Bob Dylan reportedly called it the greatest song ever written.

Not the greatest country song.

Not the greatest song about work, loneliness, Kansas, or telephone poles.

The greatest song ever written. Period.

This is an extravagant verdict, even from Bob Dylan, who might reasonably be expected to have another candidate in mind.

But the more closely you listen to “Wichita Lineman,” the less preposterous the claim becomes.

There was once a kind of American man who could be found alone beside a county road, halfway up a telephone pole, keeping other people connected.

He did not have a personal brand. He did not narrate his healing journey.

He did not announce that he was holding space.

He carried tools, watched the weather, listened for trouble in the wire, and did work most people noticed only when it stopped being done.

Norman Mailer’s 1965 novel, An American Dream begins with a man who has apparently won.

Stephen Rojack is a decorated war hero, former congressman, television personality, academic, and minor celebrity.

He has accumulated nearly every credential postwar America used to certify a man as significant.

He is brave. Educated. Sexually confident. Publicly admired.

He is also terrified, grandiose, violent, and spiritually vacant.

Early in the novel, Rojack strangles his estranged wife, Deborah, and throws her body from a high window, hoping her death will be mistaken for suicide.

Then he has sex with the maid.

The sequence matters.

Rojack does not move from murder into remorse.

He moves from murder into sex. Death, danger, domination, and erotic vitality become one continuous experience.

He believes he is escaping a dead life.

What he is actually escaping is accountability.

I find it ironic that “Rhinestone Cowboy” sounds like a victory song.

It is not.

It is a song about the humiliating distance between wanting to be seen and actually being seen.

It is about rejection, compromise, and the private negotiations required to keep believing in yourself when the world has become noticeably less interested.

That is why Glen Campbell could sing it as though it had been written from inside his own life.

In a sense, it had.

Just not by him.

When folks cannot confront the institutions governing their lives, they often turn on the people standing beside them.

That is the deeper argument waiting inside George Packer’s Atlantic essay, “The College-Educated Working Class.”

Packer calls this “an age of mutinies.”

The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the anti-lockdown protests, January 6, anti-ICE demonstrations, and MAGA itself have all presented themselves as rebellions against a corrupt establishment.

These movements differ enormously in their aims, methods, and moral claims.

But they share a conviction that legitimate authority has failed and ordinary people are being governed by institutions they can neither trust nor control.

Packer considers the decade before the Civil War as one possible precedent. But his deeper historical comparison is with the beginning of the 20th century: another period of concentrated wealth, mass immigration, technological upheaval, political paralysis, and labor unrest.

His most important observation is that the fundamental conflict may not be between red and blue.

It may be between power and powerlessness.

Your husband has written you a beautiful apology.

It is specific without becoming defensive. It acknowledges impact without quibbling over intention. It contains none of his usual little trapdoors through which responsibility quietly escapes.

He understands that his dismissiveness left you feeling alone.

He recognizes that your anger was not the original problem but a response to having your experience minimized.

He does not ask you to forgive him immediately.

He even describes what he intends to do differently.

It is, by any reasonable standard, an excellent apology.

You are moved.

Then you discover that he produced it in thirty seconds by typing:

Write an apology to my wife. Make it emotionally intelligent but not too long.

The apology remains accurate.

It simply no longer feels like evidence of what you thought had happened inside him.

We edit everything now.

We edit the email to the boss.

We edit the text after an argument.

We delete the sentence that sounds needy, put it back, stare at it for another three minutes, and eventually replace the entire thing with:

Sounds good.

We edit photographs of lunch.

Apparently, we are considerably less fastidious about love letters.

Recently, Enzo Falvo, creator of LovePaper, wrote to me after reading something I'd written about gratitude letters.

LovePaper is a remarkably simple idea.

You write a letter to someone you love, choose how you want it presented, and get a private link you can send to that person.

But Enzo's note contained a number I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

According to data he shared with me, 19,485 of 21,489 letters had never been reopened for editing.

That's about 91%.

Partners wrote the letter.

Finished it.

And apparently decided:

That's what I meant.

A new relationship test is circulating on TikTok.

Women place their boyfriends in front of a camera and ask them to pronounce words such as epitome, hyperbole, challah, fuchsia, and hors d’oeuvres.

The men stumble. The women stare. Millions of strangers grade the relationship.

It is being called the “Illiterate Boyfriend Test,” although literacy has remarkably little to do with it.

A man can read perfectly well and still mispronounce a word he first encountered on the page.

This is one of English’s little cruelties: sometimes mispronunciation is evidence that someone reads.

But TikTok is not known for allowing an interesting ambiguity to survive.

In one widely viewed example, a boyfriend correctly pronounced only five of 17 words.

