speck

With antitrust in vogue on a global scale, and in the face of a recharged, newly aggressive regulatory apparatus under the current Democratic president, Joe Biden, you don’t want to find yourself in a position where you can lose even a speck of the sheer power and autonomy you’ve garnered for yourself over the years.

April spent most of her childhood in Kellyville, Oklahoma, a town of about 1,000 people just off historic Route 66, a town April describes as “a speck on the map.”

To this day, not a speck of evidence has been produced to validate this claim; scientists versed in the relevant disciplines of virology and epidemiology say the evidence overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that the virus reached humans via the wildlife trade, and that its journey may well have started with bats thousands of miles from Wuhan, China.

“Whenever I am asked to help resuscitate a city or town center, before doing anything else, I run in a panic to Google Maps to see which, if any, of the downtown streets are state property,” the planner Jeff Speck wrote in his 2012 book Walkable City.

From the overlook, I watched the early morning light over the canyon, feeling like a little speck of stardust in our vast universe.