TREES ARE PLANTS THAT PEOPLE CALL TREES—A TERM OF DIGNITY, NOT botany. Personification is intrinsic to treeness.

The British called this conflict “The Great Game,” but no Russian people called it that.

Turkish, for example, had a suffix, -miş, that you put on verbs to report anything you didn’t witness personally. You were always stating your degree of subjectivity. You were always thinking about it, every time you opened your mouth.

Then came the inexplicable shame. Of not being believed. Of not being worth more.

“I feel a responsibility,” Mom said. “You always want to feel responsible for everything,” Lauren said. “And that’s so bad?” “It’s like—you want to feel guilty about it, like you’re being selfless, but you’re not, you’re just making it all about you.”

“…friendship risks the end of friendship…”

There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.

“Why do you think it’s your fault?” she finally asked. It had never occurred to me that it was not.

“There are no ghosts, but up here”—she gestured toward her head—”it’s a haunted house.”

America is Not the Heart and How to Read Now
Have you ever really thought about Fremont? No? Why not?

An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873
Learn your blood-drenched history and mourn your courageous dead

Another Day in the Colony
Know that history is in no way done with us yet

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
Comics aren’t supposed to make me cry (are they?)

Homage to Catalonia
Reread old novels now that you’re big enough to understand them

Nona the Ninth
Meet the soul of the earth

Outrageous Conduct: Art, Ego, and the Twilight Zone Case
Understand how power corrupts

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
Consider alternatives

The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred and The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)
Drive from San Francisco to Joshua Tree thinking about deep space and social justice

The Years
…so that when Annie Ernaux wins the Nobel Prize you can say “oh yeah Annie, I call her Annie, she’s great”

In that brief moment before the clouds shielded the sun again, I felt what it was like to be held. I was standing in the earth’s enormous hand.

The drive over the Golden Gate Bridge never stops being beautiful. In every kind of weather on every kind of day it’s a different kind of beautiful.

Whoever saved the seed loved us before they knew us. And some of them loved us as their world was ending. Our gardens archive that love.

camel, horse, mammoth, saber-tooth cat, dire wolf, short-faced bear, coyote, flamingo, pelican, eagle, swan, goose, mallard duck, ruddy duck, canvasback duck, double-crested cormorant, grebe, crane, seagull, stork…

corporate strength has always come from transmuting the threat of force into softer trade.

I wanted to be the kind of woman people didn’t leave.

my only job now, in all the world, is to not destroy my kids, and in turn, teach them not to destroy others

I wish I had spoken when it mattered

Three years ago Daria described the fall of the Soviet Union to me. She said, Nastya, one day the light went out and the spirits came back. And we returned to the forest.

She had the terrible sinking feeling that whatever was going wrong right now, it was her fault somehow: that she hadn’t been smart enough or good enough.