A Calipers Commencement: Q2 2025
Cally Needs a Vacation
The quarterly special has mutated, and it’s cancer. Last reflection, I sketched bridges between worlds, threading a dignified middle way between truth and consequences. And then the better angels of my nature lost quorum. You can trace in the titles alone how questions don’t end with question marks anymore. Probing calipers turned into pointed fingers: the criminal’s face! the Iranian kidney bazaar! apocalyptic Jew-hating cults!
One thing about me is I honor a duty. Nobody demanded a weekly post, and I never formally promised one. Still, once an informal pattern set in, I felt mental pressure at regular intervals if I didn’t publish. Highlighting this compulsion was one reason I wrote You Can Lead a Horse to Banking. Dutiful, disciplined behavior runs deeper than external incentives. So do its pathologies, like stagnation and neuroticism.
Keeping a rhythm is good for mood-tracking. But here’s the tea: Based Black Catholicism, released a day after Pope Francis’s funeral, rode a wave of speculation on entirely the wrong questions about the 2025 conclave. Third World or Europe? Tradcath or ultra-progressive? I had started some original data analysis for a more enduring piece on the Church, but it was sacrificed to the god of timeliness.
Sticking to both a schedule and a high standard of accuracy takes real time and effort. That kind of discipline makes sense for someone trying to build a public profile. But I do it under the handicap of anonymity. The time and attention come from real life, but the rewards don’t return there. Little debts accrued offline, where my life ran on autopilot. Living out of sync with my values made my writing itchy and venomous.
Voices in the Vault
Around the topics I write about, the reputational safe zone is “just asking questions.” Great Ape Lives Matter is where I felt this tension most sharply. You can ask why lucid chimpanzees have fewer rights than senile humans. But once you start living as though the answer matters, you’re no longer just curious. You’re serious. And that commitment means real sacrifice, like skipping the steak to break bread alone.
Alienation hurts, so it’s comforting to believe it’s a blessing to be “a people that shall dwell alone.” This conviction was prosocial in the hands of a peaceful diaspora. But in Will the Real Chosen People Please Stand Up?, I explored how the same end-times fervor grew violent when embraced by Afro-diasporic nationalists. Their destructive moral certainty reveals why future generations need honest archives to judge our present.
Time Capsules for Utopia opened with truth leaping from archives of a century-old injustice. The 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager, was expedited by a nativist alliance of black and white nationalists that echoes in 2025’s MAGA. Fair is foul and foul is fair. History often reverses judgment, leaving vilified voices misunderstood in their lifetimes. Filling time capsules is an act of hope and courage.
Bodies Without Borders
In everyday life, money and mobility offer distance from popular prejudice. Prison, that great equalizer, strips this insulation away. Leo Frank learned this on the branch of a Georgia oak. Today’s inmates discover it through despoiled intestines, as it drips in How Painful is Prison Sex? Behind bars, gang leaders trade bodies for cigarettes and boredom relief. The invisible hand leaves bruises wherever the state refuses to surveil.
Why the market gotta be black, though? In Praise of Iran’s Kidney Trade illuminates a silkier road. By legalizing and regulating payments to kidney donors, the Islamic Republic erased waiting lists for that organic gold of lifestyle disease. Backward as Iran may be elsewhere, necessity pushed the Ayatollahs beyond “exploitation” fears, to actually saving lives and uplifting the poor. Good ideas like this deserve visas.
The benefits of importing high human capital are well-known to my readers, yet political debate stays stuck on how many people may enter a desirable country. Denaturalize Domestic Terrorists suggests a win-win: ease congestion by facilitating exits for disgruntled, natural-born citizens who take up arms against the homeland. Legal or not, passport markets will continue to drain sentimentality from citizenship.
Proof of Humanity
When critics can’t articulate why something is actually harmful, they resort to vague warnings about “commodification,” whether of countries, bodies, or art. The latest panic is over “AI slop,” the meaningless, mass-targeted entertainment flooding our feeds. But as The Fraudulent Genius of Freestyle Rap reminds us, human-generated content can be just as empty. Charisma, confidence, and superficiality will always sell.
So how do authenticity-hungry buyers avoid getting sold a lemon? Deep Physiognomy flashes a vision of machine judges as protectors. Beyond the consolidated public wisdom of correlations well-known to experts, statistical models now infer height from voice, and hidden traits from visible cues, making the world more honest. Such software will also forcefully “merge” the identities of writers moonlighting as anons.
Thus far I’ve offered two drawbacks to pseudonymous writing: asymmetric downside, where meatspace costs outweigh the merits; and uncertain, time-limited refuge dependent on AI-driven authorship detection staying weak. A third emerges clearly in Last Word Before the Swarm, which previews the future of automated persuasion. Readers increasingly distrust and discount writing whose human origin is uncertain.
I can’t stop writing any more than a beaver can resist building dams from stuffed animals. But I need to divert some attention away from Substack, to better align my life with my stated values. Descending this plateau is the only way to climb beyond it. Posts will come less frequently than weekly, and I trust some of you will find intermittent reinforcement sweeter than consistency. Catch you on the flip side.
I’ll have whatever The Calipers is having.