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I’ve done everything I can do. I’m registered and ready to vote this year in both the U.S. midterms (should they occur) and the Swedish elections. I’ve done a ton of volunteer political work. I call my reps all the time. There’s nowhere left to go from here for me.

Despite all that, the picture is dark, of course. We all know exactly how dark, so there’s no need to summarize. That is a change. Eighteen months ago, I would have felt like I would need to summarize my argument for making such a claim. No more.

Claire Berlinski’s recent piece, The Danger Interval, argues brilliantly that there’s a non-zero chance that we might all be dead in two years’ time. I read it through. Then, when I could breathe again, I read it again. I found nothing to contest. That’s a change, too.

Berlinski writes: “ ... I’ve said and written many times in recent years, that given the combination of catastrophic and existential risks we now face — almost all owed to astonishing new technological powers we have acquired but not mastered — there are grounds to worry that humanity will not survive this century.”

“But recently, on waking up, the thought came to me with uncommon force that all of these risks have become more acute, and the time we have left to mitigate them has contracted sharply. It may already be too late.”

You know you’ve had the thought. She said it.

How do we live with this knowledge?

I’ve run as far as I can run. I’ve got as many passports as I’m likely to get, which is to say two. I’ve prepared my children as well as I can prepare them for God knows what while keeping their sense of hope alive. I’ve organized my finances against collapse as well as I can. I have my supply of war food, as recommended by the Swedish government. I have lots of bottled water, a First Aid kit and a hand-cranked radio. I have tea lights, cash and hand sanitizer. I have wet wipes, extra batteries and a bug-out bag stuffed with passports, documents and cashew nuts. I have wine and chocolate.

Now we wait. We wait to see if the world will somehow respond to these imminent threats or no. Whether there will be generational change in the U.S., or not. Whether we will live.

Look: Whatever the fuck. There’s nothing further I can do. These kinds of problems have to be addressed at the government level and I am only one person.

Why do I feel a surge of hope?

I’d been thinking all summer about what I need these days. Not in order to feel safe — that ship has sailed. But to feel that I have a fighting chance. I realized I wanted to feel agile, that I could maneuver with speed. I wanted to drive up to Norrland, where no one is around and I can floor it. I wanted to drive south, around Skåne — especially Österlen — and feel the wind in my hair. I’ve ignored Germany my whole life because I don’t understand it, but now I was dying to drive the “fairytale route” from Hanau to Bremen. I wanted to drive to the Dolomites to see them at sunset. I wanted to keep moving until I know what is coming.

I decided to get my Swedish driver’s license. I haven’t done a comprehensive review, but people say Sweden’s is the hardest license in Europe to get. I am going to rise to the challenge.

When I applied for my learner’s permit, I found the questions are not like those in the States. In fact, I felt that Trafikverket, the Swedish Transport Administration, took things too far. Do you have an intellectual disability? Anything wrong upstairs? Any dementia? Narcolepsy? Disorders of consciousness? Nothing? Maybe a “surprising” attack of dizziness? No? No neurological diseases or motor tics? And then the question that stayed with me: Do you have any mental illness or disorder?

My God, who doesn’t? It’s a cesspool out there.

I passed my vision test by only one point. “For your safety and for the safety of others, I recommend that you get fitted for distance glasses,” the optician said. His lips were pressed together.

As with most things Swedish, on top of the intrusive questions, there will be daunting hoops to jump through, all interwoven with bureaucracy. In some respects, it mirrors the process in the U.S. Once you have your permit, you’ll need to practice by driving around with a certified instructor, even if you already know how to drive. You have to take a difficult multiple choice test and get 52 out 70 questions right (if you want to know if you’ve got what it takes to drive in Sweden, you can practice with driving videos). Then, finally, you have to take the driving test.

But before all of that, there’s the Risk course. The first part explores the potential consequences of alcohol, drugs, fatigue, and distractions like phones and other people. The second part, Risk 2, is terrifying, because it prepares you to deal with the ice. How? They take you to a remote road, made slick by either God or by man, and then they force you to spin out at different speeds.

I can barely endure thinking about this. I struggle with PTSD from my experience on 9/11. My trigger is the feeling that something is careening wildly out of control and that I have no power to stop it, no recourse at all. Or: Exactly the conditions this test will simulate. But if I have to take this test 100 times before I pass, as I expect, then I will. Because all of a sudden, I feel like I have a future again.

An unfathomable thing has happened lately. I can’t understand it, but I feel at peace. I feel like everything will be OK. I know that we are heading into a difficult stretch of years. We are going to have to fight. Most of us will suffer and some of us will die, I know. But I feel like eventually everything will be OK.

Is it just my reaction formation? Have I reached that point in despair where it can’t get any worse and so I begin to imagine that I love my oppressors? Or is it that maybe I am right, because the intuition that is whispering to me has never lied?

If you spin out on an icy road, the trick is not to brake. The trick is to let it happen. It’s counter-intuitive, of course, and so is the next bit: You should turn into the spin. Not only that, your turn should be proportionate to the spin’s severity. You need to meet it where it is. In the test, you’re supposed to control the spin in this way, but nothing now makes me think that I can.

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I’ll never forget the day I arrived here in Stockholm. My taxi pulled up to a 1925 stone building by a park. It had a birdcage elevator, a balcony overlooking the courtyard, high ceilings and parquet floors. “I’m in heaven,” I thought. The kids arrived a few days later, then the dog and then my husband. When school started a few weeks later, I thought that would be when real life began, but it wasn’t. I was in love with everything and I stayed in the dream for a long time.

That was seven years ago this week and the anniversary is hitting me hard. My first anniversary here passed unremarked, because it was the Summer of Covid. The five-year mark was a non-event, as we were sending our eldest away from home for the first time. But this one? I’m feeling it.

I think the seven-year itch is kicking in. My love affair with Stockholm is waning, overridden by the ice and the inwardness of the natives. It bothers me. My high school biology teacher said our cells constantly regenerate, so that in every seven-year cycle, they are completely new. So I guess I don’t have a single American cell left. But I already knew that: I’m not the same person who pulled up in that taxi. Life has changed. My eldest is at university. Our beautiful dog is in Valhalla. My youngest graduates next year. Perhaps I need to rotate the crops. Perhaps I need to lie fallow.

I’ve watched my native country dying for seven years. Now the hegemon has committed suicide and we could all drown in the blood.

Perhaps I have earned a sabbatical.

I’ve written before about how my decision to leave the U.S. was largely intuitive, how I just knew that it was time to get the hell out of there. But I couldn’t see huge parts of the context around that. For instance, I didn’t at the time understand that my nerves were fried to a crisp. Our family depended on my income and I had to keep the show going. That kind of pressure on me, a will o’ the wisp with a creative temperament, nearly killed me. I also sensed a grand conflict drawing near, something akin to a civil war. Everyone around me scoffed at that idea, like I was a wild-haired revolutionary, but I knew what I knew. I couldn’t see any counterweight to what was happening politically. And absolutely nobody was talking about any of it, which was really the death knell of the Republic and still is. When Trump won reelection in 2024, I knew that I’d been right. I knew that I’d never return to the United States.

This doesn’t go back in the box.

I guess I jumped ship just in time. Some analysts cite 2019 as the last normal year in the U.S. When I left, we still thought we had rights and privileges. We still thought tech was humanistic and that our institutions were robust and that our government was offering us a square deal. Gas and groceries were manageable enough and the 30-year fixed rate was at 3.6%. It was still a place of abundance. In many ways, my sense of the U.S. is trapped in amber; I still catch myself sometimes thinking of it as it was, but then I correct myself.

I got here and the next year would bring Covid. The long-festering political divide rupturing the country spilled into public view. If I’d stayed, I’d probably be a nervous wreck by now. My work would have definitely been vulnerable to the AI displacement and I’m not sure my husband’s business would have survived Covid and its aftermath.

For a while, during Biden’s term, I allowed myself to hope that the threat of democratic collapse was all in the past. But what has happened is worse than I expected. To know that it happened by design and through years of careful planning is hard to accept. In her essay, The End of Days Inn, Sarah Kendzior writes:

Biden was a Placeholder President designed to fill the four years between two terms of Trump while plutocrats shifted American political culture sharply to the right. Media gutted, Twitter decimated, activism destroyed, books censored, minorities demonized, public health annihilated, victims blamed, empathy scorned ... The most important thing about the election is not that Trump was proclaimed the winner, but that he was allowed to run. The second most important thing is who paid for it.

We all paid for it.

I am settled in. I have long since let go of the redemption fantasy that Sweden will save me. It’s just a country, but I think it’s a good one and it has allowed us a fantastic life. I think of my children’s eyes when our water taxi docked at our Venetian hotel on Halloween, party-goers in fantastic costumes milling around in the moonlight. I think of the party boat to Helsinki, where we belted out show tunes in the disco at 2 AM. My kids have gone all over the place, from Spain to Bulgaria, from Reykjavik to Bari. None of this would’ve happened if we’d stayed in Connecticut, I promise you.

I’ve got a Swedish passport now, so the EU is wide open. My original plan had been to move somewhere warmer when the kids were gone, ideally around the Mediterranean. But the warm places are too warm now. The EU lost more than 10,000 people to the June heat wave, with the elderly particularly vulnerable. At the beginning of this month, that death toll exceeded 25,000. Since 2019, I thought I was step ahead of a failing country. Now, I wonder if I’m one step ahead of a failing world.

I could never move somewhere again with the same sense of trust I had in the beforetimes. Nowhere is safe now, but Sweden is pretty good. I’m not in love, true, but I am grateful. I am full of respect. That’s probably enough. Is that maybe enough? I will probably stick around, maybe try a new town, see how the polycrisis and the omnishambles play out.

The summer I first got here, it was trendy for Swedes to wear baseball caps branded with New York teams. It took me a while to realize these people were not all New Yorkers, that in fact, none of them were. I learned this by trying to chat with them, a no-no here. Lately, I’ve noticed that the hats are gone. If I still believed in a benevolent universe, I’d think that was telling me something. Maybe it would be telling me that now, seven years in, I don’t need the hats from home, that maybe this is home.

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I’ve been out of commission for a long while. Hobbled by pain and brain fog from a frozen shoulder, my days have passed with the same fumbling sense of timelessness as in life with a newborn. It was daylight and then dark and then light again. I did whatever I had to do, but otherwise, I mostly dozed. As Robert Penn Warren put it in All the King’s Men, “Sometimes sleep gets to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order that you may be able to get up, but get up in order that you may be able to go back to sleep.”

That’s all winding down now but time stops for no one and I’ve woken up to a changed world. The U.S., my native land, staggers, kneecapped by a mad king. Its hands are dripping with 250 years of blood. And my adopted country, peaceful, neutral, egalitarian Sweden? My new country is suddenly acting a lot like my old one, only in a good way. Very quietly, very quickly, Sweden has become bad ass.

The uncanny thing is that Sweden is reacting to the same appalling shift in the U.S. that I did when I made the decision to leave in 2019. America mauled me and now, in its frantic death spiral, it’s mauling virtually everyone on earth and the sweet haven to which I fled is baring its teeth. This feels like that same bizarre conflation of public and private that I experienced on 9/11, when the whole world knew about my bad day at work. I stood at the window at my office, across Liberty Street from the towers, and watched people dying, the whole world watching with me.

You can run away from America, but you can’t really hide, not anymore. I thought I could. Solving your problems by running away isn’t supposed to work, of course. It doesn’t work because, alas, wherever you go, there you are. But for me, at first, it did work. My relief was intoxicating. Sweden was my salvation. I could have clean water, fresh air, good food and a government that centered its people. My children could have those things. For a long time, I looked at my new country with stars in my eyes. But then the shit that I fled burst its container and flooded the planet.

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You know you’re in a time of sweeping geopolitical reconfiguration when countries start changing character. I realized this in May, when Canada announced it would explore a deal to buy a fleet of Saab’s GlobalEye early warning aircraft. This was big news here. It decisively established the new Sweden, a global player in defense. It also cemented Canada’s new policy of pivoting away from American military capabilities (Canada dissed the U.S. by rejecting a competing model from Boeing). Then, the next day, Sweden said that it would sell 20 Gripen fighter jets to Ukraine and also donate 16 more jets from its own Armed Forces fleet. It was around then that I realized this transformation had actually been going on for while.

It started small scale. It started with the eggs.

Not long after the inauguration, Washington started trawling Europe for eggs, badgering the self-same countries they were hitting with punishing tariffs. Radio Sweden interviewed several Swedish egg producers about whether they’d be helping the U.S. out. The answer? Nej.

“We have a lot of people who are disappointed with the U.S. and its politics. Reading about this shortage of eggs in the U.S., consumers have contacted us saying they would not approve if our company did export eggs there,” said one. Furthermore, any “export adventure” of Swedish eggs to the U.S. would likely involve tariffs, so that would be a double nej. “I’m sorry about that, but that’s the way it is,” said Håkan Burlin, CEO of Stjärnägg. In Swedish, this translates as, “Get bent.”

OK, it didn’t really start with the eggs. It really started with Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, in what would become the biggest and deadliest war in Europe since WWII. That landed hard. Sweden and Russia don’t share a border proper, just a tiny, five-mile maritime boundary off Kaliningrad. But Russia does live in the neighborhood. So Sweden did something startling, something that Americans haven’t seen their own government do for over a quarter of a century: They responded.

Many Americans are too young to remember what that feels like. It’s that thing that didn’t happen on 9/11 or Katrina or Sandy Hook or January 6. We didn’t know it at the time, but as a political experiment and as a country, we were already dead in the water. That unsettling silence was the proof of the institutional rot that would be our undoing.

