(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.)

From the winner of last week’s contest:

Woo-hoo! What a thrill, thank you! I’ll most definitely I’ll take the book, so I can brag endlessly to anyone who comes near our coffee table.

What I love most about the VFYW is the odd amount of intuition that goes into it.  Even though I have been lucky to have grown up in and lived all over Europe — and ultimately to Akron, OH — I have never spent any time anywhere else. Yet so many times I get to a region by just imagining myself in the location of the view, and I get a strong feeling from the sky, the vegetation and the color of the landscape. Then I move to logical deduction. But I have no idea why sometimes I know right away that we are in New Zealand, or Bali, or South America. 

The contest is a Friday night/Saturday morning ritual I really enjoy.

Another exclaims:

I finally did it! I guessed the exact window last week! I have been so close, so many times. What a great feeling! Then, you see that someone found video from inside the actual room and you don’t feel so smart …

But last week’s results were fascinating, and I love the weekly history lessons! 

One more brief lesson:

I was traveling last weekend and didn’t get to see or enter the Prague contest, but if you’ll forgive a postscript: the event of 1618 described by your sleuths was only one of many “Defenestrations of Prague.” Historians differ as to which are canonical, but they certainly include the 1419 defenestrations of several city officials by Hussite religious rebels, and the 1948 death of democratic Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk shortly after the communists took over, officially labeled a suicide but widely believed to have been murder.

Before we get to the official view this week, you will be happy to learn — and probably not terribly surprised — that the VFYW came through for the romantic sleuth who’s trying to find the location in Puerto Rico where he fell in love with his wife and the mother of their two boys, who are returning to the island in April. Now he knows exactly where to go to find the spot where he captured the photo of his wife that now sits on his nightstand.

Here’s a reminder of the two photos our Romeo sent as clues:

The first sleuth to send a solution was, of course, the great and powerful Chini:

The street they walked on in 2008 was Jose M. Tartak Avenue. The exact spot of the photo was:

18°26'33.28"N
66° 1'16.92"W

Sadly, the tree appears to be gone, but everything else is pretty much still there.

The next one to email was the super-sleuth in College Park:

I won’t be alone in choosing to spend my discretionary time trying to help a lover search for the canonical VFYW. The street is Calle José M. Tartak, in what Apple Maps suggests is the Isla Verde beach district of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Here’s the VFYC (view from your camera) showing the tree:

… and near the south end of Tartak, on Google Earth’s street view, I find this:

The tree supporting the pixie in a yellow sundress has, I think, been cut down — but the protrusion from the wall, the larger tree next to the retaining wall, and the various drains appear to be present and accounted for.

A few paces north, down the street toward the ocean, turn your view to the left (west) and the VFYC was:

This view of the Ocean View building, at 5575 Avenida Isla Verde, is largely blocked nowadays by the building that was under construction then, but we can get a glimpse of it if we crane our Googly necks …

The concrete-mixer VFYC is almost in line with the balconies on our side of the Ocean View — a red arrow below marks that line, and what I guess to be the line of sight in the tree VFYC is marked with a blue arrow:

That’s such an impressive entry, but technically the spot is in the city of Carolina, not the abutting city of San Juan, which is just a handful of blocks away. Here’s how another sleuth — the ski-champ one — tracked down the spot:

The Puerto Rico challenge was easier to identify than I first thought — it took me about 30 minutes to get to the exact spot in Street View — on José M. Tartak Ave, Carolina, Puerto Rico:

Facing in the opposite direction, you can glimpse the white building with the distinctive pattern of windows behind the cement truck and the then-new construction:

Unfortunately, the leaning tree has been cut down (you can see several stumps along the fence). It took me about 15 minutes of flying in Google 3D Global View along the coastal development near San Juan to find the white building, and then another 15 minutes in Street View to find the exact spot on nearby José M. Tartak Ave.

My favorite email on this mystery comes from the super-chef, who waxes poet:

So, the tree where his wife was standing is no more, but the other tree in that picture is still there, so maybe he can get a picture with his wife and the kids at that one. The tree of love will stay eternal in memory, the tree of family lives on.

Note the place where the wall juts out, which is just on the right in his photograph, directly opposite his tree. The pipe coming out of the wall is a match, as is the positioning of the stanchions in the railing. The exact location of his tree is 18.44257266339264, -66.02136517734424. 

My best wishes to him and his family.

The super-champ in Berkeley gifts one of his collages:

I’m sure the usual suspects have already come through for our romantic compadre, but here’s my contribution:

Finding the spot was fun, but it was also a piece of cake. The only thing that delayed my sending this earlier was putting the collage together (I’m not as good at making them on my phone as on my laptop).

Seven sleuths in total found the spot (Eagle Rock and the Austin mixologist were the other two). The final word on this side puzzle goes to Chini:

I hope the doctors and their kids have a great time in Puerto Rico. It feels awesome for the VFYW group to use its skills for something like this, and perfectly timed a week before Valentine’s Day.

On to the main puzzle this week, here’s the beginning of the entry from Berkeley:

I wasted a little time looking at some bayous in New Orleans, because of the art nouveau ironwork in the photo and because, after three weeks of the contest being abroad, I’d gotten the idea we might be in for another stateside view. When the bayous came up empty, I recalled something Chini once said about analyzing the image for 10 to 15 minutes and adjusting its brightness and contrast before starting any serious searching (none of which had I taken the time to do).

A sleuth in Alexandria stuck with NOLA:

I’m super heckling y’all from the cheap seats way up top, with minimal research, but I’m going to throw out a guess of New Orleans Riverwalk, LA, USA, just based on the iron works in the photo. I can’t imagine how the other sleuths get the window ... too much for me :)

Another riverwalk from this sleuth:

I don’t know with this one. Vegetation and a wrought-iron canopy says southern USA to me. Then a river or canal in a denser urban area … so, how about San Antonio?

Another sleuth gets to the right continent:

Could that be Berlin on the Spree River? I am probably wrong, but it does look like the lovely beer garden my family sat at one beautiful summer day when we were visiting! The best part? We looked over the river and saw Angela Merkel herself walking around and waving to people!

Here’s the beginning of an entry from the winner of the recent contest in India:

Boy, this week’s challenge had me giving up before I started. I thought that I could possibly identify the scene from the white office building near the middle of the picture. It looked a little out of place. But every search for white office buildings with ridges or flutes kept bringing me to the Russian Embassy in Washington or the Egyptian Ambassador’s residence in Lisbon.

A previous winner teases the answer:

Hmm, the intricate white scalloped roof edge, the cafe chairs, the ornate scrolled ironwork on the balcony and stairs, the tranquil river. As pretty as a painting. It all has a certain ... je ne sais quoi, no?

A sleuth on Vashon Island sends “another short entry, as the week has gotten away from me” — but he names the right country:

This one really me stumped initially. At first glance, I saw the long, unmowed grass, the strings of lights that look like they might be from Costco, the buildings across the river that are devoid of any character, and an old brick building with some faux French details. This has to be America, right? Somewhere in Louisiana, maybe?

But wait, maybe that isn’t faux architecture; maybe it’s really France. And maybe these are the real lights that those Costco ones are based on. And maybe those buildings across the river do have character, now that I know they are in France. All buildings in France have character. And that unmowed grass — well, why would we French bother ourselves with such petty details as this? The long grass is better to hide the snakes.

One last thing: I was thinking about how many of your sleuths have their own “thing”: movies, drinks, the nearest Bellevue. Should I have a thing? How about the nearest island? Alas, this window is on an island, so there goes that idea.

The VFYW is always open to new things! From our super-sleuth in Toronto:

I took this shot on an airplane five days ago in anticipation of writing an entry for Prague, pointing out that I was flying in the wrong direction. However, I didn’t find the time to locate the exact window at the Mandarin Oriental. Turns out the shot seems more appropriate for this week’s contest!

Chini zooms in on the flight path:

Every so often the contest gives you a view like this one, one where you must choose a path. Path A: a ponderous slog, a morass of internet searches that could drive one to madness, boredom or both. Path B: a search of a different kind — not in the real world, but into the recesses of one’s mind palace. There, you might just find the answer to a simple, nagging question, “Where have I seen this before?” That answer, in visual form, is this week’s clue.

Giuseppe has an eagle eye:

As in contest #404, that flag looks out of context. It’s the same flag, yes: you have to squint, but you can perceive the blue, and the white is obviously there. As for the red, it’s debatable whether it’s there or not — what I see is more like a dark blob. But after a blue band and a white band, do you really need to clearly see the red band?

That landscape doesn’t look essentially French at first sight; for a few seconds, before I zoomed in on the flag, I thought it was in some southern US state or in Australia. Yet the place is as French as the baguette: the river you see in the photo is the Seine. At first I suspected we were being served a false flag for the second time in three weeks, but it costs nothing to try. I googled “France restaurant river”, and in 10 minutes I found it. The restaurant was described in a story by Guy de Maupassant, La femme de Paul (Paul’s Wife, 1881).

Now, after a French flag not in France and a French flag in France, I expect a non-French flag in France again.

The super-sleuth in San Francisco names the right island, town, and restaurant:

Read more

Read more

Michael Isikoff is the chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo News, where he is also editor-at-large for reporting and investigations. Daniel Klaidman is the editor-in-chief for Yahoo News. The veteran reporters have new a book called Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election. We had a lively chat!

You can listen right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — the violent threats spurred by Trump’s conspirators, and the hero of the Georgia case — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: Mike as head of his college paper during Watergate and then working at the WaPo; Dan growing up with his dad at the WaPo during the WoodStein era; his mother a Holocaust survivor; Georgia as “ground zero for the most undemocratic plot in US history”; the Hugo Chavez conspiracy theory; Sidney Powell plotting a break-in and offering the henchmen preemptive pardons; Giuliani “drunk out of his mind”; the cyber-heist of Dominion software and voter data; Lin Wood and QAnon; the absurd Eastman memo; knowing the 2020 lawsuits would fail but nevertheless pressure the Electors; unfounded claims of ballot stuffing; Ruby Freeman and her daughter; Giuliani’s “racial dog whistles”; the infamous call to Raffensperger to “find votes” and “recalculate”; Stacey Abrams; whether Trump cynically or sincerely believed the election was stolen; Mike Flynn; whether the transfer of power was ever really in jeopardy; the principled Pence; the courts holding firm against Trump; autocracy as a “gradual slow burn” (e.g. Hungary); Fani Willis; her Black Panther father who dated Angela Davis; Fani’s sexual relationship with a prosecutor in the Georgia case after she hired him; the terrible optics of it all; the tough-on-crime campaign she ran in 2020 and getting endorsed by the police union; Barr and Esper keeping Trump from using the Insurrection Act; Trump fundraising off his mugshot; and whether he will have the same guardrails in a second term.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Nate Silver on the 2024 race, Christian Wiman on resisting despair as a Christian, Jeffrey Rosen on the pursuit of happiness, George Will on Trump and conservatism, and Abigail Shrier on why the cult of therapy harms children. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other pod comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a big fan of our latest episode:

I just reached my first-year anniversary as a paid subscriber! Very glad to be renewing for another year. I just finished listening to the episode with Justin Brierley, and I think it might be my favorite episode yet. Incredible guest and great conversation, which helped me with my own struggles with the faith.

On a more urgent note, I have a few people in my life who are struggling much more than myself — for example, my brother who is a recovering alcoholic, in and out of jail and rehab for over a decade. The bits near the end of this episode where you guys spoke about the “meaning crisis,” and the need for people to find God more than ever — it really resonated with me when I think of my brother and others who are in very real danger of losing their lives because of a lack of meaning, a lack of God.

Another also “really enjoyed your conversation with Brierley”:

As a committed atheist, I resonated with the nuanced way in which you discussed Christian faith as something between literal and metaphorical. The idea that humans have a religious impulse that will express itself one way or another is something I have come to accept as well.

Your discussion about the New Atheists, however, was overly dismissive. I strongly recommend you invite Sam Harris on the Dishcast. While I understand that some atheists sound as dogmatic in their lack of belief as the faithful do in their belief, Sam has done a great job of articulating ideas around developing an ethics and moral compass without belief in God.

He is also the best person I know to discuss non-Western traditions like Hinduism and Buddhism that preceded Christianity by 100s of years (and maybe by over a millennium). While many believers in the Abrahamic religions dismiss Hinduism as “idolatry”, that is not quite the case. And the idols are better understood as symbols, just like the crucifix is in Christianity. These religions have a very rich ethical framework around right thought, action, and duty, which have several things in common with Christian tradition, but perhaps some important difference as well. 

Thanks always for the fun and entertaining conversations. I am a very happy subscriber.

If you’d like to join him, subscribe here. Sam Harris has been on the Dishcast before — on Trump, wokeness, and the 2020 election — but maybe we’ll have him back to talk religion and fundamentalism. (He and I debated the topic 17 years ago in a long back-and-forth over email.) I should add that I have every respect for Buddhism, and for meditation.

Another listener on the “meaning crisis”:

I came of age politically in the early 2000s and had a deeper hostility to religion than almost anyone I knew. I longed for a time when we could shake ourselves of those silly superstitions and the intolerant views they led to, and transition to a golden age of logic and reason. I also despised what I regarded (and still regard) as a largely insincere and cynical attempt by the Bush administration to use religion to advance its indefensible positions, splashing in a few Bible verses into speeches.

It did not take me long, though, to realize that the absence of religion in the West does not lead to an increase in rational thought. On the contrary, people are so often left with a giant void from which to derive meaning, purpose, and a way to explain the mysteries and injustices of life. They turn to substitute religions that are often much more fanatically held and impervious to doubt. Many of them are far more dangerous, because they need a fundamental reorganization of society, instead of a private observance of a higher cause. For example, there is no concept of “live and let live” when you believe the destruction of the Earth is imminent due to human activity.

More importantly, I came to realize that many of the most basic ideas and values I took for granted as being part of Western civilization might not exist in the absence of Christianity and Judaism. I’ve asked some nonbelievers why murder is wrong, or why human life is more valuable than animal life, and find that almost none of them have a good answer. Kind of big issues!

