Posted on

The Confederate Question Never Closed

An old professor’s epigram, tested against the monuments, the forts, the flag, a Supreme Court ruling from this spring, and the counterfeit history of emancipation now spreading online. An old history professor of mine once offered a sentence that has outlasted most of what I learned in his classroom. The South lost the battle, he said, and won the war. He meant that the Confederacy was more alive in the present than it had been on the April morning when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. The claim sounded like provocation at the time. It reads now like a weather report. Army forts carry the names of men who took up arms against the United States. The Supreme Court has just rewritten the rules that protected Black voters in the states most determined to suppress them. A battle flag the rebel armies never managed to carry into Washington was paraded through the Capitol in 2021. My professor’s epigram deserves a hearing, and it deserves a harder examination than its admirers usually give it, because one half of it is true in a way that should alarm anyone who wants a working democracy, and the other half is false in a way that can disarm the people who would defend one.

Continue reading → The Confederate Question Never Closed

Posted on

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.

Continue reading → On Synalosis and the Second Wall

Posted on

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.

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

Posted on

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.

Continue reading → The Goldfish Never Said That

Posted on

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.

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

Posted on

The Third Casket: How Shakespeare Taught Us to Choose the Thing We Cannot Refuse

A man walks into a room and finds three boxes waiting for him. One is gold, one is silver, one is lead. He has been told that his whole life turns on which one he opens, and that the rules forbid him to open more than one. The woman he wants stands beside the boxes, unable to help him, bound by a dead father’s will. This is the casket scene from The Merchant of Venice, and it is one of the strangest moments in Shakespeare, because the test is rigged twice over. It is rigged inside the play, where Portia’s dead father designed the riddle so that only a man who can see past surface will win her. It is rigged outside the play, in the deeper sense Freud uncovered in 1913, where the choice was never free at all, and the man was always going to reach for the box that means his death.

Continue reading → The Third Casket: How Shakespeare Taught Us to Choose the Thing We Cannot Refuse

Posted on

The Rented Crowd: Nero’s Five Thousand, the Paris Claque, and the Box That Laughed for America

For the better part of two decades, the laughter of the United States lived inside a padlocked box. Charles Rolland Douglass, a CBS sound engineer who had spent the war helping the Navy develop shipboard radar, built the device in the early 1950s and guarded it the way a sexton guards a reliquary. The laff box, as he called it, stood a little over two feet tall and worked like an organ: keys for titters, chortles, belly laughs, shrieks, a foot pedal to let a wave of mirth swell, crest, and die on command. Douglass wheeled it from studio to studio himself. Clients heard the output and never saw the mechanism. Only his immediate family knew what the inside looked like, and when he finally stepped back from the work, his sons carried the trade forward like a guild secret. The industry word for what he did was sweetening, which tells you the industry understood the product. Sugar is what you add when the thing itself goes down easier disguised.

Continue reading → The Rented Crowd: Nero’s Five Thousand, the Paris Claque, and the Box That Laughed for America

Posted on

The Glass People: The Materials of Madness, from the Glass King to the Simulation

More than six hundred years ago, the King of France stopped letting anyone touch him. Charles VI had iron rods sewn into his clothing and moved through his palace with the stiff care of a man carrying something breakable, because he believed he was carrying something breakable. He believed it was himself. The chronicles of his reign record that the king became convinced his body had turned to glass, and that a careless embrace or an ordinary stumble would shatter him to pieces on the stone floor.

Continue reading → The Glass People: The Materials of Madness, from the Glass King to the Simulation

Posted on

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.

Continue reading → The Book I Could Not Afford to Get Wrong

Posted on

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.

Continue reading → Stop Applauding the Forced Apology