Yet more hackery

I don’t see a single piece of hard reasoning in the article. I fail to see how it could convince anybody of anything. Rouse interest, yes.

Ted @1:
Just so. The prize in this game is winning the election. The CEI is avoiding the science and seeking to cast Gore as a sanctimonious hypocrite. So? It is intellectually dishonest, but it may be very effective politics. They aren’t hacks until they lose the game that they are actually playing.

I don’t know what people are talking about when they say Achenbach doesn’t “evaluate the claims” of the skeptics. He writes: “HUMAN BEINGS ARE PUMPING GREENHOUSE GASES INTO THE ATMOSPHERE, warming the planet in the process. . . . The Arctic is melting at an alarming rate. Arctic sea ice is 40 percent thinner than it was in the 1970s. . . . The 1990s were the warmest decade on record. The year 1998 set the all-time mark. This decade is on its way to setting a new standard, with a succession of scorchers. This isn’t a theory anymore. This is happening now.” This seems like a pretty clear statement that the claims of the skeptics are wrong. And if you say people live on a “parallel earth,” I think you’re signaling strongly to readers that they’re loons.

Not strongly enough, William. The article uses most of its space to provide a soapbox for the loons, and the less than careful reader could easily come away with the impression that the passages you quote are just a statement of “one side” of the “debate”. The whole thing comes across as a typical instance of fatuous journalistic “balance”, no matter what “signals” Achenbach may have inteded to send.

Joel Achenbach is a writer, looking at what is essentially a political subculture, full of people who genuinely (at least in some sense) believe certain crazy things about global warming. He wrote a piece about these people, letting them speak in their own words, etc., while making clear early on that he thinks they’re wrong. What more do you expect him to do? He wasn’t writing an Op-Ed piece, he was writing a feature. Is it now unacceptable to look in detail at the beliefs of people who think crazy things? Should he have followed every quote with the statement: “This is wrong.”

The standards you’re holding Achenbach to here are absurd, and would make for boring, rote journalism. And this has nothing to do with balance. It has to do with the fact that it’s often interesting and enlightening to read about eccentrics and corrupt people and loons.

Finally, this “less than careful” reader business has got to go. Achenbach shouldn’t be worried about what less-than-careful readers are going to think of global warming after he’s done. He’s a writer. He should be worried about what will make for the most true — and, from his perspective, the most worthwhile — depiction of the world he’s writing about.

The real problem with Aschenbach’s piece is the context. It ran as the cover story in the Post’s weekly magazine, with a full picture of a leading skeptic and a cover headline to match. I’m a Post subscriber and I have never seen any story about global warming given the prominence that this article got. The story itself was reasonably balanced, but in the overall context of Post coverage it was wildly favorable to the so-called skeptics. Where are the two dozen magazine cover stories that say that global warming is happening and spelling out the consequences that could balance this fringe opposition movement?

I realize you’re not convince-able on this issue, but Achenbach’s piece said, explicitly and high up in the piece, that global warming is happening, and that the consequences of it may very well be disastrous. The piece was not, context or no context, “wildly favorable” to the skeptics. It was a piece that showed that these skeptics exist, and that laid out what they believed, all the while making it clear that they are, in fact, a “fringe opposition movement” whose beliefs are rejected by the vast majority of people who’ve thought seriously about the question of global warming.

Let me put it differently. If Achenbach did a piece about the war in Iraq in which he included, high up in the piece, a paragraph that said, “For all its troubles, the war in Iraq has been a success. The removal of Saddam is an unqualifiedly good thign, etc.” but then went on to say, “There are these other people who live on a parallel earth. They think the war has been a debacle” and then quoted them at length on what a failure the war has been, would you really think the story was unfairly tilted toward the anti-war people? I doubt it. I assume you’d think Achenbach was setting up the anti-war people to look like fringe crazies. And that’s exactly what he did with the global warming skeptics.

Subscribing to the Global Warming theology seems to me to be as silly as accepting that it would be a good idea to invade Iraq, or believing that Toni Blair really is a straight sort of a guy. Just not the sort of thing that intelligent people should fall for.

