Even in the bad years, before the Boston Red Sox won the World Series, in 2004, and upended all the foundational bad-luck stories of the franchise, the smart take among Sox fans was that it wasn’t really Bill Buckner’s fault. Blame it—and the word “it” alone always sufficed—on a rogue’s gallery of pitchers (Roger Clemens or Calvin Schiraldi or Bob Stanley, take your pick), or on the manager, John McNamara. The cruel, late-inning crumbling by the Sox against the Mets, in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, which derailed a victory that would have given the Sox their first championship in sixty-eight years, was a true team effort. The score was already tied and good fortune clearly exhausted by the bottom of the tenth inning, when the Mets outfielder Mookie Wilson hit a meek dribbler down the first-base line that bounded not under Buckner’s glove, as many would later put it, but somehow, impossibly, around it and into right field, allowing Wilson’s teammate Ray Knight to score from second, winning the game for New York. Those wised-up Sox fans would then add that, even after all that, there was still another game for Boston to play—and blow a lead in—before the Series reached its dismal end.

But that’s a twisty story, and so, not right away but eventually, out of some combination of mental convenience, mediocre newspaper columns, mounting losses to the rival Yankees, and predictably lousy winters, the story in New England became the one that I got growing up, that Bill Fucking Buckner lost the 1986 World Series and then was chased into hiding in Idaho.

Neither part of the story was right. Buckner didn’t enter witness protection. He returned to the Red Sox for the 1987 season, following an offseason in which blame for the 1986 loss was spread around liberally, and during which Buckner himself suggested that Wilson might have been safe even if he had fielded the ball, since the pitcher at the time, Stanley, hadn’t covered first base fast enough. Buckner was let go midway through the ’87 season, but, after stints with the Angels and the Royals, he came back to Boston again, making the team in 1990, at the age of forty, after scratching his way onto the roster in spring training. “This is more satisfying than anything I’ve ever done in baseball,” he said at the time—hardly the words of a ruined man haunted by a single, irrevocable moment from his past.

Buckner did move to Idaho a few years after retiring from baseball, but this, like everything else about him, was both more and less complicated than the narrative that came to prevail. His departure from New England followed an altercation with a fan after a minor-league game in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where he was serving as a hitting instructor for the visiting team. He was leaving the ballpark when, as he told the Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, “Somebody asked for an autograph, and another guy said, ‘Don’t give him a ball, he’d just drop it anyway.’ I got to my truck to put my bag inside, and I started thinking about it. I went back and found out who said it, and I picked the guy up by the shirt collar.” This must have been where the exile story started: Buckner chased west by one wise-ass too many. He told Shaughnessy that he didn’t want his kids having to hear about ’86 anymore. And yet, a few years later, Buckner told the Globe that the tale of his self-imposed hermitude had been overblown: he had a ranch in Idaho, he liked it there, and he wasn’t hiding from anyone.

Bill Buckner died in Boise on Monday morning, of Lewy body dementia, at the age of sixty-nine. The news of his death has occasioned an airing of regret. Buckner had 2,715 career hits and twenty-two seasons in the majors; that should never have been subsumed by the black cloud of a single misplayed grounder, many people have noted. Mookie Wilson, who became friends and an occasional memorabilia-seller with Buckner, said that his former opponent “should not be defined by one play.” Also making the rounds during the past twenty-four hours is a clip from Opening Day at Fenway Park in 2008, when Buckner was invited to throw out the ceremonial first pitch. He takes a long walk from left field to the mound, wipes a few tears from his eyes, and then delivers a looping curve over the plate for a strike. (Afterward, he said, “In my heart I had to forgive the media, for what they put me and my family through.”) It was a moving moment, owing to Buckner’s grace at the center of the spectacle, but there was a whiff of self-satisfaction and stage-managed pathos on the part of the Red Sox organization and its fans, who were celebrating their second World Series victory in four years, and were at last successful enough to reckon with, and put to bed, an emblem of their former, sadder selves.

