“To be punctual meant to exist at a point, meant that as well as to arrive somewhere on time. [Malachi] Constant existed as a point — could not imagine what it would be like to exist in any other way.” — Kurt Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan

My day job is pretty straightforward — and not particularly challenging — and this is a good thing until it isn’t. Bored is a dangerous way for me to be, and I try to head off boredom as quickly as I can. The best way to do this is to make my job harder, and the best way to do that is to try to teach it to someone else. Fortunately, someone else isn’t particularly hard to find.

My office employs a small cadre of undergraduates — bright and earnest kids — and they get bored, too. If I throw a meeting on their calendars, most of them will show up for an hour or so. When they get there, I try to teach them a bit about writing, and this makes my day very challenging right away. First, our student workers are pursuing a wide range of studies, but almost none of them are in the humanities. It’s been a few years since most of them have talked about writing for writing’s sake, and I struggle to speak in an idiom common to us all. Second, I’m not very sure what the future of professional writing looks like.

Technology had rendered penmanship and spelling obsolete before I started grade school, and I suspect that good grammar and clever constructions are similarly obsolescent. So instead, I mostly talk to them about reading, and I try to explain that to be a good writer is to be a good reader on someone else’s behalf. This insistence has always been a big part of writing. It might soon be the whole thing.

The next lesson will be about deixis, the use of words to refer to a particular time or place or person relative to the context in which they’re used. It’s one of those cases in which linguists make a complex issue of a simple habit. Let me say the sentence: I am here now. And let you say the sentence: I am here now. Both of us have used the exact same words in the exact same order, and both of us have uttered a necessarily true statement, but each of us has described a radically different fact. I am John . . . on the fourteenth floor of the National Press Building . . . around dinnertime on St. Patrick’s Day. You are whoever you are . . . whenever you are . . . wherever you are. Contained in this short example are the three main types of deictic words: the personal, the spatial, and the temporal.

The personal deictic words are more easily recognized as the personal pronouns used for our different grammatical persons. The first person or the speaker: I. (And its plural: we.) The second person or the listener: you. The third person: he or she or it. (And its plural: they.) We can imagine these words radiating outwards, like ripples in a pond. Say I am in a room speaking to you about our mutual friend in another city. When I use the word I, I’m speaking about someone very, very close to me. When I use the word you, I’m speaking about someone a bit farther and further away. And when I use the word she, I’m speaking about someone the farthest and furthest away.

The spatial deictic words are a bit easier to understand. A proximal word like “here” refers to a place near the speaker. A distal word like “there” refers to a place far from the speaker. The words “this” and “these” describe things near the speaker, while the words “that” and “those” describe things far off. Directional words like “come” and “bring” indicate motion toward the speaker, while words like “go” and “take” indicate a motion away. See, that isn’t so hard.

The temporal deictic words are a variation on this theme. The added complexity is that time is rarely treated as an absolute value — as distance so often is — and must instead be placed in either the past or the future. Of course, there are the present “now” and the agnostic “then”, but we also make frequent use of relative distal words like “earlier” or “later” and sequencing distal words like “before” or “after”. The further complication is that most temporal deictic logic is carried in tense itself. The past : I wrote. The present: I write. The future: I will write.

I only expect my students to understand about half of this, because I haven’t explained it very well. To be honest, the finer points aren’t all that important to my case. All I want to convey is that some words only take on functional meaning within the context of their utterance, that this meaning might be broadly construed as some kind of measurement, and that these measurements are made in reference to some central point. That central point is called the deictic center. I am here now. I am here now.

I would then make use of a visual metaphor, and this decision would likely doom me. I’d ask them to remember the “thinking caps” their grade school teachers once asked them to don. Now imagine another kind of cap, a metal thing with spindly arms. When you put this one on your head and buckle the chinstrap — I imagine it needs one — the arms extend out to take measurements, radiating in all dimensions.

If an arm touches a nearby person, it calls that person you. If it touches a faraway person, it calls that person he or she. If an arm reaches a nearby time, it calls that time now. If it must reach into the past or into the future, it calls that time earlier or later, respectively. If an arm passes through a nearby place, it calls that place here. If it passes to a faraway place, it calls that place there. In this way, an incredible thing has happened. When you take up this magic helm, all people and all times and all places are held in reference to your own position, and briefly the world turns around you.

But in some cases, the arms run into someone or sometime or someplace too great to push around. In these cases, the gravity shifts massively, and you become the measured point. Jesus of Nazareth was not born about two millennia before you. You were born after Jesus. The Third World War is not some years after the present; the present is some years before it. The Sun is not 92 million miles away from you, but you are 92 million miles away from the Sun. When I write that I came to sustained consciousness a year after the Twin Towers fell, I am not situating a historic moment to myself but myself to a historical event.

Even within these broad limits, the deictic center is an incredibly powerful thing. It marks the active mind in a given situation. It shows who is doing the thinking. I suspect, but cannot fully warrant, that to hold this point is to make the most powerful kind of metaphysical claim, to cast oneself as the center and to cast all others as eccentricities.

A good writer knows how to keep this device on his head. A great writer knows when to take it off. To wrap the fingers tightly around the brim. To plant the feet firmly in the earth. To twist the torso deeply across the body. To draw the throwing arm back in a wide, slow arc. To find stability and poise before a single, decisive motion, a great unwinding and a calculated release. The central experience is not of the writer, of Perseus, following the line of his throw. That honor belongs to the reader, to Acrisius, to the brief and final realization that prophecy must be immediate and inevitable.

I want these students to understand that point of view — carried by person and voice and tense — might be the single most important aspect of human communication. I want them to realize that ethos, pathos, and logos are encoded in perspective. In the industry of marketing — itself a realm of persuasion — no skill is more decisive than one’s ability to appreciate and manipulate the reader’s own understanding of things.

It is to my great and undying horror that so many young people cannot understand point of view. A few years back it became trendy to — say — drop your phone in a paper bag and grasp around with a greasy hand and caption the ensuing vertical video something like POV: you are the last french fry. But in the past few years, it has become painfully clear that many people do not understand what point of view actually means. How many times has someone filmed her boyfriend as he chops an onion and sobs, only to caption it with POV: cutting onions makes you cry. No! No!

I just can’t get my mind around this disconnect, because no generation has been more persistently exposed to deliberate and explicit manipulations of the viewpoint. Most men my age were raised on first-person shooters. Many women my age are now enthralled by second-person romantasy. How have they not realized that the content of the caption and the pretended experience of the camera must be in full agreement?

In my time as a reader and writer, I have come to a fledgling but disturbing opinion of the viewpoint: it’s real insofar as it’s fake, and it’s fake insofar as it’s real. No need to read that thesis statement again — it was basically gibberish. Let me try to explain.

The viewpoint is real insofar as it’s fake. The fact that we can only write — or think — in sentences built on person, voice, and tense reflects the limits of our language and not the limits of our world. Tell Wittgenstein I said so! Most experience and all non-experience would be properly rendered with another kind of language, but we don’t have any other kind. This tension is laid bare in the first lines of Linda Gregg’s gorgeous poem “The Copperhead”, as the pit viper begins to consume the field mouse:

Almost blind he takes the soft dying
into the muscle-hole of his haunting.
The huge jaws eyeing, the raised head sliding
back and forth, judging the exact place of his killing.
He does not know his burden. He is not so smart.
He does not know his feelings. He only knows
his sliding and the changing of his hunger.

In this one sense, the viewpoint is all too often an artifice balanced atop a reality that did not accept it but cannot reject it. It is at best an approximation and at worst an obfuscation — and yet, for our minds’ own failings, we have no other option before us. Tell me again how the hydrogen atoms “want” to bond to the oxygen. I won’t protest.

The viewpoint is fake insofar as it’s real. All writing — all thinking — requires an active mind. The trouble is that we writers so often lie about the active mind, misdirecting the audience as to who the mind is, where the mind is, and when the mind is.

By convention and decorum, it’s considered improper to write formal literary criticism in anything but the third person, the active voice, and the literary present. And yet I suspect that all criticism is written in the first person, because all ethos lives in the first person. I have some patience for the death of the author but none for the death of the critic. It was T. S. Eliot who so famously called Hamlet an “artistic failure” because the protagonist’s emotional state was disproportionate to the “objective correlative” laid out in the facts of the play. This is the kind of read that could only come from Eliot, the man who, at the young age of twenty-two, wrote the most famous ballad of pensive, middle-aged dithering. In the whole Western canon, only the old-souled Eliot could fail to grasp that young men — by their very nature — are moved by emotions that so greatly exceed the facts.

The fiction writer might think that he has more perspectives at his disposal than anyone else, but this too is an illusion. The task of the fiction writer is to establish and maintain an empathetic relationship between the real but unfamiliar reader and the imagined but familiar character. While contemporary English writers skew toward the third person, the active voice, and the simple past, I suspect that all fiction is written in the second person, because all pathos lives in the second person. Consider this sentence from The Old Man and the Sea, as Santiago tends to his wound:

Shifting the weight of the line to his left shoulder and kneeling carefully he washed his hand in the ocean and held it there, submerged, for more than a minute watching the blood trail away and the steady movement of the water against his hand as the boat moved.

The sentence is written in the third person, but it is completed in the second. Just as the imperative construction implicates the addressee as its subject — the sentence “Be quiet.” is actually “[You] be quiet.” — descriptive prose contains a hidden you. He washed his hand in the ocean. You watch him wash his hand in the ocean. You wash your hand in the ocean. You hold it there, submerged. You watch the blood trail away. The fictive arrangement so often modeled as a triangle is better considered as a great act of unification, the pains it takes to collapse a rigid shape to a single affective point.

If criticism must be considered in the first person — and if fiction must be considered in the second person — then what should be considered in the third? I think the answer might be history or the lesser testimonies. In human discourse, the charge of the witness is to restrain the scope of his claims, or to attempt to restrain them, or to appear to attempt to restrain them. The witness is there to testify to a universal truth, and yet he can only do so by testifying to a particular truth. This false modesty is expected in formal environments and effective in casual ones. The best example must be from Shakespeare, as Marc Antony says in his funeral oration for the slain Caesar:

You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.

The witness might efface his own historical claims as personal experience, but this has only ever been pretension. I suspect that all history is written in the third person, or toward the third person, because all logos lives in the third person. As the witness confines his testimony to his own experience, the historian confines his narration to the experiences of others. But the fact remains that these small and varied experiences are in some kind of contact with a grand and unified reality — such is the very purpose of their summoning. That reality is, as best we can tell, arranged by ordinality and governed by causality and altogether carried by logic. Who cares who saw what or who said what? There is only the happening. So if there is a view from nowhere . . .

Good luck getting to it.

Of all the news from Minnesota, none of it has affected me like the profiles of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Both of these people — shot dead by federal agents — seem like straightforwardly decent people, generally pleasant and occasionally heroic. If either of them had a fault, it might have been courage. What a shame it is to write that.

I’m not inured to violence — not yet, anyway — but I’m rather used to reading about it. I’m not sure how I could have lived this long without some callousness. But then I still come across something that stops me in my tracks. Here’s an excerpt of a sworn witness statement filed in the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota:

The scene was chaotic. Many civilians were screaming and honking. Over the noise, I informed the ICE agents that I am a physician, and I asked to assess the victim.

At first, the ICE agents wouldn’t let me through. They repeatedly asked me for my physician’s license, which I obviously didn’t have. But none of the ICE agents who were near the victim were performing CPR, and I could tell that the victim was in critical condition. I insisted that the agents let me assess him. Normally, I would not have been so persistent, but as a physician, I felt a professional and moral obligation to help this man, especially since none of the agents were helping him.

Finally, one agent agreed to let me assess the victim. He patted me down to “make sure I didn’t have a weapon” and then let me approach the victim.

As I approached, I saw that the victim was lying on his side and was surrounded by several ICE agents. I was confused as to why the victim was on his side, because that is not standard practice when a victim has been shot. Checking for a pulse and administering CPR is standard practice. Instead of doing either of those things, the ICE agents appeared to be counting his bullet wounds.

For anyone keeping track, that’s not the first time federal agents blocked a physician from assessing someone they had just shot. Three minutes after Renee Good was shot, an onlooker identified himself as a doctor and offered to help, but ICE agents turned him away. A minute later, the same man would try to approach the scene, and agents would yell for him to “back the fuck up”. After a brief evaluation by several ICE agents, Good was left alone in her car until the first firefighters arrived on scene. She wouldn’t lose her thready pulse until ten minutes after the shooting.

History is continuous, and it can be difficult to say when we’re at the end of one thing or the beginning of another. In fact, it can be difficult to say if such a thing is even sayable. Reservations aside, it seems fine to call Minneapolis a significant rupture.

How are we to understand this? I’ve described the invasion of American cities as a kind of bloodsport, a spectacular cruelty meant to satiate the lust of white nationalists without endangering the profits of parochial elites. But even this seems overwrought.

When these abductions were still concentrated on small businesses in large cities, I saw someone call this the unemployable assaulting the employed. But the target list has expanded to include courthouses, schools, and churches, and I’ve come to see the world in almost Manichean terms. We should call this what it is. We should call this the anti-social assaulting the pro-social. A year after the September 11 attacks, Fred Rogers came out of retirement to bring some comfort to the nation’s children — and many of its adults. He told them to look for the helpers. But you can’t even do that.

They’re killing the helpers.

It’s interesting to watch these so-called conservatives come into fleeting contact with real community, with true flourishing. These people will talk stupidly about the order of love but recoil when they witness the order amoris. They’ll talk stupidly about high-trust societies, but as soon as they encounter a church lady driving a station wagon of groceries to a food bank they take her actions as proof that some Soros-funded NGO web is hard at work. They’ve already shown themselves unwilling to extend their humanity to a stranger. But now they’re proving themselves unable to maintain a basic theory of mind for more than a few sentences.

I’m reluctant to call this an intelligence issue, but it probably is to some extent. I’m pretty sure that a lot of these people have dedicated their considerable powers to acts of self-sabotage. They’ve spent the last decade slamming their heads against a wall. They’ve rendered themselves incapable of handling abstract ideas. It’s not my fault.

A few weeks ago, I made the mistake of arguing with a rightwing friend about the dangers of federal overreach. I asked him how he would feel if Joe Biden had sent thousands of ATF agents into the Dallas-Fort Worth area to kick down the doors of gun owners and demand to see the paperwork from their short-barreled rifles. He asked me what the implication was, and told me to say what I mean. I almost told him the implication was self-evident and clearly contained in the hypothetical itself. But instead, I asked him how he would feel if he hadn’t eaten breakfast that morning. When he glossed over the question, I asked it again. And again. And again. And then he told me, rather smugly, that he’d eaten a bacon-egg-and-cheese on a plain bagel.

The day that federal agents killed Alex Pretti, Amy Klobuchar asked Donald Trump and his lieutenants to “watch the horrific video of the killing”. In turn, Stephen Miller called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” who “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement”. The Department of Homeland Security released a statement saying Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement”. These are wicked things to say, but they’re also very, very stupid.

Every American has imagined himself on at least one side of the gun. Americans have had a couple of decades to viscerally understand that a lone actor seeking to produce massive casualties will tend toward two or three optimal strategies. Americans know that none of these involves a handgun on an open street. If there’s one thing the American people know, it’s the mechanisms of mass violence and the production of mass death. It’s a fool’s errand to try to brainwash them on at least this one issue.

You have to wonder where they even find these people. As the Department of Homeland Security rushes to hire 10,000 new agents, some incredible anecdotes have emerged. “We have people failing open-book tests and we have folks that can barely read or write English.” The age limits are gone, and the training period has been slashed to six weeks. “We even had a 469lb man sent to the academy whose own doctor certified him not at all fit for any physical activity.” Recruits are being sent to the training camp before their drug tests come back positive. At one point, a recruit asked to be excused from class because he had a court date for a gun charge.

These are illiterate, out-of-shape thugs enticed by a large signing bonus. The entire process is almost designed to select against competence, against composure. They’re looking for small men, for useless men, for men who have washed out from even the dregs of society. At the risk of quoting Donald Trump, they’re not sending their best.

Let me tell you what really scares me. The modern right has two main forces: a reactionary cultural process and a (purportedly) redistributionist economic project. These two forces have shown themselves to be almost magnetically repelled from one another, but you can see that some figures are straining to bring them into contact.

People tend to speak of this tension as something new to American conservatism, but the project is not unfamiliar to such strains. In fact, the conservative movement — whose core tenets were negotiated by Bill Buckley and his National Review — is a result of a concerted dialectic process. It was Buckley’s associate editor Frank Meyer who helped formulate the “fusionist” understanding of conservatism, which more or less synthesized the traditionalist and libertarian factions into an effective political organization. The post-Trump right might seem like a fracturing of a monolith, but that pre-Trump right was itself assembled from many pieces.

JD Vance is a synthetic man — although not in the way he might like — and I suspect that he considers himself to be the rightful heir to his intellectual predecessors. He’s the figure who most openly tries to fuse cultural reactionism with economic redistributionism. That’s what he’s doing whenever he hits on one of his longstanding but less-appreciated bugbears, the notion that undocumented immigration is “one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country”.

For the time being, Vance’s strategy doesn’t seem to be getting much play. This underutilization probably has less to do with the message and more to do with the messenger. It’s hard to imagine any person less charismatic or more contemptible than the vice president, and I imagine his allies feel much the same disgust when they interact with him. But history has shown this reaction-redistribution synthesis to be a very dangerous idea. It has already shown up here and there, and it will arrive in full force sooner or later. That arrival will be the tipping point.

Sometimes you hear a fact so good that you can’t forget it and must instead patiently wait for an opportunity to deploy it. Many years ago, I learned that the word pioneer shares the same root as peon or pawn. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 arrived as a vast conspiracy between the United States federal government and the burgeoning American financial sector,1 but the larger process of expanding and settling the American West required the labor and violence of America’s lower classes, including many immigrants.

