The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr. / Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“Empire, white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, and homophobia are linked in complex ways, and our struggles against them require moral consistency and systemic analyses.”

— Cornell West / “Introduction,” The Radical King

“Having ruined the future of becoming fossils, finally we will know that it is for nothing we die, never in place of drowned sea turtles or swarming locusts…”

— Cindy Juyoung Ok / “The End of Crisis”

“I’m not alone in being unacceptable. Toni Morrison and Stephen King are banned, too. It’s supposedly because there is too much sex in our books. So, when are they going to kick out the Bible, because that’s got lots of sex in it? What century are we living in for heaven’s sakes? Really, it’s a show of power. Governor Glenn Youngkin is saying: ‘We’re in control of this and we’re going to make life very unpleasant for students and librarians.’ And the subtext is we don’t actually want our kids to be educated and successful, because one of the biggest factors in whether kids do well in their marks is whether there is a school library with a librarian.”

— Margaret Atwood / The Guardian

“Let it pass let it pass because everything will pass and be effaced
I will be back not yet erased

Memories
Are hunting horns whose sound dies in the breeze”

— Guillaume Apollinaire / “Cors de Chasse”

“Looking after elderly and sick people doesn’t burn a lot of carbon. Making art doesn’t burn a lot of carbon. Teaching is low-carbon. Day care is low-carbon. And yet this work, overwhelmingly done by women, tends to be undervalued and underpaid, and is frequently the target of government cutbacks . . . It was an attempt, in short, to show how to replace an economy built on destruction with an economy built on love.”

— Naomi Klein / No Is Not Enough

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr. / “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”

What I’m Listening To:

“I’ve got some edged bummers that you’ve never seen / Come on in, there ain’t nobody home but me”

— Kaleidoscope / “Come On In”