There is a book at the bottom of this page. It is called Let’s Burn This Book!, it is 250 pages long, and it is free — free to read, download, print, lend, translate, give away. It can’t be sold, and it can’t be fed to a machine. That’s the whole licence.

This page is not the book. This page exists to hand it to you — and to tell you, in the time it takes to decide, what it argues and why it was written.

Everything on this page is a sample. Take the book.

The rent notice comes by email now, which means it can find you anywhere. Two hundred apartments get it on the same morning, at the same minute, from the same account — and two hundred households run the same math in private, each believing it happened only to them. One decision, made once, in an office none of them could find, collected from all of them at the same minute.

This is the richest society in the history of our species, and it is not close. There are more empty housing units in this country than there are people without housing, and 22.7 million renter households are paying more to stay housed than the government itself says they can afford. The book’s argument is that this is not scarcity — it is a wall built between people and what they need to live, with a toll set on every gate. It walks through six of them: the roof, the loan, the dollar, the job with the medicine chained to it, the tools, and the machine now being installed behind all the rest.

Then it asks the harder question — why a country full of people who can see all this does so little about it — and finds the answer in the kitchen, not the capitol.

“There is no conspiracy in that building. There is only a mailing list.”

— The Notice

“Not a coward. Not a broken man. A man with smaller desires, who acquired them honestly, one reasonable evening at a time.”

— The Shape Sets

“You cannot fire a mother. You can only make her job unnecessary.”

— The Masterpiece

“You do not have to choose which retiree eats less. You have to stop running a country in which that is the question.”

— The Objection

“It is not weather. It was built — out of law and money and habit, by people, in rooms, on dates you can look up. And what was built can be taken apart and built differently.”

— The Floor

1. The Notice

   A rent email, two hundred households, and the private math that turns a levy into a personal failing.

2. The Disease

   Wasting in the presence of plenty — and why “scarcity” is the arrangement’s favorite alibi.

3. Six Gates

   The roof, the loan, the dollar, the job with medicine chained to it, the tools, the machine — and what each one costs, in numbers.

4. The Shape Sets

   How twenty years of one small calculation turns refusal into reflex, and reflex into preference.

5. The Mother at the Door

   Why the wall maintains itself — and files the maintenance under devotion.

6. Who Holds the Gates

   $25 trillion, nine of every ten companies — and the fraction that is, at one remove, you.

7. The Objection

   Which retiree eats less? Neither. Change the question.

8. A Floor

   Not utopia — repairs, each tested against one standard: power over your own conditions, not more bearable payments.

9. The Grove

   Why the tallest living things on earth hold each other up, and what saved the last of them: being placed beyond sale.

The book is also about my family, which this page is not. A woman who taught school in Mexico and was never allowed to teach here, and raised thirteen children anyway. The night my mother ran, aged eight, with her sister under one arm. Those belong to the book, and I’d rather you met them there.

I didn’t write it to make money. I wrote it because the arrangement runs on people believing their situation is private, and a private injury can’t be organized against. So it costs nothing, asks nothing, and tracks nothing.

Print it and leave it somewhere. Read it aloud. Argue with it. Hand it to the person the notice found last. The licence forbids exactly two things: selling it, and feeding it to a machine.