The physical work of conquest — building roads, forts, canals, railroads, and farms — fell overwhelmingly to poor white Americans, Irish and German laborers, Scandinavian homesteaders, Chinese railroad workers, and Mexican laborers in the Southwest, all of whom were cheap, expendable, and easily mobilized. At the same time, much of the dispossession of Native Americans was carried out not by elites themselves but by settlers, militias, posses, and vigilante groups, whose actions were incentivized by land grants, good wages, debt relief, and a promise of social mobility.

For immigrants and marginal Europeans, participation in frontier settlement also functioned as a pathway to conditional belonging, a means of proving loyalty and earning whiteness through service to the project of expansion. The main proceeds of this system accrued upward — to speculators, railroads, banks, and investors — while the risks of death, deprivation, and moral injury were borne by those sent ahead, pioneers in the original sense of the word: foot soldiers and laborers tasked with clearing the way for a nation whose rewards they would rarely enjoy.

Across history, expansion and conquest have rarely been carried out by those who stand to benefit most. The Roman Empire relied on auxiliary soldiers from conquered peoples to garrison hostile frontiers, while Spanish conquistadors enlisted Indigenous allies to topple empires they could not conquer alone. Centuries later, the British Empire drew on poor Irish laborers and soldiers to build infrastructure and police colonies, just as France recruited tirailleurs sénégalais to fight wars and suppress resistance. Nazi Germany similarly outsourced mass violence to Eastern European collaborators, using local auxiliaries to enforce occupation, carry out massacres, and police populations. In the modern day, this basic formula of yoking an expansionist or exterminations project to a redistributive process can be seen in places as diverse as the Amazon rainforest and the West Bank.

We should not be surprised that overt reactionary-redistributionism would make its return through our domestic police force. Through the last fifty years of neoliberalism, the only exception to the prevailing trend has been a robust military Keynesianism, the economic strategy of using sustained government spending on the armed forces to stimulate growth, maintain employment, and secure political stability — effectively turning war preparation into a tool for domestic economic management. By the last decade of the twentieth century, this was basically the only untouched form of wealth redistribution from the federal government to local communities.

That decade saw three major events. First, the collapse of the Soviet Union threatened a drawdown in military posture and downsizing of the military economy. Second, the crime wave brought about by neoliberal restructuring and urban disinvestment heightened popular anxieties about public safety. Third, domestic threats like the Unabomber attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Centennial Olympic Park bombing drew attention to the homegrown threats. All these forces would help shift funding from the military to the police, as exemplified by the 1033 Program, inaugurated in 1990 and expanded in 1997, which allowed local police departments to acquire surplus military equipment directly from the Pentagon.

Then came the September 11 attacks. Suddenly, domestic policing was framed as part of the global war on terror, and the lines between foreign and domestic threats blurred. Counterterrorism funding surged, local law enforcement agencies received unprecedented resources, and programs like the 1033 initiative were expanded and normalized. Police departments acquired not just armored vehicles and rifles, but surveillance technologies, tactical gear, and training designed for battlefield environments. As the military began to function as a police force in Afghanistan and Iraq, the police began to take on the form of a military in American cities.

While a series of high-profile police killings between Michael Brown’s death in 2014 and George Floyd’s death in 2020 would galvanize anti-police sentiments on the left, no such pressures came from the right. This was a missed opportunity. The left was properly motivated by concerns over civil liberties and human dignity, but the right was not met with an effective messaging campaign around — for instance — the massive conspiracies of time theft and systemic fraud committed by many American police departments. Instead, those redistributive processes were coddled by the reactionary politics of the anti-anti-anti-Black right. The task before them is to now accelerate this fusion and make it legible to the American public. A vast transfer of wealth is underway. Don’t you want to get in on the grift? Here’s your chance.

Of course, the enticements of good insurance and a federal pension are probably not enough to attract the manpower that mass ethnic cleansing would require. The increase in ICE funding is truly staggering. At $37.5 billion a year, the funding has jumped almost fourfold since last year, meaning the agency receives more money than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined and more money than all but fifteen militaries on earth. But even all that money wouldn’t do the trick.

Operation Metro Surge saw 3,000 federal agents deployed to Minneapolis, dwarfing a city police department of fewer than 600 sworn officers. But Minneapolis is home to about 430,000 people and could produce tens of thousands of coordinated and disciplined protestors. Even with a staggering 1:143 ratio, the feds can’t hold the city.

At that ratio, a total deportation action across the United States would require 2.4 million federal agents — about four times the total number of sworn state and local officers in the country. If it were confined only to blue states, it would still require about 1.2 million agents. Short of retasking the entire active duty military to this effort, the federal government would need to try something else, something older.

My great fear, to finally spell it out, is that the American right may take a gamble to enlist sympathetic civilians in the cause of ethnic cleansing. At moments when the state lacks either the manpower or the legitimacy to carry out coercive projects directly, executives have historically turned not to brute recruitment but to legal reclassification by blurring the boundary between civilian and agent. The real danger is not mass deputization in the literal sense, but the executive branch’s ability to transform private action into public service after the fact, laundering participation through pardon, immunity, and material reward.2 The pardon power alone is an extraordinary solvent: it does not merely forgive crimes, but signals in advance which acts will be forgiven, creating a shadow zone of authorized illegality. Paired with redistributive inducements — access to federal benefits, preferential hiring, loan eligibility, or retroactive recognition as service — this power can turn ideological sympathy into rational participation.

Historically, this process is accompanied by a rhetorical shift rather than a formal command. Enforcement becomes “community self-defense”, targeting becomes “verification”, and coercion is reframed as vigilance. The executive branch’s unique power here is not legislative but administrative and discursive: control over charging priorities, civil-rights enforcement, consent decrees, task-force eligibility, grant conditions, emergency authorities, and — most importantly — the decision to stop intervening. None of this requires new law; it requires only the selective withdrawal of restraint. The result is a familiar pattern: the state remains officially clean while violence and intimidation are subcontracted downward, carried out by actors who are nominally private but functionally aligned with state power.

What makes this especially volatile in the American context is saturation. We live among a heavily armed civilian population, decades of valorized vigilantism, and a political culture already primed to confuse legality with legitimacy. In such an environment, the executive does not need to deputize millions. It need only create permissive structures and redistributive promises, allowing ideology, grievance, and opportunism to do the rest. In binding coercion to advancement, the state can fold private grievance into public power.

I usually let an essay’s cover art speak for itself, but some things can’t be left to chance.

Francisco Goya gave no names to his Black Paintings — the body of work he created late in life, shaped by his personal fears of madness and a broader pessimism about humanity, so it was art historians who gave us the title Duelo a garrotazos or Fight with Cudgels.

Painted directly onto the walls of his house, the scene shows two men locked in a brutal duel, each raising a club against the other. They stand at close range, their bodies tense, their expressions hard to read. For generations, viewers understood the figures as mired in deep mud, up to their knees in something that makes retreat impossible. That detail has done much of the painting’s work, suggesting a humanity so sunk in its own conditions that conflict becomes at once inevitable and futile.

But that interpretation may itself be an artifact of damage. Photographs taken before the murals were transferred to canvas suggest that the lower portions of the figures were lost in the process, obscuring what had originally been tall grass rather than muck. Contemporary viewers described an open field, not a bog. The men were not trapped by circumstance but choosing to fight, locked in a ritual that requires no external force to sustain it.

The art historian and museum director Francisco-Xavier de Salas Bosch suggested that Goya might have drawn inspiration from Diego de Saavedra Fajardo’s Empresas Políticas, a book of a hundred political maxims meant to help educate a prince. Read in the shadow of Ferdinand VII’s restoration — a regime defined by repression, purges, and the deliberate stoking of internal enemies — the reference takes on a sharper edge. Salas Bosch pays particular attention to a maxim on the myth of Cadmus.

Following Athena’s guidance, Cadmus plants dragon’s teeth in the earth, and from them emerges a band of armed warriors known as the Spartoi — the sown. By hurling a stone among them, Cadmus gets the warriors to turn on one another, fighting bitterly until only five remain. It was these men who helped him build the citadel of Thebes.

Note: I’m keeping this one a bit short, as you’ll be getting another email about the survey results at noon EST.

Much ink has been spilled about algorithmic social media and its effects on American politics. The prevailing theory is that these platforms amplify outrage, reward sensational content, and create echo chambers that expose users to views that reinforce their existing beliefs. By tailoring feeds to maximize engagement, algorithms effectively incentivize extreme or emotionally charged material, nudging discourse toward polarization. Critics argue that this dynamic both skews public perception and alters the incentives for political actors, encouraging strategies that prioritize attention-grabbing narratives over substantive policy debate.

I want to work with the echo chamber model, but I want to set aside the quality of discourse and instead focus on the quantity of discourse. More specifically, I want to treat this discourse not as an absolute value but as a relative value. This will be best explained through comparison.

In the 2020 presidential election, the most Democratic state was Vermont, where 66% of votes went to Biden-Harris and 31% of votes went to Trump-Pence. In the same election, the most Republican state was Wyoming, where 70% of votes went to Trump-Pence and 27% of votes went to Biden-Harris.

To make this a bit simpler, we can work with round numbers: for every ten Wyoming voters, seven went Republican, and three went Democratic. Let’s say that you’re a Wyoming Republican who lives in a county that’s representative of the state — Natrona County looks pretty good. Let’s say you live in the county seat of Casper.

One Saturday morning, you walk outside your house and speak briefly with your neighbor. What’s the probability that you’ve spoken to a Republican?

After this, your mailman comes by and drops off your letters, and you speak to him as well. What’s the probability that both people you’ve spoken to are Republicans?

After this, you get in your car to run some errands. You go to the bank to deposit a check, swing by the coffeeshop for a drink, and stop at the store to buy some eggs. By midday, you’ve spoken to ten people. What’s the probability that all the people you’ve spoken to are Republicans?

And then you go to a diner for lunch and talk to ten more people. What’s the probability that all the people you’ve spoken to are Republicans?

So even in one of the most homogeneous parts of the country, the chance of you not coming across someone with an opposing viewpoint over the course of a moderately sociable morning is something like 1 in 1,200.

But what’s it like online? How many tweets would you have to scroll through before you find someone who disagrees with you at some fundamental level? How many videos would you have to watch before you find someone who sees the world in a radically different way? And will you even be aware of this? Well, probably not:

[Echo chambers] are loud places — that’s why we call them echo chambers. In an intragroup debate, two people armed with deep knowledge of the terrain can duke it out in close quarters over a claim of shared values. All too often, it’s the intergroup debate that seems some half-hearted skirmish over a patch of no man’s land.

Now, does this matter? I’m not generally inclined toward the language of reconciliation and the politics of compromise. I think there are a lot of bad people out there, and I think they need to lose across the board. But even I have some concerns.

It isn’t good for people to move through the world with a false sense that they’re in the majority — let alone a unanimity. That’s basically what happened in 2020, isn't it? People were completely without the corrective of moving through the real world and speaking to real people. They were confined to the online world and speaking with online people. And when those online impressions came back into contact with real voting results, it was too much of a difference for many people to handle. A good number of them went completely out of their minds.

Even between elections, American governance is usually reliant on — if not always sensitive to — feedback. Do you remember the Kamala Harris vibe shift? Democratic insiders basically convinced themselves that they were much more popular than they were. I’m pretty sure that the same thing is happening within the Trump administration as I write this.

They’ve spent the last couple of weeks doubling down on a wildly unpopular immigration enforcement apparatus. They have a long history of ignoring real world opinion polling, and this must be partly due to the fact that so many of their staffers are so terminally online. That’s the thing that gets me, you know? They really think people like them and like what they’re doing.

Note: What follows is some back-of-the-envelope math that I’m writing in the wee hours of the morning. It’s obviously a vast oversimplification, but I think it still has something to say.

If we should worry about unanimity engendered by digital algorithms, then we should also worry about unanimity engendered by non-digital algorithms. And if we should worry about unanimity across groups, then we should also worry about unanimity across time. These two premises have brought me to an interest in the mathematical modeling of discrimination in supposedly representative systems. Let me explain.

Say that Mississippi has been a full democracy since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This would mean that Mississippi has been a full democracy for 60 years. And say that Mississippi has four statewide offices — a governor, a lieutenant governor, and two senators — decided through elections. The executives serve four-year terms, and the senators serve six-year terms — so we can use a five-year average. From all this, we can say that those 60 years have seen about 48 statewide elections.

In those 60 years, Mississippi has never elected a Black Mississippian to be governor, lieutenant governor, or a U.S. Senator. This pattern is strange, because Mississippi is the Blackest state in the Union. About 40% of Mississippians are Black. And so — in a truly colorblind selection process — we would expect that about 20 of those terms would have gone to a Black Mississippian. But that isn’t what’s happened.

What is the probability that Mississippi elects its leaders in a colorblind way? What is the probability that Mississippi would have a white person win statewide office 48 times in a row?

Imagine that you looked up at all 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy and wrote down the names of ten of them on a sheet of paper. And then imagine that I guessed one of the names on your list. That’s the probability that Mississippi isn’t racist. When these people cheat, they don’t cheat by a point or two. They cheat by infinities.

People say that the Deep South is a lot better than it once was. It’s also a lot worse than it once was. There were about 20 years between the end of the Civil War and the start of Jim Crow. In that time, Mississippi elected one Black lieutenant governor and two Black senators. Hiram Rhodes Revels was the first Black person to serve in Congress. Blanche Bruce was the only senator to be born a slave.

This is the third part of a short series. You can find the introduction here and Part I here and Part II here. The aim of this series is to build on Five Flips for the New Millennium with an examination of three smaller (and less dignified) errors of thinking that will continue to dominate our lives in the medium term.

When I was in college, I had a bespectacled friend with what I judged to be a philosophically laden habit. Sometimes he’d get really impaired and study his own face in the mirror, narrating his thoughts to the room. He’d look at himself for a while with his glasses on. Then he’d take his glasses off and look at himself for a while longer. He’d wonder aloud if he should switch to contact lenses — or even schedule some laser eye surgery. He just looked so much handsomer with his glasses off.

The rest of us would chuckle at this because — well. Was he handsomer without the obstruction of the frames? Or was he handsomer without the benefit of the lenses? Was it that he had a better picture of himself? Or a worse one?

Social psychologists often talk about the fundamental attribution error, a cognitive bias that undergirds much of human conflict. In short, we tend to judge ourselves by our circumstances and other people by their character. This means that if we both do something good, I’m liable to explain my behavior in terms of my disposition and yours in terms of external factors. Conversely, if we both do something bad, there’s a good chance that I’ll explain my behavior as situational and yours as dispositional.

Say you and I are coworkers. On Monday, we both show up to work on time. I’ll think that I was punctual because that’s who I am, but I’ll think that you were on time because you didn’t want to get in trouble. On Tuesday, we’re both late to work. I’ll blame my lateness on heavy traffic but treat yours as a sign of laziness. In each case, you’ll be thinking the exact inverse about me. That’s a low-stakes scenario, but the fundamental attribution error plays out at all levels of human conflict.

When applied to intergroup dynamics, the phenomenon is called the group attribution error. Imagine a Christian in the United States and a Muslim in the Middle East. If the Christian sees news of Christians committing violence in the U.S., he’s more likely to explain it through some force of circumstance — mental illness, personal grievance, economic stress. But if he sees news of Muslims committing violence in the Middle East, he’s more likely to take it as proof that Muslims are violent people. And the Muslim would be liable to think the same of Christians.

Now, there are several theories that attempt to explain the fundamental attribution error. We might blame others’ character as a way to reassure ourselves that the world is fair and that we’re safe in it. Or we might naturally focus more on the person and less on his circumstances. Or we might skip the effort of actually accounting for situational factors even when we know that they exist. All of these explanations seem plausible to me, and each of these pressures has affected my thinking from time to time. But I think that they might altogether obscure a more foundational issue.

Neither unchecked emotion nor mismanaged attention can rival the primacy of pure ignorance. The fundamental attribution error is — at its center — a problem of information. It’s a matter of perspective, distance, and detail. It’s about resolution.

In this sense, resolution refers to the ability to resolve between two things. At what scale can we tell two adjacent things apart? If we can do this only at a large scale, we can say we have a low-resolution image, a blurry picture. If we can do this at even a small scale, we can say we have a high-resolution image, a sharp picture.

There’s still time to take the 2026 essay topics survey. I’ve grouped my best ideas into ten categories and set it up so you can indicate your interest in each.

Take the Survey

In light of this, we can return to the example of the Christian and the Muslim and put some parameters on the situation. Let’s say that the Christian and the Muslim each have access to the same six news stories: three of them have to do with acts of violence committed by Christians in the United States, and three of them have to do with acts of violence committed by Muslims in the Middle East. Let’s also say that both the Christian and the Muslim are very, very good people. Neither man is biased toward his own group or against the other group. Neither man is compelled to preserve the illusion of a just world. Neither man is distracted by the salience of the actor. Neither man is unwilling to account for situational factors he knows about.

Even under these very best of circumstances, I believe it’s possible for the Christian (or the Muslim) to read the six news stories and reach the conclusion that Muslims (or Christians) are inherently disposed to committing acts of violence. Even if he leaves his loyalties at the door, keeps his emotions in check, and brings his attention to bear, he still might arrive at an unwarranted conclusion about the ways of the world.

Let’s focus again on the Christian. We can safely assume that — by the sheer fact of who he is and where he lives — he knows a great deal about Christianity and the United States. He is closer to the issue at hand and knows it better and sees it in finer detail. He might very well look at three news stories of violence committed by Christians and sort each event into finer categories. An armed standoff in Nevada is actually the work of anti-government radicals. A clinic bombing is actually the work of an anti-abortion extremist. A hate crime against a Hindu is actually the work of a garden-variety racist. It doesn’t even seem fair to call these category errors.

But the Christian — by the limits of identity and proximity — knows much less about Islam and the Middle East. He is much further from the issue and knows it poorly and sees it in broader strokes. He might very well look at three news stories of violence committed by Muslims and take the category as he finds it. He doesn’t know those militants were motivated by tribal politics. He doesn’t know that bombing was motivated by sectarian rivalry. He doesn’t know those riots were motivated by ethnic hatred. Despite his best efforts, there’s no way he can reach his usual level of analysis.

