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On the Strange Geography of Conferences

Note: This essay began with a memory from an IB Global Conference in Singapore sometime in the mid-2010s, when I first began to notice that large professional gatherings possess a kind of unofficial geography. The official conference—the keynote halls, breakout rooms, and printed program—forms only one map of the event. Running alongside it is a second map composed of bars, lobby couches, dinner tables, and long conversations that drift well past the scheduled sessions.

Years earlier I had written a short reflection on what I called unconferencing, the quiet relocation of intellectual “action” from the formal program to these improvised spaces around it. The present essay grows out of that earlier observation but shifts attention from theory to terrain. Rather than asking why unconferencing occurs, it asks where it tends to happen and how participants gradually learn to navigate those unofficial zones.

Readers interested in the conceptual background may wish to consult the earlier essay on unconferencing, which explores the phenomenon through the lens of Erving Goffman and the broader question of how individuals negotiate the locus of action within institutional environments.

As with many pieces on the Kibbitzer, the goal here is less to offer a definitive theory than to describe a pattern that, once noticed, becomes difficult to unsee. Conferences, like many human systems, operate simultaneously on two levels: the one announced in the program and the one discovered by those who know how to find the action.

“The locus of action is always in motion.”
— Erving Goffman

I arrived a day late to the conference.

This was in Singapore sometime around 2014 or 2015, at one of the IB Global Conferences for the Asia–Pacific region. The event was being held in a large glass hotel near the river, not far from Chinatown and just south of Raffles Place if memory serves. The keynote room alone seated something like eleven or twelve hundred people. The conference program was thick with panels, workshops, and presentations that began early in the morning and ran straight through the afternoon.

My suitcase had arrived before I had. I had been in China the day before running another IBEN training, and while the conference itself was already underway, I was still in transit. By the time I checked in and made my way downstairs, the official proceedings were well established: keynote speakers, crowded sessions, conference badges swinging from lanyards, the whole apparatus of professional gathering fully in motion.

At the time I was only about a year into my work with IBEN. My regional manager was Avi Nanda, who was excellent in many respects but not especially hard-charging as a networker. Gill Pressland, who later became a formidable presence in the region, was not yet in the picture. I knew a few people, most importantly Steve Keegan in Australia, who had become a kind of mentor to me. I also knew Ed Lawless, who had previously overseen a great deal of the professional development work in the region.

Ed had once joked to me, only half joking, that his job had become little more than “wedding planning.” Conferences, workshops, schedules, logistics—endless coordination. Eventually he burned out on it entirely and moved on, first to Pamoja, the online curriculum company, and later into a somewhat undefined role at an IB school in Tokyo that seemed to blend management, marketing, and development. Such trajectories are not uncommon in the IB ecosystem. People drift through roles that are part educational, part organizational, part entrepreneurial.

In any case, arriving late to the Singapore conference had the curious effect of placing me immediately at its margins rather than at its center. The keynote sessions were already underway, but instead of rushing directly into the large ballroom where most of the attendees were gathered, I began encountering people in the spaces just outside it: the lobby, the cafés, and eventually the hotel bars.

One of the first people I reconnected with was Darlene Fischer from Australia. Darlene was in her early sixties at the time and something of a force of nature. She had the sort of presence that made conversations reorganize themselves around her. Through Darlene I soon met two others who would become central figures in what I later came to think of as the conference’s unofficial inner circle: Sue Richards and Gerald Conlin.

Gerald was in his mid-sixties then, a slight man with white hair and an almost theatrical grin. His professional life consisted largely of consulting work connected to education programs, particularly the wave of hybrid master’s degrees in education that universities around the world had begun launching. Institutions like Tsukuba in Japan and Bath in the UK were building these programs, often with cohorts of twenty or so students, and Gerald had carved out a niche as the person who could authorize and evaluate them. He was also constantly presenting, constantly researching, constantly moving through the conference circuit.

Within about five minutes of meeting me he decided that I would make the perfect number two for his MA authorization work. It was flattering, though I suspected there might be additional motives behind his enthusiasm. Gerald was an openly and exuberantly gay man, and his warmth toward me carried a certain theatrical flair. He had a habit of calling me “my boy,” delegating tasks such as selecting restaurants or ordering drinks, and occasionally resting a hand on my upper thigh while speaking with great intensity about some educational development or other. None of this particularly disturbed me; conferences are full of strong personalities, and I was by then quite capable of navigating such dynamics.

Sue Richards, meanwhile, functioned as Gerald’s counterpart and amplifier. Where Gerald was slightly reserved and professorial, Sue was outgoing, energetic, and socially strategic. She worked directly for the IB at the time and moved easily through the conference environment, introducing Gerald before presentations, praising his work with extravagant enthusiasm, and generally acting as a kind of corner person for his professional persona. If Gerald was the fighter in the ring, Sue was the one shouting encouragement from the ropes.

The two of them formed a kind of traveling intellectual unit, and through them I began spending more time not in the conference sessions themselves but in the hotel’s bars and restaurants.

There were perhaps four or five of us in total who fell into this pattern. What struck me fairly quickly was that these individuals rarely attended the conference sessions unless they were running them. The keynote speeches, the panels, the carefully scheduled workshops—these seemed largely directed at newcomers or first-time attendees. The veterans, by contrast, moved through the conference in a completely different way.

They ran the unconference.

By this I mean something slightly more specific than simply skipping sessions. Years ago I wrote an essay about what I called “unconferencing,” referring to the parallel conference that emerges quietly around the official one. What interests me here is less the theory of unconferencing than its geography: the physical spaces through which these unofficial conversations travel.

At the Singapore conference, that geography quickly became clear.

There was the large ballroom where the official keynote addresses were delivered to more than a thousand people. But there were also the bars—two of them in particular—where smaller groups gathered throughout the afternoon and evening. There were the restaurant tables where dinner conversations stretched for hours. There were the lobby seating areas where people drifted in and out between sessions.

And there were the walks.

Within a day or two I began to see that the conference operated according to two distinct maps. The first map was the one printed in the program: rooms, times, speakers, sessions. The second map was entirely informal, emerging through patterns of conversation and social gravity.

The keynotes were for the newbies.

The action was at the bar and at dinner.

I was somewhat ambitious at that stage in my career, eager to establish myself in the region and become a respected trainer. Because of this ambition I paid close attention to where energy seemed to accumulate. It did not take long to realize that the most consequential conversations were happening far from the podium.

In the bars and restaurants people spoke more candidly about the IB, about institutional politics, about emerging programs, about who was doing interesting work and who was not. Opportunities were floated, collaborations proposed, rumors exchanged. Careers, in small ways, were advanced.

The official conference continued to run its scheduled course upstairs, but the real motion of the event—the circulation of ideas, alliances, and opportunities—took place elsewhere.

Seen in this light, conferences begin to resemble temporary cities with two overlapping infrastructures. The official infrastructure is highly visible: lecture halls, keynote rooms, printed programs, registration desks. The unofficial infrastructure is quieter and more fluid: bars, café tables, hallways, and late-night dinners.

Participants gradually learn to navigate both maps.

Some remain primarily within the official one, moving dutifully from session to session. Others develop an instinct for the second map, drifting toward the places where conversation gathers and where the boundaries between formal roles begin to loosen.

It is in these spaces that the unconference unfolds.

The term itself is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but the phenomenon is real. Once a small group of experienced participants begins congregating in a particular location—usually a bar or restaurant—others start to appear. Conversations splinter and recombine. Someone joins for twenty minutes before leaving for dinner. Someone else arrives with news from another corner of the conference.

Over time the group becomes a kind of floating node within the larger event, a place where information circulates rapidly and where participants feel unusually free to explore ideas that might never make their way into a formal presentation.

In retrospect, what struck me most about that Singapore conference was not any particular keynote or panel discussion but the realization that conferences possess a strange and dynamic geography. Action is rarely confined to the places where organizers expect it to occur. Instead it migrates across the built environment of the event, settling temporarily wherever people feel the oxygen is richest.

The ballroom may host the official performance, but the bar hosts the conversation about what the performance actually means.

And so the conference proceeds along two parallel tracks: the one announced in the program, and the one discovered by those who know how to find the action.

The unconferencers simply learn to follow the latter.

Dedication:

For all those who know how to find the action.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy the essays linked below, all of which also take up the fascinating theme of professional conferences.

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On The X-Files: The Paranoid Style of 1990s Television

Note: This reflection comes out of a long-standing fascination with The X-Files, one of the most distinctive television shows of the 1990s. When it first aired, the series managed to occupy a strange and compelling middle ground between science fiction, horror, conspiracy culture, and something closer to philosophical inquiry. Week after week the show asked the same unsettling question from slightly different angles: what if the world is not quite as stable or intelligible as we assume?

What made the series especially effective was the dynamic between Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. Mulder represented the pull of belief, intuition, and pattern-seeking; Scully stood for skepticism, evidence, and scientific restraint. The tension between those two orientations created a kind of philosophical engine that powered the show for many seasons.

The major episode discussed here is one of the early “mythology-adjacent” stories that sits near the boundary between the show’s monster-of-the-week format and its deeper conspiratorial arc. Watching it again years later, what stands out is not only the eerie storytelling but also the way the series captured a particular cultural mood of the 1990s — a time when technology was expanding rapidly, institutions were increasingly distrusted, and the possibility of hidden systems operating beneath the surface of ordinary life felt strangely plausible.

In that sense, The X-Files was never just about aliens or government cover-ups. It was about uncertainty itself — the uneasy space between explanation and mystery.

