Human Meme

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 Between 1862 and 1976, when the Federal Land Policy and Management Act finally repealed the Homestead Act in the contiguous states, the United States distributed approximately 270 million acres of continental North America through this mechanism of the registered claim. The claim, the parcel, the boundary line, the survey marker. That is how the American imagination learned to think about territory. My new book, The Claimed Body: How American Institutions Divided the Human Organism Among Themselves, argues that the American body is now claimed the same way. Not metaphorically. Structurally. The body you are sitting in right now, the body listening to my voice, is divided among institutional claimants who have filed on portions of it with the same legal and procedural logic that once divided the continent. A hospital claims your birth. A school claims your developmental measurements. An insurer claims your diagnostic history. An employer claims your labor capacity and your drug screens. The state claims your reproductive eligibility and your military eligibility. If the criminal claim succeeds, a prison claims your physical presence. At the other end of life, a dying registry claims the moment of your cessation, and a funeral corporation claims the disposal of your remains. Operating in the shadow of all of these, a data broker claims an ongoing right to your metabolic patterns, your consumption patterns, your grief patterns, your sleep patterns, your pharmaceutical patterns, and sells them forward to whoever will pay.

We talked once on this podcast about the pause before a lie. That episode, "Pause Before the Lie," examined the 200-millisecond hesitation that researchers have measured in the human voice when a speaker is about to say something untrue. I argued that the pause was proof of consciousness caught between realities, and that the hesitation itself might be the most human thing about us. Today I want to talk about a different pause. A longer one. One that has nothing to do with lying and everything to do with freedom. Somewhere in the last forty-eight hours, you started to type something and stopped. A sentence composed itself in your head, and you swallowed it. The thought of attending an event, visiting a website, searching a phrase flickered through your mind, and then it went dark. An edit was made before anyone requested one.

I was seven years old, sitting on red shag carpeting in Nebraska, in front of a wood-grain television cabinet heavy enough that two adults would struggle to move it. It was a Saturday morning in October 1972. My mother was somewhere else in the house, or she was not home. Curtains were drawn. A rotary dial on the front of the cabinet clicked through thirteen VHF positions, though only three of them produced a signal. The rest produced static, a white hiss I associated with emptiness. I turned on the set myself. No one helped me. No one told me to. I did not know I was being trained.

In the fall of 1984, I was sitting in a darkened lecture hall at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, watching slides click through a Kodak Carousel projector. Greek marble. Benin bronze. Mughal miniature. Japanese woodblock. The professor's argument was plain: these works endured because they were beautiful, and beauty was the thread that connected every person in that room to every person who had ever stood before the original object. Down the hall, in a different semester, a film professor made a different case. Beauty, he said, was larger than prettiness. The ugly, the reprehensible, the fantastic, the comic: all of these were forms of beauty because all of them enchanted and instructed. A movie theater was a secular chapel. We watch together because beauty is a collective event. Both professors were right. Both were incomplete. And the question that has taken me forty years to formulate is the question my new book, The Human Universal Beautiful, attempts to answer: if beauty connects and instructs, who controls the connection? Who writes the lesson plan?

Three seconds. That is all it takes. Three seconds of your voice, captured from a public meeting, a conference call, a video posted to social media, and a machine can learn to speak as you. It can produce your cadence, your rhythm, the way you pause before a name, the way your pitch drops when you are certain. It can say things you have never said, in rooms you have never entered, to people you have never met. And the people who hear it will believe it is you, because the only test the human ear can perform is recognition, and recognition is no longer proof of origin. This is the condition that The Likeness, the ninth novel in the Fractional Fiction series, examines from the inside.

Twenty-one violinists walked into a hotel room in Indianapolis in 2010. They were experienced soloists, people who had spent decades training their ears. The room was dimly lit. They wore modified welding goggles so they could not see the instruments. And they were handed violins, some worth twelve million dollars, some worth a few thousand, and asked to play them, compare them, and choose the one they would take home. Two-thirds chose a modern violin. The most-selected instrument in the entire test was new. The least-selected was a Stradivarius. That experiment opens my new book, The Counterfeit Bargain, and it opens the book for a reason that has nothing to do with violins. When the apparatus of prestige was removed, when the name, the provenance, the three centuries of accumulated myth were stripped away and only the sound remained, the superiority vanished. Same object. Same listeners. Different frame.

There are forty-one Broadway theatres. That number has been effectively frozen for nearly a century. The oldest of them opened in 1903. The newest was assembled in 1998 from the demolished remains of two older houses. Between those dates, the city tore down theatres, condemned theatres, converted theatres into parking garages and television studios and conference venues. What remains is forty-one buildings, most of them constructed before 1930, clustered in a rectangle of midtown Manhattan roughly thirteen blocks long and three avenues wide. On a Wednesday evening, all of them are running. Forty thousand people sit in the dark simultaneously, watching live performances delivered under more than a dozen separate union contracts, in rooms designed for gas lighting and audiences who arrived by streetcar. That district generated $1.89 billion in gross receipts in the 2024-25 season. Fourteen point seven million admissions. Ninety-one percent of all seats filled. The highest-grossing season in recorded history.

