Remarks by the President at the 2016 Toner Prize Ceremony
By President Barack Obama
… I spend a lot of time reflecting on how this system, how this crazy notion of self-government works; how can we make it work. And this is as important to making it work as anything — people getting information that they can trust, and that has substance and evidence and facts and truth behind it. In an era in which attention spans are short, it is going to be hard because you’re going to have to figure out ways to make it more entertaining, and you’re going to have to be more creative, not less. Because if you just do great reporting and nobody reads it, that doesn’t do anybody any good, either.
But 10, 20, 50 years from now, no one seeking to understand our age is going to be searching the Tweets that got the most retweets, or the post that got the most likes. They’ll look for the kind of reporting, the smartest investigative journalism that told our story and lifted up the contradictions in our societies, and asked the hard questions and forced people to see the truth even when it was uncomfortable.
Spare Me Your Hypocritical Journalism Lecture, Mr. President
By Jack Shafer
How do we hate Obama’s treatment of the press? Let me count the ways. Under his administration, the U.S. government has set a new record for withholding Freedom of Information Act requests, according to a recent Associated Press investigation. FOIA gives the public and press an irreplaceable view into the workings of the executive branch. Without timely release of government documents and data, vital questions can’t be answered and stories can’t be written.
Obama’s “Insider Threat Program” has turned employees across the government—from the Peace Corps to the Social Security Administration to the Department of Agriculture—into information-squelching snitches. If this isn’t Trumpian behavior, I don’t know what is.
“Obama hates the press,” New York Times national security reporter James Risen said not long ago, “and he hates leaks.” AP Washington Bureau Chief Sally Buzbee has decried the “day-to-day intimidation of sources” by the Obama administration, judging it worse than the Bush administration on that score. And in a 2013 piece, POLITICO’s Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen documented Obama’s mastery of “limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.”
Obama official says he pushed a ‘narrative’ to media to sell the Iran nuclear deal
By Paul Farhi
“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
We’re looking for writers to create Internet content!
By Wayne Gladstone
In a nutshell, we’re looking for whatever gets the most clicks from whatever our advertisers believe is the most profitable demographic at that moment, but again, that’s money stuff! You’re an artist. There, I said it. You’re an artist and I didn’t even put it in quotes. Why? Because punctuation does not affect our bottom line so why sweat it? But as the dictates of the demanding Internet Publishing market are constantly changing, no one can say if today’s Game of Thrones gallery will be as highly valued as tomorrow’s “You Won’t Believe What Celebrities Got Fat” think piece, so be sure to refresh this posting and the entire zeitgeist of the Internet often before submitting.
The fall of Salon.com
By Kelsey Sutton and Peter Sterne
“The low point arrived when my editor G-chatted me with the observation that our traffic figures were lagging that day and ordered me to ‘publish something within the hour,’” Andrew Leonard, who left Salon in 2014, recalled in a post. “Which, translated into my new reality, meant ‘Go troll Twitter for something to get mad about — Uber, or Mark Zuckerberg, or Tea Party Republicans — and then produce a rant about it.’ … I performed my duty, but not without thinking, ‘Is this what 25 years as a dedicated reporter have led to?’ That’s when it dawned on me: I was no longer inventing the future. I was a victim of it. So I quit my job to keep my sanity.”
US newspaper industry hollowed out by job losses
By AFP
The US newspaper industry has shed more than half its jobs since 1990, losses which have only been partly offset by gains in online media.
Official US Labor Department data showed the newspaper sector lost 271,800 jobs in the period from January 1990 to March 2016, or 59.7 percent of the total over the past 26 years.
The numbers, first cited in a report by the news website Engadget, confirm the massive shift to digital media that has hammered traditional newspapers.
Magazines fared only slightly better, losing 36 percent of their jobs in the same period.
Employment in Internet publishing and broadcasting, meanwhile, rose from about 30,000 to nearly 198,000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed.
Readers Dump Fleet Street: ‘Not You, It’s My Smartphone’
By Eric Pfanner
… the long-term trends are dire as digital revenue, while rising, can’t take up the slack. Just 62 percent of British adults read a newspaper at least once a week in 2015, down from 70 percent in 2011, according to the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. Print ad sales at U.K. newspapers last year dropped to 1.7 billion pounds ($2.4 billion) from 4.2 billion pounds in 2005, media-buying agency ZenithOptimedia says. Digital ads last year totaled 356 million pounds, leaving a shortfall of more than 2 billion pounds.
