Book Report: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

7. Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025) (3/29/26)

On October 25, 2023, the journalist and writer Omar El Akkad wrote on X: "One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this."

He was writing about Gaza—and about the West, about privilege, about power structures and power plays. He was writing about death and destruction, about lives turned topsy-turvy. And to what end? What does all the killing actually accomplish? Isn't it, simply, abhorrent?

This book is an extension of that tweet.

In it, he provides many anecdotes, which I found easy enough to grasp—anecdotes about love, about confusion, about power, about yearnings, about life's meaning, also about atrocities. He also interrogates this world order, and I found his polemics harder to get a handle on. He has plenty to criticize, but I ended up—as so often in these circumstances—unsure just what we are to do about it all.

El Akkad was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, is now a US citizen. From early on, he experienced the capriciousness of the world order as his father, who worked in the hotel business (think: capitalism, think: third world), tried to follow a career. He brings all those identities to bear here, in what is essentially a critique of western liberalism. 

Lord knows, we are living in a bizarre time when nothing much makes sense. Not Gaza. Not Trump. Not Ukraine. Now, not Iran. I read the news daily, and feel ever more alienated from what I've always thought of as "my country," of "the world." 

Maybe I need to read this book again, slower. Maybe I just need to accept that it will never make sense. That there's so much hatred in the world, so much desperate scrabbling for power.

Although as El Akkad reminds us at the end of his book, while atrocity is rampant, maybe the opposite is indeed stronger: kindness and love, caring and humanity. The final paragraph is this:

It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in solidarity than annihilation. That just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away. None of this evil was ever necessary. Some carriages are gilded and others lacquered in blood, but the same engine pulls us all. We dismantle it now, build another thing entirely, or we hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the certainty that, when the time comes, we'll learn to lay tracks on air. 

But: Evil is never necessary. We don't ride around in carriages. There is no cliff. We can't fly. I mean, I get the sentiments, but I guess I'm just overwhelmed by the fact that there are too many of us, and we seem to be ever more at odds. And there is so much fear and hatred and cruelty in the world. That, I don't get. But it's a fact. I would absolutely love it if, today, we could all agree that we've always been against... all the suffering, all the heartache, all the death, all the turmoil. But that doesn't seem to be the human condition. How strange, that we would choose such a state of being. How absolutely strange.

In the meantime, however, I vote, as I have done in every election for 52 years. It often feels meaningless: I live in California; my vote for president has 1/4 the weight of a vote in Wyoming thanks to the stinking electoral college. On Saturday I waved my flag with 10,000(!) others at our local No Kings protest. It feels so small. But it's something.

Sorry, I've not really covered much about this book. You have to read it yourself. Let me know what you think.

95. Essays, part II

The other day I shared a multi-part list of essays from Summer Brennan's Substack "A Writer's Notebook" and her weeklong "essay camp." Here are the rest of the essays she recommends.

Day 4

"Passing Mary Oliver at Dawn," by Summer Brennan, 764 words, 3-minute read
"A Woman's Work: Home Economics," by Carolita Johnson, 1,075 words, 5 minutes
"Natural Intelligence," by Maria Popova, 1,538 words, 6 minutes
"The Face That Replicates," by Katy Kelleher, 2,620 words, 10 minutes
"The Heaviest Pain in the World," by Rob Delaney, 4,240 words, 17 minutes
"Chicxulub," by T. Coraghessan Boyle (a short story), 4,374 words, 18 minutes
"Dreamers in Broad Daylight: Ten Conversations," by Leslie Jamison, 7,271 words, 29 minutes
"The Reenchanted World," by Karl Ove Knausgaard, 10,766 words, 43 minutes
"Ugly, Bitter, and True," by Suzanne Rivecca, about 16,000 words, 1 hour 10 minutes
"Bluets," by Maggie Nelson, about 28,000 words, 2 hours

