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There, But Not There: The Phantom DNA Effect and the Physics of Absence
A viral video promises a ghost in the machine. The real ghosts of science are stranger, and they had to earn the name. A reader sent me a short video this week with the kind of claim that arrives...
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No One Dies Lying
On the twenty-second of May, 1929, at Fort Riley, Kansas, a woman named Zenana Shepard sent her nurse to a closet for a bottle of bootleg whiskey. She said the liquor had a strange smell and a strange...
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The Last Day of the Guarantee
A box of prescription drugs sat forgotten in the back closet of a retail pharmacy long enough that some of the pills predated the 1969 moon landing. Sealed bottles, original containers, never opened....
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The One-Way Drop: Why a Drop of White Blood Never Made Anyone White
American race law rests on a piece of arithmetic no mathematician would sign: one drop of Black blood makes a person Black, and a flood of white blood makes nobody white. The formula runs in a single...
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Outline of a Christian Political Philosophical Theology
I defend a position in political thought that I call Christian anarcho-socialist liberalism. The idea is to create a Christian political philosophical theology that integrates the best elements from...
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The Name You Cannot Give Yourself
Every semester it happens by the second week. A student in ASL 1, bright and eager and already half in love with the language, waits until the room empties and asks me for a sign name. The asking is...
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The Quotation’s Chain of Custody
A mug sits on the desk with Marilyn Monroe’s face under the sentence Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” The object is wrong at the name and prone to wording drift,...
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The Vans Are Still Warm
Just after two in the morning on March 29, 1984, fifteen Mayflower moving vans pulled out of the Baltimore Colts’ complex in Owings Mills and scattered onto different highways so no single court order...
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The Whole Boodle
People keep asking me one question, so here is the answer, whole: the history, the intention, the meaning, the being, and, at the end, the me. “What’s a Boodle Boy?” I get the question at dinner...
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The Crowd That Pays
The new book is out this week, and I will tell you which page of it I expect to be disbelieved. It is not the scheme, the city that prices its poor as calories; readers accept a bureaucracy’s appetite...
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A Pendulum for the Multiverse: David Albert, Hugh Everett, and the Worlds We...
On my grandfather’s porch in North Loup, Nebraska, the ground kept its promises. Summer evenings the floorboards held the day’s heat, the corn stood in rows that ran clear to the horizon, and nothing...
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The System Won’t Let Me: How AI Turned Bureaucracy Into an Alibi
The most revealing sentence in modern institutional life is not, “You have been denied.” A denial still implies a denier. The more revealing sentence is, “The system won’t let me.” That sentence...
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The Nanosecond Scientist
A BolesBlogs.com reader forwarded me a transcript and asked whether any of it holds up. A man is talking about human origins. He says Homo sapiens appeared out of nowhere. He says a missing link sits...
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The Ghost, the Pope, and Peter O’Toole
Five days after he opened the National Theatre of Great Britain, Peter O’Toole sat in a BBC studio talking about ghosts. The date was October 27, 1963. His stage that week was the Old Vic, where the...
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The Retirement Is Always Silent
On a Tuesday in August, at three in the afternoon in Manhattan and two in the valley, a telephone went to speaker and a family in Nebraska began to read a week to me. The call carried a death and a...
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Popcorn: The Only Grain That Performs
Last weekend, the village of North Loup, Nebraska, population somewhere around three hundred, threw its 125th Annual Popcorn Days. A carnival took over Highway 11 from Friday to Sunday. There was team...
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Twenty-Five Dollars and a Signature
The mark is called a freeze brand. Liquid nitrogen chills an iron until the cold kills the color in the hair, and the government writes a registration code in white along the left side of the neck of...
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Your Mortgage Was Priced in Basel
Somewhere in America today a couple is signing a mortgage. Thirty years, a fixed rate, a kitchen table, a pen that suddenly weighs more than it should. They believe the number on the page came from...
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Nobody Knocks in Dallas
Texas wrote the fastest foreclosure clock in America. State law requires a letter giving the borrower twenty days to cure the default, then twenty-one days of posted notice, and on the first Tuesday of...
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The God Arrives Early: Rod Serling and the Endings That Paid Their Bills
The series died the year before I was born, and it hardly mattered, because the reruns never stopped. On summer nights in Nebraska in the early seventies, on the only signal that reached my...
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