Adam Victor Brandizzi

We should decide what the state should provide and how generously, writes Tim Harford

It has never been easier to find little jobs for little payments. If you are being paid through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to tag people’s photos or being hired to put up shelves via TaskRabbit, who needs a real job? For enthusiasts, these micro-jobs mean sticking two fingers up to the Man and rejecting wage-slavery in favour of freedom. For pessimists, they are precarious ways to earn a living that offer no pension or health insurance. Welcome to the “gig economy”, a phrase that evokes both the romantic ideals and the grinding poverty of life as a journeyman musician.

The app-based gig economy is still small. Perhaps one in 200 American workers rely on it for their main source of income; nobody is really sure. Yet it seems likely to grow, and, as it grows, so will a question: does the way we link social protections to jobs make sense?

Details vary but most advanced countries have a list of goodies that must be provided by employers rather than the government or the individual. In the UK a full-time worker is entitled to 28 days of paid leave. In the US the default provider of health insurance is your employer. In many countries, employees cannot be sacked without long notice periods and a decent pension is the preserve of people with a decent job. As for freelancers, they may enjoy flexibility and independence and sometimes even a good living — but as far as social protections go, they are on their own.

It is easy to understand the politics of this: pensions, healthcare and paid holidays are expensive, and asking employers to pick up the bill obscures their true cost. But the emergence of companies such as Uber is changing the calculus. Are Uber drivers employees or not?

Uber maintains that they are not. That seems defensible: a driver can switch the app on or off at any time, or work for a competitor such as Lyft on a whim. Few employees who acted in this way would be employed for very long.

Then again, does a driver who puts in 60 or 70 hours a week providing Uber-assigned rides according to Uber-determined rules and rates not deserve some sort of security? Some authorities think so: the company has lost a number of rulings in California as judges and arbitrators have found that, in certain cases, Uber drivers are employees.

Such judgments are likely to vary from case to case and place to place, and the uncertainty helps nobody bar the lawyers. Alan Krueger, former chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, draws a parallel with the emergence of the workers’ compensation system a century ago. Sensible rules were agreed, he says, once lawsuits over industrial accidents became expensive and unpredictable.

But what should the new rules be? Mr Krueger’s approach is to adapt the status quo by extending some employment benefits to gig economy workers. He and his co-author, Seth Harris, recently proposed a third category of “independent workers”, neither pure freelancers nor pure employees. They receive “all the benefits that employees get”, Mr Krueger told me, “except for the ones that don’t make sense”.

As the global economy heals, a brave new world is emerging for workers in which more temporary jobs are being created — especially for the young

For example, if Uber drivers enjoyed the status of independent workers, they could form or join a union, and be protected under anti-discrimination laws. Uber, for its part, might offer pensions, health insurance and other products that its drivers could find attractive without fear this would lead the courts to rule that it was an employer. But independent workers would not receive paid holiday or protection from dismissal.

The Harris-Krueger proposal is based on the idea that the current package of employment rights in the US is attractive, and that America would be a better place if it was available as widely as possible. In the eurozone, where double-digit unemployment seems to be customary, it is hard to see how most protections could be applied to independent workers — and harder still to see why that would be a progressive step.

So here is a far more radical approach: we should end the policy of trying to offload the welfare state to corporations. It is a policy that hides the costs of these benefits, and ensures that they are unevenly distributed. Instead we should take a hard look at that list of goodies: healthcare, pensions, income for people who are not working. Then we should decide what the state should provide and how generously. To my mind, there is a strong argument that the state should provide all of these things, to everyone, at a very basic level. What the state will not provide, individuals must pay for themselves — or seek employers who provide these benefits as an attraction rather than a legal obligation. Call it libertarianism with a safety net.

No doubt this is just an economists’ pipe dream. Even the far tamer Harris- Krueger ideas seem unlikely to gain political traction any time soon. That is a shame. While traditional jobs suit most of us, the gig economy is perfect for some people and some circumstances. It would be a shame if our welfare state and labour laws failed to catch up.

Written for and first published at ft.com.

Though we've long known that crows use tools to get food (and occasionally to amuse themselves), scientists have lacked definitive evidence. Which is why two intrepid researchers invented the crow tailcam, to record the inventiveness of these birds in the wild.

UK researchers Jolyon Troscianko and Christian Metz had observed crows making tools in the wild, as had some of their colleagues. But none of them ever caught this amazing feat of intelligence on video. A couple of years ago, Metz co-authored a paper about how crows make hooked tools, carefully fashioning them out of branches, in order to get at hard-to-reach grubs inside a piece of wood. But he was quick to point out that those feats of tool-making were done in captivity—where animals often develop a penchant for tool-making that they wouldn't have in the wild. In a paper out last week from Biology Letters, however, Troscianko and Metz describe how they finally caught wild crows making their hooked tools on video.

Not to put too fine a point on it, they put cameras on the crows' butts. More precisely, they used biodegradable rubber to attach tiny cameras to the birds' two strongest tail feathers, giving the researchers a below-the-belly view of the crow's activities. Because crows often lower their heads to foot level to eat and make tools, this was also an excellent vantage point to capture tool-making in action.

To preserve batteries, the cameras only took footage for minutes at a time over the course of roughly a week. After that, the rubber attachments degraded enough that the cameras fell off the birds, and the scientists retrieved the devices from the forest floor. In these videos, above and below, you can see the range of activity that they captured. We can see the birds feeding just using their beaks, interacting with baby crows, and using tools. What's especially remarkable is that we now have solid evidence that crows make hooked tools. Humans are the only other animal on Earth to make these kinds of tools, which require several steps of preparation before they can be used. The crow must find a branch of the right dimensions, trim leaves and bark from it, and shape the hook itself. Only then can the bird insert the hook into rotted wood, snaring larvae and insects for a delicious meal. Crows also appear to use the hooks to muck around in the leaves on the forest floor, hoping to uncover more bugs.

Elsewhere, researchers have described crows making barbed tools that are carefully crafted by stripping the edges off large, serrated leaves.

Troscianko and Metz estimate that the birds they observed used tools for foraging about 19 percent of the time. Generally the crows alternated between using their beaks and using tools. They filmed only among a group of crows that inhabit the island of New Caledonia. This frequently studied group is known for its sophisticated tool use, which appears to be a skill that is handed down within the birds' social groups. That New Caledonian crows use tools differently from other crow groups is a tantalizing hint that perhaps crows, like humans, may possess something like cultural groups with different social practices.

Scientists who study animal tool use have suggested that the practice arises in response to environment rather than something innate. Animals tend to use whatever is available around them to make their tools, which is why New Caledonian crows living in a forest full of diverse plants may have more tools than crows elsewhere. Relatedly, environmental explanations also make it obvious why dolphins use other sea creatures as tools, since there are almost no sticks floating around underwater. In other words, animals make do with what they have when it comes to innovation. It's possible that tool use evolved because it eased resource conflicts between species: the tool-users could eat things that other animals couldn't, thus allowing multiple species to thrive in the same place sustainably.

Regardless of how their tool use evolved, New Caledonian crows have proven themselves to be among the most adept tool-makers on the planet. When it comes to intelligence, opposable thumbs are not required.

Biology Letters, 2015.  DOI:  (About DOIs).

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It was easy for Megan Phelps-Roper to tweet things that made people cringe—she knew that they were evil or deluded by God. Credit Photograph by Katy Grannan for The New Yorker

On December 1, 2009, to commemorate World AIDS Day, Twitter announced a promotion: if users employed the hashtag #red, their tweets would appear highlighted in red. Megan Phelps-Roper, a twenty-three-year-old legal assistant, seized the opportunity. “Thank God for AIDS!” she tweeted that morning. “You won’t repent of your rebellion that brought His wrath on you in this incurable scourge, so expect more & worse! #red.”

As a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, in Topeka, Kansas, Phelps-Roper believed that AIDS was a curse sent by God. She believed that all manner of other tragedies—war, natural disaster, mass shootings—were warnings from God to a doomed nation, and that it was her duty to spread the news of His righteous judgments. To protest the increasing acceptance of homosexuality in America, the Westboro Baptist Church picketed the funerals of gay men who died of AIDS and of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Members held signs with slogans like “God Hates Fags” and “Thank God for Dead soldiers,” and the outrage that their efforts attracted had turned the small church, which had fewer than a hundred members, into a global symbol of hatred.

Westboro had long used the Internet to spread its message. In 1994, the church launched a Web site, www.godhatesfags.com, and early on it had a chat room where visitors could interact with members of Westboro. As a child, Phelps-Roper spent hours there, sparring with strangers. She learned about Twitter in 2008, after reading an article about an American graduate student in Egypt who had used it to notify his friends that he had been arrested while photographing riots. She opened an account but quickly lost interest—at the time, Twitter was still used mostly by early-adopting techies—until someone e-mailed Westboro’s Web site, in the summer of 2009, and asked if the church used the service. Phelps-Roper, who is tall, with voluminous curly hair and pointed features, volunteered to tweet for the congregation. Her posts could be easily monitored, since she worked at Phelps Chartered, the family law firm, beside her mother, Shirley, an attorney. Moreover, Megan was known for her mastery of the Bible and for her ability to spread Westboro’s doctrine. “She had a well-sharpened tongue, so to speak,” Josh Phelps, one of Megan’s cousins and a former member of Westboro, told me.

In August, 2009, Phelps-Roper, under the handle @meganphelps, posted a celebratory tweet when Ted Kennedy died (“He defied God at every turn, teaching rebellion against His laws. Ted’s in hell!”) and a description of a picket that the church held at an American Idol concert in Kansas City (“Totally awesome! Tons going in & taking pics—even tho others tried to block our signs”). On September 1st, her sister Bekah e-mailed church members to explain the utility of Twitter: “Now Megan has 87 followers and more are trickling in all the time. So every time we find something else to picket, or have some new video or picture we want to post (or just something that we see on the news and want to comment about)—87 people get first-hand, gospel commentary from Megan Marie.”

