“One of the Best Books of the 21st Century.” — The Guardian "No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that's marked this new millennium." —Bill McKibben "An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways." — The New Yorker A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me , her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of radicals at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of 2016 in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book. Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of eighteen or so books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including the books Men Explain Things to Me and Hope in the Dark , both also with Haymarket; a trilogy of atlases of American cities; The Faraway Nearby ; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster ; A Field Guide to Getting Lost ; Wanderlust: A History of Walking ; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper's and a regular contributor to the Guardian.

Recommended on 3 episodes:

The Deep Conflict Between Our Work and Parenting Ideals

American policy is uniquely hostile to families. Other wealthy countries guarantee paid parental leave and sick days and heavily subsidize early childhood care — to the tune of about $14,000 per year per child, on average. (The United States, by contrast, spends around $500 per child per year.) So it’s no wonder our birthrate has been in decline, with many people saying they’re having fewer children than they would like. Yet if you look closer at those other wealthy countries, that story doesn’t entirely hold. Sweden, for example, has some of the most generous work-family policies in the world, and according to the most recent numbers from Our World in Data, from 2021, their fertility rate is 1.67 children per woman — virtually identical to ours. Caitlyn Collins is a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of “Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving.” To understand how family policies affect the experience of child-rearing, she interviewed over a hundred middle-class mothers across four countries with different parenting cultures and levels of social support for families: the United States, Sweden, Italy and Germany. And what she finds is that policies can greatly relieve parents’ stress, but cultural norms like “intensive parenting” remain consistent. In this conversation, we discuss how work-family policies in Sweden frame spending time with children as a right rather than a privilege, how these policies have transformed the gender norms around parenting, why family-friendly policies across the globe don’t increase birthrates, how cultural pressures in America to be both an ideal worker and an ideal parent often clash, why many American parents feel it’s impossible to have more than one or two children, how cultural discourse has led younger women to “dread” motherhood and more.

Books recommended:

• 📕  Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives by Mary Blair-Loy
• 📘  Mothering While Black: Boundaries and Burdens of Middle-Class Parenthood by Dawn Marie Dow
• 📗  Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit

Caitlyn Collins March 22, 2024 3 books recommended

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The Dobbs Decision Isn’t Just About Abortion. It’s About Power.

On Friday, a Supreme Court majority voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. Nearly all abortions are already banned in at least nine states, home to 7.2 million women of reproductive age. And it is likely that other bans and restrictions will follow. As the court’s three liberal justices put it in their dissenting opinion, “One result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.” But this decision doesn’t just represent the end of abortion as a constitutional right; what we’re also witnessing, before our eyes, is a legal regime change — one with striking implications for the future of the court and the country. In their majority opinion on the case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the justices cast aside precedent, the court’s historical norms and evidence-based concerns about how this ruling will disrupt people’s lives. Even Chief Justice John Roberts, a fellow conservative, argued in a concurring opinion that the decision went too far, writing, “The court’s opinion is thoughtful and thorough, but those virtues cannot compensate for the fact that its dramatic and consequential ruling is unnecessary to decide the case before us.” The Dobbs ruling, in other words, isn’t just about abortion; it’s a conservative court majority flexing its newly unrestrained power. Dahlia Lithwick is a reporter covering the Supreme Court for Slate, the host of the podcast “Amicus” and someone I turn to whenever I need to understand the court. We discuss what Roe did and what Dobbs changes; why the rights to abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage have a much firmer constitutional basis than conservatives argue; how the majority opinion implicitly threatens those latter two rights, even while claiming to uphold them; why the most revealing opinion in the case is Roberts’s scathing concurrence; why the majority’s absolute disregard for precedent is so terrifying for defenders of the court; the way Justice Samuel Alito’s constitutional originalism freezes past injustices into present law; what the current composition of the court means for the future of liberal governance in America; and more.

Books recommended:

• 📙  Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit
• 📕  Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, William J. Winslade, Harold S. Kushner
• 📘  You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Howard Zinn

Dahlia Lithwick June 26, 2022 3 books recommended

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Is modern society making us depressed?

Books recommended:

• 📗  Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit
• 📙  Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky
• 📕  This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein
• 📘  A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit

April 16, 2018 4 books recommended

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