Olivia Munk

There is an urban legend commonly whispered among schoolchildren in southeast Queens, New York City, that goes like this: A high school girl has been babysitting for some kids in her neighborhood. (In local retellings, it’s usually Bayside, Glen Oaks, or Bellerose.) One day, she’s putting the kids to bed and sees a life-size clown statue in the corner of the room. She inspects it and concludes it’s just a recent, unpleasant addition to the nursery. Satisfied that her charges are safely asleep in their beds, she heads to the den and flips on the TV. A news channel announces: Escaped Mental Patient On The Loose from Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, Believed To Be Dressed As Clown. 



The rest of the story is prone to variation. Tamer versions have the hapless babysitter call the parents and the police, who remove the deranged clown to a padded enclosure where he is never again to be seen. Others recall the clown hacking the unsuspecting babysitter and sleeping kiddies to bits. In these accounts, the clown remains at large to this day. 



The children who pass along this story do so on ragged scraps of paper, in hissed, stolen gossip. Each weekday, they are trundled by tired parents or aged buses along a winding path framed by massive buildings on either side. To reach the two regional middle schools and single district high school in a cul-de-sac at the road’s end, a driver must take its passengers past older structures, decrepit ones with bars on their windows. Barricaded abodes squeeze and shadow the road, until the vehicle finally emerges into a courtyard of tasteful stucco and slate playgrounds. The schools glimmer in the morning sun, as precious offspring are placed safely in the hands of their teachers. A snake of SUVs and hybrid sedans creep away from campus and directly onto the tree-lined Long Island Expressway. The brand-new grounds are a welcome substitute for the older local schools, all in desperate need of funding. It’s a shame they were built behind a cluster of mental hospitals.



 



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Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, established by the Lunacy Commission of New York State, took up residence in Queens in 1912. The name of the outpost, a portmanteau of Creed’s Moor, is a lasting jeer at the previous owners; the large plot of land on which the Center was built was originally billed as a farm, though moors are notoriously useless for producing crops. The state-owned plot, purchased from the Creed family in 1870, was first lent to the National Rifle Association and National Guard as a firing range. Situated in a far-flung corner of the borough, its activity only irritated some livestock and their owners. The first hospital building took in 32 patients and quintupled its population in six years. When it ran out of beds, patients slept in abandoned barracks left on the property. 



An onslaught of development in the mid-20th century sought to catch Queens up to its shinier siblings, Manhattan and Brooklyn. Farmlands like the Creeds’ were destroyed in favor of housing developments and strip malls.  Commuters took up residence from the head to the tail of Long Island, a land mass whittled by the Atlantic to resemble a Florida-bound flounder. Creedmoor continued to establish outposts along the island as if punctuating its shape, defining the vertebrae of the fish’s spine. The number of admitted patients to the Center swelled to over 7,000 by the 1950s, filling over 50 massive, dingy yellow outposts to capacity. 



Along with the purchase of the moor, the state bought one of the few neighboring farms that had been left undeveloped. Working on the farm became a component of treatment for the patients. The labor was thought to be therapeutic, budgets were tight, and the number of mouths to feed kept rising. Felons deemed too insane for prison were sent to the most secluded regions of the vast premises. 



In a dark basement, Dr. Lauretta Bender would place a soothing hand on the head of a trembling child, and turn it to the left or the right. A schizophrenic child, she believed, would yield to her touch; a normal child would turn away. Those deemed psychotic by her diagnostic tests would be administered the fruits of her most recent labors, the newly experimental electroconvulsive shock therapy.



The advent of antipsychotic drugs like thorazine allowed many patients to return to the world beyond the bars of the windows. Some went on to lead normal, happy lives, adding daily pills to their habitual, all-American nine-to-fives. Many went back behind bars, greeted this time by cold prison floors. Others tried the former, served a stint in the latter, and ended up huddling for warmth beneath layers of clothing on the city streets. 



 



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My father grew up in the house we live in now, three blocks and a long, uphill walk from the Creedmoor site. He remembers a different Bellerose, one where he and his friends were forbidden to play around the mental hospital and farm by worried parents. But the pristine rolling lawns of the grounds were too tempting; the neighborhood boys often took to the hills with their wooden toboggans after a particularly enticing snowfall. When we drive past a certain exit on the Long Island Expressway, my father sometimes waves a finger over the passenger seat at some overpasses and trees, saying, “In my day, this was all Creedmoor.” 



