Meditations in an Emergency

We're in election season.

Gentle reader, I wrote this essay in 2013, but it is all the way down to the critique of pervert glasses, as Meta's version of smart glasses have been dubbed, only too timely in 2026, and the bygone things are just more bygone.

I've gotten tough or resilient or case-hardened to the ugly things I read up on daily as part of my writing and civic life.

This is the week that someone pulled the fire alarm on AI.

I realized as soon as I'd posted it that I'd failed to update some parts of it.

I wrote this for the eighth anniversary of 9/11, drawing on my 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster; it felt right to revise and reissue for this twenty-fifth anniversary.

"Canadians will have to prepare for a future that's 5 C hotter, according to a new report summarizing the latest science on climate change," says a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation report on a Canadian government study, and that sounds mildly alarming if…

To become old is to be an immigrant from a country that no longer exists, and to live among peers who sometimes remember that country and among younger people who mostly don't know how different the past was.

We will always love her, and there will never be another like her, this artist who came out of deep rural poverty in the 1960s to become not just a staggeringly great performer and songwriter but philanthropist, humanist, humorist, and – well there's a way

I've been in northern New Mexico for more than two weeks, in what is normally the monsoon season, but there has been no rain beyond a brief, quickly evaporated spatter of drops three times so far.

I spend a lot of time thinking about our habits of mind, overarching stories, and unexamined assumptions that shape thought.

To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up.

I have lived a long time but I have never lived through such a time of destruction, of nature, of human lives, of truth, fact, science, journalism, the rule of law.

Last weekend, the film The Odyssey was released and the Tate brothers were arrested in Florida at the behest of the British government, which seeks to extradite them to face a long list of charges.

It is like a bad dream that keeps recurring: people are drowning while we are prevented from reaching them with our rowboats and life preservers; homes are burning but someone is standing on the firehose or knocking down the ladders; there is a planetary…

For at least a decade we have been told that this and that and the other thing must be tolerated in pursuit of the elusive vote of the working class or the white working class which often means the white male working class which becomes in turn a way that…

I wrote the essay below on the film Giant when I was a columnist at Harper's a decade ago but I thought I'd run it like a retro film revival, because I love the film and what it has to say so much, because the essay on its politics seems timely, and to be…

There is no more one-sentence-fits-all opening in literature than Dickens's "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times," and this is a review of a lot of the winning and losing over the past week or so, some of it symbolic, some of it serious, s…

This is the one-hundredth essay at Meditations in an Emergency.

There's a golden age of literature – for us, not for them.

When I was young I believed that the ideas I needed to grasp were complicated fact-dense new ones, and maybe back then I did need to take in more data.