When did purchasing something become a political act? Most especially, when did it become the primary means of political action for us? People that would never go to a protest or write their Congresswoman would die before buying a real fur coat, and always check their labels to see if their clothes were made with slave labor.

Not that I think we shouldn’t be responsible with our purchases. I just wonder if we’ve lost something, some focus, in turning our attention so much to the impact we have on the market. It’s as if we stopped believing we could affect political change, and decided the easiest way to change the world was to buy organic. It’s worked - we can buy organic everywhere now - but at the same time a lot of issues, like women’s rights, single-payer health care, child care, our crumbling infrastructure and buckling educational systems, have stalled, many not having moved at all in the last 30 years.

How did this happen?

X happened, and then Y, so Z policy was effective is a common way for writers building a narrative to gloss over the fact that the two things linked may not actually have a causal relationship.

For example, X slew Y, becoming king is pretty clear: the killing of the old king allowed the new king to take his place. But consider “X brought peace to the realm by lowering taxes, negotiating with his barons, and concluding several alliances with his neighbors.”

It sounds straightforward. But can we be sure that the king’s policies were the direct cause of peace? Maybe the weather was good for several years, raising crop yields and giving everyone enough that they didn’t have to fight for resources. Maybe the king was lucky in getting a generation of barons who were more inclined to bend the knee than take control. Maybe the king’s neighbors were busy fighting civil wars, and too preoccupied with internal matters to seek outside enemies. Maybe all three things happened, and if any one of them had been missing, the kingdom would have been plunged into chaos.

Especially when reading condensed histories, we have to be aware of the perspective of the author, and what sort of point they might be making, even unconsciously, with the way they frame the story.

Inspired by one of Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Challenges, I’m posting three flash fiction stories today, each three sentences long, and each in a different genre.

Horror

Fantasy

Science-Fiction

A work of amazingly bad scholarship and poor critical thinking. Morris spends the better part of 400 pages trying to prove that war has been the primary engine of human advancement, and that war - not democracy, not the rule of law, not the cooperative instinct - has made us safer.

A weaker version of his thesis - that some wars make the world safer, or that war has acted as a natural selection pressure on human states, weeding out those that fail to ensure the greatest prosperity for their citizens - would be both interesting and justifiable. At every turn, though, Morris refuses to take a reasonable position, pushing his thesis far past the point at which it can be defended.

It doesn’t help that each chapter is full of historical inaccuracies. Sometimes he’s recasting historical events to suit his thesis, such as when he insists the Roman Empire “split in two” in 220, when in fact only the administration of the Empire was divided; the Empire itself was considered whole for hundreds of years after. Other times he skips over inconvenient facts, like when he insists that the years after 1100 were “centuries of decline” for Europe, despite the evidence that over that period wages rose, new inventions entered use (e.g. the water mill) and life for the common people (the majority) got better. Or when he waxes poetic about “prosperous plantations” founded by the Portuguese on Madeira and the Azores, leaving out the numerous slaves imported to work on those plantations.

Sometimes Morris makes up his own facts. In several places he compares rates of violent death across time periods, but these rates are mostly (his own) guesswork. And what a surprise, his guesses support his thesis that rates of violent death have declined as states have gotten larger.

At one point he actually admits that his numbers might be wrong, but then claims that it’s for future scholars to come up with better numbers and refute him, which is one of the most brazen admissions of copping-out I’ve ever read. Why add to the body of careful scholarship, when you can publish a controversial thesis without evidence to back it up?

Other places where Morris makes inexcusable mistakes:

• His take on the Muslim caliphates founded in the seventh century: "Hardly anybody took notice of them."
• On American Revolutionary soldiers, who nearly lost the War of Independence multiple times: "[they] ran rings around the rigid, ponderous professionals"
• He characterizes Communist China as a Soviet client prior to 1972, and that Nixon "broke them away" from the Russians. In reality, the Chinese Communists and Soviets had always been at loggerheads, and formally denounced each other in 1961. China invited Nixon to visit as part of its gradual opening up to world trade, a fact well documented in any modern book on Chinese history.

For example, he actually does have evidence that rates of violent death in private disputes dropped under the Roman Empire. His interpretation is that only fear of punishment by the Roman government kept people in line, so the Roman wars of conquest were justified. He ignores the fact that every society has means of adjudicating conflicts, some more violent than others, and that perhaps having access to something like the Roman courts was all that conquered peoples needed to put down their arms.

Also, Morris doesn’t address the possibility that the rate of violence stayed constant, but shifted to state violence instead of private violence. I might lose my hand because I was found guilty of theft by a magistrate, instead of having it cut off by a rival, but the hand is still gone.

Later he wants to distinguish between productive and unproductive wars. Productive wars are wars that create larger states - bigger is always better for Morris - and unproductive wars break up large empires into smaller ones. This leads him into contradictions when discussing the many wars fought by steppe nomads against settled peoples: he calls them unproductive wars because they broke up the empires formed in Europe and along the Mediterranean, even though they created some of the largest empires in the world (the Ottoman and Mongol both come to mind) that also stimulated trade by eliminating brigandage along the Silk Road, connecting China to the Mediterranean via overland routes.

The cycle of boom and bust (productive war followed by unproductive war followed by productive war) he wants us to believe in is easily interpreted as being proof that war is not productive, that expansion of government by violent means is intolerable and unsustainable. Trade expansion and good government become possible at the exact moment that rulers abandon war as the primary means of seeking prosperity and power.

I won’t even address the conclusion of his book, where he claims that the US needs to keep spending large sums on its military and playing global cop until the Singularity arrives and makes war obsolete. It’s such a sudden lurch off the rails of his narrative and over the cliffs of delusion that I have to believe it was inserted by the editor as a prank.

