Novelist Teju Cole is Twitter’s foremost literary entrepreneur. His “Small Fates” project, which compresses a person’s life and death down to 140 characters, is a fascinating exercise in probing Twitter’s limits as an art form.

But I’m profoundly ambivalent about his newest project, a series of Tweeted musings on the American drone program. On the one hand, his entry on Tuesday — essentially seven fictionalized Small Fates of people killed by drone strikes — brilliantly humanizes some of the more problematic parts of America’s targeted killing campaign. One of Cole’s victims was killed in a “signature strikes,” wherein missiles are launched not because of concrete intelligence indicating the target is a part of a terrorist organization, but because the person or group of people ” bear[s] the characteristics of Qaeda or Taliban” targets. This tactic raises serious legal and ethical questions, the answer to which determines whether real people live or die. Cole’s work skillfully draws the public’s attention onto the all-too-often invisible foreign victims of our counterterrorism policies.

On the other, not all of Cole’s drone writing is so revealing. About a year ago, Cole wrote a series lumping together drones with Downton Abbey and Virgin Atlantic’s name for its first class section to show that “height” was “the commanding metaphor” of our time. At the time, it struck me as fruitless postmodern metaphor-play. I still think that now, but I’d add that, unlike his recent entry, it’s didactic and unhelpful. Virgin Atlantic’s semantic choices, while maybe obnoxious, don’t shed light on why the targeted killing program continues or what to do about it. The question “those people down there, are they really people?” that Cole suggests links the things he lists isn’t one whose answer explains the American targeted killing program. America’s use of drones in the war on terrorism is an incredibly difficult policy question, one that isn’t amenable to simple moralizing. Drawing attention to the moral stakes is one thing; reducing disagreement to a world-historical dispute over “for whose sake this world exists” is quite another.

The promises and pitfalls of Cole’s writing on drones aren’t created by his his chosen medium, as a lazy analysis might suggest, but reflective of the broader limitations of literary approaches to argument about politics and philosophy. Non-fiction has the luxury of being able to be boring: it can reflect every nuance, every subtle detail of an argument, however much rote recitation of facts that might require. Even narrative journalism, with all its literary trappings, still has a basic obligation to string together an argument based on the facts.

Fiction, by contrast, is about a universe that isn’t real. It isn’t about making an argument with facts that exist in our world; it’s about creating a new one. That world may be very similar to ours, but it isn’t the same thing. Fiction isn’t a direct argument, with clear premises and conclusions; it’s a means of pointing us in a certain direction. This can be brilliantly illuminating: think 1984 on the nature of totalitarianism. But the insights that book, brilliant as they are, could very well have wrong. Winston Smith’s world isn’t necessarily ours. We know from firsthand accounts of life in totalitarian nations that the book’s account of the psychology of repression is chillingly accurate. But other world-pictures, like Ayn Rand novels, miss the mark, yet remain stubbornly influential on the real-world outlooks of a shockingly large number of people. The seductive appeal of a worldview grounded in fiction can lead to mistaken judgments about the real world it obliquely argues about.

Cole’s blend of cultural criticism and life-like fiction in his drone writing blurs the line between non-fiction and fiction, as does the pseudo-journalistic portrayal of the hunt for bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty. Both are ways to use the tools of literature, word and screen, to heighten our awareness of our real past, present, and future. That’s a laudable goal. But art can mislead as much as guide, a point that Plato first recognized when writing about art and poetry in The Republic:

There is a principle in human nature which is disposed to raise a laugh, and this which you once restrained by reason, because you were afraid of being thought a buffoon, is now let out again…the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure, which are held to be inseparable from every action — in all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue.

The irony, of course, is that The Republic itself is a fictional dialogue.

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) has banned an 11-year-old girl from participating in its youth football league, and her family says it’s because the organization told them that “football is for boys.”

Caroline Pla, according to news reports, has played football in the Archdiocese league for six years and in the CYO league for two years before officials made her aware of the rule that prevents girls from participating in the league. Neither her coaches nor her teammates were aware of the rule, and by all accounts, Pla is a standout player: she was voted to the league’s all-star team following the 2012 season. The Archdiocese bent its rule to allow her to finish this season but has not changed it to allow her to continue playing, citing safety concerns, ABC News reports:

“CYO football is a full-contact sport designated for boys,” archdiocese spokesman Ken Gavin wrote in a statement to ABC News. “There has been some perceived ambiguity in the policy regarding this point. It is currently being reviewed and will be addressed moving forward to provide complete clarity.”

That isn’t exactly a strong reason to ban Pla, who has started a Change.org petition asking for reinstatement, from playing the game. There are more than 1,500 girls playing high school football across the country, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, and the number has increased more than 17.5 percent from four years ago. Multiple women have earned chances to play football at the college level, including Katie Hnida, who became the first woman to score a point in an NCAA Division I game when she kicked an extra point for the University of New Mexico in 2003. And Sam Gordon, the 9-year-old football sensation, captured America’s attention earlier this year and ultimately ended up on a Wheaties box.

There isn’t an alternative available to Pla, who didn’t abandon a female football league to play with the boys. She’s simply playing on the only field, in the only league, available to her, and there is no evidence that she does not belong. But she isn’t alone: across sports, there are cultural and systemic barriers to female participation, and those are barriers we as a country have been tearing down in the four decades since Title IX became law. We’ve made progress, but as participation rates and funding levels (not to mention senseless rules like the one enforced by the Archdiocese) show, there is still progress to be made.

The Archdiocese’s concerns for her safety and well-being are legitimate, but they should not arise simply because Pla is a girl. It is becoming increasingly evident that football and the head injuries that can accompany it can pose serious risks to the futures of the young men and women who play it, and those injuries don’t discriminate based on gender. If the Archdiocese is truly concerned about safety, those concerns ought to cover all of its players, not just the ones who happen to be female.