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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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