The Jewish Council has a six point plan to tackle antisemitism—one that looks to bring Australians together, rather than drive them apart. As I write below, powerful political players are looking to stoke division and racism in the aftermath of the massacre at Bondi. We don’t have to let them.

A week has passed; mourners still sit shiva. The week struck many of us as a time to say little and to listen plenty. Instead the air was rapidly filled with recrimination and blame. The Americans didn’t wait 24 hours before they deployed the atrocity in Bondi for their own ends. Conservatives in Australia, thrown by the emergence of a Muslim hero, took a little longer. But by mid-week they smelled an opportunity for reprisal. A target was chosen, the longstanding thorn in their side—those who had opposed Israel’s killing of Palestinians.

15 people are dead. In our grief we want something done. We have to Do Something. It is clear now: the Government Has Failed. The government allowed Unchecked Migration. Even worse, it allowed The Protests. It allowed protestors to Chant, and to Show Images of The War. They chanted things like Globalise the Intifada, and From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free. Those Chants and those Images are the cause of our climate of antisemitism. And now 15 people are dead.

“When you see people marching and showing violent bloody images,” the NSW Premier Chris Minns told us this week, “images of death and destruction, it’s unleashing something in our community that the organisers of the protest can’t contain”.

Minns has Had Enough and now he will Do Something. It is time for Extraordinary Powers. It is time for Chris Minns to have Extraordinary Powers to ban protesting. He wants protests to be illegal for the next three months, at least.

The Federal Government now agrees: Something must be done. Under pressure, the PM Concedes He Has Not Done Enough. But now, now he is Doing Something, too. The Australian Government adopts the Plan to Combat Antisemitism, we read. He is Fast-Tracking its Recommendations.

What does that mean? It means the Federal Government will adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. Accompanying the working definition are 11 illustrative examples, seven of which relate to criticism of Israel.1 Remember that in light of the following:

Accepting the Envoy’s recommendations, the government will expand hate speech laws to include “violent or intimidating protest activity”. It will withdraw funding for universities which “fail to effectively address antisemitism”. It will screen visa processes for “antisemitic views or affiliations”.

There will be a national database for antisemitic incidents. A university report card on efforts to combat antisemitism. Charities that promote “antisemitic” speakers will have their status revoked. The media will be monitored to prevent false or distorted narratives. Criticising Israel will be antisemitic and the media will be monitored to prevent false or distorted narratives.

Why not? We have to Do Something. The government allowed criticism of Israel, and people chanted at protests, and immigration went unchecked, and now 15 people are dead.

Is that right?

In such a climate of repression, who dares say any differently? Who dares to suggest that it is not chanting that radicalises Muslim men but rather the slaughter of Muslim people?

Who dares suggest that it is not “images of death and destruction” that currently drive antisemitism, but the actual killing of Palestinians; the actual destroying of their homes?2 Who dares to ask how a bricklayer in Western Sydney was supposed to have been radicalised by students at sandstone universities? Who dares ask how these protests, only two years old, sent him to the arms of ISIS nearly a decade ago?

Who dares point out that to proscribe “Intifada” is to proscribe an everyday Arabic word, a word that is not inherently violent? Who dares to remind us that the First Intifada was a primarily non-violent protest movement, a movement of civil disobedience, one that turned bloody when Israel began shooting down unarmed protestors from afar?3 Who dares question whether the state should decide the meaning of words, rather than the person who speaks them? Who dares to ask if we want the Australian government to adopt the strategies of Donald Trump?4

Who dares suggest that the banning of criticism of Israel amounts to a protection racket of a foreign state? Who dares ask what this means for Jews critical of Israel? And who dares to ask whether the erasure of such Jews—an erasure currently pursued by the conservative political class—is not itself profoundly antisemitic?

It is exactly those Jews, after all, who have insisted for years that Israel’s actions put them in danger. The Jewish Council here in Australia, Na’amod in the UK, Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and IfNotNow in the US—these organisations have all insisted that the killing of 70 thousand Palestinians makes them less safe. They have been calling for Something to be done—that is, the ending of the killing of Palestinians—for years. They were ignored; they therefore look at the tragedy at Bondi like Cassandra might. But there is no acknowledgement of this in the Australian press, and their speech is about to be proscribed. They are to be banned from protest.

Instead we have once again “a campaign to infantalise the public”, to borrow the phrase Susan Sontag used in the week after September 11. It is a campaign to eradicate nuance and difference, to overwhelm, with social and legal pressure, the thinking mind. It seeks to make monoliths of diverse communities, and to pit those communities against each other. To understand this phenomenon we have to ask, as always, that most clarifying question. Who benefits?

It is Australia’s anti-immigration right wing, of course, which is why you now see Pauline Hanson and Sussan Ley in front of the cameras every day. And it is anyone who wants to support Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu without reservation; who wants the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians to continue apace. Their strategy is to combine the power of the state with the power of social sanction to squash dissenting opinion. What they want, most of all, is a homogeneity of speech. They want the proscription of dissent. They want a country in which no one dares question them, or their story of the world.

Here’s that petition link again.

So, in the final days of 2020, Yglesias made a range of clearly-defined forecasts about the coming year and attributed to each a measure of his confidence out of 100.1 A score of 100 reflected absolute certainty; a score of 50 reflected total uncertainty. Anything below 50 implied he thought the event would be unlikely to happen. The predictions were mostly bread-and-butter fare for his publication, , which comments on policy and politics at a truly prolific rate. Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating higher than his disapproval rating (70%), NO, went one example. The EU ends the year with more confirmed Covid-19 deaths than the US (60%), YES, went another.2

A year later, Yglesias dutifully shared his results. The scores were terrible. ‘This is a bad record’ wrote Yglesias. ‘So bad in fact that I want to curl up in a ball and give up rather than try again…I’m going to try to keep working at it, do another round, and improve my predicting skills.’

It was an admirable thing to admit. Here was a man who had built an entire career, and more than two media brands, on the claim that his was a voice worth listening to. By sheer force of reach, including more than half a million Twitter followers, Yglesias had held sway over Anglosphere public policy discourse for over a decade. At the time, it was reported, Slow Boring was read by swathes of the Biden administration.3 And here its founder and lead author was conceding that his ability to anticipate the future was at best limited.

It’s rare to see admissions like that among our pundit class. But Yglesias’ post wasn’t universally self-effacing, either. The lion’s share of the blame, he thought, should go to the difficult nature of forecasting, and to reflect this he gave his article the title “Predictions are hard”. Plus, he added, making concrete predictions was new to him. He figured predicting was much like running, a sport he had recently started getting into. ‘It turns out doing something new is really hard…I am hoping that if I keep working at it I will keep improving.’

But anticipating the future should not have been new to him—it is a constitutive component of public policy commentary. Because policy interventions are always future-oriented, prediction might even be foundational skill of the profession. The fact that forecasting is difficult—something no one will deny—is exactly why many people leave policy discussions to the best minds in town. Minds, supposedly, like that of Matt Yglesias.

There was something a bit dishonest in this professional pundit trying to let himself off the hook by claiming to be a novice at a core requirement of his own job. It doesn’t take much to see that a professional pundit’s relationship to prediction isn’t at all like his relationship to running, but a lot more like, say, a professional soccer player’s relationship to running. Being fast might not be sufficient for a football career, but it’s surely necessary… and there are no slow players in the Premier League.

Still, words like “good” and “bad”, “fast and slow” suggest some kind of benchmark. Yglesias was disappointed in himself, but his results might look more impressive when compared to other people. Prediction really is hard, after all. Perhaps other pundits would fare even worse. Could that be right? The only way to find out was to run a race next to him. So, the next year, my friends and I decided to join in. We took Yglesias’s 2022 predictions and each gave our own confidence in their likelihood. We then entered Yglesias’ forecasts into our little tournament, and we waited.

Perhaps it was a bit tough of us to compete against a guy without his knowledge, but there was no reason to think Yglesias hadn’t given these predictions his best shot. And Yglesias had been really explicit in his own post: the first time you make predictions is especially difficult, and you get better with practice. This would be his second time, and our first.

We started with a small handful of us—one group chat—and then, by invitation, brought in others we thought might enjoy playing. They were all smart friends of varying professions, though there were certainly no Superforecasters among us. We anonymised names to protect the identities of those in government or other sensitive roles, and we let the competition begin.

In the end 23 people participated. Those in my group chat all placed in the top 6. Yglesias finished back at 14.

Subscribe now

I was recently reminded of all this when I opened my inbox to find a defensive Slow Boring article called ‘I’ve been right about some things’.4 Yglesias had been driven to reply to a piece from titled The Agony and the Ecstasy of Matt Yglesias, which picked up where Nathan J. Robinson had left off, in Dec 2024, in a piece called ‘Matt Yglesias Is Confidently Wrong About Everything’. That piece had followed a not-altogether positive 2023 profile of Yglesias in the Washington Post.

For Yglesias, Savage’s piece was one dig too many. ‘I sincerely cannot recall a single instance,’ Yglesias complained, ‘of a [leftist hater] brigader saying, “You know, I really hate Matt Yglesias, but it’s not literally true that he’s always confident or that he’s always wrong — for example, even though I disagree with him on every point of factional controversy between the left and the center-left, he also has a lot of banal progressive opinions like ‘abortion should be legal’ and ‘the government should give poor people more resources.’’’

If the “center-left” has any meaning, banal progressive opinions are surely necessary to its membership—to commend Yglesias for them would suggest he lives on the political right. Why, then, does he want to be applauded for being pro-choice? Why the desire for acknowledgement, the pained cry for a little credit?

For all his sins, Yglesias does in fact represent the apex of the political blogging form. He is a producer of a prodigious and unwavering tide of content that manages, in the main, to be sophisticated, sensible, and largely unremarkable, ingesting and metabolising policy information at a startling rate. His waking hours are dominated by the consumption and production of wonkish content. Few people could do what he does; even fewer would want to.

Far from confounding the issue, these accomplishments are the best starting place to understand the cyclical dynamic of bitterness between Yglesias and his detractors. His immense effort, instead of returning universal applause, attracts consistent and vocal negative attention. His labour has won him money and power, but not approval.

And that is why, rather than take criticism as information about himself, Yglesias can only externalise the blame. His critics are in fact pathological, exhibiting signs of what he calls “Yglesias derangement syndrome”. Like Donald Trump before him, Yglesias considers his opponents bizarre, resentful, and wholly unjustified. They are ‘haters’ who ‘know they can’t hurt me’ and instead ‘attempt to bully younger writers by making an example out of me.’ Their criticism of his views can only be understood as a failing of their own—never evidence of a failing of his own.

The adopting of Trump’s rhetoric of victimisation is one sign that Yglesias is not on firm ground. Parasocial relationships on the internet do, of course, create weirdness—hatred can, of course, impair judgement. But how much criticism someone like Yglesias should receive is a kind of unanswerable question—the answer is just going to depend on your own politics. And what can’t be questioned is that Yglesias is an active participant in, and knowing stimulant of, the dynamics he claims to abhor.

That participation happens first and foremost on Twitter, where Yglesias is always present, often pugilistic, and nearly always patronising. It is there, in front of 548.2k users, that Yglesias is most visible, and there that he is least restrained. Take this now-deleted exchange, where he first characterises students campaigning for Palestine as strategic, cynical wreckers before pivoting to a view that they are ‘idealistic young dupes’:5

This degree of viciousness is unusual for Yglesias, but the type of comment is characteristic. In fact comments of this sort have been so frequent and so consistent for more than decade now that, to many internet users, they are simply what he is known for.

And while Twitter is where his reputation was built, it’s not the only place where he actively courts discord. In longform, his method consciously and explicitly maximises opposition, a fact Yglesias concedes without self-reflection: ‘My view in general is that it’s good for the world to swing pretty aggressively at the discourse pitches that come down, because there are a lot of other people who are sort of “savvily” ducking controversies.’ That view is defensible enough, but only if we accept its costs. In practice it creates exactly the dissension—the “derangement”—Yglesias objects to.

And then there are the takes themselves. Immortalised in screenshotted headlines, they are the closest thing pundits have to concrete predictions, and the only mechanism by which pundits can be judged. That is why none of Zak, Savage, and Robinson can resist naming Yglesias takes that look ridiculous in retrospect. They are trying to hold the pundit to account.

I don’t envy them the task. After two decades of ‘swinging aggressively at discourse pitches’, Yglesias has left an extraordinary back-catalogue of takes to work through, such that the challenge for a Savage or a Robinson is less to uncover dirt on their opponent than to search among the dirt for the piece of muck that might best stand in for the rest. In his ferocious desire to swing at every pitch, he is the omnipresent batter-at-the-plate of the centrist Anglophone internet. He is Mr. Opinion.

This phenomenon has led to the emergence of a sort of canon of Yglesianisms. There is, of course, his original sin of supporting the Iraq war. There is the cheerleading of poor safety regulations after the 2013 Bangladesh factory collapse. There is his active cheerleading for Sam Bankman-Fried. Yglesias likes to argue that the routine invocation of these classic examples shows how rare they are, how high his ‘batting-average’ is. But as I have said, these core texts are there to stand in for the rest.

Worse, canons ossify. Anything that doesn’t make it in falls slowly from memory, such that what remains is taken to be all that there is. Reading through Zak, Savage, and Robinson’s complaints, as numerous as they were, I was struck instead by how few of my own personal grievances had made it on to their list. They had been swallowed in the tide. I had to review my own internet footprint just to recall them in any detail, but they are there. It was to a rank Yglesianism, for example, that I dedicated one the earliest articles here at Kitchen Counter:

Already, all the way back in 2021, I thought that tweet was representative of the Matt Yglesias problem. It contained within it so much of what would cause pause in a more self-reflective thinker. There is the tone, which is sometimes called “smug” or “condescending” but which I think of, rather, as glib. There is the characteristically leftward direction of his attack, which has only increased in frequency and ferocity in intervening years as Yglesias has moved rightwards. And then there is the fact that he is wrong.

He was wrong not on some narrow, technical level (many Americans do own shares, of course, at some point). He was wrong instead only on the level his statement actually bears on his opponent’s argument. Capital ownership really is so unevenly distributed as to form distinct social classes—the existence of pension funds does not dissolve that fact. The data, which took me some hours to compile for that piece, are clear. But if I hadn’t compiled them, this Yglesianism, like so many others, would have been forgotten. He would not have been held to account.

This ultimately is the defining feature of so many Yglesianisms. They are outwardly antagonistic interventions that are noncontroversial in their narrow sense, allowing their author to retreat to safety when their bad faith gets the reaction it was designed to provoke. They are orthogonal to the point at hand. This bait-and-switch, bailey-and-motte approach to online discussion serves Yglesias’ ends well. The pedant scores a point, and the bigger progressive thrust is missed, even derailed. In the example above, I wrote thousands of words to correct his comment, but, by the time I published, the discourse had moved on.

Leave a comment

What no one seems to want to say is that the real source of rancour between Yglesias and his discontents is their irreconcilable ends. Yglesias just wants different things from the world to his detractors. In fact, far from being identifiably “left”, Yglesias represents a liberalism that is simply conservative. If that adjective is controversial, it’s only because the term is no longer coherent in the US context, where “conservative” is used to refer to the Republican Party. But the Republicans are a reactionary rightist political party, not interested in conservation but in radical reshaping, and the role of conservativism, and defence of the status quo, falls squarely to the right wing of the Democrats. What they prioritise above all is order, stability, and growth.

