under contract for Princeton University Press. It’s called Dear Student: Letters on Life and Learning in College. More info about it is here. The book occupies most of the attention I use to write. I’m not coming up with exciting new material on any other topic for now. But because I am writing a book, I am at least in a position to say how one might do that. This post is part two of ??? on this topic.

Step two: Write articles

You want to write a nonfiction book. You have embarked on Step One, which is to think about a topic for several years. I believe a good book requires a solid decade of thought — or, if at all possible, two. But here you are, just three to five years into thinking about your topic, Jellyfish Will Save Democracy, say, or perhaps The Future Is Fredericton. And you feel the itch to write a book.

It would make a certain kind of sense to give in to this temptation. After all, you want to write a book, and no one is standing in your way. And surely, the best way to write a book is to write a book. Why not open a document titled “Book” and keep going until you have a hundred thousand words?

Here’s why not: Because you’re almost certainly wasting your time. I mean, sure, writing is an inherently good activity. But — and I speak from experience here — what you write at this point is unlikely to be a publishable book. And having a complete manuscript of a long work of nonfiction does not put you in a stronger position to publish a nonfiction book than you were in before you created the “Book” file.1

So instead of writing a book, write an article: that is, a short, focused argument about jellyfish politics. Publish it. See how that feels. See how it changes your thinking about yout topic. Then write another article. And so on. If there’s a publishable book on this topic, you will find out by the fifth or fiftieth article.

Publishing an article is a whole multistep process in its own right. It begins with pitching an editor at some venue. There is a lot of information out there about how to do this. One good resource is the Op-ed Project. Another is my literary agent Alia Hanna Habib’s new book, Take It from Me: An Agent’s Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch. Chapter One is about publishing articles. It has a ton of advice from her impressive roster of authors, including some of their actual article pitches.

The value in publishing is not the same as the value in writing. In publishing with an outlet over which you do not exercise editorial control, you learn how to adapt your writing to specific audiences. You learn how to be edited (and how to edit your own work). Your writing will improve dramatically. And over time, you will prove that you’re able to write a book.

I wrote around twenty-five articles on work and burnout before I got a contract for The End of Burnout. I started writing about the topic of my current book — undergraduate education — twenty years ago, and since then I’ve published about fifteen articles on it. In the last four or five years, I’ve published more about it, which ultimately led me to realize I could write a book on it.

Publishing articles will earn you feedback. It will put you in the public conversation. It will build your platform (see ch. 2.5 of Alia’s book). It will earn you (a little) money (probably). Also, it feels good to publish an article! People will congratulate you on it! People will share it with their friends, family, and coworkers! You get none of that if you try to write a book first.

And maybe you’ll find out, after a few articles, that you don’t have a book in you on this topic. Maybe you just had a really good article or two on it. That’s fine. It’s important information to have. Now pitch an article about something else you’ve been thinking about. Publish that. See where it leads.

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I am currently writing my third nonfiction book under contract for Princeton University Press. It’s called Dear Student: Letters on Life and Learning in College. More info about it is in this post from September:

My next book: DEAR STUDENT

Jonathan Malesic

·

September 8, 2025

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I don’t know when the book will be published, but if you subscribe to this newsletter, you’ll be among the first to know when that will happen, what the cover will look like, media appearances, etc.

If you’re interested in learning all about building a career in nonfiction writing, I strongly recommend my literary agent Alia Hanna Habib’s new book, Take It From Me: An Agent's Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch. A big part of the value of this book comes from the perspectives she includes from many other agents, authors, editors, publicists, etc. That is, you aren’t just taking it from her! You’re taking it from a big slice of the publishing industry as a whole. In addition, Alia includes pitches and proposal excerpts from successful authors, with her expert explanation of what made their pitches and proposals successful.

Building on Alia’s work, I wanted to take you inside my process for writing Dear Student and my last book, The End of Burnout.1 This post deals with Step One, which occurs long before you even know you want to write a book.

(If you don’t care about how to publish a nonfiction book, that’s certainly fair enough. I hope I can get back to something you do care about before long. Though, again: I’m focused on writing my own book, so you may have to be a little patient.)

I am probably cursing myself by giving this advice before I’m really done with the manuscript. But what hell, let’s live dangerously.

Step one: Think about a topic for a decade or (ideally) two

Sure, people sometimes get a book contract on the basis of a viral article on a topic they started thinking about five minutes ago. But the book will not be good. Exhibit A is the late David Graeber’s book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, which grew out of an essay in an obscure venue that nevertheless became extremely popular on the strength of the coinage, “bullshit jobs.”

