++The moral philosopher Peter Singer on animal welfare, the ethics of euthanasia, and more. +
++When I was in seventh grade, our social studies teacher had us make a poster describing a serious problem in the world. Most people chose poverty, or hunger, or HIV/AIDS. But one friend of mine chose “the philosophy of Peter Singer.” +
++At the time, I didn’t know that Singer was a big-time professor of bioethics at Princeton, and perhaps the most famous living philosopher in the world. I just saw that this 12-year-old put him on a poster as the most dangerous man in the world, with ideas about abortion and infanticide that posed threats to human life as we know it. +
++And at age 12, I was kind of a dick, so naturally I responded by going to my nearest bookstore, picking up Singer’s book Writings on an Ethical Life, and reading it performatively in front of my friend as often as possible. +
++To my great surprise, I found the book pretty compelling. I stopped eating meat because of Singer’s arguments against factory farming. I was moved by his argument that people in rich countries like the US have a moral duty to donate to poorer countries to prevent needless death. I was 12 and had no money, but I started donating when I did. +
++I wound up studying philosophy in college, and writing about these issues as a journalist, in no small part thanks to Peter Singer. And his ideas are no less controversial now than they were back in 2002 when I was trolling my buddy. +
++Singer’s 1975 book Animal Liberation has been credited as the start of the modern animal rights movement. He just released a heavily revised new edition, titled Animal Liberation Now. It covers the dramatic expansion of factory farming since the book’s initial publication, but also the growth in animal activism, plant-based foods, and resistance to “speciesism,” a term he coined. Singer is also on a “world tour” now giving talks in the US, the UK, and Australia. +
++I wanted to talk to Singer about this book and its legacy, but I didn’t want to just talk about animals. I was also curious about Singer’s writing on euthanasia, specifically of infants with severe disabilities, which has led to furious protests from disability rights activists around the world. (Note that this transcript discusses Singer’s views on those topics, which may be disturbing to some readers.) +
++You can hear the full conversation, including much more discussion about animals and a long talk about the disgraced Singer-inspired former billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, on Vox’s podcast The Gray Area. Here are a few excerpts, edited for length and clarity. +
++Dylan Matthews +
++Fifty years ago, you were laying out the ideological principles behind the animal welfare movement. Now we’re able to look back at the movement’s concrete attempts to help animals and see what worked and what didn’t. +
++How would you characterize the lessons you’ve learned from that track record? Were there some false starts, or some particularly promising actions from the vantage point of animal liberation? +
++Peter Singer +
++The first lesson is, it’s harder than I thought. I thought that there was a really clear argument against the way we were treating animals. I had never considered myself an animal lover, and yet I was appalled to learn about the details of what we do to animals in factory farms and in labs. +
++I wasn’t certain of it by any means, but I thought there was a reasonable chance that this book would, as we would say today, go viral, that people would say, “Oh, this is terrible. I’m gonna stop eating factory-farmed products.” That would spread, they would tell their friends, and it would become sort of a taboo to eat an animal who had been reared in that way. +
++But eating habits turned out to be more deeply entrenched. Even people who were persuaded by the argument, some of them continued to eat meat, even factory-farmed meat. That’s still the case today. +
++Another lesson learned is that the use of violence on behalf of animals doesn’t work. That was a period when some people took the lessons of animal liberation to say, “We have this exploited group, the exploitation is continuing, we are justified in using whatever means we can to stop it.” Although it was a tiny group of people, there were letter bombs sent to experimenters. +
++It really backfired quite badly, because it enabled our opponents to brand us as terrorists. I think the movement lost influence for a time and took some years to recover from that. +
++As to what works and what doesn’t, it depends where you are. In parliamentary democracies, like the United Kingdom and the European Union, it was possible to get change. I’m not talking about the kind of change I wanted, of course, but significant reforms and improvements in some of the conditions for animals. It was possible to get that through conventional political channels by showing that it mattered to voters what policy you had on animals. +
++In the United States, that hasn’t been true, except in those states that have the possibility of citizen-initiated referendums. There, it’s worked. California is the best example. California has twice passed propositions for farm animals, including Proposition 12, which was just upheld by the Supreme Court. But otherwise, you have to go through trying to influence the big corporations, and that’s what the movement has done in the United States, targeting corporations from McDonald’s to the supermarket chains, getting them to improve their treatment of animals. +
