Posted on

The Lemurians of Mount Shasta: A Visit to the Hidden Country

California’s mystic volcano has tenants no census has ever counted. An inquiry into where they live, how they live, why they live, and what happened when I went up to ask. Drive north out of Redding on Interstate 5 and the land begins rehearsing for something. The pines close ranks, the grade climbs, and then the forest opens and the mountain is simply there: fourteen thousand feet of snow and andesite standing alone above the valley floor, keeping no company on that horizon, rising nearly ten thousand feet above everything around it. Joaquin Miller saw it in the 1850s and gave it the sentence it has never escaped: “Lonely as God, and white as a winter moon.” A mountain that looks like that collects tenants, and for a hundred years the most famous tenants of Mount Shasta have been a hidden people.

Continue reading → The Lemurians of Mount Shasta: A Visit to the Hidden Country

Posted on

Haven’t We Always Been Friends?

Aristotle drew a ladder. I drew a circle. A scheming actor asked to climb, and I answered with a question built to end the conversation. Years ago, in a rehearsal room that smelled of coffee and radiator dust, an actor I will call Curtis said six words I have retold wrong for decades: “I want to be your friend.” We had known each other three years by then. We had built shows together, struck sets at midnight, shared the particular intimacy of people who fail in front of each other at ten in the morning and repair it by eight that night. His sentence cornered me. I laughed a little, the way you laugh when you need two seconds to find a door, and I said, “Curtis, haven’t we always been friends?”

Continue reading → Haven’t We Always Been Friends?

Posted on

Figure Eights

The internet has decided that modern humans are developing zoochosis, the madness of caged animals. The claim is older than TikTok, and the truth underneath it is more uncomfortable than either the believers or the scoffers want it to be. For most of the 1990s, the most famous resident of the Central Park Zoo was a 700-pound polar bear named Gus who spent up to twelve hours a day swimming the same figure eight through the same small pool. Back and forth. The same loop, traced into the water until it wore a groove in the day. Reporters called him neurotic, depressed, flaky, and bipolar, and New Yorkers half-adopted him as a mascot for their own condition. In 1994 the zoo paid an animal behaviorist twenty-five thousand dollars to find out what was wrong, and the verdict passed into legend. Gus, the behaviorist said, was bored and mildly crazy in the way that a lot of people in New York are. The zoo redesigned his habitat, hid his food inside blocks of ice, gave him toys, and made him the first zoo animal in recorded history to be put on Prozac. The swimming eased. It never fully stopped. Until the day he died in 2013, there were afternoons when Gus would throw himself back into the water and trace the loop again, and again, and again.

Continue reading → Figure Eights

Posted on

Begging for My Mother: Find A Grave and the Strangers Who Collect Our Dead

This morning I signed into Find A Grave to update my mother’s memorial and discovered that I no longer manage her page. No email warned me. Nothing in my account records the change. Six family memorials, five of them sponsored with my own money in the weeks after my mother died, and my name has been stripped from every one. The site that once made me beg for custody of my own dead has taken that custody back, in silence, and left me to discover the loss the way you discover a missing wallet: by reaching for something that should be there.

Continue reading → Begging for My Mother: Find A Grave and the Strangers Who Collect Our Dead

Posted on

The Late Edit: How Belief Turns Revision Into Revelation

We have become a provenance culture, and I count myself an enforcer of it. Galleries now label machine-made images. Legislatures draft watermark bills, publishers add disclosure lines to copyright pages, and coders audit the licenses of every scraped repository. I am a plaintiff in litigation over the corpora used to train commercial language machines, so my commitment to the chain of custody is on file in federal court. The question a serious reader asks of any artifact in 2026 is blunt: who made this, from what, and who touched it on the way to me? That question is healthy. It is also, in one enormous and telling case, suspended.

Continue reading → The Late Edit: How Belief Turns Revision Into Revelation

Posted on

Two Hundred Fifty Years of What, and What For?

A drummer boy surfaced in my pocket change this week, on a quarter so worn his tricorn hat has gone soft at the edges. The Mint struck him by the hundreds of millions for the Bicentennial, Jack Ahr’s little colonial drummer with the dual date 1776-1976 stamped beneath his heels, and fifty years later he still turns up in laundromats and bodegas like a veteran who never quite made it home. I was eleven when that coin was new. Holding it on a Tuesday in Jersey City, the day the country turns two hundred fifty, I felt the whole distance between that summer and this one settle into my palm, small and cold.

Continue reading → Two Hundred Fifty Years of What, and What For?

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