This week, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, had the nation talking. And talking. And talking some more. Her intimate sharing of her egg-freezing journey was a reminder of how she, if not introduced, elevated and perfected a politics of personal vulnerability, built on direct, human connection to citizens. And her comment in a TV interview that “Woke 1 was crazy” triggered a firestorm of debate across the broad left. Is she right to distance herself from the rhetorical and tactical excesses of elements of the movement left? Is she abandoning the movement that made her? Is she forsaking the outside struggle for the inside game? Or is she doing some combination of things that isn’t quite legible to people, because it is built on a savvy understanding of how civics, attention, and power work now?

I spent a long time thinking about these questions and the congresswoman’s rise a few years ago. And I’ve gotten (rare!) permission from my publisher, Alfred Knopf, to share with you my in-depth portrait of the rise of AOC which was published in The Persuaders and was based on, among other things, several interviews with her.

We will publish it in five parts. Today is part one — the origin story.

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The rise of AOC: Part 1: Origins

On a temperate October day in 2019, on a stage in New York City’s Queensbridge Park, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came to the microphone.

“What’s up, New York Cit- eeeeeeeyyyy?” She wasn’t satisfied. “Let me ask you again: What’s up, New York Cit- eeeeeeeeeeyyyy?” She was wearing a dark power suit and one of the more fiery lipsticks in her arsenal that she sometimes referred to as war paint and that signaled to the colleagues who knew her best that she had big ambitions for the day. Facing Manhattan, with the borough of Queens, which she represented, at her back, and the Bronx, which she also represented and where she was born, to her right, she stood before a glistening sea of placards. Bernie. Bernie. Bernie.

“Last February,” she said, pointing across the East River, “I was working as a waitress in downtown Manhattan— at a taqueria. I worked shoulder to shoulder with undocumented workers, who often worked harder and hardest for the least amount of money. I was on my feet working twelve-hour days, with no structured breaks. I didn’t have health care. I wasn’t being paid a living wage. And I didn’t think that I deserved any of those things.”

Upon hearing these words, from out in the sea of placards, a man yelled, “I can relate!”

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“Because that is the script that we tell working people here and all over this country,” Ocasio-Cortez continued, “that your inherent worth and value as a human being is dependent on an income that another person decided to underpay us. But what we’re here to do is to turn around that very basic logic.” And then she delivered a sentence that I, having heard many political endorsements, will not soon forget. “It wasn’t until I heard of a man by the name of Bernie Sanders,” she said, stopping mid-phrase here to take in the crowd and the roars, “that I began to question and assert and recognize my inherent value as a human being.”

She went on to catalog the virtues of the senator from Vermont. But it was that line that hung in the air and that helped me to see Sanders’s achievement even more clearly. She wasn’t saying Bernie had persuaded her into an ideology— at least not at the beginning. She wasn’t saying he had enlisted her in the battle for a particular policy. He had persuaded her that she was human, fully human. “I used to, frankly, abuse myself mentally about how I’m nothing,” she once said of those days before her political awakening, with those gross men hitting on her at the Flats Fix taqueria and her $200- a- month health insurance that came with an awful $8,000 deductible and no stairway to a better life in sight. “I realized that I need to choose myself,” she had said, “because if I don’t, I’m just going to waste away. I’m just going to give up.” Sanders’s 2016 campaign, for which she ended up volunteering, had given her a new way of looking at herself. And now here was the disciple, a few years after she learned his name, standing on that stage as perhaps the most significant new arrival in Congress in American history, rescuing his cause.

In the months that followed, with the wind of Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement at his back, Sanders would come back from the political dead, claiming victory in the first three contests. For the first time in Sanders’s pursuit of the presidency, he was the front-runner. And this development intensified the preexisting debates within the campaign: How could Sanders close the deal by going wider, calling in those who remained skeptical of his ideas but might come around?

One line of advice came from the actor John Cusack, a die-hard progressive who sometimes traveled with the campaign. Cusack felt Sanders should begin to sound more unifying, more like a general-election candidate. “His campaign needs to create a unit that is charged with outreach to groups who do NOT identify as progressive, but have strong views that are aligned with his,” Cusack wrote in an email to Sanders campaign officials. “EXPAND EXPAND EXPAND.”

Another line of advice came to be associated with Ocasio-Cortez. It had less to do with the framing and more to do with how the Sanders movement carried itself. The concern was about the candidate himself to an extent, but also the campaign and its most avid supporters online and in the physical world. Ocasio-Cortez was worried about the movement’s posture in the face of skeptics and potential converts (these being to Faiz Shakir’s way of thinking the same people). She, having been awakened and transformed by the movement a few years earlier, having felt the righteous anger that animated it, was, at the same time, worried that elements of the movement were potentially off-putting as well. The movement that had helped her discover her humanity was coming off to too many other people who didn’t have that same experience as hostile, judgmental, and unwelcoming. Clearly, the things that made some feel seen in their humanity and welcomed, as she had felt in encountering Sanders, could turn other people away. The deploring of injustice, the propulsive force of the movement, did not on its own create a sense of home for some, and at times the stridency could prevent it.

At first, she delivered this message privately, internally. I asked David Sirota—the former Sanders aide and someone very much associated with the strident, pugilistic, at times angry posture that Ocasio-Cortez was questioning— about her critique. “I think she was right that for millions of voters who aren’t paying attention to the internecine details of this policy or that policy, there can be, there should be, a more positive, open message and themes from the campaign. That was sound counsel,” he told me.

She had other advice, too. Shakir told me she was also adamant about the importance of building Black support for Sanders and the need for Sanders to change some of his ways to do that. “She gave some specific recommendations that we adhered to,” Shakir told me. “Her big thing was, how are you going to change your language to reflect that you’re hearing many of the newer kind of dynamics and voices of the movement?” Shakir told me Sanders trusted the advice and made an effort. But ultimately, he said, “he’s Bernie Sanders, and he knows the things that he knows quite well, and he feels comfortable talking about those things in certain ways at rallies that he feels like more people will access. He’s not somebody who plays with the rally speech well.”

But it was, as Shakir tells it, the question of posture that Ocasio-Cortez raised most fruitfully and that he took to heart. “She was a little worried about whether some of the Twitter demeanor of the constellation of people around us could be seen as antagonistic or off-putting. She was definitely somebody who worried about the perception that could create about who we are. Are we just angry all the time, or are we the people looking to aspirationally build a better future for people?”

One day, she made her case to Sanders directly, Shakir recalled. “She says to the senator, without naming any names, ‘Senator, I think that the way in which we should project this campaign is to give people the opportunity to see what values we’re about— a high-minded, aspirational, better society, an advanced society for all. And I don’t think that’s always reflected in the language of the campaign and you. So I think we should do our best to make everyone understand that this is the message that we want to send.’”

Shakir understood the advice, but it was harder to act on than he might have wished. For one thing, the anger and antagonism that many perceived in the Sanders movement were anger and antagonism justified by the systemic realities of the age and sentiments that were fuel for the working-class movement to change the country’s power equations. Take away the anger, and you might take away too much. It was anger rooted in the heart and identity of the candidate, who was not easily changed. It was also late in the game to make adjustments. “You pull one thread, and it can kind of disrupt the entire fabric of the campaign,” Shakir told me. And it was complicatedly political within the campaign. “I don’t have a mute button,” Shakir told me. “I don’t control everybody’s tweets.” He said the campaign’s more strident defenders had been brought in for a reason: Sanders, knowing the establishment he was up against, wanted people who could fight.

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At some point, Shakir realized that what he could do was be a role model for the welcoming posture that Ocasio-Cortez was talking about. Until then, he had largely been behind the curtain. Late in 2019, he began to do livestreams of campaign updates: “If you go back and track what I was saying in those, one of the most oft-repeated things I would say is that we are a welcoming movement. We need to bring people in. We understand that everyone is on their journey, some people further along on that journey than others. And we need to give space and allow for people to basically be welcomed into it. I would use that phrase all the time: ‘a welcoming movement.’”

But there were also potentially real costs to meeting the conditions that would make some people feel welcome in the movement, feel seen in their humanity, and find in the movement a home. These costs posed complicated trade-offs of persuasion: Why should working-class people mad as hell about being shafted for decades graft a fake smile onto their cause? Doesn’t coalition-building invariably end up meaning compromised positions? Isn’t the desire to win over the middle

of the road why the middle always wins? Do you build a movement capable of smashing oligarchy by rallying your armies or by reaching out? Is it possible to be at once angry and generous? How do you make the cause exciting and warm and soul-stirring without descending into empty sentimentality? How do you construct a movement on the foundation of widespread frustration while offering voters something more inspiring than the sum of a million frustrations?

