Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children.

— Alexei Navalny / “Alexei Navalny’s Prison Diaries” / The New Yorker

Trumpism is a cancerous phenomenon. Treated with surgery once, it now threatens to come back in a more aggressive form, subject neither to the radiation of ‘guardrails’ nor to the chemo of ‘constraints.’ It may well rage out of control and kill its host.

— Adam Gopnik / “How Alarmed Should We Be If Trump Wins Again?” / The New Yorker

You look out in the world and you can see various versions of the oppressed becoming oppressors in different circumstances. It makes you question some of the underlying logic of our lives.

— Ta-Neishi Coates, to Moustafa Bayoumi in interview /“‘I don’t have much hope for a Harris presidency’: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Israeli apartheid and what the media gets wrong about Palestine” / The Guardian

I escape to books when everything around me fails to make sense. When I read books, I search for a bond between me and those who are thousands of miles away, geographically and historically. And that’s what I hope my own work does for others who have never been in my position, I, a Palestinian refugee and a survivor of countless air strikes and lately of the ongoing genocide, during which I lost not only my precious collection of books but more than thirty-one members of my extended family, some of whom, like my books, remain under the rubble since October 2023.

— Mosab Abu Toha / “The Annotated Nightstand: What Mosab Abu Toha Is Reading Now, and Next” / Lit Hub

Come with us, Muse of exile,
Mother of the road.

— Kathleen Norris / “A Prayer to Eve”

This policy of military and economic supremacy is openly stated everywhere from the 1940s planning documents to the National Security Strategies put out by the George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Implementing it has not just involved ignoring democracy and human rights, but often actively opposing them with tremendous ferocity.

— Noam Chomsky, Nathan J. Robinson / The Myth of American Idealism

Current climate policies will result in global warming of more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, according to a United Nations report on Thursday, more than twice the rise agreed to nearly a decade ago . . . “We’re teetering on a planetary tight rope,” U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in a speech on Thursday. “Either leaders bridge the emissions gap, or we plunge headlong into climate disaster”.

— Gloria Dickie / “Climate set to warm by 3.1 C without greater action, UN report warns” / Reuters

What I’m Listening To:

Everything I learned, it’s been burned
Everything I know has been blown

— Beat Happening / “Me Untamed”