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The Drive Would Not Spin: An Imagined Account Set in the Near Future

The drive would not spin for me. It held the original sensor records from three floods, and the public summary said a restored wetland had reduced every peak. The summary had become the accepted account in my county. Farmers repeated it at meetings. The water district used it in planning. A restored marsh had become the answer to an argument that still flooded people’s fields.

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Ten Halloweens at the Door

The centennial lands on October 31, 2026, the Detroit Historical Museum throws an evening of magic and mystery to mark a hundred years since Harry Houdini died in that city. Appleton, Wisconsin, where the boy Ehrich Weiss grew up, unveils a historical marker in Houdini Plaza the same day. At the Magic Castle in Hollywood, a centennial auction sells off his handcuffs and posters while a members’ séance waits for the night. In New York, thirteen invited guests file into his old townhouse for three closed sittings. Nobody scheduled any of it for October 30. The country knows which date belongs to him.

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Sharper Than the Original

The scene sits about ten minutes into The French Connection. Buddy Russo has been stabbed, and on the way out of the station Popeye Doyle tells him what the wound means. The exchange is short. Doyle calls Russo a dumb guinea. Russo asks how he was supposed to know the man had a knife. Doyle answers with the word that settles what Doyle is. Russo says the man could have been white. Doyle says, never trust anyone.

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The Last Memorizers

The examiner names two places. A square in Islington, a hospital across the river. The candidate sits across the desk in a Transport for London office on Baker Street and calls the run out loud: the streets in order, the exact curb where the passenger is set down. Each appearance gives him four of these calls in about twenty minutes. Marks come off for wrong street names and banned turns. Hesitation alone can sink an answer, because a route that cannot be recalled at traffic speed cannot be driven at traffic speed. This is the Knowledge of London, and it still begins and ends the same way, with a human being reciting a city from the skull.

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The Lotus Tea

Catherine Liu took the stage in London on September 21 to talk about trauma. She was there for Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, new from Verso. The book argues that trauma has been commodified into a politics of permanent victimhood, and that its loudest merchants trade in something other than the true suffering of people. Midway through the conversation with Ash Sarkar on Novara Media’s Downstream, Liu, a cultural critic and professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine, swerved into Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. She apologized for the tangent, and her interviewer told her to keep going. “What a phenomenal tangent that was,” she said when she surfaced.

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The Second Cow

Howard Stein told jokes the way other professors assigned books. He ran the playwriting program at Columbia and chaired its Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies, after teaching stops at Iowa and Yale. By the time I knew him he had trained a generation of American playwrights, and he still worked a classroom like a man with one good story left. The story he returned to was the one about the two farmers. He told it flat, without performance, the way you tell something you believe is true.

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The Arthur Miller Transistor Radio

Arthur Miller’s great demand was that attention be paid. His son Danny waited ten minutes away for nearly forty years for the same grace. In the winter of 1990 I was Arthur Kopit’s assistant through my Columbia MFA internship. I had helped him on his Phantom musical with Maury Yeston, and now the work was a staged reading of his new play at Circle Repertory in the Village, a theater with the size and polish of a garage. The play was called Bone-the-Fish, a savage comedy about Hollywood deal-making, and Kopit told me how he had named it. The title was his answer to David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow. Mamet’s title meant nothing, he argued, and it had found success anyway, so he imitated the trick and answered with nonsense of his own, aimed at the same target. Better heads prevailed later; when Circle Rep gave the play its full production, it went up as Road to Nirvana. Sigourney Weaver was in the reading. The actors sat on folding chairs with scripts in their laps. There were no sets, no lights to speak of, no money. My job that night was to watch the door for Arthur Miller. When he came in, I walked him quietly to the last row, and we sat together. He did not know I was an intern, did not know my name, knew nothing about me, and asked nothing. At some point he leaned over and whispered, with open disgust, “Oh, hell! This is only a staged reading?” I did not reply. The man next to me had written Death of a Salesman, and I was the intern who had seated him, proud to share his folding chairs.

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