Every once in a blue moon I get invited to do a literary event that sounds so cool, I wish I could just sit in the audience enjoying it, rather than being on stage trying to think of what to say next. This one in LA on 4/18 w/ @chanda.blacksky.app & @drkatemarvel.bsky.social is one such event!

FB appears to have killed the “my friends who live in…” function. I used to use that function all the time on road trips to reconnect with old friends and crash on couches. Yet one more tiny way that social media purports to connect us, but is really designed to keep us atomized…

Seattleites! (That looks weird. Is that really how you spell that?) Anyway, I'll be appearing tonight at Elliott Bay, at 7pm, with Arik Korman, to talk about trees and tree-thinking and probably a whole lot else, for a live podcast event. Join us!

Just received what has to be the weirdest, least convincing phishing attempt ever

I'm basically this book's uncle and I am IMMENSELY proud it's finally out. I command you all to check to out ...

One of my neighbors has a tree in their front yard that had a big limb nearly break off during the blizzard, and now even though it's cracked in half and lying on the ground, it's in a defiant full bloom. Same, tree. Same.

For sheer audacity and verbal verve, I’ve always been partial to this one: www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/m...

The infuriating thing about him is that if you engage with his lies, you give him what he wants (attention), but if you ignore them, you *also* give him what he wants (learned apathy). The only way out of this thumb trap, I suspect, is to think structurally, organize locally, & try to stay healthy.

I’m so looking forward to speaking with Robert Moor next week (April 14) at the (lovely, tree-bedecked) Mill Valley Public Library. Come out and talk trees with us, Bay Area! www.newsbreak.com/mill-valley-...

How it feels releasing a book right now

Vancouver friends! I’ll be appearing at the VPL at 7pm tonight with @arnokopecky.bsky.social ! I expect Arno to grill me on all things arboreal, dissecting my very soul with his ice-blue eyes, while I sweat and fidget with abject fear. It’ll be fun! vpl.bibliocommons.com/events/69b34...

Vancouver friends! I’ll be appearing at the VPL at 7pm tonight with @arnokopecky.bsky.social ! I expect Arno to grill me on all things arboreal, dissecting my very soul with his ice-blue eyes, while I sweat and fidget with abject fear. It’ll be fun! vpl.bibliocommons.com/events/69b34...

The big day is finally here: My long (long)-awaited book launch! Sprouting in a cranium near you...

"You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation... You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’"

Tree Swallow gathering nesting material this morning, on the Puget Sound prairie.

“Hang on to your hope.” E. B. White in 1973.

I call this phenomenon “real world graphing.” I love it. Primo Levi used to walk around Turin counting all the dots of flattened gum on the sidewalks of a city. He noticed that the densest clusters were outside of nightclubs, where people were presumably most concerned about bad breath.

Signed a stack of copies for one of our coolest local bookstores. Gonna hit up the others soon as well, and continue throughout my West Coast book tour, from Vancouver all the way down to LA, spreading my horrible handwriting down the coast like a plague of kudzu...

My idea of a perfect Easter Sunday

Your first look at this week's 20% off new release book picks, four fiction, four nonfiction. You don't have to support Jeff Bezos to get discounts on hot new books. Come to us: theliteratelizard.com/front-page-b.... Titles/authors in alt-text. Authors and publishers on Bluesky in comment. #Booksky

I’ve got a very, very long drive coming up. Should I do it?

Sharing again! Perfect for a quick read on a slow Saturday.

I'm not sure enough people know that @jmooallem.bsky.social is on here now, posting delightfully Mooallemian observations, free of charge, on a regular basis.

"Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?" -- Jane Goodall, born #OTD 1934

Great essay! Can't wait to get the new book!

