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As I noted earlier this month, I got too many good responses when I solicited Ask Me Anything questions in October, so I decided to break my responses into two parts. Here’s Part 1, and now for Part 2, which covers. . . a wide variety of issues. This, uhhhh, may have crept up to over 10,000 words. I will not be offended if you skip questions that don’t interest you, but I’m hoping there’s at least something here for everyone. I also apologize for the delay in publishing Part 2 of this post about the empirical evidence for/against color-blind approaches to discussing race and racism, which I’m eager to get up. You’ll have it in December. And premium subscribers, don’t forget to submit an aviation question for Patrick Smith if you have one.
For now, the first question is about this “election” we are supposedly having about 11 months from now:
If Joe Biden hired you tomorrow to run his 2024 campaign, how would you maximize his chances of winning re-election? —Eli Youngs
If Joe Biden hires me to run his 2024 campaign, that will, on its own, be evidence that he is not cognitively competent to serve as president anymore.
But, okay, this being a wild hypothetical, and acknowledging that I know very little about this stuff: Apparently Biden is in trouble (or isn’t, if you adopt the theory that a lot of voters presently batting their eyes at other candidates will come back home to Sweet Daddy Joe when the alternative to another four years of him becomes clearer).
Either way, it seems like you (I’m now referring to the president directly) should really focus on abortion! It’s an absolute weak spot for the GOP. Seems you should also obviously spend a lot of time in swing states campaigning on meat-and-potatoes economic issues. You’ll really need to rekindle the flame with various non-white constituencies (particularly non-college-educated blacks and Latinos), because they are drifting toward the GOP and because you performed disastrously poorly with them in 2020 and were instead, thankfully, buttressed by whites who strayed from their usual GOP leanings because of how Trumpy Trump is. This means talking frankly about issues like wages and crime and staying away from radical-chic bullshit. And also. . .
You know what? I’m speculating slash regurgitating stuff I’ve heard on the politics podcasts I don’t listen to enough. Let’s bring in an expert. Dave Weigel, who has been covering American politics and campaigns forever, currently for Semafor, and who also wrote The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock, was kind enough to get on the phone with me. I basically framed our conversation as “Tell me if I’m being stupid in believing these things about the next election,” but he did a lot more than answer that question — it was an interesting conversation.
“No, I think that's not unreasonable,” he said after I laid out the basic, 101 theory of the election you just read in the preceding paragraphs. Then he started discussing something he’s been thinking a lot lately: the role “wokeness,” or whatever you want to call it, will play in 2024 — especially transgender issues. “There’s an idea on the right that you can appeal — and I saw some of this in Texas in 2022 — that you can win even more Latino, Asian voters, and Muslim voters too by saying, ‘Democrats want to teach your kid that a boy can be a girl.’. . . I mean, I think if you sat somebody down for 10 minutes to explain to them the Biden policy of tying school lunch support to gender inclusive policy, you can probably convince a lot of people that’s not a great idea.”
But for the most part, what Weigel is seeing is Republicans overestimating the political potency of these controversies. “These individual issues, they’re confusing Republicans. They’re like ‘I don’t get it.’ Like, “child sex surgery” is incredibly unpopular. Puberty blockers, once you get Billboard Chris in front of a crowd, they’re incredibly unpopular. But people don’t care about everything that they’re [Billboard Chris et al.] annoyed with. They’re just like ‘Why do I care about this? My kid’s not gonna come home from school with a new identity — he’s my kid. I’m not worried about this.’ ”
These issues just require too much explaining, in many cases. But Weigel did say that the Democrats understand that this is a losing issue once you have to get deeply into the weeds, so he certainly expected Biden’s team not to lean into progressive gender-identity orthodoxy. “I think if it comes up,” he predicted, “it’ll be in the context of ‘My opponent is a crazy, vindictive, fascist bully, and here’s another group of people he’s trying to victimize.’ ” That is to say, Democrats will not be going out of their way to initiate debate-stage conversations about the evidence base for youth gender medicine.
Weigel noted that, as he just argued in Semafor, wokeness has faded as a campaign issue. “[Ron] DeSantis and [Vivek] Ramaswamy are the anti-woke guys, and they’re dropping it from the menu because it’s not playing,” he explained. “Like Tim Scott was running on ‘I’m just proving the lies of the George Floyd movement’ and everyone was like ‘Yeah, we don’t care anymore. We’re putting that in the past.’ ”
He cited Loudoun County, Virginia, as an example of a place that might have led some on both sides of the aisle to adopt the wrong lessons. Because I don’t follow American politics closely enough, and because I’m not on Twitter and therefore am not seeing Weigel’s tweets, I didn’t realize that, as he put it a couple weeks back, “Dems ran the table in Loudoun County [in the elections that just took place] — even the school board races[.]” Whatever overreach or shadiness occurred on the part of lefty school board types, not only on the complicated bathroom scandal (Charles Homans wrote the best rundown of that) but on issues like school reopenings that likely played just as large a role in motivating parents to vote red as anything “wokeness”-related, it doesn’t appear to have done lasting damage to Democratic prospects there.
That’s not to say Dems don’t understand the risk of preventable backlash on these sorts of issues, Weigel explained. He referenced the textbook wars of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the literally violent one that unfolded in Kanawha County, West Virginia (which I was totally ignorant of). In the minds of Democrats, he explained, “There’s a long memory of ‘Shit, we overreached and now our liberal educators are very unpopular,’ but it feels like that just didn’t happen as much in Virginia [meaning Loudoun County] and it has cooled a lot of the political enthusiasm for this as a winner.”
