Yoni Appelbaum On Migration Within America

His book on the history of housing and mobility is a riveting read.

Yoni is a journalist and academic. He used to be a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard, and also taught at Babson College and Brandeis. He subsequently served in many editorial and writing roles at The Atlantic, where he’s currently a deputy executive editor. He just published his first book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. It’s an engrossing account of how zoning in America — yes, zoning — evolved from the Puritans onward. I was unexpectedly fascinated.

For two clips of our convo — on the racist origins of zoning, and how progressivism is keeping poor people in place — see our YouTube page.

Other topics: raised as an orthodox Jew in the Boston area; spending a year at a yeshiva in Israel; interning for the Gore campaign in 1999; working for the Public Advocate in NYC; studying the Gilded Age in grad school; discovering Ta-Nehisi Coates as a Dish reader and getting hired at The Atlantic through TNC’s comments section; mobility as a core feature of early America; the Pilgrims; how the Puritans branched off; moving to construct one’s identity; Tocqueville; American Primeval; the “warning out” of early American towns; Lincoln’s mobility; the Moving Day of pre-war NYC; Chinese laundries; violence against immigrants; the Progressive drive for zoning; Yoni defending tenements; Hoover’s push for single-family homes; defaulting in the Depression; FDR’s push for long mortgages; the feds distorting the market; racial segregation; Jane Jacobs vs central planning; Thatcher and public housing; the rise of shitty architecture; cognitive sorting; Hillbilly Elegy; mass migration and rising costs in the UK; how leftist regulations stifle building; and the abundance movement.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Chris Caldwell on the political revolution in Europe, Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Nick Denton on China and AI, Francis Collins on faith and science, Michael Lewis on government service, Ian Buruma on Spinoza, Michael Joseph Gross on bodybuilding, and the great and powerful Mike White, of White Lotus fame. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

A listener reacts to my debate with Jon Rauch over Christianism on the right and the left:

I appreciated your conversation with Rauch about his new book, even though it seemed sometimes like you were very eager to have a different conversation than the one he wanted to have. While you kept pressing him on why he was so unconcerned with the incorporation of progressive politics into more liberal, mainline Protestant branches, the examples you provided seemed to answer the question for him.

For instance, I think it’s deeply weird to have a pseudo-shrine to Matthew Shepherd in a DC cathedral, but there’s nothing menacing about it. I cringe at the newfangled Progress flag every time I see it flying where I used to see the rainbow Pride flag (the preschool-level symbolism of which has somehow been lost on the activist brigades). But when it’s on an Episcopal church, for most people it’s simply a symbol of acceptance and safety for the people it purports to represent. “You are safe and loved and welcome to worship in this church without being told you are going to hell.”

Meanwhile, over in MAGA Christendom, they’re talking about immigrants poisoning the blood of the country. They’re talking about retribution against the enemy within. This is a language of unmistakable menace and hostility and intent to do harm — to the correct people for the right reasons, of course.

This is why Rauch is more concerned with the insertion of Trump and MAGA into the center of white evangelical religious life. I suspect Rauch will be more concerned about the Episcopal Church going woke when a violent mob of pink-haired, non-binary Episcopalians waving stupid, triangle-addled Progress flags and chanting “D-E-I” storms the Capitol in the name of pronouns.

Here’s a clip from the episode:

Here’s another dissent over my side of the pod:

This had to be one of the most defensive, adversarial episodes you’ve recorded. I know you and Rauch are old friends, and you’re clearly a kind person, but had I never heard the Dishcast before, your attempts to parse the Gospels rather than listen to him would have sounded like willful ignorance. Throughout, it seemed as though you were bent on purifying his opinions or rectifying his examination of Christianity.

Perhaps the most puzzling part was after the 42-minute mark. You agreed with Rauch’s core point that Christian values can be deployed in service of the Constitution, but then you bizarrely commented, “left-Christianity is just as politicized as right-Christianity.” The left has become a big problem, yes. But Rauch alluded to a truth I wish he had flatly said: wokeism simply did not emerge from the leftist church, so there’s no real comparison to the religious right.

