Shooting and Crying

Living rightly with Jia Tolentino

The focus of a recent conversation on the New York Times’s “The Opinions” podcast with Jia Tolentino and Hasan Piker, hosted by Nadja Spiegelman, was whether stealing from large corporations is justified and/or constitutes a meaningful form of protest or political action. Most of the controversy that ensued had to do with the fact that while Tolentino denied the latter (“Any successful direct action in history has to be ostentatious, has to make itself known, it’s ideally collective”), she affirmed the former, and not so sheepishly admitted to stealing from Whole Foods herself. Commentators expressed outrage at her glib affirmation of petty crime. What caught my attention however was something different altogether. It wasn’t a matter of questionable conduct, or a specious form of moral reasoning, per se. What struck me was a peculiar understanding of what it means to be moral at all.

Spiegelman ended the conversation by asking, “What’s one thing that you think should be OK but currently isn’t OK?” Piker answered briefly, “I.P. theft. Stealing movies, things like that.” But Tolentino struggled to answer the question directly:

One thing that should be legal that isn’t—it’s interesting, because I have to regularly explain this stuff to a small child, and have so thoroughly explained to her that some things are against the rules, but they’re OK, depending on who you are. And some things are not against the rules, but they’re not OK. There are so many perfectly legal things I do regularly that I find mildly immoral. Like getting iced coffee in a plastic cup. I find that to be a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action. I have taken so many planes for so many pleasure reasons; I have acted in so many selfish ways that are not only legal, but they’re sanctioned and they’re unbelievably valorized, culturally. So, maybe things like blowing up a pipeline, let’s say that. (Emphasis mine.)

Spiegelman found this particularly relatable. “It is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society,” she agreed. “I’m constantly acting in ways that don’t align with my belief system. And constantly having to justify that, like ordering in food when it’s raining out … my comfort is more important than someone bringing me food through the rain. And it doesn’t feel good. But it is part of living—I mean, no one’s making me do that, but it is part of the way in which we live in our society.”

On the standard view of what it means to act in the light of moral knowledge—to act while possessing a capacity to tell right from wrong—when one confronts a moral injunction, say, “don’t do X,” one faces a choice between two courses of action: refrain from Xing or figure out why “don’t do X” is only apparently a moral injunction. Show, to yourself if not also to others, why it is, in general, or under these circumstances, okay to do X.

Both paths can be difficult. Not Xing may come at great personal cost, or one might really love Xing. And figuring out why it is actually okay to do X could be tricky because it might just not be okay to do X, at all; or the argument to the effect that Xing is fine, actually, might be elusive, requiring a lot of serious thinking; or these arguments may be such as to put one in conflict with oneself—with other beliefs one espouses and ways one conducts oneself—or with others, on whose companionship, or approval, or readership, one depends. In other words, the incentives to find ways to both do X and distance oneself from doing X, at one and the same time, are plentiful and powerful.

Jia Tolentino has always been particularly interested in such dilemmas. In her best-selling 2019 essay collection Trick Mirror, she wrote probingly about the difficulty of abstaining from Amazon, Ballet Barre, Sephora, expensive haircuts and salad chains. In 2026, she adds to these moral torments iced coffee in plastic cups and flying for pleasure. By her own admission, all of these temptations might be just the tip of the iceberg.

Tolentino’s curious confessions—“I do so many immoral things every day!” she jauntily reassured Spiegelman—put me in mind of an expression in Hebrew that is meant to capture a way of responding to the powerful incentives to do X and distance oneself from doing X at one and the same time: yorim ve bochim, “shooting and crying.”

Shooting and crying is a term of derision directed at the attitude that IDF soldiers and Israelis more generally have been known to take toward the violence they routinely employ. While it was first and mostly subsequently used to mock a certain kind of post-factum lament—soldiers complaining after the Six Day war, or the first Lebanon war, or the second Lebanon war, or the Gaza war, about the military’s conduct, the implicit idea is that the crying and the shooting might as well be contemporaneous. This is because, while in individual cases those accused of shooting and crying might have been expressing genuine moral contrition—indeed some of those blithely accused of shooting and crying have gone on to dedicate their lives to justice and reform—collectively, a certain kind of crying enables rather than curbs moral disaster. This is the kind of crying that is calibrated to express regret not for what one has done and should not have done so much as for what one, regrettably, had to do. In this way, the avowed hatred of violence absolves the personal and national conscience (cf. “I find that to be a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action”) and thereby clears a path for its infinite repetition (cf. “I do so many immoral things every day”). At the same time, the professed “moral injury” to self turns the perpetrator into a victim (cf. “It is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society”). The problem with shooting and crying is that all too often you are not really crying for anyone but yourself.

