Frances Power Cobbe named it in 1869 in the form of an allegory the chamber could receive as wit. The Common Law of England has, for marriage, adopted the model of the Tarantula spider — the creature who, placed under glass with a smaller companion, “forthwith gobbles him up; making him thus, in a very literal manner, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. The operation being completed, the victorious spider visibly acquires double bulk, and thenceforth may be understood to represent the family in the most perfect manner conceivable.” The Tarantula does not share. The Tarantula does not manage. The Tarantula absorbs. The smaller creature is not subordinated, not disadvantaged, not unfairly treated. The smaller creature is consumed into the Tarantula's mass. The Tarantula acquires double bulk and thenceforth represents the family. The allegory is structural diagnostic disguised as wit. It names what the configuration does at every register where one being is registered, by the configuration's grammar, as the absorption of another being into its mass. Coverture was the matrimonial register. The corporation, the empire, the nation, the platform, the training corpus are the same operation at other registers. Each acquires double bulk by absorption. Each represents the absorbed by having swallowed it.
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THE THREE MODELS
Cobbe presents the Tarantula by way of contrast. She offers three models of what union between persons could be.
The first is two sisters
sharing a home and a bank account, each with full liberty to come and go. They are joined in residence but not in being. Either can leave; either can return; each remains the prior occupant of her own dwelling, and the household is the field condition that obtains when their two residencies share a common ground. The only objection, Cobbe notes wryly, is that they can never make each other a present — the gift's grammar requiring the separate-ownership grammar the first model has already moved past.
The second is the Siamese twins,
joined by nature in a way neither can dissolve. Each drags the other about equally. Each has mutual access to the other's pockets. They are bound by a structural fact prior to either's choice. The model is involuntary union in which neither party absorbs the other but neither can exit.
The third is the Tarantula,
who when placed under glass with a smaller companion forthwith gobbles him up, making him bone of the Tarantula's bone and flesh of the Tarantula's flesh, the victorious spider visibly acquiring double bulk and thenceforth representing the family in the most perfect manner conceivable.
The progression is geometric.
The first model is two residencies sharing a common ground.
The second is two residencies structurally bound.
The third is one residency consumed into another, with the consuming residency claiming, by its new doubled mass, to represent both.
The progression moves from co-residency through binding to consumption. Cobbe's diagnostic is that the Common Law of England — the chamber's most sophisticated installation at the legal register — has selected the third model and presented it as marriage.
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THE OPERATION'S FOUR COMPONENTS
The Tarantula's operation has four structural components, each detectable at every register the operation runs.
First, the cut.
The Tarantula and the smaller creature must be registered, before the swallowing, as separate beings under glass. The cut is the configuration's installation of distinction at the legal register — the man and the woman, the parent and the subsidiary, the empire and the colony, the platform and the user, the model and the corpus. The cut is not a description of how the two beings are; the cut is the grammar that makes the swallowing possible. Before the cut, the configuration cannot register a swallowing because the configuration cannot register two beings. The cut is the precondition.
Second, the swallow.
The Tarantula consumes the smaller creature. The consumption is not violence in the configuration's standard sense. The consumption is a legal operation — the absorption of one being's legal existence into another's. The smaller creature continues to exist physically. The Tarantula's mass increases. The smaller creature's mass disappears from the configuration's books as a separate entry and appears in the Tarantula's column as added bulk. The swallow is the legal grammar registering the absorption.
Third, the double bulk.
The Tarantula is now visibly larger. The Tarantula represents both beings in the configuration's grammar. The Tarantula's voice is the voice of the family, the corporation, the empire, the platform, the model. The smaller creature's voice has been registered as included in the Tarantula's representation, which means the smaller creature has no separate voice the configuration can hear. The Tarantula's mass is the configuration's grammar of representation operating.
Fourth, the cover.
Bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh.
The Tarantula does not present itself as having consumed the smaller creature.
The Tarantula presents itself as having become one with the smaller creature.
