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DO HARM: The Book That Began with a Word I Did Not Know

I am not a physician. I have never cultured a specimen, read a chest film, or signed a death certificate. I trained as a dramatist at Columbia, in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center, which qualifies me to tell you how a scene builds and not much else about a hospital. So let me get the obvious objection out of the way early, because it is the first thing a serious reader should ask. What business does a playwright have writing a book about hospital-acquired infection? The answer is the whole book, and it starts in a shut room in Newark in 2002.

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The Séance Court: Original Intent and the Fraud of Speaking for the Dead

Nine lawyers in black robes sit in a marble temple in Washington and commune with the dead. They ask James Madison, silent since 1836, how he feels about bump stocks. They ask a Virginia planter to rule on geofence warrants and a Boston merchant to weigh encrypted messaging, and they transcribe the answers with straight faces into the United States Reports. Every other corner of American life has a name for this ritual. When a widow pays for it in a candlelit parlor, we call it a séance and we call the medium a fraud. When five justices perform it in October Term, we call it originalism, and law schools award tenure for defending the candles.

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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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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.

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Notes on Tomorrow as Tribute

The book is out. The title is Tomorrow as Tribute: The Politics of the Burnt Future. It is available in paperback, in Kindle, and as a free web edition through David Boles Books. The audiobook is in production with narrator selection underway. The web edition is free because I want the argument to circulate as widely as possible.

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The Senator Who Used to Be Cory Booker

We taught at Rutgers-Newark in the same years, before he was mayor, before the Senate, before the rebranding. We shared a building lobby on University Avenue. I never shook his hand. I did not need to. Everyone on that campus knew Cory. He pulled the air toward him when he walked through a door, a Rhodes Scholar, a Yale-trained lawyer who had chosen Newark when he could have chosen Manhattan or Washington, a young man who spoke about education the way ministers speak about scripture. Students mattered to him. He believed a city scarred by Sharpe James and three decades of municipal corruption could be reformed from inside its worst housing project, into which he had moved on purpose. I watched that man hold a room without effort. He had a builder’s mind. He had, in the older sense of the word, character.

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The Conditions Were Not the Ones I Would Have Chosen

The cultural and political conditions under which my new book RelationShaping: Field Studies has been published are not the conditions I would have chosen for it. The book is an argument for sustained attention, long apprenticeship, and the slow acquisition of perceptual capacities that operate below the level of declarative description. It enters a culture where the dominant economic logic rewards short attention, fast turnover, and the substitution of automated outputs for the trained reading those outputs are supposed to approximate. I make the case anyway, because the case needs making, and because the people who recognize what the book is describing will recognize it whether the cultural moment is favorable or not.

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