Material Witness

A witness testifies to what they saw. A material witness testifies to what matters — the fact the case turns on, the one nobody wants entered into the record.

That’s the whole idea here. I look at things closely and report what’s actually there, in the domains where the official story and the material facts have come apart. American healthcare that runs at a $2-trillion-a-year chronic-disease economy and calls it care. A press that spent two years enshrining a pandemic model and went quiet when its own government documented the failures. A retirement system that froze the SSI asset limit at $2,000 in 1989 and never touched it again. The politics of belonging that added a face or two to the boardroom while the rent soared.

I spent seven years as a nomadic expat across four continents before settling on the coast of northern Portugal, so the beat also includes the view from outside — what the United States looks like once you’ve left it, and what a slower, cheaper, stranger life abroad actually costs and returns. The register shifts. The method doesn’t. Numbers get checked. Claims get named. Nobody gets the benefit of the abstraction.

My work has appeared in The Humanist and HuffPost. I’m at work on a book about the American medical-industrial complex and a memoir about leaving.

New essays land here first. Some of them are furious. Some of them are about a bus in Ecuador. They’re the same project.

— Mark Blondin, Vila do Conde, Portugal