Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

This is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen. It’s also a nightmarish time. Full engagement requires the ability to perceive both.

All three share an improvisational, collaborative, creative process that is in profound ways anti-ideological, if ideology means ironclad preconceptions about who’s an ally and how to make a better future.

we need stories that don’t gloss over the ugly damage out there but that don’t portray it as all there is either.

Effects are not proportionate to causes—not only because huge causes sometimes seem to have little effect, but because tiny ones occasionally have huge consequences.

You might say that the Spaniard yelling about toast wasn’t lying, but composing, composing a literature of the trenches, transcending propaganda to make art. And I wonder if what he said was this: That the anarchists were more humane than the Fascists because they recognized that beneath the abstractions of political rhetoric are desires that are c

Paul Goodman famously wrote, “Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!”

Benjamin’s angel tells us history is what happens, but the Angel of Alternate History tells that our acts count, that we are making history all the time, because of what doesn’t happen as well as what does. Only that angel can see the atrocities not unfolding, but we could learn to study effects more closely. Instead we don’t look, and a radical ch

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

hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises.