(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.)

Highlights from this week’s write-up:

• An alleged UFO that crashed in the area

• A drugged-up, maniacal film director

• Will Smith’s $2.5 million RV

• Kangaroo-like rats with magic kidneys

• When Robert E. Lee commanded camels

From the winner of last week’s contest:

Oh my goodness! Never in a million years did I expect to win. Because Vesuvius is so recognisable, I assumed lots of people would guess the right location, and the winner would be the person who had the best inside knowledge, anecdotes, etc. I’m honestly flabbergasted!

As nice as the VFYW book no doubt is, I think I’d like the luxury of two free years of Dish please. Many thanks — this has really made my week!

Here’s the winner from the previous week in San Diego:

Oh, sorry that my Europe trip, plus other distractions, prevented me from sending a following. I would love a copy of the VFYW book! I live in Riverside County but my view to the south is San Diego County, about four miles away. And I have been downtown many times for meetings and conferences.

From our super-sleuth in Eagle Rock:

The Intrepid Couch Traveler is really upping his game lately. I’m stoked for the inevitable TV series where he unmasks other sleuths and takes them on sedentary global adventures.

Also, that couch is its own personality. Perfect sidekick. Does it have a name?

ICT responds:

She is Couchella, and I love her.

And how did she get such a completely original and not at all obvious and derivative name like Couchella?

Sofa-king clever :)

On to this week’s view, here’s the king of the archive — the Berkeley super-sleuth:

Whoa! This has to be the least appealing view since contest #495 in Medford! Which itself had to have been the least appealing view since contest #489 in Redding. Which was in competition with Calgary (contest #477) — although that one included some greenery, which was nice. But probably nothing beats the view in Khabarovsk (contest #456) — not even this week’s, which has a noteworthy desert ridge with a striking mesa to keep things interesting. Not complaining. It’s just that seeing this one came as a bit of a shock so soon after Sorrento.

Our super-sleuth in Yakima knows the view well:

Last October I sent you a candidate view for the contest — also in [town redacted] — that I took on my trip to the Grand Canyon. Looking back at the photo, I notice that the hills in the background are the same hills shown in this week’s view:

The Brookline super-sleuth writes, “This week had me chasing down a blue-and-yellow herring”:

The large sign next to the highway seemed like an obvious clue, and although for a few minutes I was convinced it read “LOCO MAS” (with a really big M in a flamboyant font), I soon realized that it was the familiar Goodyear logo with the Wingfoot symbol in the middle:

Although this seemed like a simple matter of searching for Goodyear locations, things were not as they appeared. The store-finder function on the company website was not terribly user-friendly, nor was it returning suitable hits for Goodyear-owned locations in the southwestern US states where I was focusing my efforts.

On a hunch, I looked up Goodyear corporate office locations and noted one in [town redacted]. It turned out that this office was near an airport on the outer edge of town with no sign of the sign, so I was discouraged. But the surrounding mountains looked very similar, so I Google Streeted around town while looking for RV parks near highways and soon stumbled upon the very sign outside of a non-Goodyear business that would not have been listed on the website:

Here’s Giuseppe, our super-sleuth in Rome:

I had high hopes for that Goodyear sign, but they were quickly dashed when I couldn’t find the store. So, I had to slog endlessly through mountains and RV parks. Luckily, I guessed the right state and stuck with it.

Yakima had better luck with the Goodyear:

Even though there doesn’t seem to be enough room to fit a major interstate in the near background, the inscrutable signs in the view really are interstate signs on I-40:

A newcomer to the contest writes:

This photo appears to be taken from a higher floor of a building in El Paso, Texas, likely from a hotel or office overlooking the Arvey RV Park (or a very similar lot) on the city’s east side.

Fun fact: Mountains in the background are the Franklin Mountains which at over 24,000 acres comprise the largest state park in the nation located within a cities limits.

Another guess for that city comes from the Riverwoods super-sleuth:

So another mountain view baffles me, but I also didn’t have much time this week. Unfortunately my 85-year-old mother had a fall and it set off a whirlwind of decision-making and care. Thankfully she is ok, but her body isn’t getting stronger and it’s sad to see her go thru serious aging struggles.

I asked a niece from Denver if she recognized these mountains. She thinks they are the Franklin Mountains of El Paso, so I’m hoping she’s correct.

What’s that strange beam of light on the horizon? The Intrepid Couch Traveler sees the truth out there:

Chris pulled some strings this week to get advance access to the Pentagon’s super-secret UFO photo dump, picking the only interesting photo of the whole lot, with an eerie beam of light from a cloaked spacecraft, surely piloted by an alien of strange and wondrous powers:

As Couchella and I pull into town to get our kicks, we realize the eerie beam of light truly does come from an alien of strange and wondrous powers, who was kind enough to de-cloak long enough to say hi.

Our super-sleuth in San Mateo also has a go:

The Reimagined transforms this quiet daytime view into a cinematic sci-fi scene by turning the ordinary [state redacted] desert landscape into the setting for a UFO abduction at sunset:

I kept the original geography, RV park, bus parking lot, and mountains recognizable so the image still feels grounded in a real place, but I changed the lighting to dramatic golden hour colors and added a cow being lifted into a flying saucer. I chose that because this VFYW already has a huge open sky, isolated desert atmosphere, and a slightly mysterious vibe that felt perfect for a playful “close encounters” vibe.

The CO/NJ super-sleuth observes:

To have installed that fearsomely nasty, ledge-top deterrent outside our window, the hotel either has a major problem with crime or crapping birds. Yikes.

From the A2 Team in Ann Arbor:

The spikes in the foreground, together with a landscape of the Southwest, really threw us off for a while. Were we looking at a piece of the border wall? No, they use other forms, if at all. Or a prison wall? Not likely, and a pain to search for.

So finally, we just went with the RV park and eventually got to [town redacted], where the truck visible in our picture …

… was already parked there in 2018, according to Google Maps:

Identifying the spikes is our “a-maize-ing sleuth” in Oklahoma City

Outside the window is a parapet with bird deterrent spikes. The gadget at the lower right of the photo turns out to be a wall-mounted exterior lamp, shown in full in this photo posted by another guest of the hotel:

The fixture is angled upward to illuminate the hotel exterior.

The Ridgewood super-sleuth names the right state:

This week’s view is from ... Montana!

JK.

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Jerusalem is a journalist and entrepreneur. She’s a former staff writer at The Atlantic and a former policy writer and podcaster at Vox. Last year she founded The Argument, a liberal magazine on Substack, where she serves as CEO and editor-in-chief. Subscribe! We went at it on liberalism and how to reform the Democrats.

An auto-transcript is available above (just click “Transcript” while logged into Substack). For two clips of the episode — on Biden’s biggest mistakes, and how DEI went off the rails — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: born in Ethiopia as an Eritrean Christian; why her father became an atheist then converted back to Christianity; growing up in suburban Maryland and becoming a citizen at age 14; the formative influence of Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian; being a Christian in a secular-left bubble; the stagnation in England before Thatcher; imposing liberalism on Iraq; torture under Bush; the long Great Recession; the American Rescue Plan and inflation; Biden ceding order on immigration; Greg Abbott exporting migrants to liberal cities; rural and retired voters most against immigration but least affected; cancel culture; the race card on immigration; the antisemite card on Israel; US aid to Israel; Hormuz and oil prices; Jerome Powell; DEI and the NYT lawsuit; diversity vs quotas; trans issues; the suicide canard; orgasm loss and FGM; opposition to bathroom bills reversed; Bostock; housing policy and abundance; ICE in Minneapolis; JD Vance; Kamala and Hillary; Jon Ossoff; and Keir’s cautionary tale for moderate liberals.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. We have some real stars coming up: Ben Rhodes on Iran and speech-writing, Harvey Mansfield on modernity, HW Brands on the life of George Washington, John Gray on Trump’s new world, Bob Wright on the evolutionary force of AI, Tiffany Jenkins on privacy in a liberal democracy, Daniel McCarthy on conservatism, Stephen Grosz on the struggles of love, and Robby George on all our disagreements. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a returning paid subscriber:

I had decided to let my paid membership lapse because I thought conversations were too often Trump-centric and similar to one another, but that Tom Junod interview reminded me how uniquely excellent and weirdly individualistic your discussions can be. I lasted two days away from the paid subscription, and then you earned my support once again — you thoughtful, occasionally aggravating old bear.

I’m so grateful, especially considering the wave of cancellations over criticism of Israel. Over 25 years of this, I find I often purge a subset of Dish readers every time I take on a contentious issue, and take it as a sign I’m not off-track. Sometimes, of course, they have a point, and I adjust. But the woke cancellations — from right and left — are badges of honor here. If you want to support sites that piss off readers on a regular basis, you know how to help:

Subscribe now

Here’s a fan of last week’s pod with Adrian Wooldridge on the genius of liberalism:

This conversation and framework for understanding today’s moronic inferno is fantastic! Will classic liberalism survive? It’s a toss-up right now. More conversations like these please!

Here’s a recommendation for a future guest:

I’m another reader who thinks you have a strange blind spot regarding Israel. Where is the conservative in you — prepared to acknowledge that the reality of a situation requires selecting between two bad choices? I see your criticism of what Israel has decided to do, but never an explanation of what you think Israel should do under the circumstances. (But I will continue to subscribe to the Dish.)

I think you should interview Corey Gil-Shuster, the gay liberal Canadian-Israeli academic at Tel Aviv University who runs the “Ask Project” on YouTube, which interviews Jews and Arabs in Israel and the Palestinian territories. The videos are always fascinating and informative, and he is a very good interview.

I need to find more Palestinian voices first I think, since we haven’t had one on the pod yet. A reader writes, “I’ve been following your engagement with the Nicholas Kristof piece in the NYT, and it sparked some thoughts related to the nature of the ongoing dialog surrounding Israel and its actions”:

A couple of weeks ago, you were kind enough to say that a dissent of mine on the ongoing Israel debate had “some very sharp insights.” In it, I was skeptical of a proposed Sullivan/Sam Harris debate and was attempting to honestly reckon with the depth of the problems that both Israel faces through no fault of its own and the problems that Israel’s government has caused. I mention that prior dissent in the hopes of quickly establishing bona fides as a fair-minded skeptic of all parties involved.

Now I’d like to bring that skepticism to bear on your favorable reaction to and amplification of Kristof’s piece, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” I can’t hold you responsible for NYT columnists, and I know you’ve taken a lot of unfair claims of anti-semitism, which I don’t make here. But there is a point at which honest criticism seemingly becomes a pathology, and I think to promote and defend the piece as you have puts you closer to the latter.

In the aforementioned dissent, I referenced the recently dismissed charges against IDF officers, and there are elements of the Kristof piece that we know are true. I make no claims that Israel is wholly innocent. However, the breadth and depth of Kristof’s accusations are staggering and, most crucially, under-supported.

I don’t need to rehash it all. You’re no doubt familiar with many of the criticisms, and it’s better to just link to National Review’s critique. My concern is that his piece, your “restack” of it, and the entire Internet dialogue around it thickens rather than clears the fog of war. Kristof takes a nugget of what we know to be true and builds upon it with testimony from less-than-reputable sources, including claims that, without more evidence, border on conspiracism.

Indeed, for all his allegations to be true, how many hundreds, if not thousands, of soldiers and officials must be aware of and helping to hide all the sexual assault, the procurement of carrots for assault, the training of animals for rape, the use of such torture techniques across multiple facilities? Executing that level of malevolence and keeping secrets of that magnitude under wraps for multiple years is damn near impossible, especially in the 21st century. Yet Kristof presents no new evidence beyond personal testimony.

Conversely, to build on the National Review, one Kristof’s chief sources, Euro-Med, is a group that’s been decidedly anti-Israel years prior to October 7 (e.g. systematic training of Gazans to edit Wikipedia to disparage Israel, or the head of the organization tweeting that a map of rocket attacks was actually “a map of registered sex offenders in Israel”). How likely is Euro-Med to vet Gazan witnesses with integrity?

Euro-Med, Kristof, and others suggest, then, that the IDF went from giving Yahya Sinwar free brain surgery to systematic and widespread rape of prisoners, including employing dogs in their cruelty? Best bring a stack of itemized receipts for that kind of claim. And Kristof didn’t.

I have absolutely no problem believing that some of these incidents have occurred or that Netanyahu’s government is happy to ignore some of it, since we already know that that has happened — for which there is evidence and reporting. And further, the US should be making Israel pay for its own weapons; the Iran war was a mistake made largely at the behest of Israel; Netanyahu has aligned himself with bad actors; what’s happening in the West Bank is a form of ethnic cleansing; et cetera.

So my complaint is not with you or Kristof critiquing Israel’s government. Rather, my complaint is with anything that adds to the emotional turmoil and confusion of our (inter)national dialogue.

All decent points. I hope I was able to answer some of them in today’s column. My only general quibble is that in wartime, you’d be surprised how things can be suppressed. No one wants them exposed. If it hadn’t been for the gruesome photos, you think we’d have ever heard about Abu Ghraib? Or the prisoners we tortured to death?

But the right response to a piece like Kristof’s is not to sue the NYT, but to open Ben-Gvir’s prisons to the Red Cross, open them to journalists, let reporters into Gaza.

Another writes, “I think a future Dishcast with you and Nick Kristof would be quite fascinating, covering this topic or any other.” I’ve known Nick, believe it or not, since we overlapped at Oxford. We don’t see eye to eye on many things, but I’ve never seen any reason to doubt his decency and sincerity as a journalist. Of course he may have fucked up. But we don’t know that.

Another is crestfallen:

Like you, I read Kristof’s piece; and like you, it leaves me with deep conflict. I have sources whom I trust — people on the ground in the conflict zone — who confirm the overall escalating pattern of serious Israeli abuse (although not the specifics of Kristof’s piece, and I do agree with some commenters that some allegations do seem less credible).

I’ve been a lifelong supporter of Israel. I traveled there as part of a congressional staff delegation more than 20 years ago. I’ve been to Yad Vashem. And I’m Jewish. The idea that things like this could be done in the name of the Jewish people is beyond heartbreaking.

Where does that leave me?

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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.)

Highlights from this week’s write-up:

• A nearby volcano that’s even more dangerous than the one above

• A strange beautiful fish with the face of a dragon

• Yet another funicular!

• The VFYW chef trying to recreate one of the best meals he’s ever had — from visiting this area

• Lots of touristy details from sleuths who’ve been here, including the volcano

Our super-sleuth in Brookline catches a typo of mine from last week’s contest:

I had the feeling that a Brookland-Brookline mixup was bound to happen at some point, so I chuckled when the San Diego bookstore beat was attributed to my fellow super-sleuth. I recall there being one or more correct-guessing sleuths based in Brooklyn, but I guess they are less active recently?

This got me curious about other place-names starting with “BROOKL”, and I found a couple in the US: Brooklet, GA, home to the annual Brooklet Peanut Festival; and Brooklin, ME — where E.B. White lived when he wrote Charlotte’s Web (inspired by life on his farm there) and Stuart Little. Brookl-ians of the world, unite!

Here’s a submission for a window photo that doesn’t quite make the cut, given its difficulty:

Maybe you can use it — taken from the historic Gasparilla Inn, 500 Palm Ave, Boca Grande, Florida:

We were just here for a wedding. It’s a fascinating, old-money place owned by a former US ambassador to the UK, William Farish (who married a DuPont).

