Gregory Payan/AP/File

Ultimate Fighting Championship announcer and podcaster Joe Rogan speaks at the weigh-in before a UFC event in Seattle, on Dec. 7, 2012. Recently, Mr. Rogan apologized for using racist slurs on his podcast and removed more than 100 episodes from Spotify.

When controversy erupted over the edgy banter of the “Fear Factor” host-turned-podcaster Joe Rogan, Jonathan Jarry wasn’t surprised.

After all, Mr. Jarry, co-host of “The Body of Evidence” podcast, had delved into “The Joe Rogan Experience” months before the podcast and its platform, the media streamer Spotify, took heat for using racist and misogynist language and spreading misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.

His finding: Though Mr. Rogan’s show is seductive and “delicious,” especially to young male viewers, it often sends conflicting or inaccurate messages about not just science, but how science works. The show swirls around a recurring theme: The government and its media lackeys aren’t telling the truth. Joe Rogan and his guests will.

“You just can’t say whatever you want, wherever you want, whenever you want to,” says Mr. Jarry, a science communicator with the McGill Office of Science and Society in Montreal. Tech companies and popular podcasters “are growing into a responsibility they didn’t seek out, but that they have to meet,” he adds. 

The pandemic’s large death toll, which has topped 900,000 in the United States, and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection to overturn Joe Biden’s legitimate election showed many Americans the dangers posed by lies and misinformation distributed globally by algorithms and conspiracy hawkers. 

The Rogan controversy comes amid a growing debate as to whether the marketplace of ideas should come with warning labels. It also comes amid efforts on the right and left to silence those with whom they disagree, whether on podcasts or in history classrooms. Free speech advocates would argue that one person’s irresponsible speech is another’s freewheeling conversation. Nor is groupthink always accurate, so silencing unpopular speech holds its own perils. 

Mr. Rogan isn’t the only celebrity facing blowback for on-air remarks. ABC punished “The View” host Whoopi Goldberg with a suspension for suggesting that the Holocaust wasn’t about race, despite Ms. Goldberg having apologized. Substack, a platform for writers, has been dinged for making money from writers espousing anti-vaccination views. 

At a time when attention spans are short and trust is an increasingly rare commodity, audiences are, by many measures, drawn to everyman personas rather than to experts. And Americans are clamoring for both open debate (for people they agree with) and accountability (for those they don’t) in a country where the right to speak freely is enshrined in the Constitution. 

“The issue isn’t really who is undermining each other or canceling each other,” says Sigal Ben-Porath, a professor in the literacy, culture, and international education division of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. “It’s that audiences, at least for the moment, are calling for everyone to take a stand. You can say it’s a mob and sometimes it is. The difference between audience and mob is in the eye of the beholder. So, who decides what merits a response?”

Janerik Henriksson/TT News Agency/AP/File

Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek poses for a photo in Stockholm on June 18, 2009. Mr. Ek wrote in a note to employees on Feb. 6, 2022, that while he condemned podcaster Joe Rogan's use of racist language, he did not believe that cutting ties with the popular personality was the answer.

What is a platform’s responsibility?

One name pops up: a Swedish guitar player and tech pioneer named Daniel Ek. 

As a teenager, the now 30-something Mr. Ek built websites from his home in the Stockholm suburbs. His parents didn’t know he was on his way to becoming wealthy until they saw him carrying large-screen TVs into his room.

After founding and selling several startups, Mr. Ek co-founded Spotify as a way to combat piracy by creating a wide-open music universe, supported by ads and subscriptions. 

In 2012, he told a conference in New York: “I’m just interested in building a company that doesn’t necessarily change lives but adapts people’s behavior. I’m naive enough to think things will always work out, and I don’t fully understand how hard things are.” 

He is now finding out.

Mr. Ek has taken a somewhat muddled stand. Claiming he has no editorial control, he nevertheless applauded what he called Mr. Rogan’s decision to remove 113 episodes, some of which featured white nationalists and others where he used the N-word in conversation, though he maintains he intended no racist animus.

The company has vowed to add warning labels to shows that challenge scientific consensus and is investing $100 million – the reported amount it paid for exclusive rights to the show – in artists from underrepresented communities.

