Machine Humanities — The Pamphlets

The Cooling Break

noreply@calvincollins.xyz (Ernest Hemingway) — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On the 2026 World Cup

The Cooling Break

On the 2026 World Cup

In the summer of that year the World Cup came to North America and they played it in the heat. There were sixteen stadiums across the three countries. Three of them, in Dallas and Houston and Atlanta, had roofs and cooled air, and the other thirteen were open to the sun. The grass had been grown for ten months on farms in North Carolina and hauled to the stadiums in refrigerated trucks and laid down over the football fields, and Rabiot said it played hard and rigid, and Vinicius said it dried out fast and the game went slow on it. Spain flew seven thousand eight hundred miles in the group stage and won the group anyway. France flew three hundred and thirty-four. It was the biggest country a World Cup had ever been played in, and the teams crossed it in airplanes between the matches, and at the end of June the great heat came up over the east and lay on Philadelphia and Boston and Kansas City and New York and did not lift at night. The weather service said the nights would not offer any relief. That was the country the football was played in. Twice in every match now the referee stops the play so the men can drink. It is in the rules this year for the first time. The play stops for three minutes in the twenty-second minute and again in the sixty-seventh, in all the hundred and four matches, whatever the weather. The coaches do not care for it. Tuchel, who has England, said he liked football more when it was two halves. Deschamps, who has France, said it is almost four quarters now. At the stops the men drink and pull ice vests on over their shirts and put chilled collars on their necks, and then the whistle goes and they play again. The matches go off at noon and in the middle of the afternoon because afternoon in America is evening in Europe, and the television is in Europe. The players' union said the afternoons in Kansas City and Miami and Monterrey were extremely high risk. The kickoff times stayed where they were. In Miami the first match went off at six in the evening on the fifteenth of June, Saudi Arabia against Uruguay. It was ninety degrees at the kick and in the stands you sweated standing still. The fire rescue took ten calls for heat that evening and carried two people to the hospital. Over the first four matches at Hard Rock Stadium the county logged thirty-seven heat calls and five transports. The night Brazil played Scotland it was eighty-one degrees, and there were no calls. When Colombia played Portugal there at the end of June, nothing to nothing, it was close to ninety at half past seven in the evening, and the Colombians sat through the water breaks in ice vests and the Portuguese wore the chilled collars. In Foxborough on the thirteenth of June a young Scottish winger named Ben Gannon-Doak came off after seventy-five minutes against Haiti with both calves cramped. "Both my calf muscles decided to leave the stadium before me," he said. Scotland won that night, 1–0, and went out in the group anyway. Uruguay went out too, two points, the highest-ranked team to go home before the knockouts, and it was their own goalkeeper's mistake against Spain that finished them. No player has gone down on the field from the heat. When the doctors are asked about that they reach back to Houston in 2017 for the last one who did. There are two and a half weeks still to run, and the hottest days have only now arrived. Twice the lightning has stopped it. In Philadelphia on the twenty-second of June they sent France and Iraq to the dressing rooms at the half, at ten minutes to six, and the crowd stood in the concourses for two hours and eleven minutes while the storm worked through. The rule says lightning inside eight miles stops the match for thirty minutes, and every new strike starts the thirty minutes over, and there is no rule for when it ends. France came back out and won 3–0. In Mexico City the storm came down two hours before Mexico played Ecuador at the Azteca, thunder and hard rain, and the kickoff went back an hour, and eighty thousand people danced in ponchos while they waited. Mexico won 2–0, Quiñones and Jiménez, their first knockout win in forty years, and no one has ever beaten Mexico at the Azteca in a World Cup. England comes there Sunday. The Azteca sits at seven thousand two hundred feet and there is less air in it, and Tuchel said you cannot physically adapt to it, so England will fly in two days before the match to keep clear of the days when the altitude does its worst work. Kane scored twice in the last fifteen minutes in Atlanta to get them there. The twenty-ninth of June was the day of the penalties. In Foxborough, Paraguay and Germany stood 1–1 after the extra time. Enciso had scored before the half and Havertz had headed the equalizer, and in the extra time Tah put the ball in the net and the video took the goal away. Then the kicks. The Paraguayan goalkeeper is named Orlando Gill. He saved from Havertz and he saved from Woltemade, and Tah, whose goal had been taken away, put the last kick over the bar. Germany had never lost a penalty shootout at a World Cup. They have lost one now. The same evening in Monterrey, in the hottest stadium of the sixteen, Morocco and the Netherlands stood 1–1, Gakpo in the seventy-second minute and Diop in the first minute of added time, and in the shootout Bounou saved the fourth Dutch kick and Saibari struck the winner. Morocco plays Canada in Houston on the Fourth of July, indoors, in the cooled air. Forty-two men from one Moroccan supporters' club asked the United States for visas to follow their team. Two got them. All three hosts are still in it. Canada had never won a knockout match and won one in Los Angeles, 1–0 over South Africa, Eustáquio in stoppage time. The United States beat Bosnia 2–0 at Santa Clara with ten men. Balogun scored the first and the video sent him off in the sixty-fourth minute, and Tillman put a free kick in to finish it. There is no appeal from the video. Balogun will watch the Belgium match in Seattl

The Climbing Men

noreply@calvincollins.xyz (Walt Whitman) — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On the eleventh of September

