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The Candlelit Lie: The Illuminati, the Masons, the Skull and Bones, and the Power That Hides Nothing

The word Illuminati arrives wrapped in candlelight and oath, conjuring a hidden council of masterminds who steer history from a chamber no camera has ever found. The image has held its grip for more than two centuries, and the grip tightens whenever the world feels ungovernable. A pandemic, a market crash, an election that smells stolen, a war that makes no sense to the people paying for it: each crisis sends a fresh wave of seekers hunting for the secret hand behind the curtain. The search flatters the seeker, because it promises that the chaos has an author, that the suffering was planned, and that a door exists somewhere with the guilty men sitting behind it. That promise is a lie, and the lie does real damage, since the energy poured into chasing phantoms gets stolen from the visible machinery that shapes an actual life.

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Three Books on a Table

When this novel began, there were three physical books on my table, and none of them had anything to do with the others. One was a slim green-and-gilt volume from 1922 called The Wild Heart, eleven animal sketches of Puget Sound country, foxed at the corners, written by a woman almost nobody remembers. One was the Theogony of Hesiod, a genealogy in verse, roughly a thousand lines of who was born to whom, composed by a Boeotian farmer about seven hundred years before Christ. And one was the Inferno, in the English that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made out of the worst years of his life. An animal book, a family tree, and a tour of hell. The Disposition is what happened when I stopped treating them as three books and started treating them as one instrument with three registers.

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The Farmer’s Word: Winona LaDuke, a False Etymology, and the True Root of “Colonization”

A reader sent me a video clip. In it, Winona LaDuke opens a talk on colonization by reaching for the dictionary, and the first thing she says is wrong. LaDuke is Anishinaabe, from White Earth in northern Minnesota. She trained as an economist, ran twice for vice president on the Green Party ticket, wrote All Our Relations, and has spent four decades on wild rice, pipelines, and land recovery. Rooms fill when she speaks. So when she tells an audience that colonization “has the same root as the word colon” and that the root “means to digest,” that line travels. It is vivid, it is anatomical, it is easy to repeat, and it is the sentence people carry home. It is also folklore. This is a claim about the history of a word; no lexicon supports it, and it collapses the moment anyone opens a Greek dictionary. The rest of her argument is largely sound and in places understated. That is exactly why the false root matters. An argument this strong should not be walking around with a demolition charge strapped to its opening line.

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The Lemurians of Mount Shasta: A Visit to the Hidden Country

California’s mystic volcano has tenants no census has ever counted. An inquiry into where they live, how they live, why they live, and what happened when I went up to ask. Drive north out of Redding on Interstate 5 and the land begins rehearsing for something. The pines close ranks, the grade climbs, and then the forest opens and the mountain is simply there: fourteen thousand feet of snow and andesite standing alone above the valley floor, keeping no company on that horizon, rising nearly ten thousand feet above everything around it. Joaquin Miller saw it in the 1850s and gave it the sentence it has never escaped: “Lonely as God, and white as a winter moon.” A mountain that looks like that collects tenants, and for a hundred years the most famous tenants of Mount Shasta have been a hidden people.

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DO HARM: The Book That Began with a Word I Did Not Know

I am not a physician. I have never cultured a specimen, read a chest film, or signed a death certificate. I trained as a dramatist at Columbia, in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center, which qualifies me to tell you how a scene builds and not much else about a hospital. So let me get the obvious objection out of the way early, because it is the first thing a serious reader should ask. What business does a playwright have writing a book about hospital-acquired infection? The answer is the whole book, and it starts in a shut room in Newark in 2002.

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Haven’t We Always Been Friends?

Aristotle drew a ladder. I drew a circle. A scheming actor asked to climb, and I answered with a question built to end the conversation. Years ago, in a rehearsal room that smelled of coffee and radiator dust, an actor I will call Curtis said six words I have retold wrong for decades: “I want to be your friend.” We had known each other three years by then. We had built shows together, struck sets at midnight, shared the particular intimacy of people who fail in front of each other at ten in the morning and repair it by eight that night. His sentence cornered me. I laughed a little, the way you laugh when you need two seconds to find a door, and I said, “Curtis, haven’t we always been friends?”

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Figure Eights

The internet has decided that modern humans are developing zoochosis, the madness of caged animals. The claim is older than TikTok, and the truth underneath it is more uncomfortable than either the believers or the scoffers want it to be. For most of the 1990s, the most famous resident of the Central Park Zoo was a 700-pound polar bear named Gus who spent up to twelve hours a day swimming the same figure eight through the same small pool. Back and forth. The same loop, traced into the water until it wore a groove in the day. Reporters called him neurotic, depressed, flaky, and bipolar, and New Yorkers half-adopted him as a mascot for their own condition. In 1994 the zoo paid an animal behaviorist twenty-five thousand dollars to find out what was wrong, and the verdict passed into legend. Gus, the behaviorist said, was bored and mildly crazy in the way that a lot of people in New York are. The zoo redesigned his habitat, hid his food inside blocks of ice, gave him toys, and made him the first zoo animal in recorded history to be put on Prozac. The swimming eased. It never fully stopped. Until the day he died in 2013, there were afternoons when Gus would throw himself back into the water and trace the loop again, and again, and again.

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