A couple of hours after Phelps-Roper posted her tweet on World AIDS Day, she checked her e-mail and discovered numerous automated messages notifying her of new Twitter followers. Her tweet had been discovered by the comedian Michael Ian Black, who had more than a million followers. He was surprised that a member of the Westboro Baptist Church was on Twitter at all. “I sort of thought they would be this fire-and-brimstone sort of Pentecostal anti-technology clan that would be removed from the world,” he told me. He tweeted, “Sort of obsessed w/ @meganphelps. Sample tweet: ‘AIDS is God’s curse on you.’ Let her feel your love.” The director Kevin Smith and “The Office” star Rainn Wilson mocked her, as did many of their followers.

Phelps-Roper was exhilarated by the response. Since elementary school, she had given hundreds of interviews about Westboro, but the reaction on Twitter seemed more real than a quote in a newspaper. “It’s not just like ‘Yes, all these people are seeing it,’ ” she told me. “It’s proof that people are seeing it and reacting to it.” Phelps-Roper spent much of the morning responding to angry tweets, citing Bible passages. “I think your plan is back-firing,” she taunted Black. “Your followers are just nasty haters of God! You should do something about that . . . like tell them some truth every once in a while. Like this: God hates America.” That afternoon, as Phelps-Roper picketed a small business in Topeka with other Westboro members, she was still glued to her iPhone. “I did not want to be the one to let it die,” she said.

By the end of the day, Phelps-Roper had more than a thousand followers. She took the incident as an encouraging sign that Westboro’s message was well suited to social media. She loved that Twitter let her talk to large numbers of people without the filter of a journalist. During the next few months, Phelps-Roper spearheaded Westboro’s push into the social-media age, using Twitter to offer a window into life in the church and giving it an air of accessibility.

It was easy for Phelps-Roper to write things on Twitter that made other people cringe. She had been taught the church’s vision of God’s truth since birth. Her grandfather Fred Phelps established the church, in 1955. Megan’s mother was the fifth of Phelps’s thirteen children. Megan’s father, Brent Roper, had joined the church as a teen-ager. Every Sunday, Megan and her ten siblings sat in Westboro’s small wood-panelled church as her grandfather delivered the sermon. Fred Phelps preached a harsh Calvinist doctrine in a resounding Southern drawl. He believed that all people were born depraved, and that only a tiny elect who repented would be saved from Hell. A literalist, Phelps believed that contemporary Christianity, with its emphasis on God’s love, preached a perverted version of the Bible. Phelps denounced other Christians so vehemently that when Phelps-Roper was young she thought “Christian” was another word for evil. Phelps believed that God hated unrepentant sinners. God hated the politicians who were allowing the United States to descend into a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. He hated the celebrities who glorified fornication.

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Phelps also believed that fighting the increasing tolerance of homosexuality was the key moral issue of our time. To illustrate gay sin, he described exotic sex acts in lurid detail. “He would say things like ‘These guys are slobbering around on each other and sucking on each other,’ ” Megan said. In awe of his conviction and deep knowledge of Scripture, she developed a revulsion to homosexuality. “We thought of him as a star in the right hand of God,” she said. Westboro had started as an offshoot of Topeka’s East Side Baptist Church, but by the time Phelps-Roper was born its congregation was composed mostly of Fred Phelps’s adult children and their families.

Nevertheless, Phelps-Roper didn’t grow up in isolation. Westboro believed that its members could best preach to the wicked by living among them. The children of Westboro attended Topeka public schools, and Phelps-Roper ran track, listened to Sublime CDs, and read Stephen King novels. If you knew the truth in your heart, Westboro believed, even the filthiest products of pop culture couldn’t defile you. She was friendly with her classmates and her teachers, but viewed them with extreme suspicion—she knew that they were either intentionally evil or deluded by God. “We would always say, They have nothing to offer us,” Phelps-Roper said. She never went to dances. Dating was out of the question. The Westboro students had a reputation for being diligent and polite in class, but at lunch they would picket the school, dodging food hurled at them by incensed classmates.

Phelps-Roper was constantly around family. Nine of Fred Phelps’s children were still in the church, and most of them had large families of their own. Many of them worked as lawyers at Phelps Chartered. The church was in a residential neighborhood in southwest Topeka, and its members had bought most of the houses on the block around it. Their back yards were surrounded by a tall fence, creating a huge courtyard that was home to a trampoline, an in-ground pool, a playground, and a running track. They called the Westboro compound the Block, and considered it a sanctuary in a world full of evil. “We did lots of fun normal-kids stuff,” Megan said.

The Phelps-Roper home was the biggest on the Block, and a room in the basement acted as a kind of community center for Westboro. An alcove in the kitchen had cubbies for the signs that were used in pickets. On summer afternoons, Shirley led Bible readings for young members. She had a central role in nearly every aspect of Westboro’s operations: she was its media coördinator, planned the pickets, and managed Phelps Chartered. A parade of journalists and Westboro members sought meetings with her. Louis Theroux, a British filmmaker who made two documentaries about Westboro, said, “My feeling was that there was a pecking order and there was an unacknowledged hierarchy, and at the top of it was Shirley’s family.” Starting in middle school, Megan worked side by side with Shirley; among her siblings, she had a uniquely strong bond with her mother. “I felt like I could ask her anything about anything,” Megan told me.

Other young Westboro members regarded Shirley with a mixture of fear and respect. “Shirley had a very abrasive personality,” Josh Phelps said. But, he added, she could be remarkably tender when dispensing advice or compliments. Megan lacked Shirley’s hard edge. “She was just happy in general,” her cousin Libby Phelps, one of Megan’s close friends, told me.

Shirley, as Westboro’s de-facto spokeswoman, granted interviews to almost any outlet, no matter how obscure or adversarial. “She was smart and funny, and would answer impertinent questions and not be offended about it,” Megan said. When reporters wanted the perspective of a young person, Shirley let them speak to Megan. In sixth grade, Megan gave her first live interview when she answered a call from a couple of radio d.j.s who wanted to speak to her mother. Megan recalls, “They thought it was hilarious, this eleven-year-old talking about hating Jews.”

Obedience was one of the most important values that Shirley instilled in Megan. She would sum up the Bible in three words: “Obey. Obey. Obey.” The smallest hint of dissent was seen as an intolerable act of rebellion against God. Megan was taught that there would always be a tension between what she felt and thought as a human and what the Bible required of her. But giving place to rebellious thoughts was the first step down the path toward Hell. “The tone of your voice or the look on your face—you could get into so much trouble for these things, because they betray what’s in your heart,” she said. Her parents took to heart the proverb “He that spareth his rod hateth his son.” Her uncle gave them a novelty wooden paddle inscribed with the tongue-in-cheek direction “May be used on any child from 5 to 75,” and her father hung it on the wall next to the family photos. The joke hit close to home for Phelps-Roper, who was spanked well into her teens. Sometimes, she told me, “it went too far, for sure.” But, she added, “I also always knew that they were just trying to do what God required of them.”

As she grew older, she came to find comfort, and even joy, in submitting her will to the word of God. Children in Westboro must make a profession of faith before they are baptized and become full members of the church. One day in June, when she was thirteen, her grandfather baptized her in the shallow end of the Block’s pool. “I wanted to do everything right,” she said. “I wanted to be good, and I wanted to be obedient, and I wanted to be the object of my parents’ pride. I wanted to go to Heaven.”

Westboro started picketing in June, 1991, when Phelps-Roper was five years old. Fred Phelps believed that Gage Park, less than a mile from the Block, had become overrun with gay men cruising for sex. Phelps claimed that he was inspired to launch the Great Gage Park Decency Drive, as he called it, after one of his young grandsons was propositioned while biking through the park. The church sought redress from city officials, to no avail, so throughout the summer church members, including Megan, protested every day, walking in a circle while holding signs with messages written in permanent marker such as “Warning! Gays in the Bushes! Watch Your Children!” and “And God Over-Threw Sodom.”

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The pickets were met with an immediate backlash from the community, but Phelps was not deterred. He had been a committed civil-rights attorney in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, one of the few lawyers to represent black Kansans in discrimination suits, before the state disbarred him, in 1979, for harassing a court reporter who failed to have a transcript ready in time. Now Westboro targeted local churches, politicians, businesses, journalists, and anyone else who criticized Phelps’s crusade. Throughout the nineties, Westboro members crisscrossed the country, protesting the funerals of AIDS victims and gay-pride parades. They picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, the gay man whose murder, in what was widely believed to be a hate crime, became a rallying cry for gay-rights activists. They picketed high schools, concerts, conferences, and film festivals, no matter how tenuous the connection to homosexuality or other sins. “Eventually, the targets broadened such that everyone was a target,” Phelps-Roper said.

Phelps-Roper enjoyed picketing. When the targets were within driving distance, the group packed into a minivan and her grandfather saw them off from his driveway. “At five in the morning, he’d come out and give us all hugs,” she said. When they flew, she and Libby recounted “Saturday Night Live” skits. Amazing things happened on the trips. In New Orleans, they ran into Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister, and serenaded him with an anti-Semitic parody of Israel’s national anthem. Phelps-Roper learned to hold two signs in each hand, a technique that Westboro members called the Butterfly. Her favorite slogans were “God is your enemy,” “No Peace for the Wicked,” “God hates your idols,” and “Mourn for your sins.” She laughed and sang and smiled in the face of angry crowds. “If you were ever upset or even scared, you do not show it, because this is not the time or the place,” she said. Phelps-Roper believed that she was engaged in a profound act of love. Leviticus 19:17 commands, “Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him.” “When you see someone is backing into traffic, you yell at them,” Phelps-Roper said. “You don’t mope around and say it’s such a good idea.”

One of the most common questions she was asked on the picket line was why she hated gay people so much. She didn’t hate gay people, she would reply, God hated gay people. And the rest of the world hated them, too, by cheering them on as they doomed themselves to Hell. “We love these fags more than anyone,” she would say.

In the summer of 2005, Westboro began protesting the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, holding signs like “Thank God for IEDs.” “They turned the country over to the fags—they’re coming home in body bags!” Fred Phelps would say. He believed that 9/11 was God’s punishment for America’s embrace of homosexuality, but that, instead of repenting, Americans had drowned this warning in a flood of patriotism. Phelps believed that God had killed the soldiers to warn a doomed America, and that it was the church’s job to make this fact explicit for the mourners. The scale of the picketing increased dramatically. One of Phelps-Roper’s aunts checked the Department of Defense Web site every day for notifications of casualties. The outrage sparked by the soldier-funeral protests dwarfed anything that Phelps-Roper had experienced previously. Crowds of rowdy, sometimes violent counterprotesters tried to block their signs with huge American flags. A group of motorcyclists called the Patriot Guard Riders eventually began to follow Westboro members around the country, revving their engines to drown out their singing.

Phelps-Roper picketed her first military funeral in July, 2005, in Omaha. She was nineteen years old and a sophomore at Washburn University, a secular public college in Topeka, where many Westboro children went. The Westboro members stood across the street from the church, in a quiet neighborhood in South Omaha, as the mourners filed in. “Everybody’s in close quarters, and marines in dress blues are just staring at us with—the word that comes to mind is hateful ‘disgust.’ Like ‘How could you possibly do this?’ ” Phelps-Roper said. But, before the picket, she asked her mother to walk her through the Bible passages that justified their actions. “I’m, like, O.K., it’s there,” she said. “This is right.” She added, “This was the only hope for mankind, and I was so grateful to be part of this ministry.”

In September, 2009, when Phelps-Roper began to use Twitter in earnest, Westboro was preparing for the end of the world. Fred Phelps had preached for years that the end was near, but his sermons grew more dire after Barack Obama’s election in 2008. Phelps believed that Obama was the Antichrist, and that his Presidency signalled the beginning of the Apocalypse. The sense of looming calamity was heightened by a multimillion-dollar judgment against the church that had been awarded, in 2007, to Albert Snyder, who sued Westboro after it picketed the funeral of his son Matt, a U.S. marine killed in Iraq. Westboro members drew prophecies from the Book of Revelation about how the end might unfold. First, the Supreme Court would overturn the Snyder verdict. The country would be so enraged by Westboro’s victory that its members would be forced to flee to Israel. Obama would be crowned king of the world, then lead every nation in war against Israel. Israel would be destroyed, and only a hundred and forty-four thousand Jews who repented for killing Jesus would be spared. (Revelation says that a hundred and forty-four thousand “children of Israel” are “redeemed from among men.”) Westboro members would lead these converted Jews through the wilderness until Christ returned and ushered them into Heaven. Phelps-Roper and her family members all got passports, so that they could travel to Israel. One day, she was in the grocery store and picked up a container of yogurt with Oreo pieces. She stared at it, thinking, We won’t have modern conveniences like this in the wilderness. Is it better to learn to live without them, or to enjoy them while we can?

Still, she had a hard time believing in aspects of the future foretold by some church members, like the idea that they would soon be living in pink caves in Jordan. “We were making specific predictions about things without having, in my mind, sufficient scriptural support,” she said. Many other members shared her bewilderment, she found, and so she turned to Twitter for answers. Most of the prophecies centered on Jews, so she found a list, published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a syndicated news service, of the hundred most influential Jewish Twitter users. She created an account under the pseudonym Marissa Cohen and followed many of the people on the list, hoping to learn if Westboro’s prophecies were coming true.

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As the prophecies were developed, Westboro expanded the focus of its preaching to include the Jewish community. Members hoped to find the hundred and forty-four thousand repentant Jews. They picketed synagogues and sent anti-Semitic DVDs to Jewish organizations. Westboro called the protests the Fateful Fig Find, after a parable in the Book of Jeremiah that compares Jews who had been captured by the Babylonians to two baskets of figs, one good and one “naughty.” Phelps-Roper thought that this initiative was more explicitly supported by the Bible than other parts of the prophecies were, so she threw herself into the effort. She wrote the church’s press release: “WBC is looking for the good figs among the Christ-rejecting hypocrites!” She looked at the J.T.A. list of influential Jews and saw that No. 2 was David Abitbol, a Jerusalem-based Web developer and the founder of the Jewish-culture blog Jewlicious. With more than four thousand followers and a habit of engaging with those who tweeted at him, he would be a prime target for Westboro’s message of repentance, she figured.

On September 9, 2009, Shirley gave an interview to an Atlanta radio station, and Phelps-Roper shared a quote on Twitter. Phelps-Roper tagged Abitbol in the post so that he would see it. She wrote, “Atlanta: radio guy says ‘Finish this sentence: the only good Jew is a . . .’ Ma says ‘Repentant Jew!’ The only answer that suffices @jewlicious.” “Thanks Megan!” he responded. “That’s handy what with Yom Kippur coming up!” Phelps-Roper posted another tweet, spelling it out more clearly. “Oh & @jewlicious? Your dead rote rituals == true repentance. We know the diff. Rev. 3:9 You keep promoting sin, which belies the ugly truth.” “Dead rote rituals?” he responded. “U mean like holding up God Hates Shrimp, err I mean Fag signs up? Your ‘ministry’ is a joke.”

“Anybody’s initial response to being confronted with the sort of stuff Westboro Baptist Church says is to tell them to fuck off,” Abitbol told me. Abitbol is a large man in his early fifties who often has a shaggy Mohawk, which he typically covers with a Montreal Expos baseball cap. He was familiar with Westboro from its godhatesfags.com Web site. He had lived in Montreal in the nineties, and had become fascinated with the explosion of hate sites on the early Internet. “Most people, when they first get access to the Internet, the first thing they wanted to see was naked ladies,” he told me. “The first thing I wanted to see was something I didn’t have access to in Montreal: neo-Nazis and hate groups.” There were few widely available search engines at the time, so he spent hours tracking down the Web sites of Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites, and racists of all types. He and a friend eventually created a directory called Net Hate, which listed the sites along with mocking descriptions. “We didn’t want to debate them, we just wanted to make fun of them,” he said. As for the Westboro members, “I just thought they were crazy.”

Phelps-Roper got into an extended debate with Abitbol on Twitter. “Arguing is fun when you think you have all the answers,” she said. But he was harder to get a bead on than other critics she had encountered. He had read the Old Testament in its original Hebrew, and was conversant in the New Testament as well. She was taken aback to see that he signed all his blog posts on Jewlicious with the handle “ck”—for “christ killer”—as if it were a badge of honor. Yet she found him funny and engaging. “I knew he was evil, but he was friendly, so I was especially wary, because you don’t want to be seduced away from the truth by a crafty deceiver,” Phelps-Roper said.

Abitbol had learned while running Net Hate that relating to hateful people on a human level was the best way to deal with them. He saw that Phelps-Roper had a lot of followers and was an influential person in the church, so he wanted to counter her message. And he wanted to humanize Jews to Westboro. “I wanted to be like really nice so that they would have a hard time hating me,” he said. One day, he tweeted about the television show “Gossip Girl,” and Phelps-Roper responded jocularly about one of its characters. “You know, for an evil something something, you sure do crack me up,” Abitbol responded.

On December 20, 2009, Phelps-Roper was in the basement of her house, for a church function, when she checked Twitter on her phone and saw that Brittany Murphy, the thirty-two-year-old actress, had died. When she read the tweet aloud, other church members reacted with glee, celebrating another righteous judgment from God. “Lots of people were talking about going to picket her funeral,” Phelps-Roper said. When Phelps-Roper was younger, news of terrible events had given her a visceral thrill. On 9/11, she was in the crowded hallway of her high school when she overheard someone talking about how an airplane had hit the World Trade Center. “Awesome!” she exclaimed, to the horror of a student next to her. She couldn’t wait to picket Ground Zero. (The following March, she and other Westboro members travelled to New York City to protest what they described in a press release as “FDNY fags and terrorists.”) But Phelps-Roper had loved Murphy in “Clueless,” and she felt an unexpected pang—not quite sadness, but something close—over her death. As she continued scrolling through Twitter, she saw that it was full of people mourning Murphy. The contrast between the grief on Twitter and the buoyant mood in the basement unsettled her. She couldn’t bring herself to post a tweet thanking God for Murphy’s death. “I felt like I would be such a jackass to go on and post something like that,” she said.

Her hesitance reflected a growing concern for the feelings of people outside Westboro. Church members disdained human feelings as something that people worshipped instead of the Bible. They even had a sign: “God hates your feelings.” They disregarded people’s feelings in order to break their idols. Just a few months earlier, the Westboro Web site had received an e-mail arguing that the church’s constant use of the word “fag” was needlessly offensive. “Get a grip, you presumptuous toad,” Phelps-Roper had replied. She signed off, “Have a lovely day. You’re going to Hell.”

But on Twitter Phelps-Roper found that it was better to take a gentler tone. For one thing, Twitter’s hundred-and-forty-character limit made it hard to fit both a florid insult and a scriptural point. And if she made things personal the conversation was inevitably derailed by a flood of angry tweets. She still preached God’s hate, and still liberally deployed the word “fag,” but she also sprinkled her tweets with cheerful exclamations and emoticons. She became adept at deflecting critics with a wry joke. “So, when do you drink the Kool-aid?” one user tweeted at her. “More of a Sunkist lemonade drinker, myself. =)” she replied. Phelps-Roper told me, “We weren’t supposed to care about what people thought about us, but I did.” As she developed her affable rhetorical style, she justified it with a proverb: “By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.”

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Other Twitter users were fascinated by the dissonance between Westboro’s loathsome reputation and the goofy, pop-culture-obsessed millennial who Phelps-Roper seemed to be on Twitter. “I remember just thinking, How can somebody who appreciates good music believe so many hateful things?” Graham Hughes said. In November, 2009, Hughes, then a college student in British Columbia, interviewed Phelps-Roper for a religious-studies class. Afterward, they corresponded frequently on Twitter. When Hughes was hospitalized with a brain infection, Phelps-Roper showed him more concern than many of his real-life friends. “I knew there was a genuine connection between us,” he said.

As Phelps-Roper continued to tweet, she developed relationships with more people like Hughes. There was a Jewish marketing consultant in Brooklyn who abhorred Westboro’s tactics but supported the church’s right to express its views. There was a young Australian guy who tweeted political jokes that she and her younger sister Grace found hilarious. “It was like I was becoming part of a community,” Phelps-Roper said. By following her opponents’ feeds, she absorbed their thoughts on the world, learned what food they ate, and saw photographs of their babies. “I was beginning to see them as human,” she said. When she read about an earthquake that struck off Canada’s Pacific coast, she sent a concerned tweet to Graham Hughes: “Isn’t this close to you?”

