“If you have a space of democracy that is closing, you have infinitely more leverage to act before it closes than after.” — Paul Rogat Loeb
The Impossible Will Take a Little While is an anthology of essays, speeches, memoirs and poems about perseverance & hope in troubled times. Edited and introduced by Paul Rogat Loeb, the anthology came out in 2004, in the middle of the Bush years and the Iraq war, and now has 125,000 copies in print. Colleges assigned it across the curriculum. One of the founders of the Natural Resources Defense Council told Loeb he reached for it at the points where he had hit the wall and wasn’t sure he could keep going.
In 2026, many of us feel we’ve hit a wall and aren’t sure we can keep going. So it’s apt that Loeb has reworked his book to suit what seems to be our particularly troubled times. Classic essays from Havel, Mandela, Neruda and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail all remain in the anthology. But this edition has also been comprehensively rebuilt. New work includes Navalny’s prison journals, essays from Jesmyn Ward & Rutger Bregman and a chapter on the South Korean coup. What’s changed over the last couple of decades, Loeb says, is the routinization of surveillance, the attacks on democratic institutions, and the daily reality of climate disaster.
Hope, Loeb reminds us, isn’t blind optimism. His most hopeful stories in the new anthology are about people who weren’t heroes. In Seoul in December 2024, as troops moved to shut the parliament, one detachment stopped for ramen noodles. They had their orders, Loeb says, but food came before politics. In Norway in 1942, eleven thousand teachers simply declined to teach fascism. So history often isn’t made by Havel, MLK or Mandela-style heroes. Hope, then, lies in the action and sometimes inaction of ordinary people. In Seoul noodle restaurants or Norwegian classrooms or on the streets of Minneapolis.
FIVE TAKEAWAYS
1. He Doesn’t Believe the Arc Bends — Asked whether the arc of history bends toward justice, Loeb says no. It can bend, depending on how we act. What he has instead is Havel’s distinction, written in 1986 when the Czech dictatorship looked permanent: optimism expects things to turn out, hope is what lets you act when they might not.
2. Panels on the Ground in Pakistan — Solar output doubled in two years, then again in one. Pakistani farmers skip the permits and the installers and simply lay panels on the ground — a third of the grid displaced in a year, and panels now turning up in wedding dowries. But prices collapsed because the German Greens pushed through subsidies. Citizen action made the technology cheap.
3. Berlin, 1943: The Wives on Rosenstrasse — Pressed on whether readers might cast themselves as martyrs when Mandelstam’s Russia and the present are nothing alike, Loeb concedes it at once. Then the counter-example: the non-Jewish wives of Jewish men gathered outside a Berlin collection point until the men were released. He won’t claim it could have beaten the Nazis. Only that it happened.
4. King’s Letter Was About the Elites — Rereading Letter from Birmingham Jail, Loeb says it clicked. King’s target — the white man of goodwill whose silence does more damage than the Klansman — maps onto the elite law firms and university presidents. Ordinary people, he says, have come out of this year better than the elites.
5. Act Before the Space Closes — In Buenos Aires he met a young Russian couple. She protested when Navalny came home; then the protests shrank, the cost rose, and now none of them do. The lesson is leverage: a closing democracy gives you infinitely more of it than one that has closed.
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Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
02:28 — Worse than 2004?
06:07 — Does the arc of history bend toward justice?
06:42 — Hope is not the same as optimism
10:50 — South Korea: Yoon’s self-coup
13:30 — The soldiers who stopped for ramen
21:45 — Have the people done better than the elites?
26:30 — Norway 1942: the teachers refuse
30:31 — McKibben, solar, and Pakistan
45:43 — Is there a danger of ahistoricism?
48:06 — Navalny, laughing in prison
50:00 — Act before the space closes
53:53 — Closing