I wrote the essay below on the film Giant when I was a columnist at Harper's a decade ago but I thought I'd run it like a retro film revival, because I love the film and what it has to say so much, because the essay
There is no more one-sentence-fits-all opening in literature than Dickens's "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times," and this is a review of a lot of the winning and losing over the past week or so, some of
This is the one-hundredth essay at Meditations in an Emergency. Thank you everyone who has joined me here. A while back I bought a first edition of a Willa Cather novel for nothing much at a library book sale. It was Lucy Gayheart (1935), one of her less celebrated
There's a golden age of literature – for us, not for them. That is, extraordinary work is being done in all genres of writing and the mashups inbetween them; extraordinary poets and prophets are at large in the land; magnificent books tumble forth at a rate I can'
When I was young I believed that the ideas I needed to grasp were complicated fact-dense new ones, and maybe back then I did need to take in more data. As I've gotten older, I've come to realize that a lot of the important things
Something huge just happened. Or rather another step was taken in the successful trajectory of the most important climate action you probably never heard of. It was a follow-up to maybe the biggest thing that happened last year, though it didn't get much attention then either. There
The Autumn of the Patriarchs One common and inaccurate picture of change assumes this thing so obvious, so potent in the present, will just continue to expand and the future will be like the present, only more so. This version ignores that individual actors and collective forces can suddenly emerge
"Hope does not mean saying this is not bad, and it does not mean saying that we can defeat it. It just means saying we will keep showing up. That we will not give up. ...we do not know how it will unfold, and neither do those we oppose."
For decades most politicians who are not outright climate deniers have sounded like "oh yes, as you mention, the building is on fire and countless beings are trapped in it, and what if in a week or so I wander over and splash a little leftover lemonade on it?
"This is how the attack by one petro-state (ours) on another (Iran's) may be turning out to be very bad for petroleum, because the only thing history loves more than a surprise party is irony." The Crisis The biggest news is always the climate news,
Here are two short pieces about political violence and sexual violence. The first I wrote yesterday as a social media post that I've revised and improved here. The second is an excerpt from my 2020 book Recollections of My Nonexistence, and it's a meditation on the
Like a lot of you, I'm not, to say the least, a fan of billionaires as a species. Perhaps unlike a lot of you, I'm not a fan of airtight categories either: categories are leaky and a lot of what you may assume about gubernatorial candidate
In this chaotic, transformative period, a lot of realities are changing in a lot of ways, and public opinion is often either changing with it or leading the change. We are not who we were even a few years ago when it comes to opposition to "Epstein class"
What is power? It is at its most essential the ability to influence an outcome on any or all scales, to protect one's own at a minimum and to influence, even control others at a maximum. Violence is constantly misunderstood as power, and it certainly looks like power,
I have been hesitating to hit send on this one, because across the world we are all under the shadow of Trump's threat to commit war crimes that will "eradicate a whole civilization" in Iran while Iranians bravely surround threatened infrastructure with human chains. But I&
It wasn't just bigger than the previous #nokings. It was different. Here's how USA Today unpacks that: "The organizers' crowd count, not verified by independent analysts, put the total at 8 million people, topping the 7 million estimated at the previous No Kings day,
Find your #nokings march here. And while marches, protests, and demonstrations don't do the work of protecting democracy and human rights all by themselves, they're an important part of it, and very often an inspiriting one. [What follows is a thread of various media with and
On one side of the world the US and Israel are pursuing an ill-conceived attack on Iran that has hugely impacted the flow of fossil fuel in the region. This is already having a grim impact on daily life in many nations, jacking up the price of oil and
Two stories erupted in the last twenty-four hours that have to do with antisemitism. One is deeply positive. It's a letter signed by 132 Jewish faculty and staff at UCLA rejecting the Trump Administration's definition of antisemitism while pointing out what's dangerous about
I often say that spoken and written are two different languages with their own grammar and their own difficulties and invitations. Anyone who's ever transcribed a conversation or an interview learns that most of us speak in phrases, rather than sentences, phrases whose intention is clarified by pauses,