“Everyone was waiting for the moment when digital ads were going to offset the drop in print,’’ says Alex De Groote, media analyst at Peel Hunt in London. “The tipping point didn’t come through, and it’s not going to.”
Vice Media Traffic Plummets, Underscoring Risky Web Strategy
By Andrew Wallenstein
The irony of what’s propelling this precipitous decline is a controversial practice that Vice, as well as other digital publishers, engage in online that’s actually aimed at inflating traffic numbers.
The inventory that Vice makes available to media buyers is actually a combination of its own website, Vice.com, and a collection of other Web properties Vice doesn’t really own or operate, such as ModernFarmer.com and ThePlaidZebra.com. Comscore enables this arrangement by allowing one publisher to essentially sign away its audience to another publisher through a document known as a “traffic assignment” letter. These pacts are typically struck by smaller publishers lacking advertising sales infrastructure; in exchange for turning over their traffic, they can have their inventory represented by a bigger entity with better access to a wider range of marketers.
But while traffic assignment letters are perfectly legal, they’ve been long criticized within the industry. While reach-hungry publishers like Vice aren’t hiding these partners from advertisers, these ad buys are considered the digital equivalent of mortgage-backed securities: mixed in with the premium inventory is lesser-quality placements.
Media Websites Battle Faltering Ad Revenue and Traffic
By John Herrman
A broad slowdown in venture capital funding leaves even newer media companies with hard choices to make; even those built with social media in mind have been forced to fundamentally reconsider their plans.
Mr. Malik of Gigaom, whose site employed 85 people at its peak, said if he were to start the business today, it would probably be a Facebook page. There is an opportunity, clearly, to reach people there.
Money? That’s another matter.
“How do I monetize?” he asked. “Still not clear.”
Pop Goes the Digital Media Bubble
By Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery
If we’re going to have a functioning democracy, we’ll need a press that can turn over rocks, and the days of that being financed by deep-pocketed media companies are drawing to a close. The new moguls are in the technology business, not the journalism business. And while some of them say wonderful things about journalism, money talks—and right now, the money is saying “pop.”
Thiel vs Gawker: Why a Defensive Media is the Real Threat to Free Speech
By Claire Lehmann
The media’s response to the Thiel vs Gawker affair has been to make much of Thiel. But the paramount issue is the conduct of the media itself. Journalism fails as a profession when it cannot adequately police itself. Thiel vs Gawker demonstrates the blindness of the press to the unseemly excesses of those within their ranks. The public are disgusted by Gawker, as they were disgusted by The News of the World phone-hacking scandal of the mid 2000s.
Columnists may strike an imperious posture if they wish, and attack Silicon Valley out of resentment. But that won’t do anything to restore the integrity of their profession. If journalism fails to open up its own industry to the same kind of scrutiny that it demands of others, it will not be digital disruption which causes its demise. It will be its own hypocrisy.
Anti-Trump Riots and the War Over Liberalism
By Jonathan Chait
Liberalism sees political rights as a positive good — rights for one are rights for all. “Democracy” means political rights for every citizen. The far left defines democracy as the triumph of the subordinate class over the privileged class. Political rights only matter insofar as they are exercised by the oppressed. The oppressor has no rights.
“Free speech, while an indispensable principle of democracy, is not an abstract value,” as one fairly representative left-wing polemicist explained. “It is carried out in the context of power disparities, and has real effects on peoples’ lives. We can defend freedom of speech — particularly from state crackdowns — while also resolutely opposing speech that scapegoats the most vulnerable and oppressed people in our society.” A liberal sees Trump’s ability to deliver a speech before supporters as a fundamental political right worth defending. A radical sees this “right” as coming at the expense of subordinate classes, and thus not worth protecting.
Privilege: The Left’s Original Sin
By James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian
For many contemporary left-situated activists, privilege occupies the same role in a religion of contemporary identity politics. There is no greater sin than having been born an able-bodied, straight, white male who identifies as a man but isn’t deeply sorry for this utterly unintentional state of affairs.