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It wasn’t the first time that Buckner had been hailed by the crowd in a much publicized return to Fenway. Eighteen years earlier, in 1990, in what would be his final Opening Day in the majors, he was announced in the lineup and greeted with a minute-long ovation. For David Nyhan, writing in the Globe the next day, the scene had been a kind of religious reckoning, “a day for Second Chances, if not Second Comings.” Nyhan went on, writing, “New England doesn’t forget. But New England forgives. You are us. We are you. Only by forgiving you do we forgive ourselves.” For as long as Sox fans had maligned him, there were others who relished their forgiveness of him, their accepting of an apology that he had never offered for a play that was not, in fact, some mystical or accursed happening but just the result of an unfortunate bounce.

The truth about baseball and its slow accumulations is more mundane than any of the stories—of failure, or of misunderstanding, or of redemption—that attached themselves to Buckner. For him, it was a mile of eye black and thousands of bags of ice and shredded knees, bickering with team executives about contracts and managers about playing time. It was appearing in a major-league game for the Dodgers at nineteen and winning a batting title with the Cubs at thirty-one. It was the great satisfaction not of being hailed by the fans on Opening Day, in 1990, but grinding to make the team in the first place. It was running the bases that season to leg out an unlikely inside-the-park home run, looking like “a suitcase falling downstairs,” as Roger Angell put it at the time. And it was being cut for good that June, finally too old to do it anymore.

And it was a cruel trick of the ball on a night in October in 1986, a trick made crueller because it yielded an image that so perfectly encapsulated the seeming sports tragedy that had unfolded for the Sox, which was irresistible, in its way. The legendary play-by-play man Vin Scully, announcing the game on television, said, “If one picture is worth a thousand words, you have seen about a million words.” He was talking about all that had transpired in the tenth inning, but he could have been talking just about Buckner, bending his busted knees, jabbing his glove to the ground and coming up empty, then turning his head as the ball went by. Scully made the comment after going silent for nearly two remarkable minutes, as the cameras cut from the Mets mobbing one another to fans screaming and the Red Sox moping out of the dugout. Scully knew what something astonishing looked like, and he knew when words couldn’t do it justice.

Tony Horwitz’s great-grandfather Isaac Moses Perski came to America from tsarist Russia in 1882, a penniless teen-ager, and one of the first things he bought in his new country was a book, an illustrated history of the Civil War. In 1965, he showed that book to his very little great-grandson. “Peering over his arm, I saw pen-and-ink soldiers hurtling up at me with bayonets,” Horwitz later wrote in The New Yorker. “I was six, Poppa Isaac a hundred and one.”

Horwitz, who died Monday, at the age of sixty, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, a former New Yorker staff writer, and a distinguished American historian with a singular voice, full of compassion and delight and wry observations and self-deprecating humor—layers that covered but never obscured his deep and abiding moral seriousness about the task of the historian as the conscience of a nation.

The author of “Baghdad Without a Map,” Horwitz undertook adventure. He reported on strikes. He covered the war in Iraq. He once retraced the ocean voyage of James Cook. But, most lastingly, he wrote about the Civil War and its tortured legacy of hatred and division, battles that never ended. Those pen-and-ink soldiers, in the pages of Horwitz’s many books, came to life in their descendants, champions of the Confederacy, modern-day Klansmen, anguished, angry, and haunted.

His book “Confederates in the Attic,” from 1998, shattered his readers’ understanding of the Civil War. When Horwitz and his wife, the novelist Geraldine Brooks, had a son and decided to take a break from their work as war correspondents, they moved to a house in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Horwitz started spending his weekends with Civil War reënactors. The Confederacy, he reported, was alive and well, and as full of animus at the idea of equality as ever. Horwitz interviewed a Klanswoman at a gathering, a macramé-making grandmother, who told him about the test she’d had to take, full of tricky questions. “Like, if someone asks, ‘Why do we hate Jews?’ I didn’t know before, but I found out.” Horwitz then asked her why she wasn’t wearing her robe. “It’s a good look,” she said, but “the cleaning bills will kill you.”