If our knowledge of ourselves is so much more reliable than our knowledge of others, it seems unwise to not extend the former as far as we can in pursuit of the latter. I suppose that’s the central thrust of cognitive empathy, and in these examples, it would have been a good heuristic to follow. Weren’t most Iraqi insurgents primarily motivated by specific, political grievances, with the abuse at Abu Ghraib chief among them? Wasn’t it the case that many of them couldn’t even recite the Shahada? Weren’t the Oklahoma City bombers primarily motivated by Ruby Ridge and Waco? Wasn’t Timothy McVeigh basically agnostic? A guess can only get us so far.

Remember that no one is more aware of this information asymmetry than the intelligent demagogue. His whole game is the throttling of information, the metering of resolution. When you judge the in group, he demands endless nuance — and he has plenty of it to offer. But when you judge the out group, he insists you retreat into your reptilian brain, engaging in “pattern recognition” as a grander project of “noticing”.

Social psychologists often take the fundamental attribution error as evidence that the theory of mind has collapsed. I know that I reach my decisions through mostly good reasons, but I don’t extend that principle to you. But maybe the fundamental attribution error is evidence that the theory of mind has prevailed. I know that I reach decisions for reasons of some kind, and I extend that principle to you. At the end of the day, I’m locating a mind between your ears. So what if it’s a dumb one?

Perhaps we should worry less about the fundamental attribution error and more about the fundamental error of attribution. Each of us is many things, but none of us is a mindreader. I don’t think we gain much by pretending otherwise. Let’s treat ourselves with a bit more humility. Let’s meet one another with a bit more grace. The motto of the equanimous has been: Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance. Maybe the mantra of the truly enlightened should be: Never attribute.

This is the second part of a short series. You can find the introduction here and Part I here. I will publish Part III tomorrow. The aim of this series is to build on Five Flips for the New Millennium with an examination of three smaller (and less dignified) errors of thinking that will continue to dominate our lives in the medium term.

Before we get to the essay, I want to ask you some questions. You don’t have to write down your answers, but do your best to think through each question. Here they are:

1. If you had to guess, what percentage of American adults are Christian?

2. If you had to guess, what percentage of American adults are white?

3. If you had to guess, what percentage of American adults are Jewish?

4. If you had to guess, what percentage of American adults are Native American?

5. If you had to guess, what percentage of American adults own a house?

6. If you had to guess, what percentage of American adults are transgender?

In 2022, YouGov asked thousands of Americans those questions and others like them, inviting respondents guess the relative size of various demographic groups. In an article about the survey, the pollsters set the average guess for each group’s size alongside its actual size.

The results demonstrated a stark error in how the country imagines itself. Small groups are wildly overestimated. Large groups are quietly underestimated. Anything near the middle is judged most accurately.

One in five Americans is transgender. One in four Americans is Native American. One in three Americans is Jewish. These are the guesses of the average American! Now would be a good time to consider how your own guesses deviated from the mean.

One might think that these trends are driven by fear of others or ignorance to diversity or general media panic, but that’s probably not the case. In fact, members of a given minority group were no better than non-members — and were often quite worse than non-members — at estimating their own size. As the article explains:

Black Americans estimate that, on average, Black people make up 52% of the U.S. adult population; non-Black Americans estimate the proportion is roughly 39%, closer to the real figure of 12%. First-generation immigrants we surveyed estimate that first-generation immigrants account for 40% of U.S. adults, while non-immigrants guess it is around 31%, closer to the actual figure of 14%.

What this poll actually shows is something more fundamental and perhaps more unsettling. When people are uncertain about something, they instinctively drag reality toward the middle. Through mere shortcut, the average person walks around with a skewed understanding of who is rare, who is common, and who has power.1

The average person lives in a world where minorities seem omnipresent and majorities feel embattled. Arguments about proportion, distribution, and representation are built on numbers that exist only in the collective imagination. The next time you think about the kind of country we live in, I want you to think of this study and its findings. How can you bring yourself into contact with the real world?

There’s still time to take the 2026 essay topics survey. I’ve grouped my best ideas into ten categories and set it up so you can indicate your interest in each.

Take the Survey

If statistics don’t feel intuitive to you — that’s fine! No one is born with the cross tabs of every census tract seared into his hippocampus. But we all have the power to be curious about the world around us. You can — and should — learn some very basic facts about your nation, state, and town to at least one significant figure. About a quarter of my audience lives in Pennsylvania. Do they know the population of Pennsylvania to at least the right order of magnitude? Do they have a feel for it?

Whether we like it or not, we live in an age of identity politics. If you are a proponent of identity politics, you need some fluency. If you are an opponent of identity politics, you need some leverage. No matter what, you need some understanding of the identities in our politics. It is, for better or worse, a core competency in civic life.

When someone is worrying about trans people, you need to ask that person how many trans people are even out there. If they guess twenty percent, you need to either reorient the conversation or recalibrate your interest in it. When someone is raging that Christianity is under attack, you need to fall back on some vague sense of American religiosity. If they don’t understand what a supermajority is, you need to either slow down or skip out. That might not be sufficient, but it’s damn necessary.

This is the first part of a short series. You can find the introduction here. I will publish Part II tomorrow and Part III on Friday. The aim of this series is to build on Five Flips for the New Millennium with an examination of three smaller (and less dignified) errors of thinking that will continue to dominate our lives in the medium term.

People have been writing on bullets for a very long time. Archaeological evidence shows that as early as the fifth century BC, Greek soldiers were casting short messages — names, taunts, and threats — directly into lead sling projectiles. The practice continued throughout history, evolving with new technologies. The practice found new importance in the First and Second World Wars as a way to psychologically connect homeland production to frontline action, and the gesture has — like all things — taken on an overt political valence. In May of 2024, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley signed “Finish Them!” on Israeli artillery shells during a visit to an outpost on the Lebanese border. In September of 2024, current Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro autographed the same kind of shell while giving Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a tour of a munitions plant in Scranton.

Of course, when you think of writing on bullets, you probably think of something a bit different. When Luigi Mangione (allegedly) assassinated UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December of 2024, police recovered bullet casings with the words “delay”, “deny”, and “depose” scratched into them — an apparent reference to tactics health insurance companies use to avoid paying claims. When Tyler Robinson (allegedly) assassinated rightwing influencer Charlie Kirk in September of 2025, police recovered bullet casings engraved with references to anti-fascism, furry roleplay, and video games. And when Joshua Jahn fired multiple rounds into the sally port of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility that same month — wounding one detainee and killing two others — police recovered an unfired round with the phrase “ANTI-ICE” written on it.

I’m not sure how closely you were following those events, but you might have caught something of the ensuing discourse. In the hours and days after each shooting, countless feats of speculation unfolded across a range of media. Had Thompson’s assassin meant to signal some legitimate grievance? Or was this misdirection by some contract killer settling a business score? Had Kirk’s assassin meant to spell out his left-wing rage? Or was this some convoluted inside joke by a cabal of Groypers? Had the Dallas assailant meant to kill ICE agents? Why then had he only shot ICE detainees? And that photo FBI Director Kash Patel posted — was that ballpoint pen?

I was actually in the midst of one such argument about the Kirk shooting when one of my interlocutors sent my own writing back to me. His point was that all of us were engaging in the sort of “Hijacker’s Passport” thinking that I’d described not five months earlier. He was right, of course, and I felt rather humbled by the exchange.

Why do I tell you this story? To admit that I engage in my share of conspiracy theorizing? To insist that I generally keep my theorizing among friends and away from the public eye? To suggest that epistemic vice can be luxurious, that bad thinking can be delicious? To demonstrate some sort of humility? I suppose so. But for the most part, I just want to remind you that I wrote about five essays explaining how people can get turned around on matters of probability, evidence, authority, contradiction, and semantics. We all might do well to remember those pitfalls.

When I wrote “Five Flips for the New Millennium”, I was playing on the title of Italo Calvino’s lecture series Six Memos for the Next Millennium — which I highly recommend. I was trying to gesture at some fairly sophisticated, widely ignored errors in thinking. In the intervening months, I’ve come to realize that I failed to pick some low-hanging fruit.

Consider this my return to the orchard.

This introduction is the beginning of a short series. I will publish Part I tomorrow, Part II on Thursday, and Part III on Friday. The aim of this series is to build on Five Flips for the New Millennium with an examination of three smaller (and less dignified) errors of thinking that will continue to dominate our lives in the medium term.

Ten times I’ve tried to write this essay. Ten times I’ve come up short. In truth, I can’t think of any topic that’s affected me like this one has. It finds me feeling dangerous, nauseous, overwhelmed, and it leaves me — well, it doesn’t leave me. That’s the problem. I’m setting out for an eleventh time to see if this might be a solvable problem, and I really hope it is. In truth, I’m not sure if I can write anything else until I lay this one down. And I desperately, desperately want to write about anything else.

I know it’s poor form to set out with a disclaimer, but it feels right here. This whole thing is going to be some kind of disclaimer. So let me tell you at the start that you don’t have to read this one. But I surely had to write it.

I saw what I saw, and I know what I know. That man was never in any more danger than a drive-thru attendant. That woman was never more dangerous than anyone else in a running car. If you think that’s what attempted vehicular homicide looks like — well, you don’t think that. Not really. You might have convinced yourself that you convinced yourself. You’re never going to convince me that you convinced yourself.

I haven’t been around for that long, but I’ve had lots of chances to see how the state talks whenever it kills someone. And in that time, I’ve noticed a few things.

It might seem like there are lots of ways to talk about killing someone, but there are only two. You can talk about why you got to kill a person. This is a register of license, of permission. You can talk about why you had to kill a person. This is the register of necessity, of obligation. The trick is that — up until very recently — a conversation in the register of license must be carried through the register of necessity.

An officer of the state might speak about his decision-making in the crucial moment, but this performance is only to show that none of the decisions were truly of his making. The state might describe its officer as well within his rights, but this insistence is only to show how the person was far outside of theirs. Even in the best of circumstances, the discourse must be one of displacement. The thing of the aftermath is always to shift agency from the speaking living to the speechless dead.

Listen as all this reduces to pure tautology. I had to do what I had to do.

I don’t want you to think of this as an act of self-defense. I don’t even want you to think of this as murder. I want you to think of this as I think of it, to see it for what it was.

It was bloodsport. It was human sacrifice.

I want you to know that the great evil is actually two. Take them briefly in your hands. Feel that one is cold, the calculus that wrings gold from the sweat of others. Feel that the other is hot, the pure wrath that works blood to iron to steel. Meet these evils on their own terms, and try to get your mind around them.

Know that this life was an offering made by the first to the second.

In 2019, federal immigration authorities carried out the largest workplace raid in at least a decade, arresting 680 workers at seven poultry plants in and around Jackson, Mississippi. Agents barricaded the plants, detained workers in parking lots, and shipped them to facilities across Mississippi and Louisiana. Families were separated, schools were disrupted, and hundreds of workers faced prosecution and deportation over the following year. But when indictments were unsealed, they targeted only four executives and excluded Koch Foods and PECO Foods, which together owned five of the raided plants. It’s worth noting that executives at those two firms are longstanding donors to Republican politicians at the state and federal levels.

In 2025, federal authorities carried out a dramatic immigration raid on a 130-unit apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. SWAT teams rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter and threw flashbangs into people’s homes. Residents were zip-tied, lined against a wall, and questioned while a television crew filmed the operation. Officials framed the raid as a decisive victory against the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, with Stephen Miller claiming it had “saved God knows how many lives”, but most of the detained were U.S. citizens, and no weapons were recovered.

I want someone to bring up these cases, to put them in the juxtaposition they demand. I want someone to draw a line from one to the next, to trace the devolutions and evolutions. I want someone to explicate the tensions between them. I want someone to interrogate what motivated each action. I want someone to make it make sense.

There’s much that I cannot get my soul around, but there’s only one thing that eludes my mind entirely. Why on Earth did they release that video?

What on Earth were we supposed to make of it? That he could shift the one machine from his right hand to his left? That he could draw another machine with his right? That he could make full use of the second without dropping the first?

That he had to do what he had to do? Can you know that he had to do it? Can I know that he wanted to do it? Can we agree that he wanted to have to do it?

I guess I can get my mind around it. Now it’s just more work for my soul.

Further Reading

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs. Renée Nicole Macklin. 2020.

Carrie & Lowell. Sufjan Stevens. 2015.

“Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most Holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water.” — Translators’ Preface to the King James Version

When considering all the discursive modes and the skills required to produce them, the humble act of paraphrasing might be the least appreciated. The task of rendering someone else’s ideas “in your own words” is criminally underrated. I’m trying to figure out why this might be the case.

One theory is that the best paraphrasing is almost invisible. When things go right, the reader should enter, experience, and exit a section of paraphrase without realizing what happened beneath them. I like to think of really good paraphrasing as a patch of black ice, a radical change in conditions indistinguishable from the regular surface.

Paraphrase is so easy to miss that the speaker is actually obligated to signal its presence. You see this signaling all the time during extemporaneous speech. A speaker will begin to say what someone else has said, stop himself, hold his hands in the air like a referee, literally say the words “I’m paraphrasing here”, and then continue. In more formalized kinds of discourse — like academic writing or professional journalism — this obligation carries ethical or legal weight. A researcher who provides a direct quote without attribution will be scolded for his laziness. But a researcher who paraphrases without citation will be accused of outright theft.

To paraphrase is rightly seen as a dangerous act. There is a narrow path to success, and any deviation from this path — in either direction — imperils the writer. If the writer wanders too far from his source, he might be charged with misrepresentation. If the writer hews too close to his source material, he might be charged with plagiarism. The black ice metaphor can apply to the writer, too. It is entirely possible for a careless author to enter and exit a section of paraphrase without realizing it. For this reason, paraphrase is one of the few discursive modes with a safety culture built around it. Just as a marksman is taught to double or triple check that the action is cleared, many writers are taught to read their source text, to literally put the book face down on the table, and then to write their paraphrase. It’s a high-stakes game.

Another theory is that paraphrasing is often seen as a mindless activity, as a tedious affair that must be suffered so the author can get back to the good stuff. I’ve heard the work of paraphrasing maligned as not-quite-reading, not-quite-thinking, and not-quite-writing. I suppose its detractors view each of these sub-activities as overly constrained by the scope of the source material. But that’s a terrible misapprehension.

Good paraphrasing requires the full cognitive participation of the writer. He must read perfectly. He must think perfectly. And he must write perfectly. Each of these elements is necessary for good paraphrasing, and none alone is sufficient. Good paraphrasing requires incredible finesse, and even bad paraphrasing requires a great deal of effort. And to make matters worse, you have to do it so damn always.

To fully appreciate what good paraphrasing requires, try to think of it as an act of English-English translation. How many noteworthy English translations have been made of the Odyssey? Fifty? One hundred? Each of these translations was undertaken by an intelligent person, fluent in Ancient Greek and Modern English. But how many of those translations are actually read? Maybe three? I would guess that Lattimore, Fagles, and Wilson together account for ninety percent of all contemporary sales. Even if you can’t read a word of Greek, you probably wouldn’t hesitate to call at least one edition of the Odyssey a bad translation. Now imagine if you could actually read the source text, if you actually had it right beside you. Imagine if you could see every move the translator made, every tiny little decision. That’s the nature of paraphrase.

Beyond reading, thinking, or writing, good paraphrase requires a kind of feeling unique to itself. When you begin to paraphrase something, you set out on that narrow path, and you feel that your powers are constrained. Most forms of writing reward your visibility, but the best paraphrasing demands your own suspension. Most types of thinking reward creation and generation, but here your inventiveness must be destabilized. Most attempts at reading flow in one direction and offer you the cover of subjectivity, but now you must say plainly what was said to you.

It becomes briefly clear how common it is for others to take you the wrong way. It becomes cruelly obvious how common it is for you to take others the wrong way. You think back to those lines from Eliot: “That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant, at all.” You come to see the act of paraphrasing as an act of humiliation, in the original sense of the phrase. And then you put it from your mind, and treat each word before you as you would the word of God.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a thousand words might be worth a picture. I always considered the long-response timed exam to be the gold standard, but it’s been almost five years since I’ve written for keeps. In the spirit of the topic at hand, I’m going to try to write 1,000 words in 90 minutes without the use of outside resources. We’ll see where it goes.

I’ve been asking myself this question for a long time. Even as a child, I had some sense that each year brought less composition than the last. At the beginning of elementary school, there had been lots of composition work, but by the end of high school, only a little bit of it would remain. I remember at times despairing that writing had gone from something I could do well or poorly to something I could do rightly or wrongly.

When I use the word composition, I mean to suggest a kind of generative writing not primarily concerned with a source text. I’m not talking about the synthesis essay, the rhetorical analysis essay, the literary analysis essay, or the like. In fact, I’m talking about basically any kind of extended prose dissimilar from those forms — a personal essay, a short argument, a scene, a letter — with special attention paid to prose that emphasizes the deliberate assembling of language as the primary intellectual activity.

As I got older, I came to realize that my specific experience fit within a more general history. Through most of Western education, composition was treated as a freestanding intellectual discipline — not unlike arithmetic — in which students worked to fluency through repetition, imitation, and correction. But by the time my generation entered the classroom, composition was not considered a central competency. My peers and I were instructed — or, at least, incentivized — to see writing as mostly a way to demonstrate our comprehension of someone else’s text.

Here, two concerns have entered my awareness, and both of them have to do with the fact that many of you knew me as a younger person. First, I do not want to seem at all ungrateful for my education. I enjoyed almost every day of almost every English class. I enjoyed reading and thinking and writing, and I’ll come back to this enjoyment later in the essay. Second, I suspect that some of you are thinking about my younger self and wondering if the boy you knew might have bristled at the prospect of a writing education built on repetition, imitation, and correction. And that’s a fair question.

Lest you think I’m some kind of reactionary, I’ll be the first to admit that I would not have enjoyed wearing a dunce cap as punishment for bad penmanship. But I might have enjoyed the cadence of shorter writing exercises, the celebration of exemplary prose, the camaraderie of peer review, and the catharsis of performance. Anytime I got close to these attributes of composition, in English electives or theater extracurriculars, I was more invested in my education than I’d ever been.