Weigel also mentioned the ever-important divide between the Twitterati and the real world, in the context of “the way that Biden juggled the crime issue in 2020. You and I have memories, we remember it, and he would repeatedly denounce Defund The Police and people on Twitter were like ‘He’s going to lose the black vote,’ and it turns out, No, that’s not how you lose the black vote.” Because this is a hobbyhorse of mine, I mentioned to Weigel how silly a view this is if you know anything about black public opinion polling on policing, which tends, at the level of averages, to be far more complicated and nuanced than support for fewer and less-well-funded police officers in high-crime areas. “Yeah,” Weigel replied. “I mean, living within New York and DC — I imagine DC in particular — there’s a very clear division between the actual black working class and how they want more cops, and like the white people who read Ibram X. Kendi who are “ACAB!” or whatever.”
Thank you to Dave Weigel! It’s nice having an actually talented voice in this newsletter for once.
Having successfully resolved the issues of the 2024 elections, race, and policing, let’s move on to a less challenging subject: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Here I’m going to pair two questions together:
As an admittedly heterodox progressive, but an undeniable principled progressive (as opposed to the more practical-based center-leftism of, e.g., Yglesias and Chait), how has the left-wing embrace of Hamas caused you to reconsider who you consider as allies? Even those who are normally opposed to identity politics and with whom you often relate (for instance, Freddie deBoer) have toed the line of outright anti-Zionism, and it’s hard to find any unabashed leftist who acknowledges the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and security, even if they are against the actual politics of that Jewish state. (As an aside, their cheerleading of terrorism and stoking of anti-Semitism up to and including clear pogroms only reinforces the practical need for Israel, of course.) Why is it so hard for leftists to acknowledge that Israel is entitled to exist? Why is a one-state Yugoslavia an obvious nonstarter, but a one-state Palestine (to be ruled, naturally, by genocidal and fundamentalist Muslims) the sine qua non of the political left? Why can’t criticism of Israeli policies (especially settlement policy in the West Bank) be separated from Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza? Why do so many lefties decide that there’s room in their coalition for murderers who execute gays on sight, but not a well-meaning liberal who uses the wrong pronouns sometimes? —wes brooks
And:
Jesse,
Are you upset at all [by] the genocide apologia in this AMA? Like I totally get being angry about antisemitism — my grandfather had his grave desecrated by Nazis in 2016 — but this heterodox embrace of Zionism and its consequences is stunning and abhorrent. What Hamas did is unspeakably evil FOR SURE, and many on the left didn’t immediately condemn it (but many also did!), but Netanyahu’s retaliation has killed SIX THOUSAND CHILDREN. Babies! Not to mention the ongoing treatment of Palestinians preceding (and precipitating. . . ) the attacks. Calling a spade a spade isn’t antisemitism, which is why thousands of American Jews are occupying public spaces and calling for a cease-fire.
I don’t know. I feel really let down and disappointed by the responses in these comments. I also find many progressives off-putting, but it feels like many in this space are ignoring reality based on the figureheads who are calling for justice in Palestine. —Duane
Taking the second question first, of course I’m not seeing calls for genocide in the comments. Rather, if you follow the thread, you’ll see that Duane was relying on this reasoning:
I’m following the lead of Craig Mokhiber, a recently resigned director of the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights. I think he knows a little bit about what a genocide is.
“The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt.”
The problem with this conversation is that everything is so high stakes, involving thousands of deaths of innocent people, that the mere suggestion that things have gotten rhetorically overheated generates some understandably angry responses.
This isn’t genocide, though. It’s definitely horrible, that’s for sure! While I don’t automatically trust death totals generated by the Hamas-controlled health authorities in Gaza, I do trust The New York Times when one of its reporters writes that while “Civilian casualties are notoriously hard to calculate, and officials in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip do not separate the deaths of civilians and combatants. Researchers point instead to the roughly 10,000 women and children reported killed in Gaza as an approximate — though conservative — measure of civilian deaths in the territory. International officials and experts familiar with the way figures are compiled by health officials in Gaza say the overall numbers are generally reliable.” I don’t think anyone denies that the Palestinian civilian death toll is quite significant and numerically dwarfs the 1,200 victims of the 10/7 massacre.
And yes, a huge number of innocent babies and children, who of course definitionally have nothing to do with Hamas or Palestinian terrorism or the 10/7 attack, have been killed. Multiple 9/11s have been inflicted on the Palestinian people in response to Hamas’s horrific acts, and most of the dead had nothing to do with that attack.
In the first question, Wes mentioned Freddie deBoer, who I’m a huge fan of. In his piece, “Goliath, Who Aspires to be David,” he argued that contrary to claims that Israel is a vulnerable and besieged state, it is ridiculous to view it as anything but a technologically advanced, militarily potent regional power with plenty of powerful allies, foremost among them the United States.
There are aspects of the piece I deeply agree with, especially deBoer’s view that there will never be peace until Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied territories have full political and legal rights (fat chance of that happening anytime soon, and before anyone sends me an angry email, I am of course including Hamas high on my list of obstacles to this outcome). But I thought that its main weakness concerned an area where deBoer is usually pretty strong: the intersection between politics and psychology. Specifically, Freddie barely acknowledges Israeli psychology. I think his only real nod to that factor comes when he writes that Israel’s defenders “seem to feel the tug of powerlessness, the desire to wear the sad but comfortable cloak of a refugee people, a natural and sympathetic impulse for a culture still touched by the hand of diaspora.”
I’d say it goes beyond “natural and sympathetic.” Here I am attempting to explain Israeli psychology, not defend specific actions the Israeli government has taken. But it doesn’t take expertise in the region and its history to understand the reasons why Israelis and diaspora Jews might feel Israel is weak and vulnerable. Among others: one, the country was formally established during the darkest part of the shadow of the Holocaust, meaning that shadow is now baked into everything over there (the real war crimes are my mixed metaphors); two, the surprise attack of 1973, during the early days of which “Israel seemed to be on the verge of military collapse as the armies of Egypt and Syria broke through its defensive lines and advanced,” which would have been it for Israel after a brief quarter-century run, is also baked into the country’s collective consciousness; and three, a lot of Israelis have died in terrorist attacks in the twenty-first century!
