[{"id":276135,"date":"2026-08-25T04:00:53","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T08:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276135"},"modified":"2026-08-25T07:35:07","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T11:35:07","slug":"agnes-callard-on-socrates-turf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/agnes-callard-on-socrates-turf\/","title":{"rendered":"Agnes Callard on Socrates\u2019s Turf"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Welcome to season four of <\/em>The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of the Interview<em>. This season, host Merve Emre talks with professional interviewers of all kinds about how they get the answer they&#8217;re looking for, what makes a good question, how do you listen for what&#8217;s unsaid, and how hard do you have to push someone before they say something new? <\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em><strong>Subscribe to <\/strong><\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/link.chtbl.com\/tcahp\"><strong>The Critic and Her Publics<\/strong><\/a><em><strong>, available wherever you get your podcasts!<\/strong><\/em><strong><br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"width: 100%; height: 200px; border: 0 none;\" src=\"https:\/\/art19.com\/shows\/e2dec8ed-68d4-4c0a-bd4f-d022abd2c95f\/episodes\/a7c530f8-7302-4dbb-8d6e-c93ed03958f3\/embed\" scrolling=\"no\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-popups allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>From the episode: <\/em>&#8220;The philosopher Agnes Callard is one of the most genuinely curious thinkers I have ever met. Whether she\u2019s writing about unrequited love, parenting, politics in the classroom, or the moral failures of people who like to travel, I get a thrill hearing her examine ordinary life from unexpected angles. And I love to disagree with her, which I often do. Callard teaches at the University of Chicago and is the author of several books, including, most recently <em>Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life<\/em>, which came out last year. She joined me to talk about perhaps the oldest form of the interview, the Socratic dialogue, and what we might learn about asking questions and seeking the truth from Socrates and other gadflies&#8221;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong><em>For a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/online\/2026\/08\/18\/socrates-turf-agnes-callard-merve-emre\/\">full transcript<\/a>, head over to the <\/em>New York Review of Books<em>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">_________________________________<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong><em>The Critic and Her Publics<\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nHosted by Merve Emre <strong>\u2022<\/strong> Edited by Michele Moses <strong>\u2022 <\/strong>Music by Dani Lencioni <strong>\u2022 <\/strong>Art by<br \/>\nLeanne Shapton \u2022 Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>The Critic and Her Publics<\/em> is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, <em>New York Review of Books<\/em>, and Lit Hub.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome to season four of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of the Interview. This season, host Merve Emre talks with professional interviewers of all kinds about how they get the answer they&#8217;re looking for, what makes a good<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16133,"featured_media":276138,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43071,43069,6,43072,43110,43070,93330],"tags":[82311,3512,41410,28008,5089,111700,93331],"class_list":["post-276135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-in-conversation","category-lithubradio","category-literary-criticism","category-the-critic-and-her-publics","tag-agnes-callard","tag-interview","tag-lit-hub-radio","tag-merve-emre","tag-podcasts","tag-the-art-of-the-interview","tag-the-critic-and-her-publics"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19PN","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/image-800x40011-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16133"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276069,"date":"2026-08-24T06:30:28","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T10:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276069"},"modified":"2026-08-24T08:59:46","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T12:59:46","slug":"lit-hub-daily-august-24-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/lit-hub-daily-august-24-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Hub Daily: August 24, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<span class=\"caption\"> TODAY: In 1899, Jorge Luis Borges is born. <\/span>\n<ul>\n<li>How surveillance technology infuses policing <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-technology-assisted-surveillance-promotes-racial-bias-in-policing\">with even more racial bias<\/a>. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/newsandculture\/politics\/\">Politics<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/dorthe-nors-on-striving-to-write-emotionally-resonant-fiction\/\">Why studying Goldilocks<\/a> can help us write emotionally resonant fiction. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/craftandcriticism\/craft-and-advice\/\">Craft<\/a><\/li>\n<li><span class=\"byline\">Claire Boyles considers <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/fiction-as-a-filter-on-writing-the-american-wests-water-crisis\">the impact of the American West&#8217;s water crisis<\/a><\/span>\u00a0on her writing: &#8220;In fiction, we connect with characters we don\u2019t have to continue living with, and in that ephemeral state of love we may be more willing to consider ideas and perspectives we would otherwise resist.&#8221; | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/craftandcriticism\/craft-and-advice\/\">Craft<\/a><\/li>\n<li>\u201cJason was not just hounded out of academia, he was hounded out of existence.\u201d\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/steven-thrasher-on-the-killing-of-jason-arday\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">Steven Thrasher on the killing Jason Arday.<\/a>\u200b| Lit Hub<\/li>\n<li>\u201cWhat if every human being were born with an irresistible need to do good?\u201d Christelle Dabos explores <a href=\"http:\/\/lithub.com\/christelle-dabos-on-empathy-doing-good-and-how-we-fill-ourselves-up\">the radical possibilities of empathy<\/a>. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/craftandcriticism\/craft-and-advice\/\">Craft<\/a><\/li>\n<li>&#8220;The first time I saw this place, I knew I had come home.&#8221; Read from <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/gaining-ground\">Joan Barfoot&#8217;s new novel, <em>Gaining Ground<\/em><\/a>. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/fictionandpoetry\/from-the-novel\/\">Fiction<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Accelerate, dog, accelerate! Elise Broach considers <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/page-turner\/get-a-tech-job-babies\">the strange rise of high-level STEM books for babies<\/a>. | The New Yorker<\/li>\n<li>Carolyn Kellogg looks at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment-arts\/books\/story\/2026-08-19\/california-indie-publishers-transit-unnamed-press\">the ambitious literature coming out of California presses Unnamed Press and Transit Books.<\/a> | Los Angeles Times<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/pioneerworks.org\/broadcast\/no-myth-here-khajistan-saad-khan-megan-fernandes\">Saad Khan and Joey Chriqui of the \u201cutterly visionary\u201d Khajistan<\/a> talk to Megan Fernandes. | Broadcast<\/li>\n<li>Alex Dueben explores <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tcj.com\/rewriting-the-world-lettrism-and-comics\/\">how the poetics of Lettrism shows up in comics.<\/a> | The Comics Journal<\/li>\n<li>Jessica Simmons-Reid looks at <a href=\"https:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/sophie-calle-overshare-herve-guibert-photography-langson-museum\/\">Sophie Calle through the work of Herv\u00e9 Guibert<\/a>. | Los Angeles Review of Books<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How surveillance technology infuses policing with even more racial bias. | Lit Hub Politics Why studying Goldilocks can help us write emotionally resonant fiction. | Lit Hub Craft Claire Boyles considers the impact of the American West&#8217;s water crisis\u00a0on her<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":276071,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[45236],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-276069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lit-hub-daily"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19OJ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/borges1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275986,"date":"2026-08-24T05:10:32","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T09:10:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275986"},"modified":"2026-08-25T05:23:46","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T09:23:46","slug":"steven-thrasher-on-the-killing-of-jason-arday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/steven-thrasher-on-the-killing-of-jason-arday\/","title":{"rendered":"Steven Thrasher on the Killing of Jason Arday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Though I have been mostly offline for my annual summer social media sabbatical, I watched the Jason Arday story unfold with increasing horror over the last couple of weeks. With hundreds of stories in traditional media, along with many people texting me updates because they perceived parallels between his situation in academia and my own, it was unavoidable.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">I had never interacted with Jason, but I\u2019ve spoken at Cambridge twice over the last two years\u2014on my way out of the academy myself\u2014and, like many Blackademics, I\u2019m aware of most of the few of us who live in Black and brown skin while inhabiting these primarily white spaces.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Jason\u2019s life ended in tragedy, and while our stories bear many similarities, at least I am privileged to leave academia on my own two feet and not in a body bag. May Jason know peace now, something he was not allowed to feel in the last weeks of his life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Suicide is complicated and multifactoral in its causes, but it is undeniable that the ghoulish hunting of this gentle spirit is why he is dead today. Jason was not just hounded out of Cambridge or academia; he was hounded out of the workforce, hounded out of existence. For this wretched Western society (which is so well exemplified by the grotesque nature of so-called \u201chigher\u201d education) wants each of us to believe we are born to be exploited and used up\u2014especially people who are Black or mentally ill or disabled. This grotesque order wants each of us to believe that if we fail to manage our own exploitation, we deserve the death penalty.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">I, for one, refuse to accept this.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">I want to consider Jason\u2019s story in tandem with my own, but not to foreground myself. No, I want to hug Jason close because there is a tendency when looking at the downfall of Black or brown academics or writers to cleave them into categories of \u201cworthy\u201d or \u201cunworthy.\u201d \u201cGood trouble\u201d or \u201cbad trouble.\u201d It\u2019s the same sentiment Chris Rock utilized when he <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/stage\/2012\/may\/24\/chris-rock-bring-the-pain\"><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">yelled<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\"> \u201cI love Black people but I hate niggers\u201d in 1999 and it is often applied to situations like Jason\u2019s. This narrative tries to distinguish between Blackademics deserving of sympathy and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">niggers<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">\u2014because, let\u2019s be honest, that\u2019s the word gatekeeping Primarily White Institutions (PWI) like Cambridge would use if they could.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><p class=\"pullquote\"><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Nothing Jason was accused of doing justified what he was subjected to<\/p><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">I have no idea if, how, why, or to what degree Jason may have done or not done what he is accused of having done. And I do not care. At all. He seems to have been a gentle soul who navigated disability, racism, and cruelty with tenderness and tenacity\u2014a human being struggling with mental illness whose cries for help were ignored. As my friend Gregg Gonsalves asked, \u201cWho had the duty of care for Jason Arday? From my perspective, it was everyone around him, who watched what he was going through and walked away, ignored it. I don\u2019t care what he was accused of; it is monstrous that no one stepped in to help. He died alone.\u201d (Gregg works at Yale, a university which is actively re-segregating itself and<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/yaledailynews.com\/articles\/as-yale-seeks-settlement-with-trump-new-haven-remains-on-the-offense\"><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\"> colluding with the Trump administration<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\"> to destroy higher ed. \u201cWhatever you think about universities,\u201d Gregg added, \u201cthey are not places of justice or kindness.\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Nothing Jason was accused of doing justified what he was subjected to: being hounded to his death (even after he resigned) by a chorus of petty, cruel, and often blatantly white supremacist people who filed hundreds of stories about him (not to mention an avalanche of tweets). I received multiple breaking news alerts about his death\u2014about the death of someone who should have never been a globally known name. But that&#8217;s what contemporary academia does. It forces writers, journalists, and professors to summit pedestals if they are to have any hope of securing precarious employment. Then it waits for them to fall, and rips them to shreds when they inevitably do.