no kings / 6.14.2025

The United States in the last four months has felt like an unremitting series of shocks: executive orders gutting civil rights and constitutional protections; a man with a chain saw trying to gut the federal government; deliberately brutal deportations; people snatched off the streets and disappeared in unmarked cars; legal attacks on universities and law firms.

Unlike the Russian autocratic breakthrough (or, for that matter, the Hungarian one, which has apparently provided some of Donald Trump’s playbook), the transformation of American government and society hasn’t been spread out over decades or even years. It’s been everything everywhere all at once.

M. Gessen, "Beware: We are entering a new phase of the Trump era." The New York Times (gift link), 5/28/2025.

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In a post-reality environment, it turns out, the president didn’t need to wait for a crisis to launch an authoritarian crackdown. Instead, he can simply invent one. ... If you saw all this in any other country—soldiers sent to crush dissent, union leaders arrested, opposition politicians threatened—it would be clear that autocracy had arrived. The question, now, is whether Americans who hate tyranny can be roused to respond.

Michelle Goldberg, "This is what autocracy looks like." The New York Times (gift link), 6/9/2025. 

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In a remark that has since gone viral, Conor Simon, a resident of Honesdale, Pennsylvania, observed:

It’s really hard to fathom that the guy making my pizza for 25 years is a gangster and a terrorist, and the person who shows up in an unmarked car wearing a mask and body armour to take him away is somehow the good guy.

Trump may spin spine-tingling tales of ‘bad hombres’, but videos of recent ICE raids tell a different story. The mother of a newborn is handcuffed and shoved, head down, into an unmarked vehicle, her family screaming, the neighbours filming, her baby cradled against a weeping woman’s shoulder. A young boy wails as his father is thrown into the back of a van. Children whose parents have been taken into custody sob on the floor of a school gym, not knowing if they will ever see their families again. The raids have not been on drug dens or sex-trafficking rings. They have been on restaurants and schools, hospitals and court houses. ICE’s war is not simply at home, but on home.

Anahid Nersessian, "ICE’s War on Home," LRB Blog, 6/10/2025.

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Remember that studies of social movements worldwide show that it takes just 3.5% of a population engaging in sustained peaceful protests to topple an authoritarian regime. ... The Women's March in January 2017 was the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. Between 1% and 1.6% of the U.S. population participated. Double or triple that scale would approach the 3.5% threshold.

That's our mission: doubling or tripling the size of the Women's March and engaging 3.5% of the U.S. population in mass, sustained protests to stop authoritarianism in America, which is here, at our doorstep, right now. 

MoveOn, 6/10/2025.

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On June 14, 2025: No Kings. Over 2,000 peaceful, nonviolent protests against Trump's authoritarian actions are planned in all 50 U.S. states (the map is pretty awesome—see above); there are also protests happening worldwide. (The Associated Press has a good explainer on No Kings here.)

I have been to many protests, from the very small (a handful of people standing alongside a road) to the very big (the Women's March in Washington, D.C.). And while I am not a person who loves crowds (pro tip: stand at the edge) or noise, I always come away feeling glad that I went, and humbled, too. It is a powerful thing to stand in community with other folks who care, to see that none of us are alone in our outrage, that we can show up for each other. 

There are many good and valid reasons folks can't attend protests, but for those of us who can, we must. We can't cede space; we have to make it known that we do not stand for the rampant cruelty, idiocy, and greed of this administration. So on Saturday, my family will go to a local No Kings event in the morning. Later that night, we'll take our signs and march up and down the sidewalks of our village, just to bring it home to those of our neighbors who prefer to pretend none of this is happening. Every action matters. 

odds and ends / 3.31.2025

 

Frank Wilbert Stokes, "The Sun’s Rays, Sidney Herbert Bay and Joinville Land, South Pole, Feb. 10, 1902." Via subterranean thunder.

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Found text via stopping off place.

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What was being contrived at the time was the abolition of all dissent or nuance, with narrow-mindedness elevated to a universal principle, and betrayal the new public morality.

W.G. Sebald, translated by Jo Catling. From Silent Catastrophes (excerpted in Book Post). 

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Flooding the ether with bad ideas isn’t Trump’s unique know-how—it’s standard autocratic fare. Hannah Arendt used the word “preposterous” to describe the ideas that underpinned 20th-century totalitarian regimes. Bad ideas do a lot of the work of building autocracy. By forcing us to engage with them, they make our conversations, our media and our society dumber. By conjuring the unimaginable—radical changes in the geography of human relationships, the government and the world itself as we have known it—they plunge us into an anxious state in which thinking is difficult. That kind of anxiety is key to totalitarian control.

Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you that most of the time, for most people, it’s not frightening. It is stultifying. It’s boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water—because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.

Masha Gessen, "The Barrage of Trump's Awful Ideas Is Doing Exactly What It Is Supposed To." The New York Times, 2/15/2025.

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Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed . . . by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli . . . We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made? 

Paul Valery, quoted as the epigraph in Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity.

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To put it bluntly, under conditions of ‘liquidity’ everything could happen yet nothing can be done with confidence and certainty. Uncertainty results, combining feelings of ignorance (meaning the impossibility of knowing what is going to happen), impotence (meaning the impossibility of stopping it from happening) and an elusive and diffuse, poorly specified and difficult to locate fear; fear without an anchor and desperately seeking one. Living under liquid modern conditions can be compared to walking in a minefield: everyone knows an explosion might happen at any moment and in any place, but no one knows when the moment will come and where the place will be. On a globalized planet, that condition is universal—no one is exempt and no one is insured against its consequences. Locally caused explosions reverberate throughout the planet.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity.

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Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality. ...  

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

Ursula K. Le Guin, "Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters." November 19, 2014. Copyright © 2014 Ursula K. Le Guin.

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A writer can’t not respond to the present, because it’s the only thing that’s actually here. A writer can’t be anyone other than themselves. But an obsession with raw surging nowness or authentic personal experience can often just feel like an excuse for incuriosity. If mainstream literature shows it’s possible to be deeply incurious while maintaining a superficial commitment to diversity, alt lit shows that a superficial commitment to being countercultural and different doesn’t guarantee much either. There is probably no shortcut to a better literature, but a start might be writing that tries more ambitiously to escape its own confines, expanding into the large and sensuous world we actually inhabit, in all its contradictory and ironic dimensions. This writing would take a genuine interest in other people, other eras and other ways of being. 

Sam Kriss, "Alt Lit." The Point, 2/4/2025. 

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chronoclasm

(plural chronoclasms). From Ancient Greek χρόνος (khrónos, “time”), and κλάστης (klástēs, “a person who breaks something”); from κλάω (kláō, “break”).

 1. The intentional destruction of clocks and other time artifacts
 2. (politics) The desire to crush the prevailing sense of time, due to a conflict regarding the fixation of linear time in a community

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Time lives in the body, not as the tick of the clock, but as a pulse in the blood. It is a thought, buried deep in nerve, leaf, and gene. It is also a social contract, one we adjust according to different needs, whether for daylight saving or simply setting a watch five minutes fast to avoid being late. Yet, as philosopher Michelle Bastian has recognized, our habitual ways of telling time have their limits. 'While the clock can tell me whether I am late for work,' she writes, 'it cannot tell me whether it is too late to mitigate runaway climate change.' She suggests that, as our usual ways of telling the time flounder, perhaps other living things might become our 'time-givers' instead.

David Farrier, "Wild Clocks." Emergence, January 23, 2025. 

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What tense would you choose to live in? I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle—in the ‘what ought to be.'

Osip Mandelstam, Critical Prose and Letters. 

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Saturday plans:

Donald Trump and Elon Musk think this country belongs to them. They're taking everything they can get their hands on, and daring the world to stop them. On Saturday, April 5th, we're taking to the streets nationwide to fight back with a clear message: Hands off!

'the hill we climb'

We've seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
And this effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed,
It can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith we trust.
For while we have our eyes on the future,
History has its eyes on us.

Amanda Gorman, "The Hill We Climb," a poem for the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, 1/20/2021.

odds and ends / 1.14.2021

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We are a country built on fabrication, nostalgia and euphemism. And every time America shows the worst of itself, all the contradictions collapse into the lie I've heard nonstop for the last several years: 'This isn't who we are.'

 

Sam Sanders, "The Lies We tell Ourselves About Race." NPR, 1/10/2021. 

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'This is not America.' That strange, contradictory phrase seems to descend like fog every time a legible and precedented event occurs in the United States. If it wasn’t America, it wouldn’t need to be said. Take the 1898 Wilmington insurrection, an all-American white nationalist riot also aimed at seizing state power, only it succeeded. Its example suggests that what happened this week was not a case of chickens coming home to roost. The chickens had simply never left. A more recent antecedent—one that I didn’t think could be forgotten so quickly—was the spectacle of armed right-wingers who filled statehouses last summer. These mobs were derided by many as mere LARPers, though the photos and videos suggested a high degree of professionalism—a dress rehearsal at the very least. It’s true that many of the people wandering through the Capitol looked ridiculous, too—decked out in horns and knockoff Marvel merch and Nazi-themed hoodies and Confederate symbols. Some people may treat the appearance of a Confederate flag as another bit of absurdity, but I’ve never had the luxury of taking it in any way other than literally and seriously. In certain situations it’s not worth trying to locate the line between playacting and enacting.

