"I understand and partially support your decision to remove comments from your website but if you persist in this effort you need to quit asking questions that beg a comment. State your opinion and let the chips fall where they may."

A reader named Carl emails.

I don't think he's trying to be funny, but that made me laugh. Questions are a literary device — often found in books, where there's never a comments section — unless you scrawl marginalia. I would never undertake to squelch the questions in my writing. They come up naturally as I'm thinking in real time. 

To form a question is to get somewhere into thinking about a topic. It's progress. It's a thought, not merely a failure to complete a thought. Not every question demands an answer. It might be a rhetorical question. But even when it's a question that would be good to answer, it doesn't need efforts to answer it right underneath. 

It can go into the reader's head and work the magic of giving rise to thoughts. It doesn't need other people immediately chattering. The reader might do better thinking independently. And surely you don't need me answering all my own questions. To say "State your opinion" is to assume I always have an opinion, but why would I? And I think a framed question is a kind of opinion. It's the opinion that this is a question. It's a statement of the issue.

And what is "let the chips fall where they may" supposed to mean? That I'm somehow withholding the answers to my questions out of fear of consequences?! 

I think questions are exciting, so I don't feel that I'm withholding answers. I like to open things up and create potential. That can go well with a comments section, but it's certainly not the case that it can't go without it.

FROM THE EMAIL: A reader named Ron writes:

It’s a guy thing. When a woman asks a question we think we have to come up with an answer. In fairness, we have learned this from a lot of “are you listening?” when we don’t “answer.”