The administration of antipsychotic medication, an outpatient treatment that did not require 50 buildings’ worth of beds, caused the patient population at Creedmoor to dwindle from 7,000 to 500.  Today, only a few active buildings remain, relics of an empire for patients who require something more than pharmaceutical care. Purged of its reluctant participants, the farm became a public park in 1975.  With too little money to fill it or even demolish it, one of the Creedmoor outposts—referred to as Building 25—was left abandoned for 40 years. Amateur photographers who delight in grotesque, abandoned locations have published pictures of its interior. Multicolored pigeon droppings form stalactite formations that coat the walls and ceilings; wallpaper and paint peel back to free the asbestos beneath; a collection of rusted cash machines and typewriters, already outdated when they were left behind, rust by a broken window. But you would never know Building 25’s interior decay from the outside. Its façade, better-kept than those of many still-active facilities, bears no mark of the deterioriation within. 



I attended one of the intermediate schools constructed behind Creedmoor. My mother says she never truly got used to the dismal morning drive to deposit me behind a mental institution for eight hours a day. My father worked as a clinical psychologist, performing evaluations of at-risk students in public schools and overseeing outpatient treatment at a clinic in Staten Island. He had a long commute from our home in Bellerose to the clinic each morning that required him to leave while I was still eating breakfast in my pajamas. One day in eighth grade, I came downstairs to eat and noticed that he, too, was in his pajamas. He was going, he informed me, to a conference at a new clinic for children that Creedmoor had built in a lot right next to my school’s campus—today, we could walk to our respective day jobs together. I passed that lot every day on my way home from school, but I had never noticed that the perpetual construction had come to an end. I was stunned to learn that there was something new being created for an institution that had seemed so static and quiet beside three schools of screaming children. He came home that day to report that the new facilities were beautiful and modern, worthy of comparison to the brand new schools that now mark the campus. 



 After the creation of the new center, I always wondered why my father didn’t transfer jobs to work closer to home, but deeper down I knew that his work in outreach was more important to him than it was to cultivate a new career to avoid a commute. Some evenings, when he and my mother locked the office door, I knew he was telling her horror stories from work: parents abusing their children and children abusing their parents. And these were the patients deemed well enough for outpatient treatment, leaving my mother to wonder about the condition of those who remained in the facilities next door to the school. 



Only once in my three years on campus did I ever see someone emerge from the remaining Creedmoor buildings. We had just been released for recess. In the distance, I noticed a slow row of people emerge from a Creedmoor side entrance. They milled around the enclosed playground, some stalking the perimeter, others half-heartedly tossing a basketball. I thought of all the times kids in my middle school would ask each other if they were “in the wrong building,” a joke I now understood as a cruel jab at the actual sick people who were our neighbors. I stood paralyzed by this realization. A few minutes later, a guard rounded the Creedmoor patients back into a line. Our lunch aide blew the whistle, signaling the daily headcount and the dreaded return to math class. The inmates returned to their respective institutions. 



 



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On January 28, 2014, Raymond Morillo escaped from Creedmoor during a psychological evaluation. Though he had recently maxed out his 1998 sentences for slashing and manslaughter, authorities deemed the 33-year-old too dangerous for the city streets and sought to place him behind a new set of bars. Around 11:30 a.m., Morillo quietly exchanged clothes with an insider friend and strolled off of the premises. The hospital did its best to hush up the breach, and my mother only found out a week later in a community newsletter: Garage Sale, Church Fair, Escaped Convict. By this point, Morillo had been caught boarding a Greyhound bus outside Memphis, Tennessee, one step away from anonymous freedom out West. I have not been back to my middle school for several years, but I can already hear the phony, prepubescent chatter: Those in the know can guarantee that Morillo evaded capture by donning a clown suit.  

*Hamlet *is not a romance. Nor is it a comedy. Its very structure defies the Shakespearian definition of one; as the deranged Dane cries to a bewildered Ophelia, “We will have no more marriages!” It ends, instead, in many deaths, fulfilling the requirements for a tragedy and leaving only poor Horatio behind to tell the tale of murderous uncles and ghostly requests. 