These were questions swirling around Sanders’s campaign when Ocasio-Cortez gave another speech, less noticed but no less significant, a few months after the endorsement—after Sanders’s winning streak had come to an end in South Carolina, which went for Joe Biden, but with the contest still up in the air. She had campaigned for Sanders on and off in the preceding months, but had been more absent from the trail than some expected, leading to speculative headlines. But now here she was in Michigan, on the cusp of its primary, and she delivered a somewhat different- sounding message that seemed to reflect the advice she had been giving on the inside, now made public.

“We are here because we have been separated from each other,” she said. “As sister Rashida Tlaib here in Michigan says, ‘We are not divided; we are disconnected.’ That is, at its core, our problem today. And that means that the antithesis of that is to connect, to fight for someone you don’t know, to love our neighbor, to bring people into the cause. To listen, to adapt, to open a posture of acceptance. That is what we must do in order to win on Tuesday.”

It was brief, subtle, but carefully worded advice. If the movement was determined to combat the disconnection and alienation and brutality of America in the age of capital, it had to embody, to be, the opposite of those things. It had not only to argue for a politics of love and solidarity but also to incarnate it with a sense of welcome and home and humanity. And that persuasive approach demanded new behaviors from the movement.

Not long after the speech, I asked Ocasio-Cortez what lurked underneath those words.

“Granted, I don’t think the progressive movement overall is like this,” she told me, “but I do think that a very loud and small sector of the movement can be like this; as we know, very loud but small populations and communities can have an enormous amount of sway because they are loud.” She was referring to a certain type of progressive who came off as uncompromising, who, to paraphrase the journalist Michael Kinsley, was more interested in finding heretics than converts.

“It’s not about giving up your principles,” she continued, “and it’s not about changing your positions, but it is about opening up your posture. Because if we’re just about finger wagging and nagging and shaming people into positions—sometimes that needs to be done in our politics. Sometimes—a lot of times—politicians and pundits deserve to be shamed. But it’s not the only thing that we can do. And it’s not the only tool that we have. And sometimes the most persuasive way that I find to bring people into the fold is what my mentor called ‘the golden gate of retreat.’ You create a path for someone that perhaps started out a conversation disagreeing with you.”

Yet even as Ocasio-Cortez gave this advice, she wasn’t teaching what she had mastered so much as voicing what she herself was grappling with at that moment. It was the spring of 2020 when she shared these reflections with me, and there was a special poignancy in her advice to Sanders and the movement, about the open posture and the spirit of grace and the golden gate of retreat and a sense of welcome, because at times she seemed to be speaking to herself, too.

All her life, as far back as she could remember, she had cultivated that spirit of openness and outreach. She was an organizer who knew you had to meet people where they are and pitch the same thing fifteen different ways to eleven different people. And then lightning had struck. In a way no person on this earth could ever plan for, she had landed on the world’s stage, and landed in a particular way that bore a real but fractional resemblance to the person she knew herself to be. Suddenly someone who would probably strike you in a first encounter as quiet and shy was, in the public imagination, queen of the strident, duchess of the doctrinaire, countess of the clapback and callout. This picture of her was based on very real things about her; at the same time, it wasn’t her. But you don’t always get to choose where you’re standing and what you’re wearing when the lightning strikes. And so when Ocasio-Cortez spoke to Sanders and his armies, she was also, and quite consciously, speaking to herself, asking herself and others if it was possible to change big things by summoning in yourself the humility, patience, and openheartedness to move individual human beings.

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In 1938, the MetLife corporation bought a 129-acre tract of land in the Bronx that was owned by the Catholic Church and used as the site of an orphanage where more than twenty-five hundred children lived in wait. It was destined to become the largest condominium development on earth, with some twelve thousand units, built on the concept of a “city within a city”— a place, as a local website puts it, “where one can shop, work and live without ever having to step foot outside.” The development straddled two different Bronx neighborhoods, Park Versailles and Westchester Heights. Which is how it got the real-estate-branding portmanteau of Parkchester.

The development was open only to white people at first, from 1940 to 1968. The president of MetLife was quoted as saying, “Negroes and whites do not mix. Perhaps they will, in one hundred years, but they do not now.” In 1968, the city ordered the development integrated. Coincidence or not, that was the year MetLife decided to sell. It sold the development to a real-estate magnate named Harry Helmsley, who at first continued to run Parkchester as a sea of rentals but later converted the units into condominiums. He and his wife, Leona, were later found to have engaged in financial shenanigans involving their vast business empire. While Harry was ruled unfit to stand trial, Leona did in the summer of 1989. On August 30, she was convicted on 33 charges, including tax-fraud conspiracy, tax evasion, and filing erroneous returns. She received a sentence of sixteen years, which was later reduced to four. She was eventually released after 19 months. (She received help with her appeals from a cunning young lawyer by the name of Alan Dershowitz.) The iconic moment in Helmsley’s trial came when a former housekeeper recalled hearing Helmsley say, “We don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.”

Two months after Leona’s conviction, a young couple living in the Parkchester complex—an architect named Sergio Ocasio and his wife, Blanca Iris Ocasio, who, as it happens, would also work as a taxpaying housekeeper—welcomed a daughter. They named her Alexandria, which, translated from the Greek, means “defender of humankind.”

Blanca was an evangelical Christian, born in Puerto Rico, who cleaned houses to help the family’s finances. Sergio owned a small practice in architecture, remodeling, and landscaping. He had grown up in the Bronx during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, when the borough was said to be burning. As the journalist Joe Flood later wrote, “Seven different census tracts in The Bronx lost more than 97% of their buildings to fire and abandonment between 1970 and 1980; 44 tracts (out of 289 in the borough) lost more than 50%.” At the time, the prevailing narrative was that the fires were mostly the result of arson—landlords taking advantage of insurance or tenants taking advantage of welfare. But, as Flood reported in his book The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City—and Determined the Future of Cities, arson turned out to explain a small fraction of the blazes. The actual problem, Flood argued, was the new vogue for business thinking in public affairs: private-sector technocrats from the Rand Corporation advised the city to close firehouses and curb inspections, all in the name of “efficiency.” While many blamed “hoodlums,” Flood writes, they gave a pass to the “whiz-kid consultants with plans to save the city through technology.” Amid the wreckage of burned-out buildings they left in their wake, Sergio Ocasio “wanted to be one of the people that helped put the buildings back up,” Alexandria, or Sandy, as she was known as a child, later said. Sandy had a younger brother named Gabriel, who one day would nominate her for Congress.

As a congresswoman, Ocasio-Cortez told a moving story about her father. Around age five, she had talked her way into joining him and two of his friends on a road trip to Florida. “Three burly men and a five-year-old in a sedan,” she told David Remnick of The New Yorker. “One day, his buddies went to get a beer or something, and he took me to the reflecting pool of the Washington Monument. I put my toes in the water, and suddenly the goldfish started to nibble my toes. It was a beautiful day, the sun was out, totally clear. And my dad pointed to all of it—the reflecting pool, the monuments, the Capitol, and he said, ‘You know, this is our government. All of this belongs to us. It belongs to you.’ ” Years later, when she returned to the scene as a new congresswoman, she recalled, “I thought about that. I feel like it’s supposed to belong to us. Not all of it belongs to all of us. Not yet. But that’s the whole point of going to Congress, isn’t it?”

From the earliest days, Ocasio-Cortez’s life was defined by the straddling of worlds, being at once on the inside and on the outside, at once alienated and at home in both positions. And one of those straddlings began around that same age of five, when she and her mother half uprooted from the Bronx for a two-bedroom house in the tranquil suburb of Yorktown Heights, less than an hour’s drive to the north of the Bronx, in Westchester County. The Bronx is one of the poorest counties in the country. Westchester County is among the richest. But it wasn’t a dramatic change of fortune that propelled the move. Rather, Ocasio-Cortez’s parents were concerned about the quality of education their daughter could receive in the Bronx, and so they called in resources from across the family, hitting up aunts, grandparents, and other relatives, to scrape together a down payment on a home in a place with good public schools.