This sort of place isn’t usually my jam, but it was fun for a couple of days. It closes every July-October during the “hot season” and has the strictest dress code I’ve ever experienced at a hotel anywhere, let alone in a sleepy island town.

On to this week’s view, our super-sleuth on the UWS is psyched:

OK, now we’re talking! The times when I instantly recognize the View are few and far between, but this is one of them. It makes me happy just to see this — and also totally envious of the sleuth who was there.

Another sleuth writes:

It’s the coastal town of Kii Katsuura, Japan.

No? Rats!

From a first-time sleuth:

I’ve been reading Andrew since the 1990s. I have never participated in this contest, but I think that photo is from the island of Faial in the Azores. My dad was born and raised there, and I have climbed that mountain. My family still has a place there. It’s not fancy, but it’s right on the water.

Here’s Brookline again:

This week’s view demanded some squinting, especially for the letters on the skinny banner on the left side of the photo:

I was fairly certain about six out of the ten letters — ??A?AN?URA — so I tried several plausible-sounding combinations until I landed on SHAMANDURA, which turned out to be the name of a diving resort in Egypt on the Red Sea, as well as a yacht charter company active around southern [redacted]. The latter seemed more promising, given the landscape in the view.

Our super-sleuth in Riverwoods is thinking the Caribbean:

Thanks again for posting the pic of my daughter last week — the whole family enjoyed it! This week was tough. I am pretty bad with mountain views in general, but add the tropical and I am doubly lost.

Good job disguising the flag with Dusty; that would have helped me a lot. I think the signage says “Amanoura”, which research says its a boutique jewelry shop with a few locations, including St Barts and Guadeloupe. Both are mountainous islands, but I couldn’t really match them up with our view, so I had to throw in the towel and take a WAG for Guadeloupe.

Chini circles the right spot:

Another newcomer gets very close: “It’s the boat marina on the island of Capri, looking toward Naples, Italy.” That’s the right country. And the mountain looming on the horizon? It’s identified by our super-sleuth in West Orange:

Hello Chris! I’ve been out of the game for a while — just too much to balance lately — but what a great contest to grab a history nerd’s attention. I’ll pin down the precise location of the window later, but if that’s not Mount Vesuvius, I’ll eat my Loeb Classical Library books.

From our super-sleuth in Ridgewood:

I had been complaining about the lack of Google Earth coverage in recent contests, but this time it delivered:

It’s truly eerie to behold Mount Vesuvius in this photo and think this is the same volcano responsible for the sudden death — yet haunting preservation — of so many souls in the city of Pompeii thousands of years ago.

These two images pretty much say it all:

Next up is our CO/NJ super-sleuth, who deserves a big congrats:

I have not been playing as long as some of the other, more legendary sleuths, but this week is my 200^th correct guess — assuming it’s correct!

Looking at the view this week, I thought, “Huh, that looks like Mt. Vesuvius.” A quick profile of the mountain looming over the ruins of Pompeii (though from a slightly different angle as our view) seemed to reinforce the hunch:

I hope the view submitter had an amazing time. I cannot image they did not. Wowzers. I myself have been to Pompeii, nearly 40 years ago. As a dirtbag backpacker, though, I did not have the means to partake in the finer luxuries available in Sorrento and the Amalfi Coast. I’ll have to go back!

The Intrepid Couch Traveler also visited — virtually: “This week, I wanted to make sure your smart and beautiful sleuths have a full picture of the dogged dedication of your humble couch correspondent”:

Generating a much less placid view of Vesuvius is our super-sleuth in San Mateo:

I usually begin my explanation of the Reimagined with a description of the several clues I’ve found in the VFYW. This week, the obvious clue is Mt. Vesuvius. And what’s likely to be the Reimagined if the VFYW is a picture of Mt. Vesuvius? I imagine that the submitter snapped the following photo just a minute or two after taking the VFYW:

But perhaps a realistic volcanic Reimagined is too obvious. We’re in Italy, and of course the most famous Italian painter is widely considered to be Leonardo da Vinci. So how would da Vinci sketch the VFYW in his notebook?

Our super-sleuth in Berkeley draws from his vast knowledge of the VFYW archive:

Over the years, this window identification contest usually involves a window (with or without glass). These windows are typically stationary, though we’ve had rare instances of mobile windows, including one in a funicular, one in a Ferris wheel, one in an Airstream (or were there two? [yep, two]) — and, most controversially, the window in contest #175, which was in an automobile stopped on the shoulder of a highway outside the West Bank city of Nablus. We’ve had a plexiglass railing in a treehouse, and the occasional glass-panelled door, and sometimes we’ve crossed the threshold on to the balcony and dispensed with any pretense of a window.

But I think this may be the first time we’ve had a photo taken at the railing of a cliffside terrace, which must’ve been at least a dozen feet from the nearest glass (ignoring any wine glass that might be on the table behind the photographer).

Indeed, the VFYW this week isn’t from a window. Occasionally I have to bend the rules because it’s often difficult to find suitable photos for the contest: not too challenging, not too easy, and a whole host of other factors that change week to week. So, if you have a photo candidate you’d like to submit, please send it our way: contest@andrewsullivan.com. Horizontal photos are preferred, and make sure part of the window frame is showing. Please also send an image of the building with the window circled, which makes the contest go much smoother. If we select your photo, you’ll get six free months added to your Dish subscription.

Back to the “window” hunt, a previous winner in Milwaukee reveals the right city and building:

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Adrian is a journalist and an old friend. We arrived in America on the same plane in 1984 and spent the first few days together in the same hotel room. After more than 20 years writing for The Economist, he became the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He’s the author of several books, including The Aristocracy of Talent, and the co-author of many more with John Micklethwait, including The Right Nation. Adrian’s new book is The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism. It’s a terrific tonic for a philosophy as vital as it is in eclipse.

An auto-transcript is available above (just click “Transcript” while logged into Substack). For two clips of the episode — on how Enlightenment ideas got corrupted, and Big Tech’s threat to liberalism — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: raised in rural Shropshire; his parents both teachers; his dissertation on the 11-plus (an exam that changed my life); when IQ tests were a liberal cause; Luther and the Reformation; the religious civil wars leading to the Enlightenment; Hobbes as a proto-liberal; the humanism of Erasmus; Montesquieu and the spirit of liberalism; John Stuart Mill and utilitarianism; Isaiah Berlin and pluralism; Graham Wallas and the Great Society; Lippmann; Leo Strauss; Thatcherism; consumerism vs. self-improvement; meritocracy threatened by the left; Foucault’s folly; the EU and managerial liberalism; Brooks’ bobos; affirmative action and DEI; why liberal democracy in Iraq didn’t work; Oakeshott; Schmitt and friend-enemy; Trump’s stark illiberalism and neo-royalism; King Charles; Putin ushering in a strongman era; Biden’s open borders; the migration crisis and Brexit; the buffoonish Boris; the struggling Starmer; high culture and other upsides to elitism; Abundance; Deneen and post-liberalism; and Europe stepping up for Ukraine.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. We have some real stars coming up: Ben Rhodes on Iran and speech-writing, Harvey Mansfield on modernity, HW Brands on the life of George Washington, John Gray on Trump’s new world, Bob Wright on the evolutionary force of AI, Tiffany Jenkins on privacy in a liberal democracy, Jerusalem Demsas on the state of the left, Daniel McCarthy on conservatism, Stephen Grosz on the struggles of love, and Robby George on pretty much everything. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s TMI pod with Tom Junod:

OMG. “But wait … there’s more!” 🤣 This conversation feeds my little bitchy soul. I just love a good dish, and this is it! I ordered the book halfway through the episode.

Another fan:

I just listened to your Dishcast with Tom Junod and had to write in, because your conversation was incredibly moving. I’ve been a fan for years, and your podcast is a staple on my Saturday morning drive to the South Bronx, where I practice law. I wish you would release as many pods as Rogan!

I’m 49, married with two kids, and have worked with my father for 24 years — Irish Catholic, Queens through and through. That out-of-borough identity that you and Tom discussed, especially as it relates to Trump, really hit home. I have met many Big Lou-type men throughout my life, so Tom’s reflections on his father resonated deeply. That mix of admiration and complexity felt very real. I listened to a sample of the audio book right after and can’t wait to listen to it as well.

The previous episode with Greg Lukianoff on free speech was excellent as well. Thanks for what you do — it really matters.

Here’s a guest rec:

I recommend you consider Fr. Bill Dailey, CSC as a future guest. He teaches at Notre Dame, where he’s a rector in one of the residence halls, and he’s a member of the Holy Cross community. He clerked in the 9^th circuit and is a member of the Federalist Society. He’s also the former head of the St John Neuman Center for Faith and Reason in Dublin.

I seriously doubt that two lower-middle-class, high-IQ, Irish-Catholic bros would have difficulty finding subjects to discuss, but I will be brash enough to propose a few:

• His origin story in the rapidly deindustrializing city of Warren, Ohio

• Loss of a brother to drugs

• How woke Notre Dame is and what he sees on campus today

• His view of the Dobbs decision and abortion in general

• The current state of the Church

• What Patrick Deneen (a faculty colleague) is up to

• How he evaluates the performance of his former faculty colleague Amy Coney Barrett

I will conclude with the memory of how you turned me around on gay marriage and acceptance of the LGBT community. In March 1999, you spoke at Queer Awareness Day at Stanford (an event you will not soon be invited to again, as you know), and I saw you on C-SPAN explaining the conservative case for family life. It completely changed my views — thank you.

Ah, yes, the days I was invited to campuses! It’s been a few years. But thanks for the memories. I’ve come to accept that the TQ+ world will write the history of marriage equality and yours truly will appear nowhere. Who cares? We got marriage — which is all that matters.

On last week’s column, “The Ukrainian Miracle,” a reader writes:

I appreciate this piece. I have started to call #47 “Trump the Destroyer, Forcer of Change.” As much as I’ve hated the obnoxious “You don’t have the cards” incident and the insane Greenland threats, Trump has FORCED Europe to get its ass in gear when it comes to its defense — finally. And if anything good comes out of the disastrous Iran war, it will be that Europe and other countries will start doubling down on energy resilience and security (read: solar, wind, nuclear, and geothermal). None of this is what Trump intended, and yet, it could all be for the good.

Another reader on that column:

You acknowledge that Trump may be a world historical figure “despite himself,” and in a later section you comment:

The election and re-election of Trump is proof of American decline. No serious country would dream of electing a deranged, delusional monster not once, but twice.

That’s too simple. And I believe the reality of the situation to be this: Trump is indeed a world historical figure; it’s not entirely despite himself; and he is more than a mere monster. I think Bill Maher may have recently put his finger on the quality, the defining characteristic, that elevated Trump to his current spot on the historic pantheon of world leaders. On his 4/17 show, Maher asked Rahm Emanuel if — during his presumed run for the presidency — he was going to cave in the face of the inevitable onslaught of leftist activism. Rahm implied he would not.

But the real answer is Yes. Of course Rahm will cave. If there’s one astonishing fact we’ve all learned in the last decade, it’s this: every establishment representative at all elite institutions (education, journalism, publishing, entertainment, politics) will cave. The pillars of our liberal society have been hollowed out, and when recently challenged by a wave of illiberalism, they were simply swept away.

Enter Trump. He built his political brand by not caving. And we now know, beyond any dispute, that such fortitude in high-profile personalities is beyond rare. Trump took on one sacred cow after another to win the nomination and then the presidency in 2016, and he never apologized for doing so.

In his decade in politics, Trump has indeed allowed himself to be flattered and manipulated. And he’s been inconsistent on various topics. And yet, as far as I can tell, he remains not just the most prominent American politician, but also one of astonishingly few world leaders who will still call out the BS that no one else of similar stature will condemn.

There are many examples. One of the more famous is Trump’s opposition to open borders. He has also leveled some genuinely constructive critiques at NATO — a once unquestionable institution. But even closer to my own heart is his opposition to the most sacred of all sacred cows throughout the educated classes of the Western world: trans fundamentalism.

At a time when the UK is throwing its own citizens in jail for questioning trans ideology, I found it intensely satisfying to hear the American president refuse to cave on that issue. And in an absolutely morbid piece of irony for the “right side of history” crowd, it was Trump, not them, who was bending the metaphorical arc towards justice.

Your podcast guest Wesley Yang argued that by not just denying empirical reality, but by insisting that the rest of us do the same, gender fundamentalism threatens the foundations of the liberal world order. So, in that case, does Trump not become one of the 21st century’s greatest champions of classical liberalism?

Alas, no. He suffers from the very real vices of his virtues. And the same impressively unyielding instincts that have brought him to genuine historic prominence also led him to deny the results of the 2020 election. And that was an act so discrediting that I would never vote for him.

Nevertheless, I can still recognize that no matter how flawed he may be, he has still managed to alter the course of history through a genuinely impressive blend of steadfast iconoclasm, talented theatrics, and uncanny timing. Yes, he’s a bully, among other things. But have you seen the opposition? They just tried to assassinate him for the third time.

Our historic moment may well have demanded a bully. You may be right, he may be crazy, but 250 years since the Declaration, he could be just the lunatic America was looking for.

I think it’s sensible to forgo a lunatic in the White House, as the entire world is now finding out.

Here’s a dissent over me agreeing with the Joe Klein piece we featured “In The ‘Stacks”:

You ought to reconsider your support of the Supreme Court’s Callais decision. It seems to me that interpreting the Voting Rights Act to allow at least a few black politicians from Southern states to make it to Congress was a good thing — and what will now replace it will make things worse.

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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.)

Highlights from this week’s write-up:

• Painting the town yellow and teal

• Gender role-reversal in birds

• Cross-dressing stars of the Greatest Generation

• A helicopter accident on a movie set that cost the producers the bulk of the budget — but at least they got it on camera

• A sleuth who dispatched his daughter down to the view’s location

From the winner of last week’s contest:

Yes!!! Woo hoo! Who knew that I was finally winning with a tough one? (I assume it was tough, we’ll see in the results how many got close … ) Tough call for which prize, but I’ll go for the VFYW book — a physical object that shows that I actually won.

Here’s our super-sleuth in Hells Kitchen with a musical offering:

I wanted to follow up on Belize, since I spent a wonderful week there in 1990. I’m surprised no one mentioned the country’s most well-known cultural export: punta rock. In Belize I was lucky enough to see the late Andy Palacio — who more or less invented the form — perform at an outdoor concert. Punta rock is a fusion of Black Caribbean and Latin musical forms, much like the country itself. Here’s a taste:

As for the contest view itself, I thought I recognized Belize City but couldn’t find the right combination of buildings on Google Earth. Still working on this week’s ...

Our super-sleuth in Japan follows up on contest #501, for which she had submitted the view:

Hi Chris! I feel as though every time I’ve emailed you in the recent past, I’ve apologized for it being so long since the last time. I’m back into term time in Japan and have a heavy teaching load Mon-Weds, so the Wednesday contest deadline puts a bit of a spoke in my ability to join in — unless I am VERY prompt about doing it over the weekend.

But I came into work early this morning SPECIFICALLY with the intention of emailing, even if I didn’t have an answer to the puzzle, because I wanted to say — alongside my amazement at how many people found the location (taken from my hospital room in Japan) — how touched I was that so many people added to their entry some version of “Hope the photographer is okay!” The hospital stay was for a broken ankle, after I foolishly slipped on wet pavement after a few beers, but I am absolutely back up and running … well, walking and cycling — running was never my thing!

