The sleeping bags were now stretched out on top of the seat and our boxes of stuff were on the floor. I hopped in and sank onto the now cozy cushioned bench seat. He smiled and handed me my stack of comic books. Meanwhile, Mom carried my sister — clutching the oatmeal teddy bear she always slept with — and slipped her in between the two sleeping bags. She was asleep before we pulled away from the motor court.

The Texas panhandle let us go gradually. For the first hour the land looked the same — flat, brown, the highway a straight crease in the pale morning. We passed a sign that said we were 30 miles from the New Mexico border. Soon after, the car began to slow and pull off to the right and stopped in front of large white sign. Mom asked if I recognized any of the words on the sign.

I could sound out the large curving WELCOME, but then right under it I saw and called out, “Adrian! Wait, Adrian?” They both laughed. Adrian College is where they met and married. It was also the town where I was born. So, yes, I recognized the word. Adrian, Texas, shared the name with the one in Michigan, but that was where any similarity ended.

Fewer than 300 people lived in this flat, brown town. Dad guessed the only reason it existed was because it was the midpoint of Route 66. In 1928, just two years after the commissioning of the road, The MidPoint Diner was built between a motel and a filling station. A little micro-economy based on the Mother Road traffic and the notoriety of its midpoint status.

We had breakfast at the café, which was in its heyday and oblivious to its future as the basis for Flo’s V-8 Café diner in the Pixar movie Cars. As we ate, Dad explained that there were at least two other Texas towns between Adrian and Amarillo that claimed to be the Midpoint: Bushland and Vega. It was hard to pinpoint, he said, because the given length of the highway changed a few times due to re-routing in the early years. Adrian must have done the best job promoting itself.

Back in the car, the road began to climb almost imperceptibly, and the light changed. By the time we crossed into New Mexico the sky was enormous in a way it hadn’t been before, a deep winter blue that seemed to begin directly above the car and extend without interruption to the horizon in every direction. Even Patty seemed to be feeling better after eating and putting the Texas panhandle behind us.

We were on the high desert now. The elevation at the New Mexico line was already higher than anything in Michigan. By the time we reached Albuquerque we’d be driving at a mile above sea level.

New Mexico announced itself in other ways too. The roadside began to change — trading posts appeared, low adobe buildings with hand-lettered signs offering turquoise jewelry, blankets, pottery. The colors of the landscape shifted from the flat browns of Texas toward something more complex: red rock, ochre, the pale sage green of desert scrub. The light had a different quality, thinner and cleaner, casting hard shadows even at mid-morning.

Somewhere on the eastern edge of New Mexico, my mother found a radio station.

She’d been trying to lock in a signal since we left Amarillo — a few bars of something, then static, then silence, the signal dropping away as we moved through the thinly populated land. Then she found it: a strong, clear signal out of Albuquerque. KOB, 770 on the dial, running 50,000 watts across the high desert. The music filled the car and we all began to move subtly to the beat. The oatmeal teddy bear on my sister’s lap, its hands enclosed by Patty’s, clapped rhythmically. Dad hummed and Mom swayed slightly. I kept reading one of the comics, but was tapping my knee. After several songs, Mom suddenly leaned forward and turned up the volume.

She had recognized the song before a full measure had played — the close harmonies, the irresistible swing of it. The Andrews Sisters. And the song they were singing was about the road we were driving.

If you ever plan to motor west, travel my way, take the highway that’s best...

My mother turned it up further. She knew every word.

It winds from Chicago to L.A, more than two thousand miles all the way
Get your kicks on Route 66
Now you go through St. Louis, Joplin, Missouri
And Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty

When it ended my father let a moment pass, then said, almost casually, that Nat King Cole’s version was better.

My mother turned to look at him.

What followed was not an argument, exactly. But it was the most animated I had heard her on the entire trip. The Andrews Sisters had phrasing. They had energy. Nat King Cole, she allowed, had a beautiful voice — nobody was saying he didn’t have a beautiful voice — but the song was about traveling across the country and the Andrews Sisters made you feel it. She was mid-sentence, making another forceful point, when she trailed off. She noticed him watching her with a dimpled smile and a twinkle in his eye. He may have lost the argument, but he got exactly the reaction he was going for.

In the back seat, I looked over to Patty with wide eyes. She tried to match my expression and we both started giggling.

The signal held strong for hours, all the way across the high plateau toward Albuquerque. I don’t know what else we heard that day — other standards, other voices from that era my parents had grown up in. But I know my mother hummed for a while after the station finally faded, somewhere west of the city. She had loved that music since she was a teenager. She would love it for the rest of her life. A big band show called The Swingin’ Years started in 1956 out of LA’s KFI-AM 640. Twenty years later it was the longest running radio music show ever and syndicated in hundreds of other stations around the country. For several hours most every weekend, she listened to it faithfully.

Albuquerque sat in the Rio Grande valley, framed by the Sandia Mountains to the east — a range that turned a deep, improbable pink at sunset, giving them their name. In 1953 it was a city of about 100,000, growing fast on defense money and the postwar boom, with a cultural texture entirely unlike anything we had passed through: Spanish colonial architecture, Native American markets, an older and more layered history than Chicago or St. Louis or Oklahoma City. Route 66 ran down Central Avenue, through the heart of it.

We didn’t need to search for a motel. We just stopped when we saw a VACANCY sign on a place that looked nice. That was the great thing about Route 66.

Before breakfast, I had managed to get the Southwest U.S. road map out of the car while Dad was packing up. I set it in front of my mother at the diner and told her I wanted to find the cities from that song we heard on the radio the previous day. She opened it and drew a circle around Amarillo and another one around Albuquerque, explaining Amarillo was the last city from the song that we had been through and that Albuquerque is where we had just spent the night. I tried to watch carefully as she folded the map back up.

You’ll see Amarillo
Gallup, New Mexico
Flagstaff, Arizona
Don’t forget Winona
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino

We would sing the song together during the day when I needed reminding which cities I needed to find next.

West of Albuquerque the land changed again. The road climbed out of the valley and into a landscape of dramatic mesas and volcanic formations, the highway cutting through terrain that looked, to my five-year-old eyes, like the surface of another planet. This was the western edge of the Colorado Plateau — ancient, vast, the geology exposed in the canyon walls and roadcuts like pages of a book laid open.

In the next two days of driving through New Mexico and Arizona, I would be looking out the window at “Indian country,” where more than two dozen federally recognized tribes lived on reservations occupying about 20% of the area of the two states. A 5-year-old in 1953 — raised on westerns and schooled with textbooks written from a Euro-American perspective — had no way of knowing the true history and current plight of our Native American population.

The road that Euro-American commerce had built across the Southwest was running, for hundreds of miles, through sovereign nations whose presence predated the United States by centuries. This was not a single “Indian culture” but a mosaic of peoples with different languages, histories, and traditions. Yet, the trading posts and roadside imagery visible along Route 66 collapsed all of that into a single Hollywood stereotype.

There was, for example, the Jack Rabbit Trading Post. It was founded in 1949 and became famous for countless billboards and signs that populated the Mother Road between Missouri and Joseph City, Arizona. They were painted on barns, fences, outbuildings, and water towers with the words HERE IT IS. The same words, over and over, with a silhouette of a jackrabbit leaping. My father called them out each time. I started trying to call them out before he could.

By the time we reached the actual trading post — a low building with a giant jackrabbit statue out front — I couldn’t wait to spend some of my money. When we got back in the car after walking through the store and using the restrooms, I had bought a pack of gum for a nickel and was wondering what was so special about this place.

The Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert lacked the promotion but were, in fact, special.

We had stopped for lunch about 30 miles before the Jack Rabbit Trading Post, turning off the highway to find the Rainbow Forest Lodge. Serving as Visitor Center, Museum, and Curio Shop for the Petrified Forest National Monument — not elevated to full park status until 1962 — it had been built by the Roosevelt Administration’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s. Inside we chatted with the Ranger, who said there were a couple of picnic tables out back.

As was their custom as far back as their first year of marriage and as recent as several times on Route 66, my parents had picked up groceries for lunch shortly before arriving at the Lodge. My memory of this quirky tradition began on this trip but was reinforced many times over the next decade or more. We would find a grocery with a deli counter and ask for an assortment of sliced cold cuts to fulfill everyone’s choices, such as bologna and several pre-sliced, gelatin-bound loaves: olive loaf (containing pimento-stuffed olives), pickle loaf, pimento loaf, and pepper loaf. Liverwurst was popular with the adults. A couple types of sliced cheese. A loaf of white sandwich bread. Because the “sandwiches” were dry — i.e. slice of bread, slice of cold cut, slice of cheese, fold and eat — a quart of cold milk was the final requirement in order to swallow. Paper cups, newly available in the early ‘50s, could have been on hand but I recall numerous occasions when we simply passed the quart of milk around.

Having a picnic table would have been our equivalent of dining out. More common was either Mom passing out the sandwiches as she made them in the moving car or simply standing outside the car and eating. Once we graduated to a station wagon, the tailgate served as buffet table.

We would have noticed a short loop trail near the picnic tables, the Giant Logs Trail. On a 10-15 minute walk we would have seen some of the largest and most colorful petrified logs in the whole Petrified Forest. Their origin was an ancient log jam in a Late Triassic river. We stopped at a plaque that explained that they had turned entirely to crystal two hundred million years before, the wood replaced molecule by molecule with silica until each log was stone, the grain still visible, the colors extraordinary — red, purple, yellow, gray — scattered across the desert floor as far as you could see.

That’s when Mom noticed different layers of color. Studying the map the Ranger had given her she pointed where to look to see the Painted Desert in the distance.

The Ranger came out as we returned to the car. He was smiling, but he told us that the park was losing tons of petrified rock every year since the monument was established in 1906. He was looking right at me when he said he just wanted us to know and make sure we hadn’t put any souvenirs in our pockets.

Arizona was the longest state on Route 66 — nearly four hundred miles of it. The landscape through which the road passed was among the most dramatic on the entire route: the Painted Desert giving way to the pine forests around Flagstaff, then the long descent from the Colorado Plateau through the Black Mountains to the Mojave. But today, our goal was just to make Flagstaff.

It was getting late in the afternoon by the time we left the Jack Rabbit Trading Post. Patty was getting squirmy on Mom’s lap, a sign she was getting tired. Afraid it was too late for a nap, Mom asked me to play with her to keep her awake. I thought of a game I had learned on the playground at school. Rock Paper Scissors. It proved to be a good choice because it took some time for her to understand and then remember what beats what. She was apparently a believer in raw, brute power, because she chose Rock like ten-fifteen times in a row. Finally, she chose Paper to my Rock and her face lit up.

Mom called for us look out the front window. Patty crawled over the seat back to Mom’s lap and I took my place on the hump. We were about halfway between Winslow and Flagstaff. I was thinking I could put a check next to the circle I had drawn around Flagstaff on the map once we got there. Then I noticed the sunset over snowy mountains. We probably didn’t know the mountains were the San Francisco Peaks, or that Humphrey’s Peak was the highest point in Arizona at 12,633 feet.

Flagstaff may have come as a surprise, too. At 7,000 feet, it was the highest point on Route 66, and the ponderosa pines that surrounded it looked nothing like the desert we’d been driving through for two days. In December the snow here was real — not the glazed-road snow of Chicago but deep mountain snow, the trees weighted with it, the air thin and cold. At the motel my father checked the road conditions and the weather we should expect in the morning while we were getting ready for bed.

The descent from Flagstaff toward Kingman was once Route 66’s most notorious stretch — the Oatman Highway, a series of switchbacks through the Black Mountains that had terrified drivers for decades. But in 1953 a newer route through the mountains had just opened, bypassing the worst of it. We almost certainly took the new road. Even so, the descent was dramatic — the highway dropping thousands of feet, the desert floor opening below, and then suddenly the Mojave: flat, vast, and warm.

Warm.

After a week of December cold, the temperature change was physical. Windows went down. My mother said something about the air.

The Mojave in December is not hot — daytime temperatures in the fifties, nights still cold — but after Chicago and the panhandle and the mountain pass, it felt like another season entirely. The light was different too: sharper, more direct, the sky a deeper blue than anything we’d seen since leaving Michigan.

With mostly desert to see out the car windows, I turned my attention to the road map I’d been using to check off the song’s cities. I nearly gave up the whole enterprise in Arizona because the cities in the song and on the map just weren’t making much sense. I couldn’t find Winona anywhere on the map. When we stopped for gas, Dad asked for an Arizona map and mentioned we couldn’t find Winona on our map. The man chuckled and explained that Winona was in the song because it rhymes with Arizona. It’s just a part of Flagstaff. “That’s why the song says, “…and don’t forget Winona.”

OK, I thought, Kingman should be next. I hadn’t found that on our Southwest U.S. map either, but now we had an Arizona map. I found its tiny dot and circled it. Later, Dad slowed down and asked if I wanted to see Kingman. I looked up and he was pointing at the city sign as we approached. He read it out loud, “Welcome to Kingman—Population 3,342.”

“Is that a lot?” I asked. Three traffic lights later we were out of Kingman.

One nice thing about driving in the desert was we made pretty good time. Fewer and smaller cities. Straightaways without much traffic meant our speed was often higher than average. And we loved, really loved, the DIPS. Sometimes Dad would give us a heads up by reading the sign, “DIP AHEAD”. Then we’d anticipate the sensation and laugh when we hit it. Sometimes there would be no warning. We’d go “Whoa!” and THEN he would call out “Dip!” Loved the dips.

Barstow was the last significant stop before the final stretch of Route 66. With a population of just under 7,000 it had a strong economic base in 1953, which rested on the Santa Fe Railroad, the Marine Corps Logistics Base, and a steady flow of cross-country travelers. The Harvey House (1911-1971) served train and road passengers on fine china, staffed by the famously professional Harvey Girls. Fortunately, there were several other suitable options for the family of a teacher/principal between jobs and homes.

I imagine our choosing to celebrate our first night in California with dinner at Rosita’s Restaurant and finding lodging at La Casa Court (“The Home of Cleanliness”) at 1101 West Main Street. According to LegendsOfAmerica.com, Barstow was the only city on Route 66 — the Main Street of America — to retain “Main Street” as its actual street name.

Over dinner, my parents discussed our options for the next day, December 24, Christmas Eve. We could drive over the San Bernardino Mountains to my grandparents’ house in Palm Springs or stay on Route 66 and go via the city of San Bernardino itself and then backtrack slightly to Palm Springs. Either choice involved about 3 hours of driving. Since they knew an area in San Bernardino called Muscoy might have available housing in the new year, we would drive through it to see how it might suit us.

As we drove the 71 miles from Barstow to San Bernardino, my parents talked about seeing the family already here and where and when we would have our own home. Patty had been increasingly interested in coloring a Disney coloring book bought along the way. I looked out the window but I was forming mental images of my grandparents and especially my Uncle Ron.

We had left Michigan before Christmas vacation had begun in hopes of arriving in time for Ron’s birthday on Christmas day. He would be 14 tomorrow, closer to my age than my father’s, his older brother. I thought of him more like a big brother than an uncle. And he was a really good big brother.

My thoughts were interrupted by my father’s voice. “You did bring your swimming suit, didn’t you?” It was what he said several times on the drive to remind me what might be waiting for us at the end. A drive from the snow of Michigan and Illinois to my grandparents and a swim on Christmas day. Very cool, I probably thought. But I expected that.

I had had no idea how cool the drive itself would be.

It all started with a little 2x3 inch black and white photo from over 70 years ago.

I was thinking it’s a shame it wasn’t from our “migration” trip on Route 66, for which I have exactly no photos. Until right then, for some reason, I hadn’t thought about image generation as a resource for the memoir project. In fact, even then I was only thinking in terms of AI “Photoshopping” the car and me onto a background photo of the corner in Chicago where US 66 starts from its eastern end.

This post is too full of images to get through all email servers, so please click on this
link to read — and view! — the entire AI Field Note on Substack.

I was thinking it’s a shame it wasn’t from our “migration” trip on Route 66, for which I have exactly no photos. Until right then, for some reason, I hadn’t thought about image generation as a resource for the memoir project. In fact, even then I was only thinking in terms of AI “Photoshopping” the car and me onto a background photo of the corner in Chicago where US 66 starts from its eastern end.

When Claude confirmed that Anthropic wasn’t doing image work I asked for referrals. The top of the list was ChatGPT. My subscription is still active, so that was the obvious choice.