Sergio stayed behind in the Bronx, where his renovation and remodeling work was rooted. Blanca and Sandy spent the weekdays in the suburbs, the daughter going to school and becoming by her own account a nerd consumed by science, her bedroom decorated in a jungle theme with a monkey adorning the wall. Her mother polished their neighbors’ kitchen counters and scrubbed their toilets to get by. Often, they would return to the Bronx on the weekends, where Sandy would melt back into the mix of cousins and friends who didn’t have the escape hatch to mobility she did. Before she became a famed critic of inequity at a national scale, she encountered inequity between cousins—a “gaping maw,” as she has put it, in which she had the upper lip. Her cousins’ lives had the constant, whirring stress of insecurity. In later years, Ocasio-Cortez would anchor the story of her convictions in her time as a bartender, understanding, as she did better than most, the necessity of narrative simplification. But those convictions were shaped equally by those seasons of her life when she was on top relative to others and experienced the survivor’s guilt of opportunity.

“This very regular drive between Westchester County, this small town Yorktown, and the Bronx, to where my cousins were, where we were being essentially raised as siblings, was really formative, because I would always see the difference between my school and their school, my air and their air,” she later reflected in a public conversation with the writer Ta- Nehisi Coates. “And I recognize that the only thing, the only difference, between their outcomes and my outcomes was a forty-minute drive. Because we were born in the same place. It was just this one decision that my parents were able to make at a very young age that changed such a wide scope of the trajectory of our lives.”

If she would end up with advanced powers of speaking to those at the bottom about what goes on at the top, and of speaking to those at the top about the plight of those at the bottom, and speaking without apology or fear in either circumstance, it was perhaps because she grew up toggling between social orders herself, being brown and relatively poor in a white and affluent world one day, the lucky suburban prima the next.

Some remember Ocasio-Cortez as being precociously political. Her mother told a reporter, “There was nobody who could shut her up. I saw the political tendencies since she was very, very young.” There is a story of how she was so aghast at the dirty, dead, frogless pond outside her middle school that she showed up at a town board meeting to petition for an aerator machine. “It was the first time that I realized that there’s a world outside of school that I could change,” she later told a reporter. (For the record, aerator: denied.) Her family, she has said, wasn’t overtly political—“they weren’t in the streets, they weren’t activists”—but their relatives were always in and out for coffee, talking about the world. And her parents were generous in the way that people who themselves rely on generosity can be. “I always kind of called them informal or unrecognized community organizers,” she told Coates, “because they would always find the people in need in our community. They would always have them over for dinner, but they were never politically active in the way that we think of people being politically active.”

In later years, she would speak of a leftist politics that grew out of experience more than theory. “It’s not like I grew up reading Noam Chomsky,” she told a reporter. “I grew up scrubbing toilets with my mother.”

If she was relatively fortunate among her cousins on weekends, on weekdays she was an outsider of an altogether di9erent kind, a “brown girl” in a white town who “didn’t have crimped hair like the rest of the ’90s kids,” as her brother, Gabriel, put it once, a girl from the Bronx, no longer in the Bronx, whose house “wasn’t ever going to be the sleep-over house,” he said.

One summer day, I spoke to Ocasio-Cortez about those early years in Yorktown. She told me she had only as an adult begun to understand the dualities and toggling that defined that time.

“The world inside of our home, when I opened the door and got home from school, was completely different from the world of my classroom and the world of just the broader town and culture that I grew up in,” she told me. “And so I wasn’t conscious of the fact that I was learning to navigate all of these wildly different worlds.” Her mom was working much of the time, and her father “was struggling the majority of time that I was growing up, and so the person who took care of me growing up was my grandmother.” Her grandmother’s father had been a medicine man back in Puerto Rico, which left a family “penchant,” as Ocasio-Cortez put it, for gardening—herbs, cures, veggies. “I would go home, and she would set down all of these green peas for me to unpack.”

Ocasio-Cortez spoke mostly Spanish at home in those days and then English out in the world. She had actually spoken no English until entering school. “We moved to this white neighborhood, and then my parents were like, ‘All right, she’s going to learn in preschool.’ And so I literally showed up to preschool not speaking a word of English, and that was my introduction to this dual world.”

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I half-joked that that abruptness sounded similar to her early days in Congress in 2019.

“Yeah, it pretty much feels very similar, culturally and all of that,” she said. “First of all, when you’re in that experience as a young child and you literally don’t speak the language, you become hyper-attuned to people’s disposition, to try to glean meaning from how they’re feeling, where they are, without words. That was actually a skill that I really developed, to a wild degree, when I was waitressing. Because waitresses and bartenders, their job—our job—is to look across the room and read people’s faces and figure out who’s feeling what, who’s having a good time, who’s not having a good time, who looks like they need help. And so 90 percent of this work isn’t even verbal.

“I struggled so much as a child to be heard and to be recognized,” she continued. “They tried to hold me back in the second grade and get me to repeat the second grade, because these little things started adding up: I was left-handed; English was my second language.” Her parents fought for her not to be held back. She was put in remedial classes. It wasn’t until she took her first state test a few grades later that she scored in the ninety-ninth percentile “across the board in every single category,” she recalled. The calls to hold her back went silent.

“I had to really learn how to advocate for myself,” she said. “It took me a really, really, really long time to realize that these basic challenges to be heard and to be believed were not challenges that my parents had.” The parents at home didn’t see the cowed girl at school whom no one listened to. The kids and teachers at school didn’t see the confident, opinionated child whom Blanca saw. No one saw Ocasio-Cortez in her complicated fullness, across these walls. “For more affluent kids or white kids, it’s a much more seamless transition between home, get on a school bus, school, and come back,” she told me. “And for me, it was like all of these different worlds. And trying to be myself in all of these different worlds required me to learn those kinds of communication skills.”

Had she felt like the same self in each of those spaces, or like a different person in each one, a character playing a role?

“I don’t know if I necessarily was conscious of being different in different worlds, but I remember feeling kind of misunderstood,” she said. “I remember having this feeling of like, ‘They don’t get it in school.’ ” Everyone in the books they read was white. Most characters on the TV shows she watched were white. “Everyone else’s experiences were reflected, uplifted, affirmed in the books they read, in the curriculum that we had, in the examples that were used in texts, in the things that we spell—all of it, it’s so pervasive.” She couldn’t shake a feeling that “people just didn’t understand experiences like mine.”

This was one difference with her hero Bernie Sanders. He was less concerned than she was about being understood. He was interested in the content of the case he was making against the system, and less so in how that case was reaching people, drawing them in or turning them away. It was why he had done less than he could have to heed her advice to make sure that people were receiving the transmissions of his movement of love, rather than being content that he was transmitting it. But that self-confidence in not worrying about being misunderstood was not a luxury Ocasio-Cortez had felt. She wanted to be understood. His was the persuasive approach of If you say it and say it again and again, they will come. Hers was that of the brown girl in the white town who wanted to be seen and recognized and was willing to try this way and that way and the other way to reach you until she was, though without compromising her stance.

In high school, her life goal was to be an obstetrician-gynecologist. Excelling in science, she achieved second place in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. One of her teachers, Michael Blueglass, later told a reporter this story about the presentation of her research on how antioxidants can slow aging in roundworms: “One of the administrators wasn’t there at the beginning and came in after she started, and he said to the superintendent, ‘What company is she from?’ The superintendent said, ‘She’s a 17-year-old senior in our high school.’ She presented herself, verbally, visually, everything, as if she was a 30-year-old professional presenter businesswoman even though she was 17 years old.” In honor of her success in the Intel fair, a team of scientists that controlled naming rights to asteroids it had discovered named one after Ocasio-Cortez. “Somewhere between Mars and Jupiter floats 23238 Ocasio-Cortez,” Vanity Fair reported. Because of the enmity and apocalyptic fantasies the eventual congresswoman would come to inspire, the magazine felt compelled to add, “According to the experts who named it, there’s ‘zero chance’ it will destroy us.” Fresh out of high school, Ocasio-Cortez phone banked for a political candidate to whose rhetorical talents hers would one day be compared, who shared with her a shape-shifting youth and a hunger to be holistically understood in one’s teeming variety, and whose consensus style of politics she would seek to challenge: Barack Obama.

Cobbling together some scholarships and loans, Ocasio-Cortez entered Boston University in 2007. She got on to the premed track, with a plan to major in biochemistry. In the fall of her sophomore year, her father, Sergio, was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Sandy visited him in the hospital as he lay dying. “Make me proud,” he told her. He died days later, leaving no will and leaving behind a country tumbling into a financial crisis of generational proportions. “My mother was done,” she told a reporter years later. “My brother was lost. I took it hard, too, but I channeled it into my studies. That’s how I dealt with it. I was home for a week and went right back to school.” His words “Make me proud” stuck with her: “I took it very literally. My G.P.A. skyrocketed.”

