Between a Rock and a Hard Place – On age, the presidency, and mistaking corruption for confusion.

The world is ending, so I went to the place where it began.

One and a half billion years ago, Earth exploded and left the remains in Missouri.

This occurred in the Precambrian Era: before skeletons and sexual reproduction and oxygen, before anything but heat-strewn rock that flowed like rivers of blood. Earth exploded as if in revolt against itself, magma molding into subterranean formations. When erosion wore down the lithosphere, resigning the planet to bearing life, those formations rose to the surface and stayed there.

This is why it is called Mother Earth. You bleed pointlessly for what feels like eons until one day, beautiful creatures emerge from inside, so perfect you wonder how they came from that wreck they call the core.

But they’re here, and you enjoy their company.

I admire Sarah Kendzior's tireless, almost Cassandra-like reporting on the coup ambitions of far-right US politics, and I no less admire her powerful, poignant language.