This week Anat and I sat down with Rebecca Solnit, talking about her new book The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. Solnit’s core argument is that we’ve lost our baselines — that most people have no real memory of how dramatically the world has changed for women, queer people, immigrants, and Indigenous communities, and without that baseline, you can’t see what the fascist MAGA backlash is actually trying to undo.
The conversation ranges widely from there: what Gramsci’s “monsters” of an interregnum really represent, why Indigenous worldviews and the renewables revolution offer genuine reasons for hope, how Silicon Valley’s oligarchs have gone from “cute liberals” to authoritarians controlling the actual infrastructure of thought, and why framing climate change as a matter of individual consumer choice has always been a way of letting the real culprits off the hook.
It’s a sweeping, often very funny, and always enlightening conversation that’s worth watching in full.