The true implications of the tragedy of the work was likely unknown to a young E. Martin Browne when he first memorized the text—by accident—at the age of 11. In 1904, at the same tender age as that of the infant century, Martin lost his father and cousin at sea while they were en route to the family estate in Australia. Though a piece of the *SS Waratah *was recovered off the coast of South Africa some years later, the Colonel and his niece were never heard from again.  Perhaps Martin found a sort of solace in the words and action of Hamlet, who, at the core of his madness, is a son in bereavement. As he absorbed the words in the grand house he lived in with his mother, on the Fifeheadhouse estate in Gillingham, a girl named Henzie Raeburn, also born in 1900, observed the bronze Art Nouveau ashtrays in her parent’s Hampstead home. It was her duty to dust them each Saturday morning. One was gold, and featured a gilded naked woman, kneeling mythologically upon a leaf. The other, Henzie recalled towards the end of her life, also depicted an undressed lady, clad only in “Ophelia-like draperies swooning or drowning on a wave crest.” 



Henzie and Martin, each unaware of the other’s parallel birth years and internalization of Shakespearian rhetoric from a young age, separately arrived in the British seaside town of Angmering-On-Sea in the summer of 1923. In 1921, Henzie, now an actress (naturall), had visited Angmering with her sister, where they had delighted the vacationing crowd and the proprietor of their hotel with their renditions of classical recitations. When a summer Shakespeare festival came to the town two years later, the hotelier—one Mr. Hollis—recalled the two young performers who had “brought the house down,” as Henzie remembered of their first visit, with their dramatic speech. Henzie, out of work in London for the season (as is the life of an actor, more often than not), happily accepted Hollis’ proposal to share her portrayals of Lady Macbeth and Katherine of Aragon for the summer crowds. 



It was only after lunch with friends on a Saturday afternoon that she happened upon a photo call for a production of *Hamlet *included in the festival. “A slim, darting young man in an orange cotton tunic was directing operations,” recalled Henzie. “He seemed to know just what he wanted.” The beginning director’s sense of confidence was both attractive and repulsive to the seasoned actress, who had enjoyed a relatively successful career for someone so young. “Amateurs daring to present Shakespeare! Had I not already worked at Stratford?” exclaimed Henzie, many decades later, of her recollections of her first encounter with Martin, who was freshly graduated from Oxford with degrees in theater and theological studies. Yet her attraction to the boldness of the man in orange was such that she found herself shaking his hand, and noting that she would be willing to help out on the production in anyway she could—an offer that anyone working in the theater industry, professional or otherwise, knows to be the kiss of death, particularly when on holiday. And, in a way, for Henzie, it soon was: By Tuesday, the 12-year-old actress set to play Ophelia had fallen ill with a fever. Martin, remembering her promise, asked her if she knew the part. “No. Would I learn it, and play Thursday night? *Please*!” Henzie stayed up all night on Wednesday memorizing her lines, rehearsed with Martin and the rest of the company on Thursday morning, and found herself performing the part Thursday evening. 



While the rest of the company likely breathed a sigh of relief that the lady doth protest at all, Henzie found herself falling in love with the newly formed words in her mouth—and the actor she spoke them to. During the “Mad Scene,” Ophelia turns to Horatio, and offers him a flower: “Here’s a daisy: I would give you some violets, but they withered when my father died.” Nearly sixty years later, Henzie recalled that moment as the one in which she knew of the relationship to come. “Is this part of the mystery of acting?” she wrote, “or is it that ‘at the first sight/They have changed eyes’?” As Ophelia deteriorated and drowned each night, Henzie and Horatio grew more and more intrigued with the other. When the festival ended at the end of the summer, and with it the production, they continued to exchange letters—Henzie’s sent from her parent’s home in London, and Martin from his first postgraduate job in York. On November 14, Martin proposed that they call each other by their “Christian names”; on November 26, Henzie accepted the offer by signing hers in reply. By Christmas, they had spoken these names aloud; by the spring, they met to discuss the following season’s productions, which they were to co-direct, of *Richard III* and *The Tempest*; by the next Christmas, they were married. 



The service took place at 9:30 a.m. on a blustery Saturday morning so that bride and groom could catch a noon train to another seaside town, St. Ives, for their honeymoon. “My mother had offered me a trip round the world if I would not marry Henzie,” recalled Martin, but marry they did, with mostly their young theater friends, ripped out of bed at what is an ungodly time for an industry where work is concentrated in the later hours, as their witnesses. The bride and groom nearly missed their train due to the best man’s insistence that he be dropped off at his dentist appointment on the way to the station; but the train happened to be running one minute late, and they set forth on their new lives together. 