Blair McClendon, "Lost Lost Causes." N+1, 1/9/2021. 

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LARPers: live-action role-playing, as in role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.

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NYT: Decoding "the iconography of the American far right." 

'It’s often all a caricature—it looks like military fan fiction—until it’s not and it crosses a very dangerous line,' said Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

'It’s funny until it’s scary,' she said. 

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...[I]n an important sense all culture is larping—our species is Homo larpens at least as much as it is Homo narrans or ludens. The Viking who put on a bear sark was larping too. I larp every day I get up and pretend to be a competent professor of philosophy who understands anything at all about how the world works. This is all of course well-trodden ground for twentieth-century philosophy. Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of the waiter who was trying too hard to be a waiter—dressing up as a waiter each day and studiously imitating the bodily motions he associated with waiterdom—put to rest, if only incidentally, Heidegger’s expectation that there might be some deeper way of conducting ourselves that we can deem “authentic.” It’s just fake waiters all the way down, and fake philosophy professors, and mirror neurons spreading cultural patterns from one individual to the next. Another word for all that fakeness is, precisely, “culture.” And this is the danger of talk of larping: it reasserts willy-nilly the opposing, and dangerous, notion of authenticity.

 

Justin E. H. Smith, "An Exceptional Situation." 1/11/2021.

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A lot of America slipped into conspiracy thinking during this pandemic, and they got there from yoga Instagrams and NFL forums and private church choir Facebook groups that were systematically invaded by QAnon and anti-vax recruiters. It’s going to be a rude awakening in the next few months as we find out which of our friends got sucked into truly astonishing tales of New World Orders and Great Resets that helped them cope—and just so happen to be spectacularly wrong.

 

Ben Collins, "We Need to Learn to Talk to (and About) Accidental Conspiracists." NiemanLab, 12/2020.

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On mainstream social platforms, QAnon mushroomed out from its initial audience of angry alt-righters to infect accounts previously dedicated to crystals, yoga, and manifesting, where it got a glow-up, as it were, from the more aesthetically minded set. Marc-André Argentino, a doctoral student at Concordia University who studies how extremist groups use technology, coined the term “pastel QAnon” to describe the watered-down, sound-bite-friendly version with much more mass appeal than the angry (and much more masculine) original. Suddenly, QAnon hashtags were tucked into selfie captions on perfectly curated feeds that also extolled the wonders of detox tea—the kinds of accounts Jennifer followed. Highlights like “Covid?” and “Trafficking” were sandwiched between “Workouts” and “Meditation”; other times, they were hidden in Linktrees amid brand sponsorships.

 

Clio Chang, "The Unlikely Connection Between Wellness Influencers and the Pro-Trump Rioters." Cosmopolitan, 1/12/2021.

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Please, sit down. I’ve got a whole bag of Cool Ranch Doritos here: electric blue, plump as a winter seed, bursting with imminent joy. ... Join me. Grab whatever you've got. Open the bag. Pinch it on its crinkly edges and pull apart the seams. Now we’re in business: We have broken the seal. The inside of the bag is silver and shining, a marvel of engineering—strong and flexible and reflective, like an astronaut suit. Lean in, inhale that unmistakable bouquet: toasted corn, dopamine, America, grief!

 

Sam Anderson, "I Recommend Eating Chips."  The New York Times Magazine, 1/13/2021.

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Félix Valloton, Bathers Caught in a Storm (Les baigneuses surprises par l'orage), 1893.

headline news

 

V O T E

This Little Book Contains Every Reason Why Women Should Not Vote. New York: National Woman Suffrage Publishing Co., 1917. 

Note: Every page is blank. 

Found thanks to the Public Domain Review.

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Me, I voted for Biden and Harris last week, and I hope you did (or are planning to), too. I don't have it in me to write a heartfelt plea encouraging you to vote. If, after four years of outrage, disaster, and tragedy, you cannot be bothered to vote or are somehow undecided, there is nothing I can offer you, except maybe this book. 

of course

I bought an Elizabeth Warren sweatshirt on Tuesday night after it was clear she wasn't going to win anything on Super Tuesday. I'd sent money before but I wanted to send more, and I guess I thought it would make the perfect layering piece over my HILLARY CLINTON 2016 t-shirt. I'll be able to work out for years defiantly wearing the souvenirs of thwarted dreams.

I remember sitting on my parents' couch in 2016, watching the maps turn red, and feeling disbelief, though disbelief is maybe not the right word. It was more a sneaking, queasy confirmation of something I had not let myself quite believe: that women are thought so little of that even in a contest of compromises, people will choose a fatally flawed awful man over a complicated competent woman.

