It used to be that if you wanted to give your ideas the best chance of living on after you, you would write them down and publish them in a book. Today, you might have good reason to believe that your ideas will last longer if you speak them into a video recording and publish them on YouTube. This revolutionary change in human communication was in large part made possible by Susan Wojcicki, the Google executive who guided the tech giant during its video platform’s period of remarkable growth. Without Wojcicki, who died on Aug. 9 of lung cancer at the age of 56, we may not have YouTube today as we currently know it and enjoy it. At the same time, during her tenure as YouTube’s CEO, Wojcicki was behind some of the platform’s troubling forays into censorship and content suppression that have been so disconcerting to many of us who are concerned about the state of freedom of speech in America. 

Wojcicki, who was born on July 5, 1968, in Santa Clara, California, grew up in an academic family — her father was a particle physics professor at Stanford — and continued in that direction at Harvard. But after taking a temporary job at a startup tech company during one school break, she developed an interest in computers and tech, fields that were burgeoning by the time she received her B.A. in the early ’90s and that would be positively booming by the time she began to devote herself completely to the field in the late ’90s. In between that time, she continued her education at U.C. Santa Clara, where she received an M.S. in economics in 1993, and at UCLA, where she earned an M.B.A. in 1998. Convinced that tech was the future, not only for the world at large but also for herself, she took a job at Intel, one of the darlings of the mid-to-late ’90s tech world. But with the position being a rather low-paying one, and while being several months pregnant and knowing that she would need to look for ways to supplement her income to support her soon-to-be-born child, Wojcicki decided to rent out some rooms in her house. The tenants who signed on to rent her Menlo Park, California, garage were two young tech entrepreneurs named Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Page and Brin had recently founded a new tech company called Google. (You may have heard of it.) But their tech startup, which was then only a search engine, had yet to turn a profit. They were looking for cheap office space in which they could try to continue to develop their small little internet company into something that they might one day actually be able to make a living off of. They found this much-needed cheap office space in Wojcicki’s garage — and, even more importantly, found Wojcicki. After she caught wind of what these two tech nerds were up to in her garage, and after Brin and Page found out about Wojcicki’s expertise in business and marketing, it wouldn’t take long for chocolate to get together with peanut butter to form something new and rather fantastic. Wojcicki left her secure job at Intel to work with Brin and Page on their precarious startup, a decision that appeared to be reckless and senseless in 1998 but now looks to be not too different from a bassist quitting the London Symphony Orchestra in 1957 to start playing music in a Liverpool garage with a fledgling band that was calling itself the Beatles.   

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Within a few years, Wojcicki helped Brin and Page begin making those elusive first profits after she assisted in Google’s development of its first internet search-related advertising products — first AdSense and then AdWords. She also had a hand in the company’s creation of its now-iconic logo, as well as its introduction of image-search capabilities. It wasn’t until 2006, though, that she would truly transform the company and, with it, much of our current media and cultural landscape. She advised Brin and Page to acquire YouTube, a then-small internet video startup that was popular with college-age adults at the time like myself who used it mostly to watch random Family Guy clips but was otherwise not well known to most non-millennials. People laughed at the $1.6 billion that Google paid for a 1-year-old internet video platform, but with the over $30 billion in annual revenue that YouTube now generates for Google, I don’t think anyone’s laughing now — especially the folks at the Justice Department, who have reportedly begun looking into ways to break up the now-gargantuan tech behemoth.  

During her tenure as YouTube’s CEO, Wojcicki presided over the platform’s rise into one of the most-visited sites on the internet. Wojcicki, however, also introduced unsettling content suppression practices into the platform, particularly after 2020, buckling to governmental and commercial pressures to limit the reach of videos that were purportedly spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19 and “vaccine hesitancy” about the Pfizer and Moderna inoculations. Demonetization, shadowbanning, algorithm manipulation, and other attacks on creators’ freedoms of expression, including outright censorship and de-platforming, were also implemented, and continue to be used, to suppress other videos that Wojcicki and her content moderators deemed to be overly controversial. YouTube may have taken humanity one giant leap forward in our video-sharing capabilities, but in the past few years, it has also taken us a sizable step back regarding our First Amendment rights.      

Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America.

2024-08-16 07:13:00, http://s.wordpress.com/mshots/v1/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonexaminer.com%2Fmagazine-obituary%2F3122308%2Fsusan-wojcicki-1968-2024%2F?w=600&h=450, It used to be that if you wanted to give your ideas the best chance of living on after you, you would write them down and publish them in a book. Today, you might have good reason to believe that your ideas will last longer if you speak them into a video recording and publish,

It used to be that if you wanted to give your ideas the best chance of living on after you, you would write them down and publish them in a book. Today, you might have good reason to believe that your ideas will last longer if you speak them into a video recording and publish them on YouTube. This revolutionary change in human communication was in large part made possible by Susan Wojcicki, the Google executive who guided the tech giant during its video platform’s period of remarkable growth. Without Wojcicki, who died on Aug. 9 of lung cancer at the age of 56, we may not have YouTube today as we currently know it and enjoy it. At the same time, during her tenure as YouTube’s CEO, Wojcicki was behind some of the platform’s troubling forays into censorship and content suppression that have been so disconcerting to many of us who are concerned about the state of freedom of speech in America. 

Wojcicki, who was born on July 5, 1968, in Santa Clara, California, grew up in an academic family — her father was a particle physics professor at Stanford — and continued in that direction at Harvard. But after taking a temporary job at a startup tech company during one school break, she developed an interest in computers and tech, fields that were burgeoning by the time she received her B.A. in the early ’90s and that would be positively booming by the time she began to devote herself completely to the field in the late ’90s. In between that time, she continued her education at U.C. Santa Clara, where she received an M.S. in economics in 1993, and at UCLA, where she earned an M.B.A. in 1998. Convinced that tech was the future, not only for the world at large but also for herself, she took a job at Intel, one of the darlings of the mid-to-late ’90s tech world. But with the position being a rather low-paying one, and while being several months pregnant and knowing that she would need to look for ways to supplement her income to support her soon-to-be-born child, Wojcicki decided to rent out some rooms in her house. The tenants who signed on to rent her Menlo Park, California, garage were two young tech entrepreneurs named Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Page and Brin had recently founded a new tech company called Google. (You may have heard of it.) But their tech startup, which was then only a search engine, had yet to turn a profit. They were looking for cheap office space in which they could try to continue to develop their small little internet company into something that they might one day actually be able to make a living off of. They found this much-needed cheap office space in Wojcicki’s garage — and, even more importantly, found Wojcicki. After she caught wind of what these two tech nerds were up to in her garage, and after Brin and Page found out about Wojcicki’s expertise in business and marketing, it wouldn’t take long for chocolate to get together with peanut butter to form something new and rather fantastic. Wojcicki left her secure job at Intel to work with Brin and Page on their precarious startup, a decision that appeared to be reckless and senseless in 1998 but now looks to be not too different from a bassist quitting the London Symphony Orchestra in 1957 to start playing music in a Liverpool garage with a fledgling band that was calling itself the Beatles.   

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Within a few years, Wojcicki helped Brin and Page begin making those elusive first profits after she assisted in Google’s development of its first internet search-related advertising products — first AdSense and then AdWords. She also had a hand in the company’s creation of its now-iconic logo, as well as its introduction of image-search capabilities. It wasn’t until 2006, though, that she would truly transform the company and, with it, much of our current media and cultural landscape. She advised Brin and Page to acquire YouTube, a then-small internet video startup that was popular with college-age adults at the time like myself who used it mostly to watch random Family Guy clips but was otherwise not well known to most non-millennials. People laughed at the $1.6 billion that Google paid for a 1-year-old internet video platform, but with the over $30 billion in annual revenue that YouTube now generates for Google, I don’t think anyone’s laughing now — especially the folks at the Justice Department, who have reportedly begun looking into ways to break up the now-gargantuan tech behemoth.  