For the next few years, the couple lived simply in Doncaster, where they worked in community theater, often bringing their productions to neighboring villages. Life—the annoying reality that cannot be manipulated with colorful costumes and lights on an elevated stage—soon brought its own tragedies and joys. Henzie received notice one Friday night that her father was not well, and he passed away the next afternoon; that same year, a fainting spell revealed that she had been living with a hole in her heart since birth, and would carry it with her until her death in 1973. A son, Denis, was born on the 12th of August, 1926. That year, jobs were hard to come by, particularly in the arts, and Martin was fortunate to find employment by the newly created British Drama League, for which he became a judge of amateur dramas around England and Scotland. In these travels, *Hamlet* recurred “over and over again in my theatre-going memory,” noted Martin, who, in his brief stints as an actor, played Voltimand in the Old Vic’s annual matinee of the entire “uncut” text. 



Though the job market of theater is notoriously fickle, and its network even more so, when the proper opportunities arise, it tends to take care of its own. At the advice of the eminent Elsie Fogerty, founder of the Central School of Speech and Drama, a “B. Iden Payne” contacted Martin from across the pond at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, offering him a job as assistant professor of drama; Henzie would direct productions with the students. Neither Martin nor Henzie had ever formally taught drama, nor had they been to America. All of their friends, families, and everything they knew existed in England. They had a baby. So, of course, they accepted the offer and set sail for Pennsylvania. 



Both pious Anglicans, Martin and Henzie specialized in religious drama, a genre that had been seeing a surge in amateur dramatic circles following the first World War. Religious themes—in particular, the representation of Jesus on the stage— had been systematically censored by the Lord Chamberlain since the nation’s (arguably dramatic) shift away from Catholicism in the 16th century. However, amateur productions, notably ones performed in ecclesiastical venues, were not subjected to the same laws, and York and Mystery Cycle plays thrived in off-West End community troupes. (It would not be until 1968 that theatrical censorship laws would be formally struck down; it is no surprise, then, that 1971 and 1972, respectively, saw *Godspell *and* Jesus Christ Superstar *on West End stages.) Martin naturally brought their area of expertise to the students of “Tech,” as the Institute was fondly called in the years in which it focused largely on science. After three years, Martin received another life-changing call: Would he be interested in becoming the first director of drama at Canterbury Cathedral? The family had just agreed to more years in Pittsburgh; they had come accustomed to American life, and the deplorable vernacular that Martin was slowly correcting in his speech lessons with aspiring actors. They had a new baby, Christopher, born in 1929. So, of course, they accepted the offer, and set sail back to England. 



After just a few months back in their home nation, it became clear that Henzie and Martin had returned not just for a career shift--Martin was finally at the helm of original religious dramas, rather than coaching American students through diction exercises--but to welcome a new member into their family. At a dinner party some years earlier, Martin had met a young poet who gave a reluctant but chilling reading of his new poem. The poet had recently, “found his haven, after a stormy journey,” in the Church of England, Martin recalled. When Martin began a collaboration in 1933 to create a pageant play to fund the building of 45 new churches in the rapidly expanding suburbs, he asked the poet if he would be interested in penning the scenes, and he accepted. When the pageant was so well received that the poet was offered, by Martin’s employer, the Bishop of Chichester, to create a new play for the Canterbury Cathedral Festival of 1935, the poet accepted only under the condition that Martin would direct the production; it was soon after determined that Henzie would lead the female chorus. Before long, Tom (as the couple fondly knew the reticent man whose writings had finally brought him to the forefront of international literary circles with the 1927 publishing of *The Waste Land*) was a regular at their dinner table. He spent a weekend with the family while working out the plot for the Canterbury play about the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket, tentatively entitled *Fear In The Way, *drawn on Tom’s love of murder mysteries and the Sherlock Holmes novels. Martin found it to be too sensationalist; Henzie suggested *Murder in the Cathedral*. The name stuck. 



Martin and Tom continued to collaborate on Tom’s new texts, with Henzie often performing in iterations of them around the country. On March 21, 1939, Tom’s next play, *The Family Reunion,* opened on the West End in 1939; spirits were high, despite and perhaps, in spite of, the fact that Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia six days earlier. But when Great Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, even the most ardent of dramatists could not deny that theater was the best way to expend time, effort, and resources. Productions were halted as bomb shelters were constructed. Tom volunteered as a fire-watcher, and spent his evenings peering across London from a rooftop searching for flaming remnants of raids. Martin and Henzie looked into securing positions back in the States, potentially at the Yale School of Drama. In the course of such discussions, a friend off-handedly suggested that in light of the closed theaters, the couple take their religious dramas around the country they way they had historically been performed: by wagon. Though Henzie and Martin laughed at the notion, ideas began to form--they had recently inherited 50 pounds from an aunt, and knew of plenty of now-out of work actors who would be interested. 