I remember being fifteen and arguing at school about what was fair and what was equal. It felt like I was constantly having these arguments, pointing out to teachers and administrators and students and parents that things were unfair, horribly unfair in many, many ways, and that they could be better if we tried—that actually, even only a little trying and thoughtfulness would make things much better. This was never a popular message. One particular day, a day when I can't remember what I was arguing about, just the endless arguing, I do remember this kid Kevin turning around and looking at me, and saying, "You know, you make me think that maybe a woman could be president." I remember feeling flattered and appalled. Maybe? Of course, a woman could be president. Of course.

Of course.

I am sitting here today, twenty-odd years later, and I don't understand how two aging male career politicians of dubious health became my only choice for president when there was a third candidate who had the best qualities of both and less downside ... oh right. Of course.

Of course.

The grimmest irony is that Sanders and Biden are both emotional choices. One old man makes people feel safe. One old man makes people feel righteous and excited. Woot woot, I guess. OLD MEN 2020!!! I'll vote for whoever the Democratic nominee is—Trump is a blight, a boil, a plague, a menace, an insert-your-favorite-apocalyptic-adjective-here—and must be defeated, and women—Black women especially, and women of color—will carry on, doing "the custodial work of democracy" in the words of Dr. Brittany Cooper, but I supported Warren for reasons neither Biden or Sanders match.

• She had plans. I care about the progressive agenda, and I wanted someone with a concrete vision for how to make it happen, not just galvanizing rhetoric, and a track record of making change. She put in the work and the research.
• She could learn and evolve. Everyone is wrong sometimes, and I appreciated that she could admit it, listen, and improve. We are in a time when most of us do need to change, sometimes in radical ways, to meet the changing world we're living in, and it would have been extraordinary to have someone in charge who could model how to do that.
• She was many things—tough, fair, kind, brilliant—but also funny and joyful. It made me believe that the grim future still holds hopeful possibilities as long as we are willing to work together.

Teenaged me would be shocked to know that I have to type this next sentence, sitting here at my desk in the year 2020: All I can hope is that I live to see a progressive woman president someday.

So, if you feel like you've eaten a rage sandwich today, that you somehow need to pick dumb Internet fights or scrub the hell out of the bathroom or run until your lungs and legs hurt too much to move forward—yeah. Same here. Let's give ourselves a day or two to feel it all before we pull up our socks and help one old man beat another old man so we can get the terrible old man out of office.

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Gender in this race, you know, that is the trap question for everyone. If you say, 'Yeah there was sexism in this race,' everyone says, 'Whiner!' If you say, 'No there was no sexism in this race,' about a bazillion women think, 'What planet do you live on?'

Senator Elizabeth Warren, speaking to PBS NewsHour, 3/5/2020.

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You can tell me and you can tell me and you can tell me—but let me tell you: There's not a lie I haven't heard about what a woman can and cannot do. At my age, every act of sexism and misogyny is an encore production.

Connie Schultz, "A Not-So-Super Tuesday." Creators.com, 3/5/2020.

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'When you look at someone like Sanders, the way he behaves onstage, his mannerisms and his way of speaking, his single-mindedness, his very limited track record of getting anything done—a woman would have been torn apart,' [Sayu] Bhojwani said. As for Biden: 'Imagine a woman who had lost every state in every presidential primary, running for the third time.'

Ruth Graham, "I Waited Four Years for This?!" Slate, 3/5/2020.

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Kate Manne, a philosopher at Cornell University, describes misogyny as an ideology that serves, ultimately, to reinforce a patriarchal status quo. “Misogyny is the law-enforcement branch of patriarchy,” Manne argues. It rewards those who uphold the existing order of things; it punishes those who fight against it. It is perhaps the mechanism at play when a woman puts herself forward as a presidential candidate and finds her attributes—her intelligence, her experience, her compassion—understood as threats. It is perhaps that mechanism at play when a woman says, 'I believe in us,' and is accused of being 'self-righteous.'

Megan Garber, "America Punished Elizabeth Warren for her Competence." The Atlantic, 3/5/2020.

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If American women earned minimum wage for the unpaid work they do around the house and caring for relatives, they would have made $1.5 trillion last year.

Gus Wezerek and Kristen R. Ghodsee, "Women’s Unpaid Labor is Worth $10,900,000,000,000." NYT, 3/5/2020.

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Nevertheless, you must persist.

Elizabeth Warren, "The Fight Goes On." 3/5/2020.

vote

Every single one of us—every single one of us—has the same power at the polls, and every single one of us has something that, if done in numbers too big to tamper with, cannot be suppressed and cannot be denied.

