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Here’s an interesting piece from Hamilton Nolan arguing for a rather expansive journalistic mission. The cause is the recent unmasking of celebrated novelist Elena Ferrante. As most of her fans know, “Elena Ferrante” is (or was) a pseudonym. Nolan believes that the revelation of Ferrante’s real name and identity, against her wishes, is at the core of what journalism is ultimately about:

The very general proposition of journalism is this: The public has a right to know true things that are important to the public. It is the job of journalists to supply the public with these true things. This broad idea applies in practice not just to the goings-on of government, but to crime, and business, and science, and sports, and the actions of all sorts of people who are famous and/or notorious, either temporarily or permanently.

There’s a lot here that’s left vague in Nolan’s proposition, beginning with the imagined entity Nolan claims to be advocating for—the public. Nolan neither defines who this “public” is, nor proposes a means for assessing what it takes as  important versus what it takes as trivial. How do we know, for instance, that “the public” really thought it was important for journalists to expose the facts of her life?

And yet on behalf of this vague entity, Nolan claims expansive powers—the public has the right to know anything it deems “important.” Essentially fame is the forfeiture of basic human and individual privileges in favor of an ill-defined public interest. It’s worth taking this logic to its conclusions. If “the public” wishes to know the identity of a whistle-blower who helped down a corrupt national official, then journalists should reveal it. If the public wishes to know the identity of the woman who accused Nate Parker of rape, then journalists should publish it. If “the public” decides, for instance, that it’s “important” to see the tape that a stalker took of Erin Andrews in her hotel room, then evidently journalists should offer this up too. Nolan offered no exemption for famous children either, so presumably all of their doings are also part of the pot of public knowledge.

It is certainly true that Ferrante’s identity is “newsworthy”—which is to say some demonstrable and significant number of people would like to know who she is. But “newsworthy,” a term that could be applied to everything from Watergate to sex tapes, lacks the moral force of claiming to act on behalf of the presumed rights of the public. “Newsworthy” describes how journalism works. But it doesn’t engage the complicated, constant ethical dilemmas which journalists face over what to report and what not to report. Nolan claims to be engaging that question, but what he’s actually doing is avoiding the hard work which it entails.

Admittedly, I’m biased. But I get nervous when I see journalists blithely and casually invoke the right of the public to know, without any attempt to define those terms, their limitations, and their history.

Say this for presidential elections: They can get silly, even nasty, but they’re a useful, quadrennial Rorschach test for the American right and left. As candidates battle for the trove of working-class voters in New York’s April 19 primary and in Pennsylvania after that, this thrilling/depressing/aspirational race, and some commentary on it, have taught us one thing about politics and workers:

Neither conservatives nor liberals get it. The former demonize struggling workers; the latter romanticize them.

I should follow New York Times columnist David Brooks’ commendable confession that workers’ thinking eluded him before the election because they aren’t part of his social circle. Nor mine: Save for occasional professional interaction with laboring folks as a writer, I don’t hang out regularly with those whose collars are blue. But neither, apparently, do two preeminent spokesmen for the left and right — Bernie Sanders and the editors at National Review, William F. Buckley’s iconic journal.

Sanders’s shortsightedness is old news and easily recapped: He has long predicted that if the working class would only turn out to vote, he’d win big. This year, they have turned out — and white ones have largely sided with Donald Trump. (Workers and people of color have gone for Hillary Clinton.) Psychologists studying the election explain what Sanders missed: the mindset of folks who swoon for an authoritarian blustering about their problems being the fault of others (immigrants, America’s trading partners).

Ignoring or being blind to poor people’s prejudices is nothing new on the populist left. William Jennings Bryan remade the Democrats into the party of the common person with his 1896 presidential campaign. But he needed Southern white workers’ votes, and many were vicious racists, so he shamefully passed on condemning Jim Crow. He lost anyway.

This April 8, 2016 photo shows Bernie Sanders’ campaign offices in a working-class industrial neighborhood with the Gowanus Canal and a toxic waste site nearby in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (Beth Harpaz/AP)

If Sanders was naive, National Review reporter Kevin Williamson wrote a demented March meditation that blamed the white working class’s desperate straits solely on — the white working class. (NR is the house organ of the conservative dump-Trump movement.) Williamson deserves quoting at length; he wrote that seeing workers as victims “is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t.”

He goes on:

“The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about ‘globalists’ and — odious, stupid term — ‘the Establishment,’ but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.”

Let’s agree there’s an idea worth discussing about federal moving subsidies to help the unemployed find work elsewhere. Otherwise, this spasm of uncorroborated assertions about non-existent economic forces and “welfare dependency” withers under a moment’s scrutiny.

Perhaps you’ve heard about the wage stagnation and the collapse of economic mobility that began before today’s younger poor were even born. Or the impediments to earnings-boosting college education that made hundreds of our best schools oases of the well-off. Or how more generous welfare states avert our dire inequality.

Permit a personal anecdote. During the recession, I spent more than a year seeking steady work. I didn’t succumb to heroin needles or OxyContin, but I did let areas of self-care lapse in quiet despair over whether I’d ever work again. If that happened to me despite my not falling out of the middle class (my wife’s job supported us, thank God), only the terminally non-empathetic would be shocked that some people slide into worse self-abuse under graver circumstances.

Of course people must take personal responsibility. Habits can be self-destructive, as when poor people forego the advantages of bank accounts, partly for access problems but also out of financial illiteracy and misguided distrust. We shouldn’t excuse the ill-informed, especially when they’re conned by bigotry like Trump’s.

But wealth and poverty both can warp human beings. The former steers some into greedy materialism and a belief that money is the only measure of good. The latter can breed toxic resentments and self-destructive behaviors. Rich and poor are alike in one respect: They’re human. Some are good and decent. Some are not.

Related:

• On Point: Thomas Frank On How The Democratic Party Lost Touch With The People
• Julie Wittes Schlack: Using ‘1984’ To Understand Election 2016

Elon Musk’s space exploration company, SpaceX, made history a few days ago when one of its rockets successfully deployed a cargo capsule to the International Space Station, then returned to Earth, making a pinpoint landing on a small platform out at sea. In doing so, the company made critical progress in both being able to reuse rockets, and in enabling future missions farther out into space.

So it was a tad surprising to find that the Washington-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation recently made Musk (along with other science and technology lightweights like Stephen Hawking) the winner in their slate of nominees for the 2015 Luddite Awards, referring to them as “The Worst of the Year’s Worst Innovation Killers.”

What, in their view, makes Musk a small-minded foe of technological progress? It’s his temerity in voicing concern about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence (AI). According to Robert Atkinson, president of ITIF, society is threatened by “neo-Luddites, [who] have wide-ranging targets, including everything from genetically modified organisms to new Internet apps, artificial intelligence, and even productivity itself. In short, they seek a world that is largely free of risk, innovation, or uncontrolled change.”

Really?

Never mind that Musk is a major investor in and co-chair of Open AI, a nonprofit research organization whose goal is to “… advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” Forget about the fact that Musk’s own Tesla Motors uses AI technology in its experimental self-driving cars.

In fact, Atkinson acknowledges that Musk and Hawking are “pioneers.” But recognizing that there are two sides to the developing AI story — one replete with opportunity, the other with risk — makes Musk an “alarmist” in the eyes of ITIF.

Well tag me an alarmist too — not in regard to artificial intelligence, about which I am almost as ignorant as I am about space travel — but about the polarization and belligerence that characterizes our public political discourse making its way into scientific debate.

This is not a new phenomenon. From the heresy trials of the Inquisition to the creationism cults of today, ideological zeal and financial corporate self-interest have infused most scientific disputes of any significance. Nowhere is that more dangerously apparent than when would-be President Ted Cruz flat-out denies global warming, and the tiny minority of climate change-denying scientists accuse climate change activists of fear-mongering for financial gain. (After all, isn’t it obvious that academics feeding at the trough of grant money live far more lavishly than the hard-working, modestly living gas and oil company executives they persecute?)

