Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit’s books include Orwell’s Roses and the co-edited climate anthology Not Too Late.

Seeing cars​ with no human inside move through San Francisco’s streets is eerie enough as a pedestrian, but when I’m on my bicycle I often find myself riding alongside them, and from that vantage point you catch the ghostly spectacle of a steering wheel turning without a hand. Since August, driverless cars have been available as taxis hailed through apps but I more often see...

Letter

The Right to Sex

22 March 2018

I was reading Amia Srinivasan’s essay about ‘the right to sex’ and enjoying it very much when I ran into a surprise (LRB, 22 March). ‘Rebecca Solnit,’ she writes, ‘reminds us that “you don’t get to have sex with someone unless they want to have sex with you," just as “you don’t get to share someone’s sandwich unless they want to share their sandwich with you." Not getting a bite...

From Lying to Leering: Penis Power

Rebecca Solnit, 19 January 2017

Hillary Clinton was all that stood between us and a reckless, unstable, ignorant, inane, infinitely vulgar, climate-change-denying white-nationalist misogynist with authoritarian ambitions and kleptocratic plans. A lot of people, particularly white men, could not bear her, and that is as good a reason as any for Trump’s victory. Over and over again, I heard men declare that she had failed to make them vote for her. They saw the loss as hers rather than ours, and they blamed her for it, as though election was a gift they withheld.

Letter

Get off the bus

20 February 2014

It was a mistake for the editors to announce my essay about San Francisco on the cover with the words ‘Go back to Palo Alto’. Palo Alto is not where the big tech companies have their headquarters and isn’t mentioned anywhere in the piece.

Diary: Get Off the Bus

Rebecca Solnit, 20 February 2014

The young woman at the blockade was worried about the banner the Oaklanders brought, she told me, because she and her co-organisers had tried to be careful about messaging. But the words FUCK OFF GOOGLE in giant letters on a purple sheet held up in front of a blockaded Google bus gladdened the hearts of other San Franciscans. That morning – it was Tuesday, 21 January – about fifty locals were also holding up a Facebook bus: a gleaming luxury coach transporting Facebook employees down the peninsula to Silicon Valley. A tall young black man held one corner of the banner; he was wearing a Ulysses T-shirt.

The frontispiece to this biographical study is an unknown photographer’s portrait of the bearded Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) taken in about 1872. He sits awkwardly hunched on a crate...

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