odds and ends / 9.8.2026

Firmin Baes, "The Young Girl and the Cabbage (‘La petite fille au chou’)," ca. 1903, private collection, Antwerp.

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A grasshopper design in Leavers lace. Late 19th or early 20th century. Collection of Anne Swift.

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Yui Suzukey, "Lattice Picnic," 2026.

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Felix Vallotton, "Coucher de soliel, nuages bleus (Sunset, Blue Clouds)," 1918.

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Excerpt from "Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him" by Nancy Willard.

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Early 20th century three-light chandelier made of lacquered sheet metal featuring thistles and tulips.

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Charlotte Perriand with an unknown man on a summer’s day, date and photographer unknown, from the collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, via aetherian_upstate.

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He was born in 1948 and grew up in a small Suffolk backwater. This was a world closer to the 19th century than it was to our own dully fractious era. No global hullabaloo of youth culture: impossible to imagine Altamont or Live Aid, Michael Jackson on the Thames, Bono cold calling George Bush mid-gig, Katy Perry in orbit. No personal touchscreen beckoning itchy fingers. Just gazing dreamily into the distance or cycling about aimlessly on long summer afternoons. Boredom and its cloud-drift antidotes. Boredom as something almost erotic.

Ian Penman, "Infinite Wibble." London Review of Books, 9/25/2025.

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Monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity—the most atrocious if it is the sign of an unvarying perpetuity. It is time surpassed or time sterilized. The circle is the symbol of monotony which is beautiful, the swinging of a pendulum of monotony which is atrocious. ... A squirrel turning in its cage and the rotation of the celestial sphere—extreme misery and extreme grandeur. It is when man sees himself as a squirrel turning round and round in a circular cage that, if he does not lie to himself, he is close to salvation.

Simone Weil, "The Mysticism of Work" from Gravity and Grace.

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In order for work to be meaningful and sustaining, Weil argued, it had to demand thought and attention. This was an insight she arrived at through firsthand experience. During her work on the assembly lines of newly automated factories, she marveled at “this mental void inside me, this absence of thought indispensable to the slaves of a modern machine.” She worried that the “social machine,” the managerial class of bureaucrats and technocrats, was slowly gravitating toward unconsciousness as countless decisions were being outsourced to specialized technical criteria nobody really understood. Modern life was no longer serving human needs; it was serving the ends of the machine, and it was becoming more and more difficult to steer it in a direction of our choosing. In the talks I gave that year, I often quoted a passage from Oppression and Liberty in which she imagines a future civilization where “all human activity…was subjected right down to matters of detail to an altogether mathematical strictness, and that without a single human being understanding anything at all about what he was doing.” It never failed to elicit a sympathetic murmur from the audience.

Meghan O'Gieblyn, "Wishing It So." New York Review, 9/24/2026.

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... [H]e asked if I’d be open to reading some Shakespeare aloud together: specifically, Act I, Scene 7 and Act II, Scene 2 from “Macbeth.” ... “I’m kind of obsessed,” he said. “I go see the same plays over and over and over.” We sat opposite each other at a glass dining table in a midtown hotel suite. ... [H]is performance was serious, decisive, earnest. Afterward, I told him that it was nice to be reminded of the particular, idiosyncratic music of Shakespeare’s lines. He agreed. “It affects you even if you don’t understand the words sometimes,” he said. 

Amanda Petrusich, "Rivers Cuomo Is Piecing It All Together," The New Yorker, 8/30/2026.

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I myself went fell hard for the Eclogues as a University of Michigan undergrad from 1982 to 1984; really, the line A Jove principium; Jovis omnia plena (“The beginning is from Jupiter; all things are full of Jupiter”—but the English just doesn’t cut it) altered me neurologically and impaired my enthusiasm for anything subsequent. Indeed, I became an obscure poet, a translator, a sarcastic cultural historian, and a serial axe-wielding reviewer.

Sarah Ruden, "Criticism, Then." Book Post, June 18, 2026.

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"You do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time."

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We chew our burritos. Maybe our cells yearn to be free of us, I think, most unscientifically. Maybe they’re exhausted by the constant negotiations in time and space it takes to maintain the form of an eye, a limb, a mind. Lord knows I’m tired too.

Claire L. Evans, "Report from Goleta." Wild Information, 7/12/2026.