Everybody is a sinner; everybody is privileged; and both are the fall of Man. Both are the stain upon everyone who, by virtue of existing, falls short of moral perfection. Both are a kind of disease that threatens society. Neither can be escaped. Both must be abhorred and demand redemption from the guilty.
I can tolerate anything except the outgroup
By Scott Alexander
You can bet some white guy on Gawker who week after week churns out “Why White People Are So Terrible” and “Here’s What Dumb White People Don’t Understand” is having fun and not sweating any blood at all. He’s not criticizing his in-group, he’s never even considered criticizing his in-group. I can’t blame him. Criticizing the in-group is a really difficult project I’ve barely begun to build the mental skills necessary to even consider.
A Dialogue With a 22-Year-Old Donald Trump Supporter
By Conor Friedersdorf
My correspondent has come to believe that political correctness is transforming American culture in a way that puts his interests at odds with activists who are pursuing social justice and Hispanic immigrants who might benefit from affirmative action. His perception of these changes is causing him to engage in zero-sum thinking. If identity-based tribalism is America’s lot, he intends to vote his group interests, whereas he was previously inclined toward a more individualist ethic.
That shift alarms me.
…
In The Federalist, David Marcus argues that anti-white rhetoric is fueling white nationalism. I’ve previously warned that “encouraging a focus on white identity is a dangerous approach for a country in which white supremacy has been a toxic force,” an admonition that applies to the right and left in different ways. And on the subject of “political correctness,” I’ve posited that citizens who oppose Trumpism should “take a careful look at everything that falls under the rubric of political correctness; study the real harm done by its excesses; identify the many parts that are worth defending; and persuade more Americans to adopt those norms voluntarily, for substantive reasons, not under duress of social shaming or other coercion.”
Jon Ronson: ‘Time and again on Twitter we act like the thing we purport to hate’
By Tim Adams
This censorious attitude filters out into the real world, it seems. We have the absurd situation where, say, Germaine Greer can’t talk at universities because of social-media pressure…
I went to college in the 80s in London. We were all social-justice people but there was always one person who was way more social justice than everyone else. It can seem like that fucker from the 80s is now in charge, and no one is allowed to say anything. I mean I still consider myself a politically correct person, and we don’t want to go back to racism and sexism and homophobia, of course. But it has got to the point where a lot of comedians over here [Ronson now lives in New York] won’t play colleges in case someone puts something online out of context.As you argue in the book, there are financial imperatives for Twitter and Google and Facebook and the rest to maintain this attitude…
Yes. The corporations don’t want blandness or complexity. They want spikes of outrage. Journalism was always about speaking truth to power. But increasingly people are wary of trying to speak truth to social media I think.
Conservatives love to hate political correctness, but the left should rail against it too
By Gay Alcorn
That’s the story – social media outrage. I am sick of reading stories that begin “Twitter was outraged” but it’s obvious why it’s become routine. Conventional media, as well as platforms like Facebook, need drama to achieve online traffic.
…
The right loves all this stuff. Conservatives rail against “political correctness” but have little commitment to social justice or addressing structural inequality. Yet progressives should rail against it too, much more strongly than they are now. Because it’s not progressive in any way. The censors of the left may have the best of intentions, but too often, they’re just another bunch of reactionaries.
The Bard’s New Bowdlers
By Nick Cohen
Much of modern “dissent” is not a protest against injustice but a kind of religious test. The inquisitor discovers sin where no one has seen it before and demands you prove your worth by seeing it too. The flimsier the pretext for complaint, the worthier complainants prove themselves to be. Our culture of competitive grievance is at root a form of showing off. I am more perceptive than you are, more compassionate, and more determined to purge the world until it is clean.
4 arguments for ethical online shaming (and 4 problems with them)
By Matthew Beard
… shame works best when there is a commonly-held standard the community can enforce. The inherent plurality of views online, coupled with the fact there is more than one community online, means shame is going to be a pretty blunt and indiscriminate mode of moral education. But seeing the internet as a shame community (or group of shame communities) helps us understand how online shaming has developed.
There’s obviously something legitimate about a society using moral emotions to try to communicate and instil values in the members of that society. However, the de-personalised nature of online communities makes shame as a moral educator difficult, because in order for the shamed person to learn from being shamed, they need to be guided by the community to a new level of understanding.