The Washington Post exists in a political context in Washington, DC. There is a broad constituency for the naysayer tabloid tenor of the WaPo’s article on Gray. You may take a visit to the cooler tones of the discussion among the NASA scientists trying to understand the decades-long output from and design of multiple computer models of the complex interaction which is climate science at the following linked site. The first article is about summer reading of consumer oriented books some aligned closely to the Gray naysayers, some more thoughtful, all popularizers in approach.
The second linked article is for the math inclined among your readership, discussing how one recently prominent naysayer tuned the model to a starting point which would hide data.
The rest of the website needs exploration to discover who the brightest scientists are. A tour there will show climate change science is a fairly dispassionate field but is visited by a lot of writers and people interested in politics and other forms of eschatology. I will be glad to highlight a few articles, if some here would like; the two I selected for the links pretty much cover the range, from pedestrian to specialized. Enjoy.
John Lopresti
book review

designing the statistical model

Oh, shit! — Dearieme.

Obviously, Aschenbach is right about one crucial thing: the ‘skeptics’ aka denialists are winning. That is, they are winning the actual battle of preventing green policies from being implemented in D.C.

Given that, I thought his portrayal of them was actually pretty naked and revealing. There are several strategies for destroying Exxon pseudo-science, and one of them is to show it as Aschenbach did. That is not the only strategy, of course, but dialogues in which people slap up ‘facts’ carved out of Wikipedia seems to mire global warming into an eternal he said/he said, which serves the Exxon policy of stasis. The quotes in that Aschenbach article are beautiful — they can be wrapped lovingly about the necks of the denialists for years to come. One article isn’t going to bring about some flash of revelation in the American mind, but I think Aschenbach’s article opens the gates for the next one and the one after.

I think “jr” has it right — the issue isn’t really the content of the article, but the context.

There’s an almost structural bias towards the novel and the contrarian in the whole news industry, and it’s one the right wing has learned to expliot: Newspapers aren’t interested in the “dog bites man” story, but rather the “man bites dog” stories. Even when they’re written and researched well and contextualize the story, they tend to publicize exceptions and make them seem more common or more legitimate than they are. Thus, you almost never see a news story that says “The best way to lose weight is eating a balanced diet of fewer calories and exercising regularly,” but rather “Does the bacon-only diet work? Experts weigh in.” Even if 99% of the experts say no, the fact of the story phrased in that way makes people think, “Hey, some experts now support the bacon-only diet! Sounds good.”

The global warming issue is similar — no editor wants a dry policy piece that confirms what most people already believe. They want something interesting that will catch readers’ eyes, and the way to do that is “man bites dog.” Thus the focus on the earth-is-flat crowd — it’s interesting because they run contrary to conventional wisdom. Even as Achenbach accurately describes the dynamic of the conflict — they don’t need to win, they just need to muddy the waters — and points out what loons these guys are, his piece by its very existence continues that dynamic. By his own standards, and probably most of ours, he’s been fair, done an accurate job debunking in many ways, but the problem is that in the big picture, that doesn’t matter. The overall effect of the story will probably be the opposite of its content, legitimizing the global warming sceptics.

Burying the lede, which this piece did, is a standard practice of bad journalism. A story with the lede buried and no clear conclusion is a bad piece unless the point of the piece is that no clear conclusion can be come to.

The Times and Post are afraid of organized winger protests and soften everything as much as they can in order to avoid controversy. It’s quite possible that Aschenbach’s piece was much better to begin with and was garbled by an editor.

The things I am talking about have been pretty well known for some time and I don’t understand the reason why people are denying that it’s happening or digging for a more complex explanation.

John, you keep talking about the “lede” of Achenbach’s piece as if this were a news story. Nor is it a critical essay about the science of global warming. It’s a piece of feature journalism. Achenbach is trying to do something closer to Tom Wolfe or Didion or Michael Lewis than to a typical piece you’d see in the NYT. The point of the piece, again, is not to make the case for global warming. It’s to give readers a look at a strange subculture of true believers who think they’re right, and the rest of the world is wrong. This kind of piece doesn’t need — and in fact would probably be much worse with — a straight lede and a clear conclusion.

It’s not “Chekhov or Henry James”? Well, Achenbach isn’t as good a writer as Achenbach or Henry James, but the idea that magazine pieces can’t be literature, and shouldn’t aspire to literary values, is absurd, and should have been buried a long time ago. Achenbach is a writer. His only responsibility, again, is to write the best-crafted, truest story he can.