Epigraph:

“Autorerotic asphyxiation is not a pleasant way to go, Mr. Mulder.”

Clyde Bruckman, The X-Files

The X-Files is my second favorite television show of all time, behind only The Wire, and it’s not close.

That may sound like a bold claim given the sheer amount of television produced over the past thirty years, but for those of us who came of age in the 1990s the show hit a nerve that very few cultural artifacts ever have. It wasn’t just entertaining. It was atmospheric. It was unsettling. It felt like it was plugged directly into the cultural nervous system of the time.

To understand why, you have to begin with a simple generational fact. I was born in 1974, just eleven short years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That event cast a shadow that lingered for decades. My parents’ generation and my grandparents’ generation were deeply scarred by it in ways that people my age never fully understood. Something in the national psyche broke that day. Trust in institutions never really recovered.

Historians later described this cultural mood as “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” borrowing the famous phrase from the essay by Richard Hofstadter. Whether one agreed with Hofstadter or not, the phrase stuck because it captured a very real undercurrent in American life: the suspicion that unseen forces were operating behind the scenes.

The genius of The X-Files was that it leaned directly into that atmosphere. It didn’t treat paranoia as pathology. It treated it as narrative fuel.

Discovering the Show

I was an early adopter.

The show premiered in 1993, and by 1994 I was already watching it in the dorms at Hamilton College with a group of friends. If possible we’d get a little baked first, which in hindsight may have been perfect. The X-Files is a show that rewards slightly altered states of perception.

At first it was something of a cult discovery. A few people watched it religiously while others barely knew it existed. But by the time the second and third seasons rolled around it had become a communal ritual. Thursday nights meant Mulder and Scully.

The chemistry between the leads was immediately apparent.

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson had what we would now call “shipping chemistry,” although that term didn’t really exist yet. We simply knew that something electric was happening on screen. The characters worked because they embodied opposing ways of understanding the world. Mulder believed everything. Scully was more skeptical. Between them the truth hovered in an unresolved middle ground.

The show was also disciplined enough to hold that tension for years. In an era before streaming algorithms and social-media speculation, viewers waited week to week to see how the relationship evolved.

Hovering over them was their boss, the enigmatic Walter Skinner. For several seasons it was impossible to tell whether Skinner was helping Mulder and Scully or quietly managing them on behalf of darker forces. That ambiguity was one of the show’s greatest pleasures.

In a delightful twist of pop-culture irony, the actor Mitch Pileggi was at one point named TV’s Sexiest Man by a glossy magazine. Which is hilarious when you remember that Skinner is essentially a bald FBI bureaucrat in a gray suit. Such was the cultural power of the show.

The Smoking Man

Then there was the figure lurking in the shadows.

The Cigarette Smoking Man is one of the great villains in television history. Played with eerie understatement by William B. Davis, he appeared whenever the conspiracy thickened.

He looks exactly like the kind of man who would be at the center of a decades-long government cover-up. Three packs a day. Cheap cologne. A lingering Jameson hangover. The sense that he spends most of his time in dim Washington parking garages and windowless offices and only emerges from his crypt when the conspiracy requires it.

It’s a performance so physical that you can almost smell the character through the screen.

Three Essential Episodes

Every long-running show has defining episodes, and The X-Files produced dozens. But three in particular illustrate what made the series so special.

The first is the pilot itself, which introduces Mulder investigating mysterious disappearances in the Oregon woods. A key moment occurs when the agents experience missing time on a dark forest road. The scene establishes the tone immediately: eerie, ambiguous, and faintly plausible.

The second is Fallen Angel, an early classic that introduces the lovable conspiracy obsessive Max Fenig. Max’s jittery paranoia captures the spirit of the show perfectly. When he remarks that “someone’s always watching, Mr. Mulder,” it feels less like dialogue than like a thesis statement.

The third is the masterpiece of dark humor, Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose, written by the great Darius Morgan. In it, a weary insurance salesman named Clyde Bruckman discovers that he can foresee the exact circumstances of people’s deaths. Played beautifully by Peter Boyle, the character delivers a hilarious and oddly touching performance. It is Bruckman who also delivers the immortal line that also gives us our epigraph: “Autorerotic asphyxiation is not a pleasant way to go, Mr. Mulder.” Run roh. Take that belt off Fox baby.

What makes the episode remarkable is that it gently mocks the show’s own hero. Mulder spends the entire series searching for hidden meaning in the universe. Clyde Bruckman, by contrast, believes life is largely arbitrary and tragic.

His prediction of Mulder’s death—immortalized in the epigraph above—is both absurd and strangely profound. It’s also a sign that by Season Three the show had gained enough confidence to poke fun at itself.

When the Mythology Expanded

Like many successful serialized shows, The X-Files eventually struggled under the weight of its own mythology. One of the central narrative engines involved Mulder’s missing sister, Samantha Mulder. Early on, the mystery added emotional depth to Mulder’s obsession with the paranormal.

But as the seasons progressed the storyline became increasingly convoluted. Samantha might have been abducted by aliens, or replaced by a clone, or transformed into something else entirely. Meanwhile the conspiracy expanded to include frozen alien ships in Siberian ice, shadowy government syndicates, and the infamous black-oil virus that seemed capable of possessing human hosts.

At a certain point the mythology began to chase its own tail.

Then, as the final blow, David Duchovny left the show. Gillian Anderson remained excellent, but The X-Files was always fundamentally a two-hander. Without Mulder and Scully together the balance of the series shifted in ways it never fully recovered from.

Why It Still Matters

And yet, for all the narrative tangles of the later seasons, the early years of The X-Files remain extraordinary television.

The show captured a very particular moment in cultural history: the twilight of the pre-internet era, when conspiracy theories spread through late-night radio programs, photocopied newsletters, and whispered conversations rather than social media feeds.

It was a time when the idea that powerful institutions might be hiding enormous secrets still felt plausible rather than merely exhausting.

For a few seasons in the 1990s, Thursday nights belonged to the weirdest, smartest, most paranoid show on television.

The truth, as Mulder kept reminding us, was out there

Dedication

For Dana and Fox. You know we still want to know what went down in that motel room baby.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay you may also enjoy the two essays below, both of which, in different ways, take up themes of intrigue and mystery.

The Thin Man in Singapore Part I: Washing Ashore
Are There Aliens In Our Oceans? An Objective Investigation
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On Julian Jaynes and the Origins of Consciousness: A Modern Look

Note: This essay is a reflection on the ideas of Julian Jaynes and his remarkable 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes’ theory—that human beings once experienced divine voices guiding their actions before the emergence of modern introspective consciousness—remains controversial and widely debated. The purpose of this essay is not to prove or disprove Jaynes’ neurological model but to explore the enduring power of the questions he raised.

In particular, I am interested in two aspects of Jaynes’ work that remain deeply suggestive: his interpretation of early literature such as the Iliad, where modern psychological interiority appears strangely absent, and his observations about how mobility—travelers, shepherds, merchants, and wanderers moving between cultures—may have destabilized older systems of divine authority. These figures, operating in uncertain cultural terrain, may have been among the first people forced into the improvisational reasoning that resembles modern consciousness.

The essay also touches on institutions like the Oracle of Delphi and on the persistence of voice phenomena in modern contexts, ranging from hypnagogic states and exhaustion to more troubling historical cases such as the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan. These examples are not presented as proof of Jaynes’ theory but as reminders that the boundary between internal thought and perceived external command may be more complex than we sometimes assume.

Finally, the brief personal anecdote involving an MRI scan is included not as evidence but as illustration: a small modern echo of the ambiguous mental territory Jaynes explored. Moments in which voices seem to arise from somewhere between the inner and outer mind remain part of human experience.

Whether Jaynes was ultimately correct in his sweeping historical claims is still an open question. But his work continues to provoke a fascinating possibility: that consciousness itself has a history, and that the modern reflective self emerged gradually out of older forms of human experience.

If nothing else, Jaynes reminds us that the human mind is not a finished structure. It is something still unfolding—shaped by culture, language, movement, and time.

“She keeps coming closer saying I can feel it in my bones
Schizophrenia is taking me home.”
— Sonic Youth

There are certain books that never quite disappear. They do not settle comfortably into the academic canon, nor are they fully dismissed. They linger. They circulate quietly among curious readers, occasionally resurfacing in conversation decades after publication, as if waiting for another generation to discover them.

One such book is The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Its author, Julian Jaynes, was a psychologist who spent much of his career outside the central institutions of modern neuroscience. When the book appeared in 1976 it created an immediate sensation. Reviewers alternately described it as brilliant, bizarre, visionary, or simply impossible. The theory it proposed was breathtaking in scope. Jaynes suggested that the subjective, introspective consciousness modern people take for granted—the inner sense of “I,” the reflective voice narrating our own thoughts—was not an ancient human constant. It had emerged, he argued, only a few thousand years ago.

According to Jaynes, the minds of early civilizations functioned differently. People did not experience themselves as the authors of their own decisions. Instead they heard the voices of gods.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Commands issued in auditory form—voices that appeared to come from outside the self—guided action. These voices, Jaynes argued, were generated by one hemisphere of the brain and experienced by the other as divine instruction. He called this earlier mentality the bicameral mind.

The theory has never been accepted in its full neurological form. Archaeologists, classicists, and neuroscientists have raised serious objections. And yet the book continues to circulate, discussed by philosophers, psychologists, historians of religion, and the occasional curious reader who stumbles across it in a used bookstore or late-night internet search.

Why?

Part of the answer is simple: Jaynes was asking a question that remains deeply unsettling.