++That’s made progress, but less progress than in the European Union. To give one example, if you take the cages that egg-laying hens are standardly kept in, those are now banned across the United Kingdom and the European Union. The majority of laying hens in the United States are still kept that way, although, as I said, they’re not allowed in California and several other states. The same is true for keeping sows and veal calves in individual crates so narrow that they can’t turn around. +
++Dylan Matthews +
++My sense is that some of your work on issues of life and death in humans, especially as relates to disability, came out partially out of your work on animals, out of an attempt on your part to try to think through what makes life for humans and animals valuable. +
++Could you say a little bit about that and how that research project of yours came about? +
++Peter Singer +
++That’s partly correct. The aspect in which it’s not correct is that when I was a student at the University of Melbourne, which is obviously before I went to do my graduate work at Oxford, and therefore before I started thinking about animals, I was active in the abortion law reform movement. +
++But what is correct about what you said was that when I started thinking about the ethics of how we treat animals, I started asking questions about, well, is it only inflicting suffering on animals that is bad, preventing them from having enjoyable lives? Or is it the fact that we kill them? +
++That led me to think, well, what is it that makes killing wrong? And because I’m not religious, I was not going to say “because we have an immortal soul,” or “because God forbids it.” I started thinking, well, maybe it’s something to do with our intellect, the fact that we want to plan for the future and that if we are killed, we can’t. +
++So I thought about that and that made me think, well, okay, so maybe the humane killing of a non-human animal is not as bad as the humane killing of a normal human being. I still think that. +
++But suppose that you have a human who lacks the cognitive capacities that enable normal humans to think about their future. That could be an infant. None of us were born with those capacities. Or it could be someone with a severe intellectual disability that was not treatable. For that matter, it could be somebody who didn’t really have much of a future to look forward to because they were terminally ill and they were expecting to die within weeks or months, and their quality of life had fallen to a level where they didn’t think it was worth going on. +
++Dylan Matthews +
++These ideas are, of course, immensely controversial, and you’ve faced protests about them. It’s been an interesting thing for me personally — I admire your work a great deal. It has changed my life in important ways. But I also have friends in the disability rights movement who view your work as incredibly dangerous and as a threat to them. +
++I’m curious what you have made of that pushback and if there are points where you’ve changed your mind. My sense is that you haven’t changed your mind on the overall framework, but are there empirical questions about what life is like for specific kinds of disabled people where you have? +
++Peter Singer +
++You’re right to say that in terms of the underlying ethical arguments, that’s not changed. I still think there are cases where parents should have the option of ending the life of their severely disabled infant. +
++Let me just say a couple of things why I think that’s not as radical as some people might think. It’s standard practice in neonatal intensive care units pretty much everywhere, that if a child is born with a very severe disability, doctors will ask parents whether they want to put the child on life support or not — or if the child is on life support when the disability is discovered, whether they wish to remove life support. +
++If you have, let’s say, a premature infant who’s had a massive brain bleeding, a hemorrhage in the brain, which does happen with very premature infants, and the doctors say, “Would you like to take your child off life support? This is the prognosis. Your child will never be able to live independently, will never be able to recognize the child’s mother or father, will basically be needing complete care. Would you like to take this child off life support?” That’s a decision to ask: “Would you like the child to die?” There’s no other way of glossing that. +
++That happens all the time. Parents very frequently say yes, and the child dies. So the difference between what I’m suggesting and what is happening is that, if the child is not on life support, when the disability is discovered, the brain hemorrhage or whatever it might be, and therefore you can’t end the child’s life by taking the child off life support, parents should still have the option of saying, we think that it’s better that the child should not live, and doctors should be able to make sure that happens, to give the child a drug so that the child dies without suffering. +
++I continue to think that it’s okay for doctors to offer to take the child off life support, and it’s okay for parents to accept that offer. And I continue to think there’s no real ethical difference between bringing about a child’s death by turning off life support than by giving the child a lethal injection. +
++I’m not sure which of those elements people think I should change, but I don’t think that I should change any of them. +
