Globally, 2024 was the warmest year on record—more than two and half degrees hotter than the preindustrial average. In the U.S., there were twenty-seven climate-related disasters that caused more than a billion dollars’ worth of damage, just one short of the record, set in 2023. Scientists had expected temperatures to moderate this year, because a new, typically cooler weather pattern, known as La Niña, took hold in December. But January, once again, broke all heat records. Bill McGuire, a professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, called the January data “astonishing and, frankly, terrifying.”
— Elizabeth Kolbert / “The Second Trump Administration Takes Aim at the Climate“ / The New Yorker
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
— Timothy Snyder / On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
My parents taught me solitude is another form of survival.
— Saúl Hernández / “A Note on Solitude”
I felt like Earth in that extraordinary picture of the planet surrounded by a thick belt of space junk. I felt it would be years before the knotted-string dream of other people’s performances of woe for my dead wife would thin enough for me to see any black space again, and of course — needless to say — thoughts of this kind made me feel guilty.
— Max Porter / Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
If we wise hominids were sensible, we’d do that too, or eat our young, like sharks.
— Margaret Atwood / “February”
But even the rubble in Gaza has meaning to us. It is where our loved ones lived and died. When the time comes, we are the only people who will be removing what must be removed, only to reuse it to rebuild.
— Mosab Abu Toha / “Gaza Must Be Rebuilt by Palestinians, for Palestinians” / The New Yorker
Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they’re amiable and sometimes not.
— China Miéville / The City & The City
Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy. Perhaps rulers did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise this value or that principle. Perhaps a new regime did not at first have the direct means of influencing citizens one way or another. After the German elections of 1932, which permitted Adolf Hitler to form a government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed.
— Timothy Snyder / On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
What I’m Listening To:
Polythene bags, they’ll never go away Us dogs and rats, will never escape If you said it could be better out, l probably won’t believe you I’ll knock the teeth out my head And we’ll see
I heard that before, somewhere— it resonated. A chord struck—atonal & dissonant.
A wound—a pickaxe stymie, a hurricane hole in homogeneity. Monosyllabic trickle & tone.
Where you going—where you been?
I’ll find a planetarium to bathe in— nothing more to say.
What I’m Reading:
This language is a chain of accidents. What I’m trying to say is no one gives a fuck about your poems but write them anyway. If you’ve got a body, a pen, a shadow that follows you like a dog, then make it mean something.
Apropos of nothing . . . As ceilings evolved from feral rafters into beloved Victorian concatenations, a nascent pet-forest economy arose on the carts of so-called “pulpy curiosity pools involving hitmen.” We will explore the linens they slept upon and the gnarled toes of these itinerant offal splattermen.
I will then grift you an overcoat made of castor beanlets in a blanket.
Subsequently, president-New Wheel SlipperyMan Deep Unthinker—a pioneer of thee queerest directives, and wearing “unclassifiable fleshiness” unfolds in a torrent of psoriatic folds and crepey skins. He feathers abortive invectives at squelching tires in an impenetrably viscous fog.
He speaks in fragmentary sentences, mired in orange spread, and plays with his tiny pens of eviscerating fraudulence.
You wear your Midday Mask as the rats run rampant through the works.
Jack the Ripper Day is thee new national holiday—so have a bloody pleasant vacation from reason and sanity.
Time to travel cross country and across time to get thee head correct . . .
Goodbye!
What I’m Reading:
Poets should be concerned with how an empire makes us hate the people without papers. Who could be us, who are us, but temporarily less human because it is convenient for the jobs. The jobs are too important to stop the bombs that burn the flesh of the children who were my face as a child, but I live here, with papers.
“There’s a pretty dramatic jump in temperature that started in mid-2023, and it has really persisted through the present,” says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with the group Berkeley Earth. The persistence, he says, has surprised many climate scientists and caused them to wonder if climate change may have begun to push Earth’s oceans and atmosphere into new, potentially unforeseen behaviors.
— Alejandra Borunda / “January wasn’t expected to break global temperature records. But it did.” / NPR
Somewhere someone is playing “Funkytown.” Loud. Very Loud. Forty-five years old this song! How has this endured so long?
What I’m Reading:
As I sat on the toilet of a Boeing 727, somewhere over Ohio riding United tourist, I imagined my last moments of life falling bare-assed through the sky…
A new year brings the promise of more longanimity and asceticism. Nothing is as safe she expects in the age of vulnerability and shame.