The VFYW sleuths are truly a lovely bunch, and I’m honoured to now be both a contestant and a photo submitter!

For a virtual community, it does have a lot of heart. On to this week’s view, a first-time sleuth in Austin writes:

The photo is taken from a window in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, specifically in the Garment District / Times Square West area, looking roughly south from somewhere around W 37th-38th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

From our super-sleuth in San Mateo:

There are four architectural clues this week. First there’s a distinctive and colorful mid-rise building near the center of the view with “Z” signage over the entrance. This structure stands out immediately due to its playful, graphic façade, which departs from the neutral palettes typical of surrounding downtown buildings. Its exterior features are bold, geometric color blocking — yellows, teals, and whites — combined with diagonal striping and even a stylized “cut line” motif (complete with scissors imagery), giving the impression that the building itself has been “cut and assembled” like a piece of design work:

The architecture leans heavily into branding as identity, blurring the line between building and billboard. Despite this expressive skin, the building maintains a compact urban footprint: there’s no driveway, landscaping, or large setback. Instead, it sits flush with the street, reinforcing the dense, pedestrian-oriented fabric of the neighborhood and placing it in direct conversation with adjacent restaurants, bars, and mixed-use buildings.

Towering above it is a 20+ story, contemporary, residential slab tower with a repetitive balcony grid and glass-concrete façade. Then there’s the SELF STORAGE building across the street, with its company name and phone number obfuscated. Finally, we see Dusty sleeping in front of a sign showing “COUR___.”

So how should we Reimagine this week’s VFYW? Let’s use the “Z” building as a paintbrush and revitalize the scene:

In addition to “Hotel Z,” that hotel has another name — revealed by our super-sleuth from Santa Monica, who’s stayed there:

First time in a while I’ve entered the contest: all my routines are off, for not very good reasons. By the way, I did watch the Palisades documentary you recommended a while back; thanks for the steer. But I did have thoughts … and perhaps there will be some VFYW to put them into, in context.

I glanced at the VFYW this week and, as has become usual, I thought, “Another ugly overbuilt American-ish city. Condos all over the place? Vancouver, but the weather? Can’t be bothered…” Then I saw the stripy Staypineapple Hotel, which I stayed at in December 2022 — and from there it was easy to look across the street to the [hotel redacted].

Another prominent clue is covered by Giuseppe, our super-sleuth in Rome:

The most visible clue is, of course, the “Self Storage” sign. Needless to say, there are a lot of self-storage facilities in North American cities, so how do you narrow the scope of your search? The city looks like any other to my European eyes, but I guessed it could be on the West Coast — correctly, yes, in retrospect, but I couldn’t count on my intuition being right. So I thought a little, then googled “self storage” “downtown.” I don’t have the slightest idea of how frequently self-storage facilities are located downtown in US cities, but in any case, I found the hotel in about five minutes. Maybe it was just luck.

He also circled the right window, so it’s more than luck. Our super-sleuth in Hinckley spots another key clue:

First thought: Is that a gas lamp? Now where have I been that has street gas lamps? One has an entire Gaslamp District.

Here’s the newly minted super-sleuth in Sherman Oaks:

My dream has come true: I have been awarded the title of Super Sleuth. Thank you — and you can send the plaque to my home address on file :)

Many parts of the photo looked very much like my hometown of Los Angeles, including the mix of modern and early 20th century architecture. I even noticed the five-globe lamp post, which used to be prevalent in the downtown area of LA:

But when I searched on Google street view from Spring and Hill streets, south of downtown looking north, not only could I not match the view, I could not find any of the five-globe street lights. Apparently they were removed from service — but a couple were preserved and can be seen around the City Hall Plaza, including this one:

Those street lights were designed and made by the Llewellyn Iron Works of Los Angeles, so I did a quick search and found they also provided the lamps to Portland, Oregon and a few other cities up north. However, none of those cities matched this week’s view.

Next up is the super-sleuth in Brookland, who began his entry:

I had to zoom up and convince myself this was an actual photograph, and not a painting. This must have been taken through some sort of screen?

A previous winner in Toronto thinks it’s smoke:

Some weeks I look at these and I’m utterly baffled. Others are easier. I initially thought last week would be easy, but I never got closer than Costa Rica or vicinity.

This week was easier. I wouldn’t have guessed this was [city redacted] from the first glance, if only because of the apparent smog. I assume it was forest-fire smoke.

The main clue was this distant but distinctive three-segmented building, which I later learned (after briefly chasing false leads in New York and Pennsylvania) was the back of the Spreckels Building:

This week’s view is gray because the photo, when it was embedded in the submitter’s email, appeared that way — but after I posted it, I realized that the attachment version of the photo, when downloaded and opened, is much more clear and blue. Here’s a screenshot version to see what I mean:

The file size for the photo is 15MB, so the compression process for the email version must have distorted the color. Weird. But the effect made this week’s contest a bit more challenging, because this city is famously sunny most of the year. Here’s a typical view from above, courtesy of Chini:

Here’s a newcomer to the VFYW naming that city:

For this week’s contest, I think it’s Sixth Street in downtown San Diego, looking towards Market Street. I don’t have any fun facts or stories about it — and that kind of cityscape and architecture really isn’t my cup of tea.

Here again is the Santa Monica sleuth, who had a scary experience in San Diego with his dog:

You and many of the sleuths will remember my adopted beagle named Dougal — specifically an Envigo beagle, from the 2022 shutdown of an appalling facility in Virginia. Here’s a NYT piece about the Envigo facility, under the headline “4,000 Beagles Are Being Rescued From a Virginia Facility. Now They Need New Homes.” (You have very likely seen something similar at Ridglan Farm, except here the authorities seem to be on the other side.)

My old dog Charlie — a beaglegänger of Bowie, Andrew’s dog — had died in June 2022, and I was planning to be allowed to have a bit of a life … but then the Envigo story erupted. About half my friends sent me the NYT piece, saying some version of, “You’re used to adopting beagles, and it seems like you have the space.”

The story had so much traction that adopting one of these sad beagles was highly competitive. The Humane Society had a kind of Underground Railroad, distributing beagles to adoption facilities around the country, and the nearest one to me in Santa Monica was in Chino. The only thing I knew about Chino was that it’s shorthand for “rough as hell, wrong side of the tracks.”

I declined to go, but a second site opened, at the Helen Woodward Center in Fairbanks Ranch, which is near San Diego. Envigo presented itself as adjacent to medical research, so it’s very likely that Dougal and his ilk had been destined for cancer trials. My sense is that because of this, it’s a plus if the dogs are genetically similar, so the breeding program is like the Habsburg family tree. It became clear that the applications at Helen Woodward were effectively an essay writing contest — and I won. Since I lived without children, I would be a good home for a dog they worried might snap. That apparently sealed the deal, and I went home with Dougal.

In November, the Helen Woodard Center wrote to everyone who had adopted one of the beagles, inviting us to appear on a telethon on San Diego KUSI on December 11th, in order to raise money for the center:

I hadn’t been to San Diego, but everyone said it’s a lovely city, and I had heard there was a dog beach there. I also wanted to see the desert, and Trump’s wall, so this was as good a hook as any other to hang a trip on. So, Dougal and I piled into the car for our TV appearance:

It poured with rain, depressing attendance. After the show, off we went to the dog-friendly Ocean Beach. We checked into a hotel right on the beach, where “dog friendly” meant they allowed Dougal — and charged an arm and a leg, for easily the worst room in the place. This is par for the course, but even by those standards, it was prison-like. No matter — we were about to have off-leash joy:

In the drizzle, fun was had and other dogs were met — until 5:30 PM. All of a sudden a loudspeaker system all crackled into life, with a tone and voice announcing that the lifeguards would be going off duty. I don’t know what it was about that noise, but it was clearly terrifying for Dougal — who bolted. And didn’t stop.

There had been one bolting experience before when Dougal had broken his own leash, but he ran home. We were not at home. And the sun began to drop. If you’re a dog owner, you’ve probably experienced a similar moment of panic.

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Tom is a journalist and author. A former staff writer at GQ and Esquire, the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was based on his Esquire article on Fred Rogers. He’s currently a senior writer at ESPN, and his new memoir is called In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man. It was an intense conversation — about dads, sex, Catholicism, and growing older.

An auto-transcript is available above (just click “Transcript” while logged into Substack). For two clips of the episode — on being your dad’s wingman as a kid, and the dark secrets that Catholic families often carry — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: his dad’s serious injury at Normandy; emulating leading men in Hollywood; selling women’s handbags; his extreme vanity and obsession with scents; “the first metrosexual”; women flocking to him; making Tom complicit in his countless affairs; how men benefitted from the early Sexual Revolution more than women; Vatican II; Tom’s close relationship with his Catholic mom; Tom fearing his dad; the friends who worshipped him like a celebrity; hiding his Brooklyn accent; hiding extreme porn and dildos in his briefcase that Tom found; sadomasochism and bondage; dad’s sleeping with both Zsa Zsa and Ava Gabor; a mystery mistress who spoke at his dad’s funeral; Tom’s grandmother who was a notorious adulteress in the press who pimped out Tom’s dad and his aunt; and the challenge of writing my own memoir.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. We have some real stars coming up: Tiffany Jenkins on privacy in a liberal democracy, Adrian Wooldridge on “the lost genius of liberalism,” Jerusalem Demsas on the state of the left, Ben Rhodes on Iran and speech-writing, Harvey Mansfield on modernity, Daniel McCarthy on conservatism, HW Brands on the life of George Washington, John Gray on Trump’s new world, Bob Wright on the evolutionary force of AI, Stephen Grosz on the struggles of love, and Robby George on pretty much everything. Here’s a fan looking forward to HW Brands:

His Founding Partisans was one of the best books I ever read! With the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, that is the book that should be talked about and read by everyone.

That’s what we were thinking. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com. From a big fan of last week’s episode on free speech:

Thank you, thank you for having the great Greg Lukianoff on the pod.

FIRE is one of only two nonprofits that get my money. I don’t know how many other small donors they have, but I sure hope conversations like this one inspire more Americans who love their country to start giving. I’m doubling my donation today after listening to your conversation. Tell Greg if he needs volunteers to do research or review things, this recovering lawyer would be proud to donate some time as well.

I agree. With the ACLU now an enemy of free speech, FIRE is a lifesaver. From another listener:

When you and Lukianoff were discussing how students often “shout down” guest speakers they disagree with, I thought of Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins:

Students are, if the truth be known, a bad lot. En masse they’re as fickle as a mob, manipulable by any professor who’ll stoop to it. They have, moreover, an infinite capacity for repeating dull truths and old lies with insistence of self-discovery. Nothing is more dreary than the ideology of students. ... Kids now don’t have the sense enough to know what they don’t know ... Who can tell them who’s right? Students are a shaky dogmatic lot and the “freer” they are, the more dogmatic.

Percy FTW! Here’s a dissent over something I wrote on the pod page last week:

When talking about potentially debating Sam Harris, you referred to Haviv Rettig Gur as an “Israeli dead-ender.” What do you mean by this? Haviv is a super insightful, thoughtful columnist and podcaster, who in my experience never shies away from criticizing Israel or its government. Just last week he wrote an article in The Free Press about the problem of right-wing extremism in Israel.

I don’t think having a discussion with an Israeli would change your opinions, but as I’ve mentioned multiple times, I do think it would be beneficial to hear from (and ask all your tough questions to) someone who lives there and is extremely familiar with the history of the region. I appreciate that you’re willing to publish dissents about Israel each week, but I don’t understand your hesitation to speak with people who actually live there.

FWIW, I don’t think it’s accurate to call Haviv a “dead-ender” — if by that you mean a “lost cause” in his support of Israel or someone who won’t say every single thing Israel does is wrong/bad. One of the key points he often makes is that Western critics view Israel through a simplistic, ideological lens, treating it as a “moral cartoon” rather than considering its complexity — from both an Israeli and Palestinian perspective. I think if you’re willing to debate Sam on this topic, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be open to talking with Haviv too.

The only problem with this is that I’ve read Gur, and his pose of moderation and reasonableness is just that. Take the piece you cite. Here’s its take on the settler movement in the first paragraph: the problem for Gur is that they “are causing Israel a large and growing headache.” He goes on: “To understand the problems that some settlers are causing Israel …”

Think about that formulation for a moment. The settler movement is at the heart of the Israeli government; its victims are objectively not Israelis, but Arabs who are being subjected to pogroms, violence, murder, arson, and terrorism — protected by the IDF and Netanyahu’s vile cabinet. But for Gur, it’s a PR problem. That’s the position of the Netanyahu government.

Of these murderous racists and religious fundamentalists, Gur writes this:

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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.)

Highlights from this week’s write-up:

• A dangerous rapper who converted to Orthodox Judaism in prison

• Stingless bees that keep their honey in pots

• Skeletons and skulls calcified into a cave

• A thumb-stealing goblin

• “You can buy this week’s hot spring!”

Our super-sleuth in Eagle Rock floats an idea:

Could WindowSwap be a new angle for the contest?

Always open to creative new angles. Our super-sleuth in College Park sends a view candidate I recognized instantly — because I’ve spent countless hours inside the window’s building (mostly doing the Dish):

Here’s a VFYW for an audience of one — Andrew. It’s a view out of the side door of the public library in Provincetown:

Here’s the circled window — on the side entrance door:

I hadn’t been to P-town in at least 35 years, since my graduate school days. I passed by the Atlantic House bar, which I’d visited illis temporibus, and it seemed appropriate to pay respects, since we were staying in the Atlantic House hotel in Narragansett. We also passed by Titcomb’s Book Shop in East Sandwich, from which I had previously bought a book only once before. I supported P-town arts by buying a print from Julie Tremblay’s gallery.

Anyway, our normal place in the OBX was closed for renovation over my spring break and it was a pleasure to head northeast for a change. I’m sorry not to have participated in most of the recent contests. I did look very earnestly for Bridgeport, CA, but foundered because I was convinced the site was in the Rockies, not the Sierras. Agh. So while I will not take credit for solutions without effort, I will still confess abjectly to my failures!

Andrew, Truman, and I will be heading up to Ptown for our annual road-trip soon. Here’s our super-sleuth who’s an architect in NYC:

Thanks for emailing me the video of the tallest building in each state. Very interesting.

Back in 2014, after my daughter and I climbed to the top of the tallest building on five of the continents, we toyed with the idea of climbing the tallest building in each state. After checking out a few online, we decided against it for two reasons. The logistics of getting permission for each building would be overwhelming. Also, as the video shows, many if not most of the buildings aren’t all that interesting.

I was curious, though, if someone has done it. I looked it up and it turns out last June someone finally did. Here’s the video:

The guy is insane; it appears he ran up and then down the stairs. We just walked up and took the elevator down.

From a VFYW newcomer:

Might as well use my time in the spotlight to plug my new substack, LoveMind. It was inspired by reading Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s books on brain lateralization and how it affects consciousness, and applying his insights to my own experience as a Zen priest and trainee in interfaith chaplaincy. I think this understanding explains the difference between Christians and Christianists — as one example pertinent to Dish readers. See this post or the About page for a flavor of what it’s about.

Sleuths are always encouraged to highlight their own substacks. From a fan of the VFYW:

I’ve re-upped my Dish subscription and now remember why I gave it up: I forgot what a fun time-suck the VFYW can be. If I give myself more than 15 minutes on this damn game, my husband will divorce me.