Let’s focus on that last factor for a minute, because in many ways it is the most recent and salient one. DeBoer points to various metrics suggesting Israel is a healthy, well-functioning place, which it absolutely seems to be, on most days, if you visit it. But even before 10/7, would it make sense to tell someone who has vivid memories of family members or friends getting blown up in pizza shops or buses — in Israel, everyone has lost someone to terrorism, or knows someone who has — “You know, you’re very unlikely to die from heart disease here — really great medical system!” That’s just not how this sort of thing works. Nothing affects human psychology more profoundly than the sense that their personal security, or the security of those they love, is under threat — that any one of your people could be blasted into nonexistence in a split second.
So it doesn’t really matter that you can wander around Tel Aviv on a warm night and feel like it’s paradise, as I did a year ago. To Israelis, threat is always looming, and 10/7 was seen as vindication by hard-liners who argued that the country had grown soft and complacent, since the end of the Second Intifada, on the threat of Palestinian terrorism (which of course the average Palestinian in the West Bank or Gaza would likely find ridiculous).
Obviously whenever Israel responds forcefully to Palestinian terror attacks, far more Palestinians die. That’s because Israel does exert military dominance over the Palestinians, and because the biggest source of threat, Gaza, is densely populated, and run by an entity, Hamas, that really doesn’t seem to care if the civilians it rules die. But I just think we’re defining down “genocide” to the point of meaninglessness by describing what’s been going on as genocide. Israel values its citizens’ lives more than Palestinian lives, especially in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. This is what every single country — every single tribe — everywhere does. It is an unfortunate but deep-seated part of human nature. As a result, Israel reasons that it must take out Hamas, and it’ll try not to kill Palestinians unnecessarily (which, believe it or not, it does make some efforts to do), but it’s not going to treat that as the highest priority. The highest priority is keeping Israelis safe in the future, and the second-highest is rescuing as many hostages as it can (hence the temporary truce).
As I noted on my podcast, the number of dead Palestinians, especially children, is getting so sickening, so quickly, that it’s fair to ask what Israel is going to get in exchange for all that horror, for further pouring fuel on Gazans’ hatred of Israel (though I’m sure plenty of them hate Hamas — not mutually exclusive), and for incurring such widespread international wrath. In fact, as a journalist who was embedded with the IDF reports at the end of this Haaretz podcast, there’s widespread dissatisfaction within the Israeli military over the fact that no one understands exactly what the goals are here or how they could be achieved. This is what even people who are very ignorant of the on-the-ground specifics, myself included, have pointed out since the start: it’s very hard to imagine a scenario in which Hamas is actually destroyed in a durable manner and in which a favorable situation emerges afterward. Or as The Economist put it recently, via this tweet: “After two days of talking to officials about the plan for post-war Gaza, the inescapable conclusion is that there is no plan. . . no one — not Israel, not America, not Arab states or Palestinian leaders — wants to take responsibility for it.”
If I had to guess, Israeli decision-makers are laser-focused on destroying Hamas and fundamentally don’t care if what follows is a period of chaos and further immiseration inside Gaza, as long as that chaos doesn’t cross the security barrier. The only thing that matters, aside from rescuing the rescuable hostages, is eviscerating the group that killed and kidnapped so many Israelis. If the outcome is another however many years of Gazans living trapped, difficult lives, then — again, I am describing the Israeli mindset rather than endorsing it — that’s unfortunate. Israel will allow in more aid and a semblance of pseudo-stability once things have calmed down (think more refugee camps, think more kids growing up in situations you’d never want your own kids exposed to), but the well-being of Gazans is just not the top priority: the top priority is protecting Israelis.
I don’t think Israelis are monsters. I think if its decision-makers had a lever they could flip with two options — “Israelis are safe and Gazans are safe and have freedom of movement and are well-fed” vs. “Israelis are safe and Gazans remain trapped and immiserated” — most would choose the former option. But those aren’t the options. Israel has decided it has to “destroy Hamas.” The Israeli mindset that screams enough is enough: this was the biggest massacre of Jews since World War II (with some non-Jews thrown in as well). This is all going to lead to a lot more Palestinian death. It will be gut-wrenching. But it is not a genocide. If Israel wanted to commit genocide against the Palestinians, in the sense of intentionally, wantonly killing civilians, it could do so immediately (albeit risking a multifront war in the process).
And I actually don’t doubt that if some of the furthest-right elements in the government had full control over the military, the death toll would be much higher (maybe those are the ones who would choose the latter lever option). This time last year, those who desire lasting peace between Jews and Palestinians were disconsolate at the fact that, as part of the new far-right government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir had been appointed to a newly created national security leadership position. This is a man who, until 2020, had a photograph of Baruch Goldstein, a mass murderer of innocent Muslim worshippers, hanging in his living room — and when he did take it down in 2020, he did so grudgingly and snarkily, and without disavowing Goldstein’s infamous Hebron massacre.
This conflict has produced maniacs, and on the Israeli side there are maniacs who just want to hurt Muslims and eliminate them, one way or another, from the area between the river and the sea. The existence of equally zealous maniacs on the other side is so obvious as to not need repeating. But I do not think Israel is controlled by people who intentionally seek to murder Palestinians, and/or who can do so without repercussions.
Of course, from the Palestinian perspective, “We didn’t mean to kill your babies — it was unintentional” isn’t exactly a satisfying answer. And I understand why people say “If you do this thing that you know is going to have a certain result over and over and over, then you can’t really claim it’s unintentional.” But I just do think there’s an important moral difference between engaging in military operations that will likely lead to civilian deaths and seeking to intentionally kill civilians. I could absolutely be slicing the (kosher) salami too thin here, and I can’t emphasize enough that I’m trying to explain, not justify, and am deeply concerned about the possibility of 15,000 or 20,000 Palestinians eventually dying and no one involved having anything to show for it in terms of lasting security gains in the long run.