What made me change my thinking most are the developments in the MAID program in Canada. In less than 10 years, the country has gone from allowing assisted suicide in cases of unbearable suffering and imminent death that cannot be relieved by medical means, to seriously considering it for poverty, mental health problems, and minors. Some people might not consider MAID radical and dystopian now, but what will the program will look like in 50 years, once the West has further secularized and shed its general Christian ethos?

To me, the main reason anyone has even pumped the brakes on MAID is that the West is still living off the fumes of Christian values and structures. Because it’s all they have ever known, many people assume that matters like the inherent value of human life will always be regarded as such.

The Dish covered the MAID program here and here. Another listener dissents over the following clip:

What are the odds of life emerging in the universe? Come on — that has to be the least convincing argument possible. What are the odds that there’s somebody up in the sky that listens to the things we say and answers our prayers? What are the odds that there’s something out there that snapped its fingers to create the entire universe?

I do, however, love the conversations you have on the Dishcast and appreciate the opportunity to hear both sides.

Another dissent:

While this atheist finds a lot of your discussion of the existence of God circular and deeply flawed, I won’t bother with detailed rebuttals. It’s well-trodden ground: many of the particulars you and Brierley discussed were long ago tackled convincingly by your friend Hitch — not only in God Is Not Great, but also in the conversation with him that you aired on the Dishcast. I can’t thank you enough for that, and given last week’s topic, it’s worth recommending to any newer listeners who enjoyed the Brierley chat.

I do, however, wish to challenge a few notions you raised with Brierley.

Read more

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The Kendi Scam, Unraveled

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Excepting the Dish, of course. But I'm still kinda European I guess.

Liberal Democracy In The ICU

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A Normal Summer And A Normal President

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A Live Boy Or A Dead Girl?

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June 2023

Just Breathe

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Should We Eat Animals? Your Thoughts.

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Corrections Matter

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The Return Of The Evil Gays

It's about time ...

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The Boomers In The Twilight Zone

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Boomers In The Twilight Zone: Your Stories

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He Is What He Always Was

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England, His England

Thoughts on a cultural and demographic revolution

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The Essential Moderation Of Marriage Equality

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The Normie Center Strikes Back

Democracy works, survives, and can surprise us (including me). A great night.

Will Biden And The Dems Finally Get It?

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The British Barack Obama?

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The Tory Present Is The GOP's Future

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The Oliver And Stewart Method

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The Placebo Of Affirmative Action

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September 2022

The Tories' Weird Incoherent Collapse

The contradictions of Brexit and a choice for conservatism

The Gender Identity Of ... Eunuchs

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The Gender Identity Of ... Eunuchs: Your Thoughts

The Swedes Turn To The Far Right

A Cold Reckoning In Europe

And a confession that I've been too gloomy about the war in Ukraine

Some Myths About Marriage Equality

The Sexual Revolution: Your Thoughts

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Taking Summer Seriously

See you after the break.

The Law and Mr Trump

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Exceptions Prove Rules

The Joy Of Doing Nothing

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Yes, Politics Works — Even On Abortion

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Yes, The Trans Madness Is Real

What Orbán Believes

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The Meaning Of Patriotism

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And The Band Plays On

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How Dare They! Your Thoughts.

The Rumblings Of Rome

April 2022

When Will They Cancel Karl Marx?

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The Problem With Jon Stewart: Your Thoughts

March 2022

The Strange Rebirth Of Imperial Russia

And why it could be here to stay.

The Hipness Of It All

An abridged Dish for the week, with apologies.

Realism On The Trans Question

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February 2022

Ukraine Now. Taiwan Next?

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The Backlash Against Trans Extremism

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Between The World And Men

Truckers, Rogan, Peterson and the revolt of masculinity.

The Anti-Semitism In Anti-Whiteness

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Boris Is Not Trump, Part CLX

January 2022

The Right's Ugly War On Woke Schooling

There is a better way to defeat left indoctrination than banning books.

Diversity Without “Equity” Is Possible

On Rishi Sunak

How Biden Lost The Plot

Listening to interest groups and activists is no way to get re-elected.

The Trans Movement Is Not About Rights Anymore

It's about a cultural revolution and the abolition of biological sex.

The Unraveling Of Boris And Biden

A Denial-Of-Service Attack On Our Minds

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Why Isn’t BLM Celebrating?

December 2021

Biden's Annus Horribilis

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We need a racial politics for 2119, not 1619. Latinos will lead the way.

Why Roe Will Fall And Obergefell Won't

The case for returning the abortion question to politics

“There Is No More Time To Reform France”

November 2021

It Wasn't A Hoax. It Was Media Overkill.

Parsing the truths in the "collusion" narrative

Boris Is Bombing

The Ever-Radicalizing Republicans

How do we fight back against left extremism if the alternative is worse?

Jonathan Last’s Weak, Lame Defense Of The MSM

When All The Media Narratives Collapse

In case after case, the US MSM just keeps getting it wrong.

The Woke Meet Their Match: Parents

Glenn Youngkin's mix of populist policy and moderate style is a breakthrough.

October 2021

How To Turn The GOP Green

We need both parties to prevent environmental catastrophe. Here's how we do it.

Turning The GOP Green: Your Thoughts

The Betrayal Of Our Gay Inheritance

How has the new trans left come to resemble the old religious right?

I Was Wrong: An Update

No, The Personal Is Not Political

The truism that is tearing at the fabric of liberal democracy.

Dave Chappelle Is Right, Isn't He?

The comedian defends reality. Which is currently under siege.

How Biden Could Bring Back Trump

He's losing control of events, and immigration is front and center.

The Risks Of Dem Over-Reach

September 2021

The Deepening Menace Of Trump

The more we learn, the worse it gets. The emergency is far from over.

Back When “Queer” Was A Slur

“I Am Person: Hear Me Roar”

Can’t you just see Helen Reddy belting out that lyric?

The Boldness Of Biden And Boris

Whatever you think of them, they're making big decisions

Liberalism’s Antibodies Watch

An update on the ongoing social justice cultural revolution.

Emerging Cracks In The Woke Elite

Some small signs of hope for liberal society

Our No-Limits Presidency

August 2021

Two Men Falling

The long war in Afghanistan is finally ending. Thank God.

The Price Of Tucker Carlson's Soul

Going cheap for a corrupt, fashy kleptocrat in Central Europe

Biden's Not-So-Great New Normal

The reality checks keep coming

Saving The Pigs

Pigs are highly intelligent, and yet we torture and terrorize them before we kill them.

July 2021

Let It Rip

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Live With The Virus

The Deepening Republican Degeneracy

The Darkness Visible In China

And the realism that requires we live with it

The High-Tech Outing Of A Gay Priest

Introducing "Out On A Limb"

A selection of my writing from 1989 to 2021

What Happened To You?

The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism

Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part III

July 4 edition

The Insouciance Of Evil

On the death of Donald Rumsfeld

June 2021

Our Very Catholic President

The strange miracle of Joe Biden

The Actual Diversity Of The Gay World

Don't Ban CRT. Expose It.

There's a liberal way to fight illiberalism. And it's beginning to work.

The Grim Trade-Off Of BLM?

Fewer African-Americans killed by cops; many more killed by civilians

Our Politics And The English Language

What would Orwell say about our debased discourse?

Yes, He’s Still Out Of His Mind

An update on Trump

May 2021

Removing The Bedrock Of Liberalism

What the "Critical Race Theory" debate is really about.

The Triumphs Of Gay Black Men

On Lil Nas X

The Shame Of NYC Pride

We cannot attend a Pride parade that excludes some openly gay people.

When A Canceler Is Canceled

On Nikole Hannah-Jones and UNC

The GOP's Massive Missed Opportunity

It's called Trumpism Without Trump. But they can't get there, and he won't let them.

Israel’s Incipient Civil War

April 2021

The Strange Fate Of Joe Biden

The unlikeliest would-be revolutionary in American history

Are Face-Masks The New Condoms?

Some thoughts on plagues, rationality and recovery.

The Missing Context In The Police Shootings Debate

The American Political Crisis Deepens

Beneath the surface, the center continues to collapse.

The Right’s Missed Covid Opportunity

A Truce Proposal In The Trans Wars

There is a compromise available. Here's one version.

Religion And The Decline of Democracy

We may miss it when it's gone.

The Use And Abuse Of “Queer”

March 2021

What Biden Doesn't Get On Immigration

We're in a new era. It's time to adjust to it.

How Far Back Does The Sex Abuse Crisis Go?

When The Narrative Replaces The News

How the media grotesquely distorted the Atlanta massacres

When The Narrative Replaces The News: Your Thoughts

Biden's Revolution Takes Shape

If you ever believed he would govern like Obama, it's time to rethink.

The Dawn Of Mass Child Migration

Killing The SAT Means Hurting Minorities

The evidence is clear. But the woke refuse to accept it.

The Post-Modern Barbarism Of Bush And Cheney

A movie review of The Mauritanian.

February 2021

Two Sexes. Infinite Genders.

How the world changes and yet stays the same

The Over-Reach Of The Equality Act

The "Majority-Minority" Myth

Our racial future may not be what we have come to believe.

The "Majority-Minority" Myth: Your Thoughts And Stories

Rush To Judgment

On the death of Rush Limbaugh

Convict Him

This really shouldn’t be hard.

The Magic Money Tree Of 2021

One of the few lasting legacies of Trump is the end of fiscal conservatism.

The Unbearable Whiteness Of The Classics

The woke argue that the study of ancient Greece and Rome should be junked. Oy.

The Unbearable Whiteness Of The Classics: Your Thoughts

January 2021

The Vaccines' Race Against Time

As the virus adapts, these months may be the hardest of them all.

Counter-Insurgency In America

On the January 6 mob.

Biden’s Culture War Aggression

He may have needlessly crippled his chances for lowering the temperature already.

The Big Lie That Must Die

The core legitimacy of our democracy is in the balance.

This Is The Face Of The GOP Now

The descent from conservatism to nihilism is now complete.

December 2020

Why 2021 Is Going To Be Epic

A new president, a vaccine, a boom, and you’ve got yourself a party.

Christianism And Our Democracy

The fusion of religion and politics on the right has made moderation impossible.

Do All Black Lives Matter? Or Just Some?

On the soaring toll of civilian violence against African-Americans

Do All Black Lives Matter? More Of Your Dissents.

All Black Lives Matter: A Reader Forum

November 2020

Where Have All The Lesbians Gone?

They're coming out as nonbinary or as men. [by Katie Herzog]

The Minorities Within Minorities

And how they can help us revive liberal democracy

The Cult Is Now The Party

Trump Is Winning. Democracy Is Losing.

The Weimarization of American politics may be picking up steam.

Trump Is Gone. Trumpism Just Arrived

The air has been cleared. And democracy is working.

October 2020

Healing From The Center Out

Joe Biden, a president for all Americans, period.

The Psychedelic Election

A new issue arrives on the horizon. Why it matters.

Why Is Wokeness Winning?

The astonishing and continuing success of left illiberalism

The Germaphobe Who Let The Virus Rip

Dreaming Of A Landslide

I know I'm tempting fate, but a landslide is what this country so desperately needs.

The Achievement Of The Veep Debate

Reality Ends The Reality Show

Is this a chance to start over?

Trump Lost. But Did Biden Win?

On the first presidential debate

September 2020

Yes, This Is The Face Of A Tyrant

And a competent one at that.

We Are All Algorithms Now

Is that what's really destroying the legitimacy of our democracy?

Critical Race Theory And The Epidemic

The Logic Of Bell Curve Leftism

A twist not many of us saw coming.

The Metastasizing Cancer Of Trump

Vote as soon as you can. Vote Biden.

August 2020

The Trap The Democrats Walked Right Into

If law and order are what this election is about, they will lose it.

The Cascading Complexity Of Diversity

And why the New York Times still doesn't get it.

Burning the GOP To The Ground?

Here’s the gist of a platform I think could work.

The 1620 Project

This year has been a demoralizing one for this little town at the very end of Cape Cod.

July 2020

The Roots Of Wokeness

It's time we looked more closely at the philosophy behind the movement.

The President vs The Election, Once Again

The Summer Of Menace

How plagues can inspire social revolt — and a potential reaction against it.

In Defense Of J.K. Rowling

Pining For An Analog World

I’ve found myself deliriously lost in HBO’s new series, Perry Mason.

See You Next Friday: A Farewell Letter

My last column at New York Magazine, announcing the launch of The Weekly Dish.

(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.)

Calling all sleuths — a mission, if you choose to accept it:

I do not have a VFYW entry, but a small hope you could help me surprise my wife with reliving a happy memory. 

She and I took our first vacation together to Puerto Rico in 2008, when we were still in med-school. In April we are going back for the first time, with our two boys. The picture I keep on my nightstand is from that trip. She looks like a pixie in a yellow sundress. 

I would like to take her back to that spot. Back to the tree she was leaning on and showing me that smile I fell in love with. The VFYW contest inspired me to try my hand at finding the spot on my own. I could not.

Would you be able to ask the VFYW sleuths to help me locate the street we walked on? We stayed just east of San Juan, and I think the spot was within a few blocks of the ocean. We were walking back from the beach to our shoddy hotel room (the name of which has disappeared from my mind and email) when we stopped to take pictures.

Thank you for reading and considering this request.

His reply to my email:

That is wonderful. This is a real kindness. This is one of my happiest memories. I’ve attached the few pictures we took that day (and I used Photoshop to remove us):

I’m pretty sure both pictures are from the same walk down one street. I know that isn’t much to go on … fingers crossed.

Maybe our sleuths can solve this mystery by Friday, just in time for Valentine’s Day. The VFYW is often a place where sleuths help sleuths. An example from our resident chef:

Before I get to the food, I want to say that “The Layover Cure” is the best name for a cocktail the Austin mixologist has invented. And boy, did I need one this week. After a brief week of jet-lag recovery, I flew to New Orleans for a business meeting and spent two days trying to get home. This included a wait of three hours in the airport with no functioning toilets because of a broken water main. In recompense, I made the cocktail for the VFYW dinner, pics below. 

By the way, I’ve been following Cocktails With Suderman for over a year now, so I’m glad you mentioned the substack last week. I think Suderman should have a guest appearance with the Austin mixologist.

