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Pillar of Salt

Genesis records the first health warning about sodium. Lot’s wife, fleeing the burning city, looks back and turns into a pillar of salt. Read it as a warning about attachment, about the price of facing the wrong direction. Then read it as prophecy. Three thousand years later, a whole food supply did the same thing to its eaters. We became the preserved: cured, brined, and held in place by the leading cause of death in the country.

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Preplay: The Courtroom in the Wings

The news of my removal from my own show came from the producer. I had obtained the rights, signed us to a first-class theatrical option, and written the book and lyrics, all of it inside the year the rights contract granted to us. The director hired to stage the all-or-nothing reading was not my choice, and he was friends with my collaborator. After the failed previews, I was unceremoniously let go. When I asked my composer collaborator why this had happened, the director called me instead, and said that nobody wanted to talk to me. I had no choice but to sever the show, and my attorney fought to get me paid, credit on show. Everyone stonewalled him as well. That is the whole record, at the width the print ruling allows, because the identifying details of the production and the collaboration stay blurred in print for the privacy of the living, and the blur is logged in the specimen record beside its telling.

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The Paper Scalpel

In 2022, after years of court fights, Donna Langan became the first person in federal custody ever to receive gender confirmation surgery. The Bureau of Prisons directory listed her as female. In February 2025, three weeks into the new administration, she was notified that the system holding her was moving her to a men’s facility. Her body had changed years before, under lawful medical care ordered through the government’s own clinical process. What changed in 2025 was a signature in Washington, and the signature was enough.

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Show Me Where It Hurts

I have been building and moderating conversation on the internet since the internet had conversation worth moderating, and one quarrel from those years has never let me put it down. It happened on Reddit, in one of the medical-advice communities, the ask-a-doctor kind, and the room’s name has dissolved from memory while its images have refused to leave. People arrived with photographs of their own fresh cuts and posted them for assessment, and the moderators split over what they were looking at. One camp called the pictures fine in a medical setting: a patient presenting an injury to doctors, the oldest transaction in medicine arriving through a new door. The other camp read performance, attention pursued through injury, and wanted every image gone. I stood with the second camp’s verdict while distrusting its reasoning, because the deletion seemed right to me for a reason neither camp was saying: whatever any single poster intended, the gallery was awe-inspiring to the wrong eyes. I could not have defended that instinct with numbers then, and now I can, so here is the argument laid out in full, the folk theory measured, the audience counted, the room itself put on the scale.

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The Nanosecond Scientist

A BolesBlogs.com reader forwarded me a transcript and asked whether any of it holds up. A man is talking about human origins. He says Homo sapiens appeared out of nowhere. He says a missing link sits at the base of our species, and that the link is easy to find: hand any person’s DNA to a scientist who works with CRISPR, ask whether the sample has been edited, and the answer arrives in a nanosecond. Yes. Edited. From there he moves to the identity of the editor, God or a visiting intelligence with advanced technology, and he closes by asking why Britain colonized America. Here is the short answer before the long one. Three of the speaker’s sentences are accurate. One sentence is invented, and that invented sentence carries the entire argument. Everything downstream of it, the aliens, Dr. Moreau, the colony, the closing questions, rests on a laboratory result that has never happened and cannot happen. The combination deserves slow handling, because the arrangement recurs everywhere now, and the arrangement does more damage than the content.

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The Last Day of the Guarantee

A box of prescription drugs sat forgotten in the back closet of a retail pharmacy long enough that some of the pills predated the 1969 moon landing. Sealed bottles, original containers, never opened. Diet pills under brand names nobody has spoken aloud in forty years. Barbiturates. A four-ingredient headache compound. Every one of them was at least twenty-eight years past the date stamped on the label, which meant that under every rule governing American pharmacy, they were garbage. Lee Cantrell, who helps run the California Poison Control System, looked at the box and saw an experiment nobody could afford to run on purpose. He called Roy Gerona at the University of California, San Francisco, a chemist who had grown up in the Philippines watching people take outdated medicine and get better anyway. Gerona ran the contents through liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. The results were published in the Archives of Internal Medicine on October 8, 2012, under a title that gives away nothing: “Stability of Active Ingredients in Long-Expired Prescription Medications.”

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No One Dies Lying

On the twenty-second of May, 1929, at Fort Riley, Kansas, a woman named Zenana Shepard sent her nurse to a closet for a bottle of bootleg whiskey. She said the liquor had a strange smell and a strange taste, and she asked whether enough remained in the bottle to test it for poison. Then she said the sentence that would outlive her by four years and travel all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States: “Dr. Shepard has poisoned me.” The doctor was her husband, Charles A. Shepard, a major in the Army medical corps, and the government would later argue he had salted that whiskey with bichloride of mercury because he loved a woman named Grace Brandon and his wife declined to divorce him. Zenana Shepard died on the fifteenth of June. Her husband was convicted of her murder, and her sentence, the spoken one, did much of the convicting.

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