What if human consciousness has a history?

What if the inner voice we experience as our own—our private mental narrator—was not always there?

I first encountered Jaynes sometime around 2012 or 2013, during a period when I was reading deeply in the work of Carl Jung and writing a small series of reflections that I called Jungian Intimations. Like many readers drawn to Jung, I was interested in symbolism, archetypes, and the strange persistence of mythic imagery in the modern psyche. I briefly considered enrolling in an online course with the Jungian analyst Michael Conforti, though in the end I took a class from his wife, Nancy Qualls-Corbett, on Jung and visual art. Around that time I read the slim but remarkable volume Jung on Art, which argues that artistic creation often emerges when archetypal material pushes through the individual psyche into symbolic form.

Jaynes appeared in my reading not long afterward. At first glance he seemed to be asking a related but far more radical question. Jung had treated mythic figures as symbolic expressions of the psyche. Jaynes suggested that the gods of ancient literature might once have been experienced as genuine voices—psychological events interpreted as divine command.

Whether or not one ultimately accepts his neurological model, Jaynes assembled a body of evidence that continues to provoke thought. In particular, he pointed to a striking feature of early literature. Characters in ancient texts often act without the kind of introspective self-reflection modern readers expect. Decisions appear suddenly, attributed not to inner deliberation but to divine intervention.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the world of the Iliad. When Achilles restrains himself from killing Agamemnon, it is not because he pauses to analyze his emotions. Athena appears beside him and tells him what to do. The boundary between divine command and human action is porous.

Jaynes argued that such passages were not merely literary conventions but traces of an earlier mentality.

Yet perhaps the most fascinating part of his theory lies elsewhere—in the margins of ancient societies, among the people least anchored to a single cultural world.

The wanderers.

Ancient civilizations were more mobile than we sometimes imagine. Even in the Bronze Age there were shepherds drifting across borderlands, merchants following caravan routes between cities, sailors moving from port to port across the Mediterranean and Near East. These figures lived at the edges of cultural systems that otherwise depended on stability and hierarchy.

For Jaynes, such wanderers may have played an unexpected role in the transformation of the human mind.

The bicameral system, as he described it, functioned best within tightly structured societies. Authority flowed downward through clear hierarchies: gods to kings, kings to priests, priests to ordinary people. Ritual, language, and shared myth reinforced the system. The divine voices guiding behavior were embedded within a familiar cultural environment.

But travelers moved beyond those environments.

A shepherd leaving his village might cross into territory where different gods were worshipped. A merchant arriving in a foreign city encountered unfamiliar laws, languages, and customs. A sailor might spend months among people whose rituals and social expectations bore little resemblance to those of home.

In such situations the guiding voices of one’s own culture could become unreliable.

If a divine command urged action in a place where the surrounding society operated under entirely different assumptions, the voice might cease to function as a stable guide. The traveler found himself in a new psychological situation—cut loose from the authority structures that had previously organized experience.

This was not a comfortable position.

To survive, wanderers had to develop different skills. They had to negotiate, observe, and interpret. They had to learn foreign languages and read unfamiliar social signals. They had to improvise.

In other words, they had to think.

Jaynes speculated that these mobile figures—shepherds, traders, sailors—may have been among the first people forced into something like modern reflective consciousness. The birthplaces of that consciousness may not have been temples or palaces but the messy contact zones of ancient trade: caravan routes crossing deserts, harbor towns where languages mingled, frontier markets where strangers bargained with one another under uncertain rules.

If the bicameral system required cultural enclosure to function, then mobility threatened its stability.

And the ancient world was becoming increasingly mobile.

Even as this transformation unfolded, remnants of the earlier mentality persisted in institutional form.

One of the most famous examples was the Oracle of Delphi. For centuries Greek leaders traveled to Delphi seeking divine guidance on matters of war, colonization, and political decision-making. The oracle’s pronouncements—often delivered in trance-like states by the Pythia—were treated as authoritative messages from the god Apollo.

From a Jaynesian perspective, institutions like Delphi may represent cultural technologies designed to preserve the authority of divine voices even as the underlying psychological system weakened. Kings and city-states continued to seek guidance from gods because the tradition of divine command remained embedded in social life.

Gradually, however, new forms of decision-making emerged.

Written law codes appeared. Philosophical reflection developed. Greek drama explored the tensions between divine authority and human responsibility. The shift was not sudden or uniform, but over time a new psychological landscape became visible—one in which individuals increasingly experienced themselves as authors of their own thoughts.

This transition was not simply intellectual. It may have been neurological, cultural, linguistic, and historical all at once.

Jaynes placed the decisive phase of the transformation during the turmoil of the late Bronze Age collapse, roughly between 1200 and 800 BCE—a period when many ancient societies experienced widespread disruption. Cities were destroyed, trade networks collapsed, and populations migrated. In the midst of this upheaval, older forms of authority may have faltered, forcing new modes of self-organization to emerge.

Whether or not Jaynes correctly identified the precise mechanism, he was surely right about one thing: consciousness as we experience it today may not be a timeless given.

It may be an achievement—fragile, historically contingent, and still evolving.

Yet if the bicameral mind truly vanished, one might expect the phenomenon of hearing commanding voices to disappear entirely from modern experience.

It has not.

Under certain conditions, people still report experiences remarkably similar to those Jaynes described. In states of extreme exhaustion, during moments of sensory deprivation, or in the liminal territory between waking and sleep, voices sometimes appear that are difficult to classify as either internal or external.

I had an experience of this kind several years ago while undergoing an MRI scan in a hospital.

Anyone who has had an MRI knows the strange psychological environment it creates. You lie alone inside a narrow tube, immobilized, while the machine produces a sequence of loud mechanical pulses and vibrations. The noise is rhythmic and relentless. There is little sensory input beyond the sound and the awareness of one’s own breathing.

Somewhere in the midst of that experience, a voice appeared.

It was not loud or dramatic. It was simply there—a calm male voice with the unmistakable tone of a father speaking to a child. The message itself was simple, almost reassuring. But what struck me most was the ambiguity of the experience. The voice did not feel exactly like a thought, yet it did not feel entirely external either. It occupied a strange borderland between inner and outer perception.

The moment passed quickly, but the memory lingered.

Experiences of this sort are not uncommon. Psychologists studying hypnagogic states—the transitional zone between waking and sleep—have documented similar phenomena. Auditory hallucinations appear in certain psychiatric conditions, most famously schizophrenia. Hypnotic suggestion can also produce experiences in which subjects perceive commands or messages that seem to originate outside their conscious control.

Jaynes believed such phenomena represented vestiges of the older bicameral mentality.

The voices of the gods, in his view, had not entirely vanished. They had simply retreated to the margins of modern consciousness.

Occasionally these phenomena intersect with darker episodes of modern history.

The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan remains one of the most disturbing cases often discussed in connection with hypnosis and altered states of consciousness. Some researchers have argued that Sirhan may have been unusually susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, raising unsettling questions about the relationship between external influence and voluntary action.

It would be irresponsible to claim that Jaynes’ theory explains such events. Human behavior is far too complex for any single model to capture fully. Yet cases like Sirhan’s remind us that the boundary between autonomous decision and externally shaped impulse is not always as clear as modern assumptions suggest.

The mind remains a mysterious territory.

Half a century after its publication, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind continues to provoke debate not because it solved the problem of consciousness but because it reframed it. Jaynes forced readers to confront the possibility that the human mind has undergone profound historical transformations.

Even if the details of his neurological model prove incorrect, the broader insight may endure. Literature, religion, and psychology all suggest that the experience of selfhood has changed over time. The ancient world did not necessarily perceive the mind in the same way we do.

Something was gained in the transition to modern consciousness.

We gained introspection, philosophical reflection, and the capacity to examine our own motives. We gained the intellectual freedom that made science, democracy, and modern literature possible.

But something may also have been lost.

In the world Jaynes described, human beings lived in a landscape animated by voices of divine authority. Decisions arrived not through anxious deliberation but through commands experienced as sacred guidance. That world may have been more constrained, but it may also have felt more certain.

Modern consciousness offers freedom, but it also brings doubt and solitude. The voices of the gods have largely fallen silent, replaced by the quieter and often less confident voice we call our own.

Perhaps the most we can say is that consciousness, like culture itself, continues to evolve. The wanderers of ancient caravan routes helped shape the first emergence of reflective thought. Today we inhabit a global world of constant movement, translation, and negotiation—a world not entirely unlike those early contact zones where cultures once collided.

We are all wanderers now.

And somewhere, perhaps, the faint echoes of older voices still remain.

For dreamers and wanderers everywhere.

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Stringer Bell: Middle Manager

Note: This essay reflects on the character of Stringer Bell from The Wire, one of the most carefully written figures in modern television drama. Like many viewers, I first experienced the show simply as a gripping crime story. Only later did I begin to appreciate how deeply it is really about institutions—how they work, how they resist reform, and how the people inside them often misunderstand the systems they inhabit.

The reflections here are not meant as a definitive interpretation of the series, but rather as one viewer’s attempt to think through what makes Stringer Bell such a haunting figure. His intelligence, ambition, and curiosity make him unusually sympathetic for a character who is also capable of ruthless decisions. That tension is part of what makes his story linger long after the episode ends.

If this essay encourages even a few readers who have never seen The Wire to give it a try, it will have done its job.

Epigraph

“Problems go away because someone does something about them.”
— Peter Drucker

“Are you taking notes on a criminal fuckin’ conspiracy?”
— Stringer Bell

When people first enter the world of The Wire, the Barksdale organization appears to be run by two men.

Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell.

But the first time the audience—and the Baltimore Police Department—really sees the organization up close, it is not Avon who appears.

It is Stringer.

Early in the first season, Detective Jimmy McNulty begins digging into the Barksdale crew after the murder trial of D’Angelo Barksdale. The courtroom scene is deceptively quiet. The defense attorneys maneuver. Witnesses crumble. The case falls apart.

And sitting calmly in the courtroom, overseeing the entire operation, is Stringer Bell.

Avon Barksdale is nowhere to be seen.

It takes McNulty, Kima Greggs, Lester Freamon and the rest of the detail several episodes just to figure out who Avon even is. The name circulates through the investigation like a rumor. The man himself remains hidden.

That arrangement is not accidental.

Avon’s power depends on distance. He is the sovereign, and sovereigns are not meant to be easily found.

Stringer, meanwhile, is everywhere.

He attends the meetings. He coordinates the lawyers. He moves through the organization like a senior executive walking the floor of a factory.

To the police, Stringer looks like the boss.

To the young dealers on the corner, Stringer looks like the boss.

But he is not.

Inside the Barksdale organization, Avon Barksdale is the sovereign.

Stringer Bell is the middle manager.

The Face of the Organization

One of the most fascinating dynamics in the early seasons of The Wire is the way the younger dealers perceive Stringer.

For Bodie Broadus, Poot Carr, and Wallace—the kids working the Pit—Stringer Bell is a kind of mythic figure.

When the SUVs pull up and Stringer steps out in dark glasses, the reaction is immediate. The security guys spread out. The conversations stop. Bodie and Poot straighten up.

It is like watching a celebrity arrive.

Stringer has the clothes, the posture, the quiet authority. He moves through the neighborhood with a calm confidence that suggests total control.

Avon inspires fear.

Stringer inspires admiration.

That difference matters.

Because for the people actually living inside the organization, Stringer looks like the boss.

But the real power structure tells a different story.

Avon is the sovereign.

Stringer is the administrator.

He handles the money. He organizes the meetings. He manages the supply lines. He solves the problems.

Stringer Bell, in other words, is the middle manager of a criminal enterprise.

And for a long time, the arrangement works perfectly.

The Wallace Problem

One of the earliest hints of Stringer’s managerial mindset appears in the tragedy of Wallace.

Wallace is young, sensitive, and increasingly disturbed by the violence surrounding the drug trade. After the brutal murder of Brandon, Wallace begins unraveling. He disappears from the Pit. When he eventually returns, he is clearly not the same person.

Stringer recognizes the problem immediately.

Wallace is unstable.

In a normal organization, instability might mean poor performance reviews or termination.

In the Barksdale organization, instability means something else entirely.

Wallace becomes a liability.

And liabilities are removed.

The decision that follows—Bodie and Poot carrying out Wallace’s execution—is one of the most haunting moments in the series. Wallace is not a rival. He is not a traitor. He is simply a young man who cannot psychologically survive inside the system.

Stringer sees the weakness clearly.

And acts accordingly.

It is a brutally rational decision.

It is also a glimpse of the darker side of managerial thinking: the moment when people begin to look like components in a machine.

The D’Angelo Decision

If Wallace’s death hints at Stringer’s managerial instincts, the fate of D’Angelo Barksdale reveals them in full.

D’Angelo is not just another soldier in the organization. He is Avon’s nephew. His position inside the crew is both familial and political.

But prison changes him.

Separated from the streets and increasingly disillusioned with the life he has been living, D’Angelo begins questioning the entire system. He reads books. He reflects. He talks openly about the violence and the futility of the drug trade.

From Stringer’s perspective, this creates an intolerable risk.

D’Angelo might talk.

D’Angelo might cooperate.

D’Angelo might bring the entire organization crashing down.

So Stringer makes a decision.

D’Angelo must be removed.

The murder in the prison library—staged as a suicide—is one of the most chilling scenes in the show. It is also the moment where Stringer Bell fully commits himself to the logic of the organization he hopes one day to escape.

D’Angelo becomes a problem.

And problems, as Peter Drucker might say, go away because someone does something about them.

Stringer does something.

The consequences will follow him for the rest of the series.

The Education of Stringer Bell

One of the most extraordinary details in The Wire is Stringer’s quiet pursuit of education.

While running one of the most powerful drug organizations in Baltimore, Stringer enrolls in community college economics courses.

The image borders on the surreal.

By day, he sits in a classroom discussing supply and demand curves.

By night, he oversees one of the city’s most lucrative heroin distribution networks.

But Stringer takes the lessons seriously.

He studies the language of markets. He begins speaking about product elasticity and supply chains. He becomes fascinated with the idea that organizations can be structured rationally—that chaos can be replaced with systems.

At one point he attempts to introduce Robert’s Rules of Order to a meeting of drug dealers.

The result is both comic and strangely admirable.

Stringer genuinely believes the world can be organized.

Violence is inefficient.

War disrupts business.

Stability produces profit.

These ideas will shape everything he attempts to build in the seasons that follow.

The Co-Op

By the third season, Stringer has begun putting his theories into practice.

Working with Proposition Joe, the careful and pragmatic East Baltimore kingpin, he helps create a cooperative arrangement among several drug organizations.

The goal is simple: stabilize the market.

Under the Co-Op system, competing crews share access to high-quality product and reduce unnecessary warfare. Prices stabilize. Territories become less important. Profits increase.

From a managerial perspective, it is a brilliant solution.

The Co-Op is essentially a cartel.

And it represents the closest Stringer Bell ever comes to successfully rationalizing the drug trade.

But the Co-Op also reveals the limits of Stringer’s power.

Because while Stringer is busy building alliances and managing markets, Avon is thinking about something else entirely.

Reputation.

Territory.

War.

Avon Returns

When Avon is released from prison, the delicate balance between sovereign and minister begins to collapse.

Avon quickly realizes that Stringer has been running the organization.

More troublingly, he has been running it according to rules Avon does not fully respect.

Negotiation instead of dominance.

Cooperation instead of conquest.

To Avon, this looks dangerously close to weakness.

The emergence of Marlo Stanfield only sharpens the conflict.

Marlo represents the future of the street—pure sovereignty, stripped of managerial compromise. His only concern is power and reputation.

Stringer sees Marlo as a business problem.

Avon sees Marlo as a challenge.

The difference is fatal.

Clay Davis

While this conflict is unfolding on the street, Stringer begins pursuing what he believes will be his final transition: legitimacy.

Through Proposition Joe, he enters the orbit of Baltimore politics and real-estate development. The meetings take place in offices rather than abandoned row houses. The language shifts from territory and product to zoning permits and development projects.

For Stringer, this looks like the next step.

The doorway out.

But the world he is entering operates according to rules he does not yet understand.

State Senator Clay Davis greets Stringer warmly. He speaks the language of political access and investment opportunities. He promises permits, influence, connections.

And Stringer believes him.

The moment of realization arrives slowly and then all at once.

The money is gone.

The development deals are illusions.

And Clay Davis responds to Stringer’s anger with one of the most surreal pieces of advice ever delivered in the series.

If Stringer wants to find the money, the senator explains, he should get himself some running shoes.

Because the faucet has already been turned on.

And the money has already flowed away.

The respectable world Stringer hoped to enter turns out not to be more rational than the drug trade.

It is simply corrupt in a different vocabulary.

A Small Recognition

Watching Stringer struggle with these systems, I sometimes feel a small flicker of recognition.

At one point in my own professional life I became deeply interested in the development of strong child protection policies in schools. From my perspective the issue seemed straightforward: the risks involved were serious, the international standards were clear, and the responsible course of action was to align institutional practice with those standards.

So I did what people like Stringer Bell often do when they encounter complicated systems.

I went looking for expertise.

I attended conferences and studied international best practices in child protection. One particularly influential experience was a conference at the Western Academy of Beijing, where I met the child protection expert Jim Hulbert.

I came away convinced that the issue was both urgent and solvable.

My assumption—naive, as it turned out—was that if I could simply demonstrate the seriousness of the issue and show how other institutions were addressing it through clear policies and professional standards, the system would naturally move in that direction.

That was not what happened.

Large organizations, like criminal enterprises, develop internal logics of their own. And once those logics become embedded in everyday practice, they can be remarkably resistant to rational reform.

Stringer Bell is discovering the same lesson, only under far more dangerous circumstances.

The Final Exchanges

By the end of the third season, the web of betrayals has fully formed.

Stringer gives up Avon’s location to Major Bunny Colvin, hoping the police will remove the sovereign whose instincts threaten the stability of the organization.

Avon, in turn, quietly provides Omar Little and Brother Mouzone with Stringer’s location.

And somewhere above them all, Clay Davis continues collecting money and smiling.

The systems Stringer tried to manage—street power, political corruption, organizational loyalty—close in around him.

The End of the Manager

In the final scene, Stringer stands alone in a half-constructed building.

Omar Little and Brother Mouzone walk slowly toward him.

For three seasons Stringer Bell tried to manage the world he lived in.

He studied economics.

He built alliances.

He created the Co-Op.

He tried to rationalize both the corners of West Baltimore and the offices of Baltimore politics.

But the systems he moved through were never built for management.

They were built for sovereigns.

And by the time Stringer Bell finally understands that lesson, the meeting is already over.

The middle manager has finally run out of problems he can solve.

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What Ever Happened to the ACLU?

