"midnight gold"

Friday Seven // 0008

// 1. Hello and a brief introduction: this is a newsletter called "Friday Seven," written by me, Melissa Gira Grant, journalist and author, to record seven things that are still on my mind as the week runs down. Welcome back. I've been putting my newsletter time into working on my new book, called A Woman Is Against the Law, which will be published by Little, Brown. I'm also a staff writer at The New Republic, where I've spent the past five years reporting on all that is under attack (again), which is not really a "beat," but is how it looks to me. You can find me most often on Bluesky, but not right now; I'm taking a break to stay a few days more with my book (for a sense of what that can look like, here's a run of posts from my last long book leave) until I return to TNR next week.

// 2. A rapid-fire rundown of some of what I've been storing up to send, as a series of questions on recent events: "Why did Elon Musk go after bunkers full of seeds?"; "What's the matter with abundance?"; "How can we memorialize what we’re losing to climate change?"; "Is it safe to travel with your phone right now?"; "How can we find a way not to betray the future?"

// 3. "The reason to oppose Trump’s violation of court orders is not out of a general faith in judges or constitutional norms." Aziz Rana, in the New Left Review, calling for "norm-breaking from the left, but on behalf of democracy," for "civil disobedience of judicial authority."

// 4. "The fetishization of law and order as the foil to fascism falls flat when so many of the U.S. government’s deadly injustices are legal." Kelly Hayes and Maya Schenwar, in the Boston Review, calling on us to "dismantle the lie that criminalization safeguards democracy and ensures our safety."

// 5. Reading Derek Jarman's Modern Nature, on creating his garden on the sea in Dungeness in his 47th and 48th years. (I had to do some math on my hands and realized as I started reading it I am also 47. It’s an age that feels invented.) My garden is settling in, after its first drenching May rain, and some cold that seems rare. Here in Zone 7, we do not appear to have much in common with the rocky beach (the shingle) in sight of a nuclear power plant where Jarman grew rosa mundi, pelargoniums (only in a red that's hard to find), and sky blue borage. (Ed. note: I did plant a sky blue borage, but it was the only one out of the six annuals I had delivered last week from an online nursery that did not make it, and they've no more until next year. If you have a line on a sky blue borage plant, lmk.)

// 6. Hand-selected and a ward of protection against an age of algorithms, with lots of static: Midnight Radio.

// 7. The Zebra Sarasa Clip Gel Pen in Vintage Sepia Black (no kickbacks, just a link).

Thanks for reading. Those are all photos from my garden. You are still here.