Horwitz wasn’t the liberal tourist, laughing at hicks. He hated that stuff. That attic? That was his attic, the American attic. As a boy, he’d painted the walls of the attic of his family’s house with a re-creation of the Battle of Antietam. “The attic became my bedroom,” he wrote, “and each morning I woke to the sound of my father bounding up the attic stairs, blowing a mock bugle call through his fingers and shouting, ‘General, the troops await your command!’ ”

I first met Tony fifteen years ago, when he spent a year at Harvard, and he sat in on a class of mine. We’d meet for lunch and swap stories and take walks and talk books. He’d come by the house and tease my kids. The first time his family came for dinner, we played Fishy, Fishy, Cross My Ocean in the park, and he made an excellent shark. The kindest, gentlest, and most generous people are always the ones most fun to watch trying to be ferocious. He was like an uncle, the one with all the funniest stories. Not the uncle who says “Gosh, you’ve gotten big!” to the littlest kid but the uncle who brings chocolate and says, to that kid, “Eat all of this before your brothers get back and I won’t tell them I brought it.” Mostly, we e-mailed each other terrible jokes, because we both had boys who had a particular passion for really bad one-liners.

Horwitz reckoned with the legacy of the Civil War all his life, fearlessly, long before battles over Confederate monuments and the press’s fascination with the resurgence of white nationalism. He was the rare historian—the only historian I can think of—equally at home in the archive and in an interview, a dedicated scholar, a devoted journalist. He counted, among his heroes, John Brown, the subject of his masterly book “Midnight Rising,” from 2011. But I think he identified most with the subject of his last book, “Spying on the South,” Frederick Law Olmsted, who, on assignment for the Times, reported on the South in the eighteen-fifties, years before he became a landscape architect and designed Central Park. Horwitz retraced Olmsted’s steps, and redid his reporting, in Trump’s America, marvelling at what his “Fred” had seen, and what he hadn’t, and what’s changed, and what hasn’t. He’d send me dispatches from the road, full of despair and homesickness and dread. He’d struggled with writing the end of the book. He wanted to find something beautiful for the ending, and where, now, is beauty? A century and a half after the Civil War, twenty years after “Confederates in the Attic,” people hate one another as much as ever, hurtling tweets as barbed and blood-soaked as bayonets.

He went, in the end, to Central Park, to wander. He struck up a conversation with a sixth grader from Harlem, and asked him what he liked best about the park. “Going where I want,” the kid said. Tony said he thought the man who designed the park would like that, and the kid asked what his name was, and then the kid said, “Tell Fred he did good.”

Last week, when a doctored video of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, began circulating on Facebook, it seemed like it would only be a matter of time before it was removed. After all, just one day before, Facebook proudly announced that it had recently removed 2.2 billion fake accounts between January and March as part of its expanded efforts to curb the platform’s circulation of misinformation. The video, which was manipulated to make Pelosi seem drunk and confused, is not a particularly sophisticated fake. But it was convincing enough that countless commenters believed it to be true and sent it spinning through cyberspace. At one point, there were seventeen versions of the video online; various iterations had jumped to Twitter and YouTube, and one was picked up by Fox News. The Fox News clip was then posted on Twitter by President Trump. Within hours, a version of the doctored video had been viewed more than two million times.

The Pelosi video was reminiscent of one broadcast on Facebook, last June, just after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for New York’s Fourteenth Congressional District. What appeared to be an interview between Ocasio-Cortez and Allie Stuckey, the host of the online political channel Conservative Review, which made the young, self-declared democratic socialist look foolish and uninformed, was, in fact, a cut-and-paste job: answers from a legitimate public-television interview with Ocasio-Cortez were paired with new questions posed by Stuckey which were designed for maximum humiliation. In less than twenty-four hours, the video was viewed more than a million times. When Facebook was asked to take it down, the company demurred, saying that the bogus interview did not violate its “community standards” because Stuckey told them that it was meant as satire and that Facebook does not police humor. Similarly, Facebook refused to remove the Pelosi video because, according to Monika Bickert, the company’s head of global policy management, it does not violate the company’s community standards, even though it is demonstrably false.

