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The Corner Store at the End of the World

Every local prepper carries the same private film in his head. He is the survivor. The neighbors who laughed at the Costco pallets and the propane tanks and the blue tarp over the generator are huddled in their cold houses while his basement lights still burn through week three of the outage. He sits on the front porch with a rifle across his knees, finally vindicated, the man on the block who saw it coming. The film has a hero, a moral, and a clean ending. What it leaves out, what eight years of YouTube channels and bug-out videos have trained him to leave out, is the crowd.

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Notes on Tomorrow as Tribute

The book is out. The title is Tomorrow as Tribute: The Politics of the Burnt Future. It is available in paperback, in Kindle, and as a free web edition through David Boles Books. The audiobook is in production with narrator selection underway. The web edition is free because I want the argument to circulate as widely as possible.

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The Senator Who Used to Be Cory Booker

We taught at Rutgers-Newark in the same years, before he was mayor, before the Senate, before the rebranding. We shared a building lobby on University Avenue. I never shook his hand. I did not need to. Everyone on that campus knew Cory. He pulled the air toward him when he walked through a door, a Rhodes Scholar, a Yale-trained lawyer who had chosen Newark when he could have chosen Manhattan or Washington, a young man who spoke about education the way ministers speak about scripture. Students mattered to him. He believed a city scarred by Sharpe James and three decades of municipal corruption could be reformed from inside its worst housing project, into which he had moved on purpose. I watched that man hold a room without effort. He had a builder’s mind. He had, in the older sense of the word, character.

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Stored Sun: What a Book Actually Is

Ask ten readers what a book is and you will get ten metaphors and no definitions. A mirror, they say, or a door, or a passageway with footfalls behind it. The metaphors flatter the reader and obscure the object. None of them tell you what is sitting on your shelf, dark and patient, while you sleep. Here is the answer. A book is stored sun.

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Still Eating Your Patients

Seventeen years ago I asked whether every veterinarian should be required to be a vegetarian. The question has sharpened since then. The right word now is vegan, because the line between dairy cow and veal calf is no longer plausibly deniable, and because the climate science on animal agriculture has overrun the old fence between eggs and the slaughterhouse. The provocation in 2009 was short, almost a snapshot of a paradox. A profession that swears to relieve animal suffering, going home from the clinic and ordering bacon. The post received twelve comments, a few sympathetic, a few cautious, and then it slept on the page while the world kept slaughtering animals at industrial scale. The question never left me.

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The Box You Cannot Check

The clinic intake form on the clipboard at the front desk has two boxes next to the word “sex.” A patient who is neither of the two options has been given three choices: pick one box and lie, write something in the margin, or refuse the form. The receptionist will not read the margin. Data entry clerks will not transcribe it. EHR systems will not store anything outside the two values the form lists. The patient walks out of the clinic with a treatment plan based on a box that does not correspond to their body, their history, or their current endocrine state. The form has done its job, which is not the job it claimed to do.

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The Conditional Button

The mid-block crosswalk at a flashing-yellow pedestrian signal does work. A pedestrian presses the button, the overhead lights flash yellow, drivers slow or stop, and the pedestrian crosses. The system responds visibly, with no covert work happening underneath. The button does what it claims. But the same system also fails, often, in ways that have nothing to do with the button itself and everything to do with what is wired several layers behind it. A reader pointed out that drivers in his city tend to keep rolling through the flashing yellow if the pedestrian is still on the curb, and only stop once the pedestrian commits to the street. The same reader noted that drivers in his town do not give flashing yellow signals the obedience they give to red lights. Here in Jersey City the same mid-block button gets a more reliable yield because the lights are tied to traffic enforcement cameras, and drivers know that yield failures can become citations they actually have to pay. The button works because what is wired behind it works.

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The Dishonest Button

The mute button on the top of an Amazon Echo of a certain vintage is supposed to disconnect the microphone. A small icon of a crossed-out microphone sits next to the button, and pressing it turns on a red LED that confirms the disconnection. Software controls this button, which means the microphone remains electronically capable of capturing audio after the LED turns red, and the only thing preventing that capture is a line of code in the firmware. Security researchers have documented the capability and the manufacturers have acknowledged it. Whether the capability was ever exercised in practice is a separate question that the user pressing the button cannot answer from the front of the device. Bloomberg reported in April 2019 that Amazon employed thousands of workers worldwide whose job was to listen to Alexa recordings, and similar contractor review programs were acknowledged by Apple and Google for Siri and Assistant later that year. Subsequent Echo models added a hardware microphone disconnect that physically interrupts the microphone circuit when the mute button is pressed. Press the mute button on a smart speaker without that hardware disconnect and you are pressing the third kind of button in this series.

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The Honest Button

The crosswalk button at the corner of my downtown intersection has an LED above it that lights up red and says “Wait!” when you press it. The traffic signal does not change any faster. No wire runs from the button to the signal timer. The LED is connected only to the button itself, and it does the single job of telling the pedestrian to wait. A reader who pressed one of these recently described pushing it three or four times rapidly anyway, because it’s fun. They are correct on both counts. The button is fun. The button is also a different kind of object than the placebo buttons it replaced.

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The Placebo Button

The elevator in my building has a door-close button that does nothing. I learned this the way everyone learns it, which is to say I pressed it for years under the impression that it was speeding up my departure. The button lights up. It makes a small click when pressed. It provides every sensory signal of function. What it does not do is close the door any faster than the door was going to close on its own. The elevators in most American buildings installed since 1990 have door-close buttons wired to nothing, because the Americans with Disabilities Act requires the door to stay open long enough for a person using a wheelchair or walker to enter, and the button that overrides that requirement is accessible only to the fire department with a key.

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