During her tenure as YouTube’s CEO, Wojcicki presided over the platform’s rise into one of the most-visited sites on the internet. Wojcicki, however, also introduced unsettling content suppression practices into the platform, particularly after 2020, buckling to governmental and commercial pressures to limit the reach of videos that were purportedly spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19 and “vaccine hesitancy” about the Pfizer and Moderna inoculations. Demonetization, shadowbanning, algorithm manipulation, and other attacks on creators’ freedoms of expression, including outright censorship and de-platforming, were also implemented, and continue to be used, to suppress other videos that Wojcicki and her content moderators deemed to be overly controversial. YouTube may have taken humanity one giant leap forward in our video-sharing capabilities, but in the past few years, it has also taken us a sizable step back regarding our First Amendment rights.      

Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America.

, It used to be that if you wanted to give your ideas the best chance of living on after you, you would write them down and publish them in a book. Today, you might have good reason to believe that your ideas will last longer if you speak them into a video recording and publish them on YouTube. This revolutionary change in human communication was in large part made possible by Susan Wojcicki, the Google executive who guided the tech giant during its video platform’s period of remarkable growth. Without Wojcicki, who died on Aug. 9 of lung cancer at the age of 56, we may not have YouTube today as we currently know it and enjoy it. At the same time, during her tenure as YouTube’s CEO, Wojcicki was behind some of the platform’s troubling forays into censorship and content suppression that have been so disconcerting to many of us who are concerned about the state of freedom of speech in America.  Wojcicki, who was born on July 5, 1968, in Santa Clara, California, grew up in an academic family — her father was a particle physics professor at Stanford — and continued in that direction at Harvard. But after taking a temporary job at a startup tech company during one school break, she developed an interest in computers and tech, fields that were burgeoning by the time she received her B.A. in the early ’90s and that would be positively booming by the time she began to devote herself completely to the field in the late ’90s. In between that time, she continued her education at U.C. Santa Clara, where she received an M.S. in economics in 1993, and at UCLA, where she earned an M.B.A. in 1998. Convinced that tech was the future, not only for the world at large but also for herself, she took a job at Intel, one of the darlings of the mid-to-late ’90s tech world. But with the position being a rather low-paying one, and while being several months pregnant and knowing that she would need to look for ways to supplement her income to support her soon-to-be-born child, Wojcicki decided to rent out some rooms in her house. The tenants who signed on to rent her Menlo Park, California, garage were two young tech entrepreneurs named Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon) Page and Brin had recently founded a new tech company called Google. (You may have heard of it.) But their tech startup, which was then only a search engine, had yet to turn a profit. They were looking for cheap office space in which they could try to continue to develop their small little internet company into something that they might one day actually be able to make a living off of. They found this much-needed cheap office space in Wojcicki’s garage — and, even more importantly, found Wojcicki. After she caught wind of what these two tech nerds were up to in her garage, and after Brin and Page found out about Wojcicki’s expertise in business and marketing, it wouldn’t take long for chocolate to get together with peanut butter to form something new and rather fantastic. Wojcicki left her secure job at Intel to work with Brin and Page on their precarious startup, a decision that appeared to be reckless and senseless in 1998 but now looks to be not too different from a bassist quitting the London Symphony Orchestra in 1957 to start playing music in a Liverpool garage with a fledgling band that was calling itself the Beatles.    CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER Within a few years, Wojcicki helped Brin and Page begin making those elusive first profits after she assisted in Google’s development of its first internet search-related advertising products — first AdSense and then AdWords. She also had a hand in the company’s creation of its now-iconic logo, as well as its introduction of image-search capabilities. It wasn’t until 2006, though, that she would truly transform the company and, with it, much of our current media and cultural landscape. She advised Brin and Page to acquire YouTube, a then-small internet video startup that was popular with college-age adults at the time like myself who used it mostly to watch random Family Guy clips but was otherwise not well known to most non-millennials. People laughed at the $1.6 billion that Google paid for a 1-year-old internet video platform, but with the over $30 billion in annual revenue that YouTube now generates for Google, I don’t think anyone’s laughing now — especially the folks at the Justice Department, who have reportedly begun looking into ways to break up the now-gargantuan tech behemoth.   During her tenure as YouTube’s CEO, Wojcicki presided over the platform’s rise into one of the most-visited sites on the internet. Wojcicki, however, also introduced unsettling content suppression practices into the platform, particularly after 2020, buckling to governmental and commercial pressures to limit the reach of videos that were purportedly spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19 and “vaccine hesitancy” about the Pfizer and Moderna inoculations. Demonetization, shadowbanning, algorithm manipulation, and other attacks on creators’ freedoms of expression, including outright censorship and de-platforming, were also implemented, and continue to be used, to suppress other videos that Wojcicki and her content moderators deemed to be overly controversial. YouTube may have taken humanity one giant leap forward in our video-sharing capabilities, but in the past few years, it has also taken us a sizable step back regarding our First Amendment rights.       Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America., , , https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Susan-Wojcicki_Obit_YouTube_8821.webp, Washington Examiner, Political News and Conservative Analysis About Congress, the President, and the Federal Government, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/cropped-favicon-32×32.png, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/feed/, Daniel Ross Goodman,