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">The way Jason was treated in the press as a Blackademic is so common that it has almost become a genre of sorts. Recently, another prominent Blackademic was accused of poor citational practices (I will not mention them by name or link to the coverage to spare them more unfair attention). The parallels between the coverage of this other scholar\u2019s work and Jason\u2019s were so similar, as were the targeted attacks, that you can begin to see this issue for what it is: an insidious structural problem.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">The real transgression which triggered the investigations of both of these scholars was being a star in a PWI, and having a crossover book by a major trade publisher. This was their true sin. This is what brought a level of scrutiny upon them, which cost them their careers (and, in one case, their life).<\/span><\/p>\n<p><p class=\"pullquote\"><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">\u201cDare to step into these spaces,\u201d they warn, \u201cdare to take some of the resources we\u2019ve been hoarding, and this could happen to you, too.\u201d<\/p><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">I am reminded of the case of Juan M. Thompson, a Black journalist who was fired from the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Intercept<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\"> for fabricating sources in 2016, prior to making bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers, serving 5 years in prison, and <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.stlmag.com\/news\/juan-thompson-st-louis-journalist-bomb-hoax-died\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">dying at 39<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">, likely of a drug overdose. Thompson was a fabulist and also seriously mentally unwell. When there are so very few Black journalists and professors in PWIs, it is extremely suspicious that some who squeak in do so with stories too outlandish to be true. Is this storytelling required to get in the door?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">And what does it mean when most of us who don\u2019t make them up <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">also <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">have to present heroic narratives about ourselves as the price of admission?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">What if we didn\u2019t blame individuals for not solving a systemic issue? What if they weren\u2019t punished for their shortcomings with a lynch mob?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">What if we instead asked questions like:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Why are there so few Black people in well-resourced institutions?\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Why does someone with Black or brown skin have to have some super human quality\u2014like claiming to run 30 marathons in 35 days\u2014to gain entry into one of these institutions?\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Why are Black and brown institutions\u2014like HBCUS or universities in Africa or Mexico\u2014purposefully under resourced?\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Why are people who inevitably fail to find stability on the wobbly pedestal they\u2019ve been placed on the only ones from marginalized communities who can break into well-resourced institutions?\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Jason, others in PWIs, others kept out of PWIs, and others trying to do right in under-resourced nonwhite institutions are victims of a kind of systemic violence. When so much vitriolic rhetoric is directed at one person, it\u2019s a form of what <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/muse.jhu.edu\/verify?url=%2Farticle%2F715439&amp;r=9369892\"><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Koritha Mitchell calls<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\"> \u201cKnow Your Place Aggression.\u201d Mitchell describes this as &#8220;the flexible, dynamic array of forces that answer the achievements of marginalized groups such that their success brings aggression as often as praise. Any progress by those who are not straight, white, and male is answered by a backlash of violence\u2014both literal and symbolic, both physical and discursive\u2014that essentially says, know your place!\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><p class=\"pullquote\"><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">What does it mean that our downfalls and deaths, rather than our achievements and ascensions, are the only things of interest to these voracious outlets?<\/p><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Some of the people who hunted Arday are, let&#8217;s be honest, extremely mediocre people. To call them journalists would be an insult to the profession. And while he was partially their focus\u2014and while he paid with his life for their malice\u2014their bigger target was all non-white people who try to wrest away resources from PWIs. \u201cDare to step into these spaces,\u201d they warn, \u201cdare to take some of the resources we\u2019ve been hoarding, and this could happen to you, too.\u201d Every public lynching has hoped to serve this purpose of deterrence, and this once was no exception. One of the reasons I warn against \u201cfirst narratives\u201d and times when Black people are \u201cthe only one\u201d in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">The Overseer Class<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\"> is not just because the dynamics push one to become an overseer, but because they leave one vulnerable to scrutiny, shunning, and, ultimately, ruination.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">The mediocre \u201cjournalists\u201d covering Jason\u2019s downfall are vultures. His death was a breaking news event in the<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\"> New York Times, Guardian<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\"> and BBC\u2014publications, I can personally attest, which have ignored the work of many brilliant Blackademics in recent months, but which will giddily announce their deaths.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">What does it mean that our downfalls and deaths, rather than our achievements and ascensions, are the only things of interest to these voracious outlets?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">In <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">The Viral Underclass<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">, I wrote about how racism eventually got George Floyd\u2014through the police, through Covid, through poverty; one way or another, racism was always going to get that man. And it did. I look at how racism grinds up Black and brown people inside these PWIs, how it uses us up and casts us aside, systematically. How, as <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2025\/12\/01\/world-aids-hiv-trump-cuts-unemployment-lgbtq\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Afeef Nessouli and I reported in the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Intercep<\/span><\/i><i><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">t<\/span><\/i><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">, it is Black and brown people with HIV who are spit out by public health projects around the world\u2014after they perform the important labor that makes it possible for white researchers at PWIs to buy houses and build careers in the global north.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">On Halloween, 2024, not long after I myself <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">had<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\"> been <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/false-profits-why-i-am-not-teaching-in-the-classroom-this-fall\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">suspended from teaching<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\"> over my support for Palestine, <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">I was invited to debate at the Cambridge Union Debate Society. (I stayed in Jesus College, where Jason Arday was a professor.) The motion before us was \u201cThis House Welcomes the Decline of America.\u201d I chose the occasion to talk about a gay Latino student in the first college class I\u2019d ever taught. His name was Andres. He was a total pain in the ass, but also brilliant and wonderful, and I loved him. He was an immigrant from Colombia, and I was the \u201cfirst adult\u201d he told he was HIV-positive. He did sex work to meet NYU\u2019s huge costs. By the time he left NYU, he was $150,000 in debt. Andres wanted to pursue scholarly study\u2014and he certainly had the smarts for it\u2014but he saw law school as the only way to get out of debt someday. Yet by the time he left law school, he was $300,000 in debt. He died at age 27 of a drug overdose.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">As I said that Halloween night at Cambridge, \u201cIt is obscene that America could not find a place for my beautiful, queer, brown, pain-in-the-ass student\u2013who was not my student at all, really, but my teacher! And America took him away from this world before he got to do what he came here to do!\u201d America has no copyright on lethal racism, though; England, its press, and its universities remind us of that often.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Andres\u2019 corpse was just one of many I had to mourn during my short stint in academia. In America, while I was in grad school, there weren\u2019t many Black or brown PhD students studying what I was studying (and none at all in my cohort at NYU). But we found each other at conferences and on Twitter, and we kept in touch in group chats and tried to support each other.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">And yet, amongst those few of us, three died before I finished my PhD: <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/evanstonroundtable.com\/2018\/03\/08\/doria-dee-johnson-1961-2018\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Doria Johnso<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">n (cancer, like <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/08\/12\/us\/johanna-fernandez-dead.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Johanna Fernandez<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\"> and Audre Lorde, at age 47), <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/obituaries.startribune.com\/obituary\/jesus-perez-estrada-1090642466\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Jesus Estrada Pere<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">z (\u201csuicide\u201d in jail, 28), and <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/yaledailynews.com\/articles\/beloved-dus-lecturer-and-office-of-lgbtq-resources-leader-andrew-dowe-dies-at-34\"><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Andrew Dowe<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\"> (unknown, 34).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">Racism is succinctly defined by Ruth Wilson Gilmore as \u201cthe state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.\u201d Western society in general, and its universities specifically, not only fails to make a place for the many brilliant non-white people who have so much to offer the world; it produces and exploits the vulnerability of people like Jason, Andres, Doria, Jesus, and Andrew. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 500;\">As a friend put it to me, \u201cThe moral of this unspeakably tragic story: the \u2018post-racial\u2019 university and the elite it serves are ideological weapons of death.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Though I have been mostly offline for my annual summer social media sabbatical, I watched the Jason Arday story unfold with increasing horror over the last couple of weeks. With hundreds of stories in traditional media, along with many people<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16376,"featured_media":276077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43095],"tags":[111916,51179,111833,104,80981,658],"class_list":["post-275986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-politics","tag-blackademics","tag-cambridge-university","tag-jason-arday","tag-racism","tag-steven-thrasher","tag-suicide"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19No","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Jason-Arday.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16376"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275986\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275625,"date":"2026-08-24T05:09:55","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T09:09:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275625"},"modified":"2026-08-24T08:00:52","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T12:00:52","slug":"dorthe-nors-on-striving-to-write-emotionally-resonant-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/dorthe-nors-on-striving-to-write-emotionally-resonant-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Dorthe Nors on Striving to Write Emotionally Resonant Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I published my first novel twenty-five years ago. It was not a masterpiece, but to me it was a miracle. Unboxing was still a private phenomenon back then and I remember looking at the book in disbelief. There it was in the box, and I found I didn\u2019t care much about how it would be received. The fact that I wrote it and that it made it into the world with a real ISBN was the focus of my celebration. It existed!<\/p>\n<p>I gave my mom the first copy of my book. My mom had dreamed of becoming a painter. She had a teacher who supported her. He believed she had talent. But her lower middle-class rural background and gender made it hard in the early 1950s. Still, she wanted to provide for herself, so she fought to get an education, any kind would do, and she became a hairdresser. I\u2019m her third child and the only girl. The story goes that I was born in the middle of a perm and the customer, with her curlers and all, was still sitting in her chair when I was delivered in the bedroom next door.<\/p>\n<p>When I turned eight, my mom went back to school to become an art teacher. The dream caught up with her. Not in the original form, but still. It was as monumental as unboxing my debut back in 2001.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">According to the original story, Goldilocks is a naughty girl, but I can\u2019t help but see a child on the quest. She\u2019s looking for the perfect place, isn\u2019t she.<\/p>\n<p>The second copy I gave to my schoolteacher. Let\u2019s call her Laura. I wrote a personal dedication. Then I biked to her house in the rural village where I went to school as a kid. I walked straight up to her door, knocked on it, and when she opened, I handed her the book. Shaky hands, a little embarrassed. As far as I remember my dedication read:<i> Dear Laura, Thank you for teaching me how to write.