Oprah Winfrey, campaigning for Stacey Abrams.

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Images, from top to bottom:

VOTE. Image created from letters in “Specimens of calligraphy, ornamental initials, borders, etc.” Italy, ca. 1600. Created by The Newberry Library.

A. Harlingue, Ballot-Urn, c. 1910-1920, via The Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

"Collection of more than 100 Votes for Woman badges from different countries." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 

 

what kind of times are these

Adrienne Rich, brought to mind thanks to Brian Ferry.

odds and ends / 11.3.2018

From the top:

Peter Blume, Vegetable Dinner. 1927.

The two women in Vegetable Dinner are both images of Peter Blume's companion Elaine ... The woman on the left, with her fashionable clothing and lit cigarette, evokes his love of parties and freedom, while the woman on the right chops vegetables to represent commitment and domesticity. This expresses Blume's conflict between his affection for Elaine, who "had very competent hands," and his need to live the bohemian life of an artist ... The dramatic cropping of the two figures, together with the knife pointing ominously at one woman's thumb, transforms this ordinary scene into something far more menacing, and suggests that neither of Elaine's roles would have made the artist completely happy. Blume eventually parted from Elaine, remembering later that their relationship was "always in a state of high tension anyway. It could never have survived as a marriage."

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"No!" by Thomas Hood.

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Admiring all things patched and quilted at Carleen.

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Victorian glass and sterling hand and key pendant.

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Marsden Hartley, Landscape No. 25. Always think of this painting this time of year.

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Filed under fancy pants: Studio Hecha Matisse multicolor hand-painted vintage denim at West End Select.

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Humans have often looked at insects and seen themselves, or the selves they would like to be. Early-modern European naturalists peered into termite mounds, anthills, and beehives and saw microcosms of well-ordered states: monarchs, soldiers, laborers. (There was no general recognition that bee “kings” were actually female “queens” until the sixteen-seventies, when a Dutch microscopist, Jan Swammerdam, pointed out that bee kings had ovaries.)

Amina Srinivasan, "What Termites Can Teach Us." The New Yorker, 9/17/2018. (This article may be the single most enjoyable thing I've read in the past month.)

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Can you copyright a quilt?

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“Posing Modernity” has been organized by Denise Murrell, a former chief executive who recently earned a Ph.D. in art history at Columbia University. The idea for the show — and the thesis that preceded it — came to her after sitting through a few too many art history lectures that pored over the white subject of “Olympia,” but barely mentioned its black one. Ms. Murrell sought to discover more about the model for the maid and other women like her, and what they could tell us about modernism. 

Roberta Smith, "A Long Overdue Light on Black Models of Early Modernism." NYT, 11/1/2018.

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Like superficial spirituality, looking on the bright side of things is a euphemism used for obscuring certain realities of life, the open consideration of which might prove threatening or dangerous to the status quo. . . . The acceptance of illusion and appearance as reality is another symptom of this same refusal to examine the realities of our lives. Let us seek “joy” rather than real food and clean air and a saner future on a liveable earth! As if happiness alone can protect us from the results of profit-madness.

Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals, quoted by Becca Rothfield.

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Refusing to collude in injustice is, I’ve found, easier said than done. Collusion is written onto our way of life, and nearly every interaction among white people is an invitation to collusion. Being white is easy, in that nobody is expected to think about being white, but this is exactly what makes me uneasy about it. Without thinking, I would say that believing I am white doesn’t cost me anything, that it’s pure profit, but I suspect that isn’t true. I suspect whiteness is costing me, as Baldwin would say, my moral life.

Eula Biss, "White Debt." NYT 12/2/2015. I just finished Biss' Notes From No Man's Land.

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There is something dying in our society, in our culture, and there’s something dying in us individually. And what is dying, I think, is the willingness to be in denial. And that is extraordinary. It’s always been happening, and when it happens in enough of us, in a short enough period of time at the same time, then you have a tipping point, and the culture begins to shift. And then, what I feel like people are at now is, “No, no, bring it on. I have to face it — we have to face it.”

angel Kyodo williams, Zen priest and activist, in conversation at OnBeing.

'because of everything'

There is not a word in the American lexicon for such gatherings—the semi-spontaneous assembly of people in the wake of tragedy, who are united by both grief and by anger, and whose public mourning serves to reaffirm their civic bond to one another. But we need such a word, because this ritual happens frequently enough to be familiar—so frequently that its purpose need not be explained to those in attendance. “Are people here to protest against Donald Trump?” I asked a man in the crowd. “They’re here because of everything,” he answered.

Jelani Cobb, "From Charleston to Pittsburgh, an Arc of Premeditated American Tragedy." The New Yorker, 11/1/2018.

