I've gotten tough or resilient or case-hardened to the ugly things I read up on daily as part of my writing and civic life. Some of them, the amoral destructiveness of the tech industry and the Trump Administration, often appear in impersonal terms, as statistics and economics
This is the week that someone pulled the fire alarm on AI. It began with industry employee Jacob Coxon issuing a dire warning: "I resigned from Anthropic today," he wrote on Twitter/X. "I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic.
I realized as soon as I'd posted it that I'd failed to update some parts of it. If you click through to read on the site rather than read the emailed version, it should be okay! Here's the link again: https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/
I wrote this for the eighth anniversary of 9/11, drawing on my 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster; it felt right to revise and reissue for this twenty-fifth anniversary. A quarter century ago, 2,600 people lost their lives in
"Canadians will have to prepare for a future that's 5 C hotter, according to a new report summarizing the latest science on climate change," says a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation report on a Canadian government study, and that sounds mildly alarming if you're not up
To become old is to be an immigrant from a country that no longer exists, and to live among peers who sometimes remember that country and among younger people who mostly don't know how different the past was. Much dismissiveness about feminism comes from ignorance about how profoundly
We will always love her, and there will never be another like her, this artist who came out of deep rural poverty in the 1960s to become not just a staggeringly great performer and songwriter but philanthropist, humanist, humorist, and – well there's a way she demonstrated that lots
"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."
I've been in northern New Mexico for more than two weeks, in what is normally the monsoon season, but there has been no rain beyond a brief, quickly evaporated spatter of drops three times so far. The plants are parched, and the usual green regeneration of monsoon season
I spend a lot of time thinking about our habits of mind, overarching stories, and unexamined assumptions that shape thought. Because behind the events that shape our world are communications and representations and behind them are thoughts and ideas and frameworks and so the equipment of our minds shapes the
To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (“They don’t mean me”) or by despair (“There’s nothing we can do”). Each of us must find our work and do it. --Audre
I have lived a long time but I have never lived through such a time of destruction, of nature, of human lives, of truth, fact, science, journalism, the rule of law. I write during a summer of colossal wildfires, of extreme heat, of human rights abuses, of attacks on history
Last weekend, the film The Odyssey was released and the Tate brothers were arrested in Florida at the behest of the British government, which seeks to extradite them to face a long list of charges. Andrew Tate is charged with "seven further counts of rape, three counts of arranging
It is like a bad dream that keeps recurring: people are drowning while we are prevented from reaching them with our rowboats and life preservers; homes are burning but someone is standing on the firehose or knocking down the ladders; there is a planetary thermostat and countless people are trying
For at least a decade we have been told that this and that and the other thing must be tolerated in pursuit of the elusive vote of the working class or the white working class which often means the white male working class which becomes in turn a way that
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