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The Viking Funeral and the Us of Us

On the last Saturday of August 2019, in a valley that had already lost the assembly plant and the regional medical center, the daily newspaper of Mahoning County, Ohio, printed its final edition. The Vindicator was a hundred and fifty years old. It had celebrated its sesquicentennial the week before it died. The announcement had come on June 28, in a letter signed by the publisher and the general manager, members of the family that had owned the paper since 1887, and the record of the letter is exact about the cause: the paper was hemorrhaging money, the family had looked for a buyer, and there was none. The letter’s close is in the record too. “It is with broken hearts that we say goodbye and a final thank you.”

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The Mercy of Forgetting: The Story Leads the Telling, and Perfect Memory Is the Enemy of Inspiration

At a dinner table, the worst storyteller is often the person with the best memory. He begins with the route to the restaurant, the trouble finding parking, the waiter’s name, the table beside the kitchen, the appetizer nobody liked, and the exact minute when rain began ticking against the window. Twenty minutes later, he has not reached the thing that made the evening worth recounting. He is not lying. His defect is more serious. He has not decided what happened. Every remembered detail has presented itself for admission, and he lacks a law of relevance. The salt cellar enjoys the same narrative standing as the marriage proposal. The price of the wine competes with the sentence that ended a friendship. Accuracy has occupied the table, ordered dessert, and refused to leave. The teller possesses the evening as an archive, but not yet as a story.

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The Watermelon Is Innocent

The knife goes through a seedless watermelon the way an argument goes through a lazy afternoon: no resistance, no interruptions, nothing to spit. Somebody at the picnic table always ruins it. This summer the ruin arrives as a warning passed hand to hand across the internet: every seedless bite is a serving of your own impending death, because a fruit without seeds is a future without planting, and a future without planting is a population that eats only what it is sold. Subscribe to eat, the warning goes, or starve on schedule. The charge deserves a trial. Half of it is theater. The other half is the most important story in agriculture, and the theater keeps pointing at the wrong defendant.

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The Notary’s Stamp: Why the Law Still Trusts a Body in a Room More Than a Key in a Machine

In Jersey City, a woman can sit behind a desk with a ten-dollar embosser. She checks a driver’s license, watches a name move across a page, signs her own name, and presses a raised circle into paper. The tool is cheap. The ceremony may take three minutes. Yet the result can travel through banks, registries, agencies, and courtrooms with a dignity that a far more sophisticated digital signature does not automatically possess. Strictly speaking, the squeeze does not defeat cryptography. Federal evidence law recognizes both lawfully acknowledged documents and properly certified electronic records or digitally identified copies as potentially self-authenticating.1 The difference is cultural and procedural. The notarial certificate arrives as a familiar legal form, already attached to a public officer’s accountable act. A digital signature may provide strong evidence that data remained intact and that a particular private key generated a signature. It does not, by itself, prove who controlled the hand behind the key, what that person understood, or who else was standing in the room.

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The Censor Keeps a Copy

Twenty years ago, give or take, a friend told me a story he expected me to admire. He was a Latter-day Saint who worked in technology, and he was, as I understood it then, the bishop of his ward, an unpaid office the church gives to laymen who keep their day jobs, so he kept a company’s hours all week and presided over a congregation on Sundays. There was a Mormon bookstore he went into often, and one day he walked in and found a new display for Goosebumps, the paperbacks with the dripping green logo about haunted masks, a ventriloquist’s dummy with a mind of its own, and a werewolf in a Florida swamp. He spoke to the owner. The owner told him the books were selling well and that those sales were keeping the store alive. My friend pressed him on content, judged the whole series blasphemous, an invitation to the occult at a child’s price, and let it be understood that if the titles stayed on the shelf a report would go to the stake president. A week later he came back. The books were gone, the owner was distant and cold, and my friend bought a couple of books, in his own phrase, to make up the difference. He told me this the way another man might tell you he had coached his kid’s team to a championship. He was proud. The word I have settled on, twenty years later, is forensic: he had investigated, prosecuted, and won, and he walked out of that store on the high of it.

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Journal Square, Where the Library Only Takes Returns

On August 17, 2026, the Jersey City Free Public Library installed a book drop outside its Five Corners Branch at 678 Newark Avenue. The building behind it, sixty-nine years old and dark since early July, will accept what you give back. It will lend you nothing. A parking lot where a Bookmobile idles four days a week is now the whole of the public library in Journal Square, the neighborhood at the center of the loudest building boom in New Jersey’s second-largest city. I live in this city. I have spent my working life writing, editing, and publishing books, and I can tell you what that steel drop says to a child walking past it on the way to school: the city will take from you, and the city has stopped giving.


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Free Buses, Dark Screens

On the Thursday before Labor Day, the principals of New York City’s public schools opened a memo from the Education Department. The free T-Mobile internet service built into 350,000 student Chromebooks would end that Sunday, August 31. Classes begin September 10. Four days of warning, ten days of scramble, and then the school year opens on machines that still power up, still glow, and can no longer reach anything. The laptop survives. The world inside it has been repossessed. During the pandemic the city handed out some 725,000 devices and never tracked how many still function; the Chromebook program was the sequel, the do-over, the one arriving with a plan attached. The plan lasted a year.

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