Suspension of the usual order

Some thoughts and links to meet the heavy moment

Unsplash | Kseniya Lapteva

The raison d’etre of this newsletter is figuring out how to build a meaningful life in a chaotic and unstable world. So far, 2025 has been over-indexing on the chaos and instability.

This week in particular is going to be a tough for obvious reasons, and I plan to stay out of the algorithmic loop as much as I can. But I felt compelled to send this rare Monday edition, which is a grab bag of partially-formed thoughts, ideas, and links that have been getting me through, reframing my thinking, or just meeting the moment well.

Nothing that is happening in the world right now is particularly surprising to me, but grief is non-linear. For whatever reason, I’m really feeling the heaviness of the world we inhabit. If you are too, I hope some of the below helps you sit with it.

The fires

One fact that I don’t volunteer too freely is that I grew up in Malibu. The reason is that if you tell a person that in virtually any place on earth (really! any place!) you will spend the rest of the conversation trying to reverse the perception they just formed of you.

But the truth is I grew up in an idyllic neighbourhood of single story homes where everyone knew each other. A place where Malibu’s wealthier residents would drop their kids off on Halloween because it was so safe and friendly.

Of course, I still have a fondness for the place I grew up. But the recurrent fires we grew up evacuating from — and that severely damaged my parents’ former house in the 2018 Woolsey fire — have certainly changed the way I feel about it as an adult. Long before these unprecedented fires, I had come to the mounting and uncomfortable conclusion that perhaps the town I grew up in shouldn’t really exist in the form it does. That it has always represented a kind of a taunt to nature, an ecological arms race. As Joan Didion famously wrote, “the [Santa Ana] winds show us how close to the edge we are.”

When I wrote about collapse in November, this event, sadly, is exactly the kind of thing I was writing about. Not an aberration or freak event that we’ll never see again in our lifetime, but a logical conclusion of our decisions and (in)actions as a society. Unimaginable in its horror, and yet also entirely foreseeable.

If there is one thing you read about the fires, let it be a piece by Mike Davis written in 1998. “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” was very controversial when it was published, and Davis was seen as a pariah (I wrote about him in 2018). But damn if every word of it has not proven true. It will deepen your understanding of these fires, both ecologically and societally.

Two more pieces that helped me process:

• LA shouldn’t build back in the same way again. [NY Mag]

• Could the LA fires have been stopped sooner? The answer is … not really. So what do we do with the knowledge that un-fightable fires are the future? This NYT podcast thoughtfully tries to answer that difficult question. [The Daily]

Here comes Trump II

I’ve been trying to think of some kind of posture, a mantra, a guiding principle to psychologically weather Trump II. I have to be honest, I feel incredibly tempted to tune out.

Trump’s unique asset (aside from his pathological lack of shame) is his ability to read the meta vibes of the culture. And so I worry that he might enjoy more popularity this time around, when truth literally feels like an afterthought in the culture, and the left feels perpetually obsessed with the wrong things. At the same time, with the right ascendent in both politics and the mainstream culture, Trump now has to do something rather difficult: stay popular while actually governing.

No answers here (sorry!) but I did find both of of the links below really helpful in framing my mental model for the chaos that’s coming.

• Perhaps what is even more important than money is our current culture is attention. Trump and Musk are masterful merchants of it. This conversation between Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes helped me see more clearly just how those two men wield it. But they also point out the (hopefully) growing backlash to the ways our attention has been mercilessly commoditized and manipulated. [The Ezra Klein Show]

• How to live under Trump II: “What I observe many people wrestling with is the question of whether one’s posture — the way you stand in the world relative to that world — should be reflexively, automatically, saturatingly decided for you by national political events.” [

  Anand Giridharadas
  of The Ink]

A village check-in

On the last day of the year, my husband and I sat in a pub and talked over some of the things we did well in 2024, and what we want more of in 2025. I said that one of the the things I’m most proud of is the effort I’ve made to build a village since we moved in April.

And it’s true, over the past couple months I have looked around me and realized I have … several friends with kids … who live very locally ... that I see almost every week in a pretty low-effort way? Basically, exactly what I wrote about wanting here, I have started to create. Emphasis on the word create, because it has been an active process, not passive. I have done things I don’t always feel like doing, gone out of my comfort zone, only to be pleasantly surprised when my efforts are reciprocated back to me. As a result, I feel a lot less lonely in the week-to-week slog of being a mom to a toddler. And if that is not something to marvel at, I don’t know what is.

I have a lot more to say on this, which I will be saying in part through a series of Q&As around the topic of village-building, the first of which I’ll send in my next edition. My goal with this topic has always been to write about it in a way that is compelling to both parents and non-parents — the solution requires both parties to not retreat into their identities! — so my interviewees will come to the topic from diverse and unexpected angles.

A reading prescription

I’ll finish with something that connects all three of these threads. I can’t think of a more resonant book to read during this time than Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, first published in 2009.

Solnit’s thesis is that people often find the most meaning, satisfaction, and, yes, even joy right in the aftermath of catastrophe and natural disasters. How can that be? Using case studies including of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the London blitz, and 9/11, she argues that it’s because all of a sudden, they have an urgent purpose. They are presented with an immediate way to serve the people and environment around them — something that “normal” life usually suppresses with bullshit jobs and busy-ness.

Disaster, Solnit argues, opens up possibility: When the normal societal and economic forces are disrupted, people are given an opportunity to live in a way that’s in accordance with their deepest nature. The village shows up, basically. As she writes, “if paradise now arises in hell, it’s because in the suspension of the usual order and failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.”

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