This tendency has historically been identified with the centre-right, but around the world rightward ruptures have changed that, and nominally “left” parties have come to occupy the space of conservativism. In the UK, for example, Labour’s Keir Starmer is best thought of as a conservative. The US, meanwhile, has had to deal with the problem for much longer. There, the contrived and contingent constraints of the two party system have long cause conservative liberal politicians and pundits into unholy and ultimately bitter alliances with the left. It’s only in a particularly odd political world that it makes sense to pretend a person like Matt Yglesias is “centre-left”, and only in such a world that he would believe it about himself.6

That is why his relationship with the online left is so fractious—they’re just too-strange bedfellows, forced to share a party and, even more perversely, a political identity. Underneath it all, one group fundamentally disapproves of our economic regime. Yglesias does not.

This disjunct goes ignored in part because no one knows how to fix it, and in part because Yglesias likes to argue more about instrumental political strategy than he does about his substantive normative goals. In practice, these arguments about political means always paper over the fundamental question of political ends, and the fights about Democratic electability rarely articulate what world elected representatives are supposed to create. It’s no wonder, then, that Yglesian tactical recommendations for the Democratic Party, like “popularism”, tend in practice to advocate for the Party to become more right wing. Yglesias wants the Party to genuflect to voters on its right because he is a voter on its right. This is his prerogative, but the misnomer of “centre-left” is one we must leave behind. Irreconcilable differences are always felt more acutely when they emerge inside the family. We’d all be a lot happier, I think, if we stopped pretending they weren’t there.

Which means that we have, in the final analysis, an actively-antagonistic conservative commentator in control of an immensely profitable and influential blogging machine, unable to anticipate the future, uninterested in self-reflection, and loathful of being held to account. That makes him truly the perfect pundit—or, as wrote in his 2023 piece, ‘an exemplar of the form, for better and for worse.’ For Read, what makes Yglesias special is that he is uniquely unencumbered by shame. He has risen above it, zen like, and has built psychological mechanisms to ensure that being wrong never chastens him, never slows him down. He accepts no criticism and dismisses all detractors. People yell at him, he writes again the next day. Meanwhile his subscriber list grows. An exemplar of the form. All hail Mr Opinion.

You might notice that I’ve returned to posting regularly here at Kitchen Counter. If you appreciate my work, or just want to support a writer trying to make sense of the world, consider subscribing and pledging. The blog’s free for now, and most of it will still be free when I go “paid”. But the pledge is the best signal I get that you value what I do, that the work is worth doing and sharing.

Subscribe now

In the years 1787-1795, all Europe, and soon all the world, was passenger to the decisions of a few hundred men in Paris. The first of these men were aristocrats, trying to recapture the state from the monarchy. Then they were moderate bourgeoisie, brought together by a nascent ideology—liberalism. Then the Jacobins, led by Robespierre and backed by the inchoate but immense power of the sans-culottes, brought the world into modernity.

None of them had much control over the situation, either, not least Robespierre, who had in fact no formal executive powers, and who instead depended on the fervour of the Paris masses. For all his zeal, he was the temporary conduit for forces far beyond him. And when the sans-culottes became discontented with the economic pressures of war, Robespierre found himself isolated. By July 1794 he was in the guillotine. That was only a year after his power had peaked. All of them, from Robespierre to Marie Antoinette to Saint-Just, all the way down to the anonymous Parisian poor, were caught in the great impersonal tide of history. Only Napoleon, a generation later, can be said to have had something like control over, or responsibility for, the events of his time.

Still, they were at least on the ground to see history happen—were, in some sense, part of the action. They’re the closest thing to agents in the whole story. But outside Paris the agrarian countryside began, and the peasants there were utterly subject to decisions made in the city. Their illiteracy didn’t help, nor their social position, nor the sheer size of the world. In an era without the train or the telegraph, they may as well have been on the far side of the planet.

Even worse, most of the people who would be affected by the decisions in Paris were on the other side of the planet. Some knew it more than others. If the characters of Jane Austen seemed to be totally uninterested in the world outside their garden walls, others waited anxiously for the news, like Toussaint L’Ouverture in San Domingo. The ideas fermenting in Paris were the ideas he would depend on as he began the emancipation of his people. The citizens of Königsberg, it is said, accustomed to the regularity of Immanuel Kant’s daily strolls, knew for the first time of this shift in world history when the philosopher one afternoon failed to appear.

Share

‘It was not a comfortable phase to live through,’ wrote Eric Hobsbawm, ‘for most men were hungry and many afraid; but it was a phenomenon as awful and irreversible as the first nuclear explosion, and all history had been permanently changed by it.’

Both the revolution and the bomb changed everything around them and everything that came after them. But the peasants of Europe and the citizens of Hiroshima/Nagasaki had no say over what happened to them. Nor did the European nobles, for that matter, or Emperor Hirohito, the POWs on the Burmese railway, or the slaves of the Caribbean.

They were effected either way. The nobility of Europe hung on for a bit longer, but their position was now terminal. After the bomb, the Emperor soon renounced his own divinity and became a ceremonial figurehead. Those POWs who were healthily enough to travel made it home. And the slaves of what is now Haiti took their chance to launch the first successful slave rebellion since Spartacus.1

One of the strange effects of modern nationalism is the way it causes otherwise smart people to deny the fact of the rest of the world. It seems to create in their minds an idea, surely wishful, that borders are containers, holding back the events that occur inside country from everyone else. This impulse props up all the time, across political identities, and across societies. When I lived in China, the CCP was pushing hard on the concept of “China’s internal affairs”. The Party felt that the attention we foreigners gave to Xinjiang, Tibet, or Hong Kong was illegitimate. It was their business, not ours.

The glimpse I got of Xinjiang in 2018 inoculated me forever against the idea of “internal affairs”. No defensible notion of sovereignty allows the state to do what it likes to its own people—that, famously, is one lesson of the Holocaust. And there is the base fact that nothing is ever contained—what happens in one place always ripples outwards. (That is why so many young men travelled to Spain during the Civil War to fight in the International Brigades.)

When I knocked doors in New Hampshire for Bernie Sanders in 2019, Australia was burning in the Black Summer. For many, my “involvement” in US politics was outrageous. At the doors I relied on a simple message: US leadership on climate change would decide the severity of Australian fires in the future.

That argument was convincing to Americans every time I made it. Give Americans a chance to consider the far reaching consequences of their country, and they tend to understand our interest. And yet we foreigners continue to feel squeamish about the attention we give the US. We here in Australia—and for that matter, those in Britain and Nigeria and India and Sweden, or anywhere with internet—often feel a reflexive embarrassment regarding our obsession with American news. Sometimes we mock each other for it. When we do we surely are mocking ourselves.

With half a glance at the history of the world, all this attention starts to look perfectly reasonable. It’s not just that the US culture industry, that juggernaut of capital, presses politics-as-entertainment down our throats, whether we should want it or not. And it is not merely that American political life is especially structured as television drama—team sports, perhaps, or reality TV—so that it makes for genuine entertainment.

It is that we are subjects of history, are subjected to history, and the decisive historical moments of our time continue to occur on US soil. As the world fragments into multipolarity, and as China and India and Nigeria and everyone else rise in power and wealth, this only becomes more true. The steady march of rival powers might be momentous, but it does not create so many Moments. The unpredictable jerks of the US, on the other hand, come in the form of rapid and distinct events, each with the latent potential to trigger world-historical ramifications. The US, in its death throes, is swerving into a volatility that actually is as significant as it is spectacular.

More than anything, it produces, and propagates, ideas. It doesn’t help that the Americans speak a form of English. Here in Australia, white nationalists relying on a diet of US social media walk the streets. Recently, about 40 of them violently attacked Camp Sovereignty, the First Nations protest camp. Meanwhile, in the UK, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is surging in popularity. It copy-pastes large sections of Trump’s agenda. 100,000 anti-immigration protestors recently marched in London. In one brain-breaking moment, a cohort of right-wing Maori led a haka in memory of Charlie Kirk.

Which is to say that the US remains, for our sins, significant. Its significance derives from some combination of three factors: the sheer size of the country (the magnitude of its effects), the unpredictability of the country (the volatility of its events), and the country’s connectedness to the rest of the world (its propensity for contagion). From all that comes the sheer weight of contingency. There are butterflies in the Amazon changing the course of history, but in North America an injured, dying Mothra thrashes around, sending across the oceans storms that the rest of us have no choice but to withstand. Why not keep a weathered eye?

One final thought. I’ve been reading a lot of history lately, I think because history is a source of zen. It asks humility. The macro sweep of events hardly absolves us of responsibility at our micro levels, but forces us to be a little more realistic about, and therefore a little more accepting of, our own limited power. In that way the scale of time is kind of relief, at least for me. The scale of it all helps the ego let go of the panic of the present. To maintain sanity, and energy, and effectiveness, we’d do well to remember that the currents of the moment are surely too powerful for any one of us to control.

So it was pretty uncomfortable to see him open his otherwise great piece on the killing of Charlie Kirk with effectively the opposite view to mine. I put a lot of emphasis on US gun culture. To my mind, gun access, and the maelstrom of gun ideology that surrounds it in the United States, is the indispensable starting point to understanding a killing like Kirk’s.

Subscribe now

But Ganz seems to want to disregard the gun culture stuff entirely:

To those who say, “Guns are the issue,” I say, get real:—Charlie Kirk was killed with a bolt-action hunting rifle, not with an assault rifle. Even the most modest attempts at reasonable gun control have failed. There is no conceivable world in which there would be a powerful movement in this country to ban the types of guns that millions and millions of Americans consider to be a natural part of their lives, as normal as an automobile or a refrigerator. And even if they did, the judiciary is attached to an extremely expansive notion of 2nd Amendment rights and would strike it down. Even in countries with stringent gun control, these are the very types of weapons that are permitted. Out of respect for my fellow citizens and their liberty, I would not take them away even if I could.

There’s an array of arguments in there, both practical and normative, but I take Ganz’s ultimate point to be that hunting rifles will be available even if the gun reformer’s utopia comes through. Robinson would therefore still have shot Kirk. This sort of thinking rests on the view that gun control only works when it eradicates guns from the private sphere. But that’s just not right.

Few countries go so far as to remove firearms entirely from private hands. Many countries ban some weapons. But gun control is not limited to bans—much of its effectiveness comes from the conditions of access it puts on the guns that do remain legal.

I think it’d help to familiarise ourselves with those conditions. To buy a similar rifle where I am in Victoria, Australia, you would first need to acquire a gun license—specifically a category A or B longarm license. To get that you have to do a firearm safety course, which has both a theory and a practical component. You’d also have to demonstrate a “genuine reason” for owning a gun. And you’d have to demonstrate that you are a “fit and proper person”, which excludes people convicted of some crimes, people with histories of some mental illnesses, and people who have been issued domestic violence orders. Then you have to let a 28 day waiting period pass. You’d also need your Permit to Acquire, which connects your permit to the serial number of the gun you buy. Then, once you own the gun, police will (or, say they will), occasionally visit your home to check on the safe storage of the weapon.

Let’s compare that process to where Charlie Kirk was shot. To buy a rifle in Utah, any person over 18 can walk into a gun store and purchase a bolt-action hunting rifle the same day after passing a criminal background check.

Leave a comment

These are radically different environments of gun accessibility, and those differing contexts help to explain why, according to data accumulated by USYD, something like 6.2% of Australian households hold a firearm, compared to 42% in the United States.1 Buying a rifle in Australia is totally feasible—it’s just layered with friction. So much friction, in fact, that outside of regional communities gun ownership is simply not a salient feature of Australian life. While reading Ganz’s piece it struck me that I don’t even know where to buy a rifle in this country—and I live in regional Australia.

Meanwhile I remember well the location of a number of gun shops I encountered in the US. In the nearly 6 years I lived there, basic access to guns was a salient feature of day to day life. Gun access was actively advertised—in some states, on billboards.

The diminished salience and proximity of weapons materially limits a would-be killer’s access to those weapons, but it also, and maybe even more importantly, restricts the psychological work a person must do before he picks up a gun, loads it, points it at another, and pulls the trigger. The type of decision tree that Tyler Robinson was led down does not occur easily unless the mind is actively reminded of the accessibility of the weapon. The mere presence of guns, on the other hand, is a reminder that guns can, even should, be used. It is their raison d’etre.

Share

When guns do end up in the hand of murderers and assassins in Australia—Dezi Freeman reminded us of that they sometimes can and do—those stories shock us exactly because, relative to the United States, they are so rare.

That is why I’m perplexed by the idea that America’s gun culture is irrelevant to the killing of Charlie Kirk. His death, after all, was one more murder in a national firearm murder rate 18 times higher than that of other developed countries.2

The idea might be perplexing but it’s not unfamiliar. Ganz’s approach is representative of an attitude I encountered time and time again when talking to liberal and left-wing Americans. It seems to inhabit some mix of acceptance, fatalism, and American exceptionalism. The idea is always that the policies that worked elsewhere could never work there.

Why? This always gets hard to pin down. In Ganz’s piece there is a sort of retreat to the uniquely violent nature of American society. An explanation of this nature is not provided. It is a given.

That sort of exceptionalist approach is not just thought-terminating. There’s a deeply-conservative element to it, too—a futility thesis, to steal from the theorist Alfred Hirschman. As Wikipedia has it, the thesis holds that ‘attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will fail to "make a dent" in the problem, and the motives of those who keep attempting futile reforms are suspect.’3

How else to understand Ganz’s dismissal of gun reformers? Time to get real.

Share

It need not be so. Gun reform is a solved problem—Australia is the paramount example, but countries around the world have done similarly. One is reminded of the old headline from satirical newspaper The Onion: No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.

Americans, conservative and liberal alike, often invoke American exceptionalism to suggest that policies that work elsewhere will never work in their country. Their country, they think, is special. It is not.

What is special is the refusal to act, and the willingness of the right wing to ensure further death. People that defend the status quo, like Kirk, are responsible for maintaining that status quo.

Kirk liked to imply that gun deaths are the doing of trans- and black people. He was just finished doing exactly that when a sniper shot him through the neck. “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” an audience member had asked him.

“Too many,” Kirk responded, to applause.

The audience member told him that the total was merely five, and went on: “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?”1

“Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk replied, in what would be his final words.

Subscribe now

In a sane world, right wing Americans would understand that no one is safe in a society ruled by the gun. Yesterday the country that fully acclimatised itself to the shooting of school children was jolted awake by the shooting of something it values more highly: the influencer. I am not being glib: hours after Kirk died, a school in Denver was shot up. The US President has said nothing. The massacre of praying children last month barely registered. It is a society inured to the death of children.

In the coming days we will find out more about the shooter. My own money is on a deranged white supremacist, or a QAnon-type upset that Kirk, after a phone call with Trump, announced he would stop talking about Epstein. Many on the right are claiming that this is a left wing political assassination—I find it hard to believe anyone on the left wants to give the Trump administration pretext for further grabs at power.

But who can say. What matters for now is this: whoever is responsible, they would not have been able to shoot Kirk if they did not have access to a gun.

Kirk, meanwhile, lived and died in the gun-addicted status quo he defended. He argued that deaths were “worth it” to protect the right to bear arms. Now he is dead, and the remaining democratic pillars of his country, already fragile, could crumble at any moment.

Hello everyone,

I decided to lay low after my deportation and the media storm that followed, and I’m just now finding my feet again. The break was restorative—I had two weddings to attend and a bunch of friends to visit. They helped make a difficult time easier.

All that media attention was an mixed bag, emotionally. It was a great relief to see that so many people found my story outrageous. But it was a stress to the nervous system, too, and, well, my nervous system was already under plenty of pressure. After 12 hours in detention and 15.5 hours on the plane, I landed back in Melbourne pretty exhausted, fighting to understand what had just happened, and then was thrown immediately into the learning curve of television media. Soon I was on a train to Melbourne to record with The Project. Days later I was doing a live cross from my parents’ living room to All In With Chris Hayes. In my interview with Democracy Now! I found myself battling the challenges of regional Australian internet.