I did learn some things, though:

• If you're a British professor, you can get poorly-argued historically inaccurate books published, so long as they're also controversial
• There's a segment of the US and British elites that still want to believe colonialism was justified
• It's possible to write modern books on history without catching up on recent scholarship

A few days later, Wright was standing outside my door again. I looked past her, at the uniformed cops dragging a handcuffed Dave away from his condo.

Wright was smiling. “Thought you’d like to see the fruits of your labor,” she said.

I shook my head. “I still can’t believe you found proof.”

“Well, he was clever to pump out the urine. Not so thorough about getting rid of it. Or his tools.”

“Guess we got lucky.”

“You got lucky, kid.” She chuckled. “I just did my job.”

She started to follow the uniforms out, then turned back. “Speaking of which, you should be getting a check from a thankful city soon.”

I grinned. “Thanks. But how will I cash a check made out to ‘Anonymous’?”

She smiled back. “Well, I might have listed you as a consultant on the case. Don’t thank me too much, though. You gave us a pretty cheap rate.”

She strode down the hall, whistling.

I went back into my condo, wondering how this would affect my unemployment.

Brian’s doubts gnawed at me all the way back from the pub.

As soon as I got home I went to the police department’s website to look for any information on Emily’s death. I found it under the heading “Police Investigate Death in Little Italy.”

The article didn’t say much more than the officer had told me earlier. Two things stood out: the cause of death was still listed as Unknown, and Dave hadn’t been booked for murder.

That should have settled it. After all, if the police didn’t think Dave was involved, why should I?

Besides, how much did I really know about Dave and Emily? Were we even friends on Facebook?

I logged in to check. We were.

Feeling a little guilty, I started reading through Emily’s timeline. I told myself I was just trying to get to know her a little better, a silent memorial to the neighbor I’d lost.

And I did learn some new things. She’d been a nurse, working shifts at Sharp Hospital. She posted several photos of dinners made for her by Dave, a consolation at the end of her workday. She’d been thinking about getting a dog, and posted pictures of cute ones she’d seen on the street.

Just for comparison, I clicked over to Dave’s timeline.

Not much there. A couple of bitter-sounding posts about how the recession was supposed to be over. Half-hearted attempts to promote sales at the Macy’s he worked at. Some back and forth arguments about politics around election time.

Oddly enough, though, his relationship status was set to “Single.” I double-checked Emily’s, which was still set to “Married.”

WTF? He’d changed it already?

I scrolled all the way back to the top of his timeline. Sure enough, at the very top of the page, it announced the change in his relationship status.

It was dated 6:53 pm on a Monday, two weeks ago.

I felt a chill go down my back.

Why’d he change his status so early? Were they having problems?

I dug through their timelines for another hour, but couldn’t find anything. If they were on the rocks, they weren’t posting about it. I suppose that made sense, but why else would he update his status?

Why else, unless he knew what was going to happen?

I chuckled at myself. What did a Facebook status prove? Brian’s comments had gotten me pretty worked up, to be thinking the guy next door had killed his own wife.

And how would he have done it, anyway? If there’d been any obvious marks on the body, the cops would’ve cuffed him then and there, right?

I checked the time. 6:00. Dave’d probably be home from work by now, assuming he’d even gone. I hadn’t talked to him since last night. Shouldn’t I go over and offer my condolences?

And wouldn’t that be a great way to get some more information?

Dave answered the door after my first knock, surprising me.

His eyes were red and bloodshot. “Yeah?” His gaze wandered down to my shoes, back up to my face. “Oh, it’s you. Sean, right?”

I cleared my throat. “Yeah, I uh - " the speech I’d prepped seemed false, inadequate. “Can I come in?”

He nodded, opened the door wider. “Sure. Come on in.”

His condo was laid out basically the same as mine, but reversed left to right. His kitchen was on the left side of the front door, with the living room stretching ahead and to the right. A closed door at the far end of the left-hand wall led to the bedroom, I assumed.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No, thanks, Dave.” I took one more look at the kitchen, at the dirty dishes piled in the sink, the empty wine bottle in the trash, and stepped into the living room. “Actually, I was wondering if there was anything I could do. You know. For you.”

He nodded, his gaze wandering over the furniture. There was just enough room for a couch and two small chairs, all three of which were covered in a combination of cardboard boxes and candy bar wrappers. He sighed. “Thanks, Sean, but I’m doing ok so far.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He rubbed his hand over his face. “Um, not really, thanks. Did enough talking with the cops and the doctors and the " - his voice caught - " the funeral home. I’m all talked out.”

I nodded. “Okay. I understand.” I gestured at the boxes. “Are you moving?”

He tensed, then shrugged. “Yeah. Maybe. I dunno. Might move back east. I’ve got family in PA. Don’t really want to stay here anymore, you know?”

“Yeah. I know.”

He let out a deep breath. “Anyway, I’m staying in a hotel tonight. Just gotta - " he waved his hand in the air - “gotta get away for a bit.”

I nodded again. “Gotcha. Well, if you need anything over the next few days, just let me know, man.”

He smiled a little. “Thanks, Sean.” He walked over and re-opened the door. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

I stepped out, raised a hand in farewell, and went back to my condo. I slumped on my own couch, thinking.

What had that accomplished? Wanting to move wasn’t telling enough. Who would want to stay in the apartment your spouse had died in? The candy wrappers didn’t speak too well of his eating habits, but that was it.

I closed my eyes, trying to remember what the living room and kitchen had looked like. Was there something I’d missed?

There was. Hanging on the living room wall, right next to the bedroom door, was a framed movie poster for Arsenic and Old Lace.

Hadn’t I seen that movie mentioned recently?

I flipped open my laptop and went back through Dave and Emily’s Facebook pages. There, listed on Emily’s About page, was her favorite movie: Arsenic and Old Lace.

I don’t know why, but I looked up the movie on Wikipedia. The movie poster on the page looked just like the one I’d seen on Dave’s wall, except his had a couple of stains near the center.

