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The Clock Came Off the Wall

In the spring of 2018, schools in England started taking analog clocks down from the walls of their examination halls. The reason arrived in the education press without a trace of shame: teenagers sitting their exams could no longer read a dial, they grew anxious watching a circle that told them nothing, and the schools judged it kinder to remove the clock than to teach the child. A deputy leader of the head teachers’ association explained that students were more accurate with digital displays. So the ladders went up, the hands came down, and an instrument that had governed rooms of learning for two centuries was carried to the storage closet as a courtesy to the people it once served. I have kept that ladder in my head ever since, because it shows the modern school system performing its signature move in a single gesture: confronted with an untaught skill, remove the evidence.

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Journal Square, Where the Library Only Takes Returns

On August 17, 2026, the Jersey City Free Public Library installed a book drop outside its Five Corners Branch at 678 Newark Avenue. The building behind it, sixty-nine years old and dark since early July, will accept what you give back. It will lend you nothing. A parking lot where a Bookmobile idles four days a week is now the whole of the public library in Journal Square, the neighborhood at the center of the loudest building boom in New Jersey’s second-largest city. I live in this city. I have spent my working life writing, editing, and publishing books, and I can tell you what that steel drop says to a child walking past it on the way to school: the city will take from you, and the city has stopped giving.


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Nobody Knocks in Dallas

Texas wrote the fastest foreclosure clock in America. State law requires a letter giving the borrower twenty days to cure the default, then twenty-one days of posted notice, and on the first Tuesday of the month the house goes to auction at the courthouse door. Federal servicing rules add a floor of 120 days of delinquency before the first legal step, so call it five months from the first missed payment to the crier calling for bids. Five months. Across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex this year, households have sailed past five months, past twelve, past fourteen, and the crier stays home. The reports are accurate in their bones: thousands of families are living in houses they stopped paying for, the lender mails a brochure about options, and nobody knocks.

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The Vans Are Still Warm

Just after two in the morning on March 29, 1984, fifteen Mayflower moving vans pulled out of the Baltimore Colts’ complex in Owings Mills and scattered onto different highways so no single court order could catch them all. Maryland’s legislature had spent that week advancing a bill to seize the team by eminent domain, and Robert Irsay beat the bill out of the state. By sunrise the Colts belonged to Indianapolis, which had spent $77.5 million raising the Hoosier Dome on speculation, a nest built before Indiana had any bird to put in it. One landed. The city took its bows, Irsay took the building, and Baltimore took four decades of grief it can still recite by heart.

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John Fetterman Punched Us in the Mouth

On May 10, 2022, I published an article on this page under the headline “John Fetterman Will Punch You in the Mouth!” I meant it as tribute. I called him “what a Democrat used to be,” a man “of the land, against the elite power, for the common good,” and I welcomed him into my invented fraternity of “Big Uglies,” the large, plain, unpressed men who do the country’s heavy carrying. The year before, on my Human Meme podcast, in an episode called “The Great White Bridge as Throughline,” I had floated him as a future Democratic President, with Keisha Lance Bottoms standing as his second. I believed the hoodie. I believed the shorts, the goatee, the 6’8″ frame, the tattooed forearms, the whole costume of the steel-town avenger who, I assured you, “suffers no fools.” Four years later I am here to take it back, in public, at length, because the recantation is owed, and because the autopsy of my error teaches more than the error did.

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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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Take Your Children Offline NOW: Twenty-One Years Later

In July of 2005, I published Take Your Children Offline NOW on this blog, and the comments arrived in two distinct waves. The first wave came from parents who said the article forced them to think, and several of them removed every photograph of their children from their websites within hours of reading it. The second wave came from parents and bloggers who told me, with varying degrees of contempt, that I was hysterical, paranoid, anti-celebration, and ill-positioned to speak on parenting because I was married without children. One commenter wrote that if he lived in fear of someone furtively masturbating to pictures of his kids, he would never get anything done. The post was held up by a few critics as a case study in childless people moralizing at parents.

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