Page 2 of 12

Posted on

Honest Opacity

Honesty is a rule about what you say. Transparency is a rule about what you hide. They are different instruments, and the confusion between them is how power keeps its secrets in the open. Two words get treated as synonyms by people who ought to know the difference, and the people who exploit the confusion understand it best of all. A company under investigation announces that it has been fully transparent and expects the phrase to function as an alibi. A politician says he has nothing to hide and trusts you to hear it as proof of innocence. Each one is trading on a slippage between two ideas that are not the same and do not even point the same way.

Continue reading → Honest Opacity

Posted on

Make the Decision Right: A 1987 Aphorism Against the Age of the Open Tab

An old professor of mine, holding forth in 1987, handed his students one sentence to carry out the door: don’t make the right decision; make the decision right. He attached a coda that landed harder than the maxim itself. Regret, he told us, is mindless. I have been turning that sentence over for nearly four decades, and the turning has become its own education, because the sentence makes a metaphysical bet most listeners never notice they are taking. It claims that rightness arrives after the choosing, manufactured through labor and revision, and that no quantity of advance analysis can locate it beforehand, since the future refuses to sit still long enough to be computed. With one stroke the professor moved the entire moral weight of decision-making off the moment of selection and onto the years of execution. Pick a door, any door, then build a house behind it.

Continue reading → Make the Decision Right: A 1987 Aphorism Against the Age of the Open Tab

Posted on

The Rented Crowd: Nero’s Five Thousand, the Paris Claque, and the Box That Laughed for America

For the better part of two decades, the laughter of the United States lived inside a padlocked box. Charles Rolland Douglass, a CBS sound engineer who had spent the war helping the Navy develop shipboard radar, built the device in the early 1950s and guarded it the way a sexton guards a reliquary. The laff box, as he called it, stood a little over two feet tall and worked like an organ: keys for titters, chortles, belly laughs, shrieks, a foot pedal to let a wave of mirth swell, crest, and die on command. Douglass wheeled it from studio to studio himself. Clients heard the output and never saw the mechanism. Only his immediate family knew what the inside looked like, and when he finally stepped back from the work, his sons carried the trade forward like a guild secret. The industry word for what he did was sweetening, which tells you the industry understood the product. Sugar is what you add when the thing itself goes down easier disguised.

Continue reading → The Rented Crowd: Nero’s Five Thousand, the Paris Claque, and the Box That Laughed for America

Posted on

The Unfathered: A Short Story for a Long World

There is a part of the Book of Genesis that almost no one reads aloud. It sits between the famous scenes, the garden and the flood, and it is only a list. Adam lived a number of years and begat Seth. Seth lived and begat Enosh. The text walks down the page through nine generations of fathers and sons, each man reduced to two facts, that he lived and that he made another like himself, until the line reaches Noah and the world is ready to drown. I used to skip those passages. I read one again last night, on a laptop in an apartment I am about to leave, and I understood for the first time that a genealogy is a horror story told slowly enough to be survived.

Continue reading → The Unfathered: A Short Story for a Long World

Posted on

What the Lemmings Could Not Do: On Suicide, Cognition, and the Mortal Imagination

Of all the acts a human being can perform, suicide is the strangest. It requires the actor to picture a world without itself, judge that world preferable, and execute a plan whose author will not survive to see the result. No other behavior in the human repertoire so cleanly inverts the survival logic that built every body and every brain. The question of whether other animals do the same thing is a question about cognition. The behavior is downstream of cognition, and beneath cognition runs the question of meaning. To kill oneself one must first have the kind of self that can be killed by its owner.

Continue reading → What the Lemmings Could Not Do: On Suicide, Cognition, and the Mortal Imagination

Posted on

The Glass People: The Materials of Madness, from the Glass King to the Simulation

More than six hundred years ago, the King of France stopped letting anyone touch him. Charles VI had iron rods sewn into his clothing and moved through his palace with the stiff care of a man carrying something breakable, because he believed he was carrying something breakable. He believed it was himself. The chronicles of his reign record that the king became convinced his body had turned to glass, and that a careless embrace or an ordinary stumble would shatter him to pieces on the stone floor.

Continue reading → The Glass People: The Materials of Madness, from the Glass King to the Simulation

Posted on

The Number on the Wall: Why Physicists Call 137 Magic

I came to 137 the way most people come to it, by hearing it called a magic number and wanting to know whether the word was earned. My instinct with a claim like that is suspicion, because a working life spent around language and persuasion teaches you how easily a large word gets draped over a small thing. This time the suspicion did not survive the facts. The number turned out to be real in a way I had not expected, and the people most gripped by it have been some of the hardest-headed physicists who ever lived.

Continue reading → The Number on the Wall: Why Physicists Call 137 Magic