This seems to require a connection and intimacy most online communities are unable to provide – and which the ‘churn and burn’ mentality of most online shaming surges isn’t patient enough to offer.
The Reaction to Brexit Is the Reason Brexit Happened
By Matt Taibbi
Maybe the slide started with 9/11, after which huge pluralities of people were suddenly OK with summary executions, torture, warrantless surveillance and the blithe disposal of concepts like habeas corpus.
A decade and a half later, we’re gripped by a broader mania for banning and censoring things that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
It seems equally to have taken over campus speech controversies (expanding the “fighting words” exception to the First Amendment is suddenly a popular idea) and the immigration debate (where Trump swept to the nomination riding a bluntly unconstitutional call for a religious test for immigrants).
Democracy appears to have become so denuded and corrupted in America that a generation of people has grown up without any faith in its principles.
Teaching Inclusion in a Divided World
By Nicholas A. Christakis
Students are demanding greater inclusion, and they are absolutely right. But inclusion in what? At our universities, students of all kinds are joining traditions that revere free expression, wide engagement, open assembly, rational debate and civil discourse. These things are worth defending. In fact, they are the predicates for the very demands the students have been making across the United States.
Conversely, it is entirely illiberal (even if permissible) to use these traditions to demand the censorship of others, to besmirch fellow students rather than refute the ideas that they express and to treat ideological claims as if they were perforce facts. When students (and faculty) do this, they are burning the furniture to heat the house.
The battle against ‘hate speech’ on college campuses gives rise to a generation that hates speech
By Nina Burleigh
Legal scholar and cultural critic Stanley Fish, author of There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech…and It’s a Good Thing Too, says administrators should ignore student censorship demands because they go against the purpose of the university. “Scholarly inquiry cannot be impeded by demonizing certain forms of speech in advance or anointing as holy certain types of speech in advance,” he tells Newsweek.
“What we are seeing is not just phobias about language,” Kaminer says. “We have gone way beyond political correctness and are seeing a real decline in critical thinking. If you don’t know the difference between quoting a word and hurling an epithet, then you don’t know how to think.”
Free speech & the modern campus
By Camille Paglia
The old-guard professors at the Yale Graduate School in the late 1960s may have been stuffy and genteel, but they were genuine scholars, passionately devoted to study and learning. They believed they had a moral obligation to seek the truth and to express it as accurately as they could. I remember it being said at the time that a scholar’s career could be ruined by fudging a footnote. A tragic result of the era of identity politics in the humanities has been the collapse of rigorous scholarly standards, as well as an end to the high value once accorded to erudition, which no longer exists as a desirable or even possible attribute in job searches for new faculty.
Postmodern Glacier professor defends his dreadful study as “misunderstood”. It wasn’t.
By Jerry Coyne
Along with three co-authors, Mark Carey, a dean and professor of history at Robert D. Clark Honors college at the University of Oregon, recently published a dreadful postmodernist paper in Progress in Human Geography, “Glaciers, gender and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.” (reference and link below). I wrote about it on this site last week, and have since read the whole thing twice. I still haven’t recovered.
At first I thought, with others, that the paper might be a hoax, but it wasn’t—it’s a real paper, just as opaque and crazy as Alan Sokal’s paper that caused such a furor when published in Social Text in 1996. But Sokal’s paper was an out-and-out hoax, designed to show just how insane the whole postmodern enterprise really was. And it did its job—mostly. But it didn’t eliminate this kind of nonsense in the humanities, because papers like that of Carey et al. are still being written, still being reviewed favorably and published, and still getting funding from the American taxpayers. Carey’s work, including this paper, was funded by a National Science Foundation grant to the tune of nearly $413,000 …
Why an article about ‘feminist glaciology’ in a major geography journal has been its top-read story for months
By John-Michael Schneider
One popular Twitter user is taking advantage of the increasing controversy around questionable academic research. The account @real_peerreview posts often-sardonic comments along with excerpts from articles with titles like “‘I’m a Cross between a Clown, a Stripper, and a Streetwalker’: Drag Tipping, Sex Work, and a Queer Sociosexual Economy,” and “Liquid Racism and the Ambiguity of Ali G.” One of the papers argues that high school students could benefit from dropping out.