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Those constant bearers of meaning
bore me. I want to open wide now
to the absence of concept, understanding,
representation, to the inward flare
of exhilaration. To the gratuitous
revelation of mineral forces.

Forrest Gander, from Mojave Ghost.

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A curtain blowing in the breeze. 

odds and ends / 7.21.2026

 

Still from "Clotheslines," directed by Roberta Cantow, 1982.

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Sawyer Made split-step stool, for Walker Street Market, photographed by Winnie Yang via The Secret Strategist.

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"Ideal Hollow" by Nichola Manning, via drifting lament.

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Shell buttons, via slow roads.

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Detail of "an exquisite, finest muslin early 1800s French hand embroidered shawl," sold by starchedandcrumpled.

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Photo of H.D. and a child on a beach in California, collections of the Beinecke Library.

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"The pleasure I take from these sun-dried clothes is more than I can describe ..."

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Overlapping in a complex network, each line of garments reads as a household census noting: age, family size, and social status. Bed sheets, undergarments, and women’s hosiery on thin strings allude to bodies not present. Starched white shirts dangle neck-down on tiny tightropes stories high above a precipice of filth-black alleys. A warm summer breeze could bring each garment to life with the weightlessness of guardian angels overlooking the city.

Lissa Rivera, "A Fine Line: The Art of the Clothesline," Museum of the City of New York Blog, 8/7/2012.

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[Clotheslines] were useful in many ways besides drying laundry: for running messages and cups of sugar from one apartment to another, or—stretched diagonally down to the ground—for conveying groceries to the elderly infirm or growlers of beer up to the corner saloon. They were characteristic of a life stretched by necessity, out of interiors of apartments as far as possible into the public space beyond.

Lucy Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York.

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She felt contempt for her environment. ‘Women, yech!’ she’d say. ‘Clotheslines and gossip,’ she’d say. She knew there was another world—the world—and sometimes she thought she wanted that world. Bad. She’d stop dead in the middle of a task, staring for long minutes at a time at the sink, the floor, the stove. But where? how? what?

Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments. 

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I think the idea of comfort generally, even when you asked me if I’m comfortable, is a rich thing. These are concepts. If you ask somebody how they grew up, they won’t tell you rich. They’ll say, “We were comfortable.” I’d never heard the word growing up. Comfortable? What? We’re not comfortable. Nobody is comfortable! There are roaches in the sink. The snow has come through the window, and I’ve got to put cellophane on it. Nobody is comfortable, and we’re very comfortable being uncomfortable. But the rich are not. And they dictate what is comfortable and what isn’t. They are uncomfortable often.

Robby Hoffman, interviewed by Lulu Garcia-Navarro for the NYT, 6/27/2026.

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"Suffering and enjoyment as sources of knowledge."

odds and ends / 4.10.2026

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1980s British Telecom Picturephone at wertwerk.kr, via Mildew.

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Button seemingly referencing Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics in "The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze" from Act 2 of The Mikado:

Ah, pray, make no mistake, we are not shy
We're very wide awake, the Moon and I

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Ray Johnson's "Evaporations" book stamp, via the London Centre for Book Arts:

Johnson had his "Evaporations by Ray Johnson" rubber stamp made after a May 1970 Artforum article by Robert Pincus-Witten that mused on the legacy of Pop art and dismissed Johnson, along with "Wesselman, Indiana, Marisol,…[and] so many others" as “evaporations” who had "fall[en] away to nothingness."

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People today, especially younger people, have to go out of their way to know literature qua literature—to understand it as a living thing separate from trade publishing as presented to them by mainstream reviews and Goodreads. They live in a world in which people are happily (always happily) "creative"; they understand an activity called "creative writing"; they might even know that there are many professional writers spread across the land like peppercorns spilled across a hardwood floor, teaching at universities and community colleges while paying off debts to Home Depot and Subaru, watching Netflix, and checking their retirement accounts. They understand, at every level from pillow design to haute cuisine to wet-sand sculpture, the whole idea of "art"; but what is meant by "literature," in the sense that Howard deploys it throughout his study of [Malcom] Cowley, has largely passed from view. The idea that a small number of people belonging to each generation have thrown themselves at literature, have tried to become part of it and pound it and reshape it and alter its history—that they have risked their chances of satisfactory, comfortable lives for it—all of that is becoming increasingly difficult to explain.