She liked it more when every emotional situation didn’t need a “name” where you could “hold” it in its “safe space.”
There is no room for nostalgia, but she has no use for these “isms” either.
She wants to crawl into a garbage can large enough to hold her and live out the rest of her days like that lady in Beckett’s Happy Days — remember, she has no room for nostalgia.
But there are bills to pay and some sort of food preparations to be made if she wants to continue on living in this hovel.
And there is the crow.
Always that crow! She inherited it from someone she cared about deeply once, but she can’t remember quite who.
The crow is tethered to the radiator and has to be fed often. And if the food isn’t placed just so, on time, the cawing is insufferable.
No room for nostalgia, but she longs for the halcyon days of pandemic when she knew what to expect — even if it was the worst.
This new post-apocalypse state of being is a bit dull. And this noisome, pediculous crow leaves much to be desired.
What I’m Reading:
I thought it was unfair, and then I understood that, alone and terrified, anger was my only weapon against the horror.
But what needed to be understood was not how all Germans were as evil and guilty as their leaders: clearly, they were not. More troubling was how the ordinary bourgeois German had turned executioner not because there was a gun at their head, but because they had persuaded themselves, with remarkable effortlessness, that a job was a job and feeding the family came first. How had evil been organized so that it became so commonplace? That was the question.
— Lyndsey Stonebridge / We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience
I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.
— Susan Sontag / “The Art of Fiction No. 143” / The Paris Review
We had survived the prison, the plain and the loss of all hope, but the women had discovered that survival is no more than putting off the moment of death.
— Jacqueline Harpman / I Who Have Never Known Men
It seems apt. A melting glacier made from tears.
— Rebecca Priestly / End Times
We are living in an age of mass migration.
Millions of people from the poor world are trying to cross seas, forests, valleys and rivers, in search of safety, work and some kind of better future. About 281 million people now live outside the country in which they were born, a new peak of 3.6 percent of the global population according to the International Organization for Migration, and the number of people forced to leave their country because of conflict and disaster is at about 50 million — an all-time high. In the past decade alone, the number of refugees has tripled and the number of asylum seekers has more than quadrupled. Taken together, it is an extraordinary tide of human movement.
The surge of people trying to reach Europe, the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia has set off a broad panic, reshaping the political landscape. All across the rich world, citizens have concluded — with no small prompting by right-wing populists — that there is too much immigration. Migration has become the critical fault line of politics. Donald Trump owes his triumphant return to the White House in no small part to persuading Americans, whose country was built on migration, that migrants are now the prime source of its ills.
— Lydia Polgreen / “Something Extraordinary Is Happening All Over the World” / New York Times
People talk and talk more about black holes.
I believe the blackest hole is the one we inhabit . . .
— Eugenio Montale / “People talk and talk more …”
There was a palpable sense of relief that it was now possible to leave the earth behind. This was mad, she thought. The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition. The world that men wanted to escape was the one which they had made themselves.
— Lyndsey Stonebridge / We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience
What I’m Listening To:
That Californian sun on my face All those drugs they They fogged his brain
So she’s says to him, “when I was younger and finally got a prescription for Prozac and Lithium I thought my life was finally pivoting.”
He was nonplussed. He’d been talking about the horses and such.
But she went on: “I hoped the medication would uptake all that awful brain chemsistry and wash my brain in the good stuff, and that the darkness that pervades my thoughts, my emotions, my outlook would somehow lighten…”
But he’s still thinking about trifectas and quinellas, and if the odds are correct for that pedigree. He’s still engrossed in the Daily Racing Form.
What’s that?
The horse racing newspaper, dear.
Okay, and then?
She hadn’t paused a beat, she was still wound up, she said: “I never wanted to be an ‘up with people’ type person, and attend Sunday services, and say things like ‘praise the lord’ and ‘thank you, Jesus’ in conversation—I still wished to enjoy David Lynch, Joy Division, and Samuel Beckett, without having to live the life portrayed in their art. But much to my amazement the medication—”
And he hit her!
Don’t even!
He hit her with that Daily Racing Form. I remember it was the July 14, 1997 issue. The newsprint left that date marked upon her forehead.
It was the darndest thing!
What I’m Reading:
If the only thing that differentiates us from animals is the fact that we hide to defecate, then being human rests on very little…”
thee istsfor manity reader 