In February, 2010, Westboro protested a festival in Long Beach, California, that David Abitbol had organized through Jewlicious. Phelps-Roper’s conversations with Abitbol had continued through the winter, and she knew that debating him in person would be more challenging than on Twitter. The church set up its picket a block from the Jewish community center where the festival was taking place. Phelps-Roper held four signs, while an Israeli flag dragged on the ground from her leg. The church members were quickly mobbed by an angry crowd. “Each of us was really surrounded,” Phelps-Roper said. “Two really old women came up behind me and started whispering the filthiest stuff I’d ever heard.”

She recognized Abitbol from his Twitter avatar. They made some small talk—Abitbol was amused by a sign, held by one of Phelps-Roper’s sisters, that said “Your Rabbi Is a Whore”—then began to debate her about Westboro’s doctrine. “Our in-person interaction resembled our Twitter interaction,” Phelps-Roper said. “Funny, friendly, but definitely on opposite sides and each sticking to our guns.” Abitbol asked why Westboro always denounced homosexuality but never mentioned the fact that Leviticus also forbade having sex with a woman who was menstruating. The question embarrassed Phelps-Roper—“I didn’t want to talk about it because, ugh”—but it did strike her as an interesting point. As far as she could remember, her grandfather had never addressed that issue from the pulpit. Still, Phelps-Roper enjoyed the exchange with Abitbol. Not long after, she told him that Westboro would be picketing the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations, in New Orleans, that year. Abitbol said that he’d be there, too, and when they met again they exchanged gifts.

Phelps-Roper and Abitbol continued their conversations via e-mail and Twitter’s direct-message function. In Phelps-Roper’s effort to better understand Westboro’s new prophecies, she had bought a copy of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Judaism,” but she found it more profitable just to ask Abitbol her questions. Here was a real live Orthodox Jew who lived in Israel and was more than happy to enlighten her. During their debates over Scripture, Phelps-Roper sometimes quoted passages from the Old Testament; Abitbol often countered that their meaning differed in the original Hebrew, so Phelps-Roper bought some language-learning software. She figured that, since she would soon be living in Israel awaiting the end of the world, she should learn the language. Abitbol helped her with the vocabulary.

Phelps-Roper still urged Abitbol to repent, but as someone who was concerned about a wayward friend. “I just wish you would obey God and use your considerable platform to warn your audience about the consequences of engaging in conduct that God calls abomination,” she e-mailed Abitbol in October, 2010.

In response, Abitbol kept pressing Phelps-Roper on Westboro’s doctrine. One day, he asked about a Westboro sign that said “Death Penalty for Fags,” referring to a commandment from Leviticus. Abitbol pointed out that Jesus had said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” Abitbol knew that at least one member of Westboro had committed a sin that Leviticus also deems a capital crime. Phelps-Roper’s oldest brother, Sam, was the product of a relationship that Shirley had had with a man she met while she was in law school, before she married Megan’s father.

Shirley’s sin of fornication was often thrown in the church members’ faces by counterprotesters. Westboro always argued that the difference between Shirley and gay people was that Shirley had repented of her sin, whereas gays marched in pride parades. But Abitbol wrote that if gay people were killed they wouldn’t have the opportunity to repent.

Phelps-Roper was struck by the double standard, and, as she did whenever she had a question about doctrine, she brought up the issue with her mother. Shirley responded that Romans said gays were “worthy of death,” and that if it was good enough for God it was good enough for Westboro. “It was such a settled point that they’ve been preaching for so long it’s almost like it didn’t mean anything to her,” Phelps-Roper said. Still, she concluded that Westboro was in the wrong. “That was the first time I came to a place where I disagreed, I knew I disagreed, and I didn’t accept the answer that they gave,” she said. Phelps-Roper knew that to press the issue would create problems for her in the church, so she quietly stopped holding the “Death Penalty for Fags” sign. There were plenty of other signs whose message she still believed in wholeheartedly. She also put an end to the conversations with Abitbol.

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Phelps-Roper found it easy to ignore her doubt amid the greater publicity that Westboro was receiving, much of it tied to her Twitter activity. In February, 2011, the hacker collective Anonymous declared war against Westboro. On Twitter, Phelps-Roper taunted the group’s members as “crybaby hackers.” Anonymous retaliated by hacking godhatesfags.com, and blogs seized on the drama. “Thanks, Anonymous! Your efforts to shut up God’s word only serve to publish it further,” Phelps-Roper tweeted. In March, Westboro members walked out of a screening of the film “Red State,” which spoofed the church. They had been invited by the director, Kevin Smith, with whom Phelps-Roper had kept up a running feud on Twitter since World AIDS Day. Ten days earlier, the Supreme Court had overturned the judgment against Westboro in the Albert Snyder case. Phelps-Roper was inundated with tweets and new followers. That month, she tweeted more than two thousand times; by the end of the month, she had more than seven thousand followers. “That explosion of activity, it was insane,” she said.

But as other members of the church joined Twitter they began to question her friendly relations with outsiders. In April, 2011, the BBC aired one of Louis Theroux’s documentaries about Westboro. In one scene, Phelps-Roper explained how she used Twitter to keep up with a group of four Dutch filmmakers who had visited Westboro in 2010. She showed Theroux a picture of one of the filmmakers, Pepijn Borgwat, a smiling, handsome young man holding a package of chocolate truffles that she and her sister Grace had given to him.

The day after the documentary aired, Sam Phelps-Roper sent an e-mail to church members urging more discretion in their tweets. “I understand the concept of showing the world our brotherly kindness, but we don’t have to let it all hang out,” he wrote. Megan’s father made her block the Dutch journalists from her private Twitter account. “It feels like we are opening ourselves up for entangling ourselves with the affairs or cares of this life,” he e-mailed Phelps-Roper and her siblings. Phelps-Roper said, “It made me scared for myself that I wanted that. And so I was, like, ‘O.K., you gotta step back.’ ”

Another online relationship proved more threatening. In February, 2011, Phelps-Roper began to have conversations on Twitter with a user named @F_K_A. His avatar was Robert Redford in “The Great Gatsby.” He had learned of Westboro after reading an article about the Anonymous hack. “He sent me a tweet, and initially it was like this angry, nasty tweet,” Phelps-Roper said. But @F_K_A was disarmed by Phelps-Roper’s friendly demeanor. He began to ask her questions about life in Westboro, and, because he was curious instead of condemning, she kept answering them. One day, Phelps-Roper recalled, “I asked him some kind of pointed question about the Bible. He said something like, ‘I can’t answer that, but I have never been beaten in Words with Friends’ ”—the popular online Scrabble knockoff. Phelps-Roper replied, “I can’t boast the same. =)” She put her Words with Friends username at the end of the tweet.

They began to talk about the church using the in-game chat function, free from Twitter’s character limit. @F_K_A told Phelps-Roper to call him C.G. But C.G. remained a mystery. She knew that he was an attorney, but she didn’t know where he lived or how old he was. “He was careful not to reveal anything about himself,” Phelps-Roper said.

Like David Abitbol, C.G. argued against Westboro’s beliefs and practices, but while Abitbol’s arguments were doctrinal C.G. was most critical of Westboro’s cruelty. “We had the same discussion several times when someone would die,” Phelps-Roper said. C.G. urged Phelps-Roper to think of how much hurt it must cause the families of the deceased to see Phelps-Roper and her family rejoicing. Westboro divided people into good and evil, but, Phelps-Roper said, C.G. “always tried to advocate for a third group of people: people who were decent but not religious.” She had heard all these arguments before, but they had never affected her as they did when C.G. made them. “I just really liked him,” she said. “He seemed to genuinely like people and care about people, and that resonated with me.”

Phelps-Roper increasingly found herself turning to Bible passages where tragedy is not met with joy. The Old Testament prophet Elisha, for example, weeps when he foresees disaster for Israel. One day in July, 2011, Phelps-Roper was on Twitter when she came across a link to a series of photographs about a famine in Somalia. The first image was of a tiny malnourished child. She burst into tears at her desk. Her mother asked what was wrong, and Phelps-Roper showed her the gallery. Her mother quickly composed a triumphant blog post about the famine. “Thank God for famine in East Africa!” she wrote. “God is longsuffering and patient, but he repays the wicked TO THEIR FACE!” When Brittany Murphy died, Phelps-Roper had seen the disparity between her reaction and that of the rest of the church as a sign that something was wrong with her. Now the contradiction of her mother’s glee and her own sadness made her wonder if something was wrong with the church.

Phelps-Roper’s conversations with C.G. often drifted away from morality. C.G. liked indie rock and literary fiction. He introduced Phelps-Roper to bands like the Antlers, Blind Pilot, and Cults—“funnily enough,” she said—and to the novels of David Foster Wallace and Marilynne Robinson. “Hipster shit,” Phelps-Roper said. He turned her on to the Field Notes brand of notebooks. He poked fun at the inelegant fonts that Westboro used for its press releases. After C.G. complimented her on her grammar, she took pains to make sure that her tweets were free of clunky text-message abbreviations.

As Phelps-Roper developed her relationship with C.G., her sister Grace grew suspicious. “Suddenly, her taste in music started changing,” Grace told me. “It annoyed me, because it wasn’t coming from Megan. It was coming from him, this question mark of a person that I don’t get to know about, but she has some kind of thing with.” As young children, Grace and Megan had squabbled constantly, but they had grown close. Grace was seven years younger than Megan, and still in high school at the time. Grace would scroll through Megan’s iPhone, asking about the various messages and e-mails. But soon after Megan started talking to C.G. she stopped letting Grace look at her phone. “I remember thinking, What the heck? What are you hiding?” Grace said.

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For young women in Westboro, having romantic interactions with someone outside the church was forbidden. When Phelps-Roper was growing up, one of her cousins had been pushed out of the church for, among other things, getting entangled with boys; other young women had been harshly punished. Phelps-Roper had long assumed that she would likely never get married, since she was related to almost every male in the church. “I was terrified of even thinking about guys,” she said. “It’s not just the physical stuff that can get you in trouble.” She did her best to displace her feelings for C.G. onto the music and books he recommended, which she fervently consumed. “I was in denial,” she said.