For Sweden, Ukraine was a wake-up call. Stockholm started moving like a country that has decided its industrial base, its energy base and its defense base are all part of the same strategic map. Despite its policy of neutrality since the Napoleonic Wars, Sweden joined NATO. It decided to embrace nuclear power because, as Shankar Narayan of The Concis put it, “Power is now part of national security. More power means less dependence on fossil fuels. Less dependence on fossil fuels means less need to deal with autocrats who use energy as leverage.” In June, the Swedish utility Vattenfall announced a deal with Rolls-Royce SMR for three nuclear reactors (and, in so doing, dissed U.S. rival GE Vernova).

Once my eyes were open, I saw that Sweden was doing things it wouldn’t have done before. For instance, doing its bit for the Sell America trade, a leading Swedish pension fund dumped a shit ton of T-bills, some $8.8 billion. The fund cited the unpredictability of the current administration, swelling budget deficits and growing U.S. debt. In Swedish, this rationale translates as, “Fuck you very much.” And in May, Sweden’s Coast Guard boarded and detained a Russia-facing shadow fleet tanker in the Baltic, part of a burgeoning campaign to stymie a vast fleet of tankers evading Western sanctions. Totally bad ass, all of it.

Maybe Sweden’s been asleep, too, but now we’re all awake. Political culture has changed quickly in this part of the world before. Sweden was a quiet, peaceful agrarian nation until the first astonished Viking found the first unlocked church door in Lindisfarne in 793 AD. There began the Viking Age.

I never really bought Sweden as the pacifist, matriarchal paradise. I feel a live undercurrent. And there’s something about Swedish men that tells me different. Maybe they’ve been waiting. There’s something about them that tells me they’re ready for whatever’s coming next.

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I’m mentoring a college kid here in Stockholm. He’s a solid kid, articulate, engaging, a big reader. He overcame some tough obstacles back in the day and now he’s on an upward path. Like my own kids, he’s a dual citizen, half American and half Swedish. Like them, we don’t agree on a lot of things: Whether monogamy is a relic of an obsolete patriarchy, how much red meat you should eat, whether philosophy is boring, the centrality of the mind-body to the origins of disease. I could talk to him all day.

My deal with this kid is that I’ll think alongside him about everything, and I’ll tell him whatever I know. In return, I’ll get absolutely nothing, except the pleasure of his company. These are the kinds of deals that we make with the kids and it’s more than enough. Even so, I think we are approaching the limits of our arrangement, because he wants to go to law school and I know nothing about it. I’ve already begun steering him toward people who do.

We kind of fell into this. Before I moved here to became a Swedish housewife, or whatever the hell it is I’m doing, I was really good at getting fancy jobs in New York, in journalism, investment banking and consulting. A lot of that wasn’t what I wanted to be doing, so I’m not all that proud of it, but it is a true statement that I was good at getting fancy jobs. In fact, I loved it. I loved putting on the red dress and going out and hunting. I loved the dance and I loved the bolt of pure, capitalist joy when I got a kill: The fat offer. I wanted to share all of this with the kid, but my career was in the beforetimes, like Victrolas or smelling salts. Now, there are no jobs.

Still, the kid needs hope. He has to plan his future, even as the old world is dying before our eyes. How do you game out this new world, though? How do we advise these kids?

There are things we don’t talk about. That the American collapse is inevitable now. That all knowledge workers — anyone who sits at a desk and looks at a computer much of the day — are going to be out on the street within two years. That this impending wave of AI displacement — which Andrew Yang has dubbed “the Fuckening” — is going to slaughter the dreams of an entire generation and beyond. That some of my friends’ kids are skipping college entirely, because the cost-benefit is insanely out of whack. That I have contemplated an America with only a thin layer of HVAC repairmen between the wealth class and the rest of us, newly disenfranchised, selling our plasma for food, serfs with nothing, not even a field. That we are in a class war with a bunch of centibillionaires who want to kill us off because we’re meaningless, like ants, and consume resources they don’t want to share. That this isn’t going to go away, but must be fought. And that we probably won’t start fighting it until we have no choice and that these aren’t conditions under which you can build a life.

He doesn’t tell me things, too, like that I’m older than fuck and that the world is what it is. He doesn’t tell me that he’s terrified, and I don’t tell him that I am, too.

We don’t agree on his plan. He wants to go on to law school in his “real” country, the U.S, where he lived until high school. Not a great idea, at least in my opinion. There is a problem of applicability. There is another problem of return on investment. And there is the third problem of dying in the street. A country where the regime’s paramilitary can shoot citizens in the face with impunity has no rule of law. Therefore, why study law there?

He interrupts me to say that he doesn’t want to actually work as a lawyer. He wants the degree as a foundation for work in diplomacy or government. He wants to help save the country. “The fight is over there,” he says.

God knows the fight is over there, but it will probably be everywhere soon enough. And then, we won’t be fighting with ideas or diplomas and certainly not with the law. No, I’m advocating for European law school. It’s the social democracies who will rise from the ashes, if anyone does. The new good guys will be the EU, Canada, Japan and, who knows, perhaps a rump United States comprised of blue states. This bloc will be the anti-authoritarian bulwark, preserving our ideals of justice, equality, progress and human potential. “Stay put,” I tell him. His Swedish passport gives him the right to settle in any of the 27 member states. “Use it!” I want to hiss at him.

“The world is falling apart right now,” I tell him instead. He shrugs.

“This is all I’ve ever known,” he says, smiling gently.

There’s one more thing we don’t talk about. It’s the loudest thing we don’t say: The draft. If you move with your family to a new country and acquire citizenship, your kids could be called on to fight their wars.

You have never known self-doubt until you have filled out a mandatory draft registration form for your child in a foreign country. “Why the hell did I ever leave Connecticut?” I asked myself as I did this for my eldest, one year into the war in Ukraine. I answered the Swedish Armed Forces’ detailed questionnaire, describing my child’s weak knees, poor grasp of Swedish and delayed reaction time, none of which would seem to work particularly well in combat.

Sweden is decent enough to ask whether or not you want to join the military and we checked the box that said no, but not every country asks. Conscription is in place for nine of Europe’s NATO states: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden and Turkey. Croatia is joining their ranks this year and I wouldn’t be surprised if more countries did the same as Europe rethinks security and strengthens its defense capabilities.

As I said, the fight will probably be everywhere soon. Still, even if the whole world burns, I’d rather he stayed here. But it’s not my world anymore and it’s not my decision, it’s his, and for that, I’m grateful.

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It’s the season of ice, here in a land of ice. It’s everywhere, beautiful and treacherous. In the polar night, the ice glitters in the sodium-vapor streetlights like diamond pavé. The more trafficked places have the most ice, hard packed and planed smooth. You can fracture an arm or break a hip on it in an instant, so it forces you into wariness, to choose your footing with intention. I move so tentatively outside that my eldest taunts me, calling out, “Run, Forrest, run!” I move so slowly that sometimes I feel I’m not moving at all.

Older Swedes wear cleats on their boots, tiny spikes that grip the ice. In fact, the city of Gothenberg sends them out for free to citizens when they turn 65. But Stockholm, where I live, doesn’t do that. It’s up to me to decide when I need them, but that decision would be conceding that I am old and I’m not yet.

Walking around in winter requires some technique, then, or at least it does for me. Most Swedes scamper up and down curb-side piles of glistening ice like mountain goats. They ride bikes on the ice next to huge trucks and they never slip or slide. For myself, I have to work at it. The foot must land squarely: No angles, straight down.

“Walk like a soldier,” my husband said during my first winter here. “There’s a reason armies march.”

For years now, I’ve been urging people to get out of the U.S. like I did in 2019. I wrote about my decision to leave and about why I thought life in Europe was better. I talked to what felt like a million would-be emigres about strategy and I put together a guide. I did most of this under the Biden Administration, when I thought the risk of democratic collapse was receding. I still believed at this time that all of the things that were wrong with the U.S. were somehow policy oversights, fixable gaps. I thought that if we advocated with enough passion and grit, Americans could get things like universal healthcare and rational housing markets and tuition and childcare at accessible prices. Still, I could feel something menacing slithering underneath the surface. I sensed that people were becoming devalued, as labor, as humans, as Americans. After the election, I would come to understand what that menacing thing was: A new economic dynamic of serfs vs wealth class, in which they win and we lose.

This year, I began to dread winter before summer had even ended. I knew that things in the U.S. were going to get worse and I didn’t know how to fight it. Then I woke up one day this fall with no use of my left arm. It came out of nowhere: I hadn’t injured myself or strained the muscles. The pain was 24/7 but at first, I thought that I could continue writing, just eat some ibuprofen and crack on. But I couldn’t write, not only because I had only one arm, but because the pain kiboshed my brain. I didn’t have a single idea, nothing for weeks at a time. I was unable to form associations, the raw material of ideas. For a writer, this is game over.

Probably frozen shoulder, the doctor said. To freeze is a neural response to a threat. It’s a state of attentive immobility that allows animals (that’s us, if you’re not clear) to avoid detection by predators, and to enhance perception.

We’re probably at the point where it’s too late for many Americans to leave. The whole of the EU is tightening immigration restrictions and so are many countries in Asia and Latin America. They don’t want us. We have a bad reputation, I hate to say. We’re loud and we often don’t bother to learn the local language. We don’t approach community in a way Europeans recognize. We drive up housing prices and welch off healthcare systems that we didn’t pay into. I was already hearing stories of Americans getting harassed across Europe, in the airports, on the streets. Now Europeans are furious at us and rightly so: Trump’s mad talk of annexation and invasion is threatening the whole world. We will become pariahs.

My adopted country just sent troops to defend against a threatened invasion by the country of my birth. France, Germany, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands and the UK did, as well. We are becoming despised.

Before the election, I thought Trump 1.0 was the story of a close call. I wrote a novel based on that premise, about that dark place where we almost went. I didn’t know it was a prelude.

Now we all know and that novel is in a drawer, the bleak fictional future it described eclipsed by a far worse reality. I worry about all of us who are here now. If the U.S. invades Greenland or attacks another NATO ally, Americans living or working in Europe could lose their legal protections and residency status with a stroke of a pen. The story isn’t over for all of those people who made it out, who are sitting in the sun in Portugal and Spain and Italy and France. It is not over for me. We could become persona non grata, facing deportation or even internment, as the U.S. did to Japanese Americans during World War II. We may need to scramble again.

I’m a Swedish citizen now, but they know I’m not native. Americans aren’t hard to spot. They could turn on me in heartbeat, if it came to it. I wonder if the time is coming where I will need to obfuscate my origins, perhaps impersonate a Brit or just keep my mouth shut.

Time feels frozen now. We are at “the still point of the turning world,” as T.S Eliot said. No one is stopping him. Nowhere is safe and nobody’s children, either. The cascade of consequences will probably be terrifying on a scale Americans cannot imagine. The Doomsday Clock now stands at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest to catastrophe in its nearly eight-decade history. No one is taking a breath.

If you believe, as I do, that the unconscious speaks through the body and that disease originates in part in the psyche, then what is a frozen shoulder saying? Why this now? I’ve spent so much time on the couch, my bad arm propped up on a stack of throw pillows, waiting. It has been, above all, so incredibly boring, but I think I needed it. When he blows up the world — and he will — I hope to be ready.

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There are only five Sears stores left in the U.S. now, the New York

Times reported over the weekend.1 I had all these tender feelings when I saw it, like I was watching a baby chick miscalculate distance and tumble off a ledge. Only five stores left and they’ll be gone soon enough and that will be the end of an era.

Sears was the Amazon of its day: When you needed something, that’s where you went. They had it all. The Sears outlet in Lindale, Texas is where my grandmother took me, the summer that Elvis died. She insisted on buying me a pair of Lee Wrangler jeans with pleather trim on the back pockets. I let her, even though I wouldn’t be caught dead in them in New York, where I lived. My grandfather also had a Sears connection. On the Texas farm where he grew up, his family put the Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogue to good use in the outhouse, where it stood in for toilet paper.

The company began life in Minneapolis in 1886, when Richard W. Sears founded the R.W. Sears Watch Company to sell watches by mail order. He relocated his business to Chicago in 1887, hired Alvah C. Roebuck to repair watches, and launched a mail-order business for watches and jewelry. By offering an array of merchandise at low prices to farms and villages that had no easy access to retail outlets, the company grew explosively.

Once the automobile arrived on the scene, Sears began opening retail stores — 3,500 at its peak. It was an iconic brand. For 20-odd years, Sears owned the Encyclopædia Britannica. It created Allstate Corp. in 1931. Its house brands, like Craftsman and Kenmore, were household words. But its crowning achievement, at least to my mind, was Sears Modern Homes. Between 1908 and 1939, Sears sold some 75,000 house kits across the country, in a wide range of sizes and architectural styles from Craftsman to Cape Cods. The kits included most of the building materials for a house, shipped via railroad boxcars. I love this for its crazy ambition, its outlandishness, its Americaness. I love it.

By the time I went there with my grandmother, Sears had long since lost its lustre. It didn’t feel properly organized into sections, but jumbled and too big and it smelled like tires. I wasn’t yet a teenager, but still old enough to be embarrassed to death to be shopping there. It was not Fiorucci, I’ll put it like that. The world was moving on, it was obvious, but Sears didn’t yet know it was dying.

Sears was the uncontested king, the largest retailer in the U.S. until the ‘80s, when it was overtaken by Kmart and then by Wal-Mart. Its demise marks the end of an era because the companies that succeeded it aren’t like it. Sears did bad things, of course. All companies do. But it didn’t spy on its customers. It didn’t rack up creepy defense contracts or wield monopoly power like a bloodied axe or suck up public resources for nothing and otherwise damage communities and God knows what else. But behind the curtain, where we can’t see, our overlords appear to be planning to extract every last drop out of us, before they just let us die. We are all serfs now and soon the billionaires will longer need us.

