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The Clock Came Off the Wall

In the spring of 2018, schools in England started taking analog clocks down from the walls of their examination halls. The reason arrived in the education press without a trace of shame: teenagers sitting their exams could no longer read a dial, they grew anxious watching a circle that told them nothing, and the schools judged it kinder to remove the clock than to teach the child. A deputy leader of the head teachers’ association explained that students were more accurate with digital displays. So the ladders went up, the hands came down, and an instrument that had governed rooms of learning for two centuries was carried to the storage closet as a courtesy to the people it once served. I have kept that ladder in my head ever since, because it shows the modern school system performing its signature move in a single gesture: confronted with an untaught skill, remove the evidence.

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Who Is Jesus to You? Cecile Mentor Interviews the Christian Philosopher Andreas Saugstad

By Cecile Mentor in collaboration with Andreas Saugstad

Andreas Saugstad is a Norwegian thinker who connects Christian mysticism, everyday experience, and philosophy in a personal way. At the heart of his work is a deep trust in Jesus, who, he believes, brings calm, hope, and meaning into the struggles of life. He often writes about how philosophy can empower people, helping them to live a more authentic life and to find joy in thoughtful reflection. Saugstad also isn’t afraid to challenge postmodern ideas or hyper-capitalist culture, and he defends a social justice view of society that values dignity and compassion. This interview was conducted in Oslo, Norway, in January 2025, but the message is eternal and relevant to everyone, no matter where they live.

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Make a Game of Life

In North Loup, Nebraska, where I spent my boyhood summers with my grandfather, the television pulled one signal out of the sky, channel 10/11, and when the picture dissolved into snow the day still had eight hours left in it. A boy in a town like that learns the oldest technology on earth. Boredom is a raw material. A long afternoon wants shape, and shape comes from rules: the stick is a bat because we agree it is, the crack in the walk is a foul line because we say so, the score matters because we decide it matters. Nobody sold us that afternoon. We manufactured it ourselves, on the spot, out of dust and agreement, and the dust became the best part of the summer.

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Preplay: The Courtroom in the Wings

The news of my removal from my own show came from the producer. I had obtained the rights, signed us to a first-class theatrical option, and written the book and lyrics, all of it inside the year the rights contract granted to us. The director hired to stage the all-or-nothing reading was not my choice, and he was friends with my collaborator. After the failed previews, I was unceremoniously let go. When I asked my composer collaborator why this had happened, the director called me instead, and said that nobody wanted to talk to me. I had no choice but to sever the show, and my attorney fought to get me paid, credit on show. Everyone stonewalled him as well. That is the whole record, at the width the print ruling allows, because the identifying details of the production and the collaboration stay blurred in print for the privacy of the living, and the blur is logged in the specimen record beside its telling.

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The Paper Scalpel

In 2022, after years of court fights, Donna Langan became the first person in federal custody ever to receive gender confirmation surgery. The Bureau of Prisons directory listed her as female. In February 2025, three weeks into the new administration, she was notified that the system holding her was moving her to a men’s facility. Her body had changed years before, under lawful medical care ordered through the government’s own clinical process. What changed in 2025 was a signature in Washington, and the signature was enough.

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The Song Arrives Before the Truck

Before you saw anything, you heard it. Three streets over, thinned by distance and bent around the corners of houses, a music box the size of a paperback was broadcasting through a horn speaker bolted to a roof, and every child on the block lifted like a field of prairie dogs. The ice cream truck is the only store in American life that hunts its customers, and its weapon is a song. I grew up inside that ambush on a grid of flat streets in Lincoln, Nebraska, where sound carried forever, and I live now beside another version of it on the sidewalks of New York, where the song obeys different laws, sells a different menu, and means something different to the children chasing it. One machine, two rituals, and the split between them is the story.

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The Great Memory Robbery

For forty years, the computer business kept one promise better than any industry has ever kept any promise: memory got cheaper. Every year brought more bits for fewer dollars, so reliably that the whole culture of computing leaned on the assumption. Software bloated because RAM would cost less next year. Photographs went uncompressed because storage would cost less next year. Then, late in 2025, the promise snapped. A 32-gigabyte kit of DDR5 desktop memory, the sensible middle of the market, sold for under ninety dollars in early 2025. By December, listings touched five hundred. By the second of September, 2026, the builders’ forums had settled on 375 to 400 dollars as the going rate, and the daily trackers showed the price still climbing this week, up ten percent in seven days. One index of the broad market moved from 445 percent above its old baseline to 486 percent in a single month this summer. The entire digital world has been repriced, and the repricing took about ten months.

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