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A Pendulum for the Multiverse: David Albert, Hugh Everett, and the Worlds We Never Feel

On my grandfather’s porch in North Loup, Nebraska, the ground kept its promises. Summer evenings the floorboards held the day’s heat, the corn stood in rows that ran clear to the horizon, and nothing in all that flat immensity so much as trembled. When a teacher first told me the Earth was spinning at close to a thousand miles an hour while racing around the Sun at sixty-seven thousand more, I pressed my bare feet against those boards and waited to feel the ride. The stillness came back like a verdict. Whatever the books claimed, my soles reported a stationary world, and a boy trusts his soles. Every child who has run that experiment has rebuilt, in miniature, the strongest objection the seventeenth century could throw at Copernicus. If the Earth turns, why does a dropped stone land at the foot of the tower and never a few feet to the west? Why does the gale of our orbital speed fail to strip the leaves from the trees? The objection deserved respect because it rested on evidence, on the honest testimony of every human body that had ever stood still. It took Galileo’s ship, and then Newton’s laws, to explain why that testimony, though honest, was worthless.

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The Crowd That Pays

The new book is out this week, and I will tell you which page of it I expect to be disbelieved. It is not the scheme, the city that prices its poor as calories; readers accept a bureaucracy’s appetite on sight. Nor the flood; readers accept water. The trouble page is the fourteenth chapter, the one where the crowd takes the stores. The Quarter rises after the flood, goes to the Trust’s grain, seizes it, and then does the thing the whole city has spent the year insisting a crowd cannot do. It pays.

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The Whole Boodle

People keep asking me one question, so here is the answer, whole: the history, the intention, the meaning, the being, and, at the end, the me. “What’s a Boodle Boy?” I get the question at dinner tables, in podcast mail, in the pause after a lecture when someone has finally worked up the nerve. My business cards claim the title. My websites announce it. A consultancy of my own wears the name. The asker usually half-expects a punchline, because the phrase sounds like something a vaudeville comic would shout while falling off a stage, and some people assume the whole thing is a pun on Boles. Those vowels help, I admit. History does the heavy lifting. The honest answer needs a Sunday night in 1974, a Dutch probate record from 1699, a safe-deposit vault stuffed with bribe money in St. Louis, a candy raid at West Point, and a banana leaf piled with garlic rice somewhere on Luzon. It also needs a teenaged cadet holding a pot of coffee. Pour yourself a cup, and I will lay the whole boodle on the table.

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The Vans Are Still Warm

Just after two in the morning on March 29, 1984, fifteen Mayflower moving vans pulled out of the Baltimore Colts’ complex in Owings Mills and scattered onto different highways so no single court order could catch them all. Maryland’s legislature had spent that week advancing a bill to seize the team by eminent domain, and Robert Irsay beat the bill out of the state. By sunrise the Colts belonged to Indianapolis, which had spent $77.5 million raising the Hoosier Dome on speculation, a nest built before Indiana had any bird to put in it. One landed. The city took its bows, Irsay took the building, and Baltimore took four decades of grief it can still recite by heart.

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The Quotation’s Chain of Custody

A mug sits on the desk with Marilyn Monroe’s face under the sentence Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” The object is wrong at the name and prone to wording drift, and it keeps selling because the right sentiment can carry any name. The claim riding beside it has manners: why care whether the mug gives Monroe a line written by Ulrich, or whether a poster hands Voltaire a sentence built by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, so long as the line still stirs? Its appeal points to use over receipt. Its conclusion says the words have done good work in the world, and good work should settle the bill.

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The Name You Cannot Give Yourself

Every semester it happens by the second week. A student in ASL 1, bright and eager and already half in love with the language, waits until the room empties and asks me for a sign name. The asking is shy and confident at the same time, the way people ask for something they assume is a formality, a small ceremony the teacher performs on request, like handing back a quiz. I tell them no. Then I tell them why, and the why takes the rest of the semester, and if I teach it well, it takes the rest of their lives. I want to set the why down in one place, because the question deserves a fuller answer than a hallway can hold, and because the answer opens a door into how Deaf culture actually works, which is what my students came to learn whether they know it yet or not. Two notes on words before we start. Students usually say sign name; the scholarship says name sign; I answer to both terms and grant neither on request. And when I write Deaf with a capital D, I mean the culture: the language, the schools, the clubs, the families, the jokes, the weddings, the funerals, the whole inherited world of people who live in American Sign Language. Small-d deaf is an audiogram. Capital-D Deaf is a people. The name sign belongs to the people.

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Outline of a Christian Political Philosophical Theology

I defend a position in political thought that I call Christian anarcho-socialist liberalism. The idea is to create a Christian political philosophical theology that integrates the best elements from socialism, liberalism and anarchism. The Christian Gospel is about far more than politics, and it must never be reduced to politics, though it does have many important political implications. When we combine the Bible, classical Christianity, political theory and postmodern thought, we can create a visionary and powerful Christian political philosophical theology. Christian-humanistic values and ideals must be implemented in postmodern society in the age of globalisation. I am convinced that we can combine a strong emphasis on religious liberty with a strong emphasis on social justice for the poor and the weak. What I present here is a vision and an outline of a Christian political philosophical theology. You might also say that I here present an approach to a postmodern political philosophical theology. My political thought is to a great extent inspired by thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman, Noam Chomsky and Cornel West, but it also contains many original and dynamic dimensions that transcend these thinkers.

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