In Sears’ day, the customer was always right. Back then — and this, as strategy, no longer even sounds credible — you sought to satisfy a customer by providing a good product at a fair price, all in the hope that the customer would come back. You didn’t try to screw them into a wall, into pulp, like companies do now. And that’s the shift: Late capitalism perceives us not as consumers, but as prey. We are captured. The wealth class took off its mask at the inauguration. We all saw them on that podium. They will keep on stripping our assets, raising prices and degrading the quality of everything until it all falls down.

Umair writes in How to Think About the Economy in 2026, “ ... that ‘affordability crisis’ is really just the flip side of capitalism doing very well: It’s exploiting people at a rate which is crushing them. But all of that spells real trouble ahead. Because of course people can’t keep up this rate of exploitation forever, or even much longer.” We are headed for a crises of demand, when this rate of exploitation spikes so high it punctures the economy like a pin in a balloon, killing growth, killing profit.

If I had stayed in the U.S., I think I would be in trouble now. I think I would be at risk of plunging out of the upper middle class, with my children falling right behind me, all in less than a generation. This is the American Nightmare, the corollary of the American Dream, and it is taboo to discuss it, for reasons I don’t understand. Still, no one I know in the U.S. can afford anything. Those diplomas aren’t pulling their weight anymore, the kids are done in by anxiety and all sense of security has disappeared, like a fist when you open your hand. A job loss doesn’t feel like a survivable event in this climate, amid this palpable dread. Where do you invest effort? How do you get ahead of this?

You don’t. We went from normal enough to here in less than a year. The speed leaves you breathless. But this isn’t a new era, like the heydays of Sears and Elvis or my Greatest Generation grandparents. Eras change almost invisibly. They wind down, you adapt to what is changing, you dig in and then, all of a sudden, the characteristics that defined the past era seem unimaginable.

My grandmother sewed her own wedding gown, cooked (and burned) bacon for breakfast every single day, and washed out my mouth with soap for taking the Lord’s name in vain. Those things all seem wildly implausible now. So does supporting a family of four in New York on one income, with two kids in private school, like my dad did. It doesn’t seem real, like shopping for jeans at Sears, or paying for a flight with cash or making a call from a phone booth with a quarter. Like smoking at the office and on planes, too. Like buying a two-bedroom condo in a doorman building in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn on a newspaper editor’s salary, like I did in the penultimate year of the previous century.

This isn’t a new era, but a new paradigm, as capitalism has begun to eat itself.

I’m not sorry to bid farewell to 2025. This has been one of the hardest years of my life, not least because of the rapid collapse of democratic norms in the U.S. Even though I made the painful decision to leave for Sweden in 2019, and even though America is a crazy country, patched together out of thousands of disparate influences and competing interests, my heart is still there. This year, it broke.

As the onslaught of executive orders kicked in on Inauguration Day, my thoughts turned to resistance and the CIA’s own field manual on sabotage. This is how it’s done, people!

The regime’s cartoonish rollout of its so-called Liberation Day tariff scheme trashed the markets and left everyone’s 401(k) lighter by 30%, hitting us where we live.

As it became obvious that none of this was going to go back in the box, we Americans in Europe began to see ourselves in a new light. The always-contentious word “expat” lost ground to the word “émigré,” because no one’s planning to go home anymore.

The country seemed to be transforming into something unrecognizable. I wondered about the cultural identity of people born of the U.S. diaspora in a post-American world.

Worried about the possibility of capital controls and a sealed border, I arranged to meet my oldest friend in Marrakech while she was still free to leave the U.S. I wondered if it would be the last time.

This year, the regime let its mask slip and we saw it for what it really is. In 2026, I hope we show them who we really are, work that began on Election Day to stunning effect. There will be a lot to talk about. I’m delighted by the response to my work here and I have big plans for 2026. I’m so grateful that you are here.

Wishing everyone a very happy holiday!

Laura

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It was 2:45 PM when my sister called from Florida. I was on the couch in between calls and the sky outside my window was a twilit gloaming, because 2:30 is the outer limit of light this time of year. After that, everything becomes a dim, lumpen shape of one kind or another.

“You look like you’re in a coal mine,” she said. There was no point in turning on the lights, I told her, because I’d just have to turn them off again. This is how it is here in November. You cannot beat the dark.

This is Sweden’s worst month. It’s cold, yes, but the dark is so much worse. This morning, the puddles were frozen, the branches were bare and the dogs were wearing their winter coats. Everything was a shade of gray. Most years, you can feel your serotonin leaching out by the nanogram, but this year it’s not too bad, because I am filled with hope.

The election results in the U.S. were stunning. It was a blowout and I can’t get over it. That kind of turnout in an off-year. The way everything went in only one direction. The overwhelming force of the message. We were in shock for a long time, numb and not knowing how to resist. And yet: When there was a mechanism to express our dissent, this off-year election, we blew it up. I am not a psychic or even a political analyst, but I know what I feel and it’s certainty. We are going to be OK.

In Sweden, the Christmas decorations start creeping into the stores before Halloween, but this isn’t driven by hollow commercialism or poor taste, as in the U.S. It’s a desperate act of hope. All during the dark months of November and December, Swedes put lamps in the windows and keep them lit. It’s the same impulse that makes a motherless child draw pictures of mothers: It’s the expression of a wish.

When I came here in 2019, I didn’t realize that November was the worst month. I assumed that would be February, because that’s how it was in New York. This is the kind of unchallenged assumption that will absolutely kneecap you in a new country. I wasn’t prepared for the dark. I spent that first November in Stockholm sitting in my kitchen, playing Tougher Than the Rest on repeat and feeling that I should steel myself. Against what, I didn’t know.

Now, in my sixth November here, I’ve got tricks up my sleeve. I fight the dark now, usually by travelling somewhere warm. I’ve spent parts of Novembers past in Venice, in Seville, in Valletta, in the South of France. It works to stave off some of the gloom so you can get to the turning point: Saint Lucia’s Day, the festival of light. In ancient times, the Norse spent the winter solstice lighting huge bonfires, hoping to alter the course of the sun and I understand why. After converting to Christianity around 1000 AD, they incorporated the legend of St. Lucia into their seasonal rites.

“Lucia” means “light,” of course, and the day commemorates the Fourth Century virgin martyr who wore a wreath of candles as she navigated the pitch-black Roman catacombs, looking to bring aid to the persecuted Christians hiding there. The candles lit Lucia’s path in the darkness and also freed her hands to carry food and provisions.

Saint Lucia’s Day falls on Dec. 13. If you can somehow make it to that day, then you’ve survived the dip. By then, it will be Christmas and the champagne will flow and there are parties every night. By the time you stagger out of bed on New Year’s Day, the days start getting longer again.

Until then, I’m sticking to my November strategies. I take a daily dose of Vitamin D3 and bask in the fake sunshine of my happy light, 30 minutes every morning. If the sun won’t deliver the cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters that we need for energy and for well-being, then this little $50 device will. Yes, I may have left the homeland, but I’m still American enough to think that I can outsource the work of the sun itself. Anyway, Saint Lucia would have loved this thing: Full-spectrum light burning at 10,000 lux, equal to the illumination of 10,000 candles.

I’m not used to the dark yet. Twice this week, I started on dinner at 3:30, because it looked like midnight out there. It’s dark but still, I am filled with hope. I know now that we are going to fight. It will be a long and difficult struggle and probably a violent one at points, but we are going to be OK.

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I’d been dreading November 1 and now here it was, the day one in eight U.S. residents will lose their food benefits, pawns in a mentally ill budget game that has already cost us a functioning government. I couldn’t help but think of all those people who would now go hungry. I was especially haunted by the kids. Something James Baldwin said kept running though my head: “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

The history isn’t crystal clear, but it’s thought that in 731 AD, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a day of remembrance for saints of the church who had no days of their own. The Church of Sweden fine-tuned the ecclesiastical calendar, so here, All Saints Day falls on the Saturday between October 31 and November 6. It’s a public holiday and most shops keep Sunday hours. This year, it happened to fall on November 1, just as Gregory intended. Even though this is not a particularly religious country, many Swedes pay tribute to their dead on this day. I was grieving a country rather than a person, but I was definitely grieving, so I decide to join them.

As it turns out, the Woodlands Cemetery, or Skogskyrkogården, is just a few metro stops from my house. It lies outside Stockholm proper on a site that was originally gravel quarries encircled by pine trees. Woodlands was designed by the renowned Swedish architects Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz as a place of both life and death. According the cemetery’s site, the architects’ vision was to “unite the landscape and structures” in such a way as to create “an experience encompassing life and death, hope and sorrow, and light and darkness.”

I was skeptical, because this language sounded like every artist’s statement ever written. But the place was miraculous. In fact, UNESCO designated Woodlands as a World Heritage site in 1994, one of only 15 in Sweden. The World Heritage List contains 1,248 properties of outstanding cultural value or natural beauty. UNESCO is committed to protecting and preserving all of them for future generations, because art and culture matter and it ennobles us to touch them.

There are 26 UNESCO sites in the U.S, and also, now, 42 million people whose food benefits have been defunded and who therefore may not eat. Their hunger is deliberately engineered by the regime to create pain among those who were already contending with poverty, injustice and invisibility. In the face of their desperation, the regime is serene. The mothers who will be forced to witness their children’s suffering will lose their minds for grief and rage. No mother can endure this.

The crowds at Woodlands surprised me. There were so many people that the train station platform was cordoned off into lanes supervised by the police. Once inside the cemetery’s stone walls, a vast green space opened up and I followed the crowd streaming along the path in silence. The mood was somber, but I could feel the sparks of the joy that derive from community: We were doing this together. It was a magical place. Staff set up braziers with fragrant wood fires against the chill. Among the graves, groups of people sat on blankets or stone benches with thermoses of coffee, dogs and babies, communing with the dead in the midst of all this life. In the memorial groves, where the ashes of the cremated are placed without marking, people lit candles and left floral offerings along the path.

In the Catholic tradition, the commemoration of the feast of All Saints focuses on reminders of death and of last things: Death, judgment, heaven and hell. It asks: Since we all must die and are destined to judgment, how then are we to live? I cannot make sense of the sadism of this regime. I cannot fathom that our own government is trying to kill us, beginning with the most vulnerable. But I know this: There will be a counterreaction. This will be answered.

The regime has let its mask slip — maybe too soon — and we can all see everything. The jig is up. We know now that the ideas we believed in are dead. The allegiance that we pledged every day was not to this. The words live in name only now and if we do not fight, we will die. What we are witnessing is depravity. “There’s going to be a enormous political and cultural reckoning in a year or two,” a friend of mine had said the night before. “But it will take years to recover from this.”

Individuals have psyches and so do cities and so do countries and they all work the same way. There can be no wholeness without a reckoning with the darkness inside us, an integration of all of our various parts. Our dark aspects are all too present now, and all too real. “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely,” as Carl Jung said.

Could this violence mark the beginning of our healing? Will we finally look in the mirror?

I follow the Path of Seven Wells along its entire course, from Almhöjden, a hilltop meditation grove, to the Chapel of Resurrection. The path was originally a firebreak in the pine forest, but it was widened and lined on one side with birch trees. The seven wells designed to sit alongside it were never built, though. They live on in name only.

After walking for an hour or so, I was getting cold. The dark half of the year is upon us and I could see my breath. I sat at the cafe with my coffee and gingerbread, lost in contemplation of this sacred place. I couldn’t work out what it was about the design that left me so profoundly moved. Then I realized that it wasn’t the built environment or the natural one, either. It was the paths. The problem of grief is that you must keep going, even when you don’t feel you can. But you can, because the path is right there, just beneath your feet.

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I was sitting on the roof deck of my hotel in Marrakech, sipping mint tea. I’d spent part of the past week here with my oldest friend, but she’s just left for the airport and I’m heartbroken. From this perch, I can see the planes take off and I think I saw hers disappearing into the blue. She couldn’t get as much time off as we’d hoped. It really was too far to come for so few days, but the choice was that or nothing. In any event, she had to leave a few days before me.

She was returning home to the U.S. and I hated it. It’s not safe there, not for anyone, and I don’t think she has any kind of path out. Underneath that layer of fear lies another one: I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again. God forbid the border is sealed. God forbid people lose everything.

My hotel is in a riad, a traditional Moroccan house built around a central courtyard. It’s 600 years old and sited in the heart of the medina, the old walled part of the city where the tangled alleys are unmarked and the way home is anyone’s guess. The riad’s design is brilliant, a perfect balance of the private and the communal. It’s nine apartments circle the courtyard, each with its own bathroom and fireplace. The interior windows feature ornate wooden shutters with panels within panels. Opened one way, you can spy on what’s going on in the courtyard. Opened another way, you can eavesdrop, too. And somehow in this frantic, jumbled, wonderful city, the riad is absolutely silent. I don’t even hear the calls to prayer.

I needed to get out of Stockholm and the beginning of the seasonal gloom. It was a difficult summer for many reasons and I didn’t have a chance to savor the sun. So when my friend suggested a trip to celebrate her birthday, I jumped on it. October is the high season in Morocco and the weather is perfect, not too hot and blue skies every day.