In these examples, the disputes have ostensibly been over the facts themselves — the age of the earth, the rotation of the planets, the cause of the rise in average temperature. But they’ve been fueled less by genuine scientific disagreement than by the drive to exercise power on behalf of certain interests such as the dominant church of the time (first Catholic, now Evangelical) or the fossil fuel industry. And if society’s understanding of the facts — of observable phenomena — can be so skewed by commercial and institutional influences, our thoughtful consideration of what actions we should take based on scientific knowledge is even more vulnerable.

Sixty years ago, when the first nuclear power plants came on line, the scientific community agreed on how nuclear fission worked. The debate then (and to a lesser extent, still) was over how they should apply that knowledge, about whether nuclear power was safe and inexpensive enough to be a viable long-term solution. Now we can say with greater certainty that the answer to both is no. But thanks to the concerns and convictions of some in the scientific community, research around renewable energy alternatives to nuclear power and fossil fuel continued even as nuclear power plants were being built. Caution and some healthy skepticism didn’t stifle innovation; it propagated it.

But now, 383 years after Galileo was sentenced to life imprisonment for asserting that the planets in our solar system revolve around the sun, I fear that we are once again entering an era in which anything short of total, unquestioning embrace of a position — any position — is too nuanced to be tolerated. And once again, this trend isn’t driven by dogmatism alone, but by political and financial interests hiding behind the banner of “innovation.”

Anti-Luddite crusader Robert Atkinson defines innovation in terms that sound eerily like political campaign promises and corporate annual reports — as developments that increase household income and boost productivity. He worries that questions about the risks of AI will undermine public and private investment in this technology, and his scorn isn’t limited to those who consider its dangers as well as its constructive uses. He also objects to those who question the safety of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food, or argue that RFID chips in credit cards or video cameras at red lights pose privacy concerns, or express moral qualms about offensive autonomous weapons — also known as “killer robots.”

Whether Atkinson and others in his camp are honest scientists or purely self-serving corporate interests (or perhaps both), they do us all a disservice by trying to shut down discussion about the potential consequences of these technologies. Innovation may be important, but never for its own sake, and never at the expense of examining our societal values and collective conscience.

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• State’s New Innovation Institute Wants To Shake Up Textiles Industry

Baker and bathroom laws are popping up across the United States. The former seek to allow businesses to refuse to serve those who are LGBT, the typical example being the anti-gay baker who doesn’t want to make a cake for a same-sex wedding. The latter pretends there is no such thing as being transgender. Both laws are thinly disguised measures to discriminate and harass.

And they are prompting a thunderous backlash. One wonders, however, whether that backlash is more an effort to garner good PR than it is genuine, deep-seated offense at egregious public policy.

How else to explain Canadian rock star Bryan Adams announcement that he was so upset by Mississippi’s new “religious tolerance” law he was cancelling an April 14 concert in Biloxi? Bully for him, you might think: He’s putting into action his ethical beliefs. Perhaps. Yet within the last four weeks, Adams had no problem performing in both Russia and Egypt — each deeply and notoriously anti-gay.

Hypocrisy? You bet. And Bryan Adams isn’t alone.

Bruce Springsteen also canceled a planned concert because of a newly adopted baker and bathroom law in North Carolina. But Springsteen apparently has no problem performing in far less gay-friendly places such as Italy, Poland and Japan — he’s held concerts in all many times over the last number of years.

Nor is the hypocrisy confined to musicians.

PayPal, for instance, was apparently so concerned by the North Carolina law that it said it would cancel plans to build a new operations center in Charlotte, a loss of $3.6 million and 400 jobs. Apple, Bank of America and more than 100 other companies signed onto a letter opposing the new law. Many cities, including Boston, have banned city-funded travel to North Carolina.

At the same time, though, PayPal is making great efforts to expand throughout the Middle East, where intolerance for LGBT rights is intense. Apple, of course, manufactures many of its products in the People’s Republic of China, also a country unfriendly to all human rights — including LGBT. Nor does Bank of America hesitate to set up shop in the more repressive areas of the world. Homosexuality is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia, but if you need to bank in that country, BofA — conveniently located on the 20th floor of Kingdom Tower in Riyadh — is happy to help. And Boston counts Ghana’s Sekondi-Takoradi as one of its sister cities; Ghana also has a well-deserved anti-gay reputation.

So what’s going on? Getting indignant over human rights helps burnish corporate and political patinas. They make for good press, too. (In Adams’s case, one suspects his hostility to Mississippi’s law was also a good career move; he’s received more media attention of late than he has for a long time.) But indignation had its limits. It’s easy for PayPal to write off North Carolina; it can just build in another state. But avoiding entire countries can be economically costly. If, say, Apple abandoned cheap Chinese manufacturing, profits would likely plummet.

It’s questionable in any event whether boycotts or economic sanctions really are the best ways to change behavior. In many cases, close economic and cultural engagement with regimes hostile to human rights are more effective. That, after all, is the essence of the argument for normalizing relations with many backward regimes — most recently, Cuba.

Still, the hypocrisy argument — clean hands for one should mean clean hands for all — can go too far, becoming, really, just an excuse for inaction. Yes, there are double standards. But on occasion it can make sense to treat those in your backyard differently from those an ocean away.

Moreover, sometimes a well-timed boycott or economic sanction can have an impact — not necessarily for their monetary cost, but because they raise an issue’s profile. The backlash against North Carolina and Mississippi is a case in point: It actually seems to be having an effect. The governor of North Carolina just weakened one offensive portion of the state’s controversial law. Meanwhile, other states seem to be treading more carefully as they consider passing their own versions of baker and bathroom bills. None of this would be happening without the outcry from Adams, Springsteen and numerous corporations. It may be hypocrisy, but its pragmatic hypocrisy: the kind that works.

Related:

• Peter May: Basketball, Bigots And Unfair Play In North Carolina
• On Point: North Carolina, Georgia And LGBT Discrimination

Princeton University announced this week that it will not remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from its School of Public and International Affairs as well as a residential college that also bears his name. The decision comes in the wake of student calls last November for the university to recognize and disavow the racist and segregationist views of America’s 28th president, and to acknowledge the problem of racial inequality on campus, by changing the school and the college’s names.

The protests were part of a larger student movement last fall calling for, among other demands, reconsideration of Harvard Law School’s seal, which is based on the family crest of slave owners, and the removal of Thomas Jefferson statues at William and Mary and other colleges, because the Founding Father and third U.S. president also owned slaves.

All of which causes me to wonder: Are we missing the forest for the trees? If we remove all public references to racist historical figures but continue to ignore the roots and the enormity of racial inequality in America, is that really a victory?

So now might be a good time to ask: What, in the end, did the Princeton protests accomplish?

Wilson’s name stays, but the university announced initiatives geared to improve diversity on campus and enrich the experience of underrepresented students. Among them, pipeline programs to increase the diversity of doctoral students. School officials also pledged to increase programs that promote education and transparency on diversity issues.

In a statement announcing their decision, Princeton officials noted that “contextualization is imperative.” Officials urged “transparency in recognizing Wilson’s failings and shortcomings as well as the visions and achievements that led to the naming of the school and the college in the first place.”

In asking us to compare the value of Wilson’s work to prevent war against his efforts to block the enrollment of black students, is Princeton posing the right question? Is one individual’s “complex legacy,” as the Princeton statement put it, sufficient context to examine a problem far bigger than any one person?

Instead of looking at Wilson’s record on race in the context of his full resume, we should instead look at it in the context of society at the time. Princeton cautions against forgetting that this racist, segregationist president brought about world peace. I would caution against forgetting that his racist, segregationist views were widely held at the time.

It’s not just that Wilson was racist or that Jefferson before him was. It’s that America was racist. A focus on a few of history’s bold face names risks vastly underestimating the scope of the problem. It leads us to think that equality can be achieved by changing a name or a seal.

That’s not to say that challenging the names that adorn these symbols isn’t an important way to start conversations, open minds and implement course-correcting changes that bring about greater equality. The Princeton example demonstrates this. As Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber, whose office was ground zero of the 32-hour student protest last fall, told NPR, the protesters changed the way the school and the country thinks about Wilson.

But we let ourselves off easy by scapegoating dead white men, no matter how worthy of our scrutiny their records on race may be. We need to change the way we think about our history beyond just reevaluating the legacies of historical figures.

