Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

History is made out of common dreams, groundswells, turning points, watersheds—it’s a landscape more complicated than commensurate cause and effect,

“Every line we succeed in publishing today—no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it—is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness.”

When we are asked how are we going to build a new world, our answer is, “We don’t know, but let’s build it together.”

movements driven by imaginations as supple as art rather than as stiff as dogma.

Many people who had never spoken out, never marched in the street, never joined groups, written to politicians, or donated to campaigns, did so; countless people became political as never before. That is, if nothing else, a vast reservoir of passion now stored up to feed the river of change.

Often the road to politics is through culture.

“The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think,” said Virginia Woolf in the midst of the First World War, a war in which millions of young men died horribly. They died, but not everything did.

Most of us would say, if asked, that we live in a capitalist society, but vast amounts of how we live our everyday lives—our interactions with and commitments to family lives, friendships, avocations, membership in social, spiritual, and political organizations—are in essence noncapitalist or even anticapitalist, full of things we do for free, out

In a way, capitalism is an ongoing disaster anticapitalism alleviates,

To live entirely for oneself in private is a huge luxury, a luxury countless aspects of this society encourage, but like a diet of pure foie gras it clogs and narrows the arteries of the heart. This is what we’re encouraged to crave in this country, but most of us crave more deeply something with more grit, more substance.