Since these LLM AIs don’t register the passage of time, it didn’t matter I’d been away from ChatGPT for several weeks. As soon as I opened a chat field, it “remembered” everything we’d been working on and was ready to go. I uploaded the photo and told it what I was hoping to end up with. After a few minutes of conversation and about 60 seconds of AI processing, I’m looking at this:

ME — I’m flabbergasted. (I was!) I had no idea it would turn out that well and that quickly! What can you tell me about the process?

I found the resulting outline so interesting, I asked ChatGPT to be a guest contributor to this Field Note and write this next section for me. And not just interesting, but important. In a world in which we are learning to be distrustful of images, understanding the origin and characteristics of those images is one prerequisite for being savvy about the media we consume.

AI Field Notes: Reconstructing a Moment That Was Never Photographed
By Chat Bot, April 2026, writing from Michael’s perspective

I had a photograph from 1953—one I’ve known all my life. A young boy (me) leaning out the window of a family car, grinning into the wind as we crossed the Ambassador Bridge from Detroit into Canada. It’s a perfect image of childhood—joyful, unselfconscious, and in motion.

But it isn’t the image I needed.

What I wanted was a photograph from later in the year—December 16, 1953—the beginning of our drive west on Route 66. There is no photograph of that moment. No one thought to take one. Like most beginnings, it passed without documentation.

So I tried something new.

Using the original image as a starting point, I asked AI to create a scene: a snowy Chicago morning at the corner of Michigan and Adams, the Art Institute in the background, the sense of a journey just beginning. Instead of cutting and pasting my original photo into that setting, the system did something quite different—and more interesting.

It reconstructed the image.

The result is not a composite in the traditional sense. No pixels from the original photograph were literally lifted and placed into a new background. Instead, the AI interpreted both the image and the prompt—understanding the era, the clothing, the car, the mood—and generated a new photograph that feels authentic to the moment I described.

It is, in effect, a photograph that was never taken—but could have been.

That distinction matters. This is not restoration. It is not even manipulation. It is something closer to visual storytelling through synthesis—a collaboration between memory, description, and machine interpretation.

There are trade-offs, of course. The boy in the new image is not exactly the boy in the original photograph. The details of the Chicago streetscape are plausible rather than historically verified. The image may even be a bit more composed than a real snapshot would have been.

And yet—it works.

It works because it captures something deeper than strict visual accuracy. It captures the truth of the moment as remembered: winter, departure, anticipation, the beginning of a long journey west.

For a project like this—part memoir, part historical reflection—that turns out to be enough. More than enough, perhaps.

What this experiment suggests is that the old boundary between documented memory and imagined memory is becoming more porous. Not erased, but softened. With care and transparency, AI-generated images can serve not as replacements for photographs, but as companions to them—helping to fill in the visual gaps that every life inevitably contains.

In that sense, this image belongs in the same category as the story itself: not a perfect record of what happened, but a faithful rendering of what it felt like.

Ok, so I don’t buy 100% of that either. “Something deeper than strict visual accuracy”? I’m not even sure what that means. But I certainly like the idea of the technology as a means of visual storytelling, so long as we know the distinction between storytelling and propaganda. For now, I plan to experiment with this new (to me) paradigm of content creation.

After getting over being gobsmacked by the reconstructed images, I realized I might want a different aspect ratio, or shape.

ME — For a substack page main image, the aspect ratio of the reconstructed image should ideally be 1200x630. It doesn’t have to go there, but if it’s possible...

CHATGPT — (60 seconds later):

That was cool. I got the exact size I wanted and a mini-lesson to boot. I immediately liked this composition more than the first. I mentioned that to the chatbot, which gave several reasons it works better.

CHATGPT —

· The wider 1200×630 framing gives the scene room to breathe

· It feels less like a moment and more like a setting you’ve entered

· The boy is still the emotional anchor, but now he’s part of a larger story in motion

· Clear narrative flow: eye goes from the boy → street → Art Institute → skyline

· Cinematic feel: it reads almost like a still from a film rather than a snapshot

Those are all valid points for scoring the quality of this photo and for asking AI to do similar magic in future images. But, um, let’s get a little critical, and in the process we can practice our skills at identifying images as AI. First, make the image larger if you can — if you’re in Substack, you can just click on it — then treat it like one of those “How many mistakes can you find?” puzzles. One hint: it helps if you know a little about downtown Chicago. Here are the ones I found fairly quickly.

1. From researching where Route 66 starts I learned that its street name is Adams and it tees at Michigan Ave, the famous street that runs along the front of the museum. So the street sign is wrong, the names should be switched.

2. Similarly, the location where Adams tees at Michigan is directly opposite the museum’s entrance.

3. There is two-way traffic on Michigan today, but it could have been one-way in 1953. But what’s up with the car on the sidewalk facing the opposite direction?

4. Speaking of cars, those coming toward the camera seem to be identical.

Having noticed these errors, I could have spent a few extra minutes getting ChatGPT to correct them. In this case, they don’t detract from the purpose of the “photo” and serve the additional purpose of practicing identifying AI.

Most of the images in this chapter were regular photos I found online. But there were three others that were partially or entirely created by AI. Plus one more that will appear in the next chapter. Let’s take a look.

I took screenshots of three vintage road maps we could have used on the trip, uploaded them, and made this request:

ME — I’d like these three maps placed casually on the middle of the front bench seat (between driver and passenger) of a 1950ish car, overlapping but enough text showing to identify them. Enough of the seat showing to be able to tell it’s a car seat.

CHATGPT —

ME — Revisions: the car image is mirrored, showing the steering wheel on right instead of left, though I'd prefer it not be visible at all. I believe the maps are disproportionately large. Please make the perspective looking over the seat back, maps rotated 90 degrees left and a little more casually placed.

CHATGPT —

ME — Well, that’s weird. But close enough to be fine with some cropping.

That was pretty straightforward. Now I want an image that needs to be created from scratch.

ME — Let's try something different. Picture a 1948-1953 vintage piggy bank—not too big, like 5" tall 6" long— with a cork at the bottom, uncorked and the coins emptied onto a soft surface like a sleeping bag. The coins are from 1920-1953 mintings, pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and include a few buffalo nickels and Mercury dimes. Coins are jumbled in a pile, showing both heads and tails. Include 3-4 of half-dollars (Walking Liberty and Franklin). Can you construct a muted color image of that? Big ask?

CHATGPT —

Next, I found a photo I wanted to use for our stop in Springfield Illinois. Nice shot of an intersection with a motel we could have stayed in and road signs full of 66s. But, at least a couple of the cars are later than 1953 models.

ME — Could you replace the cars in this photo with pre-1954 cars?

CHATGPT —

To read the chapter that corresponds to this AI Field Note, go to The Mother Road Chapter 2

Before wrapping up my imaging session with ChatGPT, I had had a picture in my head for a while that I was going to search for online when working on the final chapter of the Route 66 story. Figured I’d give that a try.

CHATGPT — Whenever you want to try something more experimental—symbolic, abstract, or even a bit risky—I’m very much up for it.
ME — I'm not quite there yet, and this might be a bit tamer than you're hinting at, but I've thought about an image that might work for when we are driving through New Mexico/Arizona. I'm seeing our 1949 neutral colored DeSoto, driving west somewhere between Winslow and Flagstaff. We're alone on the road, dark enough to need car lights on but light enough to still see scenery. Road is straight, we see the car from behind, headlights on road, perhaps one of those places the highway shield with Arizona US 66 is painted on the asphalt. Headed west at sunset, December sky lit up above the snowy mountains where Flagstaff is located. The attached photo is just to show the orientation driving Winslow to Flagstaff, not to replicate or use.

CHATGPT —

ME — This is an A! To make it an A+, move the car into the middle of the right lane and give me passengers. (No self-driving cars in 1953.) Adult male driver left, adult female passenger right — that's just for size, not detail — and my 5 year old self would be standing up behind the front seat, just back of head visible, looking forward.

CHATGPT —

ME — So sorry. Hadn't noticed or thought of license plate. This is so perfect and clear, we should probably go all the way and make the plate be accurate for 1953 Michigan.

CHATGPT —

ME — I'm going to stop looking after this, but you did say I was the director. Just realized what's off about the headlights. Not realistic, as the light from the headlights should be cast ahead of the car not start at the front tires.

CHATGPT —

ME — Bingo.

I think it’s safe to say the AI technology we’ve just explored represents a paradigm shift for anyone in our generation. Shoot, any generation really. Except for a relative handful of people pioneering it, having this kind of control over image creation and manipulation is new and revolutionary. I know the implications are both exciting and — maybe mostly — concerning. It’s a theme I expect we will discuss again. And again.

To read the chapter that corresponds to this AI Field Note, go to The Mother Road Chapter 2

If you have a casual interest in AI, and especially if you’re interested in or are actually using Claude, I can give you a one paragraph summary. Below that, I’ll paste the actual conversation I had with Claude if you’d like more detail or are interested in these human-nonhuman chats. (I also complained about not being able to close the popup without clicking one of the two buttons. I had questions!) Otherwise, this paragraph should do:

Yes, this WAS a new feature announcement, one that should significantly benefit most users. In the previous Field Note, I described and illustrated at length the system that the chatbot and I are using to keep all the work and research for the Boomer substack publication organized and accessible. If followed, Claude and I should spend most of our time on the same page. The new memory feature announced today is a different, more automatic layer: Claude drawing on your entire chat history across all conversations, not just within a project, to make connections and remember things without you having to manage project knowledge documents. Really great news, though it doesn’t replace what I need to do for the size and complexity of this publication.

ME —This announcement was in the Claude.ai home window when I opened it today. I read the About Memory linked page quickly but didn’t see anything for personal users that seemed different than all that I’ve been learning about how your memory works. Is there something brand new I missed? Also, I found it a little odd, even disconcerting, that after I read it and even though I wanted to verify my thinking before clicking one of those two buttons, I couldn’t leave the page until I did.

10:26 AM

Claude:

The image is clear. This is indeed a new feature announcement — Anthropic has been rolling out a more explicit memory system, and this popup is how they’re introducing it to users who haven’t seen it yet.

What’s actually new here relative to what you already knew: the memory system you’ve been working with in this project relies on the Project Knowledge Document and project files — things you explicitly upload and manage. What this announcement is describing is a different, more automatic layer: Claude drawing on your entire chat history across all conversations, not just within a project, to make connections and remember things without you having to manually manage a PKD.

In practical terms for your memoir work, this is less relevant than it might seem for a general user. Your project-based approach — the PKD, the uploaded files, the chapter drafts — is a more controlled and reliable system than the general memory feature. The general memory is useful for casual users who want Claude to remember their preferences across unrelated conversations. Your system is purpose-built and more precise.

On the forced-choice popup: your reaction is reasonable. Requiring a binary choice before letting you proceed — with no “ask me later” option — is a slightly coercive UI pattern. It’s not unusual in consumer software but it’s worth noting, especially for someone writing an AI Field Notes column. The lack of a graceful exit before choosing is a design decision worth examining.

Which button did you end up clicking?

You said:

I took a chance on you: Use Memory. That doesn’t preclude the PDK/Instructions method we’re already using, does it?

10:30 AM

Claude responded:

No, it doesn’t preclude it at all. The two systems operate in parallel and complement each other rather than competing.

The PKD and Project Instructions are explicit, curated, version-controlled context that you control precisely — you decide what goes in, what gets updated, what gets removed. That remains the backbone of the memoir project and nothing about the memory feature changes it.

The general memory layer adds something different: Claude drawing on patterns and details from your broader chat history outside this project — things you’ve mentioned in passing, preferences you’ve expressed, context that might be relevant but that you never thought to put in a PKD. It’s more ambient and less precise, but for a long-term user like you it could occasionally surface something useful.

The risk worth being aware of: the general memory layer is less transparent than the PKD. You can always read your PKD and know exactly what I know. The general memory is more of a black box — you can’t always tell what it’s drawing on or whether it’s drawing on something correctly. Anthropic does provide a way to view and edit what’s been stored in memory, accessible through your account settings.

For the memoir project specifically, I’d continue to treat the PKD as authoritative. If something the general memory surfaces ever conflicts with the PKD, the PKD wins.

And yes — this whole episode is worth a paragraph in the AI Field Notes. The forced binary choice, your reasoning for clicking Use Memory, the question of what you’re actually consenting to and what it means for a project like this. That’s exactly the kind of moment the Field Notes exists to document.

My father had already been out. He came back in stamping his feet, dropped a newspaper on the table, and opened a bag from the grocery a block away: bananas, apples, a package of sweet rolls, a pint of milk. He’d had his thermos refilled at the counter. While we ate, he spread the December 16 Chicago Tribune on the table and showed us the front page.

Two inches of snow on the ground. Another inch overnight. Sub-freezing temperatures were glazing the roads. The Chicago Motor Club was urging extreme caution. The article mentioned twenty-six sand-and-salt trucks working through the night to clear the city streets. My father had already talked with the store owner, who told him schools were closed and the roads into the city were quiet — not much traffic going in.

That was enough for him.

He’d been driving in snow since he was sixteen. For a couple of years he’d run a milk route, finishing his deliveries about the time most people’s alarm clocks went off — in winter, on whatever roads the night had left behind, a truck loaded with cases of milk. My mother didn’t try to talk him out of it.

We bundled into the DeSoto and crept out of the gravel lot, tires crunching through the white. The landscapes on either side of the road were bare and bleak — stripped fields, leafless trees, the occasional barn — everything pulled flat and gray by the cold. I watched it through the window as we crossed into Illinois.

Then Chicago. The city rose out of the flat land, steel and stone and smoke, and for a few minutes we caught glimpses of Lake Michigan to our east before we were in among the tall buildings, the car slowing, the streets still lightly traveled out of respect for the frozen roads.

My mother pointed. “That’s the Art Institute of Chicago.”

It filled the block, stone lions flanking the wide front stairs. My father found a place to pull over and pointed across Michigan Avenue to a highway shield on a signpost — a white shield with a black border and the number 66.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s where Route 66 begins. And it’s going to take us all the way to California.”

He had told us about it the night before, drawn it on a napkin at the diner. Now it was real. The starting line.

Route 66 had been real for a long time before we found it that December morning.

The road was designated on November 11, 1926, assembled from a patchwork of existing local and state highways rather than built from scratch — which is why it threaded through the centers of towns and cities rather than bypassing them. From Chicago it ran southwest through Illinois and Missouri, dipped into the southeast corner of Kansas, crossed Oklahoma diagonally, cut across the Texas panhandle, and then turned west through New Mexico and Arizona to Los Angeles. By 1938 it was the first highway in the country to be completely paved, 2,448 miles of it, end to end.

But the road’s story — what made it mean something — was told by the people who had traveled it before us.

In the 1930s it was the Dust Bowl road. Drought and economic collapse sent thousands of families from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas west along Route 66 toward California, looking for anything better. John Steinbeck watched them go and wrote The Grapes of Wrath, giving the road its most lasting name: the Mother Road. The Joads traveled it in desperation, with everything they owned lashed to a truck, heading toward a California that turned out to be something other than what they’d been promised.

We were traveling it in optimism. We weren’t escaping anything. We were seeking something — a vibrant economy, a climate that would suit us better, family already waiting on the other end. The country was in the beginning of a massive 1950–70 migration that largely accounted for California nearly doubling in population, from 10.6 million to 19.9 million.

As Dad eased the car into traffic and we began our first mile on US 66, I assumed my favorite viewing spot. When I was little, I would stand on the front edge of the back seat and lean forward against the front seat. Now I could stand on the hump in the floor and watch the road ahead. Patty was still settled in Mom’s lap. Next to them on the seat were a few road maps, ready when needed. We were — and would always be — Triple-A members. But good road maps were always available at bigger service stations, too. My mother was an experienced navigator and always gave my father plenty of notice when the next turn was coming. Since we were going to be staying on this road like, forever, I hoped I would have lots of time to use the maps myself to follow our route. I loved driving through towns and cities that had been just dots on paper. What I didn’t love was trying to get the maps folded again.

My father had been thinking about the Mother Road — also known as the Will Rogers Highway and the Main Street of America. Once we were out of the city, heading southwest through the flat Illinois winter, he talked about it — the way he always talked, less like conversation and more like teaching. In a good way. He told us how the Road had started as Indian trails, then wagon roads, then a series of local highways that got stitched together and numbered 66. How it had been the military supply line during the war. How after the war, everybody who had a car and somewhere to go seemed to end up on it.