I want to talk about a face. Specifically, I want to talk about the face you see when you look in the mirror and the face other people see when they look at you, and whether those two faces have ever been the same face, and what happens to a person who discovers, at the age of five, that the answer is no, and that the distance between the two can be closed by reaching out and copying someone else's bone structure onto your own skull. That is the premise of my new novel, The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins. A boy named Asa Greer stands in a bathroom in Decker, Ohio, and watches his reflection change. His cheekbones soften. His jaw loses its angles. The space between his eyes widens. For three seconds, maybe four, he is looking at the face of the boy next door on his own head. Then it collapses. His own features rush back. And the bathroom is loud again.

I want you to think about the last time you encountered an achievement that seemed too large for the person who produced it. Something that made you pause, narrow your eyes, and reach for the comfortable explanation. Maybe it was a historical figure whose story sounded exaggerated. Maybe it was a living person whose accomplishment struck you as implausible given what you thought you knew about their background, their body, their circumstances. You felt a flicker. A small, quiet impulse that said: that cannot be right.

There is a street in Jersey City called Baldwin Avenue. If you drove down it today you would see nothing unusual. Asphalt. Cars. A fire hydrant. The usual negotiation between infrastructure and weather. But if you had been standing on that street in late September 2013, you would have seen something that has stayed with me for thirteen years. A road crew was rolling fresh asphalt over granite cobblestones. The cobblestones were a hundred and fifty years old. The asphalt would last about twenty. I asked the man operating the road roller why they were burying them. He gave me a one-word answer. Tires. Not cost. Not engineering. Not city planning. Tires. Cobblestones are rough on tires. Asphalt is smooth. The logic was complete.

I want to tell you about something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago, and about the book that grew out of it, and about why it took me a quarter of a century to understand what I heard. I was teaching at the time. A colleague from my department was sitting near the window with her daughter, a young woman just starting her freshman year of college. I came in, we exchanged the usual pleasantries, and then I sat down at the next table and we performed that ritual of urban public life where you pretend you cannot hear the person three feet away from you. But I could hear her. Her voice had changed. It had acquired weight. She was no longer making conversation. She was delivering an instruction. She pointed at her daughter and tapped the table with her finger, and she said: "Go to every funeral. Even if you don't want to. Even if you don't know them. If you know the people around them, you go."

The book is twenty-one letters. I use the word "letter" loosely. A surgical dictation is a letter. A cockpit voice recorder transcript is a letter. A recipe card annotated by three generations of the same family is a letter. A homestead deed from 1884 is a letter. A radio signal broadcasting Chopin and a list of forty-seven names into a dead frequency is a letter. A mathematical theorem inscribed into the DNA of a bacterium is a letter. Each one crosses a gap. The first gap is one second. A surgeon dictating an operative report while the patient is still on the table. The last gap is 4.24 light-years. That is the distance to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, and it is also zero, depending on your frame of reference. Special relativity tells us that a photon traveling at the speed of light experiences no transit time. From the photon's perspective, emission and absorption are the same moment. The gap is a property of the receiver, not the sender. The message does not know it is late. Between those two extremes, one second and light-years, I tried to cover every register of human communication I could reach. The clinical and the domestic. The bureaucratic and the intimate. The comic and the elegiac. The personal and the geological. The living and the dead.

I want to talk about a sentence. A very specific kind of sentence. The kind of sentence you hear every day, in every newscast, in every corporate press release, in every school board meeting and church bulletin and government report, and you never notice it, because the sentence was designed not to be noticed. The sentence goes like this: "Jobs were lost." Or: "The congregation dwindled." Or: "The neighborhood changed." Or: "The program was discontinued." Listen to the grammar. In every one of those sentences, the subject is the thing that was abandoned. The job. The congregation. The neighborhood. The program. In none of those sentences is the subject the person or the institution that did the abandoning. The jobs were not taken by a board of directors who calculated that cheaper labor was available overseas. The jobs were lost, as if they had wandered off on their own, as if employment were a set of car keys that slipped behind the couch cushions through nobody's fault. That is the grammar of leaving. And my new book is about that grammar.

When an actor walks onto a stage and says the words a playwright has written, whose body is it? Not legally. Legally the question is settled. The actor owns the body, the playwright owns the words, and an intricate web of union contracts and intellectual property law keeps the two from colliding in ways that require attorneys. The legal answer is clean. I am asking a different question. I am asking what happens, at the level of consciousness, when a human being stands in a defined space and pretends to be someone else. Whose experience is the audience receiving? The character's? The actor's? The playwright's? Some fourth thing that does not exist until all three converge in a room where strangers have agreed to sit in the dark and watch? I have spent more than forty years in the theatre, and I do not have a settled answer. What I have instead is a book.

