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2021 | 2024

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CHAPPELL ROAN performing at Outside Lands (August 11, 2024)

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I don't wanna see ANYONE talking about how they won't be voting for Harris in November because of Palestine. This is the best it can possibly get. We're all depending on you. Vote.

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hey. don’t cry. you’re not a Harry Potter adult

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It's honestly such a shame that we've made such a huge thing out of swimming and swimsuits and looking good in swimsuits and fat people not looking good in swimsuits. Swimming is actually the perfect exercise for fat people because it puts zero pressure on the joints, which is a much bigger concern for us than it is for skinny people, and lets you exercise basically every muscle group without straining too much and risking injury. Yet somehow this is one of the least accessible exercises to fat people due to nothing more than a culture of body shaming. The work to unlearn all the shame to be comfortable in a bathing suit in front of strangers is huge even for conventionally attractive people, but I could probably count on one hand the number of fat people I've met who were confident enough to get in a bathing suit and go swimming in public.

And what is the exercise that somehow everyone thinks they should do instead? Jogging. It's more accessible, sure, it's easy and costs nothing to go outside and run. But I need you to understand telling a fat person to go running is basically telling them to go destroy their knees. Not to mention it's probably one of the most physically uncomfortable exercises to do when you have a body that jiggles even with compression garments.

Imagine a world where everyone had the ability and equal access to whatever exercise fit them best and helped them be happy and healthiest. Imagine a world where fat people go swimming.

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CHAPPELL ROAN at OUTSIDELANDS

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Sometimes a Son’s Greatest Fear is Becoming His Father

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Hell Yeah

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“When I was 26, I went to Indonesia and the Philippines to do research for my first book, No Logo. I had a simple goal: to meet the workers making the clothes and electronics that my friends and I purchased. And I did. I spent evenings on concrete floors in squalid dorm rooms where teenage girls—sweet and giggly—spent their scarce nonworking hours. Eight or even 10 to a room. They told me stories about not being able to leave their machines to pee. About bosses who hit. About not having enough money to buy dried fish to go with their rice.

They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”

So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?

It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.

This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.

These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”

Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”

The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.

The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.

In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal work— to others.”

- Naomi Klein

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I was feeling agitated and artblocked yesterday so I decided to give my brain a rest by watching TV and then the next thing I knew these were in front of me

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was walking along a stream and kept seeing these little flower boats go by, and i was like "how nice is it that someone took the time to make these". and then 15ish minutes layer i came by a bridge where a guy in his sixties/seventies was sitting down with a huge bucket of freshly plucked flowers and leaves making the little boats, and another guy in his twenties who was fluent in english explaining to passers by that yes it's free, yes you can take pictures, yes it's just for fun. the older guy kept telling everyone that succesfully dropping them into the stream upright and having them sail away meant good luck in the future, and i'm like 98% sure that they were folded in a way where they're *always* gonna end right side up, but that didn't stop him from clapping/cheering every time one landed right. i sat down for a bit and hung out and chatted with them for like half an hour and they were SO fucking nice that i genuinely cried a little afterwards and anyway thank u for coming to my ted talk about the restoration of my faith in humanity

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the trolley problem vs. systemic oppression: a comic.

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Frodo: Sam hates Gollum, but that is what I shall become once I have lost myself to the ring… he’ll despise me… 

Sam if Frodo did turn into a Gollum: That’s a very nice fish you caught with your bare hands, Mr. Frodo, and its very smart of you to eat it raw, saves us the trouble of starting a fire. I knitted you a sweater in case you get cold running around in that loincloth of yours. Is the sun hurting your eyes? I’ll kill it if it’s bothering you. I’ll kill the sun

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Mosab Abu Toha, "Interlude", from his poetry collection Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, available for download here