Ryan McCarl It began, to pick an arbitrary beginning, with a key that would not turn in a lock. I hauled my first load of bags and boxes into a Mass Ave complex, struggling through two heavy gates with my car against the curb. Up a slow, sweating elevator, and I gratefully dropped everything in the hallway, inserted the key, and turned – and nothing happened. A half-hour of phone calls later it came to light that the place for which I...

Ryan McCarl First, question everything, beginning with the political ideas you inherited from your parents, family, community, church, and school. Create an inventory, in your mind or on paper, of these ideas: what are your strong, visceral, “gut” feelings about the political parties, religion in schools, the legalization versus criminalization of abortion, taxation, drug laws, and so on? What about your ideas about other races and...

Ryan McCarl Every day for ten years Robert had come to this café on the second floor of the Borders on North Michigan Avenue. He was a talented day-trader, fluent in the language of the market. He saw candlesticks and skylines in graphs where those with less training saw only the patternless movement of a line; in cloud-clusters of data points he saw writing as clear as Times New Roman type, with outliers dotting and flourishing the...

Ryan McCarl Human beings have strong emotional immune systems, and human societies have a remarkable capacity for collective forgetfulness. Milan Kundera, writing of the effect of the news cycle on historical memory, once said: “The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the war in the Sinai desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai,...

by Ryan McCarl

by Ryan McCarl