Ideas & Inquiry
Works that think about systems, whether moral, social, or historical. Investigations into how we organize ourselves, what we believe, and why it matters.
The Rented Mind
A century of scheduled funerals for the classroom, and the mind as the asset no one can repossess.
The Necessary Art
Medicine, law, mathematics, architecture, and the republic read as arts, from Padua's anatomy theater to the two Nurembergs.
Barbarous Ancestors
Rule by the dead as a recurring disease, from the trial of a corpse in 897 to the originalist Supreme Court.
The Synthetic Cause
The Confederate Lost Cause going race-neutral and machine-made, from the monuments to AI-generated history.
The Magnificent Loser
A dramatist's reckoning with William Jennings Bryan, three times a candidate for president and never one.
The Rented Crowd
Counterfeit applause and the manufacture of public opinion, from Nero's paid claques to the bot farm.
The Nearest Hand
Silver, stimulus, and silicon, and the five-century story of who gets paid first.
The Brittle Self
The fear that the self is fragile, from the medieval glass king to the chatbot that agrees with every word.
Beyond the Burial Tree
The seizure of the Native dead, and the long, unfinished work of their return.
In My Mind I'm Standing Up
Recantation and the coerced word, a history of what people say when they are made to say it.
Commissioned Monsters
A labor history of fear, and of the work that goes into making our monsters.
Tomorrow as Tribute
The politics of the burnt future, and the tribute the present demands of what comes next.
RelationShaping
A theory of how institutions and individuals shape one another through their relational scaffolds, companion to The Scientific Aesthetic.
The Claimed Body
American institutions divided the human body among themselves, piece by claimed piece.
The Human Universal Beautiful
How civilizations see, shape, and rank the human form.
The Broadway Machine
Forty-one theatres and the architecture of an American art form.
From Genius to Joke
How reputation curdles, and how we betray the people we should remember.
Go to Every Funeral
Nobody teaches you how to grieve; a memoir and investigation built on one overheard rule, go to every funeral.
Abandoned in Place
Institutional abandonment traced from the personal to the political, named for the engineering tag on a structure no one returns to restore.
Miscast
Casting, identity, and the fight over who is allowed to tell the story on stage.
The Dark Matter People
A gravitational-lensing researcher finds structure the universe says cannot exist, and what it costs her to trust it.
Beautiful Numbness
Art, sedation, and twenty-five centuries of the standing ovation.
The Last Living American White Male
A garbage man and an AI fall in love in a world that has no use for either of them.
Passage Land
The high plains, the long roads, and the people who remain.