The email followed years of racist activity online. Van Alphen’s account on Gab features a slew of bigoted posts written between 2016 and 2019. The most recent, posted more than a year ago, reads “HBO’s Watchmen is just as pozzed you’d expect given its (((writer))). Whitey bad, whitey racist. N*o good, n*o noble.”

Keep fooling around with it, improving it, and making it better. You know you have a unique factor when someone steals it. So keep the unique factor unique by constantly plussing it.

Some of the other charms employed by the wise men had a more tangled pedigree.

Above all, let her eschew the impertinence of invention; let her leave genius to her milliner.