If Wilson’s name were to be removed at Princeton, would the students, faculty and staff there be closer to racial equality? No. Considering one man’s racism in the context of his wider biography is still just considering the tree, and we’re in a forest.

Related:

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• Harvard Remembers Slaves Who Lived On Campus

A parent once told me that playing in the earth and exploring nature was not going to get his 5-year-old son into Harvard.

I humbly beg to differ. Free play outdoors teaches a child how to imagine and solve problems and how to imagine a world outside the concrete confines of urban and suburban America. It also delays the onset of Nature Deficit Disorder, the condition identified by Richard Louv in his important book, “Last Child in the Woods.”

Free outdoor play involves learning about natural relationships and learning to see — not just look. It teaches a child to question rather than to accept blindly. It also helps a child understand that there may be real and sometimes unfortunate consequences to even well-intended actions. Here I’m thinking of the time children released a three-legged frog back into a pond. Before the flap over whose turn it was to set it free, that creature had four legs.

This type of real-world experience is likely to make a child not just an excellent candidate for Harvard, if that’s the goal, but a more successful person. That seems a point worth emphasizing in this season when many parents are planning their children’s summer activities.

There has been much reported on the importance and relevance of play. But the play that I think is most meaningful isn’t the kind that is supervised on a playground, with the child exploring this structure or that, splashing in the sprinkler, rough-housing with other children.

To me, raised in the countryside of Vermont, ideal play is unbounded. No swing set or merry-go-round. No water-spitting steel snake. Such diversions don’t create imagination or foster creative learning. They don’t instill the thrill of discovery or the joys of freedom.

Many summer programs and other recreational opportunities for children are not terribly different from supervised time on a playground. Young people herd children from one managed activity to the next. The goal is to engage children in the same activity at the same time and to make sure that no one gets too excited. What are their charges really learning? What is anybody learning? Where are the formative relationships?

Play is not mindless activity, but it need not be highly organized, either. It should not be goal-oriented. Play lacks measurable consequences and is geared only to the realizable goals of the players. Play is where the players find joy in their explorations, creations and meanderings.

John Lee: “…ideal play is unbounded.” (Annie Spratt/Unsplash)

Enough with schedules and choreographed commitments. Summers, afternoons and weekends are for creative play and exploration. Perhaps not every child would consider catching frogs or hunting worms, observing butterflies or making ice cream by rolling a can down a hill a good time. But learning by doing (or not doing) is instructive for everyone, parents too.

I have made a career of managing farms, and on every one, the kids I’ve seen are mesmerized and want to explore it all. The same is true, it turns out, for their parents. This speaks to a universal longing to know, understand and be able to explicate some of the truly basic and essential experiences of life.

For children, the difference between observing creatures in a zoo or aquarium and catching a tadpole or a turtle in a pond is geometric. Feeling a live and wild animal wriggle in one’s palm is a different experience from seeing specimens in a controlled environment. Returning that creature back into its habitat, and doing it safely and with compassion, is equally important and rewarding. ‘Catch and release’ is a fundamental life experience that can only be learned in nature, and it is a core value of our humanity.

Dr. Scott Sampson’s prescription of a minimum of 30 minutes per day, three days per week of outdoor time is barely enough to satisfy a child’s natural curiosity. Life without the joys of the-out-of-doors is an empty plate, and we will end with a generation or two of hungry, nature-insecure children who will not be able to relate to or value the non-human biome that sustains our planetary home.

We should all take a page from a once well-read children’s classic, “How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen,” by Russell Hoban. The hero, Tom, is a boy who’s constantly “fooling around” — that is, playing — and his no-nonsense aunt decides to teach him a lesson by bringing in the formidable Captian Najork and his hired sportsmen to beat him at games.

“The hired sportsmen brought out the ramp, the slide, the barrel, the bobble, the sneeding tongs, the bar, and the grapples. Tom saw at once that sneedball was like several kinds of fooling around that he was particularly good at. Partly it was like dropping things off bridges into rivers and fishing them out and partly it was like fooling around with barrels in alleys.”

Needless to say, Tom wins — or perhaps I should say, he “gets into Harvard.”

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JOHANNESBURG—Lamenting that there was nothing they could possibly do, tearful anthropologists announced at a press conference Thursday that they had discovered the bodies of 15 deceased human ancestors 100,000 years too late. “Not too long ago, these early people were alive and going about their normal daily lives, but sadly, by the time we scaled down the narrow 90-meter chute leading into the cave, they’d already been dead for at least 10,000 decades,” said visibly upset University of the Witwatersrand paleoanthropologist Lee R. Berger, bemoaning the fact that they could have saved the group of human predecessors if they had just reached the Rising Star cave system during the Pleistocene epoch. “We briefly considered resuscitation when we found their bodies, but after a cursory examination we knew that they were already gone. If we found them a hundred millennia sooner, this tragedy might have been prevented ...

Onion Sports presents its winners and losers from the opening week of the 2015 NFL season:

Winners

• Tony Romo: Held tighter and for several moments longer than usual during postgame hug with Jerry Jones

• New England Patriots: Operation Pyerun proceeding as planned

• Peyton Manning’s Arm: Quietly enjoying second year of retirement

Losers

• Houston Texans: Offense committed crucial mistake early in the game when they started Brian Hoyer
  
• Ndamukong Suh: Had worst statistical performance of his career with just one stomped player
  
• Terrell Suggs: Torn Achilles means career will surprisingly end from something other than criminal investigation
  

WUHAN, CHINA—Claiming the aquatic mammal had squandered the countless opportunities it had been given, wildlife experts reported Tuesday that the Chinese river dolphin, a species that had an entire 25-million-year period to evolve ways to survive, was pathetically snuffed out by less than a decade of environmental changes.

According to researchers, the dolphin—which hasn’t been spotted in the wild for several years and has been declared functionally extinct—evidently “sat around with its thumb up its ass” for epochs before being caught completely off guard by only eight short years of increasing industrial runoff and overfishing within its Yangtze River habitat.

“Chinese river dolphins had literally millions of generations to develop stronger staminas or at least expand their habitat beyond a single river, but they couldn’t get their act together, and now look at them,” said exasperated marine biologist Susan Reese, who explained that if the ...

No overview of Viking mythology would be complete without delving a little bit into Loki and the role he plays in the Norse universe. Along with Odin, he’s the most mysterious and perplexing of the gods. Part of the confusion is that his physical being is difficult to nail down. He’s the son of a giant and an unknown figure — perhaps a giantess, a goddess, or something else completely. Loki is at times human-ish (like the other gods), at times a shapeshifter (like Odin), and even one time a mother — he in fact birthed Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged flying horse. He was indeed a father as well, but his offspring were terrifying beings like Jormungand (the world-encircling serpent), Fenrir (the great wolf), and Hel (the goddess of the underworld). Before even getting into his character traits, it’s obvious that Loki is capricious and hard to trust.

The children of Loki: Fenrir, Jormungand, and Hel.

In terms of behavior, he’s seemingly either playfully mischievous or downright evil, depending on the story. A reader of Norse mythology is often left perplexed by Loki’s actions, and how those actions are viewed by his fellow gods. He’s cunning, but charismatic to a degree, and it’s a bit of mystery why the other gods in Asgard even keep him around.

Although he’s ever present in the Norse world, he’s never actually worshipped by Viking people like the other gods are. Additionally, while he has a role in many myths — you’ll have noticed his role in nearly all of them throughout this series — he’s never the hero. He’s simply a sideshow — either a foe or a friend, helping or hurting or instigating from the sidelines.

Let’s briefly look at the one story in which he does star, but as you’ll see, is clearly not the hero.

***

Baldur was one of Odin’s sons, known to be generous and courageous. When he started having dreams about a terrible event befalling him, his father — the wise chief — was charged with inspecting the meaning behind these foreshadowings.

So Odin ventured to the underworld, where, after consulting a seeress, he learned that Baldur was indeed doomed and destined to an early death.

Frigg, Baldur’s mother, was obviously distraught by this news. So she obtained oaths from everything in the universe to not harm her son. The gods even tested it by throwing great rocks and sticks his way, only to see the projectiles bounce off him and fall harmlessly to the ground.

