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The Voice Goes Off: Writing My Half of Back to Willowbrook

On the first day of my classes at New York University, the voice goes off. I stand at the front of the room and I do not speak, and no one else will speak for the rest of the semester, because the language my students have come to learn does not live in the throat. It lives in the hands and the face and the shaped space between two people, and the fastest way to teach that is to stop pretending otherwise on day one.

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Twenty Billion Scans a Month: Have We Already Lost the Farm?

The questions arrive together, the way dread arrives. Have we already lost the farm? Can anything already recorded be dissolved and unlinked from our names? Is every Bluetooth signal tied to us, every chip in every pet a beacon, every Flock camera quietly cataloguing the bodies that walk and drive past it? And if enough of those answers are yes, why are companies pouring concrete across the desert to raise data centers the size of small cities, and what is the end of it, to track, to prosecute, to imprison? I chased the documentation and let it correct me where I was wrong. Here is what holds up.

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The Escape From Politics

Somewhere in the source code of a website the public was never meant to see, a secret society for the people who run the world kept a list of its members in plain text, sitting in the page where anyone who thought to look could read it. On the morning of Monday, June 15, somebody looked.[1] The group is called Dialog, an invitation-only network founded in 2006 by the investor Peter Thiel and the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Auren Hoffman, and for two decades it kept one promise to its members above all the others: that nothing said inside the room would ever be written down where the rest of us could find it.[1] That promise held until the society’s own code broke it.

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Still YUkon

My 212 number is YUkon 2. The exchange was retired as a spoken name sometime in the 1960s, when the phone company finished converting the system from alphanumeric to pure digits, and the YU that used to stand at the front of every Upper West Side number became a 9 and an 8 on a rotary dial. The number remained the same. What changed was the meaning. YUkon 2-8888 was an address. 982-8888 is a string of digits.

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The Harvest: Canada’s MAID Program, Eugenics, and the Commodification of Despair

When a state administers death as a healthcare service and then discovers the dead have commercially valuable parts, the question is no longer about dignity. It is about inventory. Something has gone structurally wrong in Canada, and the evidence is no longer ambiguous. In 2024, 16,499 Canadians died through the country’s Medical Assistance in Dying program, accounting for 5.1 percent of all deaths nationally. Since legalization in 2016, the cumulative total has surpassed 76,000. One in every twenty Canadian deaths is now a state-administered killing, dressed in the language of compassion and categorized by Health Canada not as a cause of death, but as a “health service.” That semantic sleight of hand is doing heavier lifting than any euphemism should be asked to bear.

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2024 Return to Happy Jack Mountain

Janna and I made a pilgrimage to Happy Jack Mountain near North Loup and Scotia, Nebraska this summer. Okay, maybe Happy Jack is more hill than a mountain, but because Nebraska (Otoe for “Flat Water”) is pretty dang flat, any rolling hill easily becomes a mountainous monument in memory. Happy Jack sits over the chalk mines below, and we’ll get to that wonder of the valley in a future article. The goal of us trekking up Happy Jack — me, for the second time, and for Janna, first — was to land in front of a giant, wooden cross atop the mountain. Easter services are held under the cross every year, but my question, now as an aged, and somewhat wizened 59-year-old man-child was, and still is, this: WHO IS CLIMBING HAPPY JACK MOUNTAIN ON EASTER MORNING? (the threat of dying is palpably real!)

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What the Dead Leave Behind

Every death is a beginning of the end of the beginning of the end. Or something like that; but there is no curiosity more powerful than the clues the dead leave behind as breadcrumb secrets of who they really were during their lives, along with all the curses left behind with the truths of their real, haunting, hidden, desires.

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