Living on the brink of oil stained societal collapse, everything going wrong in 20 different directions Christopher Wood, Zebra and Parachute, 1930, © Tate, CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 I’m going to write about William Gibson today, for the second time in this newsletter, because while he is best known for a
Listening to the hull of the ship groaning and creaking under the pressure outside HMS Erebus and Terror in the Antarctic by John Wilson Carmichael (before the fatal Franklin expedition) Last week I was wondering whether we might be learning to live a smaller, slower way of life during all
In an effort to expand our reach across the planet, we have cornered ourselves Vanitas still life with a globe, sceptre, a skull crowned with straw, Hendrick Andriessen, c. 1650 One of the big ideas echoing around the world right now, because we live in this weird time when everyone
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