Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

I need to speak about living room
where the land is not bullied and beaten to
a tombstone

— June Jordan / “Moving towards Home”

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt remarked that we repeat propaganda not because we are persuaded by such ideas but because we are organized by them. I think myths about poverty in America work the same way. When people express a familiar cliché about poverty—Those who remain poor haven’t tried hard enough. Discrimination is rare. Welfare creates long-term dependency. Expanding opportunity through government programs leads to socialism.—I don’t necessarily think it’s because they believe these things but because in saying them, they feel a bit safer. (How reassuring it can be to tell ourselves that poverty is the result of individual failings; how comforting to assume hardship can be avoided if only we stay on the straight and narrow.)

— Matthew Desmond / “14 Notes from Poverty in America” / Goodreads

What will you do without me, Moscow?
What can you do—I have to be in the south.
I’m leaving you my fiery word.
You will be needier without me . . .

— Yuri Andrukhovych / “Letters to Ukraine”

“I think the real test will be what happens in the next twelve months,” Wijffels said. “If temperatures remain very high, then I would say more people in the community will be really alarmed and say ‘O.K., this is outside of what we can explain.’ ”

In 2023, which was by far the warmest year on record on land, as well as in the oceans, many countries experienced record-breaking heat waves or record-breaking wildfires or record-breaking rainstorms or some combination of these. (Last year, in the United States, there were twenty-eight weather-related disasters that caused more than a billion dollars’ worth of damage—another record.) If the climate projections are accurate, then the year was a preview of things to come, which is scary enough. But, if the projections are missing something, that’s potentially even more terrifying, though scientists tend to use more measured terms.

— Elizabeth Kolbert / “Why Is the Sea So Hot” / The New Yorker

How big would the swimming pool have to be
to hold all the red salty stuff spilled the last week?
Who will recline in the fresh blood bath?
What swimmers will adjust their goggles
and freestyle the miles of blood?

— Jeffrey McDaniel / “The Jesus Fridge”

Dengue (pronounced DEN-gay), a mosquito-borne illness that has circulated to a limited degree for centuries, is now spreading with unprecedented speed around the world. It’s a worrying example of how a changing climate and 21st-century demographic trends can quickly turn a public health nuisance into a daunting global health crisis.

— Dylan Scott / “The tropical disease that’s suddenly everywhere” / Vox

I know grief and you may know it too,
but I have reached the age where it
is perpetual—I didn’t know it would be
like this so I’m telling you, who still have
a whole lifetime to forget your grief . . .

— Maxine Scates / “To You”

What I’m Listening To:

He was a wild god searching for what all old wild gods are searching for
And he flew through the dying city like a prehistoric bird

— Nick Cave / “Wild God”