Lisa has been wearing this t-shirt for a decade now:

Over the weekend, the kid asked what it was a picture of, and we both realized that we didn’t know. Was it the silhouette of a real portable library or was it just a fantasy of one, à la Moose’s Book Bus? Lisa had been following Feminist Library on Wheels on Instagram for many years but had never seen a picture of anything that looked like this glorious, bike-core contraption. So we scrolled back and back and back—and found the sacred machine!

Vincent Poturica writes in to share his own encounter with a tiny book, which happened to coincide with reading my essay on “The Zen of Tiny Books”:

I’m in NYC and, yesterday at The Cloisters, took a couple pics of an astounding, tiny prayer book (from a Dutch Middle Age artist) that moved me to tears.

This “diminutive Book of Hours” was made by Simon Bening circa 1530-1535. It measures about 2½ by 2 inches. The catalog text goes hard on its enchanting tininess:

It was a reminder of the omnipresence of God, meant to be attached to its owner, or stored with precious possessions. There is a special magic achieved by Bening’s exceptional skill at creating a miniature world. The miniatures follow standard convention, but Bening consistently tweaks the presentation, making this manuscript exceptionally poignant and affecting.

I wish I was in New York…I’d go visit this book that so moved Vincent!

The most hopeful thing I read this week was an account from a Minneapolis resident, Winston Hearn, of the mutual aid networks and bravery and love breaking out across the Twin Cities, despite it all. I loved this description of patrols and attempts to disrupt ICE (and I watched the linked video at least five times):

There are patrols in every neighborhood, at every school, watching for the unmarked cars that suggest the paramilitary terrorists are coming. Those patrols are supported by people who can check tags, relay information, track in real time through trusted networks. When ICE agents get brave enough to step out of their cars, the community swarms to make their jobs difficult. Here is a video with no violence that shows just how this works. People materialize to witness, to confuse, to chase off. To protect everyone that they can.

Here are two terms that help me as I try to make sense of The National Political Scene™ in this dark hour:

I. Diversity of Tactics

This concept says that we are all in charge of our own actions and those tactics that we are comfortable with, but we should as much as we can refrain from criticizing the tactics of those with whom we share concerns and goals. For instance, I personally am deeply committed to nonviolence and will not engage in property destruction—but I refuse to spend my voice and energy denouncing the protesters who burned down a police substation in Minneapolis in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Here’s Malcolm X (via Wikipedia) explaining the reasoning behind diversity of tactics:

Our people have made the mistake of confusing the methods with the objectives. As long as we agree on objectives, we should never fall out with each other just because we believe in different methods or tactics or strategy to reach a common goal.

Imagine if Martin Luther King, Jr. had spent significant time criticizing Malcolm X and the Black Panthers because of their more militant tactics. He would have played right into the hands of the racist, segregationist right. And without more militant actors making King’s nonviolence seem reasonable and like a decent compromise, we might never have had the Civil Rights Acts.

Now look at this headline and framing from the New York Times:

This kind of hand-wringing and scolding of the left plays directly into the hands of the fascists! How in the ever-loving world do you think centrist Democrats might have the chance “to rein in the agency” if not by having this position seem like the reasonable, compromise in contrast to the vehemence and moral clarity of the “Abolish ICE” crowd. This compulsive criticism of the left is itself a bad tactic, and one that takes pressure off of the very agency (ICE) that these “Democratic Critics” are supposedly critical of.

David Graeber has a wonderful explanation the necessity of embracing a diversity of tactics—and the danger of trying to police others’ tactics—in his short essay “Concerning the violent peace-police”:

Successful movements have understood that it’s absolutely essential not to fall into the trap set out by the authorities and spend one’s time condemning and attempting to police other activists. One makes one’s own principles clear. One expresses what solidarity one can with others who share the same struggle, and if one cannot, tries one’s best to ignore or avoid them, but above all, one keeps the focus on the actual source of violence, without doing or saying anything that might seem to justify that violence because of tactical disagreements you have with fellow activists.