We met in fifth grade. She was the new kid in school and I scooped her up. We were still young enough to play with dolls. She knows everything about me and admires me anyway, and the same goes for me. There is no comfort greater than a friendship of this length and depth. I desperately need her to be OK and I don’t think she is. She’s an anonymous cog in the meat grinder of American capitalism, just like I used to be and even thought she has a good job, things are getting tight and it’s all speeding up. She doesn’t see how she can ever retire and I don’t, either.

The souks were packed tight. The Brits were out in force, congregating as ever wherever alcohol is served. There were even more Frenchies, chic and tanned, lingering forever over their zaalouk. But the Americans weren’t there. I noticed their absence because they’re inundating Sweden and other parts of Europe, more all the time. I wonder again if the flow of émigrés out of the U.S. is slowing, if those who can leave have already done so. I wonder if, for everyone else, the die is cast and their fate sealed. We are all falling, all of us, privately and communally.

We spend hours trawling the markets and I was working hard, because negotiating isn’t my friend’s cup of tea. The guidance is to pay about 30% of the starting offer, but that was harder than it sounded. I bargained, half in French and half in English, half in Moroccan dirhams and half in dollars. The pace was intense, the pleading emotional and the refusals adamant. They mostly won because they had better stories and we were powerless against this. At the leather shop, Omar said that in a cold climate, cheap leather will smell like fish. At the carpet stall, Hamza said that if you burn a crappy carpet, it will reek of burnt hair. He flicked a lighter and burned his own rug to illustrate its quality.

At a restaurant off Jemaa el-Fnaa, the main square, we ordered the tasting menu to celebrate my friend’s birthday. It kicked off with twelve appetizers, because they do not take half measures with hospitality here. After the sun set and the belly dancers had come and gone, we were on the tagine course, talking about her long-lost, problem brother when I began to feel dizzy. I tried to ignore it, but it kept getting worse. My heart was pounding all of a sudden and I was fighting for breath. I thought of going back to the riad to rest, but it was unthinkable. I couldn’t leave her alone at her own birthday dinner, here in darkest Africa. The thought flashed through my mind that I might die there at the table. I didn’t know what to do.

“Can we talk about something else?” I asked. My voice was hoarse.

Her eyes trained on me like lasers.

“What is it?” she demanded, worried.

“I don’t know. I feel sick.”

She was coiled to spring. She gave me a long, penetrating scan with those all-seeing eyes of hers, eyes that I have loved most of my life. A few moments passed in silence. She must have decided that I was OK, because soon enough we eased back in to conversation. I felt fine by dessert, which was pastries and tea instead of cake and coffee. There were no birthday candles, so she made a wish and blew on our table lamp and I turned it off.

It wasn’t until her last day that I could articulate what had come over me at that dinner. That when she had spoken of her brother, I could see his face, as he was at 16. How I saw the other faces of those we had loved deeply and then lost, my father, her mother, my sister. How the rich and layered beauty of a friendship of this length has a terrible corollary, a front-row seat to the destruction of the passage of time. I see this in my own life, of course, but to see it up close in hers, as well, is to see it in everyone, in everything. I have lost so much, a peril of my age. I know I will lose still more in this crisis and I fear that I cannot survive this knowledge.

My friend left Marrakech but then her plane stopped in Casablanca to pick up some more passengers. Then she had a layover in Doha. In the end, her travel time was about 28 hours. My path will be easier, a five-hour direct flight back to another world, sunless and gray. The night my friend left, I dreamt of the town in Westchester, New York, where we lived when our children were little. I saw a well-kept path of cut stone, set into a beautifully tended lawn. I followed it with my eyes and then took a few steps forward, trying to see its end. I saw that it went on, almost for forever, but that it led nowhere at all.

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Last week, I had to stop reading the news coming out of the U.S. I felt I was standing on the lawn watching my house burn down. It’s worse than we thought, and faster, too. We all can feel that something inexorable and dark is about to happen. At the grocery store here in Stockholm, I was picking through the mushrooms when they started playing the Grateful Dead. When I heard those lazy opening chords of “Sugaree,” I thought of the old America, the good one, and I was crying again.

I’m 4,000 miles away from New York, where I grew up, and my life in Sweden is fully entrenched, but that doesn’t matter. No one who isn’t American could ever understand what the Dead mean. It’s not possible. They wouldn’t have the cultural associations and the layers of memory or the knowledge of how my friend’s little sister followed the Dead for an entire year after college (running around “like a demented bird,” as her mother put it) because Jerry’s music was alive for her and she just had to. This was the old days, before we knew we were dying, when you could navigate life with a lighter touch.

Now, things are shutting down. The slant of morning light through my kitchen window has shifted as the fall equinox recedes and sunset comes earlier. I wanted to mail some embroidered hand towels to a friend in Connecticut but I can’t, because a. the best delivery service will no longer ship to the U.S. and b. the ones that still do will charge a tariff that equals 300% of the gift. On this blog, people are shying away from commenting publicly. They DM me instead, and say they are afraid to speak. At the same time, the emails from people looking to get out of the U.S., once a flood, has dwindled to almost nothing. I don’t know why this is, but it feels like something around the stay/go decision has been settled en masse. I often text myself ideas and notes, but had no memory of the one I found on my phone this morning. It said: How are you?

It’s all taking a toll. As Umair Haque writes in “America’s Big Stupid Energy, or What Happens When Stupid Goes Radioactive and Melts a Society Down”:

“I can barely see straight anymore. Typing a word, anymore, is like lifting a goddamned metric ton of plutonium, every keystroke, because to do it, I have to fight the weight of more stupid than human history has known since the Fall of Rome. You do too. That’s why so few of us write anymore, or even talk about it all anymore, really. We have to lift off the weight of all the headlines, all the psychodrama, the gaslighting, the spectacle, the scandal, the idiocy, and that’s like lifting the heaviest elements in the solar system, with only the tips of your fingers, which is a Herculean feat.”

The mushrooms are for the bœuf bourguignon that I will make that afternoon. I do this for all new babies. This newest baby, Leo, was born to an American mother and a Swedish father, both accomplished professionals who met in San Francisco. They filed the paperwork to move to Sweden on Jan. 7, 2021. They’d seen enough, they said. Unless there is a miracle of resistance, Leo will inherit a passport to a dead kingdom.

When he’s old enough to start building his life, will all of the people leaving the U.S. now still consider themselves Americans? They may just melt away into this globalized world of “criss-crossed economies, intersecting systems of meaning and fragmented identities,” as the anthropologist Robert Rouse puts it. Or, like so many people before them — Jewish, Armenian, African, Sikh, Chinese, Indian, Lebanese, Afghan and Caribbean — they may come to identify as diasporans, haunted by memories of home and the desire to return. It’s hard to picture Americans like that, as a community of migrants fixed in space somewhere else, strangers in a strange land. We don’t really do yearning. But maybe I’m wrong.

A while back, I went to a lecture on citizenship and belonging at the American Club of Sweden. Whoever chose the speakers did a brilliant job: One was a Swedish sociologist who’d worked in various academic positions in the U.S. since the ‘70s and the other was an American sociologist who’d just received her Swedish citizenship. They explored the question, “Who is one of us?” The allegiance of a Swede is to the state, not the nation. Americans, by contrast, love the nation, not the state and definitely not the IRS. Swedes express fealty through paying taxes and following rules, while the American affinity for their country is emotional. Swedish citizenship is a social construct with a package of benefits. American citizenship is a legal construct with a package of rights (or at least, it was until recently). The divergence was fascinating.

At the reception afterward, I chatted with a guy who was half Swedish and half American and grew up with a leg in each place. I asked him which nationality he most identifies with.

“It’s not either/or for me,” he said. “I’m fully both.”

I love the sentiment and maybe that’s how Leo will feel, but I’m not fluid in that way. I will never feel anything but American. I’m too old to integrate well, but that’s not really it. My Americaness is all too entrenched, but that’s not it, either. I think it’s that emotional affinity that the sociologists described. I love America and even though I can’t live there, I can’t let go of it, either.

As Americans bolt for the exits, it’s clear that we are amid a dispersal. We may be on our way to establishing ourselves a transnational community, with financial activities and personal networks that span the globe. Or we may tip into diaspora, but what defines that is hotly debated within the academy, as it mixes complex notions of nationhood, ethnicity, race and migration. It’s complicated. Displaced people don’t always stay still. They can return home, they can fragment or assimilate. For many reasons, including shifting geopolitical alignments or just the passage of time, diasporas relocate sometimes once and then again, forming double and even triple diasporas.

In Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return, political scientist William Safran proposes several characteristics that might define an “ideal” diaspora, but I can’t see it for us. These characteristics include the collective retention of a memory or myth about the homeland, its history and achievements (“Come, children, gather! Let us speak of Elvis and the moon landing, supersized fries and $2 gas.”). Another one is the conception of the ancestral lands as one’s true home (“As God is my witness, children, someday we will return to our rightful home in Gary, Indiana and sit out under the carport with Solo™ cups of Mountain Dew and a Tupperware™ bowl of Cheetos, listening to “Call Me Maybe”). And then there’s the idea of a collective commitment to the restoration of the original homeland, to its safety and prosperity. Hard to see this one, because we’re not even doing that now, while we’re mostly still home and the autocratic takeover is still in motion.

Wouldn’t we be more likely to just forget the whole thing? Without a country, what even are we?

In my darker moments, I see our national identity as a flimsy thing based on a love of consumption, a belief in tomorrow, some gooey feelings and some badly tarnished ideals. Late capitalism forced us to be kind of transactional about things, more than many of us wanted to be. Because of that, the only thing we really pledge allegiance to now is ourselves. I don’t imagine that could be enough to move we migrants to cohere, to continue to connect, emotionally and in other ways, to home. I worry it will all soon be over, here and there, in a generation.

But then I consider my own situation: Everything I do in my life in Sweden revolves around Americans and the U.S. And I’m not alone: We’re all out here, looking around. And, my God, are we paying attention. It’s not exactly a collective commitment to the restoration of the original homeland, but it’s not nothing. So maybe there’s some small hope, because home is a hard thing to let go. I think of the words of Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet who wrote so beautifully about the sorrow of dispossession and exile: “Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?”

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When you move to a new country, you learn a few things right off the bat. In Sweden, the first thing is that there are rules and you better follow them, or these gentle, communitarian people will rip out your spine. Trust me on this. These folks haven’t been to war since 1814. They’ve got 212 years of pent-up aggression. The nanny state smacks them into compliance on the daily, but their Viking bloodlust is always whispering into their ears and they are dying to rip out someone’s spine.

Then there’s the maxim, “There is no bad weather, only bad clothes.” You hear this over and over again. It means: Don’t blame the weather. And: You better show up. And they do. There is lots of snow here, but no snow days. I believe this is either the result of the famous Swedish tough-mindedness, or its genesis. Chicken, egg.

This leads us to the third thing, which is fika. Fika just means sharing a cup of coffee and maybe a pastry with a friend or colleague. Swedes do this two to three times a day, which explains why the pastries are so tiny. Fika is the core cultural reality of Swedish life. It doesn’t seem to me to be a big enough thing to have a culture about, but for them, it’s central. France has Sainte-Chappelle and Italy has the Sistine Chapel and Sweden has fika, which is meeting a friend for coffee.

The word fika originated from the 19th century word kaffi (coffee). Then, someone reversed the positions of the two syllables and removed an f, because who the fuck would do this and the epochal formula thus became:

kaffi -> ffi-ka -> fika

(I can’t help but be reminded here of the weird local shorthand for Stockholm, which is STHLM and makes no sense whatsoever. It’s unpronounceable. It’s not intuitive like L.A. or D.C. It’s clearly not a jaunty nickname like the Big Easy or the City of Light. It’s not even a sad game of “Let’s Strip Out The Vowels!” because that would be STCKHLM. No, it’s a demented game of “Let’s Strip Out The Vowels, Plus Some Consonants, Specifically C And K!” as if Big Bird had stroked out. The thinking is so distorted it doesn’t even feel Swedish, because Sweden is orderly. In my own wee hours here amid the encrusted ice, I fear this is all a heartbreaking attempt at whimsy by a culture that just cannot achieve it.)

Perversely, despite the cultural significance of fika, the coffee is undrinkable. It’s vile. It’s grainy, it’s bitter and it fights back like hell is on fire (and I realize some of what follows will sound embittered, but I came here on the assumption that it would be a life-sustaining place only to get served this shit that makes my esophagus feel like it’s been scraped by a cheese grater wielded by a maniac). Before I moved to Sweden, I visited with my kids to tour potential schools and get a feel for the place. Our Airbnb host had serious coffee equipment, shiny and complex. Because he seemed to know what he was doing and because I was a stranger in a strange land, I helped myself to his coffee (sorry, Ludwig!) and made a pot. The many chrome measuring implements were precise. The water temperature was finely calibrated so as not to scald the beans. The machine hummed and groaned and beeped. It was like having a toddler, living with this thing. I couldn’t leave it unattended. I was constantly adjusting knobs and releasing steam valves and checking timers, gauges and dials. But at the end of all of this, the coffee it produced was loathsome.

Coffee was first introduced to Europe when the Turks invaded Hungary at the Battle of Mohács in 1526, so Sweden had fuck all to do with it. Coffee is grown in the equatorial zone that lies between the tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. Whereas Sweden was underneath two miles of ice for 2.6 million years until the Last Glacial Maximum, and even then it wasn’t completely free of ice until 7,000 BC. And even then, the massive weight of the ice sheet (isostatic depression, if you care) left large parts of eastern Sweden and western Finland underwater and you don’t grow coffee there, do you? Even if you could, there was no one around to do it. The Scandinavian peninsula was the last motherfucking part of Europe to be colonized and oh boy, do I have theories, but my point here is that there is no historical justification for Swedes to claim coffee as Swedish. It isn’t. Lingonberries, yes. Coffee, no. They claim it because they like it, despite what it is, which is a liquid assault.