You can join her by subscribing here — to enjoy the full contest write-ups, the full Dishcast episodes, and the rest of the full Dish offerings.

On to this week’s view, here’s the beginning of the entry from our super-sleuth in Sherman Oaks:

Good thing I upgraded the memory on my computer from 16 Gb to 32 in order for it to handle all the tabs the Chrome browser has open while I worked to solve this VFYW.

At first glance I felt it’s a Caribbean view, with its brightly colored buildings. The building in the foreground had green and yellow stripes, which made me look at Jamaica. The big yellow building across the water with maybe “HOODIES” written on it was a good starting point. The VFYW looks across a body of water like a river or a bay, so that helped narrow my search. No luck though.

I kept looking around the Bahamas and Dominican Republic, which had either sparse city-scapes or large mountains in the background. Still nothing.

He eventually got there. So did Chini:

Next up is a sleuth on the Correct Guesser list (for those who have guessed the right window before but lost the tiebreaker):

I was able to identify the city and the building, but without Google Street View, I can’t get to the window ... but I guess all the VFYW contestants are in the same boat! Tough one, so I hope I’m close enough to win!

The key searches here were from this zoom:

As in a previous submission (for the contest in Guatemala City), the banking system came to my rescue: Atlantic Bank.

That entry continues below. But first, our super-sleuth in Sydney notes, “Love the sign that says ‘Brodies’ (it’s a supermarket) … my son’s name is Brody!” Berkeley is less thrilled:

What kind of twisted game are you playing, Chris? Two tropical contests in a row with no Street View?! Okay, not absolutely zero Street View, but the few little blue dots scattered around on both locations’ maps weren’t much help.

From our super-sleuth in Yakima:

The white building behind Brodie’s shoulder turns out to sport the logo of Atlantic Bank, whose network is considerably narrower than its name implies — 14 branches, all in [country redacted].

The map was misleading, sending me on a fruitless search to the north for our window. I finally figured out Brodies is east of the bank branch. Even though [city redacted] mostly lacks Street View, Wikipedia has a photo of the nearby Bliss Center for Performing Arts that matches the building just right of Brodies in the view, confirming our rough location is east across the bay:

From our super-sleuth in San Mateo:

The clues this week are manifold, if insufficient: a yellow building with a BRODIES sign; a white building with an “Atlantic ???” sign and triangular logo (the Atlantic Bank); a yellow building with a “The B???” sign (“The BLISS”); and a bus with “Blackbird” and “WITC___” signs (WITCON). All the clues in your photos point to [city redacted], likely near the downtown/waterfront area. But still not enough for me to confidently identify the vantage point.

Identifying the “Blackbird” is our super-sleuth in Raleigh:

It’s been such a long time that I almost forgot how to submit one of these. I’ve had a crummy semester, which has been marred by big cheating scandals in both of my classes. So, I have spent almost all of my free time since the beginning of March trying to deal with this and I’m still not finished.

I had a break on Friday night and I decided to give the contest photo a look. After doing the usual enlargements, I found a few clues — one of which led me to directly to the location of the window view. In the grass lot in the forefront of the picture, there is a resort van from The Blackbird Caye resort in [redacted]. It’s on a small island across the bay, so that is where I figured our view is from.

Our super-sleuth in Brookland gets crafty:

Figuring out that this is [country redacted] was at once tricky but straightforward, and it required careful examination of the full resolution photo. (I can’t imagine doing this on a phone!) After false starts with Brodies (the palm trees indicated it wasn’t the Brodies in Salem, MA) and trying to figure out what “Atlantic Ba___” might be (turns out it’s Atlantic Bank, and I’ll bet that a bunch of entrants used this clue to find this place), I noticed a bit of scarcely legible writing on the van. Playing with the Levels command in my photo viewer revealed the following:

We aren’t looking at the Blackbird Resort, which is on Turneffe Atoll, but once I got to [country redacted], everything fell into place.

The right country is revealed by our super-sleuth in Chicagoland, who hasn’t participated much in the VFYW this year:

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Greg is a lawyer, journalist, and author. He’s also the president of FIRE — the best free-speech group out there. His books include The Coddling of the American Mind (written with Jonathan Haidt), The Canceling of the American Mind (written with Rikki Schlott), and War On Words (written with Nadine Strossen). You can find him on Substack at The Eternally Radical Idea.

An auto-transcript is available above (just click “Transcript” while logged into Substack). For two clips of our convo — on whether Biden or Trump has been worse on free speech, and how to decrease wokeness on campus — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: his Russian dad’s 100th birthday the day we taped; how he fled the Soviets as an orphan and came to America speaking 7 languages; his British mom coming over as a nanny; growing up among immigrants in Danbury as both a football player and nerd; studying 1st Amendment law at Stanford; the wane of gifted-and-talented programs (which Greg once taught); the declining support for free speech; family breakdown and protecting kids from bad speech; the perils of social media; race wars on X; censorship against porn and age-restriction laws; where Greg disagrees with Jon Haidt; free speech as a form of bullying; Nick Fuentes; how banning people from X increases groupthink; Jon Rauch; sex changes for kids; gay promiscuity; Covid censorship; AI worries; the killing of Charlie Kirk; the infamous Larry Bushart case; the Ozturk case; Rubio’s anti-speech crusade against immigrants; Israel and BDS; antisemitism on campus; heckling vs shout-downs; viewpoint diversity; the FCC and Carr; jawboning and merger threats; the Ellisons; Trump threatening law firms; “hate” crimes; mass arrests in UK over speech; the Varsity Blues cheating scandal; and South Park.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Tom Junod on his dad and masculinity, Jerusalem Demsas on the state of the left, Tiffany Jenkins on privacy in a liberal democracy, Adrian Wooldridge on “the lost genius of liberalism,” HW Brands on the life of George Washington, Ben Rhodes on Iran, Harvey Mansfield on modernity, John Gray on Trump’s new world, and Robby George on everything. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Here’s a review of the Dishcast from a new paid subscriber:

Great guests. Thorny questions. No answers. Keep up the good work!

On last week’s episode with Jeffrey Toobin on the pardon power, a listener writes:

Thanks for the very interesting conversation.

My dissent here has to do with the brief discussion at the very end about the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision. I was a bit surprised by the ease with which you and Toobin dismissed this as benefiting Trump and Trump alone, on the rationale that the only reason that Trump was prosecuted after leaving office was because he was the only president who had merited being prosecuted.

As you are someone who has written many times on the parallels between the twilight days of the Roman Republic and the current American situation, you of all people should know that politically motivated prosecution of Roman magistrates for whatever they had done during their term of office was commonplace — very often for “offenses” that were offensive only to their political opponents. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he had been put into just such a situation: faced with enemies who refused to negotiate, he could either give up his command and come back to Rome to face political prosecution and very likely death or exile, or bring the fight to them.

The specter of post-term prosecution highly incentivized holding on to consular or proconsular office (with its attendant immunity) for as long as possible. Is it really hard to see how a similar dynamic could play out in the US — party politics being so absolutely toxic — if the door were open for the previous president to be prosecuted every time the office changed parties? That isn’t to say that the immunity decision was necessarily the right one — just that I think it deserves a bit more consideration than you and Toobin seem to be allowing it.

Points well taken. Another has a suggestion:

Why doesn’t the government instigate a safety check, where any pardon must be agreed to by a majority of the Senate? That way any senator who’s going to run again can be held accountable for a pardon issued by a president who is walking out the door with no future accountability. I somehow doubt all J6 convicts would have been pardoned for serious crimes committed at the Capitol.

Some accountability is needed — or it’s a hole below the waterline of the rule of law. Another listener sends “a poem for you regarding your Derek Thompson conversation about human need”:

I’ve been reading and listening for a while, so thanks for all the thought provoking conversations. Just wanted to share with you a poem I wrote over 30 years ago, when all this stuff of modernity was starting to be troubling, confusing. I’ve lived alone now for a good many years, and I — like everyone I guess — continue to find ways to be needed.

P.S. My grandfather was the 17th of 18 children. They lived on a farm deep in Oklahoma Territory, where every kid was needed for something.

NEED

How do we find a way to need each other, now
That there are no fertile fields to plow?
No bread to be baked from our own wheat?
No herds to drive?
No sheaves to be sheaved?
You do not need to fill my womb
With a dozen sons, strong-backed, strong-armed,
To shoe the horse,
To fence the farm.
What do I do so joyfully freed
From that place that still longs to need your need?

In truth, there’s little too heavy for me to lift.
Most things I can hoist and place with some sweat and strain.
I know a Crescent from a Phillips now.
Don’t laugh.
I do.
But if I lie and pretend I don’t
When you offer to come by
And fix the stove, carburetor, chimney flue,
It’s to let you find a way for me to need you
That you can give,
Because that’s the kind of giving you were made to do.

An earthquake shook my house one night so hard
That plaster, brick and mortar rained all round.
Ceilings cracked, beams twisted, and great shards
Of glass fell, mixed with wine and ash.
Doors unlocked, swung free unhelped,
As if by the hand of the Holy Ghost himself.

The sun rose. Smoke cleared the air,
I smiled at the shock of grey in my hair.
I never felt so steady,
Yet ready to be held.
How do we need each other now?
Foundations shifted, aquifers’ course changed,
How do we find the source again?
What tools do we use to dig and fill that well?

Here’s a guest rec:

As a long-time subscriber and an international environmental lawyer, I’m worried about a creeping climate-skepticism finding its way into your restacks. Before celebrating our collective corporate and governmental retreat from clean energy ambitions, sit down with Bill McKibben — or any other sober environmentalist (there are many) — talk through the science (and its gaps; I swear we know about them), refresh yourself on policy pathways, and grapple with many strong arguments that favour unwinding our dependence on fossil fuels. After all, conservatives and conservationists are only ever a suffix apart!

I’m still a big believer in non-carbon energy; my concerns are solely about the transition and avoiding shortages that discredit the whole endeavor. Bill is an old acquaintance, and we featured his work frequently on the old blog.

From a reader on last week’s column, “And Augustine Wept”:

You have written so many columns I have admired, and my favorite had been one you wrote some years ago, “This Is What a Tyrant Looks Like,” comparing Trump to Shakespeare’s Richard III. This new one tops it — just extraordinary.

Another writes:

Excellent piece. I’m wondering what you think of the US decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan, and what you think Augustine or Niebuhr would say?

A very tough one. I don’t think just-war theory would allow for it: mass extermination would have horrified Augustine. We know what Niebuhr thought. In his essay on the bombing, he wrote:

We reached the level of Nazi morality in justifying the use of the bomb on the ground that it shortened the war … the bomb was merely the culmination of our own strategy of total war, involving the use of ever more powerful obliteration bombing and incendiarism.

“Nazi morality.” Another reader:

You’ve repeatedly written how “any remaining serious nuclear threat had been ‘obliterated’ last year” to show that the war is aimless and unnecessary. Perhaps the Trump administration was lying about obliterating the nuclear sites and therefore the nuclear threat is still present? He obviously lies every time he opens his mouth, and early reports also claimed the nuclear program was not obliterated, but set back. So, if the nuclear threat is still present, then I could see that as a rational reason for the war. But what makes that argument dubious is that the Trump administration never made it — instead, they threw a bunch of other reasons at the wall to see what would stick.

Indeed. A war president who lies every time he opens his mouth cannot properly conduct a war. Here’s a dissent:

You captioned a quote from JD Vance by writing that he “converted to Catholicism about five minutes ago.” Come now, Andrew; whatever one might think of Vance, the tendency for people to cite his being a Catholic convert as some kind of failing ought to be beneath you.

When I converted to Catholicism, after 20 years as an Anglican, I took John Henry Newman as my Confirmation Saint. Perhaps an imperfect analogy (my theological gifts are few), but the Church — the barque for all humanity — does not teach that converts are forever second best. I’m sure you’ve disagreed with any number of popes about any number of things over the years and, toasting first to conscience, your right to do so is not predicated on your being a cradle Catholic.

Fair enough. It was uncharitable. My snark was simply because Newman didn’t immediately tell the Pope to be careful in pronouncing on morals. Vance has some chutzpah.

Next up, an expert on Iran urges me to “give war in the Middle East a second chance”:

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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.)

Highlights from this week’s write-up:

• A country with more native tongues than any other

• The largest butterfly on Earth and the world’s only poisonous bird

• Mesmerizing mollusks

• A library that floats around the ocean

• A proximity guess wins the prize this week — 8,100 miles from the window, which might the the farthest in VFYW history.

From the winner of our most recent contest, in Denver:

Yay! Thanks for selecting my entry. The book would be great.

Here’s the runner-up from that contest:

Noooooooo!

Ah well, I’ll just try to get it before another 16 years goes by? For now I’ll stick to sharing my own windows — like from yesterday’s Good Friday ice storm here in Iron Mountain, MI:

And thank you for publishing Dick’s story last week; he will be so pleased!

Hi to Dick! Here’s a longtime local of the latest city:

Thanks for the encyclopedic riffs on Denver in contest #502 — even if some of the more obvious large public artworks to rival “The Big Sweep” (giant broom and dustpan at the Denver Art Museum) were MIA, notably “Big Blue Bear,” which peeks benignly through the tall windows of the Colorado Convention Center downtown:

Not to mention what we call the “dancing aliens” boogying nearby outside the Denver Performing Arts Complex:

Any passing mention of Wynkoop Brewing Co. (for its the Heisman-posing simian) that fails to note its distinction as Colorado’s first brewpub is kinda flat and skunky — which is not how Wynkoop’s signature Rail Yard Ale tastes. And, oh yeah: the brewery was founded back in the 1980s by a laid-off mining geologist named John Hickenlooper (aka Hick, or to a few, J-Loop). Hick went on to become Denver’s mayor and is now one of our two US senators. Although he no longer owns the place, Wynkoop’s remains an original anchor of the revitalization of Denver’s old skid-row quarter in Lower Downtown. (And yes, we’ve called it LoDo ever since.)

Finally, a small correction to your “local animal report”: Nee Noshe Reservoir — where that bald eagle sent all those thousands of Snow Geese into the sky — is NOT “about an hour south of Denver,” unless you’re traveling by plane. (Good luck finding a place to land!) We Coloradans who enjoy the state’s uncommonly abundant birdlife (for an interior state with no coastline) know that Nee Noshe and its companion reservoirs north of the Arkansas River Valley in southeastern Colorado are THREE hours south of Denver, give or take five minutes. So if you’re a birder and want to enjoy spring migration (now through the end of May) in that very “birdy” corner of the state, plan travel times accordingly.

Despite picking nits, I remain a fervent fan of the VFYW. Thanks for enlivening our Fridays, and thanks for the fine shoutout to the Queen City of the Plains (before Mile High City became the slogan) and the Centennial State (Colorado’s 150th anniversary of statehood is August 1).

Another beer-related followup — plus a small clue for this week’s view — comes from our CO/NJ super-sleuth:

I hope you had a happy Easter and a relaxing week off work. I really enjoyed the sleuths’ stories about my childhood home city of Denver, and I even learned many things. Of the things I did know, the Ft. Collins super-sleuth’s recommendation of the Westbound and Down brewery was spot on. We frequent the original Idaho Springs location, usually hitting it on our drive back to Summit County after a trip from Denver or the airport. They produce consistently great beer. In fact, as I am typing this, I am drinking one of their products:

Serendipitously, this particular beer — a New Zealand IPA from a Colorado brewery — serves as a link between last week’s contest and this one, since this week we are rather close to New Zealand (maybe not in absolute distance, but certainly in geographic regionality).