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I could not make it to services tonight, but I am sitting here thinking of Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil and David Rosenthal, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, and Irving Younger; of Maurice Stallard and Vickie Lee Jones, each a victim of the poisonous hates that are being encouraged in our country.

hear me

Many of the women shouting now are women who have not previously yelled publicly before, many of them white middle-class women newly awakened to political fury and protest. Part of the process of becoming mad must be recognizing that they are not the first to be furious, and that there is much to learn from the stories and histories of the livid women — many of them not white or middle class — who have never had reason not to be mad. 

If you are angry today, or if you have been angry for a while, and you’re wondering whether you’re allowed to be as angry as you feel, let me say: Yes. Yes, you are allowed. You are, in fact, compelled. 

If you’ve been feeling a new rage at the flaws of this country, and if your anger is making you want to change your life in order to change the world, then I have something incredibly important to say: Don’t forget how this feels. 

Tell a friend, write it down, explain it to your children now, so they will remember. And don’t let anyone persuade you it wasn’t right, or it was weird, or it was some quirky stage in your life when you went all political — remember that, honey, that year you went crazy? No. No. Don’t let it ever become that. Because people will try.

Rebecca Traister, "Fury Is a Political Weapon. And Women Need to Wield It." NYT, 9/29/2018.

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Helena Almeida: Ouve-me/Hear Me, 1979. Via Stephen Ellcock.

he said/she said

The point of all this is that “he said, she said” accounts aren’t the empty contradictions we often dismiss them as; they can tell us quite a bit about the different realities in which men and women get to live. We think of these testimonies as being equally valid, even if they’re at odds. (Kidding: We usually assume that the woman has somehow exaggerated or misremembered or misread the context or lied: “I think she’s mistaking something, but I don’t know, I mean, I don’t know her,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch of Ford.) We don’t question the particulars of someone’s account of their mugging, but rape inspires people to start panning the story for possible “misunderstandings.” But given all of the above, there is, actually, a decent explanation for this: The painful experiences claimed by women make no impression at all on a certain kind of man’s sense of reality. Her perspective is as unreal as it is inconsequential to him. Result: His and her story can be, in a limited and horrifying sense, equally true. 

Lili Loofbourow, "Men are More Afraid Than Ever." Slate, 9/18/2018.

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Women are believed when they go on the record, potentially sacrificing their own career goals; they are believed when their words are dissected and fact-checked and tentatively quoted. Men are believed when they render an argument with the trappings of a heartfelt confession.

Nausicaa Renner, "On the confessions of fallen men." The Columbia Journalism Review, 9/18/2018.

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In all of the cases that I heard about, it seemed to me essential, as a bare first step, for the man in question to understand that his experience is not inherently more important than the experiences of women, to acknowledge what he did, and that it was wrong. This is the minimum precondition for the better world we’re struggling toward. It is amazing, if not surprising, how many of the men in question are incapable of it.

Jia Tolentino, "Jian Ghomeshi, John Hockenberry, and the Laws of Patriarchal Physics." The New Yorker, 9/17/2018.

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All three of these pieces are enraging and brilliant, well worth reading in full, as is this incredible excerpt from Rebecca Traister's new book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger.

It feels hopeless to keep calling my Republican senator, who has publicly lauded Brett Kavanaugh as a friend and a "good man," but I keep calling anyway. I'm too angry not to. As Traister points out:

This work of perfecting our union is often circular, always daunting; these efforts take time; they require our resilience and determination. Rage helps drive them forward, through the bleakest periods.

odds and ends / 7.13.2018

Sky dessert plates by Astier de Villatte at John Derian.

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Henrik Vibskov Wing Wang sweatshirt at Judith.

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Snippet of text from The Moon Jumpers by Janice May Udry, one of our favorite summer reads.

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Summer shoes: Vans Anaheim Factory Style 93 DX.

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Brian Persico sugar maple steps.

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Sunflower pebble mosiac (also: ravens, bees).

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She used every tool available to teach young readers (and especially young women) how to see history in creative new ways. If the available textbooks were tedious (and they were), she would write better ones. If they lacked illustrations, she would provide them. If maps would help, so be it: she would fill in that gap as well. She worked with engravers and printers to get it done. She was finding her way forward in a male-dominated world, with no map to guide her. So she made one herself.

Ted Widmer, "America's First Female Mapmaker." The Paris Review, 6/18/2018.

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Patricia Hampl: 'That’s it. That’s all. That’s the poem that has beguiled and vexed me all these years.'

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Trump administration officials, under pressure from the White House to provide a rationale for reducing the number of refugees allowed into the United States next year, rejected a study by the Department of Health and Human Services that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in government revenues over the past decade than they cost.