I have tears in my eyes.

This brings us to Stockholm Syndrome. If you don’t know the story, allow me to recount: In 1973, a convict out on parole took four employees hostage during a failed bank robbery at Kreditbanken. He held them stuffed in a vault for six days in the August heat. Nonetheless, when they were released, nary a one of them would testify against him in court. No, instead, they promptly began fundraising for defense costs.

As this story implies, Swedes don’t complain and that’s probably how you get a coffee culture with terrible coffee. By the way, the effect opposite of Stockholm Syndrome ― when the hostages enrage the kidnappers by defying their demands, arguing with them about their ideology or trying to escape ― is called London Syndrome. Remonstrating with your captors? That’s cojones.

Here’s the worst part. If you say that the coffee is terrible, the Swedes will smile condescendingly. A cold smile, the kind that doesn’t engage the eyes. Then the gaslighting begins. Just like your narcissistic ex, they will go full DARVO. They will say that you must not understand coffee and that bitter and black and grainy is good and what is really bad is you and why did you come to this country anyway, with your shitty Swedish and your American arrogance and your poorly trained dog that routinely pisses on the beautifully arranged potted plants outside the flower shop?

No one believes me about the coffee, not until they come here and suffer it firsthand. I recently met an Austrian woman at a cafe of unverified safety. The coffee was dreadful, landing like a roundhouse punch. She took a sip and then compressed her lips and kind of scrunched up her neck like a turtle retreating into its shell. Then she pushed the cup away.

“Not to your liking?” I asked, trying not to laugh.

Recovered, she shook her head gently.

“It’s amazing,” she said wonderingly. “You can hit some people in the face with a toilet brush and they won’t be offended.”

My friend’s voice is tense. I can hear it across the Atlantic. We’ve been talking about the news for almost an hour in the stilted way that’s commonplace now, when you cannot believe the words coming from your own mouth. I’m trying to understand what it’s like for her there now. She is, too.

I always call around the same time, when she’s still on coffee and I’m thinking about dinner. This difference between us in time is nine hours and in space, it’s 2,838 miles, but these yield to another kind of distance, a more profound one. It’s shot through by a hyper-awareness, a keening guilt: I am outside and she is inside. I’ve never called someone in prison, but I imagine it must feel like this.

The rage I am hearing from people at home takes my breath away.

My friend is fighting for calm, even though I know she’s half out her mind with panic. She runs a cafe on the West Coast and her livelihood is vulnerable to the ongoing ICE raids. Her staff is at grave risk and they also happen to be people she cares about. But it’s not just that. It’s the suffocating feeling of entrapment, that the door is barred from the outside and the clock is ticking and no one is coming.

“But ...” she said.

“But?”

“But why is nothing happening?” she said it pleadingly.

“What would work?” I asked. Because I can’t stop thinking about this.

“That is the question.”

No one is doing anything. It’s silent and still and, underneath, seething. I wonder if it feels worse to live inside this, as she does, or to watch it helplessly from afar, as I do. I’ve heard this stillness characterized as a kind of immobilization brought on by fear and helplessness. A public too overwhelmed to resist, because the scope and the speed of the autocratic takeover knocked our legs out from under us. But I don’t think that’s it. Some are resigned, yes, and plenty are in despair. But I think most of us are waiting, because the tipping point will come.

The question wakes me up in the wee hours: “What will it be?” This isn’t to discredit the many successful resistance campaigns across the U.S., including the powerful mass protests and targeted consumer campaigns like Tesla Takedown. I view them with deep respect. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about storming the castle.

Not long after Election Day, when I was still reeling, I went to a meeting for lefty Americans overseas. It was sponsored by a political organization and the agenda was to plan campaigns for the year ahead. At the time, sabotage was very much on my mind. I was desperate to take action. I would have gone out and dug a foxhole in the frozen earth if they’d told me to. But that’s not what they wanted. They wanted me to phone bank for the state supreme court election in Wisconsin in the spring. And then for the special elections in Florida’s 1^st and New York’s 21^st congressional districts.

I was incredulous. Phone banking? In the middle of this? It was like holding a bake sale at the Battle of Stalingrad.

Emile Durkheim, the founding father of sociology, called the emotional mood of a nation the “collective consciousness.” This is comprised of the set of shared beliefs, ideas, attitudes, and knowledge that are common to a social group or society. The mood can flip in an instant, as it did, for instance, after the murder of George Floyd. And when the righteous mobilization of the people hits boiling point and an authoritarian regime cracks and takes flight? That’s called a tipping point revolution and it’s how most of us think political change arrives.

I knew the Wisconsin race was critical, but I didn’t want to chat with folks in the Milwaukee suburbs. I wanted the resistance to dial it up to thermonuclear. I wanted everyone to spill into the streets, ready to fuck shit up. I wanted drums and torches. I wanted a revolution and really, I expected one, because of the way we are, which is heavily armed, short on patience and furious.

I phone banked and the executive orders started rolling out at breakneck speed. All of our symbolic actions looked stupid. Those endless donations bought us nothing. Our passive wait for salvation exhausted us. No court could deliver the justice we sought. Our fantasy of rescue — via policy solutions or tech or good-guy billionaires or, really, anything — died. At the same time, sober voices urged restraint and strategic action, advising that we proceed in a democratic way, when the other side clearly was not. In my dark moments, I thought, “Cui bono?” In my dark moments, I feared that my country is and has always been an entrenched war machine that makes borders, prisons, cops and weapons and that it was going to kill all of us.

Maybe I’m wrong to wish for that surging crowd of enraged citizens with pitchforks. Not because it wouldn’t be gratifying (it would be so delicious), but because it could fail. The work of unfucking this autocratic takeover may be a longer, slower project than I’d hoped, because tipping point revolutions often don’t tip. They can peter out, leaving behind rival factions locked in internal quarrels, bloody struggle or civil war. They can only skim the surface, unable to achieve deep structural changes, as in the Arab Spring popular uprisings. Or they can fail entirely like the 1989 democracy movement in China.

The kind you want is the kind that deliver major structural changes, like the French Revolution of 1789 or the Russian Revolution of 1917, or the 1989-91 anti-Soviet revolution. As described in the work Theda Skocpol, Jack Goldstone, Charles Tilly and others, these were state breakdown revolutions. They stuck because they transformed deeply entrenched economic, political and cultural institutions.

Since Election Day, I’ve assumed that one day we’d arrive at a flashpoint. I thought we would tip. I’ve been waiting for it, every day, all day. Expat Prep recently compiled a list of red lines that, if crossed, would trigger the writer to exit the U.S. It could be a degradation of posse comitatus, a third Trump term or the cancellation of the 2026 midterms or the 2028 general election. It could be a major war or sustained unemployment. It could be the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus or the implementation of capital controls.

What will it take?

Nothing is happening now, but I refuse to believe that will stay. A revolution is any change in government outside the procedures provided by the regime itself. We may not need it, but just discipline and hard work instead and, perhaps, a spark.

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In July, Stockholm is a ghost town. The seasonal cycle goes like this: In April, Swedes trickle outside, where they have not been spotted since the prior August. By the time the white nights hit, the town is unrecognizable, with cafes packed with smiling, tanned Swedes. Then, in July, poof! Everyone decamps to their sommarstuga, usually a rustic cabin in the woods somewhere. Everyone and their mother has a stuga, except me. I like summer in the city and there’s nothing I particularly need to escape.

Except America. I’ve been in the middle of a big fuck you, because the country of my birth is destroying itself before my eyes. It’s been hot and quiet here. So when I received an email from a team of sociologists at a university in Philly, inviting me to participate in a research project on the perceptions of American expats in Europe, I accepted. Specifically, they wanted to know how living abroad may have shaped my perceptions of social differences between the U.S. and Sweden, such as work-life balance and overall quality of life. You know what shaped those perceptions the most? The hundreds of messages I get from people at home, asking how they could get the fuck out. I got so many I put together a guide.

Anyway, the timing was eerie. Just that morning, a friend in the South of France had mentioned that the Americans there were bitching about the lack of air conditioning amid a raging heat wave. But he didn’t call them “Americans.” He called them “émigrés.” This was new. A chill ran down my spine. Americans abroad don’t look like expats anymore and I know why: They’re not going home.

“Expat” is a loaded word. It can start a war on Reddit. Unlike an immigrant, a migrant, or a refugee, an expat is associated with privilege, wealth and whiteness. In its Lost Generation variant, it’s the artists and writers of 1920s Paris. Dazed by grief and aimless after the destruction of World War I, they drew on that energy to bloom creatively. In its South of the Border variety, the expat is a disreputable, alcoholic and grubby loser (cf. Banana Republics, Jimmy Buffet). The Asian stripe has its fair share of sex-pats, alongside outcasts and ESL teachers. The Eastern European cultivar (which included me) flourished after the fall of the Berlin Wall in Prague and Budapest. We attempted to recreate the Paris of Les Années Folles, but succeeded only in achieving liver damage and beautiful memories.

The sociologists proposed to explore what compelled me to move abroad, what my experiences as an expat were like, and how I “compare social differences.” Their goal? A greater sociological understanding of American expats and “contemporary views on American exceptionalism.” Oh, honey, be careful what you wish for.

I wondered who they were expecting. Your classic latter-day expat is a corporate animal with a chipper outlook, a dry cleaner and a fancy title. That’s not me. I’m scarred and pissed off and I stalk my ex country online, desperately hoping for an uprising and, in my darker moments, much worse.

Anyway, I’m not really an expat. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines that simply as “a person who lives in a foreign country,” but it’s more complicated than that. If I’m any kind of expat, I’m a rex-pat, a repeat offender. But I’m really an immigrant, because I plan to die in Sweden, or at least in Europe. I’m also a dual citizen, which should factor in somewhere. And I’m an émigré, like those sweltering former Americans in France, because I left the country of my birth in part for political reasons. Whatever I am, I’m not going back there and neither are a lot of those chipper corporate expats. They’re trying to finagle a way to stay here, because the current state of American exceptionalism? It’s sitting in a for-profit prison in El Salvador with its head shaved.

I don’t know what I am. A Swede without a stuga. An American without a country.

The United Nation’s Organization for Migration defines an expat as “a person who voluntarily renounces his or her nationality.” But most of us don’t go that far, despite the enraging consequences for taxes and banking. In my lifetime, the game has been to collect as many passports as possible in order to widen your options, but that’s changing. Fresh research documents the American expats’ growing desire to renounce their citizenship, citing political frustration and concerns about affordability. The financial burdens on expats, described so well by Caroline Smrstik here, are another reason. There’s also, survey respondents reported, a sense that the U.S. has lost its global standing. No shit.

I get filthy comments on my work, lots of them. I seem to trigger a certain swathe of Americans. They seem not approve of me, a mere woman, having opinions and, further, they do not favor the opinions themselves. They reckon that leaving the country, as I did, is plain cheating. And obtaining a second citizenship through marriage, as I did, is double cheating, for reasons I don’t fully understand (although I suspect it’s because, for them, marriage is supposed to privilege only men). They see a “COWARD who turned Tail and ran!!!” These folks often confuse Sweden with Switzerland, but you can’t really hold that against them (it’s such a common problem that the Swedish Tourism Board was forced to make a video to address it). One of them wrote, “Dont let Switzerland hit you on the ASS on the way out!!” I couldn’t get the idea of this Swiss spanking out of my head. I was laughing for days.

I can’t help but notice their misspellings as I delete their comments and block them. Three times now, I’ve seen the word “expatriate” misspelled as “expatriot.” This coinage is an eggcorn, a word or phrase that results from mishearing or reinterpreting (or misspelling!) another word or phrase, creating a new expression that makes sense in the same context. I think it’s brilliant, however unlikely the source. I think my greasy brethren got it right for once. I think it may be the answer.

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In Russia, they call this time of year the White Nights and in Norway, the Nightless Night. In Alaska, it’s known as the Midnight Sun and, technically, also here in Sweden (midnattssol). But in practice, no one here really calls it anything. It simply is.

Sweden’s biggest holiday, Midsummer, takes place on the summer solstice. On that day, the sun sets at 10:07 PM and rises at 3:31 AM and in the interim it never really gets dark. The sky just changes blue from light to dark. The word “solstice” translates roughly to “sun stands still” because of the way it seems to hang endlessly in the sky.

The festival of Midsummer, also known as Litha, has thousands of years of history. It was adopted by the Celts, but its origins are Germanic Pagan and its roots may date as far back as the Neolithic. Midsummer is a sabbat in celebration of the sun, the light’s triumph over darkness and the abundance it brings us.

For about a month and a half, the sun is below the horizon for less than six hours and no one sleeps properly. The siege begins in mid-May, just as you’ve arrived at full confidence that the snows are over. You’ve only just put away your winter coat. Somehow, you’re never really ready for it. You feel groggy for a few days in a row. You keep waking up way too early. Then it hits you: The light is back.

Summer sleep strategy is an art here. Some swear by valerian root capsules, others prefer lavender aromatherapy. For me, it’s melatonin tablets and magnesium oil and hot tea. Every year, I fish out the dried chamomile flowers from the back of the kitchen cabinet and then I consider my bedroom windows. Every year, I devise a new plan for blocking the light. Every year, I fail.

The sun seeps in around the blackout shades, no matter how cleverly you tape up the seams. It cascades into the room before 4 AM and surges in past your sleep mask, even if it’s as tight as a vise. Your brain knows the light is there, even if your eyes are closed. Your skin knows, too. No matter what you do to block it, the signal is somehow sent, somehow received: Rise and shine. You can fight it if you like and try to go back to sleep, but you’ll lose the battle. You’ll be fully awake and the hours ahead of you will be foggy and endless.