I just think people respond in certain predictable ways to members of their tribe being threatened or killed. That is what’s happening here. I am not sure that if you swap out Israel for Canada or the U.S. or Germany, if you put these nations in the exact same place Israel is, the reactions are that different. Humans treat other humans terribly and devalue their lives when they feel threatened, and Israel feels extremely threatened right now, because a bunch of Israelis were just murdered.
To finally get back on track and at least partially answer Wes’s original question, yes, I was of course disgusted by the immediate response to the conflict. In the past, I’d sometimes viewed “Israel has a right to exist” as an obviously true sentence that was frequently deployed as a thought-terminating cliché to shut down criticism of Israel — which has been a problem during my lifetime, particularly in American Jewish communities. In some situations this sentence honestly hasn’t been deployed all that differently from when someone screams “Trans people have a right to exist!” in response to a substantive point about the evidence for youth gender medicine.
It’s not that I didn’t know there were people who wanted Israel to be destroyed; of course there are. I just felt that it was important to be able to critique Israeli’s policies without being accused of wanting Israel destroyed, in much the same way it’s (obviously) important to be able to critique transgender medicine without being accused of wanting trans people to be harmed. If you care about something, you need to be able to critique it in the hopes that it will improve.
But since 10/7, it’s just been extremely disturbing to see how little of the leftist activist response is willing to throw a bone and to denounce the attacks and make it clear “We’re not saying Israel shouldn’t exist.” There’s always a risk I’m over-extrapolating from social media’s tendency to disseminate outrage content, but it’s been genuinely upsetting. Maybe it’s an ill-advised metaphor, and of course nothing happening here holds a candle to what’s going on over there, but this attack really did drop a bomb on the American left. It is going to take a long time for the extent of the fallout to be clear. Whatever you think about Israel’s founding, about ’48 or ’67 or ’23, Israel does exist. It is recognized under international law as existing. And any situation in which it no longer exists in something like its present form will entail the massacre or ethnic cleansing of millions of Jews. But that won’t happen. If Israel’s existence were truly threatened, America would immediately intervene to defend it directly, even if that meant a yearslong Middle Eastern engagement.
Israel isn’t going anywhere. You can both recognize the horrors and indignities Palestinians have endured for far too long while also acknowledging Israel isn’t going anywhere — and how harmful the myth that Israel might go anywhere is to almost everyone involved in this conflict, save for a few demagogues and clout-chasers. You think it helps the average Palestinian to be told that Israel is going anywhere, that there’s any solution but lasting coexistence, somehow? You think it helps the average Arab living in an unfree society, for whom Israel is their dictator’s favorite piñata? Come on. I’m not saying that other Muslims (not to mention non-Muslims) aren’t moved deeply by the plight of Palestinians, but it’s clear that calls for Israel’s destruction, or to “contextualize” Hamas’s most heinous acts, are dead-end slogans motivated by opportunism.
I’ve rambled too much. Maybe at some point I just need to do a My Thoughts On Israel Megapost Braindump, get it all out there, and then avoid this subject for a very long time. I know too little and there are just too many trip wires. Surely the preceding paragraphs, which consist mostly of points that strike me as obvious and zoomed-out, will enrage some people on both sides. I did the best I could to serve up some potentially useful thoughts here, because I preferred answering these questions to dodging them, tempting as that was. I’m heartbroken about all of this and it’s not my area at all.
(Very last-minute, pre-publication addition: I thought this article in UnHerd made a convincing argument that, as the headline alleges, “Israel has no plan for Gaza.”)
I hope this doesn’t offend you, but I was surprised at how well you handled the call-in to The Majority Report. I’ve seen a lot of brilliant writers struggle with extemporaneous communication under pressure, but you were great! Have you ever considered trying to do debates before? —bdzr
(And in response to bdzr’s question, a comment rather than a question that provides more meat for my response:)
Agree with your take. To add — after those clips — I don’t see why anyone who doesn’t 1000% agree with the MR hosts would ever go on. They had his sound distorted, wouldn’t answer his questions, talked over him, went off on tangents that had nothing to do with what they were discussing, and generally used him as a punching bag. “The Left” appears to worship Hannity and Carlson as much as Fox viewers do. —Dee
I am very offended at being complimented! How dare you! No, I mean. . . I didn’t go in there expecting to win. As I told a couple friends beforehand, I was basically playing for a tie because it was, in effect, an away game. I was calling in to their show and they all hate me, or at least have to pretend to hate me for their audiences. I think it really, really helps to have a calm demeanor, whether it’s via text or in an in-person discussion, and I take my cues from folks like Jonathan Chait and Conor Friedersdorf who, on Twitter at least, are preternaturally talented at responding with politeness and dignity to deranged lunatics going after them.
Part of the reason it was easy not to lose my cool during my Majority Report call-in is that they were talking over me — and themselves — so much that I barely had a chance to speak, anyway. So it wasn’t any major challenge not to start yelling. There was one point where I got a bit agitated at Emma Vigeland — and how can you not, given that it’s Emma Vigeland? — but that barely stood out amid the rest of the chaos.
Anyway, I have no experience with formal debate and it has never appealed to me. My understanding is that the connection between debate and actual, careful logic and reasoning can be tenuous at best (I did find this article about the far-left politicization of debate totally fascinating). You can be a great debater while being a mediocre thinker, in other words. Writing is a much better medium for hedging, acknowledging the other side’s counterpoints, and being an insufferable nuance-bro. Debating seems much more like performance, for lack of a better word. That’s not to say it doesn’t take immense talent to be excellent at it, but I don’t think it’s where my talents lie, and it doesn’t appeal to me the way that writing articles or giving pre-written talks (and then answering questions after) does.
Oh, and to be clear, I don’t believe my sound was intentionally distorted. I was calling in from my cell phone and it was just crappy audio quality. It did seem like they could have boosted my volume a little, but I’m not sure even that is their fault.
