Worthy Reads: The World Spins On Insensate
Worthy Reads for May 2025
I am still working on my promised “If They’d Made Me Pope” article, but it turned out to be longer than I expected, and I know not every reader is here for the Catholic stuff, so…
Welcome to Worthy Reads, where I share some things that I think are worth your time! Everyone gets the first half of this month’s items, but the second half (and footnotes) are paywalled. Don’t begrudge the paylisters; they’re the ones who keep me writing.
“Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges into the Public Record,” by Tracing Woodgrains:
Since 2017, when Wikipedia made the decision to ban citations to the Daily Mail due to “poor fact-checking, sensationalism, and flat-out fabrication,” editors have waged an intense, quiet war over which sources to ban, which to give strict scrutiny to, and which to crown as Reliable. Based on the site’s policy, it’s easy to understand why: while editors with a stake in the frame of an article have to acquiesce to determined opponents bearing Reliable Sources—or at least must have long, grinding disputes about what should be emphasized and why—if they can whip a consensus to declare the sources opponents would use unreliable, they can win edit wars before they happen. This extends well beyond simple factual coverage: cite an opinion or even a movie review from one of those sources, and Gerard or other editors sweep in to remove it as having undue weight.
The battle over the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online newspaper that alternates between tabloid-style sensationalism and serious, in-depth investigative journalism provides a good example of how this works in practice: in three sparse discussions (one, two, three), a dozen or so editors opined, for example, that it “doesn’t particularly have a reputation for journalistic credibility,” with one citing two Snopes articles in support but most presenting bare opinions. As a result of those sparse discussions, Wikipedia editors treat the site as generally unreliable. Every citation to it is presumed suspect, and rather than spending time and effort haggling over each, editors are broadly free to remove them en masse after cursory examination. In practice, this means Gerard scanning through dozens of articles in the span of a few minutes, tearing out all information cited to the Free Beacon as presumptively unreliable.
When I was in high school, I was a Wikipedia editor. Wikipedia was new, but not so new you’d get lost in it. The Internet was still a place of hope. I saw it as my civic duty to pitch in where I could, so I learned about WP:NPOV and WP:3RR and got to work. Anyone who reads this blog can see where it might be easy for me, of all people, to fall deep down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. My proudest three contributions were:
A rewrite of the mechanism-of-action section in the Emergency Contraception article, which I still think was pretty darn good research, and I’m not sure how I did it as a 17-year-old in the early days of the Internet with no library database access. Everything I wrote has since been supplanted by new science,1 but, when I want to recall the history of how today’s knowledge developed, I still sometimes go back to that work.
I was the lord and master of the Star Trek (2009) article for about six months. Not that I pushed anyone around, but I was obsessed with cleaning it up and keeping it updated, and people let me cook. That article was, without a doubt, the single finest source of information about Star Trek XI in summer 2006, “a hard rock of information in a sea of rumor.” Then one of the other regular editors of that article, Anthony Pascale, launched The Star Trek XI Report (today TrekMovie.com) and quickly eliminated the need for an exhaustive Wikipedia article with his own excellent coverage.
I was a member of WikiProject:Abortion, where I won respect from both pro-life and pro-choice peers. For quite some time, the definition of abortion on Wikipedia was actually pretty accurate: “An abortion is the premature termination of pregnancy ending in the death of the embryo or fetus,” or words to that effect. Many of the less encyclopedic pro-choice editors hated the reference to fetal death, although it appears in many medical dictionaries and is very obviously the crux of the act. (Premature termination of pregnancy that does not have fetal death as the outcome is just called a premature birth!) I labored in the trenches for weeks and months defending that clause, with some support from honest pro-choice editors. Eventually, of course, we were overwhelmed, exhausted, and bureaucratically outmaneuvered. That was always how it was doomed to end. Wikipedia’s pro-encyclopedia policies do genuinely help maintain editorial neutrality, but no policy in the world is anything but paper in the face of a determined, angry mass of people (even nerds) who find a certain fact politically unhelpful. Still, the ferocity of the debate at least forced a permanent footnote onto that opening line, and I’m fairly sure some portion of the modern-day Definitions of Abortion article is based on research I did in Talk:Abortion arguments two decades ago. (Or somebody just duplicated my work, which is fine, too.)
It is that last item that I think of when I read this article by TracingWoodgrains. I’ve never heard of this man David Gerard, but his story, as told here, has more than a ring of truth. I have no doubt it is the story of hundreds of Wikimedians.
If you have ever depended on Wikipedia for information (as I do every day, even now), I think it’s important to read this story to understand the lenses through which Wikipedia is filtered, and the complicated levers and bitter flame wars that are waged in order to present you, the end user, with a safely anodyne, authoritative-sounding (but also frequently biased) final product. It’s still an invaluable project and I am forever grateful to Jimmy Wales for creating it, but I think it is important to understand how the sausage gets made.