When the Harry Potter series was becoming popular in the early 2000s, an impassioned debate arose among parents and teachers as to whether it was good that so many children were spending so much time reading such fantastical stories. Some thought that becoming hooked at a young age on this kind of easily digestible fare would make it hard for them to develop tastes in more edifying literature in high school and college. Others, though, argued that it was good they were reading anything — and that once they were reading something, they could later grow into the kinds of readers who would explore all kinds of books and subjects. 

J. K. Rowling wasn’t the first phenomenally successful young adult fiction writer to spark anxious debates about children’s reading habits. Before Harry Potter, and even before Goosebumps, there was Sweet Valley High, a hugely popular series that transformed, and, in some ways, created, the young adult book market and that left a lasting imprint on a generation of girls across the country. The creator of the series, Francine Pascal, died on July 28 in New York at 92. 

Born in Manhattan as Francine Paula Rubin on May 13, 1932, and raised in Jamaica, Queens, Francine enjoyed comic books, fairy tales, and movies as a child. Creating stories of her own, in retrospect, appears to have been a natural result of her imaginative childhood interests — though she came to the career of young adult novelist through a kind of writerly backdoor. Her first writing jobs consisted mainly of freelance work for gossip magazines, but she was soon thereafter able to place pieces in more established outlets such as Cosmopolitan and Ladies’ Home Journal. Shortly after marrying the journalist John Pascal in 1964, Francine and her husband both landed jobs as writers for the daytime ABC soap opera The Young Marrieds. When the show’s producers demanded that they move to Los Angeles, rather than relocate to California, they quit the show and embarked on writing ventures of their own, such as a book based on John’s coverage of the Patty Hearst bank robbery trial and a book based on Francine’s brother Michael Stewart’s play about the theatrical pioneer George M. Cohan. (Stewart, a Tony-winning playwright who predeceased his sister by nearly 40 years, was the librettist of several Broadway hits, such as Bye Bye Birdie and Hello, Dolly!) 

Pascal’s breakthrough did not come until she was in her 50s. While struggling to write a soap opera of her own, an editor friend of hers gave her an idea that was so simple, obvious, and easy to imagine, like one of the now-clichéd “Speed on a boat”-type pitches, that it was hard to believe it had never been done before: “Dallas for teens.” (Dallas was one of the era’s most popular soap operas.)

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Pascal took up the idea with gusto, quickly creating the basic template that would become the basis for the Sweet Valley High book series: two twin teenage girls who live in a Los Angeles suburb and who are contending with all the usual dilemmas of adolescence, from crushes to jealousies to peer pressure and petty rivalries. She wrote up the first treatment into a book, which she quickly sold to Bantam Books, now an imprint of Penguin Random House, which immediately ordered 12 more. Once it became clear to her that Bantam would keep wanting more and more Sweet Valley books at a rate she likely wouldn’t be able to churn out herself, Pascal hired a team of writers who were charged with producing the series’s books at a rate of roughly one per month, all based on Pascal’s detailed outlines and instructions. Since the publication of the first Sweet Valley book in 1983, the series — including its many spinoffs, which include Sweet Valley series set in middle school, junior high school, and college, and spinoffs of its spinoffs (and you thought only Marvel and Star Wars were good at franchising?) — has sold over 250 million copies worldwide. 