II. Police Riot

This term describes a confrontation between police and civilians in which the police are the ones inciting, escalating, and sustaining violence. I learned this term during the George Floyd protests in 2020, and I wrote about it then:

[P]olice have committed many of the signal violent acts of the last week-and-a-half. Perhaps nowhere has this been clearer than when military police gassed and assault[ed] peaceful protesters in D.C.’s Lafayette Square so that our president could have his picture taken holding up a Bible like 12-pound salmon. But here in Los Angeles we have also had incidents of police intentionally ramming protesters with their cars, clubbing peaceful protesters, and even smashing out windows to drag people out of their cars for the crime of driving after curfew.

The past is prologue. Today in Minneapolis ICE agents act more as occupying militia than as police. And boy do they love shattering windshields and dragging people out of their cars. The violence and spectacle and provocation are the point. Here’s Lydia Polgreen reporting what it was like to actually go to her hometown and see the occupation firsthand:

From afar, this tragic and possibly criminal act of violence could plausibly be seen as incidental to President Trump’s mission to deport undocumented people from the country. But when I landed in Minneapolis on Monday and saw the size, scope and lawlessness of the federal onslaught unfolding here, I understood that Good’s killing was emblematic of its true mission: to stage a spectacle of cruelty upon a city that stands in stark defiance against Trump’s dark vision of America.

The brutality is the point. A police riot seeks to create the conditions of violence and lawlessness that, by a certain logic, call for further police to be deployed. They create the conditions of their own necessity. (Or for the invocation of the Insurrection Act.)

Pursuant to making print objects, last year I took on a handful of freelance print design projects: four full-length books, two academic reports, a conference program, and an album jacket. I love print design: I love how this work often puts me into a non-verbal trance state, I love the challenge of presenting someone else’s work in the best way possible, and I love how collaborative the design process can (and I think should) be. I rarely feel too possessive of a specific layout, because the final product, when you’re doing it right, has been arrived at mostly through conversation and consensus.

Anyways, I bring this all up to share that I recently found a new and wonderful resource: the ongoing “Best Book Covers” series written by Emily Temple for Literary Hub. Each year she asks about 50 book designers to share their favorite cover designs of the year, and then she ranks them on the basis of which covers were mentioned the most—and she includes the designer-judges’ comments. So much good stuff.

Reports of the revival of print media get louder by the day. Soon we’ll have a trend piece in the_New York Times_and that’s how we’ll know it’s over and we can all go back to our phones. Until then, I thought I would share some notable developments from the artists and writers I follow:

• Sarah McColl’s beloved email newsletter, Lost Art, is folding up shop and being reborn as Paper Choir, a 4x / year mailing “of various risograph ephemera (zines, recipes, notecards, illustrated diaries, stickers, collaborative texts, posters, postcards, broadsides, etc.)” Can’t wait to get the first mailing in March! 
• The poet Annelyse Gelman just sent out a call to her mailing list: “Are you sick of email? Me too. I am doing SNAIL MAIL instead and have written a zine, ART SCHOOL REPORT #1, which I would be happy to send to you for free. It’s about Clown, Internal Family Systems, & other stuff.” (By the way, Annelyse’s website is sooooo good, strong multiverse.plus vibes.) 
• I just received my first copy of the relatively new and extremely gay poetry magazine & Change. I subscribed after reading Xander Beattie’s interview with publisher Kevin Bertolero. The subscription is just $3 per issue. As Kevin explains, 

“That fee covers the cost of printing each issue (usually somewhere around $1.50 per copy), and then $0.10 for the envelope, and $1.36 for the stamp. The format of the issue is actually the way it is (including choice of paper stock) so that each issue will weigh under 3 oz, which means it can be mailed through USPS as a letter.”

• Robin Sloan sent three zines through the mail last year. I loved receiving them, these beautiful two-tone risoprints on A3 paper, tri-folded so that they fit in a 6x9” booklet envelope. In December he sent out an issue of his newsletter with links to six new, Bay Area-based print outlets, and explained, “… you have to understand, Bay Area media has felt, at times, shockingly thin. This is an embarrassment of riches.” 
• The tech journalism website The Verge even published a zine, Content Goblins. I had sticker shock for the shipping ($10.74 on a $20 zine), but went ahead and ordered it. The design is excellent, but the content is more magazine than zine—the articles are simply high-quality The Verge articles. I don’t think I’d buy a second edition. 