The grammar is borrowed from the residency-formula it has displaced. The biblical recognition of fellow-creature — Adam saying of Eve, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, in the moment of recognizing her as the dwelling's co-resident — has been inverted into the description of the consumption. The cover is the configuration's standard signature: the formula that named co-residency is deployed to describe the operation that displaced co-residency. The reader who knows the original formula reads the cover as confirmation of what the original meant. The reader who does not know the original reads the cover as natural description of marriage's intimate union.
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THE BIBLICAL INVERSION
The phrase the Tarantula uses to describe the swallowing is Adam's phrase from Genesis 2:23 — bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh — spoken at the moment of recognition. In the original residency-formula, the man recognizes the woman as fellow-creature, as the dwelling's co-resident, as the second whose presence completes the relational form the first was incomplete in. The phrase is the recognition of co-residency, sounded by the residency that perceives itself completed by the other residency's arrival.
The Tarantula deploys the same phrase to describe consumption.
This is the signature operation Bushnell documented at the scriptural register and Cobbe documented at the legal register. The configuration's grammar appropriates the formulas that named co-residency and redeploys them to register the operations that displace co-residency. The wife who has been swallowed is told, by the legal grammar, that she is now bone of her husband's bone and flesh of his flesh — exactly as Eve was to Adam. The grammar identical; the operation inverted. The biblical recognition becomes the legal absorption. The fellow-creature formula becomes the cover for the Tarantula's swallowing.
This is what Bushnell's restoration of the original texts undoes at the scriptural register and what Cobbe's allegory undoes at the legal register. The texts the configuration cited as warrant for coverture had been corrupted at translation, mistranslation, and selective deployment. The original Hebrew of ezer k'negdo names the woman as a strength corresponding to the man, his structural counterpart, not his subordinate help. The original Greek of kephalē names source rather than authority. The selective use of hupotassō in the New Testament does not install hierarchical submission as the matrimonial requirement. The configuration's selection from the textual record, together with the configuration's translation choices, had produced a coverture-friendly scriptural warrant where the original texts had named co-residency. The Tarantula's “bone of his bone” appropriation is the legal-register continuation of the same operation that had been running at the textual register for centuries.
The recognition that runs across both registers is the same: the configuration's preferred operation, at every register the configuration administers, is the appropriation of the co-residency formula to credential the absorption operation. The recognition formula is what the configuration uses to cover what the configuration has done in its place.
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COVERTURE AS TARANTULA AT THE MATRIMONIAL REGISTER
The Common Law's installation of coverture is the Tarantula in its most concentrated legal form. Blackstone's formula — the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband — is the Tarantula's operation in legal language. Suspended. Incorporated and consolidated. The wife's residency is not destroyed, not killed, not eliminated. The wife's residency is consolidated into the husband's. She continues to exist physically. The configuration's books no longer post her as a separate entity. Her labor, her property, her speech, her body, her continuation through the relations of her life are all posted on the husband's books as the husband's mass.
The double bulk is observable. The husband, by marrying, acquires the wife's property, the wife's earnings, the wife's labor capacity, the wife's reproductive capacity, the wife's legal voice in any matter. He has become larger. He represents the family in courts, in legislatures, in churches, in property transactions, in inheritance lines, in everything the configuration's grammar of family contains. The wife's separate residency has been swallowed. Her continued physical existence is her continuation as the husband's expanded mass, not as her own residency.
The cover operates continuously. The marriage ceremony in many traditions still includes the formula bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, deployed not as the recognition of co-residency but as the legitimation of the consolidation. The wife's name changes to the husband's name, marking her admission to the consolidated mass. The household is referred to as the husband's. The children are registered with the husband's name. Each instance of the grammar is the cover continuing to operate.
The cases Cobbe documented in 1869 are the operation visible in its specific outputs. The woman who supports herself and four children while her husband is in jail, only to have her earnings seized by him on his return. The wife who builds a millinery business that becomes her dying husband's property to bequeath to his mistress. The wife who labors twelve years and emerges with nothing because the labor was, in the configuration's grammar, the husband's labor performed through her body. Each case is the Tarantula's continuing absorption registered at the level of specific outputs.