++What is true is that on the range of disabilities where I think parents may properly say, “We want our child to live” … I’ve broadened my views somewhat on that. +
++I’ve talked to people in the disability community, and I accept that there are all kinds of worthwhile lives. I used to say the parents should discuss it with the doctors, if there’s some uncertainty about the condition. I now say parents should discuss it with the doctors and with representatives of people who have the disability that their child has. Depending on the nature of the disability, that may be people with a disability themselves who’ve grown up and lived that life, or it may be the parents who are living with a child. +
++But I certainly accept the point that doctors themselves may have a prejudice against people with disabilities, and that therefore it’s good to get a wider range of advice. +
++Dylan Matthews +
++In preparing for this conversation, I went back and reread a piece by your late friend and argumentative antagonist Harriet McBryde Johnson, about your correspondence. [Johnson was a lawyer and disability rights activist who sharply criticized Singer and other bioethicists for devaluing disabled people’s lives.] +
++Part of what I take her to be saying is that there’s a kind of speech harm in making these kinds of arguments about disabled people. You may be making a specific argument about a particular case in the NICU of some hospital involving parents facing a brutal situation. But when you’re making that argument, adult disabled people or adolescent disabled people who did live with similar disabilities are hearing it, and there’s something harmful to their status as equals in society about that. +
++You’re also involved with the Journal of Controversial Ideas [an interdisciplinary academic outlet where scholars are allowed to present incendiary arguments and findings pseudonymously, without fear of damaging their reputation]. You’re a big defender of academic freedom. Part of what’s interesting about Johnson’s argument to me is that it’s somewhat utilitarian — it’s about consequences. It’s suggesting that we should judge actions by their consequences as opposed to their intent, or even their truth value. +
++I’m curious what you make of that idea that there are argumentative paths you don’t want to go down because of their potential to hurt groups of people. +
++Peter Singer +
++I do consider the consequences of our actions as the way to determine which actions are right or wrong, and if I were persuaded that the harms are really so serious that it is better not to talk about these issues, then I wouldn’t talk about them. But I haven’t been persuaded by that. And, of course, we have to balance it against the consequences of parents thinking about the issue in a way that doesn’t leave them tortured with guilt for making what many people would think of as a morally wrong decision. +
++I’m interested in social reform. For example, I think switching to voluntary euthanasia or physician-assisted dying, that movement has made very significant progress in the last 40 years, and I think has greatly reduced the amount of unnecessary suffering. But some people with disabilities are opposed to that as well, because they think pressure will be put on people with disabilities to end their lives. +
++That would be a serious consideration if there were clear evidence that that’s the case. But I really haven’t seen the evidence, either about the speech harms that you’re referring to or about pressure on people with disabilities to end their lives. So I continue to advocate for physician-assisted dying. +
++In general, I think that freedom of thought and expression is really important. I think that people have become, perhaps, overly sensitive in the last couple of decades about speech harm. It’s often said but rarely backed up with firm evidence about how serious it is. So that’s why I haven’t stopped talking about these issues. +
++How warm water in the Pacific shapes storms, droughts, and record heat around the world. +
++El Niño is the warm phase of the Pacific Ocean’s temperature cycle, and this year’s El Niño is poised to be a big one, sending shock waves into weather patterns around the world. It’s likely to set new heat records, energize rainfall in South America, fuel drought in Africa, and disrupt the global economy. It may already have helped fuel early-season heat waves in Asia this year. +
++“A warming El Niño is expected to develop in the coming months and this will combine with human-induced climate change to push global temperatures into uncharted territory,” said Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, in a statement earlier this month. “This will have far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management and the environment. We need to be prepared.” +
++We know the next El Niño won’t be cheap. The one in 1997-98, one of the most powerful in history, led to $5.7 trillion in income losses in countries around the world according to a study published earlier this month in the journal Science. That’s much higher than prior estimates of as much as $96 billion. It was also blamed for contributing to 23,000 deaths as storms and floods amped up in its wake. +
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Agustin Diaz/AFP via Getty Images
