The Architecture of Forgetting

Aristotle said we become brave by doing brave things. The prairie understood this twenty-four centuries later when it built institutions that made brave things ordinary.

Now, why does any of this belong on a podcast about consciousness and the human condition? Because what I am describing is not merely a sociological phenomenon. It is a crisis of awareness. We dismantled these technologies across two generations, between roughly 1960 and 2020, and we did it one reasonable decision at a time, and at no point did anyone stand up and say: we are removing the infrastructure that produces citizens. Nobody said it because nobody saw it. The forgetting was built into the process. Each individual replacement seemed logical. In aggregate, they amounted to an act of civilizational self-erasure.

This is what makes the prairie such a powerful diagnostic instrument. In a city, civic life can sustain itself through sheer proximity. People bump into each other and institutions emerge from the friction. On the prairie, where the nearest neighbor might be a mile away and the nearest town twenty, every act of community is deliberate. The barn does not raise itself. The letter does not write itself. When deliberate acts cease, the absence is immediate and total. You do not fade from civic life on the prairie. You disappear from it. And because the land is flat and the light is honest, the disappearance is visible in a way that urban decline never is. You can count the closed schools. You can drive the abandoned roads. You can stand in the silence where a town used to be and understand, in your body rather than your mind, what it means when the infrastructure of mutual obligation collapses.

Check out this episode!

The Loneliest Thing in the Universe

People sometimes ask writers how long a book takes. The honest answer is always unsatisfying because the honest answer is: the whole time. Everything I have read, studied, failed at, observed, and lived through is in these stories somewhere. My training in dramatic literature at Columbia is in the structure. My years studying medicine are in the neurological precision of "The Limerick Ward" and the physics of "The Atomic Man." My time studying law is in the procedural architecture of "The Man Who Knew Too Much." My decades of teaching are in the conviction that a story should leave you knowing something you did not know before, not because the author lectured you, but because the character's experience rearranged something in your understanding.

But the specific creative archaeology of this collection, the work of recognizing that these twelve pieces belonged together and then preparing them for publication, that involved a different kind of effort. It meant going back into stories I had written years ago, sometimes decades ago, and asking whether they still meant what I thought they meant. Some of them did. Some of them had grown into something larger while I wasn't looking, the way a tree you planted as a sapling has become something you cannot get your arms around. And some of them needed work, not because they were broken but because I was different, and the book they were joining was more demanding than any of them had been on their own.

Check out this episode!

The Pharmacist's Bell: Introducing Beautiful Numbness

I was ten years old the first time I understood what art does. Not what it says it does. Not what we teach that it does. What it actually does.

The production was Hello, Dolly! at a community playhouse in a town where amateur theatre was both social ritual and minor act of civic pride. I was a child in the ensemble, old enough to have memorized my blocking and young enough to believe that what we were doing mattered in some way I could not yet name. The show went fine. The audience clapped politely. Nobody stood.

Then the orchestra played the curtain call.

An experienced actor standing next to me leaned toward another veteran and whispered five words that I have carried for more than half a century: "They can't help but stand."

Check out this episode!

Beyond the Hands: Completion of the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners Trilogy

Today we celebrate the completion of a project seven years in the making. The third volume of the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners series, Beyond the Hands: Non-Manual Grammar, Discourse Structure, and Sentence Types in American Sign Language, co-authored with Janna Sweenie, is now available. This episode explores what the book is, why it matters, and what it reveals about language, embodiment, and the nature of human communication.

Let me begin with a claim that may seem strange if your experience with language has been limited to speaking and listening: The face is grammar.

Not expression. Not emotion. Not accompaniment. Grammar.

In American Sign Language, the eyebrows mark the difference between a statement and a question. The mouth produces morphemes that modify meaning. The head nods and shakes with grammatical force. The eyes point to referents and track agreement across discourse. The body shifts to mark perspective and emphasis.

Check out this episode!

Standard Deviation

You have a number.

Not your phone number. Not your social security number, though that one matters more than most of us like to think about. I mean another number, one that follows you through databases you will never see, aggregated from purchases you barely remember making, from the length of time you hovered over a photograph before scrolling past, from the route you took to work last Tuesday and whether you lingered outside that coffee shop or walked directly to the train.

This number has a name in China. They call it a Social Credit Score. But the American version has no single name because it has no single keeper. It lives distributed across credit bureaus and insurance actuaries, across hiring algorithms and rental application systems, across the predictive models that decide whether you see an advertisement for a luxury watch or a payday loan.

You did not consent to being numbered. But you are numbered nonetheless.

Check out this episode!

Depicting Space: When Language Lives in the Hands

Let me start with a confession. Classifiers are hard. Not hard in the way vocabulary is hard, where you simply need more exposure, more repetition, more time. Classifiers are hard because they require signers to think spatially while signing temporally, to track multiple referents while producing new content, to select among productive options while maintaining discourse coherence.

That mouthful of a sentence appears in the opening of Depicting Space, and I want to unpack it for you, because hidden inside that description is something important about human cognition.

When you speak English, your words unfold in time. One after another. Linear. Sequential. The sentence has a beginning, a middle, an end. You cannot say two words simultaneously. The channel is narrow.

But when you sign ASL, something different happens. Your hands can represent two entities at once. Your face carries grammatical information independent of your hands. Your body can shift to become a character while your hands continue to manipulate objects in observer space. The channel is wide. Parallel processing becomes possible.

Check out this episode!

Civility Certified: A Dossier Novella

For Civility Certified, I worked with three sources.

The first is Martin Luther's 95 Theses from 1517. Luther posted his propositions to the church door at Wittenberg, demanding that the institution admit what it was doing - selling salvation, monetizing grace, creating a credential system for the afterlife. The structure of numbered propositions, posted to the institutional door, demanding accountability - that form echoes throughout this novella. There is a character who writes theses. The institution does not welcome them.

The second source is Jefferson Davis's address to the Confederate Congress in 1861. This gave me the rhetorical DNA of exclusion dressed as protection. Davis spoke of voluntary participation, states' rights, procedural legitimacy - all while encoding slavery into the constitutional fabric of the Confederacy. The Civic Trust & Access Authority in my novella speaks in that register. It promises safety. It delivers sorting.

The third source is Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin from 1925 - specifically, his theoretical writings on dialectical montage. Eisenstein believed that meaning emerges from the collision of images, that the audience assembles truth from fragments. This novella works the same way. You receive documents out of sequence. You reconstruct causation. You become complicit in the interpretation.

Three sources. Three different centuries. Three different forms of institutional power confronting individual resistance. And from their collision, a new story emerges - one that feels disturbingly contemporary.

 

Check out this episode!