Part of me was flattered by all that attention, but another part was humiliated, fearful, and desperate to go into hiding. The stakes of each appearance felt high: the US Government started to accuse me of lying, and I did the same in return. At the same time, I worried I was risking a lifetime ban from the country by speaking out. Trolls, real and AI-generated, went at me on social media, and I got my share of hate mail from the usual sources.

And, on top of all that, the situation required me to discuss parts of my life I prefer to share on my own terms. Privacy is ultimately about autonomy—the ability to control the terms on which your life is shared with those around you. But my autonomy had already been violated at the border, and for the sake of transparency, trust, and truth, I had to be as forthcoming as I could.

Subscribe now

So, an initiation by fire, but I didn’t really feel that I had a choice. Speaking out was my way of wrestling the power asymmetry between me and the CBP back towards something more dignified. And I was indignant on behalf of others, too. I knew that my own politically-motivated denial of entry wouldn’t be the last, and that other travellers needed to be informed of the risks.

That’s why I’ve also spent a fair bit of my time corresponding with readers on a one-to-one basis.1 But bespoke advice is getting a bit unsustainable, and my advice is pretty consistent, so I thought I’d write to you all to tell you what I understand about the situation. I have in mind non-citizen tourists from countries like Australia, the UK, and across Europe, though, as the case of Hasan Piker showed, US citizens should be wary, too, when re-entering their country.

Ad hoc searching

Preparing for my trip to the US, I took it that CBP would be running ad-hoc searches and probes at the border. For that reason, I scrubbed my phone and my online presence of politically-sensitive material. I chose not to carry a burner phone, worrying that a too-sanitised device would provoke suspicion.

An ad-hoc phone search is how Mads Mikkelsen, a 21 year old Norwegian, was denied entry, detained, and deported not a week after my story broke news. In that equally-horrifying but even-more-ludicrous story, Mikkelsen was questioned heavily after CBP officials found this meme of JD Vance on his phone:

The CBP denies that the meme had anything to do with his deportation, and claims instead that Mikkelsen was deported because he failed to admit to having smoked weed in the past. But, as in my own story, drug use is the pretext by which CBP can deny entry to those it does not like. (In my own case, the government cannot get past the fact that its officer admitted to me that I was detained for one reason and one reason only: what I wrote about the protests at Columbia University.)2

Targeted searching

Mikkelsen and I might have been deported with the same pretext, but we got there different ways. All my preparation for an ad hoc search was wasted—I was pulled into secondary processing before I even entered the primary processing queue.

What terrified many about my particular case was that it revealed a whole new layer to CBP’s denial of entry protocol. CBP told me explicitly that they were interrogating me because posts that I had removed from the internet days before my flight. As I wrote in The New Yorker:

Because Officer Martinez had apparently read all of my material so long ago, he didn’t even know that I had taken all this material down. What this means is that, by the time a foreigner cleans his social media in preparation for a trip to the U.S., as much of our news media has been urging us to do, it may already be too late.

This revealed that CBP was using methods beyond an ad-hoc search of social media at the border to identify travellers for denial of entry. But what were those methods?

A webscrape of politically disfavoured speech?

My first guess was that CBP is becoming increasingly sophisticated in its use of technology, and had begun running ESTA visa waiver applications against a web-scrape of disfavoured political speech. If that were the case, many readers of this blog would have reason to fear their names being called over the loudspeaker at LAX.

I now think that’s pretty unlikely. It’s not technically difficult—some of you could build that tool in an afternoon. But it’s not particularly useful. That sort of tool would be, in a sense, too effective. If the CBP ran a webscrape of anti-Trump social media, they’d produce a very, very long list of traveller names, far more than they’d be willing to turn away, and they’d then have to find some way to choose among them. You and I would then have to figure out how they were choosing people from among that list.

It’s possible that they’re using that list to randomly select names to harass, but the base fact is that the vast majority of travellers vocally critical of Trump or Israel continue to cross the border unencumbered.

The list

We now know, thanks to testimony provided in AAUP v Rubio, that the government relied upon the hard-right, pro-Israeli organisations Canary Mission and Betar US for a list of names of students to target and possibly deport on grounds of “antisemitism”. These organisations, like the Trump Administration, cynically weaponise the charge of antisemitism to intimidate pro-Palestinian voices.

This is to say that the US government is treating politically-motivated hitlists as a starting place for deportation targeting.

To my mind, the list is the best explanation for why I, specifically, was targeted—for why the CBP had read my posts days before I got on the plane, and others have been able to cross the US border without trouble.

It’s possible that some other explanation is available, but I haven’t been able to uncover it. If you or someone you know has more information, please contact me on Signal: kitchena.32

Under this theory, I was targeted at LAX exactly because I was at Columbia at the time of the protests, and because my writing caught the attention of someone at, or connected to, one of these organisations.3

What this means for you

My story understandably caused a lot of fear for people with their own US travel plans. It suggested that CBP was more sophisticated, and more thorough, than previously known.

My sense is that those fears are overinflated. Rather than a highly sophisticated and methodical screening system, it is still better to think of CBP as a large, clumsy, and capricious institution that is occasionally instructed by more intentional parts of the administration.

My advice for tourists travelling to the US is this:

• If you do not have reason to believe that your name has already been flagged, you are unlikely to be targeted specifically and directly. (If you do have reason to believe you will be targeted, probably don’t travel.)

• If you are like the majority of travellers, you are nonetheless subject to CBP’s clumsy and capricious searches.

• If that’s you

  • Always travel with Face ID turned off.

  • Always accept immediate deportation rather than hand over the contents of your phone.

  • Always be polite, clear, and honest but never admit to, volunteer, or concede to accusations of any form. CBP interviewing depends upon entrapment and self-incrimination.

  • Always travel with emergency phone numbers memorised.

• If you are detained and are told you will be deported

  • Ask to call your consulate as soon as you can, and do so as many times as you like.

  • Ask the consulate to call your emergency phone numbers.

  • Wrap yourself in a blanket early, and opt for cup noodles to stay warm.

  • Breathe deeply and know that you will probably be okay.

Subscribe now

Many of you have been vocal, in public and in private, about the current US administration, and just as many of you have been vocal about the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state. Still, you’re probably going to be fine crossing the US border.

But, if you get a border guard in a bad mood, or a new order has come down from Marco Rubio, or if the guards are struggling to hit their quotas for the week, you could find yourself in a basement detention centre. You have no power there. Accept that, stay warm, and breathe deeply.

I got through the week only because of the generosity and support of many of you. Thank you. It means the world.

I thought I’d share a few pieces from the week, and from this blog. There’s plenty more to come, including a book about masculinity and gender. I hope you stick around for the ride.

Alistair

From this week

How My Reporting on the Columbia Protests led to my Deportation — my full account, in The New Yorker

'Deportation of dissent': Aussie writer deported after reporting on Gaza protests — my chat with on MSNBC

I Was Detained, Deported From LAX for My Reporting on Gaza Campus Protests: Australian Writer — my chat with Amy Goodman at Democracy Now!

Australian writer deported from US after being grilled about views on Gaza — my chat with Fran Kelly on the ABC’s The Radio National Hour

Australian denied entry to US after being grilled about Israel-Gaza views — ABC News

Australian deported from US says he was targeted for writing on Palestine protests — The Age

Subscribe now

From the blog

The Potato People — A pseudonymous online scientific collective tries to solve the mystery of obesity

It's okay to be normal — and other lessons from the poly discourse

Becoming a Person — the point of all this

Notes on AI; Notes on Art — Everything happens so much

Who is a capitalist? — notes on a Twitter fight

And, of course, On the deportation of dissent, and the Liberated Zone series

The guards just came out and said it: “We both know why you’ve been detained…it’s because of what you wrote about the protests at Columbia”.

Their targeting of me led to two interrogations, 12 hours of detention, and eventually my removal from the country.

Over the last few days I’ve been inundated with media inquiries, kind messages, and hate mail. I’ve worked hard to be fully forthcoming with my story, which includes admission of drug use and a humiliating end to my privacy. You can now read my full account in The New Yorker.

Many of the things that I think are good are not possible except by concerted actions of disparate people. It happens that those particular things are also the things most important to me: human freedom; egalitarianism; democracy.

I’m emphasising my own preferences because there are many people who have different preferences, who are not interested in what might be broadly called the liberal society. They value instead hierarchical power expressed through domination and subordination. Those people have the advantage that their goals do not require the coordination of diverse groups: only the expression of the raw power of the strong over the weak.

The coordination of individually-weak students against the institutional might of the Columbia administration posed a genuine threat to the established order. It is only through the lens of threat—that administrators did in fact feel pressure exerted upon them—that the aggression of the organisation can be understood.

Last night, the Department of Homeland Security detained Mahmoud Khalil, lead negotiator of the Columbia Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Khalil is an Algerian citizen of Palestinian origin and an American green-card holder. According to ICE, he was detained at a DHS facility in New Jersey. But when his wife, eight-months pregnant, went to visit him, she was informed he was not there. His location is currently unknown; he has disappeared.

According to Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), the arresting DHS agents told Khalil that the U.S. Department of State had revoked his student visa. But Khalil does not have a student visa. As a green card holder, he has permanent residency. DHS has given close to no justification for the arrest, except to claim, in a statement to Drop Site News, “Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.”

The goal here is the deportation of dissent. In an executive order 10 days ago, the Trump Administration promised to ‘go on offence to enforce law and order’ by ‘cancel[ing] the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses.’ This is a mode of speech suppression that seeks to physically remove the undesirable elements it can, and, through fear, ensure silence in everyone else.

To my mind the arrest of a student on utterly specious grounds by a neo-fascist state, clearly designed to breed a climate of fear among students, calls for the resignation of a university president. That role is untenable so long as it does not involve the ferocious protection of student speech. The same goes for faculty, who last year demonstrated a mixed commitment to the defence of students. The situation requires their concerted action.

I’m not optimistic. The reason the protests made it feel as though good things were again possible was exactly that their example was so exceptional, so rare. The habits of solidarity required for concerted action are gone; the muscles required for effective striking have atrophied. Individual faculty fear the individual costs they will bear by acting. But already they are collectively bearing other costs: the costs of standing by while the liberal university dies on their watch.

Meanwhile the US government is effectively a one party state. The Democrats seem as unwilling as they are unable to amount a defence of liberalism. I suspect that the Trump administration chose to make an example out of Khalil for this reason. They knew no concerted action would come. They knew they could get away with it.

Listen to the story here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I write about a lot of different subjects. The Palestinian student protest movement and the neoliberal university. The role of art in a world of AI reproduction. The bizarre reaction against polyamory. What sort of life becomes a human being. I’m now completing a book: a suite of personal essays about gender and masculinity. I hope you’ll buy it when it’s out.

Of all those topics it is this story, the potato story, that has been the most challenging. On one level, its deepest level, it is a story about what science is and what it should be. At another level it is a story about particular epistemic claims, particular models of metabolism, particular hypotheses about chemical mechanisms in the body.

Reporting this story required both a capacity to arbitrate the plausibility of claims made in nutritional science and a considered understanding of epistemology itself. My background’s in philosophy, so the latter came more easily than the former, and I am now better at both.

My point is that I think this is the type of story that is worth doing. You’ll know that I haven’t, and don’t, publish particularly often via this Substack. That comes with costs—my audience doesn’t grow fast, and I don’t expect to monetise any time soon.

But what I gain from irregularity is worth more to me. I gain the chance to not fill your inbox with shit.

Our inboxes are filled with shit. Our ears and our eyes and our mouths are filled with slop. The oversupply is part of our malaise. Good work does not always cut through. We are drinking from the firehose of content, and the water has lead in it. The situation will only get worse from here.

I said, starting this blog, that it would feature a breadth of writing that is not found anywhere else, I believe that’s turned out to be true. At the very least this particular mix is unique. Work will only appear if I consider it worth doing. I hope you’ll stick around.

Guevara found the condition of the world as it is intolerable. It has only recently become so. Previously, the conditions under which two thirds of the people of the world lived were approximately the same as now. The degree of exploitation and enslavement was as great. The suffering involved was as intense and as widespread. The waste was as colossal. But it was not intolerable because the full measure of the truth about the condition was unknown—even by those who suffered it. Truths are not constantly evident in the circumstances to which they refer. They are born— sometimes late. This truth was born with the struggles and wars of national liberation. In the light of the new-born truth, the significance of imperialism changed. Its demands were seen to be different. Previously it had demanded cheap raw materials, exploited labor and a controlled world market. Today it demands a mankind that counts for nothing.

Guevara envisaged his own death in the revolutionary fight against this imperialism. "Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battlecry, may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons and other men be ready to intone the funeral dirge with the staccato chant of the machine-guns and new battlecries of war and victory.”

His envisaged death offered him the measure of how intolerable his life would be if he accepted the intolerable condition of the world as it is. His envisaged death offered him the measure of the necessity of changing the world. It was by the license granted him by his envisaged death that he was able to live with the necessary pride that becomes a man.

At the news of Guevara’s death, I heard someone say: "He was the world symbol of the possibilities of one man.” Why is this true? Because he recognized what was intolerable for man and acted accordingly.

Something about block quotes causes the human brain to skip or skim. But I urge you to read the above and to read it again. Read the whole piece, even. A Berger sentence for me is a lot like a Brutalist building: ugly and monstrous and unimpeachably true. It stands unembarrassed and unadorned and refuses to be denied. It stands against obfuscation and for truth.

Guevara recognised what was intolerable for man and acted accordingly. This I think is simply true. It is true in a way that largely bypasses, or at least reorganises, the tired fight about means and ends. Instead it addresses Guevara the man and his personal orientation to the world.

The degree to which a person finds the truth of the world intolerable and acts accordingly is the degree of their nobility. I believe this and I am aware others do not. I believe that the degree to which a person finds this world tolerable is one degree to which they should feel shame. The degree to which a person finds the world intolerable, but does not act accordingly, is one degree to which they actually do feel shame.

The more one acts accordingly against the intolerability of the world, the more inhospitable this world becomes to them. The less one acts against the intolerability of the world, the more comfortable life becomes. I myself increasingly opt for the latter. This is not a world for the principled. It is built for the cowardly.

I have been reflecting on the nobility of men and women in the light of election in the US, and in light of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. In the United States some people have found this ethnic cleansing intolerable. I have close relationships with some of the people who have acted accordingly. These people may live without shame. There are different sorts of people acting accordingly: my own friends are Jews involved in what can be called the Jewish Left. They are noble people.

They have peacefully resisted. They have been arrested many times. They have marched, and protested, and blockaded every week for over a year. They have occupied buildings. They have confronted politicians. They have sacrificed relationships, and sleep, and their own health. They are exhausted—not in the sense of a person who has run a marathon, but in the sense of a person who has had the light of their soul extinguished by a political system that denies them at every turn.

Share

In Tuesday’s election American voters will choose between a candidate satisfied with the current rate of ethnic cleansing and one who wishes to accelerate it. My exhausted friends have failed. The Democratic Party is unresponsive to them; it treats them with contempt. The major US political parties remain united in their view that the war should continue, and so it will.

Here is the image of Che Guevara’s dead body Berger was responding to when he wrote that passage:

Berger says that Guevara foresaw, anticipated, this moment. It is a moment in which his enemies prop up his body in an attempt to symbolise the futility of resistance. But photographs are not complete, says Berger. They call for the viewer to decide on their meaning. Guevara lived waiting for this moment of failure. And in doing so, in acting accordingly against the intolerability of the world, in full knowledge that he would not see it become tolerable, he found the necessary pride that becomes a man.