Yet another followup comes from our super-sleuth in Indy (who crafts the weekly report on a local band):

I wanted to comment on Eagle Rock’s memory of Denver and his interesting story about the Dandy Warhols. I mentioned the band in a 2023 contest (Hong Kong) and their ongoing feud with Brian Jonestown Massacre. There’s a documentary about it called Dig!, and you will see the crazy in both bands:

I’m sure that experiencing a band in the way Eagle Rock did can certainly change your opinion. That’s why I don’t always like to go too deeply into some musicians. It’s better just to listen to their music. (FWIW, I like the Dandy Warhols.)

Next up, our “a-maize-ing sleuth” in Oklahoma City has a “quick reaction to Sagaponack’s mural from the latest contest”:

Its graceful curves framed the scenes and gave them order, just like the parapet at the rooftop terrace of the Denver Art Museum gathered the sky and city into a single cradle, all in Libeskind’s style:

And the many distant views of the Rockies in the contest reminded me of the Front Range, seen from a roadside pullout on Route 67 near Cripple Creek, looking westward in a November morning of 2024:

I like the long, serrated procession of the snowy peaks, not entirely regular, but laid one next to another as if by a confident, rhythmic hand. Say, the right hand of Bob Ross. I can imagine him saying, “You need the dark in order to show the light.” Or “It’s so important to do something every day that will make you happy.”

I am not sure about every day, but doing the VFYW puzzle every Saturday does make me happy. Thanks Chris!

Thanks goes to the sleuths! Here’s the super one in Augusta:

Summer Greetings! (No spring here in the South — straight to summer for us!) Apologies to those who never want to see snow ever again, but I’m already counting down to next winter. Hope you had a restful break (and that things are going better for you).

Even with the extra week, I haven’t been able to find any time for sleuthing, but I was delighted to open the most recent View and see all the mentions of the Denver International Airport, since it has got to be the most random place on earth to ever have so many conspiracy theories surrounding it. Places like Stonehenge or Area 51, sure — but a public airport?

I first encountered the DIA lore in this 2011 Anderson Cooper segment featuring the “Third Eagle of the Apocalypse” and his groundbreaking investigation into the secret agenda of ... uh, Big Phallus?

The “Co-Prophet of the End Times” noticed Mr. Cooper noticing him, which then led to this video, as well as this one. Let’s hope no one ever tells this guy about Bhutan!

Also, I can’t believe the VFYW landed in Colorado without anyone trying to blatantly pander to you by referencing South Park. So to remedy that, may I present Hello Kitty Island Adventure, a 2023 casual lifestyle sim (think Animal Crossing, but with Sanrio’s classic characters) by Boulder-based developers Sunblink Entertainment — which induced a strong sense of déjà vu in all those who recalled the classic 2006 episode “Make Love, Not Warcraft”:

No such game existed, but since it was so immediately evocative of a particular genre of game, it quickly became a meme that was acknowledged by Sanrio itself (although upon the actual game’s release, the company was very quick to emphasize that it was completely unaffiliated with South Park and contained no crossover content whatsoever). I’m sure Butters pre-ordered it twice!

Butters always brightens my day. Here’s belated commemoration of contest #500 from our Alaskan globetrotter (who crafts an ecotourism report every week):

If I were to reflect on 500+ weeks of the VFYW, I’d say its greatest pleasures are the opportunities to learn esoterica about an astonishing diversity of places. When I occasionally divulge that my major in college was human geography, I recognize that people probably think I can recite capitals — but I no longer try to explain my interest in “where” with an academic spiel. I just tell them about the contest. Each week it holds my interest as I try to suss out the clues that make a place distinct and the window findable; researching an adventure one might take if you got dropped there; and most of all, getting exposure to the vast array of odd facts, stories, and associations that others bring in the Reveal. Truly a geographer’s playground.

On to this week’s view, here’s the beginning of the entry from our super-sleuth in Brookland:

Surveying the photo, the first thing that struck me were the red satellite dishes: surely, this must get us at least to the right country! Alas, red satellite dishes are much more common worldwide than I would have guessed.

I really wish I was better at tree identification, but at the very least, I can say that palm trees mean somewhere tropical. And judging by the terrain here, it has to be somewhere mountainous as well.

A sleuth in La Jolla seizes upon a big clue:

Feels like tropical Latin America. At first I thought Rio de Janeiro, but “PLAZA” is Spanish, not Portuguese. Medellin, Colombia? Backup guess is San Jose, Costa Rica, but really this could be one of dozens of hilly cities in South America.

Our super-sleuth in Austin also focused on the sign:

Good contest this week. The big clue was the “PLAZA” signage visible on the condo tower. I recognized the font as the same from the hotel chain CROWNE PLAZA. Knowing we were in a hilly, tropical area — and likely near the ocean, given the balconies on the other buildings all facing the same direction — I was able to locate the CROWNE PLAZA residences in [city redacted] after only a bit of searching.

He’s right about the ocean, as Chini reveals here:

From a previous winner in London:

Not a picture (I think ) of somewhere in the USA (hurrah!) — which opens the field to those, such as me, who live elsewhere. My initial thoughts were the south of France, where I had many fabulous holidays as a youth). Then I realised the vegetation was too lush, so I thought of St Lucia — again a great holiday — although I was nearly booted out on arrival, as our travel agent took our money six months earlier but conveniently forgot to pass it on. The agent and I had a full and frank conversation that night.

But I eventually I settled on Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago, specifically the Cascade area. A lot of topography clues. Opting for a hotel, I think I have narrowed it to the Hilton Trinidad Conference centre. The possible window is marked with an X:

Little I can input on the country, except I know that it qualified for the 2006 football World Cup (soccer, to those in the USA). It was then the smallest nation (both in size and population) to qualify.

A sleuth in Toronto is also looking in the Caribbean:

Time is short this week, so I’m just going to throw this out there: Castries, St. Lucia, only because I’ve been there a few times and this looks very familiar.

From a first-time sleuth:

I saw the latest view and here’s my guess: Istanbul, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. It could be Acibadem or else Bugurlu — which is not a name to pronounce during a meal.

Heh. The Intrepid Couch Traveler throws a dart:

So after extensive research, focused mainly on the color of the satellite dishes, I have narrowed our location down tremendously. I have determined it is coming from only one of the seven continents. It only took me half an hour to eliminate Antarctica as a possibility. The rest took longer.

But it appears the dishes are from Claro TV. And thank God they are not a global company — merely a continental one, across large parts of South America.

But then, despite two weeks to solve this one, I somehow ran out of time. So, time for the patented Intrepid Couch Traveler dart, which landed on São Paulo, Brazil:

Our super-sleuth in Riverwoods has a WAG for Matagalpa, Nicaragua:

This was a tough one for me and I am out of time. I got as far as the red satellite dishes likely being from the satellite provider Claro. The problem is they operate in 18 Latin American countries — too many to search easily. And neither the Plaza sign nor the colorful water collection arrangement on the roof helped me either. So I threw in the towel this week.

Our super-sleuth in Alexandria gets to the right region:

I’m guessing this window is somewhere in Ipoh, Cameron Highlands, Malaysia. I have zero proof, except that I want it to be that place :) The buildings and vegetation kind of look like it, but it’s a stretch.

My husband and I spent a fun and memorable week there in 1990: spectacular birding, hiking, drinking tea, enjoying the cool temperatures, and not enjoying the terrifying bus rides. It was great! We then hopped an overnight train in Kuala Lumpur and got off at Singapore for a few days ... then on to Bali.

So fun to be in your 20s with no schedule, no job, no reservations, and nowhere to be … no money, too, but that also was pretty fun. Thanks for the memories!

Thanks for sharing! Our super-sleuth on the UWS names the right country and city:

Hope you had a restorative week off! I’m here at the last minute (again) with little to show for it (again). Too many things going on: that’s my sad excuse!

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Jeff is a lawyer and a contributing opinion writer for the NYT, after a long run at The New Yorker and CNN. He has written many bestselling books, including True Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Oath, The Nine, and Too Close to Call. He appeared on the Dishcast in 2024 to talk lawfare, and in this episode we discuss his latest book, The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy.

We recorded this episode a while back, and we’re posting it this week after Trump promised mass pardons for White House staffers before he leaves office. For two clips of our convo — on Biden’s corrupt pardons, and Trump’s obscene pardons — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: how pardons can be a beautiful act of mercy; the varying powers among the states; Lincoln’s amnesty for Confederate soldiers but not leaders; Andrew Johnson’s pardon for Jefferson Davis; Johnson’s impeachment; the thousand pardons of Rutherford B Hayes; Ford pardoning Nixon; Jimmy Carter pardoning resisters to the Vietnam War; the Willie Horton furlough and ad; HW’s pardons for Iran-Contra; Clinton pardoning his own brother and Marc Rich; Dubya’s refusal to pardon Scooter Libby against Cheney’s wishes; Dubya advising Obama to have a set protocol; Trump pardoning crooks like Charles Kushner and Paul Manafort who could have testified against him; the blanket pardon of January 6ers; Kim Kardashian’s role in Trump’s pardons; the ICE killings in Minneapolis; and the need for presidents with some basic virtue.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Greg Lukianoff on free-speech fights, Jerusalem Demsas on the state of the left, Tiffany Jenkins on privacy in a liberal democracy, Adrian Wooldridge on “the lost genius of liberalism,” HW Brands on the life of George Washington, Ben Rhodes on foreign policy, and Tom Junod on his dad and masculinity. As always, please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a returning paid subscriber:

I subscribed last year but let it lapse recently — not as a protest on your war stance, but because I have so many other subscriptions. But listening to your Tom Holland episode reminded me of how much I value the conversations you share. So I’m back. Plus, I missed the value-add on the weekly column.

A dissenter writes, “Up front: I love your writing, and I’m an atheist”:

Tom Holland has a lovely turn of phrase and one of those deep knowledge banks that makes you proud to be a fan. I loved the conversation, but I found your takeaways infuriating. You both acknowledge the importance of empathy, but credit yourselves this quality, when, in fact, your elite fantasies shine through. Historically, the mass of people were ignorant, chronically fucked from subsistence endeavours, and, when occasionally forced to contemplate the divine, shit-scared.

I would argue that even in America, the bulk of Christians are just cultural and political. Given the choice between “finding a deeper meaning in life” or making a better living, most would choose the latter. Your plaintive musings on you missing out on peak, rapturous Christianity were, I’m afraid, quite pathetic. You can’t really mean that you would have preferred to have been born in the 13th century? Let me guess: in this alternative history, gay sex is just fine?

The intellectual aspects of Christian faith are fascinating and clearly fundamental to Western society, but I think that the difficulty of accessing the experiences of the “common people” obscures the negligible role it played in day-to-day life. In other words, it’s only people like you, Andrew, who get to think about religion in the way you do.

You should have met my grandmother. Another writes, “Thank you for this interview, and thank you for not talking about Trump (much)”:

I love Tom Holland’s description of “you’ll always have the poor.” Spot on, and it emphasizes my recent musings on God and Jesus. I started reading through the Bible in chronological order in a year during Covid. (I’m now doing my sixth year.) I was bowled over with the epiphany that the God of the Old Testament is not, as most peripheral Christians say, an angry God. The Old Testament God is an utter pushover. Time after time after time, he forgives, tries again, and falls back in love with his people, sometimes against his better judgment (or at least mine).

Then I get to the New Testament and that man, Jesus, is terrifying in his electrifying responses: he cuts people off, dismisses fools, demands impossible perfection, shows breathtaking kindness to a stranger and then ends it with, “go and sin no more” with a strident finality. His love is more like a bracing slap in the face or jump into an icy lake. He is reliable only in his ability to shock.

But every time I find him inscrutable, I recognize the problem is probably mine. Most of all, together, the OT God and NT God form the most perfect answer to my deepest longings.

By the way, if you interview Fleming Rutledge (whom Holland recommended), my head would explode — in a good way. Do it!

Def on the list. Another suggests a topic for the pod:

I’ve been a longtime reader of your columns since we met at Haverford College some years back when you were on a book tour for The Conservative Soul. I remember we discussed Plato, as I was then studying classics and went on to write a thesis on Political Eros in Athens in the 5th century.

Many have compared Trump to Nero, but there are apt comparisons to Alcibiades (and his own brand of populism) — though the logical extension of this comparison to include both Socrates and Roy Cohn makes me shudder at the thought. I wanted to thank you for bearing witness to the madness of this era and all the ways in which it has been derailed by Trumpian populism and left-wing excesses. Your interviews with the many guests of the Dishcast give me hope that there are still those who tend the sacred flame of Eleutheria and Aletheia.

That being said, I wanted to recommend a topic that has been hovering in the background for a while now, but few in the mainstream press dare cover it with any seriousness.

Let me start with a story: I was enjoying a glass of red wine with a friend in my parents’ backyard in New Jersey pre-pandemic. The sun was setting and we were looking at the sky and noticed three lights hanging in the dusk in a triangle formation that looked somewhat out of place. I got up to go into the house to grab binoculars, and as I was going into the house, the lights scattered in three separate directions like shooting stars. Now, I’ve seen shooting stars and satellites — and these three lights were neither. It seemed as if the lights knew we were trying to observe them more closely; the timing of their “departure” was uncanny.

I was only dimly aware of the subject of UFOs/UAPs, since my childhood fascination about the topic gave way to adult skepticism. This was after the NYT piece by Leslie Kean but before the wave of sightings surrounding the Chinese spy balloon shot down during the Biden years, as well as the New Jersey drones closer to the 2024 election. The story only got weirder when a former spy and two retired airmen went in front of Congress making all sorts of wild claims:

You may be thinking I’ve lost my mind (and I probably have; it’s hard not to these days), but without trying to sound like a snob, I work in investment banking in NYC and have an MBA from NYU and a wife and a cat and a baby on the way, so I’m far from being a tinfoil hat wearer. You could also ask Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds regarding the language in the 2023 NDAA. Reasonable people see things they cannot explain all the time, and I’d love it if you could mention this the next time you speak with Sam Harris, or if you were to invite a guest on the pod like Gary Nolan, David Grusch, or Chris Mellon.

As far as what “the phenomenon” is, my own private hunch is that we are being surveilled by an AI system of extra-planetary origin.

My brother keeps nagging me on this as well, and he is at least marginally sane. I’ve not known what to say, to be honest. But maybe I can find someone who does.

Here’s a dissent over the Dishheads pushing to get Sam Harris on the pod to debate Israel:

Sadly, you cannot count me among the Sullivan-Harris crossover fans eager for an attempted conversation on the Israel-Gaza-Iran conflict. I think one of the reasons this is such a thorny topic is that there are some legitimately good points to be made on each side. But sorry to say, I have my doubts that even two of my favorite public thinkers/writers can truly tackle them. If it comes to fruition, though, I hope it can remain focused on those best, difficult-to-address arguments rather than many of the tempting side topics that would arise.

Harris, like many others supporting both the actions in Gaza as well as Iran, rightly notes that Israel faces an enemy dissimilar to any other in modern history.

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(The Dish is on Easter break and will return in full next Friday.)