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n<p>From age six to fourteen Laura oversaw my reading and writing skills. It was easy to see that she was moved by the dedication, and yet she corrected me: <i>I only taught you the letters, Dorthe. I didn\u2019t teach you how to write.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m not sure this humble response is true. What Laura did was notice that I was a chatterbox and that I got easily bored. Therefore she provided me with books. Over time she would secretively hand me advanced tasks. She made me write \u201cjust a little play\u201d and turned its passages into theater for my classmates and me. It was as if she pointed at the walls surrounding me and with a piece of chalk drew a door. An exit, a way out, a future.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m convinced Laura was the first person to tell me about Goldilocks. This strange girl who wanders around alone in the middle of nowhere and then enters a house that belongs to gentle bears. The bears have just cooked porridge and have gone for a walk while it cools off. In comes Goldilocks; grabs a spoon. The first spoonful\u2019s too hot, the next is too cold, and the third\u2019s just perfect. She sits in chairs and rests in beds until finally she\u2019s content. According to the original story, Goldilocks is a naughty girl, but I can\u2019t help but see a child on the quest. She\u2019s looking for the perfect place, isn\u2019t she. The spot where you feel safe but not imprisoned, free but not lost, warm but not burned, cold and yet not freezing. She\u2019s looking for her zone: The Goldilocks zone.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>What happened was that I wanted the protagonist of my tenth book, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781644454046\"><i>Range<\/i><\/a><i> <\/i>to have a job that wasn\u2019t close to my own. I wanted to be challenged! I decided to make her an astrophysicist and I called her Gunn. To give Gunn a field of study, I got in touch with The Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. There I met a helpful professor called Johan P. U. Fynbo. He and his team are looking for the moment when the first light broke through the dark and cold of the young universe.<\/p>\n<p>I soon understood that Professor Fynbo and I have very different and incredibly similar jobs. He\u2019s using math and I\u2019m using language, but were both trying to figure out things like: How did we get here? What are we here for? What is life? I also learned that astrophysicists use tools from my toolbox to make their work understood by laymen. They use metaphors, for instance. Professor Fynbo once told me that his job was like looking for \u201cglow worms in the dark.\u201d That\u2019s poetry.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">Like all fairytales, the story about Goldilocks wishes to teach us something using a magical form that makes it emotionally hard for us to forget.<\/p>\n<p>I wasn\u2019t looking for Goldilocks when she appeared in my research. She walked right into an article about life on other planets. No longer on the quest for porridge but now an example of life itself. I read that if we look for life in space, we should look for the planets that are in the Goldilocks distance to a host star like the sun. Like our own beautiful watery planet. Traveling through the darkness of space, orbiting a light. Placed exactly where it\u2019s not too hot, not too cold, just in the perfect distance to a star.<\/p>\n<p>Or a mom, or a dad, or an aunt, or a teacher, or a bear.<\/p>\n<p>Like all fairytales, the story about Goldilocks wishes to teach us something using a magical form that makes it emotionally hard for us to forget. It tells us an important truth about growth and becoming. We must be in a healthy range to a source that has a strong capacity for care. A host star. Too close to the source and our dreams will be burned to ashes by the needs and personality of the host itself. Too far from the source and we\u2019d be so cold and alone. The best place for a kid\u2014and a planet\u2014to be is in the Goldilocks zone. That\u2019s where life thrives. Planets and humans. Remember the connection.<\/p>\n<p>In my new novel, I gave Goldilocks the more common name Jenny, and I let her seek out Gunn, or the Professor as the locals call her in the area where they live, a place of dark skies and neighbors. Jenny is a strange child, weird you could say, but she\u2019s also helped along by her caring mom, the hairdresser.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s fiction, of course. But as we know from the study of Goldilocks, fiction carries the deepest truths.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">_______________________________<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275627\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/dorthe-nors-on-striving-to-write-emotionally-resonant-fiction\/range-1\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/range-1.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"1242,1863\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"range (1)\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/range-1-683x1024.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275627\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/range-1-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/range-1-200x300.jpg 200w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/range-1-683x1024.jpg 683w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/range-1-768x1152.jpg 768w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/range-1-40x60.jpg 40w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/range-1-1024x1536.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/range-1-33x50.jpg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/range-1.jpg 1242w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781644454046\">Range<\/a> <em>by Dorthe Nors, translated by Caroline Waight, is available from Graywolf Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I published my first novel twenty-five years ago. It was not a masterpiece, but to me it was a miracle. Unboxing was still a private phenomenon back then and I remember looking at the book in disbelief. There it was<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7250,"featured_media":275831,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43071,43069,11],"tags":[99004,47513,15528,3506,23613,937,9424,45195,13552],"class_list":["post-275625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-fullwidth-slider","tag-caroline-waight","tag-craft-advice","tag-dorthe-nors","tag-fairytales","tag-fiction-writing","tag-graywolf-press","tag-novel-writing","tag-range","tag-writing-process","story-type-craft-advice"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Hz","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/goldilocks.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7250"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275625\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275794,"date":"2026-08-24T05:09:05","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T09:09:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275794"},"modified":"2026-08-23T20:48:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T00:48:11","slug":"fiction-as-a-filter-on-writing-the-american-wests-water-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/fiction-as-a-filter-on-writing-the-american-wests-water-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Fiction as a Filter: On Writing the American West\u2019s Water Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Years ago, during the Great Recession, I attended an event sponsored by an environmental organization that had formed in protest to a planned dam construction project on the Cache La Poudre River in northern Colorado. At the time, my husband and I owned water rights that drew from that river system, which we used to irrigate our small-scale vegetable farm. Most of the farmers in our rural community were in favor of the dam, but as environmentalists, we opposed it. I admired the work the group was doing and was considering joining myself.<\/p>\n<p>That is, until one of the group\u2019s members, upon hearing I was a farmer, cornered me to deliver a condescending lecture about how agriculture should be managing water. I might have still had water spots on my glasses from installing our drip irrigation system, and I was not about to be farm-splained by some dude who wouldn\u2019t know a ball valve from an intake line. I\u2019ve come to believe that the most effective activism often involves sitting in long, boring meetings with people you find vaguely annoying even though you are on the same side, but I never went back to any of that group\u2019s events.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">I wanted to write a novel in which the water crisis of the American West was \u201credeemed by the imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Years later, while writing my novel, <i><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780393531800\">Appraisals<\/a>, <\/i>I spent some time dissecting this exchange. In real-life, it was obnoxious, but not especially meaningful. In fiction, I could see the narrative potential. I became fascinated by the force of our instant disdain for one another and the assumptions each of us carried into that space. I had been very certain of my place on the moral high ground, and it was clear to me that he had felt the same. I began to wonder: what if my husband and I talked about the dam project with such mutual contempt? Or one of my teenage kids? A neighbor or a friend I cared deeply about?<\/p>\n<p><i>Appraisals <\/i>is about water rights and marriage and local farms and parenting and zoning laws and grandmothers, which is to say it is about the emotional impacts of climate anxiety in rural spaces, how these issues put us at odds with, or, more hopefully, draw us closer to the people we love. The novel is set during the Great Recession, on a farm much like the one my husband and I bought in 2008, the one we sold at a loss in 2013, just barely avoiding bankruptcy and foreclosure. Originally, I thought that having such deep real-life experience would make the book easier to write, but the opposite turned out to be true. Through multiple failed drafts, I struggled to separate all of my opinions about the book\u2019s political background issues\u2014the value of local foodsheds, regenerative practices, water law and the water crisis, and the impact of oil and gas development on rural communities\u2014from what I know good fiction does, which is center character and relationship.<\/p>\n<p>In the author\u2019s note to the 1995 paperback edition of <i>In the Time of the Butterflies<\/i>, Julia Alvarez writes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>What you\u2019ll find here are the Mirabals of my creation, made up but, I hope, true to the spirit of the real Mirabals\u2026I wanted to immerse my readers in an epoch in the life of the Dominican Republic that I believe can only finally be understood by fiction, only finally be redeemed by the imagination. A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I did not want to write a memoir, and I did not want to write essays. I wanted to write a novel in which the water crisis of the American West was \u201credeemed by the imagination.\u201d For models of how to keep the polemic from overpowering the personal, I turned to other writers working in the subset of climate fiction that I call contemporary agrarian.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>In Ruth Ozeki\u2019s <i>My Year of Meats, <\/i>the protagonist Jane Takagi-Little produces a TV show called <i>My American Wife!<\/i> that is really a series of advertisements meant to sell American meat to Japanese housewives. When the job takes her to an eastern Colorado cattle ranch, Jane notices that the family\u2019s young daughter has precocious breast development as a result of the hormones the operation uses. Here is Jane deciding to confront the child\u2019s mother, Bunny, about her suspicions:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I know what denial looks like, and what it feels like too. It\u2019s a mercurial flicker of recognition in the eye, quickly blanketed with a vagueness that infuses the body like sluggish blood. It is opaque. Murky\u2026I know this because I make television and try to walk through it on a daily basis. It feeds on convention, cowers behind etiquette, and the only way to deal with it is a blunt frontal attack.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">In fiction, we connect with characters we don\u2019t have to continue living with, and in that ephemeral state of love we may be more willing to consider ideas and perspectives we would otherwise resist.<\/p>\n<p>Beyond the larger metaphor for the climate crisis in those first sentences, this is where the large-scale agricultural politics become mere backdrop to the more compelling personal story. Jane understands that calling Bunny out is a social and professional transgression, but her decision to do it anyway is ultimately an invitation for redemption, which Bunny accepts. The intricacies of the interpersonal dynamics and conversational turns in the scene ground the dispute in emotion, and two characters who were once at odds find common ground.<\/p>\n<p>But what if there is no common ground to be found? In Diane Wilson\u2019s <i>The Seed Keeper<\/i>, Rosalie Iron Wing, the main character, grows an organic garden on her husband John\u2019s conventional farm. When he is young, their son, Tommy, works with Rosalie in the garden, and she teaches him about their Dakh\u00f3ta history and beliefs. When Tommy starts working in the big fields with John, who is white, he pulls away from Rosalie.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Surrounded by approving adults, [Tommy] learned that his father\u2019s beliefs were blessed by God and church and community. Eager to please him, Tommy began spending less time with me, until I finally stopped asking if he wanted to help in the garden or gather plants in the woods. Because this is what he remembers, Thomas grew up believing that I had given up on him. And that is what he can\u2019t forgive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This emotional rift is deeper than just the family\u2019s disagreements about what to grow and how, encompassing the brutal history of genocide and displacement that is embedded deep in America\u2019s agricultural history. Wilson explores these relational fissures throughout the novel but does not resolve them. Rather, she leaves them to mirror and amplify the still unresolved wounds of the nation\u2019s story.