But it was a giant loss of someone who had taught her to dream big. “I don’t think there’s any way to overstate how close I was with my dad,” she has said. “That sense of ambition to try things when the odds seem so unfavorable, that very, very much comes from my father.” She has said that, over and above losing him, she felt as though “I also lost myself.”

For her mother, back in the Bronx, it was grueling in its own way. The prospect of foreclosure descended. “We were really working on the classic American dream,” Ocasio-Cortez later told an interviewer, “and overnight it was all taken away. My mom was back to cleaning homes and driving school buses, to keep a roof over our heads.”

Back in college, friends noticed that Ocasio-Cortez had a laser-like new focus. She was no longer going to college just to cultivate her mind and widen her opportunities. She was now on a mission to save her family. And she was more determined than before to have immediate impact.

She drifted away from premed and into majoring in economics and international relations. She didn’t think her father’s passing changed who she was, she told Ta-Nehisi Coates, “but I think it really clarified a lot of things. Because having my father pass away at such a young age forced a lot of questions of mortality. What am I here for? He passed when he was forty-eight years old. And so it really forced me to grapple with questions of legacy and what is important, and what do I want to do with my life at eighteen? And so I really started to feel when I was kind of on this pre-medical route that it was going to take another twelve years for me to actually kind of serve as a doctor after your residency, after medical school, after undergrad. And even then it would be treating patients on a case-by-case basis. And I wanted to examine issues on a more macro scale.”

Her new interests were reflected in a discussion series where she became a fixture. Most Friday afternoons, students would gather on campus for “Coffee & Conversations” to discuss such topics as the merits of the Affordable Care Act. Among the regulars at these sessions was a student named Riley Roberts, who enjoyed playing devil’s advocate. He and Ocasio-Cortez forged a bond, and they remain a couple today. She also got her first real taste of Congress, volunteering for Senator Edward M. Kennedy. She helped field inquiries from people with immigration problems. And she spent a semester of her junior year abroad, in Niger, working in a maternity clinic. College complete, Ocasio-Cortez knew where she wanted to go. She could have gone many places, but she returned to the Bronx. She would come to call the next period of her life “the crucible.”

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Photo by Jason Connolly/AFP via Getty Images; Excerpt from The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy courtesy Vintage.

That’s how it was with my friend Sam. We had come up as journalists together, had met while we were foreign correspondents in India, had built parallel New York lives together, raising kids, writing, trying to make sense of the age.

A few years ago, first gingerly, then more pointedly, he confronted me. He was worried for me. Worried that, the more my ideas got out there, the more of an audience I found in print and online, I was changing.

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I prided myself on my reporting, but I was becoming known for my opinions. I prided myself on being able to understand and empathetically portray anyone, but I was succumbing to the temptations of us and them, good people and bad people. I prided myself on my curiosity, but I had given in to the incentives of the age, offering up my certitude instead. I prided myself on reflectiveness, but now I sometimes seemed more interested in what Twitter fight I could get into than what I could learn.

Maybe I’m only saying this to feel less alone, but I think what happened to me happened to a lot of us in these last years. It was some cursed stew of social media and what the algorithms reward; the economics of outrage; the relentless speed of everything now and the lack of time to think; ideological tribes that reward orthodoxy and punish open, free, unbounded thinking; the very real stakes of an authoritarian age in which it felt important to take a stand.

Sam was right. In these last years, I had changed. And the change felt like doing the right thing, it felt rewarded, it felt important. But what it amounted to was walking away from some of the qualities I had once most valued, and becoming someone tempted by reducing more than complicating, condemning more than understanding.

Donald Trump is not just a president. He is a culture. While only some of us have voted for him, all of us belong to that culture.

Maybe you feel this happened to you, too. Maybe you feel exhausted by this way of moving through the world, in which there is great pressure to reduce the kaleidoscopic complexity of other people to a simple story with flattened characters.

I was annoyed by Sam’s interventions. He was right. I began to listen. One day, in May 2023, he called. I have your next book, he said. The story of Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny and their fateful encounter on a New York subway car — it was, he said, a tragedy whose retelling would let me tell the story of America itself. But he also said it was a reporting project that would get me back to being the guy he met two decades earlier in India, the reporter who wanted to understand, not the pundit who knew.

I am neither a spiritual person nor from Los Angeles, so I don’t generally talk like this, but what I remember from diving into the reporting for MAN IN THE MIRROR was that it felt like a spiritual cleanse. I realized I had become, more than I wanted, a person with a TelePrompTer, and now I was back to being a person with a notebook.

As I began to probe the story of that killing and all that it catalyzed and reflected, I realized it was a story, at its heart, about the difficulty of seeing each other as fully human. I resolved that I would invert that in my writing. A story of dehumanization would be told by a humanizing approach. Perhaps I could use the book to jolt myself back into a humanizing way of working; maybe it would help readers do the same.

I began to reach out to my potential subjects, who I call characters, even though that may sound strange when talking about nonfiction. It is an enormous act of faith to let someone else tell your story. I was reaching out to everyone from grieving relatives to city hall officials, Republican lawyers to revolutionary activists. And I made them all a promise that felt shaky even to me back then, because I was still very much known for another way of working. (In my defense, I was still putting out rigorously reported work all the while, but what got attention was what grabbed and poked and affirmed.) The promise I made was that this book would be different from what they might have seen from me. It would try to tell everyone’s story with all the empathy I could summon. It would be a kind of perspective roulette, in which you’re looking at the world through this person’s eyes, then that person’s eyes next. I think I told some that I intended to capture them so that if their mother read it, she would say, You got ’em.

I felt like one of those Silicon Valley founders who pitch the vision and then, if investors buy in, now have to make the thing. It had been a long time since I worked in the way I was proposing, and I had never done it at the scale and depth I was about to. But I made these promises, and I began.

In journalism, you don’t owe your subjects a portrait they will like. But I did try as hard as I ever have to paint portraits people couldn’t deny. That meant understanding why our cities feel so dystopian and crime-plagued to some and feel so oppressive and over-policed to other people. It meant spending days with a Marine Corps unit that Penny belonged to, in order to understand the training that forged him and would become central to his trial. It meant trying to understand the Michael Jackson super-fan community Neely was part of, and the intricate social dynamics among mere mimics, capable street impersonators, and devoted tribute artists. It meant spending time on the street with homeless people and trying to see what they see when the police come, and spending time with the police doing impossible jobs. It meant trying to inhabit the brilliant, caring minds of homeless outreach workers who walk the streets with an encyclopedic knowledge of the clients they serve and what they need.

Fake it till you make it, they say. In this case, simply doing this kind of work again started to change the person doing the work. I felt it palpably. It’s hard to explain, but I felt myself reopening, deepening, relaxing from the culture of reactivity I was in and had sought to navigate and at times mastered.

Now that the book is about to be birthed, here is my deepest hope for it. What it did for me, I want to offer that to you in turn. Yes, it’s a story, and if I may say so, a pretty riveting one. But my real dream for it is that it will help you think and feel and see in ways that our culture has made so elusive.

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What it really is, I hope, is a story that will open you up and restore in you some of the humanity we have all lost in this draining time.

I first wrote this book for myself. Now I offer it to you as a tool, maybe a jolt of the kind Sam gave me, to return to yourself. Maybe it will help you, too, become someone who is more curious and doesn’t so easily flatten. Maybe it will help you remember how hard our biggest shared questions are, how hard so many people are trying. Maybe it will help you think, not just react. Maybe it will help you hold complexity — without letting go of moral clarity. Maybe it will make you harder to dupe and con and manipulate by politicians who profit from our failure to see each other fully. Maybe it will give you permission to listen to other ways of seeing without feeling like you are complicit or capitulating — just listening.

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Let me go out on a limb. I don’t think Trump is the biggest threat to our democracy. I think we are. Our culture, our behavior, our ways, which created a Petri dish for him. All around us, I see the culture that I succumbed to — that perhaps I’m still part of. Where living with difference feels like surrender. Where finding common ground is smeared as selling out. Where we dream of the society being purged of those we don’t like. Where the dream of domination trumps the pursuit of persuasion. Where we police who is welcome on our raft instead of building a ship big enough for all.

Democracy requires an ability to look into the hearts of those you share space with. If we continue to be addicted to caricatures of each other, we will continued to be ruled by political caricature artists, those with a gift for exaggerating our worst features and sorting us into lucrative Uses and Thems.