Then, on September 30, 2011, she had a dream: It was a beautiful summer day, and she was standing on the driveway of the church. A black car with tinted windows pulled up, and a tall, blond man got out. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew it was C.G. She walked up to him, and they embraced. She knew her family could see them on the surveillance cameras that line the Block, but she didn’t care. “It was so real, that feeling of wanting to be with him,” Phelps-Roper told me. She woke up fighting back tears. “He was not a good person, according to the church,” she said. “And the fact that I dreamed about him, and the strong feeling of wanting that relationship, represented huge danger to me.” That day, she told C.G. that they couldn’t talk anymore. She deleted her Words with Friends account. C.G. deleted his Twitter account.

Phelps-Roper tried to throw herself back into the Westboro community, but the atmosphere had changed while she was distracted by her relationship with C.G. It had started in April, 2011. Her mother seemed mysteriously troubled. After Phelps-Roper pressed her parents, they showed her an e-mail they’d received from her oldest brother, Sam, and Steve Drain, another church member. It accused her mother of lacking humility, saying that she was too zealous in correcting other members’ behavior and had overreached her authority on a number of occasions, Phelps-Roper told me. Reading the e-mail made her sick with fear. When a Westboro member was singled out for bad behavior, it often triggered a harrowing period of discipline. The smallest transgression could spark another round of punishment, until the member either shaped up or was kicked out of the church.

Shirley’s role in the church was reduced dramatically. “My mother was supposed to be primarily a mother and a caretaker,” Zach Phelps-Roper, Megan’s younger brother, told me. Megan took over picket planning, while Steve Drain became the church’s media manager. The Phelps-Roper house was now quiet, as the flow of church members and reporters stopped. “I watched her all my life work so hard and sacrifice so much, and just be so willing to do anything for anybody,” Phelps-Roper said. “She had to be put in her place, essentially, and that feeling—it just was really, really wrong to me.” (Drain insists that Megan’s description of the letter is inaccurate. He said that it was a “disciplinary message,” but wouldn’t reveal its contents. “We don’t air our dirty laundry,” he said.)

An all-male group of nine elders took control of church affairs. Previously, decisions at Westboro had been hashed out in church meetings, where consensus was required before moving forward. But the elders met separately before bringing their decisions to the rest of the group. The church became more secretive, as members were reluctant to discuss important issues for fear of appearing to go behind the elders’ backs.

Women like Shirley and her older sister Margie—an attorney who had argued the Snyder case in front of the Supreme Court—had always been among the most public and influential members of the church. Westboro members drew on stories of powerful women in the Bible, like Deborah, a prophet and judge of Israel. But now the emphasis shifted to passages about women submitting to their husbands. Fred Phelps encouraged church members to read the Evangelical writer John R. Rice’s book “Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers,” from 1941, which offered a view of gender roles that was regressive even when it was published. “It suddenly sucked to be a woman,” Phelps-Roper said. “It was, like, I would need to get permission from Dad to talk to anybody else.”

Westboro women had long been forbidden to cut their hair, and had restrictions on other aspects of their appearance. But now the elders required more severe standards of modesty. Phelps-Roper had to wear high-necked shirts and dresses or shorts that covered her knees. After one shopping trip with her mother and her sisters, Phelps-Roper had to show her clothes to her father and her brother Sam, to make sure that they were appropriate. She was barred from wearing colorful nail polish and her favorite gold sandals to church. Phelps-Roper was upset to learn that some of her cousins lived under more liberal standards. How could God’s judgment differ from house to house?

Phelps-Roper’s confusion soon turned to outrage. In 2012, she was twenty-six years old, but she was still being treated like a child. Once-minor indignities, like being accompanied by an adult chaperone while eating lunch at a restaurant with other young church members, now seemed unbearable. In April, she was shocked when Westboro expelled a cousin of hers without adhering to the process that the church had always followed, which was derived from the Book of Matthew. Typically, expulsion resulted only after a unanimous decision, but in the cousin’s case she was excluded over other members’ objections. (Drain recalls no objections, and said, “Everything was done decently and in accordance with Scripture.”) “It stopped feeling like this larger-than-life divine institution ordained and led by God, and more like the sniping and sordid activity of men who wanted to be in control,” Phelps-Roper said.

She resented the increasing authority wielded by Drain. One of the few Westboro members unrelated to Fred Phelps, Drain had visited Topeka in 2000 to film a skeptical documentary about the church, but he soon became convinced of its message. The next year, he and his family joined the church. He’d long pushed for a larger role in Westboro, and after the elders came to power his influence increased. In February, 2012, during the funeral of Whitney Houston, in New Jersey, Drain urged Phelps-Roper and other members to tweet poorly Photoshopped images that depicted them haranguing mourners. The media quickly unravelled the hoax. (Drain told me that the fake picket was never meant to be taken literally.)

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Phelps-Roper was embarrassed by the debacle. It undermined her own proud claims on Twitter to be spreading God’s truth—and lying violated Scripture. In addition, she now had to have all her media appearances approved by Drain. “It seems like he wants to be Pope Steve and for no one else to do anything without his permission,” she wrote in her journal. “I hate it so much.”

Megan’s doubt engendered by the “Death Penalty for Fags” sign grew. She started to complain to her mother, saying that the elders were not obeying the Bible. They treated her mother and other members with cruelty when the Bible required brotherly love, she said. The elders acted arrogantly and tolerated no dissent, when God demanded meekness and humility. Phelps-Roper was struck by the similarities between her arguments and what C.G. and David Abitbol had always said about the church. “It was like we were finally doing to ourselves what we had done to everyone else,” she said. “Seeing those parallels was really disorienting.”

Drain disputed many of Phelps-Roper’s characterizations of the changes in the church. He acknowledged that an all-male group of elders assumed preaching duties, but not that this led to a less open atmosphere in the church. “There’s definitely more participation than when I first got here, in 2001, when you had one person doing all the sermons,” he said, referring to Fred Phelps.

He also denied that women in the church had been significantly marginalized. “Women do a lot at Westboro now, as they always have,” he said. Shirley’s role was not reduced as a punishment for overstepping her bounds, he said. Instead, after the Snyder decision, other members had volunteered to help her deal with an overwhelming torrent of media. “We lifted her burden,” he said. He pointed out that Shirley had recently spoken at a picket protesting Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who had refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples—the church took issue with Davis’s remarriages after divorce. (Through Drain, Megan’s parents declined to comment.)

Phelps-Roper first considered leaving the church on July 4, 2012. She and Grace were in the basement of another Westboro family’s house, painting the walls. The song “Just One,” by the indie folk group Blind Pilot—a band that C.G. had recommended—played on the stereo. The lyrics seemed to reflect her dilemma perfectly: “And will I break and will I bow / if I cannot let it go?” Then came the chorus: “I can’t believe we get just one.” She suddenly thought, What if Westboro had been wrong about everything? What if she was spending her one life hurting people, picking fights with the entire world, for nothing? “It was, like, just the fact that I thought about it, I had to leave right then,” she said. “I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin.”

The next day, she mentioned the possibility of leaving to Grace. Grace was horrified. “It just sounded ridiculous to even suggest it,” Grace told me. “These were the points I brought up: we’re never going to see our families again, we’re going to go to Hell for eternity, and our life will be meaningless.” Megan, still uncertain, agreed. But she plunged into a profound crisis of faith. “It was like flipping a switch,” she said. “So many other thoughts came in that I’d never pursued, and that’s every doubt that I’d ever had, everything that had ever seemed illogical or off.”

When they were together, Megan engaged Grace in interminable theological conversations. When they were apart, Megan detailed her doubts in text messages. One day, she texted Grace, “What if the God of the Bible isn’t the God of creation? We don’t believe that the Koran has the truth about God. Is it just because we were told forever that this is How Things Are?” She added, “Does it really make you happy when you hear about people dying or starving or being maimed? Do you really want to ask God to hurt people? I ask myself these questions. I think the answer is no. When I’m not scared of the answer, I know the answer is no.” Two days later, she texted Grace about Hell: “Why do we think it’s real? It’s starting to seem made up to scare people into doing what they say.” Grace replied, “But what if?”

That day, Grace wrote to Megan, “Our belief in God has always curbed everything. Like, pain & sorrow, I mean. Without that we’d only have our belief in each other. But we are human & humans die. What would we have if we didn’t have each other?” For Megan, the answer could be found in other people. “We know what it is to be kind & good to people,” she wrote. “We would just have to find somewhere else, other people to love and care about and help, too.” Grace wrote back, “I don’t want other people.” In truth, Megan didn’t want other people, either; she desperately wanted things in Westboro to go back to the way they had been. But the idea of living among outsiders was no longer unimaginable.

Phelps-Roper spent the summer and the fall in an existential spiral. She would conclude that everything about Westboro’s doctrine was wrong, only to be seized with terror that these thoughts were a test from God, and she was failing. “You literally feel insane,” she said. Eventually, her doubts won out. “I just couldn’t keep up the charade,” she said. “I couldn’t bring myself to do the things we were doing and say the things we were saying.”

She largely stopped tweeting and tried to avoid journalists on the picket line, for fear that she might say something that revealed her misgivings. At one protest, a journalism student cornered her and asked if she ever got tired of picketing. “I honestly replied no,” she wrote in her journal. “It’s not about being tired, it’s about not believing in it anymore. If I believed it, I could do it forever.” In October, Megan finally persuaded Grace to leave. At the end of October, the sisters started secretly moving their possessions to the house of one of their high-school teachers, who agreed to help them. Many of Megan and Grace’s young relatives who left the church had slipped away quietly, in order to avoid confronting their families. But the sisters wanted to explain to their parents the reasons behind their decision.

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As the sisters agonized over whether to leave, they befriended an older man in the church and his wife, eventually becoming allies in discontent. For a while, they all planned to leave together. Then the couple’s marriage began to deteriorate, and the husband told Megan and Grace that they were going to divorce. Grace became involved in a brief romantic relationship with the man. After the relationship ended, the wife learned about it, and sent a letter to Megan and Grace’s parents revealing both the relationship and the sisters’ plan to leave.

On Sunday, November 11th, the family had just returned from church when Megan and Grace were called into their parents’ bedroom, where their father began to read the letter out loud. Megan told Grace quietly that they had to leave: “It was like the world was exploding and I didn’t want to be around to see it.” Their mother tried to calm things down. Their parents wanted to talk things over—they seemed to think that the sisters could be persuaded to stay—but Megan and Grace had made up their minds. As Grace packed, their father came into her room and asked what she wanted the church to do differently. “I want you and everyone else to leave with me,” Grace replied. Their parents were stunned, but they didn’t try to force the sisters to stay.