When asked what she thought was the secret of Sweet Valley’s success, Pascal indicated that they could be thought of as a kind of modernized version of Jane Austen novels, but for young girls — books that helped them understand many of the basic problems and types of characters they were encountering in their everyday realities. But according to my sister, whose bookshelves were as filled with Sweet Valley books as mine were with Goosebumps, their appeal was much simpler: “They were great girly pre-teen stories.” 

Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, was published last summer by the University of Alabama Press.

2024-08-09 02:10:00, http://s.wordpress.com/mshots/v1/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonexaminer.com%2Fmagazine-obituary%2F3115450%2Ffrancine-pascal-1932-2024%2F?w=600&h=450, When the Harry Potter series was becoming popular in the early 2000s, an impassioned debate arose among parents and teachers as to whether it was good that so many children were spending so much time reading such fantastical stories. Some thought that becoming hooked at a young age on this kind of easily digestible fare,

When the Harry Potter series was becoming popular in the early 2000s, an impassioned debate arose among parents and teachers as to whether it was good that so many children were spending so much time reading such fantastical stories. Some thought that becoming hooked at a young age on this kind of easily digestible fare would make it hard for them to develop tastes in more edifying literature in high school and college. Others, though, argued that it was good they were reading anything — and that once they were reading something, they could later grow into the kinds of readers who would explore all kinds of books and subjects. 

J. K. Rowling wasn’t the first phenomenally successful young adult fiction writer to spark anxious debates about children’s reading habits. Before Harry Potter, and even before Goosebumps, there was Sweet Valley High, a hugely popular series that transformed, and, in some ways, created, the young adult book market and that left a lasting imprint on a generation of girls across the country. The creator of the series, Francine Pascal, died on July 28 in New York at 92. 

Born in Manhattan as Francine Paula Rubin on May 13, 1932, and raised in Jamaica, Queens, Francine enjoyed comic books, fairy tales, and movies as a child. Creating stories of her own, in retrospect, appears to have been a natural result of her imaginative childhood interests — though she came to the career of young adult novelist through a kind of writerly backdoor. Her first writing jobs consisted mainly of freelance work for gossip magazines, but she was soon thereafter able to place pieces in more established outlets such as Cosmopolitan and Ladies’ Home Journal. Shortly after marrying the journalist John Pascal in 1964, Francine and her husband both landed jobs as writers for the daytime ABC soap opera The Young Marrieds. When the show’s producers demanded that they move to Los Angeles, rather than relocate to California, they quit the show and embarked on writing ventures of their own, such as a book based on John’s coverage of the Patty Hearst bank robbery trial and a book based on Francine’s brother Michael Stewart’s play about the theatrical pioneer George M. Cohan. (Stewart, a Tony-winning playwright who predeceased his sister by nearly 40 years, was the librettist of several Broadway hits, such as Bye Bye Birdie and Hello, Dolly!) 

Pascal’s breakthrough did not come until she was in her 50s. While struggling to write a soap opera of her own, an editor friend of hers gave her an idea that was so simple, obvious, and easy to imagine, like one of the now-clichéd “Speed on a boat”-type pitches, that it was hard to believe it had never been done before: “Dallas for teens.” (Dallas was one of the era’s most popular soap operas.)

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Pascal took up the idea with gusto, quickly creating the basic template that would become the basis for the Sweet Valley High book series: two twin teenage girls who live in a Los Angeles suburb and who are contending with all the usual dilemmas of adolescence, from crushes to jealousies to peer pressure and petty rivalries. She wrote up the first treatment into a book, which she quickly sold to Bantam Books, now an imprint of Penguin Random House, which immediately ordered 12 more. Once it became clear to her that Bantam would keep wanting more and more Sweet Valley books at a rate she likely wouldn’t be able to churn out herself, Pascal hired a team of writers who were charged with producing the series’s books at a rate of roughly one per month, all based on Pascal’s detailed outlines and instructions. Since the publication of the first Sweet Valley book in 1983, the series — including its many spinoffs, which include Sweet Valley series set in middle school, junior high school, and college, and spinoffs of its spinoffs (and you thought only Marvel and Star Wars were good at franchising?) — has sold over 250 million copies worldwide. 

