Rebecca Solnit Discusses “The Beginning Comes After the End” With Anand Giridharadas

BPLvideos Streamed live on Mar 24, 2026 BPL Presents welcomes Rebecca Solnit back to our stage, whose The Beginning Comes After the End offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century. In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility; it is an inevitability. The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world. Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than 25 books, including Orwell’s Roses, Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A longtime climate and human rights activist, she serves on the boards of Oil Change International and Third Act. Her newsletter of essays and analyses can be found at meditationsinanemergency.com. Anand Giridharadas is a writer. He is the author of The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy (2022), Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018), The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (2014), and India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking (2011). A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, he has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and he is the publisher of the newsletter The Ink.