As the sisters packed, their younger brother Zach sat at the piano downstairs, crying and playing hymns, which he hoped might change their mind. Other church members stopped by to say goodbye and to warn the sisters of the consequences of their decision. “The fact that I’m coming face to face with the damage that I was doing to them was even worse than anything else that was happening to me,” Phelps-Roper said. Her parents told her to say goodbye to her grandfather. She walked over to the residence where her grandparents lived, above the church sanctuary. When Megan told them she was leaving, her grandfather looked at her grandmother and said, “Well, I thought we had a jewel this time.”

Megan and Grace’s father drove them to a hotel in Topeka, where he had paid for a room, but they were too scared to spend the night alone, so they called the teacher who had agreed to store their boxes. That night, they cried themselves to sleep on couches in his basement. Megan and Grace returned to their house the next day with a U-Haul truck to pick up their remaining possessions. As they walked away for the last time, Shirley called after them, “You know you can always come back.”

For the next few months, the sisters drifted. They lived in Lawrence for a month with their cousin Libby, who had also left the church, while Grace finished the first semester of her sophomore year at Washburn. They travelled to Deadwood, South Dakota, because Megan wanted to see the Black Hills. As she drove there, she kept imagining her car careering off the highway—she was so afraid of God’s wrath. “We were a mess, crying all the time,” she said. Phelps-Roper was tempted to hide in the Black Hills forever, but soon decided that, after spending so many years as the public face of Westboro, she wanted to go public with how she’d left the church, and to start making amends for the hurt she had caused. In February, 2013, she wrote a statement on the blogging platform Medium. “Until now, our names have been synonymous with ‘God Hates Fags,’ ” she wrote. “What we can do is try to find a better way to live from here on.” She posted a link to the statement on Twitter. It was her first tweet in three months. “Hi,” she wrote. Tweets of encouragement and praise poured in. “I expected a lot more people to be unforgiving,” she said.

When David Abitbol learned that the sisters had left Westboro, he invited them to speak at the next Jewlicious festival in Long Beach. They agreed, hoping that the experience might help them to find their way, and to finally understand a community that they had vilified for so long. “It was like we were just reaching out and grabbing on to whatever was around,” Megan said. Abitbol said, “People, before they met them, were, like, ‘So, now they’re not batshit-crazy gay haters and we’re supposed to love them? Fuck that.’ ” He added, “And then they heard them speak, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.” The sisters befriended their hosts, an Orthodox rabbi and his family. They went kosher-grocery shopping together, and Megan and Grace looked after the kids. Grace became especially close with the family, and ended up staying for more than a month. “They were amazing and super-kind,” Phelps-Roper said. Abitbol joked about the dramatic role reversal: “ ‘Your Rabbi Is a Whore’? Your rabbi is a host.”

Megan tried to put herself in situations that challenged the intolerance she had been indoctrinated with. One evening, after speaking at a Jewish festival in Montreal, she and Grace passed a group of drag queens on the sidewalk outside a cabaret. She felt a surge of disgust, but when Grace asked if they could watch the show she agreed. “It felt illicit,” she said. “Like, oh, my gosh, I can’t believe I’m here.” She and Grace ended up dancing onstage during the intermission. Wherever Megan and Grace went, they met people who wanted to help them, despite all the hurt they had caused. The experience solidified Megan’s increasing conviction that no person or group could claim a monopoly on moral truth. Slowly, her fears about God’s judgment—the first terrifying understanding of her faith as a child, and its most stubborn remnant—faded. “As undeniable as they had seemed before, they seemed just as impossible now,” she said.

“I’m just here for the dental.”August 29, 2011Buy the print »

One Sunday last February, I went with Megan and Grace to visit their old neighborhood. We parked a few blocks from the church and walked down a quiet street lined with ranch-style homes. It was sunny and warm for a winter day in Kansas. Phelps-Roper wore a green polka-dot dress and high leather boots, and her long curly hair—she still hadn’t cut it since leaving the church—fell down her back. Now twenty-nine, she lives in a small town in South Dakota, where she works at a title company. Six months after she left the church, she went on a date with C.G. They met in Omaha, in driving distance for both of them, and saw “The Great Gatsby,” the Baz Luhrmann movie. “It’s hard to even describe how weird it was,” she told me. It was her first date ever, and it was with someone who had become a symbol of the unattainable. “I was quite a bit like a teen-ager. He put his arm around my waist at one point, and I just stood up so straight.” She and C.G. connected as strongly in person as they had online, and they now live together.

When we reached the Block, we walked along the privacy fence. In front of each house where Westboro members live, Megan pointed out colorful numbers on the curb; Grace had helped paint them when she was a teen-ager. We passed the Phelps-Roper house and came to an intersection. A group of men and boys came toward us. “I can’t tell yet, but it sure looks like a group of brothers and cousins,” Megan said. First came five of their young cousins, followed by two of their brothers, Sam and Noah. Steve Drain, a large bearded man, trailed behind. They carried tools. Megan later explained that they had probably just come from doing repairs on a Westboro member’s house. The group passed us without stopping. Grace called out, “Hi!” Sam nodded and gave a terse smile and a small wave. “Hi, how are you?” he said. Sam and Noah had recently had birthdays, and Megan wished them a belated happy birthday. The sisters said nothing to Drain. The crew quickly disappeared into a house.

We reached the church, an unremarkable white and brown mock-Tudor building on the northeast corner of the Block. A banner advertised a Westboro Web site, godhatesamerica.com. Two American flags—one of them rainbow colored—flew upside down from a pole. The church sign read “ST. VALENTINE IS A CATHOLIC IDOL AND AN EXCUSE TO FORNICATE! JUDE 7.”

Directly across the street stood a house painted in bright, horizontal rainbow stripes. The house had been bought, in 2012, by Planting Peace, a nonprofit group whose mission, according to its Web site, is “spreading peace in a hurting world.” The Equality House, as it’s known, is home to a group of young L.G.B.T. activists. Planting Peace has worked with former Westboro members to spread its message of tolerance. Megan first visited the house in 2013, after her cousin Libby encouraged her to visit. She sneaked in the back door, for fear of being spotted by her family.

Today, Megan and Grace’s only connection to Westboro is virtual. Although Phelps-Roper no longer believes that the Bible is the word of God, she still reads it to try to find scriptural arguments that could encourage Westboro to take a more humane approach to the world. Sometimes she’ll tweet passages, knowing that church members will see them. After they left the church, Megan and Grace were blocked from Westboro’s Twitter accounts, but they created a secret account to follow them. Sometimes, when her mother appears in a video, Megan will loop it over and over, just to hear her voice.

Fred Phelps died in March, 2014, at the age of eighty-four. Former members of the church told me that Fred had had a softening of heart at the end of his life and had been excommunicated. (The church denies these claims.) Zach Phelps-Roper, Megan’s younger brother, who left the church later that year, said that one of the precipitating events in Fred’s exclusion had been expressing kindness toward the Equality House. At a church meeting, Zach recalls, members discussed the episode: “He stepped out the front door of the church and looked at the Rainbow House, the Planting Peace organization, and looked over and said, ‘You’re good people.’ ” ♦

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Ellis Island in Upper New York Bay was the busiest immigrant inspection station in the United States at the dawn of the 20th century, with millions of immigrants arrived in the United States via the island by boat.

Amateur photographer Augustus Sherman was the Ellis Island Chief Registry Clerk for a number of years in the early 1900s, and he used his special access to shoot portraits of many of the immigrants who passed through the station.

The New York Public Library recently published a collection of photographs captured by Sherman between 1902 and 1914. They document both what the immigration station was like at the time as well as special cultural outfits of the new immigrants arriving on US shores.

“It is likely that Sherman’s elaborately costumed subjects were detainees, new immigrants held at Ellis Island for one reason or another,” the NYPL writes. “While waiting for what they needed to leave the island (an escort, or money, or travel tickets), some of these immigrants may have been persuaded to pose for Sherman’s camera, donning their best holiday finery or national dress, which they had brought with them from home.”

You can find the entire collection of 89 photos in this Flickr set.

(via New York Public Library via Flickr Blog)

Take a close look at the water in your local marina and you'll probably shudder at the amount of waste floating around. You'd practically need a dedicated clean-up crew to make it safe, wouldn't you? However, a pair of Australian surfers think they h...

MY FAVORITE VULGAR WORD by far is “shit.” I was about six years old when I learned the word, and ever since I’ve felt the greatest fondness for it. It seems to me one of the truly irreplaceable words in the language.

I learned the word from my childhood friend, Tony Tanzio. “Shit” was not the first bad word that Tony taught me. The first was “asshole.” It was Tony’s appellation for the ants that thronged around and into an ant hole that Tony and I found at the base of an aged, rather patriarchal oak tree. I knew that the primary name for these creatures was ants, but when Tony referred to them as “little assholes,” I decided that there was a secondary term. Many items in the world seemed to go around under two names, why not ants? 

The day after Tony increased my vocabulary with the “little asshole” appellation, I introduced it to my mother. “Hey,” I said, “did you know that ants are also called ‘little assholes’?” My mother was quite close to falling over flat on her face, like a flipped pancake. “Go tell your father,” she said. My father was shaving in the bathroom. His face was fully lathered, his towel was wrapped around his mid-section in Roman- senator-on-his-way-to-the-bath style, and he was smoking. (When my father was awake, he was smoking.) I told him how Tanzio had expanded my vocabulary and he jumped as though rather than speaking words, I had pinched him by surprise in the rear of his senatorial towel.

I was always trying to make an impression on my parents. What kid isn’t? I memorized poems, made up songs, and even tried a physical trick or two — like trampolining on their bed before they were awake. No trick that was so briefly enacted and so easy to bring off ever had the effect that the two-word incantation “little assholes” did. Talk about magic words.

Though maybe they were black magic words, since the reaction they garnered from my parents, though intense, was not quite so approving as what I got by learning the opening lines of “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” or singing a ribald song my father taught me about a woman from the Bible who danced before Saul the King. (“And what she wore didn’t amount to anything.”) I sang this for a few of his Greek card-playing buddies and made quite a hit. I may have danced it out too. But the singing and dancing reaction was nothing as strong as what I got by renaming the ants.