When I cannot take another walk, I clean out drawers and organize closets and make lists. There is so much time in the summer. In a sense, though, we are lucky in Stockholm. Way up north, in Kiruna, the sun doesn’t set at all between late May and mid July. In Svalbard, Norway, it’s even worse: From around mid April to mid August, it’s perennial daylight. People lose their grip. The light can make you manic and the sleep deprivation can make you half insane.

It’s probably my age, but in the past few weeks, I’ve become more clear-seeing. Time does this. It brings a startling clarity. The stars have fallen from my eyes and in this strong, magic light, all is laid out, all the things I knew but didn’t want to see. I can see all the lies I told myself, and the beautiful stories, too. They are dead now because I have killed them but I live on, somehow stronger for it. I will never stop fighting my private wars and one of them is for this, for the truth. I figure I won.

Midsummer is summer’s blazing high point. The flowers are in glorious bloom and the bees are buzzing. But the holiday also signifies something less joyful: The season is ending. After Midsummer, the days begin to grow shorter again. Soon the light will die and the world will return to shadow. The corollary to June, when the sun never sets, is November, when the sun never rises. The polar night can feel like it will never end.

The Romans considered Sweden a “land beyond God” and even now, when I haven’t slept for days, when I have a scratch on my cheek from trying to tighten my sleep mask, even now this cracks me up. I picture the bewildered Roman soldier who somehow made it this far north, I see him surveying the lichen-covered rocks and the tundra and the stark landscape. He has waged combat against the earth’s fiercest principalities and powers, but he can’t begin to fight this, the light and the dark.

There are no weapons for this.

Here, you’re nature’s bitch, and all you can do is like it or not. Someone said the other day that these extremes of light and dark make them feel more connected to nature. Me, I feel less connected than schooled. It is saying: Listen. There is beauty in the dark and even something good can be too much and, in any case, you can’t escape your season.

This morning at 4:00 AM, I sat outside under a light sky and watched the daylilies open. I thought about when I was young and believed everything anyone told me. That version of me has been gone for a long time. Now I know more than I want to know and I see more than I want to see. But that’s how the light is. It shows you everything.

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This is an occasional series about things I don’t like about Sweden. Usually in this space, I argue that America is bad and Sweden is good and to be clear, I have never regretted my decision to leave the former for the latter. By my calculus, the tradeoff has had very little in the con column. But I have to be honest with you: There are a few areas in which I think Sweden sucks. In this fair and balanced series, I detail them for your benefit.

Healthcare here doesn’t cost much, but it pretty much sucks. I understand what an unimaginable luxury it would be to have healthcare at these prices — a $25 copay for a CT scan, for instance — for the many Americans who are struggling right now with the sadistic U.S. healthcare system. But still, Swedish healthcare sucks. I think of the words of my journalism school professor: “If it’s free, it must be worth nothing.”

Most of my work contains some element of analysis, but this one doesn’t. It’s only a story.

When I got here in 2019, I was normal. I didn’t love the dentist, but it was no big deal. Before I left the U.S., I knew I needed a cap on a tooth that had been bothering me for a while. “Don’t wait too long,” my American dentist warned. But I did. With this and that, I never got around to it. Then, one Friday morning about two years into my time in Sweden, I woke up in pain.

My Swedish dentist took a look. I was shocked when she said I needed a root canal. I was even more shocked when she said that we were going to do it right then and there. Everyone masked up. The suction device roared, the drill whined and the sickle probe tapped in a frenzy of activity. And then, like blowing out a candle, all activity ceased. The dentist turned off the overhead light, took off her mask, and said I needed a specialist.

She didn’t say why and I was then still new enough in Sweden to ask a doctor a question, sweet summer child that I was. “Why do I need a specialist?” I asked. In silence, she squeezed my elbow, passed me a card, and then disappeared like mist.

Doctors here don’t explain things to patients, because the doctor is the government, in the same way that a Department of Motor Vehicles clerk is the government. Do DMV clerks explain things to you, patiently, with eyes full of tender concern? They do not. At best, you bore them with your stupid problems and your cloying face and, at worst, you irritate them, because you are a human worm. Do you know why this situation exists? Because you can’t sue them, that’s why.

Congratulations! You now understand Swedish healthcare.

I went home. In a matter of hours, the tooth had gone from irritated to infected. My husband called the specialist and he prescribed a course of antibiotics ahead of the root canal. Since the pain was intense and growing by the minute, he prescribed opioids, as well, which is unusual here. The joke, which isn’t really very funny, is that no matter how dire your medical crisis, all you’ll get is ibuprofen. My friend had brain surgery and that’s all she got. So I was thrilled, until I noticed the painkillers weren’t working at all. I was high as a kite and struggling with executive function, but still in terrible pain. Something wasn’t right. By Sunday morning, I was unable to speak and living from breath to breath. When it became unbearable, my husband took me to the hospital.

But I didn’t make the cut. The ER nurse came out from her station to observe me with great clinical interest, as I rocked and muttered in agony. Her coolness was kind of insulting. After a few minutes, she nodded, as if something had been decided.

“You’re not a priority for us,” she said, with the customary Swedish bluntness.

“What?” I asked, panting.

“Pain isn’t an emergency. Your life is not at risk.”

My husband looked homicidal, but she remained unruffled. This is par for the course in Swedish hospitals. To see a doctor, you need to appear to be at death’s door and you also need luck. She explained that I had two choices: Wait an estimated eleven hours for a doctor, who would probably just send me home to wait for Monday morning, when the specialist would come in. Or I could just go home now.

I showed her my box of painkillers and pleaded for something better. “That doesn’t work for dental pain,” she said breezily. “Just alternate acetaminophen and ibuprofen.” She brought me two ibuprofen tablets to get me started and we went home in a daze. Were we victims or victors? On the phone later that day, as I iced my face with a bag of frozen edamame, my friend chided me. “You’re not much of a drug seeker, are you, trading your heroin for ibuprofen?”

The following Tuesday, still in considerable pain, I was due at the specialists. I went to the address on the business card, as one does. It was a big, stately building right on Vasa Park, but it was clearly residential. Something wasn’t right, so I called the number on the card. The friendly man who answered said I was at the wrong place.

“That’s actually our home address,” he said, chuckling. “It’s a misprint.”

“Oh,” I said. “I must have gotten an old card.”

“No,” he said. “We never fixed it. Why waste money?”

His use of the possessive pronoun — our home address — threw me. It seemed odd, because Swedes aren’t folksy. And how would it be wasting money to correct an error that defeats the purpose of the entire exercise? I tamped down these thoughts, though, and got back on the bus, because my tooth really hurt.

When I arrived the right place, the same man who had answered the phone greeted me in the reception room. He was enormous, almost seven feet tall and beefy. His vast shadow danced behind him on the wall. “I’m the endodontist,” he said, after we had switched from Swedish to English. “I’m actually Canadian.” As we were chatting, his exact copy entered the room from the opposite direction. A second shadow merged with the first and seemed to rise and twist heavenward, like the Matterhorn. The new guy said he was also the endodontist. My specialist turned out be a pair of giant, identical twin brother endodontists from Winnipeg. And, yes, they lived together in the stately building.

Once in the surgery, I lay supine in the chair while the brothers loomed over me. For some reason, I need a lot of anesthesia. If it’s not enough to knock a bull flat, it won’t work. This runs in my family. And even if I do get a big dose right off the bat, it still may not work, as in the case of my two failed epidurals. I explained all this and they gave me a jumbo dose, but something wasn’t right. I could feel every foray of the probe. I have a pretty high tolerance for pain, but this was bad. I whimpered and flinched but they kept going. But then the twin who didn’t seem to do much besides hand implements to his brother rose to the occasion. He began narrating the scene in a formal baritone, describing me as if I couldn’t hear him.

“Laura may be experiencing touch as pain,” he said.

“No, she is not!” I hissed. “Stop!”

When they finally gave me more anaesthesia, it was alarming. I began to shake violently. “Nothing to worry about,” said the twin who did all the work and all the talking. He chuckled as I thrashed around in my reclined chair like a blue-fin tuna on the deck of a trawler. Rolling around, my spine arching and contracting, I wondered why everything was always so fucked up.

The shaking subsided and we waited for the new dose to fully kick in. The boys were good enough to fill me in on their recent monograph on the complexities of dental practices in Uruguay, where the locals’ teeth have up to seven roots. Very few endodentists in the world had the knowledge, skills and experience ― let’s just say it, the balls ― to handle something like that, they assured me, but they did. The twin who did all the work leaned back in his chair, taking a moment to reflect on his professional achievements from this, the pinnacle of his career.

“Where do you go when you’re at the top?” he mused, arms crossed against his chest.

Bliss and numbness took me. Nothing hurt anywhere for the first time in days! It was like drifting inside a dewy, misty bubble. It lasted a good while, too, until we were almost finished, when the probe was circling the pulpy tangle of nerves at the bottom of the root, which God reserves for the true pain. Then the probe landed and I saw a blinding flash of white light. There was nothing like this that I have ever known. The world tore open and time stopped. I couldn’t scream because I had several implements and a large man’s hand in my mouth. In shock, my animal self took over. I began batting away the nearer twin and kicking toward the other one, ready to fight to the death. As they dodged my blows and shut it all down, they looked sad. This is not supposed to happen, not even in Sweden, where pain is unimportant. This was beyond pain: It was torture. They cleaned up in silence. They did not charge me for the work.*

I went home with a sore jaw and a shaken sense of trust in my new Swedish brethren. I slept for 13 hours and woke up in pain again. It did not subside. It got worse. After five days, I went back, because I didn’t know where else to go. The x-rays showed that the root canal had been flawless, the twins declared triumphantly. They exchanged congratulatory nods. It had been perfect work. The only problem was that I was in agony.

“I guess it just isn’t working,” said the brother who didn’t do anything.

That was that. They gave me enough pain killer for a sperm whale and extracted the tooth. It didn’t take long and we didn’t talk much. They didn’t charge me again for the perfect work and after they cautioned me against eating peanuts or popcorn, I went home.

It’s just a story. A nasty tooth and some bad luck. I’m still not sure if it meant anything. But I can’t help thinking about the Swedish concept of lagom: Not too much, not too little, but just enough. This concept is part of why Scandinavian countries are so relaxed (just enough) and why there is zero sense of urgency in the air (too much), even when there should be. I credit the lagom philosophy with my children’s academic success here. When we arrived, the school just met them where they were and took it from there, beautifully, without all the American ranking and measuring and assessing and stressing. The Swedes were like, “whatever.”

But that’s also what my dentists seemed to be saying, and they shouldn’t have. I’m old enough to know that we’re all making it up as we go along, no matter how accomplished. And I quit believing in experts a long time ago. But that was a bad week for me and it didn’t have to be (too little) and my new dentist has tissues on hand when I come in, because now I always cry.

* Dental and ophthalmology care are billed for Swedes over age 20, but they are subsidized by the state and cost much less than in the U.S.

It’s spring and the sun is finally here after a long season of ice. The cherry trees are in bloom and if you’re into so-called slow TV, you can watch the third season of “Den Stora Älgvandringen” (The Great Moose Migration ) on Swedish Television. Moose — technically, European elk — are headed toward their summer pastures, as they do every year. Filmed way up north in Ångermanland, the show makes for what the producers call “contemplative” viewing. It might be just the right speed for me at this point.

I’m sorry for the long silence. I haven’t been able to write. The crisis in the U.S. is dire and while my heart is there, my ass is here, in Stockholm.

When I logged in to my U.S. bank account this morning, it dawned on me how much has changed, just in these few short months. The legend on the top of the page read, “FDIC-Insured ― Backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.”

Hilarious!

It reminded me of other expressions from the old days, things we used to say but that you don’t hear anymore. Like: “I don’t agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” That earnestness? That civic trust? That country that worked for its people? Gone.

Since the election, I’ve undergone an intensive reeducation, all in double time. I sought out new people who are fluent in how autocracy works and the mechanisms of the mafia state. They helped me to see with new eyes. In studying their work, I’ve learned so many things I didn’t know I didn’t know. We’ve been steering this way since the Carter Administration, but most of us didn’t perceive it. Now the U.S. is in that bad place I saw coming when I decided to leave.

My immediate problem is not how to survive this as a person, but how to approach it as a writer. I will survive this as a person by not living in the U.S., a decision I made in 2019. I will survive this as a Swedish citizen.

As a writer, it’s more complicated. When I began Notes from Exile, my idea was to explore what it was like to live abroad with this American consciousness and also how home looked from here. I still like that idea. But the premise ― that home is still there ― is shuddering under the weight of event. The America we knew is transforming into something malevolent. It’s destabilizing not only her people, but also the entire world. And it’s happening more quickly than I would have thought possible.

The past few weeks have been rough. My friends — and your friends, too, I bet — got slaughtered in the market. Everyone was down 30%. Everyone was in tears and terrified. The future seemed to just evaporate.

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I got out of the market before Inauguration Day, so this round didn’t get me but I’m sure the next one will. I worry that none of us are getting out of this nightmare with a dime to our names. As William A. Finnegan at The Long Memo put it in his article, “Am I Financially Screwed Forever?”, “This isn’t bad luck. It’s not personal failure. It’s not because you didn’t hustle hard enough or download the right budgeting app. It’s because the game ended, and they’re still selling you tickets.”