We should get his wife, Megan McArdle, on the Dishcast sometime — especially since she was one of the old-school bloggers at The Atlantic when Andrew and I were there oh so many years ago.

From a previous winner:

First off, I have to say that I actually won last week’s competition in a parallel universe. That particular cathedral actually does exist in France. I found it, and I’ve enclosed the picture along with a Google Earth rendering from a similar angle for you to confirm. It’s St. Maclou in Rouen, France.

But unfortunately, in our branch of the multiverse, that exact shot with the Trustees Executors building doesn’t exist. I’m content to know that my counterpart in the parallel universe is currently enjoying his victory.

Here’s the long-awaited return of the super-sleuth in Augusta, GA, who consistently makes me laugh more than any another sleuth:

2024 Greetings! It’s not too late to still wish you and Andrew a Happy New Year, is it? I’m of the opinion that anytime before, say, June is acceptable, provided you haven’t communicated with the person since the previous year. But I have noticed that many seem to have a hard cutoff after the first week or two of January, and get quite peevish about it after that. If that’s the case, then Happy Groundhog Day!

Things have been much too busy for me to participate recently, but I still love reading the VFYW each week. I particularly enjoyed the Halifax one. I can sympathize with the Warrensburg super-champ; on my final year competing in the Geo Bee, I made it to the very end of the state finals. Only six people stood between me and a trip to D.C. — and I blew it by not knowing the location of a certain aquifer. (I guess they really like aquifer questions, since you mentioned your brother got one.)

I won’t name the aquifer, because I, too, secretly hope that one day it will collapse into a sinkhole and drag the entire blasted state down with it. I knew the answers to the rest of the questions, so if it wasn’t for that stupid aquifer, I could have gone to Washington and made out with Bob Dole just like your brother did! (I’m pretty sure that’s what you said happened; I didn’t bother to re-read that part.)

Good thing Bob Dole wasn’t doing Viagra commercials yet:

Because I read Augusta’s email on January 29, a Happy National Puzzle Day to her and everyone else who plays our weekly puzzle!

On to this week’s view:

Since way back when you and Andrew had your blog and I had no kids, I promised myself I would not attempt another crack at the contest. It took entirely too much time, and now I have precious little of it. Yet here I am again. It’s like heroin (I suppose, not having actually done any). The pull is too strong.  

Anyhow, my guess is Lyon, France. I saw the photo and thought it had a French look to it. I then Googled “tower and church on a hill,” because I think I see one — over to the far upper-right — when I squint and stand on one leg. I hit results for Metallic tower of Fourvière, and Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourvière. Then I searched around for churches in Lyon, until I came upon a photo of Saint George Church of Lyon, which looked like the church in this photo. The photos also showed that the buildings across the Saone River may be the buildings seen in the distance in the photo.  

And that’s where I hit a snag. The labyrinthian streets did me in. I felt I was close, but the more I searched on Google Street View, the less certain I became. I did become certain that I had spent entirely too much time. So that’s it. I leave it to the masterminds who each week pick the exact set of pajamas and shoes the photographer was wearing as they snapped the photo from the precise angle of the precise room, etc. I’ll simply enjoy reading how their minds work. And I’ll vow never again to undertake the hunt myself ... until the pull becomes too strong again.

Another asks, “Is it Gothenburg, Sweden?” Nope, and it’s not “Budapest” either, nor is it “Skagen, Denmark.” Another writes, “My first impression upon seeing the view was Eastern Europe”:

Two different friends recently traveled to Croatia, and the red ceramic tile roofs sent me down a rabbit hole looking at at Croatian cities on the coast. I hoped to find the large, long building in the background. I assumed it was governmental, but I found nothing resembling it anywhere. I even swung around the Adriatic into Italy but soon found that was not helpful.

Another first impression comes from the wine geek in San Francisco:

Shiela doesn’t usually help me with these contests, but this week she scanned the photo and said it looked like Portugal. Actually, I had the same initial reaction. But then we both agreed that the architecture seemed to be, um, grander than what we recalled from Lisbon. So I thought maybe it was somewhere in Central Europe, e.g. Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic. The building in the far background looked like a castle of some type, so I searched for “Central Europe castle in city.” A blog popped up with 11 “magnificent” castles to visit in Central Europe and the castle we see is the second one listed.

Chini zooms out, then zooms in:

The grand-champion adds, “Our clue this week should be easy for long-time Viewfinders, since we find ourselves in the capital of a once great empire, one that ruled over the town my grandfather was born in (a picture of which I shared here previously).” A sleuth in Bend names the right city:

I haven’t guessed for a while, but I recognized Prague pretty quickly, so thought I’d attempt to sleuth out the window. About a half hour of searching got me to the correct hotel, but the window turned out to be another matter entirely, as you can't see it from the street, thus there are (to my knowledge) no real “Street View” pics of it. I could tell where in the hotel it ought to be, and in fact someone generously posted to Google a few pics looking out from what appears to be the room directly above the window in question. Didn’t really help me though.

He eventually got the right window. So did a sleuth in Andover:

Some views tell me nope right out of the gate, and it’s been a long run of those lately. But this week (as I morph into a couch troll, laid up with a herniated lumbar disk), the view told me maybe. So a little sleuthing (inSPIREd? aSPIREing?) brought me to Prague, the city of 100 spires. A little fiddling with the old Google Earth, and we’ve landed another satisfying view! There’s a specific thrill in locking in the address and window after all the searching: we’re addicts for it! Thanks for giving me somewhere fun to visit from this couch.

Feel better soon! Here’s the beginning of the entry from the Berkeley super-champ:

I normally hammer out several paragraphs detailing how one search method led to another to another to another until Success! Not this week. This week I started and finished with the teal colored steeple (though I learned back in contest #381 that copper and patina were better terms than teal to describe such things), and success came suddenly, unexpectedly.

I started by searching for images that matched the terms “copper spire Europe” or “copper steeple Europe” (hoping for a flukey shortcut that would spit out an image right away featuring that teal-colored steeple in our image, the one shaped like a traffic cone or a witch’s hat). But no dice. So I repeated the same search over and over, substituting individual country names for “Europe.” First the Baltic states. Then one after another of the countries in eastern Europe (because architecture).

And before long, Bingo! When I typed “copper spire Czech Republic” this image appeared (peeking out from amongst a ton of others):

A sleuth on the Correct Guesser list gets close to the right building:

Hi, it’s been a while since I had the time to do some searching. But I so enjoy this game and the weekly write-up, so it’s never too far from my mind. I think this week’s view is from the Appia Hotel Residences, in Prague, CZ. And if it’s not, I still totally want to go there.

The super-sleuth in Ridgewood gets even closer:

This week’s window is from the Czech Museum of Music located at Karmelitska 2, Lesser Town, Prague 1, Czechia.

But this week I’m here to talk about Peter Jackson, who wasn’t covered enough in last week’s contest. Many of the greatest directors cut their teeth making low budget horror movies such as Coppola (Dementia 13), Spielberg (Duel), Oliver Stone (The Hand), and Peter Jackson is no exception. I somehow recently stumbled across one of his early films: the “splatter comedy” Dead Alive (aka Braindead), which is available for free in full on YouTube and which Wikipedia calls “one of the goriest films of all time” and “a cult classic”:

I checked it out and found it quite hilarious, in part because it’s insane to think how this ridiculous movie was done by the Oscar-winning director of Lord of the Rings, and yet you can clearly see the talent and the inventiveness on display right from the get-go.

Next on my list is Jackson’s film prior to that one, called Meet the Feebles (also available in full for free on YouTube). It looks similarly deranged and also regarded as a cult classic:

Back to Prague and its spires:

The most helpful clue for me was the red roofs, surprisingly. My first thought was, “Oh, geez, a bunch of red-tiled roofs. Approximately 200 countries on the planet have an area like that.” But upon closer inspection, these weren’t red tile roofs you’d find in Spain. They just looked like red shingles.

A little time with Google had a few pictures of Prague popping up. I’ve never been to Prague. Are there any spires there? Oh, apparently Prague is known as the “City of a Hundred Spires.” Oh shit, I know what that means. It doesn’t mean Prague has a hundred spires. It means it’s really the “City of a Bazillion Spires — More Than You Can Count.” I already went down that rabbit hole last week, looking for spires, and I wasn’t even in the right country!

However, a more specific search for the Czech Republic and red roofs quickly turned up a picture of a spire that looked suspiciously similar, located in the “Lesser Quarter.” I was home free from there.

I looked around a bit for the history of these red roofs, but couldn’t find anything interesting. I hope one of the other contestants will come up with something!

FYI, I added that big Dusty cartoon to conceal the right window he circled, to keep the guesses going. This next sleuth focuses on another big clue:

I tend to only make progress on the more clearly urban photos, and this one was instantly obvious, on account of the distinctive view of Prague Castle in the distance. But where exactly? The buildings of the castle gradually slope downward from west to east, as it does in this photo, meaning the photographer was looking northwards. This gives us a rough search area on Google Maps. Pinpointing the location to the hotel was fairly easy using satellite view, thanks to the distinctive shapes of the garden furniture (three squares and a circle), which clearly stood out:

Another sighs:

Man, this was a tough one. Thanks to a planned trip to Prague with my sister and her family, who were living in Germany at the time, I was aware of the magnificent Lobkowicz Palace, which gave me the location of this week’s view. However, how in the hell am I going to track down the exact window in such an old, DENSE city???

This sleuth names the right building:

I will start be saying thank you for the free month subscription after you posted my entry for Arlington, VA. No more freeloading for me; I am now a paid subscriber, and it was the Saturday morning VFYW recap for Dunedin that pushed me over the edge. Really good stuff. This contest is going to become addictive ...

So, as soon as I saw this week’s view, I was almost certain it’s Prague, confirmed by a quick Google search. That was the easy part, but where in Prague? A nondescript courtyard with no identifying markers? Could be anywhere. 

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Justin is a writer and broadcaster who gets Christians and non-Christians to talk to each other. He co-hosts the “Re-Enchanting” podcast for Seen & Unseen, and is a guest presenter for the “Maybe God” podcast. He also contributes to Premier Christianity magazine, where he used to be editor. His new book is The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, and he has a documentary podcast series of the same name.

You can listen right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on what killed the New Atheist movement, and the infinitesimal odds that life ever emerged in the universe — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: his parents the “hippies who found Jesus” at Oxford; his early childhood in a Christian commune; the left and right brains of faith; conversion moments; Pascal; Augustine; the evolutionary need for religion; Hitchens and me debating the meaning of life; our disdain for proselytizing; Dawkins and the “mind virus”; atheism and why people “need more than a negative to live on”; my falling away from the Church after the sex-abuse crisis; the quasi-religious movement of BLM and wokeness; its need for purity without grace; the Trump cult; evangelicals drifting from the church-state divide; Christianism; my atheist ex-boyfriend; Ayaan’s conversion; Tom Holland; Game of Thrones as medieval Europe without Christianity; how Jesus changed human consciousness forever; Bart Ehrman; debating the details of the Resurrection; the #MeToo movement and the dignity of women; monogamy as a way to protect women from polygamist men; Louise Perry’s Case Against Sexual Revolution; how ISIS brought back crucifixion; the chasm between Christianity and its leaders; the many messiahs of the ancient world; psychedelics; sensing my friend Patrick after his death; scientific materialism; Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality; the problem of consciousness; panpsychism; Harari on human rights; Paul Davies and the “directionality of life”; logos as logic speaking into chaos; and why “Christianity has to stay weird.”

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Isikoff and Klaidman on Trump’s trials; Christian Wiman on resisting despair as a Christian, Nate Silver on the 2024 race, Jeffrey Rosen on the pursuit of happiness, George Will on Trump and conservatism, and Abigail Shrier on why the cult of therapy harms children. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other pod comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Here’s a listener on last week’s convo with Jonathan Freedland on anti-Semitism and the left:

Thank you for that super interesting and very engaging conversation! 

I’m a bit of an Anglophile and do follow British politics, and Jonathan is one of the few Guardian columnists I really respect. I haven’t heard you utter a single word I disagree with on the topic of Israel and Hamas, and I found Jonathan’s opinions to be so enlightening and moving, really. I listened to it on a long walk, avoiding lake-sized puddles of slush on this mucky, too-warm January day in Montreal.  

That’s the perfect way to listen to the Dishcast! From another listener who enjoyed the pod:

We don’t get such detailed discussions of British politics very often here in the States. So great. But the thing that always troubles me, in that episode and many other places, is how people go on and on about how it’s not anti-Semitic to criticize the Israeli government or its policies. And I agree that it’s not inherently anti-Semitic to criticize a government and its policies, but this particular government is criticized constantly, for everything. Israel was criticized in October, before they even started the invasion of Gaza. Nasty stuff, like the crowd in Sydney chanting “Gas the Jews,” or those lovely young people at Harvard who claimed that the attack was Israel’s fault, 100%. And on and on and on. To these people, Israel can do no right, in any situation, ever.

So while it may not automatically be anti-Semitic to criticize the Israeli government, it sure as hell feels anti-Semitic to this Jew. Especially as Israel is so much better than its neighbors in terms of democracy, doesn’t torture and/or kill citizens the government doesn’t like, and has freedoms in general. Even for its Arab minority! 

And stories about how the Global South disapproves of Israel would make me laugh if I weren’t so outraged. How many of these countries are beacons of democracy, freedom and tolerance? So for them to continually bash Israel is laughable, and hypocrisy of the highest order. And South Africa? Their government is hardly without some very grievous sins, including continuing to align with Russia, even in the face of their invasion of Ukraine, for which there is NO excuse.

On the other hand, the near-total obliteration of Gaza as a place where anyone could live is more like Putin’s use of the military rather than the West’s. Another on Israel:

I was fascinated by your discussion with Jonathan Freedland about anti-Semitism, which I firmly believe has been spurred to a significant degree by the actions of Netanyahu and the radical West Bank settlers. He has used Hamas to undermine the Palestinian Authority and even agreed to allow billions of dollars to be sent to Hamas by Qatar. I think Hamas and Netanyahu need each other in order to survive. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wants to prolong Israeli military action in Gaza because he knows if the fighting ends, he will likely be ousted from power when an election is held and could very well wind up in jail for corruption.