As a recovering lefty living in a Midwestern gay outpost where every business flies transqueer flags, I can assure you that absolutely no one here is getting their lefty politics from their church. Even considering the Matthew Shepard shrine you mentioned, wokeism is mostly an import to churches, not an export. It’s the secular institutions that you rightly chastise where wokeism, lefty politics, and identitarianism has festered: colleges, media, etc. Despite your lengthy, distracting protest, Rauch is correct that for all the left’s problems, the leftist church simply isn’t all that culturally relevant.

This next listener is more sympathetic to my view:

Thank you for enlightening Rauch about the problem of aggressive left-wing Protestantism. Too few people are covering this phenomenon, and I’ve experienced it firsthand in multiple Protestant denominations — from New England to Dallas. There is an obsessional focus on “inclusivity” that paradoxically excludes all sorts of people who otherwise would be valuable, conscientious, loving members of a church community.

Because my own church became almost laughably woke, I made the difficult decision to leave the United Methodist denomination in 2023. Some aspects of church life felt engineered to expose anyone who held more conservative, traditional, or moderate political beliefs. The worship services, sermons, liturgy, adult education programs, and mission statement were crammed to the gills with all of this groveling leftist posturing: Progress flags, land acknowledgments, a reparations committee, the editing/omitting of any scriptural readings that contained “offensive” language (such as the word “master”), trigger warnings about “gendered references to God,” and name tags displaying everyone’s pronouns.

The purity tests administered by the church’s activist leadership struck me as eerily similar to the ones flung at Jesus by the Pharisees … which Jesus resoundingly deflected by calling them out on their first-century virtue signaling! How could this abject failure in pluralism have infected Christianity, which should be a model of pluralism?

One thing that especially troubled me before I left the UMC: there was plenty of outward contrition for the church’s complicity in systemic racism and oppression of the LGBTQ community — and yet, oddly enough, I never heard a single word in church condemning the UMC’s history of sexual abuse and misconduct, which the denomination issued a flaccid online apology for in 2024. There were no banners, messages, or symbolic gestures for these victims. It just reinforces my suspicion that “progressive” Protestantism is more about moral posturing around the most fashionable social justice causes than it is about nurturing a countercultural community of faith, confronting truly shameful transgressions, and safeguarding the most vulnerable in society — namely children, women, the sick, and the elderly.

In the Old Testament, when God gets fed up with the utter emptiness of Jerusalem’s atonement rituals, he speaks through the prophet Isaiah: “Bring no more vain offerings; your incense is an abomination to me; your new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot endure; it is all iniquity…” Both extremities of the politically performative church must come to terms with how their “vain offerings” have damaged the church’s overall credibility.

Amen, as it were. Maybe I should restate my view: Christianism is far, far more influential on the right than the left. But wokeism is itself a manifestation of buried New England puritanism, a new kind of religion, and this was easily imported into mainline Protestantism.

I also think there’s a kind of myopia with these people. Their flags of “inclusion” — the transqueer flag, for example — are actually flags of exclusion. They are telling you that unless you subscribe to the view that the world is fundamentally defined by the oppression of some groups by others, you’re not welcome. If you don’t believe in “intersectionality”, you have no place here. If you didn’t support BLM or back sex reassignment for children, you do not belong. None of these ideas are intrinsic to Christianity; but they are now orthodoxy.

In Provincetown, for example, the inoffensive rainbow flag has been replaced by the trans-queer-BLM flag, smugly called the “Progress Flag.” Lefties barely notice this; normies don’t either: it’s just an uglier update to them. But for anyone not signed up to the woke left, these flags say quite loudly: “You do not belong here; this is a space solely for left-liberals.” It’s the very opposite of inclusive. And it is designed to foster intolerance of alternative views. Most gays and lesbians, of course, have such a media bubble around them, and have it reinforced all the time, that they have no idea any of this is faintly debatable. I mean: they get their news from Rachel Maddow.

Here’s a clip on the growing tolerance of the Mormon Church:

Another writes:

I had to chuckle, Andrew, at your insistence that Mormons cannot be considered Christians because they don’t believe in things like the Trinity. As a former fundamentalist Evangelical, I almost always heard grudging allowance of their Christian label because they believed in: 1) the divinity of Jesus, 2) his death, and 3) most importantly, his resurrection. Only the strictest fundamentalist would deny them the label of Christian (albeit heretical ones) for other doctrinal reasons.

I am not a strict fundamentalist obviously. But denial of the Trinity and a belief that humans can become gods are way outside even the most liberal Christian lines.