Note: This essay reflects a personal memory of what the American civil libertarian tradition once represented to many people who came of age politically in the late twentieth century. Organizations evolve, and the American Civil Liberties Unionhas played an important role in many areas of constitutional law and civil rights over the past century.

The purpose of the piece is not to dismiss that legacy but to reflect on a perceived cultural shift in how civil liberties—particularly free speech—are understood within contemporary progressive politics. The older civil libertarian framework emphasized neutral principles that applied equally to all speakers, even those whose views were widely considered offensive or dangerous.

Whether that framework still holds the same cultural authority today is an open question. This essay is simply one observer’s reflection on how that shift has felt from the inside.

Epigraph:

F the CC

Steve Earle

When I was younger, the American Civil Liberties Union had a certain reputation among politically attentive Americans.

They had balls.

The ACLU was the organization that defended people nobody liked. Neo-Nazis marching in small Midwestern towns. Communists during the Cold War. Religious cranks, fringe activists, offensive speakers. The principle was simple and bracing: civil liberties matter most when they protect speech we find offensive.

I admired that. Many people did.

In the 1990s the ACLU seemed to embody a kind of austere civil libertarianism. The idea was that the Constitution protected everyone equally, and that civil liberties meant very little if they only applied to people we already agreed with.

And there were plenty of examples that made the point vividly.

The most famous was the controversy over whether a small group of neo-Nazis had the right to march in the Chicago suburb of Skokie in the late 1970s.

National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie

Skokie was home to many Holocaust survivors, which made the proposed march especially painful and inflammatory. But the ACLU nevertheless defended the Nazis’ right to demonstrate, arguing that the First Amendment could not be applied selectively. Free speech, if it existed at all, had to apply even to people whose ideas were repellent.

That case became a kind of civic legend among civil libertarians.

There were many others.

During the Cold War the ACLU repeatedly defended the rights of individuals accused of Communist sympathies, arguing that political belief alone could not be grounds for government punishment. In later decades the organization defended the speech rights of controversial artists, religious minorities, and political extremists across the ideological spectrum.

Every once in a while a case would appear that tested the principle in uncomfortable ways. I remember reading about things like the aftermath of Ruby Ridge and the legal questions surrounding the government’s conduct toward Randy Weaver. Weaver himself was hardly a sympathetic figure to most Americans, but the civil liberties questions raised by the incident were serious enough that organizations committed to constitutional rights had to pay attention.

That, at least in my memory, was the ACLU’s zone of operation: defending civil liberties even when the individual involved was politically or culturally radioactive.

For a long time that seemed like the organization’s defining characteristic.

Then something began to feel different.

My moment of realization came around 2017 at a conference at Case Western Reserve University. The event was filled with what felt like an entire arena of fucking international liberals—academics, activists, policy types, the whole familiar ecosystem.

At one point a speaker took the stage and launched into a full-throated denunciation of Donald Trump.

Now, criticizing a president is of course perfectly legitimate speech. But as I sat there listening, something about the moment felt off.

The energy in the room was not about civil liberties. It was about political opposition. The speech had the tone of a campaign rally rather than a lecture about constitutional rights.

And I remember thinking very clearly: this is not the ACLU I admired in the 1990s.

Something about the mission had shifted.

To be fair, institutions rarely change because they suddenly become foolish. They change because the culture around them changes first.

The older civil libertarian tradition that shaped organizations like the ACLU grew out of a very specific intellectual climate. It emphasized neutral principles, distrust of government power, and a willingness to defend speech even when that speech was deeply unpopular.

The logic was austere but powerful: the moment we begin deciding which speech deserves protection, the principle itself begins to erode.

But the dominant strain of progressive politics today often approaches these questions differently. Instead of asking whether a principle applies equally to everyone, the question increasingly becomes whether a particular form of speech contributes to harm, inequality, or social injustice.

That shift in moral emphasis naturally changes how civil liberties are understood.

Speech that once would have been defended in the name of neutral principle may now be evaluated in terms of its social consequences. And organizations that operate inside a particular political culture tend to absorb the assumptions of that culture over time.

The ACLU did not necessarily set out to abandon its older civil libertarian posture. It may simply have followed the broader ideological current of the progressive world in which it operates.

Still, for those of us who grew up admiring the older model, the change can feel disorienting.

The ACLU once stood for the uncomfortable proposition that freedom of speech requires defending people whose views we might find offensive, foolish, or even dangerous.

It is not entirely clear whether the culture that once sustained that belief still exists.

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Are There Aliens In Our Oceans? An Objective Investigation

Note: This essay is written in the spirit of amused inquiry rather than firm conclusion. Human history is filled with reports of strange visions, unexplained lights, divine visitations, and unidentified aerial phenomena. The interpretation of such experiences has tended to shift with the cultural vocabulary of the time. Medieval Europeans often described encounters with saints or angels. In the twentieth century the language of extraterrestrials became available.

The psychologist Carl Jung famously suggested that UFO sightings may function partly as modern mythologies—symbolic attempts by societies to understand mysterious experiences in technological terms. Jung also observed, with characteristic dry humor, that UFOs often appear to be “somehow not photogenic.”

The present investigation was prompted by my brother Mike, who recently asserted via text message that extraterrestrials are currently residing in Earth’s oceans. His wife Coleen agreed. “They are everywhere,” she said. While this claim remains unverified, the oceans themselves are vast, poorly explored, and capable of sustaining a wide range of speculative hypotheses.

The purpose of the essay is therefore not to prove or disprove the existence of extraterrestrial life in the ocean. Rather, it is to examine why such ideas persist, how they resemble earlier historical visions—from medieval religious phenomena to modern UFO culture—and why the possibility continues to feel strangely plausible to otherwise reasonable adults.

Epigraph

There are aliens in our midst.

Wussy

The Jung Problem

At this point in the investigation one is reminded of a dry observation by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.

Jung noted that UFOs possess a curious property: they are “somehow not photogenic.” Sightings multiply, witnesses speak with conviction, yet the documentation remains just slightly blurry.

Jung’s larger argument was that such phenomena often behave like modern myths. They appear at moments when societies are under stress, technological change is accelerating, and people are searching for new symbolic explanations of the world.

In other words, the sky fills with things.

Medieval Precedents

This pattern is not entirely new.

During certain periods of medieval Europe, particularly when grain supplies were contaminated by the fungus ergot, communities reported vivid religious visions: glowing figures in the sky, saints appearing in fields, the Virgin Mary materializing in unexpected places.

Ergot poisoning, now understood scientifically, can produce powerful hallucinations. But to the people experiencing them the visions were not chemical side effects. They were divine manifestations.

Entire crowds could witness miraculous shapes in the heavens or detect holy images in the crust of bread. A modern observer might diagnose environmental intoxication or collective suggestion. The participants experienced revelation.

The important point is that the content of the vision reflected the cultural vocabulary available at the time.

Medieval Europe saw saints. Modern America sees aliens.

One can see this dynamic clearly in the case of Joan of Arc. Joan reported hearing voices and receiving instructions from heavenly figures whom she identified as saints.

Historians generally accept that Joan sincerely believed these visions were divine communications.

But it is difficult not to notice that saints were the most advanced category of non-human intelligence available in fifteenth-century France. The conceptual vocabulary for extraterrestrials would not be invented for several hundred years.

Had Joan lived in the late twentieth century, it is at least possible that the same experience might have been interpreted somewhat differently.

She might have reported a craft.

The Cold War Sky

By the late 1940s the heavens had acquired a new cast of characters.

The famous incident near Roswell occurred in 1947, just as the Cold War was beginning to reorganize the world’s imagination. Reports of flying saucers multiplied. The mysterious visitors were described with increasing consistency: small grey beings with large heads and enormous eyes.

The explanation most often offered by the authorities was considerably less glamorous.

Weather balloons.

Strange objects falling from the sky during the early Cold War often turned out to be classified surveillance equipment. Unfortunately, the phrase “weather balloon” never fully satisfied the public imagination.

Aliens, after all, are much more interesting than meteorology.

The Mulder Doctrine

By the 1990s the entire mythology had been carefully systematized by American television.

The X-Files:

In the series, FBI agent Fox Mulder dedicates his career to investigating extraterrestrial activity after his sister Samantha is abducted from their home during childhood.

The abduction occurs at night. A strange light fills the room. The sister disappears.

Mulder spends the rest of his life attempting to prove that what he witnessed was real.

His partner, Dana Scully, is assigned to bring scientific skepticism to the enterprise. Their relationship gradually becomes one of the most beloved partnerships in television history, built on the productive tension between belief and doubt.

Entire generations of viewers absorbed the idea that somewhere in the sky—or possibly beneath the ocean—extraterrestrial activity might be quietly unfolding.

A Modern Lens

Seen from a slightly greater distance, the pattern begins to look familiar.

Medieval villagers saw saints because saints were the explanatory language available to them. Cold War Americans saw aliens because aliens had become the new vocabulary of the unknown.

Both phenomena may reflect the same basic human impulse: when confronted with mysterious experiences, we populate the heavens with the most compelling figures our culture provides.

Which brings us back to Mike.

So Are There Aliens In Our Oceans?

It must be admitted that if an advanced civilization from another planet wished to observe humanity without attracting attention, the deep ocean would offer several practical advantages. The environment is dark, difficult to access, and rarely visited by surface-dwelling primates equipped with submarines that can only remain operational for limited periods of time.

From a strategic standpoint, it would be an excellent hiding place.

This possibility has occurred to more than one observer, including my friend Mason, who recently suggested that a technologically sophisticated off-world civilization might simply have decided that the bottom of the ocean was the most convenient place to avoid the rest of us.

