Language Matters Podcast

I. A Possible Tuesday What follows is not a prediction. It is a possible Tuesday in a future we still have time not to build. Maya wakes at 6:17 because her body has not yet learned that there is nowhere she is expected to be. For twenty-three years, mornings had consequences. At twenty-four she was an analyst. At twenty-nine, a manager. At thirty-six, a director. At forty-two, she could walk into...

There is something about the faces of Iran’s rulers that has always bothered me. I do not mean that as physiognomy. I do not believe evil announces itself through the arrangement of a man’s eyebrows, nor that cruelty can be diagnosed from a photograph. History has given us smiling murderers and severe-looking saints. But watch enough footage of Ruhollah Khomeini speaking, and then Ali Khamenei, an...

Prologue — The Tsar Was Certain In the winter palace of Nicholas II, the world still possessed an order. There were great nations and lesser nations. There were ancient empires and newly dressed imitators. There were white armies, disciplined by history, and yellow armies, assembled from peoples who had only recently learned the machinery of Europe. Russia stretched across the curvature of the ear...

I should begin with an apology. Some of you may have subscribed expecting essays. By essays, you probably meant the normal kind: a few observations, a book quotation, perhaps an opinion about democracy delivered before lunch. Instead, you received a prolonged inquiry into empire, narcotics, algorithms, theology, masculinity, professional dentistry, and whether civilization can survive the disappea...

I. Two Things My Father Told Me My father once told me he wanted to leave me with two thoughts. The first was reassuring. “Elias,” he said, “do not underestimate your assets and your skills. You may leave one job and still be employable by a thousand other employers. Never doubt your strengths. You are talented.” This was excellent advice. I received it immediately, preserved it carefully and have...

I. The Temple Has a Gift Shop Stanford University lay beneath the California sun with the relaxed confidence of an institution that had already won history. Its sandstone arches glowed. Its palm trees swayed. Young men in fleece vests bicycled between laboratories where the future was being invented for people who had not been consulted. The names of dead industrialists appeared above doors in let...

The Last God A civilization may stop believing in God long before it stops needing gods. The temples can empty. Ritual can fade into private habit. Priests can become cultural relics. Yet the deeper human demands remain: the need to suffer for something, to belong to a people, to name evil, to distinguish innocence from corruption, to believe that history moves toward judgment. Modern societies of...

The Man Who Used to Know What to Do There was once, in every family or neighborhood, a man who knew what to do. He knew how to restart a furnace, speak to a grieving widow, remove a stripped screw, negotiate with a mechanic, and determine whether a sound coming from the basement meant “old house” or “leave immediately.” He was not necessarily wise in every area. His views on diet may have involved...

The funeral was a sea of black. Black chadors. Black banners. Black turbans. Black cloth stretched across buildings and avenues. Black gathered into such density that it seemed less like color than atmosphere, as though the state had found a way to manufacture night and march it through the streets. The cameras moved over the crowd slowly, reverently, searching for grief and finding it everywhere....

In Tehran, they came dressed in black. Women in chadors gathered beneath the banners of the state , their bodies arranged into the visual grammar of mourning: rows of veiled figures, coffins raised above the crowd, flags moving through the air, grief translated into choreography. The cameras found the most legible symbols first. The loyal. The devout. The disciplined. The people willing to stand f...

America has always been at its best when an invention stopped being a marvel and became part of ordinary life. Electricity was not important because a scientist could make a bulb glow in a laboratory. It became important when homes, factories, streets, hospitals, and schools could depend on power. Aviation mattered when it stopped being a stunt. Refrigeration mattered when food lasted longer. Anti...

Opening: A Car, a Feed, and a Man in Pajamas A car is not a saintly object. It pollutes. It breaks down. It costs too much. It turns ordinary men into philosophers of parking. It gives suburban fathers an excuse to say things like “torque” while standing in driveways. And Henry Ford himself was, to put it with maximum charity, not exactly a walking retreat center of moral enlightenment. Still, the...

