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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.

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Make the Decision Right: A 1987 Aphorism Against the Age of the Open Tab

An old professor of mine, holding forth in 1987, handed his students one sentence to carry out the door: don’t make the right decision; make the decision right. He attached a coda that landed harder than the maxim itself. Regret, he told us, is mindless. I have been turning that sentence over for nearly four decades, and the turning has become its own education, because the sentence makes a metaphysical bet most listeners never notice they are taking. It claims that rightness arrives after the choosing, manufactured through labor and revision, and that no quantity of advance analysis can locate it beforehand, since the future refuses to sit still long enough to be computed. With one stroke the professor moved the entire moral weight of decision-making off the moment of selection and onto the years of execution. Pick a door, any door, then build a house behind it.

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Discrimination Day: How a Classroom Stunt Trained Children to Obey and Called It Empathy

At Brownell Elementary School in Lincoln, Nebraska, around 1973, my teachers ran a famous experiment on my class, and by the standard they set, I failed it. They split the room in two. The children with brown eyes were told they could command the children with blue eyes, and the blue-eyed children had to obey. I have grey eyes, so the teachers folded me in with the blue group, the way they folded in the hazel-eyed and anyone else who refused to fit the clean binary they wanted. For a day I watched classmates order other classmates to do push-ups, to fetch coats, to answer to the word “master.” The teacher delivered the moral with a satisfied smile: “Now you know how it feels to be Black.” We had, at most, one or two Black students in the entire school.

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Always Open, Never Empty

The internet abolished closing hours. The new wave is abolishing the pause. Both moves are economic in origin and psychological in effect. Both promise convenience and deliver a different kind of cost. The first cost was paid in time. The second is being paid in attention. How that arithmetic finishes is the open question.

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Arm in Arm with Chance

A misdated photograph, two of the largest minds of the last century, and the partnership physics never got. The photograph travels well. A man and a woman walk the edge of a lake, both buttoned into heavy coats against a cold the season should not have brought. He wears the famous hair, gray now at the temples, the drooping mustache, the look of someone who long ago stopped negotiating with his tailor. She is smaller and upright, her face composed into the expression of a person who has weighed sorrow by the gram. Their arms are linked. The internet, which prefers its history pre-chewed, captions the image with confident precision: Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, Saranac Lake, New York, 1929. Nearly every word of that caption is wrong.

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What the Lemmings Could Not Do: On Suicide, Cognition, and the Mortal Imagination

Of all the acts a human being can perform, suicide is the strangest. It requires the actor to picture a world without itself, judge that world preferable, and execute a plan whose author will not survive to see the result. No other behavior in the human repertoire so cleanly inverts the survival logic that built every body and every brain. The question of whether other animals do the same thing is a question about cognition. The behavior is downstream of cognition, and beneath cognition runs the question of meaning. To kill oneself one must first have the kind of self that can be killed by its owner.

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Hands as the Language of Thought: Correcting a Kant Attribution

There is a line about hands that travels well. It reads cleanly, carries an air of philosophical dignity, and arrives in print wearing the name of Immanuel Kant. “The hand is the visible part of the brain,” runs the most common English form, or, in an older rendering, “the hand is the outer brain of man.” The phrase appears in publishing copy, in teaching materials, on Goodreads quotation pages, in popular psychology, in surgical textbooks, in neurology lectures, and in essays on sign language and gesture. It has the shape of something Kant should have said. The difficulty is that no reliable evidence supports treating it as a verified Kant statement.

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The Charge and the Curriculum: How the Dark Arts Replaced Black Magic

Two phrases arrive from different centuries and now sit on the same shelf: “black magic” and “the Dark Arts.” Modern speakers treat them as synonyms. Older readers would have disagreed, and the disagreement matters, because the collapse of the two terms shows how our language for forbidden knowledge has migrated from the judicial to the aesthetic, from accusation to ambience.

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Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld

In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word “story” carries a double valence. We say “tell me the real story” to demand truth, and we say “that’s only a story” to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what stories do.

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The Area Code Comes Home

When Scott Frost took over at Nebraska in 2018, he brought with him from UCF a small equipment decision that ran directly against what the phone system had been doing for fifteen years. Frost let Husker players wear their three-digit home area code on the helmet bumper above the face mask. A Peyton Newell on the defensive line, a Mike Williams at wide receiver, an Andre Hunt lining up outside, each wore the digits of where they came from in black on red. The helmet bumper is a small piece of real estate, two inches by four, just large enough to carry three numbers. Frost had started the practice at UCF in late 2016 before the USF rivalry game, and he said at Nebraska that the guys took a lot of pride in it. Where you come from, he said, still counts.

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