The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.”

— Sarah Vowell / Assassination Vacation

“The last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there were trees at the South Pole. All of our fossil-fuel burning is accelerating or rewinding all kinds of natural phenomena, mixing geologic eras and warping the previously well-defined strata of Earth history. We are hurtling into the future at a breakneck pace, only to be outrun by the distortions of nature we have unleashed by rampant extraction and consumption.”

— Tatiana Schlossberg / “She Taught Us to Do Nothing. Now Jenny Odell Wants to Save Time.“ / The New York Times

“You can fall in love
in a museum, but only

with the art
or its silence…”

— Kevin Young / “Diptych”

“To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither questions nor answers, as if it weren’t the bearer of any information. This is no longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?”

— Georges Perec / “Approaches to What?”

“All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

— George Orwell / “Why I Write”

“Looking back on previous human calamities, all of which will be dwarfed by this, you find yourself repeatedly asking “why didn’t they … ?” The answer is power: the power of a few to countermand the interests of humanity. The struggle to avert systemic failure is the struggle between democracy and plutocracy. It always has been, but the stakes are now higher than ever.”

— Georges Monbiot / “With our food systems on the verge of collapse, it’s the plutocrats v life on Earth” / The Guardian

“He didn’t mean any harm, just as Father never meant any harm. But harm is rarely about intention.”

— Victoria Chang / Dear Memory

What I’m Listening To:

“Free advice is adjusted to market price
One dollar symbolic”

— Gastr Del Sol / “Each Dream is an Example”