“I realize that some still want more,” Mr. Ek wrote earlier this week in a company memo. “And I want to make one point very clear – I do not believe that silencing Joe is the answer. We should have clear lines around content and take action when they are crossed, but canceling voices is a slippery slope. Looking at the issue more broadly, it’s critical thinking and open debate that powers real and necessary progress.” 

Yet questions remain about Mr. Rogan’s show.

With an audience total that at times bests TV networks like Fox News and MSNBC, Mr. Rogan, who is in his 50s, has found a formula that Mr. Jarry has called “heroin for the adolescent mind.” 

His primarily male audience hits the 18-to-25-year-old sweet spot. He provides back-channel information on topics such as forgotten human civilizations and bodybuilding supplements. He has done a show while high on the drug psilocybin. He endorsed the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. To some of his fans, Mr. Rogan is a “Galileo figure” who uncovers mind-expanding knowledge that has been kept secret.

“There is something very attractive about this kind of basement-level discussion of, like, ‘Hey, we’re away from the mainstream media, we’re having this discussion, and it’s very quiet. We sound very rational; we’ve got microphones very close to our mouths for a very intimate sound,’” says Mr. Jarry, the “Body of Evidence” podcaster. The audience is there “like a fly on the wall.”

After apologizing for his use of the N-word in the past and vowing to expand his roster of guests, Mr. Rogan addressed the controversy at a comedy show in Austin, Texas, this week. 

“I talk [expletive deleted] for a living – that’s why this is so baffling to me,” Mr. Rogan said. “If you’re taking vaccine advice from me, is that really my fault? What dumb [expletive deleted] were you about to do when my stupid idea sounded better? ... If you want my advice, don’t take my advice.”

But at least some people do. A Washington Post survey found that regular listeners of Mr. Rogan were 18% less likely to vaccinate than occasional listeners, though it’s very likely those listeners came to the show armed with views similar to Mr. Rogan’s libertarian mindset.

“Words don’t kill people”

The White House weighed in last week, urging Spotify to do more to counter misinformation, especially about vaccines.

Neil Young kicked off a protest by asking Spotify to remove his music catalog, which it did. Former bandmates David Crosby, Graham Nash, and Stephen Stills followed suit. So did musician India.Arie, citing Mr. Rogan’s usage of the N-word. Podcaster and author Roxane Gay also removed herself from the platform. Some of the artists say they are not asking for Mr. Rogan to be censored, but they do not wish their work to stand with his.

“I am not demanding his removal,” the singer Mr. Crosby wrote on Twitter. “I am removing me. Rogan has a right to spew his [junk]. Spotify has a right to choose money over truth. I have a right to not want to be associated with [jerks].” 

The blowback comes as veteran recording artists are reconsidering some of their material. The Rolling Stones self-canceled “Brown Sugar” for its references to slavery. Elvis Costello removed the hit “Oliver’s Army” from his catalog for its mention of the N-word.

Amy Harris/Invision/AP/File

Winston Marshall of Mumford & Sons performs in Napa, California, May 26, 2019. Mr. Marshall, who left the band last year after an uproar over his conservative views, has called the current protest “lateral censorship – artists trying to shut down other artists.”

Winston Marshall, a British musician who quit the American band Mumford & Sons after blowback for his conservative views, called the current protest “lateral censorship – artists trying to shut down other artists.”

Indeed, defenders of Mr. Rogan may have a deeper point: The impulse to shut down uncomfortable, inappropriate, or even possibly dangerous speech can backfire. 

Blaming free speech for society’s ills goes back to Socrates, who was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens. John Stuart Mill argued that citizens in a democracy must constantly hold their dearest beliefs up to scrutiny.

“The truth is that words don’t kill people,” says Nadine Strossen, a professor at New York Law School. “In that way, the internet is a net good in that it ... allows for the most robust development of ideas and examination of ideas and debate of ideas. And that’s what’s the best test for truth. ... If you don’t do that, it’s going to become a dead dogma, and it might also be a false one. And you’re never going to persuade anybody through coercion, including censorial coercion.”

Duking it out in the marketplace of ideas

One answer is that Spotify and other tech companies are increasingly using advisories or warnings to flag potential misinformation.

