Pun Salad

Every day when I walk into work as a public-school teacher, I am prepared to take a bullet to save a child. In the age of school shootings, that’s what the job requires. But asking me to return to the classroom amid a pandemic and expose myself and my family to Covid-19 is like asking me to take that bullet home to my own family.

Last week, the [NY] Times ran a story about a 30-year-old Texas man who believed COVID-19 was a hoax and contracted the disease at a “COVID party” before dying. Every detail of the story was uncorroborated, which made it exactly the kind of urban legend that moral panics produce. Though it was viral on social media, because it confirmed all the prejudices of the Times’s energized liberal readership, the Times began to edit the story as it was criticized here in National Review and in Wired. The entire tone of the story went from credulous to skeptical, but you wouldn’t have noticed the difference if you hadn’t been paying close attention, because no editor’s notes were appended to it announcing the changes. The Times has begun “stealth editing” its stories in this manner more and more lately, effacing the traditional journalistic ethic that seeks to keep an intact record not just of the news, but of how the reporting of the news evolves.

Also last week, The Atlantic ran an essay, “How I Became a Police Abolitionist,” that roots the activism of its author in a heart-rending story of a 16-year-old gunned down by the police in a rec center for failing to put his name on a sign-in sheet. Christopher Bedford, at The Federalist, a conservative web outlet that has far fewer resources than The Atlantic, rather conclusively showed that the story as told was full of holes and likely never happened.

Students at pricey Marymount Manhattan College are demanding a veteran professor be fired for allegedly falling asleep during an anti-racism Zoom meeting.

Students at the Upper East Side school claim Patricia Simon, a theater arts associate professor, took a snooze during the virtual town hall last month, and have collected 1,800 petition signatures.

A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine or promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence.

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.

A mass movement… appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self.

Suppose I ask you to name some of humanity’s great thinkers. What would you say? If you’re in philosophy, Plato and Aristotle will immediately come to mind. Then maybe Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Leibniz, Adam Smith. Go down the list. Maybe you’d add St. Augustine, J.S. Mill, Bertrand Russell, maybe even Wittgenstein. Among scientists, you’d surely include Galileo, Newton, Einstein. Then Darwin, Lavoisier, Archimedes, Maxwell, Boltzmann, etc. Q: how far do you have to go down the list before you name a person who is now alive? Pretty far, I bet.

Do the same thing for artists and writers. You have people such as Mozart, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, etc. (I don’t know that many artists, so you fill in the rest. [Emoji Elided]) Again, how far do you have to go down the list before you reach one who is now alive? Pretty far. You might even refuse to name any living artists as ‘great’ no matter how many names you are prompted for.