In our last summer-break podcast two-fer, we’re re-running two very different conversations on sex and race, with two very different characters: Louise Perry and Glenn Loury. Next Friday we’ll be back with fresh Dish as the new season of Dishness kicks off after Labor Day with some great guests lined up for the fall.

We’ll also be introducing Weekly Dish 3.0! Stay tuned.

Louise is a writer and campaigner against sexual violence. She co-founded a non-partisan, feminist think tank called The Other Half, and she’s currently a WSJ columnist and the host of the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast. In this 2022 episode, we discussed her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century.

A polished transcript is here. Money quotes from Louise:

• On sex drive: “The problem with our current straight culture is it encourages women to imitate male sexuality, and they don’t want to. I mean, men don’t want to imitate female sexuality either. But my feminist principle is that it’s better to be sexually frustrated than to have unwanted sex.”

• On Tinder: “My argument is that the only people [on Tinder] who are really benefiting are the really high-status men, at least the ones who want to take advantage of all the pleasures offered by sexual liberation.”

• On the biggest losers: “Is it men? Is it women? It’s actually children who are the main losers from the sexual revolution and the destruction of the institution of marriage.”

• On BDSM: “I do wonder if part of the reason that BDSM has become common among straight people is because we live such gender-neutral lives … It is interesting to me that what BDSM is most of the time is an exaggeration of masculinity and femininity.”

You can find two clips on YouTube: on whether Louise finds it suitable to watch porn while married, and if gay promiscuity is more harmful than straight promiscuity.

Below is a ton of listener commentary we posted back then. To start:

Thank you for giving your full-throated defense of — no, paean to — masculinity and the male sex drive! That it had to come from a middle-aged gay man is a sad commentary on the cowed submissive state of the progressive heterosexual males of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), especially the castrati of academia. They wouldn’t have DARED say out loud that sex is inherently invasive.

That observation made this next listener understandably uneasy:

I very much enjoyed your episode with Louise Perry. However, I became uncomfortable with the discussion around violence/violation as a necessary and desirable part of intercourse. From the perspective of a gay man, that may make perfect sense.

However, for most women I know, the very best kind of relationship is one where the greater strength of the man is acknowledged, but this is held in check and used gently out of respect and love for their partner. In my experience, what women most often love and admire about men is their ability to do this, both in intercourse and as part of the wider context of a man using his power to sustain and support his family, rather than to dominate and overcome them. You did not seem really to listen to Ms. Perry on this topic.

I am a rape survivor. So I felt this part of the conversation strayed uncomfortably towards the acceptance of violence in intercourse as normal. This is widely promulgated in our society, often through pornography, and I believe it needs to be forcibly challenged. In my view, this is one of the most damaging areas of misogyny in modern society and is hiding in plain sight. We can think, for example, of the messaging amongst Metropolitan police officers and the appalling crimes of Wayne Couzens, as well as the crimes of R. Kelly. This, in my view, is why Ms. Perry’s book is so important.

Of course I agree. But I stand by my point that the sheer act of repeated, rapid penetration of another person’s body — which is intrinsic to humans and not all animal species — is inherently a form of violence. All the more reason to be extremely careful with it.

Another on that theme:

Louise Perry and Jill Filipovic were on Bari Weiss’s episode entitled “Sex, Porn, Feminism: A Debate!” I commented that the next time the topic includes men, sex, and porn, it would be best to have at least one man to offer the male perspective. I think women have difficulty understanding men’s sexual appetite, porn, and masturbation. You challenged Perry way more than Weiss did, and that forced her to think more about her position and dig deeper into her reasons for the conclusions she makes.

Rod Dreher wasn’t a fan of my position:

What is astonishing — and depressing, as someone who likes and respects Sullivan — is how completely consumed he is by sexual desire, such that he believes the world should be ordered to fulfilling his sexual desire.

I’m not sure how Rod infers that I am “completely consumed by sexual desire.” It would be hard to put out the Dish each week if I were completely consumed by it.

I just don’t believe sexual desire and consensual sex with other adults is somehow inherently morally wrong. I know this is not in line with Catholic teaching, and I’m grateful Rod accepts that this conflict is between me and my God. Sex can be wrong, of course. It can be abusive; it can reduce a human to sex and nothing else; it can be compulsive and unhealthy. But it is also a source of intense pleasure — an intensity wired into our highly sexualized species — and this is a natural good. Christianity did not see sex this way, and saw it as a distraction from the divine and a surrender to lust or sin. Only monogamous lifetime marriage made sex morally permissible. While I deeply admire monogamous lifetime marriages, I think that stricture is way too tight for most people, and a little concession to our natural realities is prudent.

As to Rod’s view that I believe “the world should be ordered to fulfilling his sexual desire,” I really don’t understand what he’s saying. My only position on the ordering of the world is that gays and straights should have the same access to civil marriage; and that the state should stay out of everyone’s bedrooms, gay and straight. That’s not about my sexual desire. It’s about a liberal society.

As to the broader context, this pod episode was not my chance to explain my own sexual ethics or beliefs. I wanted to foreground Louise’s book because I think it has a lot of wisdom in it, expressed lucidly and well. My role on the Dishcast is to interrogate my guest’s views, to push back, to play the devil’s advocate as it were. So some of what I said was deliberately provocative. I was trying to air some views that are often privately expressed but taboo in public. That doesn’t mean I endorse all of them.

There can be some joy in fucking around — but also a lot of misery and loneliness if you can never attach sex to love and intimacy. And there is a mismatch here between men and women. Our entire civilization is testimony to that.

Another dissent from a listener:

Last week I disagreed with your comments about circumcision affecting male sexual pleasure. This week it’s about most of your comments about male drives in your interview with Louise Perry. I don’t much argue with your views on male sexual “drives”, but I do have a problem with your apparent difficulty “getting” that there are other “drives” — often contradictory, but equally often compelling among many heterosexual men: the desire to create and foster a family that gives them pleasure and purpose.

Most of my relationships with openly homosexual men have come in my dotage, and with men in their dotage. Most have taken advantage of recent changes in the law and married partners. My guess is that their organs, like mine, are no longer a great match with their physical desires.

Of course. Here’s another along similar lines:

As partnered men, we have a choice. Invest in what you’ve got and do what you can to make it better by building love around the body of your partner, however flawed. Alternatively, you could invest outside the relationship in search of better bodies and a more exciting sexual experience. Investing in your partner is costly but ultimately rewarding. Investing in your own desire for something “better” will ultimately be unsatisfying and will undermine your relationship further. I know — I’ve tried it!

Here’s a reminder of Perry’s views on married men who want to watch porn:

This next listener suggests that men can have the best of both worlds with their partner:

Your assertion that men are only briefly sexually aroused/satisfied by their wives tells me that you have, at best, limited imagination. Sex within a long marriage can be infinitely varied. It is also a man’s best chance of being loved sexually into his old age, wherein adjustments need to be made for infirmity or other age-related realities. Tenderness can be important.

What about the single men who have a high sex drive but don’t have the status or looks to compete in the sexual marketplace? A listener tackles the question:

I loved your interview with Louise Perry. As a pro-sex individualist who likes porn, I expected to be unimpressed by her. But in fact, she was consistently persuasive and made me rethink a lot of my views.

Whenever we talk about males having a greater appetite for promiscuity, the conversation always takes a tone that implies straight men have more sex than straight women. But this can’t be true. For every heterosexual coupling there is one male and one female participant. Add them all up and the total encounters by all straight men and total encounters by all straight women must be equal. Therefore, if it is true (and I think it is) that there is a population of horny men that has a lot of sex with a lot of women, it must also be true that there is a corresponding population of men that is having little or no sex at all. When you consider *all* men, not just the most successful, the fact is that the average man is no more promiscuous than the average woman.

But in fact we do consider just the most successful. Among media’s many systemic biases is that it pays more attention to the people at the top. When comparing men to women — whether it’s promiscuity, intelligence, income, or what-have-you — we’re usually unintentionally comparing just the top tier of men against the top tier of women. Inevitably that skews the picture. If we looked only at the bottom tier of men, all these comparisons would look very different.

Another turns to STDs:

A couple of instances during your Perry episode, you reference antibiotics as a reason why women can continue to partake in the sexual revolution. However, we must not overlook the issue of antimicrobial resistance. Due to AMR, patients and physicians are increasingly running out of treatment options. Drug-resistant gonorrhea is very much an issue, and it impacts both women and men (particularly painful among men) in our most marginalized communities.

Plus, we now have urinary tract infections that are resistant to antibiotics. Any woman will tell you that UTIs can arise from sex, and it makes sex far less pleasurable. This is not to mention the pervasiveness of drug resistant UTIs in lower resourced countries.

(In full disclosure, on behalf of private industry, I lobby for public policy incentives to address the market barriers for new antibiotics. Without continued innovation, we will encounter a situation where we cannot rely upon antibiotics as a countermeasure against STIs.)

By the way, I recently listened to Bari Weiss’s podcast, where she hosted a debate on liberalism featuring Patrick Deneen and Bret Stephens. There is an interesting alignment between Deneen (coming from the post-liberal right) and Louise Perry (from the post-liberal left) regarding the return to family as a response to the excesses of liberalism. Of course, their respective motivations are different, but interesting nonetheless.

Points duly taken. From a conservative Christian:

Louise Perry is a breath of fresh air. It seems you put your finger on a missing piece in her project when you asked what her framework was — natural law, Judeo-Christian morality, something else? Based on this interview and her debate with the camgirl Aella, Perry’s conclusions sound primarily consequence-based:

In an artificial world where women were never trafficked against their will, were always protected against violence, and never entered prostitution as part of a downward spiral into addiction and despair, Perry doesn’t clearly articulate any prima facie ethical reservations about paid sex. It’s just that we don’t live in that world; we live in reality.

Of course, I listen to Perry as a MNGA Christian (Make Natural-law Great Again) and I think to myself that she really is more or less reinventing natural law, but without putting the word “law” to any of it.

At the same time, I did find your side of the argument quite thin, particularly the discussion of porn. One element not touched on is the frighteningly young age at which children are now accessing and internalizing hardcore material. A very good friend of mine became addicted to porn in the era of Playboy magazine, then went on to make gay porn in the 1990s. It still amazes him that the kind of material he used to create in an obscure corner of the black market is now a click away for any 10-year-old with unfettered Internet. This alone seems like it should be sufficient reason to approve of a large-scale legal crackdown.

But beyond this, it should be clear that porn has a corrosive effect on the mind and soul of any viewer, which Perry unpacks quite capably, even though she seems as shy of the word “soul” as she is of the word “law.”

Also, tired as ever is your straw man of the Christian position as anti-pleasure. Just because Augustine over-corrected for his youthful hedonism doesn’t mean he gets the final word on all things pertaining to Christianity and sex. Yes, it is true that Christianity allows for only one context in which sex may be licitly enjoyed, but within that context, it is quite obviously meant to be enjoyed as much as lies within the couple’s power. Sexual pleasure is so strictly circumscribed precisely because it is such a potent and wonderful thing. Indeed, it was God’s idea to begin with.

On the discussion of gay male promiscuity, I can’t come up with a more succinct summary comment than this snatch of dialogue from Larry Kramer’s Faggots, so I’ll give him the last word:

“You don’t want to know why you do the things you do?”
“No. Why should I?”
“So you might stop doing them.”
“I like doing them. If I knew why I did them, I might not like doing them anymore.”

Regarding the listener’s point that sex is “quite obviously meant to be enjoyed as much as lies within the couple’s power,” The Onion articulated that position well in its classic piece, “Local Lutheran Minister Loves To Fuck His Wife.” But there’s also some data on how married couples have more sex than unmarried ones, which certainly implies they’re enjoying it.

Yet another on porn:

I found your interview with Perry very interesting. Please, please investigate and interview Gail Dines — she is the world’s leading expert on how porn has changed and the devastating effect it has had on our culture — men and women. (She also has lots of interesting things to say about trans women.)

I’m a straight white feminist and the mother of two sons. Porn and the pornification of our culture is my number one issue. And it is grossly misunderstood by the wider culture (yourself included). Today’s porn is not the porn we grew up with, nor is the access to it what we grew up with.

Being anti-porn does NOT mean you are anti-sex (a tired old stereotype) — quite the opposite. Porn is suffocating sexuality.

“The larger issue is technology,” another insists, “primarily smartphones”:

In the newest generation to come of age, the most important relationship people have is with ... their phones, not other people. People live in their phones. Yes, this has been made worse by the pandemic, but it was there all along. As a result, a lot of these newly-reported mental health issues stem from interpersonal social interaction. It’s a generalization, but Gen Z feels awkward around people. People don’t know how to talk to other people. As a result, people don’t know how to woo other people, date other people, and get engaged to other people in the same numbers as prior generations.

Sometimes the explanation to a mystery is right in front of your nose. In this case literally — your screen.

On the general effect of tech:

I have my quibbles with Perry’s qualitative and somewhat unscientific analysis, but I don’t disagree with her on much of what she says. Fortunately, despite the current post-liberal theme of the Dishcast, there are likely ways to regulate and deal with some of her concerns within a liberal framework, namely through regulation of social media platforms, of which most online porn sites certainly qualify.

Just as the problem with Twitter isn’t so much free speech as much as it is the amplification effect, the robots, and the opaqueness in what’s being fed to the reader and why, it isn’t so worrisome to me that people are fucking on screen — or even engaging in some of the less mainstream behavior Perry worries about, like BDSM. The bigger set of issues is that anyone — including 13-year-olds — can get porn; that all the incentives are aligned to make it more extreme; and none of the incentives are aligned to cause people any hesitation or effort whatsoever.

Your prior guest Jonathan Haidt has one suggestion that would translate well across all platforms.

One might imagine Twitter (or YouTube comments sections or Facebook discussions) as becoming better with age restrictions, identity verification, and transparency of how the algorithms select and promote content. The same is true of porn websites: If these content aggregators absolutely and authoritatively had to verify IDs, complete age checks, collect tax IDs of people uploading content, and so on, one might imagine at least some dampening effects.

Indeed, I’m in my 40s, so remember the Herculean (and yet arguably worthwhile) effort it took to hunt down a single Playboy. Or the deliberate efforts required to sort through but not noticeably disturb a friend’s dad’s closet … only to discover his dusty Betamax videos wouldn’t play on a VHS VCR.

Compare that to any teenager suddenly having zero barriers to hundreds of hours of every specialized fetish video imaginable. It’s not hard to fathom how a teen boy’s mind is nudged and shaped by being fed unlimited tailored content. And conversely, it’s easy to see how people might have a bit more hesitancy, modesty, or even shame when a verified ID is tied to an account, when comments are associated to a real person; when viewership records are forever linked to one’s account; and when the content one uploads has at least some more barriers to entry involved in the process — or in the case of teen boys, having to commit fraud to get on a site.

As is often the case, the concerns of the far right with the degradation of norms or morals are not unjustified, even to this lefty. There’s clear evidence that our worst impulses are being served by the advances in technology that amplify the effects of porn (or conspiracy theories, woke rhetoric, white nationalist rantings, et cetera). But as is often the case on both the far left and far right, there are too many with the impulse to clamp down on individuals as though we can regulate people’s libidos.

To Perry’s credit, she tries to avoid that trap by favoring carrots rather than sticks. But there’s more we can do than she might think — namely, in the case of Twitter, PornHub, et al, to regulate platforms rather than people. The technology to do this exists; though sadly, I’m not sure the political will or expertise is as plentiful.

Great points. I wouldn’t be against most of that.

From a single parent:

Reading your post makes me turn to you with this question: Are children raised by same-sex couples as “disadvantaged” as kids raised by single parents? (I don’t think there’s enough good science teasing out the variables (single/couple; married/common law; divorced/remarried; lesbian/gay/mixed sex; poor/financially stable), so am interested in informed, thoughtful opinion.)

I’m a staunchly independent, old, white, tomboy-type woman who likes men. I was raised Roman Catholic, left that decades ago, wanted a male partner but not a marriage, and I’m a single parent. While your views on the importance of a father in child-raising irk me, mine is an unscientific, emotional response. I do feel child-raising is much harder for a single parent. I most missed having another person’s invested, caring point of view when facing child-raising issues.

On the other hand, I raised a daughter. Had I birthed a son, I’m not sure I could have pulled it off.

I think the data are very clear that having a father in a child’s life, especially a son’s, is extremely important to the child’s future health and happiness. But there are countless exceptions to this rule. It’s quite possible for single mothers to find male authority figures to fulfill that role in part. Same-sex parents also often make sure that there is an adult of the opposite sex in their children’s lives.

Lastly, one more dissent:

Let me first say that I am such a supporter and fan. I have considered myself a Dishhead, and I value and respect your commentary, insight and perspective. But I end up feeling, often when you discuss female issues, an inability on your part to in any way try to have a perspective of what it feels like to be a woman (both biological and culturally, in this case).

Perhaps some women do enjoy rough sex and “get their rocks off” on being like a man. But you try to have it both ways in this episode — either portraying women as totally unlike men in their sexual appetites and sensibility, or, reducing them down to that when it suits you.

You cannot separate women’s attitudes about sex from the culture we swim in. From an early age we often feel violated and threatened by the gaze of men, the physical presence of men, their reducing us — as soon as we reach adolescence —to an object of desire. I don’t think you have any idea how dehumanizing that can be. I don’t think you try.

Even my ex-jock brother-in-law could, for one moment in his life, empathize: when he had a broken ankle and found himself alone in a bad part of Belize City. For the first time in his life, he felt what it was like to be physically vulnerable. And thus for the first time in his sexist life, he felt — he admitted, if only during that brief half hour — what women might feel. I wish you could too.

And I do try to feel what it is like as a gay man to be demeaned as a “faggot” and “queer.” And the worst insult they labeled you as? That you were one of us, a girl. So, yeah, that should give you some perspective about just what the pecking order is.

I won’t pretend I have the lived experience of a woman. I’m sorry when that means I’m occasionally tone-deaf or insensitive or just clueless. But of course I understand that sense of vulnerability and can empathize with it deeply. And I can invite women like Louise on the Dishcast to help me (and listeners) better understand and engage. My own immersion in a largely male-dominated subculture can be blinding — but it also offers a perspective into the male psyche outside the female presence that might be helpful to the debate about sex and liberation.

Listeners continued the debate (and TMI) here.

See you next Friday.

In our last summer-break podcast two-fer, we’re re-running two very different conversations on sex and race, with two very different characters: Glenn Loury and Louise Perry. Next Friday we’ll be back with fresh Dish as the new season of Dishness kicks off after Labor Day with some great guests lined up for the fall.

We’ll also be introducing Weekly Dish 3.0! Stay tuned.

Glenn is an academic, writer, and podcaster. At the age of 33, he became the first African-American professor of economics at Harvard to get tenure. He’s currently the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Economics at Brown University, a columnist for UnHerd, and co-host of The Glenn Show, alongside John McWhorter. In this early 2023 episode, we talked about Glenn’s incredibly colorful life, and he subsequently published his memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. So in this conversation we got a preview of the book: the product of a remarkable American life.

Read a polished transcript here. Money quotes from Glenn:

• “I’m a black kid from the South Side of Chicago. Those are my people. That was the pull for me to reorient myself. I was unhappy with my life as a token and a mascot. That was the unfriendly way of putting it. But there was some truth in that.”

• “Don’t make us [black Americans] into clients. Don’t make us into wards. Don’t make us into a project. Don’t patronize us.”

• “I wouldn’t take solving the racial wealth gap as a goal of public policy, to be honest with you … Why not simply address ourselves, to the extent that we’re concerned about the lack of wealth of some quarters in the society, to the lack of wealth? What’s race got to do with it?”

• “I did not abandon the South Side. I transcended it. … I’m not less black for being, as it were, a free man.”

You can hear two clips on YouTube — how the insistence on the permanence of “white supremacy” hurts African-Americans, and how we are all “hypocrites” to some extent. Other topics covered: Glenn’s parents dealing with him as a prodigy; dropping out of college with a newborn; rebounding to MIT and Harvard; being ostracized by the black cognoscenti; his drug addiction; his conversion to Christianity; his loss of faith; falling out with the neocon right; the racial wealth gap; and affirmative action.

A fan wrote at the time, “I really enjoyed the Glenn Loury episode — disarmingly honest and very human.” Another:

I enjoyed hearing about Glenn’s personal journey — something I hadn’t been aware of before. Thanks for that.

My one wish would have been at the end of the interview, instead of the extended expressions of mutual admiration, I would have liked to hear you both talk about how we support those who do not have the intellects you have to heal and live full lives. You both overcame great adversity and I do not discount your efforts. But you also had the brains to get to Harvard, and from there into a high-economic strata that allows you the benefits of good healthcare, vacations, good child care, etc — quality-of-life items that many of my neighbors in upstate New York will not have access to no matter how hard they work.

There are a lot of regular people in the world who have a lot of shitty things happen to them, burying them under economic catastrophe and opportunity disadvantage that they will never get out from under. They don’t have the intellect to reinvent themselves. It cannot be that pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps is the only answer, as some don’t even have boots to pull on.

