Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Who could be excited for the apocalypse?

— Emma Pattee / Tilt 

Why do I care so much if time and space disappear when the world has come undone? Will there be borders and countries again in the future? Today, here, right now, the days don’t matter. Or the months. They disappear like sand between my fingers, without a trace.

— Agustina Bazterrica / The Unworthy

There is no such thing as new pain,
only the same pain recycled a hundred ways.

— Mai Der Vang / “Beast You Are Who Calls to the Beast I Am” / Primordial

Mocking a woman for doing her job isn’t honesty. It isn’t candor. It isn’t toughness. It’s smallness. 

It’s the behavior of a man who cannot face a question without trying to diminish the person asking it. And when grown adults laugh at that, it says less about her and far more about what we as a country are becoming . . . Democracy depends on people willing to ask uncomfortable questions. But calling a woman “piggy” isn’t holding the press accountable. It’s the oldest trick in the autocrat’s handbook: Humiliate the critic so you don’t have to answer the criticism.

What troubles me most isn’t just the insult itself. It’s the applause for it – the way some cheer cruelty if it comes wrapped in their team’s colors. The way grown men laugh at a woman being demeaned. 

The way people confuse bullying with strength.

Leadership requires restraint. It requires self-discipline, respect and the ability to face scrutiny without collapsing into name-calling . . . When the president of the United States talks like this, it gives the country permission to talk like this. It corrodes our civic life. It teaches our kids that mockery is a substitute for argument. It encourages the belief that the way to win is to shame someone into silence.

— Ray Watford / “The worst part of Trump’s ‘piggy’ comment wasn’t the insult” / USA Today

The nostalgia that permeates so much of today’s right and no small part of today’s left is no accident. We have lost the faith in the future that once powered our optimism. We fight instead over what we have, or what we had.

— Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson / Abundance

In the 1930s, the best of the Americas converged. Now, the worst, despite efforts by good people on both sides of the border to hold off the eclipse. If the Conquest inaugurated the “slow creation of humanity,” we, America, América, seem to be living through its dismantling.

— Greg Grandin / America, América: A New History of the New World

“Our whole generation is crazy . . . “

— Maureen F. McHugh / “Special Economics” / After the Apocalypse

What I’m Listening To:

Yes, I can tell
That you can’t be what you pretend
The caterpillar hood won’t cover the head of you
Know you should be home in bed

— Syd Barrett / “No Good Trying”