Or:

the foreseeing of this final logic is part of what enables a man or a people to fight against overwhelming odds. It is part of the secret of the moral factor which counts as three to one against weapon power.

When the Americans are done with their voting, the world will continue to be intolerable and the war will continue to be spurred on by their government. There will be a photograph of one or other candidate smiling in victory. We will all be presented with that image.

In face of this photograph we must either dismiss it, or complete its meaning for ourselves. It is an image which, as much as any mute image ever can, calls for decision.

You can read the first here, second here, third here, fourth here, fifth here, and sixth here. Thanks for following along over the last two months—we’ll soon return to regular programming.

It is now more than a month since the student occupation, and retaliatory police raid, of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall. The NYPD liberated the University of its Liberated Zone. Out the window of where I currently sit, in the grand reading room of Butler Library, the campus is once again serene. Students and security are roughly equal in number, and the tents are gone.

Recently, they were replaced, for about a week, with marquees—tall, canvas, glaring white—erected to house alumni fundraising events. The gates that were used to shut out currently-enrolled Columbia students were flung open to welcome people who left 10, 20, 30 years ago. There were speeches and champagne and networking events, all part of a sophisticated donations pipeline designed to funnel alumni towards the final goal of the modern university: the supplementation of a $13.64B endowment. From the point of view of the administration, everything is once again as it should be.

This new alumni encampment, in its sterile orderliness, made for a surreal imitation of the tents it supplanted. A newcomer would have had no way of knowing that the largest student protest movement in decades started here, barely weeks previous. How could they? The unceasing stream of Events in our lives has an amnesiac quality. Our attention cannot hold. Even now it can be hard to summon the vitality of the encampment’s early days. But for those of us who saw it firsthand, the parallel between the tents and the marquees is bitter. It adds insult to the injury of last month’s eradication of dissent.

Two encampments, one erected by students, the other for donors. Still, the symmetry is hardly perfect: it is not like the protestors ever called for the endowment to shrink in any way. They asked only that Columbia sell stock associated with the Israeli occupation to some other bidder, and to move that capital to other assets. If anything, this was probably good investment advice for Columbia. As Adam Tooze has discussed in detail, the University’s portfolio is woefully mismanaged. In every year since 2016 the endowment has underperformed the S&P500 (and comparable university portfolios, too).

Which is all to say that the University’s resistance to divestment has very little to do with its financial interests. Even major donors, often blamed for administration decisions, don’t hold that much sway. Everyone, from the New York Times to the most rabid antisemites, seems to agree that donors exert massive influence over universities, but few acknowledge that there’s little reason individual donors ought to be able to. Next to the size of the endowments, their individual contributions are tiny. Robert Kraft, a Columbia major donor who, in interviews with CNN’s Jake Tapper and Fox’s Sean Hannity, actively and vocally threatened to withhold funding from the University until it squashed the protests, appears to have given less than $10 million dollars in two decades. That is peanuts.

And yet the administration acted in lock-step with his wishes. Individual donors clearly do exert power over university presidents: the mystery is how. And I think the most plausible explanation is that, in the political economy of the university system, material factors take a back seat in determining power relations. The size of a particular donation matters less than the status of the donor qua donor. The revealed belief of university boards is not that donors do have more power than students and faculty, but that they ought to.

Subscribe now

I am of the view that the modern university holds faculty and students in disdain. This is maybe hard to see for people who are not familiar with the trajectory of the university-institution over the last 40 years, but it is palpable to those who try to exist inside the system. The rift between the administrative class (who view the university as a portfolio, students as customers, and degrees as commodities) and the pedagogical class (who view the university as a site of social growth, democratic development, and learning untethered from the needs of the labour market) is what ultimately grants veto power to billionaire alumni.

Students, especially those who take to protest, stubbornly refuse to accept the terms of the new university, and continue to fall in behind their teachers in the belief that education is something special, something human, something that ought not be reduced to an exchange value. Remarkably, this continues to be true of students in 2024, decades after the neoliberal turn in universities. Students somehow remain committed on to an older vision. College administrations once agreed with their students, but since the turn they no longer do: this disagreement is one source of the disdain.

Meanwhile, alumni donors are functionally in full agreement. They have a central role to play in achieving the goal of the neoliberal university—which, again, is the continued growth of the endowment. And, while the contributions of individual donors are negligible, the contributions of the donor class collectively and through time are substantial. It is from this fact that donors receive exalted status from administrators—they exist symbiotically, even symbollically, within the corporatisation of the academy. They are what the university is for.

Share

The consequence is that college boards believe earnestly that the views of the richest alumni are more important than the views of the students. Put another way, the administration’s commitment to billionaire voice is in fact the same thing as the administration’s antagonism towards student voice. In the contest over the Future of The University, the administration sees donors as allies and students as foes.

This is all true before we even approach the content of the dispute, which only makes matters worse for student protestors. To find itself opposing its students, the administration does not even need to disagree with students about Israel/Palestine—but, as it happens, they do. The base fact is that university boards share the same ideological commitments as billionaire donors like Robert Kraft. This means that Kraft’s refusals to donate, far from being a source of genuine material power, serve for the administration as a useful pretext for what they already hoped to do.

Meanwhile, the war goes on.

I’ve also attached an audio account of last night, recorded for Lever News.

I went to campus last night because I heard that something was going to happen.

The administration had announced that negotiations had failed; that they would not divest from Israel; that protestors would have until 2pm to clear the encampment. The protestors said they would not. By evening there was talk of more arrests, of a late night police sweep.

I didn’t quite believe that would happen. The administration’s behaviour has certainly been bizarre, and contrary to its own interests, and difficult to anticipate, but over recent days I had developed the sense that they had finally learned their lesson. They knew, surely, that their first attempt to clear the camp was exactly what had consolidated support for the camp. They would surely not make the same mistake again.

I felt vindicated as I approached campus. There were fewer police patrolling the outside than I have seen in weeks. Typically they like to line up along Broadway, standing bored and useless with thumbs hooked into black, velcroed vests, but last night only a small number were there collecting overtime. There were no prison vans and there was no riot gear.

I entered at the 117th Street gate—one of the few entrances that was still accessible to students—and then approached the main square of the University. What I noticed first was that it was quiet. On nights when arrests are expected the camp usually has a lot of sound. Loudspeakers give out information: ‘mike check’ call-and-response spreads it through the crowd. Typically someone is going over the best practices of arrest. Tents are moved around to remove trip hazards, students move back and forth excitedly, and fearfully.

But that wasn’t what I came upon. The students were clearly not preparing for a police sweep. The first odd fact was that the camp itself was more or less empty. The square, however, which surrounds the camp, was filled with students. They behaved queerly. I noticed first the proliferation of the keffiyehs. They have been popular for some time, but last night they were almost universal. Face masks, too, were everywhere.

The students moved together like schools of fish (in my mind I began to call them squadrons). They spoke quietly but excitedly. The dominant sound in my memory is giggling. I started to feel anticipation in my body, and realised that even though I had no information, I was picking that sensation up from those around me.

I could tell immediately and intuitively that the students were under instructions not to speak with people they did not know, and I decided not to press my case as a reporter. I decided just to watch. In the middle of the campus, the administration has this week assembled scores of palettes holding stacks of floor tiling—little towers about 1.5 metres high. These palettes are there because the tiles were supposed to have been placed on the lawn in preparation of Commencement, but the encampment prevents it. I have made it a habit to use these towers as parapets: I found one at the centre, climbed upon it, and had a 360 degree view of the square.

Time passed. Midnight approached and receded. I started to feel confused, then disappointed. Would anything happen? The breeze cooled and I started to shiver slightly. I thought about going home. Then at about 12.30, the squadrons, which had been roving around the square, suddenly coalesced upon the steps in the middle. I realised for the first time how many students there were. I estimate they totalled a thousand. Then suddenly, as if spurred by a signal I was not privy to, they formed a long line and began to march in an arcing chain around the square, with me and a small gaggle of student journalists watching awkwardly from the centre.

Suddenly I realised what was happening. This was not a protest, it was a distraction. I turned from my pedestal to my right and saw a new squadron move fast up from a far building, altogether ignoring the marching students, towards Hamilton Hall. A group of them entered the open doors and immediately began to barricade themselves inside. Others began to move the heavy metal outdoor furniture of the square to press against the doors. And a third team joined arms, backs to the door, and made a semi-circle defence against would-be attacks. They students had occupied the building.

Leave a comment

They unfurled a banner, renaming the building Hind’s Hall, after Hind Rajab, a 5 year old child killed, along with the paramedics who were trying to save her, by Israeli forces as she hid in a car. From the balcony of the building they declared the Hall ‘liberated.’ They released the university staff who had been caught on the inside of the building as they barricaded the doors.

There is much about the protestors I do not understand; there is much I do not like. But I cannot have any reservations about their bravery or their organisation. I rushed to the Hall, found a new pillar to stand on above the crowd, and felt waves of admiration for what I was witnessing. A thousand students had kept this secret from the world while they coordinated. What political party has such discipline? They successfully supported a smaller number to do something dramatic, something they knew would get them expelled. Indeed the University announced this morning that would happen.

Over the course of two hours the protestors linked arms, five deep in places, to defend the students indoors against the arrival of the police. The police did not come. If the University has any political competency (and I have had my doubts) it must have had in place some plan for this contingency, and that plan seems to have been not to call the police onto campus if a building is occupied. There was a small contingent of campus security—perhaps five, who stood to the side and watched in powerless bewilderment at the scene. I believe they could not have done anything even if they had been instructed to. When I arrived in front of the Hall there were 50 protestors completing the action. Within 15 minutes the number was 500.

Many of the crowd were clearly not of the protesting core. They were not hardened, radicalised activists. They were loosely-connected sympathisers there to tread the border of cheerleading and participation. And yet repeatedly I watched as they chose to cross that line, to take a hand in the game.

Subscribe now

I was no such hero. I have tried these recent days to position myself as a sympathetic, curious witness. I often remind myself that if I am arrested, my residency in this country is threatened. True, as far as it goes. But I felt some shame as around me fellow spectators made the decision to step over that thin line that divides the passive and the active. They were told by the student crowd marshals that they had better step back if the police arrive—without a clear delineation, the police tend to arrest spectators and participants alike. Instead of stepping back, I watched three in front of me step forward, link arms with their fellow students, turn their backs to the door, and their faces to me.

Sooner or later one must take a hand in the game. It is not sufficient to live a passive life. The world is real, and it is unjust, and where there is unjustice there is obligation, and no manner of excuses and self-justifications, however sophisticated and intellectualised, abrogate our obligations to our fellow humans—and to our own souls. I want now to speak honestly of my frustration with those willing to critique the actions of student protestors but unwilling to themselves act vigorously in pursuit of justice. I am implicated, like many of you. I consider such behaviour a cowardice; our cowardice.

When yesterday I described the hard right’s clamouring for the National Guard, I did not expect that the Columbia Administration would themselves make that threat hours later. But at 9.39pm my phone lit up with yet another bizarre campus-wide email from President Minouche Shafik. She was writing to students to declare an artificial deadline to negotiations with the protestors. ‘Those talks’, she wrote, ‘are facing a deadline of midnight tonight to reach agreement.’ She went on:

‘I very much hope these discussions are successful. If they are not, we will have to consider alternative options for clearing the West Lawn and restoring calm to campus.’

Meanwhile, University negotiators were more explicit in their talks with student protestors. They told Columbia University Apartheid Divestment (CUAD) that the National Guard were ready to be called in. It was a threat.

Subscribe now

The problem for the University is that they, uh, don’t have the power to call in the National Guard—only the Governor does, and Kathy Hochul has said she will not deploy them. Still, the police remain on speed dial, and so, as the University’s arbitrary midnight deadline approached, students protestors began to prepare for another raid by the NYPD.

Word of possible arrests soon spread, and I got on the 1 train up to campus as soon as I could. By 11.30pm hundreds of students, perhaps more than a thousand, were again gathered around to support the protestors. It was an eery replication of the scene a week ago when the NYPD arrested 113 of their classmates, except that beyond the protestors and their supporters, the campus was last night otherwise empty. There was a low murmur of anticipation among those who gathered to watch; many repeatedly refreshed their social media to keep track of developments.

The protestors themselves were in full arrest-preparation mode, dividing themselves into groups willing to be arrested and groups unwilling to be arrested. The former received instruction on arrest best practice: how to be zip-tied comfortably; how to turn off a phone’s biometric security; what phone numbers to write on their arms. Since October arrests have become so routine among New York’s anti-Zionist left that these skills are now widespread among the protestors. Even so, a last-minute refresher course was held for newcomers, of which there are many. Beside me, I overheard a young woman, perhaps 22, tell her friends why she had turned up to support. ‘I wasn’t going to join because I was pretty uncomfortable with some of the chants,’ she said, ‘but after the way the administration reacted I feel I have no choice.’

Share

Then, just before midnight, news came through from the student organisers that the administration had pushed their “deadline” back until 8am the next morning. Some feared a trap—would the police raid at 3am, in the dark, once the audience had gone to bed? But by 1am most of the crowd had thinned out, and the protestors had begun to behave as if the 8am deadline would be held in good faith. They returned their tents to the lawn, which they had cleared to make the arrests safer; they brought equipment back from storage; they began to plan for the next morning. They made the right call: the negotiations continued through the night, and this morning I woke to yet another bizarre email from the President’s office, sent at 4am:

‘We are making important progress with representatives of the student encampment on the West Lawn,’ it began, before listing a range of minor concessions made by the protestors. It also announced that the University had moved to a new arbitrary deadline: Friday morning.

The press release from the students, ‘Columbia University Concedes to Student Demands Issuing Written Assurances of Safety from State Violence,’ framed things differently:

‘Columbia’s reliance on state violence against peaceful protestors has created an unstable ground for the negotiations process…However, Columbia’s written commitment and concession not to call the NYPD or National Guard signifies an important victory for students.’

The situation, as you can tell, is moving quickly. With solidarity protests breaking out around the world, the most acute phase of media backlash complete, and the students ready to call the University on its bluffs, this campaign is moving into a new phase. The University’s “deadlines” are clearly manufactured attempts to pressure negotiations, but a real deadline looms: graduation, and the end of semester.

The real genius of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment is its placement. The two lawns it has been situated on, the East and the West, provide no functional purpose to the University except on graduation day. They are supposed to host seating for the huge audience that will, looking up toward the Low Library, watch the graduating students walk across the stage. University divestment campaigns, as a decade’s worth of student environmental activists have learned, are notoriously difficult to achieve exactly because semester always ends; the students always graduate. This means that it is all too easy for the University to wait the students out. But the CUAD students of the Liberated Zone have turned this logic on its head. The University now faces the prospect of a graduation ceremony in which half of the audience will be comprised of extremely vocal student activists: tents replacing chairs, keffiyehs replacing gowns.

Leave a comment

I have been writing regularly in these letters about the politics of self-defeat: the key actors have consistently made decisions that have weakened their hand. But the mistakes have not been symmetrical. Since I first warned of the need for the students to aggressively disavow antisemites on the perimeter of the University, they have made no unforced errors. The university administration, however, continues to demonstrate political incompetence.

