Dear readers, I'm setting off in a couple of hours on an overnight trip with a friend to go visit our mutual friend, Jarvis Masters, who's one of the many prisoners moved off Death Row but not actually relieved of that murderous sentence. He's
I saw two radically different versions of what a quilt could be yesterday and yet they spoke to the same issues. I caught the show Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California at the Berkeley Art Museum Sunday afternoon. I love quilts and while I could love them purely
There's been a lot of fuss about Trump recently calling female journalists "stupid" and "piggy" though there's nothing really new about his misogyny toward that sub-population (I am so old I remember 2016 candidate Trump saying weird things about Megyn Kelly when
Everything changed in the last few weeks. The Republicans, assumed by themselves and too many others, to be unstoppable got stopped again and again. Public opinion manifested in many ways: as an election that went hard against them, by a once-loyal Trumpist who turned on him, as a remarkable shift
It's striking to me that a lot of people want politics to be about their personal feelings, in which case they're not engaged in politics, though they may be engaged in the sabotage of politics. This is why I declared that "voting is a chess
A young white woman in yoga clothes berating masked ICE agents in a parking lot this spring. A pope speaking up again and again for immigrants. Furious judges dressing down the Trump administration and ruling against it time after time after time, in response to the blizzard of lawsuits filed
When word went out that border patrol agents had been sent to the Coast Guard island off Alameda near Oakland on the eve of October 23, Bay Area residents sprang into action. Before dawn the next morning, valiant locals began a blockade of the island, which is connected to Alameda
In 2022, the tech critic and privacy advocate Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe what's happened on the Internet to a lot of the most widely used platforms: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Spotify. He writes: "First, platforms are good to their users; then they
This is the first guest essay at Meditations in an Emergency. I'm proud to bring you yesterday's speech by the great Cleve Jones, who has for nearly half a century been a key organizer for the global queer community and the San Francisco Bay Area, gave
Portlanders deploying inflatable animal costumes, a brass band, mass ukulele renditions of “This Land Is Your Land,” naked bike rides, and other tactics in their ICE protests are undermining the Trump administration’s lurid claims that Portland, Oregon, is a “war-torn” city under siege by a violent left. It’s
Many people seem to love sweeping generalizations. Not all people, but lots of people I come across trying to discuss the politics of our time fall back on pretending that a category of people is homogenous as in all its members hold the same positions. If categories were indeed airtight
An Army Called ICE Is Already Waging a Domestic War (This is a series of short essay-reports, beginning with the worst – ICE and attacks on immigrants and ending with the best – what we can do and a brief homage to Jane Goodall.) A lot of us have assumed that somehow
Tuesday, hundreds of highly skilled professionals were forced to sit in the room where their inferiors in all but rank staged long, pointless, hateful, ignorant, and undisciplined performances. Such a gathering of all top military leadership is unprecedented in modern times, a major security risk, and a big insult to
My dearest wife, It is week two of the Siege of Portland, and still these barbarians will not yield to our troops. We have severed the cords of their latte machines but they are making cowboy coffee in their camps, where loud ukulele songs of resistance even now drift in
Something that's true of all the narcissists I've known and witnessed is that they're unhappy and they can't recognize that this is an entrenched condition. They think it's due to something someone just did, and if they punish, intimidate, coerce
Hannah Arendt famously wrote, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer
I drove home to San Francisco from New Mexico last weekend, and in the western Mojave desert of California I passed in quick succession three vast renewable energy sites: the first was three solar concentrator power plants, the kind where rings of mirrors reflect sun onto a central tower, which
I and we are wildlife whose natural habitat is libraries, when it comes to physical space, because they contain books in which minds roam free through time and space, encounter Dogen and Dante and Sappho and Black Elk and others long since gone, meet ideas and possibilities, meet each other
Twenty years ago, on August 29, 2005, a huge hurricane hit the Gulf Coast. New Orleans's levees failed, as had been predicted, and much of the city went underwater. Although the authorities had issued a mandatory evacuation order, they had provided no resources to the many who were
Someone made this extra-grumpy meme about the fact that football player and podcaster Travis Kelce proposed to pop superstar Taylor Swift and now they're engaged, or rather about the fact that of course lots of people and media outlets are paying lots of attention, which Grumpy Meme believes
There's a reason why sports teams don't chant "I believe that we will lose" before a game, a reason so obvious that I'm pretty sure it needs no explanation in that context. Words have power. They not only describe but shape reality;
On July 31, the Washington Post ran a story noting that the National Museum of American History, a branch of the Smithsonian, took down a portion of an exhibit about presidential impeachment concerning Trump's two impeachments. The piece quoted an unnamed source: "A person familiar with the
I've been traveling, which means being blessedly offline a lot more than usual, but I'm settled for a while, and there's so much to say. Before I say anything elaborate or essayistic, I just want to say THERE IS A LOT OF RESISTANCE GOING
This is the forty-fifth post since I launched on February 2. It's been a wild ride and a lot of fun and quite thrilling to see so many of you join me (there are a bit over 30k subscribers now). To celebrate I dropped the – strictly optional but