Provisional Conclusions

My brother Mike believes there are aliens in the ocean.

Carl Jung might have suggested that mysterious phenomena often adopt the symbolic clothing of their era. The Middle Ages had saints. The twentieth century produced extraterrestrials.

Mike has simply moved the story offshore.

The oceans remain vast and poorly explored. The woods remain dark and occasionally unsettling at night. Both environments have the correct atmospheric conditions for unexpected encounters.

If extraterrestrials are present, they may well prefer the sea.

But it would be a mistake to rule out the woods.

In either case, it seems wise to remain polite.

Footnote: The Ocean Logic

It must be admitted that if extraterrestrials wished to establish a long-term observational presence on Earth, the ocean would offer several advantages. Humans rarely visit the deep sea, and when we do we tend to leave fairly quickly due to crushing pressure, darkness, and the general inconvenience of breathing water.

From the perspective of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization attempting to avoid unnecessary interaction with our species, the ocean may therefore represent the single most sensible real estate on the planet.

Mike may, in other words, be thinking strategically.

POSTSCRIPT: Supplemental Testimony

Shortly after the investigation began, the primary witness—my brother Mike—provided additional clarification regarding his position.

According to Mike, extraterrestrial life has not only visited Earth’s oceans but has been present there for a considerable period of time. The aliens, he explained, appear to prefer the environment and have constructed bases beneath the sea.

When asked for supporting evidence, Mike cited the well-known Navy pilot videos showing unidentified aerial objects performing unusual maneuvers.

These videos—often referred to as the “Tic Tac” incidents—have circulated widely in recent years and are frequently interpreted as evidence of advanced technology of unknown origin.

Mike considers them decisive.

A second observer, his wife Colleen, agreed with this general assessment while expanding the hypothesis somewhat.

In her view, extraterrestrials may not be confined to the ocean at all. Rather, they may be present around us at all times.

According to Colleen, it is entirely possible that aliens walk among us.

At this stage of the investigation, these claims remain under review.

Dedication: For my brother Mike. I love you bro, but I still thinks them shits are in the woods.

Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the pieces below, which also discuss the famous psychologist Carl Jung.

Carl Jung’s Collected Works: I
Jungian Intimations: I
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On The Dubious Anna Delvey

Note: This essay reflects on the curious cultural figure of Anna Delvey, whose rise and fall in the New York art and social scene became one of the stranger morality plays of the late 2010s. Delvey—born Anna Sorokin in Russia—gained notoriety for presenting herself as a wealthy European heiress while attempting to secure loans and social capital for an ambitious but largely imaginary cultural venture known as the Anna Delvey Foundation.

The events described here draw on widely reported elements of the case: Delvey’s years moving through luxury hotels in Manhattan, her efforts to obtain financing for a private art and social club, the unraveling of her financial claims, and the now-famous trip to Dubai in which a friend—later a magazine writer documenting the experience—was left responsible for an enormous hotel bill after promised funds failed to appear.

The piece does not attempt investigative reporting. Instead, it approaches the story in a spirit of cultural anthropology. Cities like New York have always attracted individuals engaged in various forms of self-invention. The line between ambition, performance, exaggeration, and outright fraud can sometimes appear only after events have run their course. Delvey’s story is compelling partly because it dramatizes this thin boundary in unusually vivid form.

If the tone here sometimes drifts toward sympathy rather than condemnation, that is intentional. Many urban cultural scenes—especially art worlds—operate on the energy of strivers who are, in one way or another, attempting to become something slightly larger than their present circumstances allow. Most of them eventually succeed or quietly disappear. A very small number, like Delvey, collapse in public.

Their stories reveal something not only about themselves, but about the environments that briefly believed in them.

Epigraph

“For all the crazy people who can never get it right.”
— Drugstore

I. The Entrance

There is a certain kind of person who arrives in a city not merely to live there but to declare themselves into existence. Cities like New York attract them the way bright lights attract moths. They arrive with luggage, ideas, clothes that signal belonging, and an almost reckless confidence that the future will eventually arrange itself around their intentions.

Anna Delvey was one of these people.

When she appeared in the New York art scene, she seemed to possess the basic ingredients required for entry into that peculiar ecosystem: style, confidence, and an air of European mystery. She wore expensive-looking dresses and shoes. She wore aa lot of make up and had her hair done at expensive salons. She seemed for a while to ooze money. She spoke casually about ambitious cultural projects. She moved through hotels and restaurants as if she had always belonged to that world. In New York, that is often enough.

The city runs on confidence performances. Every ambitious young person who arrives there is, in some sense, performing the life they intend to have. The art world especially is full of people who are not yet what they claim to be but are working very hard to become it.

Delvey fit into that theater perfectly.

II. The Vision

The striking thing about Delvey was that she didn’t simply want to attend the art scene. She wanted to build something inside it. Her idea was the Anna Delvey Foundation: a kind of private cultural club and exhibition space in downtown Manhattan. It would combine gallery spaces, social rooms, events, artists, patrons, and the atmosphere of a private cultural salon. A place where the city’s creative and wealthy classes might gather.

The plan was grand. But it also had a strange plausibility. New York is full of institutions that began with the ambition of a single person who simply decided that something should exist and then spent years convincing others to believe in it.

Delvey spoke about the project with total conviction. She behaved like someone who already possessed the financial backing required to make such a thing happen. And because she behaved that way, many people assumed the money must exist somewhere.

This is one of the basic mechanics of social confidence. If someone carries themselves like a person whose financial arrangements have already been verified by someone else, most people will not ask too many questions.

III. Hotels

Hotels played a central role in the Delvey story.

Luxury hotels are perfect environments for people living inside ambitious performances. They operate on the assumption that their guests are legitimate. The bill will eventually be settled. The credit line exists somewhere. The guest’s presence itself is treated as evidence of solvency.

Delvey floated through some of New York’s most expensive hotels as if she were simply another wealthy European visitor temporarily residing there while arranging various cultural affairs. The lobbies, the restaurants, the rooms—all of it provided a stage set that reinforced the story she was telling.

Hotels also create a particular social atmosphere. Everyone is temporarily suspended between identities. People are traveling, negotiating, arriving, leaving. It is a place where someone can exist slightly outside the ordinary structures of verification.

For a while, the performance worked.

IV. The Father

Like many figures who construct elaborate new identities, Delvey carried with her a somewhat murky origin story.

She spoke of family wealth. Of connections. Of a background that seemed to hover somewhere between Russia and Germany, between modest beginnings and more glamorous narratives.

Her real childhood was more ambiguous. Her father had worked as a truck driver and later operated a heating and cooling business. It was a respectable, ordinary life. But it did not contain the European aristocratic wealth that sometimes appeared in Delvey’s stories.

This kind of ambiguity is not unusual among people attempting radical self-invention. The past becomes something flexible, something that can be rearranged slightly in order to support the person one intends to become.

In cities like New York, such reinvention is practically a tradition.

V. Dubai

The most extraordinary episode in the Delvey saga took place far from Manhattan, on a trip to Dubai. Delvey traveled there with a friend—a magazine writer who was documenting the glamorous world that Delvey seemed to inhabit. The trip was meant to be luxurious: private villas, elaborate dinners, the kind of extravagant travel that confirms a person’s social status.

For a few days everything unfolded according to the script. And then the bill arrived. The charges for the trip reached roughly $60,000. Delvey’s payment arrangements suddenly failed. The promised wire transfers did not appear. The hotel demanded settlement.

And the friend—the magazine writer who had been invited along for the ride—found herself responsible for the enormous bill. So Delvey left her there. Super bad business Anna baby.

It was a moment that perfectly captured the strange mechanics of confidence artistry. The performance works right up until the moment when reality insists on payment.

Someone, eventually, must pay the bill.

VI. Collapse

Once the financial machinery began to fail, the unraveling accelerated. Banks wanted documentation. Hotels wanted payment. Institutions that had briefly entertained the idea of supporting Delvey’s foundation began to ask more detailed questions about the supposed trust fund that would finance it.

The answers did not exist. The performance collapsed. Delvey was eventually arrested, tried, and convicted of fraud.

VII. The Strange Sympathy

And yet the Delvey story produced a strangely sympathetic public response. Perhaps it was because she had not simply been extracting money for luxury purchases. She had been trying, in her own improbable way, to create something. A cultural institution. A social space. A downtown hub for art and ambition.

The plan was impossible, but the ambition was recognizable. Many people—especially those drawn to cities like New York—understand the impulse to reinvent oneself, to construct a future through sheer force of belief. Delvey simply pushed that impulse far beyond the point where the arithmetic could sustain it.

VIII. Coda

In the end, the most interesting thing about Anna Delvey may not be that she fooled people. New York has always been full of people attempting improbable social performances. The interesting thing is that, for a moment, she came very close to building the life she imagined. And perhaps that is why stories like hers continue to fascinate us. They remind us that the line between visionary and impostor is often visible only in hindsight.

Dedication: For Anna baby (you’re hot BTW) and all the beautiful strivers out there. May your world-curated art spaces someday come true.

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On George Santos (aka The Fabulous Kitara)

Note: This piece uses the figure of George Santos as a kind of cultural parable. The story of Santos—his improbable congressional run on Long Island, the famous unraveling of his résumé (including the legendary and totally outta control Baruch volleyball claim), the rapid collapse of political support from fellow New York Republicans, his eventual expulsion from Congress, and his strange second act as a Cameo celebrity—forms one of the more surreal public morality plays of recent American politics.

