The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“The greatest threat to our species lies within us.”

— Blake Crouch / Upgrade

“A winged bit of Indian sky
Strayed hither from its home on high.”

— Alexander Posey / “The Bluebird”

“There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves.”

— Blake Crouch / Recursion

“How can I rest?
How can I be content
when there is still
that odor in the world?”

— Louise Glück / “Mock Orange”

“We were a bunch of primates who had gotten together and, against all odds, built a wondrous civilization. But paradoxically—tragically—our creation’s complexity had now far outstripped our brains’ ability to manage it. Put simply: Our situation was fucked, and we weren’t doing enough to un-fuck it.”

— Blake Crouch / Upgrade

“For death is a race run in a single place
And death must know the heart, and have no fears.
The day is for dying; darkness has no doors.”

— Allen Grossman / “The Householder Awakes”

“Our species’ superpower is not caring, we merely exercised that ability. We don’t have an intelligence problem. We have a compassion problem. That, more than any other single factor, is what’s driving us toward extinction.”

— Blake Crouch / Upgrade

What I’m Listening To:

“When the last strip of light is dimming
When the spotlight starts to fade
If there’s no tomorrow
You better live”

— Sleater-Kinney / “Fade”