I finished this book two weeks ago and have been thinking about it ever since—a brilliant, turbulent, troubling feat of planetary writing.

There are passages in here that will freeze the air in your chest, and ideas that will crack your dead, calcified heart right open.

Great little thread. Some may have missed the odd fact that a black pastor at DJT’s inauguration just passingly referenced one of the most strikingly racist monuments in the US: Stone Mountain, Georgia.

There are layers of history and irony hidden within this one phrase, which Cotlar unpeels.

I would kill to know what happened in the three days between these two tweets.

Debord put his finger on this problem all the way back in the 60s. Isolation—or more specifically, thinner and thinner forms of connection, resulting in “lonely crowds”—is central to the workings of capitalism.

Car culture is one (esp damaging) example of this phenomenon. Screen culture is another.

This seems like a good north star for any nonfiction writer (or really, any human being) to aim for.

(Wallace Shawn, describing the authorial voice of Jonathan Schell, in the NYRB)