And thus, the Pilgrim Players were born--a traveling troupe of actors performing plays on a shoestring budget, around England during a time when entertainment was scarce. Christopher and Denis were sent to stay with family friends, while Martin and Henzie journeyed anywhere that needed them. Costumes were borrowed from generous theater and festival stockpiles; performances were done with little to no sets or costumes. Lighting was a perpetual difficulty, due to government-imposed blackouts and the scarcity of petrol. Yet for the duration of the war, the determined troupe played in bomb shelters, schools, and churches to rapt audiences, grateful for a departure from the fear that the palpably potential whirr of raid sirens imposed onto everyday life. The Players charged a nominal fee for each performance, just enough to keep their automobiles and bodies going. Occasionally, a parish or school in distress would request a free performance, though they were always declined. “We had to bring people, who had never thought of a play as food for the spirit, to consciously realize that they must have it, and that, like any food, it must be paid for,” recalled Henzie of their rationale. The hunger for stories was great enough to fuel the Pilgrim Players through the war, until the theaters, and London itself, were open again for business. 



Though the Players typically traveled as a troupe, Henzie and Martin made a journey on their own to Orkney, Scotland, where they performed *Hamlet*--the play that had first, unwittingly, and then, quite overtly, knitted the strings of their fates together as partners in performance and in life. Of their performance, a reviewer wrote: “You may wonder how two people can stage *Hamlet. *Martin Browne has adapted the play in this way. He acts the part of Hamlet and his wife plays the eight other characters. They act the essential scenes and Martin Browne explains the rest of the play as they go along. As he himself says: ‘It needs a bit of imagination on the part of the audience,’ but not so much as you think because the Brownes are first class actors and Shakespeare does the rest.’” Certainly, there is no doubt that the speech of the Bard is what carried the spare production to success; but it is not unlikely that their inherent connection to the play as a pair is what made the drama, though not as religious as per their usual genre, divine in its own, private way. 



When the war ended, Henzie and Martin returned to their city lives, and resumed making theater on proscenium stages. Martin continued to collaborate with Tom, for a total of seven productions, until the quiet poet died in 1965; Martin dedicated much of his later years to chronically their collaborative projects in books, articles, and speeches. Henzie continued to work prolifically on British stages as well as in film, and continued to often play the lead role in the chorus of *Murder in the Cathedral *that she had originated in 1935. In the 1970s, the couple took turns writing chapters of their lives together, chronicled, culminating in the joint autobiography *Two In One. *The inscription of the book reads:



 



*For by your leaves, you shall not stay alone*



*Till holy Church incorporate two in one*.



*Romeo and Juliet, II, vi*



 



Like *Hamlet*, *Romeo and Juliet *is not a comedy. It is romantic--one as classical as they come--but it is a tragedy; the young lovers die of want for the other. There is something tragic about the language lending itself to the title of a memoir, penned by two aging lovers, one of whom would die before the other. And yet, it is fitting: Though they were entwined by Shakespearian text before they even met, they spent a lifetime turning tragedy into romance--Ophelia was never supposed to fall in love with Horatio--and romance into madness--what sane mother and father, husband and wife, professional actress and director would attempt *Hamlet *with only two actors and an incredulous audience? Only one who had total and complete confidence that the text was in their hands.



Henzie died in 1973, eight years before Martin. Dutifully, he finished the book, and it was published one year after his death in 1980. Horatio, it seems, completed his duty to spread the story. 

On March 5, 2012, if you logged into Facebook, a video entitled “KONY 2012” was sure to pop up as every third or fourth post. 



Perhaps at first, you ignored it. However, after seeing it posted over and over again for hours, maybe you clicked on it, and watched at least some of the 29 minute, 59 second video. Even if you only watched the first few minutes, you learned that there is a warlord named Joseph Kony wreaking havoc in Uganda with a rebel militia group, that he is kidnapping children from their homes to make them unwilling soldiers, that the situation is getting worse, and that something must be done. It is a call to arms, for the people of America to do their part to combat a foreign terror. Like many of the other people on your Newsfeed, you probably felt horrified, outraged, catalyzed. And maybe, just like them, you shared it.