<\/p>\n<p>Returning to these writers helped me find the distance I needed to get closer to my novel\u2019s characters, and in doing so, I became even more convinced of the importance of fiction set in the contemporary climate moment. Increasingly, media is moving away from real-life climate stories, assuming, I think, that people don\u2019t want to read them, much in the same way that I did not want to join the same group as the farm-splainer. It\u2019s hard to summon the energy for confrontation, with strangers or beloveds or even our own complicity in this disaster. In fiction, we connect with characters we don\u2019t have to continue living with, and in that ephemeral state of love we may be more willing to consider ideas and perspectives we would otherwise resist.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">_______________________________<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275795\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/fiction-as-a-filter-on-writing-the-american-wests-water-crisis\/appraisals\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/appraisals.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"600,897\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"appraisals\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/appraisals.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275795\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/appraisals-201x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"201\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/appraisals-201x300.jpg 201w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/appraisals-40x60.jpg 40w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/appraisals-33x50.jpg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/appraisals.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 201px) 100vw, 201px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780393531800\">Appraisals<\/a> <em>by Claire Boyles is available from W.W. Norton &amp; Company.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Years ago, during the Great Recession, I attended an event sponsored by an environmental organization that had formed in protest to a planned dam construction project on the Cache La Poudre River in northern Colorado. At the time, my husband<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31676,"featured_media":275804,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43071,43069,6],"tags":[111794,69026,46867,49273,632,17878,86778,23613,9424,7026,12598],"class_list":["post-275794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","tag-appraisals","tag-claire-boyles","tag-climate-crisis","tag-environmental-writing","tag-environmentalism","tag-farming","tag-farms","tag-fiction-writing","tag-novel-writing","tag-the-environment","tag-w-w-norton-and-company","story-type-environmentalism"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Ki","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/farm-field.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31676"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275794\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275491,"date":"2026-08-24T05:08:21","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T09:08:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275491"},"modified":"2026-08-24T14:14:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T18:14:08","slug":"how-technology-assisted-surveillance-promotes-racial-bias-in-policing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-technology-assisted-surveillance-promotes-racial-bias-in-policing\/","title":{"rendered":"How Technology-Assisted Surveillance Promotes Racial Bias in Policing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Policing and incarceration in the twenty-first century are not wholly human practices. The strategies, tactics, and encounters that organize the carceral state are developed and prosecuted in collaboration with inhuman technologies that \u201cwe\u201d do not and cannot fully understand. In fact, the demotion of the human agent in policing is often by design. Making sense of carceral power at this moment requires that critics approach policing the way we do other industries that are widely acknowledged to be fully captured by digital media, like finance.<\/p>\n<p>Policing is, now, an inhuman practice in both an ethical and a technical sense. People might set policy and parameters for what we\u2019d like our carceral institutions to do. But, practically speaking, none of it is imaginable or executable without digital technologies that are fundamentally black-boxed, inscrutable to individual cops on the beat and institutional decision-makers alike. This, as much as anything, is the key point of the carceral surround: \u201cWe\u201d humans are the products of the twenty-first-century carceral technology industry as much as its authors.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve developed the carceral surround to name the logic that connects the NYPD\u2019s 2020 siege of Black Lives Matter activist Derrick Ingram, who was wanted for yelling into a bullhorn during that summer\u2019s protests, to police agencies\u2019 precision targeting and abduction of international students opposed to genocide in Gaza, to the surveillant mundane of everyday life under what Jackie Wang names \u201ccarceral capitalism.\u201d This logic is extensive and immanent to the social world. It organizes the network of computational technologies that collectively work to instantiate carceral power as a bedrock and reality-defining force of contemporary capitalism. This force flows from a populational logic that uses statistics and algorithms to distribute the state\u2019s violence work.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">Instead of law enforcement, policing shifts to violent secure against mathematical possibility by acting against living humans now.<\/p>\n<p>In the 2010s, when the massive generation and capture of data became simply referred to as \u201cbig,\u201d highly capitalized information technology companies promised that they and only they could make sense of the new hyperobject. This was as true in the carceral field as it was in other industries. Silicon Valley insisted that their tools could finally eliminate uncertainty and subjectivity from juridical decision and instantiate a perfectly mathematical official antiracism in criminal justice. The momentum in many criminal legal enterprises began hurtling toward digitally automating this analytic regime of knowledge.<\/p>\n<p>Nowhere was this convergence more spectacular than in California, which launched an unprecedented Supreme Court-mandated effort to depopulate its \u201cGolden Gulag\u201d of state prisons at the beginning of the decade. Microsoft, the carceral state\u2019s most important IT partner, wanted in. California\u2019s Proposition 47 reduced certain drug convictions from felonies to misdemeanors and allowed inmates and formerly incarcerated people to petition the court for resentencing. It didn\u2019t permit re-sentencing to those with any prior convictions for \u201csex offenses including rape, child molestation and other sex offenses; murder, attempted murder and solicitation to commit murder; assault with a machine gun on an officer; or any serious or violent crime punishable by a life sentence or death.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>nBut it compelled the resentencing of any other inmates \u201cunless the court finds an unreasonable risk to public safety,\u201d determined by \u201cthe offender\u2019s criminal history, the types of crimes committed and when they occurred, the extent of injury to victims, the length of prior prison commitments, the inmate\u2019s disciplinary and rehabilitation records while incarcerated, and any other relevant evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The passage of Prop 47 meant that the criminal legal system had slightly less leeway to lock \u201cmodestly educated women and men in the prime of their lives\u201d in cages. But because of the efforts of officials like Commander Will Brown, the San Diego County Sheriff\u2019s Department officer in charge of its Prop 47 transition, it became an opportunity to imagine a redesign of the entire criminal legal system. Brown seized on the law as an opportunity to use risk to \u201cbasically level the playing field, re-evaluate how criminal justice happens in our county and remove all the labels that we\u2019ve learned over the past three years: split sentences, straight sentences, post-release community supervision, 999 [the term for someone sentenced under California\u2019s three strikes laws]&#8230;all those labels I think should go away,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>In their stead, Brown envisioned \u201crisk and risk alone\u201d determining \u201chow we spend resources and how we provide for public safety.\u201d If the police and the courts determine that someone is at a high risk of committing new crimes, he argued that the police owe it to their \u201celected constituents to reduce that risk by spending resources on an offender to lower their recidivism so they\u2019re not creating new victims in the community.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The sheriff\u2019s department turned to Microsoft to help accommodate this vision. The company would link the different agencies\u2019 data silos, provide software and hardware to facilitate the GPS tracking of paroled people convicted of crimes, and develop an efficient data analytics system to analyze in real time agency databases and surveillance information to determine risk levels of persons that the police encounter. This profoundly racialized idea of security effectively transforms living people into possible future threat. Instead of law enforcement, policing shifts to violent secure against mathematical possibility by acting against living humans now.<\/p>\n<p>Ruha Benjamin calls the collection of tools that are designed to produce this racial power \u201cthe New Jim Code,\u201d and population racism works to think through how this New Jim Code works to produce new forms of value in a 21st century political economy. As terrifying as so many of the technologies that constitute the carceral surround are (or purport to be), the reality is that in practice many of them work terribly. Despite truly astronomical levels of funding, most of the flashiest and most future-shocked crime-control technologies fail and fail consistently. ShotSpotter, which is designed to automatically detect and pinpoint gunshot locations, has been found to cost NYC tens of millions in wasted funds as it consistently directs officers to incorrect locations. Commercial predictive policing technologies (which have largely been brought under ShotSpotter\u2019s parent company SoundThinking\u2019s umbrella) do little more than ratchet up racist overpolicing and offer bad predictions. Automated facial recognition software is notoriously inaccurate, and especially so against people of color, who are most likely to be targeted by police.<\/p>\n<p>Even more seemingly banal technologies like body-worn cameras have had no discernible impact on police behavior or on departmental transparency. Efforts to integrate these cameras with software that would provide real-time automatic threat assessments to officers (by analyzing the body language of whomever police are interacting with) have gone nowhere. Likewise, NYPD-issued smartphones were imagined to fully integrate beat cops with the city\u2019s automated surveillance, command, and control apparatus, but the main impact has been to create an indelible image of waste and indifference: of officers standing around staring at their phones all day. This list could go on.<\/p>\n<p>And yet research and investment continue to pour into digital policing technologies even as the failures mount. In certain spaces, like community supervision (probation and parole), automated surveillance tech is now de rigueur, even as its brittleness consistently remands people to cages over sometimes literally human-imperceptible infractions. What James Kilgore calls \u201ce-carceration\u201d continues to proliferate as an alternative to lockup as overburdened cities and states seek the supposed benefits of mass incarceration\u2019s spatial fix without incurring its attendant fiscal cost. Meanwhile, a cowed political class meets every crisis caused by the monumental violence of policing and prison with calls to direct more funds to the instigators of racial-sexual oppression and to more heavily invest in technologies and training. In other words, repeated failure catalyzes an ever-deeper investment in the carceral surround as a horizon of governance.<\/p>\n<p>For Commander Brown, public safety is determined by risk that technocrats meet behind a closed door to determine. In fact, Brown argues that the principal advantage that Microsoft\u2019s package offers to \u201ccriminal justice partners\u201d\u2014the term the company uses for all players in the public-private partnership of policing\u2014is that it facilitates the smooth and seamless communication between agencies necessary for them to \u201cshare resources&#8230;[and] information to make your county safer\u201d without making such communications public. Rather than taking place among elected or public officials, these conversations take place among the \u201cpeople below that position\u201d of representatives and public-facing managers who can be \u201cvery frank and can just put it on the table in a way that your elected and chiefs can\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">Digital technology captures and shapes this violence as both best practice and as a model for society. It not only makes such an order of things \u201cnormal,\u201d it makes it seem \u201cnatural\u201d or, worse, \u201cright.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s not let this moment pass. What about how police agencies understand criminality and risk can only be put on the table and frankly stated behind closed doors? What important insights into policing can\u2019t elected officials or chiefs say out loud? To say that the answer is <i>race<\/i> is both obvious and not enough. More specifically, it is population racism and the animating power of statistically racialized threat to do speculated harm. This negatively racialized fear of future harm is always posited against an equally racialized bearer of property that is harmed. It is, in other words, an imagined Blackened harm that animates these technocratic assessments of risk and precisely the whiteness of the harmed that must \u201cvery frank[ly]\u201d remain (un)spoken only behind closed doors. This is the very logic of police power.<\/p>\n<p>Prisoners are created through policing, which has been defined for decades by \u201czero tolerance,\u201d \u201corder maintenance,\u201d \u201ccommunity policing,\u201d or \u201cbroken windows.