This next listener looks to the Ross Douthat pod:

I was confused by your whole deathbed hallucination discussion and how that proves anything. When citing the “similarity” of experiences and stories of people whom have almost died, why is it not the power of suggestion. You would have to live as a hermit to not have heard these near-death stories of family as a person approaches death. Maybe that becomes their and their brain’s focus – because they have been expecting it.

Another adds, “Regarding your recent episodes with Junger and Douthat talking about near-death experiences, you might want to see this 2022 article: ‘First-ever scan of a dying human brain reveals life may actually ‘flash before your eyes.’” This next listener focuses on another theme of the Douthat pod — theodicy:

I’ve just finished listening to your conversation with Ross Douthat — an hour-and- a-half of more entertaining craziness than I could have imagined from two writers whom I follow, um, religiously. Let’s leave aside the origin of the universe and the mind/body problem (two areas where the evidence is thin enough to admit a range of speculation) and jump to the problem of evil, which you guys passed over suspiciously quickly.

For starters, take the natural world, about which we do know quite a lot — for example, that it amounts to a global system whose inhabitants are able to survive only by eating each other. Wouldn’t you think an all-powerful being could manage to keep sharks from chewing on surfers and get the dog fed without anything first having to suffer a premature death?

In response, you offered just the sort of argument from personal experience that you’ve criticized in the exponents of victimology, but with an even stronger masochistic inflection: you believe in God all the more when He’s knocking the stuffing out of you! And Douthat seemed to suggest that a species of neo-Manicheanism might dispose of such objections by name-checking the forces of darkness. Somewhere St. Augustine is sitting up and exclaiming, “Hold on! I thought I set everybody straight on that stuff a long time ago!”

One more on that episode:

Recall that Douthat talked about how amazing it is that human reasoning and intellect was able to decode our universe (paraphrasing), and how improbable that all seemed without a god. Razib Khan makes the case that we actually may be more primitive than extinct Neanderthal or Denisovan lineages. There’s just so much we don’t know, and this isn’t necessarily proof of anything, but I suspect there are many, many more holes to be shot in Douthat’s brand of miracles and human exceptionalism.

On the recent John Gray pod, a listener dissents:

I was incredibly unimpressed with John Gray, and his fawning over the potentially “more morally clean” foreign policy of Trump. It is simply untrue that wherever the West intervened it abandoned its allies. Bosnia, Kosovo — an order was upheld. Estonia and other Baltic countries would already be overrun by Russia if one had not extended Euro-Atlantic institution to them. Poland would already be under the yoke also. The Kurds in north Iraq have had a fairly good run, as things go in that part of the world. Should I go on? Yes, we need to discuss the limits of foreign policy, but we cannot do that without some plausible version of the truth.

Of course, Gray is spectacularly wrong in betting on a “more morally clean” foreign policy, too, as within days of your episode being out, Trump announces a bizarro Gaza project, having already threatened a takeover of Greenland, and picked fights with Canada and Mexico.

A guest rec for the pod:

Oh wow, I initially thought there was some kind of mistake with your reference to “Jessica Riedl.” I’ve long known of Jessica (formerly Brian) Riedl as one of the very few true fiscal conservatives left in the country. I have great respect for her analyses. Please interview her at some point!

I’ve admired Riedl’s fiscal acuity for years. She has actual principles and is intellectually honest!

Here’s a reader dissent over last week’s column:

I’m disappointed but not surprised at your utter disdain for what Trump and Musk are trying to do. You’re being nuanced in an era where nuance has long since gone out the window. The woke NGO expenditures of USAID and the blatant attempt to spread LGBTQWERTY ideologies in other countries amounts to cultural imperialism.

But I want to focus on one particular line from your piece — about Trump’s “violation of norms.”

Sure, Trump violates norms of decorum. Do we not see how he represents — how he is — the backlash to the violation of norms elsewhere in American society? To put a real fine point on it, no one — no one — who has embraced trans ideology has any room whatsoever to bitch about Trump “violating norms.” (I know you’ve long been at war with trans ideology yourself.)

But it’s not just that; it’s immigration — and the surge of the Biden years was a clear violation of norms. Freddie DeBoer just wrote yet another piece on how, if you picked up a liberal from 2008 and dropped him in the middle of 2025, they’d be flabbergasted at what liberalism had become. And the violation of what we once held, collectively, as norms is a huge part of that.

