Meanwhile, in San Rafael...

Two of the best booksellers to do it visited @pointreyesbooks.bsky.social today. I've learned a lot from (and drank a lot with) Rick Simonson of Elliott Bay and even more from Paul Yamazaki of City Lights.

Currently reading: @peterbrannen.bsky.social 's very good new book, The Story of CO2 is the Story of Everything.

This is a breathtaking and heartbreaking poem by @joriegraham.bsky.social

Reading lately:

Rob's right: this is a sharp and thoughtful book. I'm excited to talk with Ben about it when he visits Point Reyes on August 9. ptreyesbooks.com/event/2025-0...

Reading lately, w/ @dorothyproject.bsky.social, @joannapocock.bsky.social, @adambecker.bsky.social, and others.

"The libertarian withdrawal from democratic life is often imagined as a quest for freedom. In fact, it is a search for its opposite — control — which at the societal scale is tyranny."

🚨 There’s a lot of horrific news out of Washington right now—but you might have missed this: Senate Republicans just introduced a plan to sell off 120 million acres of our public lands. Let me break down what’s in the bill and why it’s a full-scale land grab. 🧵

Hard to fathom how someone can so blithely make a statement like this when children are left crying on sidewalks as their parents are sent to prisons.

I was told that the selection of AI books at @pointreyesbooks.bsky.social "skewed toward the skeptical," and uh, yes that's correct.

Note to self: do not underestimate the practice of quietly doing the work.

Every time I watch a Tesla turn without signaling, I mutter quietly to myself, "Fascist."

A small good thing: fresh bouquets of local flowers on the counter at our bookshop.

Each time you ask an AI chatbot a question, it sends a request to a data center and strains an increasingly scarce resource: water. A 🧵on our investigation into how the data centers that power AI are increasingly being built in highly water-stressed places: www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

I assure you that Point Reyes Books is not located in San Francisco, but that Robert Macfarlane will be here (in Point Reyes Station) on June 14.

"To be nonpolitical is not, as one might suppose, evidence of a passive psychic condition, but of a highly active attitude, a defense against the awareness of social responsibility." - Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

"[A] commitment to the right to the 'hereness' of this particular ailing planet, to these frail bodies, to the right to live in dignity wherever on the planet we are, even when the inevitable shocks forces us to move." - @astra.bsky.social and @naomiaklein.bsky.social showing a way forward.

"They are waging a war on living. The more fully you live, the harder their job will be." - @anandwrites.bsky.social

An LA Times writer called our bookstore "absolutely perfect."

an incredibly cursed headline www.eenews.net/articles/big...

Walter Kempowski's All for Nothing (trans. Anthea Bell) is a devastating masterpiece. Just astonishing.

Running through my head lately, from Wendell Berry's "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" "...Be joyful/ though you have considered all the facts."

Some good news

Sometimes, the best I can muster is a sincere fuck you to the goons.

The more I think about this, the more myopic a take it seems to me.

“Geologic Life argues that a shift is necessary in the discourse around race from ideology and identity politics into discussion about material relations between people and environments,” she says. “The extraction of geological materials ultimately sustains forms of power.”

Well-timed new editions of John Berger's 'Bento's Sketchbook' and 'Hold Everything Dear' from @versobooks.bsky.social.

"If you and I sit around waiting for all of those Respectable Institutions to take the lead, we will be spending the next few years doing nothing except being crestfallen by the inaction from above. I guess we might as well get to it, then. Don’t be sad you’re not rich. Be happy that you’re free."

What an embarrassing time to be alive.

Finally reading Greg Grandin's 'End of the Myth,' a book that offers clear-eyed contextualization for this moment in our history. I recommend it highly.

Tonight, I went to see the first theater screening of a 30 year old documentary on the life & work of Gary Snyder, and was reminded of how foundational that work—his poetry and, later, his writing on place—was to me, a floundering kid in NJ, about the same time this documentary was being filmed.

I'm excited to host Allison Carruth and @alexis-madrigal.bsky.social this Saturday in Point Reyes for a conversation about 'Novel Ecologies,' a timely interrogation of the ways Silicon Valley imagines the natural world.

Some figures on the potential death toll from Musk's pointless destruction of USAID, from a memo written by a fired official. He will be remembered as one of the great monsters of history. 1/x

March blew in on a gust of wind.

This morning, I mailed a book to Brother Arnold, one of the last remaining Shakers. This is where I've found my joy this today.

It turns out that I'm okay being typecast as a reader who revels in this kind of narrative (tragedy at sea, floundering on land).

A good pairing of riparian books for our season of atmospheric rivers here in California: @robgmacfarlane.bsky.social's 'Is a River Alive' and James C. Scott's posthumously published 'In Praise of Floods'.

As corporations line up behind the false mandate of this administration (cynically aware that they can recalibrate w/ little consequence when the winds change), I find myself becoming even more entrenched in the radical possibilities of a small bookstore.

"The ocean is coldblue and never still, a gigantic creature that breathes, most often tolerates us, but sometimes not and then we drown; the history of humankind is not terribly complicated."

Raise your hand if you're unwittingly already following section 12(i) "Cry and sob hysterically at every occasion, especially when confronted by government clerks" of the CIA's anti-fascist Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944).

"On my way home, I ask the sky to come down and keep me company, but the sky prefers its own boundlessness." -- from Yuki Tanaka's "Chronicle of Drifting"

That 🧵 should have been an internal monologue.

"A thin sauce of ideology covered lewdness, greed, sadism, and fathomless lust for power..." - Friedrich Reck writing about the rise of Hitler in 'Diary of a Man in Despair,' a book that's a grim portrait of its time and a chilling glimpse of ours.

brimming with rage

Emmet Gowin / Artful Genealogies Render Them Insensitive to Pain, 1976

A welcome surprise to open @nicktriolo.bsky.social's forthcoming, 'The Way Around,' and find the Tamalpais inside.

Cover reveals at the end of the world.

You have to read this entire profile of the wonderful @transitbooks.bsky.social to learn about the pangolin sex novel (we're assured it's "high literary") coming later this year. Talk about burying the lede.