\u201d There are some differences in each of these approaches, but the overriding philosophy that unites them is that it is the job of police to determine what counts as a \u201ccommunity\u201d and then to maintain community \u201corder.\u201d Cops do this with the tools available to them: They criminalize and punish aspects of daily life that do not comport with a department\u2019s sense of what order means. Police deploy a host of tactics that target \u201cdisordered\u201d bodies in \u201cordered\u201d spaces and \u201cordered\u201d bodies in \u201cdisordered\u201d spaces. This entails criminalizing everyday life and everyday forms of community. \u201cOrder\u201d maintenance proceeds by disordering social bonds and community ties. A sidewalk party to celebrate a six-year-old\u2019s birthday? Cleared by cops. A neighborhood cookout? Not without police permission. Black and Brown teenagers hanging out on the corner of their block? Inherently dangerous. Digital technology captures and shapes this violence as both best practice and as a model for society. It not only makes such an order of things \u201cnormal,\u201d it makes it seem \u201cnatural\u201d or, worse, \u201cright.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The only position capable of contesting the expanding power and violence of the carceral surround is abolition. To quote Ruth Wilson Gilmore, \u201cAbolition requires that we change one thing, which is everything.\u201d By offering the necessity of changing \u201cone thing, which is everything\u201d as its opening gesture, abolitionist thought breaks a cultivated feedback loop in which the insistence that carceral power is an isolatable part of the social world works to reinforce its place at <i>this<\/i> world\u2019s center. Abolition, in this reading, is broad. It encompasses, of course, the elimination of police and prisons. But also, to quote Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, \u201cthe abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.\u201d In refusing and critiquing analyses that ask after how carceral technology is used and how it can be improved, abolition opens up the space to genuinely think critically\u2014to ask not only what these technologies <i>do <\/i>but what can be built in their place.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">_______________________________<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275492\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-technology-assisted-surveillance-promotes-racial-bias-in-policing\/the-carceral-surround\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-carceral-surround.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"600,927\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"the carceral surround\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-carceral-surround.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275492\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-carceral-surround-194x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"194\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-carceral-surround-194x300.jpg 194w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-carceral-surround-39x60.jpg 39w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-carceral-surround-32x50.jpg 32w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-carceral-surround.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 194px) 100vw, 194px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>Adapted from\u00a0<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781517921255\">The Carceral Surround<\/a>\u00a0<em>by R. Joshua Scannell,\u00a0published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright <strong class=\"rQesXe MPyX\" data-sfc-cp=\"\" data-sfc-root=\"ep\">\u00a9 <\/strong>2026 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. Used by\u00a0permission.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Policing and incarceration in the twenty-first century are not wholly human practices. The strategies, tactics, and encounters that organize the carceral state are developed and prosecuted in collaboration with inhuman technologies that \u201cwe\u201d do not and cannot fully understand. In<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31603,"featured_media":275805,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43092,43095,43445],"tags":[31430,81254,19446,9235,51996,111697,8611,111698,41565],"class_list":["post-275491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-newsandculture","category-politics","category-technology","tag-big-tech","tag-carceral-state","tag-police","tag-policing","tag-prisons","tag-r-joshua-scannell","tag-silicon-valley","tag-the-carceral-surround","tag-university-of-minnesota-press","story-type-policing"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Fp","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/data.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31603"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275491\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275826,"date":"2026-08-24T05:07:44","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T09:07:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275826"},"modified":"2026-08-23T20:46:32","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T00:46:32","slug":"christelle-dabos-on-empathy-doing-good-and-how-we-fill-ourselves-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/christelle-dabos-on-empathy-doing-good-and-how-we-fill-ourselves-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Christelle Dabos on Empathy, Doing Good, and How We Fill Ourselves Up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It\u2019s Sunday morning, September 18, 2016. I spent the previous day signing books in Lille, in northern France. My head is still foggy. I am making myself a cup of hot chocolate when, at the exact moment the microwave dings, my eyes widen.<\/p>\n<p><i>What if every human being were born with an irresistible need to do good?<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Years later, that question would become the seed of my novel <i>We<\/i>. But where had it come from? Let\u2019s jump back in time again.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">I was living in a world where empathy was not a priority.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m in Nice, in the south of France, sometime in the 2000s. I\u2019m taking the bus to the Faculty of Arts and everyone is scrambling for a seat. The students cling to theirs as if they own them\u2014they won\u2019t give them up to anyone, not even that old lady. <i>It\u2019s her fault, she could have taken the bus at another time.<\/i> At the university, it\u2019s the same story: everyone for themselves. A student insists on paying me because I shared my notes from a class she\u2019d missed. She keeps repeating, \u201cNothing in life is free.\u201d In the street, I start noticing the averted gazes (mine included), hands that never reach out to help (mine included), the excuses: too tired, none of my business, me first. These thoughts follow me home, to my parents\u2019 house, to the bedroom where I shut myself away, a tiger poster taped to the door to signal, \u201cDo not disturb.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I was living in a world where empathy was not a priority.<\/p>\n<p><i>What if I could change things?<\/i> I wondered<i>. Change myself?<\/i> My savior complex, probably dormant until then, kicked in. I had seen <i>The Matrix <\/i>by the Wachowskis and <i>Am\u00e9lie <\/i>by Jean-Pierre Jeunet\u2014now it was my turn to break the cycle of everyday conditioning! From the desk in my bedroom, I founded an Order of Chivalry and drafted a charter whose number one rule was: \u201cI pledge to help anyone in need.\u201d Then I started looking for knights.<\/p>\n<p>I recruited two members on MSN Messenger\u2014voil\u00e0. I then left the French Riviera for Belgium. There, I met big-hearted people\u2014generous with their time and quick to lend a hand\u2014who taught me something not often practiced in France: the ability to laugh at oneself. I cast off the knight\u2019s heavy armor.<\/p>\n<p>But that \u201cwhat if?\u201d didn\u2019t stop there. It patiently carved its path until that morning in 2016, in front of the microwave: <i>What if every human being were born with an irresistible need to do good?<\/i> A form of solidarity that wouldn\u2019t be a choice, but an all-powerful force called \u201cInstinct,\u201d with a capital \u201cI.\u201d There would be different categories of Instinct: the feeders would have no choice but to feed anyone who was hungry; the protectors would have to defend anyone in danger; and many other types too\u2014those who heal; those who listen; those who develop new drugs; those who retie untied shoelaces! Together, all these Instincts would connect human beings to one another through a collective consciousness: the We.<\/p>\n<p>I had just watched the TV series <i>Sense8 <\/i>(the Wachowskis again!), in which eight people separated by thousands of miles begin to simultaneously perceive and feel what the others are experiencing. I had also just discovered <i>The Power of Now <\/i>by Eckhart Tolle, the famous spiritual teacher who describes experiencing the dissolution of the \u201clittle me,\u201d and who led me to question everything I thought I knew about my own identity. Around the same time, I read Philip K. Dick\u2019s <i>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? <\/i>(which inspired Ridley Scott\u2019s movie <i>Blade Runner<\/i>). Beyond its exploration of identity, I was fascinated by the concept of the \u201cempathy box,\u201d a virtual reality tool that makes it possible to share the same redemptive pain.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">True empathy requires giving something up.<\/p>\n<p>All these works, all these \u201cwhat ifs?\u201d fed my reflections\u2014more than that, they set a whole inner process in motion.<\/p>\n<p>I decided to push this line of reasoning to the extreme in <i>We,<\/i> where human beings are biologically programmed to help one another\u2026 Can we still speak of Good if there is no choice? Can we still talk about empathy? The characters in <i>We <\/i>are ambivalent on this point. Goliath saves lives even if it costs him pieces of his own body, but he acts alone and keeps others at a distance. Claire is a confidant who wants to solve everyone\u2019s problems, but that comes from a void she\u2019s trying to fill. I imagined a society built entirely on the system of Instincts, where the more lives you save, the higher you climb in the hierarchy. But in the end, the We itself is a very relative absolute, confined to the human scale. Besides, it doesn\u2019t adapt, it doesn\u2019t differentiate. It doesn\u2019t take into account the aspirations of all the \u201cI\u201ds that constitute it, nor does it include the rest of the living world.<\/p>\n<p>The further I got into writing <i>We<\/i>, the more I tested the limits of my little code of chivalry: acting nobly, speaking the truth, exercising self-control, harboring good thoughts, and (it is quite funny, given the contradiction) never depending on others. The young woman who wrote this code was primarily trying to improve her self-image. Seeing yourself as a savior is not the same as showing empathy. Fiction is filled with villains who believe they\u2019re acting for the good of others. I\u2019m thinking of the cult Japanese manga <i>Death Note<\/i>, which became hugely popular in the French-speaking world in 2008. The main character comes into possession of the notebook of a Shinigami (a god of death) and, overnight, gains the power to kill whoever he wants with total impunity. He sees it as an opportunity to bring justice to the world, but it\u2019s only an excuse to feed his own ego.<\/p>\n<p>True empathy requires giving something up. We let go of the \u201cI,\u201d we no longer look at reality from a single point of view (I think of all those comments on social media!) and that\u2019s when we encounter the other. There\u2019s a powerful scene in <i>How to Train Your Dragon<\/i>, DreamWorks\u2019 animated film, in which the hero is about to kill the dragon to live up to his father\u2019s expectations but sees the fear in the dragon\u2019s eyes and decides to let him go. Later, he explains: \u201cI looked at him\u2026 and I saw myself.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">A book takes us outside ourselves, yes, but once we look up from the page and return to our own little story, a bit of our loneliness has disappeared.<\/p>\n<p>In the end, that\u2019s what I\u2019ve always wanted to write about\u2014read about, watch, and experience. That\u2019s what <i>We <\/i>is all about: the relative becoming absolute.<\/p>\n<p>And as I write this, I realize that I\u2019ve already experienced it. Hundreds of times, ever since I was very little\u2014including on that bus between the train station and the university in Nice, where everyone rushed to grab a seat while I opened a book \u201cjust to pass the time.\u201d That\u2019s what happens every time we lose ourselves in a book, a movie, or any other \u201cwhat if?\u201d We forget our small, individual story to make room for someone else\u2019s.<\/p>\n<p>Or is it an escape?<\/p>\n<p>At one point when I was struggling with my writing, I became deeply interested in <i>The Anatomy of Story <\/i>by John Truby. I was particularly struck by the distinction he makes between the hero\u2019s <i>desire <\/i>(what they think they want) and their <i>need <\/i>(what they truly lack). This incompleteness is not only the defining trait of a character: it\u2019s what we all have in common. We all feel an emptiness that we try to fill. We all long to feel connected\u2014it\u2019s no coincidence that we spend our lives online. One part of us is afraid of the other\u2014it judges them, criticizes them, exploits them, conquers them, and protects itself from them. Another part longs to become one with them.<\/p>\n<p>So, is reading an escape? A book takes us outside ourselves, yes, but once we look up from the page and return to our own little story, a bit of our loneliness has disappeared. A real encounter has taken place; we have understood and we have felt understood. Intimately. We have vibrated with the characters; we have suffered alongside them.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s Philip K. Dick\u2019s \u201cempathy box.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: center;\">__________________________________<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275827\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/christelle-dabos-on-empathy-doing-good-and-how-we-fill-ourselves-up\/we-4\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/we.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"600,922\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"we\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/we.