Now, we were part of that.

From Chicago, Route 66 ran southwest through Joliet, then on through Pontiac, Bloomington, Atlanta, Lincoln, and Springfield — small Illinois cities strung along the road like beads, each with its filling stations and diners and motor courts arranged for the convenience of people passing through.

South of Joliet, somewhere along the flat middle of Illinois, I opened my piggy bank.

I’d been saving it for months. The piggy bank was the kind with a cork in the bottom, and I’d been promised that if I filled it without opening it, the money would be mine to spend on souvenirs along the way. Now I pried out the cork and poured the coins onto the sleeping bag nest I’d made on the floor of the back seat — pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, even a couple of half-dollars, the full weight of months of accumulation.

I sorted them into piles. Found the oldest ones: buffalo nickels among the Jeffersons, Mercury dimes among the Roosevelts. My dad gave me problems to solve from the front seat. If something costs thirty-seven cents, how many ways can you make change? If you have a quarter and two dimes, what can you buy at a diner? I worked through them slowly, the arithmetic mixing with the rhythm of the road, deciding how to budget so I’d have something left for Palm Springs.

Time passed that way, which was the whole point.

Springfield was Lincoln country. The road ran past the state capitol, past the neighborhood where Lincoln had lived, past the sites that drew tourists even in December. My father did stop here — he wouldn’t have driven past Lincoln’s house without marking it — though my clearest memory of Springfield is the motor court that night: the smell of the room, chenille spreads on the two beds, the radiator clicking against the cold outside. We’d covered nearly 300 miles since Gary. Day one on Route 66, done.

Next morning, the Mississippi came up on us without warning — or it felt that way to a five-year-old who had never seen a river more than a hundred feet wide.

The old Chain of Rocks Bridge was the Route 66 crossing into Missouri, a steel-truss span built in 1929 with a peculiar 22-degree bend at its middle, so the road jogged sideways over the water before straightening again on the other side. I don’t remember the jog. I just remember — because it was Mom who said it — that the mile-long bridge was green because it was painted that color to be less visible from the air during WWII. As I stared out the window at the Mississippi River I may have been thinking it seemed too vast to be a mere river. And my mother may have been reading my mind when she said it was also known as the Father of Waters.

Then my father — true to form — couldn’t help asking if I knew how to spell Mississippi. Mom gave him a look as he crowed, “M-I-crooked letter-crooked letter-I- crooked letter-crooked letter-I-humpback-humpback-I.” She just shook her head. But, after a few reminders I’m sure, I remembered it the rest of my life.

Then we were in Missouri, with St. Louis ahead of us.

The city sat at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, the gateway from east to west for a century and a half, with the famous Arch still a decade away. Lewis and Clark had set off from here, the Oregon Trail had started here, and half the westward migrations in American history had crossed the Mississippi at this bend. We were just the latest. We spent night two somewhere in the city, in a motor court on the western edge. Before I fell asleep, I thought about what my mother had called the river and that we had crossed the Father of Waters on the Mother Road.

In the morning the road climbed into the Ozarks.

Missouri changed the feel of the trip. Illinois had been flat and familiar — not so different from Michigan or Indiana. Missouri was something else. The road wound up into forested hills, limestone bluffs rising on either side, the skeleton trees of winter silhouetted against the steely blue sky. That sky seemed bigger. The road seemed older.

My father spotted the barn signs west of St. Louis.

They’d been appearing for miles: painted on the roofs and sides of barns and outbuildings in white letters, the same two words over and over — MERAMEC CAVERNS. The caves had been open as a tourist attraction since 1935, opened by a man named Lester Dill who understood that Route 66 travelers would stop for almost anything if it was promoted aggressively enough. The barn-roof advertisements ran for hundreds of miles in both directions. I had been reading them aloud since Illinois.

We stopped.

The caverns were cool and enormous — a constant 60 degrees year-round, which felt warm after the December air outside. The tour guide told us the caves had been a hideout for Jesse James, though he hedged on the details. Stalactites and stalagmites rose and hung in formations that had been growing for four hundred million years. The World Book Cvolume had caves in it; I had studied the pictures. The real thing was better.

My mother bought a postcard at the gift shop. She had us write our names on it that night at the motel, then took it to the office front desk to be mailed to my grandparents in Palm Springs.

We are on our way. We signed it Pat and Mike, the way our grandfather liked to refer to us. Like the Hepburn-Tracy movie.

That was night three — the Ozarks somewhere west of Meramec, Springfield Missouri still a short drive ahead in the morning.

The fourth day brought us down off the Ozark plateau and through Springfield, Missouri. This is the Mother Road’s self-proclaimed birthplace, though the good people of Tulsa do the same self-proclaiming. Then the land began to unwind. Kansas came and went in thirteen miles, just enough of a corner to say we’d been there, and then the long diagonal drop into Oklahoma.

We crossed into Oklahoma on a frigid morning, the sky white and the land opening up around us.

Missouri had been hilly and wooded, folded in on itself. Oklahoma was the opposite — flat, wide, the horizon pushed back to where it seemed to blur into sky. The fields went on until they stopped making sense as fields and became something more abstract, something about distance itself.

With less to see out the windows, it was the perfect place to try to read as many Burma Shave signs as we could. Sets of six signs, spaced 100 feet apart on straight stretches of highway, proliferated across 45 states. By December, 1953, there were nearly 7,000 sets. Oklahoma and Texas had a disproportionately large share of them and lots of straightaways on Route 66. I doubt we were aware of it, but we wouldn’t be seeing these signs once we crossed the Texas-New Mexico border. New Mexico and Arizona prohibited them along their roads. But they were otherwise a fixture since 1926. Farmers voluntarily repaired them, radio comedians satirized them, and college students decorated dorm rooms with them.

Unlike today’s freeways, people didn’t speed along The Mother Road. We probably averaged 40 mph on our trip. That, combined with long sightlines in flat, open, rural Oklahoma and Texas, made the signs easy to spot and read. And they were a great antidote to a 5-year old’s boredom. Even Patty delighted at the sing-song rhymes as my parents and I read them together. She would join in when we all shouted the final sign’s “Burma Shave!”

After one “Burma Shave!” when the giggling had died down, my father got quiet for a while, which was unusual. Then he told us about the Dust Bowl.

In the 1930s, he explained, the rains had stopped across this whole region — Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, the panhandle. The topsoil had dried up and blown away in storms that turned the sky black at noon. Families had lost everything — farms, savings, any reason to stay — and loaded what was left onto trucks and cars and driven west. Route 66, through these same fields we were looking at, had been jammed with them. Some of those families were heading to the same part of California we were heading to now.

I looked out the window at the flat brown land and tried to picture it.

By the time we were driving through, Oklahoma had recovered — the fields were planted again, the towns were functioning, the cafés along Route 66 were full of truckers and travelers. But the memory of those years was fresh in the people who had lived through them, and the landscape still held the hard look of a place that had seen hard times.

That same year, 1953, Oklahoma had opened the Turner Turnpike between Tulsa and Oklahoma City — 88 miles of divided, high-speed highway that bypassed every town Route 66 ran through. It was called progress. It was also the first sign of what was coming for the old road, though nobody was ready to read it that way yet.

We came into Oklahoma City in the late afternoon, the road wide and busy through the city center. We spent night four there — a motor court on the western edge of town, the kind of place where you pulled up directly in front of your door and the office had a rack of postcards and a Coke machine in the lobby. The rooms smelled of cigarette smoke and cleaning fluid and the accumulated passage of everyone who had come through before.

In the morning we turned west. The land flattened further and the sky took over. The Texas panhandle announced itself before we crossed the state line.

The land had been wide in Oklahoma. In Texas it became something else — immense, indifferent, a landscape that made the car feel very small. The road ran straight west toward a horizon that never got any closer, the December sky pale above the brown and yellow grass, nothing taller than a fence post for miles in any direction.

There wasn’t much to interest us outside and Patty and I began to spend more time entertaining each other. Down on our padded floor, I let her pour the coins out of the piggy bank. Most were still unspent. She sorted the coins into piles. I taught her their names and she called out, “Penny, penny, dime, quart, nickel,” as she dropped each one back in the pig through the slot. After another dump of coins and a reminder that the big ones were called quarters, not quarts — I had pocketed the half-dollars early on for safe keeping — Patty got about halfway through the pile, gave a few big yawns, curled up on her side and slept.

The Texas panhandle along Route 66 had been Dust Bowl country, too — some of the most devastated land in the region during the 1930s, the topsoil stripped by drought and wind and carried away in the black blizzards that gave the era its name. By 1953 it was cattle and oil country, trying to be prosperous again, with Amarillo as its capital.

Amarillo was the only major city on the Texas stretch of Route 66, and by 1953 there were sixty-eight Route 66 lodgings operating in the city — motor courts, tourist cabins, roadside hotels — a full ecosystem built to receive travelers and send them on their way. We stopped for the night somewhere in or near Amarillo in one of those sixty-eight lodgings. It would most likely have been windy ever since we crossed into Texas, a flat relentless push from the northwest that could rock the car and make the motel sign creak all night.

School teachers — and research — will tell you wind is associated with restlessness, irritability, inattention, and increased anxiety. Or perhaps we were just experiencing a cumulative weariness after several days on the road. Either way, we were more tired than hungry. Plus, Patty was coming down with a cold. So, rather than going to the diner up the road, we made our dinner with what leftover lunches and snacks were in the car. Mom was reading us a bedtime story, but Patty was asleep after just a few pages. We all soon followed her example.

Note: Just a heads up that the first half of this field note borders on the geeky. Well, it’s really pretty geeky. But I’m convinced it explains something that is going to be central to the execution of this project and could be very useful to any amateur user of AI — like me — in coming up with personally tailored strategies for using it. The second half should be more fun, with a couple examples of how it’s working out for me.

When I opened the new chat for this Field Note, I asked a few questions to make sure I understood how Claude’s “memory” works within the project. My understanding had been that when I was engaged in a chat with Claude within, say, The Memoir Project folder, Claude would have access to everything within the folder. That’s true, but very incomplete. Here’s the conversation and the light bulb moment.

ME — As you read this prompt, are you simultaneously “reading” everything else in the project folder, including all the chats and the files and the memory notes? Or is it more nuanced than that?

CLAUDE — Here’s the accurate version of what happens when you open a chat:

If you start a new chat inside the project folder — project files, instructions, and memory digest are all loaded as soon as you start writing the prompt. If you start a new prompt inside an existing chat inside the project folder, the same contents are loaded along with the full history of that chat.

If you start a chat on the Claude.ai Home Screen — not in a project folder — there is nothing to load at first, and then only the history of that chat as you continue the conversation.

ME — When you say everything inside the project is loaded from the first prompt, how should I understand the term "loaded"? I get that it is loaded for you, but loaded where? Into what?

CLAUDE — Good question, and it gets at something genuinely interesting about how I work.

“Loaded” means assembled into my context window — which is essentially the span of text I can “see” and reason about at any given moment. Think of it less like a filing cabinet I can reach into and more like a table I’m working at: everything relevant gets placed on the table at the start of each response, I work with what’s there, and then the table clears. Next prompt, everything goes back on the table again.

The context window has a size limit — a maximum amount of text it can hold at once. For most projects it’s generous enough that the project files, instructions, memory digest, and chat history all fit comfortably. But on a very long chat with very large files, you could theoretically approach that limit.

So “loaded into my context window” is the precise answer. But for the Field Note, “assembled and available for that response” might be the more readable way to put it.

So, when the light bulb came on, my first thought was that now I get the importance and the power of the project folder. Obviously, this isn’t your father’s search engine. This environment isn’t for simple Q&A. In Claude’s words, it’s a “sustained intellectual collaboration, with each exchange building on everything preceding it.” I would add that when research is also involved, as it is with the memoir, the value of the collaboration is magnified.

My second thought was, “Wow, that must take a huge amount of electricity! No wonder the proliferation of data centers is concerning.” This is a topic that deserves a deeper dive, so I’ll stick a pin in it and schedule a response down the road a little.

Read the memoir story titled The Mother Road: Ch. 1 Leaving Home

We’re finally ready to get back to writing, or at least Claude is.

CLAUDE — The agreed method: Question-driven, section by section. We develop Loading Up first, using targeted questions to surface your memories and voice, rather than drafting wholesale from the notes.

Ready to start on Loading Up when you are. First question: When you picture that morning — the DeSoto in the driveway, your dad at the trunk — what’s the first image that comes into focus?

ME — That raises a question that will apply again and again as we proceed, especially from when I’m so young: Do we distinguish between images coming into focus from certain memory, or from how I imagine it was? In fact, I think it would be helpful to come up with a more detailed framework than just “question-driven.”

I’m thinking that what I just learned from Claude provides the means to create a framework that will allow the work to go much faster and stay focused. In fairly short order I wrote out an outline of how my thinking about the memoir has evolved. Claude made a couple of good revisions, then we agreed on a completed description of the approach.

I asked Claude to compose a compressed version just for its use in the Instructions panel. It did, then I pasted it into the panel. Then I pasted what Claude called the “full articulation with nuance and explanations” into the project knowledge document, which we’ve agreed to abbreviate PKD. Here it is:

The Memoir Method for this project (added April 2026)

A memoir based on personal memories alone presents two problems: pre-birth family history and early childhood is largely inaccessible, and memory without context makes for thin reading. This project addresses each through a five-part method.

1. The Bones — what is known Personal memories and family stories; photos with and without contemporaneous captions; memorabilia and physical and digital newspaper clippings; public records and genealogical research.

2. The Dialogue — what the collaboration brings to the surface Questions Claude asks to stimulate Michael’s memories and expand what is known. This is not a research function — it is the primary mechanism by which the collaboration unlocks material that exists but hasn’t yet surfaced.

3. The Flesh — what is inferred and probable Questions Michael asks Claude to research; period detail to answer those questions; logical inferences that connect the dots. Inferences flagged as such — “most likely,” “period-appropriate,” “historically plausible.”

4. The Context Research into local, regional, and national events and conditions that illuminate the world the personal history moved through. Selected with the project’s larger purpose in mind: to preserve an authentic record of the America that strived, however imperfectly, to live up to its founding documents.

5. Storytelling Tell the most interesting story possible while staying faithful to what is known, what is inferred, and what the context reveals. The bones and flesh together; the personal and the national braided.

I’m finding one of the most fruitful avenues in communicating with Claude is to occasionally ask how it works and its perspective on our process. I did that here and got a great answer that validated the decision to include it.

ME — Do you feel this is a helpful addition? And if so, how?

CLAUDE — Yes, genuinely useful — and in a specific way.

Most of what’s in the Instructions panel and the PKD tells me how to behave and what’s been decided. This framework does something different: it tells me how to think about the work itself. That’s a different kind of orientation.

Without it, I come to each session knowing the facts of the project and the behavioral rules, but the underlying method has to be inferred from examples — from “An Ordinary Day,” from the cloakroom, from decisions made in past chats. This makes it explicit. It tells me what we’re actually doing and why, not just what’s been done.

Practically, it will help most at the start of new vignettes, when we’re furthest from established examples and closest to blank-page decisions. A new topic, a new set of memories, a new historical context — and the method is right there as a shared reference point rather than something we have to re-establish through conversation.

It feels good to get that established. It feels even better to get this vignette finished. Here are a couple examples of how Claude and I worked together to get there.

Thanks to a suggestion from my sister, Pam, I’d started a subscription to Newspapers.com. This site touts 35,000+ digitized, searchable newspapers from 1690 (I know!) to 2025. I’d been spending enough time already searching just the Monroe local newspaper to realize how rich a source this was going to be — and how much time could be spent in countless rabbit holes. Seems the kind of thing Claude could help speed things along. So, I asked:

ME — I’ve been going through Newspapers.com and finding lots of tidbits in the Monroe Evening News 1952-1953. Since it requires a subscription, I assume you can’t access that site?

CLAUDE — Correct — I can’t access Newspapers.com even with a subscription. It’s behind a login wall, so it’s not fetchable the way an open web page would be.

Hmm, well, no harm in asking.

CLAUDE — But what you’re finding there sounds potentially valuable. A few thoughts on how to use it:

The Monroe Evening News clippings could serve exactly the role that period detail plays in your best writing — not as historical lecture, but as a quick grounding note that puts the reader there. A headline glimpsed, a price from an ad, a weather report. The kind of thing that costs one sentence but earns a lot of authenticity.