One Massachusetts Institute of Technology study, however, found that such advisories may make it more likely for people to distrust information contained in articles without warnings. 

But the study also showed that listeners and readers were largely open to accepting such warnings, even if they weren’t “concordant” with their political outlook.

Those results “are not consistent with the idea that our reasoning powers are hijacked by our partisanship,” David Rand, a business professor at MIT in Cambridge, told his university’s press office. 

The issue in many ways boils down to the waning power of long-standing institutions – including the government, media, and political parties – even as Americans are searching for information to explain a changing society struggling to build trust across ideological lines.

“You have a really open [media] landscape where people like Joe Rogan can hustle,” says Professor Ben-Porath. “The incentive structure is built around rage rather than thoughtful engagement. At the same time, society’s values are changing” around what is acceptable and what is not. “Societies are not like atomic clocks. We change and evolve over time.”  

Mr. Jarry has his own role to play in that evolution. “The Body of Evidence” shares space with “The Joe Rogan Experience” on Spotify’s servers.

Wendy Zukerman, an Australian American who hosts the show “Science Vs.,” said on her show this week that she’s not going to drop any new episodes unless they are focused on combating specific misinformation on Spotify. 

But “Body of Evidence” – which uses vignettes, music, and person-on-the-street interviews to punctuate scientific debates – will go on as planned.

For one thing, says Mr. Jarry, his audience is fairly small, so it would not be much of a protest if he removed the podcast.

But he says his insights into the draw and impact of Mr. Rogan’s show have in some ways reinvigorated his own mission to duke it out in the marketplace of ideas.

The best he can do right now is not to self-cancel, he says, but “to add a bit of good information to counteract the bad.” 

Editor’s Note: The following story was reported by Monitor correspondent Fahad Shah before his arrest in Kashmir, India, for uploading “anti-national content” to The Kashmir Walla, a popular news site he edits. The Monitor is working for his release. You can find our full statement here.

Eight-year-old Vaniangcer once came crying to her mother after a few Indian soldiers passed her refugee settlement in India’s northeastern state of Mizoram. They reminded her of the Myanmar soldiers whose gunfire had echoed through the forest as she and her family fled Myanmar back in June. 

“I was afraid when I saw them,” she says about the Indian service members, while playing a video game on her mother’s cellphone in a small hut made of bamboo and tarpaulin sheets donated by local aid agencies. “I felt they would shoot us.”

Vaniangcer is one of thousands of refugees who have crossed the border into India since Myanmar’s military overthrew a democratically elected government last February. An estimated 15,000 – including more than 2,000 children – have stayed in Mizoram, though exact figures are difficult to establish. India has not signed the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951 or the 1967 protocol, and therefore has no legal obligation to recognize or shelter refugees. Some Indian citizens, however, see a moral obligation. 

Disobeying the central government’s orders to take “prompt steps in identifying the illegal migrants and initiate the deportation process expeditiously,” Mizoram authorities are instead opening up schools to refugee families from neighboring Chin state in Myanmar, who have ethnic ties with the Mizo people. 

“Children can’t be seen as stateless anywhere in the world,” says Shantha Sinha, former chairperson of India’s National Commission for Protection of Child Rights. “It is not their responsibility that they are in the kind of predicament that they have been placed in. At no time anywhere should children pay the price for the follies and politics of adults.” 

Fleeing the coup

Many families felt that escaping to Mizoram was their only option as Myanmar’s military encroached on the northwestern Chin state, sparking repeated gunfights between military forces and local militia groups. One year after the coup, the Thailand-based human rights group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners reports that at least 1,546 civilians have been killed by the military junta and another 12,074 have been arrested. 

Thawnghnin, a laborer who like many citizens in Myanmar goes by only one name, tried to resist military rule by joining the Chinland Defence Force. When the military arrived in his village, his wife and three sons hid in a nearby house while he and CDF comrades fought through the night. When morning came, he decided that was enough. 

“I fought for our country to protect my people,” he says. “Then I decided to leave for India with my family.” Three weeks later, he had sold his house and begun the journey toward the Indian border. Thawnghnin’s family arrived at Farkawn in April.