I have been plotting my own entry into this space, ever since I got a new printer for my birthday back in 2024. Among many experiments over the last 18 months, I made a zine for this year’sholiday card. More to come soon—from me, and apparently from everyone else, too. I say, the more the merrier! |

They’re saving the crazy glowing solar pillars! Why? AI! Is this a good idea? Who can say! They kill 6000 birds a year and burn natural gas every morning and make expensive electricity, but hey, we’ve gotta keep the lights on at the CSAM factory…

Logic aside, there’s no arguing that the vibes are compellingly weird.

The latest Psuedo Press newsletter isn’t up on their website yet, but it’s a great installment. I’m really into the whole vibe of Psuedo Press—they offer their monthly newsletter in mailed zine format, they have some of the funkiest (in a good way!) email styling I’ve ever seen, and they pack their newsletter with tips for us wretched who feel compelled to make books. Their latest newsletter includes a discussion of bookbinding thread that gets wonderfully far into the weeds.

My absolute standard for bookbinding is the Fils au Chinois Waxed Linen thread, either the Lin Câblé n°526 or the Lin Retours n°24. The thread company, unfortunately quite orientalist in its brand design, is a French manufacturer from Lille (a historic center of textiles on the continent) and I order it from a haberdashery in Versailles. I’m quite smug about the whole thing, since it all feels kitchy and antiquated, like I’m in a scene from Hobsbawm’s long 19th century, engaging in the bustling raw-goods trade markets of a newly-industrialized Europe.

This kind of winding, chatty, thoughtful writing warms my heart. (Thanks to Xander for turning me on to this one!)

A few days ago, the hedge fund billionaire and triumphant hater-of-Harvard’s-first-Black-president Bill Ackerman gave $10K to a GoFundMe (set up by a Nazi) for the ICE agent who killed Renee Good.

This seems to herald an evolution of the “cancel culture grift.” That being the roughly decade-old arrangement where the billionaire class began creating all these cushy positions for “cancelled professors” (they get jobs at the billionaire-backed “anti-woke” University of Austin or at a think tank) and trans-hating comedians (they get far above-market rates to perform in Riyadh). Under the terms of the cancel culture grift, people who seem to be facing social opprobrium are suddenly presented with a fat check and a new set of friends. This strikes me as sad not just for our wider society but also—and perhaps most intensely—for those people being paid off by the billionaires. In exchange for money and a new platform, they give up the chance to reflect on what they did, grow their hearts, and maybe even make amends.

But now we’re starting to see an emerging “murder culture grift,” where if you’re a white man you can increasingly expect to be given fame and fortune by the billionaire right for murdering someone who that class sees as an enemy. We saw this when a man strangled a mentally ill person to death on the subway (he got a high-salary job at a billionaire’s venture capital firm), we saw it when a 17-year-old vigilante killed two activists in Wisconsin (he was paid to speak at events put on by billionaire-backed Turning Points USA), and now we’re seeing it with the ICE agent who murdered Nicole Good (the GoFundMe has raised nearly half-a-million dollars; Ackerman’s was the largest single gift).

The murder grift, like the cancel culture grift, works to preclude the chance of moral reckoning on the part of those who killed. The billionaires create proud monsters, figureheads for a social order based on oppression and fear. They also make clear to others considering monstrous deeds that, should they actually carry these deeds out, they will be safe, even cosseted.

It’s easy to fall into despair, so I much appreciated the positive vision for abolishing ICE offered by Spencer Ackerman in “Either ICE Is Abolished or It Will Kill Many More Renee Goods.” While it’s terrible what’s happening, it’s important to note the incredible bravery of tens or hundreds of thousands of community members who are doing what they can to protect their neighbors—and mostly with limited support from their ostensibly left-wing elected officials. This must have consequences, says Ackerman.

