The Real 9/11: Citizens Succeeded, Institutions Failed

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

Climate: Who Dies, Who Fights, Who Surrenders, Who Sabotages

"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

Gloria Steinem Helped Transform the World for Everyone

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

In Praise of Dolly Parton, 1946-2026, Our Goddess of Kindness

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

The Right Word is Wrongness

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

A is for Airtight Categories, B for Blanket Statements, C for Cherrypicking....

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

Cynicism and Naïveté in the Summer of a Thousand Fires

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

Lifeguards and Angels

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

Listening to Cassandra: Misogyny, Classical and Modern

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

A Million Warnings and One Huge Invitation: Climate 2026

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

Pod Save Patriarchy (or Whatever That Sorry Platner Spectacle Was)

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

The Giantess Turns 70 (and the USA turns 250)

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