The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“What’s hard about art is getting any good—and then getting better. What’s hard is solving problems with infinite solutions and your finite brain.”

— Elisa Gabbert / “Why Write?”

“How do we go on living when the very things we once depended upon have become undependable?”

—Elizabeth Rush / “What Antarctica’s Disintegration Asks of Us”

Some say calamity
and some catastrophe
is beautiful”

— Maureen N. McLane / “Some Say”

“You mustn’t assume that aesthetic expression is the prime motive for writing; it is really only a means to the more profound end. So don’t worry about it if you write out of sadness or hate or love—fear—or fascination, the important thing, if you wish to do it, is to write.”

— Ralph Ellison / The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison

“Even when … I started writing fervently about climate change, I must admit that I didn’t initially imagine myself living through it in this fashion—as so many of us have in this globally overheated summer of 2022.”

— Tom Engelhardt / “The Twilight Years of American Hegemony”

“… we can’t solve the climate crisis without solving the problem of inequality.”

— Damien Gayle / “Down to Earth”

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies”

— William Faulkner / The Paris Review Interview

What I’m Listening To:

“Have you seen Gary with his tinfoil ball?
He used to love to kick it with his stumpy
legs”

— Dry Cleaning / “Gary Ashby”