Day 5

"A Word for Autumn," by A. A. Milne, 892 words, 4 minutes
"Living Like Weasels," by Annie Dillard, 1,585 words, 6 minutes
"On Self-Respect," by Joan Didion, 1,826 words, 7 minutes
"Uncanny the Winging That Comes from Certain Husks," by Joy Williams, 2,251 words, 9 minutes
"Scent Makes a Place," by Katy Kelleher, 2,700 words, 11 minutes
"Frog," by Anne Fadiman, 6,019 words, 24 minutes
"When I Met the Pope," by Patricia Lockwood, 6,604 words, 26 minutes
"Shipping Out, by David Foster Wallace, about 20,000 words, 1 hour 20 minutes

And that's it! Plenty of reading material, most of which I've never encountered. 

94. Louise Gluck, poet

Witchgrass

Something

comes into the world unwelcome

calling disorder, disorder—

If you hate me so much

don’t bother to give me

a name: do you need

one more slur

in your language, another

way to blame

one tribe for everything—

as we both know,

if you worship

one god, you only need

One enemy—

I’m not the enemy.

Only a ruse to ignore

what you see happening

right here in this bed,

a little paradigm

of failure. One of your precious flowers

dies here almost every day

and you can’t rest until

you attack the cause, meaning

whatever is left, whatever

happens to be sturdier

than your personal passion—

It was not meant

to last forever in the real world.

But why admit that, when you can go on

doing what you always do,

mourning and laying blame,

always the two together.

I don’t need your praise

to survive. I was here first,

before you were here, before

you ever planted a garden.

And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon

are left, and the sea, and the wide field.

I will constitute the field.

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering

there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death

I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.

Then nothing. The weak sun

flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive

as consciousness

buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being

a soul and unable

to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth

bending a little.  And what I took to be

birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember

passage from the other world

I tell you I could speak again: whatever

returns from oblivion returns

to find a voice:

from the center of my life came

a great fountain, deep blue

shadows on azure sea water.

93. Essays, part I

The other day an email appeared in my inbox heralding a weeklong event that I (sort of) participated in last year, and so I'm on the list for this year too, it seems. It's called "Essay Camp," and its on the Substack called "A Writer's Notebook" by Summer Brennan. The point being to write an essay over the next week. Simple, huh?

Yeah, sure.

Michel de Montaigne,
father of the essay

Summer writes this: "An essay is famously defined as 'an attempt.' That is the root of the word. It means to try—but try to do what? To understand, to clarify, to persuade, to compare, to connect, to remember, to preserve. An essay can be long or short, personal or impersonal. It can express a truth or explain a stance, introduce an idea or marry two seemingly unrelated ideas together. In that trying, the author’s thought process is often visible on the page. To write an essay is to reach for something, not so much to explain as to explore."

As so often, I take a look, and yes! these look like wonderful exercises. And as so often, I then wander on to some other distraction, thinking maybe I'll just collect all six or however many days' worth and then—one day when my slate is as clean as can be—sit down and really apply myself. 

Seventy-plus years on this planet, and I still have no self-awareness!

Anyway, the reason I'm writing all this today is to catalog the "exemplary essays" that Summer mentions at the end of each day's assignment. Reading essays, she points out, is a critical exercise as we tiptoe into the murky waters that are our own lives and try to make sense of what we find.

This is part I, presenting the first three days of "Essay Camp." I'll tackle the second half in a future post. And apologies to Summer for stealing wholesale. If you're interested in her Substack, you can find it here.