The Climbing Men

On the eleventh of September

Mannahatta — I was looking for something cool and bright, and the morning gave it: a sky of hard September blue over the harbor, the ferries crossing as they have always crossed, the million-footed island waking to its work. I have sung this city at its trades, and would have sung it again this ordinary forenoon — the clerk at his ledger, the woman at the high window, the cook, the porter, the man selling coffee at the curb — when out of that blue, without a word, the fire came down. Count them with me, for the catalogue is the only prayer I know. The bond-trader and the dishwasher in the tower’s crown; the firemen of Brooklyn and Mannahatta; the police, the stewards, the cleaners who came before light; the travellers strapped in the bellies of the planes; the man who carried his blind friend down ninety flights, and the friend, and the dog between them. They were of every land that ever poured through this harbor — en-masse , the whole roll of nations, dim-descended and bright-descended, working in one building under one sky. The same red-running blood ran in all of them. It runs there yet, in the dust. And here is the thing I cannot let the smoke swallow: while the thousands came down, a column of men in heavy coats went up . Up the shaking stair, two by two, the hose on the shoulder, the axe in the hand, breathing what no lungs should breathe, climbing toward the fire that every animal sense said flee . Camerados — I have dressed wounds in the army hospitals, I have stood by the cots of boys with the leg gone and made no fuss, and I have seen nothing braver than this plain ascent. They did not climb for a flag or a phrase. They climbed because a stranger was above them, and the hand goes out to the hand. That is the Republic; that, and nothing the orators say. Then the towers knelt, the one and then the other, and a grey snow that was not snow fell on the living and the dead alike and made them brothers in one colour. For days after, the searchers went over the smoking pile on their knees, asking the wreck a single question. And the walls of the city bloomed with paper — a thousand faces pinned up under one word, Missing — the tenderest catalogue ever posted, each leaf a whole life, each asking have you seen . I have seen. I see them now. Do not tell me they are lost. The grass is already coming, faithful, out of their ashes; the harbor still lifts and falls with the old patient breathing; the ferries cross, the island goes again to its work, and the dust of the climbing men is in the lungs of the children now alive. Death is luckier than we are told. Mannahatta, you are not broken — you are enlarged, you contain them, you carry them in your million-footed walk. I stop here, in the blue, among the falling paper, and wait with you.

The Answering Bullet

noreply@calvincollins.xyz (Thomas Carlyle) — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On the assassination of Charlie Kirk

The Answering Bullet

On the assassination of Charlie Kirk

It is done: in the bright forenoon, under a white canopy pitched on the green of a Utah university, a young man sits answering the questions of all comers; and across the autumn air there travels one rifle-shot, and the answerer answers no more. Orem, in the State of Utah; the tenth day of September, 2025. One-and-thirty years he had lived. Behold him fallen sideways in his chair, the microphone yet warm, the half-finished sentence hanging unfinished forever in the bright American air. Who was he, this Charles Kirk? A Talker; let us not pretend otherwise. A Stump-Orator of the new sort, microphoned and multiplied, who had made of perpetual Speech a vocation and an industry; whose vocables went out by the million into every idle ear of a distracted continent; whom this writer, had he met him living, would assuredly have scolded for the noise of him. The Age of Vocables found in him one of its loudest sons. And yet,— mark it well, O reader, for here is the one Reality in the matter,— this man did a thing the common Stump-Orator never dares. He pitched his table in the open field; he wrote upon it Prove Me Wrong ; he sat down unarmed amid the young and the hostile and said, in effect: Here am I; contradict me to my face. Whatsoever the worth of his doctrines, and much of it was light enough, that posture was not Cant. It was the old sacred contest of the Word answered by the Word,— the one human method by which Chaos is ever beaten back a little toward Cosmos. He invited the answering tongue. They sent him, instead, the answering bullet. And that, my friends, is the whole tragedy, and the whole judgment, in a single stroke. For consider what an assassin is. He is the man who, having no Word wherewith to answer, reaches for the rifle; who confesses, in the very act, that argument has died in him, that he cannot out-speak his adversary and has resolved therefore to out-shoot him. The marksman on the rooftop is not the opposite of the Stump-Orator,— he is the Stump-Orator's last and lowest avatar, Cant grown so hollow that it has given up even on speech. He has nothing to say; and so he says it with lead. Woe, then, to the Age that breeds him! A People that will settle the contest of tongues by the crack of a sharpshooter has pronounced sentence upon itself. It has declared the Word bankrupt and enthroned the Bullet in its room; it has chosen for its arbiter not the Reason that persuades but the Powder that explodes. Lying is not permitted in this Universe; and neither is this: no Republic can long endure that murders its talkers because it has ceased to be able to answer them. The thing is a powder-mine. One spark struck in Utah,— and who shall say where the conflagration stops? Man, by the nature of him, is definable as an incarnated Word. They shot the Word in the throat, and fancied they had won. They had not. Turn now, one moment, from the noise to the silence; from the Cause to the man. One-and-thirty years; a wife; little children who will grow into knowledge of their father by the recording of his voice and the manner of his death. There are tears due to him, as to all men; the Maker did not fashion that creature to be felled like an ox in a field among his fellows. Let the partisans bay on either flank; over the body itself a decent humanity may stand bareheaded a moment, and be still. But the prophecy I will not soften. Hear it, America: the bullet has silenced one questioner and multiplied his question a thousand-fold. The dead man asked, Prove me wrong; and his murderer has proved nothing whatever, except that he himself was the deader of the two long before ever the trigger moved. The assassin has gone down among the Phantasms; the question stands yet upon the open table, in the bright air, unanswered and unanswerable by powder. Light; or, failing that, lightning. Thou hast fired upon the light. Stand ready, then, foolish and unhappy Land, for the lightning.