For the person running the Twitter account, the activity does not come without risks.
“It’s a touchy subject. I started posting these peer-reviewed examples from my ‘real’ account,” the owner explained, wanting to remain anonymous. “I was advised by senior colleagues to stop it if I wanted to continue to have a career.”
The Perils of Writing a Provocative Email at Yale
By Conor Friedersdorf
At Yale, I encountered students and faculty members who supported the Christakises but refused to say so on the record, and others who criticized them, but only anonymously. On both sides, people with perfectly mainstream opinions shared them with a journalist but declined to put their name behind them due to a campus climate where anyone could conceivably be the next object of ire and public shaming. Insufficient tolerance for disagreement is undermining campus discourse.
Prof. Geoffrey Stone Discusses Free Speech on Campus at the American Law Institute
By Geoffrey R. Stone
But what should a university do? A university should educate its students about the importance of civility and mutual respect. These are core values for students, for professors, for citizens, and even for lawyers. But these are values that should be reinforced by education and example, not by censorship. Moreover, a university should encourage disagreement, argument, and debate. It should instill in its students and faculty the importance of winning the day by facts, by ideas, and by persuasion, rather than by force, obstruction, or censorship.
Sadiq Khan’s advert ban shows he is an illiberal censor at heart
By Brendan O’Neill
Everyone thinks their censorship is good censorship. Torquemada thought burning heretical texts was justified to protect people from moral pollution; Mary Whitehouse thought banning raunchy TV shows was a good way to encourage decency and stability; and the new feministic censors think their image crushing is a good, nice way to control men’s instincts and defend women’s mental health. But a censor is a censor is a censor: a patronising, illiberal, distrustful snob, whether he’s wielding a Bible or a PhD in gender studies, and whether he’s saving souls or saving self-esteem.
Eight misconceptions about free speech on campus
By Greg Lukianoff
“But the censorship on campus is done with the best intentions.”
Censorship is not okay even if it’s done with a pure heart. Is there anything noble about a leader firing subordinates for voicing criticism, or telling protesters that they have to restrict themselves to tiny Orwellian free speech zones? Even when administrators cite high-minded reasons for punishing a student or professor, the decision usually arises from mixed motives.
“But speech codes are only directed at banning hate speech.”
Many students believe that “hate speech” is a category of speech that is unprotected under the First Amendment. This is false. But even if you did try to define “hate speech,” as some European countries have, virtually none of the cases I’ve seen in 15 years involve speech that falls under even these broad definitions. In fact, I’ve seen a number of cases in which administrators censored expression that was anti-racist. For example, administrators at the University of Iowa censored a piece by Turkish artist Serhat Tanyolacar because it provocatively drew attention to racism in both America’s past and present.
Free Speech in Peril
By Isaac Chotiner
Do you have more fear about freedom of speech being curtailed by governments or from big internet companies?
Amongst others. I think that, having lived through a period of liberal triumphalism, where one could plausibly see free speech spreading in the 1990s, early 2000s, we are now on the defensive. It’s no longer just a state. It’s not just states and censorship. It’s also private superpowers, the big giants, be they American or Chinese, and most dangerous of all is what I call “power squared,” when the governments and the internet giants collaborate without any transparency or accountability. So if I had to point to the biggest single threat to free speech, I think it would be the covert collaboration between the public and the private superpowers.
Under attack
By The Economist
The threat to free speech on Western campuses is very different from that faced by atheists in Afghanistan or democrats in China. But when progressive thinkers agree that offensive words should be censored, it helps authoritarian regimes to justify their own much harsher restrictions and intolerant religious groups their violence. When human-rights campaigners object to what is happening under oppressive regimes, despots can point out that liberal democracies such as France and Spain also criminalise those who “glorify” or “defend” terrorism, and that many Western countries make it a crime to insult a religion or to incite racial hatred.
Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash – review
By Nick Cohen
A generation on, Rushdie’s Britain of a white majority and a few designated ethnic minorities feels equally antiquated. To protect them we have “hate speech” laws. They go well beyond classical liberal limits by criminalising speech that does not intentionally incite violence, and are starting to look ridiculous. Mass migration is bringing dozens of new minorities into western countries. Within them, people are using liberal freedoms to form ever smaller circles. Some even have the nerve to defy multiculturalism and think of themselves as autonomous individuals. Should we have laws to protect all of them from being offended? And what of the white minorities in Leicester, Slough and Luton – don’t they need “hate speech” laws, too? If they do, the social justice warriors who use “white” as an insult will have to be arrested in the name of social justice. Surely, Garton Ash argues, the only way to make modern diversity work is to insist on the need for thicker skins.
The hounding of Leslie Jones: anti-PC gone mad
By Brendan O’Neill
What is most striking is how much this alt-right shares in common with the lefty SJWs (Social Justice Warriors) it claims to hate. Both are fuelled by the politics of victimhood: SJWs claim a massive culture of misogyny is ruining their lives; alt-righters insist a feminist conspiracy is destroying theirs. Both are mean: peruse the blogs or tweets of any vocal alt-right or SJW and you’ll be struck by their disgust for anyone who disagrees with them. And both are censorious. Don’t be fooled by the alt-right’s freedom-lovin’ postures. They’re just as keen as SJWs to slam and ultimately end culture that offends them, whether it’s Beyonce doing a Black Power dance at the Super Bowl or Ghostbusters with four women in it.
Trump Fans and ‘Social Justice Warriors,’ Two Sides of the Same Authoritarian Coin
By Elizabeth Nolan Brown
We needn’t cozy up with progressive or alt-right authoritarians in order to show we like free speech or don’t like bigotry. The real silent majority of millennials—the ones that show up in polling numbers not Tweetstorms, in personal conversations not viral videos—is still (and increasingly) socially tolerant and sympathetic to constitutional principles. They’re just too busy living and let live to be found prominently in either side of the junior illiberal outrage machine.
Neil Gaiman on making art, mistakes and his ‘View from the Cheap Seats’
By Tyler Malone
In “Credo,” which opens the first section of the book, you write, “I believe I have the right to think and say the wrong things.” Do you find that in today’s society — especially because of social media and the 24-hour news cycle — that we don’t let people be wrong enough?
What I tend to see happening more and more is people retreating into their own corners. People seem scared to get things wrong or be shouted at so they form villages in which they agree with every other member, and maybe they go out and shout at the people in the next village for fun, but there’s no interchange of ideas going on. I think we have to encourage the idea that you’re allowed to think things. I have thought a great many stupid things over the years, and I can tell you that there’s not one stupid thing that I ever thought where I changed my mind because someone shouted at me or threatened to kill me. On the other hand, having great discussions with good friends, possibly over a drink, has definitely changed my mind and made me try to do better. You’re allowed to do better, but we have to let people do better.
In Praise of Ambivalence — “Young” Feminism, Gender Identity and Free Speech
By Brian D Earp
As the philosopher Michael Hauskeller and I put it in a recent essay, although it is tempting to think otherwise when it comes to certain hot-button issues, there really are no “simple, straightforward answers that can lay claim to ultimate moral truth. Invariably, although it is easy to forget, there are other valid sides to every issue, other perspectives to be thoroughly considered. And it is only when we honestly engage with these other perspectives [that] we can hope to achieve an adequate understanding of what is really at stake in our moral disagreements.”
It’s okay to be ambivalent as we do this. In fact, I think it’s likely to be necessary. At least, it is if we want to make meaningful progress on resolving these polarizing issues: we have been shouting at each other long enough as it is.
The shame of public shaming
By Russell Blackford
This is not the culture we wanted. It’s a public culture that seems broken, but what can we do about it?
For a start, it helps to recognise the problem, but it’s difficult, evidently, for most people to accept the obvious advice: Be forthright in debating topics of general importance, but always subject to some charity and restraint in how you treat particular people. Think through – and not with excuses – what that means in new situations. Be willing to criticise people on your own side if they are being cruel or unfair.
It’s not our job to punish individuals, make examples of them, or suppress their views. Usually we can support our points without any of this; we can do so in ways that are kinder, more honest, more likely to make intellectual progress. The catch is, it requires patience and courage.
Our public culture needs more of this sort of patience, more of this sort of courage. Can we – will we – rise to the challenge?
