Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including A Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell, River of Shadows, and Wanderlust. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many essays on feminism, activism and social change, hope, and the climate crisis. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a regular contributor to The Guardian and other publications.
Rebecca Solnit
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Reasons Not to Glow
Chances are good, gentle reader, that you are going to have to sit next to someone in the coming year who will assert that nuclear power is the solution to climate Continue reading
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The Thoreau Problem
THOREAU WAS EMPHATIC ABOUT THE HUCKLEBERRIES. In one of his two most famous pieces of writing, “Civil Disobedience,” he concluded his account of a night in Concord’s jail with, “I was Continue reading
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The War Against Oblivion
SINGER-SONGWRITER Mat Callahan introduced a tune in the middle of his set at the Galeria de la Raza by saying that he used to be a taxi driver. Once, pulling over Continue reading
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Some Monsters Die Slowly
IN THE STANDARD-ISSUE fairy tale most of us grew up with, the hero bounded up from somewhere far away or offstage and in short order dispatched the monster, liberated the maiden, Continue reading
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More Perfect Unions
DEMOCRACY IS EVERYBODY’S FAVORITE WORD NOWADAYS, even that of George W. Bush, who claims to bring it to Iraq by means of an occupying army, preaches it to more democratic nations Continue reading
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Winged Mercury and the Golden Calf
I FOR A WHILE in the middle of the twentieth century, economists liked to model their subject as hydrology. They built elaborate systems of pipes, pumps, and reservoirs through which water Continue reading
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Acts of Hope
What We Hope For On January 18, 1915, six months into the first world war, the first terrible war in the modern sense — slaughter by the hundreds of thousands, poison Continue reading