The Family Dynamic

"Investigative journalist Susan Dominus profiles six families with several exceptionally accomplished children in order to tease apart the various factors that might have led to their success, including inherited tendencies. She starts with the iconic Brontèe sisters, whose remarkable literary success inspired endless speculation about the reason for so much talent under one roof. Dominus ... then moves to the present moment, relating the ... trajectories of families from diverse cultural, racial, and socio-economic backgrounds, including young parents from China who fled the one-child policy to open a Chinese restaurant in Appalachia and sent four children to elite colleges and careers that give back in technology and medicine; the Groff family, whose claim to fame is not just an award-winning novelist but an Olympic athlete and a notable entrepreneur; and the Holifields, raised in the Jim Crow South and boasting two powerful attorneys, both Harvard law school graduates, and a cardiologist, all three influential, in their own ways, in civil rights. Woven into these and other inspiring stories is an account of centuries of scientific research into the question of nature vs. nurture in predicting outcomes"--

Susan Dominus has worked for The New York Times since 2007, first as a Metro columnist and then as staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. In 2018, she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service for its reporting on workplace sexual harassment. She won a Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York and a Mychal Judge Heart of New York Award from the New York Press Club. She has studied as a fellow at the National Institutes of Health and Yale Law School. Her article about menopause in The New York Times Magazine won a National Magazine Award in 2024. She teaches journalism at Yale University.