So at what point do we understand that Trump is the reaction to these violated norms, this idea that “men can get pregnant and if you disagree we’ll cancel you”; that anyone who somehow makes it over the border is as “American” as anyone else and entitled to the benefits of such? At what point do we understand that the efforts of the woke era in particular to rend asunder all permanent bonds and norms would inevitably produce a vicious backlash, and if it wasn’t the guy with orange hair it would be someone/something else?

You want to stop the violation of norms? Good, so do I; but those violations must cease across the board. Because if they don’t, if Trump has to cool it but I’m required by my employer to list my pronouns in my email signature, I’m going to cheer Trump on all the more. Because fuck the society that seeks to “deconstruct” the family, the public schools, and more — then bitches about the “deconstruction” of USAID.

I’m with you, brother. I see this dynamic all too well and have tried to stay clear-eyed about both threats to a free society. Another dissenter quotes me:

“If expressing neo-Nazi views does not disqualify you from the Trump team, nothing does.” It’s disingenuous to act like JD Vance endorsed the neo-Nazi views; he was clearly acting on his belief in tolerance. Up until recently, I would have agreed with your implication that tolerance of expression should only go so far. But then came woke, and the revelation of how easily the limits of tolerance can close around all dissent.

It’s impossible at this point to crawl back to the cultural moment that allowed questioning the trans agenda but not inter-ethnic marriage. Either pure speech during off hours shouldn’t be considered grounds for termination, or we’re just fighting over where to draw the line — and we now know that there are plenty of folks eager to put us on the wrong side of that line as soon as they regain power. The informal exception for Nazi rhetoric swallowed the whole rule; the woke will just call everyone Nazis.

More to Vance’s point, if we’re just talking about internet rhetoric, why can’t mature people tolerate it? Are we afraid that we couldn’t provide counterarguments against racism? Or that we can’t just ignore internet trolls? This seems like a basic kindergarten sticks-and-stones lesson. Literally nothing but emotions can be hurt by this DOGE guy’s posts, as repugnant as they are. Grownups should be able to handle it. And yet somehow in America today, too many adults have never even been taught to handle it. If we want a free society, we need to be able to live and even work alongside people whose views we find truly abhorrent, and stick to firing people for the actions they take, not their beliefs.

So yes, JD Vance made it quite clear that not even neo-Nazi rhetoric will get you fired from the Trump team — and modeled maturity for the rest of us in doing so. He prevented his side from becoming cancel-culture hypocrites (at least in this instance) and reminded us of basic virtues of adulthood that woke had beaten out of us. We should be grateful for the example.

I take the point. It’s a fair one. But there is plenty of evidence that this young dude still believes these things — he didn’t recant them — and he works for the federal government, which seems to me to mean accountable to the public. I don’t believe Americans want full-on neo-Nazis in their government. Musk disagrees — for reasons that keep getting ominously clearer.

Another reader wants grace for Elon Musk when he said, “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected”:

Criticizing Musk for saying he won’t always be right is shameful, and I expect better of you. No one is ever right 100% of the time. Being in any dynamic leadership position isn’t easy. People get things wrong. Musk was simply acknowledging that reality. Admitting you can be wrong is paramount in leadership and relationships.

Agreed. But Musk’s response to being wrong — when Trump, for example, said Zelensky had an approval rate of 4 percent — is to double down on the lie. His own “Community Notes” system on X added that Trump was lying. So Musk said he’d have to fix Community Notes, because it is “increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media.” Musk gives not a single fuck about free speech — only the free speech with which he agrees. X is about him forcing anyone who uses it to read his deranged screeds and adolescent mind-wanks.

Another reader looks to the Democrats:

I like this point from a reader: “What I don’t understand is how Dems have the most arbitrary and stringent litmus tests on social and cultural issues but nowhere else.” And you responded, “Cultural and social issues are a new form of religion for the upper classes. Foreign policy isn’t part of that. So a disagreement on foreign policy is just a disagreement, but disagreement on gender, race, or orientation is blasphemy.”

I more or less agree. There do seem to be elements of social justice fundamentalism that resemble faith-based religious beliefs and practices. But I think of it more in terms of narrative. And that’s not necessarily in conflict with the idea of a religion. Narrative, or worldview, may simply be one of religion’s broader, more all-encompassing, expressions.