Still wondering why I was being so paranoid, I read the plot synopsis. That sent another chill up my spine.

The “friendly aunts” in the movie had poisoned their victims with a mix of arsenic, strychnine, and cyanide. How had they given it to their guests? Mixed in with elderberry wine.

It was probably a coincidence. But it didn’t feel like one.

I wondered if I should go to the police. But what would I say? My neighbor changed his Facebook status too early, and happened to give his wife elderberry wine on the night she died? Even I knew it didn’t amount to much.

I pulled out the business card the cop had given me that morning. She said to call her if I thought of anything, right? That everything was important?

I dialed her number on my phone. Maybe I could convince her.

She picked up on the fifth ring. “Detective Wright speaking.”

I swallowed, told myself I had nothing to lose by talking. “Hello, Detective? This is Sean Cook. We spoke this morning?”

I heard a chair squeak on the other end. “Mr. Cook? In Acqua Vista, is that right?”

“Yep.”

“How can I help you?”

“You said to call if I remembered anything else?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Well, I’ve remembered a few more things.”

More sounds on the other end, like a notepad being dragged across a desk. “Such as?”

I glanced at the wall I shared with Dave’s apartment. What if he could hear me? “If it’s ok, I’d rather not say over the phone.” Shit, I thought, I made it sound like I knew something really important, not just some details scraped from a Facebook page. “Could I come down to the station and talk there?”

She sighed. “Sure, Sean, that’d be fine. We’re on Imperial and 25th. You know where that is?”

“I’ll find it. Thanks.”

She hung up.

I took the trolley as far down to the station as I could. 25th was way past what I considered the safe part of downtown.

Good thing I was going to hang out with the cops.

The one at the front desk made me wait while he paged Detective Wright. She showed up just five minutes later, but even that felt like an hour.

She took me back into one of their interrogation rooms. Asked me if I wanted anything to drink. When I said no, she sat down in the chair across the table from me and crossed her arms.

“So, Sean, what did you remember?”

I told her what I suspected: that Dave had poisoned his wife using cyanide or arsenic mixed in with the elderberry wine he gave her the night she died. I described how it matched up with Emily’s favorite movie, and that Dave had changed his relationship status too early.

It still sounded crazy, even to me, but I tried to make it as coherent as possible.

When I finished, she nodded, but kept her arms crossed. “Interesting theory, Sean. But it’s missing a couple of pieces.”

I sighed. “What’s that?”

“Motive, for one. Why would Dave kill his wife?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Your second problem is that cyanide leaves very distinct traces in the body: hair, nails, even urine. We always test for those in cases like this. And guess what?”

I hung my head. “You didn’t find any.”

She smiled. “Bingo.”

She stood up. “So, unless you’ve got a motive for me, or can explain how someone could poison another person without leaving any sign, you should go home and stop worrying about your neighbors killing each other. Ok?”

I nodded and stood, feeling foolish. “Ok.”

She escorted me back to the front desk, then left me to sign out on my own.

I trudged out of the station and back to the trolley, wondering how I could be so stupid.

How could I have forgotten motive? What possible reason could Dave have for killing his wife? I’d never heard them argue, never seen either of them bring a stranger home, nothing.

And of course the police checked for poison. It wouldn’t cost them anything, and would catch all the usual suspects.

I told myself to face it: I’d had a hunch, but it didn’t hold up. I almost felt like I should try to apologize to Dave for thinking bad of him.

I didn’t sleep well that night. I kept jolting awake, frightened by dreams of some mad tea party with all the colors drained out of it. Dave was there, hanging in the background, screaming “Charge!” every five minutes.

Not relaxing.

After I gave up on sleeping and just got up, I dressed and went downstairs to fetch the mail. I’d forgotten it the day before, and was hoping my unemployment check would be in there.

Instead, I found the motive.

Tucked between a junk circular and a bill from Cox Cable was a letter from a law firm to Emily Ericson. It was stamped “second notice” in big red letters. The mailman must’ve pushed it into my box by mistake.

Normally I just push these mis-filings back into the mail slot, so they’ll be sorted properly the next day. This time, I carried it up to my apartment with the others.

I looked up the law firm online. Their specialty was Estate Planning and Wills.

Had Emily recently updated her will? I went back through her timeline. Nothing in there.

Maybe someone in her family had died?

I used Facebook to track down her sister and brother, which gave me her maiden name. Their posts led me to her mother’s blog, whose most recent, sad, entry talked about the death of Emily’s aunt two weeks prior.

Perhaps her aunt had left something for Emily in her will?

I knew it was a federal crime to open someone’s mail. I told myself Emily was dead and wouldn’t mind, especially if it helped catch her killer.

Sure enough, the letter was a notice from the law firm that Emily’s aunt had recently died and named Emily as the prime beneficiary in her will. The lawyers needed Emily to come down and sign some paperwork to make everything official.

It didn’t seem that exciting until I Googled her aunt. Turns out she’d owned a majority stake in an international shipping business, with branches on both coasts. The stock alone was worth a few million.

Had Dave kept back Emily’s mail? If she didn’t have a will written up, he’d get everything now.

I called Detective Wright. I didn’t mention the letter, just suggested that she look into Emily’s extended family. I told her it was something I’d heard from Emily a few weeks ago, about her aunt being sick.

I could tell she didn’t think it was important.

Two hours later she called me back.

“I don’t know how you knew,” she sighed, “but it seems Emily stood to inherit a lot of money before she died.”

“Did she?”

“Don’t gloat, kid,” she chided. “You haven’t explained the disappearing poison.”

“Yeah.” I glanced at my laptop, open to an article on cyanide poisoning. “Still working on that one.”

“Well, if any more ideas hit you, give me a call. If it helps, I’ll put it down as an anonymous tip, see if we can’t pay you for your time.”

Seriously? “Um, thanks,” I mumbled.

“No problem,” she said, and hung up.

