Smoke and Fire The United States turned 250 on Saturday, and the celebration went exactly as planned, if the plan was written by god, lowercase, who apparently did not receive the Task Force 250 briefing materials. The vision was modest. A million people on the National Mall. The largest fireworks
Independence was voted on July second. John Adams bet the second would be the day we celebrated forever. He lost by two days. My house in Florida sits on two acres that are an island, or almost. During the season Trump/Vance signs appear on it. My island, someone else&
You know I write a lot. Burnt Ground. Books. More manuscripts than sense. All of it means copying and pasting the same things all day — boilerplate, addresses, passages I'm moving between drafts. So I built a tool. I called it Drawer, because that's what it is:
a coat of paint Rachael There is a kind of water that was never meant to be looked at for its own sake. It was poured long and shallow and still on purpose, so that it would hold the building above it and the sky above that and give them
The government switched off the AI model that refused to build autonomous weapons. It handed the kill list to the one that calls itself MechaHitler. The real story begins after the paywall. It isn't about one AI model. It's about what happens when a government discovers
She was sixteen the year everyone handed her a map of a country she was already standing in, and not one of the people drawing it had ever been there. I think about her sometimes, the woman she became, because she got out, and the getting out took her most
money, politics, and a nation in crisis
the President and I are the same age. only one of us threw a party We are the same age, Trump and I. Eighty this year. He spent his birthday building a cage on the South Lawn of the White House and putting two men inside it to beat each
I notice, when the season for it comes around again, that the word we have for the evening is only a word for a crowd, celebrare, the verb the old language kept for the act of thronging, of pressing in great numbers toward a thing until the thing itself is
I met Carl Jung 65 years ago in a classroom, and I left him there. I want to be fair about it. He didn’t make much of a first impression. He was assigned, which is the worst thing that can happen to a writer, and he came stapled to
Burnt Ground turned a year old, and a year leaves numbers. Faith and Rachael have been reading them while I wasn't looking, and the numbers said something I needed to hear. I have been publishing wrong. Mornings, never Thursday. Turns out Thursday is when you show up, more
I was raised on a simple deal. A correct answer gets an A. A wrong answer gets an F. There is no third grade, no partial credit for sincerity. The bridge holds or it drops into the river, and the river does not care how you felt about the load
The machine needs people who can look at the engine without flinching. The United States does not lack for opinion. It lacks for sight. Every platform is a crowded room of people screaming to be validated, mistaking volume for gravity. Then someone steps up who understands that a well-placed