The world is complex. But narratives are generally simple. And once a narrative has been thoroughly absorbed, it can condition our responses in largely unthinking ways. The predominant theme of the modern left narrative involves reductive concepts of identity. And the Dems, sadly, have embraced that perspective. Hence our current situation where they are conditioned to respond on certain topics but not (or at least not with the same passion) on others.

The obvious problem is that the Dem narrative is unpopular. An average citizen, after all, may not be intimately familiar with the sacred texts of Nikole Hannah-Jones or Ibram Kendi; but they have very likely come to understand that these and similar prophets extol an overwhelmingly negative narrative about our country and its history. A certain amount of constructive criticism, coupled with a positive vision for the future, could very well work. But not an unremittingly negative narrative that seems determined to snuff out any semblance of optimism or hope.

In politics, I think it’s safe to say that the better story is likely to win. And even as someone who has voted against Trump three times, I nevertheless believe that he has in fact been telling the better story. Despite his meandering and often misleading rhetoric, he has managed to combine effective symbols (a wall), memorable slogans (Make America Great Again), and emotional appeals (I am your retribution) into a winning argument.

In contrast, can anyone remember even a single memorable thing about the Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris campaigns that wasn’t based on their identity as women?

So, to win again, the Dems need a new narrative. They will almost certainly need to break with the dogmatic left in order to accomplish that task. Like a hurt, lost, and blinded fool, as Michael Stipe might say, they need to lose their religion. Then they can hopefully tell a new story.

Buttigieg has begun to make the abstract case for moving away from woke fundamentalism, but he has yet to state a single actual position of his that would violate woke orthodoxy. So I’ll wait. The one thing I predict he won’t budge an inch on is permanently removing the ability to orgasm from pubescent boys with gender dysphoria. This grotesque and needless violation of a child’s basic human rights is something Buttigieg won’t touch with a bargepole. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong. I seriously doubt it.

Another reader dissents:

You wrote, “Biden refused to have any enemies to his left, enabling crazies and extremists and fanatics to run riot in his administration.” But he did make enemies to his left. You may have noticed them on the Israel-Gaza war, where Biden did try to find a middle ground, and he got chewed out for it. He also started beefing up border security, which as we both know the left hated. Overall, the criticism of Biden prioritizing harmony within his own camp was a terrible political judgment, but I think some fairness and nuance is required. Biden was not a uniform leftist, and anyone who hangs out with leftists will recognize that rather quickly.

On Gaza, yes, he wasn’t a captive of the far left. On everything else, he was. And on Gaza, he was simply representing the old US position: Israel can do whatever the fuck they like. The US role is to protect and defend anything Israel does. Including ethnic cleansing.

This next reader is sick of both parties:

I agree that Trump’s month of shock and awe was pathetic. The incompetence from both tribes of American leadership is something to behold. Nothing works in this country. Nothing. Every time you interact with a system, public or private, there is some kind of fuckup. The fuckup is then followed by an endless procession of automated phone systems, powerless minions, and lost communications that you, dear citizen, are required to navigate and endure alone, on your own time, and at your own expense, in the hope of unfucking yourself.

The system’s predictable errors follow a pattern that tracks pretty closely with the careless attitudes of the American upper-class: a credulous faith in technology, an unwillingness to compensate (or authorize) less privileged human beings to make intelligent decisions, and a general, high-handed disdain for the boring details of anything — you know, those pesky factual points that will determine whether an actual solution is feasible or fair. Dealing with the pervasive dysfunction of elite-designed systems is bad enough when the fuckup arises at the bank or the post office. When it has to do with your (or a loved one’s) legal rights, income, or health, it is terrifying.

Nobody cares.

We seem to have produced an entire leadership class that, in its own glib self-regard, “just can’t even.” Their parents and schools have taught them from childhood to expect admission to a global winner’s circle, with no reciprocal obligations, mostly because they are just so wonderful. Evidently, the circles they now constitute feel no shared, sober obligation to solve the country’s problems, or even to act like serious adults. They do believe that they are brilliant, and therefore entitled to have the Big Ideas (see Musk, but also the last ten years of “equity”), while those a few rungs down (often similarly educated but more accountable) have the unenviable task of figuring out how to implement the grand plans. Anything that doesn’t work is blamed on the subordinates, or the opposing tribe, while the stupidity of leadership gets a nonjudgmental pass.

