Brandon Stanton, the guy who runs the digital empathy farm “Humans of New York,” recently decided to go public with his very brave belief that Donald Trump is bad. He was reluctant to do so, however, because he doesn’t like to be political—so reluctant, in fact, that he talked to the New York Times all about it.

A girl from the required class for English majors at my college has lately been sharing a lot of posts from the website Humans of New York. I was inclined to dismiss it all as dumb clickbait—this was, after all, a girl who'd responded to the novels of J.M. Coetzee by asking about the South African head of the state "Madea," whom she knew Morgan Freeman had played in "Invictus"—but something more pernicious was at work. Turns out the site is actually popular.

Brandon Stanton is a street photographer who has made a name for himself snapping shots of New York City's inhabitants for a "photographic census" he calls "Humans of New York."