NYT, 9/18/2017.

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Listening: Les Filles des Illighadad, "Tende."

'let america be america again'

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.  

(America never was America to me.) 

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.  

(It never was America to me.)  

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)  

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.  

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!  

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.  

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”  

The free?  

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.  

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.  

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!  

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!  

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

Langston Hughes, 1902-1967. Brought to mind thanks to the wonderful people at Terrace Books.

witnessing a total eclipse

What you see in an eclipse is entirely different from what you know ... Usually it is a bit of a trick to keep your knowledge from blinding you. But during an eclipse it is easy. What you see is much more convincing than any wild-eyed theory you may know.

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse."

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On Friday night, I opened my computer to skim through Twitter. On my screen I see a photo of young white people, mostly men, carrying lit tiki torches. They are in Charlottesville, Virginia, protesting the removal of a Confederate monument, a statue of Robert E. Lee erected in 1924, almost 60 years after the Civil War ended.

The man in the center of the photo is white and clean shaven, wearing a white polo shirt with a logo I don't recognize. He has the kind of hair cut I associate with prep schools thanks to Dead Poets Society. He is shouting, and whatever he is saying makes his face ugly and ridiculous.

Most of the torchbearers look young. I think, they must know everyone has a phone. They must know everyone has a camera and the world a click away in their pockets. No one wears a mask; no one is ashamed to be part of this; no one thinks it will cost them anything. They chant  "blood and soil," a Nazi slogan.

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I did not expect the photo to be shared as much as it was. I understand the photo has a very negative connotation. But I hope that the people sharing the photo are willing to listen that I’m not the angry racist they see in that photo.

Peter Cvjetanovic, the man in the picture, quoted here. 

Cvjetanovic goes on to talk about the need to preserve white European culture. So — maybe he is not always angry; he is a racist. A racist marching with other racists, holding torches and shouting Nazi slogans. What you see is much more convincing than any wild-eyed theory you may know.

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As the shadow increased the change in the appearance of the country was most curious. The light became pale; our shadows were sharply cut, as by moonlight, but the light was more yellow. A deep gray twilight seemed to come on.

Observations by a Mr. Liveing, quoted by John Couch Adams in On the total Eclipse of the Sun, 28 July 1851, as seen at Frederiksvaern, Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol xxi (1852).

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On Saturday, I see a picture of men with guns. The men look military, like police (as I think about this, it strikes me as sad that our police choose to dress as if they are at war). They are not the police; they are white nationalists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis.Virginia is an open-carry state, and they have come with their guns. Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe told NPR:

These people all camed armed ... I've never seen so many weapons. These people were wearing better gear than my own state police ... They had body armor, helmets. They were all — I mean, people were walking around with semiautomatic rifles through the streets.

Clergy, activists and citizens are there to resist. They stand, facing down the men with guns. 

Later, a white supremacist drives his car into a crowd of protesters, killing a woman named Heather Hayer. 

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We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides. It's been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. This has been going on for a long, long time.

Donald Trump, 8/12/2017.

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And here was the totality, the sun eclipsed. On many sides. On many sides. No difference made between the Nazis and the side that punches Nazis.

This is something I never thought I'd see. Not from a U.S. president.

The neo-Nazis were appreciative. "Trump comments were good ... no condemnation at all." The president's words cast an unsettling light over the country, revealing the shape of ugly things many pretend are not there. The outrage is swift and relentless.

After two days of intense public pressure, Trump issues a more robust condemnation. In the meantime, he berates Kenneth C. Frazier, Merck CEO, who resigns from the president's manufacturing council to protest hatred and bigotry. #priorities

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In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether that buoys the rest, that gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here.

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse."

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The strange light of the solar eclipse reveals hidden things — unknown elements, the bending of starlight. Birds fall from the sky, the wind drops. People shout; people fall silent.

The moment passes, but there is a new memory of darkness. 

'i look at them and i see us'

And to most people watching the refugee crisis unfold, the refugees detained and turned back at airports across the country are likely abstractions, too. They do not see what brought them there or the bureaucratic Rube Goldberg machine they had to navigate to be deemed safe and responsible refugees. 

I look at them and I see us, sitting in that strangely lit room with the Immigration and Naturalization Service officers who processed us and to whom, I’m sure, we were an abstraction, and who didn’t tell us that the way we transliterated our last name was stupid and that people would forever after think it began with lowercase L and not an uppercase I. But I think about that room and the refugee cards they filled out, cards we still have to this day, and what would have happened if we too had been turned back. 

