Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening is a collection of hybrid feminist narratives that perfectly captures the many paradoxes of the COVID-19 pandemic, contrasting the seemingly never-ended public catastrophes we experienced as a collective with the isolated lives we carried out in private.
Longlisted for the 2023 PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Shifting effortless between social commentary and memoir, glimpses of history and threads of fiction, Stone, a lifelong feminist and longtime contributor to the Village Voice and NPR's Fresh Air, unapologetically observes against the backdrop of a Zoom call the evolution of feminism over the years, the gendered sexual politics underlying Jeffrey Toobin's public disgrace, rage and hope on the heels of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg's death, and the way we continue to pot and maintain our plants amidst the broken narrative of our world's future. As Stone says, It's good this narrative has been broken. In the narrative that has been broken, people ignored the way so many things they wanted required the suffering of others.
In a time when most of us felt more alone than ever before, Laurie Stone's Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening is a retroactive but no less timely reminder that we were less alone in our thoughts than we thought.