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I Wrote the Book I Was Born to Write

Fifty years is a long time to prepare for a single sentence. I did not know I was preparing. I thought I was living, which I was, and writing, which I was, and teaching, which I was, and publishing, which I was. I thought the Fractional Fiction novels and the EleMenTs trilogy and the Prairie Voice reporting and the Human Meme episodes and the dramatic literature and the ASL linguistics and the cultural criticism were separate projects, separate impulses, separate rooms in the interior country I have been building since I was old enough to read. They were not separate. They were all rehearsals for this.

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Why Cooperation Beats Competition If You Design It Right

We praise competition because it slings us awake, but the quiet truth is that cooperation does the heavy lifting. It stitches days together, forges talent into reliability, and turns cleverness into outcomes you can touch. You see it most clearly where failure costs blood or bread. Think of the night shift in a busy hospital: rounds, handoffs, an attending who catches what a resident almost missed because the culture expects second looks instead of blaming first movers. The system works not by goodwill alone but by rules that force repetition and reputational memory: chart audits, morbidity and mortality conferences, and the knowledge that you will see the same colleagues tomorrow. That is how fragile human kindness hardens into durable care.

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Trumpanization of a Nation

It seems insane that a man who has excellent government health insurance is able to lift himself from a surgeon’s table, hop a plane from Arizona to Washington, D.C. and then cast the Senate’s deciding vote opening the opportunity to strip healthcare protection from everyday citizens; but this is the world now in which we hurl, where the sky is green, and the Grim Reaper is now the Giver of Life, and facts are lies, and the truth isn’t published anywhere, and can never be known — because nothing is understandable, and everything else is just all made up to set up the next spin of a still life into a grave.

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Predators, Children and Sexual Prevarication

Children are some of the most vulnerable in society. They are trusting by default and unaware by necessity of nature. Popular culture and the Arts are filled with the sexual exploitation of, and the aggrieved results of, unattended children in peril with no one to protect their best interests except, oftentimes, their grooming predators.

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How a Big City Teaches Multicultural Tolerance

As we tumble headlong into the dire possibility of a Trump Presidency, I am reminded of the salient, if silent, lesson some of us learn when moving from a small town to the urban core of a Big City: If you want to get along with everybody — like everyone anyway, even if you don’t — and never badmouth anybody, even if you want to.

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