The apartment story that frames the essay is not meant as a literal equivalence. Kitara is not Santos, and roommates are not members of Congress. The comparison operates at the level of archetype: the charismatic figure who arrives full of sunshine, quickly becomes central to a small social world, and then—through one small but revealing detail—forces everyone around them to confront the uneasy coexistence of charm and opportunism.

The name “Kitara,” Santos’ drag name from back in Brazil where he if from (Santos is gay of course) is used here in the spirit of narrative shorthand rather than biography. Anyone who has lived with roommates long enough will recognize the basic situation. Shared apartments are small republics built on trust, improvisation, and the quiet hope that everyone involved is playing roughly the same game. Most of the time that hope is justified. Occasionally it is not.

If the tone of the piece drifts toward amusement, and even affection, rather than outrage, that is deliberate. Characters like Santos—and the occasional fabulous roommate—have a peculiar ability to provoke both exasperation and reluctant admiration. The performance can be infuriating. But it can also be oddly entertaining.

Such people rarely disappear completely. They simply move on to the next stage. Sometimes that stage is Congress. Sometimes it is Cameo (get that scratch Georgie baby!). And sometimes it is just the memory of a roommate who once seemed almost too good to be true.

Epigraph

“People seldom do what they believe in.
They just do what is convenient, then repent.”
— Bob Dylan

I. The Fabulous Roommate

Every apartment has its mythology.

The quiet one who never emerges from his room except to microwave things at strange hours. The earnest one who tries to establish chore charts that everyone pretends to follow for about ten days. The one who adopts pets with a confidence that suggests the rest of the household has already agreed to care for them.

And then, once in a while, there is the fabulous roommate. Kitara was that roommate.

She arrived with the sort of personality that immediately rearranges the emotional furniture of a place. Cheerful without being cloying. Social without being exhausting. Organized without being smug about it. She seemed to understand, instinctively, the delicate social contract of shared living: when to chat, when to disappear, when to clean something quietly so no one felt guilty.

Visitors loved her. Friends who came by would inevitably say some version of the same thing: “Your roommate is amazing.”

And she was. At least at first.

She was the sort of person who made the apartment feel like a small, cheerful republic. There were occasional dinners, occasional drinks, occasional pets that appeared temporarily in the orbit of the household. Nothing dramatic. Just the easy, slightly improvised domestic life that happens when a handful of semi-adults share a roof and try to keep the machinery of living running smoothly.

There are people who move through life like that—people who bring lightness with them. People who make small environments work better simply by being present. You think, when you meet someone like this: what a lucky break.

II. The Sunshine Personality

There is another category of person, however, that resembles the fabulous roommate from a distance. These people also arrive with sunshine. They are charming. They are energetic. They seem to know how to move through rooms with effortless confidence. They shake hands warmly. They remember names. They tell stories. They radiate the sort of friendliness that makes everyone feel briefly like a co-conspirator in something cheerful.

The difference is subtle, and it often takes time to notice. These are not merely charming people.

These are the performers. And, one of the most remarkable recent examples of this type in American public life was George Santos.

Santos appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in the political ecosystem of Long Island. His run for Congress was, at least initially, improbable in the way that many modern political stories can be. The district had long been competitive, but his rise through the local Republican apparatus was unusually smooth. There was little serious opposition within the party. The campaign itself unfolded with the sort of confident momentum that often accompanies candidates who seem, at least on paper, to possess a compelling life story.

And what a life story it was.

Santos presented himself as the son of immigrants who had risen through the financial world, a man with an impressive résumé and a philanthropic sensibility. He spoke of professional success, cultural fluency, and various achievements that painted a portrait of upward mobility and cosmopolitan competence.

The voters of Long Island sent him to Congress. And then, almost immediately, the details began to unravel.

III. The Volleyball Player

The first cracks appeared through the ordinary mechanism of local journalism. Reporters from Long Island newspapers began to do what reporters traditionally do: verify things.

The résumé turned out to be an imaginative document. The professional history did not quite match reality. The educational claims were questionable. Various details that had seemed impressive during the campaign began to dissolve under scrutiny.

One of the most memorable revelations involved an oddly specific athletic claim. Santos had described himself as a standout volleyball player during his time at Baruch College. Not merely a participant, but something close to a star—someone whose record-setting performance had been part of his biography.

There was just one problem. Baruch College had no record of him playing volleyball. None at all. Outta control. The story collapsed on that small detail. It is often the small details that do that.

A résumé can contain many large claims, and those claims can hover in a kind of vague plausibility for a surprisingly long time. But one precise, checkable fact—the volleyball team roster, the game statistics, the athletic department archives—can puncture an entire narrative.

The reporters pulled the thread and the sweater unraveled.

IV. The Grifter Archetype

Once the unraveling began, it accelerated. Claims about employment at major financial firms proved dubious. Educational credentials evaporated. Personal history mutated in various directions depending on which previous statement one examined.

Soon the story had migrated from the political pages into the broader theater of American spectacle. Late-night comedians noticed. Cable news panels convened. Social media filled with the strange, almost baroque details of the saga. Members of his own party began to distance themselves.

Several Republican members of the New York congressional delegation—figures who had initially welcomed a new colleague—publicly called for him to resign as the scope of the fabrications became clear. The situation became untenable. The House of Representatives eventually voted to expel him, a rare and historically notable step.

It was a dramatic fall.

And yet even during the collapse, Santos retained something remarkable.

Charm.

He gave interviews. He sparred with reporters. He adopted, at times, an almost mischievous tone about the entire affair. There was a faint air of theatricality to the proceedings, as though the story had become a kind of performance art about the boundaries of credibility.

The grifter archetype has a peculiar resilience. Even when the illusion collapses, the performer often remains oddly entertaining.

V. The Apartment

Watching the Santos saga unfold, I found myself thinking more about Kitara.

Because the thing about grifters is not simply that they deceive.

It is that they charm.

They charm their way into rooms, into institutions, into social networks. They radiate warmth. They build small communities of goodwill around themselves. And for quite a while, everything feels perfectly normal.

Until one day something small happens. Something missing.

In the apartment it was GM’s silver. Not a vast treasure. Not an heirloom of historic significance. Just a small, familiar object that lived in a particular drawer and had always lived there.

One morning it was gone. The initial reaction in situations like this is always practical. Maybe you moved it. Maybe it fell behind something. Maybe someone borrowed it.

The mind runs through a series of benign explanations, each one slightly less convincing than the last.

And then a thought appears.

Quietly.

Oh shit.

VI. The Knowledge You Don’t Want

Roommate life operates on a fragile form of trust.

You share space. You share kitchens. Sometimes you share pets, groceries, furniture, phone bills, music, stories. The arrangement functions because everyone tacitly agrees not to test the boundaries of that trust too aggressively.

When something disappears, the entire structure trembles.

But there is another complication.

Sometimes you realize what probably happened. And you also realize that confirming it would destroy the social equilibrium of the apartment.

So you do a strange psychological maneuver.

You know. But you decide not to know.

Life continues.

The dishes are washed. Conversations occur. The roommate remains charming. The apartment continues to function as a small republic of semi-functional adults.

But a hairline crack now runs through the arrangement.

VII. The Fall

For Santos the crack widened into a canyon.

The congressional investigation intensified. Ethical questions multiplied. Party support evaporated. Eventually the House voted to expel him, ending one of the most surreal political tenures in recent memory.

Yet even after the fall, Santos demonstrated a familiar trait of the charismatic grifter.

He adapted. He appeared on podcasts. He commented on political scandals involving others. He expressed a certain moral indignation about the ethical lapses of fellow politicians—including members of his own party—sometimes with a tone that was almost hilariously sanctimonious given the circumstances.

The performer remained on stage. And then came the truly modern twist.

Santos joined Cameo. And he’s fucking great on it!

For a fee, he would record personalized video messages: birthday greetings, congratulations, small performances of his peculiar brand of post-scandal celebrity.

The internet, as it often does, embraced the absurdity.

VIII. The Cameo

At some point I watched a few of his videos.

There he was, smiling warmly into the camera, delivering a cheerful greeting to a stranger somewhere in America. The tone was friendly, relaxed, slightly mischievous.

And I laughed.

Because the performance was genuinely funny. The charm, infuriatingly, still worked. It reminded me of the old fable about the scorpion and the frog.

The scorpion asks for a ride across the river. The frog hesitates, noting that scorpions have a reputation for stinging frogs. The scorpion assures him that such a thing would be irrational; if he stung the frog mid-crossing, both of them would drown.

The frog agrees.

Halfway across the river the scorpion stings him.

“Why?” the frog asks as they sink.

“I can’t help it,” the scorpion replies. “It’s my nature.”

The scorpion cannot help himself.

But every now and then the scorpion also sends someone a birthday message on Cameo, smiling warmly and wishing them a fantastic year ahead.

And you find yourself laughing anyway.

The truth about characters like Santos—and perhaps about certain roommates—is that their charm is not an illusion.

It’s real.

The trouble is that it coexists quite comfortably with everything else.

Dedication:

For Kitara. May you make a fucking mint on Cameo and look totally gorgeous while doing it.

Note: If you enjoyed this story, you might also enjoy these other pieces about American grifters.

On The Dubious Anna Delvey
On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks V: Rod Blagojevich
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In Partial Defense of Reddit

Note: This essay is not intended as a blanket endorsement of Reddit. The platform has many well-documented flaws: trolling, pile-ons, misinformation, and a general tendency toward chaos. Much of its reputation as one of the rougher corners of the internet is entirely deserved.

The point here is narrower.

