Posted on

Population One, All in Favor

The election notice goes up on the tavern wall. That is how the mayoral race begins in Monowi, Nebraska, the only incorporated village in America with a population of one. Elsie Eiler tapes the announcement up inside the Monowi Tavern, the bar she and her husband bought in 1971, and then, as the BBC’s filmmakers recorded, she votes for herself. She wins unanimously. She has won every year since the count fell to one, because she is the entire electorate and the entire government: mayor, clerk, treasurer, librarian, and bartender of Monowi, population one.

Continue reading → Population One, All in Favor

Posted on

The $20,500 Ceiling

Columbia’s journalism school paused its midcareer degree three months after Washington capped what America will lend a journalist. The timing is the story. The email went out on a Thursday afternoon. On October 1, 2026, Dean Jelani Cobb told alumni of the Columbia Journalism School’s Master of Arts program that admissions were paused for the coming cycle. The message landed in the inboxes of people who had paid six figures for the degree it described. The school, Cobb wrote, had begun “a critical evaluation” of the M.A. curriculum, and the pause would give the review “the focus it deserves.” The school’s admissions page now carries the same message and dangles a future “relaunch” for anyone willing to wait.

Continue reading → The $20,500 Ceiling

Posted on

Rudy’s Library Is Open

The key to the public library in Monowi, Nebraska hangs on the wall of the town’s only tavern, within reach of the bartender. Ask and she hands it over. Then the shed a few steps from the bar is yours for the afternoon: five thousand books and magazines, floor-to-ceiling shelves, and a sign painted by grandchildren on the side of an old refrigerator that reads Rudy’s Library. There are no library cards and no overdue fines, and there is no librarian at a desk, because the librarian is the woman who just handed you the key. She is also the mayor. You borrow on honor and you return when you can. That is the whole system, and it has held for twenty-two years.

Continue reading → Rudy’s Library Is Open

Posted on

Still on the Nail: The Farmers’ Almanac in the Age of Digital Knowing

The 210th edition of the Farmers’ Almanac reaches the checkout racks this month, which means a locked box in Lewiston, Maine, has already done its work. The winter of 2026 and 2027 is settled and printed: snow, sleet, and surprises, with El Niño shoving the storm track south and the Northeast warned of a tricky mix. Whoever buys the booklet today already knows, in calm little type, what the sky will do in February. Or claims to. It will be read out loud at kitchen tables all winter.

Continue reading → Still on the Nail: The Farmers’ Almanac in the Age of Digital Knowing

Posted on

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.

Continue reading → The Index Finger

Posted on

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.

Continue reading → No Glass on the Table

Posted on

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.

Continue reading → The Arthur Miller Transistor Radio