Loki, of course, saw an opportunity for trickery. “Did all things swear oaths to spare Baldur from harm?” he asked Frigg. “Oh, yes,” she replied, “everything except the mistletoe. But the mistletoe is so small and innocent a thing that I felt it superfluous to ask it for an oath. What harm could it do to my son?”

Loki then went out and found some mistletoe to bring back to Asgard. He approached the god Hodr, who was blind, and convinced him to take a spear and throw it at Baldur as yet another test of his invincibility. Indeed, the spear was crafted from mistletoe. Hodr threw the shaft, which pierced Baldur and killed him on the spot.

After Baldur was killed, another god, Hermod, rode to the underworld to try to convince the goddess Hel to release Baldur back to Asgard because he was so universally loved. Hel agreed that if every creature in the world wept for Baldur, she would release him. And every living thing did indeed weep for the fallen god — except one. A giantess named Tokk — certainly Loki in disguise — withheld her sorrow, and Baldur remained in the underworld.

***

This tale begs the question of where Loki fits into the Norse pantheon. Why is he there at all? What role does he play, and what can we learn from him?

While it’s an oft-debated question, my own research seems to place him as a devil-like character. It’s not the horned, red-skinned Satan you’re probably imagining, though. Early Christianity saw the devil as more of a trickster, a being who constantly lies and deceives by subtle measures rather than through overt evil. Loki’s most common pranks are small and seemingly innocuous actions, but frequently lead to terrible consequences.

When the Vikings started to convert to Christianity near the end of their reign, they combined their pagan gods with their new religion. The character of Loki made an easy parallel to Satan. In paintings, especially as the myths aged into the centuries of the 1000s, he became a jester-type figure, another image that was also often given to the Christian devil.

In this regard Loki exemplifies the trickster archetype that’s been present in mythology and folklore for thousands of years and around the world. Portrayed as a wise fool, this ubiquitous character is most often male, is usually cunning and sometimes even playful, and generally spreads discord through pranks and deception. Sometimes the trickster is simply used for lighthearted entertainment (like Bugs Bunny), and other times — as in Loki’s case — is more of a malicious being.

His presence is often seen as a way to get people to think and behave differently — to not just flow along with the status quo and accept things at face value. The trickster is proof that deception exists in our world; sometimes it’s playful, oftentimes it’s destructive.

One thing is for sure (and some experts note this is how the Vikings looked at him): Loki embodies all that man should not be. He is unreliable, disloyal, shallow, vain, hedonistic…a laundry list of negative characteristics. He’s also incredibly profane — life was simply a joke to him; there was nothing sacred about the world he lived in. To the gods who were worshipped, and to the people worshipping them, all of life was sacred. Thor was present in the thunderstorms, Odin took flight as a raven and used other creatures as his watchdogs — Norse mythology is full of examples of the blending of the natural world and the world of the gods.

As a modern writer notes, the Viking people felt that “one embodies Loki whenever one lives in a totally profane manner, without any reference to sacred models — hence Loki’s utter lack of any allegiances to the gods, giants, or anyone else.”

Rather than being flat and one-dimensional, life can be imbued with beauty and mystery when viewed through a lens that says everything is sacred. We are loyal to those around us, because they have meaning in the world, just as we do. We are not hedonistic, because there’s more to life than what can be seen on a screen or on a plate in front of us. No matter your religion or lack thereof, you can treat every day with a certain sacredness that gives texture to an otherwise bleak existence.

And perhaps this is why Loki was kept around in the Norse pantheon. Men need examples not only of the good and honorable and moral, but also of the anti-man. It’s why we have lessons in unmanliness on the website — we can learn just as much from anti-examples as we can from the good examples. When you read the myths of the Vikings, you get a sour taste in your mouth from Loki. You learn from him in a via negativa-type way — you look at his characteristics and subtract them from your life. He’s a deceptive liar, so you should be honest and forthcoming in your interactions with people. He’s unreliable, so you should strive to be a bastion of reliability. His character is as moveable as sand, so be sure your moral foundation is as solid as rock.

To some, the word “trickster” denotes something light and playful — like a young boy pulling a prank. Over the course of writing this series, I’ve talked to numerous people about Norse mythology, and Loki is inevitably one of the characters they’re familiar with. Rather than being sinister, however, they view him in that innocent regard — fun, playful, and a prankster no doubt, but causing no real harm.

Yet I would argue that he should in fact be viewed through a more serious lens. His individual acts of mischief may be small at the outset, but reap consequences far greater than what could have been foretold. Loki brought mistletoe to Asgard, and one of the beloved gods died. You sent a single flirty text to a co-worker, and it ultimately led to the end of your marriage. Small and seemingly innocent acts of deception can snowball into ruinous avalanches.

Even the gods eventually got sick of Loki’s trickery and he got what was coming to him. After Baldur’s death, and continued mocking of the other gods, he was bound to a rock with entrails and condemned to have a snake drip poison on his face forever after. He would not be unbound until Ragnarok — and to that apocalyptic event is where we will turn next time to conclude this series.

Read the rest of the Norse mythology series:

Odin
Thor
Tyr

LENOX, GA—Cringing at the thought of the embarrassing blunder being forever preserved on film, a local garter snake was reportedly humiliated Friday after a documentary crew caught footage of it completely whiffing while lunging at a toad. “Dammit, I almost never miss, but of course as soon as the cameras are rolling I totally botch it,” said the snake, bemoaning the fact that its rare misfire would now likely be seen by millions of people worldwide and possibly played multiple times in slow motion. “I bet when that thing airs they won’t even bother to mention the hundreds of other toads I’ve snagged throughout my lifetime. The other day, I plucked a mouse right off a log. Where were those cameras then?” At press time, the predatory reptile reportedly expressed additional frustration when the documentary crew managed to record it striking out big time with a female ...

A gentle wordless celebration of the true material of aliveness.

“How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote in her magnificent defense of living with presence. But in our age of productivity, we spend our days running away from boredom, never mind its creative and spiritual benefits, and toward maximum efficiency. Under the tyranny of multitasking, the unitasking necessary for the art of noticing has been exiled from our daily lives. And yet, as we grow increasingly disillusioned with the notion of “work/life balance,” something in our modern souls is aching for the resuscitation of this dying capacity for presence. That capacity is especially essential in parenting, where the cultural trope of the device-distracted parent is an increasingly disquieting pandemic.

Half a century after Ruth Krauss wrote, and Maurice Sendak illustrated, one of the loveliest lines in the history of children’s books — “Everybody should be quiet near a little stream and listen.” — poet JonArno Lawson and illustrator Sydney Smith team up on a magnificent modern manifesto for the everyday art of noticing in a culture that rips the soul asunder with the dual demands of distraction and efficiency.

Sidewalk Flowers (public library) tells the wordless story of a little girl on her way home with her device-distracted father, a contemporary Little Red Riding Hood walking through the urban forest. Along the way, she collects wildflowers and leaves them as silent gifts for her fellow participants in this pulsating mystery we call life — the homeless man sleeping on a park bench, the sparrow having completed its earthly hours, the neighbor’s dog and, finally, her mother’s and brothers’ hair.

The flowers become at once an act of noticing and a gift of being noticed, a sacred bestowing of attention with which the child beckons her father’s absentee mind back to mindful presence.

In the final scene, the little girl tucks a wildflower behind her ear, in the same gesture with which her father holds his device, and looks up to the sky — a subtle, lyrical reminder that we each have a choice in what to hold to our ear and our mind’s eye: a flower or a phone.

Sidewalk Flowers, which is immeasurably wonderful in its analog totality, comes from Canadian independent children’s-book publisher Groundwood Books — creators of the intelligent and imaginative Once Upon a Northern Night, What There Is Before There Is Anything There, and Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress.

Illustrations courtesy of Groundwood Books; photographs my own.

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That’s what changed me – and this blog. That’s what changed America. And that’s why Obama is president.