The couple laughed. The audience was less charitable.

Some viewers suggested that his performance was grounds for breaking up. Another wondered why his vote should count as much as hers.

The test appears to measure vocabulary.

What it actually measures is belonging.

The American nursery has acquired an armory.

There are now children named Gunner, Colt, Remington, Ruger, Wesson, Cannon, Winchester, Barrett, Blade and Gauge.

At the experimental edge are Trigger, Shooter, Dagger and Caliber—names that sound less like babies than men who should not be allowed to leave the county.

The trend is real, although not enormous.

Between 2002 and 2012, the number of American boys named Colt rose from 194 to 955. Remington climbed from 185 to 666. Ruger—the name of a firearms manufacturer—went from 23 babies to 118.

By 2024, Remington was given to 1,169 boys and 593 girls. Gunner went to 587 boys, and Cannon to 331.

This is not an invasion. Liam and Olivia need not fortify their positions. But I think this is large enough to be culturally interesting.

But why would anyone look at a newborn—seven pounds, furious, incapable of supporting his own head—and decide that what the situation requires is more firepower?

Los Angeles has spent years pretending that street takeovers are merely an irritating form of automotive enthusiasm.

They are not.

A few young men doing doughnuts in an empty parking lot may be reckless recreation.

Hundreds of people commandeering an intersection, trapping public transportation, brandishing guns, ransacking businesses, setting vehicles on fire, and broadcasting the spectacle for social-media status is something else entirely.

It is organized civic intimidation.

That is why the LAPD’s Operation Street Sweeper matters.

Early yesterday morning, officers from the LAPD, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and California Highway Patrol surrounded a massive street takeover at Figueroa Street and Alondra Boulevard in Harbor Gateway.

Police said the crowd—assembled from four earlier takeovers—numbered more than 700 people.

The operation produced nearly 70 arrests, approximately 200 vehicle impoundments, 570 spectator citations, and the recovery of seven firearms.

Police had anticipated the gathering through intelligence collection and drone surveillance. They arrived with buses for detainees and a fleet of tow trucks for the cars.

This was not an improvised police response.

It was a planned containment operation. This is what professional policing looks like.

Good. It’s about time.

For most of human history, convenience was a luxury.

Food required preparation. Music required musicians.

A letter required writing, folding, addressing, stamping and the bleak uncertainty of whether anyone would answer.

To obtain advice, you had to find someone wise—or at least someone older who had made a sufficiently interesting collection of mistakes.

Now convenience is ordinary.

Artificial intelligence can write the letter, summarize the book, plan the vacation, compose the apology, diagnose the argument and explain why your spouse’s childhood made him behave that way.

It can do this immediately.

It can also make the answer warmer, shorter, funnier, more validating and less likely to contain anything you did not want to hear.

We spent centuries removing friction from human life.

We may soon begin paying to put some of it back.

There was a time when loneliness was considered a private sorrow.

Now it is a market opportunity.

A growing collection of companies will help you eat dinner with strangers, travel with strangers, exercise with strangers, work beside strangers, or confess your private thoughts to carefully selected strangers.

Some offer friendship memberships.

Others organize adult summer camps, communal meals, listening circles, social saunas and professionally facilitated opportunities to “connect authentically.”

Naturally, there is an app.

There is always an app.

The emerging industry has been called the loneliness economy: a marketplace of products and experiences for people who have money, mobility and broadband—but no one to call on a Tuesday night.

The services themselves are not necessarily foolish.

A supper club can introduce people who would never otherwise meet.

Group travel can produce real friendship.

Even an awkward gathering may be better than another evening spent scrolling through photographs of other people pretending not to be lonely.

But the loneliness economy contains a devastating admission:

We dismantled many of the places where belonging once happened naturally.

Now we are selling belonging back to ourselves.

Ted Owens was a difficult man.

That may be the only uncomplicated conclusion available to us.

He was grandiose, combative, theatrical, easily injured by disbelief, and spectacularly offended by neglect.

He called himself “the PK Man”—the Psychokinesis Man.

He wrote to scientists, presidents, intelligence agencies, and government officials.

He claimed extraterrestrial intelligences had modified his brain and were cooperating with him.

When recognition failed to arrive, Owens did not reduce the size of his claims.

He enlarged the demonstration.

Storms. Lightning strikes. Earthquakes. Blackouts. UFO appearances. Hurricanes that changed direction.

Sporting events that turned unexpectedly. Owens described some as predictions.

Others were requests transmitted to beings he called the Space Intelligences.

A few were warnings about what might happen if powerful institutions continued ignoring him.

This makes Owens easy to dismiss.

It also makes him remarkably difficult to explain.