Essays and analyses by Rebecca Solnit
I spend a lot of time thinking about our habits of mind, overarching stories, and unexamined assumptions that shape thought. Because behind the events that shape our world are communications and representations and behind them are thoughts and ideas and frameworks and so the equipment of our minds shapes the
To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (“They don’t mean me”) or by despair (“There’s nothing we can do”). Each of us must find
I have lived a long time but I have never lived through such a time of destruction, of nature, of human lives, of truth, fact, science, journalism, the rule of law. I write during a summer of colossal wildfires, of extreme heat, of human rights abuses, of attacks on history
Last weekend, the film The Odyssey was released and the Tate brothers were arrested in Florida at the behest of the British government, which seeks to extradite them to face a long list of charges. Andrew Tate is charged with "seven further counts of rape, three counts of arranging
It is like a bad dream that keeps recurring: people are drowning while we are prevented from reaching them with our rowboats and life preservers; homes are burning but someone is standing on the firehose or knocking down the ladders; there is a planetary thermostat and countless people are trying
For at least a decade we have been told that this and that and the other thing must be tolerated in pursuit of the elusive vote of the working class or the white working class which often means the white male working class which becomes in turn a way that
I wrote the essay below on the film Giant when I was a columnist at Harper's a decade ago but I thought I'd run it like a retro film revival, because I love the film and what it has to say so much, because the essay
There is no more one-sentence-fits-all opening in literature than Dickens's "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times," and this is a review of a lot of the winning and losing over the past week or so, some of
This is the one-hundredth essay at Meditations in an Emergency. Thank you everyone who has joined me here. A while back I bought a first edition of a Willa Cather novel for nothing much at a library book sale. It was  Lucy Gayheart  (1935), one of her
There's a golden age of literature – for us, not for them. That is, extraordinary work is being done in all genres of writing and the mashups inbetween them; extraordinary poets and prophets are at large in the land; magnificent books tumble forth at a rate I can&
When I was young I believed that the ideas I needed to grasp were complicated fact-dense new ones, and maybe back then I did need to take in more data. As I've gotten older, I've come to realize that a lot of the important things
Something huge just happened. Or rather another step was taken in the successful trajectory of the most important climate action you probably never heard of. It was a follow-up to maybe the biggest thing that happened last year, though it didn't get much attention then either. There
The Autumn of the Patriarchs  One common and inaccurate picture of change assumes this thing so obvious, so potent in the present, will just continue to expand and the future will be like the present, only more so. This version ignores that individual actors and collective forces can suddenly
For decades most politicians who are not outright climate deniers have sounded like "oh yes, as you mention, the building is on fire and countless beings are trapped in it, and what if in a week or so I wander over and splash a little leftover lemonade on it?
" This is how the attack by one petro-state (ours) on another (Iran's) may be turning out to be very bad for petroleum, because the only thing history loves more than a surprise party is irony." The Crisis The biggest news is always the climate news,