And as for that “first sentence,” that’s not Achenbach’s. That’s an editor’s.

Washington Post is the place to find some worthwhile Congressional Quarterly’s firstrate rendering of hearing transcripts, and WaPo assures that archive remains free, unlike some other prominent publishers who place journalism behind a paywall promptly within a few days of first publication. Though the original commentary, above, is about the article in this instance rather than the vehicle for its promulgation. WaPo does all kinds of worthwhile things. When the formal study group comprised of career civil rights lawyers at the Department of Justice evaluated voter rights violations in the 2003 TX regerrymander and found Voting Rights Act noncompliance, that report, a substantial 60 pages first surfaced to the light of day as a link on the WaPo site in 2005, after the case was adjudicated in the district court, but, significantly, prior to the case’s argument in the Supreme Court. WaPo helps some worthwhile efforts by its editorial policies. Now congress is revisiting portions of VRA, and although SCOTUS’ opinion has yet to issue forth, the circumstances surrounding suppression of that internal DoJ civil rights study group’s report has to weigh in the balance of deliberations for some senators. We need not laud the WaPo excessively here, but they are a newspaper of merit; and are trying like many news organs to adapt to the new e-media, a presence which they seem to be developing well. I have noticed, too, as some commenters stated, above, similarities in US press in these times, compared to a certain dictatorship in western Europe whose press I used to read at the time the constitutional democracy was re-entering upon the scene. In that land, the economists had a daily newspaper containing some of the most insightful analysis available, but the average kiosk sold only the brand-x newspapers. Economists often are first to recognize the changes in the world order. I think a similar responsibility and ability to communicate is now evident in the science community, particularly on the global climate change topic.

Less heavy-handed irony would be more effective, Mr. polish.

but was most probably effective.

BMA, you are very naive. Or rather, it was effective all right- in bolstering the visibility of the “sceptics” and thus keeping alive the phony “controversy” so the brain-dead press can keep “covering” it. For a biologist this is deja vu, the IDiots have gotten much the same helping hand from those wonderful “journalists”.

John Emerson,

‘Big Mac, did you actually read what I wrote? Could you consider responding to what I wrote?’

Maybe better than you.

‘If the Post (thought it was the Times for awhile, sorry) has a long track record of hard-hitting, unambiguous writing about global warming skeptics, then this piece is less problematic. As far as I remember, they don’t. So I don’t think that they should have chosen to write a piece of fluff feature journalism instead of a news story or an editorial.’

Quite clearly what you are objecting to is the context and general nature of the Post’s coverage of global warming.

If that context and nature was different you wouldn’t have a problem with the piece. That is a pretty fair paraphrase of the above.

‘What the Post failed to promote effectively enough was the fact that these people are wrong and mostly dishonest. As I pointed out in detail, they made it quite easy for someone to miss the point.’

Again, what you are objecting to is that the Post did not promote your POV. And while my general POV on global warming is probably closer to yours than to the skeptics, I am quite aware that the truth of global warming is a matter of a degree of probability within a large range. Boring.

And while people like Gray and Lindz might be wrong they hardly seem genuinely dishonest. Even the CEI people came across as more extremely enthusiastic than flat out liars.

It was a well done piece. Screaming liar, liar, liar or acting like the voice of authority isn’t generally effective expect for firing up the already converted.

And while I kinda think more detail about the chief claims of skeptics, and how they are panning out might have helped the article, the article didn’t totally avoid those things.

Gray’s I am working on a paper came across as kinda of sad.

I think most people who read features of this type skim pretty extensively, if not thoroughly, and the article did a good job painting the chief critics of global warming as contrarian loons and/or nutty libertarians.

You start out sympathizing with the critics. Even admiring their works. That only makes the rug pull as the article goes on more effective.

Again not necessarily my cup of tea but a good cup of tea.

Achenbach discussed the piece quite a bit with Robert Wright on bloggingheads.tv (video link) (before it came out).

“Again, what you are objecting to is that the Post did not promote your POV.”

No, Big Mac. The Post failed to clearly state the actual truth of the situation. I happen to accept the actual truth of the situation, but that does not make the truth “my POV”.

I wasn’t talking about screaming “liar” or anything else. I was talking about stating the facts in a clear, intelligible way.