Those environments always had an interesting effect on me. I found those workshops to be democratic and egalitarian — almost radically so. Because those spaces weren’t sorted by perceived difficulty, I had a chance to spend time with students older than me or younger than me or otherwise outside my usual academic cohort. In those rooms, I couldn’t lean on my greatest strength (comprehension) and was forced to work my second greatest strength (articulation) in new ways. And despite my best efforts, I found myself pleasantly but utterly outclassed by most of my classmates and their newfound powers (invention).

I don’t want this essay to turn into a screed against standardized testing or a criticism of service-oriented pedagogy or an indictment of “writing across the curriculum”. Lord knows, I’d be preaching to the choir. Instead, I want to get at a softer sense of what the movement away from composition has cost students and how a movement toward it might enrich them.

Young people are learning to write in a skewed environment that might be roughly described as high-comprehension, medium-articulation, and low-invention, and this arrangement seems disadvantageous for almost everyone involved.

If a student’s general disposition runs counter to the prevailing pattern, then he will spend most of his academic career absolutely miserable. That student will seldom get a chance to do the thing he’s really good at, and whenever he does the thing he’s okay at, he will have to spend most of his effort on the thing he hates. It’s very unlikely that such a student will get to try his hand at playwriting, and any chance he gets to actually work his sentences will be completely overshadowed by the dull or daunting task of analyzing the use of dramatic irony in Romeo and Juliet.

If a student’s general disposition runs in accord with that prevailing pattern, then he will eventually realize that the game is rigged in his favor and will begin to play half-heartedly. At least, that’s kind of what happened to me. Around my sophomore year of college, I came to realize that I could get away with doing a lot less work. Even in an upper-level class outside my major, I could drastically lower the effort I spent on reading comprehension so long as I kept my writing clarity at something near parity. This strategy worked, and I’ll let you imagine what happened to my reading habits.

I believe that reading and writing have intruded on one another just a bit more than they should. I’m not saying that the act of reading won’t make someone a better writer or that the task of writing can’t make someone a better reader. I’m just saying that each of these pursuits is worthy in its own right, that each of these disciplines can be judged on its own merits, that each of these pleasures can be enjoyed for its own ends.

I’m just saying that I’d like to see a little daylight every now and then.

I should say at the outset that I am writing this entire essay without the use of my eyes. I’m touch typing this sentence with my forehead pressed against the desk. My hope is, that without any kind of visual information — shape and space and so on — that I can capture a very close approximation of my natural grammar. (I will later go back to clean up any errant keystrokes, to italicize portions marked with forward slashes, and to add notes where suggested by brackets — but that will be the full extent of my revisions.) Already, my face is starting to hurt from this bewildering stress position. So I think I’ll just turn off the monitor, or take my wireless keyboard to the couch. Count the ceiling tiles like Descartes. Try to graph something for you.

Literacy has been in the news, and I’ve been thinking about my own. This is not the broad kind of literacy — comprehension and analysis — but the specific kind of literacy, the ability to turn squiggles into sounds. During a conversation on learning to read, someone asked me how I learned to read. I was a bit astonished when I couldn't answer them. The only word I remember learning to read is CAUTION — emblazoned on road signs beneath an image of a leaping sag. I was three when I learned to read the word CAUTION. But of all the other words I’ve learned to read, to sound out, many tens of thousands of them — well, I have little idea how they got there, and even less of an idea as to where, exactly, they are. I have some suspicion, a sense, that my memory is so tied to literacy that I cannot really remember my illiterate self. If I can even call it myself. We might be, in the Lockean sense, different people.

This is strange because I have a good memory and used to have an excellent memory. I recently spoke to someone I knew in high school, who told me I once told her what she was wearing the first time we met in elementary school. Up until the pandemic, I had an exceptionally vivid episodic memory. I could remember what shirt any of my friends was wearing when I first met him on, say, the first day of the second grade. This chain broke during the pandemic, thankfully, mercifully, and I have some sense that a great burden has lifted off my shoulders.

But the reading example is still strange, because I do have a very good memory when it comes to where or how or from whom I learned something — almost anything. I am, for instance, in strong command of the story of my math education. If I can tell you a historical fact, I can probably also tell you exactly when and where I learned that fact. I can tell you the name of the person who told it to me, and the sentence in which the detail was conveyed. And yet I have no idea how I learned English grammar.

I have a pretty good sense of every grammar lesson I’ve ever had, and there are fewer than twenty of them altogether. In pre-K I learned that English is written left to right. I learned this because, at my Catholic preschool, one of the teachers had us write down the letters G-O-D and I wrote DOG. That’s where I got the left to right thing down pat, on the back of grave transgression, but I would still write the letter J backwards through well into the second grade. And, yes, my name does start with the letter J.

In kindergarten, I do remember learning — or relearning — that letters go next to and not atop one another. I remember asking why spaces aren’t said aloud. I remember being unsatisfied by the answer.

In first grade I remember a thing on plurals (I mistook it completely for a discussion of corals) and compound nouns (why was it that bookcase counted but library didn’t count — never mind that I then pronounced it LIE-BERRY).

In second grade there was a distinct lesson on the usage of the past participle done. Do not say: I am done my homework. Say: I have done my homework. Better yet: I have finished my homework. Turkeys are done; you are finished. Only much later did I realize that this lesson was in fact a targeted intervention to prevent me and my peers from developing an affinity for one of the nastier constructions in Philadelphia English.

In third grade there was a lesson on proper nouns — why you write Mom went to the store but my mom went to the store.

In fourth grade there was a lesson on introductory clauses. In fifth grade there was a lesson on appositives — a revelation, really — that deeply affected me, even then.

And through all of middle school, the only thing I remember was the misery of learning a song with every preposition of the English language — aboard, about, above, across, after, against, around, etc. — while still being completely befuddled as to what a preposition was. My teacher never took her time saying the word. She said PREP-UH-ZISHUN. Not PRE-POSITION. I think a bit of enunciation would have gone a long way.

The truth is that I didn’t know what a verb was until I was in eighth grade — and I only learned it in German class. Thinking back, I learned almost every grammatical term in German several years before I learned its equivalent in English. Ich habe Verben gelernt, ja, aber auch das Imperfekt und die koordinierende Konjunktion und so weiter und so fort. This knowledge also felt revelatory. My high school German teacher was an older woman, strict but very funny, with an Ivy League education, and she was rightly abhorred by how little grammar we all knew. It was she — not her — who taught us about the declension of pronouns. Frau taught us not to end sentences with prepositions, explained the use of the word whom, and suggested that we should all use the word which a lot more. I remember spending half my sophomore year, speaking English in strange and stilted constructions. It was a wonderful feeling.

The truth is that my grammar isn’t great. I’m sure it’s way better than the average American’s grammar, but this is the sort of thing that should be graded on a curve. I’m a young man with an English degree who is paid in no small part for his copyediting skills, and yet I screw up my subject-verb agreement in every other paragraph of a first draft. I spoke recently with an older editor who congratulated me on saying I am doing well and not I’m doing good. He said that this was rare among even smart young people who went to smart old colleges. It’s hard to move through the world and not have a sense that grammar is dying off, one funeral at a time. I give it another thirty years, at most.

I’m sure a linguist would take issue with this sentiment. I am falling for the old prescriptivist-descriptivist trap. Except I’m not, okay? Standard American English has, you know, standards. It has rules, and these rules have to be enforced. In this one area of my life, I’m a conservative all the way through. (Who was it that said everyone is a conservative about what he knows best? Or was it . . . about what he loves?)

It wasn't until college that I really started to get the point of grammar. The central breakthrough, if I can call it that, happened in a philosophy class, in a logic class. I have often said that none of my three majors taught me what it claimed it would teach me: philosophy taught me history; history taught me English; English taught me philosophy. This story is about a rare exception to that pattern, about a time when philosophy taught me English — and it has two parts.

The first part is in the classroom. This was Symbolic Logic, about halfway through the semester, and the lecture had pleasantly devolved into an open conversation on what might be called the purity of language. Let me now try, very clumsily, to give you a sense of the discussion.

You could say: I have a wooden desk. You could say: I have a desk made of wood. You could say: there exists a desk such that it is mine and such that it is made of wood. You could say:

That statement might be read aloud as: there exists an x such that x is a desk, and x is mine, and x is made of wood. Now, philosophers have very intense disagreements about natural language and formal language, about the differences between the two, about the possibility of reconciling those differences. For instance, if you asked me where I do my homework, you wouldn’t be too happy if I answered you:

As a writer, my main takeaway was that there’s a tension between formal language and natural language. I was never taught to diagram sentences, so I never understood that THE DOG IS RED could also be considered as ARTICLE NOUN VERB ADJECTIVE. I always treated grammar as set of rules. It never occurred to me that I could also treat it as a way of thinking or — more rightly — as thinking itself.

The second part is on the way out of the classroom. As the conversation came to a close and we packed up our things, I fell into small talk with one of my classmates. There weren’t many undergraduates in Symbolic Logic, so the two of us would sometimes chat about our other classes on the way out. I think we were complaining about a reading we had to do in Metaphysics — but that’s beside the point.

I was familiar with the concept of code switching. I suppose everyone does it to some extent. I speak different Englishes to different people, speak different Englishes in different rooms, and so on. But a vast apparatus and its sprawling processes have meant that there is a relatively small gap between my natural English and Standard American English. I had some sense of this while I was growing up, but I only really got a feel for it when I moved to a Southern college town. It’s hard to imagine a place with more Englishes. So I had heard code switching before, but I had never heard it like I was about to hear it.

As soon as we left the lecture — as soon as we went from the linoleum of the classroom to the linoleum of the corridor — just as our very bodies passed over the threshold — my classmate switched from Standard American English to Memphis English. His vowels shifted. His consonants reduced. His voice took up a lilt smoothed by a non-rhotic tendency. The change was mid-sentence, mid-syllable, instantaneous. When he started the sentence in the room, he used the word himself. When he finished the sentence in the hallway, he used the word hisself.

I actually, literally, toe-on-tile stumbled. I, my, myself. You, your, yourself. He, his . . . himself? We, our, ourselves. You, your, yourselves. They, their . . . themselves? The way my classmate spoke in that hallway was not substandard or nonstandard. It was correct. It was corrective. He was right. He was right. He was right. He was right.

For a brief moment, I was completely out of my mind. When my classmate looked back at me, I muttered some response about his commentary on the Spinoza passage. Even he must have suspected that I was somewhere else entirely. The truth is that no piece of language had ever thrown me across affective states — across somatic states — like that one did.

The first realization was that grammar is thinking. Yes, that seems an okay way to put it. We all basically agree on a set of rules for cognitive exercise, and this lets us — as a community — frontload a great deal of cognitive effort. We’ve done the hard work of writing the rules of the road, so now we can focus on driving. If you and I arrive at an intersection, we don’t have to negotiate who should go first. That’s already been established. Just do it.

It’s sort of a contract, you know? I’m going to write by this set of rules, and — in exchange — you’re going to read me by this set of rules. Seems fair enough. But as with any contract, the lesser benefit is predictability and the greater benefits are all those things that can only flow from predictability. I’m going to do all this work to accord my specific patterns of thinking with the general model of thinking, because I want you to save your strength for what actually matters.

The second realization was that the modulation of grammar is the modulation of thinking. Anything a writer does to change his grammar is something he does to change the reader’s thinking. The writer can shift the cognitive load onto the reader. Or he can take more of this weight himself. He can quicken the pace of thinking, ease the effort of thinking. He can pull focus. He can squander attention. He can complement the subject matter or conflict with it or corrupt it. The words are secondary — we all have the same words. It’s only ever the grammar that changes.

Needless to say, I immediately tried to work this epiphany into my writing. I became obsessed with parallel structure, distrusting of pronouns, and entirely hellbent on the obliteration of ambiguity. A paragraph that once would have taken me minutes now took me hours. My teachers really liked to read my essays:

Moral philosophy — as with most fronts of humanity’s ongoing campaign to better understand ourselves — might be subdivided into descriptivist and prescriptivist endeavors. Descriptivism asks how things are. Prescriptivism asks how things ought to be. And so two burdens that must be met before we accept Johnson’s charge as true: (1) that Shakespeare’s writing does not describe morality and (2) that Shakespeare’s writing does not prescribe morality. I will argue that both of these claims are untenable.

But I hated to write them, and only felt some shallow pride at having written them. The stories were the worst:

All around, the world was the same — three-hundred-sixty degrees of near symmetry. The noontime sun was held between rising and setting, held between matters of East and West. Light spilled from the top of it all, rolled down the blue sky, and drained into the horizon, thin and purple. Motion hummed in from the edge of things: hazy, becoming lower — gauzy, becoming slower. Somewhere in the offing, the blue fell away and the green came up. At last the water rolled up to him in little two-foot seas.

I felt myself to be under some immense pressure, constantly stumbling into my own way. It was miserable to do anything. I only felt some relief when, in a class on Modernism, a kind professor gave me high marks on a paper about Eliot but scratched some Yeats beside the letter grade:

I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

It’s winter, and that means I’m reading lots of graduate school applications. I have some previous experience in helping high schoolers write their Common App essays, and I’ve always found this sort of work enjoyable. If you enjoy something enough, you’ll do it for free. And if you do something for free, you’ll do it a lot.

At first, I helped my friends. Then I helped my friends’ friends — some of whom I’ve never met. Now I tell my coworkers that I’d be happy to help them out. I’m yet to turn anyone down, because it’s gratifying work. I get to learn more about people, how they think, how they write. I get to help people feel better when they’re very, very stressed.

Don’t let these long, rambling, self-indulgent essays fool you: I can be a very good editor when I feel like it. I can be considerate and judicious and ruthless and thorough. If you hadn’t noticed from the fact that this newsletter doesn’t have a paid subscription tier, I do have a day job. I am — forgive me — a professional writer.

When someone is applying to graduate school, they’re always pretty good — and sometimes remarkably good — at writing. I’m more than happy to talk through some ideas, but they usually have a good sense of what they want to say. When they send me something, the piece tends to have sound mechanics and clear organization. The draft usually falls at or above the word count, and the author usually has a few complaints already in mind. This means that I can skip right to the fun part, which is always style.

Except, it isn’t quite as fun as it could be. I enjoy reading someone’s work and thinking about issues with the work and ways to solve those issues, but I don’t like writing in those notes. I’ve tried printing, annotating, and scanning, but the process is tedious and hurts my hand. I’ve tried adding comments to a file, but the practice is cumbersome and distracts me from the reading. I’ve tried adding in-line notes to the document itself, but the product is overwhelming and intrudes on subsequent revisions. I’ve wanted something different for a long time.

With a few of these pro bono projects bearing down on me, I decided to try my hand at making what I want. I sought help from my friend, an exceptionally talented computer scientist who is always patient with my questions. I asked how hard it would be to make a simple text editor. I explained that I wanted one that toggles between highlighting specific paragraphs, sentences, etc., so that I could drop a whole text into the editor and then go one by one while making my comments.

He told me that text editors can be tricky because English has strange punctuation that makes it difficult to parse sentences. (For instance, periods are not confined to the ends of sentences: they also appear in abbreviations, and a full stop may even be the penultimate character in a sentence, as this one is.) And then he told me that it can be difficult to insert text at the beginning of a long document without shifting every other letter in the file. He said I could probably get what I wanted by asking ChatGPT to write what I want and running the HTML file in a browser.

Needless to say, I was shocked by how well this worked.

After a few hours of tinkering with different versions and figuring out what I wanted — a dark mode option, three resizable panes, good text alignment, a running word count, a way to burn notes into the document — I ended up with something pretty good.

I begin by pasting the document into the Draft pane. It’s immediately duplicated in the Focus pane. Here you can see that with a machine-generated MFA application.

With the paragraph toggle selected, I click the first paragraph, and all the others go dim. This means I can just focus on that first paragraph and how it feels. The cursor snaps to the notes text box, and I can just type what I think about the paragraph as I read it.

When I advance to the second paragraph, my first note is automatically saved. I can repeat the process of reading and commenting for this paragraph and then continue these steps to the end of the document.

Having toggled the focus setting to the sentence mode, I can then repeat this process with a finer read.

If I’m struck by a particular word choice, I can leave a comment on just that word.

But then it’s easy to go back to the sentence level to continue the pass.

Having completed this finer read, I can make sure that all the text was sufficiently considered. To do this, I clear the focus and select the option to underline notations. Here, I can see that the third paragraph didn’t receive as much attention as it should have.

It’s easy enough to check — and correct — the quality of the comment on the first sentence of the third paragraph before adding appropriate commentary to the rest of the paragraph.

When I’m done with my annotation, I can turn off the underlining and display the notes as in-line text for each of the three focus levels: paragraph, sentence, and word.

No matter what focus mode I’m in, all the in-line notes will also appear as footnotes at the bottom of the focus pane.

Selecting any of these footnotes will activate the appropriate focus mode, scroll up to that unit, and display the note.

When I’m happy with the edits, I can copy the text and notes into another document. (Because this version doesn’t have autosave, it’s good to do this every few minutes while you work.) This is sort of my ideal workflow.

I can choose to engage with only the original text throughout the editing process.

In addition to my studio practice, I am deeply invested in the dialogue between abstraction and figuration. My work often hovers at the threshold between recognizable forms and abstract gestures, reflecting the way memory itself is both vivid and elusive. By emphasizing process and materiality, I invite the viewer to experience time as a tactile, layered phenomenon, rather than a linear sequence. This approach has been shaped by my interest in artists such as Gerhard Richter and Julie Mehretu, whose work demonstrates the power of mark-making and layering to evoke complex histories and emotional resonance.

From this relaxed posture, I can develop an incredibly rich feedback architecture.

In addition to my studio practice, I am deeply invested in the dialogue between abstraction and figuration. [S6: the transition clause is a bit flat] My work often hovers at the threshold between recognizable forms and abstract gestures, reflecting the way memory itself is both vivid and elusive. By emphasizing process and materiality, I invite the viewer to experience time as a tactile, layered phenomenon, rather than a linear sequence. [S8: this seems a bit trite] This approach has been shaped by my interest in artists such as Gerhard Richter and Julie Mehretu, whose work demonstrates the power of mark-making and layering to evoke complex histories and emotional resonance. [S9: is there a particular work by one of these artists that you might want to mention?] [P2: a solid continuation of the artist’s statement, but the sequence could do with a brighter transition / the writing is clear but sterile, maybe we can try to match it a bit more closely to the artistic style]

These notes give robust insights to both the author and me as we work through revisions.

