Things are breaking too easily, and in all the most predictable ways Vanitas Still Life, n.d., Herman Henstenburgh As the scope of the pandemic was becoming clear, Shamar Bibbins, a senior program officer at climate funder the Kresge Foundation, was on a call with a public health nonprofit they
It’s been hard to force both catastrophic threats to live inside my skull at the same time Vanitas Still Life, Pieter Claesz, 1625 Not very long ago, like pretty much everyone, I was living in a world in which Covid-19 was not my problem, and then all of a
It's dumb and I don't want to learn anything from this Dreaming of Walking near Fuji, Isoda Koryusai, 1770-73 I have this running note where I jot down ideas for this thing during the week and I looked at it today and it is basically that
'Epidemics have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact' The Fall of the Cowboy, Frederic Remington, 1895 This phrase has been rattling around in my head while sitting inside my own little box surrounded by all the other boxes of other people, all of
This fantasyland daze we walk around in, pretending all of our fates are not connected The Threatened Swan, Jan Asselijn, 1650 Hello from Crisis Palace where we are healthy and safe, working from the palace, and responsibly limiting human contact. I have found that Covid-19 has turned me into a
I don't think we should be in the business of moving backward Still Life with Birds and Fruit, Giovanna Garzoni. c. 1650 I had a really cool opportunity this week to co-author an article for the fancy French publication Analyse Opinion Critique (AOC) with political scientist Edouard Morena
This vale where souls get made Cynara humilis, wild thistle, Flora Graeca, sive, Plantarum rariorum historia [1806-1840] As the credits rolled on the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, audiences in theaters were instructed to take a series of actions that appeared one by one on screen, set to the soulful
Far too little and far too much at the same time Untitled (The Moon), Willhelm Sasnal So I ended up reading about and talking about and tweeting about and yes writing about Jeff Bezos a whole bunch this week more than I prefer to be honest but I will do
How Bloomberg hijacks and redirects progressive fights Nocturne Grey and Silver, Whistler, 1873-1875 Well I guess this is as good a time as any to talk about Michael Bloomberg. In the past week or so, he has emerged as a new favorite among Democrats who are basically Republicans but maybe
A wave of history I was recently talking to someone for an article and she mentioned this idea, paraphrased from Oakland-based artist and activist Favianna Rodriguez, that “culture moves faster than policy.” I looked up the original quote, and I believe it’s in this interview where Rodriguez says, “The
How should you feel about the future? Bangkok, present day In the last newsletter of 2019 I started to talk about the dizzying scale of climate change and the algorithms that scatter the information we exchange and how they’ve broken the way we experience time. A good corollary to
The history is gruesome, but delivered so delicately, and feels like receiving a gift Naga, the seven-headed snake protector of Buddha, being carried around by like a million dudes. Angkor Wat. So I recently got back from this trip to Cambodia and Laos, and briefly Bangkok, and it was an