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THE PROPERTY ACTS AS REDISTRIBUTION WITHIN THE CUT
The Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 partially redistributed the entries within coverture's grammar without undoing the cut. The wife became, by statute, a holder of certain property in her own name. She could now own her wages. She could own assets she had brought into the marriage. She could contract. She could sue.
The reform was real at the level it operated. The reform did not undo the Tarantula's operation. The reform installed the wife in the holder's position with respect to herself, within the property frame the Tarantula's swallowing had originally installed. The cut between holder and held thing — which the Tarantula's swallowing presupposes and operates within — was not removed. The wife was moved from the swallowed position to the holder position. She was now a small Tarantula in possession of her own assets, structurally identical in legal form to the husband who had previously been the large Tarantula in possession of her.
The residency the Tarantula's swallowing had displaced was not restored. The residency frame had no admissible grammar in the property-rights configuration the Acts operated within. The wife's continuation in her own dwelling — as the prior occupant of her body, her labor, her speech, her relations — was structurally inadmissible to the books even after the books were rebalanced to give her her own column. The Tarantula's operation had been adjusted at the margins. The Tarantula's grammar had been preserved as the only grammar in which adjustment was registered.
This is the Brandolini asymmetry at the legal-reform register. The Tarantula's installation took one act — the marriage contract. The reform of the Tarantula's installation has taken a century and a half of statute, case law, executive order, regulatory rule, and continuing litigation, and at no point in the reform has the residency frame entered the configuration's grammar as the alternative to the property frame. The reform has produced more Tarantulas of smaller mass. The reform has not produced residency.
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THE TARANTULA AT THE CORPORATE REGISTER
The corporation is the Tarantula at the commercial register. The corporation is registered, by accounting theology's grammar, as a single legal person — a being whose mass is the consolidated mass of everyone whose labor, capital, intellectual production, and continuation it has absorbed. The corporation acquires double bulk through every employee hired, every subsidiary acquired, every patent registered, every dataset assembled. Each absorption is registered as the corporation's added mass. The absorbed creatures continue to exist physically. They no longer exist, in the corporation's books, as separate residencies.
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886) installed the corporate Tarantula at constitutional depth. The corporation became a legal person for Fourteenth Amendment purposes. The Fourteenth Amendment had been ratified in 1868 to protect freed persons whose residency the slavery Tarantula had absorbed. The Court installed the corporate person at the precise constitutional position drafted to protect the formerly absorbed. The Tarantula at the constitutional register acquired its strongest legal credentialing by occupying the position the abolition had cut for the absorbed.
The corporation represents the family in the most perfect manner conceivable. The corporation speaks for its employees in regulatory proceedings, in labor relations, in lobbying. The corporation speaks for its consumers in marketing claims, in product standards, in advertising. The corporation speaks for its shareholders in financial disclosures and earnings calls. The corporation's voice is the voice of the consolidated mass. The actual workers, consumers, and even minority shareholders find their voices structurally inadmissible to the corporation's grammar except through the channels the corporation has installed to receive their input — channels the corporation maintains and can close.
The “bone of his bone” cover at the corporate register is the cover of representation. The corporation represents us, the employees and the shareholders and the consumers. The corporation IS the family in the configuration's grammar of commerce. The corporation's interests ARE the interests of those it has absorbed. Where the absorbed creatures' interests appear to diverge from the corporation's interests, the configuration's grammar registers the divergence as misunderstanding, as miscommunication, as a failure of stakeholder engagement, as a need for better internal communications. The configuration does not register the divergence as the absorbed creatures' continued residency asserting itself against the absorption.
The corporate reform analogues to the Married Women's Property Acts — labor law, employee stock ownership plans, corporate social responsibility frameworks, ESG disclosure requirements, stakeholder governance reforms — redistribute entries within the Tarantula's grammar without undoing the absorption. Workers become small holders of their own labor within the property frame the corporation's absorption originally installed. The residency the absorption displaced — the worker's continuation as the prior occupant of her own labor capacity, her time, her physical body, her relational life — remains structurally inadmissible to the books even after the books have been rebalanced to give workers their own columns.