Vince Passaro, "In the Aftermath of Victory: Malcom Cowley and the Dream of the American Canon," Harpers, January 2026.

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What people click—and what they think they like—is largely a matter of what is available to them. Publics are made and maintained, not discovered preformed, like rock formations. It is a sign of a fatally limited imagination to assume that we can only ever desire the pittance to which we are currently reconciled. It is par for the course that, in a woefully limp statement on the carnage, the [Washington] Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, referred to the paper’s subscribers not as “readers” but as “consumers.” A consumer is a person whose preexisting tastes you strive to satisfy over and over; a reader is someone you hope to change, convince, and surprise. ... The prospect of a paper that flatters its readers by regurgitating what they already click is familiar and depressing. It puts me in mind of [Jeff] Bezos’s other marquee product, another service that dealt a disastrous blow to books. On Amazon, the glorious inconvenience of browsing shelves or combing through piles has been eliminated. There is no occasion to pick up an unfamiliar book out of sheer curiosity. Every book that the site’s algorithm recommends is similar to one that you have purchased already. In this way, you encounter nothing but iterations of yourself forever. It is a world in which the customer is always right. But if you didn’t want to be proved wrong, if you didn’t want to be altered or antagonized in ways that you could never predict, why would you read at all?

Becca Rothfield, "The Death of Book World," The New Yorker, February 10, 2026. 

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"The Learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar, guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life."

Charles Willson Peale, museum-maker. He named many of his ten children after his favorite artists.

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"I had a transcendent experience three or four years ago when I decided I was going to finally dust my books, and had to take all of them down by hand," he said. "It was sublime. I couldn’t restrain myself from going through each book. Every one had a whole story for me."

Richard Hell, describing his apartment in the New York Times, March 4, 2026 (gift link). 

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odds and ends / 2.27.2026

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Maurice Denis, Avril ou Les anémones, 1891.

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Glimpses into Plant Life by Eliza Brightwen, in the collection of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

As described in the catalog of Honey and Wax Books: 

"First edition of Glimpses into Plant Life (1897) by eccentric English naturalist Eliza Brightwen, in a publisher’s binding depicting a skeleton leaf. Born in 1830, Brightwen spent most of her life as an invalid, homebound and depressed at her country house, The Grove. After her husband’s death in 1883, however, Brightwen rallied. Her nephew recalled: 'As her physical strength increased she ventured to explore her lawns and shrubberies; she dared still further, into her woods and meadows; she wandered around her lake, and even, in a broad boat, upon it; she actually quitted her domain and explored the densely-wooded common that hemmed it in upon two sides. She discovered in herself a remarkable gift of natural magic.'"

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Arnold Friedman, Still Life with White Vase, ca. 1942-1946. Via Peter Shear.

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Vintage postcard of crocus flowers.

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Beaded maple-leaf coin purse, "suitable for your credit cards and identity documents."

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A clear, crispy day—dry and breezy air, full of oxygen. Out of the sane, silent, beauteous miracles that envelop and fuse me—trees, water, grass, sunlight, and early frost—the one I am looking at most today is the sky. It has that delicate, transparent blue, and the only clouds are little or larger white ones, giving their still and spiritual motion to the great concave. All through the earlier day (say from seven to eleven) it keeps a pure yet vivid blue. But as noon approaches, the color gets lighter, quite gray for two or three hours—then still paler for a spell, till sundown—which last I watch dazzling through the interstices of a knoll of big trees—darts of fire and a gorgeous show of light yellow, liver-color, and red, with a vast silver glaze askance on the water—the transparent shadows, shafts, sparkle, and vivid colors beyond all the paintings ever made.

I don’t know what or how, but it seems to me mostly owing to these skies (every now and then I think, while I have of course seen them every day of my life, I never really saw the skies before), have had this autumn some wondrously contented hours—may I not say perfectly happy ones? As I have read, Byron just before his death told a friend that he had known but three happy hours during his whole existence. Then there is the old German legend of the king’s bell, to the same point. While I was out there by the wood, that beautiful sunset through the trees, I thought of Byron’s and the bell story, and the notion started in me that I was having a happy hour. (Though perhaps my best moments I never jot down; when they come I cannot afford to break the charm by inditing memoranda. I just abandon myself to the mood and let it float on, carrying me in its placid ecstasy.)

