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
Even though large tracts of America and many old and famous red States have fallen or may fall into the grip of DOGE-MAGA and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in the Bronx
The Caprices of the Oligarchs Shocking but not surprising is a phrase I've often reverted to in the past eight years, for things that are both hideous and predictable, maybe transgressive against the old order but everyday under Trump. These days, shocking but not surprising is everywhere. I
The Wreckage They used to say war is how Americans learn geography. This civil war as Team Trump lays waste to most federal institutions is how Americans are going to learn what their federal government did. Specifically what it did for us, and for the world, for air safety and
The rhetoric and logic of the abuse of power operates similarly at all scales, which is why I've found feminism such useful equipment for understanding authoritarians in public and political life. Because no matter what abusers take from their victims, they don't want to take the
The Executive Branch There are steely evil masterminds who marshal strategy and discipline to stage successful coups, but in the USA, insofar as we have any luck at all we have the luck that this coup attempt is led by buffoons. Musk and Trump's clown car been doing
If you're reading this, you got through the first month of the assault on everything, none of it a surprise except in how stupid and ruthless the sabotage was, but a lot of its shocking, also because of how stupid and ruthless and full of petty vengefulness it
I have faith in the American people--faith that we're an unruly, insubordinate bunch scattered across a vast swathe of land, from our beautifully diverse cities to our remotest rural communities, that we are not easy to subdue and control, that even those who have supported the current authoritarian
I can sum up the Trump/Musk/Vance theory of power in five words: "We have power; you don't." Alternative version in six words: "we can do anything we want." They seem to believe that nothing is really connected to anything else and nothing
Every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis, and the current one here in the US is also a language crisis. How we use the language and how we listen for lies that are in single words and phrases as well as in sentences or narratives is part of what
Nobody wants an emergency, but perhaps we should want some of the remarkable things that can happen during them. On the top of my list of those things is how in the immediate aftermath of a hurricane, a fire, an earthquake, people take care of each other and work together
"The best study on the subject in my opinion suggests that in the long term, institutions really can’t save us; that civil society and mass mobilization are a more potent check on a backsliding democracy in the long term than relying on institutional checks and balances alone."
I started out November 5th watching election results in a taqueria with friends, and the news wasn't looking good, then went to a local election party (for the most progressive candidate for San Francisco mayor, who didn't win) but spent a lot of my time there
Yesterday the Associated Press ran a story with this sentence in it: "Last week, regional managers for the General Services Administration, or GSA, received a message from the agency’s Washington headquarters to begin terminating leases on all of the roughly 7,500 federal offices nationwide, according to an
Welcome to the emergency--or rather Meditations in an Emergency, this newsletter, not the national emergency, which is of course very unwelcome. What's striking to me about all the things our morally and imaginatively impoverished billionaires, notably Musk and Trump, right now is: they do not expect or imagine
I think of this as primarily a site for more thoughtful essayistic stuff but I was doing one of those news roundup in-the-moment things I do on FB and thought I should maybe try doing it here. Right about now on the 20th, we entered this hideous new era. It&