Public Biography
Judith Ann Crossley is an opinion columnist for The New York Time5, where she writes “The Way We Were,” a weekly column on culture, values, and the trajectory of American life. She has written the column since 2016.
Mrs. Crossley — she insists on the honorific — holds a Bachelor of Arts in American studies from the College of William & Mary and a Master of Arts in education from the University of Virginia. She spent twenty-two years as a high school English teacher in Fairfax County, Virginia, before transitioning to commentary. Her columns draw on her experience in education, her upbringing in a small town in the Shenandoah Valley, and her conviction that most of what has gone wrong in America can be traced to specific decisions made after 2003.
She is the author of Before the Unraveling: What We Lost When We Stopped Paying Attention (Sentinel, 2020), a cultural critique that spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was reviewed as “deeply felt, if occasionally bewildering in its specificity about which year things went wrong.”
Mrs. Crossley lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia, with her husband, Dale, who has never appeared in her column but is referenced obliquely in approximately sixty percent of them.
Selected Columns
- “The Last Year Anyone Knew How to Make Eye Contact” (June 2025)
- “We Used to Eat Dinner at Tables” (February 2026)
- “The Decline of the Firm Handshake and What It Tells Us About Everything” (September 2025)