This pattern of incompetence first began over a week ago with President Shafik’s craven performance in front of a Congressional House Committee hearing into antisemitism. In exchange for prostrating herself in front of the McCarthyite right and sacrificing the basic principles of liberal education, Shafik seemed to think she would be spared by the right wing antagonists who brought down her peers at Harvard and Penn. But, after Shafik did the bidding of Representative Elise Stefanik, who is building a career on this McCarthyite surge, Stefanik still claimed Shafik had not done enough and called for her resignation. Like the scorpion and the frog, only a naif could not have seen it coming.

Share

What can explain such behaviour? Last week’s arrests created a disastrous political environment for the University, hardening support here and around the world; last night’s empty threats have only emboldened the CUAD protestors, demonstrating to them them their own strength. The question we have to answer, then, is why is the administration behaving this way? Is incompetence a sufficient explanation?

My first inclination when answering these questions is always to turn to a material analysis. That approach immediately leads us to the influence of donors. After all, as The New York Times tells us:

It was wealthy alumni like the financiers Marc Rowan and Bill Ackman who helped push for the ousters of Liz Magill at Penn and Claudine Gay at Harvard. Much of their power lay in the millions that they give to schools — and their threats to withhold that money.

By undertaxing the wealthy and causing our universities to overrely on major donors, we have functionally granted our billionaires veto power over the political expressions of students. As I found in my own conflict with billionaire university donor Steve Schwarzman, there exists an expectation amid the ultra-rich donor class that their money will buy fealty to their political vision. At Columbia, Robert Kraft, who has a building named after him, has already committed to withholding donations to the school until ‘corrective actions’ are taken against the protestors. He is only the first to go public, but we can assume that Shafik is under massive background pressure to make the decisions she has been making. How else to explain their panicked incoherence?

There is one other explanation, one that requires a turn from the material to the psychological. I think it does have a role in our understanding, though I’ll let the psychoanalysts give it its full expression. This story would suggest that many people behind the decisions at Columbia University are motivated by fantasies of domination, power, and control. They view insurgent popular expressions of power like those out the window to my right on the grass of the University with a kind of visceral disgust. It provokes in them emotions that they want to displace or indulge.

I have in my mind right now the image of Saturn Devouring His Son, though this would predetermine the psychoanalytic reading. Instead what I want to stress is that these people, like everyone else, have their own hang ups, their own fantasies, their own anxieties, their own fears, their own desires. There is something psychosexual behind the administration’s relationship with its own students, and with the men outside in leather boots and armoured vests. The point is probably best communicated by this dumb meme I found from a Twitter account called Walrus Bird. The older I get, the more I think Freud just might have been right.

Subscribe now

I started writing these dispatches because, with campus closed to the press and the distortion machine of social media whirring, I thought it might help readers to get an honest perspective from the inside. I have been a part of enough political campaigns to know that they are all imperfect in some way, and that it is always better to be transparent about those deficiencies than sweep them under the carpet. And I’ve learned that smear tactics, hysteria, and disinformation are the most effective tools the powerful have against any popular movement. These movements seek popular sympathy; delegitimisation is designed to foreclose it.

That is the best lens to understand the massive anti-protest backlash seen in the media over the last 48 hours. In an attempt delegitimise the student protestors, a range of voices have coalesced to push a narrative to the effect that Columbia is now controlled by a mob of violent antisemites. I can only describe reports like these as instances of journalistic malpractice.

Unlike the panicked talking heads on television, I have actually been here, onsite, reporting what I see, and I worked hard on Sunday to give a frank and fair view of antisemitism in and around the protest. In light of the smear campaign, I feel driven to say more.

Though I have not myself witnessed any concrete instances of antisemitism in the last week, I have witnessed scores of Jews protesting alongside Muslims in the Liberated Zone. I have watched Shabbat service and Passover Seder observed among the tents. I have seen more Jews inside the encampment than Jews counterprotesting the encampment. Campus has been largely peaceful, quiet, and calm. I can see no reason why any person should feel unsafe, and I have heard from many Jews who laugh at the suggestion that they ought to. One of them, Jonathan Ben-Menachem, was able to place a good piece this afternoon with Mehdi Hasan’s new publication , titled ‘I Am a Jewish Student at Columbia. Don’t Believe What You’re Being Told About ‘Campus Antisemitism’.

‘Here’s what you are not being told,’ he writes:

The most pressing threats to our safety as Jewish students do not come from tents on campus. Instead, they come from the Columbia administration inviting police onto campus, certain faculty members, and third-party organizations that dox undergraduates. Frankly, I regret the fact that writing to confirm the safety of Jewish Ivy League students feels justified in the first place. I have not seen many pundits hand-wringing over the safety of my Palestinian colleagues mourning the deaths of family members, or the destruction of Gaza’s cherished universities. 

None of this is widely reported. It is only because Hasan, a heterodox voice, has set up his own publication that Ben-Menachem is being heard at all. It is clear that many elements of our culture do not want to hear from people like him. The erasure of anti-Zionist Jews—an erasure that often amounts to the suggestion that such people are not Jews—is actively and atrociously antisemitic, and those who participate in their marginalisation should feel ashamed.

Panics of this sort are driven by bad faith from vested interests, but they depend on a whole infrastructure of cynics and useful idiots to propagate them. Beyond the usual culprits in the media, who depend on sensationalism and base reaction for clicks, are this time a range of public figures trying to play politics. Jake Tapper, Eric Adams, Kirsten Gillibrand, and even the White House have each rushed to attack “virulent antisemitism” on campus. These superficially-virtuous condemnations of antisemitism, by warping and inflating the reality of the problem, serve to direct attention away from the new possibilities offered by the protest movement and the horrors it asks us to confront. That, of course, is the point.

But if the attempt to delegitimise the protests fails, the smears of antisemitism will have another purpose. They exist to help justify the possibility of violent military force. Take the fact that, hours after New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chaidt added to the hysteria with his piece ‘Why Anti-Israel Protesters Won’t Stop Harassing Jews’, police arrested 128 students, faculty, and supporters at NYU. I was not on scene, but footage shows what happened: scores of faculty, in an act of genuine bravery, linked arms in a circle to protect their students. Then the police arrested them all.

For lovers of state violence, the police are not sufficient. The military is called for. Shai Davidai was the first to call for the arrival National Guard. Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, soon followed. These men were joined by their unholy bedfellows on the American evangelical hard right, like Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, who last called for the military to put down BLM protestors. Hawley, for his part, egged on insurrectionists at the violent January 6 riots.

I woke this morning to see that the University of Sydney, my alma mater, has now joined the long and growing list of campuses hosting their own Liberated Zones. That, in turn, brought to mind my time at Tsinghua University in Beijing, just down the road from Peking University.

Campus activism is more or less absent in Beijing these days, except in the most surreptitious of forms, but on 15 April 1989, nearly 35 years ago to the day, those universities gave birth to perhaps the most significant student protest in human history. The students knew something was very wrong with the world and were ready to camp in a public place to demand change. By doing so they challenged the powers-that-be. Then the CCP brought in the police, and then the military, and put them down.

I was walking with a pro-Palestinian protest in October last year when a woman began to abuse me for being a Jew. I’d been chanting alongside her for nearly ten minutes before she noticed my face. When she did, she began to tell me to fuck off, to leave, to get the fuck out of here, etc. The way she said ‘Jew’ let me know she thought the word was a slur. I didn’t know what to do. I’m not, as it happens, Jewish, but it hardly felt right to deny it. All I managed was to look at her with disgust.

I wish I had managed to call her an antisemite; had let her know what I thought of her worldview; but if I’m honest I didn’t want to attract attention in a crowd that no longer felt safe. Instead I did what she wanted: I left. Whether I was prudent or cowardly I’m still not sure. But as I turned to go I took one last look at her, peering at the face behind her keffiyeh, and realised that she, like me, was an outsider to the conflict. She was an East Asian.

What to do with such information? Antisemitism is so deeply embedded in our culture, so persistent and virulent and contagious, that an Asian American marching for Palestine will mistakenly attack a white gentile marching in solidarity for the same cause. Antisemitism is a world-historical cultural toxin that resurges in moments of tension and crisis. Any person who thinks that it is not present across the political spectrum is in denial. No political group, to my mind, is not infected with the disease. So too with Islamophobia.

I’ve been thinking about that moment over the last 24 hours as I consider the real instances of antisemitism in and around the Columbia student protests. By “real” here I’m actively ruling out the ridiculous, cynical fabrications of characters like Shai Davidai, mentioned yesterday, who seem to consider the mere existence of Muslim students dangerous to Jews.

Instead I have in mind horrific instances like this one. Jews leaving campus were abused; someone yelled out ‘go back to Poland.’ It is disgusting behaviour. I want to emphasise that in the last five days reporting on-site I have not myself witnessed a single instance of this sort. Still, one instance is bad enough, and one instance will be used to delegitimise an entire movement.

Leave a comment

I thought this comment from Yoni Kurtz, a Jewish student giving firsthand testimony from campus, was measured and thoughtful. I’m going to reproduce some of his words here:

There has been a divide for a while now between the leaders of SJP inside campus (who may chant things like “intifada”, but know that the second they actually lay hands on a student, they will be kicked out of college and their movement will lose legitimacy with wider campus) and those who are random NYC residents that, in the past, have only sometimes showed up outside the gates when there are protests (who have zero repercussions for their actions, are basically professional anarchists and antisemites and may scream at visibly Jewish students).

Kurtz believes that the vocal antisemitism recorded last night came from outside groups. I think this is probably right. The perennial challenge for the left wing has been the coordination of diverse, unruly political groups under a single banner of opposition. The hegemonic position is stable and united; the anti-hegemonic coalition is unstable and fragmented. You cannot always decide who turns up to “support” your rally. In short: alliances are unholy; “bad eggs” are all too common. And what emerges is a structural tendency towards self-defeat. As Kurtz writes, the student protestors would be wise to publicly disavow the outsiders.

Meanwhile, the students themselves deploy a range of chants, up to and including calls for the end of Israel. My attitude on ‘eliminationist’ chants is that they are best fully-contextualised, are often semantically-slippery, and are even sometimes better understood seriously rather than literally. But reading such chants in this way takes significant charity. Jewish students who manage it demonstrate deep moral-sympathetic capabilities, and are not under much obligation to do so. It would be churlish, even absurd, to expect them to not take the worst chants literally.

The chanters object that, in the meantime, the actual, real-world genocide of present-day of Palestinians is underway. They are right. But it is the unfortunate task of protest movements that they must be significantly better than the powers they are trying to overthrow. There is simply no way for such groups to win political power without winning political sympathy. Lacking material power, they are competing for public opinion. And the political effect of unchecked anti-semitism, beyond its own noxiousness, will be to derail the protestors’ political project. Even this post, by beginning with an account of anti-semitism, directs attention and energy away from the issue bringing people together today: the massacre of Palestinians.

Share

Still, the protestors are lucky that they are not the only ones who suffer from the tendency of self-defeat. The groups they oppose have also, perplexingly, made consistent choices that go against their own interests. Some perverse death drive underpins this entire conflict. This is true at the level of government: the US-Israeli war on Palestine has basically assured the creation of a new generation of Hamas militants. And it is true of last week’s arrests on campus, which triggered solidarity protests at campuses across the country; hardened the resolve of protestors on this one; and made the administration look cruel and authoritarian.

And still the administration continues to make political decisions that weaken their own hand: last night, campus security burst into the Columbia WKCR-FM radio station, which broadcasts across the local community 24 hours a day, and demand they shut down and evacuate (this was later determined to be a ‘miscommunication’). Then, this morning, the University’s faculty awoke to an email telling them that their ID cards would be disconnected, and that they would need to be escorted from the gate to their classroom. At the university level all of these missteps combine to prod the sleeping bear that is faculty.

It is no surprise then than the faculty are, as I called for yesterday, beginning to organise. Yesterday the AAUP of Columbia and Barnard released a statement that condemned ‘in the strongest possible terms’ the suspension of students, demanded ‘that suspensions and charges be dismissed immediately’, and demanded that ‘no police be taken against student protestors without due process’. Tomorrow, faculty will demonstrate on the steps of Low Library in support of ‘the fundamental norms of liberal education’.

In some corners, discussion has turned towards a call for the removal of President Minouche Shafik. It is perhaps deserved. But as at least one student protestor was led to insist, this response misses the forest for the trees. The focus on the University’s authoritarian mishandling of student expression risks displacing attention and momentum that ought to be directed to the substantive demands of student protest: divestment from the Israeli occupation. Turning Palestine into a debate about free speech is a way of not having a debate about Palestine.

This is an ongoing and deeper problem with liberalism in education: many faculty believe that it is their responsibility to express no politics except on matters of freedom of expression. I tend to read this approach as cowardly. Rather, they ought to be great supporters of free expression and be ready to act decisively on substantive moral-political issues. Sooner or later someone must say something of political content. Leaving that responsibility to the students is an abrogation of responsibility.

The lesson generalises to the rest of us. It is always easier, more comfortable, and better for your career to be on the safe ground of “I don’t care what you say, but I protect your right to say it.” It is almost always easier, when subjects are particularly fraught, to disengage and let others bear the burden. The subject at our hands is perhaps the most sensitive subject in our culture. That makes it very scary for many of us to express an opinion. Many powers-that-be depend on that discomfort to ensure silence; they depend on that silence to maintain the status quo.

My last two dispatches have not expressed a particular view on the substantive question of Palestine, but have instead aimed for a sympathetic and curious reporting on the protests themselves. But even that has been too much for some people—I’ve observed a significant drop in subscribers. I’m disappointed, and therefore particularly appreciative of those who have written letters of thanks. I think what is happening at Columbia right now deserves to be reported and discussed, and the demands on the students taken seriously. I am of the view that if a situation is hard to discuss, that is good evidence that discussion is needed. What is called for now is not silence but clarity of thought.

Last night, as I filed the first of these notes, Jewish students conducted Shabbat service in the Liberated Zone. They gathered maybe ten metres away from me—in videos posted to social media, I can see myself in the background, trying to type away, routinely looking up to watch. I found the service beautiful, so beautiful that it became difficult to concentrate. The calls-and-responses of the service mirrored, in their own way, the political chants of the day. To end they sung to each other, and to all those watching, the words “ceasefire now”.

Minutes later their Muslim peers conducted their own prayer. The Muslim students have taken to praying in circles, obscured from view by a human shield of their fellow students who use blankets to provide privacy.

The concern became necessary because of people like Shai Davidai, a Columbia University Business School professor who has taken to sharing footage of praying Muslim students to Twitter, alongside the words “This is Columbia University, right now. Please share to let the world know.” In Australia we would call this a dog whistle. Earlier this week Davidai called for the use of the National Guard, as if hungering for a modern day Kent State Massacre, in which 13 students were shot, 4 of them killed. In an extraordinary feat of human psychology, this fully-employed adult man believes that it is the undergraduates who are intimidating him.

He is to my mind a transparently-hysterical racist cognitively unable to identify with any other position than victim. The bullying of students and the psychology that facilitates it is so contrary to the values of liberal education that he cannot be said to be fit to teach in a university. He remains employed.

But back to the Liberation Zone. The students are out there right now—I’ve stepped into the library to write these words—and they are prefiguring a new way of organising society. Words like these are meaningless and empty to any person who has not seen the inside of a protest movement at high morale. Most of us in this society have lost the hope that anything could ever be different; we have forgotten that things were different not too long ago, and will soon be different again. But on the far side of the wall to my right, a group of young people who have not yet learned to be hopeless are constructing at a small scale the world they hope to see come.