I often wonder how as a society we can have some kind of hybrid between letting individual intelligence, ambition, etc. flourish and be rewarded, and also something that makes the lives of ordinary people less grueling. That would have been something I’d have liked to hear you and Glenn talk about.

I agree with you. In fact, Charles Murray and I discussed those themes on the Dishcast, and here’s a key excerpt:

Similar themes cropped up during our episode with David Goodhart — author of Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect. A clip from that pod:

Back to the Glenn pod, another listener:

I can’t stop myself from adding to your discussion of the racial wealth gap the simple observation that we have for a century taxed the creation of wealth while subsidizing consumption — instead of doing the more common-sense opposite: get the boot off of the throat of wealth creation and use consumption taxes to fund collective objectives.

Political “reality” is oft cited as the reason we can’t reform this system, but technology and communication are getting closer to helping us change that reality. Plus, the transition from wealth taxes to consumption taxes can be made wealth-neutral, income-neutral, or progressive with Unconditional Basic Income algorithms. You would do well to have Andrew Yang and Scott Santens on the Dishcast to contemplate how we might come up with policy algorithms to, for example, help more pre-K kids get the sort of love and attention to prepare them to succeed where so many others are failing. (Just one upside of UBI.)

Another responded to both Glenn and a Dish thread related to race:

You published a revealing letter from someone who reads scripts in Hollywood. It was refreshing to see this insider acknowledge the strong taboo against portraying black characters in a negative light. Complicated characters offer far richer possibilities for dramatization than simplistic ones, and as another reader observed, it also undermines writers’ entertainment objectives.

Recently, I watched HBO’s The Undoing, a psychological thriller:

The show had the makings of an excellent whodunnit, at least until the fourth episode (out of six). That was when suspicion seemed to fall upon Fernando, a surly, tough-looking Puerto Rican from East Harlem. Any sentient viewer could see this was a misdirection. HBO was never going to make a show where the affluent white suspect was exonerated, and the underprivileged dark-skinned guy was the killer. So, that did it for The Undoing.

Is this too trivial an issue to draw attention to? I don’t think so. When I was younger, Hollywood had the reverse problem. Screenwriters and filmmakers failed to show the full spectrum of humanity. They tended to overlook African-Americans, or else they presented them simplistically or cartoonishly. Often enough, the portrayals were offensive.

But now, in Hollywood — as in so many other places — we’ve replaced one form of chauvinism (that disadvantaged African-Americans) with another (that elevates them). The point is simple and obvious, yet remarkable in its capacity for causing “offense.” To simply argue that people should be treated equally, as individuals, rather than on the basis of group identity, is to open oneself to torrents of bad-faith criticisms, gaslighting, and splenetic abuse. (I can hear the Dish’s critics in my mind’s eye: “Why are Andrew Sullivan’s readers so invested in wanting to seeing POC portrayed as rapists and murders?”)

Relatedly, I loved your conversation with Glenn Loury. I found myself chuckling as Glenn talked about his uncle, from the South Side of Chicago, who accidentally flirted with the trans economist and spit out his fancy hors d’oeuvres at the Harvard reception. It was a comic scene, expertly told, with mirth, warmth, and insight.

But it probably could not be portrayed in Hollywood.

Mostly recently on Glenn’s own podcast, he had a righteous rant against the bigotry and low expectations of Cambridge regarding Jason Arday. Here’s a longer video about Arday on The Glenn Show, led by McWhorter:

Here’s a Dish reader in the London, responding to my column on Arday (and the Trump cult):

Numerous public figures here in the UK, including Mayor Sadiq Khan, have expressed outrage at the intense media scrutiny that Jason Arday endured prior to his death. Many have signed a petition calling for public inquiry, describing the media coverage as “two weeks of relentless harassment,” “vicious witch hunt”, “horrible media attention.” They insist the campaign was racist because other individuals accused of plagiarism in academia “had not been subjected to the attention Arday had received.”

First of all, all public figures who have anomalies in their background are going to be subject to media scrutiny. Secondly, this was a BFD. We’re not talking about a professor at a backwater university, but someone at one of the top 10 universities in the world, and one that was under pressure to increase its minority representation of both students and faculty. As a big story, the media went after it. That’s what they do; that’s what they always do.

Therefore, the idea that the media scrutiny of Mr. Arday was racist is highly questionable. Given his fragile mental condition, the intense media scrutiny was in all likelihood the immediate cause of his death, and it’s understandable that his friends and colleagues — especially those who rallied around him and supported in his final days — are outraged. However, the root cause of this man’s death was not racism in the media, but the fact that one of the top universities in the world compromised its standards to hire a minority candidate who clearly was not qualified for the position. This is what ultimately led to the tragic death of Mr. Arday.

One more on the Arday tragedy:

Commentators have been predicting the end of the Trump and woke cults for several years now, but like Rasputin, these cults keep on rising from what should be fatal blows and causing more havoc. And the reason is the same: What is the alternative to these cults?

I won’t speak to the haplessness of the Democrats, but academia faces ethically bleak prospects. Conservatives rightly deplore the basic unfairness that leads to white professors being shut out of an extremely competitive job market while less qualified minority PhDs receive abundant offers. (I’m thinking of Jukka Savolainen and Kevin McCaffree’s statistics about sociology hires, and the situation for white humanities professors is far worse.)

But is the only alternative to this unfairness “race realism”? If one wants to understand why British academics have defended Jason Arday for as long as they have, it may be because his principal accuser was Nathan Cofnas, who has argued that, in a true meritocracy, the number of black professors at Harvard “would approach zero percent.” I don’t believe that the situation is as bad as Cofnas says. (I know plenty of brilliant and objectively accomplished minority academics.) But the numbers are still dire. We don’t want to live in a world where a chancer like Arday is feted as a major intellectual, but do we want to live in a world where there are hardly any black faculty at our elite institutions?

The question is, can we learn to live with equality of opportunity without equality of outcome? In the state of nature, there is no law dictating that equal numbers of men and women and proportionate numbers of different ethnic groups will be attracted to and thrive in every endeavor. Over 80 percent of young people going into veterinary science are women. Over 80 percent of young people going into mathematical physics are men. About 90 percent of the winners in the Scripps spelling bee in the past two decades have been South Asian. Do these lopsided figures reflect an unjust situation that needs to be corrected? Or would efforts to correct this situation be what creates the injustice?

It seems to me that we want to foster a culture where people feel supported in environments where members of their sex, race, or ethnicity are rare — but not by artificially inflating the numbers of their sex, race, or ethnicity, and in doing so, tarring them with the brush of a “DEI hire.” But that is more easily said than done.

Here’s one more email for the week, from the VFYW’s architect-sleuth responding to the invite to a BBQ posted in the latest contest:

If there is still room, I’d like to come down from NYC and join the sleuth meetup in Alexandria on September 26. I’m glad someone suggested it. I have long thought it would be fun to meet other sleuths.

My carriage house, which I’ve talked about on the VFYW a few times, would have been a nice location for a future meetup, but as it happens, last month we got an unsolicited offer for it. Since we are empty nesters and were considering downsizing anyways, we accepted. We are temporarily going to rent for the next year or two while we look for the next apartment / renovation project.

Since we currently don’t have much of a view, we’ve only been checking out rentals with views. Here are the views from the windows of the two finalists:

FYI, here’s a re-posting of the invite from the super-sleuth in Alexandria hosting the meetup:

Please join DMV-area VFYW enthusiasts for a Fall Picnic in our backyard on September 26 (Sept 27 rain-date) from 5-8 pm in the Delray neighborhood of Alexandria, VA. My husband and I are within walking distance of the Braddock Road (yellow/blue line) metro stop … no sleuthing required.

We’ll provide BBQ, a vegan dish, drinks, and cutlery for the first 50 RSVP participants. Please feel free to bring, if you’re inspired, a potluck dish to share, and VFYW memories encouraged ... with recipes!

We will provide further details to RSVP folks. (For example, there is free on-street parking, but it’s tight.) Let’s visit, share stories around the fire pit, and plot more VFYW adventures … with a group photo.

If you’re interested, RSVP to contest@andrewsullivan.com, including any plus-ones. And if you’d like to bring a small potluck offering, please note that as well, along with any ideas you might have for the meetup.

See you next Friday.

(The full Dish returns on September 4. In the meantime, we are re-airing a handful of the most downloaded episodes from the early years of the Dishcast.)

Charles is a writer, social scientist, and longtime friend. He currently holds the F.A. Hayek Chair Emeritus in Cultural Studies at AIE, and his many books include Losing Ground, The Bell Curve (co-authored with Richard Herrnstein), Coming Apart, Facing Reality, and Taking Religion Seriously (which we covered last year). In this May 2021 pod, he and I discussed Human Diversity — a book that received little attention compared to the others. If you think you know who Charles is from the way the MSM has portrayed him for years, this conversation may surprise you.

Like Cornel West, Charles is a one-off: absurdly brave (or dumb) in wading into truly touchy subjects, and always with reason. In many ways, I think if we’d been able to have a serious debate about The Bell Curve all those years ago — and I tried to encourage one — we might have avoided some awful subsequent mistakes. But we resorted to abuse and hysteria and went on to enact Woke 1.0 and, now, Woke 2.0.

Go here for a polished transcript of Charles. We also have three clips on YouTube: on the different career choices of high IQ women; the “unearned gift” of a high IQ; and IQ’s irrelevance to the human worth, dignity, and essential equality of all people.

Below are many of the listener emails we posted after the pod aired. One quick take:

Great to hear Charles Murray! I’m sure Twitter subsequently lost its mind — good. Screw ‘em. Has anyone been more unfairly maligned than this man?

Twitter was oddly quiet, actually. Another fan of the episode:

Oh jeez, Andrew — I can imagine the fun mail you’ll be getting for this one, but it’s the episode I’ve been really looking forward to! I found it both insightful and emotional.

What sticks out for me is the section about affirmative action. When Murray says that when he went to Harvard in 1961 there were few Blacks, and that you KNEW they absolutely deserved to be there on merit and academic acumen, that rang true. But then … there was no acknowledgement by him or you of the obverse: many of the white kids were there because of legacy or rich parents. I mean, isn’t that how Bush 43 ended up at Yale? There MUST be a recognition of that when talking about affirmative action.

Absolutely. I don’t want to end affirmative action before ending legacy admissions. They are inextricable acts of unfairness — but the long history of legacy discrimination makes it a higher priority. Here’s a dissent:

I find all this talk of race and IQ to be rather insulting to folks I dearly love. I would hope you could find a guest similar to Stephen Jay Gould (who’s dead) to provide a useful counterpoint to Charles Murray. Robert Bieder is still alive; he’s 82, and his book Science Encounters the Indian is a wonderful overview of the racist anthropology of the 19th century. If you’re going to give time to Murray, then you owe it to your listeners to give time to the scholars who helped us all understand that intelligence has nothing to do with the melanin content of a person’s skin or how they do on a test.

Obviously intelligence has nothing to do with melanin. But it is measurable, and real, and denial of this seems to me to be a denial of science. Another dissent:

First, I’ll lead with my background, which informs my thoughts on this: I was brought up by my Ashkenazi Jewish mother with a Yoruba/Nigerian father by blood (though not culturally). I’m in an odd space in the race wars.

The motivated reasoning on race and intelligence by the white community is something I’ve often observed but rarely have seen commented on. For example, somehow the difference between black and white is portrayed as profound, and yet somehow the difference between the Ashkenazi Jewish and Gentile communities is portrayed as less profound, even though the gaps are similar: about 1 standard deviation between each set of groups.

Also, in the case of the Jewish community, which has a lopsided verbal-loaded performance (visuospatial is below average from the Jewish community), if you just look at verbal ability, it’s likely a >1.5 standard deviation difference. Yet somehow the white community is fixated more on the black community, but doesn’t seem to really address the implications relative to the Jewish community.

More importantly, the discussion of IQ is too unsophisticated. For example, is it possible that “environmental” factors can cause a >1 standard deviation difference in IQ scores? Actually, the answer is “yes”, even obviously so, but due to reasons of motivated reasoning, this is almost never discussed. I refer to the Flynn Effect — a well-documented phenomenon, where psychologists in the industrialized world have noticed that IQ scores have been creeping upwards, to the extent that every 5-10 years they need to “re-center” their scores to keep the average down at 100. As a result, black Americans in 2020 actually get higher raw IQ scores than white Americans did in 1930.

What is the reason that Americans score so much higher today than they did in 1930? Health, education, computers? Who knows, but it’s profound enough that if psychologists didn’t recenter scores, today the average IQ score would be something like >120, which is absurd and can’t be right.

People like you make life harder for people like me. I am a gifted black American who doesn’t need more bigots wearing the cloak of reasoning from the likes of you or Murray. Are there differences between groups? Possibly. Is there bigotry? Certainly. Fighting against bigotry is ultimately more useful. It would be nice if you helped on this matter.

I agree that the white-Ashkenazi gap and the white-Asian gap are weirdly overlooked as well. There was evidence in 2020, for example, of a spike in Asian-American performance on SATs, because recent Asian immigrants — self-selected and CSIS-selected by intelligence over the last couple of decades — have pushed the average up. The same study shows SAT scores diving for everyone else. I wish we had more focus on this than on the white-black gap.

Equally, the Flynn Effect is well-known, but it does seem to have petered out over the last couple of decades — meaning that although IQ scores are indeed higher than they were decades ago, the mean differences among population groups hasn’t changed that much. That’s why they’re busy abolishing SATs — because they cannot do the racial engineering they want if objective reality counts. Get rid of the objective measurements and you can pretend we’re doing something real.

Speaking of Ashkenazi Jews and IQ, Murray back in 2007 wrote a lengthy piece for Commentary on the historical and cultural roots of “Jewish Genius.”

Yet another dissent:

Apparently every time you write about Christianity, I’m triggered — even as I listen to you from the safe space of my morning commute or evening neighborhood stroll. So I disagree with your assertion at the end of your episode with Charles Murray that Christianity provides, as I hear you, an irreplaceable societal value. From afar, it reads a bit more as nostalgia than an argument for something constructive.

I take less issue with your comparison of religion to wokeism than Murray’s to environmentalism, but either way, in what way are any of these secular self-righteous zealots different than the Christian self-righteous zealots marching out front of the Planned Parenthood clinic across the street from my house, their ghastly, spiteful, judgmental signs thrust rather proudly in front of them? While I’d place my divided opinions on that subject alongside your friend Caitlin Flanagan, they are less divided in wanting me to live life under their rules. And if I did, some in my long-time acquaintance would go so far as to feel pride that they’d saved me from myself.

Not only are Christians — and people of every faith — quite capable of a lack of humility that I think you and Murray describe as “that sense of frailty and your own sins,” they’re every bit as capable of perpetrating great evil: Dark Ages, Crusades, pedophilia, politicizing abortion, seeking vengeance through the death penalty, and justifications for abhorrent attitudes toward gay people, et cetera.

A sense of transcendence, of humility, of cosmic insignificance can be a part of faith. But it can also stand alongside. Or be entirely absent.

Referring to a lack of judgement over others, the idea that no one is better or worse than you, you commented to Murray, “I’m so grateful that truth was dinned into me.” Was it dinned into you, or were you born innately receptive to it, even eager to embrace it? You’re likely more educated on this than I am, but I thought it was clear that many of the great social scientists (e.g. Steven Pinker) have dispelled the tabula rasa concept, including of human morality.

That is to say, we cannot possibly fully understand why we are the way we are — and thus whether your intuitions, morality, and thinking are more a product of a Christian upbringing or the same genetic mix as your intellectual gifts. Perhaps your and Murray’s view of a good society simply comes from a natural ability to see complexity, including humanity, rather than from any dogma.

So when you say, “The worry is that they will find other forms of transcendence that mimic religion,” I share your concern — but my concern is about zealotry and illiberalism in all its forms, be it the rabid faith that propels Hamas or far-right Jewish settlers, the savior complex of those abortion protesters marching near my home, or the self-righteousness of any far-left secular nut waving a copy of White Fragility in your face.

For all the demurring on the topic of IQ that Murray does in this segment of the conversation, the obvious irony is that you and he are two intelligent, well-credentialed people having an intelligent, thoughtful conversation about religion. How many Christians are so reflective? Is their Christianity the transcendent factor here? Or is it your ability to see complexity, to simultaneously keep your Christian faith while also dissecting it?

I have long made a distinction between the certainty of fundamentalism and the humility of faith. Christianity is extremely complex, as is religion, and has manifested itself in countless ways, some quite horrific. But Christianity’s insistence that we are “neither Greek nor Jew, neither male or female, but one in Christ Jesus” was radical at the time, and has transformed human consciousness for the better — and away from tribalism.

Charles came back on the Dishcast last year to discuss Taking Religion Seriously, and here’s how one listener responded:

How lucky Charles Murray is to have a friend like you! If not for your promotion of his work through the years, I would only have known about him through his most controversial works — and the widespread criticism of it. I’m embarrassed to say that I probably would have assumed he was a racist, and avoided his work entirely.

But every time you have shared his work, and especially during interviews, I am struck by how curious, thoughtful, and brave he is. Those qualities are essential to do the challenging work he does. I hope that future researchers will use his scholarship as he clearly intends, which is to better mankind’s knowledge of ourselves so that we can find solutions that improve everyone’s future.

Another wrote at the time:

I listened intently to your excellent discussion with Charles Murray — one of your best so far. Both of you were on a journey of discovery, and Murray is so unpretentious and so honest that I could listen to his learning happening as you exchanged observations.

Twice during your exchange, he complimented you honestly, saying, “This is the first interview that has been a real learning experience for me.” The first time was immediately after your explanation of the significance of the Eucharist in Mass (1:15:08). Your comment opened up a new dimension of God’s presence for him, and my thought was that this was a conversion moment for Murray.

One more response came from “an old, Christian, lesbian, law-and-order Democrat (ha ha — what a combo!)”:

The pod with Charles Murray was superb. So rich and meaningful. I so appreciate how open you each were about your faith. I will read Murray’s new book.

And I would (with some withdrawal symptoms) be happy to keep subscribing to the Dish while you step away to finally write your own book on faith. If you can at least keep the podcast going while you do that, that would be fantastic. (When you and Chris took a three-week break a few months ago, I was seriously missing my weekly Dish fix.)

So I say: Take a break from the writing the Dish column and get a move-on. Your new book/memoir — whatever you will call it — will be worth the wait. God bless you and Chris.

See you next Friday.

(The full Dish returns on September 4. In the meantime, we are re-airing a handful of the most downloaded episodes from the early years of the Dishcast.)

The academic career of Cornel West is long and storied. He has taught religion, philosophy, and African-American studies at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and Union Theological Seminary. He has written or contributed to more than 20 books, including Race Matters and Democracy Matters — but he recommends you start with Chekhov.

I met Cornel decades ago, when I interviewed him at Union Theological Seminary for a TNR piece I was writing on divinity schools. He has long fascinated me, and Race Matters had a real impact on me decades ago. Erudite, passionate, and deeply humane, he is an unapologetically leftist Christian who is also a champion of free speech, civility, and the classics. In other words: a rare and beautiful man.

A key theme of the Dishcast is a willingness to talk to anyone across the political and ideological spectrum. We thought it would be cool if we re-aired this episode alongside that with Charles Murray, a philosophical opposite, but also a deeply decent man.

Go here for a polished transcript of Cornel. We also have two clips on YouTube: on how he finds common ground with bigots and racists, and his take on CRT and the 1619 Project.

Below are some of the listener emails we posted after the pod aired. One remarked:

Cornel West just exudes a cerebral, erudite, common (universalist) warmth and decency. Is this why he’s seemingly so out of fashion on the left?

Another quoted Cornel:

“We’ve got to fight the notion that whiteness is reducible to white supremacy.” Yes — thank you, Dr. West. This is my issue with how CRT is being disseminated. I don’t have any problems with teaching history — however reprehensible some of our predecessors behaved — but don’t teach children that they have some sort of original sin based on their skin color.

Another fan:

Cornel West converses; he doesn’t robotically recite dogma. There’s a very smart, thinking human being there who listens, responds, thinks independently, and speaks his mind. I’ve always liked and respected him.

Yet another:

Cornel West is like a cold glass of water and a fresh breeze after being stuck in a hot, airless room full of people senselessly yelling at each other. We have to talk with each other face to face. We have to find some common basis — however tiny — from which to disrupt this tribalist, essentializing, paranoid, mutually polarizing hysteria.

On Cornel’s deep love for the humanities:

I found very interesting Dr. West’s response to your question of who people should read more of. His response was Chekhov. Now, critical race theory would tell you that Dr. West — a black man — shouldn’t find too much in common with Chekhov — a dead white man. But in fact, the opposite is true.

Moreover, Dr. West’s analysis of Chekhov’s work wasn’t a critical-theory analysis of cis, white, patriarchal, capitalist, etc, etc. Rather, it was a fundamental engagement with. the. text. — can you hear the annoying clapping? — and what that text says about the HUMAN condition.

I think there is something deep to this, especially in our current cultural moment. That a black American professor in 2021 finds such deep communion with a Russian white playwright from (roughly) 150 years ago … worlds apart, and yet deeply connected.

