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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at the University of California, San Francisco, a chemist who had grown up in the Philippines watching people take outdated medicine and get better anyway.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.”

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The Candlelit Lie: The Illuminati, the Masons, the Skull and Bones, and the Power That Hides Nothing

The word Illuminati arrives wrapped in candlelight and oath, conjuring a hidden council of masterminds who steer history from a chamber no camera has ever found. The image has held its grip for more than two centuries, and the grip tightens whenever the world feels ungovernable. A pandemic, a market crash, an election that smells stolen, a war that makes no sense to the people paying for it: each crisis sends a fresh wave of seekers hunting for the secret hand behind the curtain. The search flatters the seeker, because it promises that the chaos has an author, that the suffering was planned, and that a door exists somewhere with the guilty men sitting behind it. That promise is a lie, and the lie does real damage, since the energy poured into chasing phantoms gets stolen from the visible machinery that shapes an actual life.

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Figure Eights

The internet has decided that modern humans are developing zoochosis, the madness of caged animals. The claim is older than TikTok, and the truth underneath it is more uncomfortable than either the believers or the scoffers want it to be. For most of the 1990s, the most famous resident of the Central Park Zoo was a 700-pound polar bear named Gus who spent up to twelve hours a day swimming the same figure eight through the same small pool. Back and forth. The same loop, traced into the water until it wore a groove in the day. Reporters called him neurotic, depressed, flaky, and bipolar, and New Yorkers half-adopted him as a mascot for their own condition. In 1994 the zoo paid an animal behaviorist twenty-five thousand dollars to find out what was wrong, and the verdict passed into legend. Gus, the behaviorist said, was bored and mildly crazy in the way that a lot of people in New York are. The zoo redesigned his habitat, hid his food inside blocks of ice, gave him toys, and made him the first zoo animal in recorded history to be put on Prozac. The swimming eased. It never fully stopped. Until the day he died in 2013, there were afternoons when Gus would throw himself back into the water and trace the loop again, and again, and again.

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The Subtraction Economy

How they take more, give you less, and train you not to notice. Pour two fingers of the vodka you trusted ten years ago and you taste grain, cold, and a clean burn that meant something had been distilled with care. Pour the same brand today and you get water and a faint chemical ghost of that promise. The bottle looks identical and the price has climbed, while the liquid inside has been quietly reformulated down toward rotgut. A label held constant over a swapped recipe is the entire con, and the house is betting you will never run a blind taste test against a memory, because memory fades while the bottle on the shelf looks just like the one you loved.

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The Magnificent Loser: The Book I Wrote to Answer Two Words in Red Ink

Every writer carries a verdict he never agreed to. Mine was two words long, written in red marker across the title page of a play I cared about, by a historian whose judgment I had asked for and could not afford to ignore. BAD DRAMA. No note beneath it, no argument, no second page. I was in my twenties. I put the play in a drawer and told myself I had learned something useful about my own limits. It took me forty years to understand that I had learned the wrong lesson, and that the right one would take an entire book to say.

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What the Dramatist Knows About Monsters

I sold my first paid byline to a Lincoln, Nebraska, newspaper at the age of ten. That was 1975. In the fifty-one years since, I have continued to be paid to construct figures that audiences will find frightening, or sympathetic, or contemptible, or laughable, on schedule, in plays and musicals and screenplays and novels and podcast scripts and editorial work. My Dramatists Guild membership dates from 1984. My MFA is from the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University. A publishing house I founded in the same year I sold the first byline has operated without interruption since. The inventory exists for a single reason: the labor of figure-construction is something I know from inside the work, and the working-dramatist’s perspective on that labor is the perspective from which my new book is written.

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Seeing Around Corners

The phrase “seeing around corners” gets tossed around boardrooms and strategy meetings as though it were a compliment, a kind of secular beatification for the executive or thinker who got there first. But the phrase deserves closer scrutiny, because what it actually describes is a discipline, and one that most people refuse to practice because the conclusions it produces are uncomfortable.

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