Monthly Muse: 6/2025
Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation
Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Here’s the June 2025 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published since last month’s Monthly Muse
Contemplation
This month, I co-hosted a Substack Meetup in Mumbai with
. There are a wide range of interesting writers who have joined the platform in India. It was great to reconnect with and meet some of them, including , , , and , as well as those who are avid readers or just beginning to explore Substack.In case you missed it, I also published “The Useful Altruists” this month on Handful of Earth. This is a piece I wrote ten years ago with Stephanie McMillan on the topic of NGOs, foreign aid, and paid activism. Have a look if you’re curious to read some of my older writing with new commentary.
Provocation
“People talk about what we can do to aid Africa, and this is, again, a kind of new paternalism. I don’t know what we can do to aid Africa or Latin America or Asia. But I do know what this source can do for us. They will survive with our help or without it. They are really our opportunity. We have been smothered, and really, let’s not talk about the public life which mirrors it, but only consider, consider the private life. Consider what is happening in those streets today to our young. To all our young. How is it that this country can only produce so demoralized a generation? And this generation is imitating its elders. They are doing what they have seen their elders do. And what their elders have been doing since they have been on earth is taking nothing seriously. Now there are some things which must be taken seriously. The nation that doesn’t take them seriously, the person who doesn’t take them seriously, can only perish.”
—James Baldwin, “One Minute to Twelve”
I remember your piece with Stephanie McMillan. Now it can be said, you were ahead of your time.