If the fact of global warming were almost universally accepted, and these people were being treated tongue in cheek like flat-earthers, the article would be amusing and no big deal. But global warming is still controversial, though it shouldn’t be. The battle hasn’t been won.

Where controversial claims are false they should be juxtaposed to the truth. That seems like common sense to me, but journalists no longer work that way.

I’m glad John used the word “commissars” first, because it certainly has been on my mind throughout this discussion, as John and Steve berate Achenbach for not toeing the right political line, not in terms of the substance (no one reading that article could doubt that Achenbach believes global warming is real — “This is not theory. It’s happening.” — and that its effects are serious and dangerous) but the style and the focus. You sound like Mike Gold, telling writers that if they’re not writing socialist realism they’re enemies of the proletariat: “Journalism can be good literature, but it has to be journalism first.” Don’t write about “background noise.” Don’t do “fluff feature journalism.” Make sure you use a blunt instrument so that everyone knows at every moment who’s wearing the black hats. What an impoverished and ponderous view of journalism and writing you’re offering up here.

The irony of all this is that, as John’s original post suggests, and as my reaction and those of a lot of the people commenting here suggest, Achenbach’s article actually did an excellent job of discrediting the people he was writing about. And yes, you probably had to read the entire article to get that. But that’s who real writers write for, not the “less careful” readers who are going to skim.

William, on the DeLong thread someone just reported that all of his global-warming-denier friends have forwarded him the article. You are just wrong that the article makes an effective case against the deniers. It’s only effective with people who already know the truth, and that’s what Aesopian language is all about. The truth shouldn’t be a coded mess age, it should be directly stated.

You’re getting worse and worse. Mike Gold was a literary critic writing about novels. As I’ve clearly explained and you should have understood by now, I’m talking about non-fiction journalism about factual topics which have major political importance. I like Chekhov and Henry James fine, but they are not models for political journalism. You’re swinging wildly and seem to be trying to insult me.

Russia’s Aesopian writers during the Czarist period wrote that way because that’s the only way they could get past the censor. Many of them would rather have written directly. To a degree that may be true of some of today’s writers, though in many cases not speaking the truth directly seems to have become second nature.

Perhaps in Czarist Russia a readership developed which only wanted to read Aesopian writing, and were offended by direct statements of fact. I don’t really know. But (judging by Goodwin’s crude smears of direct writing) such an audience apparently exists today.

William, I did no such thing (“toeing the right political line”). You are offically an ass. The problem, as both John and I have repeatedly and clearly stated, is that he buried the lede under a mound of superficially sympathetic coverage of people who are in fact talking complete rubbish. You seem to have serious reading comprehension problems since you have repeatedly avoided addressing this simple point. It is quite possible to seriously mislead while technically telling the truth, which is exactly what the article does.

Think Steven Colbert.

John, you wrote that I was “impervious to reason.” And you said Achenbach wrote the piece he did “so that the right-wing political commissars wouldn’t get mad.” It’s not clear to me you’re in a position to complain about being insulted.

Regardless, I’ll just say again what I said earlier: Achenbach didn’t bury the truth (or the lede) in his piece, because his piece wasn’t about whether or not global warming is real. He states clearly, and unequivocally, that it’s real. But he’s writing about this small group of fanatics who think that it isn’t, about their mania, their paranoia, their flights of fancy, etc. And that’s what his lede and his conclusion should have been about, as indeed they were.

You’re saying Achenbach did write the truth, he just didn’t write it often enough or in the right places in his story to satisfy you. Maybe he can send you his next piece in advance to make sure it toes the correct line.

John, you’ve now compared Bill Gray and Lindzen to racists and Holocaust deniers (over on Brad’s board). Do you actually think these people are evil, in the way that racists and Nazis are? (If you want to argue that the CEI people are, I wouldn’t quibble.) Are they that far outside the moral pale that you can’t write about them using any tone other than straight condemnation?

You keep using the word “fluffy,” but I don’t think Achenbach’s piece is fluffy. I don’t think it’s a great piece of journalism, but I think it is a serious portrait of people living on the fringes of a community, people who are so convinced they’re right and everyone else is wrong that they are no longer able to look at the evidence. There are lots of people, even now, who don’t believe in global warming. Understanding where they’re coming from is a valuable, and interesting, project.

As for the Holocaust denier question, there actually is an excellent example of precisely the kind of project you think would be inconceivable: Errol Morris’ documentary “Mr. Death.”

