Human Meme

What does it mean to say amen? We say it reflexively. The minister concludes the prayer, and the congregation responds. Amen. So be it. Let it be done. The word carries the weight of assent, of agreement, of complicity in whatever petition has just been offered to the divine. But what happens when someone refuses to say it? I want to explore the larger project of what I've been calling Fractional...

The Held Land tells three stories across 159 years, all rooted in a single quarter-section of Nebraska prairie. In March 1867, Ezekiel Washington, a Black veteran of the 5th United States Colored Troops, files a homestead claim on 160 acres. He builds a soddie with his own hands, breaks the sod, plants corn, and waits for the land to become his. Five years later, a rigged hearing strips him of eve...

What makes you countable? Not valuable. Not worthy. Not loved. Countable. What is it about you that allows a system to place you in a box, assign you a number, and track your existence across time? We live inside classification systems we did not choose and cannot see. Every form you have ever filled out asked you to sort yourself into categories invented by strangers. Race. Gender. Age. Income. E...

You inherited a debt you never agreed to pay. I want you to consider that statement before you dismiss it. Not a financial debt, not a mortgage or a student loan with your signature on the paperwork. Something older. Something that attached itself to your bloodline before you were born, before your parents were born, before anyone now living had any say in the matter. This is not metaphor. This is...

When we encounter disability, most of us have been trained to see deficiency. Something missing. Something wrong. A departure from the norm that requires correction, accommodation, or at minimum, sympathy. This is the meme of the broken body, and it has replicated through Western culture for centuries. The meme manifests in our language. We speak of people "suffering from" conditions rather than "...

Here is something I did not expect to discover while writing a textbook about American Sign Language. The shoulder knows things the hand cannot say. That sentence sounds like metaphor. It is not. It is linguistics, documented and measurable, and it has been sitting in plain sight for as long as deaf people have been signing to each other. The position of the arm, the engagement of the shoulder, th...

What does it mean to discover that you are kin to strangers? Not metaphorically kin, not spiritually connected, but genetically linked in ways that contradict everything you were taught about who your people are and who they are not? This is the question at the center of my new novel, "The Kinship of Strangers," the third book in the Fractional Fiction series. And it is a question that has no comf...

Your grandmother was frightened before you were born. Not in the ordinary way that people are frightened, the startle at a loud noise or the anxiety before a difficult conversation. I mean something more precise. Decades before your parents met, before you existed as even a possibility, your grandmother experienced something that changed her at the molecular level. Methyl groups attached themselve...

There is a forest in the Pacific Northwest that has been thinking for four thousand years. I want you to sit with that sentence for a moment. Not to dismiss it as metaphor, not to immediately qualify it with objections about anthropomorphization or the hard problem of consciousness. Just to consider: what would it mean if something could think without a brain? What would it mean if memory could pe...

There is a particular cruelty in forgetting. We dress it up in softer language. We call it moving on, healing, closure. We treat forgetting as the natural conclusion to grief, as though memory were a wound that needs to close rather than a responsibility that demands tending. But some wounds are not meant to close. Some wounds remain faithful precisely because closing them would constitute a secon...

This is the particular tragedy of sons against fathers. The father does not see it coming. The father still thinks of the son as his child, as someone he made, as someone who carries his hopes. The father may have failed the son in a hundred ways. The father may have been imperious, neglectful, demanding, disappointed. But the father did not expect the blade. The father was still, in some part of...

Martha's Vineyard. You know it now as a summer retreat for the wealthy, a place of pristine beaches and celebrity sightings. But between the late seventeenth century and the middle of the twentieth, something happened there that challenges everything we think we know about disability, about language, about what it means to belong. It began with a gene. Families from the Weald, a forested region in...

Listen to your own voice the next time you tell the truth. Notice how it flows, uninterrupted, from thought to speech. Now pay attention when you're about to lie. Feel it? That hesitation, that gathering of alternate reality before you speak it into being. Scientists have measured this pause. They've quantified it, studied it, turned it into data points and probability curves. But they haven't exp...