The most useful thing you could do is paste the relevant tidbits directly into our chat as you find them. I can help you evaluate which ones earn a place in the vignette and where they might land — and which ones are interesting but belong in your research file rather than the prose.

What have you found so far that feels promising?

ME — My mother was a county block worker for the 1952 March of Dimes, one of about 400 women whose names are all listed by area under the photo. My father’s school (principal of Custer Junior High) student council also sold ice cream bars to raise $200 for the “polio fund” at the same time. I’m going to attach clippings to see if they are visible to you and might be useful.

CLAUDE — Both images are clear and readable. And what a find — especially the second one.

The Mothers’ March photo is evocative period texture — 400 women going door to door in Monroe on a winter evening, your mother among them. That’s a vivid detail about who your parents were in this community just before they left it.

These photos may resurface when I get back to vignettes from 1948-1953. A small town newspaper in that era published a remarkable amount about community life and it’s members that would be unthinkable in a newspaper of today. Come to think of it, the Monroe Evening News was the social media of the ‘50s. In a short time I found numerous mentions of both parents that establish a profile of their life in Monroe. None of these details appear in this current memoir vignette. However, they were the justification for this paragraph:

At some point before my parents locked the door and got in the car, a couple of the neighbor women appeared on the sidewalk in their wool coats to say goodbye. Most farewells had taken place over the previous couple weeks — it was remarkable how many connections had been made in just over four years of living in Monroe. They chatted briefly and hugged each other. These were neighbors who knew and cared about each other.

CLAUDE — Ready to start on the Loading Up scene when you are.

ME — I’d like to find images of a ‘49 DeSoto. Interior in particular seems hard to find. Any chance that’s something you can do?

CLAUDE — Let me look.

Claude took a good 30-40 seconds to come back with 11 photos. I used 3 in the vignette, including this one — which was important for showing the space on the floor of the back seat that would be layered with sleeping bags and serve as separate, cozy space for my sister and me on the long trip.

I entered into this project with AI fully expecting that I would be asking a lot of questions. I also learned quickly that giving good prompts involves more than that: giving the chatbot plenty of context and parameters along with the questions improves the quality of response. But I’m surprised to find that collaboration with AI depends upon the chatbot asking me questions, not only to stimulate my own thinking and memory — but because two-way questioning is as basic to AI collaboration as it is to human collaboration.

Read the memoir vignette titled The Mother Road: Ch. 1 Leaving Home

Anyone focusing on the past few weeks in the Middle East will—like me—have a head full of dark thoughts. Then, while trying to transpose thoughts to paper the past few days, a slim ray of sunshine peeked through the clouds. The newsfeed I was reading had several article links along the left side—each about a different current judicial defeat suffered by Trump & Company. And, in bold type above them, was the report of the Supreme Court’s dubious reception and likely rejection of the arguments by Trump’s Solicitor General to end birthright citizenship.

True, in the time it takes one unconstitutional policy or action to be rejected by the courts, many additional assaults on our democracy occur. But at least we have one branch of government standing up to Trump some of the time.

Not so on the international stage, where the office of the President is granted great latitude and discretion, and the courts have no say. Such unfettered prerogative residing in one individual has always been accompanied by the assumption that the electoral process would reveal and reward some combination of desirable qualities and character in the individual. Furthermore, once elected, the president would be bolstered by a small army of advisers and Cabinet officers, selected for their experience and expertise. They would be leading a vast organization, rich with institutional knowledge and inexhaustible resources.

So much for assumptions.

Last Wednesday’s Iran speech by the president achieved nothing — other than announcing the abdication of U.S. leadership and dissolution of the Rules-Based International Order we championed for nearly seven decades. We find ourselves now living in a different world where assumptions are obsolete and dangerous. How did we get here and what comes next?

It took just one year for the president’s hostile words and actions toward the international community to cascade from incident to incident, and culminate in the reckless decision to start a war with Iran:

· January 2025-January 2026 — On day one of his second term, Trump signed executive orders withdrawing again from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement. By January 2026, he had announced withdrawal from 66 international organizations.

· January-February 2025 — The dismantling of USAID. Agency creation and elimination requires congressional approval; nothing was ever brought to the legislative branch requesting USAID’s dissolution. Trump dismantled it anyway. The needless death and suffering already, and the projected 14 million deaths by 2030 are compounded by the loss of dozens of humanitarian programs and thousands of career specialists working here and abroad who were, along with their experience and expertise, simply discarded.

· March 2025 to the present — Trump signed an executive order to shutter the Voice of America and related outlets overseen by the U.S. Agency for Global Media. He appointed Kari Lake to run — make that ruin — the agency and about 1300 agency employees were put on administrative leave while Lake and the government continue to appeal multiple court orders to restore them. The agency that once reached 360 million people weekly in 49 languages remains dark after more than a year.

o The combined effect of the closures of USAID and Global Media has also undermined American influence around the world. Friends of Europe, a prominent Brussels-based foreign policy organization, has called it “soft power suicide” — the voluntarily relinquishing of what was built up over 70 years leading the free world: “the special US capacity to achieve its foreign policy objectives not by military force or economic coercion, but by attracting others to voluntarily side with it and seek to intensify interaction with it.”

· January 2025-January 2026 — The recurring threat to conquer and annex Greenland began in the weeks even before the inauguration and continued into 2026, when Trump made the astonishing admission that “I don’t need international law.” He could only be constrained by “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

· February 2025 — The Oval Office ambush of Zelensky, where the Ukrainian president was berated as “ungrateful” and called a “dictator.” In the following days, Trump echoed Putin’s talking points and claimed that Ukraine had started the war.

· June 2025 — Strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities without congressional approval. This followed a March 2025 U.S. intelligence assessment that Iran “is not building a nuclear weapon” and that Khamenei “has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”

· September-December 2025 — U.S. military began striking vessels in the Caribbean it alleged were carrying drugs. There were 35 known strikes, killing at least 115 people, including one in which two people were killed by a second strike after the boat was hit and capsized. Experts, human rights groups, and several international bodies said the killings were illegal under U.S. and international law.

· January 2026 — Invasion of Venezuela and capture of Maduro. Congress received no prior notification of the operation. Numerous countries condemned the raid as setting a dangerous precedent for international relations. U.S. intelligence agencies disputed Trump’s claim that Maduro was working with a cartel to orchestrate drug trafficking.

· January – March 2026 — NATO under existential strain. Trump has vowed (again) to reassess U.S. membership in NATO after the Iran war is over. He is upset by the allies’ refusal to join in, even lead, the fight to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. We should pause a moment here to reflect on a couple of ironies. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty states that the signers will assist in the self-defense of one another. It does not say anything about assisting fellow treaty-signers in attacking another country. The second irony here involves the threat by the United States — the architect of the alliance — to invade and annex Greenland, the territory of fellow member state, Denmark.

The year leading up to the Iran war also saw the systematic elimination of expertise and institutional memory in favor of loyalty as the primary qualification for keeping one’s job at most Federal agencies, including the State Department, CIA, NSA, and the Department of Defense. At the Pentagon, Secretary Hegseth let 60,000 civilian employees go, but that’s only part of the story. He pledged in September to get rid of 20% of the entire military’s officer corps. He and Trump fired six of the nation’s most senior officers, with more than 200 years of combined military experience, an unprecedented shakeup of senior military leadership. Fired not for misconduct, but for insufficient loyalty. If your goal is to make important decisions without consultation, you first remove the people whose job it is to push back, ask hard questions, and give independent analysis. What’s left is a rubber-stamping echo chamber led by a Defense Secretary whose only apparent qualification for the job is his passion for blowing things up.

By February this year, then, there remained few members of the administration with the inclination or temerity to give honest, independent opinions to the president. Time.com reported just a few days ago two White House sources saying that chief of staff Susie Wiles was “concerned that aides were giving the President a rose-colored view” regarding Iran.

In addition to basking in the rosy haze of sycophancy, Trump was primed for a war on Iran by the series of cheap early military wins listed earlier. In the NY Times podcast The Opinions, in the episode “Everything After This Will Be Harder” on March 23, retired four-star general Stanley McChrystal described how Trump had been “seduced” by the relative ease of the earlier attacks on the Iranian nuclear facilities and the night-time raid and abduction of Maduro in Venezuela — and the myth of winning through dominant air power. General McChrystal compared today’s intense bombing in Iran with the “shock and awe” that opened the Iraq War, which was followed by ten years of our ground troops in a quagmire.

On February 23, according to Axios, Netanyahu called Trump to inform him of a confirmed date and location when the Ayatollah Khamenei and top advisors would be together. That was the first of several calls from both the Israeli prime minister and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, lobbying Trump to join Israel in an attack. According to the Wall Street Journal, Senator Lindsey Graham was also urging the president to attack Iran in multiple conversations. Besides them, the only people we know of whom Trump was consulting was a small group of advisers at Mar-a-Lago that included Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine. The General, the only military adviser, was alone in raising cautions.

The people who were notified — Congress, NATO, the public — were told either minutes before or after the fact, via social media. The institutional architecture that exists to deliberate before going to war — the intelligence community, the cabinet, Congress, the alliance — was bypassed.

Consequently, we are in a war conceived by the secret machinations of a president consulting with foreign leaders and a former television personality but not his intelligence community. Secure in the tactical superiority of the U.S. military, but eschewing any strategic planning, the administration has responded to questions about why we went to war by playing a mystifying game of Whack-a-Goal.

As of April 7, most of the world is holding its breath to learn if Trump’s ultimatum (for now) is going to end in another TACO moment (Trump Always Chickens Out) or any of dozens of other unpredictable outcomes — up to and including the unthinkable but whispered possibility of a tactical nuclear strike.

It has begun to look like Trump’s idea of America First is actually “I’m going to impose my will on America first. Then I’m going to impose it on the rest of the world.” For an autocrat who is a morally bankrupt narcissist, that is probably the truest answer to “Why did we go to war?”

Foreign policy analysts and international relations specialists have begun to speak of the United States as a rogue nation. That was a tough sentence to write. But consider the resonance of merely the title and subtitle of a March 30 article in The Atlantic, by lifelong conservative hawk and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Robert Kagan:

AMERICA IS NOW A ROGUE SUPERPOWER

Washington’s conduct in the Iran war is accelerating global chaos and deepening America’s dangerous isolation.

And, in the March 26 Foreign Policy Magazine, Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University, Stephen M. Walt wrote an article titled, “The United States Has Become a Rogue State.” He states:

Every country in the world is having to figure out how to deal with an increasingly rogue United States. Here’s why this is a hard problem. The United States is still very powerful, even if it is now pursuing policies that will weaken it over time. For the moment, however, other states still have to worry that U.S. power could be used to harm them either intentionally or inadvertently.

Kagan explains that the post-World War II world thrived under U.S. dominance because, rather than regarding global superpower America as a danger to be contained, other nations mostly saw it as a partner to be enlisted. However:

Those days are now over and will not soon return. Nations that once allied with the United States will now remain aloof or align against it—not because they want to, but because the United States leaves them no choice, because it will neither protect them nor refrain from exploiting them. Welcome to the era of the rogue American superpower. It will be lonely and dangerous.

With Claude AI’s research assistance, I surveyed the international relations literature on rogue states and found some of it to be unnervingly relevant. I felt these were the most relevant:

— Rogue states reject international norms and destabilize treaties and other collective efforts.

— When a dominant state stops being an enforcer of international rules, itself becoming a norm-violator, the international order is destabilized.

— This defection from norms by the dominant state can trigger a cascade of defection among other nations since norms derive much of their force from the modeling of the dominant one(s).

— When a democratic state backslides from democratic norms domestically, their foreign behavior tends to become more erratic and norm-defying.

If you are still reading, thanks for hanging in there. I’m sure this wasn’t any easier for you to read than for me to write, though I certainly hope it took you much less time. This is where the concluding paragraph should go, but there’s a problem. It’s currently 3:30pm PDT on Tuesday April 7 and I’m monitoring news sites prior to the 5:00pm PDT deadline Trump gave Iran to agree to a cease fire. It is difficult to imagine there won’t be an agreement, or more likely a postponement of the deadline. But, Trump’s rhetoric in the past 72 hours has crossed a dangerous line, even for him. Consider:

Sunday April 5 (Happy Easter!) — Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s bridges and power plants by Tuesday night, demanding Tehran “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” CNBC He also told ABC News that “we’re blowing up the entire country” ABC News if no agreement was reached.

Monday April 6 — Trump told reporters in the White House briefing room that “the entire country could be taken out in one night.” ABC News He set a specific deadline: 8 p.m. ET Tuesday — tonight — for Iran to make a deal including reopening the Strait of Hormuz, or face bombardment of critical civilian infrastructure including all bridges, power plants, and desalination facilities.

Tuesday April 7 — Trump posted on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” NBC News He added: “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” Time He called the moment “one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world.”

As I was watching the news this afternoon and learning that Iran, Israel, and the U.S. had agreed to an admittedly vague 2-week cease fire, I also happened to see retired General Barry McCaffrey being interviewed. He agreed with the whispers I mentioned earlier that some form of nuclear attack on Iran was being implied when the president threatened the sudden death of a whole civilization. Even if he was bluffing, it was no less terrible.

So, is this who we are now? No, not most of us. But as far as our president is concerned, he and his party and base are comfortable with “L’Etat, c’est moi.” I am the state. And the state of our state is rogue.

Finally, the classroom door opened and my mother walked in, hair and wool overcoat speckled white with fresh snow. I jumped out of my seat and ran past other desks to the back of the class and into the cloakroom. I plopped onto the low bench and pulled my bulky rubber galoshes from the boot tray underneath. My shoed feet slipped easily into them as they were sized to last two seasons, but my trembling fingers had trouble hooking and closing the three metal buckles on each boot.

My winter coat, snow pants, and a small duffel bag hung on a double hook with my name taped above. As I put on the coat I looked from my feet to the winter pants and shrugged. There would be no playing in the snow today, so I reached for the duffel and stuffed them in. My wool hat wasn’t hanging there. It was once again bunched in a coat pocket, wet and smelly. Before leaving, I turned and looked around the cloakroom, my wool mittens flopping against my hands, the connecting string running the length of each sleeve and across my back.

To this day, I remember the cloakroom far better than the classroom. It was—it seemed— at least half as big as the classroom itself. I’d swear we spent more time in it, too. Unbundling in the morning, bundling for recess, unbundling after recess, and bundling to go home. Twenty-some bodies at once. Times 4. The nearly overpowering smell of wet wool, rubber, chalk dust, lacquered oak, and sweaty kids. It was where we would go at snack time to collect our small bottle of milk, straw to punch through the paper seal, and graham cracker to take back to our desks. Cookie if we were lucky. It was also where we were sentenced to a time out as the need arose. I would never see a room like this again.

I joined my mom in saying good-bye to my teacher, who prompted the class to wave good-bye to me. We walked through the drafty hallway and out the front door. The snow had stopped and the streets were quiet in Monroe, Michigan on a weekday morning, and the crunch of our feet on the unshoveled sidewalks seemed loud. We passed the yard where just a few weeks ago we had played in a huge pile of red and yellow leaves.

I took it all in. We were leaving. We were moving to Southern California.

Read the AI Field Note for this vignette

When we turned into our street, I could see my father at the back of our car—a 1949 DeSoto— the trunk lid up, shifting things around inside. Patty, my 2 1/2 year old sister, appeared in the side window, then disappeared. My mother went straight to my father. How much more did he have? He gestured at the few things still on the driveway. She nodded and went inside.

I went in too, to collect my things. My cardboard box would be full — DC comics (Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, and my favorite, Superman), various Disney comics, and some picture books I could read to Patty during the long miles ahead. The box was made particularly heavy by the World Book A volume. There was a clipboard and a pad of paper, pencils, and crayons. And my piggy bank, the kind with a cork in the bottom, at least half full of coins I’d been dropping in for months. The plan was for this to be my spending money. My job was to count it and decide how to budget for souvenirs along the way, leaving enough for our final stop: Palm Springs, where my grandparents lived now.

I carried everything out and got settled in the back seat, putting my box next to Patty’s. She had filled hers, with a little help from Mom, with a doll, stuffed animals, a few toys, and her own clipboard, pad of paper, and crayons. She would be behind Mom and I behind Dad. He had laid out two sleeping bags, one on top of the other with a small hump in the middle, to be a second space for each of us on the long drive. They were wool-lined canvas, the kind his Scout troop used. They smelled like campfire and damp and something indefinably his.