And this is the real beauty of a liberal education — you can commune with anyone outside your own “lived experience” and learn from them. Their identity matters far less than their ideas — and the more cultural and historical boundaries we cross the more we stand to learn.

The Dishcast devoted a whole pod on the humanities when we had on Roosevelt Montás in 2022. A fan wrote at the time:

Thank you for the wonderful conversation with Professor Montás. It reawakened the same spirit I had 28 years ago when I walked on the campus of Columbia University as a freshman. I remember being bored by the Iliad, stymied by The Republic, infuriated by Hobbes, and feeling overmatched by Nietzsche and Freud. I often hated the workload and the two-year campaign that asked me to read, think, engage, and discuss with my professors and classmates.

But I could never deny that it asked me to do something important and novel: wrestle with the ideas of others. I was not permitted to dismiss them out of hand or avoid the hard work by pointing to false controversy. I had to grapple with difficult ideas and develop the analytical skill and tools of language to explain why an idea did or did not make sense. And the value of that struggle has never left me.

Since then, during the two tech-focused decades we have experienced, it’s been easy to forget about ancient wisdom. I have fallen victim to the ever-growing pressure to look to circuits and microchips for new solutions to the problems of life. That effort is futile. In my calmer moments, when I sit in a quiet room, I remember what I learned with those great books, and how to find peace in the effort of seeking truth with the words of those who fought the same battle many centuries and even millennia ago.

The episode made me feel like a 19-year-old student again, and that was glorious. In fact, I stopped at a bookstore to buy Augustine’s Confessions before the episode was even over.

Lastly this week, here’s a reader eager to see the full Dish return:

I hope you’re enjoying your break, but I’m having a bit of contest withdrawal while you and Chris are having your well-earned time off. Helping to ease the lack of window views while the Dish is on hiatus, I was able to visit the site of the Vancouver window view from contest #509, which you generously awarded me the win for. It turns out my son and his girlfriend live about a mile from that building. Here they are with their Formosan Mountain Dog mix, pointing in the general direction of the window:

The kicker: they named him Bowie. (And I had nothing to do with that, hand to my heart.)

See you next Friday.

(The full Dish returns on September 4. In the meantime, we are re-airing a handful of the most downloaded episodes from the early years of the Dishcast.)

In addition to the Middle East, another topic that has generated a lot of heat on the Dish since 2020 is the issue of the gender revolution and the TQ+ movement. So here are two perspectives from an early pod — that shows again how we at the Dish have genuinely sought the truth in this area, have listened to all sides, and aired all the arguments. Almost no other place does this anymore. Which is why we’re so grateful for your support and subscriptions.

Buck Angel was a pioneering porn star — the only trans man to ever win Transsexual Performer of the Year at the AVN Awards — and today he’s a sex educator, motivational speaker, and entrepreneur. Helena Kerschner is a young woman who lived as a man on hormone therapy for several years before detransitioning. Buck’s transition saved his life, while Helena’s transition was a bit of a calamity, but they share a resistance to the dogma of the trans activist community and speak forcefully and elegantly against it.

Go here for a polished transcript. Four clips on YouTube are also available: on the cult-like behavior of many trans activists; on the risks of puberty blockers; on the profound effects of testosterone; on how the hormone caused Buck, a former lesbian, to become attracted to men for the first time.

This episode is part of an ongoing series on the lives of transgender people and the debates surrounding one of the most polarizing subjects of today, especially when it comes to kids transitioning. Our previous episodes welcomed three happily transitioned and brilliant women — Dana Beyer, Mara Keisling, Brianna Wu — along with a remarkable trans man, Shannon Minter. All of them pushed back against my views, and we agreed on a lot as well.

Many listeners responded to the episode with Buck and Helena, and we’re reproducing some of them below. Here’s a fan:

I thought this discussion was terrific! Buck is a character, and Helena is warm and precocious. I had not heard of either of them beforehand, so I nearly skipped the episode. But after I began listening, I quickly appreciated their personalities; they are both open, non-dogmatic, friendly, and cheerful. By the end of your discussion, I found myself really rooting for Helena and Buck. It is wonderful that they appear to be thriving despite the difficulties they’ve faced.

Another was drawn to Buck in particular:

Thanks for a particularly good Dishcast! I’m pretty damn close to a Kinsey six or whatever; I may admire women as beautiful and impressive humans, but they do NOTHING for me sexually. I like GUYS: the hairiness, the attitude, the pheromones, the works. Someone like Buck Angel DOES just resonate as a “guy” — the secondary characteristics and attitude matter a lot more than external genitalia. So I guess that’s where I differ from you: the dick, per se, does not make the man; attitude and presentation are far more important.

The problem I’ve run into has been that some super-cute trans otter-or-bear men who appeal immensely on visual/“GUY” terms, will then, almost immediately, if not preemptively, throw up a VERY hostile separatist-lesbian wall of critical theory about “I’m not interested if you’re just objectifying me/I’m not your experiment.” If objectification is oppression, then gay men are all dirty pigs! As a 34-years-out gay man, if someone is purporting to BE a gay man, well, isn’t objectification the whole bloody point?! All my 40-50-60ish cis-male gay pals are ALL about the friendly/brotherly gropey-fun objectification. It makes us all feel seen and appreciated in a low-key kind of way.

Needless to say, I’ve had little luck with the FTM community, at least the young ‘uns. But it’s the antithesis of truth to say that’s because I’m Transphobic.

On the other hand, I do get it: That kind of gropey-fun attitude for either straight/cis women or, apparently, for anyone whose youngest formative years were as equipped with female organs and hormones, is problematic, to say the least. And I’m glad you kinda pointed that out: there is a BIG biological divergence here.

All of this just makes me REALLY appreciate a guy like Buck, who’s clearly a guy we would all just like to hang out with, and fool around with, as one of the guys. He did it utterly by himself so long ago, not in any Boomer-parent-coddled cocoon or with any internet echo chambers of satirically Orwellian social theory. He’s just … a GUY.

Another wrote, “What stood out in Helena’s story was how casually she was given testosterone”:

My son started testosterone treatments for delayed puberty and there was nothing casual about it: blood tests, bone age scans, a pituitary MRI, a thyroid ultrasound … we are on a first-name basis with security at the children’s hospital. Our endocrinologist (who coordinated with our pediatrician) has been monitoring my son for several years, and it still took three months between when she recommended testosterone and when my son had the first shot. She’s called twice to remind me she has to see him in person before the second shot (not a call from her receptionist, but the doctor herself). And my son was born a biological male, who should at this point have large quantities of testosterone in his system already.

So it’s crazy that a biological female can get a same-day testosterone shot.

Next up, a cis woman brought to bear her experience with hormone therapy:

I had stage III ovarian cancer at age 33. Now I don’t have ovaries, and I’ve been on hormone replacement for the past seven years. If a trans person told me they had gotten surgery or taken hormones, I would support them — because I don’t think it’s my place to tell another adult what to do. However, if they asked my opinion on whether to get surgery or take hormones, my answer would be absolutely not.

I know that some people might benefit from hormone treatment, as I do, but I know better than anyone the complexity of dealing with hormone changes. And when it comes to elective surgery, that’s just about the dumbest thing a person could ever do. Celebrating the fact that children are doing this is insanity.

Over the years, I’ve found myself wandering into conversations where people get very angry at me for sharing my opinions. For example, my brother flipped out on me for saying that I think many of these young people would benefit from not having medical interventions and working toward accepting themselves as they are, however they happen to be, even if this isn’t their preferred gender. Yes, they might feel they “are” another gender, but isn’t it an even higher plane of being to just accept whatever you are and try to be healthy?

I still feel like a woman, even though my female organs have been removed and I have no natural estrogen/progesterone and went into menopause as a young adult, then back out of menopause on hormone treatment. Losing those hormones didn’t change who I am. It did, however, make me appreciate being healthy and being sane. A hormone upheaval makes you feel neither of these things. I take hormone treatment now (as small of doses as possible) to try to reduce the physical symptoms of menopause.

So I look at parents championing their children’s needless surgeries and experimental hormone treatments in disbelief.

Here’s a “long-time reader since your blog was purple”:

I’m a middle-aged bisexual male married to a middle-aged trans woman. We’ve been together for 19 years, and I was her boyfriend even before she transitioned (being bisexual comes in handy that way).

I won’t bullshit you: youth trans healthcare is a zero-sum, harm-reduction game. Either you cause some harm to the gay-but-confused-not-trans kid by mistakenly delaying their puberty until 16 and then HRT, or you cause harm to the actually-trans-girl by forcing her to endure permanent masculinizing features (hands, feet, height, frame, hips) that may cause her to be permanently clocked (and often discriminated against) as a trans woman for the rest of her life.

This zero sum is undeniable. The healthcare industry and the WPATH SOC 7 generally has a high bar for determining fitness but obviously lax (and often low-income) clinics with good intentions can pave the road to hell. You go to war against the healthcare system you have, as Rumsfeld never said.

The vectors of harm are not the same for MTF vs FTM kids (and those clinically mistaken for them). It may even be the case that the solutions and risks and age determinations for MTF vs FTM should be different. Only the data and the analysis can tell you that.

I’ll bring up one point you haven’t touched on, that you should: You can’t keep young trans people from hormones. You act as if many corners of the internet like this one don’t exist: r/TransDIY. You don’t even need pre-paid debit cards anymore, since many sites that deliver meds will take crypto as payment.

The worst case: ubiquitous birth-control pills. One trip to Planned Parenthood with a cis girl friend and you have them. This is the standard way that trans women with no resources in poorer parts of the world feminize themselves — in Thailand (katoey), India (hijra/kinnar), Indonesia (waria), Mexico (muxe), etc.

Does birth control (ethinylestradiol) have major blood-clot health risks if you’re not suppressing T? Yes. Will the desperate-to-transition people give a fuck? Not really. Does it work? So-so, but when you’re a trans girl who hates that you look like a “brick”, it works wonders for taking the edge of dysphoria. Risks be damned.

My wife took birth control pills during puberty because she was trans, poor, and desperate, and it was a different time. She’s glad she did. I wish she didn’t have to.

A reader makes a semantic point about a Dish column:

When it comes to your “Trans Proposal In The Trans Wars,” I respectfully suggest you use “reasonable accommodation” rather than “compromise”? It sounds better.

When I referred to “the trans question” on Twitter, many people claimed I was comparing it to “the Jewish question” and thus the Final Solution. Oy. For the record, I constantly referred to “the gay question” in all the years I pushed for and debated marriage equality.

Below are reader emails we originally ran alongside the Buck and Helena pod. First is a reader who “recently lost my 21-year-old, mentally ill, heroin-addicted, trans nephew whom I raised during his teen years”:

As a young girl, my niece literally had no friends and couldn’t find her way in the world. Incredibly smart, beautiful, and funny, she was a lost soul and couldn’t make sense of her life. There was so much mental illness in her family, including her parents.

In high school, she founded the Equality Alliance Club and became fascinated by the trans kids. Pretty soon, I found boy’s underwear in her laundry. We had a talk and I got her in therapy. From there, things moved way too fast and before I knew it, her mom okayed testosterone treatment — like six months into the process. It just didn’t fit the kid I knew. And he never found happiness and ended up addicted and homeless.

I appreciate your thoughtful analysis of this important issue. Anything under the age of 18 needs to be dealt with slowly and carefully and definitely with second opinions.

Here’s another story about a biological girl who transitioned:

Thank you so much for “A Truce Proposal in the Trans War.” As the parent of a 20 year old who identifies as trans male, I can say that so much of your piece perfectly resonates with my observations. I may just reference it directly when asked, “What do you think?”

For me, the trans identity, or any feelings of non-alignment with externally defined gender designations, has never been an issue. My wife and I adore our son, as he is, and support him any way we can, no strings attached. We are fully supportive of him constructing his own life, defined as he wishes.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean we are required to agree with every one of his decisions. Because of the ideological forces you describe in your article, our thoughts on gender issues are not requested or welcomed. We are always under threat of being lumped in with people who are cruel or indifferent in the type of catch-all thinking you describe — either believe it all or be ostracized to the sideline.

Our son is brilliant (quite literally) and has always been extremely independent. However, no amount of raw intelligence or independence can substitute for the wisdom of age and, importantly, the final maturation of the brain. This latter idea — brain maturation — is where I have a minor dissent from your piece.

You laudably attempt to distinguish between the experiments we perform on children and those that adults choose to perform on themselves. You follow the societally determined age of adulthood as being the critical line. However, you are also attempting to ground your thinking in real science, and I suspect you have only acquiesced to 18 for convenience. The age of 18 is far from being a useful determinant of adulthood or final maturation. In fact, current research suggests that the human brain finishes maturing somewhere around 25 years old. (Here’s just one popular article.)

What’s still happening between the ages of 18 and 25? Critically, it’s the development of the prefrontal cortex, which regulates behaviors related to risk and long-term planning, to name two key areas. Those seem sort of important here.

So I am primarily concerned with medical interventions, such as hormone therapy and permanent alterations (e.g. breast removal), made prior to final maturation of the brain — and 18 has no actual basis in science. Cultures vary in where they draw these lines, while the biology couldn’t care less.

I do not have the expertise to define the “right” age, nor do I even feel like there is a perfect age for all individuals. If we admit that there are both genuine trans and trans-curious individuals (even that objectively true statement is begging for a fight), and we acknowledge our extreme ignorance about the long-term impacts of some procedures, isn’t genuine caution warranted here? Don’t we have an adult responsibility to retain some stake in the conversation after our child suddenly and instantly becomes an adult on their 18th birthday?

As it stands, my wife and I chose not to fight or attempt to interfere in our “adult” (now 20) child’s health decisions. We were essentially hostages in this non-negotiation, with only two choices: maintain a relationship or not. So instead of being partners in our kid’s heath-care choices, we are sideline observers who can’t help think that one day a host of negative health repercussions will emerge and our son will rightfully ask, “Where the fuck were you?” Good question.

Yet another parent was very reluctant to allow his child to seek hormone therapy or more:

I am a mid-40s, straight, white, Christian, conservative male with a wife and two children. However, I like to think of myself as fairly open minded, and the rest of my extended family would tell you that I’m over-the-edge liberal.

My oldest child, a 15 year old who was born female, recently told us that they were self-harming and needed help. We immediately sought crisis intervention, therapy, and psychiatry. During therapy they let us know that they were trans. They also let us know that their boyfriend was cis female and in the process of transitioning.

My wife and I have known our child their entire life and we know them well enough to know they can’t decide whether or not they like hot dogs (true story: it switches every couple months). We know that there is a strong possibility that this is due to influence from a group of friends who all identify as trans but have accepted our child into their circle. We don’t know if our child is truly trans or not, but we do know they are not in a good place to make life-altering decisions.

Of course, the counterargument is that if we allow hormone therapy, the depression may go away. It could — or it could get worse. I often wonder if I am being overly Christian conservative with all this, even though we have allowed the name change, clothing-style change, hair change, etc.

In years to come, we will know whether or not we have made the correct decision. It may be that our child is truly trans and we have delayed their happiness a few years and will be hated because of it — or it may go the other way. Either way, we will always love our child and are doing our very best to parent from a position of love, and to teach them that no matter what, love others — and everything else will work out.

Another reader suggested that waiting until early adulthood to transition better enables certain trans people to still have children:

I am a post-op transwoman in a second marriage to a woman, and also a parent and grandparent. (I also have a partially completed Master of Research with a focus of transgender health care.) So the question of fertility for trans people has a personal resonance for me, because I cannot imagine myself not being a parent. I cannot imagine needing to make a choice between transition and having children, when in my mid twenties and even later. But then I’m an older transitioner and an early Boomer, so there was nothing available in the airwaves or in popular print media in the ‘60s about gender identity or transitioning.

This last reader also touched on the topic of fertility, and much more — including the radioactive topic of autogynephilia:

Many people ignore a huge elephant in the room as to why some trans people are unable to pass. It isn’t simply because they aren’t allowed to transition early enough; it’s that gender dysphoria, especially for many trans women, doesn’t appear until sometime around puberty when changes are already happening. This is in the DSM; the distinction is drawn between early onset and late-onset gender dysphoria, since different people experience dysphoria for different reasons.

Trans activists hate this theory, because apparently the characteristics of early-onset dysphoria in children assigned male at birth correlates strongly with other kids who are not trans and grow up to be cis gay males, whereas the characteristics of late-onset dysphoria in teens assigned male at birth correlates strongly with heterosexual cis men who have an erotic or romantic cross-dressing fantasy. The explosive nature of that “two types” model, and especially the second type, is what led to the harassment of scientists by trans activists that was documented in Alice Dreger’s book, Galileo’s Middle Finger.

Accordingly, there isn’t actually any solution where if we “catch” gender dysphoria early enough, everyone is going to be able to transition before puberty and pass. In fact, many people don’t get dysphoria until puberty and it doesn’t reach the point when they want to transition until far later in life, when the dysphoria becomes so intense that they decide they need to become the woman they love so much and fantasize about. In addition to the DSM, you can find the data backing up these claims in the scholarship of Ray Blanchard, Michael Bailey, Debra Soh, and others.

The folks who are driving this activist train are mostly late-onset gender dysphoria trans women. They are people who (1) identify as women and (2) are themselves unable to bear children. The fact that these people have a very different life story than the teens they are advocating for is a real problem. They are speaking for teenage trans boys who have the capability to bear or breastfeed children and who might very much regret such a sacrifice later in life. If you take reproductive ability away from someone who later wants to bear a child, that has to be traumatic. You think Keira Bell isn’t suffering trauma?

When I got a vasectomy, at age 25, I was required to fill out all sorts of forms by the HMO and assure several doctors that I was making an intelligent decision and understood I was giving up my ability to have children. And that’s despite the fact that vasectomies are often reversible!

None of that is an argument against medical transition for people who really need it. But it underscores how folks are demanding that teenagers be able to rush into medical transitions that have serious long-term consequences of the sort that doctors traditionally felt required a great deal of guidance even when the patients were adults.

Also, I am so sick of the talking point that we don’t debate or compromise people’s human rights. The Civil Rights statutes of the 1960s were filled with compromises — for instance, the statutes didn’t apply to the smallest businesses. Thurgood Marshall NEVER said, “I don’t have to debate my human rights.” He did it, all the time, for decades.

This isn’t because we’re all a bunch of racists and transphobes. It’s because (1) you have to convince people who don’t agree with you or have doubts; and (2) there are some competing interests involved. There were even competing interests involved in race discrimination, and we ultimately, as a society, decided that the freedom to refuse to associate with Blacks had to yield. But the argument was made, and it was defeated on its merits. Sex-discrimination laws had to make accommodations for single-sex schools. Masterpiece Cakeshop doesn’t have to bake wedding cakes for gay couples because of the owner’s religious beliefs. We balance these interests.

This position of “I don’t have to debate or negotiate” is just a convenient excuse to never have to deal with dissent. And I would argue that it — rather than scientists who study ROGD, or pundits like you who try to seek compromises — is a much bigger threat to trans rights. Because if trans activists never debate or negotiate, you get more transphobic legislation like the bathroom bills and sports bills we’ve been seeing.

There’s no way any movement can get everything it wants without hearing contrary views and persuading people and, yes, sometimes compromising. The alternative isn’t a clean victory — it’s defeat.

If you’re interested in other Dish episodes on the topic of trans, check out Hannah Barnes, Carole Hooven, Julie Bindel, Leor Sapir, and Kathleen Stock.

(The full Dish returns on September 4. In the meantime, we are re-airing a handful of the most downloaded episodes from the early years of the Dishcast.)

The Middle East has become one of the most contested topics here at the Dish. So on our summer break, we thought we’d run some classics, popular with Dishheads and ageing well. So here’s the great and humane Yossi Klein Halevi from 2022, a pod that elicited some wonderful listener comments as well, included below.

Yossi is an American-born Israeli journalist, and his latest book is Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. After our pod with Peter Beinart in July 2021, many of you recommended Yossi to balance out the discussion on Israel. I was grateful for the suggestion and truly enjoyed our January 2022 talk — alternately honest and difficult. How can one admire Israel while also being candid about its flaws? How deeply utopian was Zionism in the first place?

Go here for a polished transcript. We also have two clips on YouTube — on the “bizarre, tragic” history of Zionism, and on the intractable nature of the Israeli settlements. Here’s how one listener responded:

Thank you for inviting Yossi Klein Halevi as an interlocutor. He is a deeply humane and nuanced thinker and writer, and his views on the difficult conflict are informed not by slogans but by experience. I hope you will bring a sagacious counterpart from the Arab side, who can acknowledge the existence of two conflicting true stories. This is the key that can unlock the difficult decisions necessary for a compromise.

I want to question one of the conclusions that you seem to have reached regarding the conflict. You talk about the corrosive nature of the settlement enterprise, which Yossi seems to be agreeing with. He is saying that if there is an honest peace offer to divide land, the Israelis will be willing to accept the compromise and risk the civil war. For you, however, settlements mean the end of the Zionist project.

This is where you lost me. I understand the very strong opposition to settlements. I understand that they are an obstacle to an agreement, one among many. But why do they mean that Zionism is doomed? Would you say the same if Israel hadn’t built beyond the 1949 armistice line?

