The world is unpredictable, which gives us hope amid the madness Rebecca Solnit

can’t say I have confidence in the future, but I have a lot of confidence in its unpredictability, based on the fact that the past has regularly delivered surprises. It’s easy to forget in retrospect how astonishing the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution were in 1989, or the arrival of the Zapatista army on the world stage in 1994 or how marriage equality seemed like a long shot just before it became a reality in countries all over the world not long ago or how Ireland and Argentina recently legalised abortion. The terrible, too, comes