What is happiness, anyhow? Is this one of its hours, or the like of it?—so impalpable—a mere breath, an evanescent tinge? I am not sure—so let me give myself the benefit of the doubt.

Walt Whitman, Specimen Days.

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And what is Life?—An hour-glass on the run,
A mist retreating from the morning sun,
A busy, bustling, still repeated dream;
Its length?—A minute’s pause, a moment’s thought;
And happiness?—A bubble on the stream,
That in the act of seizing shrinks to nought.

John Clare, from "What is Life?"

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"Instead of sitting and looking out of the window, I just sank into the weather and the trees ..."

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Meghan O’Gieblyn on Marguerite Young: "All her books are, to some extent, about failed searches for paradise."

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"One of the most vast and unique perfume collections in the world already sits improbably in a California strip mall. It’s part sanctuary, part treasure map, and entirely shaped by a woman who has devoted her life to the art of finding what’s worth smelling."

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"Ultimately, I am a strange person who cannot fit neatly into reality."

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I yearn for a serious yet creative American political writer, like the British novelist and queen of reportage Rebecca West, who could think deeply and in crazy detail about important events that were recent, imminent, or actually happening. I’m sometimes irritated at the play of her mind as too free; I want to shout at her that I’m not interested in the a complete tour of the setting in which the Cold-War-era spy William Marshall was arrested ... I’m sometimes put off by West’s emotional partisanship, almost certainly an effect of her hard-knocks youth ... But West’s dedication to work, to visiting and revisiting and going far off the beaten path, to interviewing and reading and writing and rewriting and republishing, sometimes over a span of decades when she was developing a single subject, paid off in super-large understanding.

Sarah Ruden, writing on Rebecca West for Book Post, 4/23/2025.

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 Found: 430,000-year-old wooden tools, a 500,000-year-old hammer of bone. 

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"The place on Earth from which you can, in theory, see further than any other is between an unnamed Himalayan ridge near the Indian-Chinese border and Pik Dankova in Kyrgyzstan."

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In other news: Days are getting longer.

"get organized now"

Thousands of masked, heavily armed agents, some with minimal training, have been unleashed on the streets of an American state. They have been promised near-total legal immunity by the president, effectively unshackled from any constitutional constraints. They have been given limitless license to abduct anyone, not just the undocumented immigrants but American citizens who happen to look foreign, whatever that might mean.

Lydia Polgreen, "In Minneapolis, I Glimpsed a Civil War." The New York Times,  1/19/2026.

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In Minnesota, the sound of whistles wafts through the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, as community members alert their neighbors that ICE agents are patrolling the area. Volunteers in green vests are stationed near mosques and Somali-owned businesses in the area, which has a large Somali population, said Suleiman Adan, the deputy executive director at Cair Minnesota, a Muslim civil rights organization.

Adan said that community members have also shared that ICE has patrolled the Karmel Mall, where many Somalis frequent. “It’s like you’re looking for game,” he said about ICE’s tactics. “It’s like you’re hunting; who can I prey on today?”

“Right now, it’s like ‘to hell with the constitution’,” said Adan. “Freedom for whom is really the question.”

Melissa Hellman, "'It's like they're hunting': US citizens and legal residents report increase in racial profiling by ICE." The Guardian, 1/22/2026.

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'This surge has changed nearly everything about our daily lives,' [Columbia Heights School Superintendent Zena] Stenvik said. 'Students are watching abductions on their way to school, on their way home and through their windows.'

'Imagine the trauma of a child being picked up by masked and armed agents, seeing their parents in handcuffs and being used to attempt to lure their mother out of the house and into danger. What has become of our country?'

Elizabeth Shockman, "ICE detains 5-year-old boy; school leader says agents used him as 'bait.'" MPRNews, January 21, 2026. 

Shockman reports that the child and his father were going through the asylum process and includes this quote from their lawyer: "Every step of their immigration process has been doing what they’ve been asked to do, and so this is just … cruelty."

