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I’ve been thinking lately about a word I came across again recently. It comes from Antonio Gramsci, an Italian thinker who wrote from a prison cell in the 1930s while trying to make sense of a world in upheaval. He called it the interregnum: the time between one order and the next, when the old world is dying but the new one hasn’t arrived yet. He said this is when the strange symptoms appear. When things feel off in ways that are hard to name.

Gramsci wrote from a prison cell because Mussolini's government had put him there. He had been one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, and the regime considered him dangerous enough to lock away for eleven years. The prosecutor at his trial reportedly said: we must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years. They could not stop him because he kept writing.

That word has been following me. I think it describes exactly where we are, and I suspect many of you feel it too. A kind of unease that isn’t quite panic. The sense that the ground has shifted even when your daily life looks more or less the same. That feeling is real. It deserves to be taken seriously.