Today, we are standing in the wings of the theater, looking out at the empty stage, asking ourselves a question about the ghosts that haunt the floorboards. We are talking about the "Original Cast Recording" and how that static document, that moment frozen in time, can become a trap for every artist who follows. We are looking specifically at Wicked, a show that has not only defined a generation o...

Someone approaches you and asks for a piece of string. That's all they say. No context, no explanation, no qualifying details. Just: "Can I have a piece of string?" In that moment, you hold something more precarious than you might realize. You're standing at the intersection of mathematics, psychology, and potentially someone's survival. How do you answer? More importantly, how do you act?

Right now, as you listen to this, your larynx is trying to kill you. This isn't metaphorical. Your voice box sits dangerously low in your throat, creating an intersection where food and air must cross paths every time you swallow. No other mammal has this problem. Horses can drink and breathe simultaneously. Newborn humans can nurse and breathe at the same time. But somewhere between three and six...

Here's something that should stop you cold: humans are the only animals on Earth that cry emotional tears. Not tears to clean the eyes, not tears from irritation, but tears from joy, from grief, from being overwhelmed by beauty. Elephants mourn their dead without weeping. Dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors without crying at their own reflection. Your dog, who seems to love you completely, ha...

The first sign something was wrong in the neighborhood came when Patricia Reeves knocked on her own door and asked her husband if Patricia Reeves lived there. She stood on the porch in her gardening clothes, dirt still under her fingernails from planting the tulips we'd all watched her plant an hour before. Her husband assumed it was a stroke. The doctors found nothing. Brain scans perfect. Blood...

When we invoke the Boodle Boy, we're also invoking a kind of professional shamanism. The shaman moves between worlds, bringing back knowledge from spaces others can't access. The Boodle Boy moves between disciplines, between technologies, between ways of knowing. He speaks theater to programmers and code to dramatists. He finds the musical structure in a business plan and the corporate logic in a...

Here's a thought experiment I want you to try. Tonight, pick one moment from your day. Just one. Don't photograph it. Don't write it down. Don't tell anyone about it. Just hold it in your mind. Try to recall it tomorrow, next week, next month. Watch how it changes. Notice how it connects to other memories, how it grows or fades, how it becomes less about what happened and more about what it meant....

"Taking the black pill" names a posture of fatalism that migrated from fringe men's forums into the wider internet. The metaphor riffs on the pills in The Matrix, but where the "red pill" claims to reveal hard truths, the black pill says those truths are terminal and change is pointless. In its most specific and consequential register, it is tied to the incel subculture that coalesced online in th...

Consider a thought experiment: one intelligence is trained exclusively on everything known about apples. Another is trained only on oranges. They are allowed to communicate but are strictly forbidden from discussing the specifics of their respective fruits. Would the apple expert learn about oranges, and vice versa? Surprisingly, the answer is almost certainly yes. Information inevitably leaks thr...

Consciousness is the raw fact of experience itself, what philosophers call qualia. It's the redness of red, the sharp bite of winter air, that peculiar texture of anxiety sitting in your chest. Consciousness is simply the lights being on, the "something it is like" to be you. A mouse likely has consciousness; it experiences pain, pleasure, fear, but probably has little to no self-awareness. Self-a...

There is no single universal definition of "Indigenous peoples." The most rigorous contemporary practice rests on a cluster of criteria: self-identification; descent from societies that predate colonization; continuity of language, institutions, and spiritual traditions; and a sustained relationship with particular territories and waters. Since the late twentieth century, international law has con...

When you really sit with these ideas, the boundary between matter and mind starts to shimmer and dissolve. Forests think with water. Worms dream soil into being. Consciousness flickers like a strobe light, creating the illusion of continuity from discontinuous moments. We're not separate from these processes; we're expressions of them. Your thoughts at this moment are as much a product of ancient...