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The Last Free Acre

The last homestead patent in American history is dated May 5, 1988. It went to Kenneth Deardorff, a Vietnam veteran from California who had filed his claim fourteen years earlier on eighty acres along the Stony River in southwestern Alaska, near the village of Lime. There was no road in. Anchorage lay about two hundred miles east. Deardorff had been wounded in the war, and by his own account he wanted the middle of nowhere. The Stony River obliged. He trapped and hunted for income and kept a small store for the traffic that came through. Mail came about once a month, from another village. He submitted his final proof in 1979, and then he waited nine more years for the paper. When it came, the patent covered 49.97 surveyed acres. By then the law he filed under had been repealed for twelve years in the lower forty-eight states and for two years in Alaska. Researchers settled the question in 2001: Deardorff was the last person to take title under the Homestead Act of 1862. The government’s case file rests in Record Group 49 at the National Archives in Seattle.

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Democracy Has a Layout

The answer came thirteen months after the election, in the December 2001 issue of the American Political Science Review. Six political scientists, led by Jonathan Wand, had spent the year inside the precinct returns of Palm Beach County, Florida. Their title surrendered the suspense: “The Butterfly Did It.” The butterfly ballot used in the county on November 7, 2000, had caused more than 2,000 Democratic voters to vote by mistake for Pat Buchanan, the Reform Party candidate. Florida had certified George W. Bush the winner by 537 votes, 2,912,790 to 2,912,253. A page layout had moved nearly four times the number of votes that decided the presidency.

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The Last Memorizers

The examiner names two places. A square in Islington, a hospital across the river. The candidate sits across the desk in a Transport for London office on Baker Street and calls the run out loud: the streets in order, the exact curb where the passenger is set down. Each appearance gives him four of these calls in about twenty minutes. Marks come off for wrong street names and banned turns. Hesitation alone can sink an answer, because a route that cannot be recalled at traffic speed cannot be driven at traffic speed. This is the Knowledge of London, and it still begins and ends the same way, with a human being reciting a city from the skull.

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The Rain Gauge

I am standing at the kitchen sink at 6:40 in the morning, rinsing a coffee cup in the dark, and there it is, whole and settled, as if it had been waiting behind the faucet for years. Every day, I cry a little bit more. I am sixty-one years old, and I have lived long enough to know that a sentence like this one does not visit at random. It comes because it is true. It stays because tomorrow it will be truer still.

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They Could Not Indict the Sandwich

Sean Dunn walked up to a line of federal agents at the corner of 14th and U Streets Northwest on the night of August 10, 2025. The agents were Customs and Border Protection officers posted outside a nightclub hosting a Latin Night, part of the federal force surging into Washington that weekend. Dunn shouted at them for the better part of seven minutes. He called them fascists and racists. He chanted “Shame.” “Why are you here?” he shouted. “I don’t want you in my city!” Then he threw his dinner at Agent Gregory Lairmore’s chest. The dinner was a Subway footlong, still in its wrapper. Dunn ran. The agents caught him. A body camera recorded what he said on the sidewalk. “I did it. I threw a sandwich. I did it to draw them away from where they were. I succeeded.”

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The Square Outlived the Paper

I live in a tower named for a square named for a newspaper. My building is called Journal Squared, three glass sections rising beside the Journal Square PATH station in Jersey City, one of the busiest stations in the system. The square below is Journal Square, which the city created in 1923. The newspaper was the Jersey Journal, which ceased publication on February 1, 2025, at the age of 157. Two of those three things still exist. The paper is not one of them.

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The Lotus Tea

Catherine Liu took the stage in London on September 21 to talk about trauma. She was there for Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, new from Verso. The book argues that trauma has been commodified into a politics of permanent victimhood, and that its loudest merchants trade in something other than the true suffering of people. Midway through the conversation with Ash Sarkar on Novara Media’s Downstream, Liu, a cultural critic and professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine, swerved into Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. She apologized for the tangent, and her interviewer told her to keep going. “What a phenomenal tangent that was,” she said when she surfaced.

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