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The Number on the Wall: Why Physicists Call 137 Magic

I came to 137 the way most people come to it, by hearing it called a magic number and wanting to know whether the word was earned. My instinct with a claim like that is suspicion, because a working life spent around language and persuasion teaches you how easily a large word gets draped over a small thing. This time the suspicion did not survive the facts. The number turned out to be real in a way I had not expected, and the people most gripped by it have been some of the hardest-headed physicists who ever lived.

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The Book I Could Not Afford to Get Wrong

Every book I take on carries some risk, and on most of them the risk is mine alone. If I misjudge a scene or overwrite a chapter, the cost is my own time and my own name, and I can live with that. Beyond the Burial Tree, my new book, was the first in a long while where getting it wrong would cost other people, and a people who have already been wronged about as thoroughly as a people can be. That fact stood over the desk through every page.

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The Listener Will See You Now

Ambient AI now records the conversation at the hospital bed and the exam table. The microphone is optional, for the moment. The receptionist slid a tablet across the counter and asked, in the bright tone reserved for upgrades, whether I would consent to let the clinic “AI Listen” to the appointment. Percy and Lotty, The Boles Brits, were already complaining inside their carrier, due for the rabies shots the state requires. The pitch was efficiency. The software would listen to my conversation with the veterinarian, transcribe it, and “ambient scribe” the care notes so the doctor could spend less time typing and more time with the animals. I declined. There was a checkbox for that, which I noted with the small relief of a man who has read the next paragraph before signing the first.

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Stop Applauding the Forced Apology

There is no such thing as a sincere statement made with a boot on the neck, and we have built a culture that pretends otherwise.Watch what happens now when someone steps out of line. A demand goes up for a statement. The statement arrives, in the approved shape, full of the approved words, and a crowd gathers to judge whether the sorrow inside it looks real enough to accept. We have a name for that performance when a dictator stages it. We call it a show trial. What we have not admitted is that we run a softer version of the same machine every week, on our phones, for sport.

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Backstage Collapsed: Universal Recording and the Architecture of Courtship

A panelist on a recent broadcast conversation made the following argument. Young people across the wealthy world are not having children. Before they do not have children, they do not date. Before they do not date, they do not interact at the dances, the parties, the mixers their parents and grandparents used as the primary infrastructure for finding mates. Even when they show up at such gatherings, they hold the wall, not approaching, not asking, not risking the awkward overture that has been the entry-cost of human pairing for as long as human pairing has been formalized into ritual occasions. The panelist asked why, and answered himself. They are afraid of being recorded. They are afraid that any silly thing they say or any failed dance step or any drunk confession will be filmed and uploaded and used against them by people they cannot identify in advance. So they withdraw. The species, the panelist concluded, cannot continue under such conditions, and the only available remedy is to restrict the technology that produced those conditions.

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The Lack of the Ack, Sixteen Years On

In February of 2010, I wrote about a small but symptomatic failure in our digital manners. Young people, then aged eighteen to twenty, would send you a message, receive your reply, and disappear. No acknowledgement, no “Ok,” no “Got it,” just the digital equivalent of someone slamming the door after asking you a question through the mail slot. The piece was called “How to Ack Back,” and the argument was that the etiquette of the early internet, the discipline of acknowledging every transmission, had been lost on a generation that grew up assuming delivery was guaranteed and silence was a defensible reply.

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What the Dramatist Knows About Monsters

I sold my first paid byline to a Lincoln, Nebraska, newspaper at the age of ten. That was 1975. In the fifty-one years since, I have continued to be paid to construct figures that audiences will find frightening, or sympathetic, or contemptible, or laughable, on schedule, in plays and musicals and screenplays and novels and podcast scripts and editorial work. My Dramatists Guild membership dates from 1984. My MFA is from the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University. A publishing house I founded in the same year I sold the first byline has operated without interruption since. The inventory exists for a single reason: the labor of figure-construction is something I know from inside the work, and the working-dramatist’s perspective on that labor is the perspective from which my new book is written.

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Magnifica Humanitas: The Pope Writes Like the Machine He Fears

On 15 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, an encyclical letter “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” The document runs roughly 35,000 words across five chapters and a conclusion. It positions itself as the 135th-anniversary successor to Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, recasting that founding labor encyclical for the age of machine intelligence. The framing image is biblical and Manichean. Humanity is presented with a choice between two ancient construction sites. One is the Tower of Babel, where collective effort produces dominance and dehumanization. The other is the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah, where shared responsibility under God produces communion.

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Has Technology Ever Reduced Labor?

Has technology ever reduced labor? The question sounds rhetorical. We carry small computers that answer any factual query in seconds, our laundry tumbles itself clean while we sleep, our cars drive themselves on highways our great-grandparents traveled by mule. Of course technology has reduced labor. The question barely needs asking.

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The Wealth Defense Industry and the Working-Class Republic: What Equity Means Here

Henry Demarest Lloyd’s 1894 Wealth Against Commonwealth made the case that liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty. The question 132 years later is whether equity against the one percent can still be won inside a system they pay to keep tilted. Equity against the one percent describes parity of political voice, of legal protection, of access to courts and schools and air and water and a livable wage, with no implication that fortunes themselves must be equal. The republic was built on that equality of standing, however imperfectly executed and however brutally suspended along racial and gender lines. The wealth concentration of the past forty years has retired the idea entirely.

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