From the writing
What Sowell Bay Knows
A review of Remarkably Bright Creatures — young adult homelessness, and the non-professional town that quietly does the work.
The picnic is not what the story was about. The picnic is what the story was for. Sowell Bay was Cameron’s housing program and his behavioral health program and his vocational training and his clinical intervention.
There Aren’t Enough Speed Bumps
On the constellation that replaced judgment — how reasonable rules, applied one at a time, dismantle the everyday trust that lets a person on the spot do the right thing.
The speed bump does not ask you to slow down; it makes you slow down. It does not trust you; it replaces you. And once a road has enough of them, drivers find another road.
The Watershed and the Pipe
On the difference between community health and the industrialization of distress — what happens when we replace the village with a claims system.
Every government function that displaces a civil society function makes the civil society function harder to rebuild. The call is easier than sitting. The sitting stops happening. The capacity atrophies.
The Formation Wage
What if we paid parents instead of paying to replace them?
You learn to read the wood — where the grain runs, where it will hold a joint and where it won’t. Systems build against the grain of the people they serve, not because anyone wants to, but because the system can’t imagine anything else.
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