Facebook’s community standards are not regulations. They are not laws. They are arbitrary and fuzzy guidelines developed by employees of a private company that are then open to interpretation by people paid by that company, and enforced—or not—by other employees of that company. Such solipsism accounts for Bickert’s inability to give CNN’s Anderson Cooper a straight answer when he asked her if the company would take down a similarly doctored video of Donald Trump that made the President, a known teetotaler, appear to be inebriated. The correct response, if the company were to follow its reasoning for not removing the Pelosi video, should have been no. But because Facebook’s community standards are interpreted subjectively and applied inconsistently, Bickert did not, and could not, answer.

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How Facebook developed its roster of community standards is instructive. As Tim Sparapani, the company’s former director of public policy, told the “Frontline” journalist James Jacoby, “We took a very libertarian perspective here. We allowed people to speak. And we said, If you’re going to incite violence, that’s clearly out of bounds. We’re going to kick you off immediately. But we’re going to allow people to go right up to the edge and we’re going to allow other people to respond. We had to set up some ground rules. Basic decency, no nudity, and no violent or hateful speech. And after that, we felt some reluctance to interpose our value system on this worldwide community that was growing.”

Choosing to allow false information to circulate on Facebook is not just “interposing” the company’s value system on those who use its platform, it is actually imposing its value system on the culture at large. In Bickert’s conversation with Cooper, she continually fell back on her company’s commitment to keeping its users “safe,” by which she meant free from the threat of physical harm. For a company whose products have been used to incite genocide and other kinds of violence, this is a crucial, if not always successful, aim. But safety is not one dimensional; when a company that operates a platform with more than two billion users takes a value-free position on propaganda, ancillary perils and threats will follow.

Bickert also repeatedly pointed out to Cooper that the Pelosi video now contains a warning stating that fact-checkers have determined it to be untrue. But that, too, is untrue. Rather, it comes with a notice that says, “Before you share this content, you might want to know that there is additional reporting on this from PolitiFact, 20 Minutes, Factcheck.org, Lead Stories and Associated Press.” Bickert told Cooper, “We think it’s up to people to make an informed choice what to believe.” What she seems to mean is that viewers can decide for themselves if the fact-checkers are right, or if the determination that this is fake news is itself fake news. This suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of fact or the point of having fact-checkers in the first place.

Facebook is continually falling back on the premise that it is a social-media company and not a media company, meaning that its allegiance is to free expression rather than to the truth. This is disingenuous. Facebook calls a user’s main page a “news feed.” And forty-three per cent of American adults say that they get their news from Facebook, more than from any other social-media site. Indeed, last year, in its response to a lawsuit brought by Six4Three, a bikini app startup, for breach of contract, the company cast itself as a publisher, with editorial discretion to publish what it wants. As Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University Law School, told the Guardian at the time, “It’s politically expedient to deflect responsibility for making editorial judgements by claiming to be a platform. . . . But it makes editorial decisions all the time, and it’s making them more frequently.” Choosing not to remove the Pelosi video, for example, is an editorial decision.

A few months before the 2018 midterm elections, I asked Zac Moffatt, Mitt Romney’s digital director in 2012 and the C.E.O. of Targeted Victory, a Republican strategy firm that sometimes works with Facebook, what he expected to see in future elections. “I worry all the time about the ability of people to create video content that is not true in origin, and the distinction is almost impossible to make,” he said. “These are really very scary trends. That’s what I think about the most: How will you determine what’s real and what is not real? I mean it’s hard now, but when video can be faked to that degree, I find that very scary going into 2020.”

