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John Fetterman Punched Us in the Mouth

On May 10, 2022, I published an article on this page under the headline “John Fetterman Will Punch You in the Mouth!” I meant it as tribute. I called him “what a Democrat used to be,” a man “of the land, against the elite power, for the common good,” and I welcomed him into my invented fraternity of “Big Uglies,” the large, plain, unpressed men who do the country’s heavy carrying. The year before, on my Human Meme podcast, in an episode called “The Great White Bridge as Throughline,” I had floated him as a future Democratic President, with Keisha Lance Bottoms standing as his second. I believed the hoodie. I believed the shorts, the goatee, the 6’8″ frame, the tattooed forearms, the whole costume of the steel-town avenger who, I assured you, “suffers no fools.” Four years later I am here to take it back, in public, at length, because the recantation is owed, and because the autopsy of my error teaches more than the error did.

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Fourteen Paintings for No One: The Most Somber Art Ever Made

Sad art is everywhere, and it comes cheap. Somber art is rare, because somber means sorrow that keeps its shape after the tears dry, sorrow with gravity, no laugh track, no lifeline. Ask which art is the most somber of all and the question sets a brutal standard: the winner must be born of grief, must depict grief, must refuse every exit from grief, and must offer no joy and no gesture of human harmony anywhere in its making or its reception. That last clause is the killer. Art is a social act before it is anything else. A song wants an ear. The play wants a house. Every poem wants a voice to carry it. Harmony rides along in the address itself, before a single consoling note gets played, and so nearly every candidate for the darkest art in the world fails on delivery, whatever horrors it contains.

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Swimming the Author

England tested witches with water. The suspect was bound, right thumb to left toe, looped to a rope, and lowered into the village pond. Pure water was believed to refuse the devil’s servant, so a body that floated was guilty and a body that sank was innocent, and the innocent were hauled up half-drowned to receive the town’s apology. The procedure was called swimming a witch, and its genius was architectural: it could only convict. Whatever the water did, the crowd on the bank went home with the verdict it had carried down to the shore. Four centuries on, the pond fits in a browser tab. Paste the chapter. Click the button. Let the water decide.

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The Wound as Diploma

A transcript arrived this week: five signs of “traumatic intelligence,” clipped from a video and passed along as science. The research record tells a different story, and the difference matters. A reader sent me that transcript. It came without a link, without a channel name, without an author, the way most things travel now, and it ended in the middle of a sentence: “Sign five. Consider this for a moment. Everything you’ve heard so far, the perceptiveness, the empathy, the analytical mind, these are not weaknesses dressed up as strengths.” Then nothing. The clipboard closed before the payoff arrived. That dead cut turns out to be the most honest moment in the whole document, and I want to show you why. The reader’s question was whether the thing could run here as an article. It can, on the table, under the lights.

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Six Hundred Million Breaths

The first inhale, the last exhale, and the enormous unexamined middle. A human being spends nine months underwater and then, in a single violent second, becomes an air-breathing animal. We tend to picture that first breath as a natural unfolding, the lungs simply beginning what they were built to do. The reality is closer to a demolition. Before birth the lungs are not empty. They are filled with fluid secreted by the lung tissue itself, and that fluid has to go somewhere before air can enter. Labor begins clearing it. The surge of adrenaline and noradrenaline that accompanies delivery flips the epithelial cells lining the airways from secreting fluid to absorbing it, and sodium channels in those cells begin pulling the liquid back into the tissue and the bloodstream. The mechanical compression of the chest during a vaginal delivery squeezes out more. Even so, at the moment of birth the newborn faces a set of collapsed, wet sacs whose internal surfaces are stuck together by the surface tension of water, and it must pull them open with nothing but the muscles of its own chest and diaphragm.

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The Plume and the Alibi

An answer to Caroline Fraser, whose book Murderland argues that lead and arsenic from the smelters of the Pacific Northwest helped produce the serial killers of the 1970s and 1980s. A reader sent me a fragment of an interview with you. You are asking why the Pacific Northwest produced so many serial killers, and you have arrived at smelters, at lead, and at a pair of graphs that lie on top of each other. You won a Pulitzer for Prairie Fires and you do not deserve a lazy reply, so here is the long one. One half of what you are saying is sound. The other half is rotten, and the rot is spreading into the half that deserves to survive.

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Four Hundred Words for Six Hundred Dollars

The announcement arrived through LJExpress on a Friday in late July, dressed in the language of service. Media Source, the company that owns Library Journal, School Library Journal, The Horn Book, and the Junior Library Guild, had opened a storefront called Open Shelf Reviews, aimed at independent authors and small presses, and the copy asked me to hold two ideas at once: the reviews would be paid for by the authors under review, and a wall would keep those purchased reviews away from the magazines whose names give the wall its worth. The company described the operation as “a clearly identified paid service,” with its own editor, reviewer pool, and website, all kept apart from the editorial processes that made Library Journal matter to librarians for a century and a half.

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