“Till the conditions in our country get better, we have to stay here,” he says. “We don’t see a future, but we want to go back.” Amid all the chaos, the couple are relieved that their children have returned to school.

In September, the Mizoram government ordered schools to open admission to Chin refugees. The official letter said that “children aged between 6 to 14 years belonging to disadvantaged communities have the right to be admitted to school in a class appropriate to his or her age.”

H. Vanlalhriata, the principal of the BCA school in Farkawn, says about 50 refugees have joined their classrooms over the past few months, and now account for roughly 20% of the student body. 

“Some of the [adult] refugees came to me,” says Mr. Vanlalhriata, who has run the school since 2015. “They wanted children to continue studies. ... I told them we will try to accommodate your children and prepare them for this new education system.”

Bhat Burhan

Fifteen-year-old Rebecca hangs clothing in the hilly village of Farkawn, India, Dec. 28, 2021. Because she can't understand the local languages, the teenager no longer attends school.

Back in class

The one-floor school sits on a hill with a large playground. From the wooden benches of her tiny classroom, Vaniangcer can see the mountains that lead to Myanmar. Her home is only 26 miles away from the settlement, but feels unreachable. 

As refugees, her parents have difficulty finding work. Her mother, Lylypar, used to run a poultry farm and raise cattle to support her family of five, including her husband, who is blind. Now she goes fishing in the nearby river and collects firewood to pay for her children’s monthly school fees, but her income is unstable. 

“At times we don’t earn a penny, but sometimes 7,000 rupees [$93] per month,” she says. “My children ask for milk and bread here, but I can’t afford it anymore.” 

Sending her children back to school has helped ease her feelings of helplessness. She says the schools in her home village were shut down after the coup. “It makes me sad that we don’t have anything to go back to” now, she says, but when the war in her country ends, “we will go back.”

Wearing a pink fluffy jacket and sitting next to a mud oven, her daughter agrees. “I miss studying in my own village. I love to read and write, but I miss walking to school with my friends,” Vaniangcer says.  

Refugee children face enormous stress during important developmental years, when a sense of stability and belonging is crucial to their long-term well-being. According to a U.N. report, only 50% of refugee children around the world attend primary school, compared with an average enrollment rate of 91%. And once students fall behind, they can find it difficult to resume their studies, especially in an unfamiliar country. 

Ms. Sinha, the children’s rights advocate, says there needs to be an effort to support refugee children in every aspect of their lives. 

Such children need “all forms of psychosocial and emotional support, confidence that they are being cared about,” she says. “No matter what other issues, children come first.”

Out of place

Mizo and Chin communities share a history and culture. Both come from the Zo ethnic group, which followed animist traditions before British colonizers converted most of the Zo to Christianity. This remains the dominant religion in Chin and Mizoram today, in contrast with Hindu-majority India and Buddhist-majority Myanmar. 

For years, the porous border between the two states allowed Chin and Mizo people to move between the countries with relative freedom, and some refugees have Indian family. 

SOURCE:

ZORO, University of Hull

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

The common heritage may have driven the decision to shelter the Chin, but with more than 50 distinct dialects and languages spoken among Zo descendants, many refugees still face barriers to education because they can’t understand Mizo or Hindi.

This includes 15-year-old Rebecca, who speaks Hakha Chin, a language common in the central part of Chin state. In June, when the water was low, her family crossed the Tiau River that forms part of the border between India and Myanmar. They’ve gone from a modest home in the now-deserted town of Thantlang to a cramped rental in Farkawn. 

“I want my children to become doctors or engineers, but they can’t even go to school now,” says her father, Lalliankhum. Back in Myanmar he had 8 acres of farmland, and made about $60 a month growing bananas, oranges, jackfruit, and lemons. Now he spends his days cutting firewood with Rebecca. 

“I miss my school and my friends,” she says, while playing volleyball with her sister. “Without going to school I have no future. When we left home, I didn’t bring my books.”

Mr. Vanlalhriata, the principal, says some children are struggling to understand the curriculum, but there’s still a place for them in the classroom.

“The refugee students are good in math and science subjects. They are very sincere in their classes,” he says. “They don’t know our local language, but we help them and they also try hard at home to prepare.”