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275827 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/we-195x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"195\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/we-195x300.jpg 195w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/we-39x60.jpg 39w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/we-33x50.jpg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/we.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 195px) 100vw, 195px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/we-christelle-dabos\/7ea7b1de6a513aab?ean=9798889662044&amp;bkshp-astro=t\">We<\/a>\u00a0<em>by Christelle Dabos is available from Europa Editions.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It\u2019s Sunday morning, September 18, 2016. I spent the previous day signing books in Lille, in northern France. My head is still foggy. I am making myself a cup of hot chocolate when, at the exact moment the microwave dings,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31694,"featured_media":275830,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43071,43069,6,43092],"tags":[111805,1149,11622,111806,63,16252,36445,13552],"class_list":["post-275826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-newsandculture","tag-christelle-dabos","tag-craft","tag-empathy","tag-empathy-box","tag-europa-editions","tag-philip-k-dick","tag-we","tag-writing-process"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19KO","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/right-sidebar-banner-images-2026-08-17T110647.582.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31694"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275287,"date":"2026-08-24T04:50:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T08:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275287"},"modified":"2026-08-23T20:51:50","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T00:51:50","slug":"gaining-ground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/gaining-ground\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaining Ground"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The first time I saw this place, I knew I had come home. I do not mean I knew it in a peaceful, comforting sort of way, the way one recognizes an old friend; that first time it was like an electric shock, sharp and abrupt, strange and terribly painful, and it changed everything. With it, the life I had disintegrated. From the first moment this was my home. How can that be understood?<\/p>\n<p>But after that initial shock of recognition, after the first changes and the settling in, the shiftings in me came more slowly, took their time in rooting. I cannot say that I lost right away the sense of distinguishing myself from what was around me. I heard the birds, looked at the flowers, but always I was separate from them, someone listening and looking. I do not know when the distinction disappeared, but it must not have been for a very long time. Not until I became a part of it, which is a different thing from feeling at home.<\/p>\n<p>It was spring then, which was a blessing because if I had arrived later, toward autumn, I most surely would not have been ready for winter. Odd \u2013 I see that remembering has separated me from it; that looking back at myself as an object of my memory has made everything I saw then an object as well, so that I have lost the unity. It is part of my confusion now, my disorientation. At this moment I don\u2019t belong, although the knowledge that I am home has not changed.<\/p>\n<p>Of course it\u2019s a different season now, summer instead of early spring, but that does not make the difference. The rhythm of the seasons is quite natural to me now. Each year, I know, the same sensations, the same breaths recur; there is security knowing that in the spring I will feel the new life, my own joy, a wish to touch all young things, the crocuses and snowdrops, searching them out, walking, the tenderness of finding a cluster of small flowers hiding from still-chilly winds, waking in the mornings, hearing each day the return of more birds until the air is filled with them.<\/p>\n<p>And in the summer working, caring for the garden, cultivating my plants, my food, inhaling the sun, seeing my skin become brown just as the flowers are also growing their colours, and my beloved garden plants are delivering their brilliant food. The long evenings, the sense of having achieved in each day what there was to be achieved.<\/p>\n<p>The autumn, the yellow squash lying in the garden, waiting their turn to be picked; the one maple tree, not on my land but near the crest of a hill on a neighbour\u2019s farm, that turns such a radiant scarlet, the only one that is so dashing, so flagrant. On my trees the leaves change more softly, lighter oranges and yellows, until they fall and I gather them up, and although I know it is probably against some township by law I burn them, the ones I do not keep for rotting down for next year\u2019s garden, and the scent of the burning is a perfect day. It is my last rite for the dying year.<\/p>\n<p>And then the snows fall, easily at first, sometimes then with fury, but mostly with huge soft flakes that stay white on the ground and are almost always fat, because, I think, they don\u2019t have to force their way through the black and the heat of the skies above cities; here, although I am truly not far from the city, less than two hundred miles, which is nothing really, it is clean.<\/p>\n<p>The first time the snow comes, it is a surprise even to itself, it seems, tentative, not belonging, an advance guard set out to test the ground which absorbs it immediately and leaves no trace. But then the snow falls harder, more determined, clinging to the earth, unwilling to be thrown off or pulled in, and winds come too so that it is not silent, not this time, not yet, and quite suddenly it seems the earth is white, green and brown one moment and then in an instant white, and soon after that the winds slow, the snow slips down more gently, knowing that it has won, it is its turn, and there is no more need to be ferocious. I watch that first snowfall late into the night, the lights turned off so that I can see better into the darkness outside, and although it marks a change there is nothing unwelcoming in me.<\/p>\n<p>I wake up in the mornings and look out at untracked snow. In the evenings I have my fireplace, my drawings, my self. Everything is very slow, very soft, and my thick quilts are like the snow, heavy and protecting. In the beginning it was a test, this hibernation of the winter, and I felt pale for a long time that first year, before my mind became as still as the whiteness outside.<\/p>\n<p>One cannot regret the loss of a season. I do not feel sad because the snow melts and the time to leave my quilted womb has come, or because the last squash is picked, the last scarlet leaf gone, and it is time to retreat once more. Each time is right for its time, and it may be mildly astonishing to find that each season corresponds exactly with some rhythmic need of my own.<\/p>\n<p>I know that in the next two or three months I will gather up my small harvest, pickle it, freeze it, preserve it. I will turn over and fertilize the earth, so that it will be rich in the spring. I will have my major fall expedition to the town, to find the things I need for winter that I cannot provide for myself. I will sweat over my stove, stirring and pouring, and my home will be filled with the odd, bitter smell of cucumbers becoming pickles, and I will see the freezer filling with the food I have blanched and bagged for the long time ahead. The wood which I have cut throughout the spring and early summer, and of which I will cut more in the next weeks, I will carry close to the house and cover with a weighted tarpaulin, so that in the snapping winter afternoons I can easily gather in enough for the evening and the next morning, to take away the chill. I will gather up seeds and put them in bags, ready to hand out to winter birds and squirrels.<\/p>\n<p>At that brief moment, perhaps just a day, when I feel that autumn has ended and that winter must begin tomorrow, I will walk. It is the day I say goodbye to the season, and I do it at the end, the beginning, of each one.<\/p>\n<p>In this autumn I will begin with my daily check of the garden, or what will be left of it by then. The soil should be moist, faintly acid smelling, from its infusion of decayed compost. It should be very soft, too, loose and crumbling, and I may walk through it in my bare feet.<\/p>\n<p>Then there will be the slow progress down the lane, through all the great old maples, enormous trees that must have seen generations passing by. I know very little of the history of this place; farming families mostly, I suppose, not well off for the land is not good enough for prosperity.With my own past discarded, I wanted my home to come to me the same way. When I did learn a little of its past, it was inadvertent and did not matter.<\/p>\n<p>I will sit in my car at the end of the lane for a few moments warming it up. I have to admit I keep the car locked; it is one of my key possessions, and to have it stolen, unlikely though that is on the wilderness of a back country road (but farm boys are not so unlike city boys in their desire for adventure, although the maliciousness one sees in the city is generally absent), would be serious and so I take care to keep it, and them, from harm.<\/p>\n<p>The ditches along my lane, and along the road that I will follow on foot for a way, will be almost dry. Only a trickle. In the spring, when the snow is melting and the springs that are high up in the rock cliffs some miles away are carrying it down full speed, the ditches overflow as does the little creek that runs near my cabin.They move with a rush then, their sound loud in the night; but in the fall they are quiet, almost dormant.<\/p>\n<p>I will walk along the road a short way, then cross the ditch and climb the little rise on the other side. There is a fence there that separates the land that is mine from the land that belongs to the township, and I have not kept it up and neither has the township. It doesn\u2019t especially matter, since neither I nor they have livestock that may wander off, although I thought once of keeping goats. I decided against it, because I do not want to be responsible for the well-being of animals.<\/p>\n<p>The fence, as I say, is not what it once was, when this land was truly a farm. It wobbles on its posts, the wire sags, and the only part of it that has kept its tension and purpose is the barbed wire across the top, which may be what holds up the fence posts. The barbs make the fence difficult to climb because it is an easy thing to be caught on one as the fence bends under my weight. Each time I say I will come out one day and clip the barbed wire away from the top, but I never do. It belongs.<\/p>\n<p>When I have edged over the fence, I will be standing in my own woods. Not a forest by any means, but a small woods where there are squirrels and chipmunks, probably snakes and skunks, rabbits and, now and then, passing through on some mysterious transient route, a deer or a family of deer. I will be very still; I will sit or crouch on a blanket of leaves, and the trees will be almost barren. If I wait motionlessly, carefully, the easiest of the wildlife, the squirrels and chipmunks, will go back to what they were doing before my disturbance, chasing each other, carrying off nuts, preparing for the next season as I have. Do they also recognize this last day, this moment of the break?<\/p>\n<p>When I take this same walk in the spring, the first small flowers are just opening. In the fall different flowers, the last of the season, will be finally wilting.The trees will be almost skeletal then, and yet I do not ever have the sense of death.<\/p>\n<p>After a long while, for I take the whole day for this walk and move only when the time comes, I will go on. At the other side of the woods the land dips into a ravine, the great trees end and dense bushes clot the bank. But I will go down, pushing through, and at the bottom, where very little sunshine penetrates, is my stream, the one that runs through the property, from other people\u2019s toward other people\u2019s, but here it is just my stream, and it passes from here close to the cabin. The sounds of the frogs that live around it dot my sleep, and the sound of the creek itself is always in the background of my hearing. Here in the ravine it is wider, narrowing farther along, and I must step carefully on stones to get across without wetting my feet. The water will be very cold in late autumn, is in fact cold all year around; it is not the sort of stream in which one paddles for long, as I have learned.<\/p>\n<p>The water will be very low, and the ravine so dense that it will seem there is very little life; it will be more silent even than the woods, except for the gentle trickling. The birds that have not yet flown south will seem far away, far above, and there is no place on my land that is more quiet. One can drink here not only the water from the stream, but the silence.<\/p>\n<p>Up the other side of the ravine there is another fence, much like the first, but without the barbed wire. Because I do not want to be the person to break it down entirely, I will climb it gingerly, testing my weight on it, finding the strongest spot. One of these years, I know, it will just lean over and not come up again, but not, I hope, in my time.<\/p>\n<p>Over the fence is a pasture, rocky and rough, flat and unlovely. The land here is generally not good for crop farming; one would want to be grazing cattle here, not trying to plow it.<\/p>\n<p>I know it\u2019s selfish to keep these acres to myself, not contributing by raising food. I know I could rent this land to a farmer who wants a little more for his cattle, but I don\u2019t because I want to be able to walk here undisturbed.<\/p>\n<p>There are big rocks to sit on to survey my world. I will move among them, pausing, watching the tiny life of the pasture, toads, birds, insects, worms, everything is there except that it is tiny and if you take a step you must be aware that something is dying underfoot. In places like the woods, where everything is larger and grander, one is not so conscious of that. But in the pasture, with just rocks and grass and weeds, one must look down and see the little forms.<\/p>\n<p>At the far side is a fence that is important, because it divides my land from the next farmer\u2019s and he has cattle that could stray. I keep an eye on this fence on my periodic walks, but he is the one who keeps it repaired. When I see that he has worked on it, I pay for half of the repairs the next time I see him. He is the same man who delivers my eggs and starts my car.