It is an extraordinary thing to watch. The students are highly organised. A constant stream of programming—from public speeches to chants to musical performances to training sessions to prayer groups—keeps the crowd entertained through the day. Leaders routinely coordinate site clean ups. Tarps and blankets and umbrellas are shared widely and managed communally. At night the students sleep on the grass—because the University removed their tents, they wrap themselves in tarps to keep off the rain. Jews and Muslims and people of every other faith coordinate peacefully to pressure the University to divest from the Israeli war machine. Meanwhile the University remains closed to the public; the riot police just outside.

Share

‘It is worth stating plainly what happened at Columbia,’ writes Moira Donegan in The Guardian. ‘The raid was nothing less than the product of collusion between a university administration and rightwing politicians to suppress politically disfavored speech.’ And as Hank Reichman ably put it on the Academe Blog:

the arrests were but an escalation of a largely one-sided effort to silence student protest and even student debate and discussion that began last Fall with the swift banning of two pro-Palestinian student groups and the adoption of overly repressive new student conduct regulations at Barnard and Columbia, implemented with no faculty or student input.

Which is all to say that we are now 6 months into a concerted effort to put down dissent on campus. When Barnard and Columbia cynically banned the two pro-Palestinian student groups last autumn, I was extremely impressed with those faculty who objected publicly and vocally. But I was even more dismayed by how few there were.

In truth I have been been consistently disappointed by the majority of faculty at this university. They have in my estimation failed to deploy their considerable power to protect their students, and have considered it sufficient to shake their heads in disappointment at the administration. My strongest feelings are reserved for those protected by tenure. Many of them, even self-described radicals with famous books about the Subaltern, and so forth, have seen fit to not act, and have left the brunt of the responsibility to lesser known but clearly more principled faculty.

But even the more-precarious faculty are hardly off the hook. I have the sense that, as the university ecosystem has consistently shifted governance from faculty to the administration, piling more and more power in the hands of management and leaving less and less in the hands of educators, a kind of learned helplessness has emerged among those who once may have held sway. The time for serious action, one suspects, was long ago, when there was still a chance to halt the slow decline of the liberal university. As the old saying goes, the frogs are starting to boil in the pot. And now that the water is simmering, and the administration is using the state to suppress student speech, many faculty have found themselves unwilling or unable to protect those in their charge.

Subscribe now

The lesson is not that all is lost but that things can still be different. It is only by exercising power that one gains power, and faculty are now presented with an opportunity to turn back the tide. I hear that some faculty are indeed now organising in just this direction. Good. They have before them an unambiguous cause for collective action at a point of maximum popular sympathy. The moment calls for an unrestrained demonstration of labour power in defence of their students, academic freedom, and pedagogy itself. Columbia faculty ought to collectively withhold their labour and march on campus until the suspended students are reinstated: it is time for faculty to show as much leadership as those they claim to teach.

As I left the Liberated Zone around 1am last night, the protestors were involved in a long call and response reaffirming their community values. The leader of this announcement, a young woman, started by asking the students to remember that the Gaza Solidarity Encampment was home to a broad coalition of political persuasions. For that reason she asked that students refrain from autonomous action, like vandalism—such actions might bring punishment on fellow students who do not support those tactics. The crowd assented. Then she made the same point about litter—the service staff of the University, after all, were also their comrades, and deserves the same respect and solidarity as those camped in the Liberated Zone. This, I thought, was real leadership.

At first, only five members of the NYPD entered the lawn. They came through the south-east gate and made their way among the tents and sleeping bags scattered across the grass. In the middle of the lawn the protesting students sat in a large ring, arms linked. They wore jeans and scarves. The Five, dressed in riot gear—helmet and vest and baton—began a slow perambulation around them.

Around the lawn, separated by a low fence and hedge, perhaps a thousand students stood facing in. I stood with a second audience, on the steps halfway up the Columbia quadrangle. Farther up, on the steps of the Low Library, were yet more spectators.

The first of The Five, a sort of pathfinder figure, led the way with a satisfied strut. He pointed with authority, stepping over bags and lunch boxes with aplomb. But he was soon overshadowed by the second man, the star of the show, who carried strapped to his belly an LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device). He looked like he would soon give birth and behaved the same. The LRAD, which during the BLM protests was used to emit high-pitched tones that damaged the hearing of protestors, this time carried a pre-recorded order to disperse. No party—not the protestors, nor the police, nor the audience, nor the University, expected dispersal. Instead the LRAD merely served to open proceedings.

The performance had to me the uneasy feel of the first stages of a bullfight. First, a loud device, usually a trumpet, announces the start of the show. The participants then parade into the arena, displaying themselves and their fancy outfits to the audience. They always move with a kind of camp arrogance. Next, the matador requests permission of the presidente to proceed. After a signal from the presidente, the performance can commence. The signal always comes: the presidente is in fact the person who scheduled the fight.

Columbia’s President Minouche Shafik passed down her signal just as The Five finished their preamble. We in the audience felt a simultaneous buzzing in our pockets—suddenly a thousand of us were looking at our phones. Shafik had emailed the entire University notifying all of her decision to use the NYPD to “clear” the lawn, transparently orchestrating the arrival of her email to coincide with the beginning of the arrests. Shafik’s comms team is best placed to explain this decision—to the students, it was confirmation that the administration had aligned itself with the NYPD against its own.

With The Five departed, scores of NYPD now entered. They filed in from the south-eastern gate on 114th St. They fell into roughly three categories: the standard cop, the riot gear muscle, and the management type. (The management types, in their skinny-jeaned civilian wear, managed to look even more out of place than their weapon-bearing subordinates, who, like a broken clock, found that their loose-fitting cargo pants were fashionable once again.)

Share

Once the preamble is complete, there are three stages to a bullfight. There is the tercio de varas, in which the bull is lanced by two picadors. Then there is the tercio de banderillas, in which the matador drives two darts into the bull’s shoulders. Finally there is the tercio de muerte, in which the matador drives a sword through the exhausted animal’s spine. This ritualised performance never varies unless the matador fails. Every party—the audience, the fighter, and the bull—knows what is to come. The question is not if the bull will survive, but if the fighter will execute him appropriately. If the matador gets a “bad bull”, by which is meant a peaceful bull, a placid bull, a bull that won’t fight back, he and the presidente are in trouble. They just look cruel.

In her letter to the NYPD requesting police force, Minouche Shafik assured the police they wouldn’t have a bad bull on their hands. ‘I have determined,’ Shafik wrote, ‘that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University.’ The threat of the protesters, Shafik assured the NYPD, was high—they would be justified in removing them. They wouldn’t look cruel.

In reality, the ‘clear and present danger’ was that some students had spent one night camped on a patch of grass, blocking no access, impeding no University activity.1 To make matters worse for the President, the students remained an ongoing posture of nonviolence as they were arrested one by one. Meanwhile, scores of riot-gear-wearing police patrolled the university. The asymmetry was so stark that NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban, later that night, actively distanced himself from Columbia’s messaging. The ‘clear and present danger’, he insisted, was identified by the University, not the NYPD. Moreover, ‘the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say,’ he said. He sounded embarrassed.

At this juncture it’s worth noting that the protestors were so un-disruptive to university life, so non-threatening to the student body, and the President so eager to remove them, that the administration chose to actively manufacture grounds for their removal. That is, lacking a reason to bring in the NYPD, the University first suspended the students so that they could be removed for trespassing. Shafik herself fronts to this in her letter to the NYPD:

‘All University students participating in the encampment have been informed they are suspended. At this time, the participants in the encampment are not authorized to be on University property and are trespassing.’

By the measure of protests from any other era, the political expression we see today is remarkably mild, peaceful, and unambitious. As Lydia Polgreen put it in a good opinion piece for the New York Times, these protests ‘were a mild echo of those of an earlier generation of students, who effectively shut down the campus in April 1985 to demand that Columbia divest from South Africa — protests that were in turn an echo of the 1968 student takeover of the university amid the broad cultural rebellion against the Vietnam War.’ In those protests students occupied buildings, not lawns. And yet our standard for what deserves the riot squad is lower than it has ever been before.

We are amidst a neo-McCarthyite backlash in which University administrators are driven out for the meekest attempts to protect their students’ freedom of expression. It is easy to wonder if we aren’t approaching new variety of authoritarianism. I suspect we are—at least in that supposed bastion of free speech, the university. As Nikil Pal Singh put it on Twitter, ‘The authoritarian turn in elite universities — via administrative imperium, loss of faculty governance, and expansion of contingent labor has been long in the making, obscured by false, reactionary promotion/panic around DEI, which never touched these aforementioned tendencies.’

Meanwhile, as I was writing back in 2021, the chief mode of speech suppression continues to come from the workplace, as 28 Google workers found out this week. This mode of authoritarianism is not felt by people who shy away from political speech, and I suspect such people will have no idea what I am talking about. So much the worse for them. Every era is populated by a class of people who are, for the most part, served by the status quo, and who, even when they find themselves in principled agreement with dissidents, do not find the energy to vocally support them. (The most famous expression of the problem comes from MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.2)

In recent weeks I have for my own purposes been reading and writing about the white Quaker abolitionist John Brown. He thought slavery was wrong and was willing to act violently, and sacrifice his life, to free the slaves of North America. For that he was hanged and dismissed as insane. Moderate abolitionists responded with insistent attempts to delegitimise his efforts, to characterise him as unforgivably violent, and above all, “ineffective”.

I conduct a longstanding informal poll, asking young Americans if they’ve heard of John Brown. Some have; as many have not. Few, if any, know his story in any detail. They are as likely to learn in school about the men who owned slaves as the men who tried to free them. It is as though the nation cannot bear to remember the greatest it produced; it cannot bear to remember that it killed him.

Share

By this I’m pointing to a repeated historical pattern, as present today as in 1854, in which people are so shamed by the presence of moral virtue that they do anything to dismiss it. So much of the broad “moderate” reaction to protest, I’m saying, comes from the knowledge that the dissidents are right and brave. Bravery makes us aware of our own cowardice, and that is an awareness we cannot bear. Better to find a way to explain away the need for protest than face the possibility of acting.

Leave a comment

That digression on the psychology of reaction brings me back to the Columbia steps where, as the riot police marched in, I found myself wondering what Minouche Shafik was up to. The choice to bring in the riot police was so clearly a violent, illegitimate reaction; so clearly revealed the administration’s willingness to do anything to silence the protestors; and so clearly played into the tactics of the protesters, that I allowed myself to imagine, just for a moment, that the University President was playing some extraordinary game of 3D chess in solidarity with her students.

Would that it were. ‘The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat,’ writes Baldwin. The protesters demanded that the University divest from the war machine. If that demand had no force, Shafik would have seen no need to act. Instead, she was driven to respond, and panicked. The University did not call the NYPD because it felt powerful. It called the NYPD because it felt the protestors were.

A day later, the administration has got the response it should have known was coming. The Liberated Zone has moved from one lawn to another. It has quadrupled in size. From where I stand in front of Butler library—named for a Columbia President who invited Nazis to speak on campus—I see protestors pass the time by dancing in a drum circle. The Jewish students among them are dancing with a poster they have printed out, on which Minouche Shafik’s face sits next to the words ‘Shabbat Shalom, Motherfucker’. Today at Harvard, and Boston College, and USC, students marched out of their classes in solidarity with Columbia students. The activists are saying that ‘something has changed.’ Let us hope.

Not too long ago I spent some time interviewing a bunch of couples for New York’s cover piece A Practical Guide to Polyamory. Here is that cover.

It was a group effort: I did some of the interviews but none of the writing or editing. If I had, it might have looked different and probably would have done much worse. So, when the piece came out, I decided to the let the discourse pass me by. Not my circus, not my monkeys, as they say. I was content! I was serene! But nothing lasts.

Subscribe now

2.

Here’s an old recycled joke tweeted by once-celebrated comedian John Cleese.

Thank you, John !

3.

It’s not a funny joke, but you’ve heard it before. It’s really old! In fact it never really seems to go away. It’s too useful, too modular. It’s our culture’s plug-and-play line of mere reaction. “Vegan” can be swapped out with whatever new thing has come around the corner. For a moment there it was “CrossFit”.

The joke survives because it captures the ethos of cultural backlash, condensing it to a single exchange. That ethos declares: I don’t care what you do in the privacy of your own home, just don’t rub it in my face!!!

4.

I was provoked out of my serenity by this tweet from Jay Caspian Kang:

I like Jay and I don’t want to put the blame on him. Instead, let’s just call this tweet representative of the backlash. Spend some time in the comments section to see what I mean.

It’s a bit hard for me to see why we need to “normalize” a reaction that is already ubiquitous. Knee-jerk “keep it to yourself!” reaction isn’t going anywhere. It’s the same reaction we gave to every counter-cultural group in history.

But I don’t want to call it normal. This behaviour is ubiquitous, but I tend to think it’s… pretty weird. Some people are going to live differently to you; sometimes you’re gonna have to read about it. That’s what it means to live among humans. So take a deep breath. It’s okay to be chill. It’s okay to be normal.

Good luck out there 👍

Share

5.

In interview after interview, the people I spoke to were terrified of the reactions they would receive if they ever spoke openly about their relationships.

They explicitly described the fear of stigma as their reason for not coming out. All but 1 of the 20+ people I spoke to asked to be pseudonymous. Nearly all remained, in total or in part, in the closet.

6.

The reason the vegan joke isn’t funny is that… it’s just not true? Any person who actually knows a vegan knows that they are more likely to feel sheepish and embarrassed: that they don’t like to make a fuss.

Here’s how you actually find out someone’s a vegan. You sit down to a meal with them and their dietary requirements naturally come up and then they work hard to make sure everyone else isn’t inconvenienced.

And then, despite all that delicate treading, their life is inevitably taken to be an implicit criticism of everyone else. There’s always some insecure bloke at the table who begins to bombard them with questions they’ve answered at a thousand dinners before, and suddenly half the night is spent talking about… veganism.

7.

I think it’s instructive that when vegans and non-monogamous couples do reveal their choices, they get the same reply: Well, *I* could never do that.

No one asked!

Subscribe now

8.

Here’s a joke a poly person told me.

Q: How do you know a monogamous person could never! be non-monogamous?

A: They’ll tell you.

9.

Disclosing any “alternative lifestyle” provokes emotions of insufficiency, envy, or anxiety in listeners. We can feel reprimanded or judged or threatened. We scramble to self-justify, we become defensive. Our internal moral order is called into question; we rush to displace those bad feelings. And the easiest way to displace them is to blame the source. They are “gross” or “strange” or “preachy” or just “talking too much about it”.

I’m saying that all the handwringing about poly people, or vegans, or gays, or trans people, or whomever, exists for the sole purpose of offloading negative emotions. That’s what being cranky is about. Being cranky is a copying mechanism.

Increasingly it’s a profession, too.

10.

I hope that the historical (or not so-historical) parallels to homophobia are obvious. I believe they should be, and that the comparison is instructive. It is manifestly not a coincidence that non-monogamy, disproportionately practiced by queer people, is a site of backlash.

(Just as it was never a coincidence that veganism, disproportionately practised by women, is scorned).

11.

Technology has accelerated cultural change; cultural change has accelerated crankdom. There’s a pretty penny to be made on the side of crankdom. Career advisors, tell your cranky students: you can go pro! Your role in the discourse economy is to intellectualise, legitimate, and finally displace the feelings of anxiety that pluralism brings. You’re there to help people offload the shitty feelings caused by people choosing to live differently to them. People will pay well for that.

12.

I think one of the problems with professional crankdom is that trying to justify your base reactive emotions can make you sound really silly.

13.

Over and over again, the people I spoke to were desperate to emphasise that their choices were not for everyone, that they made none of these decisions lightly, that polyamory for them was a path to deeper commitment. Over and over again they insisted that they had made a personal choice that did not necessarily generalise—that there was nothing wrong with monogamy.

