Founded 1983: Liberal Mindset; Conservative Morality

November 7, 2026

The Ghosts in the Dead Protocols

The handshake began with a whistle. You dialed the number and the line rang once, and then a high, steady tone answered with small snaps buried in it, like static caught in fence wire. A flurry of quick chirps followed, two machines trading menus in a language pitched past the human ear. Then the chord came, a rank of test tones sounded together so each machine could hear what the line had done to the other. After it came the long hiss of training and then the silence. A small light on the modem’s face said the connection held. I heard that sequence most nights for five years in the 1990s, in a room lit by a beige monitor, and I learned to diagnose a call by ear the way a mechanic hears a bad bearing. The screech people mock was a ceremony. Two machines were introducing themselves, and we were allowed to listen.

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October 28, 2026

The School That Signed

The first student was a girl from Omaha named Katie Callahan. She came through the door of a school building on Twenty-Second Street, between St. Mary and Leavenworth, on April 1, 1869, and Nebraska began teaching its deaf children. The legislature had voted the school into existence two years earlier, and the man in charge of it was a deaf man. Principal William DeCoursey French ran the Nebraska School for the Deaf alongside a minister named Henry W. Kuhns, and the medium of instruction was sign language. A deaf child could walk in and see a deaf adult in charge, and most such children had never seen that before. Forty-two years later, the same state made that language illegal in the school’s classrooms.

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August 13, 2026

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.