Top Highlights

• The phenomenon we confront is the worldwide equivalent of a forest fire, of the Blitz. We must react accordingly—with that same impulsive solidarity. Or, to restate this idea in terms of the other metaphor that has threaded through these pages: the only way to defeat the tiny but powerful coalition of meat hogs that is imperiling our whole communit...
• for that neighbor who’s in the same fix as we are—or care for her views on gun rights or his professed religion. It means resisting the impulse to hang him out to dry and cut a separate deal. It means finding remedies that benefit all members of the coalition—and are seen to do so—not just a subgroup. It means adopting the egalitarian ethos in our ...
• instincts—so threatened do many of us feel by those on the other sides of our various divides. Still, if we keep making up excuses for “our” meat hogs, they and their like will keep defeating us. Freeloaders would never be tolerated, whatever their political party or sexual orientation, in a flood or a group of shipwreck survivors. That is the mind...
• of opportunity had closed. I realized no one had any intention of carrying out any of these plans. What they wanted was a formula showing that some version of what they were already doing would solve the problem. And it wouldn’t. There will be no defeating this hydra without changing our
• It was during this same sixteenth century that the northern provinces of the Spanish Empire—today’s Netherlands and Belgium and a chunk of France—rose up against the Habsburg crown. In 1588, they declared an independent republic, along lines imitated two centuries later in America. Trade-based seafaring communities, with bustling towns like city-st...