At first, the paper kept getting rejected. “Weirdly, we didn’t get impostor feelings about that,” Clance told me, when I visited her at her home, in Atlanta. “We believed in what we were trying to say.” It was eventually published in 1978, in the journal Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, and Practice. The paper spread like an underground zine. People kept writing to Clance to ask for copies, and she sent out so many that the person working the copy machine in her department asked, “What are you doing with all these?” For decades, Clance and Imes saw their concept steadily gaining traction—in 1985, Clance published a book, “The Impostor Phenomenon,” and also released an official “I.P. scale” for researchers to license for use in their own studies—but it wasn’t until the rise of social media that the idea, by now rebranded as “impostor syndrome,” truly exploded.
Almost fifty years after its formulation, the concept has achieved a level of cultural saturation that Clance and Imes never imagined. Clance maintains a list of studies and articles that have referenced their original idea; it is now more than two hundred pages long. The concept has inspired a micro-industry of self-help books, ranging in tone from #girlboss self-empowered sass (“The Middle Finger Project: Trash Your Imposter Syndrome and Live the Unf*ckwithable Life You Deserve”) to unapologetic earnestness (“Yes! You Are Good Enough: End Imposter Syndrome, Overthinking and Perfectionism and Do What YOU Want”). “The Imposter Syndrome Workbook” invites readers to draw their impostor voice as a creature or a monster of their choosing, to cross-examine their negative self-talk, and to fill a “Self-Love Mason Jar” with written affirmations and accomplishments.
It’s July in northwest Montana. I prop my foot against the side of my car, Henry, so I can lace my hiking boots. My shitty green Toyota Corolla has been the only constant in my life since leaving New Hampshire after college. An hour ago, I finished working the breakfast/lunch shift at a restaurant on the edge of Glacier National Park. There are seven hours of daylight left—it won’t be dark until nearly 10 p.m. There is enough time for a seventeen-mile hike.
I am fastest when I am alone. And I am usually alone.
Maggie Millner’s “Couplets” (out with FSG
the week before Valentine’s Day 2023,
so booksellers and gifters can rest assured
they’ll have it in hand for paramours)
is an astounding debut. Ugh: astound?
A word too easily tossed around,
like “lyric,” “stunning,” “heartbreaking, “gripping” —
but, here, all are true. Millner’s clever couplets strip
Adolescence, that alchemical torment, is a time few of us wish to return to. We remember too well that maturity comes at a cost. And yet, stories of baptisms by fire are common and commonly loved. These coming-of-age tales have the narrative neatness of a hero’s journey — departure, risk, trial, disillusioned growth, humbled return. And who doesn’t savor a bittersweet mouthful of wisdom, hard-earned?
But what of coming of age after coming out? Becoming queer is a passage rarely aligned with the timetables of development. “The second adolescence — like the second first love,” writes poet Maggie Millner, “is a time we have few legends of.” What kind of self-knowledge is wrought from this rarely memorialized transformation? And at what cost?
“Your Driver Is Waiting” is an ambitious project, taking on performative ally-ship, racial discrimination and the class system all at once. It would be challenging for a veteran author to weave together theory and story, moving seamlessly between the two, while maintaining a cast of fully realized characters. Guns’s inaugural endeavor may sacrifice some nuance for message — but it will no doubt resonate with readers, particularly those who see their own struggles in Damani’s.
As near as I can tell, Bruce Schneier has never been photographed in a black hoodie, despite his hacker’s pedigree. And this is fitting: His new book, “A Hacker’s Mind,” intends to broaden the public’s sense of who hackers are and what defines a hack. A fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, Schneier has made a career of explaining cybersecurity to a lay audience. In 2014, after Edward Snowden blew the whistle on N.S.A. surveillance, Schneier briefed six members of Congress on the import of the revelations.
“A Hacker’s Mind” reads like just such a briefing — fused with a manifesto about power and compliance. Hacking, Schneier argues, need not involve computers or even technology; a hack is merely “an activity allowed by the system that subverts the goal or intent of the system.” Any system, from a slot machine to the U.S. tax code, can be hacked. Hairsplitting, workarounds, weaselly little shortcuts: These are all hacks, and if you’ve ever found yourself uttering phrases like “technically legal” or “gray area,” you might be a hacker. The odds increase with your net worth. While “we conventionally think of hacking as something countercultural,” Schneier writes, “it’s more common for the wealthy to hack systems to their own advantage,” occupying “a middle ground between cheating and innovation.” To steal a car by smashing its window and hot-wiring it would be merely criminal; a true hacker would coax the car’s computer into unlocking itself.