Alice Dreger could have been part of Bari Weiss’s absurd “intellectual dark web” but she decided not  to. Hilariously, part of her reason was that absurdly dramatic photography that y’all have been mocking overnight.

At some point, Bari decided to do a story on this—the “intellectual dark web,” not our dietary problems—and at that point I started joking about it, asking if we would all get to have a uniform. I had in mind the jumpsuits from The Incredibles. To me, the joke was the idea that a bunch of renegades would have anything in particular in common. It seems kind of, um, contradictory to consider us as a group since the point is we are all bad at group-think. Hence the desire for an ironic uniform.

At least, that’s supposed to be the point, but in fact a lot of the dark-webbers Bari Weiss wrote about are pretty good at their own brand of group-think. It’s easy to predict what many of them will say on a given issue, so are they really renegade or are they just one more faction? Look at a tweet by Michael Shermer or Sam Harris some time and see what a lot of groupy replies there are.

Anyway, when Bari called on my vacation in Hawaii to interview me on this, I just kept laughing at the idea. I told her I don’t get why I count as being on a “dark web” when what I say is out in the open.

Yes, I resigned my last academic job by choice, over censorship, but since leaving Northwestern’s medical school I haven’t been driven to some dark corner. On the contrary, people like Bari regularly invite me to write for major publications, something I’d do more if I weren’t doing a lot of intense investigative journalism for my city right now.

My point exactly. “Locked out of legacy outlets” my ass. The only ones “locked out” are the randos who are internet-famous but not genuine intellectuals. Mind you, there are plenty of people who are published by “legacy outlets” who shouldn’t be, like David Brooks for one horrible example. But the Dave Rubins and Carl Benjamins aren’t lost geniuses who would be gracing everyone’s breakfast table if only they were more Orthodox – they’re just mouthy dudes.

But, after we got back from Hawaii, the Times sent Pulitzer-winning photographer Damon Winter to take my photo in East Lansing, where I live, for this article. This was a weird scene. Damon wanted to do it at a very particular moment of sunset, out in a field with a bunch of reeds, so we parked ourselves behind the fire department in a park, with reeds.

Like the Sam Harris one – or was that sunrise rather than sunset? Nah, sunset so much more convenient.

After he left, I started thinking this was not the right story for me to be in. We had talked about who else would be in it, and it wasn’t so much as I didn’t want to be associated with those people as I didn’t know who most of them were. So, it wasn’t “I don’t want to be a member of any club that would have me” so much as “Who now? What now? What am I supposedly a key part of?”

I was also, frankly, worried about any article that was going to have a bunch of highly dramatized images.

And rightly so. Those photos make my skin crawl – they look cultish. It really does reek of thought-leaderism, as YNNB said.

I am not interested in darkness or dark connections. I want intellectualism, journalism, scholarship, and government to be about light, transparency, and facts. Peer review, checks and balances, open access. Not about clicks and skirmishes and dramatic photos taken at sunset.

And definitely not about thought leaders.