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Minneapolis has been heroic. Even after the murder of Good, people continue to show up, continue to organize, continue to resist. In a Somali neighborhood, a crowd prevented one man from being abducted; a singing patrol is among the many trying to protect the neighbors; violence is being documented across the region by ordinary people with phones and by journalists; and "six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned on Tuesday over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of a woman killed by an ICE agent and the department’s reluctance to investigate the shooter." A Minneapolis minister, writes Bill Lindeke, says “You’ve probably seen the videos of agents saying to protestors and legal observers, ‘You saw what happened. Didn’t you learn your lesson?’ The only lesson learned is the love for our neighbors is growing three sizes each and every day.”

Rebecca Solnit, "Weak Violence, Strong Peace: Who We Are in this Crisis." Meditations in an Emergency, January 14, 2026.

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"If there’s a conspiracy, it’s the entire city conspiring to be free."

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As [Victor] Fraenkel explained it, a lawless dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society. What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious. Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely. In this domain, which Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” ordinary law didn’t apply. (A prerogative power is one that allows a person such as a monarch to act without regard to the laws on the books; theorists from John Locke onward have offered various formulations of the idea.) In this prerogative state, judges and other legal actors deferred to the racist hierarchies and ruthless expediencies of the Nazi regime. ...The key here is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state. The two states cohabit uneasily and unstably. On any given day, people or cases could be jerked out of the normative state and into the prerogative one.

Aziz Huq, "America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State." The Atlantic, May 2025.

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Ask any people who have lived in a country that became an autocracy, and they will tell you some version of a story about walls closing in on them, about space getting smaller and smaller. The space they are talking about is freedom. ... The only way to keep the space from imploding is to fill it, to prop up the walls: to claim all the room there still is for speaking, writing, publishing, protesting, voting. It’s what the people of Minnesota appear to be doing, and it’s something each of us needs to do—right now, while we still can.

M. Gessen, "One Year of Trump. The Time to Act Is Now, While We Still Can." The New York Times, 1/18/2026.

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Wherever you are, get organized now. Figure out who your likeminded neighbors are. Set up your Signal chats. Get some whistles (I can spare a few if you need them). This administration has made it clear that Minneapolis is just the beginning, and when they come to your city, you’ll want to be ready.

Scott Meslow, "How much can a city take?" The Verge, 1/19/2026.

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One of my favorite books to read out loud when Hugh was small was Margaret Wise Brown's The Important Book. In it, she catalogs a number of things, whimsically distilled, and this line has been running through my mind: "The important thing about the sky is that it is always there. It is true that it is blue, and high, and full of clouds, and made of air, but the important thing about the sky is that it is always there." 

The sky has not fallen yet, and it will not fall. And the important thing about that is that every one of us can find a way to help. Some can walk alongside and blow whistles and stand in the cold; some can drive and deliver and donate. Some can organize and coordinate; some can make calls and post signs. Some can make soup and bring neighbors together so they know who to trust; some can sing and make art so that we remember what we are fighting for—kindness, neighborliness, safety, plenty, generosity. There are so many, many ways to resist. The important thing is that we find one, and do it.

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Some resources:

The easiest guide to calling your senators about ICE.

A list of ICE's corporate collaborators.

A guide explaining the rapid response model being used in the Twin Cities.

Resources for whistle warriors + whistle kits.

A useful mnemonic: SALUTE.

And for folks in northeast Ohioans: a 1/29 training on building community defense.

gifts for magazine-stackers, ephemera-hoarders, and other lovers of work in print

The ultimate in reading stands, by Bruno Mathsson.

Synonym, a magazine that tells immigrant stories through food.

To mark a place, Lucky Star Candle's burnable bookmark braid.

Brother in Elysium George Oppen broadside.

Fornasetti's Libri magazine rack, because of the key, the butterfly, and the tasseled bookmark.

COMBO, an annual magazine "conceived as an archive of our collective dreams."

Louie Issaman Jones' sculptural bookstand, designed to display spreads.

Word Making and Taking, the 19th century's favorite word game, via Haec City / Also Books.

Maggie Umber's Sound of Snow Falling, a visual diary of great horned owls.

"A piece of glass" by Derek Sullivan: "a publication to hang in a window, a bit of wonder when conditions permit" at Paul + Wendy Projects.

Archival boxes, for keeping rare pieces.

Sounds for Focus & Productivity, a zine by Sun-Rom and AURAGRAPH that comes with a risograph-printed poster for the wall and a flexidisc for the turntable.