When asked what she thought was the secret of Sweet Valley’s success, Pascal indicated that they could be thought of as a kind of modernized version of Jane Austen novels, but for young girls — books that helped them understand many of the basic problems and types of characters they were encountering in their everyday realities. But according to my sister, whose bookshelves were as filled with Sweet Valley books as mine were with Goosebumps, their appeal was much simpler: “They were great girly pre-teen stories.” 

Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, was published last summer by the University of Alabama Press.

, When the Harry Potter series was becoming popular in the early 2000s, an impassioned debate arose among parents and teachers as to whether it was good that so many children were spending so much time reading such fantastical stories. Some thought that becoming hooked at a young age on this kind of easily digestible fare would make it hard for them to develop tastes in more edifying literature in high school and college. Others, though, argued that it was good they were reading anything — and that once they were reading something, they could later grow into the kinds of readers who would explore all kinds of books and subjects.  J. K. Rowling wasn’t the first phenomenally successful young adult fiction writer to spark anxious debates about children’s reading habits. Before Harry Potter, and even before Goosebumps, there was Sweet Valley High, a hugely popular series that transformed, and, in some ways, created, the young adult book market and that left a lasting imprint on a generation of girls across the country. The creator of the series, Francine Pascal, died on July 28 in New York at 92.  Francine Pascal after receiving the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award in June 1982. (The Burlington Free Press via AP) Born in Manhattan as Francine Paula Rubin on May 13, 1932, and raised in Jamaica, Queens, Francine enjoyed comic books, fairy tales, and movies as a child. Creating stories of her own, in retrospect, appears to have been a natural result of her imaginative childhood interests — though she came to the career of young adult novelist through a kind of writerly backdoor. Her first writing jobs consisted mainly of freelance work for gossip magazines, but she was soon thereafter able to place pieces in more established outlets such as Cosmopolitan and Ladies’ Home Journal. Shortly after marrying the journalist John Pascal in 1964, Francine and her husband both landed jobs as writers for the daytime ABC soap opera The Young Marrieds. When the show’s producers demanded that they move to Los Angeles, rather than relocate to California, they quit the show and embarked on writing ventures of their own, such as a book based on John’s coverage of the Patty Hearst bank robbery trial and a book based on Francine’s brother Michael Stewart’s play about the theatrical pioneer George M. Cohan. (Stewart, a Tony-winning playwright who predeceased his sister by nearly 40 years, was the librettist of several Broadway hits, such as Bye Bye Birdie and Hello, Dolly!)  Pascal’s breakthrough did not come until she was in her 50s. While struggling to write a soap opera of her own, an editor friend of hers gave her an idea that was so simple, obvious, and easy to imagine, like one of the now-clichéd “Speed on a boat”-type pitches, that it was hard to believe it had never been done before: “Dallas for teens.” (Dallas was one of the era’s most popular soap operas.) CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER Pascal took up the idea with gusto, quickly creating the basic template that would become the basis for the Sweet Valley High book series: two twin teenage girls who live in a Los Angeles suburb and who are contending with all the usual dilemmas of adolescence, from crushes to jealousies to peer pressure and petty rivalries. She wrote up the first treatment into a book, which she quickly sold to Bantam Books, now an imprint of Penguin Random House, which immediately ordered 12 more. Once it became clear to her that Bantam would keep wanting more and more Sweet Valley books at a rate she likely wouldn’t be able to churn out herself, Pascal hired a team of writers who were charged with producing the series’s books at a rate of roughly one per month, all based on Pascal’s detailed outlines and instructions. Since the publication of the first Sweet Valley book in 1983, the series — including its many spinoffs, which include Sweet Valley series set in middle school, junior high school, and college, and spinoffs of its spinoffs (and you thought only Marvel and Star Wars were good at franchising?) — has sold over 250 million copies worldwide.  When asked what she thought was the secret of Sweet Valley’s success, Pascal indicated that they could be thought of as a kind of modernized version of Jane Austen novels, but for young girls — books that helped them understand many of the basic problems and types of characters they were encountering in their everyday realities. But according to my sister, whose bookshelves were as filled with Sweet Valley books as mine were with Goosebumps, their appeal was much simpler: “They were great girly pre-teen stories.”  Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, was published last summer by the University of Alabama Press., , , https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Obit_081424.webp, Washington Examiner, Political News and Conservative Analysis About Congress, the President, and the Federal Government, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/cropped-favicon-32×32.png, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/feed/, Daniel Ross Goodman,

