a fugitive is more than someone who runs away
a place for people seeking refuge from the news, not from the moral moment.
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Someone recently asked me if I felt there was an effective way to stay informed without feeling battered by headlines, if there was a way to know what’s important when everything feels important.
There are people who’ve responded to this tension by turning up the news. There are others who’ve responded by turning it off.
But: I’d argued we’re in a moment when everything is important. It’s important to understand what laying off tens-of-thousands of federal workers will do to the services the government provides the public. It’s important to understand the implications of I.C.E apprehending a green card-holding pro-Palestinian protester without a criminal conviction.
It’s important to understand Elon Musk’s conflicts of interest as the effective head of the entity DOGE. As well as President Donald Trump’s. To understand what cuts to science funding mean for the future of research in areas like cancer, diabetes, suicide, and heart disease. What our failure to prepare for and nimbly respond to infectious disease outbreaks means for the possibility of another pandemic. What it means that the President appears to have defied a federal judge’s order to return Venezuelan detainees to the U.S. For major universities to overhaul protest policies in hopes of winning back millions in funding the administration has promised to cut. What it means to be in a constitution crisis.
When we turn away, we relinquish agency. We renounce the capacity to respond. Democracy depends on that call and response.
This doesn’t mean absorbing absolutely everything. Emotionally, physically, tangibly, you cannot absorb everything—not at this speed, not on this scale.
So what do you do? How do you find refuge from the news without fleeing from the moral demands of this moment?
As a journalist who must be fully present yet impartial to our political reality, I’ve been searching for a way to step back without disengaging. There are amazing reporters covering how the Trump administration is reshaping the country and the world. This newsletter isn’t that. It’s not focused on the tiktok but instead on what philosopher Albert Camus called the Human Crisis—a universal question of morality, a commitment to humanity.
But this aim just didn’t fit the tone or promise of this newsletter. So, I’m starting a new one called Fugitive. It’ll feature short essays meditating on a word that connects to this moment: Imagination, Despair, Community, Paralysis, Freedom.
Grounding each essay in a single word felt like an antidote to the overwhelm, like something I could manage to write and something you might manage to read.
Even before pinning down the specifics of this newsletter, I knew what I wanted that first essay to focus on: hope.
After all, one word can be wildly loaded.
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