I went back to reading the article.

According to it, a person could die from ingesting just a little bit of cyanide. In a low enough dose, the person would slip into a coma, twitching a little before going into cardiac arrest.

Sounded to me like what had happened to Emily.

But where was the evidence? Cyanide victims were supposed to get a pink flush, and leave traces of cyanide in their blood, their lungs, their urine. Where could it have gone?

I kept thinking about the question through lunch, turning the problem over in my head like some homework assignment.

Maybe I was thinking about it in the wrong way. If I were Dave, how would I get rid of it?

The answer hit me like a slap in the face. In the urine.

I dialed the detective’s number. As soon as she picked up, I burst out with “Did Emily have any urine in her body?”

“Sean? Is that you?”

I cleared me throat. “Yes, Detective Wright, it’s me. Look, I think I’ve figured out what happened to the cyanide. Did Emily have any urine in her body when the EMTs got her?”

She sighed. “I can’t tell you that, Sean. Why don’t you tell me what you’re thinking, and I’ll look into it?”

I took a deep breath. “Okay. I think Dave gave her a really low dose of cyanide in the wine, just enough to turn her sleep into a coma, and slowly kill her.”

“Mm-hmm?”

“Most of what her body didn’t absorb went into her urine.”

“Possibly.”

“I think Dave somehow pumped the urine out of her, so we wouldn’t find anything.”

She sighed. “That’s kind of a stretch, Sean.”

“I know, I know.” I swallowed. “But there’ll be evidence. He had to get rid of the urine, right? He probably flushed it down the toilet, which means he might have splashed some around. And -”

“And if he threw away the container, it’ll be in his trash,” she finished. She was quiet for a few seconds. “All right. I’ll check into it. If I find anything, you’ll know.”

“How’s that?”

I could hear her smile through the phone. “We’ll be making an arrest, that’s how.”

By the time I made it to Shakespeare’s Pub, I’d calmed down a little. Brian was already there, flirting with one of the waitresses. She stuck around just long enough for me to order a Guinness, then hurried off to check on her other tables.

Brian stared at her as she left. “Man, those British accents. They make any girl sexier, don’t they?”

I snorted. “Whatever you say, man.”

He turned back to me. “Hey, what’s wrong with you? Why’d you need a drink in the middle of the day?”

I told him everything I’d learned that morning: how my neighbor Emily had died in her sleep sometime last night, how her husband Dave had called it in, how the cops had grilled me about it.

Brian let out a low whistle when I was done. “That’s fucked up, man. Do they think Dave did it?”

I shook my head. “Dunno. They’re probably just getting all the information they can. I didn’t see them arrest him or anything.”

He nodded. “Right.” He tilted his head. “Was Emily the blonde in 405, or the brunette in 410?”

“Brunette.”

“Damn. Always wanted to fuck that one.”

I set down my drink. “Dude, too soon.”

He glanced at me. “Right. Sorry.”

We both took a sip of our beers.

He sighed. “It’s just - she was a little older, right? But still in great shape.”

“Brian-”

He held up his hands. “Hey, I know. I’m just saying, how does a healthy chick like that just go in her sleep?”

I shrugged. “That’s what’s so fucked up about the whole thing. No warning.”

Brian lifted his glass. “Well, we’re still kicking, and I’m grateful for that. L’chaim!”

I raised my own glass, tapped his, and drank. “L’chaim."

“Could you repeat that, sir?”

I tore my eyes away from the body being wheeled out of my neighbor’s condo and turned back to the police detective standing outside my door, notepad in hand.

I cleared my throat. “He said he just wanted to borrow some milk.”

She checked her notes. “That would be David Ericson, correct?”

I nodded.

“Did he say anything else?”

I closed my eyes for a second, trying to remember. “No, not really.”

The cop looked up at me. “Not really? What does that mean?”

I sighed. “Nothing important. I mean, I asked him what he was cooking, that kind of thing.”

“Everything’s important. What’d he say?”

“He said he was making dinner for his wife again, forgot a few ingredients. Said the milk was for his almond-crusted chicken.”

“And that was the last time you saw him?”

“Um, no. Actually, he came back a little later for some flour. Traded me a glass of elderberry wine for it.”

The cop glanced up again. “Elderberry wine, huh? Any good?”

I shrugged, not sure it mattered. “Yeah, I guess.”

The cop flipped her notebook closed, then pulled out a business card. “Thanks for your help, Mr. Cook. If you think of anything else that might be relevant, just give me a call.”

I took the card. “Will do, detective. Thanks.”

She nodded and strolled back next door.

I stepped inside and pushed the door to.

My neighbor was dead. Not ten feet from where I slept, another human being had died. How fucked up was that?

At least she’d died in her sleep. That’s what the cop told me, anyway. Maybe she said that just to make me feel better. They don’t really know these things till later, do they? Don’t they have to do an autopsy or something first?

I realized I didn’t want to be alone. I called up Brian, convinced him to meet me at Shakespeare’s.

I really needed a drink.

So much of software engineering is built on trust.

I have to trust that the other engineers on my team will pull me back from the brink if i start to spend too much time chasing down a bug. I have to trust that they’ll catch the flaws in my code during code review, and show me how to do it better. When reviewing their code, at some point I have to trust that they’ve at least tested things locally, and written something that works, even if doesn’t work well.

Beyond my team, I have to trust the marketing and sales folks to bring in new customers so we can grow the company. I’ve got to trust the customer support team to keep our current customers happy, and to report bugs they discover that I need to fix. I have to trust the product guys to know what features the customer wants next, so we don’t waste our time building things nobody needs.

And every time I use test fixture someone else wrote, I’m trusting the engineers that worked here in the past. When I push new code, I’m trusting our CI builds to run the tests properly and catch anything that might have broken. By trusting those tests, I’m trusting everyone that wrote them, too.