At first, this book I have written was about the failure of some people to fully see others. It grew into a project in which I had to confront my own failures on this score, and grow. Now it’s an invitation to you. Are you ready to look, interested in looking, at our common life, at the people you share a country with, and seeing them fully? Are you tired, as I realize I had become, of seeing sides and longing to see humanity?

If you want to come along on this journey with me, I invite you to preorder MAN IN THE MIRROR today. My unabashed dream for this book is immense: I want to get enough of us talking and thinking about these questions that things can change. I am so grateful for you in this community for being the seedbed of this conversation.

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And I can finally reveal the first major event where I hope to meet many of you Ink folks — and reach even more of you virtually.

It’s on Wednesday, September 30, at the 92nd Street Y in New York, one of the most historic stages for public discussion in New York, from which Joan Didion and James Baldwin and Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Wolfe and E.E. Cummings and Arthur Miller seeded ideas for the world. The legendary editor Tina Brown will interview me onstage. Get a ticket, bring friends, and join us for what promises to be a special night of conversation about cities, belonging, writing, truth telling, and humanity.

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Talk a little bit about how you see the loneliness epidemic and where it stems from, or is that just something of our imagining?

Eggers said:

Well, I believe it. I believe the statistics. I do think it’s an existential crisis. I do…

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Don’t miss that and much more in our conversation with Eggers, above.

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As returns pour in in the Democratic primary contest for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, we revisit my reflections on a past conversation with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. What struck me most was El-Sayed’s idea of his political project as not simply to win the war against Trumpism, but to “win the peace” — which is to say, eliminate the conditions that made Trumpism possible. Let us know what you think.

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Here is a strange thing about politics. It’s a competitive arena in which people win by distinguishing themselves from others. And it’s an arena so lacking in originality. How often do you hear a political leader say something truly inspired, or even just slightly fresh? How often do you notice them actually thinking out loud, the mind still active, still with questions, not answers given to them on Post-It notes by an aide?

It is rare enough that, when it happens, it sometimes takes me a second to realize it. But that’s what happened when I interviewed Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. He is a doctor and public health professional in Michigan who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018 and is now running for the U.S. Senate.

What took me time to register was that El-Sayed was doing something more interesting than explaining why he should win his primary. He was laying out a vision for how America can finally be done with Trumpism. Like, actually done.

I don’t think I’ve heard these ideas put together like this in a package before. Each one will have its share of critics. But I think the whole package is worth a look.

The bottom line is this. A lot of what Democrats have ended up offering is contempt for Trump voters and moderate policy ideas. Dr El-Sayed is suggesting a reversal on both counts: radical empathy for Trump voters (which will rankle progressives) and radical change to eradicate the social conditions that enabled Trump (which will rankle moderates). Let them be rankled.

1. The bully and the posse

Growing up with the name Abdul, the son of immigrants from Egypt, El-Sayed knew a thing or two about bullying.

What he sees in Trump is a bully par excellence. But bullies are often secretly weak, El-Sayed observed. What props them up is their posse. Trump’s posse is millions of voters. Without their allegiance, he is a childhood-scarred, semi-literate, narcissistic bully halfwit. With their allegiance, he has a path to making himself Caesar.

El-Sayed argues, therefore, that the pro-democracy movement must obsessively seek to separate the posse from the bully. Which means adopting a posture that some fellow Democrats may not like: showing what he calls “radical empathy” for Trump voters, and viewing the choice millions made as an expression of desperation in an unresponsive system, a shout into the void.

That means not lapsing into the condescension toward lay voters that feels so satisfying and, oftentimes, so justified. It means not calling them Magats and brainwashed and irredeemable racists all. It means strategically biting your tongue and opening your arms. For winning’s sake.

Confront the bully. But woo the posse.

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2. Don’t prove them wrong. Get them to right

Winning movements don’t humiliate potential followers. They fix them a drink.

Trump’s chaotic and economy-quaking opening months are already causing lots of pain for his own supporters, let alone all the other people in his policy crosshairs.

Open any social media site, and what do you see these days? Gleeful Democrats sharing stories of MAGA types now being hurt by the policies they voted for.

Understandable psychologically? Yes. Smart politically? No. Not even a little bit.

Dr. El-Sayed framed the approach he favors instead succinctly: “We’ve got to get folks to being right, not prove them wrong.”

What’s the difference? It’s about creating, he says, “a space within which you felt safe enough…to say, you know what?, I made a mistake.”

So next time you hear a veteran who voted for Trump complaining about benefit cuts, or a shopkeeper complaining about tariffs, or a CEO complaining about the stock market, resist the temptation to gloat. If you want to save your country from hell, invite these potential newcomers to the pro-democracy cause in. Pour them a drink.

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3. America is good, actually

In some of the progressive circles Dr. El-Sayed travels in, well-earned critiques of American policy and history can sometimes devolve into contempt for America.

Progressives have a patriotism problem, often conceding the flag to those who would break the country rather than share it. They become so consumed with what is wrong with the country that they forget to say whether there is anything they love about it, and they leave the impression, sometimes true, sometimes not, that they think it irredeemably flawed, rotten at the root.

This is fine for your academic seminar. But please keep this pose out of politics. Because it’s risking the republic itself and plays right into Donald Trump’s hands.

Dr. El-Sayed, as a child of Egyptian immigrants, has a way into this issue that is compelling and worth listening to. He knows all the critiques leveled at America; he levels many of them himself. But his dualness — being from here and being from there — gives him another way of seeing.

He spoke in our conversation about going back to Egypt in his youth. He would sit with his grandmother who, he said, half-jokingly (or maybe not?), would sit with him and tell him that this cousin of his was better looking than Abdul, and this one more athletic, and this one smarter. But you know what Abdul had, his greatest gift that would matter more than any of these others? He would soon be leaving Egypt.

It’s a bittersweet truth that many of us with similar experiences of dualness know from childhood. And many of us who, like El-Sayed, would grow up to have criticisms of how America functions would also, like El-Sayed, never forget that America has real and profound gifts, that it offers many, many people — not enough, but more than most places — life chances and an opportunity to flourish and create and speak and become the fullest version of yourself. That this is a great country, which is, sadly, language many progressives would find way too cringe. Enjoy autocracy, guys!

What El-Sayed reminds us is that to be a progressive who comes partly from somewhere else can be to hold two competing ideas in tension: that America is flawed, and is built on ideals and ways rare in history and worth defending.

“America sucks” is a lazy shrug too often heard in progressive organizing spaces, and it is weirdly provincial in its obliviousness to how life is in other places around the world, and what El-Sayed is pointing toward instead is a progressive patriotism.

“I love America because I know exactly what my life would have ended up as if I didn’t, but for the accident of history, get to grow up here,” he told me. And: “My critiques about America are about the difference between what she gave me…and what she has not given too many kids.”

His advice to Democrats and progressives: “Wrap yourself in the flag as you demand the flag represent the things that you believe are best about this country.”

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4. Fighting Trump isn’t enough. Win the peace

Since Inauguration Day, I, like so many of you and so many across the country, have argued that Democrats need to show fight.

Boneless and skinless is fine for chicken thighs. It’s not adequate for a party that purports to be interested in beating back an attempted authoritarian breakthrough.

But El-Sayed challenged my thinking on the fight point. A former team captain in school sports before he became a Rhodes Scholar and a medical doctor, he pointed to scars on his face and spoke obliquely about not being afraid to fight when needed.

But he argued Democrats need to be more interested in winning the peace than the war: “Nobody fights the war to just win the war. You fight the war to win the peace.”

What he means is remaining focused on healing the causes of the pain that made Trump possible, instead of over-fixating on Trump as the sum total of the ill.

The mantra to fight more and fight harder, which I have touted as much as anyone, risks fetishizing fight for its own sake. The real goal, El-Sayed says, must be creating conditions where the fighting is unnecessary.

And how do you win the peace?

5. The age of insecurity

There are a lot of ways to frame the times we live in. But El-Sayed offered one that stuck with me: this is an age of insecurity.

What’s powerful about insecurity as a grand unified theory is that it encompasses all manner of sentiments, from all sections of the political spectrum, some based in reality, others more in fantasy, but all with emotive, often explosive political effect.

Brutal hyper-capitalism creates insecurity. Not being able to afford things creates insecurity. Feeling vulnerable to crime creates insecurity. Feeling deluged across a poorly managed border creates insecurity. Racial and gender progress, when you are not well prepared for your own new role and standing, creates insecurity. New and unfamiliar ideas about history and the meaning of your country create insecurity. New technology and the threat of obsolescence create insecurity. The loss of control over one’s children and their vulnerability to outside influences creates insecurity.