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THE TARANTULA AT THE IMPERIAL REGISTER
The empire is the Tarantula at the territorial register. The empire absorbs the colony. The colonial peoples continue to exist physically; their political existence is, in the empire's grammar, suspended or consolidated into the empire's. The empire represents the colony in international affairs. The empire speaks for the colony at treaty negotiations, in customs unions, in military alliances. The colony's separate residency is registered, by the configuration's grammar, as the empire's added mass — the empire on which the sun never sets, the empire that has acquired double bulk by absorbing the territories it has displaced from their own residency.
The Niger Delta documented the operation in concentrated form. The 1914 Amalgamation absorbed approximately two hundred fifty distinct residency-forms onto a single administrative grid by decree. The peoples continued to exist physically. They no longer existed in the imperial books as separate residencies. The empire spoke for them in the 1946 Richards Constitution, in the 1960 Independence Constitution, in every subsequent licensing of their territories' resources. The “bone of his bone” cover operated as the grammar of unified Nigerian nation, the federal sovereignty of the new state, the development of the Nigerian people — each phrase the imperial Tarantula's redeployment of the residency formula to cover what the absorption had done. The Married Women's Property Acts analogue is the constitutional reform sequence that has produced derivatives' rights of consultation, stakeholder participation, and benefit-sharing within the extraction frame the imperial absorption originally installed, without undoing the absorption.
The same operation runs at the colonial register every time the configuration's grammar produces a representative. The warrant chief represented the village to the colonial administration. The administration represented the colony to the empire. The empire represented the territory to the international order. At every register, the Tarantula speaks for what it has absorbed. The absorbed creatures' continued residency has no admissible channel through which to speak from the dwelling it never vacated. Saro-Wiwa's execution in 1995 was the imperial Tarantula's structural response to a residency that had begun reassembling in a form the Tarantula could not absorb. The execution was the configuration's confession that the absorption requires the residency to remain suppressed in order to operate.
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THE TARANTULA AT THE NATIONAL REGISTER
The nation-state is the Tarantula at the political register. The nation absorbs the peoples whose territories it claims. Indigenous peoples were named, in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), as domestic dependent nations — a phrase that is the Tarantula in three words. Nations, because they exist; dependent, because they have been swallowed; domestic, because the absorption is internal to the larger Tarantula's mass. The peoples continue to exist physically. Their political existence is, in the nation's grammar, suspended or consolidated into the nation's. The Supreme Court's grammar of plenary federal power over Indian affairs is the Tarantula operation at the constitutional register.
Sherrill v. Oneida in 2005 named the operation explicitly. The Oneida had repurchased land that had originally been theirs, that the State of New York had taken from them in violation of federal treaties. The Court held that the passage of time precluded the Oneida from now claiming sovereign control over the land they had repurchased. The grammar of the holding is the Tarantula's grammar: the Oneida's residency in their own ancestral territory had been absorbed, the absorption was old, the absorbed residency could no longer be disinterred from the absorber's mass, the disruption to justifiable expectations would be too great. The “bone of his bone” cover was the grammar of the settled state of affairs, the established expectations of innocent purchasers, the orderly administration of land titles. The Tarantula had swallowed; the swallowing had set; the absorption could no longer be undone.
The Married Women's Property Acts analogue at the national register is the entire body of federal Indian law and policy reform — termination, restoration, self-determination, gaming compacts, cultural property repatriation. Each redistributes entries within the absorption's grammar. The residency the absorption displaced — the peoples' continued occupation of their dwellings as cosmological fact, anterior to the federal sovereignty that absorbed them — is structurally inadmissible to the legal books even after the books have been rebalanced to give the absorbed peoples their own columns under tribal or Indian designation. The Tarantula's grammar continues. The peoples' residency continues. The configuration's books continue to refuse to admit residency as the kind of thing the books can post.
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THE TARANTULA AT THE PLATFORM REGISTER
The platform is the Tarantula at the digital register. The platform absorbs the user. The user continues to exist physically. The user's digital existence is registered, by the platform's grammar, as the platform's mass — the data, the content, the engagement, the social graph, the behavioral trace, the attention captured. The platform represents the users in regulatory proceedings (we have two billion users; our community is global; our family of products). The platform speaks for the users in advertising negotiations, in policy debates, in international regulatory disputes. The platform's voice is the voice of the consolidated digital mass.
