This is a line from
that has really stayed with me. She’s a mindfulness teacher, the daughter of a police officer and a writer committed to collective liberation. Before 2015, I didn’t use to think a police- and prison-free future was necessary or important… or even possible. As I read and learned more about the history of policing, especially its roots in slave patrolling, I believed reform was the way out of the endless horror.In the last couple of years, I started considering abolition, because I just couldn’t see another reform working. Some of the thinkers who keep shifting my perspective and expanding my imagination:
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, whose idea of abolition is not an absence but a creation - reallocating resources into the things that we know create safety (like housing, healthcare, income and education).
Bree Newsome, who reminds us the institution of police has existed for less than 200 years, less time than chattel slavery in the US. A world without slavery, or segregation, or voting rights once felt unbelievable too.
Mariame Kaba who says “abolition has to be an internationalist project, as well as an anticapitalist project, as well as a project that is rooted in constantly thinking about concentrated violence across the board.”
Let’s orient ourselves towards what we want, rather than what is. Have you had your mind changed recently? So curious to hear about your evolution.
In the early 1900s, Sicilian immigrant and self-taught artist Baldassare Forestiere spent forty years digging a maze of underground gardens in sweltering Fresno. He put no plans on paper, only working from his mind. Eventually he dug out a ballroom, fishponds, a chapel, bedrooms and gardens. When he died in in 1946 with no descendants, his brother was left with the underground complex and opened it up to the public. His fruit trees and grapevines are still growing today. Many of the principles that he used in his underground world are being rediscovered as energy-efficient and cost-effective ways of keeping cool. It’s an oasis in the desert I would love to visit someday.
Dan Savage being interviewed by Ezra Klein was the conversation I didn’t know I needed. They dig into the ways queer and straight relationships have influenced each other, why conservatives should embrace chosen families, and if we’ll ever get out of monogamy as a societal ideal.
Dan has a sidebar about nones (people who don’t believe in anything) which Ezra misunderstands as nuns, which reminded me of Nuns & Nones, a community I’ve been fascinated. It’s a spiritual intergenerational community started in 2016, bringing sisters and seekers together. Their land justice project is especially beautiful.
Dissident Iranian director Jafar Panahi has been released on bail! He had begun a hunger strike two days ago to protest his detention since July in Tehran's Evin prison.
Two films that premiered at Sundance and could not be more different: Magazine Dreams by Elijah Bynum and Smoke Sauna Sisterhood by Anna Hints. The first one is a harrowing character study of an amateur bodybuilder, played by Jonathan Majors. The second one is a documentary about the women who gather in a smoke sauna deep in the Estonian forest. Both have an obsession with bodies and have lodged themselves deeply into my subconscious. All hail Cailin and her wise curation - the two deserve the biggest distribution deals in all the land.
Between 1939 and 1941, the WPA took a photo of every single building in New York and a couple of years ago, Julian Boilen, a software engineer, painstakingly entered them all into an online map. I’ve loved looking up my current building, my first apartment after college, where my Mom was born, where I was born… If you are looking for a fun gift idea, a link sends you to the NYC Municipal Archive website where you can buy a print for $45.
Steph brought me back some homemade “geléia de Uvaia” from Brazil and it is absolutely what is powering me through the incoming polar vortex. It’s a jelly made from a sour yellow tropical fruit and I am dreading getting to the bottom of the jar…
Alexander Chee’s list of “100 Things About Writing a Novel” got me so good. Two gems amongst many:
“20. If I seem cagey, it is because I am not a liar and hate being considered one, due to an accident of craft. But also, if I tell you the idea, and the description disappoints you, the novel can be lost.”
“73. Sometimes it is the ship, sinking, and you, you are the captain, running around the deck, having decided not to go down with it, but to save it, to head for land all the same.”
Till next time,
ASK
Bree and Mariame have been my greatest teachers regarding abolition and a prison/police free future. Once you realize we're in this fish bowl, you realize the only reason we can't imagine an America without prison/police is because we *haven't imagined what it could be instead*. This is all we know, but there's a better way. IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY!
Delighted my words resonated.
💫 here’s to what’s possible in our future!