Monday, April 24, in Brooklyn: The Universe in Verse – an evening of poems celebrating great scientists and scientific discoveries, read by beloved actors, writers, and musicians (including Rosanne Cash, Amanda Palmer, Brandon Stanton of Humans of New York, Tavi Gevinson, Jad Abumrad of Radiolab, Sam Beam of Iron & Wine, astrophysicist Janna Levin, poet Elizabeth Alexander, and more) – essentially an elaborate protest against the defunding of science and the arts: All proceeds from tickets are being donated to the Academy of American Poets and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

More information here. 

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The Ungrateful Refugee – Dina Niyeri’s stirring Guardian essay about how immigrants are perceived in an increasingly nativist world.

Complement with Hannah Arendt, writing seven decades earlier and just as relevant today, on the immigrant plight for identity and the meaning of “refugee.”

Hannah Arendt, writing half a century ago and timely as ever, on human nature vs. culture, what equality really means, and how language confers reality upon our experience. 

On World Poetry Day, Adrienne Rich on the political power of poetry and its role in the immigrant experience. 

Rebecca Solnit’s magnificent manifesto for breaking our silences as our mightiest weapon against oppression. 

Our Political Emotions – philosopher Martha Nussbaum on taming our raging reactivity and nurturing our noblest civic selves, an immensely insightful and lucid perspective on our disorienting political moment. 

This 1969 children’s book on “how our government helps us” gives so much pause today.

Enormously important, unprecedented letter to the President from 24 United States Senators, including Bernie Sanders, outlining how defunding the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities – which is Trump’s plan – will assault creative culture and the very fabric of American society. 

Since its inception in 1965, the NEA alone has given away $46 million in grants to writers. For a writer, an NEA grant can make the difference between taking a year off to complete a book and toiling at a day job. It isn’t hard to imagine that without these grants, some of the most important writers of the past half-century may have never published the works for which they are now beloved. (Among them was Audre Lorde, who spoke up passionately for the importance of arts funding.) 

Letter scans courtesy of the Academy of American Poets, who organized the initiative.

“To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men.”

Amanda Palmer reads an astonishingly prescient 1914 protest poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, with music by Jherek Bischoff. Poem text and the story behind its rediscovery here. 

An extraordinary 1953 letter of resistance by biologist, writer, and environmental science patron saint Rachel Carson, which could’ve been written today.

Hannah Arendt, writing in the wake of the Holocaust and spectacularly timely today, on the normalization of evil and our only effective antidote to it. 

So much timely wisdom on Joseph Brodsky’s 1987 speech about our greatest antidote to evil. 

Hannah Arendt on Jewishness, the immigrant plight for identity, and the meaning of “refugee” – wisdom from the 1940s, which applies with extraordinary pertinence and poignancy to today, particularly in the context of Trump’s atrocious Muslim Ban. 

Rachel Carson, the writing of Silent Spring, and the culture-shifting courage of speaking inconvenient truth to power – the story of the extraordinary woman who catalyzed the modern environmental consciousness and whose hard-won legacy is now being threatened anew by vile political and corporate forces.