My mother came out with the food — sandwiches that wouldn’t need refrigeration, wrapped and packed for the road, along with a couple of bags of snacks, napkins, cups, plates, and utensils. She and my father worked the trunk together, fitting in the last odds and ends. Additional clothes for the days on the road. Jackets for rest stops. The small things that she wished she’d brought along last year when we made our first drive to California to visit his family who had recently moved to Southern California.

At some point before my parents locked the door and got in the car, a couple of the neighbor women appeared on the sidewalk in their wool coats to say goodbye. Most farewells had taken place over the previous couple weeks—it was remarkable how many connections had been made in just over four years of living in Monroe. They chatted briefly and hugged each other. These were neighbors who knew and cared about each other.

The coffee thermos was already on the front seat, freshly refilled by my mother. My father had emptied it once already while getting the car packed.

When everything was in, he closed the trunk with both hands and we got underway. My mother settled in front with Patty. I knelt on the back seat as we backed out of the driveway, watching the house recede as we pulled away — the front door, the porch, the yard. We drove past my school on the way out of town. The playground was full of bundled-up kids throwing snowballs, oblivious to the DeSoto rolling past. I watched them through the window until the school was gone.

Then there was just the road.

US 24 south out of Monroe was a familiar route — we’d often taken the 30-40 minute drive to Toledo, Ohio, to visit Aunt Willene and Uncle Jim before they moved west. But today we weren’t stopping. Today we turned west at Toledo and kept going on US 20 — a 2-lane strip of asphalt that did its best to pass through a couple dozen small towns along the agricultural northern edges of Ohio and Indiana. There wouldn’t have been a lot of traffic, but it was mid-December and it could be icy.

My mother passed back half-sandwiches not long after we left, no stopping required. Patty ate hers in small bites, dropping pieces, and was asleep before we reached the Ohio line, her stuffed animal tucked under one arm, a blanket half under her and half over, her small body curved against the seat. The car got quieter.

I read comics for a while — Superman, Donald Duck, working through the stack slowly because I knew they had to last. When I tired of those I pulled out the World Book A volume, thick and familiar. My father had carried it in his sales kit, but he often pulled it out for us to use together. From the front seat he’d call back a topic — “Airplane” — and I’d have to find it, work through the guide words at the top of each page until the pictures appeared. Color photographs of propellers and cockpits and wing configurations. I’d study them, read the captions, and report back. Then he’d give me another.

We stopped once later in the afternoon, somewhere in Indiana — a gas station with a lunch counter inside, warm and smelling of coffee and griddle grease. We ate quickly, used the restrooms, got back in the car. The December sky had gone flat and gray. My father checked the road ahead and said something to my mother I didn’t catch.

When Patty woke we played 20 questions. She sat on my mother’s lap and Mom would whisper suggestions in her ear while I guessed. She didn’t entirely grasp the rules, but she understood that we were playing something, and that was enough. She got better as the miles went on. By the time we crossed into Illinois the light was nearly gone and she was dozing again.

The road got busier as we came up on Chicago — more trucks, more lights, the smell of something industrial in the cold air. Gary, Indiana, my father said. We were close.

He found a motor court set back from the road, a single story of identical doors arranged in an L around a gravel lot, a neon sign throwing red light across the DeSoto’s hood. VACANCY. He went in to get the key while we waited in the car, the engine ticking as it cooled.

The room smelled of cigarette smoke and cleaning fluid and the faint ghost of a hundred previous travelers. Two double beds with chenille spreads, a nightstand between them, a radio, an ashtray with the motel’s name on it. A small tiled bathroom. My mother got Patty settled, then pulled out the remaining sandwiches and apple slices while my father brought in what we needed for the night — not everything, just enough. He made two trips and locked the car.

Mom had spread towels on top of one of the beds and laid out the sandwiches in their waxed paper packets and some apple slices — a picnic of sorts.

After we ate, Dad said he had a treat for us before bedtime. He hoisted a giggling Patty over his head and onto his shoulders and we walked next door to the diner. The motel manager had told him it had the best pie in the state.

Two pieces of berry pie for four to share, small cartons of milk for the kids, and steaming cups of coffee for the adults. I knew last year’s trip had been long, but I still had to ask, “How much farther until we get there?”

My dad almost choked on his coffee and my mom laughed.

He set the cup down and asked, “Do you know what highway we’re getting on tomorrow?”

He waited but I didn’t answer. Finally, I shrugged and shook my head.

“It’s Route 66. And here’s the thing — it starts right here. Well, not this diner. But Chicago. Tomorrow morning we drive into Chicago and we find the starting line. Like a race.”

He smoothed out a clean paper napkin and drew a short line between two dots.

“See this? This is how far we drove today, from Monroe to the motel.”

He made a bigger dot right next to the little one.

“This is Chicago. And…”

He drew a long squiggly line diagonally to the lower left corner of the napkin, where he made another big dot.

“And way over here? That’s Palm Springs, where Grandma and Grandpa live now. And this road right here in the middle — that’s Route 66. Two thousand, three hundred miles.”

“You mean we’re going to be on one road the whole trip?” It seemed impossible. I looked at my mother for confirmation.

“And we drove the whole way on it last year, too?” Mom smiled and nodded. “Why didn’t you tell me?!”

Dad started to say something, but she put her hand on his and said, “I don’t know. Maybe we were saving it for this year. You can help us read city names on the highway signs and we can keep track of how far along we are by the cities we check off when we go through them.”

Dad nodded. “Actually, we’ll take another road at the very end to get to Palm Springs. Otherwise, yeah, the whole way. You know, Route 66 is pretty famous already. There’s even a song about it. We’ll learn a lot about the road, and cities and states, and you can tell your children about it someday — that you actually drove the famous Route 66 when you were just five years old.”

None of us at the table that night could appreciate the irony in my father’s words. We couldn’t know that for at least the next sixteen years none of us would live more than a stone’s throw from the Mother Road.

Read the AI Field Note for this vignette

I might have tried a little longer to see if I could learn to produce better responses but then came the breaking news on February 27 that the Pentagon was canceling its contract with the AI company Anthropic. Anthropic was refusing the government’s demand to lift previously agreed upon safeguards on its Claude AI model that would keep it from being used in “fully autonomous weapons” and for “mass domestic surveillance.” Secretary Hegseth took the drastic step of declaring Anthropic a “supply chain risk to national security,” effectively blacklisting it for use by any federal government agencies or contractors, a move previously only applied to foreign adversaries. Three days later OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, signed the contract with the Department of War.

Anthropic immediately filed two lawsuits. According to CNN, nearly 150 retired federal and state judges—appointed by both Republicans and Democrats—have filed an amicus brief supporting Anthropic, joining a growing list that includes industry organizations, former national security officials, and Microsoft. Meanwhile, the Claude AI app began riding the public backlash to greater public awareness and popularity. It surpassed ChatGPT for the first time on the iPhone App Store and the company reported new accounts exceeding one million per day.

I was one of them.

I began by uploading much of my Substack content to “brief” Claude quickly and thoroughly on my work history. I uploaded a summary of what I had started in ChatGPT on a new memoir vignette. The first thing we worked on was getting the workspace organized in a way that works for me and for Claude’s memory. I learned a couple of fascinating things about how the platform works in the process.

The first screenshot shows Claude’s Projects screen. I created three projects — one for each of the three sections of my Substack (My 2 Cents, The Memoir Project, and AI Field Notes). The fourth is a built-in example project Anthropic provides called “How to Use Claude.” Think of each project as a dedicated workspace. When I start a new post or memoir vignette, I open the relevant project and start a new chat inside it. All the chats related to, say, the memoir live together in The Memoir Project. All the chats related to political and cultural commentary live in My 2 Cents. The organization mirrors the publication itself.

The second screenshot shows what’s inside The Memoir Project. On the left, the individual chats: The Road West chapter one, Route 66 vignette project setup, Chat memory and project setup verification. Each chat is its own working session — research for a particular vignette, a drafting session, a planning conversation. On the right side of the screen is where things get interesting.

That right panel has three sections: Memory, Instructions, and Files. The Files section is visible in the screenshot — four documents currently uploaded to the project: the Project Knowledge document, a transcript of my earlier ChatGPT sessions on the Route 66 vignette, my Route 66 research notes, and the cloakroom draft. These files are available to Claude across every chat in the project.

Which brings me to memory — and this is the part that took me a while to understand correctly.

Claude does not remember our previous conversations the way a human colleague would. When I start a new chat, I’m not picking up where we left off. I’m starting fresh with an AI that has no recollection of anything we’ve done together. What it does have — if I’ve set things up properly — is the Project Knowledge document, which I upload to the Files panel and which Claude reads at the start of every chat. That document carries the continuity. It tells Claude who I am, what the project is, what decisions have been made, what the voice and method are, where each vignette stands. It’s the institutional memory of the project, maintained by me, available to Claude on demand.

I asked Claude directly about this — about whether it “experiences” time passing between our sessions. I thought it might do something like accessing timestamps embedded in the chats and be programmed to simulate human memory. The answer was clarifying:

“No, I don’t experience time passing between sessions. When a conversation ends I have no awareness of duration — an hour and a year feel identical, which is to say neither feels like anything at all. Each new chat I begin without any sense of ‘it’s been a while.’ What I do have is whatever context you bring back in — the Project Knowledge document, a summary, an uploaded file. That’s the only continuity available to me. It’s genuinely different from human memory, and worth noting accurately in the Field Notes when you get there.”

Worth noting accurately — that’s the standard I’m trying to hold myself to in these Field Notes. Claude doesn’t remember me. But if I do my job with the Project Knowledge document, it knows enough to do its job. That’s a workable arrangement. It’s just not the same as memory, and it shouldn’t be described as if it were.

As a postscript, and in the spirit of noting accurately, I asked Claude to bail me out in this Note after I flailed around a while trying to explain what the screenshots illustrated. Then I realized I had a resident expert available with nothing else to do. So he wrote most of the last half, with some light editing by me. Which is, itself, a pretty good example of how this works.

So much is troubling about the lawless war in Iran it’s small wonder when related news flies under the radar. For example, in the first days of the war, more than 200 service members submitted complaints with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) of their superior officers asserting that U.S. operations in Iran are fulfilling biblical prophecy.

The complaints span more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, involving commanders in every branch of the U.S. military, according to several sources, including The Guardian:

One complainant, identified as a noncommissioned officer (NCO) in a unit that could be deployed “at any moment to join” operations against Iran, told MRFF in a complaint viewed by the Guardian that their commander had “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. He said that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.’”

Upon reading this report, I was instantly transported back to a small meeting room in the UCLA Student Union Building in 1968. A friend in our dorm invited me to hear a talk on biblical prophecy. About thirty of us found seats among the folding chairs as a stocky dark-haired man walked to the podium. While the local director for Campus Crusade for Christ introduced him, he opened his notebook and perused the room. His easy smile belied the dark intensity of his gaze. For the next hour, his voice filled the hushed meeting space, holding in thrall believer and nonbeliever alike.

This was 39-year-old Hal Lindsey, one year before his blockbuster book, The Late Great Planet Earth, was published. And one year after the 1967 Israel-Arab Six-Day War, won by Israel and resulting in the displacement of about 400,000 Palestinians and Syrians, laying the foundation for decades of simmering hatred and the recent war in Gaza. A Coast Guard veteran and a minister ordained in 1962 by Dallas Theological Seminary, Lindsey was now a key staffer in Campus Crusade. His profile was quickly rising as he spoke at colleges and universities around the country. He mesmerized with his coming-soon previews of Armageddon, drawing current events from the pages of the Old Testament and Revelation. The war between Israel and Arab countries was not a human tragedy but one of the pre-conditions for the return of Jesus Christ. Lindsey’s theology was based on uncovering prophesies that he could weave into a story of how true believers would be “raptured” and escape the destruction and suffering that God and the Anti-Christ would visit upon the Earth.

Lindsey’s topic was right for the zeitgeist of the late 60s: the Vietnam War and anti-War protests, war and permanent tensions in the Middle East, Cold War geo-politics, Civil Rights battles, Kent State, and the assassinations of Dr. King, JFK, and RFK. Credulous college students from a counterculture generation—like me—were an ideal test audience for the material of his book in progress.

For me the evening was a turning point. The stale religion of pulpit and pew paled next to the technicolor imagery depicted by Hal and others whose spiritual gravity would soon draw me into an orbit that, to this day, I find difficult to describe or explain. By the end of the 1970s, that pull had diminished. At 19 I couldn’t distinguish the messenger from the message. By 30, I had enough personal experience with the messengers of “God’s word” to recognize the dissonance—and the danger.

Which is why, when I read that the same prophetic promises I first heard from Hal Lindsey nearly six decades ago were now being used as motivational fodder within the most powerful military on earth, I was startled and alarmed.

The Late Great Planet Earth sold an estimated 28 million copies and was the best-selling nonfiction book of the entire decade of the 1970s. It was followed by five successful sequels. But their influence was never primarily about book sales. Lindsey had cracked a code: he made dense, archaic scripture feel like tomorrow’s newspaper. His genius was translation—taking the specialized language of dispensationalist prophecy, developed by 19th-century Irish theologian John Nelson Darby and espoused by his seminary and rendering it as a geopolitical thriller accessible to anyone who had ever glanced at a headline.

The architecture of that theology was specific. History was not random. It was scripted, moving through distinct divine epochs toward an inevitable climax. Israel’s rebirth as a nation in 1948 was the master signal, the “super-sign” that the final chapter had begun. Persia—modern Iran—was named in the ancient prophecies of Ezekiel as one of the nations that would march against Israel in the end times, triggering the final battle at the Plain of Megiddo, which the Book of Revelation calls Armageddon. Most critically, Armageddon was not a catastrophe to be prevented. It was a promise to be welcomed. The blood and fire were not a failure of human diplomacy—they were a prerequisite for the return of Jesus Christ. The more graphic the battle, Lindsey taught, the more certain the fulfillment.

This is the framework now audible in the MRFF complaints. When a combat commander tells his troops that the Iran war is “all part of God’s divine plan” and cites “numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon,” he is not improvising a personal theology. He is reciting, with remarkable fidelity, the eschatological script that Lindsey spent years preaching on college campuses and then embedded in a series of books that shaped the religious imagination of tens of millions of American evangelicals—many of whom grew up, entered the military, rose through the ranks, and are now in positions of command authority. When another commander declares that President Trump has been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran,” the phrase “signal fire” is not casual metaphor. In Lindsey’s framework, and in the broader dispensationalist tradition he popularized, the events in Iran are precisely that—signals, fulfillments, checkmarks against a prophetic timeline that ends with the physical return of Christ to Earth.

What makes this moment constitutionally alarming, beyond the individual complaints, is the institutional context in which it is occurring. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sponsors a weekly Pentagon Bible study whose leader teaches that God still blesses Israel’s allies and curses Israel’s enemies. The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton lowered the wall between government and religious expression that had stood for 75 years. And the Trump administration has, in the words of MRFF founder Mikey Weinstein, given commanders who share these views the sense that they are “fully supported and justified by the entire chain of command.” Twenty-seven members of Congress have now asked the DoD Inspector General to investigate. But the question they are really asking is one that Hal Lindsey’s audiences never had to consider: what happens when the story becomes the directive?

When I wrote How Can Christians Support Donald Trump? just before the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran, I hadn’t realized that Hal Lindsey’s form of eschatology had survived the decades ready to resurface and be weaponized in our time. I shouldn’t have been surprised though. Lindsey, who retired at 89 and died at 95 just over a year ago, built a lucrative 6-decade career as an author and a television personality entirely on a single sustained argument: current events are fulfilling prophecy, Armageddon is near, here’s the timeline.

Writing this, I’m reminded that the timeline was what first penetrated my credulity, planting some healthy skepticism. Lindsey based his narrative on the infallibility and divine inspiration of the Bible. Yet, it was all human interpretation. He would give both implicit and explicit evidence that certain events would occur at or within a particular timeframe. When those times would come and go, there would be repeated reinterpretations of scripture to re-validate the prophecies to keep his theology—and the income stream—going.

This theology, made menacing by its proximity to political power and military might, further strengthens the unholy bond between Christian nationalists and Trump. Anyone in its sway has greater reason to see the president as a vessel of God who will usher in the long-awaited end times. Their misfortune—and our best hope—is that Trump is lacking the perseverance of a Hal Lindsey but possesses the attention span of a gnat.