In 1970, a woman named Vera Rubin pointed a spectrograph at the Andromeda galaxy and found that it was wrong. Not the galaxy. The galaxy was doing what galaxies do. What was wrong was every prediction about how the galaxy should behave. The stars at the outer edge of Andromeda were moving too fast. Not slightly too fast. Not within the margin of error. They were moving as though something enormous was holding them in place, something with gravitational mass far exceeding everything visible in the galaxy combined. The stars were orbiting matter that no telescope on Earth, or in orbit, or conceivable within the laws of electromagnetic radiation, could detect. Rubin published her findings. The physics community did what physics communities do when a woman presents evidence that the standard model is incomplete. They told her to check her equipment. She checked it. She observed more galaxies. She found the same result in all of them. Every galaxy she pointed her instrument at was embedded in a halo of invisible mass that outweighed the visible matter by roughly six to one.

In 1982, a sixteen-year-old boy in the Midwest sat down and wrote eight episodes of a television series about teenagers running a school newspaper. The characters drank in darkrooms. They brought guns to school. They had bone cancer and absent fathers and substance abuse problems that no adult in the building knew how to address. One of them wore orange overalls and ordered a razor from a magazine that promised to scrape away the dead sensuality, uncovering your natural, animal instincts. The blades cost seventy-nine dollars and eighty-eight cents. The razor cost three dollars and eighty-seven cents. That detail is the kind of thing only a teenager would write, because only a teenager understands the specific economics of being cheated by the adult world before you are old enough to know the word for it. That boy was me. And for over four decades, those scripts sat in a drawer, and then in a file, and then in the particular purgatory of work that matters to its author but has not yet found its form. Today I want to talk about what happens when you go back.

In the book I describe what I call the Substitution Test. Three questions. What human good was this technology supposed to serve? What did it actually deliver instead? And who profited from the substitution? Those three questions govern every chapter. They are applied to the typewriter and the word processor. To the chalkboard and the learning management system. To the handwritten letter and the social media post. To the stethoscope and the electronic health record. And in every case, the answer reveals the same structural pattern: a genuine human need is identified, a technology is developed to address it, the technology achieves dominance, and during that dominance, something essential is lost. Not because the technology is evil, but because the technology is a tool being asked to be a god, and tools cannot be gods, no matter how sophisticated they become.

For twenty-eight episodes of this podcast, four cat heads floated through the universe looking for their bodies. Captain Whiskerfluff, gray-furred and philosophically inconvenient. Lieutenant Mittens, ginger, who told jokes the way the rest of us breathe. Cookie Kitty, calico, whose opinions about soup could be heard across three star systems. And Skeedootle, who was not a cat at all but a puppy, floppy-eared and enormous-eyed, adopted into a crew of felines because nobody could justify leaving a creature alone in the dark. They lived here. On this podcast. In this voice. In the space between my microphone and your earbuds. Twenty-eight times, we visited them. Twenty-eight times, they argued and wondered and searched and did not find what they were looking for, because the search was the point, and because finishing the search in a podcast that was also about consciousness and memory and what it means to be a living thing in a confusing universe would have felt premature. The Cat Heads existed as audio drama. They were performed. They were voiced. They were heard and then they were gone, living only in the archive, waiting for someone to press play again.

Aristotle said we become brave by doing brave things. The prairie understood this twenty-four centuries later when it built institutions that made brave things ordinary. Now, why does any of this belong on a podcast about consciousness and the human condition? Because what I am describing is not merely a sociological phenomenon. It is a crisis of awareness. We dismantled these technologies across two generations, between roughly 1960 and 2020, and we did it one reasonable decision at a time, and at no point did anyone stand up and say: we are removing the infrastructure that produces citizens. Nobody said it because nobody saw it. The forgetting was built into the process. Each individual replacement seemed logical. In aggregate, they amounted to an act of civilizational self-erasure. This is what makes the prairie such a powerful diagnostic instrument. In a city, civic life can sustain itself through sheer proximity. People bump into each other and institutions emerge from the friction. On the prairie, where the nearest neighbor might be a mile away and the nearest town twenty, every act of community is deliberate. The barn does not raise itself. The letter does not write itself. When deliberate acts cease, the absence is immediate and total. You do not fade from civic life on the prairie. You disappear from it. And because the land is flat and the light is honest, the disappearance is visible in a way that urban decline never is. You can count the closed schools. You can drive the abandoned roads. You can stand in the silence where a town used to be and understand, in your body rather than your mind, what it means when the infrastructure of mutual obligation collapses.

People sometimes ask writers how long a book takes. The honest answer is always unsatisfying because the honest answer is: the whole time. Everything I have read, studied, failed at, observed, and lived through is in these stories somewhere. My training in dramatic literature at Columbia is in the structure. My years studying medicine are in the neurological precision of "The Limerick Ward" and the physics of "The Atomic Man." My time studying law is in the procedural architecture of "The Man Who Knew Too Much." My decades of teaching are in the conviction that a story should leave you knowing something you did not know before, not because the author lectured you, but because the character's experience rearranged something in your understanding. But the specific creative archaeology of this collection, the work of recognizing that these twelve pieces belonged together and then preparing them for publication, that involved a different kind of effort. It meant going back into stories I had written years ago, sometimes decades ago, and asking whether they still meant what I thought they meant. Some of them did. Some of them had grown into something larger while I wasn't looking, the way a tree you planted as a sapling has become something you cannot get your arms around. And some of them needed work, not because they were broken but because I was different, and the book they were joining was more demanding than any of them had been on their own.