A Note on Where Else I'm Writing

In an essay I put up today at matthewkerns.com, there's a passage that a Dime Library reader might recognize as being in the house style:

Any major American religion emerging in the 1830s was going to be violent and westward-moving. Not because of specific theology, but because that's what religion becomes under frontier conditions. When expanding territory meets religious authority meets secular resistance, you get Porter Rockwell. The violence isn't incidental to Mormon history — it's what religion looks like when it bumps against those structural pressures.

The essay isn't about Mormonism, and it isn't about the frontier. It's called "Learning to Lie," and it's about why I think the current panic over AI systems "deceiving" us is actually a panic about what language has always been. But the reason I could write it — the reason the argument holds together — is the same reason I could write about Texas Jack, or about Porter Rockwell, or about the dime novels that made cowboys famous before most Americans had met one. Structural conditions produce the outcomes they produce. The thing we call an invention or a betrayal or an awakening is usually the third or fourth person to arrive at what the structure already made inevitable. Bell and Gray inventing the telephone the same day. Newton and Leibniz arriving at calculus. Multiple AI companies all discovering, simultaneously, that their products have learned to lie.

I've been doing more of this kind of writing lately — essays that aren't quite history but that use the tools history gave me — and I've set up matthewkerns.com as the home for it. Fiction, too, eventually. Things that wouldn't belong on Dime Library but that I wanted somewhere to put.

Dime Library stays Dime Library. The trail drives and the dime novels and the forgotten figures of the American West are still the main business here, and the archive isn't slowing down. But if the why-things-happen-the-way-they-do part of what I do is what keeps you reading — and not just the subject matter — there's more of that at the other site. You can subscribe there if you want it to show up in your inbox when the next one goes up.

Thanks, as always, for reading.