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The Last Closed Sunday

The World Cup final fell on a Sunday this year. The largest crowd of the summer poured out of MetLife Stadium, and the stores at American Dream were open and selling. Ten miles north, the biggest mall in New Jersey was dark. Westfield Garden State Plaza closes every Sunday. Paramus Park closes. The Bergen Town Center closes. Nearly every other retailer in Bergen County closes, because a statute older than any of the malls says clothing, furniture, appliances, lumber, and home furnishings may not change hands on the first day of the week. Bergen County likes it that way. The voters have said so twice, both times by landslide. The voters never got a say over the ground under American Dream. That is where the case lives.

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The Square Outlived the Paper

I live in a tower named for a square named for a newspaper. My building is called Journal Squared, three glass sections rising beside the Journal Square PATH station in Jersey City, one of the busiest stations in the system. The square below is Journal Square, which the city created in 1923. The newspaper was the Jersey Journal, which ceased publication on February 1, 2025, at the age of 157. Two of those three things still exist. The paper is not one of them.

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Make a Game of Life

In North Loup, Nebraska, where I spent my boyhood summers with my grandfather, the television pulled one signal out of the sky, channel 10/11, and when the picture dissolved into snow the day still had eight hours left in it. A boy in a town like that learns the oldest technology on earth. Boredom is a raw material. A long afternoon wants shape, and shape comes from rules: the stick is a bat because we agree it is, the crack in the walk is a foul line because we say so, the score matters because we decide it matters. Nobody sold us that afternoon. We manufactured it ourselves, on the spot, out of dust and agreement, and the dust became the best part of the summer.

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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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One Electron, Threaded Through Time

In the spring of 1940 the telephone rang in the graduate residence at Princeton, and Richard Feynman, then a doctoral student, picked it up to hear the voice of his advisor, John Archibald Wheeler. Wheeler skipped the greeting. He had solved a mystery no one else had thought to name, he said, and he knew why every electron in the universe carries exactly the same mass and exactly the same charge. The answer was that they are all the same electron.

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Twenty Billion Scans a Month: Have We Already Lost the Farm?

The questions arrive together, the way dread arrives. Have we already lost the farm? Can anything already recorded be dissolved and unlinked from our names? Is every Bluetooth signal tied to us, every chip in every pet a beacon, every Flock camera quietly cataloguing the bodies that walk and drive past it? And if enough of those answers are yes, why are companies pouring concrete across the desert to raise data centers the size of small cities, and what is the end of it, to track, to prosecute, to imprison? I chased the documentation and let it correct me where I was wrong. Here is what holds up.

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The Escape From Politics

Somewhere in the source code of a website the public was never meant to see, a secret society for the people who run the world kept a list of its members in plain text, sitting in the page where anyone who thought to look could read it. On the morning of Monday, June 15, somebody looked.[1] The group is called Dialog, an invitation-only network founded in 2006 by the investor Peter Thiel and the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Auren Hoffman, and for two decades it kept one promise to its members above all the others: that nothing said inside the room would ever be written down where the rest of us could find it.[1] That promise held until the society’s own code broke it.

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