It should be no consolation that the Pelosi video did not achieve the level of sophistication anticipated by Moffat. What Facebook and Twitter (which has also refused to remove it) have done is to make it clear to anyone with malign intent that it’s fine to distort the truth on these platforms. They are sanctioning the creation of misinformation and injecting it into the public consciousness. Bickert told Cooper that after Facebook learned that the Pelosi video was a fake, it had “slowed down the virality.” In other words, it will continue to infect the culture.

Ayşegül Savaş reads her story from the June 3, 2019, issue of the magazine. Savaş is a Turkish writer who lives in Paris and teaches at the Sorbonne. Her first novel, “Walking on the Ceiling,” was published in April.

In “No Mercy,” Margaret Talbot writes about the fate of immigrant children at the border.

The hit sitcom “Modern Family” is set to end next year. But fear not. There are any number of other modern families to observe, now that our long-running favorite is disbanding, including the following:

A Guatemalan child is held at a border detention facility in Arizona; his parents are held at a border detention facility in Texas.

A throuple of parents, and they’re all running for President in 2020.

The man is pregnant. (Well, he’s not, but he does frequently use the phrase “We’re pregnant.”)

The former president of Dartmouth’s Kappa Alpha frat has kids, and he thinks it’s funny to name all of them Chad (and, honestly, it is!).

Jeff Bezos’s seventy billion dollars and MacKenzie Bezos’s seventy million dollars really miss each other following the divorce, so they decide to live in the same bank account, despite being legally separated.

Siri and Alexa give birth to Spotify’s newest feature.

Ariana Grande, Pete Davidson, Kate Beckinsale, and Ariana’s pig all appear on the cover of Us Weekly together.

The Dartmouth frat boy takes Marie Kondo a bit too seriously, and there goes one of his Chads—oops! Chad is out on his own.

Everyone indicted by Robert Mueller comes together for a Thanksgiving potluck. Sure, they all hate each other, but no more than their wives do!

A woman sells her eggs. Another family buys her frozen eggs. They want to defrost them, but everyone knows that microwaved eggs are gross. They end up buying Kondo’d Chad’s sperm. This is the money Chad needs to finally turn his life around.

“Harry & Meghan: Civilian Edition.” (Meghan is allowed to tweet.)

Anyone literate and Mitch McConnell give birth to half-literate children.

The frozen-egg baby (which is, thankfully, not what they call her) is born and actually prefers oat milk.

We see a rise in the “government-mandated family”—families that “form” after the government outlaws abortion.

An American family, but now they’re in Canada, for obvious reasons.

Chad marries a woman who is then murdered. The murder is the subject of season twelve of “Serial.” Through this newfound podcast fame, Chad meets Tricia, whose spouse’s murder is covered on “My Favorite Murder.” They live a traumatized life together, never being able to sleep at the same time, but they do go on each other’s podcasts and break the charts.

Netflix stops letting multiple people use the same password, so an entire immediate family (all forty-seven of them—birth control is now illegal, too) get together every weekend to binge-watch season nineteen of “Stranger Things.” They don’t speak a word to one another, mostly because they can’t keep one another’s names straight.

The frozen-egg baby lives at home until she’s forty, and, honestly, whatever; it’s not a big deal.

Chad and Tricia become a contemporary Romeo and Juliet: she’s a raw-food vegan; he’s paleo; their families don’t approve. She dies of anemia, and, because of his history with wives dying, he gets blamed.

Trump has amended the Constitution and is serving his sixth term as President. (It’s not Howard Schultz’s fault, but it’s not not his fault.) The population of the United States is now five billion people. It’s too many people; Fifth Avenue is renamed “The Line for the Met.” Despite incessant calls for his resignation, Trump declares the United States one big happy family, which makes it the most modern family of all.

Chad, looking to redeem himself, decides to be the one to finally unseat Trump. Even though some people think that he’s a murderer, the popularity of “Serial” enables him to carry the vote, and he wins! He doesn’t have a First Family, but he does invite the frozen-egg baby to come live with him in the White House, in a historic first.

Trump, in a fit of rage, abandons his own family and leaves the country, which leads to the final, modernest of the modern families. . . .

Melania Trump, free at last.