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November 06, 2020

Photo by Alessia Chinazzo on Unsplash

This week

It’s been a week of waiting. I finished my last phone and text bank shifts on Monday, and then tried to sink purposefully into a state of not-knowing. I'd read enough to assume that it would take days to figure out who had crossed the 270 electoral-vote threshold, and I vowed not to follow every twist and turn of the count.

Of course I caved and refreshed the blue-and-red map a few times a day. I was prepared for the polls to be wrong about a Biden landslide. I expected millions of Americans to vote for the violent and overtly racist agenda of a cruel narcissist. But I was not prepared for how sad I would feel as I looked at the numbers.

As I write this, news organizations have just started to declare a Biden victory. I’m still in liminal mode, not quite able to believe it yet and juuuust starting to think through what might come next—for this country, and for me as a person pushing it to live up to its professed ideals.

On the podcast: Waiting and what's next. And from our archive, interviews with Kamala Harris and Stacey Abrams.

I'm reading

What Black history should have taught us about American democracy. On Trump's attempted autocracy. "There’s so much you could have done instead of throwing your hands up and unfriending all your high school buds from rural Wisconsin." Conspiracy thinking was one of this election's biggest winners. The real housewives of QAnon. Facebook has always been right-wing media. Instagram is dead. "I fear that to over-share is to seek out the rewards of being loved without submitting to the mortifying ideal of being known." How forged indigenous artwork ended up in a Wyoming museum. Tressie McMillan Cottom on why the right hates AOC's attractiveness. The tech revolution sweeping rural China. Choreographer Yanira Castro's instructions for home performance. A history of gender-bending in pop music. The twilight of the ethical consumer. "What if we reframed changing your mind as an action rather than a collapse? What might that free us from? Free us to?"

Pie chart

The Waiting Pie

(with apologies to Tom Petty, and to all of you for this week's messy handwriting)

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I’m looking & listening

Can't sleep? Me neither: A coronasomnia hotline. The Queen's Gambit. Some gorgeous photos of Long Beach.

GIFspiration

Me periodically checking election returns. (With a deep nod to this tweet and many related election memes.)

I endorse

Poet Diane Di Prima, who died this week. Some selections from Revolutionary Letters:

Be careful.
With what relief do we fall back
on the tale, so often told in revolutions that now we must
organize, obey the rules, so that later we can be free. It is the point
at which the revolution stops. To be carried forward later & in another country, this is
The pattern, but we can break the pattern
-Revolutionary Letter #48

but don’t kid yourself: government

is not where it’s at: it’s only

a good place to start

- Revolutionary Letter #9

Watch and listen to her read a few of these.

The Classifieds

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