“The world is too much with us,” Wordsworth wrote. All of 2026 replies in unison, “No shit.”
Everything in your feed is violent, discouraging, and makes you want to scream. So do it. Go find a place where you can be alone and give a good yell. Or open your window or go up to your rooftop like in the movie Network. I’m ready to shout out of all my windows. Because we have limits, and it’s really hard to write in chaos. It’s hard to do anything in chaos.
And yet—people do and always have. How?
Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “I Have a Dream” speech in a hotel the night before delivering it in front of 250,000 people. He only had eight minutes to speak. In eight minutes, he delivered the most iconic speech of the twentieth century, cobbled together in a hotel lobby and partly ad-libbed. Even after his speeches were typed and mimeographed, there would be notes written all over the margins. As a press copy of the speech shows, the refrain of “I have a…
