The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“Every little tilde valve, every lifted seawall, every raised house only purchases time, not a permanent fix.”

— Madeline Ostrander / At Home on an Unruly Planet

“XBB is a nasty little subvariant. But it’s not the final word on COVID. The novel-coronavirus will keep mutating, and finding new ways to evade our antibodies, whether or not many people are paying attention.
The virus isn’t done with us. Which means we can’t be done with it. Get boosted. And be prepared to get boosted again in 2023.”

— David Axe / “The Nightmare COVID Variant That Beats Our Immunity Is Finally Here”

“One minute you’re alive, the next you’re dead. Those were the conditions of the world, and even to attempt to assign any logic to them was to fall into the deep dark vat of religion and other associated forms of voodoo.”

— T.C. Boyle / “Dog Lab”

“… what needs to be stressed is the importance of ritual in the creation of work. I tell my students that they must ‘write every day and walk every day.’ It is not essential that they write a lot; only 150 words each day is enough. All that matters is the routine.”

— Amitava Kumar / Everyday I Write the Book: Notes on Style

“We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep;

We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day…”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley / “Mutability”

“I can’t really think about, you know, the 2100 scene—or whatever the projection is that we’re going to be so severely impacted that our city may not be accessible . . . But we’re still trying to think within that range of the lifetime of the mortgage—so like fifteen to thirty years—to put it into bite-size pieces.”

— Jenny Wolfe, as told to Madeline Ostrander / At Home on an Unruly Planet

“At the edge of every green lies an ocean. 
When I saw that blue, I knew then: 
This world will end.”

— Laurel Chen / “Greensickness”

What I’m Listening To:

“Is it still okay to call you, my disco pickle?”

— Dry Cleaning / “Hot Penny Day”