Dear Friends and Family of Caitlin:
Caitlin passed away at 1 am this morning in the Lurie Children's Hospital PICU. We never left her side, and she was made comfortable for her last 10 hours. She listened to David Bowie, Neko Case, and the New Pornographers. 1/4

Capitalism's Big Lie in four words: 'There is no alternative.' Looters use this lie for cover, insisting that they're hard-nosed grownups living in the reality of human nature, incentives, and facts (which don't care about your feelings).

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'A ghost in fiction represents unfinished business [...] or other forms of personal growth to move on.

Except when it doesn’t.'

today!

Ghosts vs. Ghosts and the Shift from Traditional Hauntings by M L Clark

read it here 🥀

psychopomp.com/ghosts-vs-ghos…

Today for OnlySky, I turn to an essay by Simone Weil on how the fight for personhood through political collectives failed our shared humanity.

What truly matters to the human condition?

Our ability to suffer.

Can we ever build a politics to match? onlysky.media/mclark/the-myt…

Today's piece felt too important for a paywall. Here I talk about Colombia's Total Peace, & the role of oil imperialism not just with climate but also when binding us to a different theory of power.

For peace, we must remember how deep our war wounds run. open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/…

Today's OnlySky news brief on COP28 contextualizes the Sultan's recent 'no science' remarks within a long history of climate conferences overrun by Big Oil.

How can we tackle the climate crisis when we can't even say the words we need to at COP28?
onlysky.media/mclark/cop28-h…

Today I have a deep dive for OnlySky. Human rights and crimes against humanity, especially in war, were only recently codified well. We've still barely scratched the surface on what we owe each other.

Can we ever build a truly humanitarian world?
onlysky.media/mclark/no-mons…

Recent reports about Saudi Arabia pursuing oil growth have been pitched as a revelation when they are anything but. In today's news brief for OnlySky, I explore how we allowed oil-rich countries to exacerbate the #ClimateCrisis in the first place.
onlysky.media/mclark/saudi-a…

Super love when someone asks about a story of mine, then goes & buys the issue even though the story itself is free to read. Now *that's* supporting your authors - especially in an era when clarkesworld and other such story venues really need readers to invest in what they love!

This platform remains awful, so I'm not posting here much, but this piece might resonate with a few writers and other artists struggling. It looks at Vonnegut's Bluebeard to reflect on the brokenness of art in a broken world - and why we pursue it anyway.
mlclark.substack.com/p/if-your-art-…

Today for OnlySky I have an explainer that covers 30 years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from the Oslo Accords to now. I wrote this to illustrate why peace will be hard. Simply put: attempts have never been made with sufficient regional consensus. onlysky.media/mclark/from-os…

This one is for those struggling to manage feelings about horrible things others are saying in the middle of war. People's worst natures *are* coming out, and while this may not be avoidable, it's legitimate to be hurt. It is not wrong to be humanitarian. onlysky.media/mclark/when-al…

Today for OnlySky I reflect on #GlobalHumanism : How it champions individuality and shared humanity against anything that would divide us to do us harm. ID is a key part of human experience. But wherever an ID imposes harm, our species suffers for it. onlysky.media/mclark/the-str…

Today's piece for OnlySky is long, but necessary. It covers cognitive bias that war exacerbates, looks at histories of collective punishment & the complexity of breaking cycles of violence, & notes the failure of global systems to protect civilians. onlysky.media/mclark/moral-w…

We are still assessing the financial damage caused by Amazon closing its magazine subscription program. We know we've lost hundreds of subscribers in the process. If you were one of them, or were thinking of subscribing, here are your options:
clarkesworldmagazine.com/subscribe/

Today's newsletter draws on poetry & science fiction, to reflect on how humans bear up to times when evolutionary process cannot keep up with catastrophe.
Grief affirms our desire to rise above biology.
It is a strength, not a weakness, even in hard times. open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/…

My latest for Strange Horizons tackles a work of literary analysis that attempts to fit SF into a #History of #Philosophy that Hegel & Lukács applied to other narrative forms. This text doesn't achieve its goals, but does offer insight in other ways. #SFF
strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/sc…

In The Deadlands, Zattack The Block offers a reminder, in 'Sitting Shiva', that we should live so that the dead do not mourn us. Even for secular folk, it's a good reminder that loss should always reframe how much we value life, and seek its preservation. thedeadlands.com/issue-29/sitti…

Today for OnlySky, I summarize key ways to think about the news you're seeing around Israel and Gaza. There is always gamified media whenever the world falls apart. The goal is to retain the better parts of our humanity every single time it does. onlysky.media/mclark/war-aga…

Hi holdouts! Today's newsletter builds on my 'Global Finance' podcasts. The first part, free to read, explores the dehumanization in SCOTUS cases. Then for paid readers, arbitration: a major forum for contract disputes in the global backdrop, changing law. mlclark.substack.com/p/the-great-bi…