I don’t think the Palestinian Authority is up to the task of governing Gaza, judging by their record in the West Bank. They appear to be corrupt and incompetent, which begs the question of who can govern the Palestinians if a two-state solution ever came to fruition. Talk about being on the horns of a dilemma.

Another writes, “I immensely enjoyed your interview with Freedland and laughed out loud at your recollections of Keir Starmer during your grammar school days together”:

Another has a question:

I very much enjoy your writing, but I don’t like wasting time listening to podcasts.  I can read text much faster than listening to speech. I would be happy to subscribe to a written transcript of your podcasts. Is that possible? 

A reminder that Substack recently launched an auto-transcription feature, which you can access by clicking the gray box labeled “Transcript” below the byline of every podcast post:

This next reader wants to hear more about Nikki Haley:

I welcomed your latest commentary on Trump — I despise him as much as the next guy — but I think our fear of the fool should be kept within rational bounds. Where I get off your trolley is your characterization of Nikki Haley as “ghastly.” I scratched my head wondering where you were coming from until I listened to the Maher clip and got the picture that you see her as the second coming of Dick Cheney:

While the topic may soon be irrelevant, I am puzzled by what wars you think she is interested in launching. I listened to (suffered through?) the GOP debates, and Haley sounded to me a lot more like Reagan than Cheney. She supports money and arms for Ukraine, no US troops. (So did Christie — is he a warmonger?) Ditto for Israel. If she differs from Biden on these matters, and Taiwan, it is only a matter of degree. A perfect candidate she is not, but ghastly?

Her support for Israel is close to pathological. I suspect she’d take us to the edge of war with both China and Russia. Everything she says reminds me of unreconstructed neocons circa 2003. Someone who has learned nothing from history is not someone I’d want as president.

Another reader turns to the debate over race and IQ:

The issue is vexing me terribly. I agree that the left has done a pathetic job engaging with this explosive topic, and I commend you for taking a different approach. I recommend a popular piece published by a fellow ‘Stacker, Nathan Cofnas. I’ve also been keeping track of Hanania’s recent works on this topic, and can’t shake the nagging feeling that there’s no small amount of handwaving going on when it comes both to cultural impact on IQ as well as the societal damage a simple “hereditarian” take on this topic would reap. This is not a subject one can talk about freely at dinner parties (ha!).

I think it would be helpful for all of us to acknowledge that there is no empirical doubt that IQ is distributed differently across racial groupings. It’s just a fact. Why this is the case is highly contested — with the usual nature-nurture debate at play. I think it’s only safe to say that it isn’t 100 percent genetics, as some racists believe; and it isn’t 100 percent environment, as the current orthodoxy would have it. It’s probably some complicated mixture of the two, with interaction between both. If we can isolate what’s going on, we may be able to ameliorate it. If we deny what’s going on, we go round and round in circles. That’s why I favor more research and less stigma.

From a dissenter:

I’ve followed you since your Atlantic essay on why we should vote for Barack Obama when he ran in 2008, and I’m a paid subscriber (I had to pay because I kept wanting more when your podcasts would end early). I also follow Will Stancil on Twitter (I refuse to call it X), and I generally enjoy his commentary. I saw some of that back-and-forth on race you covered, but I didn’t dive into it carefully. Reading your own commentary, though, you bring up a dimension of this debate on race and IQ that I find really frustrating.

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Here’s a followup on the latest contest from the Alaskan globetrotter (who was rushing to the airport last week for his next excursion):

I loved the Jaipur photo, but hate that we didn’t have time to find it and make some comments, because I’ve been there a couple of times (1994 and 2015). The changes I saw between those two decades really challenged my biases about developing countries and helped me recognize the astounding pace of modernization. 

India still has its issues — not least the Hindi-Muslim antipathy, ridiculous traffic, and frustrating bureaucracies — but the reduction in daily poverty is remarkable. With one of the youngest and now the largest populations in the world, plus a rapidly growing middle class, I can’t wait to see how India changes by my next visit. 

Our failure to find the Jaipur View quickly is what I call a Type 1 error — been there, but didn’t recognize it. (Type 2 is when you guess the place, look for it, and then mistakenly reject it.) Type 1 errors ruin my Saturday morning after reading the reveal. Type 2s leave a bitter taste until till you find the next View. 

The UWS super-sleuth is also kicking herself for missing last week’s view:

Jaipur! I had guessed southern India, and normally I’d be OK with getting just the country correct. But I’ve actually been in Jaipur — staying in a hotel a few miles from contest #403 — so I should have recognized it.

In any event, the timing of this View was appropriate for me, as my husband and I just celebrated our 19th wedding anniversary earlier this week, and we went to India on our honeymoon. So all the photos and stories brought back good memories. We stayed at Oberoi properties in four different cities, including the Rajvilas in Jaipur. It was easily the most glorious hotel we’ve ever been in.

But the Oberoi Amarvilas in Agra wasn’t far behind — and we even had a view of the Taj Mahal from the terrace of our room. At the concierge’s suggestion, we visited the Taj several times — to see it in morning, afternoon, and evening light. Someone from the hotel staff would give us a lift in a golf cart and drop us off at the entrance, where we’d be mobbed by people who wanted to sell us postcards and extra storage for our cameras (no iPhones yet).

We were the only Westerners there, and apparently we stuck out like sore thumbs: a pale-skinned, blue-eyed woman with auburn hair, and an even paler 6’ blue-eyed man with white hair. There we were, at one of the most recognizable and (justifiably) hyped landmarks in the world, and some of the Indian visitors wanted to take pictures of themselves with us. I’m imagining them showing friends their vacation photos, pointing us out as the curiosities we apparently were!

Yes, this is a real photo — not us in front of a poster. And that’s a real bird!

We went to India in part because we knew it would probably be our only trip there together (I had been there on business once before), and therefore we wouldn’t ever confuse memories of our honeymoon with those from any other vacation. And we haven’t!

A followup from the sleuth who submitted last week’s photo:

Here’s an elephant I spotted on the streets of Jaipur — also, it being the Pink City, it’s only fitting that I discovered a pink gin, Samsara:

Heads up to our mixologist super-sleuth: Samsara is fun to smell (notes of citrus and herbs), as well as drink. In fact, it would be a shame to mix it in a cocktail. Drink it straight.

The super-sleuth in Bethlum has “two comments about last week’s write-up”:

I’m definitely going to try the “The Pink City Tonic” creation from the Austin mixologist — sounds right up my alley with the hibiscus syrup! Also, the lac bug discussion was fun, as my spouse uses shellac for his instrument making and often can be found shaking jars of shellac flakes in Everclear to dissolve them. He retired from fixing bugs in IBM software to fixing bugs in alcohol for ukuleles. He’s much happier with these bugs.

One more followup, from a first-timer:

Thanks for including my musings in last week’s post. I now feel one with the hive! Looking forward to achieving “super-sleuth” status in the year ahead.

From the sleuth who submitted this week’s photo:

Winning the contest and then two contests later, having my photo chosen ... how exciting. Regarding the free six months for submitting it: thank you for that! Totally unnecessary. I’d happily donate it to the sleuth mentioned in last week’s edition who is a non-subscriber ... if that helps grow the VFYW family.

Thanks again for using my photo, which I took on a wonderful trip with my wife and daughter. When the Dish newsletter came, I showed the photo to my daughter and asked her if she could guess this week’s spot. She looked at it briefly, leaned back, and gave me a high-five. Priceless.

Our super-sleuth in San Mateo writes, “I asked DALL-E to produce a picture of a VFYW sleuth sleuthing”:

With a magnifying glass to this week’s view, a sleuth writes:

Man, I thought I had a chance with this one. My first thought was Normandy, France. The view reminded me of where we stayed in the summer of 2001. Of course I couldn’t remember exactly where that was, and I had to dig out a scrapbook to jog my memory. (Thanks for that — it was shocking to look at pictures of my 29-year-old self.) Turns out it was Caen. I remember noticing that Caen was mix of European old and mid-century American new (related to the recovery from WWII, I assume). 

If the VFYW this week isn’t in Caen, it must be some other city in Normandy that was rebuilt after the war. For a moment I thought the steeple was St Pierre, but I’m not convinced they match. Then I started looking at other steeples in the city. There are many.

I tried to figure out what the blue rook logo represented, but came up with nothing. I should have known the French flag was either a red herring or a hunt for a needle in a haystack. A steeple in a pile of steeples?

The flag also caught the eye of the CO/NJ super-champ:

The tricolor flying above the building obviously puts us somewhere in France. NOT!

The super-sleuth on Park Avenue also didn’t fall for the red herring:

I love the building with the flag combined with the spire of what looks like a suitably gothic French church in the background — nice way to play with people. Then you start looking at the rest of the photo and it may be many places, but it ain’t France. Indeed, the view has that distinct British-style architecture, but doesn’t look like UK. Tasmania? Too soon and wrong greenery.

Right region. How another sleuth responded to the flag: “Sneaky eh, cuz! As our NZ friends would say.” Here’s what a Frenchman says:

Hello, bonjour :-) First time writing to you, monsieur. This contest took a Sunday lunch with five people, including the cook (me). First, a French flag doesn’t mean France. French people are NOT patriotic. And if it was a French embassy or consulate, there will be an EU flag plus a French flag.

So Ava, the smart cookie, thought of a French school. Too small. French schools (lycées) are often bigger.  

He got to the right building and signed off, “Fun fun — merci, Chris, un bon moment de détectives en famille.” A noob solves another clue and gets the right country:

Greetings! First entry for me, so thanks for throwing in an easy one for the newbies. I don’t think I have the bandwidth for floor and window, so I’ll leave that to the experts. But I know it’s New Zealand, based on the New Zealand distinct fire hydrant “yellow circle and square” street signage/painting.

Giuseppe got there with another clue:

Apart from the giant red herring — or rather the blue, white and red herring — this was an easy one. That French flag is not flying over a French embassy or consulate — which would normally sport both the French and European Union flags. A clue for the correct country is found in the monogram on the side of a building with the letters “NZ”:

More initials were spotted by this sleuth:

I was lucky to figure out New Zealand rather quickly: it began with the license plates — they’re blurred, but you can still make out the aspect ratio. Then there’s the NZE logo, which I later learned stood for “New Zealand Express” — the builder and first tenant of the building now known as Consultancy House.

My first guess in New Zealand was the French embassy, which is in Wellington. That wasn’t it, of course, but things I saw in the overall streetscape — the large triangle painted in the roadway, the yellow dashes around the curbs, the handicap parking markings, the parking meters — told me to stick with New Zealand.

From a sleuth who got the city quickly:

How did I get here? Well, I’m in New Zealand. In the foreground, the Trustees Executors logo is ubiquitous enough that any New Zealander will recognise what country we are in, despite the misleading French flag. Cunning. Once we have New Zealand, we have miserable cold and wet and late Victorian architecture in a town big enough to have a spire on its church. This can only be Dunedin.

Another adds about Trustees Executors:

I lived in Wellington during the 1990s and worked for one of the banks there. My boss from that time is now one of the board members of Trustees Executors — and one of the most deeply unpleasant individuals I have ever come across.

The San Mateo sleuth “tried to improve the readability of the words on the Trustees Executors building so you can see the etchings that were erased for the VFYW”:

A first-timer is psyched to find the right building:

GUYS I FOUND IT I FEEL LIKE A GENIUS!! 

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Jonathan writes a column for The Guardian, hosts their “Politics Weekly America” podcast, and is the co-host of the “Unholy” podcast with Israeli journalist Yonit Levi. He’s also the author of The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, along with several thrillers under the pseudonym Sam Bourne.

You …

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From the winner of last week’s contest:

The VFYW has been a really fun thing to discover, and I’m grateful for your work in making it happen! I’ll take the book-prize, please. And stop by Berkeley if/when you pass through, as it seems there are a bunch of viewfinders here …

“Viewfinders” is such a great term; I haven’t heard it used for sleuths before. A followup from last week’s submitter:

I was thrilled to see how many sleuths found our Hampton Inn window! Their facts and stories about the area were fascinating to read. Our daughter, who has lived in Arlington for almost a year now, has a new appreciation for her hometown — um, homecounty — and she will definitely be checking out that underground puppet store! 

Bring holy water. Especially if they’re shadow puppets:

On to this week’s view, a sleuth makes a prediction:

I’m going to guess 150 get the city, 100 the building, but fewer than 10 will identify the room or the window because damn, there isn’t much Google Street View here. I’m not one of the correct window guessers this time, but I’ll submit what I have because I’m both thankful to be within a few hundred feet again (for the first time in months), but also, being a previous winner, I’m no longer in the running for the prize.

Actually only 40 sleuths got the right city this week, but almost all of them got the right building. The super-sleuth in Bethlum starts with the most entertaining clue:

First I tried to find the Ferris wheel (looking decommissioned) on the right side of the photo. That was a wild goose chase. If someone has the story on that, I’d like to hear it.

Speaking of wild, here’s Team Bellevue with a startling view:

We send our regards this week, given our brief VFYW entry. But for a change of pace, here’s the LEAST belle view we had this week:

That is a 100% authentic “View From Your Doorway” of the fire escape in our offices. We all made it out safely (via another fire escape), but we’re gonna need to borrow some more wet-vacs if anyone has them.

Until next Fri … blub blub blub

Yikes. From a previous winner:

Well, it’s been over a year since my last entry. Yet, surprisingly, it only took about five minutes to solve this mystery. Upon finding the location, I sat in stunned silence at my impressive feat. “I AM A GOLDEN GOD,” I thought to myself. And then I realized this is probably one of the easy puzzles you throw out there every once in a while, so I’m guessing Chini got the correct answer two days before you sent out the picture.

Here’s the clairvoyant Chini:

One sleuth simply says “Pakistan.” Another gets the right country:

I immediately sensed India in this photo. The cattle in the foreground in the midst of the dense urban environs settled it for me.

