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Caitlin Clark: Open Season on the Golden Goose

Caitlin Clark gave the WNBA the audience it spent thirty years failing to find. On the night of June 24 it gave her a fist to the throat and a step over her body, and the officials paid to watch the floor saw nothing. Here is the case for her leaving. Begin with the tape, because the tape is where excuses go to die. Phoenix led Indiana late in the first half at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, a building that exists in its current sold-out form for one reason, and that reason was lying on the hardwood. Caitlin Clark had driven the lane, absorbed contact from Lexi Held, and gone down onto her side. The ball came loose. Held, DeWanna Bonner, and Alyssa Thomas dove after it and landed in a pile on top of her. Then Thomas, with Clark pinned beneath her, drove a closed fist into Clark’s throat, pushed herself upright, and stepped over the body of the best thing to happen to women’s basketball in forty years. One account of the scramble puts Thomas’s knee into Clark’s groin on the way down. Three referees stood within a few yards of all of it and called nothing.

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On Synalosis and the Second Wall

(AUTHOR NOTE: Synalosis, a term I coined from the Greek halōsis for the fall of a besieged city, names the single geometric operation by which the set of futures still open to a target contracts to a single point as many agents converge, the same shape running through the hunt, the siege, surveillance, investigation, and the cornered market.) A camera on a pole at the entrance to my town reads the plate of every car that passes, stores the number with a timestamp, and sends it to a database that other towns and other agencies can query. There are thousands of those cameras now, strung across American roads by a handful of private companies, and the most prominent of them, Flock Safety, has built a searchable record of where the country’s vehicles go. The same years that put those cameras on the poles put readers in the parking lots that log the Bluetooth and wifi signals leaking from every phone, and put data brokers in the middle of all of it, buying the location trails and selling the assembled portrait of a life to anyone with a credit card, police departments included. I have spent a good part of the last year writing about this build-out, the plate readers and the signal harvesters and the brokers, and about the thin and late defenses raised against it, like the California law that lets a resident order the brokers to delete what they hold. I went into that reporting thinking I was documenting something new. What I came out with was the conviction that I was documenting the newest body of something ancient.

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The Mirror at the Bottom of the Telescope

We have spent a century waiting for a signal from the stars while the harder evidence accumulated quietly, under our own instruments. The belief that human beings are the first and last word in living things is a habit we inherited from a smaller universe, and every measurement of the last thirty years has been quietly taking it apart. The question most people ask about other life rests on a misunderstanding of what the evidence would look like. They are waiting for an arrival: a radio transmission decoded at a desert array, a craft on a runway, a face on a screen. That image of contact comes from a century of film and pulp fiction, and it has trained the public to assume that until the ship lands, the rational position is that we are alone. The opposite is closer to the truth. The case that life is not a one-time accident confined to a single damp rock has been arriving for thirty years, in increments, written in the language of chemistry and statistics rather than the language of greeting. We failed to notice because it never knocked.

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Twenty Billion Scans a Month: Have We Already Lost the Farm?

The questions arrive together, the way dread arrives. Have we already lost the farm? Can anything already recorded be dissolved and unlinked from our names? Is every Bluetooth signal tied to us, every chip in every pet a beacon, every Flock camera quietly cataloguing the bodies that walk and drive past it? And if enough of those answers are yes, why are companies pouring concrete across the desert to raise data centers the size of small cities, and what is the end of it, to track, to prosecute, to imprison? I chased the documentation and let it correct me where I was wrong. Here is what holds up.

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The Silo and the Demolition Crew

Howard Stein taught me that the enemy of the Arts is the Humanities. He was defending a wall between two free rooms. China and the United States are now knocking down the building. Howard Stein used to stand at the front of a seminar room at Columbia’s Oscar Hammerstein II Center and tell a room full of playwrights that the enemy of the Arts is the Humanities. He had earned the right to say it. Eleven years at the Yale School of Drama as associate dean and head of playwriting, seven years running the playwriting program at Iowa, ten years as the first permanent chairman of the Hammerstein Center, and a lifetime spent turning young writers into working dramatists. When a man like that tells you the Humanities are the enemy, you do not argue. You wait to understand.

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Honest Opacity

Honesty is a rule about what you say. Transparency is a rule about what you hide. They are different instruments, and the confusion between them is how power keeps its secrets in the open. Two words get treated as synonyms by people who ought to know the difference, and the people who exploit the confusion understand it best of all. A company under investigation announces that it has been fully transparent and expects the phrase to function as an alibi. A politician says he has nothing to hide and trusts you to hear it as proof of innocence. Each one is trading on a slippage between two ideas that are not the same and do not even point the same way.

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The Angle of Attack: What a Hunting Pack Knows About Geometry and What a Machine is Learning to do with It.

A wolf does not charge a moose head-on. It runs toward the place the moose will be, and it arrives there beside other wolves who each compute that same future from a different spot on the field. When the kill comes, it comes as geometry. The prey has one body and a small set of directions it can break toward, and the pack has arranged itself so that whichever direction the animal chooses already has a wolf folding into it. This is among the oldest forms of coordinated violence, wired into mammal nervous systems millions of years before anyone built a machine that could copy it. A certain kind of artificial intelligence has begun to learn the same lesson, badly at first and then with a competence that should make us uneasy.

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The Goldfish Never Said That

A fabricated statistic taught a generation to believe their minds had broken. The truth about attention is stranger, and it names a culprit nobody wants to indict. Picture the goldfish. You have met it a thousand times, in conference keynotes and morning television and the opening line of ten thousand blog posts. It swims in its little bowl of received wisdom and carries one damning number on its back: nine seconds of attention, a full second longer than the modern human animal. We hold nuclear codes and write string quartets, and we supposedly lose the thread after eight seconds while the fish swims on, victorious. The crown of creation, outconcentrated by a snack with fins.

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The Magnificent Loser: The Book I Wrote to Answer Two Words in Red Ink

Every writer carries a verdict he never agreed to. Mine was two words long, written in red marker across the title page of a play I cared about, by a historian whose judgment I had asked for and could not afford to ignore. BAD DRAMA. No note beneath it, no argument, no second page. I was in my twenties. I put the play in a drawer and told myself I had learned something useful about my own limits. It took me forty years to understand that I had learned the wrong lesson, and that the right one would take an entire book to say.

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Take Your Children Offline NOW: Twenty-One Years Later

In July of 2005, I published Take Your Children Offline NOW on this blog, and the comments arrived in two distinct waves. The first wave came from parents who said the article forced them to think, and several of them removed every photograph of their children from their websites within hours of reading it. The second wave came from parents and bloggers who told me, with varying degrees of contempt, that I was hysterical, paranoid, anti-celebration, and ill-positioned to speak on parenting because I was married without children. One commenter wrote that if he lived in fear of someone furtively masturbating to pictures of his kids, he would never get anything done. The post was held up by a few critics as a case study in childless people moralizing at parents.

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