“It isn’t a fact universally acknowledged that a person who mistakes his opinions for facts may also mistake himself for God.”
Rebecca Solnit
The Art of Arrival: Rebecca Solnit on Travel and Friendship
Rebecca Solnit | Orion | Summer 2014 | 20 minutes (4,780 words) OrionOur latest Longreads Exclusive comes from Rebecca Solnit and Orion magazine—subscribe to the magazine or donate for more great stories like this. Get a free trial issue Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks) [ 1. ] The word “journey” used to mean a […]
Rebecca Solnit on the Political and the Trivial
Apolitical is a political position, yes, and a dreary one. The choice by a lot of young writers to hide out among dinky, dainty, and even trivial topics—I see it as, at its best, an attempt by young white guys to be anti-hegemonic, unimposing. It relinquishes power—but it also relinquishes the possibility of being engaged […]
The Future Is Dark: Uncertainty's Creative Power
Rebecca Solnit, writing in The New Yorker, offers a celebration of the imagination’s best ally: the ability to say “I don’t know.” Solnit looks at subtlety and subjectivity in her own writing, and in that of a hero of the art, Virginia Woolf: During my years as an art critic I used to joke that museums love artists the way that taxidermists love deer, and something […]