A previous winner is also seeing cows:

I know it’s India, but that’s quite obvious. Probably Delhi, or Mumbai. I don’t have the patience to search for a wedding venue, or a cow pen, because I still have PTSD after the wine shop search in Paris — and I’m sure this week will be a similar experience :)

From the sleuth previously known as “your mediocre super-sleuth in NYC”:

Over the past several years of sleuthing, I have had intermittent dry spells lasting up to three or four months. But recently I have found 11 of the last 13 views.  So I googled what is better than “mediocre.” The gradations go: mediocre, average, good, great, superb, epic, and Chini. At the risk of jinxing myself, and with your permission, I’d like to upgrade myself to your average super-sleuth in NYC.

This week, thinking it might help me get find the right city, I googled “list most air polluted cities in India.” Check out the images in this horrifying article. In turns out our view is of a city that didn’t even make the top 20. We are doomed.

Here’s the photo for Delhi featured in that article:

Another previous winner:

A tough one! I first thought it was Japan, but my searches kept returning locations in India — but alas, no precise matches. The carriage-less Ferris wheel is a big clue, and finally I found this article about a festival in Hyderabad that has a pic of the wheel. Not sure that’s correct, though; it might be a portable ride that moves around to different festivals.

Anyway, best I got! 100% sure it’s India, 50% sure it’s Hyderabad.

The coin toss says it’s not Hyderabad. That city was also the quick guess from our Alaskan globetrotter, who is out trotting again:

We are heading to the airport for a trip to SE Asia, so we couldn’t play seriously this week. But I took a look and my two-second guess is someplace like Hyderabad. (Just for the record, if I’m within 500 km, I’ll be happy and know that we could have found it with some effort.) We’ll send some Views from our trip.

Yes please! Another gut guess: “Bhucho Mandi, Punjab 151001, India.” Another: “Colaba, Mumbai, Maharashtra State, India.” Going with “Marehra, Uttar Pradesh, India,” a newbie gets rhymey:

Here’s a little self description,
First-time player sans subscription,
Relying on my own decryption,
Since hubby says we can’t spend money.

The Bethlum sleuth asks:

Was this pic submitted by the super-sleuth from Eagle Rock who was in India looking for tigers? If so, perhaps I need to start keeping track of all the travel plans of the VFYW readership as a basis for clues! Or did you drop that fun fact in last week’s write-up on purpose?

I won’t reveal the method behind my madness. Another Indian city comes from the UWS super-sleuth:

So nice to have you and the contest back from winter break! As soon as I saw that red tent on the tiny screen of my phone, I immediately assumed it was a wedding venue in India, and that I would be able to find it. Come on: there’s a big RED Ferris wheel — seemingly under construction, since there aren’t any cabs attached. Plus a sign for a public school, which I was certain I’d be able to make out eventually.

But no dice. I cannot find that Ferris wheel, and I’m still squinting at that sign. Can’t find the silver dome. No luck looking at views from Hiltons.

Now it’s Wednesday night, with almost time for my weekly Zoom with my sisters (a nice habit since pandemic times), and I’ve got nothing but a large continent … well maybe the southern half, if those cacti-resembling plants are any indication. Unless it’s in Sri Lanka, of course.

My SWAG is Kerala, India. Looking forward to the suggested foods and drinks!

For the school sign, the San Mateo sleuth channels his inner Rick Deckard:

You provided an incredible clue with the red sign in the distance. Probably the sleuths with access to an NSA supercomputer had the answer immediately. If I’d decoded it sooner, I wouldn’t have needed to find the buildings. I’ve enhanced the sign a bit:

Here’s the beginning of the entry from our super-sleuth in SF:

I was just about to give up after a long weekend chasing kids around and trying to figure out where in a country of more than a billion souls this week’s photo was taken. The most tantalizing clue — the “Maha___ Public School” sign on the building — was actually rather tough to track down for me. I have never visited India, so I don’t have much personal knowledge to draw on, and I assumed that we’re probably in Maharashtra, but that was a dead end.

A previous winner in Alexandria also focused on the school:

I'm guessing this week’s VFYW is Kanpur in India. The whole picture kinda screams India, so I thought it must be Bangladesh, or elsewhere, to throw us off track. But I could make out the public school banner a bit and googled what I thought I fuzzily saw. It came up as the Neha Public School in Kanpur … so I’m going with that. Wherever it is, they sure do love rebar!

Yet another stab at the school sign:

Udaipur, India? Just a guess. I’m out of time, and I’m sick, so that’s it. I tried to make out the name of the “Public School” but couldn’t. Maharere? Makarena? One version I searched for took me to Udaipur, and since that’s the hometown of my best friend from high school, I’m going with it.

The super-sleuth on Park Avenue clears things up with the school sign — and names the right city:

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Jeff is a TV journalist and author focused on politics, media, and culture. He’s been a senior political correspondent for CBS, a senior analyst for CNN, and a political and media analyst for ABC News. He has authored or co-authored 13 books, including If Kennedy Lived, When Gore Beat Bush, and Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics.

You can listen right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on how dangerous a Trump reelection would be, and how Biden trapped us with terrible prospects against Trump — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up in NYC; working on the RFK campaign in ‘68; leaving a lucrative consulting job for journalism; the populist appeal of Pat Buchanan; Newt’s pivotal role in polluting politics; how Trump totalized the GOP; his cult following among evangelicals; why he won’t be as restrained during a second term; the civil service in his crosshairs; how Haley and DeSantis failed to deploy dissenters who worked for Trump; Mike Lee’s surrender as a constitutionalist; Mike Flynn wanting to use the military on Jan 6; the congressmen who didn’t vote to impeach out of fear of death threats; our plummeting trust of institutions; Trump countering Jeb over “my brother kept us safe”; Trump priming his base to disbelieve any media reports; the “pathetic miscalculation” of the Resistance that he was finished; the Dems’ lost opportunity to take seriously the concerns of his voters; Obama’s firm stance on illegal immigration; why legal immigrants dislike open borders; how crime has “bedeviled” the Dems since the '60s; why non-white voters are moving toward Trump; Fetterman changing his tune as a progressive; protesters today don’t understand civil disobedience like MLK did; Reagan as a “senior stud” compared to Biden; why Biden is stuck with Harris; how the Ivy League hearings could have been a “Sistah Souljah” moment for Biden; famous moments in debate history; people who could have been great presidents; and Jeff detailing many other counterfactuals from history.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Jonathan Freedland on anti-Semitism and UK politics, Nate Silver on the 2024 election, Christian Wiman on resisting despair, Justin Brierley on his book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief of God, Jeffrey Rosen on the pursuit of happiness, George Will on Trump and conservatism, and Abigail Shrier on why the cult of therapy harms kids. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other pod comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Here’s a listener on last week’s episode on civility:

I ought to read Alexandra Hudson’s book before commenting, but I think that politeness and civility are bound up with each other, and etiquette is something else. Miss Manners spends her time on describing proper conduct towards others founded on consideration — not on describing formal rules for the placement of flatware. She’s not Emily Post writing a social practices rule book. It’s true that “please” and “thank you” are good ideas for behavior, but they are encouraged because of an underlying idea: another individual merits your respect. Perhaps politeness is more intimate — person to person — and civility is more public, but in general, each seems to be bound up with consideration and kindness.

So I think that you are correct in saying that civility assumes that another person has inherent value. But I think there’s also a Ben Franklin argument to be made for civility just working better most of the time. You get more flies with honey, therefore civility serves one’s interest. But convincing the likes of Jon Stewart, Tucker Carlson, and Rachel Maddow will be difficult, since ratings are at stake.

Are you familiar with the term “clapter”? Seth Meyers is supposed to have come up with it and Tina Fey promoted it. It’s Alec Baldwin saying “Fuck Trump” to get mirthless laughter and applause. Cheap and stupid is dominating the discourse these days. People like Christopher Hitchens and Bill Buckley were invariably civil while discussing even contentious topics — but you messed with them at your peril. I think of you in the same way, and I believe you should take comfort from knowing that Stewart needed a gang and a claptering audience to bully you. Alone he couldn’t lay a glove on.

Another listener seeks clarification:

I’m a Christian who would be the first to share the loveliness of Jesus’ message on the dignity of all humans, which you speak to often and in the podcast with Alexandra. But didn’t other ideologies/cultures (e.g. Hinduism) message this same kind on dignity for all humans before Jesus? Or is your point that in Western culture, this specific flavor of the message underpins the liberalism we benefit from?

The specific point is the universalism of agape: unconditional love and acceptance of everyone. That was new.

Another note on the episode:

Your talk with Alexandra instantly brought to mind this recent article in the NYT on the clothing style of Mayor Eric Adams. In years past, this would have been a puff-piece about his style (which is undeniable). But today, with Adams persona non grata among the journalist class, the angle has to be that he obtained his expensive wardrobe through fraud, theft or other ill-gotten means. Just say something nice about the guy, FFS!

This next listener sends “thanks for your interview with Carole Hooven”:

The part of the conversation at the end about the diversity of views on the Council for Academic Freedom at Harvard regarding DEI, and on how to tackle the absence of viewpoint diversity, generated a jumble of thoughts. On the one hand, I strongly agree with you that the DEI bureaucracy apparatus has to go. It’s an offense to scholarly liberal values, and I don’t really care who gets rid of it, or why. On the other hand, I do care about the objectives of those leading the charge against universities more broadly.

Simply put, I have no confidence that the Chris Rufos and Bill Ackmans of the world have any more commitment to scholarly liberal values than the likes of Claudine Gay and her supporters. My sense of Rufo is that whatever one thinks of his politics, he did genuinely valuable original reporting on DEI in the federal government, and he’s got a real brain. But it gives me the heebie-jeebies that his model of what should replace New College in Florida was Hillsdale — a Trumpy Christian school with its own illiberal ideological orthodoxy. If he really wanted a Great Books school, why not St. Johns as his model? 

Then there’s Rufo’s Twitter exchange with Steven Pinker, in which Pinker expressed concerns about the direction Rufo and DeSantis are going, and Rufo’s reply was, “Sorry, buddy, we’re not going to listen to people who can’t even open their comments. We’re in charge now.” As in, Steven Freaking Pinker, who has stuck his head above the parapet more than anyone to defend proper liberal values in academia, is on the wrong team. Charming. Rufo and his allies are going to use the power they won not by seeking to build a genuinely liberal university, but by ramming a different illiberal orthodoxy down the throats of everyone who disagrees with them.

Then there was Ackman’s suggestion, in his recent piece for Bari Weiss’ Free Press, that Harvard consider hiring a businessperson for its next president. Because CEOs have done such a bang-up job of managing their companies in a manner consistent with a set of values, such as service to the public good, other than enriching their shareholders (while periodically wrecking the US economy)? They could give Claudine Gay a run for her money in terms of being unqualified to lead a university. Then there’s Ackman’s sudden position that the motives of plagiarism-detectors matter more than the objective truth when his wife, rather than Gay, is the accused. 

I feel disgusted with the whole lot of them. But then I think to myself, well, universities have had decades to address their drift towards an illiberal ideological orthodoxy, and they haven’t done anything. When they fail to police themselves, they sacrifice the moral high ground to complain about being policed by outsiders. Clearly things are only happening now because sufficient political force has gathered since October 7 to scare them; they wouldn’t have done anything if it hadn’t been for pressure tactics by the likes of Rufo and Ackman. 

So, does one support people using the tactics who got some results, at the moral risk of helping to replace one illiberal orthodoxy with a different one? Or does one take the position of a plague on all your illiberal houses, which is morally purer but offers no answer to those who would say, “You might not like us, but we’re the ones who actually got some of the results you say you want?”

What a brilliant exposition of our current impasse. I’m with my reader all the way. I just worry that the campus illiberalism is so intense and suffocating that any outsider pressure to wake them up is a good thing. But I don’t want an equally illiberal orthodoxy being foisted on campuses either. For the time being, I favor maximal pressure. I think we’re a long way away from the Ivy League turning ideologically conservative.

Carole Hooven just wrote a piece further detailing why she left Harvard. A reader flags a video from the same publication:

No doubt you have seen Bari Weiss give an accurate, 20-min walk-through on aspects our current cultural climate, specifically a critique of the current DEI atmosphere:

I believe this has been building for a long time. Weiss is correct: those who were drinking the PC KoolAid dismissed those of us who raised concerns on where the trajectory of this ideology would take us when we brought attention to it long ago. For those old enough to have lived through it, we remember the discussions in the late 1980s and ‘90s on political correctness. Today it’s the new church, and it wants your soul. 

I fought these same battles — with considerably more success! — in the 1990s. I was among the first editors to promote Camille Paglia’s work in the mainstream; at TNR we took on Afrocentrism, affirmative action, blank-slate understanding of human nature, and pioneered civil gay equality. Here’s a blast from the past doing the rounds recently:

I’ve asked and asked her to come on the Dishcast, but she’s become very media-shy. Another reader writes:

I read the dissent defending the Unitarian Universalists, and I thought you might be interested in a different perspective: “The Ideological Takeover of the Church I Loved: How the Unitarian Universalist Church lost its way.” I have not been involved in the Unitarian Church for a few years, but I think that essay probably reflects the current UUCA pretty well. I left UUCA because they were more interested in the current left-wing thinking more than spirituality or God. I remember how some of the parishioners were outraged when a pastor had the nerve to mention the “G” word — God.

Yeah; the church of social justice seems like the only mainline Protestant religion left. Another followup:

You responded to my dissent on DEI and Social Justice a couple of weeks ago, and I was a bit surprised by your response and felt that maybe I didn’t communicate my point properly. David French put my theme together much more lucidly in his column, “This Is the Actual Danger Posed by D.E.I.”

That column was one I agree with. But it was framed so defensibly, so deferent to the liberal readers of the NYT, that it still disappointed. I guess my patience for their levels of denial and avoidance has become less capacious than David’s.

One more reader on the subject of DEI:

I found it unfortunate that the University of Texas at Austin doubled down on race preferences a few years ago after they had already achieved a great deal of demographic diversity by granting automatic college admission to the top 6% (top 10% at other state colleges) of the students from every public and private high school in the state. The UT System is also very generous about admission of military veterans, even when they do not have state residency.