Where would we have gone? We were people without a home, without a country. We had been stripped of our Soviet citizenship, we had sold everything to pay the four steep fines for having four citizenships stripped from us, and we certainly didn’t have enough money left over for four plane tickets back, back to a country we no longer belonged to and wouldn’t have us. After all that paperwork and waiting, where would we go?

Julia Ioffe, 'This Is What It's Like to Come to the United States as a Refugee." The Atlantic, 1/29/2017. (This is an extraordinary piece of writing.)

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A day after American-born Omar Mateen’s June 12 attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, warned of “a better, bigger version of the legendary Trojan horse,” declaring: “We have to stop the tremendous flow of Syrian refugees into the United States—we don’t know who they are, they have no documentation, and we don’t know what they’re planning.” 

Trump’s claims are myth, not fact. Of the nearly 5.5 million people who have fled the conflict in Syria during the past five and a half years, around 10,000—less than 0.2 percent of the total Syrian refugee population—have been resettled in the US from Syria’s neighbors this year. We know who they are, because refugees are the single most vetted population entering the US. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) registers, documents, and verifies the claim of all those whom it refers to the government for resettlement. The Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and multiple intelligence agencies then conduct interviews, gather detailed biographical and biometric data, and carry out a range of background checks on every candidate before they receive clearance to travel to the US. The entire process takes between eighteen and twenty-four months. There is no harder route into the US.

David Miliband, "The Best Way to Deal With the Refugee Crisis." NYRB, October 13, 2016.

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CNN, 1/28/2017:

President Donald Trump on Friday banned nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for at least the next 90 days by executive order. The order bars all people hailing from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Those countries were named in a 2016 law concerning immigration visas as "countries of concern." 

The executive order also bans entry of those fleeing from war-torn Syria indefinitely. Trump also has stopped the admission of all refugees to the United States for four months.

As a result of this order, U.S. green card holders — permanent legal residents — including a ten year old and a five year old —  have been and are being detained, and refugees are being turned away.

A protest that started at JFK spread to airports across the country, and lawyers have set up shop on airport floors and in food courts to defend people trapped by this new policy.

From Marcelo Rochabrun, reporting for Pro Publica on 1/28/17:

Since the order’s travel ban applies to all “aliens” — a term that encompasses anyone who isn’t an American citizen — it could bar those with current visas or even green cards from returning to the U.S. from trips abroad, said Stephen Legomsky, a former chief counsel to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under President Obama. 

“It’s extraordinarily cruel,” he said.

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Artwork by Alex Proba.
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marching on

Saturday Women's March was exhilarating. I marched in Washington, DC with my husband and son, my sister and her husband, a dear friend from high school and two friends of hers, and I had many friends in the crowd that I never managed to see or connect with — there were simply too many people. Our phones lost service, so we marveled at the mass of people around us, unaware of what exactly was happening — that women were marching everywhere, filling the streets of LA and Boston and Chicago, walking through snow and rain, marching all over the world. We heard rumors in the crowd that other cities were turning out, but had no idea until we got back to my sister's apartment and turned on the TV just how massive the day was. 

And then came Sunday, and alternative facts, and a week of appalling executive orders.

I am sitting down tonight, with Hugh asleep, and Sean on the couch beside me, to write this — mostly for myself, but maybe for you, too, if you need it: chin up.

Aboard his flagship, the Bonhomme Richard, Jones led his small squadron in the capture of seven merchantmen off of the Scottish coast. On September 23, 1779, Jones fought one of the bloodiest engagements in naval history. Jones struggled with the 44-gun Royal Navy frigate Serapis, and although his own vessel was burning and sinking, Jones would not accept the British demand for surrender, replying, “I have not yet begun to fight.” More than three hours later, Serapis surrendered and Jones took command.

This week, I have felt like Jo March, wishing I could run away and somehow join the fight (or at least the Twitter fight). But much of the real work to be done is at home — in neighborhoods, like mine, where people see the world in wildly different ways. So this weekend, we are working on building our community by inviting people over for waffles and a political postcard-writing session (if you are in NE Ohio and enjoy waffles and/or civic action, email me: evencleveland (at) gmail dot com).

I'm also thinking about forming a group that would meet once a month to learn about an issue in depth at the state and local level (again, email me if you are interested). I'd like to try and bring in an expert or a speaker for each meeting, or maybe each person could take a turn doing research into a particular theme and come back to report to the group.

They may be burning the ship, but we can still fight (even — or especially — with cardboard signs and waffles and postcards and phone calls and wonky civic groups).

Some other things:
A march for science: 'Who can participate: Anyone who values empirical science. That's it. That's the only requirement.'
Leading, following and habits.
A comment thread full of resources - 'Mike Pence means it ... Call like you would floss.'
This poster, and this Twitter account.
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