The question-asker is Steve Almond. Am I supposed to know who he is? (Is it immoral not to know?) There’s no note about the author on the page and the name isn’t a hot link. What’s his moral authority?

Perhaps he wants his ideas judged by the strength of this one text, like an anonymous pamphleteer, but I Google his name and see that he’s a short-story writer and that he was an adjunct professor in creative writing at Boston College who resigned in protest when Condoleezza Rice was brought in to do the school’s commencement address. Moral authority noted.

Here’s a picture of Almond wearing a brown shirt that says “chocolate boy.” Lest you take that the wrong way, his website is called stevealmondjoy.com and he wrote a nonfiction book called “Candyfreak,” about his love for candy and his search for the stories of “the small candy companies that are persevering in a marketplace where big corporations dominate.”

I’d embed the photo, but the photographer, who seems to have just snapped a pic when Almond spoke at a high school in Minnesota, put lots of “not in the public domain” language around it when he uploaded it to Wikipedia. How boring! That photographer lacks moral authority in this world of creative commons. It’s a picture of somebody else, and that someone else was nice enough to show up and allow photographs.