Snow’s thesis is that the world faces urgent problems of the sort that only collective action can solve, but, perhaps because the problems are so large, people are overwhelmed. Reading his essay, I felt that little tingle of recognition that you sometimes get when words from long ago sound like they could have been written yesterday. Writing in 1968 - not a great time, to be sure - Snow confessed that in that year he had come the closest he had ever come to despair, as saw the enormity of the problems facing humanity and at the same time realized just how disinclined humanity was to do anything about them. Snow, a British scientist and government advisor from the middle of the last century. Perhaps because I had snow on my mind, I chose to spend an hour in the early evening reading an essay entitled The State of Seige by C. And even though the government covered it up, by sending park employees to smother Snowden’s bust in a tarp so no one could see it, civil disobedience had happened and it was noteworthy. It was an impressive gesture by a group of artists who wrote (as you shall see below) some powerful things about freedom and heroism and the public’s right to know. The monument consisted of a bust of Edward Snowden, with his name emblazoned across the column below it in big Roman capitals. It started with the news that a new monument had gone up overnight in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park, not far from the Brooklyn Bridge. Maybe it was those snowflakes in our weather forecast, but I had a lot of snow-related synchronicities this week.