On day 1, it was "some familiar classics that show variety in length, subject, and style." I've read many of these, but they are all worth a revisit:

"Tiny Beautiful Things," by Cheryl Strayed, 896 words, 4 minute read
"The Death of the Moth," by Virginia Woolf, 1,175 words, 5 minutes
"A Good Café on the Place St-Michel," from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, 1,639 words, 6 minutes
"Me Talk Pretty One Day," by David Sedaris, 1,847 words, 9 minutes
"Shooting an Elephant," by George Orwell, 3,283 words, 12 minutes
"Night Walks," by Charles Dickens, 3,788 words, 14 minutes
"Goodbye to All That," by Joan Didion, about 4,000 words, 18 minutes
"Total Eclipse," by Annie Dillard, 5,589 words, 22 minutes
"Notes on 'Camp,'" by Susan Sontag, about 6,000 wordes, 24 minutes
"Equal in Paris," by James Baldwin, 6,775 words, 28 minutes
"The Fourth State of Matter," by Jo Ann Beard, about 7,200 words, 30 minutes
"Consider the Lobster," by David Foster Wallace, about 7,500 words, 32 minutes

Day 2

"Ghost Story," by Maggie Smith, 618 words, 2.5 minutes
"The Smoker," by Ottessa Moshfegh, 1,098 words, 4 minutes
"The Invitation," by Barry Lopez, 1,758 words, 7 minutes
"Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant," from Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin, 1,673 words, 7 minutes
"Kevin Brazil," by Kevin Brazil, 3,090 woreds, 12 minutes
"On Keeping a Notebook," by Joan Didion, 3,052 words, 12 minutes
"Joy," by Zadie Smith, 2,868 words, 12 minutes
"The Youth in Asia," by David Sedaris, 3,294 words, 13 minutes
"The Terror of Love," by Samantha Irby, 3,570 words, 13 minutes
"A Toast Story," by John Gravois, 3,838 words, 15 minutes
"Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life," by Yiyun Li, 3,948 words, 15 minutes
"The Curse," by Alexander Chee, 4,924 words, 20 minutes
"My Instagram," by Dayna Tortorici, 8,323 words, 33 minutes

Day 3

"Things That Appear Ugly or Troubling but upon Closer Inspection Are Beautiful," by Gretchen Legler, 468 words, 2 minutes
"Love Songs: I'm Your Man," by Laurie Stone, 722 words, 3 minutes
"The Negreeting," in The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, 722 words, 3 minutes
"Rape Joke," by Patricia Lockwood, 1,266 words, 5 minutes
"An Almanac of Birds," by Maria Popova, 2,141 words, 8 minutes
"Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over," by Sabrina Orah Mark, 1,627 words, 8 minutes
"Periwinkle, the Color of Poison, Modernism, and Dusk," by Katy Kelleher, 2,053 words, 8 minutes
"Quitting," by John Phipps, 2,226 words, 9 minutes
"What the Black Woman Thinks about Women's Lib," by Toni Morrison, 3,878 words, 15 minutes
"One Four Two Five Old Sunset Trail," by Joy Williams, 3,936 words, 16 minutes
"Welcome to Dog World," by Blair Braverman, 7, 485 words, 30 minutes

Even if I have to cattle-prod myself to sit down and write essays, it's theoretically quite possible to sit down and read them, and so get some inspiration. 

Part II will follow when Summer has finished presenting this iteration of "Essay Camp."

Book Report: On Beauty

6. Zadie Smith, On Beauty (2005) (3/24/26)

I enjoyed this book well enough. The writing itself is spectacular, and Smith has an amazing way with dialogue. She gives us all the trickiness of interpersonal relationships, whether that comes from the passage of time, differing philosophies of life, class and race disparities, or simply assumptions made. 

The story, which a NYT book review tells me is based loosely on E. M. Forster's Howards End (which I have not read), focuses on a family living in an upscale Boston neighborhood, where the father, 57-year-old Howard Belsey, is a tenureless art historian, white and British, who has recently cheated on his wife, Kiki, African-American and a nurse, less intellectual but certainly not stupid. They have three children, two in college, one still in high school but increasingly hanging out with some Haitian rights activists. Howard's rival, a Trinidadian scholar, comes to town, a visiting professor at Howard's Ivy League–ish college—they both study Rembrandt, drawing very different conclusions about his work, his intentions; and they occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum. This man, Monty, also has a wife and two children, all of whom are woven into the story. And there's a rapper who stumbles into this rarefied environment.

