Every now and then I get asked to explain how I ended up with the career I have, and it’s been happening a lot lately, so I thought I’d write it up. (The more general and frequent inquiries come from students, and the more specific ones from other

Alternative titles: PERLs Gone Wild, Bots Behaving Badly, Rage Incensed the Machine I wrote a column for The New York Times about agentic AI and a bot that wrote a hit piece about an engineer who rejected his code. The text is below, with some annotations I'm adding

One of my ongoing frustrations of our culture's veneration of capitalistic success is that it causes people to ascribe positive qualities to rich people that they may or may not have--intelligence and competence, in particular. I wrote about evidence of this in the Epstein files for The Nation,

I've added some new dates for opinion writing, personal essay, and creative/writing practice workshops. The schedule is below, and I hope to see you in one of them! WINTER/SPRING 2026 WORKSHOP SCHEDULE AND REGISTRATION OPINION WRITING Opinion Writing | Tuesday, February 10, 2026 | 3:00 pm -

Doing it for JournalismTM Some brave journalists go to war zones and get shot at. I went to the Melania "documentary" for The Nation. Here's the column: Melania at the Multiplex Packaging a $75 million bribe from Jeff Bezos as a vapid, content-challenged biopic. by Elizabeth

This is not about "Spheres of Influence" Pundits and talking heads who insinuate that what Trump just did in Venezuela (or what he wants to do in Greenland or Nicaragua or Cuba) is part of some larger coherent foreign policy strategy as if he and his toadies are

Why Must She Stoop So Low? [Ed. note: Almost went with "why does your network blow?" but no one under the age of 40 uses "blow" in that sense anymore.] Happy New Year! We have somehow made it to 2026 without being annihilated in a nuclear

A lump of coal from President Scrooge [The NYT assigned me a column about Christmas and affordability in the Trump economy but also assigned approximately four million other columns for the holidays and so mine didn't make it in. But here it is, 🚨EXCLUSIVELY🚨 on ElizabethSpiers.com, lol.

I might as well, right? I taught my second creative practice workshop yesterday and think it went really well. I recommended a lot of the tools and strategies that I use myself, including a lot of physical objects that would make good gifts. So at the risk of cliché, here’