Human Meme

For most of Western history, the word art meant something wider and harder than it means now. Ars in Latin, techne in Greek: a principled, teachable discipline of making and doing, judged by its work. The family album that held the painter also held the physician, the pilot, the general, and the geometer. When Aristotle wrote the Poetics, the small treatise that barely survived antiquity through a...

January, in the year 897. A courtroom in Rome. In the defendant's chair sits a pope who has been dead for nine months. His name was Formosus. The reigning pope ordered the body pulled from its tomb, dressed in full vestments, and propped upright for trial. Church law required that a defendant answer, so the synod supplied a voice: a junior deacon stood beside the throne and replied to the prosecut...

I want to start with a red pen. In August of 1977, a volunteer astronomer named Jerry Ehman sat reviewing computer printouts from a radio telescope in Ohio called Big Ear. The telescope had been listening to the sky and printing what it heard as columns of numbers and letters, and most of every page was the quiet hiss of the galaxy. Then Ehman's eye caught a vertical run of six characters, seventy...

A thousand years ago, the early English law, and the Germanic law behind it, had a word for settling a death. Wergild. Wer, meaning man. Geld, meaning payment. The man-price: a sum owed by the killer, or by the killer's kin, to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, and once it was paid, the feud was closed. Grief became arithmetic so that grief would stop becoming graves. T...

Somewhere in the last year, a group you belong to went looking for a villain. Maybe it was a workplace after a project collapsed. Perhaps it was a family after a holiday turned sour, or a whole country after a hard season of news. The group did not sit inside its own failure and ask what everyone in the room had done to cause it. It scanned the faces, found the one person who fit the mood, and set...

Start with the word meme, the way Richard Dawkins meant it in 1976, a piece of culture that copies itself from mind to mind and adapts to whatever medium will carry it. By that measure the Lost Cause ranks among the most successful memes this country has produced. Confederate veterans engineered it after the war, men who had lost the fighting and refused to lose the meaning. Jubal Early and the pe...

Two thousand years ago, on a hillside in eastern Gaul, a Roman army under Julius Caesar trapped a Gallic army inside a hill town called Alesia, and then did something stranger than a siege. Caesar built two walls, one facing inward at the men he had caught, to hold them in, the other facing outward at the quarter of a million Gauls marching to break the ring, to keep them out. Miles of timber and...

This show is about the ideas that copy themselves through us, the ones we carry and hand on without inspecting them, and today's idea is a number. My new book reaches the world this week. It is called The Eighteen-Minute Lie, and it is the biography of a statistic that was never true, followed from the hour someone forged it to the moment it convinced a civilization that it had lost its mind. I sp...

So how did the cartoon win? In the summer of 1925, in a hot courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, William Jennings Bryan agreed to defend a law against the teaching of evolution. Clarence Darrow put him on the stand and took him apart in front of the country. A newspaperman named H. L. Mencken filed dispatches that turned the old orator into a national figure of fun, and the dispatches were funnier than...

In the spring of 1973, in a public school in Lincoln, Nebraska, a teacher handed me a paper armband and told me to wear it for the rest of the day. Mine was blue, and it carried a single printed letter, an "S." The children with brown eyes wore brown bands lettered "M". No one explained the letters to a room of eight-year-olds. I have spent the rest of my life arriving at what they meant. "M" for...

Picture a man in a bright room in a great house. In front of him sit three boxes. One is gold, one is silver, one is lead. He may open exactly one of them. Open the right box and he marries the cleverest and richest woman in the room and clears the debt closing around his friend's neck. Open either of the others and he leaves forever, sworn never to court another woman as long as he lives. The wom...

Let me start with a piece of paper. Early in the twentieth century a printed rate card circulated among the opera houses of Italy, a schedule of charges from a claque, one of the applause brigades that worked the great houses of Europe. Approval came in grades, and the grades came at prices. Polite appreciation cost little. Insistence cost more. Down at the luxury end, for a wild ovation at any co...

