Look how the sidewalk rises to meet your feet

with the gentleness of mothers. The splendor

of spring trees in fuchsia bloom is yours alone.

“‘Well, if you want someone to run in the primary, I’m your man!’ he exclaimed. ‘A man with no proper sense of himself—a man with nothing inside, who could therefore be all things to all people. Ahahahaha.’ He was moved to laughter by his own eloquence, by what he felt to be the truth and the transformative power of what he was saying, to the one person who could get it.”

A few years ago, I was brought on board by a New York-based publishing house to be a fiction editor. My first assignment was, instead, a book about Trump’s relationship to Russia.

“It’s in making note of the variety of seemingly timeless strategies used by rising authoritarian regimes to create fissures in the foundations of democratic governments that cause them eventually to crumble.”

The phenomenon that is “Trump” is a manifestation of patriarchal whiteness—the ghost still animating imperial and post-colonial machines—and its present incarnation carries the force of State violence to compel its attendant vision.

Everyone thinks they know what love is, but most have no clue. Reading hooks' works on love, you’ll likely discover, for the most part, that nobody loves you. Not your family, not your friends, not your “lover.” You also might discover that you don’t love anyone either.