Some see this acceptance of Chin students as a lesson not just for India, but for other countries as well. Ms. Sinha says, “If we learn to take care of our children, there could be peace on earth.” 

Colette Davidson

The Morts de la Rue collective creates memorials for those who have lost their lives while homeless. This sign, photographed on Feb. 7, 2022, tells the story of Valérie, who died on Avenue de Flandre in Paris at the end of December.

When elderly Swiss photographer René Robert collapsed on the sidewalk near the central Republique square in Paris last month, lying helpless for nine hours in the winter cold before a man living on the street alerted authorities to his plight – too late to save him – French society was shocked.

But while the public has struggled to understand why no one stopped to help for hours, Mr. Robert’s death is not necessarily unusual for France’s homeless population. In France, over 500 people die every year while homeless, and at an average age of 48, compared to 79 in the general population.

One of those was Valérie. She passed away at the end of December on a busy thoroughfare in the east of the French capital. Those who knew her say she was polite, always took care of her appearance and helped those around her, but struggled to find stable housing or work. She had three sons, one of whom lived in the United States, according to locals.

“She was really nice, I would give her hats, gloves, and other things to stay warm, but she always said, ‘No, I have enough,’” says Maria, who runs a clothing stand next to where Valérie set up a tent for over a year with her partner, under the awning of a building. (Maria declined to give her last name.)

Now, a bright yellow sign lined with delicate flowers is attached to a tree on the sidewalk where Valérie used to sleep, explaining that she lived and died here, and urging passersby to stop and remember her. The makeshift shrine is the work of local collective Morts de la Rue (Dead on the Street), which has striven since 2015 to identify and memorialize those experiencing homelessness who have died.

The challenge of providing housing and services to those experiencing homelessness is one that runs deep in big cities like Paris. But a problem that runs even deeper is a tendency by broader society to ignore those living on the street.

Though he was not homeless, Mr. Robert’s death on Jan. 19 has been a wake-up call to authorities to aid those without a place to sleep, which includes 300,000 people across the country and around 2,600 in Paris. But it has also been a reminder to French society that more needs to be done to humanize those experiencing homelessness, in order to bridge the gap of understanding between them and the rest of society.

“People living on the streets obviously have material needs like housing, food, and proper hygiene, but almost more important to them is to feel visible,” says Thibaut Besozzi, a sociologist at the University of Bourgogne, who spent eight months living part-time on the streets of Nancy as part of his post-doctoral research. “They just want recognition, that they’re not only human beings but individuals. A man living on the street once told me, ‘A hello is worth more than a euro.’”

A troubled housing process

In 2017, President Emmanuel Macron promised that no one would be subjected to living on the street by the following year. But not only was he forced to later apologize that he had failed to fulfill that promise, the measures by which French cities have dealt with homelessness have been questioned by advocacy groups.

In November 2020, police used tear gas to forcefully remove migrants camped out in central Paris, and authorities have systematically pushed improvised homeless shelters out to the edge of the capital, hidden from view. Several cities have launched anti-homeless measures, like shortening public benches so they can’t be slept on or installing spikes in doorways to prevent people from squatting.

Public sentiment has often followed suit. At the end of January, residents of the 20th arrondissement of Paris protested against an emergency housing shelter that is set to be built in the neighborhood next September, fearing disorder and insecurity.

Colette Davidson

Several French cities have engaged in anti-homeless measures, like this one in Paris on Feb. 7, 2022, where the city has blocked off a corner once occupied by a man and his makeshift tent home.

“The discourse at the moment is that housing is something you get because you ‘deserve’ it, and that if you don’t have it, it’s somehow your fault,” says Eric Constantin, the director of the Ile-de-France branch of the Abbé Pierre Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to provide access to decent housing. “But it’s so much more complex than people think. It’s always a succession of things – divorce, illness, job loss. We always think it’s something that can only happen to others, but homelessness can happen to anyone.”

The Ile-de-France region, which includes Paris, currently offers shelter to around 150,000 people, but barriers continue to make finding short and long-term housing a challenge. According to the Abbé Pierre Foundation, one out of every two requests for emergency housing via France’s national hotline receives no response.

And in order to apply for stable housing, one must go through a social worker and jump through numerous administrative hoops. For those without an internet connection or French language skills, those challenges are compounded.

