Posted on

The Failed City: I Wrote a Book About What We Bury

I have been staring at a patch of asphalt in Jersey City for thirteen years. That is not a figure of speech. I mean that in late September 2013, I watched a road crew roll fresh blacktop over 150-year-old granite cobblestones on Baldwin Avenue in the Heights, and the image has not released me since. The cobblestones were ballast stones, carried across the Atlantic Ocean in the holds of empty cargo ships and dumped on American docks because the ships needed the weight for the crossing and needed to shed it to load American exports for the return trip. Those stones were repurposed as paving. They became streets. They outlasted the ships, the shipping companies, the trade routes, the empires that commissioned them. And in 2013, a man in a road roller buried them under asphalt because, as he told me with the patience of someone explaining gravity, cobblestones eat up tires.

Continue reading → The Failed City: I Wrote a Book About What We Bury

Posted on

The Book Lives Three Times: How Seneca Got Reading Wrong by Getting It Right

You finish writing a book and the manuscript sits there, cooling on the screen like bread pulled from an oven. It is done. It is no longer yours. This is the part no one tells you about authorship: the moment the final sentence locks into place, the book begins its first death, because it has stopped being a living negotiation between you and the language and has become, instead, a fixed object. A thing. The writer’s relationship to the finished text is not unlike the relationship a parent has to an adult child who has just walked out the front door with a suitcase. You made this. You cannot unmake it. You are, from this point forward, irrelevant to its survival.

Continue reading → The Book Lives Three Times: How Seneca Got Reading Wrong by Getting It Right

Posted on

Is It From the Birds? Stephen Sondheim Asked the Right Question About Music and Then Preferred Not to Hear the Answer

In November of 1997, Stephen Sondheim sat in his Manhattan townhouse with Mark Eden Horowitz, a senior music specialist from the Library of Congress, and said something extraordinary. Not extraordinary in the way that most Sondheim quotes are extraordinary, which is to say technically precise and laced with a craftsman’s impatience for imprecision. Extraordinary because it was none of those things. It was, instead, the sound of a man who had spent his entire adult life inside music admitting that the existence of music itself was something he could not explain.

Continue reading → Is It From the Birds? Stephen Sondheim Asked the Right Question About Music and Then Preferred Not to Hear the Answer

Posted on

Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve

The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.

Content Note: This book contains accounts of suicide, suicidal crisis, and the deaths of family members, friends, and companion animals. Part Five includes detailed accounts of suicidal ideation and completed suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by phone or text at 988. The Crisis Text Line is available by texting HOME to 741741.

Continue reading → Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve

Posted on

When Does AI Fakery Become AI Reality?

We are living in the precise historical moment when the question “Is this real?” has become unanswerable in real time, and the fact that nobody seems particularly alarmed by this should alarm us all. The case study arrived this month with the force of a wartime broadcast, which is exactly what it was: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose physical whereabouts and physical condition have been the subject of intense speculation since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, appeared in a video address on March 12. Social media users immediately claimed he had six fingers on his right hand. The rumor spread to millions of viewers within hours. Fact-checkers at Snopes, PolitiFact, and Newsweek scrambled to verify that the extra digit was, in fact, the hypothenar eminence, the fleshy pad at the base of the little finger, rendered ambiguous by video compression. Netanyahu’s office declared, flatly, that the Prime Minister was “fine.”

Continue reading → When Does AI Fakery Become AI Reality?