Do you think that building settlements is a singularly bad policy that will undo Zionism, or that they expose the incurable lethal poison in the heart of Israel? If it’s the former, then every bad policy can be corrected. As Yossi explained, Israel evacuated its population when required for peace (and those who prefer to stay in settlements may chose to become citizens of the Palestinian state when it is created). So, bad as they are, settlements do not spell the end of Zionism.

However, settlements do serve as a convenient euphemism for the opposition to Zionism and Israel per se. It is not Israel’s 1967 borders, but Israel’s 1948 existence. If Israelis believed that stopping settlements means peace, they would have stopped. But if they are told that not matter what they do their country has to stop being, why would they listen?

As Yossi said, many Israelis are ready to trade ’67 for ’48. What is your position?

I favor a settlement based on the 1967 borders. And I think the settlements are deliberately designed to prevent that. But what they will create is either more atrocities, as Palestinians are expelled from those areas in due course; or endless conflict with no security for the Jewish state.

Another listener wrote, “Yossi Klein Halevi and Peter Beinart are an excellent point/counterpoint (as much as I vehemently disagree with Beinart)”:

Thank you for this discourse about Israel, and I’m sending you warmest regards from Beit Shemesh, approximately 10 km as the crow flies from the “green line.” I’m an American — and an oleh, a recent immigrant to Israel. Let me just say I immigrated here in 2018 with one set of ideas and find myself in possession of a totally different set after nearly four years living this complicated Jewish dream.

Soon after moving to Israel — and not only seeing my beloved Homeland from the inside, but also the Old Country (the USA) from the outside — I began to feel an intellectual tumult that disturbed me greatly. So much rhetoric. So much ideology. Not enough journalism. Not enough thought.

So I started a list in my Evernote called “Voices of Sanity/Voices of Reason.” You were the first person on my list, and Yossi is also on the list; his Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor is one of the most important books of my life. I read it straight through during one Shabbat in Mitzpe Yericho — one of those dreaded “settlements.”

One of the biggest shifts I’ve realized since becoming an Israeli citizen: in Israel, group identity is radically important. I guess it creates a sense of security in being right all the time. The trade-off is that everyone else is more than wrong; they are heretics. This includes family and friends.

This is the opposite of Judaism. Instead of creating the energy that brings the world together — which is our mandate as Jews — it splinters everything into the smallest possible splinters. I came to Israel more inclined to the particularist in “orthodox” Judaism. Now nearly four years later, I’m far more interested in the universalist in Torah.

For a refresher on the pod with Peter that spurred Yossi’s appearance, here’s a chunk of that conversation on the state of Zionism:

Below are some emails on that pod that are also relevant to the Yossi pod. This first listener felt that I’m “deeply wrong about Israel/Zionism”:

I think most Westerners have a delusional view: that a two-state solution was ever acceptable to enough Arabs/Palestinians to have been possible. Many Westerners also have the equally delusional view that a binational state is viable (a view you don’t share, I was glad to hear). Unfortunately, for most Arabs/Palestinians, the dream isn’t about getting East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and a bit more, while leaving the rest to the Jews. They want Tel Aviv, Haifa and everything else — with no Jews.

Every war over Israel has been fought by the Arabs in service of a one-state Judenrein solution, beginning in 1948, when they were offered and rejected a contiguous state in nearly half of Mandatory Palestine, from Sinai to Jordan to Lebanon — the river to the sea. The option for a two-state solution was on the table for more than half a century afterward, if the Palestinians had been willing to take it. Half-hearted participation by the Palestinian Authority in peace talks (which they were dragged to), with Hamas and Hezbollah jeering from the sidelines, isn’t remotely good enough.

Whether or not you think the state of Israel should ever have been created (that discussion was the most disappointing part of your episode with Beinart), there are now nearly seven million Jews in their historic homeland (of thousands of years), out of a little over nine million inhabitants. Some three-quarters of those Jews were born there. Just under half of the Jews in Israel are Mizrahi/Sephardi, whose family members were largely expelled from Arab countries. They know exactly how the Arabs feel about the Jews, so they aren’t signing up for a binational state, now or ever.

Moreover, the Arabs (the notion of a distinct Palestinian identity wasn’t a significant part of mainstream discourse until the 1960s and ‘70s) don’t actually want a single binational state. Agreeing to a peace on the basis of two states would get their leaders assassinated, because Palestinians continue to hope, against all evidence, that one day they’ll get all of it.

Arabs living in Israel proper have far better lives and prospects than their brethren in neighboring states: they can vote, an Arab party is in the government, and Israel is the best place in the Middle East to be gay, among other things. Polls show that a majority of Israeli Arabs would prefer living in Israel to a Palestinian state. It would be ideal if the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza gave up their unrealistic expectation of driving the Jews into the sea and stopped promoting terrorism. Then, security restrictions could be relaxed and their lives could improve a lot.

But I fear things are too far gone. The Second Intifada, and then Hamas’ unwavering commitment to ending the state of Israel, don’t inspire confidence.

The best solution, to be honest, would be for Jordan — more than 20% of whose residents are Palestinians — to take over the Arab areas of the West Bank, and for Egypt to absorb the pestilential flyspeck half the size of Singapore that is Gaza. But Jordan and Egypt wouldn’t touch those areas with a ten-foot pole because they’re ruled by warlords, gangsters and criminals. They’re Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles, but a thousand times worse.

I do agree with you and Beinart that the status quo could persist for a long time. I think if the PA collapses, as Beinart suggests, it’s not going to turn the West Bank into Gaza, because there’s too much economic interdependence between the West Bank and Israel. If it did, though, all that would happen is that Israel would annex the areas with significant Jewish settlements, cut the Jews in the outposts loose and create a hard border, leaving the West Bank population to figure things out for themselves and get bombed if they fire rockets.

I get it that Bibi’s an asshole and he behaved unacceptably toward Obama, your fave. But Bibi is finished and may go to jail. Time to move on — for you and the Palestinians. Maybe think more about Xinjiang (which I was glad to hear you discuss with Beinart), where a million Muslims actually are in camps, being sterilized and reeducated. They don’t have the option of giving up terrorism and eliminationist pipe dreams for peace.

“Pestilential flyspeck”? It’s that kind of rhetoric that turns me off, however sane the rest of the analysis. There’s no indication in my listener’s email that he understands why people thrown out of their own land and homes might harbor legitimate resentment, even rage.

Another pro-Israel listener:

Your discussion glossed over important points that, if discussed, would demonstrate the conflict is more two-sided than you and Beinart made it appear to be. For example, you stated that it’s apparent Israel has never supported a two-state solution, and it was all a lie. But you seem to have forgotten the Oslo Accords, where it was the PLO, not Israel, who ultimately walked away. In addition, Israel made the decision to evacuate its own citizens from Gaza in 2005, handing the Palestinians their own territory.

What has happened since then? While Beinart mentions the UN says that Gaza is uninhabitable, he or you fail to mention that a terrorist group is running the place. In fact, in your discussion about Israel, terrorism is not mentioned once. How can Israel agree to a two-state solution when one of the parties declares death to Israelis in its constitution?

When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the regime in the Palestinian territories is not held accountable. No doubt about it: the occupation creates considerable hardship on the Palestinian people. I just don’t know how the regime, particularly in Gaza, can be negotiated with.

By the way, here is a picture of my grandfather, with my mom, aunt and uncle, on the boardwalk in Tel Aviv in 1962:

My grandparents fled Iraq in 1941 after a horrible pogrom called the Farhud. It bothers me to no end when people call Jews “white colonizers.” My grandfather was far from white! Iraqi Jews trace their history to their exile from the Kingdom of Judea in 6th Century BCE. My grandmother would say she was a “Babylonian,” to signify her direct ancestral tie to the land of Judea.

My grandparents and the generations of persecuted Jews before/around them is why Zionism exists and why it endures. I will be a passionate Zionist until my last breath. It’s the only place I know for sure where Jews will be tolerated. Peter Beinart will only realize this when it’s too late. A world that that is indifferent to the fall of the Jewish state is not a safe world for Jews anywhere.

Yossi talked a lot about the Jews who immigrated from elsewhere in the Middle East, and it’s an overlooked point at times.

From a listener critical of Israel:

Thank you for having on Peter Beinart. I have followed you for years and assumed you were either a Zionist supporter or just didn’t want to touch the Issue. So I am pleasantly surprised.

During the past eight years [2013-2021], I have been to the West Bank four times working on behalf of a Christian ministry in Bethlehem. The birthplace of Jesus Christ, Bethlehem is now surrounded by prison walls and guard towers on three sides. This cultural capital of Palestine, with its rich history, art, music and food, is being surrounded by settlements, so it cannot grow. The situation is horrific.

Another critic of Israel writing in 2021:

Zionism, as an ideology, has stopped progressing. It’s like Communism in the 1980s — all energy has seeped out. It has been replaced by very nasty ethno-nationalism and an optimistic economism (Israel the Start-up Nation). The underpinning ideology has boiled down to a large collection of cliched slogans, like the ones your Israeli readers wrote down. I can already fill in the Zionist trope bingo card. Nothing new has been added in the last 15 to 20 years, except an inflated sense of victimhood.

This next listener, though, pointed to a Palestinian sense of the same forever-victim mentality:

I believe this is a point that will resonate with you: the settlement project feeds into the “settler colonialism” mantra that is a key component of intersectional doctrine sweeping through much of America. As they say, “From Ferguson to Palestine!”

In this context, my admittedly counter-intuitive argument that Palestinians will not let the Israelis leave the West Bank, just as they have successfully blocked Israel from divorcing itself from Gaza, cannot be processed by the progressive cerebral operating system (“does not compute,” as the robot would say). For this reason, the settlements and occupation are an even greater conundrum for Israel than ever before, requiring the most sober, de-politicized and mature decision-making by the new Israeli leaders.

But so long as the international community indulges the Palestinian penchant for utilizing their own self-generated suffering as their most powerful weapon, I see no good solution for Israel. There’s no Iron Dome for what, from our perspective, is this profound dysfunction.

Here’s one more listener, on the settlements:

First of all, I’m DELIGHTED that you’re planning to invite on Yossi Klein Halevi; I was going to suggest you have him before seeing four other dissenters beat me to it. In addition to sharing his views on Israel, Zionism, and the Palestinians almost entirely, I also happen to know him personally and he is an absolutely wonderful guy — one of those people whose very presence calms you.

Anyhow, you said in your response to a reader that “the settlement policy is now and always has been the core obstacle to any deal” (emphasis mine). As a liberal Zionist, I have two problems.

The first is the one you’d probably guess: While I grant that the settlements have certainly been an obstacle, I disagree that they’ve been the obstacle. They have serious competition — for instance, the dream that lives among an all-too-large contingent of Palestinians to displace Israel utterly. Call it “Greater Palestine,” if you will — and of course “displace” is a euphemism. I’d love to hear why you believe the settlements are somehow more “core” than that, a dream that is explicitly stated in Hamas’s charter.

Second (and this is a major reason I’m so glad you’re planning to invite Yossi on), is what the settlements symbolize for the Jewish people — that is, what the lands of the West Bank (the heartland of Biblical Judea and Israel, as I’m sure you know) mean for the Jewish soul. And here I’m cognizant of speaking more to your religious side. To renounce our claim to those lands is painful — necessary and right, no doubt, but painful too. And that is never acknowledged even rhetorically, let along with true compassion.

No question that Yossi’s humanity and learning and empathy are impossible to ignore. Just listen to the episode — or read the transcript here.

(The full Dish is on vacation until Friday, September 4. This week’s episode was recorded on July 21.)

John is a journalist and political commentator. He’s the founder and president of the Danube Institute, the international editor of Quadrant Magazine, associate editor of the Hungarian Review, former editor of National Review, a fellow of the National Review Institute, and editor-at-large of National Review. He’s the author of several books, including Sleepwalking Into Wokeness.

An auto-transcript is available above for paid subscribers (just click “Transcript” while logged into Substack). For two clips of the episode — on falling birth rates and immigration, and comparing Thatcher and Reagan — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up Catholic in Liverpool; his working-class parents; his dad
on a hospital ship for D-Day; stories of John working closely with Thatcher; both of us British editors of US magazines in the early ‘90s; covering The Bell Curve; the Cold War and defeating the Soviets; muscular liberalism; Tony Blair and his tensions with Bush; what it means to be a conservative liberal; cosmopolitanism; the meaning of Englishness; oikophobia; multiculturalism; the World Cup; Trump and the Greenland threat; the Dem threat to democracy via institutions; the post-liberal left; Deneen and the post-liberal right; Trump getting Europe to bolster its own security; Ukraine; the Iran War and the nuclear threat; Trump’s character; the future of the GOP; AI and automation; Brits on the dole; the grooming gangs; Andy Burnham; premarital sex; how women civilize men; and the divorce rates among gays, lesbians, and straights.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Azam Ahmed on terrifying new drugs, Emily Eakin on postmodernism, and Arianna Huffington on anything but politics. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

We got a ton of listener emails over last week’s pod with Ross Barkan on the DSA, but we’ll air them when we return from the August break. On another recent pod:

I enjoyed your discussion with Megan McArdle. I love hearing about guests’ upbringings (more of that please!), and I enjoyed learning about Megan’s knowledge of DC “elites” and insiders. But I was hoping for a more salient response and discussion to your question about why young people are enamored with socialism.

I’m very much a capitalist, but I grew annoyed with Megan’s implication that college graduates are whiny complainers. I just want to remind listeners that not everyone goes to college and that young people are financially struggling in every sector. That is why the pitchforks are out, and why all young (and old) might find socialism appealing.

Your fears of returning to the socialist state of the pre-Thatcher UK are well founded. I would love for you to have a guest with some economic bona fides to flesh out real solutions to the mess we’re in.

A reader responds to last week’s column:

I generally endorse your way of thinking, but PLEASE resist drawing false equivalence between Trump/MAGA and what you call the excesses of “Woke”. After more than a decade, I still don’t fully understand what this silly and inadequate term means, and I certainly don’t endorse the excesses of the more left-wing members of the community. But their sins are as nothing compared to the callous cruelty and gross incompetence of the Trump crew. All they ever have is grievance, nothing constructive, while the other side is often misguided, strident, irritating, but never malicious.

So many liberals say this to me. The key thing they miss, I think, is how without wokeness, Trump might never have happened at all, and Trump 2.0 definitely wouldn’t have. So wokeness is integral to populist backlash, and the left-authoritarianism is so strong and the elite so resistant to any reform that a figure like Trump becomes possible. The left cannot see outside itself.

I know of no liberals in my own life who really understand why mass immigration is a problem. Yesterday I had a chat with an extremely well-informed liberal who repeated the idiotic idea that the trans issue is irrelevant because it affects so few people. But the abolition of the sex binary affects 100 percent of all of us, as a tiny minority attempts to overhaul the entire society in order to assert its “rights”. They have no problem with hiring people on the grounds of their race and sex.

They tell me woke is over — no one is talking about this anymore — while holding on to every single tenet of the insanity. Think Remnick and The New Yorker. Woker than ever. With Trump as an insane alternative, the Dems had a chance. But if a sane Republican not wedded to the doctrines of Judith Butler and Derrick Bell replaces him — a Vance or Rubio — I suspect there won’t be a Dem president for a very long time. I sure won’t support one, and I’ve done that since 2004. Now that they’ve targeted liberal democracy for destruction, I’m out.

Another reader agrees with me:

Great piece on the cults of Trump and woke. You’ll take a lot of shit from woke apologists/lefties who’ll say Trump is the most powerful man on earth and wokeness was never that big a deal anyway, etc, etc. But it’s important to note: first, they’re wrong; and second, that the rise of woke helped create the rise of Trump, just as the rise of Trump fueled the rise of woke.

I voted for Trump three times. However much of a crook he was/is, he wasn’t telling me that I had some sort of moral obligation to agree that men can get pregnant or threaten to tattle to my employer if I disagreed that all white people are racist by their very nature. Trump was perceived as a defense against this.

If I thought wokeness was truly dying, I might gladly vote against Trumpism next time around. But we’re very much into America’s Weimar era, where it seems like the choices are communism and fascism, and not much of any heft in between. Let’s hope that changes — the sooner the better — but with the rise of the DSA, I can’t say I’m confident.

Another writes:

Your column about the dueling cults of Trump and woke is your best ever. There’s no one who better captures what I (and probably 60% of American voters) are thinking right about now. Thx and have a great vacation.

P.S. My Black American husband who grew up in the segregated South takes issue with “woke” being used as a derogatory term. He hates how the Trumpers and others (stupid White liberals) have taken what he sees as a perfectly good concept, and fucked with it.

A dissent:

It feels as though this piece (“Will The Two Cults Finally Fall?”) offers very little original insight that hasn’t already been articulated many times before — both in your previous pieces and by others on Substack, Twitter etc. Your column has become a tedious read. You might want to consider taking a longer sabbatical to refresh your creative juices. Enjoy your holiday.

One more quick dissent:

So, the Trump fever is breaking? Please tell that to our new Enabler-General Todd Blanche and his coven of enablers in the Senate.

Trump’s only real, effective opposition is in Tehran.

From a long-time subscriber who just cancelled:

The reality of a fixed income and Trump’s economy is hitting harder all the time, so I’m trying to adjust. I knew I needed to cancel and it kind of broke my heart. Much love to you and Chris. This Dishhead will never forget the first time I saw your on the Bill Maher show; you were the first conservative who made intelligent sense to me. I wish “conservative” still meant what it did then, and I just bought The Conservative Soul to learn more.

Another Dishhead:

Every year you go on the bludge for subscriptions, and every year I find myself extremely annoyed at you for not allowing me to pay a higher subscription fee. What do I have to do to get you to take more of my money?

Buying a friend a gift subscription — annual or monthly — is always a good way to support the Dish.

A reader takes care of the Mental Health Break this week:

Read more

(For the View From Your Window contest, the results below exceed the content limit for Substack’s email service, so to ensure that you see the full results, click the headline above.)

Highlights from this week’s write-up:

• Home to more than 300 Buddhist temples — the most of any city in this country

• An abundance of hot springs

• Some epic tales of elephants and water fights — and elephants in water fights

• An animal whose tongue can be longer than its body

• Randy getting randy

From the winner of last week’s contest, a free subscriber:

I’ll take two years of DISH, of course! Thanks again.

From another recent winner:

My book arrived! Thank you so much, Chris!! I love it!

That sleuth lives just outside Baltimore, so hopefully she’ll be able to make it down to Alexandria next month — for the first VFYW meetup! Our super-sleuth in that northern VA city floated the idea to me recently, and it’s a fantastic one. She has details:

Please join DMV-area VFYW enthusiasts for a Fall Picnic in our backyard on September 26 (Sept 27 rain-date) from 5-8 pm in the Delray neighborhood of Alexandria, VA. My husband and I are within walking distance of the Braddock Road (yellow/blue line) metro stop … no sleuthing required.

We’ll provide BBQ, a vegan dish, drinks, and cutlery for the first 50 RSVP participants. Please feel free to bring, if you’re inspired, a potluck dish to share, and VFYW memories encouraged ... with recipes!

We will provide further details to RSVP folks. (For example, there is free on-street parking, but it’s tight.) Let’s visit, share stories around the fire pit, and plot more VFYW adventures … with a group photo.

Please RSVP to contest@andrewsullivan.com, including any plus-ones. And if you’d like to bring a small potluck offering, please note that as well, along with any ideas you might have for the meetup.

It’s a shame our super-sleuth in Berkeley is so far from Alexandria:

Out here on the left coast, the Weekly Dish usually hits my inbox around 10:30 or 11am, which means on a typical Friday, if the search goes well, I can hope to start gathering images for a collage and identifying movies for a cinema report before lunchtime. But Jeanne and I had tickets for a 10am Friday showing of The Odyssey at our local IMAX, so I wasn’t expecting to be able to get down to VFYW business until 2:30 at the earliest.

But at around 9:30, as I sat in the middle of the auditorium, long before they’d even started showing the ads before the trailers, I glanced at my email and saw the Dish had arrived! That gave me just enough time to identify the city before the “Please silence your phones” warning. Thanks for the unexpected leg-up on my weekend!

Nice! Here’s a followup on last week’s contest from a regular sleuth:

Wow! Lots of great info and perspectives on the ATL VFYW. Well done, as always. A few post-pub notes …

When I wrote about the big-time movie biz in Atlanta, large studios’ relationships with the city were drastically changing, resulting in a major contraction and offshoring of US production. Georgia production spending peaked at $4.4 billion in 2022, fell to about $2.3 billion in 2025, and major high-budget productions — most conspicuously Marvel — have fled to the UK and other overseas locations. (Here’s a free link from the WSJ about the shift.)

After going on the road with the band for three days, I wrote the cover story on The Producers for MUZIK! Magazine in 1982:

They were on track to be the next big power pop band, but record company/management shenanigans got in the way and they peaked with their second LP. On a more personal note: my brother dated guitarist Van Temple’s ex-wife. Small world.