I have a new little essay out in the Boston Globe this weekend called "How Think Like A Tree." In it, I argue that this simple shift in how we see the world could change—indeed, has *already* changed—the world itself. www.bostonglobe.com/2026/04/03/o... @christinemehta.bsky.social

Was reading "Mount Analogue," about a fantastical expedition to scale a peak connecting heaven and earth and was surprised when it ended mid-sentence in Chapter 6 because that's when the author apparently got up to answer the door, then died. Was angry at first but now I think it really works.

This is the Moon, seen outside the window of the Apollo 11 command module. Imagine looking out the window and seeing this with your own eyes.

Somehow missed the news of the recent passing of Birute Galdikas, the last surviving member of the Trimates. From what I've read, she could be a difficult person at times, but sometimes it takes difficult people to do difficult things. And what she accomplished was extraordinary.

I love it when a writer ends a powerful, swelling passage on a perfectly oblique, unforeseen word. Such a rarified trick to pull off; gets me every time. (This one is by the great David Searcy. harpers.org/archive/2026... )

This is excellent, and vital reading to any writer trying to make it all work.

Today we're celebrating this gorgeous spring weather with a look at IN TREES by @robertmoor.com! To truly grasp the wisdom of a tree, you need to begin thinking like one… Available next week from @simonandschuster.bsky.social!

Arborescent thinking in action!

A famous AI evangelist has a new book out, which was published as a 'generative book.' (It's like an ebook, but there's an AI 'helper' in the margins that offers to summarize the text and answer questions while you read it.) Anyway, there's a typo in the second line.

In 2015, a man named John Phare was killed while fighting a wildfire. So, the following year, someone erected this memorial in his honor. Then, a few years later, some idiot used it for target practice. So someone else came along and taped little construction-paper hearts over the bullet holes.

For those not following 🇨🇦 politics: exciting things are afoot. @avilewis.ca just won the leadership race for the NDP, w/ a clear, Zohran-like, one-two punch of a pitch: Reform capitalism to 1. address the crushing burden on the 99%, and 2. avert ecological collapse. www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVy9...

A long time ago I remember reading something by DFW about how he was caught on a kind of ever-growing, sine-wave shaped curve, emotionally speaking, where with each new book he wrote, the highs got higher & the lows got lower. Does this ring any bells? (@mattbucher.bsky.social ?)

Current mood.

If you ever find yourself in this situation, just do what I do: automatically begin thinking about how every piece of good luck necessitates a turn of bad luck in the future, as part of some vast invisible system of cosmic balancing, which will snuff out any joy you might otherwise feel. Easy!

The precise intersection point of petrocapitalism, oligarchy, and idiocracy

update: it's pap AND slop

“There is a frank new air of rapine.” -Edward Hoagland, in 1969, perfectly capturing the political atmosphere of 2026

File under: the tech world’s ability to consistently generate things that, if you read them in a DFW novel, would feel at once too implausible and too on the nose.

Reading Hoagland’s “Notes From The Century Before” and thinking about the kinds of lives people use to live, just three or four generations back, and how we live now

every day living under petrocapitalism vs. the past week living under petrocapitalism

Uh guys, one of America’s largest oil refineries is on fire *right now.* www.reuters.com/business/ene...

1/ We're in yet another oil shock. It will produce yet another inflation crisis. Another recession is likely. It's a great time to remember that actually...the future is electric! We need to invest in Canadian security, stability, and energy independence. www.theglobeandmail.com/business/com...

To sweeten the deal, I managed to finagle a friends & family discount code out of Bookshop.org (And yes, I consider everyone who follows me on here a friend. Unless you use it to yell at me for taking so long to write the book...in which case I consider you family!) For 15% off, use code INTREES15

To me this article doesn’t seem AI generated so much as it feels like the kind of (bland, ‘punchy’) style of writing that AI was largely trained on. A lot of people wrote like this before AI was around; that’s *why* AI writes that way. It’s not slop; it’s pap.

Came home from a long time away to find some amazing-looking books waiting in the mail for me, converging on themes of evolution and revolution. @galbeckerman.bsky.social @jasondovemark.bsky.social @dghaskell.bsky.social