KONY 2012 is remembered today as one of the first Internet trends to spread like wildfire across feeds from Twitter to Facebook, Tumblr to YouTube. As most of its proponents and critics will remember, the fall of KONY 2012 and Invisible Children came as quickly as its rise to fame. The organization was simply unprepared for the rapid onslaught of support (at the time of the video’s release, Invisible Children had one intern to fill 500,000 orders of their $30 “call to action” kit). Within two weeks, the organization’s founder and the narrator of KONY 2012, Jason Russell, was famous himself, though unfortunately due to a nude mental breakdown on the streets of San Diego.



Like with Britney’s change of hairstyle or Kanye’s defense of Beyonce, KONY 2012 showed the world how quickly fame devolves into infamy. Invisible Children closed in December 2014, just under 2 years after the video was released, and Joseph Kony remains at large today. Ultimately, the disaster that was KONY 2012 remains more “famous” than the warlord it sought to blast into the spotlight.



When a campaign is as unprepared for mass sensation as was the KONY 2012 publicity stunt, could it be that virality actually hurts the cause it hopes to relieve? This question came under serious debate in late 2014 due to the retraction of a *Rolling Stone* article entitled “A Rape on Campus.” The piece, which focused on the rape of a student pseudonymously dubbed “Jackie” at the University of Virginia, went viral on social media when it was published in November. The article, written and researched by Sabrina Erdely, used Jackie’s heart-wrenching story to comment on the injustices of unreported and unpunished rape on colleges across America.



Like the KONY 2012 video, the graphic details of the article made readers feel horrified, depressed, and then incensed: why was no one talking about this major problem as fervently as this article? Could journalistic publicity, more delicately handled and less flashy than KONY 2012’s video, help Jackie and girls in similar situations? As with KONY 2012, social media users shared the piece in hoards, urging others to read it and work to help end rape culture on college campuses.



Unfortunately, also similarly to KONY 2012, the downfall of the article’s viral success came quickly, and swiftly. Soon after its publication, outlets such as *The Washington Post* began to point to blatant discrepancies in Jackie’s story, unraveling a chain of spurious journalistic practices that began with Erdely and wound their way up to Rolling Stone’s top editors.



In April, the Columbia School of Journalism compiled a lengthy report on the problems with both the article and the practices surrounding its reporting. In an introduction to the report (which *Rolling Stone* willingly elicited and published), Managing Editor Will Dana writes, “Sexual assault is a serious problem on college campuses, and it is important that rape victims feel comfortable stepping forward. It saddens us to think that their willingness to do so might be diminished by our failings.” Here Dana succinctly summarizes the dangers of viral, incendiary stories: when the method by which the specifics of a crisis or crime is criticized, the problem itself runs the risk of losing its credibility.



Though many of the accusations in the article, and of Jackie’s story, were ultimately proven to be untrue, the actual percentage of rape reports that are deemed false is believed to hover at or below eight percent. Because of the sensational popularity of its article, and its subsequent retraction, *Rolling Stone* must face the consequences of having potentially hurt, and not helped, its campaign to end rape culture on college campuses. Sexual assault, and the bureaucracy involved in the process of getting help and pressing charges is still a very real problem for many students. However, a highly publicized article that pointed fingers, and had to, in turn, point one back at itself, was not the correct method of activism.



The social media users that contributed to the virality of KONY 2012, “A Rape on Campus,” and other such stories are ultimately not to blame for the failings of seemingly reputable organizations and news outlets. If a nonprofit or a magazine is generating content to start a moral revolution, the information they share should be rigorously fact-checked down to the last detail. Invisible Children should have had resources at the ready for the fame that was to follow, and *Rolling Stone* should have published an article it was able, willing, and proud to defend.



If a story is too good to be true, or even too bad, or sad, it probably is, especially when it comes neatly packaged in an explosive article or well-produced and easily shared YouTube video. Topics that are messy and complex are just that—they have solutions that are difficult to grapple with, and must be conveyed with the utmost care in order to convince naysayers. If an organization creates a digestible form in which to catalyze readers, viewers, and ultimately, sharers, there is most likely a large chunk of the story missing.



In real life and online, we have an obligation to be our own skeptics. We must constantly sift through the click-bait, listicles, articles, and videos thrown at us in every direction—even, and perhaps especially, when they come from supposedly reputable sources. The world cannot be saved in a click, nor should it be. Examining and investing in important causes should not be discouraged, but we must be careful not to believe everything we read, especially when it comes with a shining, tantalizing “share” button, ready to broadcast a cause around the world.