I started this out as a letter to a friend who's feeling down about where we as a nation are at in this moment, and I am still learning how this newsletter thing works so thought I could use the newsletter template to produce a private document, maybe
In many ways this society has moved toward a democracy of voices, as people who for their race or gender were shut out of systems of power and possibility – out of jury duty, professions, institutions educational and otherwise – fought to be included. But we still have so far to go,
Today marks one full year for this newsletter, and here's the 77th post (I thought once a week was going to be a lot, but there's so much going on I wrote almost 1.5 times a week over the past year). I'm so
This morning the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial warning about the consequences of the persecution and deportation of immigrants and its impact on the overall labor force: "The Census Bureau reported Tuesday that U.S. population growth slowed significantly in the past year amid lower levels of immigration.
There are great days and terrible days in history, days a nation or world changed, that you remember forever. For me that's the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the Zapatistas, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the days of Occupy and BLM, and it's Friday
I wrote an essay in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, an essay to encourage people to not give up and not assume that the Trumpists had won. It follows, after this prelude about where we are a year after the grim inauguration that followed upon the election. As
It's getting more extreme out there, especially in Minnesota where the unaccountable army of the Trump regime has, in the wake of its murder, beaten up employees, ripped civilians from their cars, kidnapped people who are in every way outside their mandate, knocked on doors demanding to know
"Hope does not mean saying this is not bad, and it does not mean saying that we can defeat it. It just means saying we will keep showing up. That we will not give up. ...we do not know how it will unfold, and neither do those we oppose."
"A year ago, I went to Copenhagen to write about the political crisis Trump had created over Greenland," Anne Appelbaum said the other day on the hellsite formerly known as Twitter. "Danes told me that because the US can already do whatever it wants on the island,
1 They are saying it baldly: this is an oil grab. There is a history of oil grabs going back to British imperialism in the middle east in the late nineteenth century and murders of Osage Nation tribal members in Oklahoma when oil made them rich in the early twentieth
There's no show this New Year's Eve at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts because the jazz musicians scheduled to play will be a no-show. They cancelled. A fun thing happened after Donald Trump first took over control of the John F. Kennedy
I wish you all a peaceful day, whatever this day means to you or doesn't, and I'm more grateful than I might have been otherwise for the gift of life itself, because of my journey home Tuesday and yesterday. I'm grateful to all 34,
We already knew that Jeffrey Epstein had sexually assaulted and exploited dozens of girls and young women, that he had done so openly, that his dehumanization of the vulnerable had not prevented a whole lot of rich and high-status men (and women, but mostly men) from socializing with him even
Dear readers, I'm setting off in a couple of hours on an overnight trip with a friend to go visit our mutual friend, Jarvis Masters, who's one of the many prisoners moved off Death Row but not actually relieved of that murderous sentence. He's
I saw two radically different versions of what a quilt could be yesterday and yet they spoke to the same issues. I caught the show Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California at the Berkeley Art Museum Sunday afternoon. I love quilts and while I could love them purely
There's been a lot of fuss about Trump recently calling female journalists "stupid" and "piggy" though there's nothing really new about his misogyny toward that sub-population (I am so old I remember 2016 candidate Trump saying weird things about Megyn Kelly when
Everything changed in the last few weeks. The Republicans, assumed by themselves and too many others, to be unstoppable got stopped again and again. Public opinion manifested in many ways: as an election that went hard against them, by a once-loyal Trumpist who turned on him, as a remarkable shift
It's striking to me that a lot of people want politics to be about their personal feelings, in which case they're not engaged in politics, though they may be engaged in the sabotage of politics. This is why I declared that "voting is a chess
A young white woman in yoga clothes berating masked ICE agents in a parking lot this spring. A pope speaking up again and again for immigrants. Furious judges dressing down the Trump administration and ruling against it time after time after time, in response to the blizzard of lawsuits filed
When word went out that border patrol agents had been sent to the Coast Guard island off Alameda near Oakland on the eve of October 23, Bay Area residents sprang into action. Before dawn the next morning, valiant locals began a blockade of the island, which is connected to Alameda