Posted on

The Receipt Democracy Must Not Give You

William Wade Dudley wrote a letter in October 1888. He was treasurer of the Republican National Committee, and he spent that autumn worried about Indiana, where the presidential race would turn on voters of no settled loyalty, men the campaigns called floaters. Floaters drifted to whichever side paid. His instructions to an Indiana county chairman were precise. “Divide the floaters into blocks of five, and put a trusted man, with necessary funds, in charge of these five, and make him responsible that none get away and that all vote our ticket.” A Democratic mail clerk on the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad had noticed the heavy mail flowing from Republican headquarters to Indiana Republicans. He opened one letter and passed it to his party. The Indianapolis Sentinel printed the letter on October 31, 1888, under a banner headline.

Continue reading → The Receipt Democracy Must Not Give You

Posted on

Billed by the Line: Obituary Inflation, the Emptied Obit Desk, and the Last Working Vanity Press

The Sunday death notices all carry the same sentence. She died peacefully at home, surrounded by her loving family, after a courageous battle with cancer. He passed away peacefully, surrounded by family, after a courageous battle with Alzheimer’s. The names change. The sentence does not. It makes three claims. The death was peaceful. The family was present. The dying person fought. A reporter would have to verify all three. Nobody verifies them now, because nobody is paid to.

Continue reading → Billed by the Line: Obituary Inflation, the Emptied Obit Desk, and the Last Working Vanity Press

Posted on

Jersey City Drank It First

The water in my glass this morning fell as rain over Morris County, some twenty-three miles west of my kitchen. It pooled behind a dam on the Rockaway River and came down to Jersey City by gravity, the way it has since 1904. It carries a trace of chlorine, as almost every American city’s water does now. Mine got there first, on September 26, 1908. The chlorine arrived in the middle of a lawsuit, dosed toward two hundred thousand people without a public hearing, a statute, or a permission slip of any kind. The fight that followed is the closest thing this country has to a founding trial over what a government may add to everyone’s glass. The question that trial settled is back.

Continue reading → Jersey City Drank It First

Posted on

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.

Continue reading → The Second Cow

Posted on

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.

Continue reading → Speeding Up to Slow Down

Posted on

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.

Continue reading → What the Modem Was Saying

Posted on

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.

Continue reading → The Hairbrush