Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The New York Times. She has worked for the Times for the past forty years. For 18 of those years (from 1995 to 2013), she was based in London. I met Sarah exactly once, in 1980. In the late 1980s or early 1990s, I noticed her byline in the Times. I’ve been a regular Times reader throughout my adult life, and she has served as my one vague, tenuous connection to that venerable institution. Over the years, whenever I see an article of hers, there is a little internal smile of recognition. I knew her.

My podcast references “philosophy” simply because New Books in Philosophy prohibited me from interviewing philosophers. They said I needed to have a PhD in philosophy to be able to join their ranks. I angrily told them that Socrates was rolling over in his grave and that the word “philosophy” was too general for them to claim as their own. Once they started taking advertisements, I decided to leave and start my own podcast. I named it PhilosophyPodcasts.Org to preempt any more philosophical rejections.

But really I just wanted to interview people I was interested in talking to. My interests are not limited to academic philosophy. Sometimes, I ask a non-philosopher if I can interview them, and they say, “Well, can you explain to me how my book fits in with your podcast? I’m not really a philosopher.”

I used to be involved in hiring people for a consulting firm. People would come through who were smart, personable, and motivated. But that wasn’t enough. My colleagues also wanted to be sure that our firm “fit” in their resume. They would be great to work with, but … does their resume remain continuous if one put our firm in as the next stop. I always thought that was ridiculous. Let people reinvent themselves! But to no avail.

My friend Ruth (Nisse) says non-philosophers turn me down because they’re afraid I’m going to ask them about Hegel.

I saw Sarah on Instagram and mentioned that I met her once forty years ago. Then I asked her if I could interview her about her career. I give her credit for saying, “Sure!” But … then we tried a couple of times to schedule it, and the stars were misaligned. Nothing came of it. But I spent a bit of time preparing for it, so I figured I would post this page, my notes. We could call this, “what I find interesting about Sarah” or

What’s so interesting about Sarah Lyall?

(10/6/2026)

My outline had two sections corresponding to two striking facts about Lyall (1) she lived for twenty years in the U.K. and (2) she has spent forty years at one institution, one institution that is a microcosm for everything that has happened to the U.S. over those forty years.

Part I: U.S. versus U.K.

She went to the U.K., newly married to a Brit, in 1995. Little did she know what the future held: personally (for herself), politically (for the U.K.) or royally (also for the U.K.)

I thought it would be clever to cover personal, political and royal, in turn, by considering her three books. (Yes. Sarah not only has been writing for the Times. She also wrote three books.)

First book: My year off: Recovering from Life after a Stroke. 1998.

No. Sarah did not have a stroke. But her husband did. And no: you won’t find Sarah’s name as author or even co-author of this book. The author is listed as “Robert McCrum.” Mr. McCrum was the Brit who Sarah married.

What can we say about this book? Well, I found the implied narrator to be insufferable. Name dropping, and seemingly unable to talk about any subject without approaching it from some famous author. That means Marcus Aurelius, or Coleridge, or whoever. (That habit particularly irked me because it reminded me of myself. This is why we hate people: they remind us of the parts of ourselves we abhor.)

However, although Sarah isn’t given credit in the title, she should have been. Eventually I stopped reading McCrum’s contributions, but sprinkled throughout are Sarah’s diary entries, including some of her dreams. These parts made the book worth buying. Here, for example, is Sarah describing one of her dreams from the days soon after the McStroke.

I dream that I was with someone who fell down a hole and no one knew. I just left him there, to die, and felt that I had murdered him. I think I then murdered someone else - there was a horrible scene where I set up a whole party for this person - food and drink and everything - and I pretended to wait for him to come when I knew he never would. And then there was a scene of carnage, where another woman went crazy and shot a lot of people and my own crimes were overlooked in the confusion. I let everyone think that it was she who had killed the people I had killed. Then someone came with me (someone who believed the story that I was innocent) back to the place where I had been living and helped me remove my things.

Sherwin B. Nuland

Nuland was a surgeon and public intellectual. He was chosen to review the book and said it perfectly:

Author McCrum keeps his deepest emotion to himself, except to let us sense that it is there for him to know but not really for us to understand. Ms. Lyall, on the other hand, lets us into her mind. The brief passages from her diary light up this book with a humanity.

Psychotherapy as a theme

As Nuland said, there seems to be a lot going on in Mr. McCrum’s psyche. Yet he seems oblivious to it. Without reflecting on the meaning, for example, he reports that he had the stroke after having dinner with a woman, where they drank champagne, this dinner coming while his new wife has just left the country for a work trip.

McCrum dedicates the book to Sarah. He remarks often how good she is: self-sacrificing and saintly. Sarah “is very organized and reads children’s books to me.” Simultaneously, he also tells us how he finds the nurses “amusing, sexy, caring.” As though planting seeds for potential future affairs, he appears to even name them. (Or are these pseudonyms). “I missed my favorite nurse Julia Baretta intensely when she went on holiday. … "‘Julia is back today thank God.” A student nurse is his “guardian angel,” “with [her] beautiful corn-coloured hair, [her] lovely smile … and the most gentle manner of any nurse.” “I never saw Wicce (Wicker) St. Clair Hawkins again, but …”

I applaud the honesty here. I no doubt would have had the exact same feelings both about my wife (Caroline) and the nurses. But what is surprising is that Mr. McCrum just lays out these honest and (to Sarah, no doubt) hurtful statements. He offers no reflection on them. There is no olive branch to Sarah apologizing for them.

