On Tuesday, just after 11pm Pacific time, my British bestie woke up, and I got to fill her in on the election news. And while sputtering about how Mississippi was in play by a few dozen votes, and how the Dems had swept every statewide race in Texas, and how a dozen other nigh-unimaginable things had occurred, I realized that I had completely forgotten that South Carolina had flipped blue because it had happened so early in the evening and so quickly after polls closed. It was that kind of night.

The night’s second vote drop in Indiana was already portending a blue tsunami, but with every passing hour, the election felt more like MAGA’s end-Permian extinction. The staggering number of Democratic wins was overshadowed only by their eye-popping margins of victory. Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina had been won before the night even began, with Dem early votes outstripping their opponents’ eventual totals. Double-digit point shifts were the norm. Steve Kornacki kept buffering in shock. “Repudiation” and “shellacking” became cliché. Maps of voting swings resembled portraits of Smurfs. Voters didn’t just tell the GOP to eat shit; they forcibly gavaged one cartoonishly appalling candidate after another with raw sewage for hours on end.

The next morning, Liz and I talked about the path ahead. As someone who has been tracking exactly how much damage the administration has wrought, she knows how difficult the task of rebuilding will be. But we realized that we had been simply hoping for a slight reprieve—a chance to catch our collective breaths—and that the night had delivered something more. It really felt like an entire universe of possibility had opened up.

The next day, while reading the Texas Tribune’s fantastic coverage, I was struck by comments from Nathan Johnson, the Democratic attorney-general-elect of Texas (and former Dragonball Z composer). Speaking to the Tribune’s Eleanor Klibanoff, he said:

“When something has been a certain way for a long time, everyone assumes that it’s permanently that way. Someone said to me recently, ‘Texas has been red for 30 years. Those are daunting odds.’ Those aren’t odds at all. That’s just a description of the state of things. It’s not permanent.”

By coincidence, I had just finished reading two books that are very much in conversation with these sentiments. In Is It Okay to Have a Child?, Meehan Crist examines the rhetoric around raising families in a time of environmental catastrophe and future instability. Cutting through the messy debate around climate change, overpopulation, and fertility rates with immense skill and calm authority, Crist shows us how to reconcile our hopes for our personal lives with our responsibilities towards Earth’s future. Crucially, she reveals why those issues have been blurred together, who exactly benefits from doing so, and why we deserve a different debate entirely. “It is human systems, rather than human families, that need to be reimagined,” she says.

Meanwhile, in The Imaginary Wall, Sonia Shah recounts how Western societies came to so strongly separate humans from our fellow animals—physically and ideologically. Through one beautifully crafted chapter after another, Shah shows how porous and fictitious that wall really is. And by showing each agonizing step through which that wall was created it, and the people responsible for doing so, she also shows that its existence is a choice that we made—and one we can yet unmake.  

These views mirror my own. Whenever I’m asked about the pandemic, or climate change, or the lessening of the living world, or the rise of generative AI, I note that our failure to deal with these issues is not an inevitability but a choice. We lose when we let people curtail our ability to conceive of different choices, and when we accept systems that are being tenuously held together by tape as reality’s immutable baseline. As Johnson said, from a newly blue Texas, “That’s just a description of the state of things. It’s not permanent.” And I’m extremely grateful to everyone who reminds us of that constant truth, whether with pen or phonecall, campaign or ballot.

Wildlife Photography

These photos are all from my recent trip to the Pantanal in Brazil.

Other things

I have watched a lot of victory speeches in the last few days. There was much that I enjoyed, from James Talarico’s earnestness, to the defiant way Abdul el-Sayed says his full name, to the refreshing spectacle of watching nationally elected leaders talking coherently and skillfully. But Peggy Flanagan’s speech, and the ferocity with which she says “We will rip ICE apart!”, will live rent-free in my head.

The two books I mentioned—Is It Okay to Have a Child? by Meehan Crist, and The Imaginary Wall by Sonia Shah—are both coming out in the coming months. They’re both landmark works, as is The Blue Hours, Stephanie Krzywonos’s masterful memoir and mythological reimagining of Antarctica, which is out soon. As I’ve said before, pre-ordering is the single best way of supporting authors. (And since times are obviously tough, and books are expensive, I’ll note that registering interest with your local libraries is the next best thing.)

My next book, Life Beyond Measure, is now just five months away from publication (US, Canada, UK). The promotion from indie bookstore BookPassage is ongoing: you can pre-order a signed and personalized copy and they ship internationally.

That’s it for this month!

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Stay safe.