Page 13 of 19

Posted on

The Quotation’s Chain of Custody

A mug sits on the desk with Marilyn Monroe’s face under the sentence Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” The object is wrong at the name and prone to wording drift, and it keeps selling because the right sentiment can carry any name. The claim riding beside it has manners: why care whether the mug gives Monroe a line written by Ulrich, or whether a poster hands Voltaire a sentence built by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, so long as the line still stirs? Its appeal points to use over receipt. Its conclusion says the words have done good work in the world, and good work should settle the bill.

Continue reading → The Quotation’s Chain of Custody

Posted on

The Name You Cannot Give Yourself

Every semester it happens by the second week. A student in ASL 1, bright and eager and already half in love with the language, waits until the room empties and asks me for a sign name. The asking is shy and confident at the same time, the way people ask for something they assume is a formality, a small ceremony the teacher performs on request, like handing back a quiz. I tell them no. Then I tell them why, and the why takes the rest of the semester, and if I teach it well, it takes the rest of their lives. I want to set the why down in one place, because the question deserves a fuller answer than a hallway can hold, and because the answer opens a door into how Deaf culture actually works, which is what my students came to learn whether they know it yet or not. Two notes on words before we start. Students usually say sign name; the scholarship says name sign; I answer to both terms and grant neither on request. And when I write Deaf with a capital D, I mean the culture: the language, the schools, the clubs, the families, the jokes, the weddings, the funerals, the whole inherited world of people who live in American Sign Language. Small-d deaf is an audiogram. Capital-D Deaf is a people. The name sign belongs to the people.

Continue reading → The Name You Cannot Give Yourself

Posted on

The One-Way Drop: Why a Drop of White Blood Never Made Anyone White

American race law rests on a piece of arithmetic no mathematician would sign: one drop of Black blood makes a person Black, and a flood of white blood makes nobody white. The formula runs in a single direction, and it has run that way for more than three centuries. Ask why the obverse rule never existed, why no statute, no census, no courtroom ever held that a drop of white blood confers whiteness, and you have asked the question that unlocks the whole machinery, because a rule that only works one way was never measuring what it claimed to measure.

Continue reading → The One-Way Drop: Why a Drop of White Blood Never Made Anyone White

Posted on

The Last Day of the Guarantee

A box of prescription drugs sat forgotten in the back closet of a retail pharmacy long enough that some of the pills predated the 1969 moon landing. Sealed bottles, original containers, never opened. Diet pills under brand names nobody has spoken aloud in forty years. Barbiturates. A four-ingredient headache compound. Every one of them was at least twenty-eight years past the date stamped on the label, which meant that under every rule governing American pharmacy, they were garbage. Lee Cantrell, who helps run the California Poison Control System, looked at the box and saw an experiment nobody could afford to run on purpose. He called Roy Gerona at the University of California, San Francisco, a chemist who had grown up in the Philippines watching people take outdated medicine and get better anyway. Gerona ran the contents through liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. The results were published in the Archives of Internal Medicine on October 8, 2012, under a title that gives away nothing: “Stability of Active Ingredients in Long-Expired Prescription Medications.”

Continue reading → The Last Day of the Guarantee

Posted on

No One Dies Lying

On the twenty-second of May, 1929, at Fort Riley, Kansas, a woman named Zenana Shepard sent her nurse to a closet for a bottle of bootleg whiskey. She said the liquor had a strange smell and a strange taste, and she asked whether enough remained in the bottle to test it for poison. Then she said the sentence that would outlive her by four years and travel all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States: “Dr. Shepard has poisoned me.” The doctor was her husband, Charles A. Shepard, a major in the Army medical corps, and the government would later argue he had salted that whiskey with bichloride of mercury because he loved a woman named Grace Brandon and his wife declined to divorce him. Zenana Shepard died on the fifteenth of June. Her husband was convicted of her murder, and her sentence, the spoken one, did much of the convicting.

Continue reading → No One Dies Lying

Posted on

There, But Not There: The Phantom DNA Effect and the Physics of Absence

A viral video promises a ghost in the machine. The real ghosts of science are stranger, and they had to earn the name. A reader sent me a short video this week with the kind of claim that arrives already glowing. A Russian scientist, the narrator says, shone laser light through a sealed vacuum chamber. Empty, the light scattered at random. Drop in a sample of DNA, and the photons arranged themselves into the shape of a double helix, as if the molecule had taught the light how to hold a form. Then comes the part that makes people forward the video to friends. The scientist removed the DNA, disturbed nothing else, and shone the light again. The helix pattern was still there. The molecule had left a ghost in the empty chamber, an imprint pressed into the quantum field. The narrator calls it the DNA phantom effect and lets the word “amazing” do the rest.

Continue reading → There, But Not There: The Phantom DNA Effect and the Physics of Absence

Posted on

Getting the Flock Out of Ord, Nebraska

The county seat of my boyhood summers just voted, five to nothing, to pull its surveillance cameras off the poles, the first town in Nebraska to do it. The reasons cut deeper than the invoice. Ord, Nebraska sits eleven miles up the North Loup River valley from the village of North Loup, where I spent the summers of my boyhood on my grandfather’s place, and in the mental geography of a ten-year-old those eleven miles separated the known world from its capital. North Loup had a few hundred souls, a grain elevator, and Popcorn Days. Ord had the Valley County courthouse with a square built around it, implement lots, storefront commerce enough to dazzle a village kid, and a radio station whose call letters spell the valley itself: K-N-L-V, North Loup Valley, on the air at 1060 since 1965 with farm markets in the morning and high school ball at night. When my grandfather’s rooftop antenna strained for television it caught one signal, 10/11 out of Lincoln, and that was the extent of the visible world. Ord was “town.” You washed up a little before going.

Continue reading → Getting the Flock Out of Ord, Nebraska