How to make money in America

Step 1: Coil the odds as short as you can.
Step 2: Roll the dice.

The masses

It's natural to assume that a crowd of people will behave like water or an amoeba or a nest of ants, creeping and probing until it discovers a path. But a human crowd isn't focused on discovery; it's focused on desire. It's goal-oriented, like a lightning bolt or a cobra. When an event occurs -- a spreading rumor, an opened gate, a shouted order -- each individual calculates what effect it will have on his or her immediate personal objectives and the crowd reacts suddenly and unpredictably.

The best way to control a crowd of humans is therefore to never present it with new information.

Immortal beloved

I just can't get over this slightly autistic Photoshop experiment and its promise of a new, strange universe beyond our own. (With more lens flare.)

The laws of motion

These days I'm a machine, obediently crunching through deductions while I spin off into space in the last direction I was pushed. A closed system.

Gimme fiction

For a while tonight, I watched home videos from the early to mid 1990s that my parents got somebody to burn onto a DVD.

Unlike my sister, who was all ham, I carefully avoided acknowledging the camera, ever. I think this has been my Personal Moral Code of the Camera: it is your duty to ignore them. They are documentary devices.

But here's the thing, Aiken: 15 years later, watching all these disembodied memories, I enjoyed watching my sister lope around for the lens. And it didn't take long for me to become utterly bored by my somber, quiet self. Fifteen years out, it's not actually accuracy that's revealing. It's performance.

Our first WBEZ-listening president

"But here's the thing, Aiken."

All my heroes

It's from the book that was six inches from my foot when I heard the news: Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace's wonderful 2005 collection of autobiographical, moral question marks.

I don't mean to impugn or co-opt. It just seems timely.

But if you, like poor old Rolling Stone, have come to a point on the Trail where you've started fearing your own cynicism almost as much as you fear your own credulity and the salesmen who feed on it, you may find your thoughts returning again and again to a certain dark and box-sized cell in a certain Hilton half a world and three careers away, to the torture and fear and offer of release and a certain Young Voter named McCain's refusal to violate a Code. There were no techs' cameras in that box, no aides or consultants, no paradoxes or gray areas; nothing to sell. There was just one guy and whatever in his character sustained him. This is a huge deal. In your mind, that Hoa Lo box becomes sort of a special dressing room with a star on the door, the private place behind the stage where one imagines "the real John McCain" still lives. And but now the paradox here is that this box that makes McCain "real" is, by definition, locked. Impenetrable. Nobody gets in or out. This is huge, too: you should keep it in mind. It is why, however many behind-the-scenes pencils get put on the case, a "profile" of John McCain is going to be just that: one side, exterior, split and diffracted by so many lenses there's way more than one man to see. Salesman or leader or neither or both, the final paradox -- the really tiny central one, way down deep inside all the other campaign puzzles' spinning boxes and squares that layer McCain -- is that whether he's truly "for real" now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours. Try to stay awake.