Entries by Quinn Norton

A World We Built to Burn

It’s the windy end of a hot summer in California right now, and everything wants to burn. This year, like every year, fall winds jostle and tug a dry landscape of golden grasses and scrubland up against forests whose floors are piled with dry litterfall. Old powerlines hang from poles all over a landscape that […]

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How Impeachment is Gift to the DNC… and the GOP

Trump has committed a lot of impeachable offenses. He’s profited from the presidency, put children in concentration camps (where some died), obstructed justice, various other things documented at length in the Mueller report, and a litany of other crimes, including sexual assault. For years now, and to the displeasure of much of the Democratic base, […]

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Light Cycles

In 8 minutes, 18 seconds light travels from the sun to Earth. In that time, roughly 25 million in national debt accrues. Somewhere around 157,806 tonnes of CO2 is released into the atmosphere. 113,046 years of global human experience goes by in 8 minutes, 18 seconds. Around 900 people die — a Jonestown Tragedy, if such a thing could be a unit. 

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Remaking the World

“I am scared of everything” I loud-whispered to him repeatedly. He got a little in front of me, where he gets when he thinks I might absentmindedly walk into traffic. He listened, and I explained that it wasn’t just that I couldn’t see my future, I couldn’t even imagine it. Whatever sense I had yesterday for who I would be in six months, for who I would be for the rest of my life, it had slipped away as we had walked out of that office. All that was left was a warm, indecipherable fog.

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Let me tell you a story

People often wonder about how attraction affects whether an interaction is sexual harassment or not. I have an answer for that, a story from my own life. This is my story, but I’m so damn tired of starring in it. Let’s make it your story this time. Warning: this piece is scary and disturbing af, […]

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Living Without Shame is a Political Act

Every year on December 4th I tell people about what was done to the 21-year old revolutionary, Fred Hampton, by the government of America and his city of Chicago in 1969. But this year I wanted to talk about what Fred Hampton gave us before he was assassinated, and maybe what he could have given us if he’d lived.

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On Giving Thanks in Complicated World

This statement is a seed, it’s written to be read aloud at gatherings, but not as-is. Take this, and make it your own, and share with those whom you love and are grateful for. My promise for this day is to be thankful. But gratitude is complicated. There’s always the lacuna in thanks, the thing […]

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