As we have seen in Los Angeles, Charlotte, Chicago and elsewhere, the people under siege have not waited for the elected officials of the feeble political opposition to lead them. The Democratic Party, consistent with its War on Terror form, is proving itself incapable of leading people out of this danger. From the ranks of those who are defending their neighbors will emerge organic leaders whom the party will, if recent history is a guide, at first resist. The victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York shows that the people will lead their own way over the objections of the party’s functionaries. It also shows that socialism beats fascism, and so that must be the choice, because it is the choice. But first socialism and abolition must prevail against the capitalism and letter-writing of the Democratic Party in the undercard match.

I like the framing of the “undercard match.” It’s coming, and it’s urgent. Having a clear-eyed, non-billionaire-captured, forward-looking Democratic party is a matter of life and death for countless people around the globe. The editorial board of the New York Times simply isn’t going to lead us out of this mess. Hell, it’s not even going to win an election. Send more Zohrans!

I continue to worry profoundly about this country I live in, as the feds have now responded to their own murder of Renee Good by upping the level of brutality and lawlessness in Minneapolis even further. The corporate media seems to struggle to look straight at this story, to describe what’s actually happening, and even just to keep it on the front page. So once again I find the best coverage coming from outlets where you might least expect it. I was especially gripped by the firsthand reportage by Ryan Broderick in “We’re all just content for ICE: Four days on the ground in Minneapolis.”

The most gutting part of a gutting piece is this sequence of pictures:

Broderick explains,

But the most egregious example I saw of how tightly connected these two worlds are happened on Saturday morning. As a convoy of vehicles driven by ICE agents arrived at the federal building, a woman punched the window of one of the cars. Close to two dozen agents jumped out of the convoy and tackled her and her friend to the ground. Immediately following them, coming out of the same car as the agents, was Fox News national correspondent Matt Finn, who filmed the whole altercation with a massive shit-eating grin on his face. When I started filming him and asked who he was with and what he was using that video for, he turned his back towards me and tried to hide his face. “Intense video,” Finn would later caption his post on X.

When I saw this, I remembered something that happened in June of last year. One of California’s U.S. Senators, Alex Padilla, tried to interrupt a press conference being held here in L.A. by DHS secretary Kristi Noem, only to be muscled out of the room, wrestled to the ground, and handcuffed. The morning that it happened, I watched a video recording of the encounter, shocked by how security seemed to deliberately assault this man’s dignity. Over the next few days, I kept flashing back to a few frames of the video: the moment when a smirk flashed across the face of the security guard as he overpowered Padilla. I became so obsessed that I went through the video frame-by-frame and screenshotted the moment.

Seeing the Fox News reporter’s smirk, I felt I understood the first smirk better. These twisted smiles capture so much. There is a wicked, fragile pleasure in overpowering someone weaker than yourself. Men smile like this as they beat their wives and children. I assume they smile like this as they commit sexual violence against civilians during war. It’s the smile of the torturer. The smile of someone whose psychological state has taken them far away from the capacity to take care, to be gentle, and to remember the humanity of the person in front of them. They are full with gleeful bloodlust.

There must be a way to break these men out of this level of hell.

The good news is that I finished drafting Part I of my book in Chicago, just a few days after Thanksgiving. I was sitting at my cousins’ dining room table, dance music blasting in my headphones, writing longhand in the notebook I’ve been drafting the book in this year. A giant snowstorm was beginning to blanket the whole region in sculptural white fluff. (The next day we made a snowman.) It was a great, cozy, victorious morning. The bad news is that, since then, I’ve been a bit stuck. I’m bogged down by big-picture questions. How do I want Part II to go? Should I write it in the same style as Part I? Or strike out down a new path? Take a shortcut? I have been sitting with this quantum uncertainty for the last month-plus. It has stopped me from really doing any work on the book at all.

But the last two days I have felt the call to press forward again. I have been rising early and spending some time transcribing my scrawling, crossed-out handwriting into my big Google Doc. (226 pages and counting.) I have 18 more handwritten pages left to type up. I’m cautiously hopeful that by the time I finish transcribing, I will have enough clarity on how to proceed that I can begin.