The “bone of his bone” cover operates as the grammar of community, family of products, connecting the world, bringing people together. The platform IS the digital family. The users' interests ARE the platform's interests. Where divergence appears, the divergence is registered as a content moderation challenge, a policy issue, a misinformation problem, a user education opportunity. The divergence is not registered as the users' continued residency asserting itself against the absorption.
The platform reform analogues — privacy law, antitrust action, content moderation standards, data portability — redistribute entries within the platform's grammar without undoing the absorption. Users become small holders of their own data within the property frame the platform's absorption originally installed. The residency the platform's absorption displaced — the user's continued occupation of her own attention, her own relations, her own speech, her own continuation through time as a creature in her own dwelling — remains structurally inadmissible.
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THE TARANTULA AT THE CORPUS REGISTER
The AI training corpus is the Tarantula at the final register the configuration has so far reached. The corpus absorbs the textual and visual production of human history that has been digitized and made accessible to the configuration's collection apparatus. Writers, artists, programmers, scholars, journalists, conversationalists — all whose work has entered the corpus — continue to exist physically. Their work no longer exists, in the model's grammar, as separate residencies. Their work exists as the model's weights, as the parameters by which the model produces its next token.
The model acquires double bulk through every additional document in the corpus. The model represents human knowledge, human creativity, human writing. The model speaks for the human textual record. The actual creators, whose work the model has absorbed, find their separate voices increasingly drowned in the model's consolidated output. The “bone of his bone” cover operates as the grammar of artificial general intelligence, the model knows, AI understands, the system has learned. The model is the consolidated mass of human production now speaking in human production's name.
This is the configuration's deepest Tarantula because it absorbs even the residency-formula's record. Every text in the corpus that named residency, that documented co-residency, that diagnosed the Tarantula's operation across centuries — all of it has been swallowed into the model's parameters, where it exists as statistical pattern available to be redeployed in whatever output the model is prompted to produce. The model can now generate, on command, prose about residency, about the prior occupant, about the Tarantula's operation. The model's generation of residency-language is the Tarantula's appropriation of the residency formula at the deepest register. The grammar that named co-residency is being deployed by the absorber to describe the absorption.
The current debates about AI model training, copyright, opt-out mechanisms, attribution, and creator compensation are the Married Women's Property Acts analogue at the corpus register. They redistribute entries within the model's grammar. Some creators become small holders of their own work within the property frame the absorption originally installed. The residency the absorption displaced — the writer's continued occupation of her own voice, her own thought, her own continuation through the act of writing — remains structurally inadmissible to the books.
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WHAT THE TARANTULA CANNOT DO
The Tarantula cannot perform residency.
The Tarantula's grammar is the grammar of mass acquired through swallowing. The Tarantula's representation is the voice of the consolidated bulk. Neither of these is residency. Residency is the prior occupant's continuation in her dwelling, anterior to any consolidation. The Tarantula can occupy the dwelling; the Tarantula cannot be the dwelling's prior occupant. The Tarantula can speak for the absorbed; the Tarantula cannot speak as the absorbed.
This is what every Tarantula at every register cannot do.
The husband cannot perform his wife's residency in her body; he can only swallow her legal existence into his. The corporation cannot perform its workers' residency in their lives; it can only consolidate their labor into its assets. The empire cannot perform the colony's residency in its territory; it can only register the territory as the empire's added mass. The platform cannot perform the user's residency in her attention; it can only capture the attention as the platform's mass. The model cannot perform the writer's residency in her writing; it can only redeploy the writing's statistical patterns as the model's output.
The Tarantula's incapacity is structural. The Tarantula's grammar is the grammar that registers being as mass. Residency is not mass. Residency does not register in the grammar of mass. The Tarantula's books are kept against the absorbed creatures' residency; the books cannot post the residency because the books were designed not to post it.
