Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Nobody knows what’s going on. We are thrown across our lives by winds that started blowing millions of years ago.

— Miranda July / All Fours 

Yet amid this atmosphere of nationalist triumph, Remnick identifies a submerged sense of dread—and a glimmer of resistance. The writer Etgar Keret attends weekly protests against the government, even as he acknowledges the “nonexistent” political influence of liberals like him. “When we go to the beach, you can hear the booms from Gaza. When you eat a lollipop or an ice cream, you hear things being blown up,” Keret explains. “We are doing horrible things, and it’s important for me that people know I oppose this.” Such expressions of moral clarity are rare, though, in an age of confusion and endlessly contested facts that has been harnessed by the Netanyahu government, which speaks a fluent dialect of the MAGAlanguage of politics. “Not only is reality horrible,” Keret notes, “you also don’t know what the real story is.”

— Ian Crouch / “Israel’s Zones of Denial” / The New Yorker Weekly

I write,
“The rope dangling from
darkness will execute
the enjambment of everything.”

— Garous Abdolmalekian / “How Can I Bring This Poem to a Halt?”

On Tuesday, the Ukrainian president “gutted the independence of his country’s anti-corruption agencies,” Franklin Foer writes. “In the world Trump is building, there’s no need for disguise—corruption is a credential, not a liability”

— Franklin Foer / “Zelensky Learned the Wrong Lesson From Trump” / The Atlantic

Last night
the fire died into itself
black stick by stick
and the dark came out
of my eyes flooding
everything.

— Philip Levine / “Breath”

Living a moral life in an age of bullies requires collective action; it cannot be done alone. Each of us must organize and participate in a vast network of moral resistance.

This is what civilization demands. It’s what the struggle for social justice requires. It’s why that struggle is so critical today, and why we all must be part of it.

— Robert Reich / “How do we lead moral lives in an age of bullies?” / The Guardian

There was no way to fix it, nothing to open-source; life was just a struggle. It was supposed to be. 

— Miranda July / All Fours

What I’m Listening To:

“You’ll figure it out,” is what they say
What they say
You’ll figure it out
But when?
But when?

— Jeanines / “You’ll Figure It Out”