Thanks, Caspar. So glad you enjoyed it!

To any aspiring journos/nonfiction writers: my friend Sandy Allen—who’s written for everywhere from The Paris Review & The Believer to Esquire & Eater, to Cosmo & CN Traveler—is teaching a course on the most mysterious and dreaded task in freelancing: how to write a pitch. Enrollment closes soon!

"Although largely erased from public consciousness, Indigenous enslavement was a colossal phenomenon that spanned the entire Americas, ensnaring an estimated 3 million to 6 million Indigenous people between 1492 and 1880 from Canada to Brazil."

Thanks so much, Theresa!

Happy and honored to wake up to this news!

This is *the* crucial point to keep in mind. The future is not a binary between a pure, perfect world and a ruined, apocalyptic one. As I write in my book, the future is more like a tree, w/different futures branching out in all directions. It matters profoundly which branch we end up on.

I know I keep yelling about this, but fuck, look at it. That's potentially some of the most valuable land in the country, located directly between two light-rail stations in a growing, prosperous city, and we're just going to leave a FUCKING GOLF COURSE there. It's such a travesty.

A murmuration of starlings above Sardinia, Italy. One of my favorite natural phenomena.

"Her values were clear: Pay your union dues, stand with labor, love the castaways, put money directly in people’s pockets. Make great art (and own your work). Share books freely. Uplift the land as the land has lifted and lifted you. Higher still, even. And help the people climb."

(Oh wait I guess both of my books are collections of linked essays, each one building off another, if you look at them in a certain light. 🤔)

I’ve often read that Eliot Weinberger’s essays in ‘An Elemental Thing’ are arranged as a spiral, though I’ve never really been able to figure out how, exactly. In Wisdom and Metaphor, Jan Zwicky also does fascinating things with pagination (pairing a source text with essays, on opposing pages).

This is orthogonal to, well, pretty much everything, but I just wanted to point out that Berton has what might be the best author photo on all of Wikipedia. I especially love that someone took pains to credit his cat by name.

In my book I talk about how one of Trump’s most surprising traits is that he loves trees. Specifically, he loves driving around in a limo, buying old trees from people’s yards, and them transplanting them on his golf courses. (Which is *the* most Trumpy way to love a tree, if you think about it…)

Pretty sure it’s set in the present day (although it’s somewhat ambiguous as I recall), but this is one of the saddest (and funniest!) sad sack films I’ve seen in forever. It might just be the epitome of the genre.

Hey check that out. In Trees, in Dutch!