Atlanta’s Casbah” — with its mixture of Islamic and Egyptian architecture and design — is the “fabulous” Fox Theater. Threatened with razing in the mid-’70s, it was eventually placed on the National Register of Historic Places in May 1974 and thrives today as a (mainly) concert venue:

Finally, the building across the street from the VFYW entry is now a Kimpton hotel, with the restaurant Betty anchoring its ground floor. The was not always the case. The mid-rise apartment building was built in the early ‘50s and featured a swank, mid-century modern design. In later incarnations, it housed a nursing home, and after that, condos, before being purchased and rennoed by Kimpton:

As a kid, my parents would take my brother and me to after-church lunch at the restaurant where Betty is now located. It was called the Miami Cafeteria (Miami was the ground zero of swank back then, thus the name?). My brother and I would always finish eating before my parents, and I remember carousing up and down the apartment halls, poking our heads in rooms and offices we had no business being in, and commandeering the elevators, hitting every floor. The memory of the roasted chicken with rice and gravy still lingers.

Here’s our super-sleuth in West Orange:

Hi Chris! I’m appalled that I missed last week’s contest. For one, I knew it was Atlanta and talked myself out of it somehow. (“No Peachtree Tower visible; has to be somewhere else.”) But to make matters worse, I grew up five miles from the window in question and drove by it regularly. Agh!!!

In any event, I have a window view for you. This is from Indianapolis, and it would be impossible for the contest, but it might work for the newsletter. We were in town for Gencon at a lovely house outside the downtown:

A less staid view is sent by the VFYW chef:

You’ll never guess where this is:

Heh. I actually stopped by NYC en route to Ptown a few weeks ago and caught up with a friend who introduced me the newest Bathhouse location. It’s much fancier than the 134-year-old Russian/Turkish bathhouse in the East Village I frequented back in the day, but not annoyingly fancy; and it wasn’t as pricey as I expected. Much recommend.

Next up, I’m very touched that our super-sleuth in Prince George recalls an event I mentioned two years ago — the death of my stepdad:

I’m remembering you and your family today on Steve’s anniversary. Many prayers and best wishes.

Thanks so much. Below is Steve and my mom on the Oregon coast, with an inset of a FaceTime call that she and I had Wednesday with Steve’s son — a super-talented helicopter pilot:

She and I are heading out to Portland soon to catch up with family and tell stories of Steve:

On to this week’s view, here’s the beginning of the entry from our super-sleuth in Warrensburg:

Hope it’s been an okay week for you. I’m nervously counting down the days til the fall semester starts up and somehow all the work I’ve been putting off will magically get done. Good thing I have a fun distraction in the VFYW!

This week was pretty tough, I’ll admit. I guessed somewhere in East Asia or Southeast Asia, based on the architecture and flora, but I was stumped for a while after that. The lucky break came when I began focusing on this detail:

I was sure it said “Le Chat,” so I looked for every hotel or cafe with that name up and down the Pacific coast. After that failed, I wondered if it wasn’t “chat” but something else. Chal? Chap? It turns out to have been “Chai”, and the “Le” is actually “De” …

The DC super-sleuth exclaims, “Just two weeks after contest #516, durian again rears its ugly, stinky head!”

I had hoped that after the Kuala Lumpur contest, I could avoid seeing, reading about, or thinking about durian for a long, long time. No such luck. It turns out that durian, the world’s smelliest fruit, is extremely popular in [city redacted]. The city holds an annual durian festival and has recently experienced a surge in the sale and consumption of durian due to a government-backed and influencer-driven marketing campaign promoting the fruit.

I have to say that some of the photos of durian dishes at the Durianism Cafe (like the durian pizza seen below) make the fruit look much more appetizing than anything I recall seeing from the Kuala Lumpur contest. Even so, I don’t think I could be convinced to try it:

Another sleuth guesses: “Hanoi, Vietnam, from a hotel rooftop bar.” Below is the weekly flyover from the CO/NJ super-sleuth, who transports us from his Colorado home to this week’s building:

Fly to Alexandria next month! From our married team in Falcon Heights:

Just like the rest of the VFYW herd this week, I imagine, Deb and I fixated on the former residence of S. Dali the surrealist building sitting plumb-center in the window view:

I admit to a false start involving water tanks, an approach that led nowhere. Eventually, Deb found the surrealist place.

Identifying that place is our resident architect:

A few weeks ago, while discussing how buildings react in an earthquake, I asked: If a Frank Gehry building gets shaken in an earthquake and shifts a little, who can tell?

Well, this week we are looking directly at another pre-quaked building — to coin a phrase. At first I thought someone might be trying to copy Gehry, but that is definitely not the case here. The MO Room Hotel was conceptualized by the artist Mit Jai Inn, and he led a multidisciplinary team of artists, architects, designers, craftspeople, astrologers, and alternative-health practitioners. The hotel exterior is described as differently sized, box-shaped rooms “piled” together according to feng-shui and astrological principles.

MO Room contains 12 rooms, each corresponding to one animal in the Chinese zodiac. According to the hotel, each room is an individual artist’s interpretation of the artist’s own birth animal:

The animal symbolism was intended to influence the room’s geometry, furniture, doors, windows, bed, toilet placement, and treatment of the five elements — fire, wind, water, earth, and metal. The result is an irregular, cave-like interior. The hotel calls itself a livable sculpture.

I have to admit I’m not sure what to make of it. Drugs had to have been involved, right?

Another sleuth writes:

The ghastly carbuncle in the centre reminds me of some hotel in [city redacted]. (I struggle to see any redeeming features, but, who knows, someone might.) This thought is reinforced by [redacted] script on a nearby building. I’m afraid I can’t get beyond that!

Roberts Creek gets inside the ghastly carbuncle:

Here is an interior shot of a room featuring the brutalist architecture:

The guest reviews, however, are quite mixed. Although design enthusiasts praised its creativity, other guests complained that the concrete interiors made rooms feel dark, and that the artistic fixtures prioritized aesthetics over functionality — noting, for example, slow air conditioning and a lack of privacy in the bathrooms. I read one review titled “Don’t stay in the Rabbit room.”

San Mateo reimagines the odd hotel:

The Mo Rooms Hotel stands out because it looks nothing like the buildings around it. It’s built from exposed concrete, steel, and glass, with sloping walls and unusual angles that make it look more like a piece of modern sculpture than a hotel. Even from several blocks away, it stands out:

What appeals to me the most is that the architects never tried to make the building blend into its surroundings; they embraced the opposite approach. The weathered concrete, oversized windows, and dramatic geometry give the building the feel of a public art installation. Depending on the light, it almost seems to change personality. During the day it can look stark and industrial; in the evening, the warm light spilling through the windows softens the concrete and gives the whole building an almost mysterious presence.

And mysterious was the feeling I wanted to express in my Reimagined VFYW. I left the surrounding neighborhood unchanged but made the Mo Rooms Hotel glow from within, as though it possessed some hidden energy:

Awesome. A previous winner in Singapore names the right country:

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Ross is a journalist and novelist. He’s the editor-in-chief of The Metropolitan Review, and a columnist for the Nation and UnHerd. He’s the author of six books, including his new novel, Colossus. A new non-fiction book, about the rise of Zohran Mamdani, is coming soon. Find much more of his writing on his substack, “Political Currents.”

An auto-transcript is available above for paid subscribers (just click “Transcript” while logged into Substack). For two clips of the episode — on whether the DSA is truly dangerous, and the US elites’ obsession with Israel — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up Jewish in diverse Bay Ridge, BK; parents both federal workers; his dad working at the WTC on 9/11; Ross’ cynicism over Obama’s rise; coming of age in the Great Recession; the DNC screwing over Bernie in ‘16; Ross running for the state senate with Mamdani as his manager; identifying as “left-populist, woke-skeptical”; engaging and persuading ideological rivals; universal health care; questioning Covid policies; US aid to Israel; the horrors of Oct 7; the war in Gaza and the civilian toll; no pro-Palestine speakers at the ‘24 Dem convention; the decentralized DSA; calls to abolish prisons and the Senate; Jon Chait; AOC’s move to the center; border security; Trump’s norm-busting; Buckley and the Birchers; trans athletes; the + in LGBTQ+; corporations ditching DEI; the Arday scandal; The Odyssey; Jon Ossoff; the surprising surge of El-Sayed; and debating whether wokeness is dead.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: John O’Sullivan on conservatism, Emily Eakin on postmodernism, Azam Ahmed on terrifying new drugs, and Arianna Huffington on anything but politics. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s pod with Megan McArdle:

I always enjoy reading her, and this time I enjoyed listening. Thanks!

Here’s a dissent:

I love Megan McArdle and her writing! But something came up lately, and kept coming up, so I couldn’t let it go.

In your column last week, you gave a very balanced assessment of Dr. Fauci, but I think you betrayed some doubt about his intent by asking McArdle about the coziness between him and the Washington elite.

So I have to dissent to both your column and McArdle’s defense of Fauci — not because I knew him or worked in any discipline connected to infectious disease, but because I became part of a different Washington elite and watched it absolutely corrupt people who thought, and still think, they are on the side of the angels, and that their community of elites in Washington is a harmless or even productive clique for our nation.

I understand McArdle’s defense of the Washington scene. When you are a part of it, it seems natural. Everyone at the galas and dinners you attend are working for the betterment of some cause, and it seems like all are on the same team. And to the extent people are “helping each other” — through funding, information, etc. — well, that is just another aspect of how work gets done.

Except it also corrupts. Coziness begets coziness. Power coalesces and eventually shuts out new or opposing voices. Because those voices haven’t been a part of your grand cause, how would they know how things get done?

It’s so seductive. It’s so normal-seeming after a while, and you forget that the nation is watching you in disgust — because their voices are not being heard. My husband and I left DC and our cozy circles for this very reason and started to state our opinions about it. In response, the very successful organizations we created have tried to blackball us.

I’m with you. One year at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, I looked around and said to myself: last time here. Being gay also helps in DC: you can have a social life not entirely about your work. And then there’s my anti-social nature. But I take the point, saw it happening to myself, and tried to correct.

Here’s another clip from the Megan pod:

A regular contributor to the VFYW contest wrote to Chris last week:

I’ve been meaning to write several dissent emails to Andrew, but I keep having so much fun with the contest that I forget why I was angry about him in the first place.

Bodenner rescues Sully yet again! My Fauci column got more reader emails than any column this year, many of them angry. Here’s one:

I’m probably among those who lionize Fauci. His work on HIV alone is enough for me to think highly of him — and that work included politics. So I disagree with parts of your piece but, on the whole, I think its main point(s) are fair: good scientist, all too human. There was, though, one section that caught my attention:

But he’s a public health enforcer, and they are by nature power-mad authoritarians. They focus on stopping a virus, not nurturing a society. It’s the job of politicians to see the broader picture — to balance the costs and benefits of lockdowns, for example — not the scientists.

First, that’s not fair to folks devoting their lives to public-health. It’s sensationalistic to describe them as “by nature power-mad authoritarians.”

Second, “It’s the job of politicians to see the broader picture — to balance the costs and benefits of lockdowns, for example — not the scientists." I concur. But, how should we respond when politicians don’t do their jobs? And how should we respond when those who are doing their jobs are faced with tasks requiring a degree of scientific literacy they lack — or, worse, politicians who think they understand how science works, but are wrong?

I don’t have a neat answer. Society is filled with people of vastly different ideas, all of whom believe they understand how science works. But here’s a thought: if it’s the job of politicians to see the broader picture, on an issue demanding scientific understanding, and they’re shirking their duty (ivermectin anyone?), then maybe the idea a scientist who has spent a lot of time around politicians might want to speak up isn't totally out of line.

Fair enough. Some praise:

Thank you for this essay. I have generally given Tony Fauci the benefit of the doubt and have found myself defending him against friends who believe him to be guilty of gross malfeasance. Yet, you make valid points that I cannot dismiss. But mostly, your article was extraordinarily balanced, examining difficult shades of gray instead of dwelling in the certainties like the vast majority of pundits.

This is why I read the Dish. Rarely can one find humble opinions that claim not to have the answers but instead examine the nuances. Keep it up.

Consider subscribing to the Dish if you like that kind of balance. We’re experiencing a little bit of the Substack swoon right now, so every subscription counts.

From a doctor:

I simply could not believe how Fauci was behaving in the Senate testimony last week. The weekend of diary entries that I initially thought were jokes from The Onion — but were obviously all too real — were juxtaposed with the past two days of all kinds of medical colleagues on social media who have gone back to the same old bullying and condescension to support Fauci. The mind reels.

When I find myself in a situation where my heart is telling me one thing and my brain is telling me another, I often go to my elders and discuss things with them. So I called one of my last remaining elders: a 92-year-old former department chair and member of multiple prestigious medical academies. He’s as real as real gets.

He actually started crying.

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(For the View From Your Window contest, the results below exceed the content limit for Substack’s email service, so to ensure that you see the full results, click the headline above.)

Highlights from this week’s write-up:

• The tallest building in any US state capital

• A famous knight made his home here for 30 years

• Spiders that take flight using an electrical current

• Clark Gable as a dead mannequin

• A mysterious white van that haunts Google Maps

From the winner of last week’s contest:

I can’t believe it, Chris! Thank you! This good news completely made my weekend, and I honestly cannot stop smiling. The super-sleuth from Baltimore was the one who broke the news to me, which made this win even more special.

I told myself that if I ever won, I’d visit the location. Too bad it’s not last week’s location; Parkfield would’ve made a bit more sense logistically and geographically. Instead, I guess I’m heading to Kuala Lumpur to try the smelliest yet surprisingly tasty durian fruit.

The VFYW is by far the most fun and interesting contest/game I’ve ever participated in, and I cannot wait to get my hands and eyes on your book!

Here’s a followup from our super-sleuth in Sagaponack:

Thanks for featuring the puppy last week. I think his litter was all spoken for, but if you’re looking for a new little friend, they do breed very cute bernedoodles at Walnut Valley Puppies, where he came from :)

Here’s an amazing coincidence related to last week’s Kuala Lumpur View: we were at the Watermill Center Summer Festival last night and I got to taste durian ice cream!

As background, the Watermill Center is a laboratory for the arts and humanities. Founded by avant-garde visionary Robert Wilson, it’s situated on ten acres of Shinnecock ancestral territory on Long Island’s East End. Since 1992, Watermill has welcomed international artists of all disciplines to collaborate, take creative risks, and contribute new ideas to contemporary culture. It has a collection of over 8,000 artworks and objects, multifunctional studios and living spaces, a research library, and the archives of Robert Wilson and the center.

This year’s Summer Festival — “Limitless Time” — was set out at dusk and wound through the grounds, where nearly 60 artists turned the landscape into an immersive dreamscape of performance, sound, and light. The evening also unveiled the largest presentation of Robert Wilson’s sculpture and design in the US since his 1991 retrospective. It was an especially memorable event, as it was the first festival since Wilson passed away.

One of the artists last night was Hui-Ching Hsu, whose installation was called “Hybrid Truck”:

Inspired by a curious cultural overlap, Hybrid Truck begins with a simple observation: Taiwanese garbage trucks and American ice cream trucks play remarkably similar melodies while serving opposite purposes. In this live performance, a rebuilt hybrid vehicle collects trash from the audience while offering food scented like garbage. Blurring attraction and disgust, familiarity and estrangement, the work uses this exchange to reflect on cultural translation, memory, and the shifting meanings of everyday rituals in an increasingly globalized world.

And she chose durian ice cream as the “food scented like garbage”:

The funny thing was when I was told it was “trash ice cream,” I tried it and … it tasted like garbage. But later, when I knew it was durian ice cream, I tried it again and it tasted kind of fruity and good. So I understand a little better now the duality of durian, and how anticipation has a lot to do with perception!

From the A2 Team in Ann Arbor:

In the contest a few months ago, I marveled at the number of mechanics and car repair shops in Kingman, AZ, suspecting that many cars tended to die on the old Route 66. Well, I feel vindicated this week: the New York Times had an article with beautiful visuals, by a reporter who celebrated the centennial of Route 66 by riding his vintage 1970s BMW motorcycle for all 2,448 miles of it.

And guess where his motorcycle died? Exactly:

Here’s a window that is too challenging for the contest, but it has a cool backstory:

Recently, I had the good fortune to take a solo trip through Switzerland and Italy. My goal was to do it all by train and explore small towns and villages that were somewhat off the regular beaten path for tourists. The day before I was to take a four-hour panoramic train through the Swiss and Italian Alps down into Italy, I stayed for the night in the small Swiss town of Chur (pronounced, “Koor”.)

Being that Switzerland is on the pricey side (even for someone like me coming from San Francisco), I elected to stay in a hostel. The fun thing about this hostel is that it used to be an actual high-security prison — and before that, part of the medieval walls that originally surrounded the town. You can read all about the history of the medieval-wall-turned-prison-turned-hostel here.

The rooms and hallways were absolutely “no thrill” and still looked and felt very much like a prison. But even in my tiny modest room, I still had a lovely, slightly unobstructed view of the mountains I would navigate via train the next day:

Here’s a great endorsement of the VFYW from our super-sleuth in Sherman Oaks:

I’ve been meaning to write several dissent emails to Andrew, but I keep having so much fun with the contest that I forget why I was angry about him in the first place.

On to this week’s view, here’s the beginning of the entry from the Plano super-sleuth:

Wow, not a legible word in sight. Indeed, not even a visible letter or number in sight. And the rain, fog, or smog obscures the buildings in the background. This will be a tough one.

The cars seem American to me, and the apartments adjacent to the parking garage (often as a “wrap”) are typically from 21st-century USA. The foliage and rolling terrain, plus this kind of newer, not-quite-suburban growth, strike me as somewhere south of the Ohio River and east of the Llano Estacado, excluding the flatter places like Houston. But I can’t see any license plates or windshield stickers to hint at a jurisdiction.

There are a lot of skyscrapers — too many for Louisville, for instance. So we are in a larger city, and one where the tall buildings are spread across a pretty wide band of the horizon rather than concentrated in a single downtown core. Some of the tallest buildings have pointed tops, so that seems to rule out Dallas, Birmingham, and Denver. So I started out thinking Charlotte, Nashville, and Atlanta — similar foliage, similar terrain, lots of 21st-century growth.

From Sherman Oaks again:

The gray skies and wet ground made me think of the Pacific Northwest, so I started my search in Portland, but no luck there — same with Seattle and Calgary. The buildings in the foreground are all modern, so a lot of the East Coast was out. I went to some of the major cities in the Midwest but none had a pyramid building on the outside of the downtown area. And the Canadian cities were too dense with buildings.

I thought maybe I’d head south of DC for some more modern cities in NC and SC. In the back of my head I was thinking it could be [city redacted], but I thought it would not have so many skyscrapers in its downtown. I guess they went through a growth spurt in the last decade.

Our super-sleuth in Yakima clears things up a bit:

After a few weeks of easy pitches, this one was challenge, requiring a half-day’s work. Surely there can’t be that many smoky places in the country to search ... right??? A smoke-free view might have made things easier:

I’d really like to know what the tantalizing but inscrutable logos say on the white van parked in the corner rooftop spot of the parking structure. It’s a fixture not only in the view, but also in both Apple Maps and Google Maps.

Also wondering about the white van is our guy in Hinckley, OH:

Other sleuths may have been able to unlock the company name and other info from the service van on that distant parking deck, but for me it remained elusive. I’ve sent out into the wild nearly 20 service vehicles for my company, and I follow the “legibility” rule of one inch of lettering/logo = ten feet of viewing distance. My current “rolling billboard,” high-top Sprinter vans all have our name and phone in lettering that should be visible from 400 feet.

Also focused on the van is our super-sleuth in Saint George:

Interestingly, on every Google Maps/Earth view I could find, that same d*$% van is parked in the same spot:

Perhaps it’s been abandoned after some nefarious event and we should send the police to check on it. Either that, or it’s gotta be a glitch in the matrix. (Someone will, of course, point out that these likely have the same source, but that’s just trying to explain it away. Our submitter’s photo puts the lie to that! ;)

Here’s a city guess from the Riverwoods super-sleuth:

Seems to me that the only clue is the silhouette skyline. Newark, NJ? This is definitely a WAG. Otherwise somewhere in Canada.

The view from your Chini:

Our super-sleuth in Alexandria sees Philly:

I’m guessing that this is a view of the Philadelphia skyline from somewhere south of the city off 95. Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr were too far and didn’t have any tall enough buildings, and I couldn’t find anything in Wilmington DE that looked right. Drexel Hill wasn’t far enough, so I’m thinking somewhere above a Chester parking garage.

The Brookline super-sleuth also thought Philly — at least initially:

I was feeling a little rusty after being away from the contest for a while, so I wracked my brain to come up with large American cities with clusters of tall buildings spread out a bit. I thought Philadelphia at first, but the skyline didn't seem quite right, so I searched various urban areas looking for pointy skyscrapers in close proximity, and I soon arrived in [city redacted].

