YouSaid · the spoken record

Rebecca Solnit

lines on the record: 52
first: 2026-06-28
most recent: 2026-06-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Things changed and here's what they looked like before, but I wanted to do a book length version of it because I wanted a bigger toolbox, a more substantial version of what that meant. And it felt like the crises of these times also feel really different if you recognize that what the global right white nationalist right, misogynist right is doing is backlash trying to get back to their version of the good old days which are the bad old days for the global majority of us. So I wanted to look at those accomplishments at how profoundly things have changed at the writer's backlash and give people that baseline on a world before feminism gay right spatial justice indigenous uprisings decolonization. Environmental awareness, climate action, the renewables revolution because all these things have a recent history”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and You know somewhere in that book I say I often feel like a tortoise at a mayfly party in that I often think in terms of years, decades, you know, multiple decades, which is a scale on which change actually takes place, but I so often find that people don't have those memories, you know, they think feminism didn't change anything, which is staggeringly inaccurate to the profundity of difference in women's status now than in say nineteen sixty. They don't remember that so many of the rights, the environmental protections, the change laws, the change culture we have is because people showed up and made the effort. So in a lot of essays I've written, I've tried to give people back that baseline, that sense of”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT