For 6 months before they started dating, Matt scheduled time with Jane every Sunday to write together. This became a convenient time for Matt to segue into dinner with Jane on Sunday evenings.

This is one of their articles.

The Truth, the Lies, the In-Between

by Matt Goldberg and Jane Jiang

January 2022

"I would never die for my beliefs. After all, I may be wrong." Bertrand Russell

Yesterday, I joined a small dinner party in the East Village. Shockingly, the host and guests stopped making sense. They were going at it on topics like QAnon, psychic vampires, and shape-shifting reptilians. Seemed ridiculous. Then the person on my right started whispering questions to me. When we walk down Fifth Avenue, why do all the colors and styles share similarities each season? Cars too. They’re all black, white or gray lately. What happened to the green ones? And in a whole world of news to report, why do all the networks seemingly cover the same topics in unison, just maybe from different angles?

In these moments of curiosity and questioning, the line between “true” and “farfetched” blurs out of focus. We're hardwired to be suspicious; our brains take shortcuts. We stop, question, explore, and doubt. We might feel tempted to take a look behind the door. Then, perhaps we’ll even take a step into the room. But will we be left unsatisfied – still skeptics – questioning and seeking more evidence? Or will we jump to conclusions?

The funny thing is, these questions and observations might not be completely off base. For example, us fashionistas know of WGSN, a trend forecasting company that drives brands to create certain styles for specific seasons. The trends, not coincidentally, are highly coordinated. WGSN posts trend reports years into the future and has a hand in the design of numerous consumer products. 

Centralized behind-the-scenes coordination isn’t just a fashion thing. The World Economic Forum has influence across sectors, or perhaps across countries. It finds, “a globalized world is best managed by a coalition of multinational corporations, governments (including through the UN system) and select civil society organizations (CSOs),” a stance referred to as Global Redesign. The 50th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum was named ‘The Great Reset’. “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” Sir Winston once said.

While skeptics maintain conspiracy theories are a product of biases and poor judgment (see Conspiracy Theories by Cassam or Conspiracies of Conspiracies by Thomas, Milan, Konda), our experiences and substantial evidence might prove otherwise. We could all be conspiracy theorists: authors, scholars, world leaders, you and me — if we’ve ever gotten it wrong about something that seemed ridiculous at first. With that in mind, I leave you with one more story:

A decade-old memory (from one of those moments when my friend and I were standing behind that door of curiosity) still gives me pause.

It could have been any other weekday night. After hours of reading and studying on campus, my friend drove me home to help me avoid some bad weather. As the late English writer Bulwer-Lytton would have said, “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents…” But it wasn’t London. It was a small city in Upstate New York with tall gothic buildings, an enormous witchcraft book collection, and a still-unexplained pumpkin placed atop its 173-foot clock tower in 1997.

Somewhere along the way to West Ave, my friend looked pensive and distant. 

“I received an invitation letter from Quill and Dagger,” he mumbled, almost hoping no one could actually hear him.

“Oh. What did you do about that?” I asked.

“I didn’t join. Didn’t feel right,” he replied quietly. 

“I see.”

“Their tower is up ahead. Sometimes I wish I had visited.” So saying, my friend pointed to one of the most prominent towers in the entire campus. It was hiding in plain sight.