I like to believe that projects have rhythms, and sometimes you need to listen to your body and wait. In fact, I must believe this, otherwise I would exclusively feel jealousy at the 1000-words-a-day crowd and self-loathing at myself for failing to Churn It Out™. So much of the mental game of writing is coming up with excuses not to give up. One more piece of good news: in returning to the manuscript I found this:

This is my first time trying out Sandor Ellix-Katz’s incredibly simple recipe for Vinagre de Piña. I’ve been wanting to try it ever since reconnecting with his book Wild Fermentation in September as I wrote my Lightplay, “An Archipelago of Life-Promoting Culture.”

Saturday evening, the kid watched me cut up the pineapple. Then together we filled a half-gallon jar with sugary water, stuffed the roughly chopped pineapple skins into it, and covered the jar mouth with cheesecloth. We set it to ferment on the far end of the kitchen table. I ate my portion of the pineapple flesh in the bath.

Now we’re waiting, sniffing it daily, and occasionally skimming some scum off the surface. The liquor is definitely getting a bit funky. On Saturday we’ll strain the pineapple skins out and then let the clear liquid keep fermenting for a few more weeks. I’ll keep you posted on how it comes out.

The day after Christmas, I spotted some likely red cabbages at the store, bought four, and carried them home. That night I sliced them thin on the mandoline. The kid helped me pack the crock, adding salt between layers of cabbage. It has been going for a bit over two weeks now.

The other night I pulled some young kraut out to eat with nachos. I like how the acid and salt and vegetable energy of the kraut balances out the rich earthiness of the corn chips and black beans and cheese. This kraut clearly will keep getting better. But it’s already yummy: crunchy, cabbage-y, lightly sour, with a complex flavor.

When we took it out, the kid said with pride: “We made it, and no one else.”

(Real ones will remember that the third issue of Lightplay, back in May of 2020, was titled simply “Sauerkraut”.)

With the President of the United States admitting, boasting even, that the federal government will use its military to seize another country’s oil, I appreciated journalist and climate activist Bill McKibben on the climate / petrochemical angle on the invasion of Venezuela: Just possibly it’s the oil? I find this concept in particular to be highly compelling:

What if we could, simply by supporting an environmentally and economically sound transition to clean energy, remove the reason for the fighting? I don’t know how to stop the bully from beating people up for their lunch money—but what if lunch was free, and no one was carrying lunch money? Not for the first time, and not for the last, I’m going to make the observation that it’s going to be hard to figure out how to fight wars over sunshine.

The deeper suggestion here—that solar power technology might be inherently decentralizing, peace-promoting, dare I say anarchist—is not a new one. But it’s a good thing to think about in these days.

I first heard this idea from my brother Elias, who is currently finishing up a master’s degree in energy technology and policy. The other day, as I chewed on these ideas again, I hit him up for a reading list on the subject. He texted me back:

I don’t know about you, but I love a good syllabus. More to read!

Follow up Benn Jordan’s primer on anarchism with David Graeber’s Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art & the Imagination, which has more thought-provoking ideas in each essay than many full books muster. You can read many of the essays for free on Graeber’s website. A favorite is “Army of Altruists,” which refutes the so-called Effective Altruists en passant and includes this incredible observation about missionaries:

Almost invariably, they end up trying to convince people to be more selfish, and more altruistic, at the same time. On the one hand, they set out to teach the “natives” proper work discipline, and try to get them involved with buying and selling products on the market, so as to better their material lot. At the same time, they explain to them that ultimately, material things are unimportant, and lecture on the value of the higher things, such as selfless devotion to others.

I just finished it a few weeks back, and I’ve got more books of his essays waiting in the wings. Graeber’s work feels deeply relevant and illuminating to the experience of being alive here in 2026.

Benn Jordan has another barn-burner of a video out: “Gadgets For People Who Don’t Trust The Government”.

It’s a “gift guide” of adversarial, open-protocol, anti-surveillance tech, interlarded with a pretty good summary of anarchism. The word “anarchy” is, for a lot of people, a hot pan handle—too scary even to touch. This video gives a zero-entry-pool explanation of what anarchism actually means in practice. This subject is, um, relevant right now.

A user by the handle of @epstinian had a good comment:

If someone told me 10 years ago that I’d follow a musician turned into a fighter against AI technocracy I’d call them crazy.