Far be it from me to propose that a slippery slope leads from Ballet Barre to what Tolentino would be very happy to call a genocide. At the same time, Tolentino’s own moral trajectory does suggest, minimally, that one is liable to gain a certain facility with the move. Do it enough and shooting and crying starts to come easy.

In her signature 2019 essay “Always be Optimizing,” Tolentino interrogated how women subject to the quiet tyranny of salad chains and exercise classes are “genuinely trapped at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy—two systems that, at their extremes, ensure that individual success comes at the expense of collective morality.” In response to the accusation that Tolentino refuses to take responsibility for things she could easily elect not to do, Tolentino made clear that she knew full well “that of course this is all optional, of course, of course.” Of course, of course, but acknowledging that “this is all optional” gets you no closer to meaningfully exercising agency; on the contrary: “That’s part of the reason it’s so confounding as it takes hold.” As we are called to sympathetically observe the individual seduced by the siren songs of social and financial capital into betraying their principles, agency is not affirmed but mourned. Agency is not a liberatory boon but a curse; the fact that we can never quite shake it makes our inability to exercise it all the more difficult to bear. It is not fair to be forced to choose between individual success and collective morality; and is a choice this unfair really a choice at all?

I don’t know about fairness. Surely it would be better if our form of life more reliably rewarded virtue, but when it comes to ethical life, facing hard choices between the dear self’s preferences and the sacrifices entailed by doing the right thing is, as they say, a feature not a bug. Fairness aside, I’ll grant that it sucks. Requisite sacrifices of one’s interests make doing the right thing very painful. This is why demanding them en masse is unrealistic, and expecting a political movement to arise on the basis of such sacrifices of self-interest is usually hopeless.

But seven years on, Tolentino is no longer trading collective morality on the altar of “success.” Now she’s doing it for the marginal comfort of purchasing iced coffee in plastic cups. She’s doing it for a destination holiday. Let us grant that patriarchy and capitalism make women eat their greens and exercise, or rather, make it hard, very costly, to refuse to do so. But what, exactly, is the cost of eschewing that iced coffee?

Here we must return again to that slippery slope, for not all of Torentino’s moral compromises are quite so trivial. Among her recently avowed moral commitments was an October 2025 pledge not to contribute to NYT Opinion until a string of highly ambitious demands concerning its coverage of Israel-Palestine were met. The pledge’s first line reads: “‘Language makes genocide justifiable. A reason why we are still being bombed after 243 days is because of The New York Times and most Western media,’ the Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat wrote months before Israel assassinated him.” When Palestinians die in Gaza, the pledge claims, Israel might be the efficient cause but the reason they die is not just Israel, it is also NYT Opinion. This is why Tolentino committed herself to not contributing to the Opinion section until the paper conducted a review of anti-Palestinian bias, issued new editorial standards for Palestine coverage, retracted their “Screams without Words” investigation and called for a U.S. arms embargo on Israel. To state the obvious, in the six months since the boycott was announced, the New York Times has yet to comply.

So, while we’re at it, what exactly is the cost of not participating in a cheeky New York Times Opinion tête-à-tête with Hasan Piker about whether stealing snacks from Whole Foods is a form of meaningful protest? Who, precisely, finds this particular question pressing? Does Tolentino? What is it about our unethical society—capitalism, patriarchy—that made it so difficult for Tolentino to refuse the invitation?

Salads and Ballet Barre oppress women but Tolentino partakes in them anyway; plastic chokes the planet but she uses it anyway; Whole Foods steals from workers but she shops there anyway; the New York Times is responsible for genocide but here she is contributing to it anyway. “I do so many immoral things every day!”

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In the aside that caught my attention Tolentino begins by mentioning that, as a mother, she has to “regularly explain this stuff to a small child.” Notably, what she says she has “thoroughly explained” to the child is not that she frequently does immoral things, but “that some things are against the rules, but they’re OK, depending on who you are.” Fine. Crossing the street willy-nilly is against the rules, but if you’re an adult and very careful, you can do it (I assume Tolentino meant to gesture at structural inequities that allow her to get away with things other less privileged persons cannot; this is not material, the principle holds).