Jeff Bezos recently offered America a sentence so useful that it deserves to be placed on a chalkboard and interrogated until the chalk breaks. Asked about taxing the wealthy, he said, in essence: if people want him to pay more billions, fine, have that debate — but do not pretend it will solve the problem. “You could double the taxes I pay,” he said, “and it’s not going to help that teacher in Qu...

I. The Assignment The first sign came as an assignment. Not a question. Not a joint inquiry into the shape of a problem. Not the slow assembly of facts around a thing that mattered. An assignment. A senior person entered the room with urgency already formed in his mouth. Something important had to be done. Something connected to the customer, the patient, the future, the company’s ability to becom...

I. I Criticize Because I Love I know I criticize America a lot. I criticize the empire. I criticize the oligarchs. I criticize the lobbies, the media, the little factories of outrage, the algorithms that have learned to chew through the human nervous system with the efficiency of a military contractor. I criticize weak liberalism when it becomes moral theater without courage. I criticize shallow w...

The Room Where Fish Become Innocent The dinner was booked under the name The Center for Balanced Seafood , which was either a cover organization, a joke, or the most honest think tank in Manhattan. At Le Bernardin, one could never tell. The room had been prepared with the tenderness usually reserved for funerals and leveraged buyouts. White tablecloths fell like surrender documents over the edges...

I. The Insult of the Globe It is strange that we ever got used to the floor. Every morning, we place our feet on it as though it were a given. We walk to the kitchen. We boil water. We check messages. We open laptops. We discuss weather, rent, meetings, war, elections, lunch. We speak of “the world” as though it were a room whose furniture we understand. But the actual situation is obscene. We are...

Opening — Before They Were Enemies Before they were enemies, they were people. Before the state taught them the map, before the cleric gave them the vocabulary of God, before the party placed them inside history’s furnace, before the flag demanded a simplified love, before the checkpoint, before the missile, before the prison, before the slogan, before the martyr poster, before the national anthem...

Author’s note: This essay is a work of imaginative political satire. The conversation depicted here is fictional. Peter Thiel did not meet with the narrator, and the dialogue is invented as a literary device. References to public events, companies, and reported facts are used for commentary and interpretation. Prologue — The Invitation Came Without a Country The invitation arrived in an envelope w...

I. The Boy and the Dagger Henry Nowak was eighteen years old. That is the first fact, before the politics, before the footage, before the slogans, before the men with flags discovered his name and turned it into one more object in the national bonfire. He was eighteen. A boy at the beginning of that brief and foolish age when life still appears to be expanding, when a city is not yet a battlefield...

I. The Girls No One Wanted to See Between the late 1990s and the early 2010s, a series of British towns exposed a pattern of group-based child sexual exploitation that had been missed, minimized, or mishandled for years. The first thing to say is not that the men were Pakistani. The first thing to say is that the victims were children. In Rotherham, the independent inquiry chaired by Alexis Jay es...

There are empires that fall with drums. There are empires that fall with fire. There are empires that fall with statues pulled down, palaces stormed, generals shot in courtyards, flags lowered over harbors, foreign regiments evacuating by ship under a sky made orange by history. And then there is Britain. Britain falls by form. Britain falls by committee. Britain falls by memo, guidance note, risk...

Substack Notes is allegedly where writers hang out. This is already funny. Because what you mostly see there is not writing. It is slogan mist. Little moral burps. Tiny pellets of virtue. Sentences with the confidence of philosophy and the nutritional value of airport gum. Most Notes are not arguments. They are badges. They do not begin with a question. There is no method. No architecture. No atte...

A person opens his phone and sees that everyone is angry. Everyone is saying the same thing. Everyone is mocking the same target. Everyone is repeating the same accusation, the same slogan, the same moral certainty. A politician has betrayed the country. A migrant has ruined the neighborhood. A woman has lied. A product has changed lives. A war must be fought. A man must be destroyed. A company mu...

There are empires that collapse under debt, corruption, war, loneliness, broken hospitals, bad schools, spiritual exhaustion, and the slow conversion of public life into private extraction. Texas, we are told, faces something worse. Tofu. This was the great revelation offered from the stage: that somewhere in the political wilderness, beyond the cattle, beyond the megachurches, beyond the oil well...