The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“Astronaut-Bouncing
looks jive-phony, unless,
of course, you think of the moon
as a snare drum”

— Thomas Sayers Ellis / “Polo Goes to the Moon”

“We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented society’ to a ‘person-oriented society!’ When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism,and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

— Martin Luther King Jr. / “Beyond Vietnam,” (1967)

“Night is coming, shouldering a sack of misdeeds
that glow in the dark.”

—Ai / “Father and Son”

“For me the scariest thing about the last forty years, even more than the rising temperature, was the ascension of the libertarian idea that the individual matters far more than the society an individual inhabits.”

— Bill McKibben / The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon

“I have taken to photographing
my every moment
in an attempt to locate
the place where I lost myself.”

— Cynthia Cruz / “Phosphorescence”

“Because if we are to have any hope of making the kind of civilizational leap required of this fateful decade, we will need to start believing, once again, that humanity is not hopelessly selfish and greedy—the image ceaselessly sold to us by everything from reality shows to neoclassical economics.”

— Naomi Klein / That Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

“Today the great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy.”

— Robert Reich / The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It

What I’m Listening To:

“If there’s one thing you can say about mankind
There’s nothing kind about man
You can drive out nature with a pitch fork
But it always comes roaring back again”

— Tom Waits / “Misery is the River of the World”