Derek Thompson is a long-time writer at The Atlantic. His books include Hit Makers, On Work, and Abundance, which he co-wrote with Ezra Klein. Derek also has an excellent substack and hosts a podcast called “Plain English.”

This episode was recorded on March 17. An auto-transcript is available above (just click “Transcript” while logged into Substack). For two clips of our convo — on the impact of Abundance, and the difference between being alone and anti-social — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up near DC; theater his first love; the two of us trading stories of stage acting; pursuing journalism after 9/11; how writing has evolved in the 21st century; conspiracy theories online; AI creating doubt; strategizing the Abundance book; Virtually Normal; books as totems; blue vs red city governance; housing deregulation; “procedural fetish” vs Trumpian chaos; government spurring innovation; Derek’s piece “The Anti-Social Century”; OnlyFans; looking at smartphones in a gay bar; Kierkegaard; Camus; tradition as a ballast; meaning through limits; fatherhood; Hegseth reveling in dominance; Nietzsche; the tribalism of early humans; wokeness and the Trump cult; liquid modernity; consumerism replacing meaning; the fertility crisis; the growing dominance of Orthodox Jews in Israel; and Oakeshott and infinite games of non-winning.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Jeffrey Toobin on the pardon power, Tiffany Jenkins on privacy in a liberal democracy, Adrian Wooldridge on “the lost genius of liberalism,” HW Brands on the life of George Washington; Greg Lukianoff on free speech, and Tom Junod on his memoir and masculinity. As always, please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

A reader writes, “Just a few thoughts on a dreary Easter Sunday in Calgary”:

I read your latest column and have been chewing on the following line ever since: “One Trump term could be rationalized away by our friends and allies. Not two. This is America now.”

Europe has the luxury of turning away from America in the long term. Canada? Not so much. Despite our outward belligerence, we are simply too economically and militarily interdependent. We lack the internal resilience and unity required to make the sacrifices necessary to fully cut ties. I’m not happy about this. It’s just the reality as I see it; we don’t have the fortitude to engage in anything other than symbolic measures against an increasingly terrifying US. Those symbolic measures aren’t nothing, but they won’t be enough.

Which brings me to the timely question of renewal and rebirth. Christos Anesti!

How do we restore trust in this relationship after the fever has passed? What does “re-normalization” look like? My overwhelming sense is that Americans themselves don’t yet fully grasp how much damage has been done to these relationships — or they see Trump as so weird, ephemeral, and even funny that everything will settle into old norms once he’s passed. (And that doesn’t even address the fact that some of his critiques toward other countries, including Canada, are actually perfectly valid and correct.)

But, frankly, I think your assessment is correct. I don’t think you can just slide back into old patterns after two Trump administrations. There is something fundamentally dark at play in the American spirit, and until those demons are fully exorcised and addressed, there can be no real return to the old normal.

I get this sense even when I hear Democrats and liberals talk about Donald Trump — the “Good Guys” rightly outraged by his latest un-American obscenity. But what, specifically, do I hear them complain about? Gas prices. “No Kings.” Grocery bills. The complaints are all proximal and immediate to their everyday concerns. There is no sense of grander mission, nor of America’s — not just its exceptionalism, but also its special duty as leaders of the free world. I understand that isolationism comes and goes in historical waves in America but that, I think, is the problem.

Americans — not just their leaders, but the polity itself — need to decide whether or not they want to lead the free world. Until you all can answer that question for yourselves, there will be no end to these weird political paroxysms.

Just as there’s no exceptionalism without duty, the abrogation of duty will inevitably undermine the exception. America will remain dominant in culture and finance for my lifetime; but a world without American leadership in military, political, and (for lack of a better term) matters of deeper moral values, is a world that will be led by polities ready to take up that mantle. And I do not believe that is a better world for anyone — Americans least of all.

Me neither. A period of chastening may be necessary. But the Trump stain is ineradicable.

A listener writes, “Happy Easter — he is Risen!”

Thanks so much for the continued excellent podcast and weekly notes. It’s truly a highlight of my week.

I also want to endorse Tom Holland’s recommendation of Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion. Five years ago, when our second son was born, I felt a great stumbling block over the Bible verse, “He who knew no sin became sin that we might become his righteousness.” (2 Cor 5:21) How could this be? Isn’t Christ unchangeable? So as I held our newborn son on long naps in the rocking chair and on the couch, I read widely until I came to this magnificent book by Rutledge.

I am not quite sure Tom has it right that Rutledge views the crucifixion as simply a myth (though she is a bit more equivocal about the Devil perhaps being a force, or a being, or a negation), since she sure seems to emphasize that something did happen on the cross. The book wonderfully walks through all the deep motifs of how scripture talks about Christ’s horrendous death — a shameful death, and the closest modern analogue to lynching. From the scapegoat to Christus Victor to substitutionary atonement, the book is quite ecumenical in surveying the rich history of the Church. I cannot recommend it enough. Although my original question — how did Christ become sin? — was never quite answered, the book helped me understand what, if not how, all that was accomplished that day nearly two thousand years ago.

Let me close by also recommending the words of another tremendous writer, Frederick Buechner. From his book The Magnificent Defeat:

So what do I believe actually happened that morning on the third day after he died? I can tell you this: that what I believe happened and what in faith and with great joy I proclaim, is that he somehow got up, with life in him again, and the glory upon him. And I speak very plainly here, very unfancifully. He got up. He said, “Don’t be afraid.” Rich man, poor man, child; sick man, dying man; man who cannot believe, scared sick man, lost one. Young man with your life ahead of you. “Don’t be afraid.” […]

Anxiety and fear are what we know best in this fantastic century of ours. Wars and rumors of wars. From civilization itself to what seemed the most unalterable values of the past, everything is threatened or already in ruins. We have heard so much tragic news that when the news is good we cannot hear it.

But the proclamation of Easter Day is that all is well. And as a Christian, I say this not with the easy optimism of one who has never known a time when all was not well but as one who has faced the Cross in all its obscenity as well as in all its glory, who has known one way or another what it is like to live separated from God.

In the end, his will, not ours, is done. Love is the victor. Death is not the end. The end is life. His life and our lives through him, in him. Existence has greater depths of beauty, mystery, and benediction than the wildest visionary has ever dared to dream. Christ our Lord has risen.

Another writes:

I feel compelled to express my gratitude for all that you and Chris do to keep the Dish alive and kicking. I’m about to do some yard work and listen to you and Tom Holland. (And BTW, loved the pod with you and Jonah.) Even though it’s Saturday morning here in Central Texas, I want to say to you: Christ is Risen! Blessings to you and Chris, and thanks again.

Don’t forget Truman:

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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.)

Some highlights from this week’s write-up:

• Lots of sleuths entering the contest for the first time

• A bittersweet Titanic tale

• A demonic horse

• An impressive dude named Dick

• Bull testicles!

Here’s our super-sleuth in Prince George commenting on last week’s victor:

It was a literal LOL when I got to your naming of the winner last week! San Antonio, Texas, USA???? Congrats to the winner for a most unexpected (and entertaining) start to the next 500!

A long-lost sleuth — who’s only emailed once before, in 2010 — exclaims, “You quoted me in last week’s write-up!”

I got a kick out of seeing a few sentences from my entry for the Brookline contest in September 2010 (I’m the guy who said my girlfriend and I had our first hug on the sidewalk outside the building). Happy to report we’re still together and have two kids (ages 9 and 3). I haven’t entered a guess since then, but I still follow the contest every week and am starting to introduce it to our older daughter. Thanks for the walk down memory lane.

It’s always so awesome to hear from sleuths who have followed the contest for so many years, even if they rarely if ever participate. But watching is a form of participation!

Here’s another followup — from our resident ski nerd who writes our slopes report every week:

My turn to nerd out on the window location: the submitter of last week’s view from the Chūbu Rōsai Hospital said they were in room 621 and circled this window:

But the hospital’s floor plans show eight floors, so the circled window is on the 5th floor, not the 6th. Several of us circled windows on the floor above (the 6th floor).

It’s always tough to confirm whether a view submitter circles their own window accurately. A sleuth in Buffalo circles back to last week’s view:

I’ve been searching each week but have been very busy — between work and getting every cold or virus known to man! Last week I knew it was Japan and checked Osaka, because I’ve been there before. I looked for hotels with a viewing platform and found the exact same railing. Success! Except the satellite view had none of the buildings from the view.

Then food poisoning hit. I never sent an entry for Japan.

Here’s our super-sleuth in Austin (who used to do our cocktail column):

Before I get to my window entry, let me apologize for my lack of entries over the past few weeks. I’ve still been following the contest and finding the windows, but I procrastinate in writing up my entries, and before I know it, it’s Saturday morning. Since I retired my mixology column, I haven’t had a whole lot to add anyway, and you’ve definitely got your hands full with the impressive amount of entries you have to sift through and edit. (I still read the contest results voraciously.) I’m especially bummed that I missed out on the contest #500 recollections request, so I’m including my thoughts on what the VFYW has meant to me over the years.

I started my window sleuthing 13 years ago, in 2013. It was a bright spot in a bleak chapter of my life, when my marriage of 21 years was falling apart. My first successful window find was #171 (Fayetteville, Arkansas). My second find didn’t happen until four months later (#189, Phoenix), which shows how bad I was at it at first. My skills at finding the locations grew, and by the end of 2014, I was finding about half the windows each week — until I finally won the contest in October of that year (#226, Providence). The VFYW book has been on my coffee table ever since.

Like many of the other sleuths, the greatest things the contest has given me is that feeling of triumph at finally tracking down a difficult location. Digging for clues, deciphering barely legible text, scanning coastlines in Google Maps for hours until I find one distinctly shaped cove or marina. There’s no other feeling like it. It truly never gets old.

But looking back, what really stands out to me is how the contest results have transformed from a simple breakdown of wrong guesses, correct guesses, and choosing a winner to what it is today: a detailed wealth of historical, biological, and cultural knowledge about a specific place in the world. It’s so well done that I end up feeling like I’ve traveled to these locations myself. Our good friends were planning a skiing trip to Japan, staying in Hokkaido. I told them to check out Niseko (#362), describing the town like I had been there. The contest has made me much more worldly than my actual travels would indicate.

I went back through the archives to try to nail down the moment the vibe of the weekly results posts shifted from contest results to a collection of curated columns. There’s no bright line; when the column returned with the Weekly Dish in 2020, you included verses from the “VFYW Poet” in many of the entries. But it was #274 (Somerset Village, Bermuda) when you published the first postcard by A. Dishhead:

As a graphic designer, I appreciated the detail he (or she) put into it. The postcards kept coming and the column got longer and more diverse from then on, culminating in what we have today: reports of such varied and interesting subjects that I’m perpetually amazed by the amount of effort you put in every week. It’s astounding, appreciated, and treasured.

So grateful for that VFYW tribute. Another one comes from our super-sleuth in Ridgewood:

I wanted to chime in on the celebration of the 500th contest. It’s kind of funny how the contest has seeped into other parts of my life. For example, a friend of mine who lives in Philadelphia recently sent me a photo of their cat. From that I was able to pinpoint their exact address, which they found both simultaneously disturbing and impressive.

Here’s a multi-pronged followup from our “a-maize-ing sleuth” in Oklahoma City:

Thanks for last week’s write-up, and I realized I had an error: the current kanji for Nagoya is 名古屋, not 明古屋. The semantic meaning of the three characters is “Famous-Old-House,” but they sounded like “Nagoya” in Japanese.

I also have a quick followup on the Vancouver Convention Center (mentioned by the Brookline sleuth in contest #500). I saved a photo (seen below) from 2018, to show how nice the Canadians treat tourists; they remind you not to drink “non-potable water” from the toilets and urinals:

For the 500th celebration, I wanted to say something like: Chris, the next 500 will be easier. This had been true for my 1,000-mile drive from Ann Arbor to OKC last year, when the first half of the trip ran into several proto-tornados. However, when I looked through the proverbs in various cultures, I noticed that they tend to cover both ends: some say that the beginning is the hardest part of the journey, while an equal amount of them say that the end — the closing — is the hardest. I guess we should all enjoy the flow in the long-middle.

On to this week’s view, a sleuth sees the Middle East:

Jerusalem, Israel? The Chord’s Bridge? Too lazy to really search, and much too busy ignoring all the stuff on my To Do List. Hope things have been getting better for you, Chris. Happy Spring!

The warm weather is finally starting to stick in DC. This next sleuth sees Europe — specifically Rotterdam, Netherlands:

I suspect a lot of people are going to get this one right. The Rotterdam cruise port terminal is about 50 meters down the street, where the second building from the left is, before the bridge. I departed from that cruise port two summers ago on a trip to Norway and Iceland, and parked my car (we drove to Rotterdam from Berlin, where we live) in a private person’s garage about two blocks to the rear of where that photo was taken.

Another writes simply, “Boston, USA.” Right country. Another Boston guess:

Hello VFYW! This looks to me like Boston. Feels like we could be in the Courtyard Marriott looking north toward Charlestown and getting kind of a strange angle on the Zakim Bridge.

From a sleuth in Colorado Springs:

I know exactly where this is! Why? Because I used to be an associate at the international law firm, Hogan Lovells — the logo of which you can see in the southwest corner of the building below:

Maybe you blurred out the logo to avoid giving it away? That lime green is unmistakable for anyone who worked there after Hogan and Hartson merged with an English firm to become Hogan Lovells. In all events, I spent many a long night reviewing documents, reading cases, drafting memos, and taking depositions in that building.

P.S. That office of Hogan Lovells has a fairly august alumni list, including Ty Cobb, Cole Finegan, and Judge Regina Rodriguez. Nationally, Hogan alumni include Chief Justice John Roberts, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Senator Josh Hawley, and many more!

Here’s the Buffalo sleuth again:

I finally recovered from my food poisoning, and I noticed in this week’s view an American flag. Then I googled “white single mast bridges USA” with no luck. After multiple other avenues getting me nowhere, I noticed people walking around on bridge and added “pedestrian” to the search and the view popped up!

I actually thought it was over water, but it’s actually for rail lines underneath. Walking around in satellite view, all the buildings were there!

Our super-sleuth in Riverwoods also focuses on the bridge:

I’ve often admired how sleuths use a concise Google phrase to locate identifying clues in a view and then share that phrase. Many times I’ve back-checked their phrases, found what they found, and became more determined to find views like them. Well, I’m proud to admit that it worked for this week’s view — here’s my winning google phrase: “cable stay pedestrian structure in us urban city downtown near river”

Here’s Giuseppe, our super-sleuth in Rome:

I can easily imagine everyone rushing back to contest #492 (Kuching, Malaysia) to find out the name of that odd kind of bridge they can’t remember. “Hmmm… where is it? Oh, there it is: cable-stayed pedestrian bridge.”

Revealing the name of the bridge is our super-sleuth in Brookland:

First, a shout-out to the sort of website that used to make the internet a truly great place, the sort of place that search-engine-optimization and social media have mostly crowded out, where one person’s niche interests are shared with the whole world: this list of cable-stayed bridges provided me a very reasonable list to search through to find this week’s VFYW. By some stroke of luck, it was a top Google hit for “cable stayed bridge in the US.”

We are, in fact, looking at the Millennium Bridge in [city redacted]. With bus lanes, bike lanes, and tall-ish buildings, I figured it had to be a sizable left-leaning city; but even without those clues, it would have been a very reasonable list to power through.

