The Trump Vibe Shift Is Dead; The New York Times, December 21, 2025

 EZRA KLEIN, THE NEW YORK TIMES; The Trump Vibe Shift Is Dead

"In January, I made a prediction: “I suspect we are at or near the peak of Trump vibes.” Now, as this long year grinds to its end, I think it can be said more declaratively: The Trump vibe shift is dead. And there are already glimmers of what will follow it...

Political backlash always seeks the opposing force to the present regime. Closed and cruel are on their way out. What comes next, I suspect, will present itself as open, friendly and assertively moral. But it will also need to credibly offer what Trump and Trumpism have failed to deliver: real solutions to the problems Americans face."

Michael Schur On Ethics And Morality In A Crisis; WBUR, April 9, 2020

Meghna Chakrabarti and Brittany Knotts, WBUR; Michael Schur On Ethics And Morality In A Crisis

"How do you think "The Good Place" characters Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason would have responded to the coronavirus in their Earth lives?...

MICHAEL SCHUR, ON HOW JASON WOULD RESPOND TO THE CORONAVIRUS...

Jason: “Then there's Jason, who is just an idiot. And Jason, I don't know if you saw one of the craziest photos to me of all of the photos we've all been looking at, it was that county line in Florida. ... Where one county had shut down its beaches, and the other county had not. And so as a result, the beach was entirely empty. And there was just like suddenly just a wall of people extending further out, down the beach, because that county's beaches were open. Whatever county that is, that's where Jason would be. … So he and Eleanor probably wouldn't have been dissimilar in terms of the way they approached this, but for different reasons. Eleanor was selfish, and Jason was just sort of impulsive and didn't really think anything through.”...

What do we owe each other? 

Michael Schur: “I said before that there's a certain sort of minimum that is required of everyone, to the best of our abilities. The basics, right. Staying inside, staying away from people, trying to kind of stop the spread of the disease. But then beyond that, there's an enormous sliding scale, I think. If you have the ability to, for example, pay your dog walker, if you have the financial means to continue to pay your dog walker who can't walk your dog anymore, or someone who helps you clean your house, or anybody who works for you in any capacity. If you have that ability, I think you need to do that. And then, you know, you keep sliding up the scale. If you have the ability to keep people on the payroll at your business who are working for you, even if it means you lose money, I think you have to do that, too. And it just keeps going up and up and up."

Stan Lee Unleashed the Heroic Power of the Outcast; Wired, December 13, 2018

Adam Rogers, Wired; Stan Lee Unleashed the Heroic Power of the Outcast

"From the fantasy-pulp midden, Lee had excavated a gem of a truth: These tales about men and women in garish tights hitting each other were also about more. Super­heroes had incredible abilities, yes, but they were also often the victims of prejudice themselves, or trapped in moral webs stronger than anything Spider-­Man ever thwipped. So the comics appealed to people who felt the same, even before Lee and the other Marvel creators published the first African American heroes, the first popular Asian American heroes, and strong, leading-character women in numbers large enough to populate a dozen summer crossovers...

His death encouraged people to tell stories of Lee’s kindness and enthusiasm. But for every story that circulated after Lee’s death about how wonderful and caring he was, comics professionals tell other tales in which Lee is … not.

Every bit as complicated as the characters he helped bring into the world, Lee taught generations of nerds the concepts of responsibility, morality, and love. He waged a sometimes ham-fisted battle against prejudice, misunderstanding, and evil. This is what makes some of nerd-dom’s recent tack toward intolerance so painful; other­ishness is engineered into comics’ radioactive, mutated DNA. Even if Lee wasn’t a super human, he was super­human, empowering colleagues to leap creative obstacles and to give readers a sense of their own secret strengths."

O’Reilly, Ousted; New York Times, April 20, 2017

David Leonhardt, New York Times; 

O’Reilly, Ousted

"Rupert Murdoch tried to make his firing of Bill O’Reilly seem as if it were based on morality. In a letter to Fox News employees (obtained by CNN’s Brian Stelter), Murdoch wrote that “we want to underscore our consistent commitment to fostering a work environment built on the values of trust and respect.”

This claim is false, and Murdoch’s use of “consistent” is especially rich. O’Reilly’s pattern of harassing women has been clear for more than a decade. Megan Garber of The Atlantic has a useful review — incomplete, no doubt — of his behavior...

But if O’Reilly’s firing wasn’t based on morals, it is still a victory for morality. A man who spent years abusing people less wealthy and powerful than him has lost his large public stage, in a very public way. His legacy — like that of his old boss, Roger Ailes — will always involve his ugly abusiveness."