Share

14.

The picture of non-monogamous people that Tyler Austin Harper appears to carry in his mind is so utterly divorced from the reality of the human beings I spoke to that I hesitate to draw attention to it. His piece, attacking polyamorous ‘elites’ in the pages of The Atlantic (I swear to God) left me totally adrift. My interviews had involved multiple school teachers!

‘The very class of Americans who most reap the benefits of marriage are the same class who get to declare monogamy passé and boring,’ writes Harper.

What! What class? When did they declare monogamy passé and boring? When? When? When?

What strikes me at every step along the way is Harper’s refusal to ground any claim in the text.

‘From their gilded pedestals,’ he writes, ‘they declare polyamory superior to monogamy.’

What! Is! He! Talking! About! Who? When? Why can he link to no examples of this? Are you just allowed to say stuff in The Atlantic (rhetorical)? Is this a vibes-based argument? Who are these elites? Who believes that people are ‘accessories to a project of self-improvement’? Where does this fever dream come from?

It seems to me that the mere existence of non-monogamous people has been taken as an implicit criticism of monogamous people. This man has sat down to dinner with a vegan and handled it badly.

15.

Harper seems to think that ENM people actually are like the vegans in the joke, and that they are so keen to spread the gospel that they have coordinated a massive media push.1

I think this is the type of fantasy you can only develop with the right distance, right grievance, and right incentives. To get there you have to forget that editors assign stories, not interview subjects. You have to ignore the possibility that those editors may be in marriages just as monogamous as your own. And you have be blind to the fact that their first incentive is not to make people poly, but to sell newspapers.

16.

I will be concrete. I take exception to a piece that, on the basis of no evidence and no reporting, attributes a cultural practice to “the ruling class” so as to smear people without touching the mud of research. I think if you’re going to run a piece called ‘Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s Latest Fad’ you are obliged to make some attempt, any attempt, to establish the relationship between those nouns.

I think shooting from the hip of gut impulse and insecurity and pure unfiltered id is not a good idea. Dressing it up as some heroic salvo shot towards ‘the ruling class’ is good enough to flatter the populist impulses of our broadly conservative politics.2 But it does nothing to hide the transparent playacting fantasy; the shadowboxing in the dark.

Subscribe now

17.

How do two people end in such divergent places? One explanation, as Scott Alexander points out, is that Harper relies a great deal on the loudest and least attractive character in this saga: the woman who wrote the memoir that some of this stuff was pegged to. I straight up do not know her name or the name of the book: it seems boring! I try not to read boring books, and I rarely take them to represent anything.

A similar lesson came out in my exchange with Kang—he’d been activated by an interview I’d barely skimmed. I should say: Kang and Harper now host together. And in their defence, these examples were right at the top, as they say. They didn’t make them up, and the pieces were given pride of place by the publications. The media had given the most space to the most unflattering characters. The mistake of the Time To Say Goodbye guys was to take those portraits as representative. But that, of course, is what they are incentivised to do.

It’s hard to blame them. They didn’t get to interview people for hours. So they, like the people in the Instagram comments, just took the media representations at face value. But… they’re professionals. They should know better. There was no consideration that unflattering portraits are chosen deliberately, placed actively. This lack of nous concerns me most. They saw unlikable characters and reacted against them, never wondering if their reactions weren’t elicited on purpose. Shrewder, I think, is to assume the effect is deliberate.

18.

I think we’d all do well to take a step back and look at the ecosystem in which all this Sturm und Drang is produced. We could all say this more often, but rocking the boat rarely pays. Plus: everyone already knows it, even if we tend to forget.

So here goes. Your media are penguins jockeying for position on a melting ice cap. Your discourse is a semi-symbiotic resentment machine that harvests clicks and hate-clicks alike. Major publications often elicit, aim for, cranky responses in the comments section, or The Atlantic, or wherever. Content can be crafted with cultural reaction in mind. A memoir comes out; magazines peg a piece; a crank reacts on social media; an editor assigns the take over at crankreacts.com The Atlantic; a tired nobody writes a post on Substack. It’s all deliberate and symbiotic, everyone goes home dissatisfied, and the ice caps keep melting. None of this material needs to be smart or virtuous or, like, truth-directed. It’s all just culture war. For clicks.

In 2016, an Australian school teacher named Andrew Taylor decided to eat nothing but potatoes for a year.

It was a decision born of desperation. He was overweight and had been bullied for as long as he could remember. Over the years, he tried every diet and every exercise regime he could think of. But he’d encountered an experience common to hundreds of millions of people: nothing seemed to work.

Every diet had failed; many had left him heavier than before. Each time the pattern was the same. For weeks, or even months, he’d stick to the plan – counting calories, or avoiding carbs, or removing sugar. These diets put him into caloric deficit, bringing hunger and fatigue and irritability, and the results would be slow in coming. He was starving himself and had little to show for it.

So, whenever Taylor found himself reaching a weight-loss milestone, he’d give himself a reward. He’d eat, say, a slice of pizza. But then he’d find himself eating a second. The pizza would lead to a tub of ice cream; the ice cream might be followed by beer. And before the night was over he would find his diet abandoned; his head swamped by feelings of shame.

Those of us who don’t experience obesity are poorly equipped to understand the experience of people like Taylor, but the nearly 75% of adult Americans described by the CDC as either overweight or obese are better placed. They are more likely to appreciate his exhaustion—his sense of being trapped in a cycle from which there is no escape. 

One day, in late 2015, Taylor found himself having fallen off the wagon yet again. It had happened just as it always happened: an arduous diet had been followed by a precipitous binge, and Taylor found himself once more reaching for a beer. But this time, and for the first time, he found the moment epiphanic. The symbolism was too stark to be ignored. His relationship with food, he decided, was like an alcoholic’s relationship with alcohol.

Armed with this new self-narrative, Taylor decided to treat his relationship with food like he would an addiction. He knew abstinence wouldn’t work—that, after all, is all dieting is—but he figured he could make food less addictive by making it as boring as possible. He spent 6 weeks researching the nutritional value of various boring foodstuffs, settled on the humble potato, and on New Year's Day declared his resolution to eat nothing else for the coming year. There would be no counting calories. In fact, Taylor gave himself permission to eat as much as he liked, so long as it was a potato.

Taylor had chosen well. Potatoes, he had learned in his research, are extraordinarily nutritious. They contain all the amino acids one needs to get by, and are missing only a few important vitamins, like B12. Standard white potatoes don’t have much Vitamin A, but sweet potatoes do. So Taylor took B12 supplements, ate the occasional sweet potato, and regularly checked in with his doctor. 

“Over the year of potatoes I had five medical check ups”, Taylor told me. “One at the very start and then another after each quarter. All check ups included blood tests. On top of that I had four bone density DEXA scans and at the end of the year I was medically examined at Adelaide University. Everything was great all the way.” Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us: potatoes have the uncommon, and under acknowledged, virtue of being very nearly nutritionally-complete.

In a video posted to YouTube on January 2, 2016, an obese Taylor can be seen announcing his plans to the world. “G’day”, he says, walking under what looks like a humid Melbourne sky. He’s sweating and breathing hard. “I’m on my way back from the shop. Got my backpack on. And I, uh, have got 6 kilos (13 lbs) of potatoes in there.” 

When I spoke to Taylor via Zoom last November, nearly 7 years after he first committed himself to his year of potatoes, he was again out for a walk through the streets of suburban Melbourne. There the similarities end. Andrew Taylor was no longer obese. He had lost 117lbs (53kgs), or nearly a third of his body weight, in the year he ate potatoes.

I first learned about Andrew Taylor at a seafood restaurant in September last year. My party had settled into an easy, bantering camaraderie, talking happily about nothing, when our fourth member, a man I was meeting for the first time that night, sheepishly let on that for weeks his diet had consisted largely of potatoes.

My new friend—call him M—had stumbled upon a scientific study conducted by an online collective of anonymous researchers using the internet to do science outside the academic research system. These self-described ‘mad scientists’ go by the name Slime Mold Time Mold and in 2022 organized hundreds of online volunteers into a month-long all-potato diet. They were conducting an experiment to see if Andrew Taylor’s story could be replicated. Might potatoes, they wondered, hold the cure to obesity?

M is a normal, reasonable, and intelligent man of around 30 years old. He is a top graduate of an Ivy League university and holds a serious professional job at a Manhattan firm. And, because of some words on an anonymous blog, he decided to eat a bowl of potatoes for lunch every day. M wasn’t even a participant in Slime Mold Time Mold’s science experiment. He simply came across their work, got excited, and decided to follow along at home. Instead of a total replacement diet, M opted for “potatoes by default”: whenever he cooked for himself, he cooked potatoes. He lost about a tenth of his body weight this way.

Over ceviche and salmon, M told us first about Andrew Taylor, and then about a man by the name of Chris Voigt. In 2010, Voigt, a potato lobbyist and Executive Director of the Washington State Potato Commission, was sick of the potato’s bad reputation. The USDA was threatening to remove potatoes from school lunches, and had recently excluded the vegetable from lists of subsidized foods in low-income programs. In a campaign against these changes, Voigt set out to show that potatoes were so nutritious you could live on them, and set himself a goal of eating 20 potatoes a day for 60 days. Voigt figured 20 potatoes would contain enough calories to replace his typical caloric intake, so he expected to maintain his weight. He lost 21lbs (9.5kgs).

To the anonymous science bloggers known as Slime Mold Time Mold, Voigt and Taylor were giving testimony that demanded scientific attention. Because potatoes are traditionally associated with weight gain, it would have been surprising if Taylor and Voigt hadn’t put weight on after eating an unlimited supply of potatoes. But here an unlimited potato diet appeared to trigger far more weight loss than the vast majority of diets ever subjected to scientific research. 

In the language of academic science, the intervention demonstrated a massive effect size. And, crucially, these subjects appeared to lose weight without ever feeling hungry, which suggested the diet might be easier to stick with than alternatives. The bloggers wondered if, like Alexander Fleming looking into his petri dish, these potato people may just have stumbled upon a world-shifting scientific breakthrough.

At the very least the idea needed disproving. “Anecdotes by themselves are limited,” wrote Slime Mold Time Mold at the time. “We don’t know how many people tried this diet and didn’t get such stunning weight loss. We don’t know how long the weight stays off for. And the sample size is really small. Someone should really do a study or something, and figure this thing out.”

In Slime Mold Time Mold’s Potato Diet Community Trial, nearly two hundred strangers from the internet voluntarily replaced their entire diet with potatoes for a month, weighing themselves daily. For those used to the stringency of academic research, the guidelines felt remarkably lax. ‘Perfect adherence isn’t necessary,’ wrote the researchers. ‘If you can’t get potatoes, eat something else rather than go hungry, and pick up the potatoes again when you can.’ They pointed out that one mainstay of academic science, the control group, was unnecessary, because ‘the spontaneous remission rate for obesity is so low.’ If people did lose weight, they figured, they’d know why.

Announcing the trial back in April 2022, the mad scientists themselves seemed uncertain how seriously to take the enterprise (the headline read ‘Potato Diet Community Trial: Sign up Now, lol’). But if the researchers were worried about a muted response, they needn’t have been. The study aimed at a minimum of 20 participants. When applications closed, 220 strangers from the internet had registered.

In the end, Slime Mold Time Mold collected self-reported data from 160 participants, analyzed the results, and posted their findings, raw data, and methodology freely and publicly on the internet. There had been no ethics board; no peer review; no institutional funding. Just a blog, anonymous scientists, and hundreds of people willing to eat nothing but potatoes in the name of science. 

The results were extraordinary. Those who ate nothing but potatoes for 4 weeks lost on average 10.6 lbs (4.8 kgs)– far more weight, in far less time, than other studied diets can boast. Comparative studies of weight-loss diets with different compositions of fat, protein, and carbohydrates find that, whatever the diet, overweight people tend to lose roughly the same amount: about 13.2 lbs (6 kgs) over six months. This makes the potato diet, if Slime Mold Time Mold’s data is to be believed, among the most effective diets ever researched. ‘People lost more weight on the potato diet,’ they told me later, ‘than, as far as we can tell, any other diet in the history of mankind.’

Two months after we first met, M invited me and at least 30 others to his Jersey City apartment to eat and celebrate potatoes. ‘Welcome to Potato Con!!’ read the invitation. ‘Experience the satiating powers of potatoes and mingle with other potato enthusiasts.’ I walked in the front door and immediately felt better about arriving empty handed: at least 15 different potato dishes already crowded the table. The potatoes had been roasted, baked, boiled, fried, and turned into salad. The bemused and excited guests, mostly colleagues and friends of M, stood around making conversation about potatoes, and about the taste of potatoes, and also about different ways to cook potatoes. A consensus was reached: potatoes are very versatile. 

I took a plastic plate and a plastic spoon and tried as many dishes as I could. My plate exhibited the full spectrum; beige all the way to brown. A Spotify playlist titled ‘Bangerz and Mash’ could be heard dimly behind the chatter of Russets and Yukons. The room was filled with an optimistic, if anxious, spirit; one sensing that behind a tongue-in-cheek, slightly embarrassed self-awareness, the guests harbored earnest hopes that they might be part of something transformative.

Eventually, word got out that I was a journalist on the trail of the elusive—and, to this crowd, infamous—Slime Mold Time Mold. An excited and curious collection of evangelicals gathered around. Between forkfuls of mash, and with a hushed air of reverence, a kind-looking enthusiast asked me if I had learned the true identity of ‘the Slimes.’ 

In fact, I had been emailing Slime Mold Time Mold for weeks, receiving long, arcane, stimulating replies, all written in the collective voice and all signed SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD. The About page of their website listed three initials, ‘E & S & R’, which made me think there were three of them, though I had no other evidence for this. In truth they had already become a haunting presence in my life. I felt like they could be anyone and everyone. On the subway I peered at strangers and wondered if they too hosted pseudonymous science blogs in their spare time. The emails read like the disembodied voice of the internet. I was no closer to meeting them. 

At the party I could only disappoint the crowd. ‘I have no idea who they are. And I’ve promised them anonymity, anyway,’ I said, hoping I sounded like a serious journalist. I had another fear as I looked around the room: for all I knew, the mad scientists were among us.

Leave a comment

‘To us, the story is that we're on the cusp of a potential 21st century scientific revolution driven by the power of the internet,’ the collective voice of Slime Mold Time Mold told me in one email. ‘There’s a huge appetite for mad science right now, because the failings of academic science have become so obvious. Mysteries are lying around in plain view for anyone to see them; theorizing costs nothing but your time; and empirical research is cheaper and easier than you think.’ 

One of those mysteries, they say, is obesity itself. Before 1900, obesity seems to have affected just 3.4% of adult American men. By 1976, people had become a little heavier – in developed countries obesity rates had crept up to about 10%. Then, suddenly, something changed. By 2000, the CDC reported obesity among 30.5% of adult Americans. By the year 2020, the rate had increased to 41.9%. What happened in 1976, they ask, and why, in the face of history’s largest public health campaign, has obesity spread unimpeded?

That is the starting question of A Chemical Hunger, a viral, and contested, series of blog posts written by Slime Mold Time Mold insisting the obesity epidemic is not close to being understood. On top of querying obesity’s recent acceleration, Slime Mold Time Mold ask a slew of related questions to further undermine our confidence in the standard explanations.

