The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“I’m not looking to overthrow the American government, the corporate state already has.”

— John Trudell / Santee Dakota activist, artist, and poet (1946–2015)

“Given that we have left it so late, can we reach the social tipping point before we hit the environmental tipping point?”

— George Monbiot / The Guardian

“Our system of commercial medicine, dominated by private insurance, regional groups of private hospitals, and other powerful interests, looks more and more like a numbers racket. We would like to think we have health care that incidentally involves some wealth transfer; what we actually have is wealth transfer that incidentally involves some health care. . . The purpose of medicine is not to squeeze maximum profits from sick bodies during short lives, but to enable health and freedom during long ones.”

— Timothy Snyder / Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary

“I pass gin and excuses from hand to mouth,
but it’s me. It’s me.
I’m the only dirty habit
I just can’t break.”

— Ai / “I Can’t Get Started”

“In the decades ahead, summers are set to get ever hotter and last longer, overwhelming the other seasons, and reducing winter to a couple of dreary months punctuated by damaging storms and destructive floods. Blistering heat will be the default weather for July and August, when a combination of high temperatures and humidity will make sunbathing and working in the open extremely unpleasant and potentially deadly.”

— Bill McGuire / Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London

“In my lifetime, the country mounted what was clearly a racialized war on drugs; we built the world’s largest penal system, designed largely to house Black and brown bodies; lawmakers figured out systems of gerrymandering and vote suppression to keep white political power intact; the gaps in wealth and education between Black and white America refused to close, and indeed began to widen further.”

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

“There is a young generation of people more comfortable with the language of socialism than with capitalist cant, staring down climate catastrophe and thirsting for racial and economic justice. The true believers we have left in our generation have a responsibility to support these struggles to our last, to restore radical optimism to our lives and our fights. Our generation failed to stop the racist, capitalist tides, but it would be the worst possible epitaph for Gen X if, in the face of fascism, we became the slackers that the our parents’ generations always accused us of being.”

— Dave Zirin / “Reality Bites but Gen X Can Still Fight Back,” The Nation

What I’m Listening To:

“It’s funny how you look at me tonight
Turns out I look so much better during the dark part of the night”

— Naomi Alligator / “Neighborhood Freak”