Focusing on the skyscrapers is our super-sleuth in Tewksbury:

I had an unexpected but fortuitous path to this window ... I didn’t recognize anything in the view, nor could I find any legible text, even when fully zoomed in. I decided to see what I could do with this building:

I started searching for “skyscrapers with pyramids on top,” and after filtering out the Transamerica building in San Francisco, I ultimately came across the Bank of America plaza in [city redacted]. It seemed obvious that this wasn’t the pyramid in this week’s view — but hey, look at that; there are other buildings with pyramids on top in the same picture, including this promising one:

That seemed good enough to start exploring, and I was pretty quickly able to identify other buildings in the skyline, including 361 17th St NW, aka the one that looks like a giant taser:

Our super-sleuth on Park Avenue throws out a WAG — in the right region of the US:

Sorry, been completely jammed this week, and haven’t had a chance to look properly. I think Charlotte, NC, but I’ll dig a little more if I get some time.

Giuseppe, our super-sleuth in Rome, names the right state:

Over time, every VFYW player develops their own set of heuristics. One of mine states that a downtown area with high-rise buildings and surrounded by lush vegetation is most likely in Georgia.

Another writes, “I am not a subscriber, but I believe, from the skyline, that the photo was taken in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.” Yep. And our Intrepid Couch Traveler hit the streets:

While I dragged Couchella all over suburban Atlanta looking the VFYW, ChatGPT somehow convinced her to become an influencer with her own Instagram account.

Our married team in Falcon Heights was also flummoxed in Atlanta:

Deb narrowed down the search from all cities in the world to Atlanta, but now we’re stuck as to the location of the commercial building from which this pic was clicked. Possibly the neighborhood of Bolton. No more time.

Here’s a heartwarming entry from our Burner super-sleuth:

The skyline immediately says Atlanta, but the rest is one big question mark. If this were outside of the US, I would have happily spent hours looking for a hotel with a parking structure across the way with rooftop parking. Not this week.

By the way, as you know, I met the son of my nephew last weekend. (I learned from everyone that he is my GREAT nephew, not grand.) He’s adorbs — those chubby legs!

And that VFYW of the house was taken in Hopkins, MN.

Here’s our window magician, San Mateo:

Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) handles more passengers than any other airport in the world, with over 100 million travelers annually. Atlanta is not the largest city in the United States, but its central location and extensive flight network make it one of the most important transportation hubs in aviation.

Another reason for ATL’s success is its role as Delta Air Lines’ largest hub, along with significant operations from several other airlines. The airport’s layout, multiple runways, and seven concourses allow it to move enormous numbers of passengers while maintaining a steady flow of aircraft. Because so many flights connect through Atlanta, millions of travelers pass through the airport each year even if the city itself is not their final destination.

I mention this because this week’s Reimagined is reimagining the parking lot in front of our window as ATL runway 27R, with a Delta flight accelerating down the runway for takeoff. On the other side of the runway is the passenger terminal:

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Megan is an old friend, a journalist, and an OG blogger — starting way back in 2001. We were bloggers at The Atlantic together, and she went on to write for Newsweek, The Daily Beast, and Bloomberg View. She’s now a WaPo columnist, a contributing writer at The Dispatch, and a co-host of the podcasts “Reasonably Optimistic” and “Central Air.” She’s also the author of The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.

An auto-transcript is available above (just click “Transcript” while logged into Substack). For two clips of the episode — on the appeal of socialism to those under 30, and the secrecy of ailing politicians — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up on the UWS; her prof dad meeting her mom while she TA’d for him; Frank Gannett in her family; peaking at 6’2’’ in 7th grade; an eating disorder to try to counter her height; the heightism of women on dating apps; the coziness of elites in DC; Fauci worship by the Dems; his coziness with Jake Tapper and Hollywood celebs; his diary; Fauci’s lie over masks; masks at the Floyd protests; vaccine mandates; lab leak; Mitch McConnell MIA; Rep. Granger in memory care; Rep. Kean’s depression; Biden’s infirmity; age limits on the presidency; FDR’s overreach; post-Nixon reforms; the constitutional crisis over the Iran War; dwindling Tomahawks; Lindsey Graham’s closeness with Bibi; 9/11 and Islamofascism; nuclear proliferation and the Saudis; whether Vance or Rubio would make a better successor to Trump; Rubio’s designs on Cuba; Vance’s populism and lecturing the Pope; presentism; Jon Ossoff; Rahm Emanuel; the Stonewall myth; misusing rape stats and the UVA hoax; critical theory; the DSA, and its over-educated, downwardly mobile youth.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Ross Barkan on the DSA and Mamdani, John O’Sullivan on conservatism, Emily Eakin on postmodernism, Arianna Huffington on AI, and Azam Ahmed on terrifying new drugs. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s pod with Robby George: “What an interesting and lovely conversation.” Another writes:

Like you, Andrew, I was quite taken with the opening minutes of your conversation with Robby George. Beyond the interesting tales, he’s so articulate and possesses such an absurdly pleasing cadence to his speech. A great chat.

But I can’t say I agree with his conclusions. As has been the case with other arguments for natural law I’ve encountered, his pitch assumes too much about universal human truths — which contradicts the earlier idyllic tale he told of his class discovering the value of the search for truth. The type of interrogative process one generally needs to search for truth — what we see in courtrooms, old-school journalism, the scientific method, and in his very classroom — grinds to a halt in the thick sludge of wordiness he laid before you in response to your prompt, “Just tell me roughly what you mean by natural law.”

According to Robby’s tale, the lesson his class learned is that the process of finding the truth is more crucial than the mistaken proposition that leads you there. I agree. For example, Democritus speculated without real evidence about what we call atoms, and perhaps future technology would have stumbled forward a bit faster had his contemporaries bought in. But ultimately, it would have been dumb luck, and the search for all sorts of truth has been abetted far more by embracing the scientific method.

But when Robby references the is/ought distinction, or things that MLK defined as obviously morally true and worth breaking the law for, he speaks in these universal constructs that only make sense if we take a creator or cosmic plan for granted. There are assumed axioms about human nature that undergird his comments.

Ironically, given Robby’s earlier lessons about the search for truth, if he had a chat with any number of your former guests (Jonathan Haidt, Paige Harden, et al), he’d know that his repeated use of the phrase “human nature” is probably a little outdated. Sure, there are things we more or less all have in common, and no doubt individual cultures mask some universal aspects to our animal instincts. But the myriad genetic factors that tug on the Möbius strip of nature vs nurture can be very individualized — as you essentially observed about your own sexuality, and which apply in some measure to everything from our heights to our work ethics to our cognitive abilities.

Flourishing, as Robby calls it, is the right pursuit. But grand, universal playbooks like religious dogma or natural law will always leave a lot of people ill-considered. Finding the right mix of autonomy, discipline, external constraint, liberty, individualism, communalism, etc — arguably what the Founders meant when they said “the pursuit of happiness” — has been a core piece of the American project since before we had a Constitution.

Most of your conservative and post-liberal guests are right to note that some of the constraints and norms that American society has cast aside have been detrimental to flourishing for far too many. But the solution isn’t embracing unfalsifiable first principles and natural law; it’s continuing the ongoing experiment, noting the successes and failures, perpetually seeking better answers — ironically, perhaps, the exact advice Robby gave his class.

What a wonderful email — perfectly, exquisitely put. Agree with it all.

Here’s a TV recommendation:

Your fascinating discussion with Robert George over same-sex marriage makes this the perfect time to pose a question I’ve thought about asking you for a while: Have you seen — or are you even aware of — the six-part Thai serial Ticket to Heaven?

The show is an example of the genre known as Boys Love, or “BL” — which started off in Japan as a species of manga written by women for girls involving fantasy tales of impossibly beautiful boys with the hots for each other. But particularly after the Thais globalized it, Asian BL became a huge phenomenon with viewership in the tens of millions straddling continents, cultures, and — dare I say it? — genders and orientations. (Why the genre has been almost entirely ignored by Anglophone critics is itself a very interesting question.)

The show is set in a strict Catholic boys school in which a strait-laced honor student headed for the priesthood has his equanimity shattered by the arrival of a quasi-delinquent transfer student who intuits his repressed feelings and proceeds to, well, unrepress them — leading to a crisis of faith and vocation. The show is superbly acted, and while it pulls punches at times, it directly addresses the questions you and Robert George were discussing. It avoids the temptation of casting the Church as a hotbed of homophobic fanatics.

The director (known affectionately as P'Aof) is himself a practicing Catholic, but he also an advocate for gay rights and has been together with his husband for over 20 years. SSM is legal in Thailand, and the popularity of the BL genre there surely played a role in legalization. Thailand is an overwhelmingly Buddhist country, but the Catholic imprint in Thailand is larger than the number of active believers one would expect.

Please watch the show if you can. I think you would find it very moving, particularly given your own life story.

I will now. Thanks for the rec. Here’s the South Park treatment of the BL genre:

Staying on the topic of SSM, here’s a reader:

I just read the trans dissenter who went another round with you. With respect to same-sex marriage, I would like someone to explain to me how exactly Alan L. Hart (born a woman, Lucille) was legally able to marry a woman not once, but twice, more than a century ago? I get that identification schemes may have been more primitive then, but surely when you divorce, it should be grounds for annulment, no? Yet Alan married another woman. (Ironically, the author Jonathan Ned Katz described this person as a lesbian — something he acknowledges he would not do today.)

There were also court cases dealing with transsexual marriage long before same-sex marriage was even talked about (see Corbett v Corbett, a British case). Courts had to decide whether someone is the new sex or one’s birth sex — therefore, you can marry the opposite of what the court decided. Yet Alan Hart’s marriages were never challenged.

Fascinating and true. On another Dishcast:

I liked your interview with David Thomson, and it’s the first one I’ve listened to. I recommend his tome, The New Biographical Dictionary of American Film, which will take you down its own rabbit holes.

I’m a partly unwavering supporter of the Dish and disagree with almost everything you say, but I’ll keep subscribing. At least for now. You are spending way too much time on trans issues. I absolutely believe that the people directly involved need to be supported, but compared to the complete surrender of Republicans to money and only money, it’s way down the list. If they aren’t reined in somehow, the future is very bleak indeed.

I’m supremely grateful to subscribers who stick with us despite my dogged peregrinations into areas they may find icky or overdone or obsessive. I don’t want fans or haters. Just readers — autonomous, independent readers able to make up their own minds when they think I’m off base. Thank you. Thank all of you. And if you haven’t yet subscribed — please do!

A reader remarks on “Graham Platner’s self-immolation”:

I’m surprised you haven’t had much to say about the revelations of alleged drunk rapist in Maine.

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(For the View From Your Window contest, the results below exceed the content limit for Substack’s email service, so to ensure that you see the full results, click the headline above.)

Highlights from this week’s write-up:

• Money quote from Anthony Bourdain: “Your breath will smell as if you’d been French-kissing your dead grandmother.”

• Julia Child’s quote about the fruit is even more disturbing

• A tree that’s existed for 200 million years and is often called a living fossil

• The world’s only elected, rotating monarchy

• “Yes, God is a woman and has boobs — or at least one boob.”

From the victor in last week’s contest:

Awesome! Two free years of Dish please :)

Our super-sleuth in Eagle Rock has a followup photo:

Here’s a photo of my wife and our fuzzy buddy, Angus, standing astride the San Andreas Fault, near New Cuyama, CA:

Another update featuring a canine comes from our super-sleuth in Sagaponack:

The update on our puppy is that the surgery was successful, and our biggest challenge now is keeping him from running around too much. Nice to be young!

Any left from his litter? I’ve got three acres of woods that need a guardian.

Here’s our super-sleuth in Berkeley following up:

I hope you’ll accept this belated walk down memory lane. (Sometimes I can’t find time to read a VFYW write-up until Wednesday or Thursday after I’ve finished writing and submitting the cinema report for the next one.)

As a born and bred Bay Arean, all of the earthquake talk last week got me reminiscing. My very earliest memory is of a quake that struck when I was 3 years, 8 months old. Its magnitude was 5.7 and its epicenter — beneath the Gulf of the Farallones outside the Golden Gate — was 25 miles from our single-story ranch house, which was built on a concrete-slab foundation on a level, solid, non-landfill lot in Marin County. As a Brit might say, we were safe as houses — but I think my parents, who’d moved to the Bay Area from Maryland, must’ve been all shook up about it.

On the other hand, for this sub-4-year-old, who would never have dreamed the dinette could jump around like that, it was my first amusement park ride. Make it do it again! Make it do it again! (I think that sense memory is why I’ve never experienced an earthquake that wasn’t in some way more thrilling than scary.)

The 100-year-old Berkeley house I live in now has been retrofitted — bolted to its foundation with plywood reinforced cripple walls. It shakes more than my childhood house did, but not enough that I’ve ever felt nervous during the many quakes that have rolled through.

Which brings me to my other big earthquake memory: the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, the one sometimes called the World Series Earthquake because it struck just before the first pitch of the third game of the World Series (which already was expected to be earth-shaking for Bay Area fans because it was being played by the As and the Giants — both Bay Area Teams at the time).

Anyway, even with an epicenter 60 miles away, the Loma Prieta quake was a lot more destructive than my childhood one had been. People died, homes built on landfill in San Francisco’s Marina District were leveled, a double-decker freeway four miles from me collapsed, as did part of the roadbed on the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge.

At the moment it hit, I had just begun my three-mile walk home from the Berkeley Campus. I passed a campus building and heard all the windows rattling like crazy as if a hoard of demonstrators was inside staging some kind of organized ruckus. But I could see no one at any of the windows and I felt nothing. When I got home and discovered there’d been a power failure, I only thought, “Shit! Jeanne set the VCR to record the game! She’ll be pissed!” I’m not sure how long it took me to learn the game had been cancelled, that there’d been a major earthquake.

The only thing out of place in the house was an empty videotape box that had fallen off the hearth. That was all.

Our super-sleuth on Park Avenue should be very proud:

I appreciated the comments regarding FIRE in last week’s write-up. It’s a great organization, and funnily enough, our younger daughter — a rising sophomore and frequent VFYW collaborator — is working at FIRE in their summer intern program at the moment. She’s loving it.

Love that! One more followup comes from our self-described wine geek in San Francisco:

It’s been a while, I know. Last week, I was in the Texas hill/wine country and thought the VFYW was from somewhere near there. Not. I realized pretty quickly it was somewhere in California and eventually got to Parkfield, but being the lazy slug I am, I never sent in an entry.

I do want to note, however, that there was a prior contest near here a couple of years ago: #422, in San Luis Obispo. I actually submitted an entry to that one and briefly mentioned James Dean’s famous car crash nearby, and my summary was a bit different from the one you included in the Parkfield write-up last week. Dean of course died, probably instantly, but his passenger — a Porsche mechanic named Rolf Wutherich — survived. He was thrown from the car and ended up with severe injuries.

Interestingly, the driver of the other car, Donald Turnupseed, walked away with minor injuries. He was driving a much heavier, stolid Ford Tudor (two-door), which outweighed Dean’s “Little Bastard” by more than 1000 pounds. He hitchhiked home after the crash.

Nevertheless, it was a monumental and historic event, since Dean was then posthumously nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Giant. Imagine if he was driving a bit slower and had made it to Paso Robles for a glass of Dusi vineyards Zinfandel. Would he have been as “cool”? In my mind, yes. In most other people’s minds, no.

Another sleuth writes:

I love the addition of people’s own views to the VFYW lately (even if they don’t make the cut for the featured view). It’s so cool to see where all of the sleuths are hanging out.

The newest addition:

Fifty-seven people live on this island — Fetlar, in Shetland, Scotland. We are here on holiday, and every morning we get up at 5, make tea, and catch up on emails and bits of work. We had to take three ferries to reach it — the quietest place I’ve ever been. It’s my view as I type this.

Next door to this holiday house is a small local museum. It houses what was once recognised by Guinness World Records as the oldest message in a bottle ever recovered. It spent 98 years at sea, having been released in 1914 and found by a Shetland fishing boat in 2012. It hadn’t gone very far — only a few nautical miles from where it was dropped!

Thanks for a great read each week.

Thanks for the great view! On to this week’s main view, here’s our super-sleuth in Sherman Oaks, naming the right continent:

At first I thought this was going to be impossible. The view looked like it could be taken from anywhere in the world, but as I kept looking around the photo, I could see that it was somewhere in Asia and somewhere tropical.

You left the word “durian” and some Chinese lettering unblurred at the bottom, so I took that as the first clue to run down. Durian’s Chinese spelling — 榴蓮 — actually spells out liǔlián, because most of the Chinese who immigrated to the region of Nanyang (Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia) spoke Minnan Hokkien, which was prevalent in the southern region of China, and their “l” and “d” sounds were often swapped.

The durian is a fruit that grows mostly in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines:

It is highly coveted in China, and imports by last estimate have reached $6.99 billion a year. Many Chinese tourists, in order to eat it when it’s freshest, will fly into some of these countries, eat some durian, and fly back home.

I thought maybe I would look at some Chinese cities that might be the view, but with “durian” spelled out in English text, I limited my search to Hong Kong and Macau. Those cities were much more dense than the city in the view.

Zooming in on the Chinese lettering is our super-sleuth in Durham, UK:

You were kind enough to leave “durian” in the view:

This immediately suggested [country redacted], and a bit of googling got me to Dunian Durian, a fruit wholesaler. Here’s a screen grab from one of their TikTok videos:

Here’s our super-sleuth in Fort Collins:

As usual, another great VFYW image. The obvious element in the photo is the word DURIAN, which immediately brought me to Singapore — the only place where I’ve tried durian. I’m sure the Dish community is familiar with the saying about this fruit: “It tastes like heaven, but smells like hell.” TBH, I don’t remember the taste, but I sure remember the smell (stink)!

From a previous winner:

So this week was pretty easy ... as soon as I had Google translate the Chinese characters:

I don’t know if this is cheating, but it feels like cheating! Haha

Nah, not cheating. The A2 Team phoned a friend:

The name of the store that Dusty is covering up caught my eye: “Dunian Durian,” and below, in traditional Chinese (thank you, neighbor Cindy, for deciphering it): “Durian Specialty Shop.”

San Mateo breaks down the Chinese characters:

A bit of OCR attention to the characters gives us 都念榴蓮大排档:

都 (dōu) — all, everyone
念 (niàn) — think of, long for, crave
榴蓮 / 榴莲 (liúlián) — durian
大排檔 / 大排档 (dà pái dàng) — open-air food stall, hawker stall, street-food stall

The first two characters literally mean “everyone is thinking about/craving,” so a natural English rendering would be “everyone craves durian food stall.” But the first two characters also approximate the sound “Dunian,” so another rendering would be “Dunian durian street food stall.” And that is consistent with the word under Dusty — “Dunian”.

Here’s a Chinese city guess from our super-sleuth in Chattanooga:

Guangzhou, China?

I was afraid AI slop was leading me on a slow boat to China, but I enjoyed learning about the rise in Hainan Durian agriculture competing in Asia. According to Google, the Chinese distribution center is in the Nansha District of Guangzhou. This random photo of Nansha highlights does have some matching buildings, but that’s as close as I’m going to get:

Our super-sleuth in Rome writes, “Now I can’t help wondering what a durian tastes like”:

Wikipedia is encouraging — “The flavour of the flesh is complex with savoury notes, and the texture is creamy and pudding-like” — but less so about the smell: “Some people regard the durian as having a pleasantly sweet fragrance, whereas many others find the aroma overpowering and unpleasant. The persistence of its strong odour, which may linger for several days, has led some hotels and public transportation services in Southeast Asia […] to ban the fruit.”

This brave soul would like to try it anyway.

Our brave soul on Park Avenue did:

This view for me was definitely Southeast Asia from the get-go, and then the “Durian” shop was the hint that it’s in [country redacted]. I had a girlfriend many moons ago who actually liked durian and brought one over to the apartment one day to try to convince me — to no avail. We had to air out the place for days. It’s like eating custard over an open sewer with a piece of raw onion in one nostril. So not a fan — but those who like it, love it.

If you’re not deterred enough already, here’s the DC super-sleuth:

Just looking at pictures of the fruit turns my stomach, and it doesn’t help that detractors have sometimes compared the odor to “sewage,” “stale vomit,” “skunk spray,” “rotting flesh,” and (my favorite) “pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock.” Social media is full of videos of people reacting with disgust when they smell and eat the fruit. The smell can cling to skin and fabrics and persist for hours or even days, and some people wear gloves to eat it because of the difficulty of getting the odor off their hands.

Chini stays far away from the stench:

The Ridgewood super-sleuth actually enjoys the fruit — and he spotted something in the view that no one else did:

Durians are very tasty, though a lot of people dislike them. Kind of a mix of sweet vanilla and onion — yum!

Although Dusty concealed “DURIAN,” she did not conceal “Alor” — towards the bottom right:

And searching for Durian Alor takes you straight to this backspace area in [city redacted].

Here’s another city guess:

Singapore!

That’s as close as I’ve got. I had a lovely stay there a few years back. The durian referenced in the sign is going to get a ton of entries. My experience included the “No durian” signs on public transit, right next to “No knives.” We bought and tasted one (exceedingly stupidly) before throwing the husk in the trash. Some say it tastes like rotting flesh. I thought it tasted merely like old potatoes — but it smelled like death for days in the kitchenette garbage.

