in a story of my life that went like this: My life was charmed. That included the difficult parts, the years of addiction, and, as well, the childhood stuff, the kinds of experiences that, if I were differently inclined, I might be compelled to talk about in a room full of strangers at a Gabor Maté event somewhere in Canada. But I wasn’t. I didn’t see my life or myself as broken, as suffused with pain I needed someone else’s help to transcend. Even when in the midst of therapy for getting off the Adderall, the tone, the subtext, was, in a sense, entirely optimistic: I know I would be better off without this bottle of amphetamines.
Perhaps that was why, when I was with Maté, at his many and various events, I often found myself battling an intense urge to flee. It wasn’t only in Vancouver—it had happened to me in Toronto too, where I had gone to attend his two-day-long “compassionate inquiry” workshop and where I had spent the entire first morning Googling flights back to New York. I was obsessing over what to do: Should I abort the compassionate inquiry experience in order to attend a party that night in Manhattan with my boyfriend, Josh? As the other attendees at Maté’s event all eagerly, even desperately, shot their hands out for the mic, hoping to tell of their pain, I couldn’t stop scrolling through Expedia.com. I writhed in indecision until well past lunch, when I officially couldn’t make it home in time no matter what plane I caught. Only then could I finally commit to just being there.
Maté’s central belief that it’s our psychic pain that keeps us scattering ourselves to the winds, our trauma, our childhood shit, was, at that time, intriguing, startling even, but not always personally resonant. I liked this idea of Maté’s without feeling awakened by it, without feeling even the possibility of it liberating me from the old tape of my own distractions, my own distractibility. I kept it at a distance. And then, right in the midst of all my attention research, quite unexpectedly, my own attention was violently captured by the most painful turn of events of my life: my seventy-nine-year-old father falling afoul of the Me Too movement. I watched, helplessly firsthand, as the force of the Internet’s viral attention turned against my own family member.
This was December 2017. I had just come in from looking at apartments: Josh and I were planning to move in together soon after the New Year. I couldn’t remember a happier, more peaceful time. Then I picked up my phone to hear my father, Jonathan Schwartz, say: “I have something to tell you.”
“Tell me,” I said. I was used to dramatic narratives arriving in phone calls from my father, who had made a career as a professional raconteur and DJ on WNYC, the New York affiliate of National Public Radio (NPR). Between songs, he wove detailed stories about Sinatra and Sondheim, George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and other musical legends, many of whom he had known since he was born. His own father, Arthur Schwartz, was a Broadway composer, who had written the score, most famously, to The Band Wagon: songs like “Dancing in the Dark” and “That’s Entertainment!” My father’s childhood, therefore, was steeped in his father’s music, the music of Broadway from the 1920s through the ’50s, the music that comprises the Great American Songbook.
“Two weeks ago,” he began, “I was in the bathroom at the station. A friend of mine was at the urinal next to me. When we were both finished, as I passed him to leave, I sang a little to him—‘All of Me’—and I kind of patted the rhythm of it on his shoulders. Apparently, he repeated the story. A woman from HR called me and told me I was now on probation and if I did one more thing, if there was one complaint against me, I’d be fired immediately.”
In the weeks since the Me Too movement began, NPR had been convulsed by revelations that both the editorial director, Michael Oreskes, as well as John Hockenberry, who hosted the show The Takeaway, had been left in place despite years of complaints against them. Garrison Keillor had also recently been let go—the old-fashioned, avuncular persona at the heart of the long-running show A Prairie Home Companion. Like many, I’d taken those developments on faith, assuming that these three men were all equally guilty, and equally deserving of thorough punishment. I was, after all, a youngish woman who completely identified with the goals of Me Too, who cheered through Ronan Farrow’s epic reporting on Harvey Weinstein in The New Yorker, who could recite a list of my own experiences with predatory, boundary-violating, and sometimes traumatizing men, who was in awe of the women stepping forward into the public eye, forsaking their anonymity, risking their futures, to say what it was that had happened to them. But I was also the daughter of a well-known man who had never been like the other dads, keenly aware of the ways in which his eccentricities—his radical informality, his disdain for bourgeois etiquette, his pleasure in playfulness, in pranks, in disrupting the corporate texture of life—the very traits that had helped to fuel the success of his half-century-long career, could blow up in his face. As my father described the events at the station, I pictured the canvas bags emblazoned with the WNYC logo that left-leaning New Yorkers carry all over the city, proof that they have pledged to support their station, proof that they are a certain kind of person. I felt terror for my father.