In this way, UT Austin achieves considerable demographic diversity without using the invidious categories of skin color and race. Moreover, since the students admitted under this rule were high achievers within their own communities (and veterans also generally have self-discipline and a practiced work ethic), these students are more likely to overcome starting-point disadvantage and perform well. I know of one case of a brilliant young woman who graduated from a poor rural school, had test scores below the norm for prep school graduates, was accepted on the basis of general achievement to one Ivy university, and rose to become a department chair in a scientific discipline in another Ivy university.  It was hard for her at the beginning of college, but she toughed it out and excelled.

I don’t think admission departments should make an exclusive fetish of the SAT, but I do think it is one important tool in the diversity toolbox, along with diminishing the role of legacy admissions. I think it is acceptable to give a chance to disadvantaged high achievers — just without the explicit use of “race.”

On to the continued debate over the war in Gaza, a dissenter writes:

You wrote that Israel “has deprived Gazans of water, electricity, and food.” But as the latest numbers show, “A total of 7,653 trucks ferrying humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip have been inspected by Israeli authorities at the Nitzana and Kerem Shalom crossings. The IDF said the trucks have carried a total of 137,920 tons of aid.”

Next you claim, “There is no way to evacuate children, as was done in the 1940s in both Britain and Germany; and the ‘safe zones’ have turned into killing fields, because Hamas operates there as well, and can be targeted.” 

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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.)

First up is our super-champ in Milwaukee, who writes our weekly animal reports using her expertise as a biologist:

I was really glad to see the Dish and the contest resurface after Andrew skipped a week before the holidays due to illness, because what I thought would be a super busy and festive Christmas was upended by my first case of Covid. So I had Paxlovid instead of sugar plums, NyQuil instead of eggnog, and isolation instead of visiting family :( When I saw that Sully was well and the Dish was back again with a new puzzle to work on, I gave a real cheer.  

Feel better soon! The super-champ in Berkeley reflects on another year of the VFYW contest (launched in 2010):

A merry holidays to you, Chris. This strange, anonymous, quasi-community that the VFYW has become provides me more pleasure than I ever could have imagined. Developing a regular beat about cinema over the past couple of years has given me a creative outlet I hadn’t known I’d been missing. Sometimes I’m almost embarrassed by the number of appearances I make in some of the window write-ups, but I appreciate how generous you’ve been with them.

He’s far more generous with the time and care he takes every week to find the window, create a snappy collage of the location, and narrate a number of movies and TV shows that were filmed in the area. I often find myself watching new cinema recommended by him. One of the more memorable examples is Locke, a one-man tour de force with Tom Hardy:

(Update: I just realized that film was, in fact, plugged by our musical sleuth.) And a Berkeley-recommended film I watched last weekend was Dolores Claiborne, a masterful story with equal parts darkness and light, and an incredible cast:

Another star columnist of the VFYW is the musical one in Indy. She has some somber news this week:

So, an update on my absence recently. My father passed away on Tuesday. He went from just needing some PT to needing hospice care in a matter of a couple of weeks. He’s 92, so it’s not a tragedy, and it’s something everyone goes through, but it has been a crazy ride. Two months ago he was 100% healthy, driving, cooking, shopping, etc. 

A word of advice: if you haven’t had to start taking care of your parents, not everyone can step up to the plate when something like this happens. You really find out who people are when the shit hits the fan and people have to start sacrificing for others. So all of this has been a mixture of heartbreak and anger.  

Hope to get back into VFYW soon!

Our condolences. A followup from the winner of the most recent contest:

Wow! How exciting! Now I definitely have to make a trip to Halifax. I’d like the book, please. Two reasons: selfishly, I’d like a trophy, so the VFYW book will provide that. And two, I look forward to the Dish each week and want to support you and Andrew, so let me keep paying for a subscription.

I’m on holiday in NZ with my family — my wife is from this incredible place — and your note arrived here on Christmas Eve. A welcome early present.

And well-earned. From a sleuth in Raleigh:

I’m a Dish subscriber and long-time reader (from back in the Bush days), and I’m also a long-time “non winner” (in NYT parlance) of the contest. Back when it first started, I actually did pretty well for myself, all things considered. I think I had the exact location and building five times, but I could never guess the exact window. (Twice I guessed the window right next to the correct window — aarrgghh!!). Somewhere along the line I stopped playing, but in the past year I started up again.

Anyway, it took me all of 10 minutes to identify the window for this week’s contest, so I am sure you will have hundreds of correct entries. I’m sure some enterprising reader in the area will find their way to the correct room and snap an almost identical picture, thus robbing me of my hard-fought and long-awaited victory. Back in the day I bought many VFYW books as gifts for family and friends, but I’ve never bought one for myself because I thought I would eventually win the contest — Chini be damned! Unfortunately, the win has eluded me all these years (playing more frequently would help), but I feel that I’m damn close this time … perhaps close enough to have an excerpt of my entry make it into the contest results.

Another followup comes from a rivalrous sleuth in Sydney:

I saw you had an entry from Auckland. While we Aussies love our Kiwi cousins, we are never going to let them get away with this claim: “I can probably claim to be the farthest away from Halifax of all the guessers: Auckland, NZ.” The internet to the rescue! There’s a website that shows the furthest cities from any city in the world. Sydney is about 2,000 kilometres farther than Auckland from Halifax. At last, we Aussie have beaten the Kiwis at something this year (don’t mention the rugby, please).

Here’s a followup from the cartoonist who goes by A. Dishhead:

HNY, Chris! Thanks for adding in my Christmas card to the stack. It was fun to make/modify, so I hope some of the sleuths enjoyed it.

Also great to hear Carole Hooven back on the podcast and learn her side of what happened in our old department. It’s terrible how spineless the faculty were, so I’m happy she’s left for somewhere she’ll be supported.

Anyway, no art from me from week, but I thought I’d submit an answer all the same. I’m excited to see this VFYW-favorite hotel chain return to the contest. I’m a fan! Maybe ask them to sponsor the contest ...

Oh, and I took some window snaps over the holiday break. The first one is from my hotel in Tokyo, and it’s a special for Chini … hehe:

In no time Chini will get that hotel, window, time of day, and temperature. Here’s our globetrotting sleuth in Alaska on this week’s view:

It’s as generic a landscape in neo-urban America as I can imagine. Perhaps you are simply challenging us to find something interesting to say about this metro hub of an airport hotel strip.

Here’s the beginner of the entry from Team Bellevue:

We had widely spread reactions to this photo at first glance. I was sure we were doomed, because of the late holiday start/looming deadline, and everything seems so generic. But other (clearly smarter) members of Team Bellevue thought it’d be an easy one. They were right.

Quick Reads:

• Sure feels like America: cars, license plates, buildings, and English signage all feel like USA.

• Dusty covering up what our guess is a US-Bank sign? (That turns out to be wrong!)

• A crucial bit those “it’ll be easy” members of Team Bellevue pointed out: the colored pattern on the background building. Interesting.

• Some sort of traffic-light enforcement sign — perhaps a warning about photo ticketing?

The colored-building detail was promising, so we started there — but no amount of “office building colored patterns on side” searches turns up this particular edifice. 

From a first-timer to the contest:

I’m hoping my entry gets included this week, so I can get behind the Dish paywall for at least a month (after which I’m sure I’ll be addicted and will finally provide my credit-card info). 'Til then, thank you for the tasty morsels you provide in your weekly newsletter, and have a merry Christmas!

Access granted! From our sleuth in Shiprock:

At first glance I thought the photo looked a lot like Lloyd Center in Portland, OR — perhaps a nod to where you said you were headed for the holidays. I am as well, visiting my brother and his family. Hope you enjoy your time in the Rose City as much as I will.

The high point of my trip was skiing at Mt. Hood with my girlfriend — a life-long snowboarder tackling a PNW mountain for the first time — and my 14-year-old niece, tackling the top lift at Timberline for the first time:

From the PNW to the DMV:

I bet the contest this week gets the record for most correct submissions. I figure you get at least five answers that involve recreating the exact shot. If I lived in the DMV, I’d try to do so myself.

But where in the DC-Maryland-Virginia area? The super-sleuth in Bethlum determines the right time of year: “While it’s the winter solstice right now, in our window view, spring has recently arrived, based on the cherry blossoms in the view.” The Park Avenue sleuth adds, “I thought initially the cherry trees were a pink herring — but no!” Another:

DC, of course, is famous for its cherry blossoms, but they were a gift from the government of Japan in 1912. This website rightly says, “In Japan, the flowering cherry tree, or ‘Sakura,’ is an important flowering plant. The beauty of the cherry blossom is a symbol with rich meaning in Japanese culture.” We lived in Japan for three years, and it’s hard to fully describe the importance of Sakura. On TV they have forecasts for when the flowering will occur, and a popular activity is cruising on a boat down the Meguro River past avenues of the trees in bloom:

Thank you for running the contest — I can only imagine how much time it takes to wade through all the entries — and your broader work with the Dish. The benefit of being in Australia is I get a bit of distance from some of the topics that Andrew writes about, but many of his principles are like mine. I imagine it is, at times, a lonely battle against lunacy on all sides.

I have also come to realise how fortunate I was to win the contest when I did (in Montenegro, on August 11, 2023 … you never forget your first). I also appreciate that you’ve referred to me a “sleuth” — only about 50 more contests and I hope to upgrade to “super-sleuth”! It feels a bit like karate belts, working one’s way up the rankings.

A super-sleuth belt is actually bestowed to contest winners with at least 25 entries, not 50 — so if you happen to be one, but I haven’t yet referred to you as such, please ping me and I’ll tag your email address. One of our superist sleuths, Giuseppe, also stopped to smell the blossoms this week:

I’d call this one an easy hard view. It’s intrinsically tough — a nondescript American city with cherry trees and a building with a multicolored façade — yet the solution came almost effortlessly. In this case, googling “cherry trees in the US,” I eyed a NatGeo article that begins with these words: “Washington, D.C.’s famous fluffy cherry trees were gifts from Japan.” So I said to myself, “Well, why not?”; googled “Washington DC color building”; and found the location (in the D.C. metropolitan area) in a few minutes.

Also, welcome back to A. Dishhead! I really missed him and his postcards and movie posters. Hope he’s here to stay!

Chini is eternal:

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to the Dish team and all the crazies who do this every week. Now let’s get on with another year of sweet, sweet view-hunting pain! (No clues this week — too much, ahem, home-field advantage.)

From the beginning of the entry from our super-sleuth in Chattanooga:

After thinking it could be anywhere, I became fixated on the DC area as a place with reasonable density for a ‘60s-era, first-ring suburban office area. For no good reason, the roads around Silver Spring seemed right. The buildings seemed too tall to be in the district. The colorful “fins” were the clue to hunt with across US 1. I didn’t know what the adornments were called, but they reminded me of the Seattle Amazon HQ buildings and an article referred to fins. So I googled “colorful fins on 1960s office Maryland.”

He got to the right location eventually, as did this first-time sleuth: “If you can believe it, I was initially convinced that this was in Madrid, of all places.” Our previous winner in Bend follows the signs and gets to the right state:

There is a “Photo Enforced” traffic-signal sign in the view, and most of them look like this:

But the one in the view seems like it must say “Photo Enforced” on the top line, and then has a second line of text. I looked at a bunch of them and these were the only ones I saw along those lines:

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Alexandra is a journalist and public speaker. She’s the founder of Civic Renaissance, a newsletter and intellectual community dedicated to moral and cultural renewal. She’s also an adjunct professor at the Indiana University Lilly School of Philanthropy. Her first book is The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves.

You can listen right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on the moments when being civil is impolite, and the importance of indifference to others’ opinions — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: being raised in horse country in Canada; having “Judi the Manners Lady” as a mother; moving to DC in the fall of 2016 and hating it; working for Trump in the Department of Ed; the rude awakening of being loathed by her peers as an appointee; the difference between politeness and civility; a story of Queen Victoria’s bad manners; how personal boundaries are often crucial for civility; Arnold Bennett’s book How to Live 24 Hours a Day; the virtue of curiosity toward those who seem boring; hypocrisy vs. inauthenticity; Tom Holland’s Dominion; when the love of others and the self are in tension; online anonymity; the ever-growing need for forgiveness and gratitude; Aristotle and “the magnanimous soul”; the Stoics; Isocrates as the Miss Manners of ancient Greece; Erasmus; the “respectability politics” of the Civil Rights Movement vs. the crudeness of pro-Gaza protesters and the January 6 mob; empathy toward road-ragers; defenders of Gay retaliating with plagiarism charges of their own; Slow Horses and the crude authenticity of Oldman’s character; the cult of authenticity in Gen Z; how civility and toxicity are contagious; zealous extroversion; why Alexandra wants to kill the phrase “let’s get lunch”; me pressing her on how anyone praising civility could work for Trump; and why auto-didactism is the subject of her next book.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Jonathan Freedland on the war in Gaza, Jennifer Burns on her new biography of Milton Friedman, and Abigail Shrier on why the cult of therapy harms children. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other pod comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Last week’s episode with Carole Hooven was a huge hit. The following clip went viral on YouTube with 29,000 views and counting:

From a fan of the episode:

Thank you for the remarkable conversation with Carole Hooven. I have been well aware of the rot in academia, but I had no idea of the extent DEI had infiltrated all the various departments like small Stasi cells spying on everyone. I was sorry to hear what you and Carole had to endure with no support from colleagues, but I was not surprised.

I recall an amusing anecdote about Bart Giamatti, a classics professor and former Yale president who later became baseball commissioner. When asked about the biggest difference he found between the two jobs, he said in baseball you meet a better class of people. Sports and the military are the last bastions of meritocracy — but they, too, are under siege.

Another writes:

I was a grad student at Harvard during the late '60s and early '70s. This kind of behavior on the faculty would have been unimaginable back then. I no longer recognize the university where I spent so much valuable time.

Me neither. And I was there in the 1980s. Another listener is catching up on Carole’s work:

I read Professor Hooven’s book on testosterone just a few weeks ago, long after she joined the Dishcast to discuss it. I was so impressed by the book, I gave it to one of my sisters. I noticed how the first half-dozen or so pages were dedicated to respectfully laying the groundwork for ignoring politicized critiques of biology, before getting down to biology.

