David Soubly

THE GAME.

I used to play a game as a kid called Chutes and Ladders. You probably did, too. You might have known it as Snakes and Ladders. It’s based on the Indian game Moksha Patam, probably invented about eight hundred years ago.

Chutes and Ladders was very easy to learn, so kids of all ages could play it. Basically, each player rolled dice, advanced their piece, and moved upward on a board square by square. If a player landed on a ladder, the player ascended the ladder, which meant...

BEGINNINGS

I wrote SummerDance, a coming-of-age story about an eleven-year-old boy growing up in Detroit during “that hot dry 1967 summer,” describing “events that ended with me learning to be really scared of my own father, locked screaming in the bathroom, Dad pounding and bellowing to let him in, a thin and splintering door between us.”

The father wasn’t headline-grabbing abusive; instead, he was more have-too-much-to-drink-and-lose-control abusive, beating his boys with a belt,...

(This is the third in a series of observations on our pandemic times.)

I am a Shaggy Man. In that, I am not alone.

A whole lot of guys have become Shaggy Men over the last few months, thanks to the COVID lockdowns. In our state, barbershops and beauty salons were one of the last places to reopen. I suspect that’s the case across the country.

We’ve seen rebellions in this Shaggy Man era. In Michigan, my home state, we had a 77-year-old barber who refused to close his barber shop until the...

(This is the second in a series of observations on our pandemic times.)

I’ve argued elsewhere that misinformation endangers us more today than even the exposure of our personal information; that information’s usefulness, its value, is better understood by those who use it versus those who own it; that we each create the value of the information we see by attaching it to things we already know: our tacit knowledge, the sum of our learnings, influences the value of what we see.

Now we are in...

(This is the first in a series of observations on our pandemic times.)

Several months ago, on the near side of the pandemic that’s reminded us of our place in nature, I did an essay on Martha ("Martha's Anniversary") — the last passenger pigeon, who left this earth over a hundred years ago. I then embarked on two long thought exercises. One had to do with the nature and value of information, its protection, and how to develop policy statements that are strong, direct, and easy to understand...