<\/p>\n<p>Eventually on this walk I will come to the end of the pasture and head back along a path toward the cabin.There are bushes along this path, wild flowers, a couple of maple trees. Ahead I will see the enormous willow that hangs over the cabin; one day, I think, there will be a winter ice storm or heavy snowfall and one of its great limbs will crash through my roof. Or the whole tree may just lean over, because it is already split naturally, and collapse on me. I would not cut that tree, though, if I could, so until it happens, I try to trust it and forget it.<\/p>\n<p>On each walk, the sight of the cabin and the willow ahead makes me eager to get back, to light a fire, put my feet up, think, perhaps, about what I\u2019ve seen, be warm in my home. And so I will hurry along the path, forgetting already the creatures dying beneath my feet.<\/p>\n<p>The cabin itself is very old, hand-built of stone, carefully, solidly made. It is not, however, primitive; it has electricity and plumbing, and I bought a freezer as soon as I came here. It is my home. It is not an outback, a wilderness; I do not have an interest in \u201croughing it.\u201d I am accustomed to comfort.<\/p>\n<p>There are just four rooms, not counting the bathroom. The kitchen is large, modern appliances and ancient wooden counters and cupboards everywhere, hooks that I have put up myself to hold the pots and pans. I have painted the room in black and white, except for the counter tops, which are plain wood.The colours do not sound warm, but they are. I have a small table, round, some heavy kind of wood that I refinished, and two chairs, one of which sits empty. I eat breakfast at this table, and often lunch, but rarely dinner. I did not used to eat so many meals, but here the work is different and I need more food.<\/p>\n<p>The refrigerator and the stove are second-hand and white.The kitchen is the first thing that happens when you walk in the door. There is only one door to the outside in the cabin.<\/p>\n<p>It is pleasant to sit at the table in the centre of the kitchen and look around this room, which has no curtains on the window above the sink. Often kitchens are the best rooms for sitting. Certainly mine is welcoming; I would find it difficult, though, to say that I have a favourite among the rooms; each one is different, and each serves its purpose with, I think, a certain grace.<\/p>\n<p>Past the kitchen, through a short, low hallway, is the living room. I eat the evening meals here, because it is an evening room, dark, with just two narrow farm windows, at its best at night. In daylight, it can seem oppressive.<\/p>\n<p>I covered this room when I came in an old-fashioned cream wallpaper with deep red feathery patterns. I had never done such a thing before, and will not attempt it again, for I am not good with my hands. I spent several painful days doing it, trying desperately to smooth out lumps, make edges meet, cut the paper away from the obstacles of doors and windows. When it was finished, I felt tired, discouraged, incompetent, for there were gaps between sheets of the paper, wrinkles on the walls \u2013 nothing too obvious, but mistakes nonetheless. I look at it now and do not notice the mistakes.<\/p>\n<p>The furniture I bought at a second-hand store in the town, just an old couch, a deep chair with relaxed springs, three small tables, two table lamps, a floor lamp, a footstool. I bought many yards of material and recovered the couch and chair myself.<\/p>\n<p>I chose a quiet flower print, all muted blue and rose, and the rose blends more or less with the wallpaper. But actually covering the furniture with it was another struggle, with tacks and corners, and even now, sometimes something will come loose and I have to repair the damages I did. It is, however, comfortable.<\/p>\n<p>The tables I sanded down, because they are made of fine wood that had been painted over.Again I spent days on it, but for that I was able to work outside, in the sunshine. Now and again I rub oil into them and they have a deep, quiet glow. They are the one part of the living room that has elegance.<\/p>\n<p>Later I made curtains, a dull blue shade to match the couch, but only after I had experimented with making some for the bedroom.<\/p>\n<p>The vital feature of the living room is the fireplace, which is enormous and I suppose must once have been used for cooking. Now and then I use it that way, too, in the long winter evenings when there is nothing but time, and in front of it, a few feet from the flames, is a good place to set bread to rise. I have never yet run out of wood, nor had to buy any. Every day except in winter I chop wood, sometimes taking down dead and dying trees, sometimes stripping the limbs and bundling twigs for kindling, other times cutting the trunks into smaller pieces, so that there is always ample by the time the fireplace is needed. It is built into a wall, and the furniture is arranged around it so that it is the focus of the room.<\/p>\n<p>It isn\u2019t for warmth that I take so much concern for it. The cabin is kept comfortable by electric heaters in each room, and often in the winter I find myself turning off one or two of them because it is too warm. I think just that it is a great pleasure to sit in front of a fire, and even the labour is, now, part of the pleasure.<\/p>\n<p>The bedroom, which is next to the living room, is also full of second-hand furniture, wooden, and it, too, would probably look elegant and fine if I sanded it down and refinished It. But I have never gotten around to that, and I don\u2019t expect I will, now.<\/p>\n<p>It has been painted white, not by me. There is a huge old dresser with a place, a kind of broken-off stand, for a missing oval mirror at the back.The mirror was not with it when I bought it.<\/p>\n<p>The bed is a double one, with a plain headboard, and I have set it up by the window so that in the mornings and at night I can lie in it and look out to see the dawn and the wakening birds, or the stars. I painted the walls blue, but not an ordinary blue, a kind of sea blue-green, and the curtains are also a blue shade with a pattern of deep green flowers.<\/p>\n<p>They are lopsided. I cut the material carelessly, hemmed it badly, and this is the result. But still there is a feeling of resting peacefully on the sea, looking into this fragile colour of my bedroom.<\/p>\n<p>The bathroom is only a bathroom. I have done nothing with it, apart from putting up a new towel rack and shower curtains that are an unattractive pink but were the cheapest I could find. The tub, toilet and sink are all white, shining more or less, and the room has faded bluish linoleum on the floor and tired, dirty-pink walls. I pay no attention to it.<\/p>\n<p>But the other small room, which is only slightly larger than the bathroom, received the most thought if not the most time, and is certainly the most intimate. It was once a second bedroom. Now it contains a desk, a swivel rocker and some of my own sketches on the wall, which are not good, but mine.The desk is very old, pine, and it is the only thing on which I spent much money. It has huge drawers, and in two of them I keep a careful record of my getting-and-spending, as my grandmother used to call it. In the others are my journals, the books I have kept of my travels through this place. I write here, fill in sketches. It is where I come least frequently, but with the most thoughtfulness.<\/p>\n<p>After Katie leaves, after the wood is cut and the cake baked, I sit in this room. Bewildered by her and by my own reactions, I come here to write about it, to try to clear it up in that methodical way. But I can\u2019t. It is a jumble in my mind. I wonder for the first time since coming here how I look, how I appeared to her, and it bothers me that I seem to care.<\/p>\n<p>I know for certain that my hands have aged. I see them every day, and I see their thinness, their callouses. The veins stand out in them, and the skin is remarkably transparent; it is a shock to first realize how thin the covering of skin actually is. I have moved that tiny protective layer back and forth and seen through it clearly to the veins and arteries that do not move beneath, and realized how little there is to protect them, how very frail and vulnerable I am, just being human.<\/p>\n<p>I know that my body is trim; when I look down at my belly and legs I can see that they are tight and muscular, without extra flesh, even in the winter when I had thought I might be plump.That is the time when my body pales, but in the summer it becomes a deep brown and tough, not as fragile-looking as the winter translucence of it.<\/p>\n<p>I do not know about my face. I began to cut my own hair soon after I came here; the first time chopping it off short, almost in anger against the long darkness of it that I kept in coils, or braided, around my head, or pulled back and falling loosely down. I remember now that people used to tell me it looked gracefully old-fashioned, but I cut it all away. Now when I run the scissors through it, I see much gray in what I cut, and I assume that that is now the predominant colour, although I am not so old. Only forty-three or four, I think, if it has really been nine years.<\/p>\n<p>I know I have a habit of running my fingers through my hair, which likely makes me look still more odd. I wonder now what Katie saw, and am not surprised that she may have been frightened.<\/p>\n<p>The hair, I can feel, is uneven. It is still cropped short. I do not have a mirror.<\/p>\n<p>Two things I have been without here: mirrors and clocks. At first it was so hard. It was an instinct to want to know how I looked; or perhaps I wanted to be able to catch glimpses of myself, just in passing, to reassure myself that I existed. That is what mirrors do; and also, I have decided, what clocks do.<\/p>\n<p>Now I prove my existence by what I do. A growing pile of wood that is larger than yesterday\u2019s tells me that this is what I have accomplished, that progress has been made, which is what time is.<\/p>\n<p>I remember now that in the old life, I watched clocks. They told me everything: when to do each thing, waking, cooking, laundering, watching television, reading the newspaper, even having a cigarette. And sleeping.Time was how I counted off my life.<\/p>\n<p>Now I see that it was time I was accomplishing. I was not timing my tasks, but making the tasks into time; and all that is gone. A job now takes simply what it takes, a season is something in which a certain amount is done, but not according to any schedule of mine. I do what I can and for the rest I have no further responsibility. I have been absolved.<\/p>\n<p>I learned the hard way. When in the first enthusiasm and energy I tried to push, to do more than was necessary or possible, nature took no notice. After I finished with the inside of the cabin and went out to work the garden, I learned that I could not make it hurry. Elementary, obvious \u2013 but for me it was a revelation, and so I learned to let each thing have the time it needs.<\/p>\n<p>Slowly, in those first weeks and months, and painfully because so many things went against the nature I brought with me, I learned.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: center;\">__________________________________<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>From <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780571399888\">Gaining Ground<\/a>\u00a0<em>by Joan Barfoot<\/em><em>. \u00a9 Joan Barfoot, 1978. Used with permission of the publisher, Faber &amp; Faber.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The first time I saw this place, I knew I had come home. I do not mean I knew it in a peaceful, comforting sort of way, the way one recognizes an old friend; that first time it was like<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":275288,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25508,3,43074,43076,26764],"tags":[27019,111643,111642],"class_list":["post-275287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-fiction","category-excerpts","category-fictionandpoetry","category-from-the-novel","category-novels","tag-faber-faber","tag-gaining-ground","tag-joan-barfoot","story-type-daily-fiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19C7","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Gaining-Ground-cover.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275287\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276047,"date":"2026-08-22T06:30:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-22T10:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276047"},"modified":"2026-08-21T14:24:19","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T18:24:19","slug":"lit-hub-weekly-august-17-21-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/lit-hub-weekly-august-17-21-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Hub Weekly: August 17 &#8211; 21, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<span class=\"caption\"> TODAY: In<span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> 1904, Kate Chopin dies. <\/span><\/span>\n<ul>\n<li>What <i>Buffy the Vampire Slayer<\/i> and <i>Angel<\/i> can teach us<a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-grief-and-growing-up-in-buffy-the-vampire-slayer\"> about grief, literature, and growing up<\/a>. | Lit Hub<a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/newsandculture\/film-and-tv\/\"> TV<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Why the tragedy of Jason Arday reflects<a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-accusations-against-black-academics-point-to-the-real-end-of-woke-1-0\/\"> a rigged game for today\u2019s Black scholars<\/a>. | Lit Hub<a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/newsandculture\/politics\/\"> Politics<\/a><\/li>\n<li>How environmentalism shows up<a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-ursula-k-le-guin-channeled-her-environmentalism-into-fiction\"> in Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s fiction<\/a>. | Lit Hub<a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/craftandcriticism\/literary-criticism\/\"> Criticism<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Why does <i>Walden<\/i> resonate<a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/why-thoreau-and-walden-resonate-with-chinese-youth\/\"> with modern Chinese youth?<\/a> \u201c<i>Walden<\/i> is not popular in China because Chinese readers misunderstand Thoreau. It is popular because they understand him precisely.\u201d | Lit Hub<a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/craftandcriticism\/on-translation\/\"> On Translation<\/a><\/li>\n<li>R.K. Hegelman on<a href=\"https:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/articles\/1816395\/i-multiplied-myself-to-feel-myself\"> Fernando Pessoa, \u201can extreme and singular figure<\/a> in a modern poetic tradition that views poems not just as texts, but as gnostic vehicles of self-annihilation and worldly renovation.