++Rising average temperatures are poised to amplify these effects further. Even if every country met its existing pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions to limit climate change, El Niño events could lead to $84 trillion in economic losses by the end of the century, according to the Science study. +
++“[T]hese findings together suggest that while climate mitigation is essential to reduce accumulating damages from warming, it is imperative to devote more resources to adapting to El Niño in the present day,” the authors wrote. +
++This might seem like a whole lot from a weather phenomenon driven by slightly warmer than average water in the Pacific. But it turns out that the planet’s largest ocean, covering about one-third of its surface, is a powerful engine for weather around the world. Seemingly small shifts in temperature, wind, and current in the parts of the Pacific Ocean near the equator can alter weather patterns for months. +
++Scientists have improved their ability to predict when these cycles will rise and how severe they will be. At the same time, humans are also changing the climate while building more ports, homes, and offices in areas that are vulnerable to disasters worsened by El Niño. That’s why such events can be so costly — but there are measures that can dampen some of their worst effects. +
++How does El Niño work? +
++Fishers off the coast of Ecuador and Peru coined the term El Niño in the 19th century to describe a warm water current that regularly built up along the west coast of South America around Christmas (“El Niño” means “the boy,” a reference to the Christ child.) +
++The warm water turned out to be part of a much larger complicated system connecting seas and skies all over the world. Scientists now know that the Pacific Ocean cycles between warm, neutral, and cool phases roughly every two to seven years, inducing changes in the ocean and in the atmosphere. This back-and-forth is called the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. It’s “the strongest fluctuation of the climate system on the planet,” said Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). (You can read a more detailed explanation of El Niño’s mechanics here.) +
++The key thing to understand is that the Pacific Ocean is huge. Huuuuge. Huuuuuuuuge. And that’s just the surface area; the Pacific averages 13,000 feet in depth but can dip as low as 36,000 feet. Water isn’t just moving north, south, east, and west, but up and down. These currents are driven by wind as well as temperature and salt gradients. +
++Earth’s oceans also act as a giant thermal battery. They’ve absorbed upward of 90 percent of the warming humans have induced from burning fossil fuels, and the Pacific, at least, appears to be warming particularly fast. +
++All this adds up to a world-changing amount of energy packed into one big ocean. +
++During ENSO’s neutral phase, wind pushes warm water in the Pacific around the equator from east to west. This lets warm water pool near Indonesia and raises sea levels there by 1.5 feet (0.5 meters) above normal compared to the coast of South America. The warmer water near Asia evaporates more readily and fuels rainstorms there. And as surface waters get pushed away from South America, water from deeper in the ocean rises, bringing with it valuable nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen. This phenomenon is called upwelling, and it’s critical for nourishing sea life. About half the fish in the world are caught in upwelling zones. +
++When El Niño starts picking up, this engine shifts gears. The trade winds slow down and the warm water near Asia starts sloshing back eastward across the Pacific, reaching the coast of South America. The drift in warm water also moves evaporation and rain such that southeast Asia and Australia tend to get drier while Peru and Ecuador typically see more precipitation. +
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NOAA
++“It creates a lot of convection and a lot of thunderstorms in a part of the world that doesn’t always have that activity,” said Dillon Amaya, a research scientist at NOAA. “You release a lot of energy and a lot of heat into the atmosphere and this creates waves that propagate in the Northern Hemisphere and in the Southern Hemisphere symmetrically.” +
++These perturbations can then deflect weather patterns across the world. For instance, in the US, El Niño typically leads to less rainfall in the Pacific Northwest and more in the Southwest. But it’s one of several factors that influences the weather, making it tricky to anticipate just how it will play out in a given year. “It’s not always a one-to-one relationship,” Amaya said. +
++The guidelines for declaring an El Niño are sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific that stay 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 Celsius) above the 30-year average for three months. Right now, with the seasons changing, it’s tricky to say for certain that the world is in an El Niño year, but researchers say they’ll have a better answer in the coming weeks. “Once you get on the other side of spring, our forecast skill goes way up,” Amaya said. +
++This engine can also shift into reverse. Tradewinds blowing east to west across the Pacific get stronger, cooling the region around the equator, a phenomenon known as a La Niña. This tends to have a cooling effect over the whole planet. +
++What can we expect this year? +