You will no doubt identify with some forms of insecurity listed above, and not with others. El-Sayed’s point is that insecurity in general has been roiling our hearts and politics, and has achieved what he, a public health doctor, calls “epidemic” status.

“The thing about insecurity is that you may have what you need right now, but you’re constantly at risk of losing it.”

So part of winning the peace beyond Trumpism, rather than just making war with Trump, is addressing the roots of insecurity.

And how bold should Democrats be in doing that?

6. Abolish vanilla

Some of El-Sayed’s arguments above — the radical empathy part of his solution — might strike some Democrats as too solicitous of Trump voters, too eager to make accommodations. But El-Sayed is not a mushy moderate. Rather, I think of him as being in the mold of many of the organizers I wrote about in my book The Persuaders: advocating more flexibility on how you reach out to and court moderates and MAGA voters, but more stridency in policymaking.

A lot of what you see from Democrats right now is the opposite: Snideness and condescension toward MAGA types, but mushy moderate policies. El-Sayed wants to flip that script: Gentle, openhearted outreach and aggressive, even radical, policy.

“You can't beat something with nothing,” he told me. “And, love him or hate him, when it comes to Donald Trump, he's always saying something. And the problem that folks have with Democrats is that we say nothing, but we say it with a lot of enthusiasm. It’s like somebody screaming ‘Vanilla!’ at you. You're like, Well, I don't know, what if I like cookie dough? What if I like cookies and cream? What if I like Rocky Road? The folks are like, ‘Vanilla! vanilla!’”

El-Sayed has advocated aggressive policy responses to America’s overlapping crises — including Medicare for All, which he wrote an entire book about. Whatever you think about individual policy questions, the larger point is worth grappling with: that the proper place for moderation is in the stance one shows to potentially politically adrift Americans. The place for unbending passion is on substantive policy ideas that would drastically change the country, drain some of the insecurity, and therefore heal the conditions that enabled Trump, so that we don’t keep returning to square one.

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7. Reclaim common sense

Listening to El-Sayed, it struck me that he was pushing against both his fellow progressives and the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party, in distinct ways.

His message to progressives is to ditch the label. I am referring to him as a progressive, but he didn’t call himself that, although his policy vision lines up with any conventional definition. But he seemed determined to frame ideas like clean air and water, healthcare for all, ending wasteful wars, and such as basic common sense, not radical or out of the mainstream. (Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been making similar arguments on her “Fighting Oligarchy” tour stops.)

But he also has a bracing message for those moderates so singularly fixated on Trump that they think the goal of political struggle should be to return America to the day before the golden escalator ride in 2015. “That’s our own version of Make America Great Again. It just happens to be 2015 instead of 1930-something,” he told me.

America wasn’t working for most people in 2015. The way to move past Trumpism is to champion drastically, boldly upending what wasn’t working, and to do so with an openhearted posture toward converts who will have many reasons to seek a new political home in the days that are coming.

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Watch my full conversation with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed here:

We talked about the art and craft of telling big, socially important stories through the vessel of a single case, why narrative nonfiction matters now more than ever, and how Colloff thinks about the writer’s role in asking for your sustained time in an age of 30-second videos and algorithmic distraction.

It’s a great conversation.

And we want to hear from you: Are you a nonfiction reader? What do you love about nonfiction? What makes it hold your attention versus feel like a slog? What are some of your all-time favorites in the genre?

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Obviously, every election is a contest between two people or sometimes more. But your race has clearly become one of those that is not just about a choice of two people, two personalities, two histories. I wonder what you see it as.

It didn’t have to be what it’s become. This could have been a competition of ideas, as I think we would hope our democracy would offer us in these elections. What it’s ultimately become is a competition between money and people. We’re raising unprecedented amounts of grassroots money for a Michigan Senate race. And then on the other side, you’ve got $50 million of money from outside super PACs, AIPAC making up the bulk of it, and then PACs representing big pharma, big tech, big insurance, big utilities coming in to buy 30-second ads that are blanketing the airwaves, for a candidate that has not built a grassroots campaign. Could have, but chose not to. This has become a test of whether or not that can truck an honest movement of people trying to take government back.

The kind of moderation you would hear from Haley Stevens, your opponent, do you think about it as a substantive, coherent philosophy that happens to be different from yours? Or do you think about it as entirely an emanation of what donors want? In other words, if those donors were all to disappear tomorrow, do you think Haley Stevens would immediately see the light and share your philosophy and view of the world?

It’s not a moral or political philosophy. It is a tactical philosophy. And the tactical philosophy goes like this: If you would like to win a campaign in the post-Citizens United era, when there’s huge amounts of money that can flow, you need to get money from the people who can flow it fastest. And those are corporations and a few special interests. And so what you have to do is you have to use the specter of moderation as a foil to explain to your voters why you can’t possibly get guaranteed healthcare. You can’t possibly stand up to corporate monopolies, which then excuses you to go get money from the same people who are funding Republican campaigns.

And the hard part about this is that if you actually challenge the system, they bring the full weight of the system against you. To lie about you, to lie about your opponent, to mis- and disinform. And that’s what we’re up against.

Michigan contains America in a way that not every place does. There are Alabama vibes in parts of Michigan, there are Manhattan vibes in parts of Michigan, and there’s everything in between. And ideas like yours, historically — when you go out to places where these ideas are not supposed to have traction or where people are supposed to be afraid of someone singing your gospel — what do you think is happening that is causing a turning in what’s possible politically?

I actually don’t know that these ideas are not or have not been acceptable in Michigan. You know, we have a history in Michigan. Philip Hart is the best-known, most beloved former senator from Michigan. Philip Hart is the reason both your parents got to come here and my parents got to come here. It’s because of the civil rights movement, but in terms of turning that civil rights movement into real legislation. So we have a history of this. I understand that the neoliberal version of the Democratic Party has tried to turn that off. But where it’s been tested — Bernie 2016, for example — it won. And so I actually think there are a lot more people in Michigan who are looking for a common-sense approach to politics.

A lot of the distaste in Michigan for politics itself is the failure to deliver a politics that feels like it’s actually for you. More often, we’re sieving our politics through the acceptable ideas of elites on either side of the political divide. And so when you actually deliver a very clear message of saying, Hey, listen, say what you will about my ideas. I’m not bought off by a corporation who’s raising your premiums, who’s raising your car note rates, who’s raising the price of your groceries, who’s charging you more for utilities than in 46 other states over the last 20 years. Say what you will about me. Like I’m telling you what I really think. Oftentimes, Michiganders are like, OK.

I met a guy, he told me, You know what, I don’t like you very much. I was like, I’m sorry. He’s like, Yeah, but I’m voting for you. I’m like, OK, this is weird, why? He’s like, because I think you really want me to have healthcare. I was like, I really want you to have healthcare. He’s like, Yeah, I know. So then I was like, OK, so why don’t you like me? He’s like, Because you’re Muslim. I was like, Oh, OK.

At the end of the day, I don’t need you to like me. I need you to like you.

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I remember when I was covering the Bernie campaign in 2019, and we did a swing state tour. I can’t remember which stop it was. There were a bunch of union guys who very clearly seemed like they had left a factory and come straight to the event, still in work clothes. And I remember watching some other reporter interview them. And they were basically like, Oh, I hate Bernie’s socialism. That’s ridiculous. But he’s fighting for people like me. And I felt like I was watching something happening in real time that was interesting and weird. And it feels like you are downstream of that turning in the culture.

Anybody who knows me knows I’m not an ideologue. I’m too much of a scientist to be an ideologue, unfortunately or fortunately. Maybe it’s just that I got my brain pickled in medical school. If there’s faith, there’s faith, but everything else requires evidence. So show me evidence. And, you know, I have this unfortunate habit, like you, of trying to read about the things that I talk about. So I read about capitalism. And it turns out that the biggest risk to capitalism, if you go to the original texts of the people who even coined the idea of capitalism, was not government regulation, as much as Ronald Reagan and his friends want to tell us that. The biggest risk to capitalism was always monopoly. And we live in an era where you have basically algorithmic monopoly.