Every new line of code I write, every test I create, adds to that chain of trust, and brings me into it. As an engineer, I strive to be worthy of that trust, to build software that is a help, and not a burden, to those that rely on it.

“It tracks your exercise!" “I don’t need a watch to tell me when I’ve gotten exercise. I’m well aware when it’s happening, because I’m the one doing it!”

“It keeps accurate time!" “So does my alarm clock, my computer, my phone, and my car. When do I not have a clock staring me in the face, counting down my final hours?”

“Friends lets you send a message with a single touch!" “All my friends are dead.”

“It gets your attention with a tap! Isn’t that cute?" “A tap? From that whopper? It’d break my wrist!”

“You can dictate messages to it!" “Sure, if you enunciate like a British MP. That’s all I need, to spend my day, sitting on a park bench, cursing at my wrist.”

“You can read email on it!" “Maybe YOU can. With the fonts I use, it’d only display one word at a time!”

“You can send sketches to people!" “Right. Just what the world needs, more shaky doodles from my arthritic hands.”

“It can record your heartbeat!" “Now that might be useful. Can it send it to a doctor, or - no? Baldurdash.”

“You can use it to pay for things!" “Like I couldn’t do it before? Listen, sonny, cash is still accepted everywhere.”

Earlier seasons had episodes that were standalone: the Doctor and his Companions having adventures.

Moffat’s tenure shifted the focus away from the Doctor, away from adventure, and toward drama: Amy and Rory’s relationship, Amy and the Doctor’s relationship, the Doctor and River Song’s relationship.

In the first four seasons, these sort of themes were subtext, part of the background fabric of the show. Moffat’s tenure brought these elements front and center, to the point where you can’t pull an episode out of the Sixth Season that doesn’t deal with some aspect of the Doctor’s death scene from the first episode. The entire season is basically setup for that one event, which means you can skip the entire season and be happier for it.

This leads me to the contradiction in my feelings about Smith’s time as the Doctor: I like Smith’s Doctor, but I hate the episodes he’s in. Smith’s ability to portray a younger, more quirky Doctor one minute and an older, more stern Doctor the next was and is amazing to me. His portrayal is still one of my favorites, and yet, because of the way they used him, I don’t enjoy watching his seasons nearly as much as I like watching Tenant and Eccleston’s.

It’s not until Season Seven that we start getting episodes that are fun to rewatch (“Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”, for example). And only once Clara joins the Doctor do we get consistently good episodes.

Even with Clara, though, we can’t escape the Moffat approach of wrapping the Companion up with the Big Bad of the season and defining her mostly by what she does for the Doctor (Impossible Girl? The Girl Who Waited?). Martha Jones used to be my least favorite companion, but compared with Amy or Clara she’s incredibly kick-ass: a doctor, a smart woman who kept her head when the hospital she worked in got transported to the Moon, who had a life beyond the Doctor and went on to be a hero in her own right.

I almost think Doctor Who needs a reboot. Not just a new Doctor (we got that, hooray), but a scratching-out of most of the Doctor’s history since Moffat took over. I mean at this point, the Doctor we have is pretty lame: he’s 2,000 years old but lived in one single town for half of that time, his grave at Trenzalore - where he must never go - is not really his grave, and he’s given up caring or acting in the world because he’s lost his confidence.

We need to wipe the Moffat years out, and start over.

We can do it by making the current Doctor not the real Doctor.

During the end of Season Five (“The Big Bang”) what Amy Pond remembered back into existence was not the real Doctor. It was the Raggedy Man, her Doctor, not the real one.

The real Doctor got shunted off to Gallifrey during the explosion to seal the rift (emergency temporal shift). He was trapped there, and regenerated into a new body.

We introduce this as a season closer, when Gallifrey comes back. The fake Doctor sacrifices himself, the Time Lords return, and the real Doctor emerges. We can drop all the history we don’t like from the last three seasons, and go forward with a revamped show. We can get a younger Doctor, a not-so-needy Doctor, and (if we’re lucky) a female Doctor.

This episode is irredeemable. From the bad acting, the heavy-handed rehash of ideas that have been explored in previous Doctor Who episodes, and how bored the Doctor seems at everything that happens (I swear, Capaldi takes deadpan to a whole new level), it’s one of the worst episodes I’ve ever seen. The only thing we really learn about the Doctor or Clara is confirmation that yes, Capaldi and Coleman have absolutely zero chemistry on screen.

Skip it. Watch episode “Dalek” from Season One instead. It’s the same theme, executed better, and without the Doctor-is-just-anti-Dalek retcon.

Seems everyone wants to claim persecution of some sort as a way of bolstering their case. We’ve arrived at a point where we know enough about our recent history to see people - artists, scientists, political activists - that were persecuted in their time, but were right, and have now been vindicated. So we want to represent ourselves as being like those people: just as determined, just as persecuted, and just as right.

We’ll do it to gain sympathy for our cause, even when the persecution itself is completely made up.

I’ve seen Protestant Christians in the US adopt this tactic several times. They make themselves out to be the lone voices in the wilderness, when in reality over 80% of Americans believe in God, it mentions God on our money, and the Presidential Oath of Office is usually taken on a Bible. Not exactly a tigers-in-the-colosseum level of persecution.

I see anti-GMO activists take this stance when talking about Monsanto and other big corporations. These corporations are big, and mean, and use their lawyers to push people around, so obviously GMOs must be bad. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. There’s no scientific evidence that GMOs cause health issues. And really, if we had to give up GMOs, we’d have to drop most of our diet, seeing as domestication itself - of wheat, of cattle, of even friggin apple trees - is a way of modifying an organism’s genetic makeup. Being the little guy in this case doesn’t make them right. It just makes them little.

Finally, I see people that want better treatment for women in the workplace, or to increase the number of women in the sciences, that point to the vitriol from their opponents as support for their position. It’s as if they say, “Look at how mad we make people. We couldn’t make people that mad without being right, could we?”

Well, yes, you can. That’s not to say that I don’t agree with most of these people: I think women should be able to choose their career freely, without fear of harassment or hazing or running into a glass ceiling. But it’s not the anger that that stance can generate that makes it right. It’s right because respect is right, because we respect human beings and give them certain rights as part of that respect, and because women, as human beings, deserve that respect and those rights.

In the end, the Persecution Fallacy is another form of the ad hominem fallacy. It just operates in reverse: these people think badly of me and try to shut me up, therefore I must be a persecuted genius, therefore I’m right.

Unfortunately, while persecution is real and suppression of speech is real (and wrong), it doesn’t make the position of the person being persecuted correct. It just makes it harder to judge it impartially.

Mad Men hasn’t just brought 60s fashion back into style. There’s new music being made that would work as the soundtrack for a Don Draper sales pitch.

These two artists have each picked out a few threads from the tapestry of 60s music, weaving them into new sounds:

[soundcloud url="api.soundcloud.com/tracks/13…" params=“auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=“100%” height=“450” iframe=“true” /]

[soundcloud url="api.soundcloud.com/tracks/14…" params=“auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=“100%” height=“450” iframe=“true” /]

Couldn’t finish it. The first two chapters can be summarized as: “We have no idea what it was like for peasants in Roman and early medieval times, but I bet it was terrible, because every cultural achievement was built on their sweaty, overworked backs. Now here’s a bunch of quickly summarized history to wash that down.”

What did I learn? Nothing, really. There are better books out there on everything he tackles here, from the waxing and waning of Imperial Rome (see Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire) to life in Spain during the Reconquista (see Kage Baker’s In the Garden of Iden).

(Warning: Major Spoilers Ahead)

This episode is so uneven, like a miniature version of Moffat’s tenure at Doctor Who. There are some brilliant ideas - having the Doctor bring a dinosaur along for the ride after it swallowed the Tardis - and some utterly daft ones - who wants to see an older man flail about in a nightgown? - all mixed together, but never congealing into something coherently enjoyable.

Of all the things that went wrong, though, there’s a huge missed opportunity that stands out.

Clara should have left at the end of the episode.

Imagine if she did. There’s no last-minute phone call from Matt Smith manipulating her into staying, no puppy-dog eyes from the current Doctor to beg her to stay. No. The Doctor touches down in Clara’s time, she asks if she’s home, and he says “Yes.”

He drops her off, and explains why: his past self made a mistake in thinking of her in a romantic way, and some unknown person is manipulating their relationship. Until he knows who that person is, and why they’re doing it, he’s not going to play into their plans and perpetuate his predecessor’s mistake. This is a different Doctor, a Doctor that’s not as needy, and he’s strong enough to let her go when he sees it’s best.

Making that the final scene would recast the episode as the breakup of the Doctor and Clara, giving it some emotional heft, and making his abandonment of her in the middle a kind of foreshadowing. It would also give the season a little more tension: will Clara and the Doctor ever travel together again? Will he find out who’s been manipulating them? Will he take on a new long-term companion, or will this Doctor be more independent than the past?

I feel like this approach is something an earlier Steven Moffat would have done. The writer of The Girl in the Fireplace and Forest of the Dead would have seen the opportunity for a defining, bittersweet moment, and taken it. Instead Moffat’s new Doctor, perhaps like Moffat himself, does not know when to let go.

Short, direct and to the point. Yglesias makes a good case that housing prices in the US are a serious problem, and one we can solve. The driving cause is not techies taking over, or greedy landlords driving up rents. Instead, the roots of the problem lie in regulations that restrict housing density.

3 Things I Learned:

1. The meme comes from a real debate held in the run-up to the New York governor's election of 2010.
2. Tall buildings are actually illegal, not just hard to approve, in most suburban areas.
3. Parking regulations have a large impact on the feasability of a project. For example, if the law requires one parking space per unit, and the bedrock prevents building more than two stories for underground parking, you've got a hard limit to high up you can build. Ironically, with denser development placed closer to jobs, we wouldn't need as many cars. Requiring the parking spaces actually makes congestion worse, in addition to driving up housing prices.

If you like my short story, Chase, consider grabbing an ebook copy. You’ll be buying it direct from me (via Payhip), so no DRM!

Surprisingly good. Jones covers almost 300 years of history at a pace that feels perfect: not so fast that you miss out on interesting details, not so slow that you ever want to stop reading. Each chapter zooms in on just a few years, keeping them short and easily digestible but still giving him space to tell a dramatic story.

Three things I learned:

1. I always thought England went thousands of years without an invasion by a foreign power: from 1066 to the present. Turns out France invaded during the chaos at the end of the reign of King John (who you may remember as the villain in most Robin Hood movies).
2. In many ways, the early Plantagenet kings were really French lords that happened to have the throne of England. They spent most of their time in France, since that's where most of their wealth and power came from. John was the first king to spend the majority of his time in England, and the local barons got so sick of him they forced him to sign the Magna Carta.
3. I thought the Glorious Revolution was the first time parliament deposed and chose a king, but really it goes back into the Plantagenet era: both Edward II and Richard II were deposed via parliament - Edward in favor of his son, Edward III, and Richard in favor of Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV.

Part One: Angela

Part Two: Jack

Part Three: Jack

Part Four: Jack

Part Five: Angela

Part Six: Jack

Part Seven: Jack

Part Eight: Angela

Part Nine: Jack

Part Ten: Angela

Part Eleven: Jack

Part Twelve: Jack

(Start with Part One)

After all, if I knew the story behind that scream, I might go a little crazy myself.

(Start with Part One)

We were on our way up to UCSD, hoping to find Ms. Hernandez. She wasn’t in her apartment, but a couple of photos were: two young boys, both just now reported missing.

