Imagine if we were at war with a foreign power that bombed most of the federal buildings in Washington, destroying the records and functions of those departments and killing millions of federal workers – bombs falling on Health and Human Services, on the Justice Department, the Department of Interior, Veterans Affairs,
I published this in Orion Magazine in 2014, about the environmental activist Jo Anne Garrett of Baker, NV, who would've turned 100 on April 30th. I wanted to pay tribute to her by republishing this (slightly shortened) essay about her. The Las Vegas Water Grab mentioned in it--the
There's an old saying that March came in like a lion and left like a lamb. April came in a bit sheepishly and is leaving roaring and baring its teeth, and tomorrow is May Day. Not Mayday as the distress signal,. May Day the historic red-green celebration of
This is a slightly edited version of a talk I gave at last Saturday's benefit concert by the adventurous and world-renowned Kronos Quartet for Oil Change International, a climate group on whose board I've served since 2017. It was at the Oakland studio of the dance
In the summer of 2011, I went to a protest against economic injustice in New York City. I've gone to a lot of demonstrations over the decades, and this one was as forgettable as most of them are--they're good, they contribute, they aren't landmark
Imagine you were on a ship, and reports kept coming to you that the new captain and his crew had done a series of strange things--jettisoned the anchor, blew some holes in the hull, shredded the sails, thrown some of the old crew overboard. But also imagine that the person
I was the closing speaker at the ebullient San Francisco Hands Off rally, and when I got home later I scoured the news for reports on the more than one thousand other rallies. Of course people would show up in the big cities and the bluest places, but what really
I wrote the following early yesterday before the big news of the Wisconsin election in which Elon Musk's estimated $20 million and illicit bribes to voters did not net a win for his candidate and may have done the opposite and before Cory Booker's filibuster entered
The new Netflix mini-series Adolescence is not about teenagers so much as it's about how adults perceive and fail to perceive teenagers. They're presented in the first two episodes as an alien life form, leading lives adults fail to see or comprehend. I've joined
Spring is here and so is authoritarianism, and I recommend your serious attention to both. We may be at this resistance business for a while, so take care of yourself so you can keep taking care of human rights, truth, justice, and the natural world. What that means for each
You know who's doing great organizing for us right now? Elon Musk and Donald Trump, that's who. By attacking and alienating more and more swathes of the American public, they're handing us the possibility of a coalition bigger and broader than maybe anything we&
The language might sound similar but the difference between being rational and assuming Trump and Musk are rational is the difference between recognizing what's going on and pretending what's going on is sensible or sort of normal and not a howling rampage of destruction and destabilization