When I look back on the stumbling, reversed, jagged path I found myself taking with you over the past decade, it is the war that looms largest. It showed me the callowness of neoconservative certainty – a certainty I drank as solace in the lost shadow of the two towers, the falling of which propelled this blog into a very public space. It showed me the wisdom of a deeper conservatism that should have recognized the utopianism of the Iraq folly from the get-go. It showed me the depth of human evil in the dark recesses of al Qaeda and Zarqawi and now ISIS. And it showed me that merely dramatically opposing this evil is not enough to stop it – and may even unwittingly embolden and strengthen it.

It robbed me of illusions – the first being that the United States never tortures prisoners.

It denied me any intellectual safe haven, as my delusions fell from my eyes in slow motion.

It revealed an ugly side to me, in the aftermath of 9/11, that I now see with revulsion and embarrassment.

It shook me out of moral complacency and shallow absolutes.

Maybe every generation has to learn some of these lessons anew – and I should hasten to add that the war has not left me a pacifist. I still believe in the necessity of military force in confronting evil in the world that threatens us. I am merely far, far more convinced than I used to be about war’s capacity to make things worse, its propensity to upend the precious legacy of security and gradual change from which all true progress is made. Tens of thousands of human beings died in Iraq because many of us forgot that. Many more still will be. You can treat that as an abstraction – but the new media made so much of it so much more immediate, and revealed such vistas of pain and grief and brutality that abstractions were overwhelmed with reality.

And yet we move on. Accounts of the war that obscure that complex reality are emerging again. And we will be tempted to walk briskly by what the war did to the meaning of America, in its relations with the world. Which is why, in this last week of Dishing, I was glad to see an early cut of Michael Ware’s new documentary about the war as he experienced it – on both sides, in real darkness, without any attempt at protecting us from what Michael did not protect himself from. It’s called “Only The Dead.” Look out for it.

It’s only by confronting this past fully, by not flinching from it, or air-brushing it that we will emerge again into what Churchill called broad sunlit uplands. The light is still crepuscular. I just want to believe it is the light of dawn and not of dusk, and that this global struggle can lead somehow to something better, truer and more humane.

(Photo: Seen through splintered bullet-proof glass, US soldiers from 2-12 Infantry Battalion examine their damaged Humvee after an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) detonated on the vehicle, following a patrol in the predominantly Sunni al-Dora neighborhood of southern Baghdad 19 March 2007. On the fourth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq US soldiers still faced daily attacks on the streets of the war-torn capital. By David Furst/AFP/Getty Images.)

Joshua Rothman searches for an answer in Deidre Shauna Lynch’s Loving Literature: A Cultural History. How reading has changed:

For a long time, people didn’t love literature. They read with their heads, not their hearts (or at least they thought they did), and they were unnerved by the idea of readers becoming emotionally attached to books and writers. It was only over time, Lynch writes—over the century roughly between 1750 and 1850—that reading became a “private and passional” activity, as opposed to a “rational, civic-minded” one.

To grasp this “rational” approach to reading, Lynch asks you to transport yourself back to a time when, in place of today’s literary culture, what scholars call “rhetorical” culture reigned. In the mid-seventeen-hundreds, a typical anthology of poetry—for example, “The British Muse,” published in 1738—was more like Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations” than the Norton Anthology. The poems were organized by topic (“Absence,” “Adversity,” “Adultery”); the point wasn’t to appreciate and cherish them but to harness their eloquence in order to impress people.

According to Lynch, the “invention that disrupted this rhetorical world was the canon”:

Some readers read because they want to know about the here and now. But, when a young person’s favorite book is “The Great Gatsby” or “Jane Eyre,” something else is going on. That sort of reader is, as Lynch puts it, “striving to bridge the distance between self and other and now and then.” And, from that sense of striving, a whole set of values flows. In rhetorical culture, the most important writing was au courant, and the “best” readers made use of it to enhance their own eloquence. But in an appreciative, literary age, the most important books are the ones that have outlasted their eras, and the “best” readers are people who are especially susceptible to emanations from other times and places. Being a reader becomes an identity unto itself.

by Matthew Sitman

One of the first questions I get when a person finds out I work at the Dish, and that Andrew is not just my boss but my friend, is about how we met.

Unlike most of my generation, and probably most readers of this blog, I first encountered Andrew’s writing in his books. I read Virtually Normal with the thrill of genuine intellectual discovery when, as a young doctoral student at Georgetown University, I pulled it off the shelf during an afternoon haphazardly exploring the stacks. I turned to Love Undetectable and The Conservative Soul in quick succession, with the former, in my estimation, being Andrew’s best and most beautiful book. But perhaps most importantly, in early 2008, Andrew’s dissertation on Michael Oakeshott finally was published. During my graduate studies, Oakeshott had become an intellectual hero of mine, a thinker whose writing genuinely changed my life. So I scraped together the money to buy Intimations Pursued, read it slowly and deeply, and then sent Andrew an email asking if we could get coffee to discuss it.

I was a nobody – a poor graduate student in a city in which proximity to power or money is what gets people’s attention. I had nothing to offer Andrew in that regard. What I now realize, however, is that that was a good thing.

I wasn’t asking for anything other than an earnest conversation about a somewhat obscure English philosopher. I wasn’t seeking an internship, I wasn’t trying to secure a “connection,” I didn’t want Andrew to introduce me to anyone. I certainly never believed I’d work at the Dish. Andrew was just a writer who fascinated me, not a celebrity blogger. I wanted to ask him questions. That was all. And that’s why, I now feel certain, he wrote back to me suggesting we skip the coffee and just get dinner at the Duplex Diner.

That evening we shared what would be the first of many long meals together, with me awkwardly asking questions about his dissertation and trying not to seem as nervous as I really was. (Confession: I downed a beer on my way to dinner to help me relax.) I met Aaron that first night, too, and we all ended up going to listen to jazz at Blues Alley. We promised to do it again soon, and in short order we became friends – a title that he and I both revere.

Working together these last two years necessarily impinged on our friendship, with discussions of “business” always threatening to intervene. So while I will miss Andrew’s blogging, and now find myself considering what comes next in my own career, I am relieved that Andrew and I simply can be friends again. Because, after all, true friendship is entirely non-instrumental, and fits uneasily amidst the demands for productivity and performance. As Oakeshott puts it in “On Being Conservative” (pdf):

Friends are not concerned with what might be made of one another, but only with the enjoyment of one another; and the condition of this enjoyment is a ready acceptance of what is and the absence of any desire to change or to improve. A friend is not somebody one trusts to behave in a certain manner, who supplies certain wants, who has certain useful abilities, who possesses certain merely agreeable qualities, or who holds certain acceptable opinions…The relationship of friend to friend is dramatic, not utilitarian; the tie is one of familiarity, not usefulness; the disposition engaged is conservative, not ‘progressive.’

Andrew, to borrow Oakeshott’s phrasing, certainly does not always have acceptable opinions, nor is he always agreeable. Far from it, as readers of this blog certainly know. But Andrew, more than anyone else, has taught me that any genuine form of love, especially friendship, does not seek to change or improve the other person. Friendship is marked most of all by simple delight, by finding the world a slightly less lonely place because of another person’s proximity. It exists for no purpose beyond itself; it is “useless” in the very best sense of what that might mean. And so, it turns out, entering into an abiding friendship actually is the beginning of a more general wisdom: that striving must give way to acceptance, that present laughter should be valued over future reward, that life is not a series of “problems” to be “solved” but a mystery to enjoyed. I’m not sure I’d really understand these things, to the extent I do or in the same way, if Andrew hadn’t decided to answer my email that day.

I can’t help but feel joy that my friend is leaving blogging behind. His deepest interests are not political, as my own story of meeting and getting to know Andrew should indicate. The daily jousting on the web, however brilliantly he executed it, does not reveal the core of the Andrew I know. Instead, if asked to describe the man, what comes to mind is the time we talked about God hour after hour one sunny Spring day, or the eagerness with which he showed me Provincetown my first visit there. I look forward to the day, soon arriving, when reciting our favorite Philip Larkin poems supplants discussion of web traffic, and when, after going to Mass together, we can converse about Jesus without worrying over Monday morning’s blogging.

