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The Second Cow

Howard Stein told jokes the way other professors assigned books. He ran the playwriting program at Columbia and chaired its Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies, after teaching stops at Iowa and Yale. By the time I knew him he had trained a generation of American playwrights, and he still worked a classroom like a man with one good story left. The story he returned to was the one about the two farmers. He told it flat, without performance, the way you tell something you believe is true.

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Speeding Up to Slow Down

Sometime in the early 1980s, while researching a play, I spent an afternoon talking with a Nebraska State Trooper about the border between local law enforcement and the state patrol. We covered jurisdiction, drugs, homicide, and how causes of death get decided in a county with more cattle than people. By then he had worked those highways for twenty years. He was a careful man with a careful voice, and when the talk turned to death on the road, he lowered it. When you read about a one-car crash that kills the driver on a Nebraska highway in the middle of the night, he said, you are usually reading about a suicide. The car alone, the road empty, the bridge or the embankment at full cruise.

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What the Modem Was Saying

AOL ended its dial-up internet service on September 30, 2025. The company posted a short notice saying it routinely evaluates its products and had decided to discontinue dial-up, and that the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser would go with it. The service had run for over three decades, and it taught America what connecting sounded like. Two sounds went with it: the handshake screech and a recorded voice saying you had mail.

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The Hairbrush

Barbara Keating was 72 when American Airlines Flight 11 carried her into the North Tower. She had spent the summer on Cape Cod visiting her grandchildren, and she was flying home to Palm Springs. On August 7, 2025, the New York City medical examiner’s office gave her name back. Technicians had identified her from minute remains recovered in the trade center wreckage, matched through advanced DNA testing against a hairbrush from her home and samples from her relatives. Her son Paul told reporters that a scrap of her ATM card was the only other trace of her ever found. She was the 1,652nd person identified among the 2,753 killed at the World Trade Center. Her family has buried her beside her husband.

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The Sun Drift

The General Conference on Weights and Measures opens on Tuesday, October 13. The setting is the Palais des Congrès de Versailles, a short walk from the palace that Louis XIV built under the emblem of the sun. Delegates from the states party to the Metre Convention will spend three days on the business of measurement. Near the close of the meeting, at the twenty-fifth item of the agenda, they will vote on a paper called Draft Resolution C. The paper proposes that on May 20, 2027, the world’s civil clock stop answering to the sky. Resolutions reach this conference after years of committee negotiation, and they are usually adopted as drafted. If this one carries, a deference that began on June 30, 1972, with the first leap second, comes to an end.

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The Man at the Table

The evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad has a favorite classroom ritual. He ran through it again on a podcast not long ago. When he teaches at Concordia University, he asks his students to name the strongest predictor of child abuse in a home. The first answer is usually an absent parent. Then come the rest: alcoholism, poverty, a parent who was beaten as a child. He writes the answers on the board and calls them all reasonable. Then he tells the class that none of them is right. The number one predictor, he says, is a stepparent, and the effect is a hundredfold, a ratio he describes as astronomically larger than anything science ordinarily publishes. He reports getting goosebumps every time he tells it.

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Population One, All in Favor

The election notice goes up on the tavern wall. That is how the mayoral race begins in Monowi, Nebraska, the only incorporated village in America with a population of one. Elsie Eiler tapes the announcement up inside the Monowi Tavern, the bar she and her husband bought in 1971, and then, as the BBC’s filmmakers recorded, she votes for herself. She wins unanimously. She has won every year since the count fell to one, because she is the entire electorate and the entire government: mayor, clerk, treasurer, librarian, and bartender of Monowi, population one.

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