"Despair is a black leather jacket in which everyone looks good, while hope is a frilly pink dress few dare to wear. Rebecca Solnit thinks this virtue needs to be redefined.

Here she takes to our pulpit to deliver a sermon that looks at the remarkable social changes of the past half century, the stories the mainstream media neglects and the big surprises that keep on landing.

She explores why disaster makes us behave better and why it's braver to hope than to hide behind despair's confidence and cynicism's safety.

History is not an army. It's more like a crab scuttling sideways. And we need to be brave enough to hope change is possible in order to have a chance of making it happen."

"Path believes that it can make performative, broadcast behavior intimate.

That is: by limiting the number of connections, but shaping their nature, by imbuing the entirety of their product with a substantiality and a quality that emphasizes real human engagement, they can create an intimate network.

But there can be no such thing; real intimacy can never, ever be broadcast. It must be either one-to-one or one-off."

"…rather than email our wedding invitations, we make use of ludicrously anachronistic methods in obedience not solely to tradition, but to this principle: efficiency is the enemy of intimacy.

Path is an incredibly easy way to efficiently share life’s moments with your closest friends and family in a centralized way, and for that reason it subverts its own premise, which always makes me sad; it’s beautiful work in service to a flawed idea. Any broadcast is inauthentic; a general audience kills intimacy; there is no such thing as a static social network of quality."

"Scroogenomics author says bad gifts cost the world economy $25-billion ... “A spectre has been haunting the rich economies of the west, and that spectre is wasteful gift-giving.”...His favourite option is giving to charity – he is a fan of a gift card in the United States that allows the recipient to choose which non-profit gets the money, “to act like a rich person,” he says. He proposes that gift cards should come with an expiry date, after which the unused balance would go to charity rather than just back into the retailer's pocket. But he concedes: “I am told by some shrewd people that's as likely as world peace.”