Katha Pollitt

1 month ago | thenation.com | Katha Pollitt

How Far Will 8 Years of Trump Set Back American Women? The president and his cronies are committed to rolling progress back to the Stone Age. The effects could outlast his second term.

Jan 14, 2025 | thenation.com | Katha Pollitt

Subject to Debate / January 14, 2025 Let’s Cool It With the Hot TakesMuch of the immediate commentary on the election turned out to be wrong. If we want to avoid the same outcome in the future, we’d better slow down. Ad Policy (Getty) This article appears in the February 2025 issue, with the headline “More Heat Than Light.”First thing on that dark, dark morning after Election Day, I woke up and e-mailed my editor at The Nation to ask if I could write about why Trump had won.

Jan 7, 2025 | libertiesjournal.com | Katha Pollitt |Jake Harrison

Sunrise lines a cloud: flamingo silk in an old fur coat. Seagulls catch the wind like scraps of paper. She’s been up for hours, wrapped in her old plaid bathrobe. Migraine. Lightning flashes behind her eyelids. She drinks her coffee and writes: the tattered world. Later there will be champagne and candlelight Phone calls from overseas. She’ll watch the full moon rise over the blue deeps and write a dreaming Fury. Who said to kill yourself for a man Is a waste of a good suicide?

Jan 7, 2025 | libertiesjournal.com | Katha Pollitt |Jake Harrison

Ripe olives drop from the tree, grapes glow green in the sun, bursting, already smelling a little of decay. A thousand miles away, the emperor slogs through mud with his grumbling soldiers. His son is worthless, possibly insane. At night in his tent he writes of odd accidental pleasures: bread splitting its crust in the oven — why do we love it? — and urges himself to embrace his fate, like a rock in the ocean, waves boiling.

Jan 7, 2025 | libertiesjournal.com | Katha Pollitt |Jake Harrison

My witchy hair so furious and alive stands up and crackles like a scratched 78 Galli-Curci singing from the moon Sempre libera! It’s an owl’s nest twigs and feathers and bones and rain a straw broom forgotten in a corner but still capable of spontaneous combustion so watch out. There’s joy in taking your final shape if it’s what you’re meant to be. Who needs color anyway when the ocean in winter is so voracious and so beautiful?