But here’s the rub: as soon as you try to explain the second part to a child—the part about how you do so many immoral things every day—things start breaking apart. And I don’t mean the authority of the law, but morality itself. This is because if you repeatedly tell a child that you do immoral things all the time, their understanding of what “moral” and “immoral” mean will come to fundamentally diverge from customary usage. “Immoral” is not any ordinary adjective to describe an action: I do things quickly! I do things methodically! I do things immorally! In the paradigmatic case, when a person fully grasps that an action is to be done or avoided from an ethical perspective they are not merely grasping something theoretical about a possible course of action, they are practically committing themselves to act or refrain from acting. If I say that it is wrong to murder, I’m not expressing an opinion; I’m expressing the reason for why I don’t do it, won’t do it and think we cannot stand idly by when others attempt to do it or succeed at doing it.

Of course, the general phenomenon Tolentino alludes to is familiar: I know I shouldn’t snap at my friend, but here I go again. This is sometimes called weakness of will. But, as Aristotle remarked, if there is such a thing as weakness of will—knowing the right thing and doing the wrong thing anyway—this cannot be a habitual way of going about the world. If you are always “weak of will”—losing your temper every single time, doing nothing to avoid doing it next time—you are not weak of will, you are vicious. You claim to grasp the good, to know right from wrong, but in fact you hold the good to be something else entirely—the gratification of your urges, asserting your superiority over others, whatever. Wiping a tear of remorse after every conversation doesn’t make it better; at some point it adds the insult of self-pity to the original injury.

If you tell your child, “I do so many immoral things every day,” you are teaching them that “moral” is not the name we have given to the possibility that there are certain things that we have to do no matter how we feel about them or how they might advance our interests, and that there are certain things we may not do no matter how much we’d like to and no matter how well they would serve us. If you tell your child, “I do so many immoral things every day,” you teach a child that calling things “immoral” is a way of getting yours and getting away with it. Shooting and crying.

How to live ethically in an unethical society is a difficult question. Unjust systems do make acting justly hard. Kant would say that since ought implies can there is always a right course of action, but I have seen decent arguments to the contrary. Perhaps sometimes—sometimes—an unjust system can make it so that all possible courses of action commit one to moral injury. (One very good candidate for this is an example by the moral philosopher Lucy Allais, who pointed out that in being confronted by a beggar we are confronted with the choice between refusing a plea for help and offending against human dignity by granting that plea.) But the public interrogation of morally tricky positions should model as its end, its telos, not doing X and whinging about it, but arriving at one or the other: stop Xing, or find a way to justify it.

Stop Xing: make your own coffee; lug around your dirty Yeti and kindly request, or demand, that coffee shops use it (if you live in Brooklyn, as Tolentino does, you would probably get a discount for doing so); write about it in the New Yorker; organize your fellow Brooklyn moms to start a consumer boycott; collaborate on a line of coffee mugs with “VERY COOL” emblazoned on them that you will individually sign “Jia Tolentino approves of this mug.” When the New York Times calls, say “no, thank you.” Or don’t.

Find a way to justify X: the vast majority of emissions come from energy production, industrial use and large-scale agriculture; the individual carbon footprint is a ploy devised by oil companies to shift blame away from them and onto individual consumers; a single-use cup contributes tens of grams of CO2, all single-use cups combined contribute a fraction of a percent of global emissions (while a long-haul flight contributes one ton per passenger). Ethical concern should track impact, and moralizing trivial actions is dangerous. It exhausts both individual attention and collective energy, leaving us with little resources for things that matter more: clean energy policy, public transit. Critically rethink your original stance on pledges, or boycotts, or the editorial standards of the Times, or the war. Whatever.

In the process you might come to understand your desires in deeper ways, not simply as whims to indulge with one hand and disavow with the other. It might not feel as good as publicly calling yourself out for “a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action,” but that’s the thing about doing the right thing, sometimes it’s not the thing that feels best.

I take no stand on whether Tolentino should drink iced coffee, or fly, or order from Amazon, or do Ballet Barre, or contribute to NYT Opinion. I am not moralizing about how she should spend her money or her time or her political capital. I am merely pointing out that shooting and crying is not a way to be moral, it’s a way to do away with the demands of morality altogether. Perhaps, as Adorno has said, a wrong life cannot be lived rightly. All I am saying is that it can probably be lived better than this.