Something Old, Something New

And a special discount for you!

First, my gratitude. 2025 has been a tumultuous year. Like many, I am worn to the bone. I have not taken a week off since 2024, due to my book The Last American Road Trip coming out in April and because I am the only person creating this newsletter. I like it this way — original research, original writing, original photography, my paywall-free and anti-AI business model — but it is a lot of work.

There’s a song called “Devil’s Got the Blues” by 1920s St. Louis singer Lonnie Johnson that nails my state of mind: “My brains is cloudy, my soul is upside down.” If I don’t sound like myself in this post, that is the reason why.

Due to exhaustion, I am taking a week off. I will return later this month.

But even in this sad time, I am very grateful. The highlight of 2025 has been engaging with my readers: both in person on book tour, and also here in the comments. It is such a joy hearing from you. It keeps me going emotionally and keeps my family going financially. I don’t believe in paywalls in time of peril, and I rely on voluntary paying subscribers to keep this newsletter afloat.

That’s why I’m offering this Gratitude Discount for the week I’m gone. You will get 20% off if you sign up to be a paying subscriber between now and July 18! The discount lasts for an entire year. This button here should get the job done.

Becoming a paid subscriber ensures I can keep my archives accessible to all, regardless of a reader’s income. At this point, there are nearly a hundred free articles.

Speaking of, I’m not leaving you with nothing! Below are two sections: my favorite six articles from 2025, and six articles I wrote a decade ago that remain relevant now. Some of these articles shaped my 2020 book Hiding in Plain Sight -- which is on sale for $2.99 as an ebook until July 11. That deal applies anywhere ebooks are sold, including Bookshop, Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and other vendors. (I know, I’m full of discounts today.)

With no further ado, here are six articles from 2016-2017, and six from 2025:

We’re heading into dark times. This is how to be your own light in the Age of Trump | The Correspondent (11/18/16). This is the most popular article I ever wrote. It is full of advice on how to survive this era. “Do not accept brutality and cruelty as normal even if it is sanctioned. Protect the vulnerable and encourage the afraid. If you are brave, stand up for others. If you cannot be brave — and it is often hard to be brave — be kind.”

Trumpmenbashi | The Diplomat (3/22/16). This was my first long article about Trump as a potential autocrat, using the authoritarian kleptocracies of Central Asia as a guide. Who says that Central Asian Studies program you gutted isn’t useful, Indiana University?! “The ultimate goal of the spectacular state is the restriction of the public sphere, where all ideas of culture and heritage are either filtered through — or respond to — the narrative of the state, ruled by a dictator who has developed a cult of personality. The nation becomes a brand; the dictator, a brand ambassador; the people, a captive audience.”

Our fate was sealed long before November 8 (and not because the election’s rigged) | The Correspondent (11/3/16). [Note: I did not write the title!] This piece describes the rise of white supremacist violence and militias and tells the story of St. Louis abolitionist journalist Elijah Lovejoy: “By 1837, Elijah Lovejoy knew he was going to be killed. ‘If the laws of my country fail to protect me,” he wrote shortly before he was murdered, ‘I appeal to God, and with him I cheerfully rest my cause. I can die at my post, but I cannot desert it.’”

Be afraid: Trump may have bought the Fourth Estate | The Globe and Mail (9/6/16). From 2016-2020, I was a columnist at the Globe and Mail. After 2020, I left to focus on books. To my annoyance, all my work there is now paywalled, so I have posted the Web Archive version. Paywalls have marred collective memory of Trump’s first campaign and term. This early article describes the chokehold Trump has on the media: “Trump gleefully brags about his insider knowledge of the media industry. Given his 40 years working in or with the media, he likely has secrets that could destroy careers. Trailing in the polls, Trump is planning to launch his own media empire should he lose the election. Some U.S. journalists appear to be auditioning. Others seem scared into silence. Americans in general should also be afraid. Mr. Trump, who spent his life buying buildings, appears to have bought the Fourth Estate.”

Trump’s America, where even park employees have become enemies of the state | The Guardian (1/29/17). This piece on the threat to the national parks system could have been written last week: a damning indicator of the corruption and inertia of the past eight years. “That Trump targeted the parks is significant in that it displays total disregard for public opinion. His administration is not even making a pretense of assuaging the public that it is acting in their interest, as even authoritarian states often do. Instead, it is acting quickly and brutally, leaving fundamental questions about citizens’ health, safety and national security unanswered. America was a superpower; we were always big and loud and brazen. As an autocracy, it seems, we shall be so as well.”

It’s Already Happened Here | The Baffler (2/19/17). “Those asking ‘Why?’ as they seek to understand the motivation of the leader and his lackeys are better off asking ‘Why not?’ There is little ideological coherency behind the Trump administration other than sadism, expressed most acutely through racism and xenophobia, and a kleptocratic desire to strip the country down and sell off its spare parts. Trump and his inner circle of trusted advisers will do what they like, regardless of what the law decrees—unless they are stopped by it.”

And now for 2025! I am grateful for the reader support that allows me to write freely:

The Confluence: “I don’t know how much more of a favor you can do for someone than tell the future in advance, other than forgive them when they don’t believe you. A warning is a form of compassion. The reception to a warning is an indicator of how you are valued. I was among many, many people who warned of this crisis, which will hurt the most vulnerable among us first. It was often the vulnerable doing the warning. The problem is that when people are late to understand the original warning, a new crisis has already emerged from the delay, requiring new understanding and new solutions. The continual refusal to grasp that time is the autocrat’s greatest weapon is what destroys the possibility of defeating him.”

The Black Place: “I want to go back, but that’s the American mantra. No matter the place, the time, the reason — everyone wants to go back, because the new forward is a void. You can’t hold forward in your hands. Forward is looser than dust. When it comes to The Black Place or The Nowhere-Place, I choose The Black Place.”

The Craftsman: “Sometimes the best weapon is to be underestimated. History’s self-appointed winners have poor survival skills because they inherit power through family wealth and live in bubble worlds. They fear ingenuity because they have none. That’s why they build robots to tell them what to think and sell destruction as ‘disruption.’ The robots are supposed to replace us, not them. But only someone who wanted to be replaced would crave such technology. Men of scripted reality, men of cults and mafias, men who are nothing more than memes. You see it in every empire, this dearth of creativity and its twin outcomes: wreckage and theft. We will feel our own misery as a result of theirs — which is why I’ve learned to make a basket when I want to make a noose.”

Heat Exhaustion: “The earth is screaming. It has heat exhaustion. I do too, as I write this out, ride this out, waiting for the sun to set. Waiting for the sun to set on plutocrat thieves, waiting for the sun to set me free. Waiting for the day I greet sunrise not with dread at uncertain hours, but relief at the dawn of possibility.”

Searching for Bobbie Gentry: “When a woman has an unconventional hit, the reaction is often to try to contain her, even sabotage her. Success does not protect female writers — not even from their own publishers.”

And because these excerpts sound bleaker than the whole, the crux of the matter:

The Miners: “It’s not that my heart’s not in it. It’s that my heart is in everything.”

I’ll be back! And thank you.

--Sarah

I took this photo while kayaking under a St. Louis bridge.