“Just tell me, is everything okay now?” I blurted out.
He said yes. He told me the “higher-ups” had convened a meeting that my father had attended. “This has been handled,” one had told him. Her meaning, as my father took it, was: don’t worry, this is behind us now. Someone there had even apologized to my father. But before the other could speak, my father, his voice brimming with hostility, made it clear to her he was outraged that an incident like this one could have galvanized such a significant response.
“Dad, are you kidding me? Do you not understand where we are as a country?” I was even more alarmed now, sitting straight up on my bed.
“You weren’t there, you don’t understand how nasty she was to me.”
“I don’t care how nasty she was—you just lost a chance to make her your ally,” I said. I was nearly shouting by then. “You clearly have no idea how vulnerable you really are as a man in public life right now.”
My father became defensive. “These have been the most harrowing two weeks of my life,” he said, and got off the phone. The next morning, I woke up to this email:
I had already told my brother, out on the West Coast, the story. I had texted him almost as soon as my father told it to me. Of course, we were taking his narrative on faith: we had not been in the bathroom to witness the episode in question. But the story so perfectly encapsulated our father: the childlike playfulness, even, especially, in an off-color location such as the men’s bathroom. The choice of song: my father had been spontaneously bursting into the opening lines of “All of Me” since before we could even remember. All of me, Why not take all of me? Can’t you see, I’m no good without you…These were the lines we’d heard him belt out on any number of Manhattan sidewalks, in restaurants, during car rides, at baseball games, on telephone calls. It was his signature serenade, his way of saying (I’d always felt): don’t forget the music. Yet the story he told me on the phone also contained his darker side: his temper, which, though rare, could flare up disastrously at the most inopportune times. Everything about this story was quintessentially my father.
I read his email, rolled my eyes, and went about my morning. I had just stepped on the treadmill at the gym when my phone rang: my mother. “Can you talk for a second?” Her voice sounded strange. I lowered the speed to walking pace. “An email has gone around to NPR employees that your father’s been suspended.” I hit stop and hung up the phone. Standing in the window, my back turned to all the people sweating on their various machines, I dialed my father’s cell phone. His Sinatra ring tone was already a tragic detail in this unfolding story. “Darling,” he answered. “Dad, is it true? Are you suspended?” “It’s true.” “Dad, what did you do?” I was crying. “What did you do?” “Nothing, darling. Nothing. I am racking my brain. I have no idea what this is about.” He was speaking to me from the black town car that had been waiting for him on Vandam Street, outside WNYC, when he arrived at work that day. A station employee had been positioned in the lobby to intercept him and direct him first up to HR, where he was told that he was suspended, but not why. Then he was sent home, via town car.
The news hit Twitter and text messages from friends began pouring in. I love my friends deeply, but I resented their pity and ignored their messages. The only thing I wanted was their outrage. Did they not understand? He doesn’t know what he’s accused of. My father had been given no specifics about what it was that made his conduct inappropriate, such as what he had done, or who said he had done it. We would, in fact, learn nothing more for the next ten days, a stretch of time during which the reputation he had built as a presence on American radio for fifty years seemed to be entirely undone and replaced with a new one: sexual predator.
I couldn’t help but compulsively check Twitter to clock the speed with which the mysterious allegations of “inappropriate conduct” had already morphed into a sordid verdict in the court of public opinion. I thanked god for small mercies: “Jonathan Schwartz” wasn’t trending. But there were more than enough tweets on the subject of my father’s suspension, and I read them all with a sickening sensation. “I am really relieved I’ll never have to listen to Jonathan Schwartz play the same song over and over again and then ramble about the fucking Red Sox ever again,” wrote one listener. Another: “If you ever been listening to NPR and heard Jonathan Schwartz lick his lips then you know he was capable of sexual harassment.” “Not surprised about Jonathan Schwartz who played horribly offensive and insensitive song Everyone Ought to Have a Maid…” As I scrolled, I saw that the allegations against my father were already, inevitably, being characterized as “sexual misconduct,” though WNYC had not called them that. Within hours, my father’s name had been turned into a hashtag that signified everything odious about the male gender. Twitter had spoken.
all thirty-five years of it, as the daughter of a somewhat well-known New Yorker, disliked by some, beloved by others. Now, in the space of one day, that had been turned inside out. My new reality appeared to be this: I was the daughter of a disgraced almost eighty-year-old, one of the distasteful casualties of this moment in time, a man on the wrong side of history.
