Frank: Agreed. Part of what’s so frustrating is that students really do want to learn to be better writers — I see this in just about all of them — but they feel that a brutally competitive world puts a dangerously high price on mistakes. As a result, many of them do their best to avoid courses that require extensive writing.

Duke pushes back. It in fact requires first-year students in its college of arts and sciences to take a writing seminar, but to add a spoonful of sugar to that medicine, Duke lets them choose among surprising, amusing, quirky themes. One such option in recent years? A writing course titled “Dolly Parton for President?”

Bret: Bringing us to the most important, and by far the saddest, news of the week. I’m struck by how hard the news of her death hit me. I remember as a kid, watching “9 to 5” in a theater, and falling for the force of her personality. But it was only when I had kids of my own — particularly my daughters, who are into country music — that I really began to love the songs, like “Jolene” and “Coat of Many Colors,” not just for their musicality but their emotional honesty and depth. Also, if you’ve never heard it, watch Parton, with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, cover Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush,” in this 1999 performance on David Letterman. It’ll bring you to tears.

Frank: Oh, I’ve heard it. Seen it. Misted up during it. But to me and many others, Dolly Parton was so much more than music and movies. What I perhaps appreciated most about her, Bret, was this: I had no idea what her politics were. I barely had guesses. And while keeping them opaque obviously worked to her commercial advantage, minimizing the possibility that she’d anger and estrange any fans, it came to seem a kind of moral statement: We can have pockets of space and periods of grace in which we savor a shared pleasure and put our differences and our rancor on pause. Her performances were that pause, that space, that grace.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.