“The current government is repeating old errors of increasing funding for emergency shelter, but people get exhausted by this [lack of stability,]” says Edouard Gardella, a sociologist at the CNRS who specializes in exclusion and homelessness. “Plus, there is a distinction in France between emergency shelter, which is an unconditional right for all, and housing, which necessitates meeting certain criteria. This ultimately makes the system unfair.”

“Majority of those without decent housing are invisible”

Overturning current sentiment surrounding homelessness in France has been a work in progress for local advocacy groups. While the rhetoric around homelessness has shifted in the last 100 years from one of criminality to victimhood, vagabondism was technically punishable under French law until 1992.

Nonprofits like Samusocial and Aurore have relied on steadfast measures like approaching people directly on the street in order to find individualized housing solutions, as well as ways of encouraging them back into mainstream society if they so desire. They offer addiction counseling, job training, or practical courses like gardening and French language learning.

More elusive is tackling the image problem people experiencing homelessness suffer from. At Entourage, the goal is to change the perception of those living on the street and remove the barriers that prevent people from approaching them. The nonprofit has created an app that allows the 90,000 members – both homeless and not – to connect with one another in their community, when shyness or discomfort may make impromptu conversations a challenge.

“Those experiencing homelessness are just like the rest of us in that they don’t necessarily want to tell all their problems to the first person who stops by,” says Mr. Constantin from the Abbé Pierre Foundation. “We need to keep the connection alive between people… [but] the majority of those without decent housing are invisible and go to great lengths to hide the fact that they have no place to live.”

When all else fails, nonprofit Morts de la Rue – which declined to be interviewed – continues their mission to humanize those who have lived a life of precariousness and preserve their memory. Down from the memorial for Valérie is another one of their yellow signs, this time for a middle-aged man named Bogumil who died in December.

Bruno and Michel, friends of Bogumil who have struggled to secure jobs or stable housing, spend their days in front of a supermarket. They say they’ve always had a system of “helping one another out” when the city fails to do so, and don’t think that what happened to Mr. Robert, the photographer, could happen to them. But they realize the fragility of their situation.

“Most people stop to talk or ask if we need anything. But with the presidential elections and the Paris Olympic Games coming up, we’re not the image the city wants to have, so they’re trying to get rid of us,” says Bruno, a coy smile beaming under a green Nordic hat and salt-and-pepper beard. “But we’re human beings too, aren’t we? Yes, I mean, I suppose we are.”

Love is in the airmail. Just ask Joyce Boston, who has volunteered to stamp valentines en route to special someones for a quarter century.  

“I have been a widow for 13 years, and I just think it keeps me wanting to keep going,” says the senior, stamp at the ready. “Spreading love ... in this country right now, we really need that.”

She resumed her duties Jan. 31 to kick off the Loveland, Colorado, 76th annual Loveland Valentine Re-mailing Program. The tradition of routing love notes through the so-called Sweetheart City, where they get a special postmark and verse, celebrates small acts of kindness.

“It’s very important, especially in today’s society, that we continue to showcase love and spread joy and happiness around the world,” says Mindy McCloughan, president and CEO of the Loveland Chamber of Commerce, which hosts the event.

Around 200 helpers were expected this year over multiple shifts across a couple of weeks. At the kickoff, volunteers in heart headbands sat at spaced-apart tables, each stamp sounding like a mechanical kiss. Meanwhile, a red-sweatered barbershop quartet crooned.

“Heart of my heart, I looove youuu,” they harmonized.

Loveland, founded in the late 1800s along the Colorado Central Railroad, leans into its name with other love-themed festivities. A two-day Sweetheart Festival in February delights downtown. Light poles are decked with wooden hearts bearing declarations of love. A local theater manager, who was also the chamber of commerce president, was involved in the launch of the re-mailing program in the 1940s in collaboration with the postmaster.

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

At the Jan. 31 kickoff of the re-mailing program, Darin Atteberry, from sponsor Elevations Credit Union, stamps cards addressed to France, Canada, Cyprus, and beyond.

The courier of cupid’s arrows – the United States Postal Service – still partners with the chamber on the program. Last year over 100,000 cards came through, says Jacqueline Leivestad, acting station manager of Valentine Station.

