Page 2 of 10

Posted on

The Viking Funeral and the Us of Us

On the last Saturday of August 2019, in a valley that had already lost the assembly plant and the regional medical center, the daily newspaper of Mahoning County, Ohio, printed its final edition. The Vindicator was a hundred and fifty years old. It had celebrated its sesquicentennial the week before it died. The announcement had come on June 28, in a letter signed by the publisher and the general manager, members of the family that had owned the paper since 1887, and the record of the letter is exact about the cause: the paper was hemorrhaging money, the family had looked for a buyer, and there was none. The letter’s close is in the record too. “It is with broken hearts that we say goodbye and a final thank you.”

Continue reading → The Viking Funeral and the Us of Us

Posted on

The Censor Keeps a Copy

Twenty years ago, give or take, a friend told me a story he expected me to admire. He was a Latter-day Saint who worked in technology, and he was, as I understood it then, the bishop of his ward, an unpaid office the church gives to laymen who keep their day jobs, so he kept a company’s hours all week and presided over a congregation on Sundays. There was a Mormon bookstore he went into often, and one day he walked in and found a new display for Goosebumps, the paperbacks with the dripping green logo about haunted masks, a ventriloquist’s dummy with a mind of its own, and a werewolf in a Florida swamp. He spoke to the owner. The owner told him the books were selling well and that those sales were keeping the store alive. My friend pressed him on content, judged the whole series blasphemous, an invitation to the occult at a child’s price, and let it be understood that if the titles stayed on the shelf a report would go to the stake president. A week later he came back. The books were gone, the owner was distant and cold, and my friend bought a couple of books, in his own phrase, to make up the difference. He told me this the way another man might tell you he had coached his kid’s team to a championship. He was proud. The word I have settled on, twenty years later, is forensic: he had investigated, prosecuted, and won, and he walked out of that store on the high of it.

Continue reading → The Censor Keeps a Copy

Posted on

The Retirement Is Always Silent

On a Tuesday in August, at three in the afternoon in Manhattan and two in the valley, a telephone went to speaker and a family in Nebraska began to read a week to me. The call carried a death and a storm in the same breath, which is how the plains have always carried them, the funeral hour and the rain total riding the same wire. Trees down across the county. The town’s grain silo wrecked the week before the crop came in. A hundred utility poles down, thirty-four of them consecutive on one county road, snapped at ground level and thrown across into the lines and trees on the other side. Four inches of rain that day at North Loup, and still raining. The festival, Popcorn Days, running since 1901, had gone on among the ruins anyway, because a town that cancels its celebration has lost something the storm cannot carry off.

Continue reading → The Retirement Is Always Silent

Posted on

The System Won’t Let Me: How AI Turned Bureaucracy Into an Alibi

The most revealing sentence in modern institutional life is not, “You have been denied.” A denial still implies a denier. The more revealing sentence is, “The system won’t let me.” That sentence empties the room while everyone remains inside it. The employee is present. The institution is present. The consequence is present. Only authorship has disappeared. A machine with no legal personality has exercised practical power, while a human being with legal personality claims to possess none. You may hear the sentence after a medical authorization is refused, an account is frozen, a job application is rejected, a benefit is interrupted, or a manuscript is accused. The speaker may be genuinely sympathetic. Sympathy, however, cannot reopen the file, suspend the penalty, or restore what the system has taken.

Continue reading → The System Won’t Let Me: How AI Turned Bureaucracy Into an Alibi

Posted on

The Crowd That Pays

The new book is out this week, and I will tell you which page of it I expect to be disbelieved. It is not the scheme, the city that prices its poor as calories; readers accept a bureaucracy’s appetite on sight. Nor the flood; readers accept water. The trouble page is the fourteenth chapter, the one where the crowd takes the stores. The Quarter rises after the flood, goes to the Trust’s grain, seizes it, and then does the thing the whole city has spent the year insisting a crowd cannot do. It pays.

Continue reading → The Crowd That Pays

Posted on

Swimming the Author

England tested witches with water. The suspect was bound, right thumb to left toe, looped to a rope, and lowered into the village pond. Pure water was believed to refuse the devil’s servant, so a body that floated was guilty and a body that sank was innocent, and the innocent were hauled up half-drowned to receive the town’s apology. The procedure was called swimming a witch, and its genius was architectural: it could only convict. Whatever the water did, the crowd on the bank went home with the verdict it had carried down to the shore. Four centuries on, the pond fits in a browser tab. Paste the chapter. Click the button. Let the water decide.

Continue reading → Swimming the Author

Posted on

Six Hundred Million Breaths

The first inhale, the last exhale, and the enormous unexamined middle. A human being spends nine months underwater and then, in a single violent second, becomes an air-breathing animal. We tend to picture that first breath as a natural unfolding, the lungs simply beginning what they were built to do. The reality is closer to a demolition. Before birth the lungs are not empty. They are filled with fluid secreted by the lung tissue itself, and that fluid has to go somewhere before air can enter. Labor begins clearing it. The surge of adrenaline and noradrenaline that accompanies delivery flips the epithelial cells lining the airways from secreting fluid to absorbing it, and sodium channels in those cells begin pulling the liquid back into the tissue and the bloodstream. The mechanical compression of the chest during a vaginal delivery squeezes out more. Even so, at the moment of birth the newborn faces a set of collapsed, wet sacs whose internal surfaces are stuck together by the surface tension of water, and it must pull them open with nothing but the muscles of its own chest and diaphragm.

Continue reading → Six Hundred Million Breaths