Eerily, I was just in this city last week and thought about taking a window view from my hotel room, but decided that once the give-aways would be blurred out, it wouldn’t be a very interesting or satisfying view. Just as well, since this VFYW is a much better contest photo than I could have provided.

Here’s Chini showing the city from the sky:

Recognize it yet? San Mateo muses over the Millennium Bridge:

Looking at the VFYW, one is immediately struck by the dramatic curved façade of reflective glass on the building. Unlike a typical flat curtain wall, this section bows inward, creating a concave surface that gathers and compresses reflections from its surroundings. The effect is visually striking, pulling pieces of the neighborhood into a warped composition. Given its highly reflective nature and its position along the street, one might hope it would capture the Millennium Bridge, which is along the same corridor. Yet, the bridge is conspicuously absent from the reflection.

The reason comes down to orientation and reflection geometry. First, the curved section of the building does not actually face toward the Millennium Bridge. Even though the bridge appears centered in the viewer’s line of sight, the glass façade is angled in a different direction. For a reflection to occur, light from the bridge would need to strike the glass and bounce toward the viewer — but that alignment doesn’t happen here.

The inward curvature (concavity) reinforces this effect. A concave reflective surface doesn’t behave like a simple flat mirror; instead, it gathers light from a specific range of angles and redirects it in a more focused way. In this case, the façade is effectively “looking” at — and therefore reflecting — parts of the environment that lie off to the side: neighboring buildings, patches of sky, and sections of the street that fall within its reflective field. As a result, even though the Millennium Bridge is large, nearby, and visually dominant from the viewer’s perspective, it lies outside the angles that the curved glass can capture and return. The building isn’t failing to reflect the bridge — it simply cannot see it from that orientation.

But fortunately, the VFYW Reimagined isn’t limited by orientation and reflection geometry. It’s not even limited by the physics of light, or anything really — other than imagination. So let’s imagine:

Next up, a sleuth who “always looks, but seldom even gets the right continent” names the right city:

I recognized the Millennium Bridge immediately — I think the first time I’ve ever come close to getting a VFYW right.

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What has the war with Iran achieved since it was launched on February 28?

The Iranian regime’s navy has been largely destroyed; its air force crippled; its missile sites and capacity have been pummeled; and the upper echelon of the regime has been murdered. You can scour the president’s padded weave of delusion Wednesday night (or even Trump propaganda) and find little more than that on the positive side of the ledger. And, to be sure, it’s not nothing. The regime is a tyranny and a threat to the region and the world; degrading its military is a good thing.

But when you review the other side of the ledger, the negatives swarm like a murmuration.

Soaring oil prices — which will last with no opening of the Strait of Hormuz — are a huge boon to Russia in its war against Ukraine and a blow to the global economy (including our own). The cost even prompted the US to issue a sanctions waiver on oil exports that gave Iran a windfall of $14 billion in unexpected extra revenue. (Compare with Obama’s “shocking” $1.7 billion in Iranian assets unfrozen by the JCPOA.) Our Pacific allies’ economies will be particularly clobbered. So much for that pivot.

And, compared with before the war, Iran’s strategic position is enhanced, not weakened, because a regime that survives this kind of asymmetric war wins it. Buoyant oil prices are now providing Iran with twice the oil revenue it had before the war! IRGC control of the Strait of Hormuz opens another stream of tolls — up to $2 million a ship — for the regime, funding rearmament. If Iran ends the war with strategic control of almost a fifth of the world’s oil supplies, the Gulf states will have to accommodate it. That’s a huge strategic defeat for us.

And for what? Iran’s nuclear threats had already been defanged last year. There was no immediate threat. There was no looming threat. There was simply an immediate temptation: to exploit Iran’s weakness by launching Netanyahu’s long-sought-for war. And Trump was dumb enough and vain enough to fall for it.

America’s global credibility is shred. Macron put it gently enough: “When you want to be serious, you don’t say every day the opposite of what you said the day before. And maybe you shouldn’t be speaking every day.” From the utterly incoherent war aims at the start — which seemed to change hourly — to the torrential bullshit on Wednesday night, no one believes the word of the US anymore. Do you? Now, having thrown the world economy for a loop and devastated the Middle East, America’s president says he may just walk away. That’s quite something for a US president to say. It takes decades to build credibility, but just a couple of Truth Social posts to destroy it.

America’s moral standing is also finished. This is the first war in which the defense secretary has baldly celebrated “death and destruction” for their own sake, and the president has boasted “we’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.” It’s a war where an American president doesn’t even express regret for the killing of 150 schoolgirls in a mistaken strike on the first day, joining the death toll of 1,500 civilians and 15 US servicemembers.

It’s a war where Trump hits bridges, hospitals, and schools, and is now threatening civilian infrastructure, like desalination plants and refineries. Lindsey Graham threatened to bomb Iran so thoroughly it can “no longer function as a nation.” Pete Hegseth, who has renamed the Pentagon for war rather than defense, prayed for the troops thus:

Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.

Christianity with the mercy removed! This is a different America than the one the world once knew: this one is indecent, imperial, theocratic, brutal.

NATO has been shattered. The contempt the US showed our European allies by not even informing them in advance about a war that is already hurting them, is of a piece with Trump’s earlier threat on NATO territory itself (Greenland). Trump saying he wants to leave NATO — a defensive alliance — because it refused to join an offensive war of choice, was a new low. (NATO wasn’t in Vietnam either.) And this kind of breach is, at this point, irreparable. One Trump term could be rationalized away by our friends and allies. Not two. This is America now.

The recklessness of walking away also invites a new alliance of global powers — without America — to police the Gulf. It gives the Chinese an epic opportunity to present themselves as the only superpower left concerned with global order and free shipping lanes. And the contempt for international law shown by Trump, Rubio, and Netanyahu removes any legal basis the West might have for opposing the invasion of Taiwan. Wars of aggression with no immediate threat have now been blessed by the US. Enjoy the rest of the century!

If you are a supporter of Israel, this war is also bad news. The way it began, exposing the unseemly entanglement of our national interests, was bad enough. The accompanying wave of ethnic cleansing on the West Bank, the Knesset approval of a new Palestinian-only death penalty with no right to appeal, the demolition of Southern Lebanon along the lines of the razing of Gaza: Americans have seen all this, and recoiled. Hauling out the old techniques — you’re antisemites! Israel is a democracy! the nuclear threat is real! — is a sign of desperation. Especially for the young, the neocons and evangelicals have finally killed the thing they loved.

Am I being excitable again? As I read the foreign press, I suspect not. With Trump unleashed as an unfettered king, America has become a floundering farce of a superpower: profligate, indisciplined, cruel, and cringe. And yet nearly 40 percent of Americans still actually manage not to see this, still even imagine that what is happening is normal, precedented, even a success. That’s what triggers in me a Ben Franklin dose of fatalism. If four out of ten Americans cannot see how truly awful this is, how vast and long-lasting the domestic and global damage this president is inflicting on this country is, our 250 years really are up.

But with catastrophes also come opportunities. In many ways, this war has the potential to strip us of any remaining illusions that our constitution is working as designed. Only a de facto monarchy could launch this kind of war: secretly planned by a select few, kept from public scrutiny, launched by surprise, unbudgeted, with no discernible logic or strategic plan. Republics are designed to avoid precisely this kind of autocratic crash-out — to provide transparency, offer contrary advice in advance, air debate, flush out errors, ensure public support, think through unintended consequences, and provide guardrails and off-ramps so that wars can succeed. Our constitution is not just about liberty; it’s about a republic capable of making wise decisions rooted in deliberation and reason — not a mad king ad-libbing us into disaster.

Maybe, then, this fiasco will help more people understand the magnitude of what we have so carelessly thrown away for a cult figure. One-man rule is a crap shoot, larded with error and whim, dangerous, kleptocratic, and fond of the deepest of ditches. That was the understanding of strongman rule that once gave birth to America.

May it be born again.

New On The Dishcast: Tom Holland

Tom is a historian, translator, and podcaster. He hosts with Dominic Sandbrook the most downloaded history pod in the world, “The Rest Is History.” He’s the author of many books, and we discussed two this week: Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic, and Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Those two erudite, beautifully written books made a huge impact on me.

Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the paradoxical power of Christ’s crucifixion, and the Christian roots of “secular”. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s pod with Jonah Goldberg on the dismal state of conservatism. We also hear from readers on Israel, Islamophobia, and Holy Week, and I respond at length.

Heads Up

Chris and I are taking our Easter break next week. It’s been a hell of a quarter. So next Friday, we’ll just be sending you the Dishcast. See you then.

Trump, Power, and Jesus

In an Easter week gathering, just before the president threatened to bomb an entire country “back to the stone ages,” his White House “spiritual advisor,” Paula White-Cain, went there. She equated Trump with Jesus:

Mr. President, no one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life. You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us. But it didn’t end there for him, and it didn’t end there for you.

God always had a plan. On the third day, he rose, he defeated evil, he conquered death, hell, and the grave. ... And sir, because of his resurrection, you rose up. … And I believe that the Lord said to tell you this — because of his victory, you will be victorious in all you put your hands to.

She wasn’t done. Wearing what looked like a pink, bejeweled piece of lingerie, she recalled her morning prayer, when suddenly, “it was like the Holy Spirit just zoned me in and said, ‘Tell President Trump how thankful you are for him.’” Amid cheers, she continued: “I felt like I was conveying the heart of God for all of us — that we are thankful for the greatest champion of faith that we’ve ever seen in a president.”

Franklin Graham was next, and even worse. He called the Iran War a Biblical imperative:

Father, you tell us in the book of Esther that the Persians — the Iranians — were wanting to kill every Jew — woman, child — and to do it all in one day. But, you raised up Esther to save the Jewish people. Father … today the Iranians — the wicked regime of this government — wants to kill every Jew and destroy them with an atomic fire. But you have raised up president Trump “for such a time as this.”

Words fail. The Trump era has defined itself perhaps above all by its sickening abuse and inversion of Christianity. It’s far worse than W Bush’s Christianism, which was sincere if misguided. It’s entirely utilitarian and cynical. It’s why I despise Trump more than any public figure in my lifetime. He is everything I was taught not to be.

His values are, in descending order: power, money, pussy, fame, and cruelty. He is not just not Christian; he is a living rebuke to everything Christians believe in. And so, observing this religious obscenity in the White House, and its justification for an immoral war, one reaches for language strong enough to convey the kind of rage Jesus himself once felt as he turned the money-changers’ tables over in the temple.

And mercifully, another American was able to provide the antidote. On the Sunday before the smug, rich warmongers prayed for the most powerful man on earth, the Pope was clear:

Rather than saving himself, [Jesus] allowed himself to be nailed to the cross, embracing every cross borne in every time and place throughout human history… Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: Your hands are full of blood.”

Yesterday for Holy Thursday, he was talking of the crucifixion’s inversion of the paradigm of earthly power:

The cross is part of the mission: the sending becomes more bitter and frightening, but also more freeing and transformative. The imperialist occupation of the world is thus disrupted from within; the violence that until now has been the law is unmasked. The poor, imprisoned, rejected Messiah descends into the darkness of death, yet in so doing he brings a new creation to light.

It really does begin to feel like the madness of the Trump era is building to a head, doesn’t it? — that its Christianist madness may be fully exposed in Iran as the myths of the cult begin to fade and fall. Maybe the darkest of night really is just before the dawn. Or maybe I’m just dreaming.

The View From Your Window

Portal, Arizona, 9.59 am

Money Quotes For The Week

“On Palm Sunday, Jesus entered Jerusalem as crowds welcomed him with praise honoring him as king. They call me king now, do you believe it?” - Donald Trump.

“Just because I don’t like brain tumors doesn’t mean that if you show up with a kitchen knife and a rusty spoon, I’ll say, go at it,” - Phil Klay, an Iraq veteran, arguing against an unjust war against an evil regime.

“Thesis: Bibi Netanyahu is the Ahmed Chalabi of the US war on Iran — a canny foreigner who manipulated US leadership into a war it wanted to fight anyway, by telling them what they wanted to hear, especially that it would be an easy win that would change the Mideast for the good,” - Rod Dreher.

“When your ankles swell up three times the size they were before, that means heart failure. And he does look sick. And he does babble, and it sounds like the brain’s not doing too hot. So we just cut bait on Trump and mobilize against the Democrats,” - Alex Jones.

Yglesias Award Nominees

“We lost the plot. ... We brought a set of culture wars to the schools,” - Rahm Emanuel on his own party.

“I spent years amplifying a movement that treated fossil fuels as the enemy and net-zero as the solution. I was young, and I didn’t fully understand the system I was criticizing. … In this worldview, the moral clarity of the goal far outweighs the inconvenience of reality,” - Lucy Biggers, a former net-zero activist.

Dissent Of The Week

A reader takes issue with last week’s column, “Afroman For President!”:

While I 100% agree with you about the hilarity and strangely perfectly appropriate way that Afroman handled this situation, I think we should be very careful about lionizing such an odious figure as this guy. I’m not sure if you remember this incident from 11 years ago (or if you hadn’t heard about it in the first place), but when a woman — clearly nothing more than a fan — jumped on stage to dance with Afroman as he was playing a (truly horrendous) guitar solo, he threw a haymaker her way and knocked her out for precisely no reason whatsoever. Here’s a TMZ video of the incident:

And his apology at the time was beyond laughable. He said he thought it was a guy on the stage with him, and that this guy had been yelling at him throughout the entire show. Yet, as you can see from the video, after he sucker punches this woman quite literally half his size, he looks down at her for a minimum of three seconds by my count — MORE than enough time to recognize, “Oh shit! That’s a small woman, not a threatening man. I should help her up and apologize and get her medical attention!”

But what does he do? Turns around and proudly continues his truly horrendous guitar solo. (Also, I find it quite strange that he knew precisely where to land that punch so that it connected perfectly with her face. If he actually thought it was some bigger guy threatening him, I doubt he would’ve aimed so low and maintained such precision.)

Please don’t misunderstand me. I totally agree with what you’ve written about Afroman in this current incident, and I think the humorous headline you’ve put on this article is fine as well, but I just wanted to point out that Afroman is a really bad person himself. (And it’s not just this one incident with this particular woman; the TMZ video also shows him throwing another fan off the stage — literally). I just think it’s worth considering the totality of someone’s character before offering a jokey title like “[Terrible Person] For President!”

Okie dokie. A few more dissents, over Israel, are on the pod page, arriving in your in-tray shortly. Please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Mental Health Break

For when you’re tired of the news:

In The ‘Stacks

• Bob Wright illustrates “why we keep stumbling into stupid wars.”

• Enter the Houthis.

• Greg Sargent digs into Hegseth’s “bloodthirsty” Christianism.

• Jeff Maurer fisks Marc Thiessen over his blind loyalty to Trump’s war.

• You probably wish you had an electric car right now.

• “As DHS employees work without pay,” writes Gabe Fleisher, “Congress gets paid without working.”

• Will ICE stay in the airports?

• We’ve entered the age of the manosphere, and Project Hail Mary is a “textbook case in positive masculinity,” says Aaron Renn.

• Why are men especially prone to gambling addiction?

• A dating coach illustrates “why high-achieving women stay too long” in broken marriages.

• To the moon!

• “New music is slowly dying,” laments Ted Gioia.

• Is your home making you sick?

• Catherine Rampell looks ahead to Trump’s “gift-wrapped oppo ads for Democrats.”

