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Here is the shape of it. In 1955, American television had no memory. A play aired live, once, and it was gone: no rerun, no archive, no second pressing. Serling wrote a play called Patterns, and the country went so crazy for it that the critic at the New York Times closed his column with ten words …

Two Paperbacks

A friend of mine once cleared a bookshelf with one sentence. It took him a week to collect. I have spent twenty years understanding that afternoon, and the understanding became a book. Let me tell you the story first. The store was a Mormon bookstore, an independent, living on the trade of the ward…

The Four Words

Here is a game. I am going to spend the next several minutes telling you about a book, and I will not say its name once. The name is four words. Two of them are the same word. If you follow the grammar, by the end of this episode you will say the name yourself, and you will know why it could not ha…
In 2003, a laboratory asked the plainest question you can put to the night: when dreams draw on waking life, what do they take? Twenty-nine people kept logs for two weeks. The answer came back in two numbers. Two-thirds of everything these sleepers remembered dreaming drew identifiably on the days …
Every oath, everywhere, started life as a conditional self-curse. And then, century by century, the curse got amputated. First the punisher went quiet. Then the punishment went silent. What stayed in the witness's mouth was the stump. But nothing that load-bearing just disappears. The punishment cl…
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