What are we doing here?

Damn it, I've started a Substack

Well, I did it. I looked at the flaming chaos swirling around us and thought to myself, “You know what our world needs right now? Another guy with a Substack.”

So here we are. And since we’re here, here’s a quick word about me, and then one about this Substack.

I work as the director of the Climate Accountability Project at Public Citizen, where I lead a program advocating for the criminal prosecution of Big Oil companies for their climate crimes. I used to do politics and organizing, and served two terms in the Rhode Island General Assembly, where I spearheaded the passage of paid sick days, minimum wage increases, solitary confinement reform, and community solar legislation. I also lost two close races for higher office, which sucked.

I have opinions — particularly about the law, the climate crisis, and the failures of the Democratic Party establishment — that I sometimes write down. I’m a contributing editor at The New Republic, and my work has also appeared in The Nation, Rolling Stone, The Lever, Jacobin, Newsweek, Slate, Dissent, The Boston Globe, MSNBC, Common Dreams, Balls and Strikes, Ecology Law Quarterly, Environmental Law Journal, and The Harvard Environmental Law Review. But I’ve realized that now and then I have things I want to say without the shaving-off-the-hard-edges influence of an editor. I’d love to share those things here on this Substack.

A note on the title of this Substack. It is a phrase I have tattooed on my arm.

This is a line from a novel you may have heard of called Huckleberry Finn. It’s a controversial book, both for some dumb reasons, and for the very good reason that its last third is total garbage. But its first two-thirds include, in my opinion, some of the best pages in all of American literature. And as all the Huckheads out there will know, the title of this Substack constitutes the moral climax of Huckleberry Finn. The whole book, Huck’s been struggling between his own moral intuition that he should help his friend Jim escape from slavery, and what he’s been taught by the deformed society around him — that helping an enslaved person run away is a serious and damning sin. Huck at last decides to stop “sinning” and writes a note on a piece of paper to rat Jim out to his former slaveowner.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking — thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time; in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him agin in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell” — and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.

So, anyways, if any of that sounds interesting, feel free to subscribe to see some more of it. Thanks!