On early modern philosophers and online trolls. In Lewis Carroll’s ‘You Are Old, Father William,’ a young person asks: ‘You balanced an eel on the end of your nose - / What made you so awfully clever?’

Where does it come from? How do we know it exists? Does dignity need to be pinned to God, or can it have secular grounding? Is it about humility, pride, or both? What does interdependence have to do with it?

I have to be a good person, and even then, it’s up to someone else if they want to be my friend. They don’t owe me what I gave as a gift, and certainly they don’t owe me what I never gave at all.

In any case, careful speech—including refraining from speaking — can build trust. When the right wing refers to “woke,” they may want to prevent others from saying certain words—or to reserve certain words for themselves.

If they really believe in free speech, this is how we’ll know. There are many reasons why people have prejudices and why they devote their speech to expressing bigotry. Not high on the list: commitment to free speech.

Reading ‘Melancholic Parables’ as a parable of Twitter. Flash fiction by Dale Stromberg. One way to read it: who we are when we’re tweeting, who we think we are when we’re tweeting, and why we keep tweeting.