Michael Pollan’s New Yorker piece on the medical benefits of psychedelics is well worth a read:

As I chatted with Tony Bossis and Stephen Ross in the treatment room at N.Y.U., their excitement about the results was evident. According to Ross, cancer patients receiving just a single dose of psilocybin experienced immediate and dramatic reductions in anxiety and depression, improvements that were sustained for at least six months. The data are still being analyzed and have not yet been submitted to a journal for peer review, but the researchers expect to publish later this year.

“I thought the first ten or twenty people were plants—that they must be faking it,” Ross told me. “They were saying things like ‘I understand love is the most powerful force on the planet,’ or ‘I had an encounter with my cancer, this black cloud of smoke.’ People who had been palpably scared of death—they lost their fear. The fact that a drug given once can have such an effect for so long is an unprecedented finding. We have never had anything like it in the psychiatric field.”

Kleiman calls Pollan’s article “as good an introduction to the field as one could ask for”:

The central idea is that the mystiform experiences that psilocybin and other drugs can trigger under the right circumstances can be beneficial, not only in treating specific problems – end-of-life anxiety, for example, or nicotine dependence – but by enriching lives: making some people “better than well.” So far the studies are small, but the results are impressive.

It’s encouraging to see the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health taking a scientific attitude: cautious but interested. It’s discouraging, though – alas! – not at all surprising to see the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse responding to exciting research results by worrying about what might happen if someone tells the children.

The Dish has covered this subject extensively over the years. Update from a reader who contributed much of that coverage, especially on ibogaine:

The New Yorker‘s recent piece on psilocybin has been on my mind a lot lately.  I had a lot of reactions to the piece, but the most lasting feeling was a deep sadness.  I felt sad because I hoped this article would convince my 70-year-old parents to take psychedelics before they start seriously declining.  The author, unfortunately, bends over backwards to make readers frightened of psychedelics.

It depresses me to accept that the cutting edge of psychedelic research is generations away from acknowledging an obvious truth: that psychedelics are an incredible gift to humanity that could help billions of people deal with the overwhelming intensity of life.  We don’t need more expensive, intricate, double-blind experiments to know this. If we just approach what we already know without fear, then this is the only possible conclusion.

I have no doubt that psychedelics will one day be a completely normal part of a person’s life journey.  It is just a shame that billions of people will suffer before we get there: and the people who suffer will be our family, our friends, and ourselves.

PS  I am really going to miss you guys.

(Photo of Psilocybe Cubensis by Flickr user afgooey74)

One of the minor reasons I decided to stop blogging is that, it seems to me, there is an arc to the story of the Dish and the world this past decade and a half; and there is something about this moment that seems as close to closure as history will ever get.

I began blogging in the elysian, if increasingly polarized, days of the late 1990s. When Robert Cameron and I brain-stormed what the Dish could be – on a train ride from London to Oxford in the summer of 2000 – the question was merely what America would do next in an era of prosperity, peace, and smug. Gore looked pretty much invincible; Bush seemed a milquetoast moderate; and my most intense blogging was defending Gary Condit’s right to be considered innocent before being proven guilty.

9/11 changed the world and also the blogosphere. The Dish was instantly transformed. There was an urgency and immediacy and passion to those days that gave blogs a sudden new-found relevance because we needed solidarity, we needed each other, and the intimacy of the thing really deepened. And, of course, it led to my own traumatized loss of judgment (and some shameful outbursts) in the aftermath, born of shock and grief and sorrow. My readership back then was all over the map, but it included a large number of Bush administration officials and Republican voters, as well as hawkish Democrats. The Dish became a war-blog for a while as the events swirled and as the US found itself hurtling toward a new war in Iraq, one I pounded the drums for. And then, quite quickly, as the reality of the actual war came into greater focus, I began to realize my colossal failure of judgment. The incompetence was one thing; the war crimes quite another. I recanted.

I lost about half my readership, and the pledge drives I used to finance the thing dried up. I could have doubled down on the war, I guess. Many others did. I could have quit (and maybe should have). But I hung in and blogged through the remorse and shame. In some ways, I think the Dish after that moment was one long attempt by me to make up for the first phase. It made me much more open to dissent, to alternative views, to opposing arguments. In time, the collective mind of the readership was an indispensable corrective to my own flaws; and as I got my first interns at The Atlantic, I asked them to counter me in their research and interests, rather than be mere echoes.

And so began the journey toward endorsing John Kerry, and then to search for a candidate for 2008 who might be able to bind up the wounds I had helped open up. That led to the second big transformation here – my 2007 Atlantic cover-story “Why Obama Matters“, and the constant follow-up on the blog. I’d been following Obama for some time before that, and doing some due diligence on his potential. In May 2007, I wrote this post:

I went to see Obama last night. He had a fundraiser at H20, a yuppie disco/restaurant in Southwest DC. I was curious about how he is in person. I’m still absorbing the many impressions I got. But one thing stays in my head.

This guy is a liberal. Make no mistake about that. He may, in fact, be the most effective liberal advocate I’ve heard in my lifetime. As a conservative, I think he could be absolutely lethal to what’s left of the tradition of individualism, self-reliance, and small government that I find myself quixotically attached to. And as a simple observer, I really don’t see what’s stopping him from becoming the next president…

I fear he could do to conservatism what Reagan did to liberalism. And just as liberals deserved a shellacking in 1980, so do “conservatives” today.

As soon as Iowa happened, the Dish more than doubled its traffic and kept at it. We became part of the Obama revolution – and that 2008 campaign against first Clinton and then McCain was one of the more exhilarating rides any blogger could dream of. The drama of the fall – the crazy stories of Palin that the press wouldn’t touch, the financial collapse, the mobilization of an entire generation to repair the damage of Bush-Cheney – gave the Dish an energy and vibrancy that it never lost.

And then the Obama presidency – its ups and downs, its emotional highs and deep lows – interrupted by the Green Revolution in Iran, when we innovated the kind of immediate, bloggy, provisional, breaking-news coverage that is now commonplace across the media, and when the Dish trio of Patrick, Chris and me fused into one collective mind.

You know the rest, but it’s worth recalling the causes and ideas the Dish championed from the outset and how, over these fifteen years, so many have surprisingly been resolved.

First, of course, marriage equality. I began the Dish as a veteran of the movement. People refer to my one first cover-essay on it, but don’t see that the TNR cover-story in 1993, “The Politics of Homosexuality“, was much more important in sketching the case, and that Virtually Normal was the most comprehensive argument for marriage equality yet written. I followed it with an anthology and hundreds of speaking gigs and radio and television appearances. In 2000, gay marriage remained a pipe-dream or an oxymoron for many. No one was legally married in America. In 2015, 70 percent of Americans live in states where marriage equality is the law of the land. If this blog had as one of its main campaigns the fight for marriage, then it can end with a note of real amazement.

Then the battle for openly gay servicemembers, another cause of mine from the early 1990s. By 2010, done. The HIV travel ban that threatened my very staying in this country? Finished. On this blog you can read the moment when Bush’s endorsement of a Federal Marriage Amendment threatened to up-end the entire movement, and when Massachusetts made it legal in 2004, and when the Windsor case came to its climax. I’m now legally married and aiming for full citizenship by next year. The arc is almost full.

Then the Church. The Dish coincided with the worst scandal in memory: the rape of countless children, the cover-up of the crimes, and the scapegoating of gay people. My faith has long been such a deep part of me I couldn’t ignore its own narrative in these years. After all, I first quit blogging in 2005, and only relapsed when Joseph Ratzinger became Pope, because I knew very well what his vision of Catholicism was – and it sure wasn’t mine. These were dark, dark days. But by 2015, a miracle had happened. Pope Francis emerged – my Deep Dish essay on him is now available for anyone to read – and a new window opened. Who could have hoped for such a thing five years ago? And yet the Church seems to have turned a corner, and Francis appears as a potentially world-historical figure.

On America’s embrace of torture, this blog’s enduring, obsessive passion, we failed to get any real accountability from the powerful in American government who authorized it. But we did get that final Torture Report, and it is a real beginning in the search for truth. If I were to name one thing I’m proudest of at the Dish, it would be our absolute insistence that this not be ignored, and that it be ended. It was ended in 2009. And we have made the first step away from denial.