++El Niño typically picks up over the summer and shows its strongest effects over the winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Right now, forecasts drawing on ocean buoys, sensors, satellite measurements, and computer models show that a strong one is brewing as the eastern Pacific Ocean steadily warms up just below its surface. +
++“The vast majority … are assuming that we’re going to have a big El Niño this winter,” said Amaya. “I think we’re definitely expecting to break global temperature records this year.” +
++Part of what’s making this so jarring is that ENSO is coming out of an unusually long La Niña phase. They typically last one to two years, but the world has been in one since 2020. “There’s only been three triple-dip La Niñas in the last 50 years: One in 1973 to 76, one from 1998 to 2001, and then this one,” said McPhaden. That has allowed more heat energy to accumulate in the ocean and may have helped cushion some of the warming due to climate change. However, the World Meteorological Organization noted that the past eight years were still the hottest on record. +
++So the warming water detected in the equatorial Pacific and the rebound from La Niña point toward a strong El Niño. “All the ingredients are in place and the soup is cooking,” McPhaden said. “The ocean is uncorked. All that heat that was stored below the surface of the ocean is going to come out.” +
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Bill Wechter/AFP via Getty Images
++The other big factor is that the planet itself is heating up. El Niño is part of a natural cycle. Human activity is amplifying some aspects of it, but not always in a straightforward way. Researchers expect that climate change will increase the chances of strong El Niño and La Niña events, but are still chalking out how they will manifest. Exactly how that extra heat is distributed across the ocean and the atmosphere will alter which regions see more rain, which ones will suffer drought, and where the biggest storms will land. +
++And while the rising El Niño this year will eventually cycle back to its cool phase, it won’t be enough to offset humanity’s consumption of fossil fuels. “What really matters from the long-term point of view is this relentless rise in greenhouse gas concentrations,” McPhaden said. “You cannot escape that there will be continued warming because of that.” +
++These forecasts, however, buy precious time to prepare. While El Niño can push some disasters to greater extremes, tools like early warning systems, disaster shelters, evacuations, and climate-resilient building codes can keep the human toll in check. It’s going to be a hot summer, but it doesn’t have to be a deadly one. +
++The HBO film adapts the FBI transcript from Reality Winner’s interrogation into a stunning thriller. +
++When the play that would one day become the extraordinary drama Reality premiered off-Broadway, its whistleblower protagonist was still in a federal prison. +
++Back then, in February 2019, the show was called Is This a Room, an enigmatic quote from the show itself. An FBI agent looks into the place — it’s definitely a room — where two of his colleagues are interrogating the diminutive 25-year-old woman who lives there, and he makes the inquiry. He seems to be asking if the space needs to be searched. But it’s a strange, off-kilter query, one nobody would really know how to answer. Of course this is a room; what else would it be? It’s like asking where “here” is. Or whether reality exists. +
++There’s an ironic vigor to Reality’s narrative, a practically allegorical sense that it was constructed by a lightly ham-fisted author with something to prove. It’s a story about truth and twisted facts, about shadows and subterfuge, and the woman at its center is literally named Reality. +
++What makes it so strange, and so chilling, is that nobody wrote it at all. +
++The text of Reality, like the play it’s based on, is a verbatim replica, including redactions, of the FBI’s transcript of its interrogation of Air Force veteran and NSA translator Reality Winner on June 3, 2017. Playwright and director Tina Satter pulled the transcript onto the stage, and now she and co-screenwriter James Paul Dallas have moved it — to incredible effect — onto the screen, starring Sydney Sweeney as Winner and Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis as the agents interrogating her. +
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HBO
++Reality is, quite literally, the kind of movie where people just talk the whole time. But that’s precisely why it works. The dialogue (unaltered, with a key exception, from the stage production and thus the FBI’s transcript) has that greatest of theatrical qualities: Nobody is ever saying quite what they mean, and you are riveted, trying to figure out what they’re thinking, the balance of power shifting back and forth. That it works so well on screen is a tremendous testimony to both Satter’s directorial chops and the actors’ performances. +
++The real Reality Winner, you may recall from the headlines, was accused and convicted of leaking an intelligence report regarding attempted Russian hacking of voter rolls during the 2016 election. “I wasn’t trying to be a Snowden or anything,” she told the agents. Later, she told the media that she felt the government was intentionally misleading its citizens about Russia’s attempts to upend the election, and so she printed out a file and mailed it to the Intercept, which promised its sources anonymity. +