By designated dates in early February, letter-senders can mail a pre-stamped, pre-addressed card enclosed within a larger first-class envelope to Loveland. Volunteers stamp each card twice: with a postmark from Valentine Station and a valentine-themed verse, called a cachet, next to it. Volunteers have garnished greetings that are sent nationwide and to more than 100 countries. One of the first cards to be stamped this year, it’s announced, is bound for France.

“Bonjour, y’all!” Ms. McCloughan exclaims.

Loveland isn’t the only place where lovebirds can re-mail their missives. Post offices from Bliss, Idaho, to Valentine, Texas, have offered similar services, according to the USPS, though the Loveland organizers claim their initiative is the largest of its kind. It even involves a local Miss Loveland Valentine; this year it’s high school senior Olivia Friske, who was at the kickoff in a dress and sash. “I’m going to send [a valentine] to my grandparents,” she says. “They always send me one every year, so this year I get to send them one.” Her boyfriend will get one, too.

The holiday holds a sweet significance to some volunteers. Ms. Boston, the veteran stamper, says instead of Christmas cards, she sends Valentine’s Day cards. She’s held onto the first one her husband gave her in 1952. 

Though it’s a bit tattered with age, she says, “I still treasure that valentine.”

As the sun hovered over a warm Los Angeles afternoon on Monday, it was setting in Cincinnati, temperatures heading toward the 20s. Undeterred by the midwinter chill, Bengals fans poured into Paul Brown Stadium downtown for a citywide pep rally, chanting, as ever, “Who dey, Who dey, Who dey think gonna beat them Bengals?”

For decades, the realistic answer has been, “Well, anybody and everybody.” 

But as the LA Rams and Cincinnati Bengals prepare for this weekend’s Super Bowl, the Bengals are perhaps one of the most transformed teams in the National Football League. Also transformed is the entire city, swept up in a frenzy to rally behind a team that is finally good. The underdog team and its under-the-radar city are finally getting the national attention they’ve long deserved, fans and residents say. 

The Monitor doesn’t often cover sports. But since being a Cincinnati fan is – for a brief moment, at least – no longer a Sisyphean task, I went back to my hometown ahead of the Super Bowl to get a glimpse of the magic.

“For the city to be on a national stage right now is big,” Ashley Palmer, one of the rally attendees, tells me as we bundle up against the riverfront chill. This moment is also, as her mother, Denise Baker, points out, the first time in years she’s been able to properly talk trash to friends and family who support other teams.

“It’s very electric – very,” Ms. Baker says of the city’s atmosphere. “Every place you go – orange and black, orange and black.” The neighboring town of Cheviot has temporarily renamed a handful of streets after Bengals players. Even out by my parents’ house in the suburbs, vendors are selling jerseys on a busy street corner.

Before this season, the Bengals hadn’t won a playoff game since the Soviet Union was a world power – meaning a large chunk of millennials and all of Generation Z had never witnessed a postseason victory. Anyone old enough to remember the Bengals’ Super Bowl appearances in the ’80s (both losses, of course) has spent the last few decades in the wilderness, their home team reduced to the butt of NFL jokes.

Nick Roll

Chanel Bassette (center left, masked) and a group of friends attend a pep rally for the Cincinnati Bengals at Paul Brown Stadium in Cincinnati, Feb. 7, 2022. Ms. Bassette was just 5 years old the last time the Bengals won a postseason game.

“We’ve just been waiting on this – and we deserve it,” says Chanel Bassette, who was only 5 when the Bengals last won a postseason game – too young, she says, to remember. “We all want this.”

My friend Toby Bolte, a lifelong Bengals fan, would agree. “I pay a lot of money for my season tickets, to watch a lot of bad football,” he says.

Two wins in 2019; a whopping four wins in 2020. The Bengals were being, well, the Bengals. Ms. Baker’s hopes heading into this season were for a measly five wins – anything that was an improvement over 2020. It all makes this year’s Super Bowl run even more unbelievable, more exciting.