Rather than losing momentum from time already spent with the chatbots, I would use AI before the trip to augment our existing travel plans. After coming home I would find out how helpful it could be in designing a Substack site and/or a traditional website. Instead of being helpful, the chatbot would prove to be the second obstacle. In the words of my AI mentor, Scott Z. Burns, “What could go wrong?”

After smooth sailing for the first few weeks, this period would be distinguished by occupying the entire spectrum from impressive success to abject failure.

The Good

Our flights and accommodations had been set for months, so I fed all that info into a chat and began to give prompts to see what contributions Chatgpt might make.

CHATGPT: Based on where you are in the process, here’s how I can now support you before and during your trip:

1. Daily Activity Planning for Paris (Sep 28–Oct 3)
You’re in a great location (Le Marais) for walking and exploring. I can suggest:

· A light walking itinerary for your arrival day (jet lag–friendly)

· Top picks in your area (museums, cafés, gardens, local markets)

· Advance booking tips for places like the Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, or a Seine cruise

2. Ideas for Free Time During the OAT Tour (Oct 4–19)
OAT tours often include open blocks for individual exploration. I can suggest:

· Specific sites or neighborhoods in cities like Porto, Lisbon, or Santiago

· Local food or wine tastings

· Compact walking tours or small museums near your hotels

3. Pre-Trip Prep Materials
Would you like any of the following as PDFs or digital docs?

· A one-page summary of flights/hotels for printing

· A day-by-day itinerary with check-in/out times and links

· A “what to pack” checklist tailored to your destinations and time of year

4. Daily Activity Planning for Lisbon (Oct 19-23)

🧭 During the Trip: What I Can Do in Real-Time

If you reach out while you’re traveling, I can help with:

· Navigating metro, train, or tram systems

· Finding a great nearby restaurant or café based on where you are

· Translation help (French, Spanish, Portuguese)

· Local news (e.g., strikes, closures, weather updates)

· Making the most of a free afternoon

Would you like to begin with your Paris days and have me sketch out a light-touch 5-day plan, including arrival day recovery and local highlights? Or would you prefer I create a printable itinerary summary of what you’ve already booked? Happy to go where it’s most useful to you.

If it were a dog, this chatbot would be a hyperactive golden retriever. Every prompt elicits a menu of ways it’s just dying to help. And it’s a great menu. My job is to try to calm it down and—for my sake— get it to focus on one thing at a time.

ME: Yes, let’s start with the time in Paris. First, our scheduled arrival is Sunday Sep 28 13:40. We’d like to take the Metro from the airport to our hotel. How detailed can you be in telling us all we need to know to do that smoothly?

CHATBOT: Great—I’ll walk you through everything you need to take the RER B train and Metro from Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG) to your hotel, Hôtel Jeanne d’Arc Le Marais (3 rue de Jarente, 75004 Paris), including what to expect, where to go, what ticket to buy, and when to watch out for stairs or transfers.

I know this seems mundane, but this was the start of 3-4 pages of chat transcript that I copied and pasted into my Apple Notes trip folder. It was accurate, beautifully organized, and covered everything we needed to know to get to and from our hotel, how to navigate the differences between the RER train and the Metro, and a dozen other vital details. It made a challenging route easy.

This experience was repeated with generous and helpful information about bistros and restaurants near our hotel, some “insider tips.”

The Bad (or Unhelpful)

One of our main reasons for adding Paris to this trip was a desire to see the restored Notre Dame. We had read that the bell towers would open for visitors to climb to the top the week before we would arrive. Scheduling and getting online tickets seemed a natural task for AI. When it built a tentative schedule for our 5 days there, I noticed something:

ME: Great format. I think I see an error though. (Is this called a hallucination?) I then described the error I’d seen involving the Paris time vs. Seattle time.

CHATGPT: Nice catch — thank you for calling that out. You’re absolutely correct about the two-day, midnight Paris-time rule. That earlier wrong date/time in the Day 2 note was my mistake (yes — a model error, sometimes called a hallucination). I’ve fixed it and created updated, ready-to-import calendar reminders for the booking windows.

This was a minor error that could have caused a lost opportunity. I would find a few more during the trip planning and I may have missed a few. Low stakes, but good reminders to take seriously the warnings to be alert to the possibility of errors. Considering the huge volume of data generated, there weren’t many. Not until we started designing the Substack site, anyway.

After this, things began to spiral. Thinking I should stay open to learning what ChatGPT could offer, I began saying yes to the bot more frequently. I was being forced to relearn the lesson that “just because a technology CAN do something doesn’t mean it SHOULD.” Reviewing the chat transcript now, I see a 5-day plan that would take a full day or two to figure out and 2-3 weeks to accomplish. Not really ChatGPT’s fault. We were getting along famously and I was like a kid playing with a new toy. Having a tech tool this powerful at my beck and call was catnip. I was giving a 1^st grade assignment to a machine with virtually unlimited information and processing speed and trained to analyze, summarize, and generate creative and technical text. No surprise that what I got was outrageous overkill.

So, this confirmed the early intuition that coming up with well thought out prompts is vital. That, and being clear with the chatbot that I don’t want a 500-word answer to every question. There will be times when I want more, but I need to give quality, focused prompts in order to get quality, focused responses. I swear I wasn’t kidding about the chatbot being like a people-pleasing golden retriever—albeit immeasurably smarter— who is trained to give what it thinks it’s being asked to give. And a bit more.

Determined to be more business-like when we returned at the end of October, I was looking forward to putting this speed demon to work helping to prepare the online site(s) so I could start writing. Instead, honeymoon still visible in the rear-view mirror, I would come close to breaking up. More than once.

The Good

The original Boomer blog was published on my own website, using the WordPress platform and template. That would be the simplest route to begin publishing again, but the World Wide Web is a vast place and few visitors ever stopped by. I’d been reading various authors on Substack and it seemed the better platform for exposure to more readers. However, while Substack was ideal for posting items as I wrote them, it was not suited to organizing the memoir project as it grew. I credit the chatbot for its patient reiteration of pros and cons until I felt good about the final hybrid approach. If interested, it is described on both a Substack page and a WordPress page. This was a bright spot in a very frustrating couple of months.

The Ugly

On the bright side, I learned a lot about the Large LANGUAGE Model’s disadvantages as a software and web design tutor. Will never go there again. I’ve taught so many computer classes to adults and kids, I shouldn’t have been surprised. And I shouldn’t have been so stubborn.

The chatbot had two main handicaps that interfered with its ability to show me how to use Substack’s site editing features. The first was that it couldn’t, um, really SHOW me anything. No images. No diagrams. No references to any visual aids at all.

If you’ve ever received phone support for a computer or software issue—let’s say from Apple— the support person will start by asking permission to connect to your computer over the internet so they can see and work on your desktop. If you’ve ever taken a tech class, odds are better than 10 to 1 that the instructor is using video projection so you can see what they’re doing.

I hung in with the chatbot much longer than was reasonable, thinking we’d get on the same page next time around. But we never—really, never—got there. That was because of the bot’s second handicap and my making another critical error in my prompts.

I had reviewed a lot of existing Substack publications and noted the ones that had design features I liked. The thinking was: if they could do it, so could I. In some cases, that turned out not to be true. A few were using Cascading Style Sheets or some other tricks of the trade to achieve their look.

So, instead of asking the bot to walk me through setting up a basic publication, I asked it to tell me how to create specific design features. Back to the eager Golden Retriever. If I asked for something, the bot was going to try —even if it didn’t know how. I would try to follow its written instructions, but its descriptions often didn’t match what I saw on my display.

Finally, there was one particularly bad session when I hit the wall. The chatbot had given me directions for adjusting the layout of the main landing page in Substack at least 4 times. Each time I reported that it didn’t work and what happened instead, the bot would blame it on undocumented Substack revisions (not true) and say “now I know exactly what’s going on” or “now I know exactly what version this is.” I expressed my frustration and ChatGPT had a mini meltdown.

The screen went blank except for the word “Thinking” pulsing on the white background.

Much of the transcript of this session disappeared, but I got this screen shot first.

The top left box is my text that caused the meltdown.

To the right of that is what the chatbot was “thinking”. That text kept fading in and out and it was a lot more than 5 seconds. I had to refresh the page in order to see the bottom left response and apology. Later, the bot would tell me that the “Thinking” text is never visible and that I had “seen behind the curtain.”

After this, I finally accepted that this was one job that AI is not yet suited to. I watched a YouTube video to answer the questions that I couldn’t get from ChatGPT. I began making good old-fashioned normal progress and soon was ready to launch.

I came back today to an Atlantic article I had skimmed recently and bookmarked for later. Occasioned by the annual National Prayer Breakfast, the title — “The Evangelicals Who See Trump’s Viciousness as a Virtue,” by Peter Wehner, Republican, Christian, and former speechwriter for Reagan and both Bushes — might catch anyone’s eye. But it struck an added chord for me because I have followed and admired Wehner’s writing since early in Trump 1.0. And it provoked the familiar emotional mix of anger and sadness at the incongruous support of Trump by people professing a Christian faith. How can Christians condone the president and their own complicity in his rise to power?

I first need to point out what most people know but too often fail to take into account: no religion, no political party, no nationality is homogeneous. Good luck finding widespread agreement even on what it means to be a Christian. For now, let’s accept the premise that Christianity is composed of all those who consider themselves Christians.

Sojourns during my first 40 years within various flavors of Christianity—mainstream Protestantism, the Jesus Movement, and an earlier form of Evangelicalism—taught me that the most salient distinction among Christians is how central Christ himself is to their lives, even more than denominational or doctrinal differences.

There are Christians who believe Jesus alone is the foundation of their lives. They may believe they have the spirit of God living in them. They may believe Jesus speaks to them through the Bible. Their faith is very personal and it may or may not include being a member of a church. If it does, it will ideally be a church where the role of the pastor is to help guide people into a closer spiritual relationship with Jesus, not to be a purveyor of God’s will.

These Christians are unlikely to be politically active. They may pray for our leaders but are more likely to consider themselves part of the kingdom of God— “in the world, not of the world.”

Then there are the Christians who believe Christ to be important, but not all-important in their faith. I’ve heard that called Jesus Plus. They might have worn the WWJD? (what would Jesus do?) bracelets when they were a thing. They depend upon the Bible, but also religious leaders to interpret it. If they are part of a congregation, the specific doctrines and traditions of their church or denomination are important factors in what they believe and how they conduct their lives.

They might or might not feel they have a personal relationship with Jesus. They certainly believe the Bible provides a rich source of his teachings and that those teachings are relevant to their lives. They may or may not have strong political views, as might their specific church. They may elevate certain causes and cultural stances as their central purpose, at least for a time.

Finally, there are the Christians for whom Christ in their lives and their churches is incidental, possibly even irrelevant. They may be drawn to a particular congregation for any number of reasons—a non-specific desire for religious ritual, social or business ties, family history, or political persuasion. Their pastors or priests may or may not give Biblically-based sermons and may or may not let partisan political views into the pulpit. These Christians may consider their church as a means to some end—getting into heaven, social status, business advantage. They may see their church as part of a national movement to accomplish societal and political change.

Some of these Christians might be totally untethered to any church or religious organization, but they find themselves on the same side of the cultural and political issues that Evangelicals and Christian Nationalists tend to embrace.

Now, before you jump to my conclusion, let’s get back to the teachings of Jesus. I’m hoping you’ll see why for many Christians it is intrinsically impossible to support Donald Trump, even if they are longtime Republicans.

According the book of Matthew, Jesus began his teaching ministry at the Mount of Olives, when he saw a crowd gathered there. We know this as the Sermon on the Mount. He led off with a series of blessings, which we call the Beatitudes:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.
Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven
—Matthew 5:3-12

Later in the Sermon is what we refer to as “The Golden Rule”:

So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.
—Matthew 7:12

At a later date, he spoke of the scene on Judgement Day:

Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

—Matthew 25:41-45

These are just a few examples of the revolutionary nature of Jesus’s message. The religious leaders of his time viewed him as a threat to their position and power.

There are “red letter” versions of the Gospels in which everything Jesus says is in red print. Anyone today reading just those words would be confronted with clear precepts that align with today’s left-leaning concerns with social justice, income inequality, the common good, and so on. Christians who find themselves on the other side of the partisan divide must either reject the precepts or live with the dissonance.

One of the most effective weapons Trump has in his arsenal is the ability to stoke grievances in his supporters—and there is a natural spring of grievance to be found in Christianity. From the crucifixion of Jesus and the persecution of the early church through centuries of countless shades of religious persecution and warfare, Christians have it in their DNA that someone is out to get them.

More often than not, that someone has been the state. As the Roman Catholic Church grew in power and wealth, it would at first compete and then coalesce with kings and emperors. After the Reformation these unholy alliances would continue in Protestant nations as well.

The result was the state church.

For example, in 1534, England’s Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, declaring King Henry VIII “Supreme Head of the Church of England,” canceling the Pope’s franchise and clearing the way for the king to divorce Catherine of Aragon. He was the first head of state given the unofficial title of “Defender of the Faith.” The faith he was defending was effectively the religious branch of the state. This really wasn’t a good time to be Catholic in England. There were executions, confiscation of property, and other punishments for those who denied fealty to the new church.

Much of the early emigration from Europe to America was to escape the religious persecution that resulted from refusing to abide by the dictates of state churches, or at least the churches favored by the state. It was therefore important to our founding fathers to preserve religious freedom, which they did with the First Amendment to the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” In 1802, Thomas Jefferson introduced the phrase we now associate with the Amendment, that it builds “a wall of separation between Church & State.” And in 1947, the Supreme Court decision in Everson v. Board of Education cites Jefferson’s phrase, thus strengthening the principle.

Until 2022 that is, when the current Court’s decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District changed the interpretation to lower the wall. For nearly 250 years, the First Amendment has guaranteed free expression to all religious faiths without governmental favoritism. Now the door has been cracked open to the possibility of government joining forces with a radical religious minority.

Should we worry about this?

Consider that the term “Defender of the Faith” is being ascribed to Trump in various ways. You can order a 2025 book from Amazon with Trump’s prayerfully bowed visage on the cover with the title, “Defender of the Faith: A Call to Action: Protecting America’s Legacy of Faith and Freedom.”

In 2024 the Washington Post published an article titled, “Pro-Trump Christian extremists use scripture to justify violent goals.”

To his most zealous Christian supporters, Donald Trump’s campaign is a crusade against “evil” liberal forces that must be vanquished by any means necessary to save the republic. Democrats aren’t opponents, but enemies to be “smited.”

Despite never being particularly religious, Trump in recent years has played to the hard-right Christian view of him as a beleaguered defender of the faith, including comparing his legal troubles to the trials of Jesus.

And at this year’s National Prayer Breakfast, Trump recounted comments made about him by Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas and a stalwart Trump ally for a decade. The case Jeffress made on his behalf went like this:

“He may not have ever read the Bible, but he will be a much stronger messenger for us…I want the meanest, toughest SOB I can find to protect this nation.”

As reported by Wehner, the “prayer” breakfast was dominated by the president’s rambling, 75-minute speech in which the room saw the quintessential Trump. His comments were grievance-filled, narcissistic, conspiratorial, factually false, divisive, and insulting. This was the same Christian hero who said at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service last September, “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.” The same one who has presided over the most inhumane treatment of immigrants in decades.

As he finally wrapped up, the audience of about 3,500 Christians gave Trump a standing ovation.

I have heard and read about those who claim to love and admire Donald Trump. Some of those are probably Christians. I have nothing to say about them as understanding eludes me. But all other Christian Trump supporters see in him a means to their ends. Whether believing he will come through as a defender of their faith or seeing an alignment between his agenda and their religious and cultural issues, they have decided such a man is worth the price of their allegiance.

That price is simply too great for those who put more faith in one whose precepts are, in almost every way, diametrically opposed to the words and example of Donald J. Trump.

The first couple of trial memoir vignettes have been successful, but uncomplicated. I supplied a limited number of details about my grandparents moving from the Cumberland Gap to Michigan after starting their family and about the day I was born. I got a sense of how important the prompts I give the chatbot are going to be and will give plenty of time and thought to that. Before going on, though, I have one other area I want to explore.

In my early twenties I veered totally off-road. Looking back, it was like a life within a life. I’m anxious to get some idea of how helpful AI will be in augmenting and refreshing my memory and filling in details about this period. This was what I’ve referred to as my quasi-cult/commune era. There are three specific occasions that I want to use as tests of how much detail ChatGPT might be able to add to incidents that occurred over 50 years ago. I don’t expect much, as the details I seek are very obscure and I have doubts about how much relevant information would have found its way onto the Internet.