++The government found out and arrived on her doorstep even before the Intercept published the reports. For the crime of “removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet,” she was sentenced to five years and three months in federal prison — the longest ever imposed for this crime. And, incredibly, she was repeatedly denied bail, ultimately remaining there for just shy of four years, even as Congress and other government officials spoke about what she’d revealed publicly. Though she was transferred to a transitional facility on June 2, 2021, Winner never saw the show about her when it opened on Broadway that October — because she was still under house arrest. +
++Translating play to screen results in subtle changes. When the show was still on stage, redactions in the transcripts were staged visually, the audience briefly plunged into blackness, a switch flipped that left you disoriented in the audience. As a medium, film has a little more to play with visually, so instead we see Sweeney’s image fuzz out and disappear, then reappear every time the redaction ends. +
++There’s also context-setting by way of news clips; at the start, we see Winner in her cubicle, Fox News coverage of FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before Congress blaring from a TV on the wall. (Later, she’ll tell the agents that she repeatedly asked for the TVs to be switched to anything other than Fox News — Al Jazeera, or just pictures of people’s pets — and it greatly upset her.) Sometimes events and dates about which the characters are speaking are cut together with the real Reality’s images or Instagram posts; once in a while we see a waveform of the tapes, or hear some static, or see the transcript being typed, a way to remind us that what we are watching is not fiction. +
++Or not exactly, anyhow. +
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HBO
++Most significantly, some of the redactions in the play have become un-redacted in the meantime. Many of them concerned the news outlet to which Winner leaked the document; the film eventually starts saying “the Intercept” out loud, and it’s a bit shocking at first. The reasoning seems clear. In November 2021, just after the Broadway show closed, Winner blasted the Intercept for its handling of the documents, the handling of which may have been responsible for her identification by the FBI (and which became a huge problem for the publication). Visually, Reality makes the case that the Intercept screwed up. Small wonder. +
++The question at the center of Reality is complex. When it was a play, it was an inquiry into Winner’s motives. Why would a young woman who wants, as she repeatedly tells the agents, to be deployed — to get out of her dead-end position as a Farsi translator and actually use her extensive language skills — do something she knows is illegal? What “pushed her over the edge,” as one of the agents asks? +
++But as a movie, with the attendant close-ups on faces the medium provides, the question grows. Emotional complexity, the manifold feelings her character is experiencing, and her well-trained attempts to stay cool, flash across Sweeney’s face. We start to really see what she’s thinking, and that leads to a bigger, more unnerving demonstration of the abject failure of the systems meant to protect us to do anything like that. Winner’s military record can’t save her. The fact that she speaks three languages spoken in the Middle East is called “impressive” many times by the agents, but each time the repetition is more loaded — it’s going to be used against her, we realize, to suggest her sympathies lie elsewhere (and so it was). The FBI isn’t on her side; they don’t even bother to read her Miranda rights. Well-worn gender dynamics suddenly become a factor, with Winner seemingly forced into joking about her cat being obese to pacify the men, sickeningly recognizable to women who’ve ever felt the need to play along for self-protection. +
++After her arrest, media reports — stitched into the film, lest the journalistic outlets conveniently forget — include people saying that, for instance, Winner is “a person who had taken a key interest in the Middle East, with suspicious motives,” that she “claimed to hate America,” that she was a “quintessential example of an inside threat.” Even the news outlet that was supposed to protect her, that provided such careful instructions for leakers who wish to remain anonymous, screwed it all up, and she paid the price. +
++Watching Reality marks the third time I’ve seen Satter’s adaptation of Winner’s interrogation. Each time, I’m left angry and unsettled. Like many Americans, especially white middle-class women, I was raised to believe that my government messes up sometimes but is essentially on my side. That we are the good guys, a government by the people, for the people, and that we don’t imprison people here just to make sure nobody ever dares to do something like making sure we’re told the truth about our own elections. We lionize the brave person who speaks out. When we get older, and wiser, and maybe more skeptical, that bedrock belief remains: that the truth will protect us. +
++To that, Reality pulls out a sledgehammer, and a host of institutions failing to fulfill their own lofty promises. Is anyone doing what they’re supposed to do? If the US government is willing to impose a harsh sentence on someone like Reality Winner, what are we supposed to think? What else is false? Is reality real? +
++Is this a room? +
++Reality premieres on HBO on May 29 at 10 pm ET and will stream on Max. +