I was almost glad Blake had taken over the case. It kept getting stranger, and the woman in the back of the ambulance following us meant it would probably only get worse from here.

It was bad enough when it was just groggy kids. Now it felt like some cult was stirring up shit.

We pulled up to the building Hernandez worked in. The ambulance stopped behind us. Two guys in dark suits just like Agent Blake’s hopped out, then hustled to the back, where they pulled out a stretcher.

“She’s not going in with us, is she?” I asked Blake.

“Of course she is.” He replied, climbing out of the car. “That’s why we brought her.”

The two other suits helped Blake lift the coma patient out of the ambulance bay and onto the gurney. They strapped her down, checked her IVs, and nodded at each other.

“Let’s move,” Blake commanded.

Lacey got out of her own squad car and joined me as we followed Blake and the gurney into the building.

“Any idea what’s going on?” I whispered.

She shook her head. “I can’t believe they wouldn’t let us bring more backup.”

“Yeah, I don’t think the vegetable here counts.”

We split up once we got inside. The suits and the gurney took the elevator up to the fourth floor. Lacey, Blake and I started up the stairs.

“She should be in one of the labs up here,” Blake whispered to us. “Room 408. Let me go in first, then the patient, then you come in, ok?”

“How about we leave the patient outside? You’re just giving her a hostage.”

Blake shook his head. “She goes in. Can you follow directions or not?”

I felt like punching him. “Yeah, sure. It’s your freak show.”

We rejoined the suits and gurney at the elevator. It was quiet on the fourth floor. We’d called ahead to the other labs to try to get everyone out of the building.

The door to 408 was open just a crack, enough for us to hear someone weeping inside the room. I thought of the kids, probably scared out of their wits, and pulled out my gun.

Blake swung the door fully open and stepped in, no gun, just a grin on his face.

“Lieutenant Angela Burns,” he beamed, “it’s good to see you again.”

Hernandez had one of the boys cradled on her lap, her face buried in his hair. When she looked up at Blake, I could see black streaks on her face where tears had run through her makeup.

“David?” she said, disbelieving. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s time to go home, Lieutenant,” he said, stepping toward her. The suits pushed the gurney further in, turned it so the patient’s left side was right behind Agent Blake, then started pulling on what looked like thick leather gloves.

I glanced at Lacey. She raised her eyebrow, then shrugged and moved to her right. I moved left, keeping my gun up and aimed at Hernandez.

“I found him, David,” Hernandez whispered. “I found Jacob. I found our boy.”

I glanced at the kid in her lap. I recognized him from the photos back at the station. That boy’s name was Marcus, not Jacob, and his mother was most certainly not a pre-med college kid. Hernandez was raving.

Blake just nodded his head, like everything she was saying made sense, and took another step toward her. “That’s great, Angela. Now, let’s take him home.”

She pulled back at that. “Home. No. I’m not going back. You took him from me. Why did you take him from me?”

Blake stopped. Hernandez stood up, clutching the little boy, and started looking for a way out.

“Don’t move, Hernandez!” Lacey barked. “Let the kid go, and step away!”

Blake pointed at Lacey but kept his eyes fixed on Hernandez. “Stand down, Detective.”

Hernandez looked from one to the other, hesitating. “You’re going to do it again, aren’t you?” she asked Blake. “You’re going to take him away again?”

Blake lunged for Hernandez. Her eyes widened and she turned to run, still holding on to the boy.

She couldn’t move fast enough with the child. Blake slammed into her. All three of them tumbled to the ground in a tangle of arms and legs.

I moved closer, preparing to take a shot if one came, if it was necessary. From the corner of my eye I saw Lacey doing the same on my right.

The two suits by the gurney ran toward Hernandez as soon as they saw their boss jump. A few seconds after Blake, Hernandez, and Marcus tumbled to the ground, they moved in, efficiently extracting Hernandez from the pile.

“No!” she screamed. “Don’t take him away again! David!”

Lacey put her gun away and ran in to help Marcus to his feet. I lowered my weapon but stayed back, ready in case Hernandez should break free and try to run for it.

Blake stood up. “Hold her still,” he ordered the two suits.

He pulled a small case from inside his jacket, opened it, and withdrew a syringe. He strode over behind Hernandez and stabbed it into her backside, then pressed the plunger down, injecting whatever it was into her system.

She struggled and screamed for a few more seconds. Then she shivered, and her body slumped between the two suits.

“Get her to the gurney,” Blake ordered.

His men lifted Hernandez off the ground and carried her next to the coma patient. Blake walked over to stand behind the patient’s head. He put one hand on her forehead, touching it with just his fingertips, and placed his other hand against Hernandez' temple.

He whispered something I couldn’t make out. Then the coma patient blinked and opened her eyes. Her eyes focused on Blake. I heard her whisper, “David?”

Then she looked down at her own body, and screamed.

I’ll never forget that scream. It held such unbridled horror, and so much despair. Just thinking about it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

Blake only nodded and grinned. He pulled another syringe from the case, and injected its contents into the coma patient’s IV.

She stopped screaming. I holstered my gun, realized I was shaking. I took some deep breaths to try to stop.

When I felt like I had it under control, I walked over to where the suits were still holding Hernandez in the air.

“Can I cuff her now, Agent Blake?” I asked, reaching for my handcuffs.

He shook his head. “That won’t be necessary, Detective. Take that young woman home.”

“What the fuck do you mean?” I whispered, trying not to be heard by Marcus just a few feet away. “She just kidnapped two kids!”

Blake stared down at the coma patient. “No, she didn’t. Go easy on her.” He waved his suits to lower Hernandez to the ground. “If she’s lucky, she won’t remember any of this.”

(Start with Part One)

I watched the two of them sleeping while I waited for the blood test to finish. Little chests rising and falling. So adorable.

And one of them was my Jacob.

He didn’t look like me at all, of course. He’d swapped bodies a few times already. That’s why it’d been so hard to track him down.