Building on my exploration of layered memory and space, I am deeply invested in the dialogue between abstraction and figuration. My work often hovers at the threshold between recognizable forms and abstract gestures, reflecting how memory can be both vivid and elusive. By privileging process and materiality—letting paint, collage, and mark-making accumulate and interact—I aim to evoke time as a tactile, layered phenomenon rather than a simple linear sequence. This approach has been shaped by my engagement with Gerhard Richter’s Atlas series, where fragments of imagery and texture accumulate into a complex archive, and Julie Mehretu’s dense urban landscapes, which map histories through layers of gesture and form.

I know this topic is pretty far from my usual subject matter, but it seemed like the sort of thing that some of you might enjoy. It was satisfying to meet a very particular problem with a very particular solution, and I learned a lot about reading and writing in the process. The whole experience was also a lot of fun.

If you’d like to try Focus Editor yourself, just hit the button below. This will take you to a Google Drive link where you can download the HTML file. Once downloaded, open it in your preferred browser to use it. Everything that happens is happening on your computer. If you’re using it for serious work, please take care to save your work frequently in another text editor.

Try Focus Editor

If you have any ideas for future iterations, please let me know. Until then, my only hope is that at least one of you can put it to good use.

Note: Jenna is a friend of mine and graciously let me use her piece as cover art for this essay. You can find more of her work on Instagram. Through no fault of her own, Jenna’s very good art has inspired my very bad art, which you will see throughout this essay.

I am in the midst of a long and costly war with a particular doorway in my childhood home. This doorway is in the kitchen and opens to a small space where we keep things like the broom and the mop and trash bags and canned goods. This small space is actually a large landing for the steps leading down to the Pennsylvania basement, a dim place with low ceilings and parged walls. Below grade is a deep freezer and a washer and a dryer and old stuff. There’s no toilet, though. This isn’t Pittsburgh.

The trouble with this doorway is that it does’t have a door. It had one for many years, but it was ever so slightly too tall for the frame. This was good because the snug fit meant the door would stay closed even though the latch didn’t work. This was bad because the friction between the door and the frame put undue stress on the hinge screws. Each of them would work its way out of the frame.

Beginning when I was younger, I would try to solve this by taking out a screw, stuffing the hole with toothpicks, and putting the screw back in. In time, the screws would strip out again, and eventually the holes were too big for toothpicks. So I moved to chopsticks for a while. Of course, this was the kind of strategy that has its own limitations built into it. Some temporary solutions have a quality of being temporary.

The door came down last winter — or maybe the winter before — and its function became clear as soon as it was gone. Without the door, a great draft of cold air rushed up the steps and into the living space. It would take time to find someone to fix it, so I used a staple gun to tack a painter’s dust barrier where the door once was. The thick sheet of plastic kept the heat upstairs, and the tall zipper meant you could still pass through it. Some temporary solutions have a propensity for becoming permanent.

I’m housesitting for my mom for a few days while she visits my brother overseas, and I’ve turned my attention to this old nemesis. I suppose the best way to fix it would be to pull the door trim, cut the old jamb from the frame, fit a new one into place, and rehang the door. But I don’t have any of my tools with me, and my mom doesn’t keep a circular saw in the house. I’ll have to find a way to hang the old door on the old jamb.

I briefly consider flipping the door to set the hinges in the latch jamb and the latch in the hinge jamb, but then anyone opening the door wouldn’t be able to reach the light switches on the landing. I figure that my best bet is to relocate both hinges further up the door so they can be mounted into good wood further up the frame.

It’s not quite true that I don’t have any tools with me. I do my best to travel with some kind of pocketknife, and this week I have my Leatherman with me.

I do my best to travel with patience, too. This week — for some reason or another — I have lots of it.

On the off chance that you find yourself in this exact situation, let me tell you how you might proceed.

Disassembly

Go down to the basement to find the old door. Lean it against the wall, and begin to take it apart.

The first thing to deal with is the lockset. Use the Phillips screwdriver to remove the two mounting bolts on the interior side rosette. Then pull each knob to draw them from the bore hole. Use the screwdriver to remove the trim screws holding the faceplate to the stile. Then pull out the bolt assembly. The only thing that’s missing is the latch bolt. Press the back of the bolt a few times to see if it’s somehow stuck in the assembly. It’s nowhere to be found. Come to think of it, the door never latched.

The next thing is the hinges. Use the medium slotted screwdriver to remove the three screws from each of the two hinges. These are the stile-side screws. The jamb-side screws are nowhere to be found. Try to pull the hinges off the stile. The paint has adhered them to the door. Use the frame of the Leatherman to tap the hinges a few times. Try again. There they go.

Try to think of a way to fashion a new latch bolt. If you were very patient, you could whittle one from a piece of scrap — but that seems beyond your powers. You can’t buy a new latch bolt matched to this lockset, so you’ll have to buy a new lockset. You’re sad because you wanted to keep this one for its character. It’s not especially fancy, but brass is brass. You’re happy because you wanted to go to the hardware store already. And you had to go there anyway. You weren’t going to whittle those screws.

Turn your attention to the hinges. Use the medium slotted screwdriver to persuade the pins from the knuckles. Be careful here. You’ve only budgeted yourself for one injury this project, and it would be a shame to blow it at the outset — and on a screwdriver no less. Wash the pins and the leaves with soapy water. Dry them with a rag and cover them with a thin film of oil. Set them aside for later.

Layout

Pick up the door and carry it up the stairs. Remember to duck on the third step. Hitting your head wouldn’t count toward the injury budget, but it would still hurt. Bring the door to the kitchen and lay it down on the floor. Think about workholding for a moment.

It’s strange that so few crafts talk about workholding — the ways you keep stock from moving while you take pieces from it or add pieces to it. You hear about it from machinists and welders. And woodworkers never shut up about it. But the one workshop in every household is the kitchen, and you only rarely hear cooks talk about it. Maybe they’ll tell you to put a damp rag under the mixing bowl while you stream melted butter into a hollandaise — but they’ll never stop to ask why stirring a pot is a two-hand operation.

When you have a good workholding setup — a vise, a jig, some clamps, whatever — the piece can’t go anywhere. You get to put all your attention and effort into the operation — filing, drilling, sawing, whatever — and this helps keep things accurate and precise and safe. You can be sloppier and stupider with fewer consequences.

Tilt the door up so the latch stile is resting on the tile floor. The top of one panel is against a cupboard by the fridge. The bottom of the other panel is against a cupboard by the stove. Slide the whole thing back until it hits the wall. Straddle the hinge stile and twist your hips so your knees lock it in place. The door isn’t going anywhere, and your femoral artery is mostly shielded by the door itself.

You want to move each hinge 4 1/4” up the stile, and each hinge is 3 1/2” tall — which should leave a 3/4” gap between the top of the old mortise and the bottom of the new one. Use the ruler to measure this gap. Use the awl to make a mark at this spot. It’s a short, single-bevel blade, and that makes it a marking knife. Hold the hinge leaf against this mark. Check that everything is square enough. Scribe the outline of the hinge leaf into the stile. Tilt your head to see how much of the blade is obscured by the proud leaf. That’s your depth of cut. Try to remember it for later.

Once you’ve laid out the first mortise, the second one is easy. Stand up and shake the stress out of your hands. Spin around and lock your knee against the panel. Use the ruler to measure the gap. Use the awl to trace the hinge leaf.

What a joy it is to do the same thing twice.

Mortising the Stile

The power tool woodworker would do this with a router. The hand tool woodworker would do this with a chisel. The improviser will do it with a pocket knife.

You’re positioned just as you were for layout, except now the stakes are a bit higher. There are many ways to hurt yourself with a knife, but most injuries tend to play out like earthquakes. A rising tension. A sudden slip. Instead of thinking about whether the knife will jump, think about how the knife will jump. The aim is not to keep the knife away from your body but to keep your body away from the knife. Check where your legs are, and tuck your elbows to your torso. They’ll stay there for the duration.

Begin by deepening the layout line that runs the length of the mortise. This is a slicing cut along the grain of the wood, so it will go quickly. Ten strokes seem a good start. When you’ve finished your count, check your depth of cut with the tip of the knife. It needs a bit more to match the thickness of the hinge, so do two more slices.

The lines that run the width of the mortise will require you to cut across the grain, so it will take a bit more time. It was twelve strokes with the grain, so start with twenty strokes for each of these cuts. Try to think of it less as deepening the cut and more as severing fibers. Your progress is made not by pressure but by persistence.

The layout lines are now stop cuts, and the next trick is to remove the waste between them. Cut a pattern of diagonal lines across the waste. Cut another pattern in the opposite direction. You’re left with a field of tiny diamonds. Each of these diamonds is attached to the stile by only a tiny patch of lignin.

Resist the urge to twist these chips out with your knife blade. Instead, hold your knife as co-planar to the work as you can while still making a cut. Apply light pressure to get the cut started. Then you can baton the knife through the wood. Your strong hand chokes down on the handle a bit so that your weak hand has room to lightly strike the back of the knife. Each hit should help drive the blade through the diamonds. Do not attempt this with a slip joint, lest the knife jump out of the cut and your weak hand close the blade on your strong hand. That would certainly count against your budget.

In a few passes, you can clear most of the waste. Once you can’t see the diagonal pattern, you’ve hit the bottom of the mortise. A smooth whittling motion will get the mortise mostly flat, but the corners won’t be clean. Use the file to square them up.

When you think you’re done, lay the hinge leaf in the mortise to see if it’s flush. It’s a bit proud in one spot, so go at it some more. Check again. That looks good enough.

Now do it all again for the second mortise.

Mortising the Jamb

When cutting mortises into the door jamb, the theory is the same, but the practice is very different. You’re cutting into a piece of wood, yes, but you’re also cutting into a house.

For this reason, you will worry much less about how you hold the work and much more about how you hold the worker. I’d recommend finding a small step stool or a stack of very big books. You can stand on this while cutting the top mortise and sit on it while cutting the bottom one. For the bottom one, your back will be against the latch jamb. Consider leaning against a pillow or wearing a heavy coat. You’ll be there for a while. You can do the mortises in either order, but do the top one first.

Use the ruler to measure your 3/4” gap. Use the awl to scribe the outline of the hinge. Use the knife to first deepen these cuts and score a pattern across the waste.

When it comes to clearing the waste, you’ll find that you can’t get a good angle with the knife. The knife can sit flat across the mortise, but you can’t sit cleanly behind the knife. There’s a wall in the way. Instead, try to find another way to clear the chips. Use the can opener to scrape the length of the mortise. In each pass, the sharp hook will pull out some chips. Do this over and over again. Enjoy exposing five layers of paint as you go. Remember that three of these are probably lead. Pull your collar up to the bridge of your nose and make a note to wash your hands and tools. Try to think of your next move. You need some way to flatten the bottom of the mortise. The tool you need would have to be very heavy with a very wide working edge. Hang on.

Use the frame of the Leatherman to work a burr on the top edge of a hinge leaf. The brass is pretty soft, so this will only take a few strokes. Roll the burr back in the other direction. Scrape this edge along the bottom of the mortise. That worked very well. Do it a few more times. When it stops working, roll a fresh burr. Then scrape some more. Press the hinge into the mortise. It’s still proud. A few more scrapes. That’s it.

Intermission

It’s time for a break. You still need those six jamb-side screws and a new lockset. Put a stile-side screw and the old lockset in your coat pocket. Walk down to the hardware store where you used to work. That was more than a decade ago at this point. Step inside and briefly enjoy that nothing is out of place.

You know what you need and where to find it, but as soon as you cross that threshold, you have to let your mind go blank. This is the social contract of any American hardware store. To help yourself in a hardware store is acceptable only if you carry a contractor account in that store. It is a grave breach of decorum for a mere homeowner to turn down the advice of a professional. You remember your coworkers used to joke about it when closing up the store, performing skillful impressions of those prideful white-collar customers who would insist that they could find the right carriage bolt for their children’s swing set. You simply refuse to be that sort of man.

The young men look older than you remember, and the old men look younger than you expect. They look at you with some familiarity, but everyone is familiar here. There’s a high schooler behind the counter — ten or so cohorts behind you — and you wonder how the pay has changed. You enter a sadness as you remember your only true friend from here, a good-humored and hard-living man who died a few years ago. But before you can really settle into it, one of the crocs swims up and asks you what you need.

You pull the freezer bag with the old lockset in it and tell him you need one of these. You don’t even use a noun for it. He smiles and takes you where you know he would and hands you the new lockset. He asks if you need anything else. You open your hand to show him the screw and tell him you need six of these — but longer. He takes it from your palm and holds it closer to his eyeglasses. Then you follow him to the back aisle and watch him pull a box of #9 x 2 1/2” flatheads from a wall of a thousand boxes. He plucks out a half dozen, drops them in an envelope, and sends you on your way.

Roughing the Door

You desperately want to know how the door will fit the frame, but you know it isn’t ready. The door was always a bit tall for the frame, and the friction between the top rail and the head jamb is probably what caused the hinge screws to strip out. Beyond this, you have a decent understanding of the precision offered by the tools at your disposal. You’re already excited to tell the next machinist you meet about all the tolerances you’ve stacked. The door needs a 1/4” haircut — and that’s just to start.

Carry the door most of the way down to the basement. Rest the hinge stile along the staircase with the bottom corner on the basement floor and the length of it supported by the nosings of several treads. Throw a leg over the latch stile and squeeze your knees around the panels. Brace the back of your head against that low wall you always hit. This is less for stability and more for situational awareness.

Use the knife to scrape the paint from the top rail. Once you see bare wood, begin to take long, chattering shavings off the wood. After a few strokes, you get past this work-burnished layer. Now you can figure out the grain. Many people understand the difference between cutting across the grain and cutting along the grain, but fewer understand that cutting along the grain can be further subdivided into cutting against the grain and cutting with the grain. You understand it — maybe for the first time.

You also have a better sense of the door itself. At first, you could only guess its construction from the weight, but now you can lay your eyes on it. The stiles run the full length of it. There are at least three rails — top, latch, and bottom — spanning the distance between the stiles. This frame is pressed between two unadorned panels of something manufactured. From the sound of it, there’s some kind of core in the void.

The pattern of the piece is the pattern of your work. You take a few long swipes on the left and right edges to get past the panel. Then you work your way down the rail. The wood comes off in splinters as long as your forearm. You let your strong hand go a little slack and support the tip of the knife with your weak hand, skewing the blade for these long, riving cuts. The tops of the stiles protrude as little stubs of end grain, and they’re very stubborn. You have no choice but to cut a bevel at the unsupported edge and hack through them. This kind of work makes time move quickly, and you have to stop yourself from getting carried away.

Hanging the Door

Carry the door to the landing, stand it up, and rest it against the wall. The hard work is coming soon, so take a moment to do whatever easy work remains.

Hold a hinge leaf to each of the mortises. Use the awl to mark the center of each screw hole, moving from the two hinge jamb mortises to the two hinge stile mortises. That’s twelve centers to mark. Use the awl in a twisting motion to bore each of these center marks into a pilot hole, moving from the six stile-side holes to the six jamb-side holes. You can move quickly when working on the stile, but take your time with the jamb. This wood is much weaker, and the last thing you want is for it to carry the split from the old mortise up to the new one. As you work the awl with your strong hand, place two fingers on the gap between the mortises, as if you were taking a pulse. Feel for strain that might move up the jamb.

The hinges will be attached to the door soon, so this is your last chance to treat the hinge as anything but a hinge. Feel for the one with the burr, and scrape old varnish from the head jamb — all it’s doing is introducing friction to a delicate system.

Hold the hinge assembly in the stile-side mortise. Use the medium screwdriver to run in the stile-side screws. The pilot holes will help, but this will still take some effort. Most of your strength should go to seating the driver in the slot, and the rest should go to twisting the driver. Be very careful not to strip out the screw heads. Maintain this level of care as you attach the second hinge assembly to the door.

Put two of the jamb-side screws in your lips, holding them there as a tailor holds his pins. Lift the door with both hands and balance the bottom rail on your weak foot. Your weak hand steadies the door while your strong hand adjusts its position. Align the hinges with the mortises to the best of your ability. Take one screw from your lips and twist it into the top hole of the top hinge with your fingertips. You just have to accept that this next part will hurt.

Use the Phillips screwdriver to run in this first screw — except it’s more like a walk — except it’s more like a crawl. It will be easy at first, but then it will get very difficult. You feel the blood go out of your right arm, held high above your heart. Your hand begins to ache, and your forearm begins to burn. For a moment, the work is easier as the screw tip exits the other side of the jamb. But then, very quickly, it enters the jack stud. Your neck tightens as you crane to see the work. Your shoulder is sore from holding up your arm. Your core strains to compel this complex lever to the work. You have to breathe through your nose on account of the screw in your lips. Your weak hand has gone completely numb, and your weak foot hurts under the weight of the door. The only thing that isn’t bothered is your strong leg, so try to appreciate that.

When only the unthreaded shank of the screw is visible, you can turn your attention to the bottom hinge. Take the screw from your lips and take your first deep breath in a long time. Get it into place, and begin to crawl it in. Now the weak side is high, and the strong side is low. Feel your arm go warm with a rush of blood. Try not to think about anything at all for the next few minutes. When this screw is buried into the jack stud, you can carefully let go of the door. You don’t even notice it settle.

There is a drill in the house — a nice cordless one with a full complement of bits — but sometimes you just have to see something through. Reach up to touch the ceiling. Reach down to touch the floor. Pace around a little bit, and then return to the work.

For the top hinge, stand up straight and twist the other two screws until they’re almost set. It isn’t so bad now — the task is in front of you, and your body is behind you. For the bottom hinge, fall to your knees and drive in the other two screws. Then stand and snug the top set. Then kneel and snug the bottom set. Do this a few times so you don’t rack the assembly and bind the work. If it seems tedious, try to remember that your Irish Catholic neighbor has gone through the same motions at morning Mass for every day of the last half century.