“I Can Only Look Back in Anger,” by Jeff Blehar:
This time Mayor Lightfoot ignored the union’s demands but granted them a delay (during Omicron season). When March 2022 — a full two years after the anniversary of the first lockdown — rolled around, I was so grateful that I could finally send my son back to school without a mask that I tweeted about it. Because my son could not wear a mask — you literally could not get him to keep one on, in any event. Sure, the teachers were still screaming about it (I remember hearing their side of the story every morning on NPR), but I was just thrilled that my little buddy was going to be able to get back to work on his speech handicap without being gratuitously supplied with the verbal equivalent of cement shoes.
A week later my son was returned home to me one day from school by his teachers, weeping disconsolately. A mask had been forcibly tied to his face, and he was clawing desperately at it to try to get it off. He did not stop crying for an hour. […]
I will never forgive the people who did this. I will never know all of their names — I do know the names of Chicago city politicians, Randi Weingarten, the Chicago Teachers’ Union, and the CTU’s handpicked mayor Brandon Johnson, however. (I treat them accordingly.) I will not let go of my hatred for these people. I could do it if only my own vanity or interest were at stake — I actually have a very difficult time holding a grudge — but never on behalf of my son, who has no voice to speak in his own defense. I want only to remember who caused this, who allowed this, and to insist these people be blotted out of public life and civic responsibility for all eternity. I have said my piece on the Covid Era, and it will be the last time I speak of it.
For many readers of this blog this is an easy read. Those monsters screwed up covid and destroyed many good and precious things in the process, so they deserve our rage.
That is not why it’s a Worthy Read. It’s a Worthy Read, for me, because I’m one of those monsters.
I supported lockdowns from March through the end of May 2020. I was loud about it. It’s possible I played a role in extending the Minnesota lockdown from April into May. As I was later forced to admit, lockdowns failed utterly.
My kids were back in school five days a week, in-person, that fall (which I strongly favored), but they were masked and socially distanced, and I thought both measures were appropriate until the vaccine was deployed in early 2021. It’s possible this helped a little, but it’s not obvious, and the costs of masking were significant. Just read Blehar’s article about his poor son. I didn’t put his son under the bus for as long as teachers’ unionist Randi Weingarten and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot did—but I still put his kid under the bus for nearly a year.
I like to think that, if I had drafted a mask mandate, I would have made sensible exceptions for speech therapy and similar exceptional cases. However, I never wrote in support of exceptions, so I can’t prove it, even to myself.
What I know, without any doubt, is that the lockdown policy I supported caused immense suffering. I can never quite look my cousin Paul in the eye again, because I cancelled his wedding to a lovely young woman named Annie. I mean, I didn’t personally cancel it. Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI) did. However, I publicly supported Evers’ order and I would have signed it in his place, and Paul and I both know that, so it comes to the same thing. The once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring his entire family together for a wedding—and our family does great weddings—was lost forever, and he married before a priest and a handful of witnesses. I have no idea how much money they lost on the original wedding. They made the best of it, by hosting a big family party months later, but he knows and I know that’s not the same. (Ironically, I missed that party due to illness, which was the cherry on top. I was really looking forward to that one.)
Another friend of mine lost his mother to a random heart attack a week or two into lockdown. It was a lightning bolt; she was nowhere near the age where that might have been expected. He couldn’t have a wake. He couldn’t have a Mass. He couldn’t mourn properly, with his community. I took away his mother’s funeral.
And for what? Nothing. Literally nothing at all was gained from the lockdowns.
Our intention was to save lives. We argued that a lot of people were going to die of covid if we did nothing, and that we could stop a large number of those deaths by locking down. (It is worth remembering that, at the time, covid skeptics’ main argument was that covid was no worse than the flu.)
We were right about the deaths. Between 750,000 and 1.1 million Americans did indeed die of covid in 2020 and 2021, just as we had predicted, which was indeed an order of magnitude worse than the flu. However, we were wrong to think we could do anything to prevent those deaths. All lockdowns bought us was three months of misery with long-lasting repercussions. They all died anyway.
I worked so hard on covid analysis that whole year. Many things I wrote hold up well today, and I can’t forget that we were forced to make very big decisions in March 2020 when we still had very little information. I supported President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, and the vaccine his administration delivered (in record time) was the one great success of the pandemic, which clearly saved at least hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide.2 Nevertheless, my optimism that lockdowns would suppress the virus was an enormous error, which overshadows much that was good in my work.