What, for example, accounts for research of hunter-gatherer communities suggesting that non-industrial people stay lean no matter what they eat, nor how often they exercise? Why does data seem to suggest that animals—lab animals, domesticated animals, and wild animals—also all appear to be getting fatter? Why does “palatable human food”, what is occasionally referred to as “a cafeteria diet”, trigger more overeating and weight gain than equally-caloric other foods? Why are (and this is my favorite) people at higher altitudes much, much leaner than people at lower altitudes? And finally, why don’t diets work? People, it seems, used to stay thin without trying: now they can’t get thin by trying. Something, Slime Mold Time Mold suggest, has changed.

There is a conventional wisdom about obesity: it is what happens when people consume more calories than they burn. Overweight people simply eat too much and exercise too little. This view, sometimes referred to by researchers as CICO (Calories In, Calories Out) is so intuitive as to be nearly unassailable. It has become common sense to the extent that it today defines government health initiatives around the world. Defending his proposal to reduce the cup size of sugary drinks in New York City, then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg equated CICO with the laws of physics. “If you want to lose weight, don’t eat. This is not medicine, it’s thermodynamics. If you take in more than you use, you store it.”

For years, that narrative has flattered the ego of those of us with “normal” BMIs. Lean bodies, the story went, must be the result of healthy decisions. Because those behaviors are understood as virtues, thinness is virtue embodied. Conversely, people who fall outside of the “normal” bandwidth ought to feel something closer to shame. If obesity is mere thermodynamics, fat people just must not be disciplined enough. That makes the shame justified – even constructive. The title of one column in The Times last October was explicit: ‘Fat shaming is only way to beat obesity crisis’. 

This story oversimplifies the matter to the point of dishonesty. Expending more energy than is consumed brings about weight loss, but many of the factors that determine energy input and output appear to be outside of conscious control. Rather than being mere sites of caloric exchange, our bodies seem to have ways of managing our fat levels beyond simply storing fat or exercising: candidates range from fidgeting to changes in body temperature to the regulation of sleep, fatigue, and, of course, appetite. How much fat a body stores or sheds varies drastically from body to body, even when diet and exercise are controlled for. Twin studies, in which one pair of twins gains more weight than another pair, suggest that much of this is genetic. And overfeeding studies, in which subjects are fed massive caloric surpluses, seem to show that it’s extraordinarily difficult for lean bodies to gain and hold weight. As soon as the forced-surpluses end, the subjects shed their added weight faster than they ever gained it.

For overweight people, the idea of plummeting back to a “normal” BMI without effort must sound miraculous. Overweight people, that is, most people in most modern industrial societies, experience something close to the inverse. Their bodies also whiplash to an equilibrium, but that equilibrium is set higher than those of their leaner peers. Along the way they feel hunger and fatigue more acutely.

This is to say that, even if different bodies did store and shed calories identically, the subjective experience of this process would be far harder on some humans than others. It is this fact that has propelled the recent craze for semaglutide – the drug interacts with the parts of the brain that suppress appetite. It allows people to experience the world as leaner people do.

The observation that bodies have automatic, non-conscious ways of shedding or conserving energy, up to and including the subjective experiences of hunger and fatigue, should be devastating for our conventional fat-shaming wisdom. “[CICO] seems to exist mostly to make lean people feel smug,” writes Stephen Guyenet, an obesity researcher, “since it attributes their leanness entirely to wise voluntary decisions and a strong character. I think at this point, few people in the research world believe the CICO model.”

Instead, a pool of scientific literature suggests that our bodies regulate fat levels just as they regulate other things, like body temperature: homeostatically. And here we come to the radical thesis of A Chemical Hunger. Slime Mold Time Mold argue that, since the 1970s, human lipostats (think thermostats, but for body fat) have been reset higher and higher.

Until the late 20^th century, they suggest, obesity was rare because bodies regulated towards a “healthy” BMI. It was easy to stay thin because you weren’t fighting against your internal settings. But now, as if your house thermostat were reset to 90 degrees, human bodies are increasingly “set” to overweight and obese levels of fat. The best explanation for this change, they think, is that environmental contaminants are affecting our brains, and, in their view, one likely culprit is lithium in our water and in our food. This is how they answer the mystery of obesity, and how they explain the success of the potato diet. There’s something in potatoes, they suggest, that helps to undo the effect of whatever is raising our lipostats.

The lithium theory of obesity is the type of claim that, if found to be true, would change the course of human history. And while the idea is not unheard of in academic science, it has rarely received such treatment as in A Chemical Hunger. Perhaps that is part of the reason why, over and over again, when I spoke to academics about a team of online anonymous bloggers conducting experiments they hope will cure obesity, the response has been one of skepticism. In the words of one expert I spoke to, who wished to remain anonymous, ‘this situation has a lot of red flags for me. Anonymous authors with no obvious expertise, specious arguments, “everything you thought you knew is wrong”, “this one idea explains everything”. It honestly boggles my mind that they got funding to pursue this.’

In a piece published to the Substack Slow Boring, the pundit Matt Yglesias wrote against the idea that the obesity epidemic is even particularly novel: to his mind, the change from 1976 is something of an accounting error. Meanwhile, Slime Mold Time Mold’s most vocal critic, a fellow online amateur named Natália Coelho Mendonça, was driven to write multiple rebuttals of their theory on the popular website LessWrong. Her work makes a range of counterclaims, including but not limited to: lithium exposure in the general population is pretty low; the data about obese animals is weak; and there’s evidence that the lower atmospheric pressure at higher altitudes drives down obesity.

In the meantime, the potato diet really does seem to work. Why? In the latter half of 2022, the researchers wondered if it might have something to do with the potato’s particularly high levels of potassium. To find out, they launched the Low-Dose Potassium Community Trial, inviting participants to take small doses of NU-SALT throughout the day. (With participant safety in mind, participants were asked to consume less than half the potassium one would get from the full-potato diet. High doses of potassium are particularly likely to be unsafe for people with kidney disease). After four weeks, participants lost weight on average, but not much: only 0.89 lbs (0.4 kgs). 

So the mad scientists turned back to potatoes. Wondering if eating half the potatoes would bring about half the weight loss, Slime Mold Time Mold launched the Half-Tato Community Trial, also to mixed results. Where full potato diet participants saw average weight loss of 10.6 lbs (4.8 kgs) over four weeks, the half potato diet averaged only 1.7 lbs (0.77 kgs) over the same period. Again – statistically significant weight loss, but nothing of the magnitude seen in the first trial.

The question remained: who were these mad scientists? This January, months after I first started corresponding with Slime Mold Time Mold, and just as I had begun to lose hope of ever discovering their identity, the elusive scientists invited me to visit them in Boston. I felt as though I was among the elect, specially chosen to glimpse behind the curtain of the world. I took the train up from New York, then the T from South Station to Harvard Square. At Grendel’s Den, the well-worn Cambridge student pub, I stepped inside, hurriedly, my eyes adjusting to the dark, and, after a moment, saw a group at a table in the back corner wave me over.

On the train I had taken the time to record my expectations for Slime Mold Time Mold. The mad scientists, I was confident, would be three men, grad students, all around thirty. They’d wear hiking sandals and go bouldering on the weekend. And though Slime Mold Time Mold asked that I give no identifying details in this piece, I will say this much: I was wrong on all counts.

Despite the atmosphere of secrecy, Slime Mold Time Mold insist that they are pseudonymous, not anonymous. When I pushed them on this, I felt a touch of defensiveness in the reply. ‘Writing under a pen name is very historically normal, so it always strikes us as kind of weird when people ask about our using a pseudonym. No one would think to ask George Orwell or Lewis Carroll why they wrote under pen names,’ one of them told me. ‘Anyway’, they said, ‘the research should stand by itself’. 

Slime Mold Time Mold are well-educated, astute, and worldly. Their personalities range from the pugilistic to the conciliatory. They are highly scientifically-literate and share a determined, even defiant, independent streak. They have no interest in public recognition, nor the validation of institutional research. When I asked them if they wanted to be taken seriously, they gave a flat ‘no’. Seriousness, they believe, is not an epistemic virtue.

Their attitude is infectious. Observing their willingness to be guided by their own lights, one feels a mixed sense of inadequacy and optimism. It is a reminder that many of us are more free than we allow ourselves to believe. I wanted to know how I too could liberate myself from the opinion of others, and received a koan-like reply. ‘The point is not to prove yourself,’ one of them said with a shrug. ‘It’s to express yourself.’

At Grendel’s Pub, what Slime Mold Time Mold most wanted to express to me were the failures of academic science. With them was their frequent collaborator Adam Mastroianni, research psychologist and writer of the Substack Experimental History. One of his most widely-shared posts, The Rise and Fall of Peer Review, received abusive correspondence from members of the scientific academy. He was unfazed. For every abusive comment, he received ten messages of support.

Slime Mold Time Mold’s concerns are familiar. The academic research system, defined by a rigid professionalization of science, has increasingly sought to ring-fence itself from the world, becoming exploitative, hierarchical, and dogmatic along the way. The radical spirit of science has been lost, and the result, the mad scientists say, is a sclerotic and wasteful process that produces far fewer meaningful results than it ought to. ‘It’s an absolute snooze-fest,’ Slime Mold Time Mold told me in an early email. The best analogy, they say, is a ‘zombie salmon’. Confused, I clicked the accompanying link: they’d sent me a 15 second amateur Youtube video of a salmon, dead and rotting, somehow upright against the current.

Ultimately, their biggest complaint is the attitude that research is for some people and not others. ‘The idea is that people are really dumb, and we have to protect them from bad ideas,’ Mastroianni put it. But that idea, they argue, is patronizing, undemocratic, and only makes the situation worse. Peer review, for instance, supposedly exists to ensure published papers are trustworthy and credible, but critics like Mastroianni argue that its real effect is to make published papers appear trustworthy and credible. A number of studies published over the last two decades put peer review to the test by deliberately submitting flawed papers for publication. The studies were remarkably consistent: peer review caught errors around 30% of the time. The paper that first claimed that vaccines cause autism, Slime Mold Time Mold remind me, was peer reviewed, and published in The Lancet, one of medicine’s most prestigious journals. It took twelve years for the editors of The Lancet to issue a retraction.

‘It can be frustrating when, on the internet, people criticize our work much more harshly than they criticize things that appear in peer reviewed journals,’ the mad scientists tell me later, over tea. I think of the swift and strong reactions from the academics I spoke to. ‘But we think ultimately it is encouraging, because work should be held to a really high standard.’

This year, in a series of blog posts they called N=1, Slime Mold Time Mold began to call upon their readers to experiment on themselves. One reader, going by the name Krinn, decided to continue her potassium trial, but slowly increase her intake until she got about 10,000 mg of potassium a day—the amount one might get from the full potato diet. In her study, published on Tumblr with the name ‘An Ad-Hoc, Informally-Specified, Bug-Ridden, Single-Subject Study Of Weight Loss Via Potassium Supplementation And Exercise Without Dieting’ Krinn reported that ‘I lost 30 pounds (13.6 kgs) in 6 months by chugging a bunch of potassium salt and exercising a lot.’ To the uninitiated, the exercise would appear to be a confounding factor, except Krinn insists that ‘My subjective experience is that cranking my potassium intake way up made it possible to do a lot more exercise than I had been doing without also eating a lot more.’ What could that mean?

‘One obvious alternate explanation for my successful weight loss’, Krinn writes, ‘is "well yeah, you doubled your exertion and kept your food intake the same, of course you lost weight."’ She goes on:

 ‘but I don't find that explanation satisfying. To start with, if it were that easy, people would do it more often. There are a tremendous number of people who would like to lose weight and a tremendous marketplace of devices, services, and professionals to help them use exercise for that purpose, and yet in a 20-year NCHS study, average exercise rose without obesity falling.’

Meanwhile, Krinn’s results—again, this is a sample size of one—were significantly more impressive than those of studies that measure exercise-only regimes. What Krinn and Slime Mold Time Mold want to suggest is that the potassium made it easier for her to go into caloric deficit without triggering lipostatic resistance. Or, put another way, ‘exercising more and eating less’, wrote Slime Mold Time Mold, 

‘is not an explanation any more than "the bullet" is a good explanation for "who killed the mayor?" Something about the potato diet lowered people's lipostat set point, which reduced their appetite, which yes made them eat fewer calories, which was part of what led them to lose weight. Yes, "fewer kcal/day" is somewhere in the causal chain. No, it is not an explanation.’

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, I called Slime Mold Time Mold to voice my doubts. I had, over the previous months, felt alternatively seduced and disenchanted by their lithium theory of obesity, but the results of the Potato Diet Community Trial could not be forgotten. On that front I had just one question: couldn’t the success of the potato diet just be a function of it being a mono-diet? Mono-diets are common stock in the fad diet world. If they work, the explanation could be more like the one Andrew Taylor offered: eating becomes boring. The mystery of obesity is not answered by lithium or lipostats but simply by the fact that modern food is too palatable. Mono-diets make food less palatable, which drives down appetite, which in turn drives down caloric intake. Returning to an unpalatable diet helps to reshape a person’s relationship with food, and that explains why it becomes easier to lose weight.

‘If there were other mono-diets that work, we think people would have found them,’ they told me. ‘You’d expect documentation.’ But there are people out there spruiking miracle mono-diets involving other foods, I replied, and the potato diet barely had documentation until Slime Mold Time Mold came along. Leanne Ratcliffe, for instance, an influencer known as Freelee the Banana Girl, endorses a ‘fruititarian’ diet and often goes days eating only bananas. It could be that studies involving mono-diets like hers would return similar results—the reason they haven’t been studied is that institutional science won’t touch it, and not everyone runs an anonymous science blog.

It’s possible, Slime Mold Time Mold told me, but they won’t think it is plausible until more testimony comes in. Part of science is intuitional, they say, and their intuition suggests other mono-diets won’t work. Still, one told me, ‘other people might have different intuitions, and that’s the beauty of empiricism: they can do their own study, and I think it could be very informative.’ To their credit, getting people with opposing views to run their own studies is a key tenet of the Slime Mold Time Mold philosophy. ‘Everything they need to start an N=1 study is on our blog right now,’ they reminded me. And then there’s institutional scientists, who, the mad scientists hope, will increasingly join the fray. ‘We would love’, they insisted, ‘someone to replicate our research under controlled academic conditions.’

Until that happens we may not be able to know whether these online anonymous scientists have achieved major advances in obesity research or have been chasing a red herring. Until then, you should know this: I have picked up a potato habit. Whenever I have nothing better to eat, I eat a bowl of potatoes. 

It happens easily enough. When my pantry is empty and I am on the verge of ordering Thai, I remember the sack of potatoes in the cupboard above my sink, and I remember Andrew Taylor and Chris Voigt and the miracle that is the close-to-nutritional-completeness of the humble spud. I think of the potato’s journey: native to South America, cultivated there by the people of the Andes, before being brought to Europe in the 1500s. I think of the potato blight: its first instances in the north-eastern states of the USA; its export to Europe and to Ireland; its decimation of the Irish potato stock, in particular, and therefore the Irish people, in particular (the Irish depending on a single susceptible strain of potato, the Irish Lumper). I think then of the triggering of the emigration of around a million Irish men and women: many to the north-eastern states of the USA, the place from which the blight first sprung.

Pretty soon I find myself, knife in hand, chopping my potatoes into pieces, dribbling olive oil across them, and sprinkling them with salt. I put them in the oven at some arbitrary temperature and, as I wait, I consider the slight, unlikely, thrilling possibility that strangers on the internet are managing to do what fifty years of professional research science has failed to do: solve the mystery of obesity.

Or they might be totally wrong. I consider this, too, as I douse my spuds in hot sauce, feeling at once compelled and uncertain, and I remember an early Slime Mold Time Mold email. ‘To be clear, we started doing all this to have fun,’ they wrote at the time. ‘But a scientific revolution does seem like a natural next step.’