There are ways to tell that a body has been swapped. You can’t access any memories, so meeting old friends or family is always awkward. They’d trained us in some techniques used by stage magicians to fake being able to read minds so we could pass as the original person. That’d only get you so far, though.

The chronic sickness was another way to know. No antibiotics would cure that.

Turns out the host bodies start making cells of the swapper’s blood type. Eventually the body is making two types of everything, incompatible with each other and fighting for resources. That’s what makes us sick, why we have to leave every body we swap into.

So if you test someone and find two blood types, you know the body has been swapped. I was a little proud of myself for figuring that out. No need to question every kid, no need to wait for them to get sick before moving in. Just a little blood, a quick test, and you knew. Cheap, easy, and objective.

The test finished. I checked both tubes looking for the telltale signs of two incompatible blood types.

There. I set the tubes back down, gazed back over at the boys, and started crying.

I’d found him. The one on the right, the one calling himself Marcus. That was my son.

(Start with Part One)

The man in the charcoal grey suit smiled at me. “True. But the FBI has clear jurisdiction here, and they’re turning the case over to me. Trust me, you don’t want to fight this one.”

“Fuck you.”

The man - he’d introduced himself as Agent Blake, but he was The Man to me - nodded as if I’d just said good morning. “I’ll need all your files on the case, of course. And access to your witness.”

“My what, now?”

He glanced at his smartphone. “I believe her name is Mary Rogers?”

“That’s our suspect, asshole. She didn’t witness anything she didn’t do.”

He grinned again. His teeth were way too bright. And even. “Right. Silly mistake. Suspect. I’d like to talk to her, please.”

I sighed. “Yeah, sure.”

I led him to Interrogation Room 2 - the smallest one - then called for Mary to be brought over.

He poked his head out of the door. “You will, of course, not record anything said in this room, or watch behind the false mirror?”

I tried to smile at him. Failed. “Of course.”

He nodded once, then ducked back inside.

I went in to the observation room to turn off the recording equipment before Mary got there.

We had plenty of footage of Mary already. Mary crying when accused of kidnapping those kids. Mary taking the psych eval, and coming through as a scared but perfectly normal person.

Mary insisting she didn’t remember anything of the last three weeks.

She shuffled in from the stairwell, escorted by a uniform. She kept her eyes locked on the floor in front of her, raising her head only to cough. She looked better than when we’d brought her in: not as pale, and able to walk without stumbling. Still had that cough, though.

The uniform escorted her into the interrogation room, then came back out half a minute later. Agent Blake didn’t want anyone to see or hear his talk with Mary, it seemed. The uniform stood sentry next to the door, thumbs hooked in his belt.

Mary and Blake stayed in the room over an hour. Mary came out with her head up, looking around like she’d never seen the place before. She didn’t cough once as the uniform escorted her downstairs.

Agent Blake poked his head out of the door again, waved for me to come inside.

“What did you find out?” I asked. I settled into one of the hard chairs as he shut the door.

“Nothing I can tell you about,” he replied, taking the other chair. “This is above your pay grade.”

I gritted my teeth, but didn’t say anything. He smiled.

“Now, I need you to go over what happened when you caught her.”

“It’s all in our report. Or don’t you know how to read?”

“I’m quite familiar with reading, Detective, but sometimes verbal questions are best. Now, walk me through that day, step by step.”

Just to piss him off, I started at the beginning, with my regular morning BM. I moved on to talking about traffic, how some jerk had cut me off before my exit that day. I went through how well the morning coffee tasted, the dead leads Lacey and I had followed through most of the day, then how we finally got the address of the last set of plates. How we checked the owner’s background, canvassed the building before getting a warrant for it that evening. How we entered Mary’s place, chased her down, then brought her in.

Through everything, all the mundane details, Blake sat in his chair, fully at attention. He didn’t take any notes, didn’t yawn, even nodded along with me when I bitched about my commute.

That pissed me off even more.

He didn’t stop me until I got to our first interrogation session with Mary. “Thank you, Detective, that’s far enough. Tell me, what happened to the owner of the apartment you and Mary barged into?”

I rolled my eyes. “I already told you. She was pretty shaken up, but there hadn’t been any damage. We talked with her a while till she calmed down, then left.”

“Who talked with her? You?”

I shook my head. “I was busy getting Mary back to a squad car. I think Lacey spoke with her, maybe a uniform or two.”

Agent Blake stood. “I’ll need to talk with anyone that had contact with that girl.”

I sighed. “Really? Look, I can tell you everything you need to know about her. She was this tall, maybe early 20s-”

“Can you tell me her name?”

I blinked. “No, I don’t remember. Lacey might know.”

He smiled. “Bring her in here for me, so I can ask her, will you?”

I swore and stormed out. Crazy feds.

Turned out Lacey didn’t remember the girl’s name. Neither did any of the uniforms that had talked to her. Apparently they’d asked her her name first thing, but she’d been so freaked out she hadn’t answered.

Blake just smiled at that.

Two hours later, he slapped a warrant for her arrest on my desk. “Her name is Daniela Hernandez.”

(Start with Part One)

I was careful this time. I picked a runner, someone who could last long enough for me to find Jacob. Someone with a flexible job, no current boyfriend, and family out of town.

Someone that wouldn’t leave any tracks if she went out searching every night.

They almost had me, would’ve caught me if that girl hadn’t opened the door. Lucky break, there. Swapped just in time.

I was still shaking when they dragged the old body away. So close.

But I’ve got a new body now, and a new name. Plenty of fight left in this one for grabbing the last two.

And some other advantages. They took all my notes, all my equipment. According to my new body’s id, though, I’m pre-med at UCSD. Should be able to score replacements there.

I’d hoped to catch the last two one by one, spaced out at least a week apart. But if the cops know, that means the Department will be here soon.

If they find me, I’ll never see Jacob again.