A few days ago, I read that Hooven had lost her job at Harvard. Clearly Claudine Gay, the Harvard Corporation president Pritzker, and the other apparatchiki remain well-entrenched. Gay is still a professor with a $900K salary, despite her plagiarism. Meanwhile, a true scholar such as Carole Hooven is out of a teaching job.

Another notes:

I want to call your attention to the comments section of the NYT op-ed “The Claudine Gay Debacle Was Never About Merit.” Check out the reader picks; they all reject the essay’s premises. I have never seen such a degree of rejection of a woke piece in the Times, and the editors closed the comments section the day it was published. Unwelcome thoughts from the subscriber base. Dare we hope the Gay “debacle” is a turning point, and that even the committed left is beginning to see the light?

I think it might be. A Harvard alum “almost wept in relief and despair listening to your conversation with Carole”:

At the risk of parroting the ways of the standpoint epistemology set: I’m a “cis,” gay, middle-aged white male. I’m an Episcopal priest and an active-duty US Navy chaplain currently serving with a Marine battalion. I was a first-generation college student (Yale) and grew up dirt poor in a single-parent household.

I arrived at Harvard Divinity School thinking I was fairly left of center (I once worked for Howard Dean), but I left HDS with an insatiable appetite for Philip Rieff and an overwhelming conviction that elite higher education in its current form is a metastasis on society. Your talk with Carole presented that case more clearly and persuasively than I ever could. This monstrously post-moral, post-everything, proto-Klingon ideology at Harvard has gotten a stranglehold on everything from FAS to the medical school. It really is that bad.

You are completely correct that DEI must be utterly rooted out if anything is going to improve. Claudine Gay (and Aiden Maese-Czeropski, for that matter) have probably done more to ensure Trump’s election than Chris Rufo ever could. 

This next listener got creative:

I enjoy a good turn of phrase, and your use of “astonishingly mid” to describe Gay’s academic portfolio was the highlight of my day. Even my teen daughter found it humorous, which is an achievement in and of itself. So she and I created a shirt in your honor on our t-shirt page:

From a listener in Hong Kong:

I am almost a subscriber (a few more great pod conversations that fade out and I’m there.) Listening to Carole and her experience at Harvard, I immediately thought, this is the Chinese Communist Party in action. The DEI subcommittee she ran foul of is exactly the parallel power structure you find in the businesses and organisations of mainland China. It is never clear who has authority, but when push comes to shove, the parallel structure wins. The DEI/CCP does not follow rules, but always claims necessity for the higher goal. 

The DEI/CCP personnel are either true believers or highly ambitious. Carole seems to have been a victim of someone who combined both. In her reaction, Carole portrayed a typical “bourgeois” disbelief: that an appeal to common sense, the facts, and reason would persuade her tormentors of their error. ‘Twas ever thus that in every revolution, the revolutionaries — often young — sweep aside the incredulous in pursuit of enemies. The Caroles are just collateral damage along the way to a more “perfect” world. 

And another:

I have three post-graduate degrees from institutions that all skewed left. If you weren’t a lefty, you knew you were an outsider, but it was OK. But wow, things have changed.

People like me would always but affectionately make fun of people like Carole — bourgeois liberals who didn’t know anyone who was right-wing, libertarian, traditional or religious. I tended to get along swimmingly with overt Communists. In grad school I knew someone who ran for office on the CPUSA ticket and met many a Trotskyite. I could talk to these people because I had a grounding in Marxism and a shared disdain for the existing order. But let me be clear: the wokeists are not Marxists. They take the silliest aspects of Nietzsche, mix in Paul Feyerbend, Frantz Fanon and Foucault, apply Gramscian method and voila: wokeism.

Thank God I didn’t become an academic. I have a sarcastic, wise-ass sense of humor, and the devil hates laughter.

The main reason I didn’t go into academia was the office politics. But boy am I glad I stayed away.

A dissenter is sick of hearing about Harvard:

Do you not realize the irony of the Ivy-educated pundit class whining about how out of touch Harvard elites are? Dude, the actual working class doesn’t care about Harvard. Never did before, and still doesn’t now. The amount of column inches wasted on elites trying to stick it to other elites is what is truly depressing about the modern media landscape. I understand that it makes sense to write what you know, but at least be honest about it. This whole topic is the pinnacle of elitist wank.

Busted, I suppose. But elites affect the masses. And the ideology brewed in the academy has spread far and wide.

A depressing tale about DEI:

Glad you’re feeling better. Brilliant conversation with Carole. It reminded me of some horrific things I witnessed first-hand working at a large national health insurance company.

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(This week’s Dish is an abridged version. Even though we’re on our annual Christmas break, we couldn’t let the Harvard developments go un-covered. I also wrote a short piece below, “The Woke Panic Over Gay’s Resignation.” Dissents welcome as always: dish@andrewsullivan.com.)

Carole is back to discuss her travails at Harvard, teaching in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. She originally appeared two years ago to discuss her superb book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. She’s now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and an associate in Harvard’s Department of Psychology, in the lab of Steven Pinker. She’s also an active member of the newly established Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard.

We talk here about her own experience in the last few years, targeted by the woke left on Harvard’s campus, and about Harvard itself, and whether the Ivy League can be reformed. You can listen right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on loving your intellectual enemies, and how you “can’t win a fight for rights by lying about facts” — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: Carole’s popularity with students before her cancellation; her many teaching awards; her Fox News appearance; the grad student who targeted her on Twitter and terrified the senior faculty; the friends who turned on Carole; the TAs who shunned and refused to teach for her en masse; the administration that abandoned her; the sprawling DEI infrastructure at Harvard; the monoculture there; its growing disdain for the working class; how Veritas was sacrificed for standpoint epistemology; feelings over rational debate; runaway grade inflation; “decolonizing” syllabi; Katie Herzog’s report on medical schools abandoning “male and female”; how you can acknowledge nature while still respecting identities and pronouns; CRT as the enemy of liberal democracy; Gay’s testimony before Congress; the quality of her academic papers even before the plagiarism emerged; Harvard threatening the NY Post with defamation; Gay’s resignation and NYT op-ed; the NYT scapegoating James Bennet in 2020; Chait’s cowardice when I was fired at New York Mag; the Trevor Project’s redefinition of homosexuality; the pro-Hamas protesters on campus; the belated alarm by big donors; how “white supremacy” became “Jewish supremacy”; how the SAT finds disadvantaged students — but the woke want to abolish it; my debate with Harvey Mansfield over homosexuality; Harvey mentoring students from minority groups; Carole and I debating whether the the federal government should withhold funds from DEI colleges; and, as always, how Trump makes everything worse.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Alexandra Hudson on civility and Jennifer Burns on her new biography of Milton Friedman. Please send any guest recs, dissents and other pod comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com. Your emails on recent episodes are below.

The Woke Panic Over Gay’s Resignation

Some thoughts beyond what I say on the Dishcast above.

The most salutary aspect of this whole affair is that it has really helped expose the core disagreement in our current culture war. One side believes, as I do, that individual merit exists, and should be the core criterion for admission to a great university, regardless of an individual’s racial or sexual identity, and so on. The other side believes that merit doesn’t exist at all outside the oppressive paradigm of racial and sexual identity, and that membership in a designated “marginalized” group should therefore be the core criterion for advancement in academia.

For a very long time, many people have assumed you could keep these two ideas on campus at the same time, and somehow muddle through. But you cannot. When push comes to shove, when there is a finite number of places available, you’re in a zero-sum predicament. You have to pick between a smarter student of the wrong race and a weaker student of the right race. In the end at Harvard, being in the right race — not merit — determines your chances.

For example: If you are black and in the fourth lowest decile of SATs and GPAs among Harvard applicants, you have a higher chance of getting into Harvard (12.8 percent admitted) than an Asian-American in the very top decile (12.7 admitted). It’s rigged, which is why it was shut down by SCOTUS. When you look at these cold, hard stats — which Harvard, of course, did all it could to conceal — there is no debate. There’s a trade-off. But once you make identity a core qualification, you’re opening up a whole world of racist anti-racism.

This is the nub of it. Most Americans believe in individual merit, and advancement regardless of identity. Harvard and our new elite believe that our society is so structured as an enduring “white supremacy” that merit can only be considered after you have accounted for the effects of “intersectional oppression.” And so they discriminate against individuals on the grounds of their race before they consider merit.

We know this. Everyone in the university knows it. It was proven in the discovery documents in the SCOTUS case that exposed the systemic anti-Asian bias in Harvard admissions. And the only way to cover it all up, of course, is to abolish testing students entirely (which is what so many elite colleges and universities are now doing) or to give all students an A or an A-, making any distinctions of excellence irrelevant. That’s how you can claim, as Gay does, that “diversity” and “excellence” go hand in hand, when obviously, at some point they can and do conflict.

And let’s be honest: we can all see with our own eyes that subordinating merit to race and sex is how Gay got her position. Her work, beyond the sloppy dime-store plagiarism, would be underwhelming for an average member of any faculty in the country. But for a Harvard president, it’s astonishingly mid. When you look instead at what she has done as an administrator, which is where she has been focused more recently, you see it has almost all been about hiring on the basis of sex and race, persecuting heretical members of racial minorities, and removing paintings of dead white dudes. She is, at least, consistent.

In the Congressional hearings, moreover, she showed little gravitas, grace, or ability to think on her feet. She has largely hidden from public view since the plagiarism revelations — not a good instinct for a leader of a huge, public-facing institution like Harvard. She is, quite obviously, a run-of-the-mill woke academic, who was promoted at breakneck speed because of her race and sex, and found herself quickly out of her depth. Ultimately, of course, the responsibility for the fiasco lies with the Harvard Corporation, not Gay herself. I almost feel sorry for her personally.

The response to all this from the CRT crowd has been to insist — ever more strongly — that Gay is simply and only a victim of racism, or, in woke terminology, a victim of misogynoir. The fact that a white female university president at those same hearings lost her job before Gay did — and without any plagiarism questions — doesn’t count. The fact that a male, white university president also recently stepped down for academic misconduct, also doesn’t count. The fact that the president of Harvard violated rules that a Harvard undergraduate would be disciplined for doesn’t count. Nothing counts, in the end, except her race and sex and ideology. The defenses of her make this explicit. Which is why they have been salutary.

The more people see this for the systemic racism it is, the sooner we can throw this neo-Marxist cuckoo out of the liberal nest, and return to the airing of all ideas, regardless of the subject matter or the identity of the students. That’s what we’re struggling to get back to and, in that sense, the Gay resignation is just one skirmish in a long war for liberal democracy. But every controversy like this helps us to make our case. And each moment of truth puts a crack in the stifling, authoritarian edifice of DEI. We can bring this corruption to light. We can hold them to account. I’m certainly more hopeful about the future of liberal society now than I was a month ago.

Meanwhile, a reader dissents over my views on DEI:

I am a cradle Catholic in my 60s. Social Justice has always represented the best of my faith in action. The seven themes of Catholic Social Justice are hardly a synonym for the far left or right. They include the value of life, care for the Earth, the dignity of workers, the importance of family and community, promotion of peace, and giving of oneself to care for the sick and the poor. 

Do we as mere humans get it wrong sometimes when we implement these themes? Of course, that is part of the struggle of living. But ultimately, Social Justice forces us to ask ourselves, “What would Jesus do?” And I would argue that human history has yet to develop a better philosophy than that. 

I spent decades in corporate America and have hands-on experience with corporate diversity programs. Rather than forcing one narrow point of view down someone’s throat, these programs emphasize listening to everyone in the workplace, and to form teams of varied backgrounds and perspectives to offer differing views to help reach the best result. It is easy to say that every job should go to the highest qualified, but in practice, there is no scientific method to determine which applicant is best. The most talented managers form diverse teams among the many qualified applicants, and lead by example and coaching to show the team members how to value everyone’s contribution. The best businesses want to keep their diversity programs not because they fulfill some political agenda, but because they help contribute to the best business results. 

Rather than throwing out the good with the bad by turning these positive terms into something evil, let’s debate their meanings and use this debate to help us implement actions that make this a better world.

I’m afraid my reader has fallen for a woke trap. They are adept at taking words from other traditions, like the Catholic term “social justice,” while meaning something very different. There are no souls in critical theory’s version of “social justice.” There is no personal redemption. There is merely power in a meaningless world and the exercise of that power against various oppressor groups. Nothing could be further from Catholic doctrine. As for “what would Jesus do,” let me suggest that he pointedly refused a political agenda, and in his spiritual conduct, sought to get past tribal identity toward a universal caritas. Jesus’ transcendence of tribal loyalty is what critical race theory denies.

Another reader sends an example of what DEI really means:

To quote Jerry Seinfeld in a 2014 interview that popped into my Instagram feed this week, “You’re funny; I’m interested. You’re not funny; I’m not interested. I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that”:

Here’s an email from a “mom of a school-aged kiddo” sent two years ago:

I’d like to point something out to those critics claiming that you don’t know your stuff regarding CRT in schools. It’s old hat by now for anyone in education to argue that CRT isn’t being taught. I’ve been a public school teacher for 20 years, and to all my comrades still arguing this point, I have some news: THEY’RE ONTO US! Educators, we have some reflecting to do. I know we hate doing it, because we’re busy and tired and late for bus duty.

And to the wider audience, no, CRT is not “taught,” but as Dr. Cornel West said on your podcast, “It’s a lens.” And it’s the primary lens through which many other subjects are being taught (including AP Bio, trombone lessons, gym, ALL the humanities). Perhaps that’s to varying degrees depending on your region or administration, but it’s there and for the most part, it’s not new.

Case in point: pandemic learning loss is not one of my district’s initiatives this year — it’s equity, equity, equity. Everywhere. It’s also obnoxious, obnoxious, obnoxious. Mostly because anyone who’s spent more than give years in public ed knows this is how we roll: we follow the shiny ball, invest all our time and resources in it, then drop it like yesterday’s news when the next snake oil salesman comes to town. Only this time it’s not about growth mindset or Google Classroom; it’s enforcing an ideology that will further other and disenfranchise the kids we claim to care so deeply for. 

