Sign in Subscribe
6 min read 04

UofWinds 404, Week 4 2025: It's Not a Marathon, Survive the Tyrant, Bibliomancy For The Living Autobiography In The Third Person


Good morning. I'm stretched out on the sofa under several blankets in the study. The cats have found the warmest corners of the house elsewhere. As I write this, I am pruning my absurd number of playlists in my YouTube Music account. On today's agenda is a family viewing of Chelsea F. C. vs. Man City in the living room. Nothing has changed while everything has changed.

It's Not a Marathon

This newsletter was created in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In many ways, it was created because of this cataclysm. But my intention was never to create a newsletter about politics. Although, if pressed I would suggest that it performs as a reaction to politics.

This week I've read many texts about how it feels to be in this moment. I'll share two of these pieces that give advice on how we go forward, one from a place of grim realism and the other from a more optimistic position. I'm not sure whether each currently stands even really matters, as they both advise the same course of action.

From Rusty Foster's Today in Tabs, It's Not a Marathon:

My job here at Tabs is usually to follow this sort of thing closely and tell you if any of it matters, but this week I don’t want to. If you also spent the week glued to your feeds, you already know how it felt, and if not you made the right choice. You didn’t miss anything. Instead I just want to encourage you to join something. Please don’t feel like it has to be a political organization, unless you absolutely love Roberts’ Rules of Order. Find a group of people doing something you like, and join them. Join a bowling league. Find a book group. Join a church, or a mosque, or a synagogue, if that’s the way your heart leans. If the first thing you try doesn’t bring you joy, try something else.

It took me a lot longer than it should have but eventually I realized that I don’t need to feel guilty about not sticking with the DSA. And I realized that search and rescue isn’t frivolous, and it wouldn’t be even if it was a disc golf team, or a neighborhood dinner swap, or a knitting circle, or a biking group. This isn’t a marathon, this is the rest of my life, and what gets me through it isn’t eternal helpless vigilance or angry posting. It’s forming connections with other people around activities that bring me joy. It’s building trust, so that when some goose-stepping fuck tries to make me afraid of my neighbors, I can laugh at him.

If you want the social science behind why Rusty's anti-political advice might also be good political medicine for this moment, you might want to listen to Trevor Noah's recent interview with Robert Putnam to speak about his Join or Die project. For what it's worth, I don't agree with all of the conclusions that Trevor Noah makes in this conversation but I do share his belief that the world needs more games that give us experiences like those first joyful months of Pokémon Go.

Survive the Tyrant


Newer subscribers to this newsletter might not know that I have a history of playing myself in alternative reality games set in future calamities. In 2007's World Without Oil, I wrote myself into a shared fictional world that suffers a sudden oil shortage. In 2009's Superstruct, I wrote and created digital artifacts that imagined about how my family and I would cope under quarantine due to a global respiratory outbreak in 2019, among other threats:

Within this paradigm, there are five categorized 'superthreats' that players will deal with: pandemic disease (Quarantine), collapse of the global food system (Ravenous), a world divided by its alternative energy technologies (Power Struggle), dystopian scenarios where the escalation of cyber crime is compounded by privacy-nullifying surveillance technology (Outlaw Planet), and the diaspora of refugees fleeing climate change and war (Generation Exile).

I am telling you this so you might better believe me when I tell you that it is very helpful and useful to play future scenarios in which you imagine yourself surviving and helping others, even if these scenarios don't come to pass. This play and practice helps you with develop a sense of direction before a storm arises.

And with that, from https://survivethetyrant.infy.uk/

Hello, a group of us made something heartfelt that we think could help people. It’s an RPG-style guide for surviving an authoritarian and oppressive regime.
 Survive the Tyrant.pdf
 If you like it, please boost and share it however you can. Send it to your friends. Post it to social media, Discords, or subreddits. Print copies to leave at local game stores, bookstores, coffee shops, schools, or libraries. Publish it. We’ve waived all copyright protections, so please improve it however you like.
 The authors want to stay anonymous, so we’re going to disappear now. Stay safe and keep faith.

Bibliomancy For The Living Autobiography In The Third Person


Bibliomancy For The Living Autobiography In The Third Person is an essay from novelist Alexander Chee from 2023, but was brought to my attention by Shannon Mattern two weeks ago. Alex starts the essay by telling the reader that he is working on a project to teach others on how write a memoir. Then, Alex writes:

After thinking about how to introduce the project, I decided to begin with a bibliomancy exercise, one I teach students, which I think of as a kind of tarot reading but made of epigraphs. I first learned about Bibliomancy in college while reading the novel Adam Bede, by George Eliot, her novel set in a community of 18th century Evangelical Christians in America. One of the characters in the novel engaged in it: you have a question for God and then to get an answer, you open the Bible with your eyes closed, running your finger down the page. When your finger stops, you open your eyes and that's your answer from God.

The practice reminded me of how I like to browse bookstores and libraries and even my own bookshelves at home when he felt stuck, pulling books off the shelf and flipping them open at random, and I suddenly the habit a little differently. As a way to communicate with myself.

He then goes on to describe the exercise. I tried it myself and I found it a very enjoyable experience. So much so that I wrote two blog posts about it. If you are a book person with a even a small personal library, I strongly recommended trying it out to experience how the exercise feels.

  • 💸 : Currently reading: Deep Care: The radical activists who provided abortions, defied the law, and fought to keep clinics open. By Angela Hume. FASCINATING book. What I'm hoping to read next: Redefining Rich by Shannon Hayes. (actually I'm hoping to re-read it because it's been several years since I last read it). Redefining Rich is an interesting blend of goal setting and financial planning, but it's not boring. The first time I read it I was amazed by how much I learned re: using and working within our current capitalist system to redefine our lives to make them match what we WANT to do, vs. what capitalism forces us to do to keep ourselves afloat financially. Use the same tools and systems that billionaires use, except make them work for people with much less money and resources.
  • 0 : Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here. Then something lighter.
  • ✨️ : Currently, I am reading The Book of Delights by Ross Gay; and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman. // Next, I will be reading How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr; and Real Estate by Deborah Levy.
  • D : Now: Pleasure Dome by Yusuf Komunyakaa, and The Triumph of Life by Rabbi Irving Greenberg. Next: Mina’s Matchbox by Yōko Ogawa.
  • E : I'm listening to the audiobook of CG Jung's Liber Novis, The Red Book. It is his self-annotated journal from the years when he was creating Active Imagination and deeply engaging with his psyche and shadow. Inventive on every level including the writing style.
  • ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ : Charles Stross’ Eschaton trilogy, Jerusalem by Alan Moore, & W. Gibson’s first trilogy (finished neuromancer, now amidst count zero)
  • 😅 : current reading The Work of Art by Adam Moss; up next: Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin

Question 404: Grab a book from a shelf and find a random page. Please share a sentence or a short passage that resonates.

Answer below or use the UofWinds friction-free survey form.

Member discussion