What to Read Next: July 25, 2025
Issue #386, the case for hope
Happy Friday, readers!
Today I’m sharing a review that I originally published a few years ago; Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark is one of the books that comes to mind when the news gets especially grim or divisive or even just overly cynical. It’s a book that everyone should read and remember. Ultimately, hope is not dependent on circumstances, but on our own willingness to choose it.
A quick programming note: this week’s newsletter is a little shorter than usual. Blame an especially busy summer week of adventures.
Have a great weekend and please let me know what you’re reading! I love to hear.
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit
“Joy is itself an insurrectionary force against the dreariness and dullness and isolation of everyday life.”
Before encountering this slim volume, I hadn’t read any of historian and activist Rebecca Solnit’s work. Over the course of more than 20 books, she’s written about feminism, climate change, literature, society, philosophy, and more.
In Hope in the Dark, Solnit makes the compelling case that the world needs and deserves a little more hope.
As a naturally optimistic guy, I loved it.
In a series of essays, Solnit lays out why optimism is more and more needed as things get bleaker, as well as how to cultivate that elusive quality. As a long-time activist, she has more reason than most to dwell in cynicism. And yet she remains generally hopeful about the state of our world and, more importantly, our ability to change it for the better.
Solnit’s earnest writing was a breath of fresh air in a culture saturated by sarcasm, memes, and pessimistic outlooks. That’s not to say she doesn’t acknowledge the darkness of our world; it’s more that there are shafts of light to be found and explored within the shadows.
I have no problem recommending this book to everyone. Hope in the Dark is an eager and confident call to action to bring more hope and light into our dark and cynical age.
Let me close by sharing a few of my favorite quotes — it’s telling that I took more pages of notes from these 184 pages than any book I’ve read in the last few years.
“I believe in hope as an act of defiance . . . There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul.”
“To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.”
“Despair demands less of us, it's more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.”
“And maybe this is what heroism looks like nowadays: occasionally high-profile heroism in public but mostly just painstaking mastery of arcane policy, stubborn perseverance year after year for a cause, empathy with those who remain unseen, and outrage channeled into dedication.”
In the News: RIP Hulk Hogan
This section offers a book recommendation based on recent headlines, to help you make sense of the world with a bit more depth and context rather than just clickbait.
Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday
I read this book in 2018, shortly after it was published, and it has certainly stuck with me. Holiday is known as the Stoicism guy, but this might be his best bit of storytelling and journalism. The legal battle between Hogan and Gawker was fascinating, but the deeper insights into secrecy and hidden power are what elevated it to another level. Give it a shot — it’s a surprising and compelling page-turner that happens to be 100% true.
Thanks so much for reading. Be good to each other.
-Jeremy
I love Rebecca Solnit. Thanks for the reminder of this book. There is hope!