What do you think of the gradual public splintering of the heterodox/alt media concentric circle of players? Sam Harris seems to be at the nexus of this — his overall thesis being the sphere has become unhealthily contrarian for contrarianism’s sake. —Hayden Douglas
Yeah, it’s gotten pretty bad in some areas. I think I’m stealing this from one of the Fifth Column Guys, but there’s a trap here: it is true that mainstream media and institutions often fail in various ways, succumb to cowardice or groupthink, and so on. It is not true that a good response to this is to adopt the mantra: “Do, think, and say the opposite of mainstream media and institutions.”
You saw a lot of this with the coronavirus and Ukraine/Russia. It’s not that we shouldn’t be able to debate, say, masking policy, or the conditions under which we will provide military aid to Ukraine, but it wasn’t a desire for reasoned debate that I saw in the contrarian circles in question: it was conspiracy-mongering and, in some cases, the outright carrying of water for what can only be described as a colonial, expansionist Russian regime.
I’ll go back to what I wrote in my Spectator column about the “Rise of the anti-woke weirdos”: getting “canceled” (or whatever you want to call it) by your own community can be a really traumatic experience. It’s different not just in degree, but kind, from facing some “other” tribe’s outrage, even if it’s significant. The stresses of realizing that there are members of your own personal and professional networks who now hate you (or think they hate you, or have to tell others they hate you to maintain their own standing, or remain conspicuously silent as a mob gathers to chant, loudly and lustily, “We hate [you]! We hate [you]!”) can be the equivalent of a blowtorch applied directly, at close range, to some of the most primal and vulnerable parts of your brain. I’ve probably written some version of this a half-dozen times by now, but we have evolved to be very attentive to our standing in our communities, because back in the day this was a life-and-death matter.
Not everyone responds the same way. Mike Pesca has repeatedly said to me and to others that he has “the bliss molecule” and finds he remains relatively even-keeled even when bad stuff happens to him (what a jerk). It’s not that his asinine ouster from Slate didn’t affect him negatively — of course it did — but because of some combination of biological and environmental and other factors, it didn’t break him. He didn’t decide that because Slate had mistreated him, the sorts of people who read or write for Slate or listen to its podcasts are all evil bastards, and that his goal in life, henceforth, was to take them down.
Others have been broken. The stresses of being “canceled” themselves, or seeing how toxic certain corners of the left have become and how many other people have faced this treatment, have turned them into contrarian zombies who reflexively reject mainstream claims. This often leads directly to conspiracy theorizing. It is not the way, but I understand it from a human nature perspective, in much the same way I understand, without endorsing, the more serious issue of Israeli/Palestinian indifference to the loss of Palestinian/Israeli lives.
I don’t know how to pull someone up from these depths of hypercontrarianism. I do think it’s potentially useful to point out that even at the peak of the media’s Reckoning (which we are certainly past), there were large numbers of people inside media institutions really, really unhappy with what was going on. It just took a while for the pluralistic ignorance bubble to burst, but burst it did — at least in certain important places.
For example: when all those false and exaggerated claims about certain New York Times’ journalists’ coverage of youth gender transition went viral in February, some within the NYT building not only endorsed those claims but helped to spread them, which was the sort of thing that happened with depressing frequency circa 2020. But this time around, the real journalists won — “the newsroom just revolted,” as one insider put it to me. They were worn down from dealing with colleagues who shared few of their values with regard to the importance of independent journalism.
More broadly, the Times has, across its different departments, clearly taken some steps back toward journalistic normalcy and the open debate of mainstream controversies, from small things like letting me review Helen Joyce’s book, or letting Zaid Jilani review John McWhorter’s, to much more meaningful decisions like hiring Michael Powell to cover social justice blowups journalistically (though he has since decamped for The Atlantic — I keep meaning to get the scoop on that but don’t have it), hiring McWhorter, and giving Pamela Paul (who provided me the opportunity to review Joyce’s book when she was heading that section) a column.
So this is one example of how, in the conspiratorial worldview, all is lost and we must abandon hope in mainstream institutions, while in the reality-based worldview. . . well, it’s complicated. The Times, like other institutions struggling with toxic strains of social justice, is a big, messy, human place with different factions and infighting and backbiting. It continues to be capable of producing great journalism and commentary, and we should root for it, because while I’m thrilled about the Substack revolution, we need old-school, well-funded traditional media outlets too, and there are hardly any of them left.
Jesse, I understand you’re 6′4″. How long are you (no, you pervs, I’m not asking about his dick. Arm length is a thing in basketball.)? Have you ever been able to dunk? Can you describe your game? And honestly assess what level you’re at? Are you a shooter? Point guard? Post up type of player? Would you be able to get minutes in the higher level rec leagues? —Noah Pardo-Friedman
I actually didn’t know how long I am, so I used a tape measure to determine that my wingspan is about 6′4″ as well. That’s too bad; a lot of the best basketball players have wingspans considerably longer than their height. Victor Wembanyama, who as you can see from the below photo (Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images) is someone to whom I bear a striking — nay, uncanny — physical resemblance, is 7′4″ but has an eight-foot wingspan.
Despite being pretty tall, I have never been able to dunk. I tell myself that in college I could dunk a tennis ball, but I could be misremembering. I’m sure I could at least touch (but not comfortably grab) the rim pretty easily. These days, not so much — I’d probably have to lose 20 pounds and simply jump a lot more than I have been lately, plus do all sorts of weird and painful exercises, even just to back into rim-touchin’ shape. I’d almost certainly get injured — probably seriously — on Day Two of this new regimen.
I love playing basketball. It’s been my favorite athletic activity, by far, since I was 8 or 9. And because I’m tall and, while pretty slow overall, relatively quick for my bulk, I can hold my own on the average playground court. Or I could — I’ve played a lot less lately, actually only once since July (earlier this week! It did not go well but your first time back never does), in part because I’m much more afraid of injury than I used to be. That’s a sad part of aging: I remember one summer when I could go for a five-mile run and then play pickup ball in Ann Arbor, all without any real stretching or real concern about my body.
