Ed can come across as agitated and shrill, and I never stop picturing him as exactly like Jude Law's character in Contagion. But. He's still an important counterpoint to the unexamined mainstream junk, which says more about the world than about him or his style. As we've seen play out with other areas of discourse, the middle shrinks, we're forced into a dialectic tug of war between absurdly polarized extremes, and it all comes to crisis. We might rediscover caution, epistemic humility, compromise and middle-ground, but only after rising absurdity and then some kind of punishment