1. I’m trying not to read everyone’s outrage, which keeps throwing gas on my own fire of outrage, but this quote from Kate Manne talking about misogyny is going to live in my head forever:
They don’t necessarily want women to go septic and die in parking lots, denied life-saving reproductive care in case it constitutes an abortion—a reality that Trump deliberately and proudly ushered into being. But if that’s the price of a cheaper tank of gas, or being able to afford a bigger house, or run a more profitable business, then they’ll willingly pay it
2. But enough of that! I’m going to refer to “planting iris” a lot in the future, I think. From Leonard Woolf’s Downhill All The Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939, via Austin Kleon:
One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler—the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers… Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.” Last March, twenty-one years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.