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The Index Finger

Last night in Indianapolis, a man stood up and pointed at A’ja Wilson. It was late in Game 2 of a first-round playoff series at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, and Indiana was protecting a lead it would keep, 99-89. Wilson, the Las Vegas Aces’ four-time MVP, had just drawn a foul on Sophie Cunningham and was walking back up the floor. The man rose from the baseline seats, stepped toward her, and pointed, yelling. She told him one thing, twice. “You don’t point at me, you don’t point at me.” She went toward him, pointing back, and they were face-to-face before her teammates arrived to pull her away. The whole Aces bench emptied behind her, team security included, and Cheyenne Parker-Tyus pointed the man out for security. The referees gave Wilson a technical foul. Security walked the man and a woman out of the baseline seats to loud boos, then brought them back a few minutes later to applause. The Fever released a statement that night. A comment had been reported. Security found no violation of the Fan Code of Conduct, the fan was not removed, and the team considered the matter closed.

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No Glass on the Table

Students came back to Columbia College this September with printed books and pens. In Literature Humanities, phones stayed in bags. Laptops stayed home or shut inside backpacks. Some of the paperbacks were already creased. You could hear pages turn. For the length of each seminar, the only networked machine in the room was the human being across the table. The same rule now governs every section of Contemporary Civilization, the sophomore course that asks twenty-odd students at a time to argue about Plato and Du Bois face to face.

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The Arthur Miller Transistor Radio

Arthur Miller’s great demand was that attention be paid. His son Danny waited ten minutes away for nearly forty years for the same grace. In the winter of 1990 I was Arthur Kopit’s assistant through my Columbia MFA internship. I had helped him on his Phantom musical with Maury Yeston, and now the work was a staged reading of his new play at Circle Repertory in the Village, a theater with the size and polish of a garage. The play was called Bone-the-Fish, a savage comedy about Hollywood deal-making, and Kopit told me how he had named it. The title was his answer to David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow. Mamet’s title meant nothing, he argued, and it had found success anyway, so he imitated the trick and answered with nonsense of his own, aimed at the same target. Better heads prevailed later; when Circle Rep gave the play its full production, it went up as Road to Nirvana. Sigourney Weaver was in the reading. The actors sat on folding chairs with scripts in their laps. There were no sets, no lights to speak of, no money. My job that night was to watch the door for Arthur Miller. When he came in, I walked him quietly to the last row, and we sat together. He did not know I was an intern, did not know my name, knew nothing about me, and asked nothing. At some point he leaned over and whispered, with open disgust, “Oh, hell! This is only a staged reading?” I did not reply. The man next to me had written Death of a Salesman, and I was the intern who had seated him, proud to share his folding chairs.

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The Neighbor the Census Invented

The 2020 census counted two people in Monowi, Nebraska. The arithmetic surprised the only one of them. Elsie Eiler has lived alone in the village since her husband Rudy died in 2004. She is the mayor, the clerk, the treasurer, the librarian, and the keeper of the Monowi Tavern, the last business open in a town of 0.21 square miles on the far northern edge of the state. When the new census figures came out in August 2021 and showed Monowi’s population doubled, she gave the Lincoln Journal Star the only answer a competent count of one allows. “Well, then someone’s been hiding from me, and there’s nowhere to live but my house. But if you find out who he is, let me know?”

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Nobody Sent It

The comment arrived yesterday morning under my August article about Ord, Nebraska, and it opened like a neighbor at the fence. “The other end of that geography: I walked Monowi, in Boyd County, on street view. Population one. Elsie Eiler is the mayor, the tavern keeper, and the librarian. She writes the town’s tax levy and pays it to herself. A town that stayed after everyone left.” Then the whole performance in four words: “Wrote the walk up:” and a link.

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Drop by Drop Upon the Heart: On the Kennedy Center, the Kennedys’ Classics, and What a Nation Owes its Dead

On the afternoon of December 19, 2025, the board of the Kennedy Center voted to put a living president’s name on a dead president’s memorial. By evening, the letters were on the marble. A congresswoman who sits on that board by law tried to speak. They muted her microphone and called the vote unanimous. Chuck Redd, the jazz drummer who had played Christmas Eve at the center for years, saw the new name on the website, then on the building itself. He canceled within hours. Two years of this, in one afternoon: the inheritance retitled behind closed doors, the objection silenced, the musicians out in the cold.

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What the Spray Allowed

On the night of the fourteenth of September, 1997, in the first squall band of a blow that never got a name, a man went over the rail of a shrimp boat working the inside grounds off Cameron, Louisiana. The boat was the Coralee B, sixty-two feet of wood and rust out of Cameron, named for the captain’s mother. Junius Hebert was the man: twenty-nine, out of Hackberry, the lead deckhand, with a wife and two little girls and a laugh that carried over the engine. The sea that took him did not splash. He was working the winch on the starboard side, and the first green sea stood on the deck amidships, and the second one came over the rail where he was standing, and when the deck cleared the winch was running empty and Junius was gone.

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