Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

But now, capitalism has entered a radical and apocalyptic phase. There is no utopian vision in any of this. Instead, there’s a final battle. And this is where it gets really dark. The people who are advancing this agenda are also building their luxury bunkers and their spaceships to Mars. They don’t believe that there is a future. These people believe history is ending, literally. It’s end times! Get onto your rocket ship, or get into your golden city in the sky. And that is distinct. 

— Naomi Klein & Tim Dickinson / “Naomi Klein: What They Want Is Absolutely Everything” / Rolling Stone

The picture postcard Goddess on my fridge
has eight, one for every day and then some
random crap will happen, the roof
spring a leak, a dictator stink
I’ll scream or just lie
there in bed, slow draining
blinking red.

— Sophia Naz / “To Bear the Right”

More and more, climate change denial is just taking the form of conspiracy culture. It’s: “Who started the fires in Lahaina? did they direct that hurricane to [North Carolina]?” It’s about feeding this narrative of paranoia about global elites wanting to take away your freedom. 

— Naomi Klein & Tim Dickinson / “Naomi Klein: What They Want Is Absolutely Everything” / Rolling Stone

Grief felt fourth-dimensional, abstract, faintly familiar. I was cold.

The friends and family who had been hanging around being kind had gone home to their own lives. When the children went to bed the flat had no meaning, nothing moved. 

— Max Porter / Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

My house had three stories that grew less and less finished as they rose, as if the builders had lost spirit the further they were from the soil.

— China Miéville / This Census Taker

We don’t think hope,
the only tyranny
we’ll never overthrow,
will ever run dry.

— Fady Joudah / “Barzakh”

I don’t think it’s the time to give up. But time is very short. One area where there is — I don’t know if I would use the word “hope” — but where there’s some productive work to be done, is that this [Thiel/Musk] agenda is not the platform that Donald Trump was elected on. There’s quite a lot of vulnerability in the MAGA Frankenstein coalition around the extent to which Trump is not just doing the work of the billionaires, generically, but specifically the of tech billionaires. That is a place to break apart the coalition.

People who are in it just for the white supremacy are going to stay. But I don’t believe that’s everybody who voted for Trump. And the radicalism of the vision — if they have given up on the future — provides a basis on which to organize, and to oppose, that is incredibly broad. 

— Naomi Klein & Tim Dickinson / “Naomi Klein: What They Want Is Absolutely Everything” / Rolling Stone

What I’m Listening To: 

Woosh, woosh, woosh, woosh …

— The roar of traffic on my left side