Douglas Ruskoff found the right words for this moment in this beautiful midrash, soulful commentary on the whirlpool of events these last weeks. I could not have said it better. I have lots of posts in process, but for now, we need what he has to say. Or at least I need it.
It starts like this:
I’ve begun this piece maybe twenty times in the past three weeks. By the time I’ve finished the first paragraph, some new thing happens that obsolesces whatever event I’m writing about. And I’m not even writing about the news, so much as using one shared moment as a “peg” for a piece about some larger phenomenon or strategy.
How do I even write in a way that is appropriate to the moment, when the moment keeps changing? Trump wins (help people breathe), Carter dies (highlight an era where climate change was an accepted fact and a president told us to turn down the heat and wear a sweater), Musk takes power (techno-feudalism, getting off social media, reversion to the mean), disappearing transgender (the vulnerability of emphasizing language in identity), Zuckerberg saying he’ll be more like Musk (ends content moderation, says he wants more masculinity at Facebook), Steve Bannon speaking coherently about the threat that tech bros pose in DC (considering having a conversation with him about this betrayal of MAGA middle class)….Then the California fires, the Gaza maybe-truce/maybe-real-estate-deal, then Chinese Deepseek AI, then RFK, Tulsi, Hegseth, then ending all US funding to everything, then not, then the tariffs and stock market crash, then not. And plane crashes blamed on DEI. And ebola (yes, ebola!) back in Uganda and now without the USAID…
Share this post