Rebecca Solnit is the author of 13 books, including A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disasters and Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. She is, from kindergarten to graduate school, a product of the California public education system now being decimated.
A Rape a Minute, a Thousand Corpses a Year: Hate Crimes in America (and Elsewhere)
Crossposted from TomDispatchHere in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in her lifetime, the rape and gruesome murder of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi on December 16th was treated as an exceptional incident. The ...
The Sky’s the Limit: The Demanding Gifts of 2012
Crossposted from TomDispatchAs this wild year comes to an end, we return to the season of gifts. Here’s the gift you’re not going to get soon: any conventional version of Paradise. You know, the place where nothing much happens and nothing is demanded of you. The gifts you’ve already been ...
Our Words Are Our Weapons: Against the Destruction of the World by Greed
Crossposted from TomDispatch In ancient China, the arrival of a new dynasty was accompanied by “the rectification of names,” a ceremony in which the sloppiness and erosion of meaning that had taken place under the previous dynasty were cleared up and language and its subjects correlated again. It was like ...
The Rain on Our Parade: A Letter to My Dismal Allies
Crossposted from TomDispatch Dear Allies, Forgive me if I briefly take my eyes off the prize to brush away some flies, but the buzzing has gone on for some time. I have a grand goal, and that is to counter the Republican right with its deep desire to annihilate everything ...
Occupy Your Victories: Occupy Wall Street’s First Anniversary
Occupy is now a year old. A year is an almost ridiculous measure of time for much of what matters: at one year old, Georgia O’Keeffe was not a great painter, and Bessie Smith wasn’t much of a singer. One year into the Civil Rights Movement, the Montgomery Bus Boycott ...
Apologies to Mexico: The Drug Trade and GNP (Gross National Pain)
Dear Mexico, I apologize. There are so many things I could apologize for, from the way the U.S. biotech corporation Monsanto has contaminated your corn to the way Arizona and Alabama are persecuting your citizens, but right now I’d like to apologize for the drug war, the 10,000 waking nightmares ...
Welcome to the 2012 Hunger Games: Sending Debt Peonage, Poverty, and Freaky Weather Into the Arena
Crossposted from TomDispatchWhen I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s -- which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but ...
Mad, Passionate Love -- and Violence
Crossposted from TomDispatchWhen you fall in love, it’s all about what you have in common, and you can hardly imagine that there are differences, let alone that you will quarrel over them, or weep about them, or be torn apart by them -- or if all goes well, struggle, learn, ...
Compassion Is Our New Currency
Crossposted from TomDispatchUsually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed -- and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in thousands of communities across the United States ...
Last Tuesday, I awoke in lower Manhattan to the whirring of helicopters overhead, a war-zone sound that persisted all day and then started up again that Thursday morning, the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street and a big day of demonstrations in New York City. It was one of the ...
Letter to a Dead Man About the Occupation of Hope
Crossposted from TomDispatchDear young man who died on the fourth day of this turbulent 2011, dear Mohammed Bouazizi, I want to write you about an astonishing year -- with three months yet to run. I want to tell you about the power of despair and the margins of hope and ...
Recently, Nelson Mandela turned 93, and his nation celebrated noisily, even attempting to break the world record for the most people simultaneously singing “Happy Birthday.” This was the man who, on trial by the South African government in 1964, stood a good chance of being sentenced to be hanged by ...
Worlds Collide in a Luxury Suite
How can I tell a story we already know too well? Her name was Africa. His was France. He colonized her, exploited her, silenced her, and even decades after it was supposed to have ended, still acted with a high hand in resolving her affairs in places like Côte d’Ivoire, ...
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January 27th, 2013
A Rape a Minute, a Thousand Corpses a Year: Hate Crimes in America (and Elsewhere)
Crossposted from TomDispatchHere in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in ...
December 27th, 2012
The Sky’s the Limit: The Demanding Gifts of 2012
Crossposted from TomDispatchAs this wild year comes to an end, we return to the season of gifts. Here’s the gift you’re not going to get ...
October 30th, 2012
Our Words Are Our Weapons: Against the Destruction of the World by Greed
Crossposted from TomDispatch In ancient China, the arrival of a new dynasty was accompanied by “the rectification of names,” a ceremony in which the sloppiness ...
September 27th, 2012
The Rain on Our Parade: A Letter to My Dismal Allies
Crossposted from TomDispatch Dear Allies, Forgive me if I briefly take my eyes off the prize to brush away some flies, but the buzzing has ...
September 16th, 2012
Occupy Your Victories: Occupy Wall Street’s First Anniversary
Occupy is now a year old. A year is an almost ridiculous measure of time for much of what matters: at one year old, Georgia ...
July 10th, 2012
Apologies to Mexico: The Drug Trade and GNP (Gross National Pain)
Dear Mexico, I apologize. There are so many things I could apologize for, from the way the U.S. biotech corporation Monsanto has contaminated your corn ...
May 3rd, 2012
Welcome to the 2012 Hunger Games: Sending Debt Peonage, Poverty, and Freaky Weather Into the Arena
Crossposted from TomDispatchWhen I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, ...
September 27th, 2012
The Rain on Our Parade: A Letter to My Dismal Allies
Crossposted from TomDispatch Dear Allies, Forgive me if I briefly take my eyes off the prize to brush away some flies, but the buzzing has ...
December 22nd, 2011
Compassion Is Our New Currency
Crossposted from TomDispatchUsually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed -- and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to ...
July 31st, 2011
Recently, Nelson Mandela turned 93, and his nation celebrated noisily, even attempting to break the world record for the most people simultaneously singing “Happy Birthday.” ...
October 30th, 2012
Our Words Are Our Weapons: Against the Destruction of the World by Greed
Crossposted from TomDispatch In ancient China, the arrival of a new dynasty was accompanied by “the rectification of names,” a ceremony in which the sloppiness ...
October 18th, 2011
Letter to a Dead Man About the Occupation of Hope
Crossposted from TomDispatchDear young man who died on the fourth day of this turbulent 2011, dear Mohammed Bouazizi, I want to write you about an ...
January 27th, 2013
A Rape a Minute, a Thousand Corpses a Year: Hate Crimes in America (and Elsewhere)
Crossposted from TomDispatchHere in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in ...
February 21st, 2012
Mad, Passionate Love -- and Violence
Crossposted from TomDispatchWhen you fall in love, it’s all about what you have in common, and you can hardly imagine that there are differences, let ...
'Dirty Wars' by Jeremy Scahill
Why have you started a comedy festival in northern Michigan in the middle of winter?
Because if you were here in the dead of winter in the middle of nowhere (which is actually somewhere to us), you'd need a few laughs too ... Continue Reading
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