The Brick Journal, "a collaborative publication devoted to the visual language, social and geologic histories, and cultural production that stem from and connect to brickmaking and brick work."

Alan Sobrino's epistolary novel sent by mail, via five handwritten letters imagining the sexy correspondence Valmont and M. Merteuil of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

Alica Nauta's Reference Library Files, a book that documents looking for images at the Toronto Reference Library. 

Jewelry for books, by Fixed Air.

Bundle Theory, an essay by Romy Day Winkel published by OUTLINE on "collecting, or hoarding, as an aesthetic of patiences." 

Morgan Ritter's wearable poems, "curious tags [that] may be integrated into your life as plainly as the branded tags on the interior of your garments."

A wheely silver Hulken bag, for schlepping finds home from library sales and art book fairs. (I have this and love it so, so much.)

Not pictured: Gift certificates to a magazine/zine-focused store, like Chess Club  or The City Reader in Portland, Oregon, Periodicals in Detroit, Paper + Dirt in Pittsburgh, Hi Desert Times in Twentynine Palms, the Heath Newsstand in San Francisco, Tomo in Austin, Quimby or Inga in Chicago, and in New York City, Bungee Space, Casa, Head Hi, Iconic, Magazine Cafe, and Printed Matter. Alternatively, a subscription to Stack, Steven Watson's marvelous magazine subscription service, which delivers a different independent magazine from around the world each month.

Finally (though truly, this list could go on forever): Marcell Mars' manifesto:

In the 1990s, activist, independent scholar, and artist Marcell Mars founded Memory of the World / Public Library amidst the ruins of the former Yugoslavia, with the aim of resisting the privatization of knowledge and encouraging everyone to freely share books online.

B09k’s poster work is a re-enactment of Mars’s Public Library manifesto,

“When everyone is a librarian, the library is everywhere,” inviting everyone to participate and become part of the world’s memory.

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Okay, one more idea/shameless plug: magazines about sound and emotion, mushrooms (1 + 2), and cats, edited by yours truly.

odds and ends / 10.17.2025

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A photograph of autumn clouds from the collection of P.J. Cohen.

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Louise Bogan, writing to Morton D. Zabel, August 22, 1937. Via Letters of Note.

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Emanuele Cavalli, "Solitario," 1936.

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Austrian Essex Glass pendant depicting a bolete, circa 1890. Sourced by Will Martindale, Classical Gem Hunter, for J.W. Anderson.

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Stained glass by Abraham van Linge, c.1633, in a Georgian window at Lydiard Park, photographed by Caro/@soniclb.

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Still from "One Battle After Another."

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"I’m a Thing Finder," said Pippi. "The whole world is full of things and somebody has to look for them. And that’s just what a Thing Finder does."

"What kind of things?" asked Annika.

"Oh, all kinds," said Pippi. ‘Lumps of gold, ostrich feathers, candy snapcrackers, little tiny screws, and things like that."

Tommy and Annika thought it sounded as if it would be fun and wanted very much to be Thing Finders, too.

"We shall see what we shall see," said Pippi. "One always finds something."

Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking.

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"'I almost never make up anything,' she told me. 'I just notice different things.'"

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INTERVIEWER: I’m trying to imagine you writing here at your desk. I’m picturing a huge tower of books from obscure libraries that you’re collaging from as you go⁠⁠—you know, some ancient Greek texts about ant colonies in India or whatever⁠⁠—and a complex system for taking notes on all the source materials … Is that how it is?

WEINBERGER: Not exactly. I tend to do most of the research before I start. That can take months. And I’ve never kept a notebook or taken notes, because I can’t read my own handwriting. When I have to write little to-do lists, I do it in block letters.

INTERVIEWER: So where do you keep the research?

WEINBERGER: It’s all here.

INTERVIEWER: Are you pointing to your giant cranium?

WEINBERGER: No, no, I’m pointing to the books on the shelves, which are incredibly OCD-organized ... As I write, I’m trying to remember where I’ve read something, so there is a chance that I’ll lose something forever ...

Srikanth Reddy, "Eliot Weinberger, The Art of the Essay No. 4," The Paris Review, Issue 253, Fall 2025.

