Fugitive is a word I’m not entirely sure what to do with, which is how I like it. It sounds bad-ass but also a bit sad. I hear refugee in it. I hear flight. A fugitive is someone on the run, after all. An outlaw.

In the case of fugitive slaves, the law they broke was freeing themselves. Those are the fugitives for whom this newsletter is named, as well as for Saidiya Hartman’s fugitive:

…sojourns without a fixed destination, ambulatory possibility, interminable migration, rush and flight, black locomotion; the everyday struggle to live free. The attempt to elude capture by never settling. Not the master’s tools, but the ex-slave’s fugitive gestures, her traveling shoes.

A fugitive is more than someone who runs away. They are someone who runs towards a future worth being an outlaw for.

This newsletter is my response to a question I’m still answering: How do you find refuge from the news without fleeing the moral demands of the moment?

As a journalist who must be fully present yet impartial to our political reality, I’ve been searching for a way to step back without disengaging. There are amazing reporters covering how the Trump administration is reshaping the country and the world. This newsletter isn’t that. It’s not focused on the tiktok but on what philosopher Albert Camus called the Human Crisis—a universal question of morality.

This newsletter will feature short essays meditating on one word connected to this moment: Hope, Imagination, Despair, Community, Paralysis, Freedom.

Instead of the illicit movement of the body, though, these essay are focused on the movement of the mind. Grounding each one in a single word felt like an antidote to the overwhelm, like something I could manage to write and you could manage to read.

But of course, one word can be wildly loaded.