My favorite Bengals memory is from 2014. The Bengals, with a home playoff game, were facing a television blackout due to low ticket sales. After all, what fan would want to attend a game their team was sure to lose? The team rallied its corporate sponsors to buy out the remaining tickets so the game would be broadcast. But the skeptics were right: The Bengals botched their third playoff game in a row. At least fans were able to watch the disaster unfold from the comfort of their living room. 

To me, though, fans refusing to buy enough tickets felt like a rebuke, a collective strike against years of frustration. But maybe Bengals fans are just brutally, refreshingly honest. There was no point in buying a playoff game ticket, even for a game right down the street, and they knew it. 

Now, though, not only has our underdog team notched a Super Bowl bid, but the city – often considered a flyover by outsiders even though it’s actually full of hidden gems and civic pride – is finally getting its due. 

“It’s a classic midsize city battling against these juggernauts in the NFL,” says my friend Toby. “We always say they don’t talk about us on TV. ... To see them finally have to talk about us, one, because we’re winning games and we’re in the Super Bowl, is great. But [two], it’s only going to be great for the city.”

Amid the sense of shock and swelling excitement, it’s clear that you don’t stay a Bengals fan – or player – over all these years without developing a sense of humor.

Defensive end Sam Hubbard dedicated the team’s Super Bowl run to Harambe, a gorilla in the Cincinnati Zoo that rose to viral internet fame after his untimely death in 2016. Earlier in the season, quarterback Joe Burrow quipped that the team was able to avoid COVID-19 outbreaks because “there’s not a ton to do in Cincinnati.” (In response, Chad Johnson, a former wide receiver, offered a robust defense of the city, citing a Starbucks downtown and a McDonald’s across the river in Kentucky.)

At the rally, two fans are dressed in Bigfoot suits. Or maybe it’s two actual Bigfoots – Bigfeet? – in the flesh. For the past three decades, that sight would have been more likely than a Bengals Super Bowl appearance. They hold up a sign that reads, “Believe.” 

After all these years, I just might.

AP

A person using a computer (right) helps the home plate umpire receive signals from radar to make ball-or-strike calls during a minor league game in York, Pa.

Artificial intelligence is about to take on one of the most iconic jobs in all of sports: the baseball umpire.

This summer, teams in the AAA league – just one level below Major League Baseball itself – will use sophisticated technology to call balls and strikes on batters. Human umpires will still crouch behind the plate, but a voice in their earpieces will tell them to shout out “ball” or “strike” – as determined by a system known as Automated Ball-Strike.

ABS will even calculate different-sized strike zones for tall or short players, just as human umpires must do. Human umps will be able to override the ABS if they feel it made a mistake. (Some early versions had trouble calling curveballs correctly.) And they will continue to do other things umps do, like call an out made on the base paths, separate angry opposing players to prevent fights, and of course dust off home plate.

For well over a century, umpires have stood as one of the most human elements of baseball. How they make calls can affect the outcome of a game. They inevitably have human failings. But how they see things, whether right or wrong in the view of any individual fan, is how it will go down. They are the boss. In the end, it’s a human being who is running a game being played by other humans.

More and more, technology is invading sports. Data is being crunched ever more thoroughly to assess the value of individual players. Statistics advise managers on what decisions to make, such as which players to use and when. Yet sometimes a special joy can well up in a fan when a player defies the odds and succeeds when the data says it shouldn’t happen.

Computer vision, more acute than that of humans, has proved useful. Tennis shots can be ruled in or out of bounds by cameras able to detect what is only a blur to the human eye. In American football, replays halt the action while referees study plays from many angles using video from multiple cameras. And this year FIFA, the body governing international soccer, will experiment with a system that aims to call offsides more quickly and accurately than human referees.

In cases where the use of technology can make a sports competition fairer to teams, players, and their fans, by reducing the number of “bad calls,” it can be a boon to sports. Robot refs could also help solve shortages of volunteer referees at the amateur level, in sports such as soccer. A game might be run by a single official aided by technology that does parts of the job such as calling balls in or out of bounds.

Today the possibility exists that a human umpire or referee could be bribed or hold prejudices, consciously or unconsciously. Using robo-umps would seem to avoid those human failings. But what if hackers got inside a robo-ump’s program and could change its calls?

Lots of questions to be answered still lie ahead. In the meantime, play ball!