I hadn’t spoken to a stranger on a plane in years, and it was nice to feel social, to enjoy the seatmate serendipity of air travel, and even when she started recounting lies from the internet, false stories, conspiracy theories, I thought it would be good practice at keeping my cool, good practice at being a good pedagogue, and I thought I had been gently and genuinely persuasive in my debunkings until about an hour into the flight when she said “You’re very well informed” in a way that was oddly insulting, dismissive,
