The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“I want for us to want
to patch every heart
and pave every road
and destroy every system
that has ever left us
broken.”

— Jordan Jace / “I want”

“Democracy’s survival depends on what happens inside our skulls, where anything is possible. The destruction of a shared reality does more damage than economic decline or impeachable acts.”

— George Packer / Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

“‘No one look / And a canny fucking fill / Don’t lie to me!’ she sings in one moment. It doesn’t really make sense, but it’s not supposed to: Harding wants you to find your own logic. “I just want everyone to feel like a philosopher. You put on a record, and that record belongs to you,” she said in a recent Pitchfork interview.”

— Sophie Kemp / Aldous Harding’s Warm Chris album review, Pitchfork.com

“If we all paid attention to what is happening to the planet in the Anthropocene, we’d be running around with our heads on fire. Instead, we churn on in our lives, ordering stuff for next-day delivery when we could shop locally, driving to the grocery store only half a mile away instead of biking, and flipping the radio dial when another instance of extreme weather strikes, because we just can’t bear what another fire or hurricane portends. All the while, we’re nagged by conscience, which slowly drags our spirits down.”

— Lauren Groff / “Beach Bummer”

“Nostalgia is a pathological sickness. Photographed
I am as quiet as an apple approaching the mouth.
In the Pavilion of Din, my skull stays a silence.”

— Michael Dumanis / “Flag Day”

“We are not wired to make decisions about barely perceptible threats that gradually accelerate over time. We’re not so different from the proverbial frog that boils to death in a pot of slowly warming water.”

— Jeff Goddell / The Water Will Come

“Something has gone wrong with the last best hope of earth. Americans know it—the whole world knows it. Something has gone wrong out there too . . . No one is going to save us. We are our last best hope.”

— George Packer / Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

What I’m Listening To:

“Of all the ways to eat a cake
This one surely takes the knife”

— Aldous Harding / “Passion Babe”