Our super-sleuth in Sydney is also familiar with such signs:

San Mateo spots another sign:

I’m shocked — shocked. Because this week’s contest completely ignores the first rule of VFYWing:

Heh. Eagle Rock chimes in:

I tried durian once. ONCE. Thank you, no.

A compilation of reactions come from the married team in Falcon Heights:

We spotted the Durian food storefront early on and took that to imply we were in Thailand, probably Bangkok, as the durian fruit is notorious on a YouTube channel we track — the TRY Channel:

But Deb figured out it wasn’t Thailand.

More durian fun comes from this previous winner:

Sadly I don’t have any stories about durian, but it looks like Dunian Durian is a good place to go for a durian buffet — all you can eat in one hour for RM 168 or RM 198, depending on the type of durian you choose. Or maybe a durian hat, as seen at their Instagram page.

Other sleuths will no doubt have experience with durian, but I’ll just add a quote attributed to Anthony Bourdain: “Your breath will smell as if you’d been French-kissing your dead grandmother.” Still, he seems to have liked it — sampling durian ice cream in my old San Francisco neighborhood:

Here comes the creativity from San Mateo:

Now that we know we’re at a particular durian shop, there’s no question that the focus of this week’s Reimagined must be the durian. In fact, another photo of the Dunian Durian shop leads us to that conclusion with an extra-large durian in front:

Now that we know where to focus, looking into a durian portal, we find our Reimagined for this week:

Or, later in the day, we find a dramatic sunset over Bukit Bintang, viewed through the mystical durian portal:

It looks like a smelly Eye of Sauron.

Here’s Sherman Oaks again, naming the right city:

The apartment building in the middle of the view with all the rounded balconies gave an Indonesian or Malaysian vibe.

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Robert P. George is a legal scholar and political philosopher. At Princetown, he’s the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and the director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He’s also a senior fellow at both the American Enterprise Institute and the Witherspoon Institute, which he co-founded. His many books include Making Men Moral and In Defense of Natural Law. We spent many years sparring in print over marriage, gays, and Catholicism.

An auto-transcript is available above (just click “Transcript” while logged into Substack). For two clips of the episode — on disobeying unjust laws, and the supposed harms of gay marriage — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: his dad’s harrowing service in WWII; Robby growing up in Appalachia with his grandfathers in the coal mines; first in his family to go to college; stories of both of us being at Oxford at the same time; the origins of bluegrass; Robert Byrd’s legacy; Plato’s Gorgias; Aristotle and friendship; Robby’s close friendship with Cornel West; Montaigne; Aquinas; Vatican II; Eastern Orthodox liturgy; neo-scholasticism; Darwin’s survival of the fittest; Nietzsche; loving one’s enemy as uniquely Christian; just law and unjust law; MLK’s letter from a Birmingham jail; Hume; Oakeshott; natural law theorists vs legal positivists; the AIDS crisis; Christian marriage vs civil marriage; divorce; the Manhattan Declaration; Henry VIII’s annulments; the sexual habits of Clinton and Trump; illiberalism on the left and right; and the beached squids of Ptown.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Ross Barkan on the DSA and Mamdani, John O’Sullivan on conservatism, Azam Ahmed on terrifying new drugs, and Megan McArdle on pretty much anything. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s episode with David Thomson on cinema:

What a wonderful episode! It actually ended too soon. It’s good to have a rest from politics.

From another who “loved the interview”:

I’m a movie person, and it’s hard to find thoughtful writing on the movies, as pervasive as they are in our lives. It’s all celebrity junk and industry insider gossip. Who cares?

David Thomson, though, has built a career deeply thinking about movies and sharing his thoughts. What a singular and independent voice! And with the richness of the two-country perspective. I’m so glad he’s still writing! Thanks for bringing him on.

I had a blast with the book and the man. On the following clip, a listener remarks, “Scary shit”:

On another episode:

I was thinking that you should take inspiration from Russ Roberts and have subscribers vote for their favorite episode of the year. At this point mine would be Tom Junod’s “On Masculinity and His Dad,” which I could not possibly have predicted before the fact. It was so peculiar and gripping, like a dream that you half remember in the moments after you wake.

At any rate, keep up the good work and enjoy the summer!

Cheers! And yes, we will. Here’s a guest rec for the pod:

I am a longtime subscriber, immensely grateful for your work, nourished by it, and always recommending the Dish to people. I just finished listening to the audiobook of Kenan Malik’s 2023 Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics, and I thought it was excellent. Maybe he would make a good guest. You have much in common, but there might also be room for some friction, because I think he is less “conservative” than you are. I’d love to hear you have a conversation with him.

I’m a fan of Malik’s, so this is a great idea. Thanks. Another reader recommends “an eye-opening book I think you’ll love”:

Since, like me, you are a Christian with a, let’s say, conflicted relationship between your faith and your sexuality, check out Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Well, I did actually read his entire History of Christianity, which includes this material. Part of my research for the book I’m not yet writing. He’s an extraordinary scholar, the best I’ve read since John Boswell. Another book plug:

Whataboutism works so well as a defense against seeing things, such as the corruption and grift of Trump. There’s a great book by Dan Goleman called Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception. I read it about 20 years ago and remember thinking, “All of us are vulnerable to self-deception” — but I’ve never seen anything like the level of MAGA’s.

From a subscriber who’s sticking with us:

Thanks for your email reminding me of my subscription renewal. Some Substack writers don’t offer us this friendly reminder, and I appreciate the chance to decide whether to go on with you. This year I’m cutting back on all sorts of expenses, at a time when family crises need my attention and money. You do infuriate me, usually on a weekly basis. Yet … I have read you since the New Republic days, I loved the original Dish, and we have grown old together. I lost a beloved brother to AIDS, and your words of that time helped me. And so much more.

So, another year of Dish.

We can’t express sufficient gratitude. Substack seems to be experiencing a subscription swoon of sorts and we are no exception. The economy and exhaustion with the world, along with over-supply, are the main reasons, along with some readers upset by my views on Israel’s wars. So every sub counts.

On last week’s column, which was a four-parter, a reader writes:

That was a great format last week. Can you do more quick takes like that? I like your extended takes, but I also remember fondly the three-different-topic essay format from when you were at New York Magazine; I like hearing you riff on the many different topics.

Heh. Well I was desperate for a subject and gave up. But sometimes a little tapas is better than a main meal. Especially in the summer. On the substance of that column:

Your remembrance of Lindsey Graham last week was an appropriate, short epitaph for a man who never saw a war he didn’t love. That said, his devotion to Israel (especially Netanyahu’s Israel) seems to have been another political calculation from a man who justified his two about-faces on Trump as what kept him “in the game... There’s no way to get around Trump. He’s the most important figure in the Republican Party now — not me, not John McCain, not George W. Bush. Donald Trump. Let’s play the hand we’re dealt.”

I believe Graham’s devotion to Israel stemmed from South Carolina’s demographics: 77% are self-identified Christians and nearly 40% are evangelical. This is the impact of primaries in de-facto one-party states (SC hasn’t elected a statewide Dem in 20 years), when such a large bloc has a simplistic, dogmatic attachment to another country. Evangelicals, by and large, believe that Israel must exist to trigger Jesus’ second coming, therefore Graham had to “stand with Israel” in full-throated bombast. He was a political animal who always coasted along the conservative tides, and his constituents were another audience to butter up in the pursuit of power.

On a different part of the column:

I read Edsall’s piece and, on immigration, I agree — except about the path to citizenship for those who entered illegally (unless they were brought here as minors; they should be offered citizenship). Yes, we need to legalize those here illegally, because it’s both humane and will bring them into the open economy. But they did break the law, and it’s unjust to reward them by letting them jump the line ahead of those who are following the rules to legally immigrate to our country. If it were up to me, we would have a vastly more liberal immigration policy — but there has to be a consequence for immigrating illegally.

Another writes:

Tom Edsall nailed it. My version:

I didn’t vote for Harris or Trump and have no regrets about that decision. Even as the Republican train goes off the rails, driven by an increasingly insane engineer, my former party — the Democratic Party — sinks even deeper. The Dems lost in 2024 and will continue to lose in the future because of one reason: losing the support of the working class.

The historic Democratic icons FDR and JFK would laugh at what passes for policy in their beloved party. Although they were upper class, they understood that victory for their party depended on appealing to working-class voters. Current party leaders disdain the “deplorable” and “racist” members of the working class.

Working-class Americans hate the following policies foisted on them by the Democrats:

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(For the View From Your Window contest, the results below exceed the content limit for Substack’s email service, so to ensure that you see the full results, click the headline above.)

Highlights from this week’s write-up:

• One of the most tragic car crashes in American history

• One of the most iconic car crashes in cinema history

• A beetle that can sustain a car driving over it repeatedly without damaging it

• The origins of “cool”

• An obit for Miss Bigglesworth, a VFYW pet

Here’s a sleuth who recently moved to Lake Ellwood, Wisconsin:

It’s our first 4th in our new home:

Happy 250th birthday, my fellow tax absconders! 😂🇺🇸❤️

Speaking of patriotic Americans, I recently noticed a sleuth’s name in a byline on FIRE’s substack (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression). FIRE has, in my opinion, supplanted the ACLU as the premier group fighting for free speech, so it’s very cool to see a VFYW-er contribute to their mission. (Their president, Greg Lukianoff, was on the Dishcast not too long ago.) So I asked our sleuth — the self-described “ski nerd” who writes the weekly slopes report — if he would remark on his FIRE post:

I’m a (retired) fully certified ski instructor and a 40-year member of the Professional Ski Instructors of America - Western Division, which certifies nearly all ski and snowboard instructors in California, Nevada, and Hawaii. For the last year, the organization’s elected board has clung to power, secretly and unlawfully suspending all their opponents and voiding the most recent election. It’s a sorry mess, with three lawsuits, claims of violating fiduciary duty, an illegally recorded private conversation, a police investigation, and alleged civil extortion.

I discovered that the root cause was a “One Voice” policy that gags directors, preventing them from speaking critically to the membership after a majority vote of the board. And then I learned that One Voice has been a common policy among nonprofits for decades, and, even more distressing, common among boards for school districts, community colleges, and state universities. I ended up writing a Substack article, “One Voice: Gagging education board members,” for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Next up, our super-sleuth in Sagaponack sends a window from abroad:

Welcome back — hope you had a fantastic Dishcation! I captured this view while visiting Montenegro, but I’m just getting around to sending it now that we’re back in NY. It’s a nice view of the Bay of Kotor from the Church of Our Lady of the Rocks, just off Perast:

I kinda wish you’d have used this easier View last week so I would have had more time to find the window in Merligen. I had found that tower and was actually in the right town; I just didn’t get to the right buildings. Kudos to everyone who found it.

One of them was the “a-maize-ing sleuth” in OKC, who follows up:

The write-up about Merligen did not mention the centerpiece of the town’s majestic scene: the diamond-shaped, strikingly symmetrical Niesen peak across Lake Thun. Here is my 2019 view of it on the train from Interlaken toward Thun:

Among non-volcanic peaks, Niesen is a rare example of a clean cut by nature’s knife, with edges unnaturally straight. Its steep slope (~45 degrees) approaches the angle of the sides of Egyptian pyramids (51.8 degrees for the Great Pyramid of Giza). Niesen was carved from an alpine mountain mass that’s not a former volcano. Volcanic peaks are more likely to be homogeneous in inner structure, and be eroded symmetrically — think Mount Fuji, Kilimanjaro, or Rainier.

While they all have a flat top where the crater used to be, the Mælifell in Iceland is an exception; it retained the pointy top of its cone, thus becoming an iconic specimen of a perfect volcano. Mælifell was shrouded in clouds when my daughter and I drove through Landmannalaugar a few summers ago, so I borrowed a photo online:

On to this week’s view, our super-sleuth in Parkfairfax writes:

Happy Independence Day! This was a great VFYW for this American holiday weekend.

Our super-sleuth in Warrensburg:

Hope you got to enjoy a little time off, since y’all deserve a break from covering the shit-show that is our politics! You also gifted us with a mercifully easy view this week, which I appreciate.

So does our Burner super-sleuth:

This week’s window is my favorite type of window. Impossible at first glance, but eventually the clues review themselves: flag, water tank, directions post, and the carved cowboy, among others.

One of the others is highlighted by the ski nerd:

The sign “Please Close the Gates to Keep the Wild Hogs Out” reminds me of a sign I saw on a bayou tour outside of New Orleans:

From our super-sleuth in Riverwoods:

The clues of “close gate for the hogs” and bluegrass led me either to Kentucky’s Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area, or possibly to a couple counties in Eastern KY. It just looks and feels like Kentucky to me :)

Is the statue Daniel Boone? What is the word on the barrel that starts with W and ends with H? Wabash? Is that the giveaway clue?

The answers will reveal themselves soon. Here’s some context regarding the hogs, from a previous winner — who also names the right state and county:

A couple of things in this view are intriguing to me, like the short fences everywhere. This is to keep out feral pigs, which are evidently a huge problem in Monterey County and elsewhere, just like it is where I live in Oahu, Hawaii. California’s wild pig population has soared since various non-native boar and pig breeds were introduced centuries ago. They now can be found in 56 of the 58 counties in California.

Numerous environmental and public health problems are associated with pigs, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife allows year-round pig hunting. Governor Newsom recently signed into law Senate Bill 856, lifting remaining hunting restrictions allowing for better population control and habitat management.

Here’s Chini high above the hogs:

From our super-sleuth in Sherman Oaks:

I haven’t been able to submit many entries lately because I was just stumped. I actually saw how we had an extra week with this view, so I decided to take a stab at it. Luckily it was a fairly easy one.

I could tell from the scene that we were in California. The sign post with Paso Robles and the San Andreas Fault told me we were in central CA. Paso Robles is actually pretty far west of the fault line, so I guess the picture was somewhere close to the fault line. I found this map of cities that sit on the fault line in California:

Parkfield and Cholame were the closest to Paso Robles.

A quick detour comes from Hinckley, OH:

This has to one of the slowest-pitched softballs in the VFWY in a long time! I’ll leave it to others to explain the statue, and cafe, and lodge, seismicity, and the whole origin story of this town. But the next town, just north, Coalinga, has its own origin name. Many think it must be Hispanic, but NOPE. In the mining years there were three coal mines, designated Mines A, B and C. “Coaling Station A” was truncated to “Coalinga”:

A previous winner has a family connection to that town:

I actually had a great aunt in Coalinga. She learned to drive at age 92. Her license was revoked at 96. She died at 101. Her 100th birthday party was off the hook.

Berkeley settles on the right town:

This week’s vague first impression had me half expecting a point-blank closeup of a solitary, single-story structure with not much in the way of clues. When I got around to really examining it, though, I realized it would be solvable.

Dusty was hiding what seemed to be a relatively short town name starting with W and ending with H. Maybe Wabash? (Wrong on both counts.) And the distinctive statue of the cowboy with faithful dog looked as if it might have potential. (Not really.)

But I stopped thinking along either of those lines when I saw that you’d left us a couple of ostrich-sized Easter eggs: a pair of tiny directional signs pointing off to the left in the apparent direction of both the San Andreas Fault and the city of Paso Robles, both in California. So suddenly this contest promised to be not only solvable, but easy to solve.

Both signs point in the same direction, meaning our window had to be just east of the San Andreas Fault because Paso Robles is west of it. So, using the US Geological Survey’s interactive fault map, I started tracing Highway 46 East out of Paso Robles and, just after crossing the fault, turned left on Cholame Valley Road. The road ran roughly parallel to the fault, with a few jags, for about 14 miles before coming upon a little hamlet:

And bingo! Found the place in no time: Parkfield.

But I didn’t expect it would turn out to be the earthquake capital of the world (not just a slogan for tourists, although the USGS only goes so far as to call Parkfield the nation’s earthquake capital). It’s called that because of how regularly the place gets bounced around. It was hit by temblors of 6.0 or higher on the Richter scale in 1857, 1881, 1901, 1922, 1934, and 1966, which averages out to 1 every 22 years. (Followed by a pause of 38 years, which messed up the average a bit, but it’s worth noting that the last 6.0 quake was 22 years ago in 2004.) Frequent little tremors also roll through, but they aren’t worth getting agitated about.

Here’s the flyover to Parkfield from the CO/NJ super-sleuth:

Roberts Creek notes, “Parkfield is a historic, one-block town owned and operated largely as part of the V6 Ranch.” Says Brookland:

This was a fun one. I love the way the tree blocks out just enough of what would be tell-tale clues, with Dusty only needing to block out the big “V6 Ranch” painted on the horizontal tank. Enough clues remain: the signs that read San Andreas Fault, Horse Camp, and Paso Robles, plus Bluegrass, to go through a series of Google searches, and eventually “paso robles cowboy log cabin restaurant lodge” revealed the V6 Ranch and [redacted].

Clearing up the directional sign is our super-sleuth in Durham, UK:

I’m guessing this view will elicit a lot of answers! The sign was the key for me, and googling “San Andreas” plus “horse camp” got me to this newsletter, which has the same sign on page 6, with the title “Day 5: Parkfield”:

So Parkfield it is.

Another looks to the other big clue in view:

A month ago I had a swelled head for getting correct buildings in the Maldonado, Vancouver, and Lagos VFYWs, but I was then brought back to Earth on my picks for the Cusco, Montreal, and Merligen windows: Western Hemisphere, Upstate New York and Somewhere in Switzerland, respectively. So thanks for the abundance of clues this week, such as the distance signs and especially the Sculpture of Man with Dog. I’m surprised you didn’t cover it with a big sideways Dusty.

Another asks:

Isn’t that a statue of Jebediah Springfield?

I guess not.

San Mateo reimagines that statue — with video this time:

Welcome back! I always miss the VFYW when you’re gone.

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In the old Fleet Street — a row of lumbering, ugly buildings in the center of London surrounded by pubs — the hacks would call these sultry, distracted weeks of July the “dog days” of summer. (“Dog days,” I recently discovered, is a phrase that goes back to the Romans, referring to the “Dog Star,” which was dominant this time of year. Sadly, it has nothing to do with dogs wilting in the midday heat.)

News becomes less newsy (they called the interns “summer relief” in those days, and it wasn’t all about sexual harassment); sports crowds the front pages; and you feel the mind wandering as Canadian smoke turns the skies yellow, England breaks soccer hearts yet again, and the mad king sputters in the half-destroyed lair formerly known as the White House.

Speaking of whom, some brief notes on the current scene as the heat dome hovers …

He’s Still Out Of His Mind

We’re used to it, of course, but it still demands repeating. The president is mentally unwell — a delusional, malignant sociopath incapable of absorbing any reality that is not pure wish-fulfillment. We have never elected anyone to that office as inadequate to it as this man. The stream of consciousness we were subjected to last night is merely the latest of a series of humiliations for a country dumb and desperate enough to re-elect a global laughingstock. Have I said this before? Yes, I have said this before. It remains a fact we are currently doing our best to ignore. For appearance’s sake.

He provided no new evidence of any fraud. Yes, foreign countries have tried to influence our elections. So what? His claim — that China somehow successfully rigged 2020 — makes no sense, and has no serious documentation. But the result, of course, is the continued delegitimization of the core procedures of democracy, an unforgivable dereliction of duty by a president, and something he does entirely to assuage his own ego. There really is nothing more to this than Trump’s conviction that elections he wins are always fair, and elections he loses are always rigged. Trump is not hard to understand. We have a toddler as POTUS.

And he decides to bore us with this self-centered bullshit even as the war he vowed never to fight reignites because Vance was too incompetent to draft an enforceable MOU to get out of it. And so the global economy slides because Trump simply couldn’t concede that Obama got the best deal from Iran available all those years ago. The price of one man’s insatiable ego: $100 billion of taxpayers’ money, and $85 a barrel and climbing.

The Pathos Of Edsall

I read Tom Edsall every week without fail. He’s an old-school liberal lefty who nonetheless has a healthy respect for electoral reality. And after years of frustrated attempts to coax self-criticism from the Democrats, he kinda unleashed this week — with a simple plea to the party he wants to support. If they want to win, he argued, they need to change on three things: immigration, crime, and trans. He’s dead-on. These issues truly are the test, it seems to me, of whether the Dems are serious. And what Tom understands is that the change needs to be stark, clear, and striking to work.

On immigration: a pledge to keep the Southern border sealed, to deport the most recent Biden wave of new arrivals, including in the interior, and to move everyone else to a path to citizenship. On crime: aggressive prosecution of violence, restoration of bail requirements, and lifetime imprisonment for repeat violent offenders. On trans: full civil-rights protections but no co-ed sports and no child transitions. Simple, clear, sane, and popular positions. Nothing inherently conservative about any of them.

I’d add a fourth, for what it’s worth, as a kind of bouquet for the message as a whole: an end to corruption. What we’ve seen these past two years is a level of political graft and grift far beyond anything in US history. A sitting president traded on his name to scam thousands of gamblers out of $2 billion. His sons have all but integrated US foreign policy into a payola scheme for their own business interests; and no-bid contracts are ubiquitous when it comes to the Trump retinue. There is nothing these low-life crooks won’t monetize — and even the teleprompter dude is in on the scam! They’re now giving advance notice of Trump’s Truth Social posts to paying clients, who can use the heads-up to play the markets. In the DC swamp, the algae are truly balling.

