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The FCC Card on the Studio Wall

My FCC card had to be on the wall. I was starting out in radio in the early 1980s, and my stations were serious about my Restricted Radiotelephone Operator Permit. No card meant no work. An unposted card meant no work too. I still have mine somewhere, though my FCC registration does not appear online as of November 2026. That gap has an explanation. So does the rule that made a piece of federal paper part of a DJ’s working life. The microphone was only part of the job.

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The Ghosts in the Dead Protocols

The handshake began with a whistle. You dialed the number and the line rang once, and then a high, steady tone answered with small snaps buried in it, like static caught in fence wire. A flurry of quick chirps followed, two machines trading menus in a language pitched past the human ear. Then the chord came, a rank of test tones sounded together so each machine could hear what the line had done to the other. After it came the long hiss of training and then the silence. A small light on the modem’s face said the connection held. I heard that sequence most nights for five years in the 1990s, in a room lit by a beige monitor, and I learned to diagnose a call by ear the way a mechanic hears a bad bearing. The screech people mock was a ceremony. Two machines were introducing themselves, and we were allowed to listen.

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The First Person

The lawyers had been talking for more than nine hours. The case was United States ex rel. Standing Bear v. Crook. The courtroom sat on the third floor of the federal building at Fifteenth and Dodge in Omaha, and the date was May 2, 1879. The crowd had stayed past the dinner recess and into the dark. When the last argument ended, Judge Elmer Scipio Dundy made an announcement. One more speaker, he said, had asked to be heard, and he believed it was the first time in the country’s history such a request had come from an Indian. Standing Bear rose from among the prisoners. He wore an eagle feather in his braided hair, a blue shirt trimmed in red, deerskin moccasins, a Thomas Jefferson peace medal, and a necklace of bear claws. He walked to the front of the room, faced the audience, and held out his right hand. The hand stayed there, still, for a long time. Then he began to speak in Ponca, in a low voice, and the interpreter gave the room his words in English.

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The Hot Dog Will Survive. The Room Might Not.

Victor Victoratos hears the question before some customers order. They have come to Boulevard Drinks for a hot dog, but they need to know how much time is left. “When is your last day?” He says everybody asks. The question has become part of the transaction, alongside the food and the change. There is affection in it, and a little dread. People want the answer even when they already know it. Victor says April 1 would have brought 70 years at this Journal Square address. The business itself goes back to 1937. A customer can do that arithmetic while waiting at the counter, though it will not make the coming move easier to understand.

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Dolores Huerta’s Legacy Is the Work AI Cannot Do for Us

Dolores Huerta died at home in Bakersfield. She was 96, and her close family was with her on October 28, according to the Dolores Huerta Foundation. The public record will return now to photographs of the medal and the sound of “Sí se puede.” I keep thinking about the work beneath the slogan. Huerta registered voters. She learned the complaints, found the people willing to act, and stayed through the slow business of making a demand stick. Hope mattered to her because somebody had to give it an address and a next meeting. Her politics offers no rescue by a wealthy patron or an ingenious machine. It asks more of ordinary people and takes their capacities seriously. I want her legacy to remain useful to them.

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Eight to Seven

The midterms end tonight, November 3. Four days later, on Saturday, November 7, the country crosses an anniversary almost nobody has circled on the calendar. It is one hundred fifty years since the presidential election of 1876, the night the United States voted and then could not say who had won. The count ran for four months. It finished in a borrowed courtroom and then in the House chamber, in the small hours of a March morning, by a margin of one electoral vote. Congress resolved it with a procedure invented on the spot. The price was collected from people who had no seat in the room, and they kept paying it for the better part of ninety years. I count 1876 the worst election in American history. The election of 1860 brought on a war, but its count was honest; in 1876 the count itself was the fraud. The country is still legislating in its shadow, and this is a good week to read the record it left.

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The Drive Would Not Spin: An Imagined Account Set in the Near Future

The drive would not spin for me. It held the original sensor records from three floods, and the public summary said a restored wetland had reduced every peak. The summary had become the accepted account in my county. Farmers repeated it at meetings. The water district used it in planning. A restored marsh had become the answer to an argument that still flooded people’s fields.

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