Now if I play basketball there’s a decent chance I will tweak something, and even if I don’t, sometimes after I play I’ll be sore for multiple days. When I first started drafting the answer to this question, it was two days after I did this HIIT for the first time in probably a year (my exercise has only been running and occasionally biking), and I’m still sore. Running and biking never make me sore, and I can basically run every day (keep in mind that we’re talking runs between 2.5 and 3.5 miles, usually, far from marathon-length odysseys). That lack of soreness is probably a bad sign, like I’m not exercising a wide enough variety of muscles or not pushing myself hard enough or something.
Anyway, it’s a catch-22 because if you haven’t played basketball in a while and you’re 40 and then you play, there’s a chance you’ll get injured and a greater chance you’ll be sore for a couple days. But the only way to really prevent that is to get back into basketball shape by playing routinely. Part of the problem is that I hate stretching and have had trouble getting into the habit of doing so before and after playing, which I’ve always been told is vital.
Or, if my understanding is correct, there’s some at least limited evidence that so-called dynamic workouts are actually better than stretching at preventing injuries in these sorts of contexts, so maybe I should figure out if that’s true. I like dynamic warm-ups, or at least I don’t hate them the way I hate stretching. I did a dynamic warm-up before I played earlier this week, and while I was sore after, I didn’t actually injure myself. If my understanding of Science is correct, if you do something once and the outcome is good, that proves that that thing works.
When it comes down to it, I probably have to become more flexible if I’m going to play basketball in my 40s and 50s, so I can kick that can down the road only so far. If anyone has experience with good online programs for durably increasing one’s flexibility, please hit me up. Hey, also hit me up if you’re in a regular pickup game in Manhattan or Brooklyn! I’m in a weekly one, but it’s late at night and I’m often quite lazy.
Anyway, clearly I have strong feelings on pickup basketball. I really regret that I didn’t make more of an effort to play it in high school. I actually got cut from the JV team as a junior. I had no discipline. I didn’t lift weights, I didn’t do actual workouts of any sort, I didn’t hone my game. I just played a huge amount of pickup ball everywhere I could (which was true until maybe a year ago, when I really started replacing it with running). Obviously some part of my brain wonders whether I could have at least been a benchwarmer at Newton North. But maybe that’s unrealistic — there were about two thousand kids there, we’d regularly rank pretty high in the state in boy’s basketball, and so on. I think if I’d gone to a small school I would have had a pretty good shot at playing. I play with plenty of former high school players my age who I’m better than, but they tend to have been from smaller schools.
For what it’s worth, I did make the Princeton club basketball team in grad school, where from time to time we’d play against other universities’ club teams. But that was largely because while the club team had some very talented guards, they also suffered from a severe lack of size, other than one 6′7″ player who actually played for the real-life Princeton squad at one point — a really nice kid named Zane Ma who was bumped down to our level by injury issues. Six-four isn’t even that big for basketball, but I was one of the larger players. Mostly the club was just an excuse to have “practices,” which were 80% pickup runs, two or three times a week. I loved playing in those games and miss those days, just like I miss being in basketball shape. Our best guard ended up making the real-deal squad. He didn’t play much but making a DI team at 5′9″ is not an easy achievement.
I’m not delusional about my basketball ability — not only was I nowhere near being able to compete on a DI team in a weak conference, I’m miles away from having ever been a D3 player. People who don’t play don’t understand the leap between a decent high school player and even a D3 benchwarmer. But I played solidly on the vertically challenged club team, for what it’s worth.
My game is. . . odd. I can post up pretty well, at least when I’m in basketball shape (inside play is always the last thing to come back to me when I’ve been absent a while), and have a baby hook with my strong (left) hand that is very hard for most people to block due to my size. I have a broken-looking jump shot that is actually pretty consistent out to midrange. I am relatively quick for my size and have decent spin moves and drop steps that give smaller defenders trouble. Larger defenders I can sometimes get by off the dribble. I also have very good stamina. In a lower level pickup game I can play oversized point guard, but against stronger competition I will have my pocket picked by the guards if I get too ambitious with my dribbling.
Long story short, over the years I’ve usually been able to hold my own and be a net positive for my pickup team as long as I’m not playing with former college players or anything like that. But in recent years, the NBA’s style revolution has trickled down to the pickup court, and there’s a lot more spacing (or attempts at it on smaller courts), less posting up, and more three-point shooting from all “positions.” Many pickup games play by 1s and 2s instead of 2s and 3s (which I find annoying), making “three-pointers” much more valuable, relatively speaking, than they are in traditionally scored games. Because of my broken shooting mechanics I can’t hit threes consistently, which would really extend my usefulness on the court as well as potentially my overall longevity as an over-40 pickup basketball player. The less you play inside on offense, the less of a chance you’ll sustain an injury from landing on someone’s foot or whatever, and plus, if you’re a big, relatively slow guy it can actually be more helpful just to hang out in the corner, forcing your man to stay nearby if you are a shooting threat, and letting the real athletes do their driving-to-the-hoop thing.
I’ve actually thought of hiring a coach to help me rebuild my shooting form. For some reason I find the idea shameful. A 40-year-old white guy who never even played in high school paying for someone to help him refine a basic skill? But on the other hand, that’s stupid! I love the sport and want to be good at it and never had enough formal training. I should just do it and practice a lot and develop a consistent jump shot out to 22 feet. Plenty of 12-year-olds have accomplished that, and in many other endeavors, I can not only match but actually exceed the performance of 12-year-olds. That’s how impressive I am.
Anyway, this is, if nothing else, an evidence-based newsletter, and I have only limited empirical evidence for my claim that I’m pretty good at basketball. I played in a moderately competitive New York pickup league some years ago and it was the only time I had my stats recorded: 11 points and nine and a half rebounds per rather short game (time didn’t stop after a foul or out-of-bounds until the last couple minutes of each half, if memory serves).
