Patterns by Naomi Klein

As you might have heard, my country is on fire. Not only mine. There are massive fires breaking out across Europe, too. Pakistan is experiencing unfathomable heat. Next week, I’ll be posting specifically about heat, and collective policy responses. But for obvious reasons, today I am thinking about smoke. This isn’t the first time smoke from fires in Canada has engulfed the continent. It feels all too familiar. But back in 2017, it was different. Shocking.

I joined my first-ever livestream on Substack with Wajahat Ali, where we had a wide-ranging conversation from youth affordability in America to the emergence of Palestinian rights as a bipartisan issue in U.S. politics. We even talked about Elysium (an underrated movie in my opinion) and “the derangement syndrome” of bunkered billionaires. Here’s a short clip where we talk about that.

I recently had one of my regular Unshocked chats with Mehdi Hasan about Elon Musk in which we attempted to unpack how the world’s first trillionaire could also be one of the worst people in the world. Here I’d like to explain why that is far from coincidental. Most discussions of Musk keep these two sets of facts in separate boxes. In one, there’s Musk, the brilliant technologist-CEO who no one should ever bet against and whose net worth now fluctuates at the trillion-dollar mark.

I did my first Substack Live with THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali, and we talked about everything from tech fascism to Palestine and the connections between the two. I loved how wide-ranging the conversation was and how we were unencumbered by platform-imposed time limits. At the end, he surprised me by asking about Graham Platner, the now-former candidate for the U.S. Senate in Maine, and the short apology I had posted this week on Bluesky.