\u201d | Poetry<\/li>\n<li>Ed Park on stamp collecting, maximum scrutiny,<a href=\"https:\/\/pioneerworks.org\/broadcast\/13-ways-ed-park-three-tenses\"> and his book, <i>Three Tenses<\/i><\/a>. | Broadcast<\/li>\n<li>Rebecca Ford takes a deep dive on<a href=\"https:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/story\/behind-making-children-of-blood-and-bone-tomi-adeyemi\"> what went wrong on the <i>Children of Blood and Bone <\/i>set<\/a>. | Vanity Fair<\/li>\n<li>\u201cWe inhabit a world where the tendencies Hamlet embodied are magnified, and where opportunities for self-commentary are effectively continuous.\u201d<a href=\"https:\/\/hedgehogreview.com\/issues\/the-fading-promise-of-higher-education\/articles\/freud-in-the-age-of-therapy-speak\"> Anna Ballan on Freud in the age of therapy-speak<\/a>. | The Hedgehog Review<\/li>\n<li>In case you need<a href=\"https:\/\/www.404media.co\/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility\/\"> another reason to dump Amazon<\/a>, the company is destroying books to train AI. | 404 Media<\/li>\n<li>Maria Adelmann reports on<a href=\"https:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/society\/adjuncting-until-the-end-of-time\/\"> the crisis of the eternal adjunct<\/a>. | The Nation<\/li>\n<li>Take a(n illustrated) stroll through<a href=\"https:\/\/orionmagazine.org\/article\/the-lost-vocabulary-of-whaling\/\"> the lost vocabulary of whaling<\/a>, from greasy luck to blubber room. | Orion<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/articles\/1820031\/the-truth-is-in-the-detail\">Lucy Ives presents a theory of Paul Celan<\/a>: \u201cHere is a wild proposition, then: Celan didn\u2019t write in any language\u2026he was writing in between languages.\u201d | Poetry<\/li>\n<li>Nuncore is upon us: Paul Michael Johnson considers the new books, music, and other pieces of art and media<a href=\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/can-centuries-old-nuns-really-save-us-from-ourselves\/\"> fueling the culture\u2019s fixation on nuns<\/a>. | Public Books<\/li>\n<li><b>\u201c<\/b>A multi-racial, multi-gender coalition of mostly young people took to the streets demanding protection and investment in black life, and the best the country could do was to retire Aunt Jemima.\u201d<a href=\"https:\/\/defector.com\/the-crazy-thing-about-woke-1-was-how-it-was-exploited\"> Mychal Denzel Smith on the legacy and exploitation of \u201cWoke 1.\u201d<\/a> | Defector<\/li>\n<li>Geertje Bol considers<a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/polite-debate-has-privilege-the-marginalised-need-zealotry\"> the historical case for \u201crighteous zeal\u201d<\/a> (stop being polite, start getting real). | Aeon<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bostonreview.net\/articles\/revenance-event\/\">Mark Bould interviews China Mi\u00e9ville:<\/a> \u201cAll books end up to varying extents evading\u2014exceeding\u2014the bounds you\u2019ve conceived of for them. This particular book did so more, and more dramatically, than any other book I\u2019ve ever tried to write.\u201d | Boston Review<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/the-lede\/the-real-meaning-of-the-jason-arday-scandal\">Lauren Michele Jackson on the reduction of Jason Arday<\/a>: \u201cArday is dead and still being propped up as an example of various crises, by commentators unconcerned with his memory.\u201d | The New Yorker<\/li>\n<li>Grace Byron, Dorothea Lasky, Philip Ball, and more<a href=\"https:\/\/pioneerworks.org\/broadcast\/generation-astrology\"> write about astrology<\/a>. | Broadcast<\/li>\n<li>Mitch Therieau explains<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/08\/20\/magazine\/lore-language-history.html\"> the lure of \u201clore.\u201d<\/a> | The New York Times Magazine<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Also on Lit Hub:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">Jodi Picoult <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/after-six-decades-and-thirty-novels-jodi-picoult-was-missing-one-thing-a-tattoo\">gets a tattoo<\/a> \u2022 Learning about solidarity from<a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/everything-but-the-burden-greg-tate-john-henryism-and-the-cost-of-solidarity\"> Greg Tate\u2019s <i>Flyboy in the Buttermilk<\/i><\/a> \u2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/rebecca-solnit-when-penelope-tried-to-spin-her-own-fate\/\">New poetry by<\/a> Rebecca Solnit \u2022 This week in literary history,<a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/this-week-in-literary-history-joseph-conrad-becomes-a-british-subject\"> Joseph Conrad becomes a British subject<\/a> \u2022 <a href=\"http:\/\/lithub.com\/read-an-original-review-of-all-the-kings-men-on-its-80th-anniversary\">The first New York Times review<\/a> of <i>All the King\u2019s Men<\/i> \u2022 50 years of <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/reinventing-the-slave-narrative-ishmael-reed-on-flight-to-canada-at-50\/\"><i>Flight to Canada<\/i><\/a> \u2022 The problem <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-good-fat-bad-fat-and-the-problems-with-bmi\">with BMI<\/a> \u2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-that-disgraceful-disreputable-wonderful-form-of-punctuation-the-parenthesis\/\">The surprisingly controversial history of<\/a> the parenthesis \u2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/edwidge-danticat-wishes-her-former-english-teachers-would-read-her-work\">Edwidge Danticat answers<\/a> our questions about literary life \u2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/chiang-rae-lee-on-channeling-his-immigrant-childhood-into-fiction\">Chiang-rae Lee talks to<\/a> Jane Ciabattari\u00a0 \u2022 Why Earl Swift <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/why-i-hiked-the-appalachian-trail-twice-30-years-apart\">hiked the Appalachian Trail twice<\/a> \u2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-submitters-on-the-literary-economy-of-unreadness\">On publishing, careerism,<\/a> and Laura McGrath\u2019s <i>Middlemen<\/i> \u2022 Memoirs about <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-women-and-the-water-cure-nine-memoirs-about-wild-swimming\/\">wild swimming<\/a> \u2022 Did smartphones <a href=\"http:\/\/lithub.com\/did-smartphones-really-kill-reading\">really kill reading?<\/a> \u2022 Books about <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/11-books-about-women-who-rewrote-life-and-art\">women who rewrote life and art<\/a> \u2022 Charles Darwin and <a href=\"http:\/\/lithub.com\/how-orchids-inspired-the-groundbreaking-work-of-charles-darwin\">his orchids<\/a> \u2022 The <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/can-plants-feel-pain-on-the-dynamic-sensitivity-of-the-vegetal-world\">sensitivity and perceptiveness<\/a> of plants \u2022 Maris Kreizman is not a fan <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/in-praise-of-wordy-old-prose-or-fck-your-ai-reading-buddy\/\">of your AI reading buddy<\/a> \u2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/bookmarks.reviews\/5-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-13\/\">5 book reviews<\/a> you need to read this week \u2022 This week\u2019s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for<a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers-fiction-31\"> fiction<\/a> and<a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers-nonfiction-31\"> nonfiction<\/a> \u2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/what-does-progress-mean-anyway\">The idea of scientific progress versus<\/a> what it means in practice \u2022 Learning about grief<a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/a-literary-haunting-what-the-ghost-of-sylvia-plath-taught-me-about-grief\"> from the ghost of Sylvia Plath<\/a> \u2022 On 10 years <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-talking-about-death-helps-us-live-a-fuller-life\">without Max Ritvo<\/a> \u2022 The <a href=\"https:\/\/bookmarks.reviews\/the-best-reviewed-books-of-the-week-8-21-2026\/\">best reviewed books<\/a> of the week \u2022 Why television is <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/television-to-the-rescue-camille-acker-on-the-craft-potential-of-tv\/\">the serious writer\u2019s ally<\/a> \u2022 Mark Twain and <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/jeff-jarvis-on-mark-twain-americas-first-celebrity-author-and-publisher\/\">the birth of mass media<\/a> \u2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/ways-of-connecting-on-writing-that-marries-the-psychological-the-personal-and-the-political\">Faraaz Mahomed talks to<\/a> Damon Galgut<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel can teach us about grief, literature, and growing up. | Lit Hub TV Why the tragedy of Jason Arday reflects a rigged game for today\u2019s Black scholars. | Lit Hub Politics How environmentalism<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":276067,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[45236],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-276047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lit-hub-daily"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19On","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/chopin1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276061,"date":"2026-08-21T14:59:59","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T18:59:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276061"},"modified":"2026-08-21T14:59:59","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T18:59:59","slug":"heres-whats-making-us-happy-this-week-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/heres-whats-making-us-happy-this-week-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s what\u2019s making us happy <em>this<\/em> week."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Summer isn&#8217;t over\u2014in fact, we rue the hater who throws in the beach towel before Labor Day. But there is a definite wind down spirit to late August. Afternoon storms gather steam on a dime, scuttling picnic plans. In New York, people begin to trickle back from their vacations. We&#8217;re all a little tired. Bracing for back to school.<\/p>\n<p>So no better time, in this staffer&#8217;s opinion, to revive our <em>weekly gratitude round-up<\/em>!\u00a0This Friday, we offer you some of the people, places, and things that are keeping this fragile ship afloat through the late summer slowdive.<\/p>\n<p>The author and activist <strong>Arundhati Roy<\/strong> has been lighting my grey afternoons. And I&#8217;m not the only one fanning out\u2014in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.currentaffairs.org\/news\/arundhati-roy-is-the-writer-we-need-in-authoritarian-times\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Current Affairs<\/em><\/a>, the writer <a href=\"https:\/\/www.currentaffairs.org\/news\/author\/sharmistha-jha\" rel=\"author\">Sharmistha Jha<\/a> recently published a praise note to Roy&#8217;s morally courageous canon. That piece led me to revisit her debut, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780812979657\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The God of Small Things<\/em><\/a>. Which is, happily, just as terrific as I remembered.<\/p>\n<p>My own week was <em>further<\/em> Roy-pilled by a recent dispatch from Delhi, where the Booker-winning author is currently chronicling the student-led Cockroach Janta protests against the Modi government. Roy&#8217;s report on the growing movement made for a galvanizing read in last week&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.equator.org\/articles\/cockroach-janata-party-arundhati-roy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Equator<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The young have given us a gift,&#8221; she said of the protestors. &#8220;It is up to us all, every one of us to make what they have done matter.&#8221; At a moment when I find myself looking up to artists who truly practice their politics, this gauntlet hit like a gift.<\/p>\n<p>On the steamier (but still thrilling!) front, <strong>Jane Schoenbrun&#8217;s<\/strong>\u00a0thoughtful slasher <em>Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma\u00a0<\/em>made for a perfect night out.<\/p>\n<p>Just like their previous films\u2014and, eek, their <em>fiction!<\/em>\u2014this joint is smart, surreal, inimitable, and oh-so-lushly imagined. As fun to talk about after as it is to watch. I won&#8217;t spoil the real fun, but you should know that the movie includes the year&#8217;s best needle drop. An unhinged bit of seasonal spice.<\/p>\n<p>And last, here&#8217;s something you might lend your ears to. <strong>Sophie Vershbow and Rudi Greenberg<\/strong> are the bright-eyed (eared?) hosts of<em><a href=\"https:\/\/itwasabookfirst.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> It Was a Book First<\/a>, <\/em>a new podcast contrasting film adaptations and their literary source material.<\/p>\n<p>A <a href=\"http:\/\/youtube.com\/watch?v=rKoXfYbcfhY&amp;feature=youtu.be\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">recent episode<\/a> on the new indie film <em>Late Fame<\/em>\u2014which was adapted from an Arthur Schnitzler short\u2014made for perky dish-washing company. And the hosts are self-proclaimed cine and biblio-philes respectively, so there&#8217;s some fun friction when it comes to discussing each medium&#8217;s strengths.<\/p>\n<p>Alright, friends. Wishing you a weekend full of inspiration, eye candy, and good company. We&#8217;re grateful for you!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Summer isn&#8217;t over\u2014in fact, we rue the hater who throws in the beach towel before Labor Day. But there is a definite wind down spirit to late August. Afternoon storms gather steam on a dime, scuttling picnic plans. In New<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17066,"featured_media":276066,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43102,43201,43093,43092,43098,43445,43646],"tags":[111923,10061,101565,2108,107468,7902,20649,95689,105647,48273,72388,111922],"class_list":["post-276061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-biography","category-book-news-newsandculture","category-film-and-tv","category-newsandculture","category-style","category-technology","category-the-hub","tag-arthur-schnitzler","tag-arundhati-roy","tag-book-podcasts","tag-books","tag-equator","tag-film","tag-honestly-thought-it-was-spelled-tindr","tag-jane-schoenbrun","tag-late-fame","tag-nice-things","tag-sophie-vershbow","tag-teenage-sex-and-death-at-camp-miasma","book-the-god-of-small-things"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19OB","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Untitled-design-26.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17066"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276061\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]