And I shot free throws weirdly well, 82.4% (on admittedly small volume), which gives me hope I could become a decent three-point shooter.
Anyway, it makes sense this was one of my longest answers given how important an issue it is, especially relative to, like, Israel and Gaza or who the next president of the United States will be.
Will you write a post about Slay the Spire and why this is your preferred game? There’s a lot of writing [about] pro and con video games rotting the brain vs. video games teaching math and pattern matching. Or is it all just mindless distraction, tricking our brains into thinking we are doing satisfying “work.” —Ullr
Talk about shame!
I actually recently bought a Steam Deck, a supercharged portable gaming (and computing) device beloved by nerds worldwide, in part because I was taking three flights in a week and a half and figured it would be a great way to pass the hours. But I didn’t end up using it at all, mostly because I’m so scared of getting re-addicted to Slay the Spire. (I’m confident in the long run I’ll get a great deal of enjoyment out of it, so thank you to Yair Rosenberg, whose enthusiastic recommendation sealed the deal. The Steam Deck is extremely impressive hardware.)
I find this whole subject weirdly complicated (that’s a new one coming from me). This is an absolutely expertly designed game. Everything about it, from the level of randomness, which feels just right (you want to occasionally be shocked by your good or bad luck, but not feel like it’s routinely determining the success of your runs), to the different classes’ very different play styles (all satisfying in their own way), to the cute but menacing enemies. But expertly designed, in some senses, just means addictive. The game offers up rewards on a variable ratio schedule that the millions of other people who play it and I find absolutely irresistible, simply by dint of how our ancient monkey brains evolved. I’m sure I’m oversimplifying if not butchering this logic but: our ancestors would be rewarded for shaking tree after tree in search of nuts or fruit, even if they hit only once every so many trees, and feeling a jolt of dopamine when they got bonked on the head by a coconut. But that logic only applies if at least some of the trees have fruit. It would not make sense, evolutionarily, to quit shaking the first time you failed to unloose a coconut, nor would it make sense to keep shaking trees if you failed every time for six hours.
So yeah, these games rely on some pretty deep-seated reward and addiction mechanisms. I don’t know where that leaves things — I don’t know how much I should praise Slay the Spire and the other games that ensnare me once or twice a year. It’s a sophisticated, well-made game, but it’s also built to addict. I’ve wanted to write about this sort of thing for awhile but I just don’t know how to approach it. Like, I used to watch the YouTube videos uploaded by a couple streamers, jorbs and Baalorlord, who are absolute Slay the Spire experts — among the best players in the world. I really enjoyed it. I also felt like I was wasting my time. Why? Surely it’s in part because video games, even sophisticated ones like STS, are stigmatized in a way that, say, chess isn’t. The parent of a teenager would probably react differently to their kid getting addicted to watching chess streams than video game streams. Or maybe I have outdated views on this and millennial parents actually feel fine about their kids getting into a certain enriching subset of video games. Maybe there’s no actual argument for why chess is a better use of one’s time than STS, and eventually, if we survive long enough as a species, STS will be millennia old. Maybe chess will be forgotten. Stranger things have happened.
Because I lack any sort of coherent philosophy about any of this, a lot of this comes down to how consuming different types of content makes me feel. If I play a brilliantly designed, fundamentally finite indie game like Braid, to take one of my favorite examples, I feel good. I don’t feel like “Wow, I really wasted those five hours.” When I play a game like STS, or another game that is random and unbounded enough to be effectively playable forever (at least if you’re a mere mortal such as myself who will never get so good the game becomes boring), I might enjoy it in the moment, and be constantly tempted to do “just one more run,” but afterward I feel shitty and twitchy and it ratchets up my insomnia if I play it too late in the day. It’s the same as the difference between flicking randomly through YouTube garbage, a bunch of short videos, and sitting down to watch a feature-length documentary or other film. The former makes me feel bad; the latter, even if it’s a bad film, doesn’t. There’s just something about that twitchy feeling that I can’t explain, but that really does make those hours feel wasted, like I could have spent them much better on something else.
Which is silly, in a way, because I don’t think time is fungible like that. We all have focus problems and other obligations and it’s not like if I didn’t spend those 500 hours playing Slay the Spire, I would have spent them getting better at Spanish. But it just doesn’t feel like it’s been an intentional 500 hours, if that makes sense. It doesn’t feel fully like I chose it. Maybe I should read this book and better understand whether we choose anything at all.
Your name was listed as a participant for Benjamin Boyce’s panel discussion at the Genspect conference in Denver on Saturday, November 4th. Were you just an invited participant, or is that something you’re definitely planning to do? https://genspect.org/genspect-releases-full-programme-for-denver-conference/ —Teucer’s wife
So this one was my fault. I explained what happened on a recent episode of Blocked and Reported, but long story short: in early August I received an email from one of the Genspect conference organizers asking if I “would consider speaking on a panel event addressing media issues at our conference in Denver.” I said yes without asking follow-up questions, which was a huge rookie mistake. Which media issues? From which angle? I assumed, without checking, that the panel would simply be about the challenges of covering youth gender medicine journalistically, which is a subject I can talk everyone’s ear off about.
When the schedule was released, the panel was called something like “The Left’s Love Affair With Trans.” That didn’t quite sit right with me, especially because I’ve tried to carve out a niche as a true nuance-bro on this issue. Maybe I was or am overthinking it, but I decided to withdraw and simply attend the conference as a journalist. The organizers were kind enough to let me still have a free ticket, as planned (pretty standard for journalists and conferences), and I’m glad I went. I regret that I didn’t handle the panel issue in a better and more inquisitive way — obviously I would have preferred not to have withdrawn, but it’s a lesson learned for next time.