Instead of writing, I’ve been glued my desk, tracking the Dow Jones Industrial Average. I track the dollar, Treasuries and gold, up and down, all day long. And I keep a close eye on the VIX, a real-time index put out by the Chicago Board Options Exchange that measures market risk. Its nickname is the Fear Index.

I was trained to cover the markets at the Wall Street Journal, where I worked for years, back when it was a real newspaper. The markets back then didn’t act like this. Now, the president “truths” and the Dow strokes out and the 10-year Treasury yield starts spiking. He takes it back and the Dow ascends and the yield eases and we can all breathe again. As my friend Lizzy said, “It’s like we’re all in the world’s most toxic relationship and we’re elated when someone just berates us instead of beating the shit out of us.”

Our assumptions have shifted at dizzying speed. The fear is enshrouding us like a fog. In the course of a few weeks, 340 million people can no longer rely on what they thought they know. True isn’t true anymore, and safe isn’t safe. The U.S. has always been an imperfect place, but it’s always been a haven. Maybe not for people, but definitely for dollars. The creditworthiness of the U.S. and the strength of the dollar were the linchpin of the global economy. Not anymore.

Gold is where investors go when things look really bad. It’s called flight-to-safety buying and it can tell you a lot about sentiment. This week, gold priced in dollars set its 26th new record high of 2025, at least so far. This is a worrying indication, but far more serious, of course, is the on-and-off bond-market selloff. That’s the fatal coronary. That’s the terminal diagnosis, the end of the road. It won’t be tomorrow, but I am assuming that it will all burn down.

We were days, or maybe hours, from a liquidity crisis on April 9. We will probably be there again and probably soon. I don’t trust that the banks will hold, so I’ve been scrambling to get what money I have out of the U.S. and out of the dollar. I’m trying to reduce the number of junctures where this administration can touch me to zero.

But I know it probably doesn’t matter. If it burns down, it will burn all of us.

I haven’t been writing because I’m in shock, and also because I’m not an economist or an expert on fascism or a geopolitical strategist. I have no special expertise to offer that will help anyone. Also, everyone has been talking about it and the drumbeat of bleak news and dark scenarios is overwhelming. This is what I’m thinking about: How life should look after the war.

The old havens are gone, it’s true, but new havens will emerge. The Canadian response to the U.S. aggression has been magnificent. The E.U. is emerging as a last bastion of democracy and is rising powerfully to meet the moment. These have been beautiful surprises. There will be others.

When I am quiet amid the noise, when I can hear myself think, what I think is that maybe this had to happen. Many of us were blind to terrible injustices just next door. Maybe it’s time to hack out the rot and start over from scratch. Maybe the next America will be kinder and more equitable.

I couldn’t write, so I started doing collage. The unconscious likes images and I was hoping something would kick in again. I was on fire. I did collage like it was my job and suddenly the words begin to flow again and now I am back. I’m still wondering how to reconcile my American identity to my European life, still trying to square a circle, still trying to discern what it is that I see in the fog.

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The mechanisms designed to head off a democratic collapse in the U.S. have all failed. As Garry Kasparov said, “This doesn’t end with fights over top-secret documents, budget cuts and unaccountable agents taking over. It ends with who has the guns when they won’t listen to the judges.” 

I’ve been expecting something like this since 2019, when I left the U.S. for Sweden with my family. In a sense, because of this, you could say that I have already responded. But I haven’t washed my hands of the U.S., even though it’s broken my heart into a thousand pieces. I never will, because it’s home. 

The old America is gone, though. As Carole Cadwalladr wrote in IT IS A COUP, what we are now seeing is the merger of Silicon Valley with state power: “This was an organised, systematic, jailbreak on one of the United States’ most precious and sensitive resources: the private data of its citizens.” 

The tech firms are thigh-high in all kinds of frightening projects, documented in part by the Tech Transparency Project. They think that at this point, we can’t live without them. I’d like to prove them wrong. We are losing power as citizens by the minute, but we haven’t lost power as consumers. Trump supporters have lots of flags and gold sneakers, yes, but not much money. The Broligarchy needs us and that could be the secret to their undoing. I, for one, am happy to be deeply inconvenienced by fucking them over. 

I’m severely curtailing my use of tech. I don’t know that Jeff Bezos will weep because I cancelled my $139.00 Amazon Prime annual subscription. He’s still got 200 million other subscribers. But if this trend toward the rejection of tech widens and accelerates, then it could become a powerful force. Some of this is painful and a lot of it is inconvenient, but so be it. I am ready to suffer. And while I came to this decision independently, I notice that a lot of other people around me are doing the same. 

Along the same lines, I’m not buying anything – not a single thing – from any company or person that supports this administration. This means, among other things, no more Diet Coke or Uber or Airbnb for me. It will sting, but there are plenty of alternatives out there and I am not fucking around. In fact, I’m not buying much of anything these days, because it feels inappropriate all of a sudden. These are serious times.

Here’s what happened. I realized that I had a direct connection to each of the tech oligarchs up there on the podium on Inauguration Day. They had my credit card number and address. They had a grand total of eight microphones on 24/7 in my tiny Swedish house, with my consent. They had 20+ years of my family photos, all of my texts and emails, and knew exactly when, where and how much I spent every day. They knew my circle of friends, my interests, and almost everything I wrote and read, both online and via my Kindle. I wasn’t naive about the concept of digital privacy but I was also far more exposed than I had realized. I didn’t think of myself as a very tech-oriented person, but it had crept up on me and I was deeply uncomfortable. 

Back in the old days, I’d thought, “Who cares if Amazon knows I bought a jumbo box of diapers, a printer cartridge and some vacuum cleaner bags? So what?” Now I do care, because as the tech maxim goes, If you don’t pay for the product, you are the product. They know everything about us and that’s exactly what they’re selling. 

They may well know us better than we know ourselves. They have profiles of users’ routines and habits, detailed user location data, purchase history at brick-and-mortar retailers, keyword information about likes and dislikes derived from user conversations; browsing history on many third-party websites; information about how users interact with a web page, including what they linger on, and much more. 

I began to close as many points of connection to tech as I could. It all began a while back with media. I deactivated my Twitter account shortly after Elon Musk bought it. When he stopped verifying users and fired the content moderation chief, it was obvious that the site would become a cesspool and it did. I cancelled my Washington Post subscription after its shocking and craven abdication of duty in the run-up to the election. I nuked my New York Times account for the same reason, plus they truly seem to have lost their damn minds. I did keep my subscription to the NYT’s Games and Cooking sections, however, because they are necessary for my happiness. I replaced these news sources with the Guardian, the Atlantic and the New Yorker.

I cancelled Amazon Prime. They uncancelled my cancellation twice, the sleazy fuckers, but I persisted. I put my beloved Kindle in a drawer after many years of very heavy use. Now I’m reading ebooks from Bookshop.org on my laptop. I don’t love this format, so when Kobo can accept ebooks from Bookshop, as is planned, I’ll buy a Kobo eReader. I stopped using ApplePay, because Apple doesn’t need to know what I spend every day. Now, my spending is between me and my bank, which is fucking regulated. I moved my documents off Google Docs and put my longer-form work onto Reedsy Studio (free!) and Scrivener (not free). I swapped Google Chrome for DuckDuckGo, which was an easy transition. The search is far superior to Chrome and you can do it without being tracked by an army of creepy data miners. You can also get a secure email address. I love it. I’m also a big fan of Signal. 

I never had TikTok or Instagram, so there was no issue there. But deactivating my Facebook account after 17 years was difficult, even though I hated the ads and all the free-floating negativity. I gave a week’s notice to my friends and swapped contact info with those who followed up. Some wrote me long, delicious emails with their news. Others seemed pissed off at me for the inconvenience. In any event, it was definitely a hard habit to break. For more than a month, my hands would bypass my brain and try to access Facebook. The itch was upon me, bucking and thrashing! It took a while for it to die but eventually, I stopped thinking about Facebook anymore. The only social media I use now is Substack Notes, which is civilized.

Here on the other side, life proceeds at a more human pace. It feels slower and more nurturing. I call people now, almost every day, just to chat. I have more time without all those dog videos and I’m spending more time outside. I didn’t give up my phone but it’s in my hand less. I can feel my attention span sharpening and my thinking is clearer. I am gathering strength.

If you’re looking to exert more power as a consumer, Progressive Shopper helps you put your money where your values are by showing how various retailers stack up on corporate values and issue positions. Other resources allow you to research who is doing what by issues. My favorites are money-in-politics via OpenSecrets and Fox News advertisers via Media Matters. Here are some others:

• Enablers of the gun industry via Guns Down America and Business Must Act

• Funds anti-abortion politicians via Equity Forward, Don’t Ban Equality, and Planned Parenthood

• Enablers of Donald Trump via #GrabYourWallet and Popular Information

• Pinkwashers of LGBT+ rights via All Out and Human Rights Campaign

• Funds private prisons via Real Money Moves

• Enables deforestation / fossil fuels via Rainforest Action Network

• Paid leave policies via PL+US and the National Partnership for Women & Families

• Overpaid CEOs via As You Sow

• Funds climate deniers via League of Conservation Voters and JUST Capital

• Enables Russian Invasion of Ukraine via Kyiv School of Economics (KSE)

• Doesn’t support Human Rights Defenders via Business & Human Rights Resource Centre

If you want to explore getting involved in this struggle, other good resources are MoveOn, Public Citizen, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Or visit Indivisible, which offers the excellent how-to, A Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink: Strategies, Tactics, & Tips For How Everyday Americans Can Fight Back Together Wherever We Live.​​

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I began this series on Inauguration Day and since then, many of my worst fears for the new administration are confirmed. My sense is that a lot of us are struggling with how to respond. If you don’t understand what the hell is going on, I recommend Jared Yates Saxton’s explainer, What the Hell is Going On. To safeguard your media consumption from bullshit, former U.S. labor secretary and columnist Robert Reich recommends the following resources: Democracy Now, Business Insider, The New Yorker, The American Prospect, The Atlantic, Americans for Tax Fairness, Economic Policy Institute, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, The Guardian, ProPublica, Labor Notes, The Lever, Popular Information, and Heather Cox Richardson. And if you’re concerned about protecting our democracy, here is an excellent resource from the folks at Protect Democracy that includes 29 concrete steps to take.

Meanwhile, let us revisit the wisdom of our ancestors, who fought so hard and sacrificed so much for our country during one of its darkest hours. The Simple Sabotage Field Manual, excerpted below, was created in 1944 by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. It was declassified in 2008 and comes to you courtesy of the CIA website. It’s there, so they must want us to have it.

Sabotage is a powerful tool and these techniques were good to know if you were going to venture behind enemy lines. “Acts of simple sabotage, multiplied by thousands of citizen-saboteurs, can be an effective weapon against the enemy. Slashing tires, draining fuel tanks, starting fires, starting arguments, acting stupidly, short-circuiting electric systems, abrading machine parts will waste materials, manpower and time. Occurring on a wide scale, simple sabotage will be a constant and tangible drag on the war effort of the enemy.” These efforts require no active connection with an organized group and can be carried out in such a way as to involve a minimum danger of injury, detection, and reprisal. At its heart, simple sabotage is the art of turning whatever you have wherever you are into the enemy’s destruction.

Below please find an excerpt covering useful techniques from the Manual:

Safety Measures

a. The amount of activity carried on by the saboteur will be governed not only by the number of opportunities he sees, but also by the amount of danger he feels. Bad news travels fast, and simple sabotage will be discouraged if too many simple saboteurs are arrested.

b. It should not be difficult to prepare leaflets and other media for the saboteur about the choice of weapons, time, and targets which will insure the saboteur against detection and retaliation. Among such suggestions might be the following:

1. Use materials which appear to be innocent. A knife or a nail file can be carried normally on your person; either is a multi-purpose instrument for creating damage. Matches, pebbles, hair, salt, nails, and dozens of other destructive agents can be carried or kept in your living quarters without exciting any suspicion whatever. If you are a worker in a particular trade or industry you can easily carry and keep such things as wrenches, hammers, emery paper, and the like.

2. Try to commit acts for which large numbers of people could be responsible. For instance, if you blow out the wiring in a factory at a central fire box, almost anyone could have done it. On-the-street sabotage after dark, such as you might be able to carry out against a military car or truck, is another example of an act for which it would be impossible to blame you.

3. Do not be afraid to commit acts for which you might be blamed directly, so long as you do so rarely, and as long as you have a plausible excuse: You dropped your wrench across an electric circuit because an air raid had kept you up the night before and you were half-dozing at work. Always be profuse in your apologies. Frequently you can "get away" with such acts under the cover of pretending stupidity, ignorance, over-caution, fear of being suspected or sabotage, or weakness and dullness due to undernourishment.

4. After you have committed an act of easy sabotage, resist any temptation to wait around and see what happens. Loiterers arouse suspicion. Of course, there are circumstances when it would be suspicious for you to leave. If you commit sabotage on your job, you should naturally stay at your work.

SPECIFIC SUGGESTIONS FOR SIMPLE SABOTAGE

1. Buildings

Warehouses, barracks, offices, hotels, and factory buildings are outstanding targets for simple sabotage. They are extremely susceptible to damage, especially by fire; they offer opportunities to such untrained people as janitors, char women, and casual visitors; and, when damaged, they present a relatively large handicap to the enemy.

1. Fires can be started wherever there is an accumulation of inflammable material. Warehouses are obviously the most promising targets but incendiary sabotage need not be confined to them alone.

1. Whenever possible, arrange to have the fire start after you have gone away. Use a candle and paper combination, setting it as close as possible to the inflammable material you want to burn: From a sheet of paper, tear a strip three or four centimeters wide and wrap it around the base of the candle two or three times. TwIst more sheets of paper into loose ropes and place them around the base of the candle. When the candle flame reaches the encircling strip, it will be ignited and in turn will ignite the surrounding paper. The size, heat, and duration of the resulting flame will depend on how much paper you use and how much of it you can cramp in a small space.