All of which are just some of the characters and details of a constantly shifting story of constantly shifting self-understandings and desires, of time passing and connections made and lost, of strivings and settlings and abandonments, of power plays and deep satisfactions and regrets. It's life.

When I say I enjoyed it "well enough," I'm not sure if I mean I wasn't quite in the mood for what amounts to a multiple-character study, that I would have appreciated a bit more of a plot, or a, I dunno, point? What I'm left with most is how accomplished the writing is, but the story itself is more like a kaleidoscope, giving me no fixed image. Except possibly the very end, where Howard is finally presenting his lecture that could, he hopes, win him tenure—only, in the confusion of reaching the venue late, he left his notes in the car. 

Howard pressed the red button again. A picture came up. He waited a minute and then pressed it once more. Another picture. He kept pressing. People appeared: angels and staalmeesters and merchants and surgeons and students and writers and peasants and kings and the artist himself. And the artist himself. And the artist himself. The man from Pomona began to nod appreciatively. Howard pressed the red button. He could hear Jack French saying to his eldest son, in his characteristically loud whisper: You see, Ralph, the order is meaningful. Howard pressed the red button. Nothing happened. He had come to the end of the line. He looked out and spotted Kiki, smiling into her lap. The rest of the audience were faintly frowning at the back wall. Howard turned his head and looked at the picture behind him.
     'Hendrickje Bathing, 1654,' croaked Howard and said no more.

     On the wall, a pretty, blousy Dutch woman in a simple white smock paddled in water up to her calves. Howard's audience looked at her and then at Howard and then at the woman once more, awaiting elucidation. The woman, for her part, looked away, coyly, into the water. She seemed to be considering whether to wade deeper. The surface of the water was dark, reflective—a cautious bather could not be certain of what lurked beneath. Howard looked at Kiki. In her face, his life. Kiki looked up suddenly at Howard—not, he thought, unkindly. Howard said nothing. Another silent minute passed. The audience began to mutter perplexedly. Howard made the picture larger on the wall as Smith had explained to him how to do. The woman's fleshiness filled the wall. He looked out into the audience once more and saw Kiki only. He smiled at her. She smiled. She looked away, but she smiled. Howard looked back at the woman on the wall, Rembrandt's love, Hendrickje. Though her hands were imprecise blurs, painted heaped on paint and roiled with the brush, the rest of her skin had been expertly rendered in all its variety—chalky whites and lively pinks, the underlying blue of her veins and the ever present human hint of yellow, intimation of what is to come.

That's how the book ends: the final paragraphs. (It doesn't spoil anything—well, nothing important—to quote it.) It reminds me of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I likewise made my way through enjoying the writing but not quite sure what it all added up to—until the final page, which knocked me out it was so exquisite. This rich book might also transform in my mind from "good enough" to eternally memorable. I guess time will tell.

92. Toes

We took a walk this afternoon at one of our favorite dog-walk spots—only today, no dog. (Sad.) As we made our way back to the car we were walking on sandy trails, and I noticed some one-toed footprints. Horses. Which got us wondering what other one-toed beasts there are. 

Wikipedia to the rescue:

Horses, asses, and zebras, also rhinoceroses, also tapirs—three families, comprising 17 species—all belong to the order of ungulates known as Perissodactyla, meaning odd-toed. Meaning that these animals have reduced the weight-bearing toes to three or one of the original five. (Though tapirs have four toes in front, three in back, so they're a bit of an anomaly.)

The other order of (mostly) ungulates is the Artiodactyla, representing 270 species. Think pigs, peccaries, hippopotamuses, antelopes, deer, giraffes, camels, llamas, alpacas, sheep, goats, and cattle. Even the Cetaceae—dolphins and other toothed whales, baleen whales too (this blows my mind)—are sometimes placed in the Artiodactyla order of Euungulata. They don't even have toes! But they are closely related to hippos. Who knew.