On prohibition, we now have legal weed in two states, with two more states and DC voting against it last election, and the collapse of the arguments against it. The Dish campaigned tirelessly on this – and The Cannabis Closet helped expose a new reality in America. Support has now gone above 50 percent nationally. On Israel, the battle to end the settlements and to expose a dangerously lopsided alliance, in which core American interests were continually disrupted by interest group lobbying, remains unresolved. The showdown will come soon over Iran, as Netanyahu, in open league with the Republican party, attempts to displace the US president in charting America’s foreign policy. I don’t know how it will end – I fervently hope for a reliable deal that prevents Iran from developing nuclear weapons – but I do know Obama has a chance. I also know that this blog helped end the lock-step policing of thought and writing on Israel, once enforced by the gate-keepers of the old media. And on Iran, this blog’s complete immersion in the revolution of 2009 made me see much more clearly the greatness of the Persian people in their fight against a murderous theocracy. The election of Rouhani suggests the hopes of 2009 may at some point soon come to fruition.

I could cite many more examples. My point is simply that in many of the formerly hopeless causes this blog championed, it’s remarkable how much progress has been made. There were obvious exceptions. My case for a different kind of conservatism was met with derision and disgust on the right, and has failed to have any impact on Republicans. My campaign against sponsored content and the fusion of journalism with advertising has also met a wall of resistance that shows no sign of cracking. But on both these subjects, I am happy to have put down a marker, to have made a protest for the record. My book, The Conservative Soul, remains my core case on the former. And the simple example of the Dish as a blog that refused to give in is my case on the latter.

Of course, we were just part of enormous social change. We were one voice among many in all these shifts and currents and tides. But I can put down my blogging laptop with the comfort of knowing that the world really changed on our watch, and that many of the causes we championed prevailed, and that the narrative from 9/11 to Obama’s last two years is about as complete a circle as anyone in journalism or public life can hope for.

I fought the fight; we won so many battles. I walk away from this amazing little experiment not just knowing that it worked as an online entity, and as a business, but much more importantly, that we did something here that helped change the world and the minds that populate it. It was a joint effort, and I owe you and so many others so much in crafting my arguments and addressing new facts and confronting various contradictions. But I feel good about this country in a way I haven’t since 9/11, proud to have supported a president who helped make all of it happen, and humbled by how history does not always shock and surprise or humiliate us. History can also occasionally vindicate us.

Know hope.

Jessica Lahey is an advocate for it:

Society’s well-intentioned attempts to shelter children from the possibility of inappropriate touching have deprived teachers of an important teaching tool and children of an essential sensory, educational, and developmental experience. The imposition of an invisible no-touch force field around classrooms is misguided and destructive, according to the National Association for the Education of Young Children. The organization issued a clear policy statement instructing that schools and other organizations “should not institute no-touch policies to reduce the risk of abuse” and stating that “no-touch policies are misguided efforts that fail to recognize the importance of touch to children’s healthy development.”

[Re-posted from earlier this week]

One of the things I’ve always tried to do at the Dish is to be up-front with readers. This sometimes means grotesque over-sharing; sometimes it means I write imprudent arguments I have to withdraw; sometimes it just means a monthly update on our revenues and subscriptions; and sometimes I stumble onto something actually interesting. But when you write every day for readers for years and years, as I’ve done, there’s not much left to hide. And that’s why, before our annual auto-renewals, I want to let you know I’ve decided to stop blogging in the near future.

Why? Two reasons. The first is one I hope anyone can understand: although it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). That’s long enough to do any single job. In some ways, it’s as simple as that. There comes a time when you have to move on to new things, shake your world up, or recognize before you crash that burn-out does happen.

The second is that I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.

I want to spend some real time with my parents, while I still have them, with my husband, who is too often a ‘blog-widow’, my sister and brother, my niece and nephews, and rekindle the friendships that I have simply had to let wither because I’m always tied to the blog. And I want to stay healthy. I’ve had increasing health challenges these past few years. They’re not HIV-related; my doctor tells me they’re simply a result of fifteen years of daily, hourly, always-on-deadline stress. These past few weeks were particularly rough – and finally forced me to get real.

We’ll have more to say – and we’re sure you will as well – in due course. I particularly want to take some time to thank my indispensable, amazing colleagues in a subsequent post. For the time being, auto-renewals have been suspended and the pay-meter has been disabled. While we’re in this strange, animated suspension, I just wanted to take one post to thank you personally, the readers, founding members and subscribers to the Dish.

It’s been a strange relationship, hasn’t it? Some of you – the original white-on-navy ones – went through the 2000 election and recount with me, when I had to explain the word “blog” to anyone I met; we experienced 9/11 together in real time – and all the fraught months and years after; and then the Iraq War; and the gay marriage struggles of the last fifteen historic years. We endured the Bush re-election together and then championed – before almost anyone else – the Obama candidacy together. Remember that first night of those Iowa caucuses? Remember the titanic fight with the Clintons? And then the entire arc of the Obama presidency.

You were there when it was just me and a tip jar for six years, and at Time, and at The Atlantic, and the Daily Beast, and then as an independent company. When we asked you two years ago to catch us as we jumped into independence, you came through and then some. In just two years, you built a million dollar revenue company, with 30,000 subscribers, a million monthly readers, and revenue growth of 17 percent over the first year. You made us unique in this media world – and we were able to avoid the sirens of clickbait and sponsored content. We will never forget it.

You were there when I couldn’t believe Palin’s fantasies; and when we live-blogged the entire Green Revolution around the clock for nearly a month in 2009. You were there when I freaked out over Obama’s first debate against Romney; and you were with me as I came to realize just how deeply wrong I had been on Iraq. But we also fought for marriage equality together (and won!), and for a new post-Iraq foreign policy (getting there), and for legalizing weed (fuck you, Hickenlooper!). We faced the brutal reality of a Catholic church engaged in the rape of children, and the bleak truth about the United States and torture. And I think we made our contribution to all those struggles. The Dish made the case for Obama in a way that actually mattered when it mattered. I think we made the case for gay equality in a way no other publication did. And we lived through history with the raw intensity of this new medium, and through a media landscape of bewildering change.

I want to thank you, personally, for the honesty and wisdom of so many of your threads and conversations and intimacies, from late-term abortions and the cannabis closet to eggcorns and new poems, from the death of pets, and the meaning of bathroom walls to the views from your windows from all over the world. You became not just readers of the Dish, but active participants, writers, contributors. You trusted us with your own stories; you took no credit for them; and we slowly gathered and built a readership I wouldn’t trade for anyone’s.

You were there before I met my husband; you were there when I actually got married; and when I finally got my green card; and when Dusty – who still adorns the masthead – died. I can’t describe this relationship outside the rather crude term of “mass intimacy” but as I write this, believe me, my eyes are swimming with tears.

How do I say goodbye? How do I walk away from the best daily, hourly, readership a writer could ever have? It’s tough. In fact, it’s brutal. But I know you will understand. Because after all these years, I feel I have come to know you, even as you have come to see me, flaws and all. Some things are worth cherishing precisely because they are finite. Things cannot go on for ever. I learned this in my younger days: it isn’t how long you live that matters. What matters is what you do when you’re alive. And, man, is this place alive.

When I write again, it will be for you, I hope – just in a different form. I need to decompress and get healthy for a while; but I won’t disappear as a writer.

But this much I know: nothing will ever be like this again, which is why it has been so precious; and why it will always be a part of me, wherever I go; and why it is so hard to finish this sentence and publish this post.

Liam Hoare reflects on yesterday’s 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitiz:

Whether at the cement plant in Sachsenhausen, the underground V2 rocket factory in Buchenwald, or the stone quarry at Flossenbürg, homosexuals were subject to deadly assignments and a scarring, bone-shattering system of punishments. Sixty percent of gay internees died in the camps.

For those who remained alive, humiliation was an inevitable part of daily life. The Polish LGBTQ rights activist Robert Biedroń notes that homosexuals in the camps “were forced to sleep in nightshirts and to hold their hands outside the covers,” ostensibly in order to prevent masturbation. In Flossenbürg, homosexuals were required to visit female prostitutes—Jewish and Roma prisoners from a nearby camp—as a form of treatment. “The Nazis cut holes in the walls through which they could observe the ‘behavior’ of their homosexual prisoners,” Biedroń writes.