I hope that Blehar might someday forgive me the error, although I don’t expect him to write about it. I hope my cousin forgives me for being so bulge, and I hope my friend… well, I mean, it was his mother’s funeral. It seems presumptuous even to hope for forgiveness.
Even if they do, though, I must never forget this error. I must sear it into my memory. If nothing else good comes from it, let it at least teach me greater humility.3
“This Week’s Sex Diary: The 25-Year-Old Wondering If She Really Wants to Be Celibate” by Alyssa Shelasky:
1:58 p.m. My roommate and best friend, A, makes us the French omelet with potato chips from season two of The Bear. It’s a revelation. My friends all know about my celibacy and we talk about it often. A lot of them are celibate too, some for about a year, some for longer. Not all of them actually use the term celibate or identify that way, though. A tells me that many of her friends haven’t had sex in a year or more.
3:08 p.m. I keep going on Hinge. This man, K, asks me if I’d ever heard of the movie Juno. I think that’s such a stupid question. Then he admits that he’s only in town for the month but asks me to get a drink. I have definitely not said anything on Hinge about being celibate. I worry that people will be super-confused about why I’m on a dating app if not for sex (and to be fair, it is a little confusing — I’m not completely sure what I’m looking for, either). I do have the message “looking for shared interests and connection, love to meet new people but can’t promise anything romantic :)” under dating intentions, so I hope my general energy is understood. If I met anyone I liked, I’d tell them everything, of course.
4 p.m. I delete the app. I feel pretty ambivalent about dating, but some recent experiences have reminded me why I don’t like dating or feel much sexual attraction. A few weeks ago, I went on a date with a philosophy Ph.D. student that was so adversarial it was almost hot. We shared an appreciation for the band Mannequin Pussy, but he also asked me to my face if I thought I was smart and then quoted Freud. I left that date feeling gross.
This is all to say, if I’m being honest with myself, my celibacy isn’t exactly an intentional thing. I essentially saw Julia Fox name and claim her celibacy and realized I aligned with her. I’m using the term amcel, or ambivalent celibate. It just happens that I don’t want to have sex. I’ve also started wondering if Zoloft could be part of this — I went on it before I’d even had sex, and it did make me noticeably less sexual (even just in terms of what I thought about or what turned me on). Interestingly, I also met and started dating both of the boyfriends I’ve had while briefly off Zoloft.
11:20 p.m. Home now. I wonder if I would be more sexual if I was not on Zoloft. I try to masturbate, but nothing is really working for me. I look up therapists in my area and on my health insurance. I sometimes feel confused about how sex and relationships seem to be the societal default. I can’t believe the expectation is to meet someone and just … be with them. It seems like that should be the exception, not the rule. Ultimately, I feel like my relationships with my friends are the most fulfilling part of my life. I just need someone to scratch my back occasionally.
First, a point of immaculate pedantry: celibacy is the state of not getting married. The state of not having sex is continence. If you have sex with a different stranger every night, but you don’t marry any of them, you are celibate but incontinent. Finally, chastity is the state where your continence status matches your celibacy status. A married person who has sex every night is chaste; a married person who denies his spouse all sex, without just cause, is unchaste. This article, like most articles, confuses celibacy with continence. This is a very dumb pet peeve, but it’s my blog and I get to have dumb pet peeves.
Now let’s consider this poor young woman. Peel back the layers of irony and unhappiness, and it seems pretty likely that all she wants is a normal life: a decent husband, good friends, decent sex sometimes, touch. The lady is starved for touch and is considering a therapist because Zoloft-fogged masturbation doesn’t do the trick.
Yet you can’t just tell her, “Find a decent man who’s a decent friend and settle down with him.” That would obviously go over like a brick. Her expectations of ♫love♫ are much higher than that, and it seems clear that her dating pool insists on a lot of sex and emotionally fraught entanglements long before marriage, often on the first date. No wonder she’s burned out on it.
It always seems to come back to that: for most people (not all people!), the easiest road to happiness is to get married, have sex, and have kids—in that order—but, for various reasons, we no longer say so. Instead of teaching our children to find good spouses, we teach them porn literacy, with predictable results: youth don’t value marriage, fertility rates are plummeting, and anxiety and depression are through the roof. The boys are all addicted to porn, and the girls think they’re “claiming” some peculiar identity when they admit that they don’t have male-pattern sex drives!
Paywall’s here. However, before I lose the freelisters: since you are all waiting patiently for my next Big Long Catholic Whatnot post, here’s a quick… recap? update?… on my recent post about The Leonine Enigma:
Below the paywall: modern special revelations, mild griping about the criterion of dissimilarity, tariffs, project naming conventions, ramp metering, and a 2013 Doctor Who secret short I missed (and so maybe you did, too).
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