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The Unsigned Newsroom

The byline entered American journalism as a punishment, and it arrived in the mud. On January 26, 1863, Major General Joseph Hooker took command of the Army of the Potomac, a force that had bled itself white at Fredericksburg six weeks earlier and was deserting into the Virginia winter by the hundreds. The press corps trailing the army was in worse moral shape than the army. Correspondents wrote from hotel bars and Washington parlors, inflated skirmishes into battles, buried defeats, manufactured quotes, and signed none of it. Hooker’s predecessor had already begged the War Department for relief. “As it is impossible for me to ascertain with certainty who these anonymous writers are,” George McClellan wrote to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, “I beg to suggest that another order be published holding the editors responsible.”

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The Silo Remembers the Harvest

From Nebraska to New York, the silos are hollow until hallowed. The elevator starts before the sun does. On a November morning in 2019, I stood by a rail siding in a county-seat town in Nebraska and watched a truck empty itself into the pit while the leg lifted the corn a hundred feet into the headhouse, kernel by kernel, out of sight. What stays with you is the sound. A grain elevator at work has a voice like weather, a steady granular rain inside a concrete throat, and the dust it exhales catches the first light and holds it for a moment above the tracks. The building does one thing a child could explain: it keeps the harvest, standing at the edge of town, taller than the church, the courthouse, and the water tower, doing that one thing for a hundred years. Yet the same word that names this building now names the most despised structure in American institutional life. Say “silo” in a boardroom or a hearing room and the response arrives on reflex: break them down. Somewhere between the rail siding and the hearing room, the container became the crime.

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Popcorn: The Only Grain That Performs

Last weekend, the village of North Loup, Nebraska, population somewhere around three hundred, threw its 125th Annual Popcorn Days. A carnival took over Highway 11 from Friday to Sunday. There was team penning and sorting, a turtle race, kids’ games, a juvenile parade, a men’s slow pitch tournament, sand volleyball, a street dance, and on Sunday the largest parade in the area to close the show. The theme this year was “Looking Back at 125 Years of Popcorn Days,” which is what happens when the anniversary becomes the headline: the parade turns into a mirror. II spent my childhood summers in North Loup with my grandfather, in a house where the television pulled in exactly one signal, channel 10/11, and where the calendar bent around one August weekend the way other towns bend around Christmas. The smell arrived before the event did. Hot oil, salt, the sweet dust hanging over the poppers. You could stand at the edge of town with your eyes closed and know what week it was.

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The Moon Takes the Bow: The Longest Fight in the Sky, Scored on Love, Fear, Respect, and Attention

Two fighters have been circling each other since before anyone kept records, and the purse has never changed hands: the human gaze. In one corner burns a furnace so vast that something like a million Earths could rattle around inside it, the engine behind every green leaf and every heartbeat on this planet. In the other corner floats a charcoal-colored rock, airless and dead, throwing back about twelve percent of the light that hits it. On paper the match is a slaughter. In practice the rock has been taking rounds for ten thousand years, and the strangest fact on the whole card is a matter of scheduling, since only one of these two shows up for both shifts.

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Fourteen Paintings for No One: The Most Somber Art Ever Made

Sad art is everywhere, and it comes cheap. Somber art is rare, because somber means sorrow that keeps its shape after the tears dry, sorrow with gravity, no laugh track, no lifeline. Ask which art is the most somber of all and the question sets a brutal standard: the winner must be born of grief, must depict grief, must refuse every exit from grief, and must offer no joy and no gesture of human harmony anywhere in its making or its reception. That last clause is the killer. Art is a social act before it is anything else. A song wants an ear. The play wants a house. Every poem wants a voice to carry it. Harmony rides along in the address itself, before a single consoling note gets played, and so nearly every candidate for the darkest art in the world fails on delivery, whatever horrors it contains.

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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.

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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?”

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