Words with power! It wasn’t close to “Let there be Light”! But swearing could really make things happen. Did my father backhand me across my offending mouth? He did. But damn did I have his attention for a minute.

There then came interrogation. How did I learn that word? Where did it come from? Who had put it in my mouth? I forthwith blamed Tony Tanzio and was of course forbidden to play with him. But I had no real power over whether I played with Tony or not. He simply appeared from time to time on the top of the fence by the oak, with his floppy curls and his jesters’ rags and marvelous strong shoes that seemed to have been made by a village shoemaker for a boy who was about to go adventuring, off and up the beanstalk maybe, to kneecap the giant. “Tanzio arrives!” Tony would cry. Like Caesar and certain other worthies Tony Tanzio often spoke of himself in the third person. When I told him that my father had forbidden me to play with him, Tanzio simply laughed and said that he didn’t care and I shouldn’t either. My father was at work. What was he going to do? 

I could not believe that anyone would take an adult commandment so lightly. It seemed blasphemous. It was as though God had told you to cut out what you were doing and get into the ark and you, in a fit of pique, told him you were staying outside because you liked a little rain. Tanzio was a lawless person, or so he seemed. He had aspirations to some kind of heroism. It often seemed that he had arrived from another era. I sometimes imagined he came to me from a medieval village down the hill and past the Converse Rubber plant.

I persisted in telling Tony that he had to go, but he placated me by promising that if he stayed he would teach me some more words and phrases like “little assholes.” This was a promise too good to be true and I accepted immediately. So under the leaves of the fatherly druidical oak — the druids were said to be tree-worshippers, and this one was big enough for awe — I was initiated into the canon of bad words.

There were two sorts, it seemed. There were the ones that were associated with religion, and in general those were not to be messed with. A casual “Jesus Christ!” or a “God damned” could readily put you on the express to the dark place below the surface of earth. But something like “asshole” was at most a side-bet sin that could maybe extend your stay in purgatory by — who knows? — maybe an hour, maybe a decade or two. It all depended on how fast you managed to climb the purgatorial hill — a hill I’d heard a little bit about at church. I assumed that purgatory was described in the Bible, though how it could be there, affirmed in a book where a woman danced before Saul the King wearing an outfit that doesn’t amount to much of anything, was a mystery.

So Tanzio taught me how to swear. Really committed swearing was not completely unlike songwriting. And I had done a lot of spontaneous songwriting — often traversing my house chanting ditties to my three mothers (my aunt, my grandmother, and my actual mother), my father, our parakeets Ike and Mamie, and the characters on TV that I liked, most especially Rex Trailer and Pablo. Top-flight swearing involved getting a pseudo-song together drawing copiously from the bank of salty words that Tony put at my disposal. As in “Shit, fuck, balls, piss, asshole-face.”

It was a given that religious oriented cursing was the worst, only to be undertaken under major duress. To bop your finger with a hammer and yell “Jesus fucking Christ!” was an outrage and the chances of being zapped by lightning from the father’s index finger were not negligible. Tony said that you could pull out the heavy, religious guns only if your mother or father died or if you were hit by a car or something equally dire. As Melissa Mohr, the author of a fine recent book on obscenities, observes, “For more than two thousand years, swearing has alternated between the twin poles of oaths and obscenities, between the Holy and the Shit.” 

But even within the category of earthy vulgarities (the Shit), there were distinctions to be learned and observed. “Fuck” was about the worst word you could use. If your parents heard it, they’d smack you down right away. If grown-ups from the neighborhood heard the word pass your vulgar lips they had the right to make your cheeks ring, too. What was “fuck”? What did the word mean? We did not know. Even though by the age of seven I’d had a few people — crazed adults, rogue older kids — explain the dynamics to me, I could not believe the practice existed. I could not imagine that anyone would do such a thing as tangle up with another person in the described manner. It did not make sense. It was impossible. The thought that my parents would have done it, and that they would have done it to produce me and then the tiny brother who had recently arrived on the scene, was not one I could even begin to entertain. On the subject of the derivation of babies I was a full-out agnostic. I did not believe in the stork or any of that nonsense. But I could not commit myself to the copulation theory any more than a scientist of the Middle Ages could commit to the notion that the earth travels around the sun.

“Asshole” was a fine word, though not for one’s parents. There were prick and balls and cunt and the rest: anatomical profanity. But what about “tits”? We came to feel that balls and tits were about on par, and not in the more dangerous league of prick and cunt. Then there was the holy lexicon (Jesus, Mary, God, the Saints) to be generally avoided. And there was shit — which also morphed occasionally into a phrase that Tony and in time I used frequently, with verve and appreciation. (I still have a particular affection for it.) This was, Holy Shit!

Tanzio and I were Jesuits of profanity. We acquired new words steadily; we evaluated them according to their level of intensity and seriousness; we deployed them with and at each other. As time passed and I got to know more kids, the discourse on bad words unfolded further. When I was nine, I was often to be found sitting on the brick wall constructed by Tony’s grandpa, in company with a half dozen other kids theorizing about what might be the worst swear you could create. I think the prize went to terms that blended the super-sacred with the rankly vulgar: so that if you were in the mood to purchase a one-way to hell you might say something about a certain sort of act with the Virgin Mary.

We did not say the worst things outright of course, but put into play techniques of circumlocution that would have made a lawyer or a politician envious. I have no doubt that some of the richest and most complicated speculative discourse of my life came in my pre-pubescent years when I and my buddies were working out the metaphysics of profanity. When we tired of this sort of discourse, we often passed on to the fate of the soul after death; the topography of hell; the chances of Russian invasion, and the strategies we would employ to save the Bell Rock neighborhood of Malden, Massachusetts, from Soviet control; then there was the question of whether or not it was possible to see Ellie Kaufman naked if you stood patiently outside her family’s bathroom window at about nine o’clock at night, her alleged shower time.

Most of these discussions were spiced with profanity. By the time we were teenagers, not all that many significant nouns existed that did not call out to be modified by the word “fucken.” The fucken dog; the fucken paper route; and most common of all, such that the words were so deeply merged that they might have been married, “fucken school.” Tony Tanzio was rarely called by his first name. Rather he was referred to as “Fucken Tanzio,” a reflection of the combined exasperation and affection with which his friends regarded him. In time, he launched a campaign against the appellation. He would hold out his hand to one of us and say, “I’d like you to meet Mr. Tanzio, first name Tony.” To which, we could only reply, “Ah, fucken Tanzio.”

Our parents would have been blown down flat like sailors in a typhoon if they heard us cursing. They would probably have been less shocked if we had run out of the local variety store with a fistful of cash swiped from the till, or made an inept try at setting fire to a parked car. They probably wouldn’t have been impressed by our theological disputes; and they would not have been in love with the way we denounced our teachers; but they would have burst into rage if they had heard us swear.

Sometimes too, our exchanges got just plain weird. Tim, a buddy of mine from across the fence that I met when I was eight or so, used to have a fantasia that he recounted from time to time. In it, the parents of all the neighborhood kids got together for a game of football. They played fast. They played hard. There was lots of blocking and tackling, and they threw themselves into it all with abandon. O, and there was one other factor: they played naked. Mike got graphic in his description of woggly breasts and flopping dicks. (At least they stayed flopping.) I’ll say no more. Weird, right? 

But kids are weird. There used to be a feature on The Art Linkletter Show, called “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” Every darned thing the kids said was cute, sweet, peculiar, and most of all innocent. It was a sanitized version of kid discourse, and I’m sure that on some level the adults who watched the show knew it. They’d been kids after all, and they must have at least partially recalled some of the subjects they’d spent time brooding on in those kid symposia that are held around the fire with marshmallows going black, or in the tree fort after the resources of a found-on-the-street Playboy magazine have been exhausted, or in the girls’ bedroom during an exploratory game of Barbies, when the complaints about what Ken possesses and what he lacks become most intense.

But no one wants to be reminded of this part of kid life. Nor does much of anyone want to hear kids curse. (I did meet one dad who assiduously taught his seven- and eight-year-olds the most emphatic profanity. I recall that he soon ended up in prison. I am not sure what the charges may have been.) If my mother and father had heard me and Tanzio, then later my other kid-friends in a big league swearing session, my mother would have fainted and my father would have sent wind-mill backhand slaps in every direction.

But why, really? It’s not as though the kids are putting themselves in danger, as we were when we played around in the abandoned site where an elementary school had burned down five years before. It’s not as though we were committing petty crimes, like stealing a Coke from Charlie’s, which might develop into actual crimes of consequence. (People from my neighborhood and thereabouts did sometimes end up in prison.) No, swearing was just words; swearing was a matter of shaping the air that you’d taken into your lungs. Swearing was shooting the breeze. So why the big deal? Why did I know that if I got caught swearing, I’d be hung by my thumbs, whereas if I got caught jumping off the Brennan’s garage roof, I’d be reproved some, but that there would be latent admiration for my doing something significantly boyish?

I suspect that the swearing of kids cracks open illusions for adults. When a mom overhears her beloved child swear for the first time, her heart contracts until it feels like it will disappear. But imagine how she feels when she overhears a son or daughter who not only curses, but is truly adept at profanity — someone who summons up what Shakespeare might have been, if he decided to become practiced in the art of the headlong cursing symphony. And who knows, lover of language that he was, he may actually have created such compositions from time to time. What if mom hears her little boy, not long out of Pampers, still in shorts, reel off a euphonious string of curses that sounds like the work of a top sergeant in rage at his recruits?

What’s lost then is the myth of innocence. Suddenly your child has become a kid. And what better way for the child to rebel against his period of confinement as a child than to become an adept curser? It’s not like having sex just at puberty, or holding up the neighbors with a wooden gun and scampering away with a wallet and a purse. But it really can create a gap, a true facture, between the self that was and the self that now is. The first time you hear your beloved 10-year-old say motherfucker: well, on that day something changes.

Why does it disturb us so? I suppose something called parental narcissism is involved. We want the child to be perfect. We want the child to avoid all the wounds and disappointments that we suffered. We want the child to be without flaws. (For surely we had our flaws.) The child is a sort of second chance for us — a way to approach life another time and this time to get it right.

A shrill cry of “shit!” from your five-year-old suggests that even with all the preparation you had and all the thought and all the love you invested, you didn’t manage to get it right this time. The popping sound that you hear when your child curses you, the heavens, or fate is the sound of a narcissistic bubble breaking.

