What makes a good public apology? I’m sure Emily Post would have an opinion. Your therapist and your parents might have one as well. It’s some mix of taking responsibility, admitting wrongdoing, and acknowledging the pain caused and the affected party. Sometimes, it means saying how you’re going to do better. Take, for example, Kanye West’s apology to the Cher Show actors on Broadway, a heartfelt apology commensurate with his crime. His apology for his “slavery was a choice” comment on TMZ was not.

In fact, it seems like more often than not that our cultural figures are really bad at apologizing. Bad apologies aren’t just the provenance of the powerful—many of us normal people are bad at them, too—but we can track the public ones over time. And after a close read of some recent noteworthy apologies, often carved from mea-culpa marble by publicists, it’s hard not to wonder: has anyone learned anything?

The recent saga of Kevin Hart, who was hired to host the Oscars and then quit days later, specifically because he refused to apologize for a series of homophobic jokes he’d made in his past, isn’t heartening. “I chose to pass—I passed on the apology,” he said in an Instagram video posted on Thursday, after describing a phone call where the Academy told him to apologize or he’d lose the job. Hours later, he’d stepped down anyway.

The Internet and its storage place has long offered plenty of opportunities to express regret. Ask anyone who’s ever been on The Bachelor: racist Tweets, homophobic Facebook posts, misogynistic Vines are easy to uncover. But the clip of apology-required moments seemed to pick up as #MeToo gained traction, and as the apologies rolled in, each one seemed more baffling than the next.

Weinstein took the chance to respond to his accusers—then just a fraction of the ultimate number—as a creative-writing prompt, with cute jokes and nods to the “culture then.” (He’s since denied the allegations against him.) Mario Batali attached a recipe for cinnamon rolls to his. In response to his own accusations this year, Les Moonves released several statements, none of which were apologies, each of which insisted on varying levels of innocence. (A damning report has show him to be an unreliable narrator.) Judge Brett Kavanaugh raged and cried and spit, but never once did he betray a moment of self-reflection—and is now on the Supreme Court for it. Trump is Trump is Trump, and admitting wrongdoing is as rare as an apology. (He just misspoke and said “would instead of wouldn’t,” idiot, or it was “locker-room talk,” or he was actually right to say John McCain was a “loser” because he was captured, and on and on and on.)

This is not a thorough accounting of apologies—just the largest news stories of a couple years rife with them. Last year didn’t teach us much about apologies, and 2018 hasn’t either. So should anyone really have been surprised when Hart chose to quit rather than apologize? My colleague Richard Lawson described how anger is difficult to summon when you‘re so depressed about the familiarity of this all the time. But it is sort of surprising that after the Academy chose Hart, he refused to apologize. He didn’t even say “sorry you’re upset.”

Later, he tweeted, “I have made the choice to step down from hosting this year’s Oscar’s [sic] . . . this is because I do not want to be a distraction on a night that should be celebrated by so many amazing talented artists. I sincerely apologize to the LGBTQ community for my insensitive words from my past,” and followed that with: “I’m sorry that I hurt people . . . I am evolving and want to continue to do so. My goal is to bring people together not tear us apart. Much love & appreciation to the Academy. I hope we can meet again.” That’s a decent apology that came a little too late, after he’d already undermined himself. And then, perhaps most jarringly of all, he sucked the rest of the air out of it with a follow-up tweet that cast his situation as a social-justice issue, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. Not only is no one learning from apologies, but they’re getting worse.

Or maybe that’s just Kevin Hart—the same cruel forces that led him to write those jokes and tweets in the first place is likely still at work here. An apology is all tied up in learned masculinity, which links weakness to saying sorry, and doing what you can do to give the person or people you hurt back their dignity. His struggle with the apology is a sign that, despite claiming he’s a different person now than he was roughly 10 years ago, he’s not.

To be sorry—really, really sorry—is easy. To be publicly so is hard. And as long as these people, who are usually but not always men, conflate sincerity and apologies with fragility, we’re not going to get anywhere.

— The Palace has something to say about those royal-feud rumors

— Alessia Cara’s new album makes adulthood sound fun

— Paris, Lindsay, Britney: The rise and fall of celebrity supernovas

— Why Joyce Carol Oates thinks Steve Martin is a great comedian

— One year later: Meghan and Harry’s highlight reel

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily newsletter and never miss a story.