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The States That Will Not Be Commanded

There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.

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What the First Photographer Knew

Photography spent its first half-century being mocked. The painters who controlled the academies and the salons looked at the daguerreotypists and saw mechanics. You pressed a button. You waited for the silver to fix. The machine did the work. Real art required a hand, an eye, a soul, a brush moving through hours of decision. The photographers were craftsmen at best, vandals at worst, and certainly not making Art. This was the consensus from Daguerre’s 1839 announcement until the Photo-Secession movement around 1900, when Alfred Stieglitz spent decades arguing the opposite and slowly won. The Museum of Modern Art opened its photography department in 1940. The Metropolitan Museum followed eventually. By 1980 photographs sold at auction for sums that would have stunned the painters who once sneered at them. The mockers were wrong, and they were wrong in a particular way that matters here.

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An Answer to Auden: The Truth About Love, 1937 to 2026

In 1937, W. H. Auden published “O Tell Me the Truth About Love” inside a sequence called Twelve Songs. The poem is a list of comic guesses about what love might look like, smell like, sound like, do. Each refrain stanza ends in the same plea: tell me. The song is a young man’s question asked across a noisy room, hoping someone older will answer.

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When the Radiologist Becomes the Expense

On March 25, 2026, at a Crain’s New York Business panel discussion of the city’s hospital sector, Mitchell H. Katz, MD, president and CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, told the assembled executives what cost-cutting now sounds like in the largest public hospital system in the United States. “We could replace a great deal of radiologists with AI at this moment, if we are ready to do the regulatory challenge.” Sandra Scott, MD, who runs One Brooklyn Health, one of the city’s safety-net institutions operating on tight margins, replied that the move would be “a game-changer.” The exchange appeared in Crain’s coverage of the panel and was picked up by the radiology trade press within forty-eight hours.

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Preventative Medicine, or the Manufacture of Patients?

There is a sentence every American patient has heard at the dentist’s chair, the cardiologist’s office, the primary-care visit, and the pharmacy counter. It arrives in a tone of grave responsibility: We caught this early. What follows is a crown, an echocardiogram, a statin, a stress test, a referral, a follow-up appointment, and a copay. The word “preventative” has come to function as a moral shield around a billing code. To question whether the recommended intervention is necessary is treated as ingratitude toward a profession that, the implication goes, only wants to keep you alive.

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