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For sale: A former British prep school filled with 150,000 second-hand books "meticulously sorted into subject areas, from naval history to 19th-century literature, architecture to zoology ..." Includes a garden with "philosophical follies, such as doorknobs surreally attached to tree trunks" and a "modern version of the Tantalus myth ... a table and chairs in the middle of a pond, overhung with an unreachable fruit bowl." (Found thanks to Jess.)

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"In the possession of books unread, there is not shame but virtue."

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Related: antilibrary (noun): A collection of books that are owned but have not yet been read.

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We continue to know more and more about modern society, but we find the centers of political initiative less and less accessible. This generates a personal malady that is particularly acute in the intellectual who has labored under the illusion that his thinking makes a difference. In the world of today the more his knowledge of affairs grows, the less effective the impact of his thinking seems to become. Since he grows more frustrated as his knowledge increases, it seems that knowledge leads to powerlessness. He feels helpless in the fundamental sense that he cannot control what he is able to foresee. This is not only true of the consequences of his own attempts to act; it is true of the acts of powerful men whom he observes. 

Such frustration arises, of course, only in the man who feels compelled to act. The “detached spectator” does not know his helplessness because he never tries to surmount it. But the political man is always aware that while events are not in his hands he must bear their consequences. He finds it increasingly difficult even to express himself. If he states public issues as he sees them, he cannot take seriously the slogans and confusions used by parties with a chance to win power. He therefore feels politically irrelevant. Yet if he approaches public issues “realistically,” that is, in terms of the major parties, he has already so compromised their very statement that he is not able to sustain an enthusiasm for political action and thought. 

The political failure of nerve has a personal counterpart in the development of a tragic sense of life. This sense of tragedy may be experienced as a personal discovery and a personal burden, but it is also a reflex of objective circumstances. It arises from the fact that at the centers of public decision there are powerful men who do not themselves suffer the violent results of their own decisions. 

C. Wright Mills, “The Powerless People: The Social Role of the Intellectual,” Politics, 1944. Found thanks to an essay in N+1: "Large Language Muddle: It's OK to be a Luddite!"

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Mass movements sound dramatic. But they are not built dramatically. They are built through many, many mundane actions. Talking to people. Making a list. Knocking on doors. Planning a meeting. Going to the meeting. Setting up for the meeting. Participating in the meeting. Cleaning up after the meeting. Planning the next meeting. On and on. You get to go hurl rocks at the barricades sometimes, yes, but you can’t just do that part, and not do the meetings. This is why the real heroes of mass movements are… the masses. Not the guy who gets in the spotlight to announce his unique plan to save us all—all the people who actually do all the stuff.

Hamilton Nolan, "Shift Change at the Wheel Reinvention Factory," How Things Work, 10/16/2025.

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"Trump is racing against time, trying to consolidate power before his unpopularity renders his coalition too small to accomplish much."

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[O]bservers have been far too credulous of [broliagarch] libertarian self-narratives. Their actual behavior suggests fealty to a patronage market, not a free one, as they attempt to translate their proximity to President Trump into lucrative defense and surveillance contracts. These entrepreneurial parasites need a state they can feed on.

Suzanne Schneider, "From the Cesspool to the Mainstream," The New York Review, 10/23/2025. 

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I recognize the situation is growing quite frightening, but it is also important to keep in mind that fear is a weapon. Fear is a force multiplier. If you strike terror into people’s hearts, they will obey, far beyond their actual exposure to danger. And the modern dictatorship does not need to rely on bloodcurdling terror of torture and death so much as the fear of nuisance, the fear of trouble, the fear of harassment. ... Even if your personal circumstances make it difficult for you, where and when you can, do not obey. Find ways to be intransigent; a pain in the ass. 

John Ganz, "This Is It: Obedience and Support are the Same." Unpopular Front, 9/18/2025.

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Seriously, this is giving me blood pressure, I can’t take it. If only there could be some sort of great spontaneous gathering, in cities all across this great land of ours, citizens, exercising their right to the Freedom of Assembly, and Freedom of Speech, people who are mad as hell and not gonna take it any more! Maybe on a weekend? 

Joe Macleod + Tom Scocca, "Mr. Wrong: Congress' Day Off," Indignity Vol. 5, No. 84, 10/16/2025.

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No Kings, 10/18/2025.