The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“… noncooperation with evil is just as much a moral duty as is cooperation with good.”

— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. / Stride Toward Freedom

“Our modern capitalist economy was born thanks to two very large subsidies: stolen Indigenous land and stolen African people. Both required the creation of intellectual theories that ranked the relative value of human lives and labor, placing white men at the top. These church and state–sanctioned theories of white (and Christian) supremacy are what allowed Indigenous civilizations to be actively ‘unseen’ by European explorers—visually perceived and yet not acknowledged to have preexisting rights to the land—and entire richly populated continents to be legally classified as unoccupied and therefore fair game on an absurd ‘finders keepers’ basis.”

— Naomi Klein / No Is Not Enough

“… it seemed everyone was reading about extinction amidst the extinction as if knowing were enabling.”

— Maureen N. McLean / “From A Book of Hours”

“Every time over the last century Americans have sought to pool their resources for the common good, the wealthy and powerful have used the bogeyman of ‘socialism’ to try to stop them.”

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

“The road is made entirely out of words. Write a lot.”

— Rebecca Solnit / “How to Be a Writer: 10 Tips from Rebecca Solnit”

“I get it, the internet is hell in many ways. It’s neurologically damaging and addictive and my muscles have atrophied from sitting all day … I think we’re still learning how to coexist with it, we’re still in the early days and we need to exhaust ourselves with it before we can recalibrate.”

— Nada Alic / The Creative Independent interview

“On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave.”

— George Orwell / The Road to Wigan Pier

What I’m Listening To:

“Nothing works
Everything’s expensive
And opaque
And privatised
My shoe organising thing arrived
Thank God”

— Dry Cleaning / “Anna calls from the Arctic”