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DO HARM: The Book That Began with a Word I Did Not Know

I am not a physician. I have never cultured a specimen, read a chest film, or signed a death certificate. I trained as a dramatist at Columbia, in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center, which qualifies me to tell you how a scene builds and not much else about a hospital. So let me get the obvious objection out of the way early, because it is the first thing a serious reader should ask. What business does a playwright have writing a book about hospital-acquired infection? The answer is the whole book, and it starts in a shut room in Newark in 2002.

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The Voice Goes Off: Writing My Half of Back to Willowbrook

On the first day of my classes at New York University, the voice goes off. I stand at the front of the room and I do not speak, and no one else will speak for the rest of the semester, because the language my students have come to learn does not live in the throat. It lives in the hands and the face and the shaped space between two people, and the fastest way to teach that is to stop pretending otherwise on day one.

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The Necessary Art: Taking the Title Back

Today I am publishing a book about a theft at the center of Western culture, one its victims were trained to take as a compliment:The Necessary Art: Aristotle’s Six Elements in the Clinic, the Courtroom, the Proof, the Blueprint, and the Republic. It runs 342 pages in paperback, it exists in a Kindle edition and a free reading edition you can download right now, and the audiobook will follow as soon as the voice is ready. Those are the facts of the launch. What follows is the case for why this book exists, because its central fact has stood in plain sight for two hundred and eighty years while the people it names were trained to take the theft as a compliment: the professions of the working world were robbed of a word, the robbery has a date and a paper trail, and the word can be taken back.

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The Séance Court: Original Intent and the Fraud of Speaking for the Dead

Nine lawyers in black robes sit in a marble temple in Washington and commune with the dead. They ask James Madison, silent since 1836, how he feels about bump stocks. They ask a Virginia planter to rule on geofence warrants and a Boston merchant to weigh encrypted messaging, and they transcribe the answers with straight faces into the United States Reports. Every other corner of American life has a name for this ritual. When a widow pays for it in a candlelit parlor, we call it a séance and we call the medium a fraud. When five justices perform it in October Term, we call it originalism, and law schools award tenure for defending the candles.

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Hope Has No Shovel: Why We Fling Our Wishes at the Sky

Watch what the body does with a wish. The child inhales before the candles, holds the secret behind her teeth, then gives it to the room with one hard breath. Lovers press lips to a palm and push the kiss off the hand like a paper boat, up toward a window, a balcony, a departing train. A meteor scratches the dark and everyone beneath it makes the same silent motion, hurling a private want after a falling rock. Mourners lower the casket and lift their eyes. Whatever hope is made of, it has a launch angle, and the angle is up.

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Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild

A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer’s kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law’s name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there.

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The Oldest Ceremony in the World

On the morning of January 5, 1895, in the great courtyard of the École Militaire in Paris, an army stripped a man of everything it had given him. Alfred Dreyfus, a captain of artillery, stood at attention in the cold while a general read the sentence aloud. A drum roll opened the thing. Then an officer stepped forward and began to take him apart piece by piece, in front of the assembled regiments and a crowd of thousands pressed against the railings outside. The braid came off his sleeves. His buttons were cut from his coat. The red stripes were torn from his trousers, and the insignia of his rank was ripped away and thrown down into the mud of the parade ground. Last, the officer took Dreyfus’s sword, raised it, and broke it across his knee, and let the two halves fall at the man’s feet.

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