But there really is reason to be dismayed at a cursing child. There are motives to be truly distressed that go beyond the ruin of parental narcissism. What is profanity at bottom? What is the use of vulgar language all about?

I think it’s possible that religious profanity is the least distressing kind. For what is religious profanity but prayer in reverse? If you cry out on God and even use him to curse your state — God damn! — then you are exhibiting some belief in God. If you swear with Jesus’s name, you are expressing a certain sort of backhanded homage to Jesus. Religious swearing is a form of faith: it’s just faith that’s gone awry, often temporarily. Often you’re mad at God or Mary, Jesus or Allah for not having come through for you. And you believe they should have. You believe that in the future perhaps they will. As Adam Phillips says, anger is a form of hope. The angry person believes it could have gone well and didn’t and that maybe it will be better the next time.

But basic vulgarity is something different. The word “shit,” my old favorite, is constantly used to denigrate that which passes itself off as high in value. When we say that school is shit, or church is shit, or life is shit, we are bringing them down to the basic, biological level. We are saying that, for the moment at least, it all comes down to mere organic waste. Shit is foul being: being without soul. The word “shit” takes the pretentions out of that which pretends. But it can also blow apart legitimate human achievement: faith, civilization, art, what we humans have created that divides us from the animals, or should. Shit is a one-word demystification, a harsh syllable of total disillusionment, a thrust that seeks to turn ideals into idealizations, then stomp them out. When you say that the speaker is full of shit, or the book is, you are denying all lights of inspiration — every gleam of the spirit.

No doubt sometimes this denial is fitting. There is no end of shit and bullshit in the world. But when use of the word “shit” becomes programmatic, then one has reached a level of disillusionment with life that is distressing — distressing for the individual who uses the term and for those around him.

Profanity beyond a certain point is a philosophy: it’s a Weltanschauung, a worldview. A man who salts all of his nouns with the adjective “fucken” is doing a great deal to display his sense of life. And perhaps foremost his view of sex. If words like “make love” and even “have sex” are not in your vocabulary, having been replaced by permutations of “fuck,” then one can probably say that your attitude toward erotic love is anything but hopeful. Profanity is a form of reduction. It reduces something exalted, or at least something respectable, to something debased. It is a kind of secular blasphemy. When you prefix a noun with fucken, you have debased it; when you say that this or that is nothing but shit, you have brought it back down to earth and below earth — for we tend to bury our waste. You have said that what was once worth saving, or even admiring, is really a matter of dreck, crap, waste matter, shit.

And it is a good thing that humans have this capacity. I am glad that we are able to call out against pretension, imposture, and illegitimate authority in brief, hortatory terms. I’m glad there’s an economical way to say that the emperor is cavorting in the altogether. I’m delighted that we can call a spade a spade and do it quick. Swearing is one of the divine rights of man, or better, anti-divine. It’s the way we let the air out of the cloying pink balloon; challenge the teacher; turn on the boss. “Go shit in your hat,” says the enraged worker to the factory owner. Then, how much more does he have to say?

But if one’s every utterance is peppered and red-sauced with profanity, well then I believe you have revealed something that might in another context be called a worldview. This is what you think life is all about. To you, implicitly, there is nothing that is exalted; nothing that ultimately matters; nothing that can contain hopes for uplifting meaning.

Would it be wrong to say that our culture has been ever more given to profanity since (say) that time, 50 or so years ago, when Tony Tanzio and I sat under the druidical oak and learned to swear? Now everyone seems to curse. What was once a male preserve — this land of profanity — has now been amply colonized by women. When I was a boy, the only woman likely to issue a curse was a bartender or a lady of the evening. Now it seems at least half do. Business executives say Fuck; professors do (I can testify to that); politicians do when the microphones are not around (and sometimes unfortunately when they are). One would not now be surprised to hear a priest or minister let fire a string of curses, like bullets from an automatic weapon. Profanity is everywhere. What once could not be said anywhere but at the construction site and the bar (and under the druidical oak) now sounds from the TV and the internet. The movie screen is an orgy of profane language. The babysitter curses and the baby does, too.

What is to be made of this cultural saturnalia of the profane? A full answer would take a treatise, no doubt. But we might guess that what is true for an individual may be true for a culture too. People curse frequently when they are in the process of becoming cynical, even hopeless. They curse reflexively and constantly when the process of losing hope in life has become complete for them. Is it any different with a culture?

It feels like a step toward full freedom, a real stroke of liberation, when the talk show host on network TV adds another piece of profanity to his lexicon of the permissible. And maybe in some sense it is liberating. But the movement toward the omnipresent profane is a move away from hope. It’s a move from spirit to body, from soul to self, from affirmation to negation, from glory to shit. It seems to me that our culture at large is now engaging in precisely that movement.

What is the opposite of cursing? Well, it is easy enough to say that the flat opposite of sacred cursing — turning the sacred into the debased and debasing, is no doubt prayer. For as we’ve said, sacred cursing is only prayer in reverse. You wanted the lord to intervene and he failed, thus he comes in for some chastisement. Good enough for him.

But what’s the opposite of the vulgar curse, the sort of curse that has been the larger subject of my thoughts, such as they are, up to this point? Simple. That’s praise. Praise of the world in its plenty and joy; praise of humanity, noble in mind, majestic in reason; praise of men and women builders of cities, begetters of cultures. There’s praise of what god has created (or gods), or what came here of its own, and still must be praised, so marvelous do we find it.

Shall we tell our children not to curse? Maybe, maybe, though they will do it anyway and in so doing they will sometimes break our hearts. But rather than resting our teaching on prohibition, let us try to impart something else. Let us teach them the art of joy and thanksgiving. Let us teach them how to praise.

¤

Mark Edmundson is University Professor at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals.

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Eis um clube seleto, para apenas 16 pessoas, em que ninguém quer estar: a lista de turistas chineses que, por comportar-se mal, são humilhados pelo próprio governo.

Segundo o “Washington Post”, as autoridades chinesas ampliaram essa lista durante o fim de semana, adicionando cinco nomes ao projeto lançado em janeiro pela administração nacional do turismo. Entre os membros do grupo de “turistas de comportamento não civilizado” estão três viajantes que arranjaram confusão em um voo porque outro passageiro havia inclinado demais seu assento.

O governo chinês vem há alguns anos insistindo em que seus turistas respeitem a cultura dos outros países. O assunto preocupa as autoridades, já que chineses têm viajado cada vez mais e, agora, correm o risco de desbancarem outros turistas pouco queridos no exterior, como os americanos e os franceses. Segundo o Banco Mundial, 98 milhões de chineses viajaram ao exterior em 2013, o recorde mundial. Foram 8,6 milhões de brasileiros,  no mesmo ano.

O “Washington Post” cita, por exemplo, um programa da televisão estatal chinesa que tentava educar turistas mostrando um vídeo de um panda malcriado urinando em público. Mas as medidas vão além da aula –o governo também proíbe cidadãos de voar, de acordo com suas gafes. Chineses são estimulados a denunciar seus pares e encaminhar imagens às autoridades, para que turistas sejam humilhados e sirvam de exemplo aos demais. O “Business Insider” também escreveu sobre o tema.

A lista negra dos turistas chineses pode ser lida clicando aqui, em chinês. Com a ajuda do Google Tradutor, que nunca deixa os curiosos na mão, é possível ter uma ideia dos casos –por exemplo, o homem que deu um soco na cara de um vendedor porque ele havia pedido que sua mulher não comesse dentro da loja antes de pagar.

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leaving 2015

birdandmoon:

Here are some helpful reindeer alternatives.

Original on my site | Patreon

Hovertext: Of course, a perfect simulation awaits the advent of the quantum computer.

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– Ufa!

lilliphus:

rifa:

thedreamscaperer:

honestly, imagine your otp

Ok but the photos from this went viral and they are amazing

Oh my god

blazepress:

Sledding on sand dunes.

Earlier this year, NASA's Europa Mission Tweeted the following photo:

"One of these is Jupiter's moon Europa," they wrote, "the rest are frying pans."

We're sure you're trying to guess which of these is the real deal, but before we get to that, where did these images come from? While the photo of the actual Europa was snapped by their Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s, are we to believe that NASA techs are sitting around shooting photos of spent frying pans?

No, they're not. The frying pan shots are the work of Norwegian photographer Christopher Jonassen, who began shooting his Devour and Devour II series—"Still life photography of worn-out frying pans"—in 2010 or earlier.

In 2013 someone on Starship Asterisk, an online forum for astronomy geeks, began posting Jonassen's photos in the APOD (Astronomy Photo of the Day) section alongside photos of the real Europa. They subsequently ran seven "Moon or Frying Pan?" quizzes featuring Jonassen's work, properly crediting him. It appears that this quiz is what whomever handles NASA's EM Twitter account drew from.

In any case, have you figured out which of the photos in the Brady Bunch shot is the real Europa?

It's this one:

It's tough to pick it out from a field of nine, but at least one member of the Starship Asterisk forum found it easier in side-by-sides like the one below—and not by drawing on his astronomy knowledge:

"Speaking as a professional cook," the poster writes, "this one was a bit too easy. If you could somehow parley the sheen of grease into a sense of scope and distance, then you would have a challenge indeed!"

blazepress:

Diamond mine in Russia.

All photos courtesy Cindy Chinn

We’ve seen a number of artists working with pencil leads over the last few years, where the narrow dimensions of graphite are carved into minuscule objects. This recent piece by Nebraska-based artist Cindy Chinn is particularly ingenious, an entire carpenter’s pencil is turned into a tiny train, trestle, and bridge. “This piece was designed using straight lead pieces for the rails, with the tiny carved train placed and securely glued on top of the rails,” Chinn shares. “The train engine is only 3/16″ of an inch tall. The pencil is 5-5/8″ long and mounted in a wood shadowbox frame as shown in the photos.”

You can see more of Chinn’s pencil carving work on her website and on Etsy. See more pencil carving fun from Salavat Fidai, Diem Chau, and Dalton Ghetti. (via Laughing Squid)

Hovertext: In fairness, part of the problem may be the use of pick-up scrolls.

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squeakykins:

is that a THREAT

pleatedjeans:

@super_bugs