Despite its disorder, Reddit also preserves something that has become rarer elsewhere on the modern web: large, open conversations among people who possess small but real pockets of knowledge about highly specific subjects. When these fragments accumulate—through correction, argument, memory, and curiosity—they can occasionally produce surprisingly informative results.

The examples in this essay range from the internal royalty disputes of Jane’s Addiction to a map of alleged sightings compiled by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. In both cases the same phenomenon appears: individuals contributing small pieces of cultural memory that gradually assemble into something resembling a collective understanding.

This is the limited claim of the essay. Reddit is frequently messy and unreliable, but it also functions as a peculiar kind of public knowledge commons—one where curiosity, enthusiasm, and the occasional obsessive hobbyist can still combine to produce insights that might otherwise remain scattered or forgotten.

Everyone knows that Reddit is terrible.

It is chaotic. It is full of profanity, bad jokes, half-informed opinions, and the occasional theory that appears to have been typed at three in the morning by someone who has not slept since the Clinton administration. Entire careers have been built explaining why Reddit represents the worst tendencies of the modern internet.

And yet.

The other day I was reading a thread about the latest implosion of Jane’s Addiction, the once-great Los Angeles group whose internal tensions have been simmering since roughly the Reagan administration. The immediate subject was the collapse of a reunion tour following an onstage altercation involving frontman Perry Farrell. The comments were exactly what one would expect from Reddit: profanity, gallows humor, and several variations of “this band has been breaking up since 1991.”

But as the thread continued something interesting happened.

Between the jokes and one-line reactions, the users began reconstructing the band’s internal history. Someone noted that Jane’s had already declared itself finished several times across the decades. Someone else pointed out that the early sound of the band had been shaped heavily by bassist Eric Avery. Another commenter raised the eternal rock-band problem: royalties.

And this, as it turns out, is where the story becomes interesting.

Money has a way of dissolving even the most inspired musical partnerships. Bands begin as small utopian experiments—four or five people creating something new together—and then the checks begin to arrive. Once that happens, questions emerge that are almost impossible to resolve cleanly. Who wrote the song? Who contributed the riff? Who deserves the lion’s share of the publishing?

Rock history is essentially a graveyard of groups destroyed by arguments over fractions of ownership.

In the thread I was reading, one user mentioned a detail I had not known: a claim that Avery at one point wore or promoted merchandise suggesting a 51 percent stake in the band’s identity. Whether literally true or not, the anecdote captured something fundamental about how these disputes unfold. Creative partnerships may begin democratically, but the distribution of credit rarely stays that way.

The remarkable part was that I had learned all of this not from a music journalist or a band biography, but from a chaotic conversation among strangers.

Which brings me to the modest defense of Reddit.

The platform’s reputation is built on its worst features: trolling, argument, and endless bad takes. All of those things exist, of course. But what critics often miss is that Reddit also contains something else: an enormous micro-density of cultural knowledge.

The process is messy. Someone posts a half-remembered fact. Someone else corrects it. Another person adds a detail from an interview they once read fifteen years ago. Gradually, through the collision of dozens of small contributions, something resembling a coherent picture emerges.

It is not elegant. It is rarely authoritative in the traditional sense. But it is often surprisingly informative.

What Reddit does, at its best, is something the modern media ecosystem sometimes struggles to replicate: it gathers together thousands of people who care obsessively about very specific things. Musicians. Gearheads. Amateur historians. Programmers. Aviation nerds. Movie buffs. Backyard astronomers.

And when those people start talking, knowledge begins to accumulate.

The phenomenon becomes even clearer when the subject matter becomes absurd.

Consider a thread from the cryptozoology corner of Reddit devoted to a map of Bigfoot sightings. At first glance the discussion appears to be pure nonsense. The premise itself—tracking sightings of a large unidentified forest creature—is hardly the sort of topic one expects to produce serious information.

And yet the map itself is strangely compelling.

People immediately begin checking their regions. Someone from Maine wonders why Bigfoot seems to avoid the state despite its endless forests. Another user proposes that two “alpha Bigfoots” are fighting for territorial dominance between Maine and Canada. Someone else links to the sightings database maintained by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. A commenter from rural Illinois notices that two reported sightings occurred along the same river that runs behind his property and proceeds to describe the terrain—swampy woods surrounded by miles of farmland where, he notes, something large might plausibly remain hidden.

The subject is ridiculous.

The conversation, however, is oddly informative.

You learn about geography. You learn about folklore. You learn where people live, how they interpret the landscapes around them, and how stories circulate through local communities. What begins as a joke about Bigfoot gradually becomes something like amateur field anthropology.

This is the strange virtue of Reddit.

The platform functions as a kind of digital commons in which thousands of small fragments of knowledge collide in public. No single commenter possesses the full story. But collectively they often assemble something larger than any individual source might provide.

Which leads to the modest conclusion of this essay.

If you want perfectly verified information delivered in polished and authoritative form, Reddit is not the place to go. But if you want to watch curiosity, memory, obsession, and local knowledge combine in unpredictable ways, it can be surprisingly useful.

It turns out that when enough ordinary people gather in one place to talk about the things they care about—even Jane’s Addiction royalty disputes or the migratory patterns of an imaginary forest giant—they occasionally produce something that the official channels of culture struggle to replicate.

Not perfection.

But knowledge, nonetheless.

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On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks V: Rod Blagojevich

Note: This essay concludes the small series “On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks.” The earlier pieces explored several very different kinds of returns: the moral vindication of Kofi Annan, the sly tactical persistence of Joe Nash of the Seattle Seahawks, the tragic artistic authenticity of Amy Winehouse, and the mythic public legend surrounding Muhammad Ali.


The story of Rod Blagojevich introduces a different category altogether: the shameless comeback.

Unlike the other figures in the series, Blagojevich’s return to public life does not depend on moral vindication, heroic persistence, or cultural myth. Instead it illustrates something more peculiar about contemporary politics and media. In an age of fragmented audiences and constant attention cycles, a disgraced figure may sometimes reappear simply by refusing to leave the stage.

Whether one sees Blagojevich’s re-emergence as comic, absurd, or oddly instructive, it provides a fitting final example for the series. Not every comeback is admirable, but each one reveals something about the strange ways public life allows stories to continue.

Not all comebacks are noble.

Some are heroic, like the moral vindication of Kofi Annan. Some are tactical, like the sly fourth-quarter returns engineered by Joe Nash of the Seattle Seahawks. Some exist somewhere between tragedy and authenticity, like the brief blazing career of Amy Winehouse. And some, like the legend of Muhammad Ali, grow into something close to myth.

But there is another type of comeback altogether.

The shameless comeback.

For that, it is difficult to find a more perfect case than Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois whose political career once appeared to have ended in spectacular disgrace.

The original scandal is by now familiar. In 2008 federal investigators revealed that Blagojevich had been recorded on FBI wiretaps discussing how he might profit from appointing a replacement to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. The recordings were devastating. In one of the most memorable lines in modern American political scandal, Blagojevich described the Senate seat as something valuable that he was reluctant to give away for nothing.

The fallout was swift. Blagojevich was impeached and removed from office by the Illinois legislature. Later he was convicted on multiple corruption charges and sentenced to federal prison. For most politicians, this sequence would represent the end of the story.

Disgrace. Prison. Silence.

But American public life has always contained another possibility: the comeback powered not by redemption but by spectacle.

Even before his imprisonment, Blagojevich seemed instinctively drawn toward the theatrical dimension of his situation. He appeared on television talk shows, launched media interviews, and treated the unfolding scandal almost as if it were a strange kind of reality program in which he remained the central character.

His appearance on The Celebrity Apprentice, hosted by Donald Trump, felt less like an attempt to restore dignity than a recognition that modern politics and entertainment had already merged.

Then came the commutation.

In 2020 Trump commuted Blagojevich’s prison sentence, releasing him after several years behind bars. The decision itself was controversial, but the effect was unmistakable: the stage was suddenly open again.

And Blagojevich, to his credit—or perhaps to his creditlessness—walked right back onto it.

The most striking feature of his post-prison public life has been the absence of embarrassment. Many disgraced politicians attempt some form of contrition when they re-enter the public conversation. Apologies are issued. Lessons are discussed. A tone of humility is adopted.

Blagojevich chose a different path.

Instead he embraced a kind of shameless persistence, appearing in conservative media outlets, repositioning himself politically, and speaking about his case with the tone of someone who believes the whole episode was misunderstood or exaggerated. The ideological shift from Democrat to Republican was particularly striking, not because party changes are unheard of but because in Blagojevich’s case it seemed less like a conversion than a strategic recalibration.

It was, in other words, a comeback powered by the modern media ecosystem.

In an earlier era, a corruption scandal of this magnitude might have consigned a politician to permanent obscurity. But the fragmented media landscape of the twenty-first century offers a different possibility. There is always another audience somewhere, another platform, another narrative waiting to be constructed.

Blagojevich appears to understand this instinctively.

Which is why his story belongs in a series about comebacks, even if the comeback itself is of a peculiar variety. Unlike the moral return of Annan or the mythic return of Ali, Blagojevich’s version depends less on redemption than on endurance.

The secret of the shameless comeback is simple.

You refuse to leave the stage.

You keep talking. You keep appearing. You keep telling your version of the story until, slowly but inevitably, the scandal itself begins to blur into just another chapter in the larger spectacle of American politics.

In that sense Rod Blagojevich may represent a distinctly modern form of comeback: not heroic, not tragic, but theatrical.

And in the strange carnival of contemporary public life, theatrical persistence can sometimes be enough.