The Sunday New York Times, Washington edition, is delivered to my house sometime before 7:00 a.m. most Sundays—a gross extravagance and ecologically catastrophic sin for which there can be no moral justification or atonement. Here are some things I gleaned from that paper, in all my decadent shame, ink-smudged and coffee’d up and unbothered by my children’s pleas for attention.

1. Good, hard work of turning over all stones to find people fighting about racism proceeding apace

The print headline: Medieval Scholars Tilt at Racists, and Colleagues

Where is it: Front page, below the fold, center, continued on page 19

What is it: A story about a fracture in academic medieval studies between those who want to woke-up medieval scholarship and those who’d…rather not.

Why is it: On the ground was a stone. It was the Stone of Medieval Scholarship. The stone had not been turned over for some time, so the only way to find out if people were underneath it and fighting about racism was to pick it up and see. The NYT found that there were in fact people fighting about racism under the stone, and put it on the front page of their newspaper.

A fun part: The only fun part is the NYT’s insistence that “No day is complete without The New York Times” in the midst of a 1700-word story about the existence of critical race theorists in an academic field of inquiry.

The short of it: Medieval scholarship is suffering a bit of an identity crisis, in part because white nationalists and neo-nazi types like to cosplay with King Arthur stuff because they think it grounds their “white American identity” in “a noble (and implicitly white) European history,” and in part because some medievalists are trying to force the field to reckon with its own internal history of overwhelming whiteness.

What matters: Literally none of it. It’s mostly an excuse to run another photo of the neo-nazis in Charlottesville from 20 months ago right on the front page. Instead of a potentially interesting story about the substance of the conflict, this story merely points to the existence of a conflict. It’s a front page story in the Sunday NYT that says “there are some woke people in [insert field: medieval academia], and the establishment is struggling to find a way to handle their criticism without feeling like the foundational validity of their life’s work is under assault.” Where will the NYT find people fighting about racism next?! Tune in next week.

2. China imprisons millions in religious re-education camps, Trump administration shrugs, hopes to secure contract to serve American soybeans in those camps

The print headline: Unspoken in Final trade Talks: China’s Internment of Muslims

Where is it: Front page, below the fold, continued on page 16

What is it: A story about the Trump administration’s failure to include human rights concerns in their trade negotiations with China.

The short of it: The Chinese government has a large number of concentration camps filled with possibly millions of ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities. They claim that “terrorist ideas have taken root” in the population, and an internment and “re-education” program that began in 2009 has only expanded. The ongoing humanitarian catastrophe prompted the US to consider imposing economic sanctions, but the Trump administration backed off in hopes of securing the “biggest [trade] deal ever made.”

A fun part: There is no fun part.

Tahir Imin was studying abroad in 2017 when the crackdown reached his family after he spoke out about the conditions in Xinjiang. Since then, his brother and mother have been imprisoned and his family business has been confiscated. On Friday, Mr. Imin, 38, held a sign criticizing the Chinese government and pleaded with the United States government to help.

“We have just bad news,” he said, “sad news, every day.”

“We have just bad news, sad news, every day.” Yup!

What matters: Of course the Trump administration isn’t going to attach any meaningful (or any) human rights conditions to the eventual Chinese trade deal. Trump has less than no interest in human rights, and seems to lack even the basic ability to imagine that other people are actually people. I know I said there is no fun part, but an adjacent thing that is kinda fun is anybody who looks at a story like this and says that the US should keep its mouth shut about human rights abuses in other countries because people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, or whatever. This is in part due to the fact that the people at issue here are (Chinese) Muslims, who don’t tend to engender in many of us a great deal of empathy in the first place, and in part due to a complete collapse in many minds of any notion of American moral authority—or maybe just moral authority, period. The practical moral distance between the positions “don’t tell us how to treat the illegals at the southern border and we won’t tell you how to handle your Muslims,” and “the US has no room to speak about human rights as long as its own human rights record remains so abysmal,“ doesn’t actually exist. Millions of people are in prison to have their religion and culture brainwashed out of them, and the United States has nothing to say. Great! Just bad news, sad news, every day.

3. Likability is a weird-ass word, political concept

The print headline: The ‘Likability’ Trap

Where is it: Sunday Review, front

What is it: An opinion piece that posits that the concept of “likability” was invented by men and benefits men, and is a standard that should be jettisoned from consideration of politicians in favor of a standard that prizes competence, rather than how much you’d like to have a beer with a person.

Why is it: Men who seek power can still seem affable and gregarious and likable to a lot of people. Women who seek power seem…rather less all those things to a lot of people.

A fun part: The very first six words.

If the supposedly unlikable Hillary Clinton…

“Supposedly unlikable!” Ha! Hillary Clinton has a favorable rating of 36% as of now, halfway through the first term of the presidency she lost to a sentient screeching flaming yam. Surely we can agree that people don’t like her, and maybe there’s a little something to it.

What matters: “Likability” is a funny word. Perhaps because of a childhood candy, my brain wants to pronounce it “lick-ability,” which, in the context of all politicians—including but not limited to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and, say, Newt Gingrich—is extra gross. Also, the concept itself doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I’ve never really liked any politician, and I’m not convinced it’s something that most voters actually care about so much as it is something that media types always want to talk about. In a time of such stark political division, I think it means less than ever—Trump’s un-likability seems to be a rather large part of his appeal to his own base, after all. So yeah, I’m all for getting rid of likability as a standard for measuring anything about politicians, something I think would be easily achieved if the media simply stopped talking about it.