The essay was the peak of Graeber’s thinking on the topic, though. The book, obviously thrown together in haste, doesn’t improve on it and has the great disadvantage of being a lot longer and more expensive.

A good nonfiction book requires thought. And thought takes time.

I started thinking about the topic of Dear Student — how learning in college can transform students’ lives — by 2005, when I started teaching full-time, and maybe even as far back as 1997, when I started grad school and read Mark Edmundson’s Harper’s essay, “On the Uses of Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students,” which has haunted my teaching career ever since.

Compared to that, I haven’t been thinking about the topic of The End of Burnout for very long at all. I started thinking about work as a moral and spiritual problem in 2010. First I taught a college course on it. Then I made it a research project. When I had a sabbatical from my teaching job in 2012-13, I was sure I would have a book manuscript done soon after. Haha, no. I wrote a lot of pages. The thinking I did was invaluable. But I was still only getting started.

I didn’t know it at the time, but all that reading and research and seemingly-decent writing was just setting me up to make sense of the experience I would have over the next several years, when I would become profoundly unhappy in my job, quit, and then try to make sense of what happened. That experience forced my thinking in much more interesting directions, but I still needed a good three years after quitting my job to write a decent book proposal about it.

So if you are interesting in writing a nonfiction book, ask yourself: What have I been thinking about for the past decade-plus? If you don’t have an answer, you might not be ready to write a book. That’s OK. Just keep thinking. And I’ll have a suggestion about what to do while you’re thinking in the next post in this series.

Essays don’t always need so much mental gestation, but it helps.

Not long ago, I was stuck in my work on a long essay that was based on an experience I’d had a few years earlier. I had written the essay to try to make sense of the experience and then didn’t touch it for more than a year. When I came back to it to try to get it published, I remained dissatisfied. I knew the story I wanted to tell, but I couldn’t figure out what it was about. (I am being vague on purpose. I don’t know when or even whether the essay will be published.)

At some point I reread an essay, “30 Ideas About Writing Nonfiction,” by Elisa Gabbert. These paragraphs stood out:

9. The best essays are on subjects you’ve been thinking about, or questions you’ve been asking, for years, if not all your life. Your mind has already developed a structure of thinking around these questions: the triggers, the patterns, expansions, reversals. The order of insights. So much work is already done….

10. When I’m writing about something new, either new to the world (a new book, for example) or to me, I often find it helpful to anchor that new thing to something else I’ve had the opportunity to think about for longer. This strengthens and adds complexity to the newer thinking, with older, more deeply rooted thoughts. Like adding wine to sauce.

Reading this unlocked the cage. The story I was telling in the essay was relatively recent, but I realized that the intellectual conflict I was addressing had been occurring in my head for 25 years. I don’t even think I made big changes to the essay after this realization. But I suddenly saw it differently. I could now anchor it to that long-built mental structure.

I think I know what I want to write for the book after Dear Student. But I’ve only been thinking about it since 2019 or so. It’s still early.

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Holiday gift guides often include suggestions for what to buy for people who are “hard to shop for.” It’s really a problem of not knowing what the person wants — possibly because you don’t know them well. Invariably, the product being proposed is something no one would want. Maybe the point is to take revenge on those who don’t voice their preferences.

Dear reader, in all likelihood, I don’t know you. You are interested in my writing, which makes you clearly a person of good taste. But I am not entirely sure what I write that you like, and I worry that whatever that is, I don’t give you enough of it to keep you interested. I confess, I’m still scarred by the single biggest unsubscribe event in the history of this newsletter: right after I wrote that I was getting more interested in art, opera, and French.

This post is both a year-end roundup and a sort of gift guide, meant to match your interests with something I published in the past year. Maybe, if you like one thing I’ve written, you’ll try reading something on another topic. Maybe it will turn out that it’s not the topic that interests you but my general outlook on the things that interest me (including perhaps art, opera, and French, or even the ultimate destiny of this newsletter: thrice-weekly posts — and a podcast! — on art direction in French opera).

I only published five essays in 2025; ordinarily, I’m good for about 12. (I’m not counting what I write for this newsletter.) I spent the first part of the year working on the proposal for a book called Dear Student: Letters on Life and Learning in College (more info here) and the second half of the year writing it. I’ll spend a lot of next year working on it, too.

All of these pieces should be freely available, no subscription required.

If you want to give me a gift, I’d love nothing more than for you to share one or more of these essays with people you think would enjoy them.