Here is the idea at the center of it. Money has come in two families for about as long as we have had money. There is value that travels by possession: the coin, the note, the bill in your pocket that asks nothing of anyone. And there is value that travels by permission: the tally, the ledger, the account entry that moves only when a chain of institutions agrees to move it. Neither family is wicke...

There is a coin in your pocket right now, and there is an identical coin in someone else's pocket across town, and those two coins are worth different amounts. Same metal, same stamp, same date. The difference between them comes from how each coin arrived. One of them was spent early, while prices still belonged to yesterday. The other arrived late, after the prices had already risen to swallow it...

In the winter of 1393, the King of France gave his court an order that no one knew how to obey. He asked them not to touch him: not to brush against him in a corridor, not to take his arm on the stairs, not to embrace him on his name day. Charles the Sixth had become certain that his body was made of glass, and that one clumsy hand or one careless shoulder would shatter him on the floor of his own...

In 1868 the office of the Surgeon General put out an order asking Army doctors to gather Native skulls so the size of them could be studied. A grief that any family on earth would know on sight was treated, on the other side of the counter, as a research opportunity. The dead became holdings. An ancestor became an object that a stranger could keep, study, and decline to return. I anchor the book i...

The subject is recantation: the coerced word, the public taking back of a belief by a person who has been given no real choice. We use the word recant without hearing what is buried inside it. It comes from the Latin for singing again. To recant is to sing your own song over, backward, in front of the people who marched you to the microphone. A confession of error that someone else wrote. An apolo...

I want to tell you about a clay mask. It sits in a glass case at the British Museum, in the Mesopotamian galleries. The mask is approximately three thousand eight hundred years old, made in southern Iraq during the Old Babylonian period. Its face was made to terrify. The hair tangles into serpentine coils across the brow. The grin is bared, with one tooth chipped on the left side. Hooded sockets s...

The simple argument is the trade. Across more than a dozen contemporary cases, voter populations have agreed to trade the material future of their political communities for the maintenance of a fantasy past. The trade is voluntary. The costs include dead soldiers, dismantled institutions, scientific apparatus lost across decades, and democratic procedures captured by movements that openly oppose t...

There was a moment in your life when you found out. Maybe you were eleven, and a cousin let something slip at a family dinner. Perhaps it happened at thirty-four, going through a parent's papers after a funeral, when a folder you were not supposed to open contained a name you had never heard. Or you were fifty-eight, and a half-sister you did not know you had appeared in your DNA results. The deta...

I keep walking past the same stretch of river. Most days I cross over it. Sometimes I stop. There is a place along the New Jersey side of the Hudson where you can stand and see the water moving in two directions at the same time, depending on where you fix your eyes. The surface goes one way. Beneath it, the deeper current is going the other way. The Mohican word for the river is Muhheakantuck. It...

Paris, August nineteenth, eighteen thirty-nine. François Arago, perpetual secretary of the Académie des Sciences, stands at a joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He reads into the record the technical details of Louis Daguerre's photographic process. The French state has acquired the rights from Daguerre and Isidore Niépce in exchange for life pensions of si...

I want to start with four seconds. If you watched public television anywhere in the United States between 1971 and January of this year, you know these four seconds. A human face in profile, rendered first in the three colors of mid-century corporate design, recast in 1984 as a trio of interlocking faces on a field of white. Six synthesizer notes descending, resolving to a sustained major ninth ch...

Shakespeare wrote the apothecary twenty lines and then disappeared him from the text. Think about what that means for a moment. Romeo, banished to Mantua, walks into a shop and asks a starving man to sell him poison. The apothecary refuses. The apothecary cites the law. Mantua punishes the sale of such drugs with death. Romeo counters that the world affords no law to make him rich. Forty ducats ch...

1862. That is the year Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. The Act said that any American willing to settle on 160 acres of public land, live there for five years, and improve the parcel, could file a claim and receive title. Between 1862 and 1976, when the Federal Land Policy and Management Act finally repealed the Homestead Act in the contiguous states, the United States distributed approx...