Well, I think that comment captures the difference in our perspectives well. You think the stories should be organized around the falsehood of what they say. I think the stories should be organized around what will make for the most compelling, and true, picture of the people Achenbach is writing about. They do not think that what they’re saying is “clearly false,” so simply reiterating that it’s false doesn’t really help us understand them or what they’re thinking.

(The “racists” I was referring to, by the way, were the members of the CCC, to whom you also compared Lindzen and Gray.)

I think that I am correct that many people will come away from the piece with a more favorable view of the denier. (Shinypenny on the DeLong thread: “Personal anecdote: every single global warming denier I know e-mailed me a copy”.) This is my main point, and it is a valid point. To say that Achenbach is not to blame, and that the readers are to blame, is evasive. Achenbach made their mistake easier, when he could have made it almost impossible. And in any case, the whole point about Aesopian writing is that it’s not meant to be understood by everyone.

Sure, it was a feature article, but a feature article could have been written which also made the point I wanted to see made. And sure, it’s a “human-interest story”, but a human interest story could have been written which did **not** increase sympathy toward the poor skeptics who lost their grants, and which did not subordinate the question of truth.

My second point is that Achenbach’s mushiness is pervasive in journalism, including the most-respected publications, and that it is the result of a deliberate policy of trying to placate the hard right. And I think that I’m right about that one too. The norm of American journalism is timidity about anything that offends the right, and that’s become second nature to most reporters and many readers.

There’s nothing at all wrong with the clear, direct statement of unnuanced truth.

If there were a balance in the media between the various sorts of articles, you would be right. But there isn’t. There are lots of nuanced and evasive articles, and quite a few dishonest articles, and very few forthright articles.

My argument is based on the overall state of the media, and not on access to any information specifically about Achenbach except the article.

You are correct that I assume media intimidation of the by the hard right as a starting point. It’s true and well-known and I give my audience her credit for being well-informed and undeluded.

My claim is that while global warning is a live issue, and it is now, one of the organizing themes of an article about global warming sceptics should be **the truth (or otherwise) of what they are saying.** I do not think that this makes me a Stalinist.

I also think that a good article about the skeptics would anger the hard right, and that Achenbach and/or the Post was careful not to do this. There’s a bit of conjecture there, but that’s the most reasonable explanation.

I am confident that many readers come away from the article with an unduly positive view of the skeptics, and that this is because of the poor (probably deliberately poor) organization of the article, which buried key information in the middle (a very common tactic).

I do not know or care at all about Achenbach as a person or about his motives. I’m talking about the article. I have granted the possibility that an editor might have butchered the article.

The reason I say the same thing over and over again is because it doesn’t stop being true.

I wonder how many people arguing on this board are journalists. I am. So I’ll give a little “argument by authority” of my own.

1. Anyone with a brain will read these skeptics as loons. And to worry that Achenbach should state that their loons, plain and true (or that they’re lying or whatever) is, frankly, elitist. “Oh, poor stupid readers won’t know how to interpret this.” Editors do this all the time and I keep yelling at mine to give the reader more credit.

2. What should Achenbach say, exactly, that he didn’t? That Gray et al. are crazy? Lying? Wrong? He did say they’re wrong. But if he said they were lying or crazy, he’d have real libel issue on his hand. You don’t think someone like Gray wouldn’t sue if Achenbach wrote, “For all his charm, Gray is wrong, a little nuts and possibly in this for material gain”? You complain about the mushiness of modern journalism and that everyone who works for the mainstream press is in thrall to “the right.” We want to be right, we don’t want to get sued. It’s a delicate balance and non-journalists should keep that in mind some time.

3. William’s right. This is a feature piece in the magazine, not the newspaper with an old-skool inverted pyramid leade. It requires a little more work. God forbid the write respect the reader enough to enlighten, entertain, inform and even challenge him a little.

1. Anyone with a brain will read these skeptics as loons.

No offense, Mr. Allbritton, but those who are approaching this debate with a “global warming has no basis in fact” frame* will come away from that article with nothing more than facts from real live scientists that “global warming is a hoax”. Mr. Emerson is correct that the battle has not yet been won in this country. People like my father and brother (a doctor and a lawyer respectively, so not entirely stupid) are entrenched in their positions, and giving so much apparently non-critical column space to global warming deniers just has the effect of digging them in deeper (and making my efforts to convince them otherwise much harder).