Fitting the Door

The door swings on its hinges, but it won’t close all the way. Halfway through its arc, the top rail comes into contact with the head jamb and squeaks to a halt. That’s alright, though — you expected as much.

Get the small step stool or the stack of very big books. Stand on this so that — with the door mostly open — the top rail runs away from your breastbone in a straight line. Find your balance, and really get it through your head what you will do if you fall. If your motion is forward, you will drop the knife on the far side of the door so it clatters to the kitchen floor. If your motion is backwards, you will throw the knife behind you and down the stairs to the basement. Make these promises to yourself.

Use the knife to trim the door. With the latch stile pinched in your weak hand, cut a small chamfer up to the end grain. Then use long slices to carry this chamfer down the top edges of both panels. These chamfers should keep the wood from breaking out.

Try to close the door again, and note where it stops. Check this part of the top rail and find the high spot by looking where the wood fibers have been burnished by the contact. Take a light pass from over this spot. Try to close the door again. It swings a degree or two farther. Find the next high spot and whittle it down. Try the door. Find the high spot. Whittle it down. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Re—

The knife jumps from the wood, and your strong hand flies forward, hitting the wall above the door frame. You keep a good grip on the knife, but your fist carries some momentum to the paneling. From the feel of it, you managed to directly punch one of the short vertical studs connecting the header to the top plate. Funnily enough, these are called cripple studs. If you’d hit it harder, you’d have a boxer’s fracture. But the bone feels fine — it’s just a little scrape on the fifth knuckle. Step down from your perch, close the knife, and go wash your hands. This was the injury you’d budgeted.

After a few minutes to get your head right, go back to the work and check your progress. The door almost closes now — it’s just hung up on the very top of the latch stile. Use the file and some patience to bring this flush.

Fixing the Hardware

Now it’s time to install the new latch. Slide in the bolt assembly. Line up the knobs. Use the Phillips screwdriver to tighten the mounting bolts and run in the trim screws.

Try to latch the door. See that the old strike plate is a bit too small for the new latch bolt. Use the small screwdriver to remove the old plate. Use the Phillips screwdriver to install the new one. Try to latch the door. It works now, but the latch bolt has a bit too much room in the strike plate, and the door rattles when closed. That’s okay. Use the screwdriver to remove the strike plate. Use the pliers to bend the tang of the plate so it takes up a bit more room in the bore hole. Use the screwdriver to reinstall the strike plate. Try the door again. It’s perfect.

It’s absolutely perfect.

Signing Your Work

Find a discreet place on the back of the door.

Use the knife to carve a little note.

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending a small talk on the evolutions and devolutions of American free speech culture in recent years. The invitation framed the event as somewhat less interested in questions of freedom, ethics, and truth and as somewhat more interested in questions of meaning, inspiration, and goodness. Of course, those are difficult boundaries to maintain, and the conversation flowed as it must.

The talk was hosted by Cracks in Postmodernity, and Stephen G. Adubato moderated the two speakers. One was Mana Afsari, a Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) alum and the writer behind an exceptional essay on the young right’s search for intellectual vitality. The other was Shadi Hamid, a columnist at The Washington Post and a cohost of the Wisdom of Crowds podcast, whose most recent work has focused on the export of the American project. (I’ve read Hamid’s work for some time, but this was my first introduction to Adubato or Afsari.)

While I was listening, I jotted down a few notes on the topic at hand. My goal was to draw some of the vibe of the room into contact with my recent thinking. My notes aren’t good enough to fairly say where the speakers’ contributions end and mine begin, but I’m the one writing it down — and that has to count for something.

What follows is a very rough taxonomy of three personas that pose the greatest threats to free speech culture as I see it.

1. The Follower

It’s important to remember that talk is cheap. It’s very easy to open your mouth and — as my second-grade teacher put it —“let every little idea slide down that slippery sliding board”. When you’re young, it doesn’t take much effort to talk. When you’re older, it doesn’t take much effort to not talk.

I’m not worried that speech can be chilled but that speech can be so easily chilled. It would take a huge apparatus for a censor to suppress all speech, but the censor doesn’t have to prevent all dissent. He only has to prevent the first dissent. He can guard a hundred cautious men with just one bullet.

A speech code is levied by the elites but ratified by the masses, and this makes it a cruelly efficient kind of oppression. This came up in an essay I wrote back in February. Here are two paragraphs:

The point of area denial is not to destroy the enemy but to limit the enemy’s ability to maneuver. The aim of a minefield is less that the enemy might fail to recognize it and blow themselves to pieces and more that the enemy might recognize it and stay where they are. In this sense, area denial is one of the most reliable force multipliers. It allows a smaller, well-organized force to dictate the movements of a larger, more diffuse force.

This is a common and effective strategy in American politics. The Israel lobby — to pick just one recent example — does not need to primary every Democratic congressperson who would consider criticizing America’s closest ally or defrock every college president who might be a little too lenient on campus activists. It only needs to make an example of one or two. The same can be said for all sorts of interest groups and industries and individuals. Look at what Chevron did to Steven Donziger. Look at what Peter Thiel did to Gawker. Of course, it works. No one wants to blow themselves to pieces.

2. The Flopper

I don’t watch much basketball or soccer, but these sports give us some wonderful terms. One of my favorites is flopping, which refers to when an athlete dramatically fakes or exaggerates contact — falling, flailing his arms, feigning injury, etc. — to trick officials into calling a foul on the opponent and awarding the flopper an advantage like a free throw or a penalty kick. This happens a lot with free speech.

To be clear, Charlie Kirk suffered the realest possible injury when he was shot dead at a Turning Point USA rally in September. Assassination is the clearest free speech violation imaginable. But I don’t think the fact that Kirk died as a martyr should wholly obscure the fact that Kirk lived as a flopper.

One of Kirk’s main contributions to the culture war was his litany against colleges and universities. For years, Kirk claimed that American higher education is very far left, that the faculty are brainwashers, that the students are hopelessly indoctrinated, that the administrators willfully derelict their duties through all this — that any campus you visit is an isolated, insular community that suppresses conservative viewpoints and repels conservative activists.

And yet, whenever Kirk made these claims, he was usually standing on a college campus, at an event facilitated by college administrators, in front of a large and diverse and curious audience of college students. He made hundreds — if not thousands — of these appearances without running into any trouble.

When Kirk was assassinated, he was doing what he’d done so many times before. He was performing something between a debate and crowd work in the pavilion of a mid-sized university. The person arrested for his murder was not some militant professor or some lunatic undergraduate but a young college dropout in the third year of an electrical apprenticeship program.

It’s hard to understate how much of Kirk’s much-studied playbook was just variations on the theme of flopping. His organization was intensely focused on finding small instances of political disagreement, blowing them way out of proportion, and extracting concessions from American institutions. Even a few months after his death, TPUSA is still running the play that Kirk perfected.

When a University of Oklahoma junior submitted a Bible-based essay arguing only two genders exist, a graduate teaching assistant gave it a zero for ignoring the assignment and substituting ideology for analysis — an ordinary grading dispute. But once TPUSA intervened, it was blown up into a grand narrative of persecution: the student cast as a silenced Christian, the teacher as a transgender censor, the university as an anti-conservative fortress. In turn, the university put the instructor on leave, the media piled on, and a routine bit of academic feedback became a week-long morality play about the First Amendment.

3. The Fanatic

It’s basically ubiquitous for one part of the political spectrum to claim another part is censorious. The left says it about the right. The right says it about the left. The center manages to say it about both. If there’s any real agreement, it’s that some part of America doesn’t like disagreement.

But is that true? I’ve wandered into some far-left and far-right spaces in my day, and I would not say that any of them have been marked by a lack of debate. On the contrary, it’s hard to imagine anything more raucous than a DSA meeting or a NatCon breakout session. And let’s not forget that centrists are equally incapable of shutting up.

This is to say that echo chambers are loud places — that’s why we call them echo chambers. In an intragroup debate, two people armed with deep knowledge of the terrain can duke it out in close quarters over a claim of shared values. All too often, it’s the intergroup debate that seems some half-hearted skirmish over a patch of no man’s land.

And that’s what has always bothered me about the polarization model. Polarization is a relative process. From the outside, someone can see you moving toward an extreme. But from the inside, you have no sense of acceleration. You’re a free body. It’s the world that’s changing.

When you’re moving to an extreme, any change is not experienced as polarization but as specialization. Are you moving to the left? Or are you becoming a better leftist? First, you’re debating if housing costs are too high. Then you’re debating about how rental markets tend toward monopoly. And then you’re debating about whether Mao was right for what he did to the landlords. What no one realizes is that you’re debating the whole damn time. You’re doing the work. You are ascendant, my friend.

It’s the world that’s falling away.

These are old problems, and they have no new solutions. There is, at the end of the day, only one option. Let me leave you with the next paragraph from that essay:

The only real solution to this is courage. At some point or another, you have to walk through the minefield, you have to run your convoys past the wolf packs. You have to find a worthwhile risk, and you have to take it. You can’t get pinned down. You can’t stay stuck. They’ll starve you out if you let them.

It’s 2025, and you are an especially vicious man.

You blink a few times and slip a fresh nicotine pouch into your cheek. The fabric wets over in an instant, and the chemical begins to absorb through the oral mucosa. It goes nicely with the buzz you pulled off those seltzers. You take the pen from your pocket and pull until it blinks. You hold your breath while the cannabinoids defuse across the alveoli. Already the pen is away and the phone is out. You move through the feed like water. Your eyes linger on an autoplayed clip of well-produced amateur pornography, but then you’re past it to check the score. The defense wasn’t what it used to be. You exhale. In a few swipes, you’ve placed three more bets. It’s nothing major. You feel for the pouch with the tip of your tongue. Then you flush the toilet, run the sink for a moment, and head downstairs for dinner.

The soft vice is more common, but is it more popular? It’s more convenient, but is it more pleasurable? I’ve already discussed the ethics and economics of softened vice, but what of the aesthetics? When we stop to think about it, we see that vice can undercut itself. The process of softening is also a process of thinning.

I used to joke that illegal weed was good for kids because it taught them the metric system and got them outside every now and then. Looking back, there was a set of subtler benefits. An illicit activity is imbued with some thrill of danger. A costly habit requires some level of commitment, some level of enthusiasm. A stigmatized pursuit carries some weight of rebellion, some heft of transgression. Think back, if you can. Did something not die when you took your first legal drink?

The slowness of old vice must have done something for its user. How much of the drug experience — the procurement, the preparation, the partaking — was outside of the drug itself? All that times lets the user feel something like anticipation and marks the use with a kind of significance. I imagine you would be hard-pressed to find a proper stoner who would equate charging a dab pen with packing a bong or rolling a joint. It would be cliché to speak of ritual.

It’s now easier than ever to engage in a vice without anyone else knowing about it. This invisibility might help the user blend into the wider culture, but it undercuts the user’s ability to form sub- and countercultures. It wasn’t exactly difficult to tell if you were in the car or home of a pothead, and the stoner himself was fairly identifiable. It would be a trivial matter for enthusiasts to spot one another, and this visibility encouraged the formation of countless little communities. Whatever solidarity remains has been largely co-opted into the brand clout of high-spend advertising or low-stakes media output.

The weak vice has a unique versatility to it. The user has more control over the dosage and a better chance of matching his experience to his expectations. In the same sense that beer offers the drinker many gradations of intoxication — buzzed, tipsy, sauced, hammered, plastered, trashed, obliterated, comatose — and liquor offers fewer, there’s a great decrease in resolution when one moves from flower to concentrates. The median toker is only half a puff away from ruining his whole afternoon, and this greatly affects his ability to do anything interesting while under the effect.

There are many ways to distinguish between the aficionado and the addict, but the former’s interest in paraphernalia might be his most telling characteristic. (That word began as a legal term for a woman’s personal property apart from her dowry, from Greek roots meaning “beside the dowry,” before broadening by the 1730s to describe the assorted “odds and ends” of one’s equipment.) When we speak of paraphernalia, we speak of all those things that float around some central object. There is a difference between the kind of smoker who enjoys his brass Proto Pipe and hemp Zig-Zags and the kind who wishes he could simply take some kind of pill.

I’ve said before that weed has never been my drug of choice, but even I am saddened to see what has become of it. Those same forces have had those same effects on virtually every human indulgence. The modern landscape is littered with pedestrian, impatient, anonymous, unforgiving, and altogether boring fixes. I’m not so bold as to pretend that isn’t some kind of loss.

I suppose it’s strange to have written so much about vice without ever mentioning virtue. In almost any ethics, these concepts are inseparable from one another. For most of human history, it was basically impossible to speak of one and not the other.

In Christian ethics, you can think of moral life as a sphere not unlike our planet. You might think of virtue as the northern hemisphere and vice as the southern hemisphere. To make a long story short, the aim of good living is to spend as much time as possible in the northern hemisphere without ever straying into the southern hemisphere. Every vice attacked some virtue. Every virtue fended off some vice. There are the seven lively virtues — chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, patience, and humility. And these are set against the seven deadly sins —lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath, and pride.

Considered this way, the softening of vice necessitates a hardening of virtue. Vice is becoming accessible, immediate, discreet, potent, and pure. Virtue will become rarer, slower, louder, weaker, and messier. It’s difficult to look at our world and say that’s entirely untrue.

In Aristotelian ethics, you can still think of moral life as a sphere. But this time, you might think of virtue as some band around the equator and vice as the north and south poles. The aim of good living is to move either due east or due west around the equator without approaching either pole. For instance, you must be courageous. If you have too little courage, you will be cowardly. If you have too much courage, you will be reckless. You must be generous. If you have too little generosity, you will be stingy. If you have too much generosity, you will be extravagant. Ambition sits between sloth and greed. Modesty between humility and pride. And his work goes on to strike a total of eleven balances. You might know this as the golden mean.

From this perspective, the softening of vice affects the sensitivity of one’s moral compass so that the needle drifts a little bit. You might think that you’re traveling on the straight and narrow path when you’re actually passing through lines of latitude to some hideous extreme.

I fear that either of these framings might be overly optimistic. The softening of vice might not be the weakening of virtuous forces or the blurring of virtuous boundaries but the total obliteration of the virtuous category.

Because vice is no longer passively marked — by danger, by luxury, by fellowship, by pleasure, by taste — it must be actively signaled. If you want to achieve the heady buzz of transgression, you need to make a real show of it. You don’t have to drive to Atlantic City anymore, so now you tweet about your parlays. You no longer smell like cigarettes, so now you have to go tell people how much you love Zyn. If you want to feel how you used to feel, you can’t ever shut up.

The trouble with all this is that people are used to transmitting signals about good things they’ve done. They’re used to bragging about the promotion they earned or the field they plowed or the mammoth they slaughtered. And people are used to receiving signals about good things others have done. They’re used to hearing about the earned promotion, the plowed field, the slaughtered mammoth. These mechanisms are the whole infrastructure of memetic desire.

Whatever’s good must be worth signaling.

Whatever’s worth signaling must be good.

This is the fifth part of a five-part series. You can read Part I here, Part II here, Part III here, and Part IV here.

The aim of this series is to explore a theory of human weakness in the modern age.

Note: If you’re here for a good time, skip to the break.

When people talk of vice, they’re very quick to speak in normative moral terms (“drunkenness is sinful”) or prescriptive legal terms (“pornography should be outlawed”), but they’re much slower to speak in descriptive economic terms. Any economic conversation tends to consider large-scale, supply-side forces — the lobbying efforts of sports betting interests or the advertisement of tobacco products or the consolidation of the beverage industry. These conversations are important, of course, but they pay too little attention to small-scale, demand-side dynamics.

To advance a microeconomics of addiction threatens to narrow our thinking to pure individual responsibility — the just-say-no model — but this isn’t my intention. The nature of vice is, of course, inextricable from much larger trends. But any vice can become an addiction, and all addiction is the hijacking of human agency. At some point or another, the process must be considered at the level of the individual.

Whether it’s very slow or very fast, addiction is the transformation of a want into a need. This means that the substance itself becomes less a luxury and more a necessity. In economic terms, demand becomes inelastic such that the quantity demanded remains constant even when the price increases. A smoker on a cross-country road trip will encounter a wide range of cigarette prices, but these changes are very unlikely to stop him from buying a pack when he needs one. He’d sooner skip a tank of gas. It’s the same thing with alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, and so on. The supply side of the equation naturally considers the addict to be its ideal customer.

In this sense, vice has always followed a rentier model. The true revolution of our age is not that vice goods are becoming more similar to non-vice goods but that non-vice goods are becoming more similar to vice goods. In the new economy, the costs of information technologies have rapidly fallen, and the scope of rent-extraction has expanded accordingly. The whole economy was already based on property and debt, but now it’s much easier to keep track of who owns what and who owes whom.

Whereas it used to be that one could only seek rent on a few asset categories — with real estate being the most obvious example — it is now the case that one can seek rent on almost anything. You can rent out a house, yes, but also cloud storage and computer software and designer clothes and e-books and electric scooters and gym equipment and home furniture and music libraries and security cameras and television shows and video games. At the very small scale, households have replaced a series of discrete capital investments with a steady stream of access commodities. The organization of so many relationships for such small transactions would have been flatly impossible even twenty years ago, but now it’s the way of the world.

The convergence of vice and non-vice puts the addict in a strange situation. In the old economy, the addict would be marked — or would feel himself to be marked — by a distinct lack of agency. But in the new economy, the addict is not so different from everyone else. From his perspective, the individual signal can get lost in the societal noise. He’s completely dependent on a continuous stream of some metered commodity — but who isn’t?

You would have to go to one of those great contagions of history — the gin craze of eighteenth-century England, the opium crisis of nineteenth-century China, the crack epidemic of late-twentieth-century America — to find anything comparable to this. It is not puritanical handwringing to admit that we live in an age of addiction. Who can say where the consumption ends and the compulsion begins? Modern life is completely inseparable from soft vice: the accessible distraction of video streaming; the immediate gratification of social media; the discrete indulgence of smartphone gaming; the potent chemistry of junk food; the pure consumerism of online shopping. There is no such thing as discretionary spending. If you could press a button and make everyone go cold turkey, the S&P 500 would go off like a pipe bomb.

