Posted on

Getting the Flock Out of Ord, Nebraska

The county seat of my boyhood summers just voted, five to nothing, to pull its surveillance cameras off the poles, the first town in Nebraska to do it. The reasons cut deeper than the invoice. Ord, Nebraska sits eleven miles up the North Loup River valley from the village of North Loup, where I spent the summers of my boyhood on my grandfather’s place, and in the mental geography of a ten-year-old those eleven miles separated the known world from its capital. North Loup had a few hundred souls, a grain elevator, and Popcorn Days. Ord had the Valley County courthouse with a square built around it, implement lots, storefront commerce enough to dazzle a village kid, and a radio station whose call letters spell the valley itself: K-N-L-V, North Loup Valley, on the air at 1060 since 1965 with farm markets in the morning and high school ball at night. When my grandfather’s rooftop antenna strained for television it caught one signal, 10/11 out of Lincoln, and that was the extent of the visible world. Ord was “town.” You washed up a little before going.

Continue reading → Getting the Flock Out of Ord, Nebraska

Posted on

The Moon Takes the Bow: The Longest Fight in the Sky, Scored on Love, Fear, Respect, and Attention

Two fighters have been circling each other since before anyone kept records, and the purse has never changed hands: the human gaze. In one corner burns a furnace so vast that something like a million Earths could rattle around inside it, the engine behind every green leaf and every heartbeat on this planet. In the other corner floats a charcoal-colored rock, airless and dead, throwing back about twelve percent of the light that hits it. On paper the match is a slaughter. In practice the rock has been taking rounds for ten thousand years, and the strangest fact on the whole card is a matter of scheduling, since only one of these two shows up for both shifts.

Continue reading → The Moon Takes the Bow: The Longest Fight in the Sky, Scored on Love, Fear, Respect, and Attention

Posted on

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.

Continue reading → John Fetterman Punched Us in the Mouth

Posted on

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.

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

Posted on

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.

Continue reading → Swimming the Author

Posted on

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.

Continue reading → The Wound as Diploma

Posted on

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.

Continue reading → Six Hundred Million Breaths