'The Interview': Rebecca Solnit Says the Left's Next Hero Is Already Here

From the New York Times, this is the interview. I'm David Marchese. As the old saying goes, the only constant is change. Lately though, the change can feel overwhelming. We are, after all, living through an era of widespread democratic backsliding, massive technological disruption, and the ongoing slow motion disaster of the climate crisis, to name just a few. But what if there was a different and more hopeful story to tell about all that upheaval? That's the question at the heart of The Beginning Comes After the End, the new book by the prolific and critically acclaimed writer Rebecca Solnit. A thematic sequel to her earlier classic Hope in the Dark, the book takes a longer view on progress and offers a more optimistic philosophy of change based on ideas of interconnection, feminism, ecological care, and political equality. It's It's not a naive book. Solnit is keenly aware of the massive challenges we're all facing. But it provides a stabilizing counterweight to the feeling that the world has spun dangerously off kilter. Here's my conversation with Rebecca Solnit. You know, Rebecca, it's a real pleasure for me to speak to you, in part because A Field Guide to Getting Lost was a really big book for me. And I read it not long after I had moved from my home in Toronto to New York City. And it felt like a a real companion at the time. And all just the way it captured the idea that, like, displacement or and a kind of solitude can actually be positive things. So thank you for that. I'm so glad you found it at the right time for you. And, yeah, that book, we just put out a twentieth anniversary edition, and I got to spend some time revisiting it and rethinking what the hell it was I was doing in the early two thousands with it. And it's been really interesting. I wrote that book, and then I wrote Hope in the Dark, and I thought, like, am I schizophrenic? These books are so different. And then I realized that Hope in the Dark, which is very political and very upbeat, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which is introspective and kind of melancholy, were both about coming to terms with uncertainty. But, of course, I also wrote A Field Guide to Getting Lost, as I do a lot of my books, to kind of react against something happening in the culture. And something that was already happening with tech was the idea that we wanna live in a safe, circumscribed, known world. We don't wanna leave the house without knowing exactly where we're going in a sense that we need to be in control, that we need to know everything. And, of course, we're never completely in control, and we never completely know everything. So how do we look at it in a way that lets us accept it and maybe work with it instead of deny it …