2. With a flame of this kind, do not attempt to ignite any but rather inflammable materials, such as cotton sacking. To light more resistant materials, use a candle plus tightly rolled or twisted paper which has been soaked in gasoline. To create a briefer but even hotter flame, put celluloid such as you might find in an old comb, into a nest of plain or saturated paper which is to be fired by a candle.

3. To make another type of simple fuse, soak one end of a piece of string in grease. Rub a generous pinch of gunpowder over the inch of string where greasy string meets clean string. Then ignite the clean end of the string. It will burn slowly without a flame (in much the same way that a cigarette burns) until it reaches the grease and gunpowder; it will then flare up suddenly. The grease-treated string will then burn with a flame. The same effect may be achieved by using matches instead of the grease and gunpowder. Run the string over the match heads, taking care that the string is not pressed or knotted. They too will produce a sudden flame. The advantage of this type of fuse is that string burns at a set speed. You can time your fire by the length and thickness of the string you chose.

4. Use a fuse such as the ones suggested above to start a fire In an office after hours. The destruction of records and other types of documents would be a serious handicap to the enemy.

5. In basements where waste is kept, janitors should accumulate oily and greasy waste. Such waste sometimes ignites spontaneously, but it can easily be lit with a cigarette or match. If you are a janitor on night duty, you can be the first to report the fire, but don't report it too soon.

6. A clean factory is not susceptible to fire, but a dirty one is. Workers should be careless with refuse and janitors should be inefficient in cleaning. If enough dirt and trash can be accumulated an otherwise fireproof building will become inflammable.

7. Where illuminating gas is used in a room which is vacant at night, shut the windows tightly, turn on the gas, and leave a candle burning in the room, closing the door tightly behind you. After a time, the gas will explode, and a fire may or may not follow.

b. Water and miscellaneous

1. Ruin warehouse stock by setting the automatic sprinkler system to work. You can do this by tapping the sprinkler heads sharply with a hammer or by holding a match under them.

2. Forget to provide paper in toilets; put tightly rolled paper, hair, and other obstructions in the W.C. Saturate a sponge with a thick starch or sugar solution. Squeeze it tightly into a ball, wrap it with string, and dry. Remove the string when fully dried. The sponge will be in the form of a tight hard ball. Flush down a W.C. or otherwise introduce into a sewer line. The sponge will gradually expand to its normal size and plug the sewage system.

3. Put a coin beneath a bulb in a public building during the daytime, so that fuses will blow out when lights are turned on at night. The fuses themselves may be rendered ineffective by putting a coin behind them or loading them with heavy wire. Then a short-circuit may either start a fire, damage transformers, or blow out a central fuse which will interrupt distribution of electricity to a large area.

4. Jam paper, bits of wood, hairpins, and anything else that will fit into the locks of all unguarded entrances to public buildings.

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Industrial Production: Manufacturing

a. Tools

1. Let cutting tools grow dull. They will be inefficient, will slow down production, and may damage the materials and parts you use them on.

2. Leave saws slightly twisted when you are not using them. After a while, they will break when used.

3. Using a very rapid stroke will wear out a file before its time. So will dragging a file in slow strokes under heavy pressure. Exert pressure on the backward stroke as well as the forward stroke.

4. Clean files by knocking them against the vise or the workpiece; they are easily broken this way.

5. Bits and drills will snap under heavy pressure.

6. You can put a press punch out of order by putting in it more material than It is adjusted for – two blanks instead of one, for example.

7. Power-driven tools like pneumatic drills, riveters, and so on, are never efficient when dirty. Lubrication points and electric contacts can easily be fouled by normal accumulations of dirt or the insertion of foreign matter.

b. Oil and lubrication systems are not only vulnerable to easy sabotage, but are critical in every machine with moving parts. Sabotage of oil and lubrication will slow production or stop work entirely at strategic points in industrial processes.

1. Put metal dust or filings, fine sand, ground glass, emery dust (get it by pounding up an emery knife sharpener) and similar hard, gritty substances directly into lubrication systems. They will scour smooth surfaces, ruining pistons, cylinder walls, shafts, and bearings. They will overheat and stop motors which will need overhauling, new parts, and extensive repairs. Such materials, if they are used, should be introduced into lubrication systems past any filters which otherwise would strain them out.

2. You can cause wear on any machine by uncovering a filter system, poking a pencil or any other sharp object through the filter mesh, then covering it up again. Or, if you can dispose of it quickly, simply remove the filter.

3. If you cannot get at the lubrication system or filter directly, you may be able to lessen the effectiveness of oil by diluting it in storage. In this case, almost any liquid will do which will thin the oil. A small amount of sulphuric acid, varnish, water-glass, or linseed oil will be especially effective.

4. Using a thin oil where a heavy oil is prescribed will break down a machine or heat up a moving shaft so that it will "freeze" and stop.

5. Put any clogging substance into lubrication systems or, if it will float, into stored oil. Twisted combings of human hair, pieces of string, dead insects, and many other common objects will be effective in stopping or hindering the flow of oil through feed lines and filters.

6. Under some circumstances, you may be able to destroy oil outright rather than interfere with its effectiveness, by removing [illegible] from lubricating systems or by puncturing the drums and cans in which it is stored.

b. Cooling Systems

1. A water cooling system can be put out of commission in a fairly short time, with considerable damage to an engine or motor, if you put into it several pinches of hard grain, such as rice or wheat. They will swell up and choke the circulation of water, and the cooling system will have to be torn down to remove the obstruction. Sawdust or hair may also be used to clog a water cooling system.

2. If very cold water is quickly introduced into the cooling system of an overheated motor, contraction and considerable strain on the engine housing will result. If you can repeat the treatment a few times, cracking and serious damage will result.

3. You can ruin the effectiveness of an air cooling system by plugging dirt and waste into intake or exhaust valves. If a belt-run fan is used in the system, make a jagged cut at least halfway through the belt; it will slip and finally part under strain and the motor will overheat.

Gasoline and Oil Fuel

Tanks and fueling engines usually are accessible and easy to open. They afford a very vulnerable target for simple sabotage activities.

1. Put several pinches of sawdust or hard grain, such as rice or wheat, into the fuel tank of a gasoline engine. The particles will choke a feed line so that the engine will stop. Some time will be required to discover the source of the trouble. Although they will be hard to get, crumbs of natural rubber, such as you might find in old rubber bands and pencil erasers, are also effective.

2. If you can accumulate sugar, put it in the fuel tank of a gasoline engine. As it burns together with the gasoline, it will turn into a sticky mess which will completely mire the engine and necessitate extensive cleaning and repair. Honey and molasses are as good as sugar. Try to use about 75-100 grams for each 10 galIons or gasoline.

3. Other impurities which you can introduce into gasoline will cause rapid engine wear and eventual breakdown. Fine particles of pumice, sand, ground glass, and metal dust can easily be introduced into a gasoline tank. Be sure that the particles are very fine, so that they will be able to pass through the carburetor jet.

4. Water, urine, wine, or any other simple liquid you can get in reasonably large quantities will dilute gasoline fuel to a point where no combustion will occur in the cylinder and the engine will not move. One pint to 20 gallons of gasoline is sufficient. If salt water is used, it will cause corrosion and permanent motor damage.

5. In the case of Diesel engines, put low flashpoint oil into the fuel tank; the engine will not move. If there already is proper oil in the tank when the wrong kind is added, the engine will only limp and sputter along.

6. Fuel lines to gasoline and oil engines frequently pass over the exhaust pipe. When the machine is at rest, you can stab a small hole in the fuel line and plug the hole with wax. As the engine runs and the exhaust tube becomes hot, the wax will be melted; fuel will drip onto the exhaust and a blaze will start.

7. If you have access to a room where gasoline is stored, remember that gas vapor accumulating in a closed room will explode after n time if you leave a candle burning in the room. A good deal of evaporation, however, must occur from the gasoline tins into the air of the room. If removal of the tops of the tins does not expose enough gas to the air to ensure copious evaporation, you can open lightly constructed tins further with a knife, ice pick or sharpened nail file. Or puncture a tiny hole in the tank which will permit gasoline to leak out on the floor. This will greatly increase the rate of evaporation. Before you light your candle, be sure that windows are closed and the room is as air-tight as you can make it. If you can see that windows in a neighboring room are opened wide, you have a chance of setting a large fire which will not only destroy the gasoline but anything else nearby; when the gasoline explodes, the doors of the storage room will be blown open, a draft to the neighboring windows will be created which will whip up a fine conflagration.

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As I continue to research resistance in the 20th Century, particularly during World War II, I’ve become fascinated by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. Headed by William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, the OSS was created to obtain intelligence on the military efforts of enemy nations and then to sabotage them.

The OSS collected and analyzed information on areas in which U.S. military forces were operating. It made use of agents inside Nazi-occupied Europe and elsewhere, carried out counterpropaganda and disinformation activities, and produced analytical reports for policy makers. It also staged special operations, including sabotage, behind enemy lines to support resistance fighters. How? Well, the OSS produced a document setting out exactly that, unmatched in the annals of history for sheer genius and perversity, at least as far as I know. I was delighted to come across it and now to share it with you.

The Simple Sabotage Field Manual, excerpted below, was declassified in 2008 and comes to you courtesy of the CIA website. I like to think of it as a gift from our ancestors for our troubled times. Because there were so many errors in transposing it from a scan of the typewritten original, I had to scour every word to prepare it for publication. It took forever and I laughed out loud the whole time. I don’t know who wrote it – I’d like to think it was Wild Bill himself – but whoever it was, they were my soulmate.

It turns out that resistance doesn’t require the high-tech weaponry of James Bond or even much skill. To impede the enemy’s progress, all you have to do is be impossible: “Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right,” the manual reads. It couldn’t be easier:

“... simple sabotage … is based on universal opportunities to make faulty decisions, to adopt a non-cooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suit. Making a faulty decision may be simply a matter of placing tools in one spot instead of another. A non-cooperative attitude may involve nothing more than creating an unpleasant situation among one’s fellow workers, engaging in bickerings, or displaying surliness and stupidity.”

This is how we sabotage the enemy. This is how it’s done:

(11) General Interference with Organizations and Production

(a) Organizations and Conferences

1. Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.

2. Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate patriotic comments.

3. When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible – never less than five.

4. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.

5. Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.

6. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.

7. Advocate "caution." Be “reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.

8. Be worried about the propriety of any decision – raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

(b) Managers and Supervisors

1. Demand written orders.

2. “Misunderstand" orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can.

3. Do everything possible to delay the delivery of orders. Even though parts of an order may be ready beforehand, don't deliver it until it is completely ready.

4. Don't order new working materials until your current stocks have been virtually exhausted, so that the slightest delay in filling your order will mean a shutdown.

5. Order high-quality materials which are hard to get. If you don't get them, argue about it. Warn that inferior materials will mean inferior work.

6. In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that the important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers of poor machines.

7. Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw. Approve other defective parts whose flaws are not visible to the naked eye.

8. Make mistakes in routing so that parts and materials will be sent to the wrong place in the plant.

9. When training new workers, give incomplete or misleading instructions.

10. To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.

11. Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.

12. Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files.

13. Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, paychecks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.

14. Apply all regulations to the last letter.

(c) Office Workers

1. Make mistakes in quantities of material when you are copying orders. Confuse similar names. Use wrong addresses.

2. Prolong correspondence with government bureaus.

3. Misfile essential documents.

4. In making carbon copies, make one too few, so that an extra copying job will have to be done.

5. Tell important callers the boss is busy or talking on another telephone.

6. Hold up mail until the next collection.

7. Spread disturbing rumors that sound like inside dope.

(d) Employees

1. Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job: use a light hammer instead of a heavy one, try to make a small wrench do when a big one is necessary, use little force where considerable force is needed, and so on.

2. Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can: when changing the material on which you are working, as you would on a lathe or punch, take needless time to do it. If you are cutting, shaping or doing other measured work, measure dimensions twice as often as you need to. When you go to the lavatory, spend a longer time there than is necessary. Forget tools so that you will have to go back after them.

3. Even if you understand the language, pretend not to understand instructions in a foreign tongue.

4. Pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once. Or pretend that you are particularly anxious to do your work, and pester the foreman with unnecessary questions.

5. Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.

6. Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.

7. Snarl up administration in every possible way. Fill out forms illegibly so that they will have to be done over; make mistakes or omit requested information in forms.

8. If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the management. See that the procedures adopted are as inconvenient as possible for the management, involving the presence of a large number of employees at each presentation, entailing more than one meeting for each grievance, bringing up problems which are largely imaginary, and so on.

9. Misroute materials.

10. Mix good parts with unusable scrap and rejected parts.

12. General Devices for Lowering Morale and Creating Confusion

(a) Give lengthy and incomprehensible explanations when questioned.

(b). Report imaginary spies or danger to the Gestapo or police.

(c) Act stupid.

(d) Be as irritable and quarrelsome as possible without getting yourself into trouble.

(e) Misunderstand all sorts of regulations concerning such matters as rationing, transportation, traffic regulations.

(f) Complain against ersatz materials.

(g) In public, treat Axis nationals or quislings coldly.

(h) Stop all conversation when Axis nationals or quislings enter a cafe.

(i) Cry and sob hysterically at every occasion, especially when confronted by government clerks.

(j) Boycott all movies, entertainments, concerts, newspapers which are in any way connected with the quisling authorities.

(k) Do not cooperate in salvage schemes.

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