Sex-talk is not hard to find these days. There are more podcasts, YouTube channels, TED Talks, and TV series devoted to sex than you could consume in a single lifetime, even if you lived as long as Methuselah. And so many books have now been published about sex that you could stock an entire Library of Alexandria-sized collection with sex-related volumes alone. But there was once a time when reliable, science-based, compassionate discussions about sex were as rare as a snowball in the summer. One woman changed all that, and, in doing so, helped create the guilt-free sex-talk culture that we now take for granted. Her name was Ruth Westheimer — or, as she was known to her millions of grateful fans, “Dr. Ruth.”

Some people are part of history. Others make history. Dr. Ruth, who died on July 12 at the age of 96, was definitely in the latter category — but she also lived through (and participated in) epochal world-historical events. Born as Karola Ruth Siegel in Wiesenfeld, Germany, on June 4, 1928, Ruth grew up in a comfortable German-Jewish household until the advent of Nazism in 1933 began to make Jewish life in Germany progressively more impossible. After Kristallnacht in 1938, when the worst for German Jews was starting to become imaginable, her mother secured a spot for her in one of the Kindertransports, the efforts to rescue Jewish children from Nazi Germany. Most of the approximately 10,000 children who were saved in this manner from deportations to concentration camps were transported to England, while some others, including Ruth, were sent to neutral Switzerland. In this manner she survived the Holocaust; her parents, whom she never saw again after her transport to Switzerland, were not as fortunate. 

Following the war Ruth immigrated to then-British mandate Palestine, where she fought in the 1948 Israel War of Independence as a sniper. After recuperating from a serious leg injury, she moved to Paris to study psychology at the Sorbonne, and then to America in 1956, where she enrolled in a master’s program in sociology and, with the help of night classes, earned a doctorate in education. Her trajectory in psychology began to come into greater focus in 1967, when she took a part-time job with Planned Parenthood in Harlem, and crystallized while conducting postdoctoral work on sexuality at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

Dr. Ruth may have had a quiet, unglamorous life as a sex therapist in private practice if not for Betty Elam, a community affairs manager at the New York radio station WYNY. Intrigued by a talk on sexual well-being that she had happened to hear Dr. Ruth deliver, Elam asked her if she’d be willing to speak about these topics on the radio. These initial WYNY segments, titled Sexually Speaking, quickly became immensely popular, despite airing only once a week after midnight. A live call-in radio show (as the program would later become) that provided useful, expert information on sex was particularly valuable in the pre-internet age when you couldn’t just Google “Why won’t my wife sleep with me?” or “How long should sex last?”

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Sexually Speaking led to a full radio show that, by 1983, became the highest-rated radio show in the country’s largest media market. From there, like Bruce Wayne becoming Batman, Ruth Westheimer became “Dr. Ruth.” The WYNY radio show led to syndicated columns, book deals, magazine features (including one on the cover of People), commercials, an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1982, and her highly-rated daytime TV show which by 1985 was being watched by as many as 2 million people. American culture had clearly been ready for frank, well-informed, helpful conversations about sexuality — but who could’ve predicted that it would take a tiny old German woman to get us there? 

I’ll never forget the time I heard her speak at a New York synagogue. I couldn’t get over how this 4-foot-7-inch woman who sounded like a female version of Henry Kissinger and who looked like George Costanza’s mother was talking openly and unashamedly about masturbation, orgasms, and sexual fantasies — and in the same sanctuary where we’d just prayed the evening prayer! But if Dr. Ruth was sacrilegious, then so is the Talmud, where discussions about sex are featured in the same sacred pages as those that cover Sabbath rituals and biblical tort laws. What is irreligious, taught Dr. Ruth — taking a page from the Talmud — is living without knowing how to fully enjoy one of the few great (and completely free) pleasures that God has given us.

Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, was published last summer by the University of Alabama Press.