These connections are not accidental. Corporations dedicated a great deal of resources to making their products as addictive as possible. They hired behavioral psychologists well-versed in the study of addiction. They commissioned extensive studies to identify vulnerabilities. They optimized their interfaces for habit formation. They offered free trials. They built tolerances. They marketed to children. At every step, these corporations did everything they could to damn you as Tantalus was damned. They drained engagement of all satisfaction, and without satisfaction, there can be no moderation.

All this was to become the greatest feedback loop of all. As these corporations were packaging addiction for the digital age, they were siphoning off massive amounts of people’s time and money. Throughout human history, periods of addiction are not marked by excess but by deprivation. The British gin craze took off during a period of rapid urbanization and extreme poverty. The Chinese opium crisis came down on a peasantry already beset by massive foreign trade imbalances and crushing taxation. The American crack epidemic burned through the segregated neighborhoods of deindustrialized cities. And the Russian zapoi style of drinking emerged amid the bleakness of post-Soviet economic devastation.

The great litany fairly attributed to the new economy — the atomization of society, the closing of the commons, the death of civil society, the extinction of third spaces, the hollowing of education, the polarization of politics, the standardization of aesthetics, the surveillance of private life — only hastened the addiction that underwrote it. In the new economy, sobriety is a luxury many of us cannot afford.

And so the final revelation of the addiction economy might be the darkest one yet. In this brave new world, vice is at once the only way to spend money and the only way to make money. Whether your vice is informational or chemical, you can put it to work.

Gambling has always been an act of speculation, but that dynamic has never been so clear. In case you missed it, the federal government basically woke up one day in 2018 and decided to revive an entire category of human misery not widely experienced in living memory. This ruling gave rise to DraftKings, FanDuel, and so many other apps dedicated to the normalization and promotion of sports betting. If you happen to live in one of the handful of states that hasn’t legalized sports betting yet, don’t worry. There is a whole suite of perfectly legitimate retail investing platforms like Robinhood or WeBull that will happily empower small investors to trade frequently through clean, gamified interfaces. If you need a little more action, you’re more than welcome to buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any number of memecoins and shitcoins on offer in the hype-driven, hyper-volatile game of hot potato we call the cryptomarkets. If these options aren’t sufficiently all-consuming, you might enjoy the prediction markets facilitated by the likes of Kalshi that will let you bet on propositions having to do with the winner of the next election or the next awards night. You really can’t go wrong here. No matter what you choose, you will experience the FOMO-mechanics, intermittent rewards, and fleeting promises of generational wealth that were penned up in actual brick-and-mortar casinos for far too long.

It might be true that entrepreneurship has always involved some degree of prostitution, but it’s certainly true that you can now explore pornography as entrepreneurship. If you have the nerve, there’s little else keeping you from a foray into the world of amateur pornography. Outlets like OnlyFans and Fansly will graciously find customers for sexual content in exchange for a cut of the revenue — whatever that might be. If you’re looking for something a bit more softcore, you can try your hand in the vast ecosystem of influencers on Instagram and TikTok. You can keep all your clothes on and still learn the valuable lesson that attention has become capital, monetized through some nexus of subscriptions and sponsorships. If you’re of a more creative bent, you might try to break into YouTube. If you have lots and lots of friends, you can get wrapped up in some multilevel marketing scheme. If you have only a friend or two, you can give podcasting a go. If you don’t have any friends, you can take a shot at Substack. Any of these paths will basically take you to the same place. If you’re very lucky, you might eke out a meager and precarious livelihood for the rest of your days. Or until you get ugly or dumb. Or until the internet is just AI slop piped to scammer bots. That should happen in the next year or two.

Perhaps you’ve decided to forego the small business hustle altogether and accepted your destiny as a salaryman. This might be the better route, at least in the sense that you get to take the fun drugs.

If you end up in some high-pressure sector — finance and tech come to mind — you’ll be delighted to learn that tobacco companies finally kicked their rebellious branding in favor of a more practical positioning centered on workplace performance. The caffeine and nicotine stack will keep you on a sturdy drip of iced coffees, energy drinks, minty pouches, and fruity vapes to enhance your cognitive abilities in the pursuit of shareholder earnings. This is what we call a win-win situation: your habit will increase the surplus value of your labor, and your dependency can be rationalized as a kind of human optimization.

If you end up in some creative field or immersed in startup culture, you can find your way to something a bit more interesting. Cannabis is also a productivity adjunct these days — you can crack open a THC-infused beverage on a school night to prime your mind for another day of ideation. To take this a step further, you might try psilocybin microdosing — or macrodosing — as a way to kickstart your long-dulled imagination. And if you’re a true visionary, a real founder dedicated to the creation of the miracle machine and the implementation of full-blown TESCREALism, then you get to move through earnings calls and press appearances on a genuinely insane cocktail of prescribed amphetamines and horse tranquilizers.

If you end up anywhere else — that’s code for sales — there’s always good old booze. Alcohol is still central to professional culture in most parts of the country, and don’t let them tell you otherwise. Whether you’re in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, or stranded at some mid-sized shithole in between those poles, the liquor is there for you. At business dinners, conferences, and countless corporate happy hours, alcohol is there to signal inclusion, facilitate insider access, and generally lubricate your rusty social skills. If you overdo it on a given day, that’s bad for the company. But if you overdo it over the course of a career, well —

Fuck it.

This is the fourth part of a five-part series. You can read Part I here, Part II here, and Part III here. I will publish Part V tomorrow.

The aim of this series is to explore a theory of human weakness in the modern age.

Note: This is my first foray into what may generously be called data journalism. If any of the graphics don’t load properly, try hitting the Datawrapper link to open them in a browser.

Vice is one of the few constants in human history. Long before the advent of writing, people were carving erotic figurines in Paleolithic Europe. By 7000 BC, the first fermented drinks were bubbling in Chinese pottery. Andean peoples were chewing tobacco thousands of years before the first pyramids rose. The inhabitants of Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley were rolling dice by 3000 BC. And mourners in the high Pamirs were already burning cannabis in funerary rites around 2500 BC.

These are old habits, but the notion that an individual could encounter a new vice is a modern concern. Across thousands of years, vice has only undergone a handful of true innovations: the proto-globalization of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the industrialization of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and perhaps the advent of organized crime in the twentieth century. I posit that we are in the midst of a similar transformation, which I have called the softening of vice.

For me to provide a full account of the progression of vice is both improbable and — for better or worse — unnecessary. Many people alive today have lived through all the highlights, and the whole story can be told in a few generations. I have already sketched the everyday experience of old vice and outlined the five qualities of new vice. I’d next like to consider those few intervening decades. It won’t take long at all.

Gambling and Access

For our vicious man, legal gambling was confined to Las Vegas, Reno, and a smattering of race tracks — so he was required to visit underground gambling dens or play the urban numbers racket. In 1976, casino gambling was legalized in Atlantic City, making it a weekend trip for anyone living in the first or fourth largest cities. That same year, the Supreme Court ruled in Bryan v. Itasca County that states lack the authority to regulate the activities of Native Americans on their reservations, and this laid the groundwork for a transcontinental industry of bingo halls and casinos. These were formalized by the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, and in the next seven years, Native American gaming revenues would increase from $100 million to $5.4 billion. Around this time, state lotteries began to proliferate as a supposedly harmless revenue generator.

By the 1990s, gambling had begun to move online, and internet poker sites allowed users to place bets from anywhere, effectively turning a time- and place-bound vice into a daily, at-home habit. The boom accelerated in the early 2000s, culminating in the online poker craze, with sites drawing millions of players from around the world. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 attempted to curb financial transactions related to online gambling, but it only partially slowed the industry. Offshore sites continued to operate, and the demand for easy betting grew.

By the 2010s, daily fantasy sports had monetized fan engagement under the pretense of skill, creating a gray market for casual bettors. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruling in Murphy v. NCAA struck down the federal ban on sports betting, opening a flood of state-by-state legalization. Within five years, 38 states and the District of Columbia had legalized sports wagering in some form, and betting became not only legal but basically unavoidable.

In 2024 alone, Americans wagered more than $140 billion on sports, generating about $13 billion in revenue for operators. Roughly 20 percent of U.S. adults placed a sports bet that year, and over 90 percent of those wagers occurred on mobile apps like DraftKings and FanDuel.

Pornography and Immediacy

The vicious man’s consumption of pornography was inherently moderated by the technological limits of his time. His only real options were magazines or movie theaters, and the enjoyment of either would require at least some kind of nerve. This would change as the advent of VCRs let people watch adult films — well, all films — at home. In 1982, Playboy TV pioneered subscription-based adult cable. Before the end of the decade, home camcorders had enabled amateur productions.

As the internet emerged, internet pornography immediately followed. Dial-up modems brought adult images to personal computers, and digital forums allowed the trade of scans, clips, and stills long before streaming was possible. In 1997, the Supreme Court decided Reno v. ACLU and struck down the anti-obscenity provisions of the Communications Decency Act, effectively clearing the way for an unregulated online market in explicit material. Broadband arrived a few years later, and the first tube had taken over. By the mid-2000s, pornography was free and infinite.

A coalescence of three technologies — the smartphone, the algorithm, and the platform — made pornography ubiquitous, personalized, and profitable. The tube sites were contested by subscription-based creator platforms, and previously safe-for-work social media was overrun by industrious self-promoters. For better or worse, this was an inversion of the pornographic market — performers became entrepreneurs, and audiences became patrons.

At the end of last year, OnlyFans reported 377.5 million fan accounts and 4.6 million creator accounts. At the same time, the platform managed $7.2 billion in transactions and captured $1.4 billion in revenue.

Nicotine and Discretion

The mass-produced paper cigarette must have seemed like a solved technology — as indeed it was — and our vicious man was very near the high-water mark of American smoking. In 1970, about 42 percent of American adults smoked, and tobacco companies were inseparable from the wider culture. That year, the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act banned television and radio advertising. From there, an accumulation of studies, lawsuits, and social pressures began to drive smoking from many areas of public life.

By the 1990s, the Marlboro Man was dying in more ways than one. The 1998 Master Settlement Agreement forced Big Tobacco to pay more than $200 billion to states and imposed new restrictions on marketing. Smoking bans spread across cities, workplaces, and restaurants. The rise of non-smoking spaces made smokers more identifiable. What was once a common scent was now confined to the clothing, cars, and homes of a certain kind of person. Around this time, smokeless alternatives — patches, gums, pouches — emerged as quieter ways to indulge or manage addiction.

It was one of these substitute technologies — the e-cigarette — that broke containment. When the first Juuls arrived in 2015, they could be mistaken for USB drives. They did not taste or smell like tobacco. They did not stain the fingertips or teeth. The user’s entire signature was reduced to a motion of the hand, a blinking light, and the smell of mangoes.

But even this was too much for the post-pandemic return to school and work, and the nicotine pouch surged to the fore. A single Zyn — the little fiber sachet placed between the gum and the cheek — diffuses its drip for an hour or more. They can be used anywhere except in the dentist’s chair.

Cannabis and Potency

For our vicious man, cannabis was a weak and somewhat unreliable indulgence. In the 1970s, the average potency of seized marijuana hovered between 1 and 3 percent THC, and the drug’s social meaning was inseparable from its physical limits. Cannabis was a mellowing agent and a centerpiece of countercultural ritual. The weed of that day would be mild, inconsistent, and embedded in a slow, analog world.

By the 1980s and 1990s, domestic growers began experimenting with controlled indoor cultivation, high-intensity lamps, and selective breeding. This was the beginning of the potency race. Some strains consistently pushed THC levels into the low teens. Hydroponic grow operations optimized production for the margins of a black-market economy, and cannabis was roundly subjected to the forces of commodification, differentiation, and engineering.

In the era of legalization — first medical, then recreational — this economy was formalized into an industry marked by competition and innovation. In the same way that beverage companies advertised their energy drinks’ caffeine content, the new dispensaries marketed products by potency. The drug took on pharmacological formats — extracts, concentrates, distillates — and flower was rapidly outclassed.

These new potions were sold as resin, shatter, and wax, but they also lent their strengths to new modes. Edibles evolved from homemade brownies into precise confectionery science — gummies, beverages, tinctures, all with predictable pharmacokinetics and escalators like “nanoemulsion” for faster onset. At the same time, the burgeoning supplies of nicotine salt vapes were readily repurposed into methods of high-dose inhalation.

Last year, the average THC content of legal-market flower in several states exceeded 20 percent, and concentrates averaged over 70 percent. A habit once defined by its ambient mildness is now shaped by engineered intensity, and this strategy has basically paid off. Despite the mounting evidence of dependence and psychosis in high-potency users, the market continues to reward strength.

Alcohol and Purity

The American beer market was lackluster in the 1970s, but this wouldn’t dissuade our vicious man. In most parts of the country, options were limited to regional lagers, the occasional imported pilsner, and a handful of working-class stalwarts. The median consumer was — to put it kindly — value-conscious and volume-focused. Refinement wasn’t really in the picture, so refreshment would have to do.

In the following decades, consumption patterns would bifurcate. The first leg came in the 1980s, with the surging popularity of light beers. These mass-market options cut calories, blunted alcohol content, and — according to many purists — devastated flavor. It was the analogue to diet soda, a tool of self-management. The second leg came in the 1990s, as cider reemerged as a kind of sugary novelty that could appeal to drinkers who disliked beer. This set up a tension that would take years to resolve.

The craft beer era introduced a set of new extremes — high ABVs, complicated palates, obsessive provenance — that stood more or less above those contradictions. The floor of the alcohol market was instead consumed by the first “alcopops” like Smirnoff Ice, Mike’s Hard, and Bacardi Silver. These drinks were sugary to the point of fluorescence, but they went down fast.

The real breakthrough was the hard seltzer, a category that resolved those bifurcated preferences into a light and fruity drink. No color. No carbs. No aftertaste. This was the chemically simple delivery system for alcohol. White Claw and Truly were not selling indulgence — far from it. This was the great epiphany of purity. Ciders were slimmed down and rebranded to stress their new profiles: crisp, dry, clean fermentation, cold-pressed apples. Beer manufacturers quickly followed suit with super-light and ultra-light variants.

By the 2020s, purity was the central logic of the low end. The original seltzers begat vodka seltzers begat vodka waters. The drinks, the cans, the markets — everything got cleaner and leaner. The result is a drink close to the form factor of beer, the alcohol content of wine, and the nutritional profile of clear spirts while avoiding any bloated, heady, or burning side effects. There’s only the alcohol and a little fizz to carry it.

If I had just finished reading this essay, I might well believe that the author had rather overplayed his hand. Things like state lotteries and hard ciders are real — sure — but they’re a long way from the founding of the Atlantic World or the spark of the Second Industrial Revolution. And of course that’s true.

The trouble with history is that it isn’t over, and the softening of vice is far from complete. I’ve looked back half a century, but I intend to look forward, too. I aim to consider what the softening of vice might be doing to our economies, our societies, and ourselves. All vices are of the will, and the will is all there ever was.

This is the third part of a five-part series. You can find Part I here and Part II here. I will publish Part IV tomorrow and Part V on Friday.

The aim of this series is to explore a theory of human weakness in the modern age.

When I talk about the softening of vice, I am not defining one process but describing some bundle of processes. It’s these changes, taken together, that make a habit easier to start and harder to stop. Of course, any vice can undergo — and does undergo — these changes, but the clearest example in recent history is offered by cannabis. To be honest, I’ve never liked weed, and weed has never liked me. But let’s say, for the purposes of illustration, that we got along well.

Access

A vice becomes accessible. The real or potential externalities of use decrease. When this happens, it becomes easier to get your hands on the thing itself. It might be that the legal risk of engaging in the vice lessens. It might be that the financial burden of maintaining the habit lightens. It might be that the social stigma associated with the vice subsides. Most likely, it’s some complex push-pull interaction of all these forces over a prolonged period of time.

I live in the most policed city in the hemisphere, at the very heart of the American jurisdiction. In spite of this, I could walk into a store, withdraw a $20 bill from a low-fee ATM, and walk out with a Schedule I drug. With even a passing respect for good manners, I could use this drug in front of any of my gainfully employed friends — or almost any police officer — and receive less than a glance.

Accessibility tends toward a flywheel effect. If something is legal, it tends to be cheaper. If something is cheaper, it tends to be more common. Procurement becomes a smaller matter until it’s no matter at all, and here an epidemic model takes shape. The more you see something, the likelier you are to try it. The more you try something, the likelier you are to enjoy it. It doesn’t take much for this reaction to go supercritical.

The strange thing about the accessibility model is how little cause can have such a great effect. In the same sense that the difference between something costing a dollar and something being free is far greater than a hundred pennies, the difference between something being decriminalized and something being legalized is far greater than the sum of so many quality of life citations. There is nothing quite like easier.

Immediacy

A vice becomes immediate. The time it takes to get the drug — broadly defined — from the world to your brain approaches zero. The commodity moves rapidly through the economy. The contraband moves easily into the home. The chemical moves quickly into the body. The time to go from desire to experience is so compressed that desire and experience are collapsed into a single affective state.

From my front door, I could walk two hundred paces to a dispensary. From their front door, I could walk two steps, tear open the packaging of a dab pen, put it to my lips, and breathe. I would not have to drive across town. I would not have to fiddle with bowls or papers. It would take five minutes, tops.

This time factor is important because the human will is subject to a sort of entropy. Our impulses — for better or worse —are fleeting. When things are slower, it’s harder to jump from the discrete to the continuous. When things are faster, it’s easier to slide from distinct uses of a thing to constant usage of the same.

I said that the time it takes to get the drug from the world to your brain approaches zero, but this isn’t quite true. That time can actually become zero. That time can actually move past zero. You can get another dose in yourself before you even realized you were getting ready to dose.

Discretion

A vice becomes discreet. The outward signs of usage — except for the actual effects on the user — basically vanish. The paraphernalia becomes minimal. The trace becomes undetectable. The habit becomes unobtrusive.

