None of this evil was ever necessary. Some carriages are gilded and others lacquered in blood, but the same engine pulls us all. We dismantle it now, build another thing entirely, or we hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the certainty that, when the time comes, we’ll learn to lay tracks on air.

Far enough gone, the systemic murder of a people will become safe enough to fit on a lawn sign. There’s always room on a liberal’s lawn.

Through that prism, it’s hard not to see the advances in something like artificial intelligence less driven by technological breakthroughs as by a society that has, over years, over decades, become normalized to a greater and greater magnitude of both loneliness and theft, such that a sputtering algorithm badly trained on the stolen work of real

To be accused of speaking too loudly about one injustice but not others by someone who doesn’t care about any of them is to be told, simply, to keep quiet.

The defining emotion, as it has been for months, is bewilderment: What is wrong with me that I can’t keep living as normal? What is wrong with all those people who can?

There exists no other remotely plausible explanation for a moral worldview in which what a protester might hypothetically do to a hospital deserves the strongest condemnation, while what a military does—has done—to multiple hospitals deserves none.

The problem with fixating on the abyss into which one’s opponent has descended while simultaneously digging one’s own is that, eventually, it gets too dark to tell the difference.

It is an admirable thing, in a politics possessed of a moral floor, to believe one can change the system from the inside, that with enough respectful prodding the establishment can be made to bend, like that famous arc, toward justice. But when, after decades of such thinking, decades of respectful prodding, the condition one arrives at is reticent

What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity, our derangement, the plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul: one’s capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot in any rational way be understood—only felt, only moved through. And sometimes