Symptom: Mr. McCrum was not “in touch with his feelings or Sarah’s feelings.”

Prescription: psychotherapy.

And this is what Sarah asks of him. He is, however, adamantly opposed. (And again, he just lays this opposition out there, without really reflecting on it emotionally). He snidely remarks that “[Sarah] announces that her new shrink has told her to tune into her inner being.” His intenest and he discussed the possibility of psychotherapy. I mentioned my friendship with Adam Phillips once more but said that I was against seeing a shrink: I couldn’t imagine what we would talk about.”

Right. Exactly. What would they talk about? Finally, he summarily concludes:

I think Sarah found my reluctance to admit a need for psychoanalytic help extraordinarily incomprehensible, but such help is not part of my culture and I took the view that there were enough people fussing over my needs already.

2nd book: The Anglo-Files. 1st edition 2008, 2nd 2019

• Politically, Sarah arrived in the U.K. just ahead of a major change in U.K. politics, viz., all the socio-political changes associated with the ascendancy of the Tony Blair administration. This book focuses on these changes, and does so in thoughtful, brilliant Sarah-Lyall ways.

• But the thing is that Sarah is also a funny writer. She is rightly known for her brilliant humor. I think there seems to be a prejudice that, since Sarah makes you LOL, she must not be a “serious” thinker. And somehow, Sarah lets her marketing people fall into this prejudice. The subtitle itself suggests not to take the book seriously: A Field Guide to the British. Malcolm Gladwell endorses the book as “An exquisite, hilarious, devastating dissection.”

• Gladwell obviously didn’t read the book. It’s actually a brilliantly thoughtful cross-cultural comparison. An American can read this book to find out about themselves, about what it is to be American. Here is just one example: Lyall considers the different heroes that she grew up with and the heroes her husband grew up with. Yes she does this charmingly, but it is also deeply insightful.

Lincoln

“One of the positive things about Lincoln, in addition to his leading the country through the Civil War and liberating the slaves, is that he did not carelessly freeze to death because of poor planning, poor luck, and a failure to pack the right gear.”

3rd book, an audio book: UnRoyal.

• This is a brilliant audiobook. It’s also brilliantly produced. Sarah does a great job reading it. Again the marketing is way off. The marketing claims it will “serve both neophytes and obsessives a delectable royal feast.” As though Sarah’s book dishes up gossipy royal news.

• Bullshit. This does the opposite. I never took an interest in the Royal Family. Lyall humanizes them. Gossip reduces. Lyall fills out these (I now see) fascinating people. For example “As for Harry, … no one can dispute that he was genuinely traumatized by his mother’s death and his father’s remarriage to the woman who wrecked his parents’ marriage. No one can dispute that he’s spooked and enraged whenever he’s surrounded by reporters with flashing cameras and that he truly fears that what happened to his mother might happen to his wife.”

• She also includes a brilliant analysis of the U.K. versus U.S. reaction to Oprah’s interview with Harry and Meghan. The Brit view of American psychotherapy arises again. And she is particularly insightful about race. (Which we will return to below).

Schadenfreude and the news.

• Talese says newspaper men are only interested in “bankers banished to Rio and burning Buddhist nuns.” I was going to use this third book to talk about this.

• Honestly, before reading this book, I vaguely knew there was something about a divorced American woman and … [could it really be this?] a King who abdicated for her? Well, it turns out that is correct, and Lyall brings it alive brilliantly. Then there is the ultimate newspaper moment. In 1969, some interviewer actually had the gall to ask Wallis and Edward:

“Any regrets?”

Part II: Forty years at the NYT

I wasn’t sure what I would ask her about here. I was going to play it by ear. but possibilities were:

1. the Times is a fortress today, and it was a fortress forty years ago. But in between, it went through some times where it as hanging by a thread. It wasn’t clear in advance that it would make the transition from advertising-primary to subscription-primary.

2. Forty years ago the Times was a place where there was an emphasis on getting all views represented. Today that is increasingly difficult. Regardless of what you think of the Tom Cotton op-ed, the underlying economics has the Times getting paid by people who want the Times to serve an activist role. Negenborn makes this very clear.

3. What does she think about the view expressed e.g., by Bari Weiss: “The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes [and] the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country.” Her resignation letter to Sulzberger spoke of “bullying by colleagues” and an “illiberal environment.”

I am about to kill my mother

There was one particular article she wrote which is brilliant and I wanted to talk to her about. It was an article beginning with that sentence “I am about to kill my mother.” At one time, I thought we should spend the whole podcast talking about this one article. I don’t have the standing to comment on it without her. I had some ideas I was going to float. But here are the key quotes, if you want the gist:

The inevitable became less abstract and the jokes stopped. Mom had vivid dreams of death so awful that she could not bring herself to describe them.

A story passed down as gospel in [Sarah’s] family how her father helped his mother die. “So he gave her a big dose of morphine to stop the pain,” my mother has always told my brother and me, as if reaching the end of a fairy tale. “That made her heart stop, and she died.”

“Oh, Sarah,” she says. “I’m in so much pain.” Panicked, what dosage to give

One thing you can do, I tell her, is to stop eating and drinking.

The next day she wakes up. “You swore this wouldn’t happen, Sarah,” she says, her voice vibrating with fury. “I’m so sorry, Mama,” I say, crying as I drip more narcotics into her mouth with a syringe.they