The one area where this class of clowns does excel is at abusing technology, bureaucracy, mass media, and private social capital to ensure that nobody outside their insufferable bubble has an actual say. Whatever else this may be, it is not Jefferson’s natural aristocracy of a free and self-governing people.

Voters are justifiably fed up with the firehose of this phenomenon that we’ve experienced from the progressive left since 2020 (but, really, going back to Obama’s failure to hold anyone in leadership accountable after the George W. Bush and 2008 fiascos). Trump and Musk now appear to be confirming that the right can produce its own (and probably worse) iteration of it. Yes, it’s pathetic. But, with no evident path to correcting the nation’s course, it is also frightening.

Here’s a related anti-tech rant on X, from Robert Sterling:

I don’t want to connect my coffee machine to the wifi network. I don’t want to share the file with OneDrive. I don’t want to download an app to check my car’s fluid levels. I don’t want to scan a QR code to view the restaurant menu. I don’t want to let Google know my location before showing me the search results. I don’t want to include a Teams link on the calendar invite. I don’t want to pay 50 different monthly subscription fees for all my software.

I don’t want to upgrade to TurboTax platinum plus audit protection. I don’t want to install the Webex plugin to join the meeting. I don’t want to share my car’s braking data with the actuaries at State Farm. I don’t want to text with your AI chatbot. I don’t want to download the Instagram app to look at your picture. I don’t want to type in my email address to view the content on your company’s website. I don’t want text messages with promo codes.

I don’t want to leave your company a five-star Google review in exchange for the chance to win a $20 Starbucks gift card. I don’t want to join your exclusive community in the metaverse. I don’t want AI to help me write my comments on LinkedIn. I don’t even want to be on LinkedIn in the first place.

I just want to pay for a product one time (and only one time), know that it’s going to work flawlessly, press 0 to speak to an operator if I need help, and otherwise be left alone and treated with some small measure of human dignity, if that’s not too much to ask anymore.

It’s waaaay too much to ask for! He adds, “Can’t believe I typed that entire rant and forgot to mention I don’t want to leave a 25% tip on the touchscreen.” One more rant for the week:

I’m at a gorgeous peaceful beach in Mexico at a resort that costs $2K per day, and some girls in their 20s are playing loud music through a speaker. I immediately thought of your column about this. I don’t understand how people can be so selfish. Why not just use headphones??? This isn’t a club. Why would these people assume the other 50 people here on vacation want to hear this music? It completely ruins the peace of the ocean and the nature.

Your column at least made me know I’m not alone! I had to rant to someone who would understand.

The Parisian metro is moving toward making this a criminal offense. The French get some things — sex, food, peace and quiet — right.

Thanks as always for the dissents and other comments, and you can send yours to dish@andrewsullivan.com. You can also sound off in Substack Notes. From my feed this week:

“He who saves his country does not violate any law,” – Donald Trump, yesterday in a pinned tweet.

I have always avoided the term “fascist” with Trump because it’s not entirely accurate from the point of view of history. But this is unequivocally a fascist statement, almost a perfect distillation of the view that a great man should command the state and the rule of law should be set aside as outdated or too corrupted to continue.

We are used to these provocations. But I can’t see how anyone supporting Trump at this moment who endorses this sentence can plausibly deny the fascist label. There is absolutely nothing conservative about this; and nothing more repellent to the Founders of this country. If this is not a rhetorical red line — explicitly fascistic statements, attacking the very meaning of America — what on earth could be?

To which a reader replied:

As you recall, Nixon said “if the President does it, it’s not illegal”. Is that so very far away from this? Seems quite nearly identical to me. Was he a fascist? And was he not proved wrong?

On a much lighter note:

Peter Capaldi’s Dr Who is really underrated. I think he’s second only to Tom Baker.

A reader responded:

I haven’t seen any of Capaldi’s episodes, but I consider Peter Davison’s interpretation very underrated. Coming right after Tom Baker meant he had big shoes to fill, and I thought he really hit the mark with his almost-but-not-quite completely human Doctor. Honestly, he was probably the only Doctor I’ve seen who projected enough decency that I could actually believe others would willingly sign up for the endless risks that come with being his companion!

Here’s a supercut of Capaldi, as a bonus MHB:

Awesome! And Peter Davison was terrible!

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