That night, I rode the F train home to Brooklyn from my father’s apartment, sending texts back and forth with a friend the whole way as we tried to figure out how to change my online identity. I had never particularly cared before that a simple search of my name led directly to this one-line Google bio: “Jonathan Schwartz’s daughter.” It was absurdly patriarchal, to be sure, when I could have just as accurately been described as, for example, an “American journalist,” granted my own standing in the world by Google’s vaunted algorithms. But now, my Internet tagline wasn’t merely irritating: it had become a potential liability, it seemed to me. Would I see consequences in my own life? I did not fear an overt reaction but rather a subtle shift: a different kind of response when I emailed my editors about stories I wanted to write, a change in the way friends and acquaintances regarded me, a certain kind of untouchability encircling my name, the name I share with my father.
the shock giving way to a deep, unshakeable sadness. I wasn’t able to do my work on attention. Instead, I was forced to pay attention to my father’s catastrophe and how it was playing out, hour to hour, both privately and publicly. For the first time in my life, I felt that I had no control over where or how to direct my thoughts. Instead, I alternated between numbness, fury, and grief. I was terrified of my own sadness and fought against it, sending emails to people I cared about, nibbling an old Ritalin I still kept in my drawer, taking epic walks through freezing Brooklyn. My father, I knew, was sitting in his Midtown apartment, shattered, sending his own plaintive emails to friends, sometimes answering his phone. When we spoke, he was semi-coherent, in a fog of pain and confusion.
Ten days after his suspension, my father went to a law firm in Midtown, where the outside investigator WNYC had hired would ask him a series of questions about his alleged behavior. The meeting began at 2:00 p.m. His lawyer had warned him to expect the conversation to take well over an hour, maybe two. At 2:45, therefore, I was surprised to receive a text from his lawyer: “He did great. He will call you.”
That was a Friday. On the following Thursday, my father was fired. He still didn’t understand why.
It seemed to me that at the core of Me Too was this simple, obvious truth: women’s experiences must be taken seriously, as seriously as men’s. But how can we claim to value the sanctity of a woman’s life, to say nothing of her civil rights, if we appeared willing to disregard those of a man? If we were happy to say, for example, that men should lose their jobs, their names, and their futures without the ability to defend themselves and without, in some cases, including my father’s, full knowledge of the accusations against them?
But, of course, this isn’t about gender—or it shouldn’t be. It’s about seeking justice, regardless of gender. Until I saw it firsthand, I hadn’t understood that for many of these accused, in this moment, due process had been abandoned. I think that was the fact that most broke my heart.
A few months later, WNYC would finalize its offer of a settlement with my father. It came with a nondisclosure agreement he had to sign in exchange for the money. I got back on the phone with my father’s lawyer to understand the implications of this NDA, of what I could and could not say if I did choose to say anything.
As a journalist, my first instinct was to tell my story, the story of what my family had gone through. But for the first time in my career, I was afraid. There seemed to be no room to offer anything like a complicated Me Too narrative without being savaged on social media, and by my very own demographic: young, left-wing, mostly women, who, like me, support the larger goals of Me Too. I didn’t want to be here, but here I was, forced by my father’s experience into a consciousness that divided me from many of my contemporaries.
And it was everywhere. Or that’s how it felt to me. A cascade of men I knew, the husbands and fathers of friends and acquaintances, also had their day in the pages of The New York Times. Every Twitter thread I read, there it was. The anger. The relish in toppling men. An old fling of mine came to town and we met for a drink. He knew what had happened to my father but told me, quite sternly, this was the price of revolution. He seemed miffed I didn’t see it this way, then, anger mounting, told me his mother’s career had been curtailed by harassment in the workplace, as had those of so many women, and that’s what Me Too was all about, righting that wrong. If my father and others like him were collateral damage, that’s how it was and how it should be. I couldn’t help but marvel that it was this man in particular who was explaining Me Too to me, this man who had once wrapped both hands around my upper thigh, to let me know he was measuring, and I wasn’t measuring up.