* Such as my right-libertarian father and brother, to name just two of the people who e-mailed me about the piece. The others were my boss, another libertarian friend, and a Republican co-worker.

I’ve said why, Christopher. Achenbach has written a subtle, nuanced, two-tier story which makes intelligent people happy without offending stupid, wrong-headed people. Everyone’s happy, including people who depend on the votes of the stupid worng-headed misinformed people. But everyone should not be happy.

It’s already been reported that skeptics are emailing this around as supportative of their position.

Please don’t call me an elitist, and I won’t call you…. something worse. That was a silly thing to say. There really are a lot of stupid, dishonest people out there, and this country is suffering terribly from that fact.

In the world of today, being a professional journalist is not something to brag about. Many professional journalist seem to take pride in how much they make for doing bad work.

“Why should [Aschenbach] declare sides?” Because one side was clearly wrong, but many readers don’t know that.

What Aschenbach said was that it’s hard to have an intelligent argument about anything in this polarized country. What he meant, in this case, was that if he told the truth he would be attacked by a mob of fanatics. So he nuanced what he said in order to avoid attacks. And now he’s being attacked by the less-fearsome who wanted an explicit statement of the truth. There’s really no parity there, and I hope that n one thinks that there is.

So, Mr. Achenbach’s article is to be condemned because it lacks the clear and concise statements of opinion corresponding with John Emerson’s point of view. That about sums it up. Here’s a hint, John: Get your own column at a regional newspaper and you can state your opinion clearly and concisely. You don’t have to suffer the nuanced, “balanced,” even humorous prose of other writers. Fair enough?

According to JQ, “Richard Lindzen, prominent MIT climate scientist, is an irresponsible contrarian, who’s prepared to defend an implausible position on the off chance of being right when everyone else is wrong”.
This could with equal justice read:
“John Quiggin, prominent University of Queensland non-climate scientist, is an irresponsible contrarian, who’s prepared to defend an implausible position on the off chance of being right when everyone else is wrong”
Certainly attempts by me to prove that the latter is the case have been disbarred from said JQ’s blog and his mate Tim Lambert’s Deltoid, on the grounds of being “personal attacks”. What is JQ’s comment on RL then?

john emerson writes: “It would have been perfectly normal to have done so, in a healthy journalistic environment.”

Are you aware that Achenbach has long been the Washington Post’s kinda-casual kinda funny-like-Dave Barry columnist?

This is a long-standing style he’s had. He’s not Walter Pincus, or even Steno Sue, and as far as I know has no pretensions to that kind or level of journalism.

Apparently, he’s doing some more serious pieces, but look where it is – in the Magazine. Which is where you get wordier stories, arranged more elaborately than a 500 word piece about a robbery, with subsections with their own headings and all that fancy-shmancy stuff.

I dunno, I think people are making a bit of a category error here. You may prefer a different article, but I find it difficult to complain about a story which quite explicitly paints the naysayers as loons living in a world which is not the real one.

John emerson writes: “William, neither the lead sentence nor the concluding sentence spelled out the conclusion. It would have been perfectly normal to have done so, in a healthy journalistic environment.”

Only if you’re using a specific rigid definition of journalistic writing style.

There are other perfectly acceptable styles of writing which are not out of bounds merely because they happen to be published in a newspaper.

“Nothing on the first page tells you anything bad about Bill Gray or his ideas. (In fairness to Aschenbach, the opening line may have been inserted by a copyeditor).”

I’m guessing Achenbach has little to say about where the page breaks fall. They were probably different on the web and in print.

Further, it seems entirely acceptable in a longer piece to use the first portion to set the stage for the reader and as a hook so that they bother reading onward to the second page.

Half the time these days, longer-format stories start with two pages of photography and a single paragraph hook that conveys little or no definitive information. Nothing substantive is found until page 3.

John emerson writes: “William, on the DeLong thread someone just reported that all of his global-warming-denier friends have forwarded him the article.”

These people are stupid and can’t read.

If Achenbach had written the story you wanted, they probably wouldn’t have believed it, probably wouldn’t have read it, or would *still* have thought it supported their case and mailed it around.

“..back on top of his neck.”
It’s still illogical, but at least it makes sense.