• Will the Dem obsession with identity flip to straight white Christian men?

• The party has a Hasan Piker problem.

• Ruy Teixeira has a final plea for the Dems to get their shit together. RIP, The Liberal Patriot.

The View From Your Window Contest

Where do you think? Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The deadline for entries is Wednesday at 11.59 pm (PST). The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.

See you two Fridays from now. Have a blessed Easter and Passover.

Tom is a historian, translator, and podcaster. He hosts with Dominic Sandbrook the most downloaded history pod in the world, “The Rest Is History.” He’s the author of many books, including the two we discussed this week: Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic, and Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Those two erudite, beautifully written books made a huge impact on me.

An auto-transcript is available above (just click “Transcript” while logged into Substack). For two clips of our convo — on the paradoxical power of Christ’s crucifixion, and the Christian roots of “secular” — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up in Oxford and near Stonehenge; dinosaurs his first passion; how the past is more interesting than the present; Pontius Pilate; Cato; Caesar in Gaul and conquering Rome; Hegseth reveling in death; the war prayer at the Resolute Desk; Trump’s pre-Christian values; Socrates; Paul the Apostle; turning the other cheek; agape; Christ’s silence and withdrawal; logos; the Gospels; the Gnostic Gospels; the Book of Revelation; Exodus and Israel; martyred Christians in the arena; Augustine; the emergence of Islam; the Koran as the literal word of Allah; the Crusades; Pope Gregory VII making the Church sovereign; Machiavelli and mastering the secular; the Reformation; toppling idols; Nietzsche and the death of God; Marx; the Sexual Revolution; #MeToo; Dawkins and the New Atheists; the religion of wokeness; racism as a collective sin; Michael Pollan and “All You Need Is Love”; Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion; the awe of cathedrals; and the new wave of cultural Christianity.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Jeffrey Toobin on the pardon power, Derek Thompson on abundance, Tiffany Jenkins on privacy in a liberal democracy, Adrian Wooldridge on “the lost genius of liberalism,” Greg Lukianoff on free speech, and Tom Junod on his memoir and masculinity. As always, please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s pod with Jonah Goldberg:

While this conversation takes a few shots at the left, it’s one of the best objective criticisms of Trumpism that I have heard or seen. Plus, if you listen carefully, the conversation leaves some subtle suggestions on how we might become a country built on consensus again rather than division.

Another listener writes:

As a longtime admirer of both you and Jonah, I greatly enjoyed your conversation on this week’s Dishcast. However, I also ruefully chuckled to myself when you asserted late in the podcast that Trump’s rotten character ought to be noted and condemned far more frequently than it currently is. Your results apparently may vary, but over the last decade I’ve been hearing about Trump’s moral deficits approximately once every 14 seconds by everyone from you to the NYT editorial board to my mother to the rabbi at every Shabbat service. With all respect, the notion that Trump’s singular cray-cray is an under-covered phenomenon is just about the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.

All of which led me to wonder about the meaning of “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” which you and Jonah also briefly referenced in your chat. My own provisional definition of the term is as follows: The state of being so overcome with contempt for Donald Trump that you are mentally and emotionally unable to see him clearly.

For what it’s worth, I do not believe you qualify as a TDS sufferer under this definition, insomuch as you have proved time and again to understand and identify Trump’s obvious political strengths and the reasons why 50 percent of the country might be compelled to support him over the Democratic alternative. A true TDS basket case — up to and including several members of my immediate family — simply cannot process such thoughts and never will. To them, Trump is Literal Hitler, and his supporters — to a person — are Literal Hitler Mini-Me’s … and that’s all there is to it. You haven’t reached that point yet, and so I will continue subscribing to the Dish.

The thing is, though, that Trump’s depravity is truly off the charts. I don’t know of anyone quite as hideous in their character. I try to keep a balance between noting his degeneracy and viewing him politically. But I do not want to be lulled into acquiescence to the unacceptable.

Jonah and I also took a break from politics and talked dogs:

The chorus continues for Sam Harris to come back on the Dishcast:

I really hope to see you discuss/debate with Sam Harris soon regarding Israel and Gaza. Through the nudging of fans like myself and others, he seemed to be quite receptive to the idea in his last Substack Q&A.

Ok, ok. Here’s another Dishhead lobbying for a Sam pod on Israel:

On a recent “More from Sam” that was live-streamed, it seemed that most of the audience was pushing back on his support for Israel and, by extension, his belief that the war with Iran is somehow a good thing. He seems to be struggling on several fronts here, and it was proposed that you could be a good person to debate him on this topic.

For someone like Sam — who has spent the better part of the last 10 years telling us that Trump is an existential threat — to trust him to conduct this war, doesn’t feel like a defensible position. Also, Sam got years of pushback over the term “Islamophobia”, saying it’s not Islamophobia to discuss serious issues with the adherents of this faith who are the worst actors — but any serious disagreement with the State of Israel and their conduct? Now, according to Sam, we’ve got a dangerous and growing anti-semitism we simply cannot tolerate.

Can you make sense of this, because to my ears, Sam is no longer Making Sense. This is a Dishcast debate I’d love to hear.

Yes, I’m struggling to reconcile some of Sam’s views about theocracy with his support for a theocratic agenda of the Israeli far right, which controls the coalition government. It’s his view of Islam as uniquely evil that allows him, I guess, to ignore the reality that Israel has become. And speaking of that “Islamophobia” debate, here’s a famous exchange on Real Time where Ben Affleck goes ape-shit on Sam for being “gross and racist” against Muslims for “painting a broad brush” over fundamentalist beliefs:

I’m with Sam on this one. I am not with Sam in his reflexive defense of everything Israel does. A reader touches on the “Islamophobia” debate in the UK today:

The British government has just created a new advisory definition of what it calls anti-Muslim hostility. However well-intended, this seems to be an attempt to chill what looks to me like very legitimate questions about the role of Islam in the public square and in the West more broadly. I think when we talk about immigration, at least in Europe, we’re really talking about Islam.

The left seems to want to expand the definition of racism to include Islamophobia and sidestep the issue entirely by dismissing anyone with concerns as a bigot. And the right, I assume, is using the issue to scapegoat minorities. I don’t know who the sane, informed voices are. I know Douglas Murray has written about this. I sometimes listen to “The Rest Is Politics” with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart — two bright guys with a great deal of insight, but on this issue they just chalk it up to bigotry, full stop.

The left needs a better answer. It needs a better strategy than dismissing normies with credible worries as bigots — which is rhetorically lazy and politically unwise.

This issue also overlaps quite a bit with the issue of free speech in the UK. I didn’t realize until pretty recently that the UK doesn’t have the formal equivalent of the First Amendment, and this has meant that some 12,000 people a year have had a visit from the police for something they’ve written online. And some people, not sure how many, are doing real time in prison (FFS!) for writing something someone thought was inappropriate. Is this really happening in a modern Western democracy?

Yes it is. The difference between modern Islam and modern Christianity is that the latter is compatible with liberal society while the former has, in many of even its Western formulations, never made that adjustment.

Another reader dissents:

Your criticisms of Israel have detoured into some odd combination of paranoia and delusion, backed heavily by tortured logic that I don’t see you applying to any other topic. Your recent writings on the “Israel lobby” have been frequent, and I won’t try to cover all of them or respond to each point. But your criticisms can, I think, be fairly grouped into a few categories:

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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.)

Highlights from this week’s write-up:

• Festivals of nudity, penises, and vaginas, oh my!

• A creature with mud in its eye

• A cutting-edge elevator

• Magical toilets

• A very unlikely winning entry

From the winner of last week’s contest:

Wow, I really ran out of time and thought that not nailing the exact window made my chances impossible. So, this is an unbelievably happy surprise. Thank you!

And happy belated #500. While I only occasionally have time to participate, I am an avid reader — and have, for the record, actually entered the contest before from a different email address. It was #322 — close, but no cigar.

Anyway, this is an unexpected thrill. I would love a copy of the VFYW book.

Thank you for all you do to run the contest, produce the column, and support The Weekly Dish. It’s a truly treasured resource for me and so many other fans.

Chuffed! Our super-sleuth in Sagaponack follows up:

I enjoyed the VFYW 500 write-up — lots of great entries. I can imagine getting all those submissions must be like drinking from a firehose.

Pretty much — though not quite as painful as this:

Here’s a followup from Giuseppe, our super-sleuth in Rome:

Last week, Berkeley was so kind as to bring back a rule that, in his words, “was established in contest #343: if Giuseppe indicates a window … and if Giuseppe’s choice disagrees with that of the submitter … go with Giuseppe’s choice.” I am obviously flattered, but lately, for some reason, my window guesses have been spotty at best. Berkeley’s, on the other hand, have been consistently spot-on. Therefore, I am proposing an amended rule that will lead to the right window every time:

1. If Berkeley’s and my choice agree with the submitter’s, obviously go with mine and Berkeley’s;

2. If Berkeley’s choice agrees with mine and disagrees with the submitter’s, go with mine and Berkeley’s;

3. If Berkeley’s choice disagrees with mine and agrees with the submitter’s, go with Berkeley’s;

4. If Berkeley’s choice disagrees with mine, which in turn disagrees with the submitter’s, go with Berkeley’s;

5. If Berkeley’s choice disagrees with mine and mine agrees with the submitter’s, ask Berkeley if he is sure; if he is, then by all means go with Berkeley’s.

Here’s Sagaponack again:

I really appreciate that you include my fun facts and murals every week, especially since you are collating so much material, but the Amman mural got truncated and I really liked the way it came out:

Hope you enjoy these murals; they’re a lot of fun to work on. For those of us who don’t have artistic talent, the AI allows us vicarious creativity.

Yet another followup comes from the VFYW chef:

I forgot the 500th celebration last week, but my favorite moment from the contest was when you sent me the following email, after I had made a few food submissions:

Dish Staff <contest@andrewsullivan.com>
Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 6:56 PM
Thanks Bill! Love the idea of you becoming the food sleuth (like the Berkeley guy being the movie sleuth).
Happy Friday to you and yours,
Chris

I have tried to live up to this ever since.

He has, and then some. Our super-sleuth in Brookline writes:

Belated congrats on the 500th, since my discombobulated travel brain forgot to mention this mirthful milestone last week. I enjoyed reading the reminisces of my fellow sleuths and reflecting on the place of the contest in our weekly routines. For me, the VFYW has been a comforting constant across so much personal and professional upheaval in this middle phase of my life. In many ways, I’m surprised — and perhaps more than anything relieved — that early 50s me still enjoys the contest as much as mid 30s me who submitted my first guess (for a Brookline view, no less!) back in September 2010.

So thanks as always for providing this sometimes frustrating, often humbling, always engrossing weekend fixture for so many stubborn, detail-obsessed weirdos like me.

I remember that 2010 contest well, since it elicited the largest number of emails in VFYW history: about 600, and only a few dozen guesses were not Brookline. That contest was also memorable because so many people had first-hand experiences of the apartment building. For example:

My girlfriend used to live in the same complex (1215 Beacon), so I recognized this as soon as I saw it. On our third date, a little over three years ago, we had our first hug on the sidewalk right outside the gate when I dropped her off after seeing a movie. Is that enough to make us the winners this week?

It wasn’t. Below was the winning entry — from a sleuth who had nearly won a difficult contest, in Lausanne:

I won’t be the first of the hundreds who send an entry to you, and I didn’t ask my girlfriend to marry me right at St. Paul’s MBTA stop or anything. I got Lausanne correct because I lived there. I got this week’s location out of luck, because while I never lived in Boston, one week ago I moved there. After four years of long-distance relationship that began in Beirut, then variously involving Québec, Geneva, Lausanne, New Haven, and Boston, my girlfriend and I are finally living in the same place. “Même maison” [“same home”] has been our mantra for a long time, even though it has come at some career costs. I’d been visiting her on some weekends over the past year, and she lived about four blocks from here. We passed it a handful of times.

On to this week’s view, one sleuth guesses simply, “San Antonio, Texas, USA.” Getting much closer is our super-sleuth in Riverwoods:

This view looks so familiar. Seoul, South Korea?

Nope, but right region. Here’s the Intrepid Couch Traveler:

A more appropriate city for VFYW #501 I can scarcely fathom. It’s home to the most premium Levi’s jeans in Christendom, and when visiting this city, the submitter apparently had a medical emergency, I imagine after trying on a pair of 1937 “Japan” 501 jeans. Perhaps they shrank-to-fit just a little too much.

I had an eerily similar experience myself recently:

So, for the next 500 weeks, every VFYW will now have an intimate connection with the contest number — a weekly Easter Egg that all the super-sleuths must uncover to show their true mettle.

Yes please! Our super-sleuth in Oakland names the right country:

I expect to be buried in work this week, but based on the VFYW posted on the main Dish column (before I get the “official” version for #501), I’ll take a WAG that it’s Tokyo, Japan.I think I can make out some Japanese characters on some of the buildings, and then there’s the urban density and the topography. I also recognize what might be the Tokyo observation tower on the horizon near the right edge of the photo.

Then again, I could be dead wrong. ;-)

Not dead wrong, just mostly wrong. Berkeley initially thought Tokyo:

In the context of The Contest, Japan has long held a special place in my heart. Ever since March 2013, when I scored my copy of The Book on my 8th entry: an apartment window in Kagoshima (contest #143).

To be honest, #143 wasn’t one of the difficult views, containing as it did a decapitated volcano, Japanese-coded buildings, and a sign in kanji. This week’s view shares some of those characteristics, although the absence of a volcano made it a lot harder to find. And the bit of kanji script that’s legible this week just translates to “millennium”, which led me nowhere.

My starting assumption — that this time the place just had to be in Tokyo — didn’t help either. I mean come on! Five views in Japan over 16 years of the contest and never a whiff of the country’s most important city?

I nearly used a Tokyo view this week, but it was far too easy to guess. (The next contest view is also from a very popular city we haven’t featured yet.)

A previous winner guesses another city:

I instinctively thought Japan, then Tokyo, but then I thought Tokyo has more high-rise density. The skyline seems more Osaka, with a flat terrain and Kawasaki-style low-rise houses with flat brown/red roofs. I may well be wrong, but the view seems to include a school, possibly Tamagawa Elementary School:

I have been on work matters to Japan on a number of occasions, but primarily Tokyo. What limited places I have visited left me bewildered as to culture and the food, but bewildered in a positive and breathtaking way. Japan is quite unlike any country I have ever visited.

P.S. I forgot to congratulate you on reaching the 500 milestone. It’s a great competition — which actually makes me think. As do the articles, which is the main reason to subscribe.

You can join him here, for $6/month or $60/year. Another Osaka entry comes from our super-sleuth in Eagle Rock:

Brutal. This breaks my years-long streak of finding the building. The internet is convinced this view is from Osaka. Or Chitose, Kawasaki City. I can’t prove either.

The internet also thinks the yellow sign with the kanji was painted over a few years ago. But I can’t find the gray one either, which should still be there.

So a proximity guess: Nishi Ward, Osaka, Japan.

I’m so curious how Chini — or anyone else for that matter — will nail this.

Chini’s ways are always mysterious; every week he merely sends two photos — one of the window circled up-close, and one from afar:

Our Burner super-sleuth in Seattle names the right city:

As I mentioned in my comment last week about the 500th window, joy and frustration are an integral part of this endeavor. This window is no exception.

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