The Wrong Turn is an essay series about the moments America took the wrong path — and the people who tried to tell us so.
Each piece profiles a figure from the mid-twentieth century who saw clearly what was about to go wrong: the biologist who warned that we were poisoning the natural world and was hounded by industry for saying it; an OSS officer who told Washington not to re-colonize Vietnam; a Chicano poet-organizer who demanded land, language, and political power for his community when American institutions balked; a Mandan-Hidatsa educator who got Native students into college decades before federal policy caught up. Some were ignored. Some were heard, then unheard. All of them were right.
The series exists because we are now living inside the choices their warnings could have changed. Climate change, the military-industrial complex launched by Vietnam, the surveillance and silencing of dissent, the suppression of Indigenous and civil rights — these aren’t separate stories. They are the same story, told from inside the moments when listening would have cost a generation in power exactly nothing and saved everyone else everything.
These essays are also the bedrock of Mission: Butterfly, a climate-fiction novel I’m finishing, set against the unraveling of mid-century America. Some of the figures appear in the book. Others were cut. All of them shaped how I came to write it. If you want both, you’re in the right place — but the essays stand on their own.
New essays every other Tuesday. Free to read. If a piece resonates, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to one person who would care.
— Steve KrizmanWhy subscribe?
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