When It Matters

Last week I covered Stuttgart 21—the police action at the station, the protests, the kids getting hurt. The backlash came fast. Readers wanted the old version of this place back, the one about photography and music and the sex stuff. One person told me to stick to writing about tits and Lindsay Lohan’s rehab. The message was clear: stay in your lane.

But I couldn’t unknow what happened. A city was fracturing in real time. And at that point, staying quiet wasn’t neutrality anymore—it was a choice, and not a choice I wanted to make.

I get the impulse to keep things separate, to have one zone for serious stuff and another for the frivolous. It’s comfortable that way. But that’s not how it works when something actually matters. The people who didn’t want me covering Stuttgart 21 were the people who could afford to pretend it wasn’t relevant to them. I wasn’t one of them.

So I kept writing about it. Not to perform having principles or prove something to the critics. Just because certain things won’t let you look away, and if they won’t let you look away, then writing about them becomes essential in a different way. But it’s still writing. Still me. Still this place.