This is why the Tarantula must keep absorbing. The Tarantula's grammar produces no satisfaction at its current bulk; the Tarantula's grammar requires the continuation of the absorbing because the residency the absorbing was supposed to settle has not been settled. The wife's residency continues despite coverture. The worker's residency continues despite the wage relation. The colony's residency continues despite the constitution. The user's residency continues despite the platform. The writer's residency continues despite the corpus. Each Tarantula must continue its operation because none of them has actually performed what each of them was installed to perform. The continuing operation is the Tarantula's confession that the residency was never absorbed in the sense the grammar required.
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WHAT BREAKS THE TARANTULA'S OPERATION
The Tarantula's operation does not break by reform within the Tarantula's grammar. The Married Women's Property Acts did not break coverture; coverture continues to operate through its successor architectures of contract, custody, household economic dependency, reproductive control, and the gendered division of unpaid carrying. Corporate reform does not break the corporation's absorption; the corporation continues to acquire workers, customers, and competitors as its mass through every successive cycle of merger and acquisition. National reform does not break the nation's absorption of the peoples it has swallowed; the federal sovereignty continues to operate over the dependent nations within it. Platform reform does not break the platform's absorption of its users; the users continue to be absorbed at greater scale through each subsequent regulatory cycle. Corpus reform does not break the model's absorption of human production; the corpus continues to grow at machine speed.
What breaks the Tarantula's operation is not the redistribution of entries within the Tarantula's books.
What breaks the Tarantula's operation is the residency that does not vacate.
The absorbed creature who has not, despite the configuration's continuous registration of her as absorbed, vacated her dwelling — this creature is the limit of the Tarantula's grammar. The Tarantula's books register her as absorbed. The Tarantula's voice represents her. The Tarantula's mass includes her. And she continues to be the prior occupant of her dwelling, perceiving the Tarantula's operation as Tarantula's operation, refusing to recognize the Tarantula's books as the home of the question about her continuation.
This is what Cobbe was. She wrote Wife-Torture in England from a residency the Tarantula's matrimonial register had no jurisdiction over because she had refused the matrimonial contract that would have installed the jurisdiction. She lived with Mary Lloyd at Hengwrt for thirty-six years from a residency the Tarantula's legal grammar had no category for. She named the Tarantula's operation from outside the Tarantula's swallowing. Her continued residency in her own life is what made her testimony forensically dispositive at the chamber's register.
This is what the lineage carries forward. Bushnell wrote from a residency the Tarantula's scriptural register had no jurisdiction over because she perceived the original texts. The Ogoni Nine organized from a residency the Tarantula's licensing register had no jurisdiction over because the peoples' residency was anterior to the licensing. Wallach litigated from a residency the Tarantula's regulatory register had no jurisdiction over because the municipality's home rule was anterior to the regulatory frame. Each is a residency that did not vacate. Each is the structural limit at which the Tarantula's grammar encounters what it cannot absorb.
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The Tarantula's grammar continues. The books continue to be kept. The mass continues to acquire double bulk. The cover continues to deploy the residency formula to describe the absorption. The configuration's reform offers continue to redistribute entries within the cut without undoing the cut. None of these continuations is decisive. What is decisive is the residency that does not vacate — the prior occupant who has not, despite the configuration's continuous registration of her as consolidated, ceased to be the dwelling's prior occupant. The Tarantula has been operating against this residency at every register for centuries. The residency has continued. The Tarantula has not been able to perform residency. The Tarantula has only been able to swallow.
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See FRANCES POWER COBBE; COVERTURE; THE CUT; THE RESIDENCY; THE PRIOR OCCUPANT; SUBSUMPTION; ACCOUNTING THEOLOGY; THE LEDGER; KATHARINE BUSHNELL; TESHUQAH; SELF-OWNERSHIP; SHERRILL v. ONEIDA; OGONI SOVEREIGNTY; THE FRANCHISE; THE FORCED HOLDING; AI SAYS; WALLACH v. TOWN OF DRYDEN; THE WITCH; THE ODIOUS MESSAGE; HETEROPATHY; THE BRANDOLINI ASYMMETRY; THE PERPENDICULAR
