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There is a kind of sickness in failing to act the moment you know. Yet because it would be crazy to blurt out: This needs to end, the first time it occurred to you, you wait. Only, having failed to honor your insight at its annunciation, why act now? Life always obliges cowards with an excuse. Dan’…

In fact Diana thought Adam’s long article on peak oil was so-so, something someone else could have written. She seems to prefer romanticizing him as some genius. Now, however, she is glad to have read it.

“Even then, though, come on.” Sam is flustered by his older sister trespassing into the boy…

It is an immense relief to be, today, just one of many people asking the same questions, and no longer among the youngest ones. So it is no more than my own thought to reflect that, in addition to the value of relentless critique and prospective imagination, one way would be to remember, in detail …

I realize now that I was trying to undo by writing what could only be undone by action, not alone but with others—and through connections that incantation alone would not conjure. Words, it turned out, did not have all the performative powers that 1990s book-learning sometimes seemed to suggest. In…

[...] To my mind one of the parts of For Common Things that holds up best is a reporting-based chapter on the coalfields and the ecological and social violence that secures cheap energy. That chapter described West Virginia’s landscape as the remnant that persists after destruction, that which ha…