For the person who just graded a million exams and is now totally burned out

I wrote an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education called “How to Build a Sustainable Faculty Career.” It’s a bit ironic that I’m dispensing this advice, since I was not able to build a sustainable full-time academic career myself. But my failure was instructive.

I gave a few talks on this topic during the year, too, and I would love to again in 2026. Get in touch if you’d like me to speak to your colleagues. My schedule might not allow for an in-person visit until May, but it won’t hurt to ask.

For someone who complains that colleges are too woke — or not woke enough

The culture war over college is being conducted by people who are not looking at the colleges students actually go to: community colleges and regional public universities. At places like Rose State College in Oklahoma, things look very different than how they look at the colleges that grab the headlines. I know this because I got out of my armchair and visited Rose State. I talked to students and faculty. I sat in on classes, including an organized debate in an intro to American government class. I came away rather more optimistic about American democracy.

The outcome of this reporting was an article for Commonweal, “Where Politics Is Still Possible.”

For the relentless AI booster — or the person who wants to defend humanistic teaching in the age of AI

Like many people who teach, I’m dismayed by AI and don’t know what to do. Sometimes, I wonder what the point is of trying to teach, when students can cheat so easily and without much chance of definitive detection. University administrators aren’t helping; in fact, they’re making things worse

I wrote an essay for The Hedgehog Review called “ChatGPT is a Gimmick” to figure out why old-fashioned learning and teaching are still worth it. The reason: We’re going to die.

The essay was pretty widely read, getting a major boost by Matt Dinan’s viral tweet that the “last paragraph is something like a Hippocratic oath for humanities professors.” In fact, the last paragraph eventually detached from the rest of the essay and started getting posted, without attribution, on teaching forums. I discovered this when a friend and former colleague posted it approvingly on social media; she didn’t know I wrote it!

This essay, too, is based in part on reporting I did at a two-year school — Austin Community College — where great learning is happening.

For anyone who feels like their attention span is so far gone, only divine intervention can save it

Everybody knows we can’t focus. We can’t just sit still and do one thing for even twenty minutes — or twenty seconds — without checking our phones! We need to lock in on the task at hand. And art can fix us, not just because it gives us practice in attention, but because it offers models of attention, like Mary, lovingly focused on her son.

Or maybe an inability to focus isn’t the problem. Maybe attention isn’t what we think it is. Maybe our “distractability” is actually a form of attention in its own right, a great ability that gives us access to goods that we would miss if we were always intently focused on what’s before us. And maybe Mary offers an example of that form of attention, too. Find out in “To See as Mary Sees: Marian Art in an Age of Distraction,” my cover story in the December issue of America magazine. To my surprise, this essay struck a chord with readers.

For the art connsoisseur — or total novice — who wants to see what an idiot thinks about a prominent contemporary painter

I often tell students that their most ebarrassing weaknesses as writers are also their greatest strengths. (See above re: distractability. Or better yet, read the essay on Marian art and attention.) One of my weaknesses is that I like to write about art, even though I don’t know anything about it. As a doofus, though, I don’t come to an exhibition with a lot of assumptions. I have to look at an object for a long time to figure out what I think of it. And I try to focus on how people do or might interact with the artwork. All of this, I believe, helps readers in their efforts to see artworks.

A good example of my art-idiocy is “Skin Deep,” my review essay for Commonweal on a stunning and significant exhibition of work by Jenny Saville, who paints human bodies and faces in ways that provoke yet ultimately defy our impulse to see them as revealing an individual’s character. I think this is a good essay. One reader said it made her reconsider her long-held negative view of contemporary art. This is the highest praise I could hope for.

A final observation

These essays were all published in magazines I have read for decades and written for since at least 2017. My first piece for the Chroncile of Higher Education was published in 2004. I’ve had the same editor this whole time. We’re told that the media landscape is in constant upheaval, that legacy publications don’t matter anymore, that everyone is their own publishing enterprise. And it’s true that even the Chronicle, the Hedgehog, America, and Commonweal have changed quite a bit since I started reading them. (America was a weekly within my memory; Commonweal was until a few years ago biweekly.) But many good magazines have endured. In some ways, they are better than ever.

If you’re looking to give yourself or someone else a last-minute gift, consider a subscription to one of them. The links in the previous paragraph are all to subscription pages. Some of these magazines charge less than many paid Substacks and all offer much more value than a newsletter is capable of. Your subecription is also a great way to support my work and the work of many other writers, not to mention the editors, designers, and other staff we depend on. We thank you.

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