Why Are You Telling This Story?

On the intersections of art, justice, and personal responsibility

By Jeannine Ouellette

Pamela Paul’s recent New York Times column, “The Limits of Lived Experience,” argues that writing about people whose lives differ from ours involves empathy and imagination, and is therefore good, while “policing” what others should or shouldn’t write is bad. Paul writes,

What troubles me most about the increasingly dogmatic emphasis on ‘lived experience’ is that it feels like yet another way of ...