| HN Mirror

Is it? I don’t think so.

When you frame this as “I searched for hard facts and only found opinions,” you present yourself as careful and skeptical, but in practice you are setting an impossible evidentiary bar. Court records or sworn depositions will never exist for something that happened privately in a motel room decades ago. What does exist are references to letters and photographs noted in Vanity Fair. Those materials have not been published directly by the woman involved, so we cannot examine them ourselves, but their existence has been attested to by the author of the piece. That puts us in a position where we have to rely on the reporting. That is not the same as “only opinions.”

It is also true that the woman at the center of this remained close to McCarthy for years afterward, by most accounts in a way that suggests she managed to live with and even continue to value the relationship. That complicates the picture. It does not erase the fact that he was forty-two and she was sixteen. It does not make the power imbalance less real. But it does mean the story is not one of a single exploitative episode followed by disappearance and trauma. She appears to have found ways to reconcile with it, or at least to maintain her own agency in the years that followed.

That complexity matters, and acknowledging it is more honest than demanding evidence that you know cannot exist. The move of insisting on “hard facts” has the effect of collapsing the conversation into a false binary: either we have trial-level documentation or we dismiss the whole thing as gossip. That is not rigor. It is avoidance. A more responsible approach is to take the reporting on its own terms, recognize its limitations, and then decide what weight to give it when evaluating McCarthy’s legacy.

The larger issue is not simply whether McCarthy gave sound writing advice. It is that this advice appeared in Nature, the most influential scientific journal in the world. That context raises the stakes. Nature is not a blog or a casual magazine. When it publishes an essay, it confers legitimacy on the author and suggests that their authority extends beyond their immediate field. In this case, the journal chose to present McCarthy as a model for clarity of thought without acknowledging the troubling history that informed parts of his work.

Editorial responsibility requires more than selecting a piece because it is stylish or timely. The editors could have contextualized McCarthy’s advice, noting both its merits and the costs of elevating his voice. They could also have chosen to highlight other figures whose guidance on scientific writing is equally strong and free from this baggage. By opting instead for silence, they engaged in a kind of sanitization. Readers are left with writing tips stripped of context, as if the author were a neutral and unproblematic source.

To be fair, the piece was published in 2019. One could argue that the editors may be forgiven for not grappling with the full weight of McCarthy’s biography at that moment (despite substantial rumors that floated around him for decades). But its resurfacing on HN in 2025 is different. The choice to circulate it now, without reference to the context that has since been more widely discussed, revives the same problem. It treats the advice as timeless and detached when in fact the figure behind it is anything but.