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In Chicago, the Deaf Will Sing Don Giovanni

Since we opened ASL-Opera.com in September 2023, one question has arrived more often than any other: how rare is it, exactly, for an opera company to present a foreign-language title in American Sign Language? The question deserves a documented answer, and this fall Chicago supplies the occasion. Lyric Opera of Chicago opens its 2026-27 season with Mozart’s Don Giovanni, October 10 through November 1, 2026, in the Robert Falls production, Enrique Mazzola conducting, Christian Van Horn in the title role, the capstone of the company’s Mozart and Da Ponte trilogy. Inside that run sits something the season coverage barely mentions: a designated ASL performance on Sunday, October 18, at 2 p.m., which the company’s own production page marks on its ticketing calendar and describes plainly, all dialogue and lyrics translated into American Sign Language by “two certified interpreters located near the stage,” with select seats reserved for the sightlines a signed performance demands. Lyric has loaded the same matinee with its other access services, audio description and the haptic SoundShirt, a garment that lets the wearer feel the orchestra on the skin in real time. An Italian opera from 1787, interpreted live in ASL, on a major American mainstage, sold inside the regular season. In a healthy art form that sentence would read as routine. In the American record it reads as an event, and the distance between routine and event is the subject of this article.

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The Séance Court: Original Intent and the Fraud of Speaking for the Dead

Nine lawyers in black robes sit in a marble temple in Washington and commune with the dead. They ask James Madison, silent since 1836, how he feels about bump stocks. They ask a Virginia planter to rule on geofence warrants and a Boston merchant to weigh encrypted messaging, and they transcribe the answers with straight faces into the United States Reports. Every other corner of American life has a name for this ritual. When a widow pays for it in a candlelit parlor, we call it a séance and we call the medium a fraud. When five justices perform it in October Term, we call it originalism, and law schools award tenure for defending the candles.

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Hope Has No Shovel: Why We Fling Our Wishes at the Sky

Watch what the body does with a wish. The child inhales before the candles, holds the secret behind her teeth, then gives it to the room with one hard breath. Lovers press lips to a palm and push the kiss off the hand like a paper boat, up toward a window, a balcony, a departing train. A meteor scratches the dark and everyone beneath it makes the same silent motion, hurling a private want after a falling rock. Mourners lower the casket and lift their eyes. Whatever hope is made of, it has a launch angle, and the angle is up.

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Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild

A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer’s kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law’s name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there.

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Enthymemes: The Argument You Finish Yourself

“Because you’re worth it.” Four words, running in L’Oréal advertising since 1971, and by the time you reached the period you had already done the heavy lifting. No one told you that personal worth justifies the purchase, that expensive cosmetics are how worth gets expressed, that you in particular qualify for the category. You supplied every one of those claims yourself, silently, in the half second the slogan allowed. The advertiser handed over a conclusion and trusted you to build the staircase leading up to it.

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The Late Edit: How Belief Turns Revision Into Revelation

We have become a provenance culture, and I count myself an enforcer of it. Galleries now label machine-made images. Legislatures draft watermark bills, publishers add disclosure lines to copyright pages, and coders audit the licenses of every scraped repository. I am a plaintiff in litigation over the corpora used to train commercial language machines, so my commitment to the chain of custody is on file in federal court. The question a serious reader asks of any artifact in 2026 is blunt: who made this, from what, and who touched it on the way to me? That question is healthy. It is also, in one enormous and telling case, suspended.

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Two Hundred Fifty Years of What, and What For?

A drummer boy surfaced in my pocket change this week, on a quarter so worn his tricorn hat has gone soft at the edges. The Mint struck him by the hundreds of millions for the Bicentennial, Jack Ahr’s little colonial drummer with the dual date 1776-1976 stamped beneath his heels, and fifty years later he still turns up in laundromats and bodegas like a veteran who never quite made it home. I was eleven when that coin was new. Holding it on a Tuesday in Jersey City, the day the country turns two hundred fifty, I felt the whole distance between that summer and this one settle into my palm, small and cold.

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