In contrast, a reader this week “hopes to cheer you up a little about the kids today and even a few of their teachers” when it comes to DEI:

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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.)

My apologies for the late results this week. The Dish had an unplanned Christmas party last … consisting of Andrew and me getting stoned while watching the new South Park episode and PSB videos on his giant projector. We haven’t hung out in a while, since he’s been so sick, and I’m flying out to Portland this weekend to ski and visit family for two weeks. After the revelry I got back to the contest results, but by 2am my brain was completely fried, going on four hours of sleep that morning (which is pretty standard for Dish publishing day). Plus, this week’s view elicited 122 entries — the most in a long time. As always, they were packed with varied, fascinating facts and stories, so it was very difficult to not include most of them. Anyway, thanks for your patience, and on to the results …

A sleuth writes:

Firstly, a followup for the latest VFYW. Many, many years ago, my parents took my brother and me to Vanuatu. On the last night, the rustic resort put on a feast for guests. There were many courses, but I vividly recall the main one, because my brother and I were starving hungry and the previous ones involved vegetables (we were aged 8 and 6). Finally some meat!

The waiter placed our plates in front of us and a mix of emotions overcame me as he announced it was the island’s delicacy: fruit bat! I’m not proud I ate it, but my abiding memory is how little meat there was. The taste was ... a bit like spatchcock.

Makes me think of this scene:

Another followup from the super-chef:

I was struck by the juxtaposition of the statements by the DC super-sleuth and the CO/NJ super-champ: “Guam contains the westernmost point in the United States” and “Guam is the first place in the world where the sun rises on US soil.” But the sun rises in the east! At first I thought they couldn’t both be right, but a look at the globe makes it clear:

From the biologist in Milwaukee:

It was neat to hear from the new sleuth in Guam, complete with the snazziest hermit crab I’ve seen!  *waves* And I really enjoyed the video of the lassoing tree snake. I may be the only sleuth who finds the idea of a six-foot snake falling on me from a tree to be a feature, not a bug. 

I am ticked at myself that I didn’t realize the Challenger Deep trench was over there. I may have to turn in my marine biologist card.

She redeems herself this week with plenty of marine life. But first, another followup comes from our previous winner in Bend:

For all of your readers hearing sad trombones about defunct Blockbuster stores, I took a photo of my local Blockbuster while passing by it today. Hopefully this will cheer them up:

More holiday cheer comes from our long-lost postcard artist:

Here’s a little gift to you: an updated (improved?) Dishhead Christmas card homage, including Bowie w/halo ... sniff.

Sorry to have dropped from the face of the earth — I’m still a fan! Best wishes to you and Andrew for the New Year!

Another Christmas gift comes from our super-sleuth in Toronto:

I have been traveling for the last few weeks (without a laptop, which doesn’t happen very often). Here’s how one view from a “window” looked:

On to this week’s view, here’s the beginning of the entry from Team Bellevue:

Ahh, this view was full of little gifts. This location yielded pretty quickly for Team Bellevue, with plenty of interesting ships to explore, a few micro puzzles to solve along the way, and a unique “Belle View” opportunity that had us smiling …

QUICK READS

• Marine environment, clearly tidal (see walkway designed to rise/fall).

• Historical ships (with guns!) and interpretive signs. Feels semi or entirely permanent moorage, which should be helpful.

• Large ship/docking in the distance — this is a major port city.

• Nautical alphabet/flags in use on the white hut! A quick reference check yields the not-so helpful translation, “WELCOME.”

• Blurred flag above the hut, and a luffing flag at the top of the black sailboat mask.

Another simply guesses, “Oban, Scotland.” Another goes with “Stockholm, Sweden.” A gut guess from a newbie:

Looks Scandinavian to me. Copenhagen? It’s my first entry and I’m not a subscriber … yet.

From another sleuth who threatens to pay for the Dish:

I am not a subscriber, but I may be in the new year. I think the window is in Astoria, Oregon, on the Columbia River, toward the west end of downtown. Behind where Red Lion Hotel used to be, so the window is in the “new” hotel (Riverwalk Inn, I think).

Right continent. The Bend sleuth again:

That ship is obviously the HMS Beagle, which Darwin used to sailed around the world from Plymouth, England. But seeing a battleship exhibit on Pearl Harbor Day (December 7) suggests that this view is Hawaii.

The SF super-sleuth gets to the right side of the continent:

Either you took it easy on us this week (at least finding the city) or I got lucky, but I was very happy to find the location (but not window) in about five minutes while scarfing down lunch between meetings. A little island with a lighthouse in the middle of a harbor somewhere in northeastern North America proved quite easy to find.

Another gets more specific with “Provincetown, Massachusetts.” From the super-sleuth in Eagle Rock:

Well, this is a head scratcher. Took about 30 seconds to find the location, but the window ... appears to be nonexistent, if you believe the 2023 dates on the Google Satellite View captures. (I don’t.)

Hint: what looks like a parking lot is actually a giant building now:

It’s a little tricky to find a good angle on the mystery window. This is where it really helps to be Chini, with his global drone network.

Here’s the drone maven:

The super-sleuth on the UWS names the right country:

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Joe is a journalist, author, old-school blogger, and an old friend. He’s written seven books, most famously Primary Colors, and he was a longtime columnist for Time magazine. This year he launched a must-read substack called “Sanity Clause,” and he just started a podcast with the great John Ellis called “Wise Owls.”

You can listen to it right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on Trump getting more political savvy, and the NYT’s propaganda on domestic issues — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up in Queens; a grandfather who kept the books for Tammany Hall; how reporting on the busing crisis in Boston made Joe an independent; embedding with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; James Bennet’s exposé of the NYT; a new study on how charter schools help black students; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and single-parent families; Trump’s “dictator on Day One” comment; how Never Trumpers never understand his success; the Trump trials; Biden’s age; his persistently dismal polling; Nikki Haley’s potential; Trump turning the GOP against neoconservatism; how eastern Ukraine is turning into WWI; how Putin’s devastated military is no threat to Europe; The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan; Russiagate; how Larry Summers was right on inflation; Biden’s soft landing; Clinton balancing the budget; Boris and the Tories; tales from Joe’s 30 years of reporting on Israel and Palestine; his optimism on a two-state solution; how AIPAC has been “disastrous” for Israel; Daniel Finkelstein’s Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad; the Ivy League congressional hearings; DEI; why coddling Jewish students now is the wrong approach; Mao’s Cultural Revolution; the dregs of social media; the importance of civility and traditions; the Electoral College; the TV show The Crown; the Latin Mass; Pope Francis and the blessing of gay couples; the AIDS crisis; the PTSD of returning vets; and Joe’s bipartisan PAC for veterans called “With Honor.”

Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Carole Hooven returns to talk about her tribulations at Harvard, Alexandra Hudson on civility, and Jennifer Burns on her new biography of Milton Friedman. Please send any guest recs, dissent and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

On our recent episode with David Leonhardt on the dwindling American Dream, a listener writes:

Another amazing conversation. I’m a naturalized American from a Latin American country. I am American, period, when I’m on this side of the border. (I say the opposite when I’m in Mexico.) If I must be lumped into a group, I connect best with other very high-income university graduates regardless of background.

Another listener on Leonhardt:

Wonderful interview. But as we discuss the growing distrust around us, I seldom hear discussion about the limitations of government. Liberals believe government can solve all the world’s ills. My limited experience is that a government that tries to serve 300 million very diverse people simply can not do that. And the problem is that someone like Biden tries to build the expectation that government can do that. It leaves many disappointed people in the wake, leading to some of the conversation you had with Leonhardt.

As liberals, we need to appreciate the limitations of government. The limitations are real, and deeply frustrating to the people who need the help. It leaves people confused, frustrated and deeply angry. Conservatives are right to challenge what is possible and we liberals need to listen. If we do not, we sell wares that simply can not be delivered.

One more reflection on the Leonhardt pod:

Like most of your moderately liberal guests, Mr. Leonhardt advocates for increased spending on things like infrastructure, research & development, education, and social programs. I would be really curious to hear some of the guests tackle the issue of why our domestic spending seems to be so woefully inefficient. In my experience, most people think America has a meager welfare state. In fact, we spend a greater percentage of our national income on transfer payments to the bottom 50% of earners than does any European country. 

Their confusion is understandable, though, because we seem to get so little bang for our buck. A number of European countries can manage to provide free college tuition and healthcare, while we don’t even get close. We spend the second most on education per pupil in the world, and it’s hard to say that the results have been anywhere near what most Americans have every right to expect.

If you had told me that we would spend a combined $1.7 trillion over 13 years on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Inflation Reduction Act — to say nothing of the hundreds of billions otherwise spent on green energy — I likely would have supported it. However, I would have just assumed that it would result in some monumental achievements, such as nearly every building in the country being powered by renewable energy. Obviously, there was a lot of good that came from these spending measures, but nowhere near what I would have expected. By contrast, in inflation-adjusted dollars, the interstate highway system was built at a cost of only about $550 billion. And it is beyond me that a state like California could spend over $120 billion on high-speed rail and not have laid an inch of track.

I do believe that more Americans would support greater investments, but that would require a whole lot more credibility, in terms of the money going somewhere noticeable and productive. Of course, we can (and should) raise taxes. But we are also $33 trillion in debt, adding over $1.5 trillion per year, and facing an ocean of unfunded liabilities. One could argue that this is the time for austerity instead of ramping up spending. It will be difficult to seriously address our deficit, let alone increase federal spending, without raising taxes on a middle class that has already been squeezed by inflation and stagnant wages. And no serious person would deny that increased taxes will have at least some negative impact on growth. 

Some on the right blame our labyrinthine bureaucracy for the inefficient spending, but I don’t know that it’s any worse than that of European Union countries. Others blame special interests and corruption. I have no idea how much of an effect things like that have, but it’s hard not to be cynical when you see 4000-page omnibus bills that read like Christmas gift lists of payments to one favored entity after another. 

Here’s a listener on the episode with Cat Bohannon on evolution and women:

I was heartened to hear you make it clear to Bohannon why the word “queer” is so deeply disturbing for many gay men like you and me. This is an issue that should be talked about more because most people who are not aware of gay culture don’t understand the difference and, sadly, I find they get hoodwinked into thinking queer is the default term everyone likes.

When I was a graduate student in 2011, I created an intergenerational theater project with gay men and lesbian women ages 60 and up and gay men and lesbian women 18 to 27. The idea was to bring these two age groups together to create a theater piece inspired by generational differences and similarities. Many of the older adults being homosexual didn’t have children of their own, so they were craving connection with the younger generation. But it should come as no surprise to you that the main source of contention was the word “queer.” When the older adults tried to sincerely explain to younger ensemble members how painful that word was to them, the young adults used the same rhetoric Bohannon used on you: “Oh, well OUR generation uses queer because it’s more inclusive … ”

It was crushing to watch those young people behave in such an insensitive manner every time it happened, so I was very happy to hear you let Bohannon know exactly how intentionally divisive and cruel that word is. We should all be more frank with our peers, and I hope your example lets people see it’s OK to speak freely.

Just from today in the WokePo:

In Russia, where the entire LGBTQ+ community has been banned as “extremist,” some parents are paying thugs to abduct their queer sons and daughters, forcing them into secure private centers to “cure” them with so-called conversion therapy.

This is propaganda. I can guarantee you that in Russia, of all places, gay men and lesbians are not calling themselves “queer.” Even in the US, Gallup recently polled gay men, lesbians, and transgender people on what they called themselves. Only 4.3 percent chose the word “queer” or something similar. Yet the critical queer theorists have somehow persuaded the US MSM that this is the right term for gay men, lesbians and trans people. It isn’t. Over 95 percent of us disagree. It’s either a slur or a deliberate and malign ideological cooptation of the majority of non-extremist, non-queer gay men and lesbians.

Here’s a guest rec for a future episode:

Wow, did I enjoy that conversation with Matthew Crawford! Just wonderful.  

Also, I suggest contacting Christopher Beha, a memoirist and novelist who I’d never heard of until I read his essay in today’s NYT. I could see you and Beha having a wonderful conversation. He describes my Catholic(ish) spirituality so very well. Here’s a quote from his essay that perfectly encapsulates my feelings about “religious/spiritual vs. atheist” types:

I sometimes think that the modern world’s true cultural divide is not between believers and unbelievers but between those who think life is a puzzle that is capable of being solved and those who believe it’s a mystery that ought to be approached by way of silence and humility.

Yes. The other critical figure is Christian Wiman. Another guest rec:

I’d really like to hear you have a discussion with Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School. Very bright guy. Incredibly productive scholar. Some topics I’d love to hear discussed: originalism; the Second Amendment; Trump and his current trials; insurrection; abortion and Dobbs; the current state of the federal judiciary; free speech; and regulation of the Internet. And of course he’s written on behavioral economics and the “nudge” — setting up default rules to advance social policies.

One more rec:

I’m not sure if you know Tim Urban, who writes the absolutely fascinating blog waitbutwhy.com (my second favorite of all time, only to the Dish). I’m reading his book What’s Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies, which is largely about the illiberalism of wokeness. He writes incredibly well, and it’s right up your alley (and increasingly mine). He would probably be an amazing person to have on your podcast.

Cool. An amazing artist writes:

Please accept my deepest condolences on the recent passing of your beautiful dog, Bowie. I know what it feels like to lose a beloved friend and companion. 

I realize this is very personal, so forgive me if this is an overstep, but after seeing your post last night on Instagram, I felt compelled to make a drawing of Bowie based on one of your photos. I’m an artist who draws animals and I was both heartbroken for you and captivated by Bowie’s soulful eyes:

That’s incredibly life-like! A Ptown neighbor, who loved Bowie, painted this beautiful portrait:

The three legs are what make it!

From a Jewish father:

Your December 8 column on the Ivy League presidents finally convinced this longtime lurker to become a paid subscriber. While I still feel most normal people basically agree with your thoughts on identity ideology and its current embrace of anti-Semitism, we need more people to come out and call it what it is: evil.

It’s also an incredibly stupid strategy! 

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