25 Hay Festival

Human-made climate change has resulted from a failure of the imagination—our failure to collectively imagine our own future, as well as a failure to imagine the reality that millions of people are already facing (in Bangladesh, where I come from, millions have already been displaced because of rising sea levels). Perhaps if there were consequences for us, rather than just for faceless others we read about in newspapers, we might change our own habits and campaign for more structural changes. Perhaps we should all be required to provide homes for people who have been displaced because of our contributions to climate change. People have taken in refugees in so many other moments in history—why not this one.

I try not to be too happy—darkness makes for better writing.

Yes
Religion requires a passionate participation in the system of belief (ie worship and prostletyzing), but an utter lack of participation in the foundations of the beliefs themselves (ie the sacred texts). Democracy, in order to succeed, must be a robustly collective, argumentative, participatory act. The two must be kept apart.

Corruption, deep structural misogyny, and religious bigotry.

Book: Sultana’s Dream, by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (written in 1905 by a Bengali Muslim woman, it is one of the earliest depictions of a feminist utopia).
Film: The Clay Bird, a feature film set in a Bangladeshi madrasa, by the brilliant Tareque Masud
Album: Glen Gould’s second recording of the Goldberg Variations, completed just weeks before his death.