Logistics and disclosures–wise, all that’s important to note is that whereas Genspect would have covered my travel and lodging (again, standard practice for a speaking invitation — I didn’t ask for any money), once I withdrew as a speaker, I of course agreed to pay my own way. My Disclosures page has now been updated to reflect all this, with the original disclosure still visible but crossed out for transparency’s sake.
I want to be clear that I bear no ill will toward Genspect over this. They are an advocacy organization and I am a journalist. Our incentives aren’t, and shouldn’t be, perfectly aligned. I have no problem appearing on a panel run by an advocacy organization — though I always have to disclose it — but I’m probably going to hold such appearances to a higher bar than, say, an invite to give a talk where I have more or less full control over the content.
I also want to be clear that I don’t judge the journalists who did appear on the panel one bit. These are all very subjective questions and everyone answers them differently. I accepted Israeli government money to go on a trip there! I definitely don’t think I have the correct answers to these questions and other journalists do not — these are judgment calls. I don’t even deny that there are problems when it comes to the left and youth gender medicine, particularly when it comes to journalism, academia, and the medical establishment. Of course I don’t; I’ve written plenty about all of it. But at the end of the day I just didn’t quite feel right about the framing, and saw little downside to withdrawing, other than paying a bit of money (which is tax deductible, anyway, since it’s a professional conference).
As a fellow Simpsons-phile, what are your top three favorite Simpsons episodes in no particular order? Related, what seasons do you consider the golden age of the show? The golden era for me is Season 3 to about season 11 or 12 before I find the quality to really drop off.
Your friend (and definitely not Homer),
Guy Incognito
Your username references what might be one of the top five jokes in the entire history of the show. I just absolutely love it — gets me every time. It is a comedically perfect sequence.
It’s been so long since I watched recent episodes of The Simpsons that I had to pull up its IMDb page to remember the last season I’m truly familiar with. Turns out I’m familiar with all of Season 8, most of Season 9, and some of Season 10. From there it gets pretty hazy, and at a certain point I don’t really recognize or remember any of the episodes. That’s crazy. I’ve had multiple conversations with friends my age about how old it makes us feel that we’re now at a point where we’re familiar with only about a third of the run of The Simpsons, the single most important cultural product of our upbringing. That is not an exaggeration in the slightest — the show was absolutely revolutionary and people of my age range still reference episodes we first watched when we were kids to one another, as evidenced by Mr. Incognito up there.
It’s sad how little of the full run of The Simpsons I’ve seen given how O B S E S S E D I was — am, really — with the show’s earlier years, but it’s understandable given that the show undeniably changed. No one needs another article about how The Simpsons fell off, and plus there’s that thing where it’s hard to tell how much of it is an actual quality drop versus you, the consumer, just getting older and crankier. (Okay, in this case there was obviously a quality drop-off, but that’s because the early years were historically good TV that you can stack up with any comedy that was or ever will be produced by any species in any galaxy, assuming aliens have comedy which hmmm that’s an interesting question in its own right but I’m up to many thousands of words already so let’s table the alien-comedy question for now.)
I wouldn’t even know where to start ranking my favorite episodes. The Monorail One is up there, of course. It’s also just shocking, in perusing the IMDb page, how much brilliance was compressed into such a short span. For example, Season 8 alone included the Hank Scorpio episode, the Rodney Dangerfield one (“Honestly, Smithers — I don’t know why Harvard bothers to show up. They barely even won!”), the X-Files one, and the Poochie episode. These are all must-watch episodes. Poochie is up there among my all-time favorites, and has so many goddamn good lines. I mean, I don’t want to sound pretentious here, but Itchy and Scratchy comprise a dramaturgical dyad!
This is what I mean about how astonishing the show’s reach was: go up to a male who grew up in the suburbs and who is between 35 and 45 years old and say “Poochie died on the way back to his home planet,” and there is, I contend, a greater than 50% chance they will know exactly what you’re talking about and smile, if not laugh. There are very few cultural products with that level of dispersion. Of course part of it was the show’s inarguably searing brilliance and part of it was the relative lack of other options at the time, but the importance of The Simpsons — this is one of the most obvious sentences I’ll ever publish on this newsletter — can’t be overstated.
Holy crap — now I’m clicking around to random seasons and finding other strings of brilliance. Did you know that Season 3 kicked off with Kamp Krusty, followed by “A Streetcar Named Marge,” followed by “Homer the Heretic”? How the hell did they pull that off???
Anyway, I apologize for not being one of those nerds who can immediately tell you why Season 4 is better than Season 6, or vice versa. I always need to check which episodes were in which season. I just don’t have an organized enough brain. But this show, in its earlier iterations, is so, so, so important to me, and to my sense of humor. I want to hug and kiss it forever. I love it like Homer loves his ten-foot hoagie.
While I’m rambling, I think the question of whether South Park might, in the long run, go down as a more important show than The Simpsons is an interesting one. It’s arguably been more durable, quality-wise, it’s always been more political and au courant (a plus or a minus, depending on to whom you ask the question and how you phrase it), and hasn’t it at least matched The Simpsons as an international phenomenon? Is Cartman as recognizable as Bart at this point? There have been 34 seasons of The Simpsons and 26 of South Park. Those are remarkable runs. I think The Simpsons will always be tops for me, but South Park is also such an important show. And South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut was, at the time, an exceptionally important and almost unspeakably funny film, at least in my milieu. This caused me to laugh perhaps as loud as I ever have in a movie theater. I still love it, because I will be 16 forever.
As a final side note, it’s kinda funny to click around and note some of the Simpsons celebrity guests that maybe would not happen today:
S11.E1 ∙ Beyond Blunderdome Sun, Sep 26, 1999 Convinced he’s the only man with guts to tell him the truth, Mel Gibson insists Homer accompanies [sic] him in Hollywood to help fix his newest film project.
Whoops!
Questions? Comments? Requests for Part 3 of my response to the October AMA, which will be six times longer and which will run in March of 2032? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com. The image of Jerry and Kramer dealing with a mail situation of their own is stolen from Seinfeld, via here.
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