Blog

5 quick ideas about why and how to resist
The rich already run everything, and they’re grabbing more power. Build your power with others and find new ways to resist. We have ways to make things, communicate, and live that don’t depend on corporations. Maybe we forgot. But we can do things on our own.

Anti-trans feminism since the 1960s
After a couple of recent essays by Sophie Lewis chronicling this movement. Particularly because the anti-trans movement is fond of suggesting that trans people sprang into existence yesterday, I’m fascinated with timelines.

Would you work with the ‘Alliance Defending Freedom’?
A 2022 Bindel–Joyce debate in which Joyce calls my gender ‘an attack on the whole institution of civilization’. She thinks she’s preserving ‘the Enlightenment,’ ‘evidence,’ ‘stable meanings,’ ‘how you do science’, ‘the whole institution of civilization.’

Climate change is expensive, but that’s not the point
Why would we calculate how many dollars the planet’s worth? How many trillion dollars? Does it matter? Climate change is very, very expensive. It will make us reassess what it means for something to be expensive.

I’m not debating that
But what’s this article doing, then? If cheese-breads are puffy, why are nut-breads less puffy? No one is asking what bakers are up to! Might be a conspiracy. Maybe nut-breads should be banned.

You won’t be afraid of that book anymore
You’ll feel better when you acknowledge your own reactions. Some people don’t want us to think and feel for ourselves, because doing so is part of what it means to be, and they want us to be afraid.

Green Birds Are Birds
But green is a color. It’s a concept, not a thing you can point to — unless you find a thing or a living being that is green. A bird is a living being you might encounter in the air. You can see it in the world. Birds who are green are green and also birds. They’re green birds.

The living cathedral of knowledge
Secreting a shell. The cathedral is partly mine. Or is it a living snail, creeping ahead of me, of which I had lost sight, with which I am at this moment catching up?

How Many Anti-Trans Laws Were Proposed Last Week?
We need to pay attention to all 50 U.S. states—as well as all countries—but doing all that in the same article makes for challenging storytelling and storylistening. Reed’s article yesterday highlighted five U.S. states, so I’ll go with her approach.