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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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The Off Switch: When Money Becomes Permission

An all-digital economy promises a world without friction. The same design that makes payment effortless makes denial effortless, and it hands every government a quiet way to decide whether you may eat. Pay for coffee with a glance at your phone. Send rent across the country before the barista finishes the pour. Split a dinner bill at the table with no cash, no card, and no fuss. The case for a fully digital economy arrives wrapped in that smoothness, and the smoothness is real. The danger sits one layer underneath, in a question almost no one asks at the register: who has to approve this payment for it to clear, and what becomes of me on the day they decide not to?

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The Money That Never Leaves the Room: How AI’s Circular Financing Revived a Warning Richard Cantillon Issued Three Hundred Years Ago

In September 2025, the chip company Nvidia announced that it would put as much as $100 billion into OpenAI. The pledge carried a condition that few headlines bothered to translate: OpenAI would spend a large share of the money leasing and buying Nvidia’s own processors to fill the data centers the investment was meant to build. Nvidia pays OpenAI. OpenAI pays Nvidia. The figure on the press release reads as growth. The mechanism underneath reads as a man moving a coin from his right pocket to his left and announcing that the household has grown richer.

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The Placebo Button

The elevator in my building has a door-close button that does nothing. I learned this the way everyone learns it, which is to say I pressed it for years under the impression that it was speeding up my departure. The button lights up. It makes a small click when pressed. It provides every sensory signal of function. What it does not do is close the door any faster than the door was going to close on its own. The elevators in most American buildings installed since 1990 have door-close buttons wired to nothing, because the Americans with Disabilities Act requires the door to stay open long enough for a person using a wheelchair or walker to enter, and the button that overrides that requirement is accessible only to the fire department with a key.

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The Face on the Building: America’s Palazzo Braschi Moment

In 1934, the Fascist Party Federation draped the facade of Rome’s Palazzo Braschi with an enormous sculpted face of Benito Mussolini, surrounded by the word “SI” repeated in cascading rows. The building sat between Piazza Navona and the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, in the heart of a city that had been shaping political identity through architecture for two thousand years. That face functioned as an instruction. Citizens who walked beneath it understood, whether they could articulate it or not, that the state had claimed the visual field, and that to exist in public space was to exist under observation and under obligation, holding the urban semiotic.

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