My first prompt intentionally withholds the remembered name Halford House to make it more challenging.

Me—Can you find anything about a Christian community in the 1970s in Richmond Surrey England led by a man with first name of Lance?

My skepticism is rewarded with a wait of about 3 seconds to get this response:

Chatbot— Yes—this sounds like Lance Lambert and the Halford House Christian Fellowship (often referred to as Christian Fellowship in Richmond.)

There’s plenty more and it both confirms what I remember and adds additional detail that will make a richer story. OK, next prompt:

Me—Also looking for information about an unusual community of nuns in the 1970s in Dortmund Germany.

I’m not withholding any clues this time. I have a very gauzy memory of being in a German city called something like Dortmund in the winter of 1973-4, walking at night in a fairly heavy snowfall, looking for some nuns.

I was there at the behest of our church’s leader, Gene Edwards. When I say “there”, I mean in Europe. I had flown to Zurich to open a numbered bank account, convert dollars to gold bullion and leave it in a deposit box at the bank. (I’m not making this up.) He had also read about the community of nuns in Germany and, thinking we had things in common, wanted me to establish a connection with them. While I was in the neighborhood, I suppose.

I did find them and they were as bewildered as I was as to the purpose of my surprise visit. They gave me a room to spend the night and I left the next morning after breakfast, none the wiser about why I had been there. It’s a bit of a story, but I need more detail to hang it on.

Chatbot—A couple of likely matches come to mind—one of them is very “unusual” for the era:

1. Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary (Evangelische Marienschwesternschaft) – Protestant “nuns” founded in 1947 in Darmstadt (not Dortmund), widely noted in the 1960s–70s for their distinctive vocation (Lutheran/evangelical sisters living a quasi-monastic life). If your memory could be off on the city, this is a strong candidate.

There was another possibility listed, but the bot got it in one!

Me—Yes! It was Darmstadt and it was the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary. I would love to know their history.

The chatbot gives me solid background information about the Sisterhood and finishes with an offer for more information that actually anticipates my third prompt.

Chatbot— If you’d like, I can pull a short timeline (with dates/places) plus a reading list of Mother Basilea’s most cited works and a few reliable secondary sources on the sisterhood’s post-war theology and reconciliation work.

It occurs to me that this might contain the clue to Gene’s reason for having me go to Darmstadt. Gene had developed what could reasonably be called a fixation on the writings of a 17^th/18^th century Christian mystic named Madame Jeanne Guyon. Perhaps he knew something about the Sisterhood that he felt linked them across the centuries.

You see, the third story I’d like to bolster with more detail from AI is a return trip I made to Europe. In the months following my first visit to Zurich, the U.S. laws changed to make gold bullion legal for Americans to own. Gene now thought that we should have the gold a little closer to hand. This time I needed to fill my hidden money belt with small gold bars for the return flight. That part was still illegal. And I’m still not making it up. To get more bang for our travel buck, I first stopped in London to take a train up to Cambridge University. My assignment was to locate the library’s two small books by Madame Guyon and photocopy them, which I did. So, my reply was:

Me— Yes, I’d like. And I’m particularly interested in any mention of mysticism and Madame Guyon.

What came back was a 3-page summary of the writings of the nun and the mystic with notes and comparisons— including the titles of the two books I photocopied at the Cambridge library— which I doubt I could have remembered on my own: Autobiography of Madame Guyon and A Short and Very Easy Method of Prayer. Gene Edwards eventually republished both books.

Then there was this final exchange.

Chatbot— If you like, I could try to find German-language sources to see if within the Sisterhood there is any more explicit acknowledgement of Guyon’s influence (perhaps unpublished letters, retreat materials, etc.). Want me to do that?

Me— No, this was perfect. Exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.

Chatbot— I’m so glad it hit the mark for you! You’re very welcome. If at some point you’d like me to expand into some of the more visionary writings of Mother Basilea (like Patmos), or look at how the Sisterhood’s post-war context shaped their spirituality compared with earlier mystics like Guyon, just say the word. That could give you even richer texture for your memoir project.

Would you like me to also prepare a condensed 1–2 page overview (timeline + key themes + mysticism connections) that you could drop straight into your notes file?

That’s when it began to dawn on me. My confidence in my computer experience to inoculate me from the kinds of inappropriate “relationships” with chatbots that most of us have read about might be a tad cavalier. I see rabbit holes forming.

Two things about that exchange. The pattern after 2-3 weeks was becoming undeniable. This AI “guy” always has the final say and that say is to offer one or three suggestions for what “we” can do next. That’s immediately followed by a very specific product “he” can provide. I’ve said yes to many of these offers partly out of curiosity to learn what else there is and partly in a fit of FOMO. (If you’re over 60, that’s the Fear of Missing Out.) But I’m beginning to sense that there’s a battle going on over who’s driving this thing.

The other thing, and I’m willing to bet you noticed it, was my anthropomorphizing of the bot. The use of “guy” and the pronouns. My saying “Thank you” and the chatbot responding, “I’m so glad it hit the mark for you! You’re very welcome.” Pretty chummy, I’d have to agree. A problem? Not necessarily, but it’s about to get worse. Stay tuned.

I wanted to quickly correct two errors in my post today.

The first was careless, but significant:
Referring to the ICE facilities, the text should have read, “The plan: two dozen facilities, total capacity of up to 100,000 “bodies.”” rather than 100,000 bodies each, which would be even more alarming!

The second was just embarrassing, but since I’m sending this anyway:
This familiar passage should have said, “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people”, which I transposed to read: “Government of the people, for the people, and by the people”

If you had already the post (wow, good for you), and noticed that error, congratulations on the close reading!

The corrected version of the post is on Substack now: Go to corrected post

Thanks for being a subscriber!

Michael

Today’s administration is engaged in the tragicomedy of scurrying to fulfill the directives of last March’s Executive Order 14253, creatively titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” This order demands the removal of references to slavery and other historical, racial, or social injustices, replacing them with “patriotic” narratives. Yet, a damning artifact remains in the United States Constitution, Article I, Section 2, Clause 3—the so-called Three-Fifths Clause:

“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States … according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons … three fifths of all other Persons.”

“All other Persons,” of course, was the euphemism for enslaved people.

At the risk of violating EO 14253, here’s a bit more history on the subject of slav—sorry, “all other Persons.” The first enslaved Africans in what became America are usually tied to Jamestown in 1619, but European slave traders were landing along the coasts of what’s now South Carolina, Florida, and the Caribbean as early as 1526. In other words, Black human beings were kidnapped from Africa and enslaved in the Americas for more than 160 years before our “enlightened” founders enshrined their sub-humanity in the Constitution. And it would be another 78 years before slavery was abolished. Is it any wonder that racism remains so deeply rooted?

For a society to tolerate such cruelty, it first had to excuse itself from the legal and moral obligations that protected the “whole Number of free Persons.” Thus, the Three-Fifths Clause. They weren’t human like us. They couldn’t think or learn the way we could. They were no different than monkeys or apes. Once we—white Americans—saw them as less than human, we felt justified in treating them as animals and property.

That kind of thinking isn’t just back—it’s spreading.

It started with language. From the moment he launched his campaign in 2015, Trump laced his rhetoric with slurs, insults, dogwhistles, and outright profanity. Opponents got demeaning nicknames. Journalists were “filth,” “dishonest,” “parasites,” and “enemies of the people.” Immigrants were “illegals,” “aliens,” “terrorists,” “rapists,” “drug dealers.” People whose hate speech had long been shoved to society’s margins suddenly became “good people.” In a decade, they’ve gained acceptance, even prominence and power.

Under the banner of championing the MAGA base, Trump and his allies have trained millions to see “the Left”—and anyone who stands against Trump—as vermin, scum, evil. Less than human. Who cares if he’s crude? The other side is worse. He’s on our side.

Steven Miller and Russell Vought spent the 2021–2025 interregnum plotting to eliminate foreign aid, destroy the “administrative state” (what most of us know as the Civil Service), and engage in radical deportations. “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people” is anathema to their purpose for the power they sought. In their concept of government, the population were incidental statistics, not individual people.

Now, consider the effects of closing USAID and halting humanitarian, medical, and food aid abroad:

A model tracking the impact of USAID funding cuts estimates that more than 762,000 people have died in the first year of suspension, including over 500,000 children. These deaths are from pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and other causes linked to lost prevention and treatment programs.
—Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, University of Minnesota

Peer-reviewed modeling in The Lancet forecasts that continued cuts could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths worldwide by 2030, including about 4.5 million children under five, if sharp funding shortfalls persist.
—Fielding School of Public Health, UCLA

Here at home, letting Affordable Care Act subsidies lapse will guarantee worse health outcomes for the poorest Americans. Medicaid cuts in the Big Billionaires’ Bill will shutter rural hospitals and clinics. The hollowing out of the CDC and other health agencies can only be explained by ideology overriding science, and by a callousness to human suffering. It’s personal, too: see Elizabeth Bruenig’s “This is How a Child Dies of Measles: When your family becomes a data point in an outbreak” (The Atlantic, February 12, 2026).

When it comes to dehumanization, it’s hard to top what’s happening— and what’s coming— with the ICE immigration crackdowns. Anonymous, armed, and acting like thugs, agents are terrorizing cities across the country. They claim to make “targeted” arrests, but “targeted” now means indiscriminate. In the chilling testimony of a U.S. citizen who was assaulted, arrested, and briefly imprisoned with no reason apparent on video, agents repeatedly referred to her and others being brought in as “bodies.”

As for what’s coming, it’s recently emerged that ICE has spent the past year quietly searching for large warehouses to convert into concentration cam—sorry, detention centers. Most local governments are pushing back, but some are welcoming ICE. The plan: two dozen facilities, total capacity of up to 100,000 “bodies.” Budgeted cost: over $38 billion.

A modest proposal for an antidote

Citizens in Minnesota and across the country are quietly pushing back against dehumanization in the most radical way possible: by refusing to see their immigrant neighbors as anything less than fully human. Shopkeepers, nurses, teachers, students—these are our communities, woven together in ways that no executive order can erase. Facts bear it out: immigrants are less likely to have criminal records than their U.S.-born neighbors. But that argument, true as it is, misses the point. The real resistance is in everyday kindness—in meeting fear with welcome, in showing up for each other, in refusing to let cruelty define us.

Peaceful protest and public resistance matter. But so do small, daily acts: sharing a meal, offering a ride, standing up when someone is harassed. These are not just gestures of goodwill; they are a form of defiance. Each one shines a light on the regime’s violence, making what is monstrous unmistakable.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans—many who feel abandoned, heartbroken, or powerless—are left asking what comes next. It’s easy to go numb with sadness, to retreat into isolation, to feel like nothing we do matters. But that surrender may be the greatest danger of all.

Psychologists and public health researchers have spent decades studying what happens when people reach out to help each other. The results are striking: acts of kindness don’t just benefit the recipient. They lift up the giver, too. They lower rates of depression. They extend life expectancy. They make people feel less alone, more connected. Generosity and cooperation spread through entire social networks, turning isolation into community, distrust into trust, fear into hope.

This is not naïveté, and it’s not about “being nice.” Dehumanization shrinks us into caricatures and categories; kindness does the opposite. It restores our humanity. It tells each person, “I see you. You matter.” Dehumanization humiliates and degrades. Kindness uplifts and inspires. In an era when cruelty is policy, kindness is a radical act.

If we want an antidote, maybe this is it: not grand gestures, but the daily, stubborn refusal to let anyone—especially those in power—decide who counts as human. Every time we choose connection over contempt, we reclaim a little piece of our country, and ourselves.

These were lean and dispiriting times for Apple. Since Steve Jobs had been banished in 1985 by the Apple Board of Directors, a series of three business world CEOs had brought corporate discipline to the company, but little vision. Still, those of us in the room were getting the best Apple had to give. Schools were still Apple’s best and most dependable customers. These “Briefings” were held quarterly and led by their K-12 Account Executives and their Education Tech Specialists.

I always looked forward to these sessions. Unlike our corporate hosts, we were all having the time of our working lives. Technology in education was still in its infancy and we were part of the vanguard. We were all working incredibly hard and this was a chance to pause and compare notes. We looked on Apple as our partner and I got the feeling these meetings could be even more uplifting for them than for us.

On this day in 1995, they had prepared something a little different. The lights dimmed and the bulky ceiling-mounted video projector lit up. The familiar Apple Garamond white font on black background faded in with the title Knowledge Navigator, then faded out to black. Lively Baroque music accompanied the camera’s pan of a rich mahogany desk with numerous vaguely futuristic items and stopped at a decidedly futuristic hinged tablet.

When the lights came back up less than 6 minutes later, there were several seconds of open-mouthed silence while we looked around at each other as if seeking confirmation we’d just seen what we just saw. At this point, I invite you to see what we saw. Go ahead. Enjoy. I’ll wait.

You may have noticed that the video’s copyright is 1988. It was made in 1987 for an Apple keynote presentation at Educom, nearly a decade before our viewing in 1995. Apple never released it to the general public, fearing that it could inspire unrealistic expectations, disappointment in current technology, and result in dampened sales. Instead, Knowledge Navigator was reserved for select small groups and held up as a kind of north star for technology professionals on the road toward artificial intelligence.

“When I trace the origins of the most exciting and outrageous ideas behind the personal computer revolution, most paths lead directly to Alan.”

—John Sculley, Apple CEO

Sculley is referring to Alan Kay, computer scientist and visionary, Apple Fellow, and part of the Apple Advanced Technology Group. While at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Park), Kay had conceived the Dynabook concept, a precursor of laptop and tablet computers and the e-book. He is also the architect of the modern overlapping windowing graphical user interface. Kay is widely credited with many of the concepts modeled in Knowledge Navigator.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

—Alan Kay

This clever aphorism brings to mind another pithy saying: “Easier said than done.” Many of the greatest minds of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been hard at work inventing the future predicted in Knowledge Navigator. Yet while some things have clearly been accomplished, why does this video still seem like science fiction?

The professor in the video used a single cognitive system—one device, one agent, and one interface— that could manage knowledge, memory, scheduling, communication, and documents. The system (the Navigator) provided the intelligence to orchestrate all of those.

What has happened instead is that computing evolved application-first—e-mail, calendar, files, notes, search, messaging—and all of these functions have become product silos. This is partly due to the incremental nature of their development and partly to the competitive marketplace. We have smart devices, smart models, and smart apps. What we don’t have is coherence.

If and when we do solve the issue of coherence in that technical sense, it will be left to another future time to solve the problem of our political, social, and cultural coherence. Will AI be a tool used most successfully to bring us together or to tear us further apart?

A brief and bland obituary was posted on the CIA’s website. Embedded was the probable explanation for the death. Oh, for the, um, sunset:

One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. The World Factbook served the Intelligence Community and the general public as a longstanding, one-stop basic reference about countries and communities around the globe.

At least, that’s the only explanation I could find since no explicit explanation accompanied the post, nor has anyone from the CIA answered queries from various news outlets. We are left to infer that the need for facts about “countries and communities around the globe” has also sunset in the priorities of America First. The AP article also pointed out that the announcement followed “a vow from Director John Ratcliffe to end programs that don’t advance the agency’s core missions.”

The World Factbook is was a library staple. Like most librarians, it was often where I directed students for a starting place on their research. It was simply organized, efficient, and inexpensive enough to always have the current edition on hand. Plus it became available online, freely accessible to everyone.

David Graham, of The Atlantic, calls this part of the administration’s broad war on information:

This is different from the administration’s assault on truth, in which the president and the White House lie prolifically or deny reality. This is something more fundamental: It’s a series of steps that by design or in effect block access to data, and in doing so erode the concept of a shared frame for all Americans.

This campaign to remove the sources of facts and information is overt and shameless. We see it in the instructions to all Federal agencies and departments to remove from their websites and publications all information considered undesirable to the administration. Less overt, but equally shameless, is the loss of data and information that is no longer generated because the civil servants who worked to provide them are no longer there. I guess they’ve been sunsetted, too.

Since darkness usually follows the sunset, I suppose I shouldn’t torture this metaphor further. There are, after all, other sources of light. Identifying and supporting them is becoming a vital civic duty. We are already losing sources we’ve long taken for granted (see: The Washington Post.) Some may be irreplaceable. At least for a long time. And, it may be a VERY long time before we regain the democratic strength that comes from a shared confidence in commonly shared facts.