(Photo: Mug shot of homosexual Auschwitz prisoner August Pfeiffer, servant, born Aug. 8, 1895, in Weferlingen. He arrived to Auschwitz Nov. 1, 1941, and died there Dec. 28, 1941. From the State Museum of Auschwitz, Oswiecim, Poland)

We can’t argue with this contribution:

Humanity’s greatest invention? That’s obvious.

Dogs.

Think about it. Wolves are terrifying, but no animal is more loving than a dog. Wolves compete with us in the food chain – even hunt us in the food chain! – but dogs have an ancient tradition of being our best hunting partners. They could rip out our throats, but all they want to do is please us. What other animal is eager and effective at offering comfort in times of grief? And they’re often better at it humans.

Frankly, I like dogs a lot more than I like people. One of the few times I’m wary of a dog is when I see one being walked next to a baby in a stroller. It’s hard to know what that dog will do if you get too close to the baby. And when you think about it, doesn’t that really say it all?

The above video says even more. Another reader on the question at hand:

Indoor plumbing. I know there is a God because I don’t have to shit in the woods. So no one needed to invent religion. All we needed was indoor plumbing and you kill two birds with one stone.

A reader sends the above image: “The art teachers at this school had an enjoyable retort to bathroom graffiti.” Another adds two examples of latrinalia to the long thread:

My personal favorite, from a stall in the University of York in the UK (my alma mater):

There is nothing in life so overrated as a bad shag.
And nothing so underrated as a good shit.

Close runner-up was the handwritten addendum to a sign saying “Please do not throw cigarette butts in the urinals”:

… it makes them soggy and hard to light.

Another:

I haven’t seen this one posted yet: In the bathroom I once saw that someone had written notes under the instructions on the hand drier saying “press button … receive bacon.” Looks like it’s a real meme nowadays (see attached image), but I cracked up the first time I saw it.

A dozen more below:

Finally! A thread to which I can possibly add!

My favorite stall in college had two remarks that were stacked on top of one another. The stall scrawls were written in different handwriting:

There’s corn in the my poop
Better than the other way around

Another:

UCSB, circa 1975, inside a stall at the bottom of the door, about 8 inches from the floor: “Beware of limbo dancers.”

Another:

When I was a student, anti-nuclear demonstrations were big. Some sanctimonious person wrote in a stall, “You can’t hug your children with nuclear arms.” Someone thoughtfully replied, “No, but you can prevent them from wetting the bed.”

Another:

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I saw in a bathroom stall in the Math Department’s Eckhart Library the following text written just above the toilet paper dispenser: “U of C diplomas. Take one.” I laughed then complied.

Another:

Above the urinal in a men’s restroom at a golf course outside a small ranch town: “This is the only place on this course where somebody won’t try to correct your stance or adjust your grip.”

Another sends a brilliant NSFW ad we posted several years ago when it first came out:

I saw this today, and I thought it fit well with the theme. Wait for it!

Another:

Spotted above a urinal in Michigan decades ago and never forgotten (probably because it’s all too true):

No matter how much you shake and dance
The last few drops go down your pants

Another:

I remember this graffiti from back home: “More than three shakes is masturbation.”

Another:

In the men’s room in the library of the University of Amsterdam: “Here I sit and contemplate, do I shit or masturbate?”

Another:

Not graffiti, but a note from the management posted behind the urinals in a restaurant men’s room in Cottage Grove, OR: “We aim to please. Will you aim too, please?”

Another:

I can’t believe I’m adding to this thread, since I’m a 66-year-old grandma now, but here it is: Many years ago I was at a little bar in the Des Moines suburb of Urbandale, and on the back of the door in the women’s restroom was a glorious big poster of a gorgeous man, bare to the waist, with Levis low on his hips that were unbuttoned down a couple of buttons (and this was in the late ‘60s when such eye candy was very unusual and very provocative). On the bottom of the poster was written in pencil, “What’s waiting out on the barstool for you?” I’m sure there were a lot of unhappy guys in that bar who couldn’t understand why they just couldn’t score there.

And last but not least:

This bathroom graffiti from a pizza joint in Tallahassee is wonderful:

“Anything will work as a dildo, if you’re brave enough.” – A. Lincoln

by Will Wilkinson

My son, Felix, is not yet a year old, so Kerry and I have got a lot of parenting choices ahead of us. For example, should we conspire to make Felix believe in Santa. I think we should, for pretty much the same reasons Pascal-Emanuel Gobry won’t:

If you are a Christian, as I am, you are really shooting yourself in the foot. “No, the thing about the magic flying fat man, that was just a made-up story, but the thing about the magic bearded Jesus, that part, that’s totally true!” That sounds silly, doesn’t it? Mainstream popular culture works hard enough telling people Christianity is unbelievable; we should not join the chorus ourselves.

Well, we’re atheists. I don’t intend to proselytize atheism to my kid, because I’m not interested in getting him to believe anything in particular. What I’m interested in is teaching him how to reason in a way that maximizes his chances of hitting on the truth. Now, one of the most interesting truths about the empirical world is that there are all these powerful systems of myth that are kept afloat by a sort of mass conspiracy, and humans seem disposed to pick one from the ambient culture and take it very seriously. But it can be hard to get your head around the way it all works unless you participate in it. Santa is a perfect and relatively harmless way to introduce your child the socio-psychology of a collective delusion about the supernatural. The disillusionment that comes from the exposure to the truth about Santa breeds a general skepticism about similarly ill-founded popular beliefs in physics-defying creatures. Gobry would rather his children not learn to side-eye well-loved myths in this way, and, given his faith, that seems reasonable.

Rich Cohen puts it really well:

[A]t some point—maybe you’re 7, maybe 10—you discover the truth: There is no Santa. It’s just a story, a polite word for a lie. Worse still: Everyone knew, even your mom. The adults have been involved in a vast, “Matrix”-like conspiracy. You awake in a pod, bald, swimming in goop. You have a keen sense of being laughed at; you picture them all yukking it up. You’re beset by doubt: If Santa is just a story, does that mean everything is just a story? For some, it’s a moment as painful as the more profound moment that might come later, when your inner Nietzsche emerges from the hills to announce, God is dead.

Perfect.

Except Cohen, despite his own youthful experience – (“When I learned the truth—from Todd Johnston, from my sister—I was crushed, changed”) – has become convinced that believing in Santa is actually great practice for believing in a divine Jesus.

According to Fred Edie, an associate professor at Duke Divinity School, children are drawn to Santa because he represents certain aspects of Jesus. “I suspect the story evolved in part along the same lines of other stories of Christian saints and exemplars,” Dr. Edie wrote to me. “In this genre, characters are cast as ‘types’ of Jesus because of the ways their lives reflect dimensions of Jesus’ life. Santa may have been good to children, as was Jesus, which would have constituted a radical, even subversive gesture back in the day when children were considered little more than property.” […]

Fred Edie changed my mind. He convinced me that I had it backward. Santa doesn’t prepare you for disillusionment—he prepares you for belief. He’s a kind of training-wheel Jesus, presenting aspects of faith in a manner that kids can handle.

I don’t buy it, and reading Cohen, I don’t believe he believes it either. In fact, I found Cohen’s otherwise winsome piece awfully puzzling. Cohen is a Jewish guy who believed in Santa as a kid, and then became skeptical of his own religion when he found out there’s no such thing. “For years, I refused to believe anything until I saw proof,” he writes. “It could be from the Gospels, it could be from the Torah—I wasn’t interested unless I could touch it. I came to see Santa as a historic mistake with one function: to hurry kids toward disbelief.” And then Fred Edie changed his mind? Why? As far as I can tell, believing in Santa didn’t bring Rich Cohen around to a late-in-life Christian conversion, unless he’s trying to tell us that in a very coded way, so I’m not sure what’s going on. He became a more steadfast Jew, thanks to Santa? Weird piece.

Anyway, I think it’s pretty clear Gobry and I, and Rich Cohen before the unmotivated reversal, are right. Santa is an exercise in losing your religion. So get ready, Felix. Santa’s coming to town!