Senator Ossoff has the goods — which is why he is easily the most attractive possibility for 2028 right now:

How much do you guys know about Jared Kushner, Ivanka’s husband? He’s on the Saudi payroll for $2bn, did you know that? And now he’s leading American diplomacy in the Middle East, apparently, while at the very same time asking princes and sheikhs across the Arab world to give him billions more. Can you imagine, like a normal, sitting US ambassador just hitting up Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman for billions of dollars? But he’s a Trump, a royal, a princeling. The rules are for us, not for them. ... The Mar-a-Lago mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights.

More like this, please. A lot more.

Keir Was A Good Bloke

It is one of those rare things in life when someone you knew extremely well as a kid goes on to become prime minister, if only for two underwhelming years of relative failure. I’m not immersed enough in the details of English politics to offer a serious critique of his premiership, but I do think it’s worth noting that I never really recognized the boy I remember in the man I observed from afar. He used to be a kid of daring and drive. He ended up a half-man in a neutered suit.

What happens to people when they climb the greasy pole I avoided? Some adjustment is essential, of course. White lies, euphemisms, awkward alliances, and trade-offs are all integral to political survival, and I’m no purist. But the one thing I recall of Keir in grammar school was the clarity of his strong convictions — a clarity utterly absent in his time in Number 10. Of course these convictions needed tempering over time. But they seem to have evaporated entirely into a zone of pure “process”.

Part of it I ascribe to the kind of socialization anyone who becomes an international human rights lawyer, as Keir did, will go through. These elites glide effortlessly together, like shoals of tiny minnows, especially in the EU bureaucracies where Keir thrived. They use their own language; abide by their own rituals; every argument they make is parsed to avoid offense, every point finessed, until what’s left is oddly sterile and unsatisfying. The antics of a Trump or a Farage are, to my mind, much worse in a leader. But they represent something recognizably human; and people want their leaders to be human above all. Keir somehow drained that out of his system until his smallness absorbed itself. He’s not alone.

Why can’t we have clarity and decency? What in our system keeps giving us either dangerous clowns or clinical careerists? As soon as I get a chance to have a beer with the dude, I’ll ask Keir myself.

Was Lindsey Graham Gay?

Who cares? That has long been my view. (On the other hand, I was once asked to interview him for an Atlantic event, and in order to get out of it, I said I’d ask him directly about it on stage. They quickly found someone else.)

Of course, some did care — and made Graham the butt of some pretty basic leftwing homophobia. Jamie Kirchick has a good round-up. My faves: “fuck u u closeted idiot,” from Rosie O’Donnell, and “From the closet to the coffin, real seamless,” from Margaret Cho. The queers can be so charming, can’t they? I’d put Graham in a somewhat lamer category. At the Daily Dish, we used to refer to him as Butters, the South Park character, who’s always Cartman’s easy mark. He attached himself to others: first McCain, then Trump. As if he could only really function in some other bigger dude’s shadow.

But what I found truly odd about Graham was his strange, almost pathological devotion to other countries. It’s one thing to support Israel, for example. It’s quite another to almost take up residence there, all but internalize being an Israeli, and speak constantly as if you were a representative of Jerusalem rather than Washington. All of that was true this year.

“I will be with Israel until our dying day,” is not an atypical statement for Butters, who was more in favor of US aid to Israel than Netanyahu was. He favored Dresden- and Hiroshima-like action in Gaza: “I think they should go in and destroy Hamas, just as we destroyed the Germans and the Japanese.” There was a near-religious level of devotion: “If America pulls the plug on Israel, God will pull the plug on us.” I’m sorry but at some point, this is just weird. The same could be said for his championing of Ukraine: not so much a sober weighing of America’s interests but a full-on, enthusiastic participant in another country’s destiny.

Maybe this is simply a function of the power a US Senator can wield: you visit a foreign country, are treated like a demigod, and get to like it. Maybe it’s simply a yearning for righteous conflict usually unavailable in a peaceful democracy, which Graham shared with McCain.

But part was also that he was a global Senator for whom American power was such an aphrodisiac in the late 20th Century that he couldn’t resist over-using it. I can forgive him for that. He meant well, after all, even though hundreds of thousands died and America became a war-criminal nation because of policies he backed. What I find harder to forgive is his total refusal to recognize how disastrous for America his adventurism turned out to be. This man never conceded an error of judgment. He never recanted the Iraq War and was a fervent supporter of the Iran War until his last breath. He’d be trying to get ground troops into Iran right now if he were still alive. The sole consolation of his death is that his catastrophic, well-intentioned, meddling will finally end. But the damage still mounts.

(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a fascinating chat with film critic David Thomson; reader dissents over the DSA and Dems; 13 notable quotes from the week in news; 19 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of a boy’s birdsong; a patriotic window from Michigan; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)

From a new subscriber:

I’ve been a lurker for a while, but this genderqueer BS makes me angry if I think about it too much. I will never give another penny to mainstream LGB groups, considering how totally they’ve squandered the good will that many of us worked so hard to achieve for our community. Heartbreaking.

Another reason for subscribing: “I enjoy the excellent interviews and insightful commentary.” Most grateful for the support.

New On The Dishcast: David Thomson

David is a historian and perhaps the greatest living film critic. He’s the author of more than 20 books, including biographies of David O. Selznick and Orson Welles, and The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. His new book is called A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies. It’s a wonderful extended rant in some ways, a love letter and a searing indictment of cinema. I was a little intimidated talking with him, but it was a lot of fun.

Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the uptight genius of Hitchcock, and the authoritarian nature of cinema. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s pod about love and psychoanalysis, as well as readers on the DSA. I also address a couple emails from canceled subscribers.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: John O’Sullivan on conservatism, Azam Ahmed on terrifying new drugs, Robby George on natural law, and Megan McArdle on pretty much anything. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Support the ad-free pod!

Dissents Of The Week

In response to my column on the DSA, a reader writes:

I would dispute your characterization of DSA candidates conducting a takeover of the Democratic Party. Yes, they are winning races in deep-blue urban seats, but they are all getting crushed across the Southeast. I don’t think a single DSA candidate won a primary anywhere in that whole swath of the country.

And I live in Connecticut, which is also very blue. We haven’t had our primary yet, but no candidates endorsed by the DSA are favored to win any congressional primaries. Even the cities here elect mainstream Democrats.

Another dissent along those lines:

It’s as though you intentionally ignore all the success that the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party had during the November election and those currently having success right now in very red districts. Of course NYC elections are going to dominant the news cycle, but far-left candidates winning in extremely blue districts doesn’t mean a party takeover, or that the far-left ideology is taking over. The far left couldn’t even hold Chicago! We’re supposed to think what’s happening in NYC is going to transport to nice, moderate, purple, or even blue districts???

Thanks for the pushback. It’s important. More dissents are on the pod page, and please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Support good-faith debate

In The ‘Stacks

This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as Lindsey Graham, deadly ICE, and the bloodshed in Burma. Below are two examples, followed by a new substack:

• Here’s an FAQ for the cyclospora outbreak.

• Is alcohol going the way of cigarettes?

• Naomi Klein makes the jump to an ever-crowded Substack.

Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

The View From Your Window Contest

Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday at 11.59 pm (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription. Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!

The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Since this week’s pod is cinema themed, let’s give our cinema sleuth another shout-out — for his detailed weekly reports that include film location maps, like this one for Montreal:

And from the latest contest, in the Alps, here’s a shout-out to this poor pup:

From what I can tell in this week’s View, we’re somewhere in the Bernese Oberland. My closest connection is our Bernedoodle puppy, who has 1/8 heritage from that region. Sadly he broke his leg, but happily is on the mend:

He did his best to help us find the View window from his homeland, but we just ran out of time.

See you next Friday.

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David is a historian and perhaps the greatest living film critic. He’s the author of more than 20 books, including biographies of David O. Selznick and Orson Welles, and The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. His new book is called A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies. It’s a wonderful extended rant in some ways, a love letter and a searing indictment of cinema. I was a little intimidated talking with him, but it was a lot of fun.

An auto-transcript is available above (just click “Transcript” while logged into Substack). For two clips of the episode — on the uptight genius of Hitchcock, and the authoritarian nature of cinema — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: born in South London in 1941 and his home damaged by the Blitz; his father leaving when he was born; his boyish mix of fear and delight at the cinema; the shower scene in Psycho; how film denies you the chance to stop and think; the directors who relish white space (e.g. PT Anderson); Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will; newsreels before TV; real nuke explosions on screen; Oppenheimer; from communal theater viewing to solo smartphone viewing; Game of Thrones and the insane production value of TV these days; Breaking Bad; Trump the ultimate product of TV; his telegenic Cabinet; the danger of deepfakes; Paul Schrader’s First Reformed; the audience’s love of car crashes and villains; Godfather I and II; contrasting Hitchcock and Malick; Tree of Life; nature in Thin Red Line; Fincher’s Seven; Robert Bresson’s religious films; Scorsese’s Silence and Last Temptation of Christ; the vulgarity of Spielberg (e.g. the red dress in Schindler’s List); ep. 3 of Adolescence; and Nolan’s new Odyssey.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: John O’Sullivan on conservatism, Azam Ahmed on terrifying new drugs, Robby George on natural law, and Megan McArdle on pretty much anything. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s pod with Stephen Grosz: “Absolutely loved this conversation about why psychoanalysis is useful.” Another:

Just last week I wrote this long email about how much I appreciate the Dish, so I feel silly writing again this week. But I wanted you to know: I listened to the podcast with Stephen Grosz as I was driving to and from the trailhead where I do my Saturday “long run,” came home, took a shower, and went online to purchase Mr. Grosz’s book. I love to read, but I have never — not one time in my life —bought the book after listening to any podcast.

From a subscriber who’s renewing this year:

I don’t agree with everything you say, but I agree with a lot of it and particularly appreciate your courage around this LGB/T stuff. I say that as an evangelical Christian woman who feels like had I grown up now, rather than the ‘70s and ‘80s, I would have been convinced that I am “really” male, simply because I am an assertive woman. The trans stuff is offensive; it feels like blackface to me. It deals in all the worst stereotypes about what it means to be a woman.

You have also introduced me to so many good people on your podcasts. I listened to the one with Rod Dreher and thought, “This lunatic thinks exactly like I do” — and then I subscribed to him.

More doctrinally orthodox nut-jobs, please! Maybe Wes Huff? It would be really interesting if you interviewed a conservative but intelligent evangelical pastor like JD Greear. UNC history professor Molly Worthen would also be good. She has written some interesting things about charismatic leaders, but her personal story of conversion is really fascinating and it was incredibly influential on my own transition from the Episcopal Church to a more orthodox Bible church after 50 years, which has been a wild ride.

I’m happy to renew again. Hang in there. The photo of you with your pup makes me happy. God bless you.

Back at you. Here’s a reader on my column on the dangers of the DSA:

I wasn’t sure exactly why I objected to this piece, even though I share a lot of your opinions. I think some of the new lefties like Darializa Avila Chevalier are genuinely dangerous, but I also think these objections won’t matter. I couldn’t figure out why, but then I came back to a point you’ve quoted a great deal in regard to Trump and immigration: if liberals don’t get a handle on the issue, then fascists will step in and do it.

We are at a similar process here. If establishment Democrats won’t do anything about the rampant “Epstein class” corruption that Trump exemplifies, then the wannabe commies are going to. We need SOMEBODY to address what’s going on in this country, and it looks like “the democratic socialists” are in fact going to be the Left Tea Party, if only because they’re the only ones in the country with both strategy and balls.

(In that regard, I refer to the liberal writer Mike Brock, who wrote a piece on Peter Thiel at the Aspen conference that eventually got to Brock’s thesis that Thiel represents why the socialists are taking over.)

I agree with you on corruption. I intend to emphasize that more in the coming months. Yes, if liberals don’t confront this, leftists will. Another writes:

I want to offer another explanation for the left/Democrats’ embrace of socialism: center/center-left pundits completely dismissing people’s concerns about monopolies, oligopolies, and increasing corporate power, often seemingly embracing libertarianism as the only viable economic policy. These centrist pundits mock concerns about the economy (saying things like “the left just hates the rich,” “billionaire is a slur”), ignoring very real concerns, often with a very know-it-all tone.

But the facts aren’t on their side and, at this point, their denial of reality reached levels of gender-ideology misinformation. That’s a big claim, but just look at egg prices.

A few years ago, egg prices shot up, and the neo-Brandeisian/anti-corporate-consolidation view was that the three major egg companies were fixing prices. Basel Musharbash wrote an excellent article on it. In response, centrists mocked concerns about price-fixing and eggs, including Jason Furman in the NYT, along with Megan McArdle, Josh Barro, and Noah Smith mocking Kamala Harris’ call to investigate price-gouging. Yglesias called it “slopulism”.

Sure enough, completely under the radar, the same week those DSA extremists won their elections, the Trump administration reached a settlement with the three largest egg producers, providing clear evidence that they fixed prices, since they emailed each other about it.

Did you read any mea culpas from those pundits? Anyone admitting what they got wrong? Heck, McArdle double-downed on her assertion on Twitter, which feels insane. At this point, it’s identical to far-left gender-ideology denialism. These people have a philosophy — no government intervention in the economy — and no amount of evidence will change their mind. This is how Jonathan Chait can write an article taking down the neo-Brandeisians without mentioning Google or TicketMaster. Seriously, read his article and tell me where he once actually addresses corporate consolidation in America; instead, it’s all nut-picking bad quotes.

But you can only deny reality for so long. Increasingly, the economy is consolidating and consolidating, ruining the free market. If you read the right people every week — like Matt Stoller, Pat Garofalo, and Justin Stofferrahn — you can read well-researched, evidence-backed, nuanced, non-hyperbolic stories about antitrust and consolidation. To mention just one: how railroads will be more consolidated than the era of robber barons.

To be clear, what I am arguing for is pro-market policies. I want lots of buyers and lots of sellers in markets. I want to regulate the anticompetitive, anti-consumer policies of companies. I don’t want giant firms to erect barriers to entry to markets— literally, what they call “moats”! If centrist pundits like Yglesias, Barro, and Jerusalem Demsas don’t embrace any pro-market reforms, then yes, Democrats and the left will increasingly turn to socialists and socialism. Ironically, the so-called centrists/moderates need to moderate their policies. They should co-opt much of the far left’s policy ideas on antitrust, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Thanks for listening to my rant, and hope you had a great vacation!

I hear you. I really do. Sadly, I spent much of the July 4 break in bed with bronchitis. Bad timing! But better now.

Here’s a view from abroad, in Tbilisi:

You just wrote that the radical politics of the Democrats makes it very hard “to rebuild a sane center.” From my vantage point far away from the United States — and this also relates to your recent piece on the trans/queer threat to lesbian and gay rights — woke radicalism does “pull up the ladder” more globally.

Here’s one of the arguments that authoritarians use (as in Georgia, the country in the Caucasus): “if you give gays proper rights, who knows what craziness it will end in.” It’s more difficult to credibly push back against that view when you have to explain cultish and extreme behaviour — to the point of extreme and irreversible surgical intervention — now driven forward under some guise of “rights” in the US. So radical illiberalism there also harms a broadly progressive cause internationally.

Absolutely. The cost of Western queer self-indulgence is continued persecution of gay people across the developing world. It’s an insight into the narcissism of the woke, and indifference to the costs of over-reach and hubris.

Here’s a dissent over an aside in my latest column:

There you go again on misstating basic empirical facts on transgender rights. On Friday, you wrote that the marriage equality movement “had almost nothing to do with [trans people].” Have you ever looked at the old law journals or political science journals? There are numerous pieces on that very connection. Here’s one I did back in 2007. While it is a broader trans piece, there is a fair bit on marriage laws, given the way that trans people were very much caught up in that.

Please get the facts straight while taking down transgender people and their rights. On the subject of trans rights, the decision in West Virginia v. BJP is going to be far more reaching than sports, and few people are talking about that. My colleague Andrew Flores and I did a piece in The Advocate pointing that out.

The Court also signaled in footnote 1 that very soon, blue-state laws offering transgender people nondiscrimination protection are likely to be neutered where there is conflict with federal law (which is clearly going to align with the BJP interpretation). As Gorsuch notes in his concurrence, dress codes based on biological sex are not blocked by Title VII. I expect that soon, we are going to have red-state policies that have bald and bearded transgender men forced to wear women’s business attire at work, and blocks on trans women wearing a bra in the workplace.

Sorry, but trans people were not “very much caught up” in the marriage fight, and your article doesn’t change that. You’re the one inventing facts to justify the trans movement’s hostile takeover of the gay rights infrastructure — like the invention of trans people at Stonewall. And again, you say I am “taking down transgender people and their rights.” You can repeat that as often as you like, but I’m not. I favor protecting trans people from discrimination and full adult rights to transition. I oppose denying the sex binary, wrecking women’s sports, invading intimate same-sex spaces, and medical experiments on children with gender dysphoria. So do most sane Americans.

This next email is titled “So Long, and Thanks for All the Dish”:

When I went on Substack to discontinue my automatic renewal to the Weekly Dish, it asked me to give a reason. Instead of giving a one or two-word response on a form, I thought it best to send an email.

First, a sincere “Thank You!” I’ve enjoyed the Dish since it was written with white letters on a blue background. Your blog, magazine articles, and now, Substack, have informed and challenged me throughout most of my adult life.

I retired about a decade ago, but my last 15 years of work was with a legislator. We spent our most fervent energies fighting the battle for gay marriage. You have no idea how much your reasoned arguments helped me to successfully inform and convince a skeptical and culturally conservative constituency against attacks from the Phelps family and the others of that time.

You published three of my View from Your Window submissions, including this one:

From the start of the Weekly Dish, I’ve happily paid over the minimum dollar amount, as I wanted to support your ability to make a living expressing views unchecked by previously crazy woke media staff. I am happy knowing that you have built a following on Substack sufficient to sustain you and Chris.

I leave not because I disagree with you on any singular issue. Lord knows we’ve disagreed on many. I remember you clapped back hard when I emailed you a “hang on a moment” thought or two when you initially went gung-ho for the Iraq War. After that, I realized that I preferred reading your thoughts passively rather than engaging you and risking the rough edge of your tongue.

In fact, it was a difference of opinion that drew me to your writing in the first place. I saw an article in a gay magazine (gay not queer — remember those?) containing your argument against hate crime laws. As a young gay attorney in LA, I was aghast. I initially thought your position was so idealistic as to be naïve. Then I read the article again. And again. I liked the way you approached an issue to make a point. So, I went to your blog and I was hooked. To learn that you could be gay, Christian, and conservative, against all popular cultural pressure, was a place to which I had just not yet been able to leap.

Since starting the Weekly Dish, you have been marvelously articulate about the absurdities and dangers of wokeness and DEI. Your arguments against the trans-queer perversion of the gay rights movement are some of the most impressive you have made since the marriage and military debates.

But, aside from the occasional pro-gay/anti-queer Dish topics, it appears your focus now tends toward anti-everything-Trump. I also realize my disinterest in parsing every detail of whatever is going on with Israel makes me an outlier among your subscribers.

With age I have learned that sometimes people initially in sync can grow to have different interests and that it’s best to leave it — with a smile and nod to good memories, lest annoyance irreparably mar a happy past. You are a fabulous writer and I wish you every success. May God bless and keep you well.

And we’re still getting cancellations along these lines:

I really did enjoy my subscription and was sorry to let it go, but I found your unbalanced hostility toward Israel simply intolerable. The Free Press’s TGIF is now my beloved Friday read, and it doesn’t stab me repeatedly in the gut with the sort of anti-Zionism that is this era’s version of antisemitism. I respect your right to your opinions even when ignorant, and do not expect any exodus of readers to change them. So I’ll miss you and thank you for many good years.

Well, if you want uncritical coverage of a foreign country, you’re smart to pick The Free Press — a public relations vehicle for Israel financed by the Ellison family. You will never read anything unsettling or sharp on Israel there. But I notice you use the term “unbalanced”. Have you seen the sheer volume of criticism on Israel we publish here every week? The pod episodes where Israel’s defenders get their say? The to and fro on Notes? I have a view on Israel but it is always balanced by alternatives — in ways you won’t find at The Free Press. I also notice you use the word “ignorant” despite reams of fact and evidence and opinion I have aired here. Those adjectives reveal to me a completely closed mind.

The truth is: some diehard Israel supporters simply do not tolerate debate or dissent on the subject. I’m not a queer for Palestine; I reject the genocide canard; I have no time for Hamas and their evil pogroms. But still I’m no different for many of these Israel supporters than Nick Fuentes. Which is why they really shouldn’t subscribe to the Dish. And why I’m sorry but in no way troubled by your departure.

For those of you who want to support a site immune to pressure from audience capture, committed to airing every argument, and not shrinking from judgment when necessary, please keep subscribing or join us. It’s called liberal democracy. It’s not always pleasant, but it’s worth the struggle! Dishness forever!

And have a wonderful summer weekend.

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