The dab pen would not reek through my pocket. It would not fumigate my wardrobe or scatter roaches about my home. I could probably fly with it in my hand luggage, or so I’ve been told. And if I had any worry that someone in my household would give me any trouble for it, that whole issue is easily avoided. It uses the same charger as my phone. The safest place for it is in my pocket. I might as well keep it there.

Not to be pedantic, but there is a difference between embarrassment and shame. Embarrassment is an interruption of dignity, and you need an audience to really feel it. Shame is a disgrace to honor, and you can feel it all along. (In fact, that’s where you usually feel shame — isolated and insomniac.)

We’re very social creatures and naturally susceptible to the opinions of our peers. The trouble with discretion is that it can fend off the interruption of dignity by hiding our embarrassments from our audiences. This leaves us to whatever shame we can endure, whatever honor we can summon. You may judge which motive is the more reliable.

Potency

A vice becomes potent. Just a little of the thing goes a long way. The drug — broadly defined — becomes stronger, overpowering its carrier media until the carrier media comes to be seen as just another impurity.

The dab pen, by some back-of-the-envelope math, would be five times as potent as modern flower. And modern flower, by similar estimations, is ten times as potent as it was fifty years ago.

The tolerance mechanism is a cliché — but only for good reasons. The body tends to get used to a drug and tends to need more of it to reach similar effects. And lest you think this some kind of D.A.R.E. propaganda, remember that happy recreational smokers will use t-breaks — brief stints of sobriety — to reset their sensitivity.

The trouble with potency is often an issue of resolution. A weak drug offers many gradations of effect, so that it’s easier to resolve between one effect and the next. A strong drug offers fewer gradations and eventually collapses into a binary of the two conditions: no effect and full effect. Whereas a weak drug might help you find your limit, a strong drug dooms you to blow past it. Just a few misadventures can dramatically recalibrate your tolerance for the drug.

Purity

A vice becomes pure. All the surrounding unpleasantness falls away. The pollutants are filtered out. The side effects are mitigated. The high is clean.

I did not have to meet a drug dealer in some parking lot. I did not have to feel heat in my lungs or clean ash from my shirt. Instead, the thing itself is anodized metal and tempered glass or a few kinds of plastic. It doesn’t really taste like anything. It’s neutral. When I looked at the packaging, I couldn’t even snag on a serif font.

You don’t have to look for the drug or wait for the drug or hide the drug or go back to the drug. The drug is right here and right now, and all you have to do is take it. Nothing out there has stopped you, and nothing in here will stop you either.

The drug has been reduced to the drug itself. Anything that might have given you pause has been hunted to extinction. All inhibitors have been banished to oblivion. A perfect sphere falling through a vacuum. An interminable velocity. A perpetual motion. The perfect device.

These are the qualities of a softened vice — access, immediacy, discretion, potency, purity. The vice becomes effortless, and effortless things become everywhere.

All evolutions are about competition, the raising of measures against countermeasures, the niche gouged deep and planed wide. The question is not how you will adapt to this environment. The question is not even how this environment will adapt to you. The question is when you became the environment.

This is the modern vice — easy, fast, quiet, strong, clean. The softening is, of course, a hardening.

This is the second part of a five-part series. You can read Part I here. I will publish Part III tomorrow, Part IV on Thursday, and Part V on Friday.

The aim of this series is to explore a theory of human weakness in the modern age.

It’s 1975, and you are an especially vicious man.

Even before your eyes open, there’s a cigarette between your lips, and you’re struggling to play the flame against it. You sit up, and this helps with the cigarette, but it hurts your head terribly, a cord drawn tight around your temples. Even through this bombed-out feeling, you know you’re partly drunk. You fumble around the drawer and find the grass easily enough. It’s all shake, but that doesn’t matter. You’re out of papers anyway. All this has taken some time, and you’ve forgotten to ash. Your neglect has asked too much of the unsound cigarette. The ash falls — pulling the cherry with it — and lands in your bare lap. All at once, you yelp and leap up and pat out the ember. There’s another hole in your sheets, but at least you’re really awake now.

You’re out the door and down the stairs and into the awful sunlight. You still have some money in your pocket, and that just won’t stand. It’s a few hours to the nearest race track. What’s left of your paycheck would last maybe twenty minutes in those places, and even you know the trip isn’t worth it. That just leaves Martin.

He’s a good way crosstown, but you get to the barbershop sooner than you expected. There’s a sign at the door — BE BACK SOON — but the lights are still on. You peer inside and see Marty eating his lunch. He’s reading the sports page. You rap on the glass, and he looks up. He knows you’re not here for a haircut. He taps his watch and shakes the paper at you, as if to shoo you away. He knows you won’t go far.

The fifth cigarette of the day carries you to the theater, the sixth carries you past the box office and to your seat. There are a few other men scattered about, but it’s pretty empty at this time of day. Even you notice the dankness of the room, but it’s soon overpowered by the thrill you feel. It’s worlds away from those few magazines you keep at home — the motion, the sound, the color. It’s almost too much. Almost.

You’re halfway through the pack by the time you’re back at Marty’s. There are a few patrons in the backroom, but he ignores them while you fill out the slips. This courtesy makes you feel more hassled, and you break two pencils marking down your bets. It’s supposed to be in pen, but no one ever seems to mind. You only rarely win.

It takes you another few hours to make it back home, on account of all the errands. One stop for a fresh bottle of liquor. Another for a new carton of cigarettes. Here you also get some more lighter fluid and rolling papers. Then it’s late enough to stop at your dealer’s apartment, and this always proves to be a whole ordeal. When you do get home, it’s only to drop off your bounty and quickly eat. The game has already started when you sit down at the bar. You drink and smoke and become miserable. None of your bets panned out. You think about going elsewhere but end up back at home.

As you smoke up and doze off, you think of generations. Not all vices are heritable, but you know that yours will be inevitable. They will toll like church bells, you just know it. In 2000, your son will be your age. In 2025, your grandson will be as you are.

Despite your very best efforts, you cannot begin to fathom what will beset them.

This is the first part of a five-part series. I will publish Part II tomorrow, Part III on Wednesday, Part IV on Thursday, and Part V on Friday.

The aim of this series is to explore a theory of human weakness in the modern age.

Here, at the beginning of the end, it seems well to address what I have so far dodged.

The Great Replacement (French: grand remplacement) is a discredited white nationalist and far-right conspiracy theory developed by the French writer Renaud Camus. It claims that “replacist” elites are enabling the demographic and cultural displacement of ethnic French and other white Europeans by nonwhite populations — particularly immigrants from Muslim-majority nations — through mass immigration, higher birth rates among these groups, and declining birth rates among white Europeans. Of course, it didn’t take long for this drivel to jump the pond.

For our purposes, there are three things to know about the Great Replacement theory. First, the Great Replacement is not new. It has origins in the late 19th century, when members of the American elite fomented fear of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and pushed for restrictive immigration policies. Second, the Great Replacement is not fringe. It has been advanced by the most prominent rightwing media figures, promoted by the most powerful conservatives in government, and accepted as fact by two in three Republican voters. Third, the Great Replacement is not harmless. Several far-right terrorists have been motivated by it, including the perpetrators of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings, the 2019 El Paso shooting, the 2022 Buffalo shooting, and the 2023 Jacksonville shooting.

This means that you absolutely know someone who believes in some form of the Great Replacement. That person enjoys all the security of the mainstream and — whether he knows it or not — draws from a deep well of American nativism. Because the theory is so uniquely libelous, you might well feel the need to respond.

Let me see if I can give you some advice.

Let me draw you an indirect approach.

Your aim is to throw this person off balance, and this task is best accomplished through interrogation. Take your time, if you can. Let him sweat, if he’s worth it — I have to believe that most of these people can be reached. Ask him about his life. Ask him about his family. The man across from you has hardened his heart to the suffering of innocents. Your task is to thaw it.

Does it bother you that this kind of thinking has killed people?

Do you not already benefit a great deal from the diversity around you?

Was it all that long ago that people said these things about your kind?

Do the people you admire tend to think this way?

You should listen to what he says, of course, but the answers are less important than the answering. A good deal of what you hear might be insensitive or illogical or even insane, but that’s probably fine. Human identities are complicated — that’s an honest understanding of it. Only racists pretend they’re simple.

At some point in this long exchange, one of three things will happen. The interrogation might stall, so you need a stronger stimulus. The conversation might devolve into an argument, so you need some harder evidence. Or your interlocutor might reveal himself to lie beyond redemption. In this last case, you’ll want some means of escalation.

If there’s one upside to speaking with someone who thinks a globalist cabal is waging genocide against white Americans, it’s that you don’t have to watch what you say. So long as your personal safety is assured, you can really let loose.

A few weeks ago, I came across some white nationalists arguing about a graphic. It was titled “How American Are You?” and gave four options:

Grade A — Colonial Old Stock (1607-1789);

Grade B — Antebellum Stock (1789-1861);

Grade C — Ellis Islanders (1861-1945);

Grade D — New Arrivals (1945-).

They accepted the basic premise of the chart but disagreed about the finer points of its interpretation. One insisted that a person should be rated by his newest ancestor in America. The other insisted it should be the oldest. “Just one colonial ancestor is enough to make you Old Stock.” It was wild to watch him derive an inverse of the one drop rule in real time.

Obviously, one thing can be wrong for many reasons. You could take the high road, I guess. Remind them that the stated purpose of American society was to do away with hereditary caste. You could take the low road, too. Point out that — given the passage of the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves of 1807 — almost any Black American is significantly “more American” than almost any white American.

No, they’d say, it’s about culture. Here again, two roads diverge. You could point out that the cultural contributions of Black Americans are so rich that no area of American culture could be cleanly separated from their talents. Or you could tell them about your friend who teaches kindergarten in Mississippi. She looks at her roll sheet before the first day of school. She reads the names Achilles, Antigone, Braxton, and Blakely. Would they like to guess which kids are the white ones? Would they like to tell us which parents have shunned the triumphs of Western Civilization?

If you know your history, you can do this trick for just about anyone. During the pandemic, there were all those terrible hate crimes against Asian Americans, and many of them took place in California. They were all terrible, but I remember one in particular. It was a young white man who shoved an elderly Chinese American woman and hurt her pretty badly. During the assault, he told her to go back where she came from. I know it’s beside the point, but both their names were in the paper. His was something like Bianchi, and hers was something like Zhang. I’d bet the Zhangs were in San Francisco for three generations before the Bianchis ever stepped off the boat.

A few times in my life, I’ve heard a little quip from other white men: If I move into their neighborhood, it’s gentrification. But if I move out, it’s white flight! Yeah, man. Sure thing. I never really know what they want me to say.

I shudder to think about the other side of the ledger. To be outside the American majority seems to be the most frustrating dilemma ever devised. On the one hand, you get told that every day that your culture is just absolutely incompatible with the mainstream. You speak the wrong language or pray to the wrong god or eat the wrong food, and so your family is barred from entry into American society. You get told day after day that you never make an effort to change. On the other hand, the moment you actually try to adopt some mainstream practices, everyone freaks out. I mean, they absolutely lose it.

I’m sure lots of people get stuck with this one, but I’ve noticed it a lot with American Muslims.

In 2024, the East Plano Islamic Center unveiled plans for EPIC City, a residential development in Texas focused on an Islamic community, located about 40 minutes from Dallas. The proposed community is set to include more than 1,000 homes, as well as a mosque, a K–12 faith-based school, a community college, and commercial retail spaces.

Of course, the American right immediately went out of its mind. Greg Abbott said that “Sharia cities” will not be allowed in Texas. He then launched several state investigations and convinced the federal government to open its own. This was enough to halt construction for the foreseeable future. Say what you will, but I know I never heard such fear about the Amish.

What exactly had these Muslims done wrong? How exactly had they offended the great state of Texas? What strange and foreign practice had they foisted on the good people of Josephine? Well, they tried to build a megachurch.

When these racists try to get you worked up about demographic change, they ask you to imagine what America will be like in a generation or two. This is a rhetorical flourish, of course. You’re not actually supposed to do it.

If things go the way they’ve gone, then I guess Staten Island will have a lot more Guatemalan flags. I guess the NYPD will have a sizable Honduran contingent, and I trust that they will be no less dedicated to the cause of overtime fraud. I guess we’ll all have a favorite Haitian restaurant.

If integration has some great tragedy, it might be the paths that people take through it. Fuentes. Tarrio. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are the last names of vanguard white nationalists. ICE agents insist they wear masks and forego badges so people don’t find out who their friends and family are. I suspect it’s more so their loved ones don’t find out who they are. From the videos, they seem very good at barking orders in Spanish. I’d guess that under every other balaclava is a set of handsome Latin features.

If there’s any hope for America, it might be that Americans are a disorganized people. It takes a great deal of effort to pin people into categories. It’s a lot to keep track of a rigid caste system. I’m just not sure we’re up for it.

So long as citizenship remains a birthright, I think we might be okay. I’ve met enough white Republicans in my lifetime. I know they don’t play about their mixed grandbabies.

This is the fifth part of a five-part series. You can find Part I here and Part II here and Part III here and Part IV here.

The aim of this series is to explore demographic change in America, past and present.

My maternal grandfather was born in 1931, the first child of what would become a large Irish Catholic family. His parents had a store that sold watches to trolley drivers — the only people with money during the Depression — so his boyhood in Philadelphia was fairly stable. Looking back, it’s hard to remember any aspect of his personality not somehow linked to his city.1 He went through the parochial schools and then to St. Joe’s Prep and then to Wharton. He spent his career first as an East Coast accountant and later as a West Coast executive.

My grandfather was just old enough to catch the very last of the anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiments. He was insulated from it for most of his childhood, but that changed when he got to Penn. It wasn’t anything intolerable, but he didn’t like it. At the very least, it stirred up blood memories of what his relatives had lived through.

This knowledge was only conveyed to me through a few short conversations over the course of my childhood. My strongest memory of it comes from a trip we took to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. I remember the Irish apartment on the top floor. I remember the cold plaster, the well-worn floors. I remember that my grandfather seemed, in his own way, as affected as he’d been at his little brother’s funeral.

The South will teach you many histories — some false and some true — and the most startling ones are always those deployed in discussions of race. The point of these histories is to draw equivalencies — some false and some true — between the experiences of different groups throughout the South.

The most notorious of these might be the Irish slaves myth, a revisionist narrative conflating the penal transportation and indentured servitude of Irish people with the hereditary chattel slavery endured by African people. From hearing this, you’re supposed to draw the conclusion that slavery wasn’t that bad.

The less conspicuous of these might be the fact that the largest mass lynching in American — which took place in New Orleans in 1891 — targeted Italian American immigrants and not Black Americans. From hearing this, you’re supposed to draw the conclusion that lynchings weren’t that bad.

I never really got the point of telling these stories. To me, they seemed not only morally decrepit but also rhetorically impotent. If it were true — and it isn’t — that your Irish ancestors had been enslaved, wouldn’t that make you feel greater solidarity with other descendants of slaves? If it were true — as it is — that your Italian American ancestors had been subjected to extrajudicial violence, wouldn’t that make you feel greater empathy for other victims of racial terror?

I admired that my grandfather was pretty good at keeping this perspective. Recent inductees to the American mainstream face a lot of pressure to act like longstanding members. But he was pretty good at remembering that people like him were relative newcomers, and this made him more gracious.

My grandfather lived most of his life in major American cities, and this gave him a nice disposition — especially for a man of his generation. He wasn’t afraid of people or awkward around them. He had a genuine fondness for the company of others and a general contempt for anyone who might interrupt such merriment. It was as if he parlayed some depth of personal magnanimity into a current of political generosity.

I’m hesitant to tell this story because it smacks of saviorism or self-satisfaction. But someone thought it important enough to share with me, so I’ll share it with you.

When my grandfather died, he had two funerals — one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast. It was at the California memorial luncheon that one of his former coworkers approached me. He was a Black man, very tall, and maybe five years younger than my grandfather. He shook my hand and said he was sorry for my loss, and we chatted about school for a bit.

As the conversation was wrapping up, the man got a little tense for a moment, as if he was thinking something over. Then he said to me rather formally:

“You know, John, your grandfather was very good to work with. For everyone, but especially for African Americans and women, too. I just thought you should know.”

He pursed his lips and shook his head, as if to show that wasn’t what he meant to say. Then he looked around the room and stooped down to my height:

“One of the guys in the office made a comment — well, never mind what it was. The point, is your granddaddy threw a bottle at him. Overhand.”

Insofar as one can be grateful to learn about race, I’m grateful to have learned about it from my grandfather. He had an earnest optimism that now feels inaccessible. I can’t tell you if that’s because it was the late-2000s or because I was in elementary school.

Whenever we watched Tiger Woods play golf, he’d talk about Jack Kelly Sr. Whenever we drove on Kelly Drive, he’d talk about Tiger Woods. He did the same — of course — for John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama. I remember the kick he got out of those stickers — the green shamrocks emblazoned with O’Bama. He was so glad to live through that first term. I’m almost glad he never saw the second.

I’ll put my cards on the table and tell you that I don’t know how to wrap this up. It’s gotten away from me, maybe, but I don’t really mind.

To be clear, I’m not implying my grandfather was so benignly ignorant as to mistake similarity for sameness. And I certainly don’t want to draw equivalence between the experiences of Black Americans to Irish Americans or any other group.

If living in the South convinced me of anything, it’s that anti-Black racism is its own thing. I don’t think an honest person can look at centuries of chattel slavery and decades of unvarnished apartheid and say otherwise. Whenever I heard a case for Afro-pessimism, I was left to think: Jesus, probably.

How did that debater put it? “It’s just not the same. It’s just not the fucking same.” How did that classmate say it? “Things might get better, but they will not get better.”

A friend of mine likes to remind me that things can always get worse. This, to me, is the most optimistic sentiment, because it encodes an insistence that all things are mutable. If we are to improve things, our best bet is to proceed not with maturity but with naiveté. To be generous of spirit. To make clumsy comparisons. To throw bottles overhand.

This is the fourth part of a five-part series. You can find Part I here and Part II here and Part III here. I will publish Part V tomorrow.

The aim of this series is to explore demographic change in America, past and present.