I turned down two different offers to write about what had happened. I concluded that I wasn’t tough enough, tough like the small band of journalists—nearly all of them women—who had written about the movement with less-than-unconditional support for its methods. They had been blasted on social media with such vitriol that it had shaken me. I surmised that the popular slogan “Believe Women” in fact applied only to certain women, telling certain stories.
I knew that whatever I wrote, I’d be seen as biased, blind, or possibly worse. I also knew that my story could inspire unknown accusers out of the woodwork, someone else who had somewhere along the line been offended by my father and now had a damning new label to apply to him.
For the fact was my father’s case, like every case, was not perfectly black and white. Ultimately, we would hear there were some complaints against him but not of what they comprised or exactly when they were made. We heard a rumor that one involved his complimenting a coworker’s haircut. One coworker stated in a blog post that he’d been “inappropriate” but not the “least bit traumatic.” Another rumor had it that he had made an off-color comment about his boss. I came to believe that WNYC saw him as ill-suited to the new rules of Me Too, un-coachable, a man nearing eighty who couldn’t be made new. My father, on the other hand, according to the NDA he eventually signed, is allowed to say that he wasn’t fired for reasons of sexual misconduct.
when I arrived in Mountain View. Months had passed, Christmas and everything that had come with it receding into the background, somehow. My mind had shifted back to my work, my subject. My attention had returned to attention. At the invitation of a new friend, I had come to Google’s campus. I wanted to see the company that had erected the very infrastructure of our attention economy.
I was surprised by how quiet it was. A long line of buses waited patiently outside one of the squat, unremarkable office buildings dotting the campus. I didn’t know there was a strict prohibition on photography, and I began snapping away at the picturesque multicolored bikes provided for Googlers to traverse their environs. This was what I was doing when the doors opened and workers began streaming out of their various buildings, making their way toward the buses that would transport them home to San Francisco. Many wore thick, noise-canceling headphones and walked alone, glancing at me strangely as I continued to take my photos, but saying nothing.
As my host and I walked across the tidy lawns separating the squat buildings, it occurred to me to bring up another question altogether. “Could we stop by whatever office is in charge of writing the bios?” I’d like to have mine changed, I explained. I was still identified as “Jonathan Schwartz’s daughter.”
“Oh, that would be really difficult,” he told me. “There’s no office for that. It’s more like our algorithms recognize that as the primary fact about you. It’s all based on page views.”
“So, if I were to write about my father, I would actually make that association much worse?” I asked him.
“Pretty much,” he said, shrugging sympathetically.
The way I saw things by then had grown a little more detached. I had come to feel that I had witnessed an Internet-specific phenomenon, a case study from the pages of Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. My father, like many other men, had been declared guilty by strangers on the Internet before they knew of what he was accused. The Twitter conversation had spread instantly, in the absence of facts, fueled by an enormous amount of collective emotion, of righteousness, of denouncement, of rage.
There were scientists studying exactly this phenomenon: how moral outrage spreads online. I called one of them, Molly Crockett, a slightly reserved, extremely accomplished thirty-five-year-old with her own lab at Yale. Crockett, a neuroscientist, studies morality and moral transformation. I wanted to talk to her about attention, I said, about the specific ways that Internet platforms seize and keep our attention.
“One of the things that reliably captures our attention is anything having to do with morality,” she said. “Separating who’s a good guy from who’s a bad guy is probably the most important thing our brains do, because being able to figure out who our friends and enemies are is pretty much one of the most important things for our survival. So it makes sense that our brains would have evolved to devote a lot of resources to solving that problem.
“Moral content, especially moral content that triggers emotion, which is a sign of importance—that’s going to grab our attention. If you build a technological system that selects content on its ability to grab our attention, you’re going to disproportionately be showing people content that pushes their moral buttons.
“One potential unintended consequence of all of this is that we are constantly bombarded with outrage-triggering content—and it could reduce our ability to separate signal from noise, and ultimately break down our ability to sort out which problems really need our attention, and which are superficial button pressing.”
She added, somewhat offhandedly, that Me Too had made her for the first time believe that something good could come from the wildfire spread of digital outrage. At this, I said nothing. I didn’t tell her that I don’t see it in precisely those terms. I didn’t tell her I was asking as much as a daughter as a reporter. Infinitely easier to be the reporter, get the quote, hang up the phone.