4. Instant replay makes everything worse

The print headline: Sloppy Track Yields Sloppy Result as Apparent Winner Is Disqualified

Where is it: Sports Sunday, front

What is it: A story about horses running in a circle in the mud—in the newspaper!

Why is it: The Kentucky Derby ended in controversy after the first horse to cross the finish line was disqualified for leaving the lane he was running in and impeding the progress of other horses. The horses very nearly clipped hooves, which would have resulted in a rather nasty pile up of horse-and-jockey-bodies in the final turn of the race.

I, like many other observers with absolutely no stake or real interest in horse racing, found the decision to be bullshit. The eventual declared “winner” did not deserve the title at all! The horse that was interfered with ended up finishing toward the back of the pack, and did not benefit from the real winner’s disqualification. Instead, all the benefit passes to the inferior second place horse, who was clearly slower than the original winner. The fastest horse should win! This is an injustice! Somebody get Michael Lewis on the case! Anyway, it was a dissatisfying result, but, really, who cares. A sport has got to have its rules.

A fun part: The fun part isn’t in the story at all, but is a tweet from the President of the United States of America, in which he blames POLITICAL CORRECTNESS for the whole mess.

As you can see, the president and I are not too far apart in terms of our feelings about who should have won the race. (For a moment, I’d like to sit with the idea that I know what the President of the United States thinks about the outcome of an “important” horse race, as though I were a close family friend or aide who watched it with him. The staggering weirdness of having a president who believes he should make known his thoughts about such things really cannot be overstated.) But! What the actual fuck is he talking about? Political correctness didn’t have anything to do with this decision! They followed the rules of their sport and determined the winner in a manner that is definitely less satisfactory than “just look who got to the end first,” but certainly doesn’t have anything to do with any rational understanding of the phrase “political correctness.” All he means when he says “political correctness” in this context is “everything is too pussified now,” and that back in the good old days the horses and their jockeys would be out there Ben Hur-ing each other until the bitter, bloody end.

One more thing: The headline—Sloppy Track Yields Sloppy Result as Apparent Winner is Disqualified—contains so many great potential horse names. Who would you bet on?

Apparent Winner (32-1)

Disqualified (9-2)

Sloppy Result (13-1)

Sloppy Sloppy (16-1)

Apparent Result (19-1)

Sloppy Yields (4-1)

Sloppy Winner (56-1)

Apparent Yields (11-1)

Sloppy (100-1)

My money is spread evenly on all the Sloppy’s.

5. Some people are just fuckin’ nuts.

The print headline: Tech’s Foremost Manfluencer

Where is it: Sunday Styles, page 2

What is it: An exploration of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s cultish influence on the lives of impressionable young men.

Why is it: Because some people are just fuckin’ nuts.

A fun part:

Young men are staggering around, hungry for days. They are throwing themselves into ice baths and cryotherapy pods. There are not enough beds at the silent vegan meditation centers to accommodate them. They need more near-infrared bulbs.

They are the followers of Jack Dorsey, Silicon Valley’s answer to the mega-influencer Gwyneth Paltrow. The lithe, 42-year-old tech founder has become a one-man Goop.

The short of it: Jack Dorsey is a walking, tweeting, meditating productivity-hack article. He has strange eating habits and strange living habits and a studied casualness and goes into silent meditative retreat for ten days at a time. And some non-zero number of people apparently treat him like he’s some sort of enlightened guru.

I’m not saying I know anything about anything, but what is it with people turning celebrities into cult-like figures? Why do we seek to believe so badly that we allow ourselves to be deluded into thinking any other dope has got it figured out better than we do? You think the guy who founded what is indisputably one of the ten worst websites of all time has a handle on how to live the best life? He’s just a dope, too, you weirdos!

Brian Richards, the founder of SaunaSpace, also owes something to the Twitter founder’s words. His company makes “Personal Near-Infrared Sauna” equipment. (A near-infrared sauna heats by pointing incandescent lights at you.) Its latest product is a Faraday tent, of sorts, that purports to block electromagnetic transmissions — creating “your very own EMF-free ancestral space.” Mr. Richards said his company had never been mentioned in the national press until Mr. Dorsey started talking about his personal SaunaSpace sauna on a fitness podcast, and now his products are back-ordered by a month.

“The demand’s been insane,” Mr. Richards said. “He legitimizes it. He’s a true believer. And now people are like, ‘Hey, if this guy’s doing it, maybe there’s something to it.’”

To Mr. Richards, who is based in Columbia, Mo., it makes sense that Mr. Dorsey’s tech followers would find these saunas and become one of his biggest consumer bases.

“An EMF-blocking Faraday sauna is really the only escape these people have from electromagnetic stress,” Mr. Richards said. (Though a study of middle-aged and older Finnish men indicates that their health benefited from saunas, there have been no major studies conducted of “Faraday saunas.”)

An EMF-blocking sauna! Don’t have heroes. Don’t have gurus. Read a book.