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CONTRITE SOCIETY From far left: Jesse James, Don Imus, Bob McDonnell, Tiger Woods, David Letterman, Mark Sanford, and Roseanne. What are they sorry for? Go to aarp.org/mybad.
while attending grad school: “It was a trivial dispute about
who sat where in my car, but over the years I’ve felt so bad
about screaming at her that I tracked her down.” After
searching MySpace and Facebook, he found her on the
social site 43things.com. One surprise: “When I apologized,
she typed back, ‘I don’t even remember that!’” But Gubar
still felt good—and he’s not alone. The open forum at
thepublicapology.com yields some classics of contrition.
“I apologize for calling you ‘domineering’ all these years,”
writes one user to her mom. “I never knew what domineering really was till I met my mother-in-law!” —Allan Fallow
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY AWIS MRANANI AND GREG PELKOFSKI; PHOTO CREDITS ON PAGE 72
Who’s Sorry Now? Everyone!
THESE DAYS THE MEA CULPA IS MEGA-COOL—AND WEBSITES ARE SPECIALIZING IN APOLOGIES
TIGER WOODS DID IT to his fans. Governor Bob
McDonnell of Virginia did it to his constituents.
And adults 50-plus are doing it to everybody. “It” is apologizing—a trend fueled by the power of social media to track
down those we’ve wronged. Now people are posting apologies on websites such as imsorry.com and perfectapology
.com. And overall traffic to confession sites has increased
66 percent—with visits among those 55-plus up 172 percent—
since February 2007. Ben Gubar, a 50-year-old chiropractor
from Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey, used the Web to say
“I’m sorry” to a woman he had humiliated 22 years earlier,
