We’ve all loved terrible people. How do I know this? Because I know people, and people are terrible. Sam went to the real problem at the heart of everything: the problem of human love. The aesthetic and ethical issues presented by men from Caravaggio to Michael Jackson are a kind of parable for this larger problem.

What do we do about the terrible people we love? Do we excise them from our lives? Do we enact a justice, swift and sure? Do we cancel them? Sometimes. But to do so is an excruciating process, and ultimately goes back to the calculator I introduced in the beginning. We ask, or maybe don’t ask, but actually feel our way through the problem: How terrible is their terribleness? How much do we love them? And how important is that love to us?