So you’ve got a couple of corporations, they use algorithms that basically tie them together and they say, we’re not colluding, it’s just the algorithm doing what it does. And then all the prices ratchet up in a particular way. And then when you have a few enough producers in a particular market, then they can squeeze downward and squeeze all of their workers in what’s called monopsony. All of that is to say that if you’re a worker in any industry, you’re getting squeezed. And if you’re a consumer in any industry, you’re getting squeezed. They make more from what we have to buy from them, and they pay less for the work we do. And so I don’t need anybody to agree with me on any ideology, because I don’t agree on any ideology. But my job is to go and narrate what’s happening in people’s lives and tell them what I think we could actually do to solve it.

That’s my job. That’s the work. That’s what political persuasion is about. You wrote a whole book about it. It’s about being able to say, Hey, listen, Remember, I ran in 2018, I said this thing that I think folks weren’t ready to hear, but that’s just proven more poignant now, which is that Donald Trump’s not the disease. He’s just the worst symptom. The disease is the system, and it allows the richest folks to buy politicians to do their bidding. I mean, that’s exactly what’s happening in the trade. $50 million doesn’t just fall off a tree. They don’t give it to you because they think they’re nice. They give it to you because they know that there’s going to be a pro quo on the back of the quid.

So if I’m out there being like, hey, look, your utilities are getting more expensive. Your groceries are getting more expensive, your healthcare is getting more expensive. And it’s all getting worse, by the way. And it’s all because of the money that’s coming into these elections to defeat anybody who wants to stand up to it. And then all of a sudden, guess what happens? $50 million materializes into this race and attack ad after attack ad after attack ad. And I’m like, what did I tell you all?

So if you like the system as it works, you got two options. The other Democrat I’m running against or the Republican, because guess what? They’re all being bought and paid for by the exact same companies. I’m the only one who doesn’t take their money.

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I wanted to ask you about the war in Gaza and the way that argument has become central to this race and so many races, where you might not expect it to be as central as it has become. I heard Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, say something in a New York Times interview that was striking, and I thought might explain this from one angle. He said, We’ve learned in the past that if politicians are willing to make one exception in their advocacy of human rights, they’re likely to be willing to make others. Is that how you see the connection between something that may feel very far away for some voters in Michigan — of course, feels very close to other voters in Michigan — and issues like the price of eggs, wages, healthcare, these kitchen-table things?

What is the link in your politics on Israel and Gaza and those very bread-and-butter issues in Michigan?

I think there’s two things. Number one, you know, Israel is an affordability issue. Every time you want to put glasses on kids’ faces or give people healthcare or fix a school, somebody pops up and is like, Well, how are you going to pay for that? I don’t know. Maybe we should keep our money here instead of sending it there to drop bombs on people’s schools or their hospitals. That’s our money. You just saw $3.3 billion voted to send abroad to a foreign government that, by the way, has guaranteed healthcare and can guarantee college education without debt. We can’t. And you want to send my money over there? That’s insane.

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People are calling this America first from the left.

Yes, I have no problem saying America first. Yes, America first.

Here’s the other point. If I tell you I want to fight for more affordable healthcare and I want to fight for better schools and I want to fight for union representation, voters are asking two questions. One is explicit and one is implicit. The first question is, What are you going to fight for? And then the second one is: How do I know you’re going to fight for it?

Where Democrats often fail is the “How do I know you’re going to fight for it?” part. So if you can’t call a genocide a genocide, which is like obviously happening, everyone’s seeing it on their phones, and you can’t call it a genocide — because why? Well, it turns out that if you call it a genocide, someone’s going to drop $30 million on your campaign and end your campaign. What that tells me is you’re probably not going to show up and fight because everyone else is going to spend money, too. So you care more about you being in office than you care about you fighting for the thing.

There are easier, better lives to live that don’t involve me spending days and days away from my little kids. As Democrats, we’ve got to recognize that if you don’t pass the moral Rorschach test of being able to show up and say the obvious thing, at some point, there is this — to use economic terms, there’s a moral hazard in every vote. And at some point, you say you’re going to do a thing, like it’s a commitment I’m making to you by giving you my vote that you’re going to do the thing that I expect you to do, and you fail the moral hazard. Because you can’t even say the obvious thing because you’re more afraid of somebody else’s money than you are of disappointing me, the voter, who is counting on you to fight for you.

You live in a state that has a large Muslim population — and a significant Jewish population. So there’s one group of defenders of Israel who are really militant. Let’s set them aside. There’s another group of Jewish Americans who I think has huge problems with the current leadership of Israel, problems with this war, reservations about it. And, at the same time, feels a lot of fear and anxiety right now around Israel. There’s a synagogue in Brooklyn that I’ve been to a few times. The rabbi of that synagogue is one of the fiercest critics of Israel in the American Jewish rabbinate. And on the stage at her synagogue is an American flag and an Israeli flag. No matter what she says, that’s still the other flag there. How do you talk to Jewish Americans who might agree with you on some of the substance of Israel’s behavior, but do feel like there’s a dangerous turn in the left that makes them not sure if they belong?

So I grew up in a community where about 40 percent of our community was Jewish. And I’m really grateful for that, for folks who know Bloomfield Hills in Michigan. I grew up about 15 minutes away from Temple Israel. I’d been to Temple Israel before. I grew up going to bar and bat mitzvahs, going to shul, going to seder. And I learned so much about the Jewish faith, about Jewish culture, Jewish history, Jewish traditions, Jewish contributions to American life. I’m really grateful for that. I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people, no doubt about it. I also recognize that Judaism and the Jewish people are different from AIPAC and Israel.

And I say that as an Egyptian American. My folks came from the place that gets the second-most contributions in foreign military aid in the world from the United States. I love Egyptian history, tradition, and culture. Even when I’m elected to the U.S. Senate, I will be the chief critic of the Egyptian government. That doesn’t make me anti-Egyptian. That just makes me anti-Egyptian government. And I would hate if somebody were to assume that I agree with the Egyptian government because I happen to share the same ethnicity with the majority of people who live in Egypt.

And for folks who say, Listen, the role of Israel is critical to me in my political opinions, I would say then you and I are just going to disagree on that. But I also think it’s important for us to ask the bigger meta question about the role that AIPAC has inserted itself in our politics. If one super PAC can spend $30 million trying to annihilate the character of a candidate because that candidate opposes sending military aid to Israel, if one super PAC can do that, that on its own terms is what we’re talking about when we say we should end Citizens United.

Look, I believe in equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike. And a lot of people ask, Well, do you believe in one state, two states? I’m like, that’s not my role. Actually, as an American policymaker, part of the problem is that we’ve had too much hubris to think that we get to dictate what the outcome should look like. I actually think that it’s about a process. I want a free Palestinian people and a free Jewish Israeli people to be able to come together and decide what the ultimate peace should look like in the region. And the problem is that right now, under the guise of a two-state solution, we are allowing our government to aid, arm, and abet the very people trying to foreclose on the possibility of Palestinian self-determination.

Most importantly, the money that we send trying to foreclose on the possibility of Palestinian self-determination — doing genocide, doing apartheid — that is money that should be spent here, providing for children here to do and have the things that they need and deserve in terms of schools, in terms of healthcare, in terms of infrastructure. So it’s not about hating anyone. It’s not about wanting any less for anyone. It’s about loving everyone. It’s about believing that Palestinians and Jewish Israelis have rights.

It’s about believing that kids in Michigan have rights to their tax dollars before anyone else has those rights.

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If you win, what will it prove to be true about the world?

That we can have democracy of the people, by the people, and for the people. That people-powered movements can beat a lot of money. That money can’t foreclose on the truth and that we have an opportunity to build a government. Look, my vision at the end is simple. What would America look like if we behaved as though all of our kids were all of our kids? What would we build? What would we have? How would we make decisions? That’s what I want to see.

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Join the Ink Book Club Live later today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern for our second and final conversation with Dave Eggers. Now that you’ve had a few weeks since our initial announcement of Contrapposto as our July pick, let’s dig further into how the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius conceived this portrait of aspiring artists and soulmates Cricket and Olympia, and their lifelong struggles to make sense of the world through their friendship, their activism, and their art.

While Contrapposto is a coming-of-age tale that is remarkably tech-free, Eggers has lately been in the news for his take on generative AI — which he terms “a catastrophic technology.” He brought that critique to Open AI staffers last year at the invitation of CEO Sam Altman, where he told those gathered that in facilitating the use of AI, they are perpetrating “a crime against yourself.” Addressing some 200 employees, Eggers pulled no punches, warning that “whether you intended to do it or not, you’ve made every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult.” Eggers says he came away from that meeting believing that while OpenAI engineers might be well-intentioned, they are too “compartmentalized” to comprehend “the collective harm” their innovation is wreaking. He charged that the use of AI tools by students risks “silencing an entire generation of young writers.” We’ll ask him to talk more about this, and how he proposes we prevent that prophesy from materializing. We’ll also discuss the prescience of his novels — 2013’s The Circle and its sequel, The Every —which satirized and anticipated the immense power, hypocrisy, and overreach of big tech companies.

