JOHNSTONE

It doesn’t have to be this way. Nowhere is it inscribed upon the fabric of reality that control of the world must be ceded to the dumbest, crudest and cruelest among us. Nowhere is it written in adamantine that our happiness and the fate of our biosphere must depend on what the market will bear. It’s one of those things that gets sillier and sillier the more you think about it, like making your bed or the Avatar sequel. We are giants who have been tricked into thinking we are insects. We are a dragon wearing a name tag being yelled at in a cubicle by a short man with a receding hairline whose wife is about to leave him. We could bite him in half at any time, or light him on fire like a child’s marshmallow on a stick, but instead we sit there taking it while his spittle frosts our cheeks, silently hoping that we are making the expected level of eye contact. There is a hungry wolf inside every wagging dog. Every tiger in every cage remembers the natural order of things, and reminds us now and then right when we are in the middle of our favorite sequined Vegas routine. We have galaxies and sorcery roiling within us. We have barbed wire wings beneath our sundresses waiting to be unfurled. The tiger show is over when we decide it is over. They can lock up Luigi, but they can’t lock up everyone. ___________ Reading by Tim Foley.

Drop Site News reports that more than 80 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF in Gaza since what we’re calling a “ceasefire” went into effect on the 19th of January. The majority have been in Rafah, a now completely destroyed city which the Biden administration had previously said was off limits for a major Israeli offensive. Reading by Tim Foley.

And this, ultimately, is why the world looks the way it looks: because powerful people have been so successful at manipulating the way the public thinks about things. Reading by Tim Foley.

And the liberals shriek about Donald Trump while the sky rains blackened skeletons And the capitalists surf on collapse like raptors on an updraft And we scurry back and forth between toil and distraction with pythons around our stomachs and mollusks in our mouths And we search achingly for our pilfered hearts inside bottles of pills and TED Talks And the amputated limbs of Ukrainian men and Palestinian children are draped about the fast food restaurants like Christmas tinsel And the billionaires turn the oceans into plastic so they can pay strangers to pretend to love them And men with rusty nail teeth push needles into babies to open up markets in the global south And the talking heads tell us the news but won’t tell us why the flesh is melting from their faces as they die of radiation poisoning And we cackle at parties and act like everything isn’t covered in oil and the bones of birds and fish And we beat back the revolution within ourselves with a chair and a whip for no other reason than because that’s how we were raised And the rotting corpse of the middle eastern woman in the corner is beginning to make you uncomfortable And the floorboards creak as something green and ancient moves below them And the platypus with mirror eyes is gazing at you from the dawn of the universe And your consciousness is consumed with the words “THERE ARE FATHOMS OF PEACE BENEATH THE WARS, AND A VAST WISDOM WINKS FROM BEHIND THE MADNESS” And you come at long last to stillness And you turn and face the world, palms open. Reading by Tim Foley.

The buzz around Xiaohongshu and then DeepSeek has had an unusually high volume of westerners speaking positively about China for the last couple of weeks, which of course means we're also seeing many westerners falling all over themselves to say "Well actually China is actually quite bad actually" in response. Reading by Tim Foley.

Both Jordan and Egypt have put out statements rejecting President Trump's proposal to "clean out" Gaza and move its population to those nations. Reading by Tim Foley.

They killed a two year-old girl in the West Bank on Saturday. Laila al-Khatib was shot in the head by Israeli forces in Jenin, because I guess they needed one more dead Palestinian kid. One more dead Palestinian kid to add to the mountain. One more small Palestinian face raining down upon us in our nightmares like meteors on the dinosaurs in the prequel to this apocalypse. One more screaming, blood-spattered mother. One more grandfather with boulders for feet carrying the tiny shrouded form of someone who should have buried him. It’s one more dead Palestinian kid. One more snowflake in the blizzard. And yet here I sit, mouth agape, a mortally wounded polar bear in my chest and a cry of despair turning into a ghost and leaving me silent and slack-jawed like an imbecile. I want to crawl into my childhood crib and fall asleep forever. I want to turn into a crystal punch bowl and fall and shatter on a marble floor. The air is full of flapping, and there’s seaweed in my hair. There’s an angel with a mushroom cloud head in my doorway. They killed a two year-old girl in the West Bank on Saturday, because I guess they needed another one. I write her name on some paper and send it off into the wind, and stride back into the suburban ghost town with my body on fire. Reading by Tim Foley.

Well that didn't take long. President Trump has said he wants to "clean out" Gaza and relocate its population to US client states Egypt and Jordan, which would of course be a textbook case of ethnic cleansing. Reading by Tim Foley.

They've arrested another pro-Palestinian journalist, this time in Switzerland. The Electronic Intifada's executive director Ali Abunimah has reportedly been detained by Swiss police in Zurich, after having been interrogated for an hour and released the previous day when entering the country. Abunimah, who is Palestinian-American, has played a leading role in exposing and critiquing the apartheid abuses of Israel for many years. Reading by Tim Foley.

Here in the thick of it, our eyes full of pixels and our veins full of microplastics, out here with the child amputees in Gaza and the frightened street schizophrenics in Los Angeles and the pigs living their whole lives in metal crates the size of their bodies, our lives ruled by algorithms and wealthy world eaters as we pray for a miracle on knees made of miracles with clasped hands made of miracles in a world made of miracles, craning our necks to see past the giant flashing signs saying "YOU ARE LOVED, YOU ARE LOVE" in order to find Defects and Inadequacy. In the thick of it, up to our ears in it, cracked wide open, wide open to the screams of mothers clutching tiny broken bodies, to the screams of men on fire, to the screams of dying coral reefs and rainforests, to the screams inside all of us saying "Something is wrong, something has gone very, very wrong," wide open to the agony but also to the beauty, to the booming holiness of the earth and the sky, to the mysteries hiding in abandoned buildings, to the noble pigeons whose pristine minds know nothing of Elon Musk, to that place of tenderness within all of us which we cover with shields and armor and feigned toughness and pretend confidence, feeling it all, letting it all in, the pain and the exaltation and the weight and the exuberance and the rage and the orgasms and the darkness and the light and the Israeli stormtroopers and their victims and the bank boys and the savage saints and that song within all of us calling us home saying "It's here! It's here! Buddha nature is here!", and blessing it all, my darling, blessing it all. Here in the thick of it, our hearts sliced open like gutted fish, we breathe in the air, exhaust fumes and all, and we realize with slowly widening eyelids that this, this is paradise. There is no Heaven but That which sits before us and beats within our chests and grows the grass and spins the galaxies, right this very waking moment, closer to us than our own skeletons which will one day be laid to rest in the soil of a revolving ball in a universe we never once in our lives understood. Reading by Tim Foley.