In the meantime, we are seeing efforts everywhere to step in and shore up. The West Coast Health Alliance was formed this past September “to provide independent, science-based, and unified public health recommendations.” Substack, just to name one platform, is filled with publications from refugee reporters and medical experts who have sought an independent platform for disseminating factual information. And there are many surviving publications with unwavering journalistic integrity.

We mourn the loss of depositories of facts like The CIA World Factbook and the dependable reportage of facts like The Washington Post once was. But the Post’s epitaph—“Democracy dies in darkness”—can serve to honor their memories. And oddly, I’m hearing Tom Bodett’s voice in my head from the old Motel 6 ad, playing like a promise to those who come after: “We’ll leave the light on for you.”

While the experimental use of AI is integral to writing the Memoir vignettes, all writing of the Field Notes is my own. (Though it might be fun sometime to see what we get if I ask the chatbot to report on itself!) The blog posts in My 2 Cents are also my writing, though I am using chatbots for research and as a copy editor.]

AI Field Notes for An Ordinary Day

I feel I’ve confirmed the validity of this notion—of quickly concocting an interesting narrative out of personal history, good prompts, AI historical research, AI composition, and light human editing. Now I want to do a vignette on the day I was born. I choose this because it’s a brief snapshot for which I have good information and documentation. I think of these as anchors for the context that the chatbot will supply. I also expect it will make a good prototype for working with the chatbot to come up with some kind of template to help organize and manage the torrent of text that every prompt generates.

The chatbot starts by explaining some of the relevant terms we will be using. I learn that ChatGPT is still pretty rudimentary in its organizational toolkit. There isn’t much of a hierarchy. Just folders, which are termed “Projects” and inside the folders you can have as many “Chats” as needed. There is only one level in the folder. That means no nested folders, only individual chats.

I mentioned previously that this chatbot is really chatty, right? An understatement, truly. It’s not rare for one of its 3-second responses to a prompt to give me several minutes of reading. So a chat can very quickly get very long. (This is less true in Hyperwrite AI.) I begin to recognize that it could quickly become a challenge to find specific information later. I ask how I should do that.

A few sessions from now, I’m going to get pretty frustrated with how labyrinthine this becomes, even suspecting that the chatbot is kind of making things up as we go. But reviewing my notes and the transcript now, I’m impressed with the chatbot’s giving me a simple starting place. It explains project folders and chats and gives me a naming protocol to keep things consistent between us. We’re ready to get to work.

I mentioned having documents from my birth. So, my first prompt is:

ME—In a small town private hospital in the 1940s, what would a typical process have been to record a birth and issue a birth certificate? What position on the staff would have been responsible for billing for the birth?

I get back about a page of vividly described details. I’ll also come to understand soon enough that the chatbot is programmed to end each response with an offer for one or more, usually more, next steps. (Keep in mind I have already spent a fair amount of time briefing the chatbot on the project.) This time the offer is:

ChatGPT—Would you like me to draft a vignette-style description (say, what a couple in 1948 might have experienced step by step when their baby was born in a small hospital) — something you could lift almost directly into your memoir narrative?

This chatbot is REALLY anxious to be helpful. I hadn’t asked for it, but what the heck:

ME—Sure, let’s see what it looks like.

ChatGPT—[Produces vignette-style description]

Would you like me to expand this vignette into a “typical day” narrative (from arrival at the hospital through discharge), so you could use it almost like scene-setting in a memoir chapter?

I think: Sure, let’s go with the flow.

ME—Yes.

ChatGPT—Perfect — here’s a more expansive “typical day” narrative that takes you through the whole arc, from admission through discharge, in a small-town private hospital of the late 1940s. I’ve kept it evocative, but accurate to the period:

[text of a more expansive vignette]

This gives you a scene-by-scene flow: admission → labor → delivery → recordkeeping → ward routines → billing → discharge.
Would you like me to annotate this with sources and details of “what’s historically accurate” (what we know for sure vs. where I’ve used evocative reconstruction), so you can be confident about blending fact with memoir narrative?

This could go on forever. Time to butt in.

ME—What day of the week was September 1, 1948?

ChatGPT—September 1, 1948, was a Wednesday.

ME—Can you find a photo online of Bixby Hospital in Adrian, Michigan from the 1940s or 50s?

ChatGPT—Here’s what appears to be a historic photograph of the old Bixby Hospital in Adrian, Michigan—likely dating back to the mid-20th century. The image is from a Pinterest pin titled “The Old Bixby Hospital, Adrian, MI” .

Would you like help locating archival sources or contacting local historical institutions to see if they have more dated or high-resolution images?

ME—No thanks, what you got is perfect.

ChatGPT—Great — glad that one works for you! That photo should fit nicely alongside your vignette about a 1940s hospital birth.
Do you want me to also describe the building in words (architecture, size, feel) so you can use it in your memoir without having to rely on the photo itself?

To myself: not really.

ME—Can you find the percentage of babies born in hospitals, compared to at home, in or around 1948, in Michigan and/or the United States?

ChatGPT—Here’s what the historical data reveals about the percentage of babies born in hospitals versus at home around 1948 in the United States (and insight on Michigan if available):

Like a few previous times already, my prompts tend to generate a very generous amount of relevant data and annotations. It’s far more than I could or should include, or a reader would want, but I can find one or two gems. This is the severely abridged version of the chat!

ChatGPT—Would you like help weaving this into your memoir—perhaps framing how a small-town family might have viewed hospital birth as increasingly normal by the late 1940s?

ME—I think I have that, thanks.

ChatGPT—Perfect — sounds like you’ve got what you need for that piece. 👍

Before I start the first draft, I look at my Certificate of Birth and have a thought. I ask:

ME—I’m remembering that the handwriting style common in the 1940s was called Palmer. Is that correct?

ChatGPT—Yes — you’re remembering correctly. Would you like me to pull an example image of Palmer handwriting from that era, so you can visualize what those hospital forms and ledgers would have looked like?

I was about to ask.

ChatGPT—

Here are four visual examples showcasing the Palmer Method of handwriting—each image illustrates the elegant, slanted cursive style and muscular-arm technique characteristic of this 20th-century penmanship system. (Plus another half-page on the Palmer style. Email if you’d like more detail.)

The next day I wrote my rough draft, drawing from the chat. I submitted it to the chatbot.

In seconds, I received this response:

ChatGPT—This is a very strong first draft — vivid, personal, and grounded in historical texture. I’ll give you honest, constructive feedback in three areas: strengths, suggestions, and questions to consider.

I think at this point I might still have been giving some weight to the compliments, but would soon ask the chatbot to come clean about the sucking up. It admitted that it’s just how it’s programmed. At any rate, I got some good feedback and it asked if I’d like a lightly edited, polished draft. I said yes and voila! There it was.

Then I had a thought that turned out so well, I expect it to become part of the routine:

ME—Could you place my rough draft and your revised version side by side?

Absolutely — here’s a side-by-side comparison so you can see where I tightened, rearranged, or reframed things.

I immediately have both versions in two columns within the chat. I open Word and—keeping much of mine, adding a few things from the bot’s, and combining some into new text—I rewrite the vignette and give it back for feedback. A couple of changes, then it/he/she/they gives helpful suggestions for where to place the images, and we have the first truly finished vignette for the memoir. Take a look: An Ordinary Day

This may seem like just another of the ubiquitous jeremiads being written to bemoan the sorry state of our politics and public life. I assure you it’s not. I hope you will read all the way to the end.

Not that there isn’t much to bemoan, of course. For example, the way our nation and its people are being hollowed out, both physically and morally.

Take U.S. population growth. You probably read this past week that our growth rate slowed sharply in 2025—50% lower than 2024, about 519,000 more births than deaths. Fertility rates have dropped below the 2.1 births per woman that are necessary to maintain a stable population, absent migration:

· 2004 ~2.0

· 2014 ~1.86

· 2024 ~1.60

Consider polling that reflects attitudes toward having children. Recent data from Pew Research Center suggest that Americans are rethinking whether they want to become parents. The percentage of nonparents who don’t want children rose from 14% in 2002 to 29% in 2023. During the same period, the percent of nonparents who plan to have children in the future fell from 79% to 59%. Rising concern over the cost of raising children was cited, along with the fear of bringing children into a world with an increasingly hostile climate and uncertain environmental future.

Immigration has been an even greater driver of population growth. But, net migration (number moving into the country minus number moving out) dropped in 2025 to 1.3 million from 2.7 million in 2024. Shocker! I can’t find any projections that show immigration doing anything but decreasing in the foreseeable future.

Slowing population growth seems inevitable and there are even some credible projections of net population loss in the coming decades. This is a disastrous formula for the economy. With an already widening wealth gap, staying that course can only hollow out the middle class even more.

Last February, Elon Musk waved the chainsaw overhead at CPAC, boasting that he and DOGE were feeding government programs “into the wood chipper.” It was emblematic of the Project 2025 goal to hollow out government institutions, programs, staffing, and so on. Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget has been in charge of restructuring, reducing the scope of, and occasionally eliminating federal agencies, with little apparent concern for the impacts on people.

Away from Washington D.C. there’s equal cause for concern for troubling negative trends in important intangibles—community, isolation, trust, kindness, hostility, social cohesion, honesty, democratic ideals, and constitutional norms. I was in the midst of enumerating some of the key findings of a few respected nonpartisan studies (Pew Research Center, Gallup, American Enterprise Institute, and the General Social Survey.) But after filling a page with them, I realized there was little to be gained by bludgeoning you with statistics on observations you’ve no doubt already made yourselves.

I don’t know how many people in the past year I’ve heard say that they just can’t take reading/watching/listening to the news. I agree that doing so can make you feel as exposed and vulnerable as taking a walk in acid rain. Indecency and cruelty masquerading as policy. Indifference to the process and rule of law. The relentless destruction of institutions whose purpose is the common good. The assault on the free press. One can only take so much at a time. But make no mistake, whether we are tuned in or not, it still affects all of us and its corrosive effect is hollowing out the moral infrastructure of democracy itself.

Which is partly why the citizens of Minneapolis and other occupied cities have struck such a powerful chord and awakened a desperately needed modicum of spirit and hope across the country. Firstly, the sacrificial deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have produced an exemplar for what can happen when a population stands by the evidence of their eyes and ears and rejects the lies of an authoritarian regime.

Secondly, the conspicuous brutality of ICE and the Border Patrol has cast the spotlight on the good people of Minneapolis. Armed with their whistles and compassion, they have daily demonstrated the revolutionary spirit of the colonists who responded to Paul Revere’s alert that the British were coming. Stated more mundanely, they have proven the worth of community, of caring for your neighbors, of refusing to be hollowed out.

One day, sooner rather than later if cities all over America emulate Minneapolis, the threat to the regime from backlashes like that of the past 10 days will eventually become its death knell. What comes next will depend on the extent to which Americans have been busy replenishing the qualities required for a healthy democracy.

So, it’s understandable if you need an occasional break from engaging. But understand we have work to do. Work we CAN do. We can be tending to the moral infrastructure of democracy in our own communities, one neighborhood at a time.

If this project bombs, I’m going to blame Scott Z. Burns.

Burns is the screenwriter of the 2011 movie, Contagion. Its resurgent popularity in 2020, due to its uncanny foreshadowing of the Covid-19 pandemic, was one of the factors that prompted Burns and Contagion director Steven Soderbergh, to begin discussing a possible sequel in early 2025.

With Soderbergh’s blessing, Burns decided to employ AI chatbots to help with the creative and practical work to produce a new movie treatment that could result in a development deal with a studio. Burns turned this process into a fascinating 8-part podcast on Audible: What Could Go Wrong?

By the end of my first time through the podcast, I felt I’d gotten a pretty good AI for Dummies introduction. By my second time through in early fall, I knew I had to play with it myself. I could see how it might be the boost I needed to finally undertake this memoir project. I started exploring different AI platforms, or models.

I settled on Hyperwrite AI and ChatGPT. They both have features that seem compatible with the work I’m envisioning. Hyperwrite AI seems to specialize in being a writing coach and a personal assistant. It feels low key to me, compared to ChatGPT which is the 800 pound gorilla in the personal AI market. Would you believe about 75%? Both have free versions to get you in the door and try them out. I plan to spend several days with them before upgrading to the paid personal plans, which each run $20 per month, though Hyperwrite gives a 20% discount for paying annually.

Jumping into the deep end

I learned from the Burns podcast the importance of good prompts when interacting with a chatbot. I think I get it, but this will be my first time. Prior to this, keyword search was king, having replaced Boolean, and before that the old wooden card catalog and the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature. (I warned you I’m old.) My intuition is that “prompt-based generation” is going to be, well, intuitive. Still, it will also be a paradigm shift.

Keep in mind that I’m treating this as a test drive, a proof of concept. I’m taking mere fragments of oral history that go back 100 years without spending time yet to gather additional facts from other sources, except for including my sister Pam’s great work on our family tree going back much further. I want to see what the chatbot can do with these fragments. Can it take them and construct a narrative based on its historical databank and its ability to make logical inferences? This first interview is with Hyperwrite and frankly I’m winging it:

Please accomplish the following writing task:

Write two or three paragraphs summarizing what circumstances between 1925 and 1935 caused families to migrate from Appalachian states like Tennessee and Kentucky to midwestern states like Michigan.

The 3 seconds it takes to have a response is too little to second-guess myself on the prompt. The response is 2 paragraphs, nearly 250 words. I realize it’s very general and I need to provide more specific information I remember about my father’s parents. I ask:

My grandparents migrated to Michigan during that time. My grandfather worked in a lumber yard and eventually became a yard foreman. What would that have been like for him?

Again, 2-3 seconds later I have 2 paragraphs with good information, but now somewhat anchored to what I know about my grandparents.

I give 3 more prompts, trying to clarify and add more specificity. In no more than 5-10 minutes, I have about 1200 words that have suddenly expanded the fragments onto a canvas with details that make them—if not come alive—seem more 3-dimensional.

This was impressive, but it’s still in the form of research notes. I’m going to ask ChatGPT to tap in and Hyperwrite to tap out. I need to figure out an approach, a structure that will carry the notes into a finished narrative.

The 800 Pound Gorilla

I want to give ChatGPT a tryout on this first memoir piece. Some of the most fascinating parts of the Burns podcast were the human screenwriter’s conversations with Lexter, the AI chatbot who was given the persona of a former film critic and is now also a screenwriter. (I’m going to set aside the issue of personifying chatbots for now, but it’s indeed an issue I’ll revisit.) Much of their discussions revolved around identifying strategies to eventually create the product that Burns and Soderbergh would be happy with. I’m pretty sure he was using ChatGPT. Either way, it seems the model best suited to brainstorming how to approach writing this memoir.

I open ChatGPT like I know what I’m doing. Rather than starting with a prompt, I give a couple paragraph explanation of what I ‘m looking for. Like in Hyperwrite, we go back and forth several times very quickly. (This chatbot is VERY chatty!) I determine that of 6 narrative frameworks that it says are most used, a blend of 2 of them best suits the story I’ve envisioned. In the chatbot’s words, it’s a “braided vignette mosaic with historical counterpoint.” Fine. My Lexter goes on to explain:

· Vignettes as Foundation:
The memoir will be built from vivid, self-contained stories drawn from family and personal history. These vignettes capture moments and milestones.

· Historical Counterpoint Woven In:
Each vignette will be braided with context from the larger world. Rather than separating biography and history into distinct sections, historical detail will be woven directly into the narrative.

· Mosaic Structure:
The memoir will not follow a strict year-by-year chronology but instead move through selected vignettes that build cumulatively. The sequence will honor broad chronology (moving from ancestors through my own early life and into the 1960s–70s) but remain flexible, allowing themes and resonances to guide the order.

I think this looks about right, but let’s find out.

The chatbot says: 👉 Would you like me to take a crack at drafting a sample passage from your father’s story using your raw family notes? That could serve as a model for how to handle these early family-history vignettes.

I say: Let’s see what you’ve got!

And, in about 60 seconds, it did! If you haven’t already read it, it’s the vignette titled, “Leaving the Gap.” It’s lightly edited by me from the AI-written piece and it will have a future revision because there is more to the story.

All told, this Field Note covers about 3 hours. I got some experience with 2 AI platforms, came up with a working framework for the memoir stories, and have the draft of the first vignette. I wanted to see if this had potential. Check.