Humans, may I remind you, are in the order Primates, 500 species strong. Our toes don't figure into that categorization. And the rest of the mammals? There are over 20 orders in all:
rodentia (representing 40% of all mammal species)
chiroptera (bats)
insectivores (moles, shrews, hedgehogs)
carnivora (dogs, cats, bears, raccoons, skunks, mongooses, weasels, and more)
lagomorphs (rabbits, hares, pikas)
proboscids (elephants)
pilosa (anteaters and sloths)
cingulata (armadillos)
sirenia (dugongs and manatees)
the marsupials: kangaroos, koalas, and wombats; opossums; bandicoots (three orders)
monotremes (platypus and echidnas)
and don't forget the pangolins, aardvarks, flying lemurs, and tree and elephant shrews

Sometimes I find it easier to try to puzzle out these various connections of our natural world than to try to make sense of human . . . what word do I want here? bullshit, malarkey, tragedy, stupidity, hubris, sad sad sad sadness. 

Maybe it's more convenient to parse a Grèvys zebra from a plains zebra, a chimpanzee from a bonobo. But shouldn't we be figuring out how to live human with human? 

91. Billionaires

I am (this is, I anticipate, going to be a bit of a disjointed rant) beside myself at the injustices of this country, this world, and the inequities, and the selfishness. Capitalism: I spit on it. It's just the new brand of feudalism—a few at the top, the rest of us below, getting stomped on. 

Not that I, personally, am getting stomped on—but my needs are modest. I managed to get born in an in-between moment when it was looking good for a middle class, when the rich weren't especially filthy. My husband worked a good job, and we managed to save up some. 

But what about the various Gens—X, Millennial, Z, Alpha, and now Beta: I see a lot of worrying about their futures. Justifiably, maybe. I don't know how you can actually make a career out of being an "influencer." But some seem to manage it. And hopefully real jobs will stay around.

Though the poor—there's never been a time without destitution. No matter the generation. Capitalism makes it hard to get anywhere. You've got to have serious breaks. Heaven forbid the government could help individuals find a decent life.

Anyway, yeah: tonight I got to thinking about all those billionaires. Careless, uncaring. What CAN they do with all that money? I honestly don't have a clue. How many yachts, helicopters, or private jets, never mind "homes," can one own?

As of March 2026, so Google AI tells me, there are 3,428 billionaires in the world, 989 in the U.S., followed next by China and India. There's a new billionaire every day, apparently. Altogether, these people (481 of whom are women) have a combined wealth of $20.1 trillion. 

As Google AI again tells me, "a trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) is visually represented as a massive, 100-level-high structure of $100-note pallets covering a football field twice, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty. It is 10,000 stacks of $100 million crates, enough to dwarf a human, making them look like an ant."

A mere billion dollars, meanwhile, "is best visualized as a 34-foot high cube of $100 bills, or in $1 bills would reach 67 miles high . . . and would take 274 years to spend at a rate of $10,000 per day."

And here I'm feeling extravagant for booking a $250-a-night hotel for a week in Berlin in June? (And yeah, it does feel extravagant.)

You can find the top ten industries for billionaires, and the richest individuals in each, here. (Though that article is from two years ago, so who knows what the shake-down is now.)

Meanwhile, I get incensed by footballers and actors and musicians getting paid tens of millions of dollars for their—I want to put "work" in quotation marks, but sure, they are working. It might not be improving the future of humanity, but it's work. And in the case of movie actors and musicians, I eat it up, so what I am complaining about? 

I also know actors who make nothing, but who do the work because they love it. I have many musician friends who go out every week and perform at a local venue, with a dedicated coterie of fans, and still they are struggling to make ends meet.

Some actors and musicians and footballers get lucky, and good for them. 

But these billionaires? Who seem to be taking over the U.S. government? What are they actually doing?

I don't have a particular point here. Except that the world has shifted dramatically from what I grew up expecting. And I don't like it.

And a big part of me says I should stop listening to/reading the news. Wouldn't that be nice?