The ideal job letter starts with a brilliant light. Then we realize that this brilliant light is actually sunlight, shafts of it, pouring through trees onto a thick bed of pine needles. Soft dusty resin floats in the sun shafts, invitingly. The smell of pine and sap rises from the forest floor. A twig snaps underfoot.

Job applications are an aesthetic event. They are performance art. They are not about proving you are smart - well, maybe your writing sample does that, but even then, the main point is to get an interview.

I'm the absolute worst at getting jobs, ever. I had 100 rejections before I landed one. I kept all the letters in a folder until I realized I could just chuck them away.

'Free speech' isn't speech at all if it's being used without listening, attention, or care.

It's very important that we keep our imagination, which is our capacity to open the future, awake at a time at which the urge to collapse into the fetal position is high.

American voting districts are, across a lot of the country, deeply messed up by having been gerrymandered by right-wing politicians.

The noises Russia makes on the world stage are deeply misogynist, homophobic and racist.

Since when did scientific evidence become a reason to shy away from ecological action just because it wasn't popular?

We like to think, in our anthropocentric way, that irony means that you transcended something, but actually, what it means is that you've realised that you're stuck in something, and you have this kind of uncanny awareness of that, and there's not much you can do about that feeling of stuckness.

I'm not unhappy with the idea of appealing to people's self-interest if that's what makes them understand something about the non-human world.