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The States That Will Not Be Commanded

There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.

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The Funeral of Handwriting: What We Lose When the Hand Stops Moving

In 2010, the Common Core State Standards Initiative dropped cursive instruction from its recommended curriculum. The decision arrived without ceremony. No public debate, no period of mourning, no recognition that a cognitive practice stretching back to the Sumerian reed stylus was being retired from American education. Forty-one states adopted the standards. Cursive, along with its slower sibling manuscript handwriting, began its institutional death.

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The Inescapable Return of Donald Trump

Donald Trump is a disgrace to America and a verified liar in the specific; and yet, I cannot get over this obligation of wonder that he has never left the consciousness of America. He is resurrected. He will return. Vengeance against us will be his. Trump still rules us from afar. He decides us. His hold over the feeble-minded, and the uneducated, is as strong as ever after his election loss and yet, for some reason, he is immaculately venerated by those he reviles. Does any reasonable person paying attention to abortion rights, the evisceration of voting rights, and the incongruous dismantling of OSHA worker protections not believe the game is already set and staged for a victorious Trump return in 2024? It appears to be all but inevitable now. The one chance we had to stop him — by standing up to the GOP in the Senate — failed miserably and miraculously. The Democrats are a proud, but unwily, gang of magnificent losers.

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