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And then tomorrow, Thursday, July 30 at 12:30 p.m., we’ll speak with renowned White Mountain Apache chef Nephi Craig, whose searing memoir, Our Knives Will Save Us, elucidates how Craig found his way out of addiction and despair by returning to his indigenous roots in the kitchen. His book traces the links among food, colonialism, and community, and how he found his way back home. Join us!

Below, some thoughts to contemplate this morning in advance of our 12:30 meeting:

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Making an audiobook is, like making a book itself, a strange, solitary, demanding experience -- and, like making a book, it can be a moving, communal, leavening one.

I wanted to share some glimpses behind the scenes from my recording work this week, some of the tricks I’m learning from the brilliant director Paula Parker about how to communicate in an era of short attention spans, and a story about my son.

I am nervous to the point of terrified, but also excited to the point of antsy, to share this book with you, my Ink community. I have put everything I have to give in to this book, and I would love for you to preorder it now. What this does is send a signal to the publisher and bookstores and librarians and others that people want this book. And that’s how it reaches more people. That makes you early adopters — evangelists.

You can find your preferred retailer here. For those who like their books signed, there’s a special link I can share with you from the McNally Jackson bookstore: if you order from here, I will make sure you get a copy signed by me. Truly, thank you.

I sometimes fret that, in an age of algorithms, people are becoming more algorithmic. As Arundhati Roy warns, in addition to the danger of bots replacing us, there is the danger that we will “turn into Chatbots. Maybe then there will be a transfer of souls. Then Chatbots will appear to be Real Souls and Real Souls will be Chatbots pretending.” In politics, the chatbot is a figure whose entire set of views is calculable from knowing any one view. Some call this coherence; I call it boring.

El-Sayed is not like this. Every time we speak, I am surprised. He is a true-believing progressive, but he lands in places you wouldn’t expect. We once had a conversation about the importance of patriotism that I won’t ever forget, and that distinguishes him heavily from his fellow progressives who seem to struggle to praise America.

He can also surprise you when talking about Trump voters. Unlike so many resistance liberals who cannot repress their loathing of Trump voters, forgetting that the whole point of politics is to win some of the people you have lost back to your side, El-Sayed has spoken about radical empathy for those voters and his desire to “win the peace” in America, not the war of all against all.

A public health doctor by training, he brings a lens to diagnosing our body politic that often strikes me as fresh and worth grappling with, whatever your own perspective.

Now that El-Sayed is running in one of the most controversial and closely watched Senate races in the country, in the state of Michigan, a growing number of Americans are getting to know him and his thinking. He is also making influential enemies.

I spoke to him yesterday between campaign stops. We talked about what he believes his race is a referendum on, what it’s like running against not only Congresswoman Haley Stevens but the mega-donors backing her, why moderation is a doomed tactic in his view, and why Gaza resonates with voters a world away on the Great Lakes.

The full video of our conversation is below. Click “Transcript” above for the text.

In the public interest, we’re keeping this conversation open to all. If you value independent journalism, support The Ink’s work by becoming a paid subscriber.

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The truth is, I haven’t been speaking as much because I’m in a reflective moment, planning to bring a new book to this community and the world th…

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What does it mean to love your country? Is it different from nationalism (I believe it is)? Can you love your country and tell the truth about it? Does patriotism require the suspension of th…

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Dave Eggers is one of those remarkable literary citizens who is as well known for his philanthropy, mentorship, and fierce protection of artists’ rights as for his work as an author. His tenderhearted epic, Contrapposto — which the New York Times praised as “a bildungsroman and a novel of ideas, exploring the meaning of art and the unfairness, pretensions and occasional skullduggery of the art world” — is also a love story that unfolds over the course of more than six decades. It’s the Ink Book Club’s July selection, and Dave Eggers will be our guest twice during the month: On Wednesday, July 8 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, and then again on Wednesday, July 29th.

We chose Contrapposto because it’s an enthralling coming-of-age novel which wrestles with childhood trauma; with being fatherless; with not-quite-requited love; and with whether art can save a life. As readers of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius will recall, Eggers’ 2000 memoir chronicled his harrowing and hilarious experience raising his 8-year-old brother, Toph, after both their parents died of cancer when Eggers was just twenty-one. The book became a cultural phenomenon and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Contrapposto mines some of that territory. Cricket, the novel’s main character, has a loving mother who is barely capable of parenting him. From a young age, he is mainly left to his own devices. After his grandfather—his only confidante and protector, dies—he takes refuge in drawing. Eventually Cricket teams up with two other young eccentrics, Olympia and Jed—also semi-orphans--who push Cricket to become more of a rule-breaker and free thinker, as an artist and a human. They’re like Peter Pan’s lost boys or characters straight out of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. They are each other’s found family, finding surrogate fathers in a store owner who employs them, or an art professor who takes them under his wing. Olympia crashes in and out of Cricket’s life in dramatic fashion over the course of decades—a love he is unable to fully claim, or to shake. She’s brainy, beautiful, ambitious, unstable, and drawn to men who inevitably mistreat her–except for Cricket. While Olympia ultimately embraces the art world and, in between breakdowns and flameouts, becomes embedded in it, Cricket fights to retain his artistic integrity by remaining outside it.

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Eggers is not merely a novelist or memoirist—which would be enough! His explosive literary debut became the means through which he’s constructed a purposeful life: “Feeling useful as a writer,” he’s said, “is not an everyday occurrence. You can spend eighteen months, two years…on writing something that you don’t know if it’s going to come to anything, but you can be sent into a middle school” (as he’s done with his non-profit, 826), “and feel like in two hours, boy, you really have an impact.”

When we sit down with Eggers on July 8, we’ll discuss the parallels between Cricket and his creator, as we know, for one, Eggers is also a visual artist whose drawings are featured throughout the book. Cricket dreams of becoming an artist’s apprentice; Eggers co-founded a San Francisco non-profit visual arts school and cultural hub called Art + Water, where aspiring artists are offered free studio space and mentorship. We will also touch on the status of book bans around the country; how Eggers helps combat San Francisco’s affordability crisis; why he launched his independent publishing company, McSweeney’s, as well as 826 National, a network of youth writing centers.

Meantime, below are some questions to contemplate:

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What’s behind the socialist surge? What does it tell us about the rise and political influence of a new white-collar working class, as Noam Scheiber describes it in his new book “Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class”?

I asked Scheiber to help us understand the shifting landscape within the Democratic Party, the connection many voters are making between Gaza and issues like housing affordability, whether solidarity is possible between frustrated Starbucks workers and frustrated Palantir workers, and how large ranks of educated disenchanted people have often changed history’s course.

If you enjoy these conversations, become a paid subscriber to support this work.

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P.S. This week, my beloved bookstore McNally Jackson began offering special signed copies of “Man in the Mirror,” my new book out in September, at their website here.

I would love for this book to be in your hands. And to sign it for you with mine.

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Today the Supreme Court of the United States struck down President Trump’s attempt to gut birthright citizenship, affirming the idea that to be born on American soil is to be, by right, an American citizen. On this occasion, I wanted to repost this very personal reflection on the larger idea behind a constitutional clause.

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I am by birth and by right an American. I do not wish to change this fact, and I will not surrender to those who would change it for me.

I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, a place I invariably think back to on those rare occasions when someone says, “Go back to your country.”

Cleveland? You want me to go back to Cleveland?

And, yes, I was born as the thing now being argued over nationwide: a birthright citizen. Which is to say, my parents were not yet American citizens when they had me.

Had they given up everything they knew to come here? Yes. Had they strained family bank accounts back in India for so much as a plane ticket? Yes. Had they committed every morsel of their energy and perseverance and ingenuity to making a life here? Yes, yes, and yes. Had my father, quoting the folk singer Tom Paxton, written to my mother of their departure from India’s comfortable certainties that the two of them were now venturing “Outward bound upon a ship that sails no ocean / Outward bound, it has no crew but me and you / All alone when just a minute ago the shore was filled with people / With people that we knew”? Yes. And he still quotes it to her.

But they were not yet American citizens. Nevertheless, they dared to cast the biggest vote of confidence a human being can cast in another country: creating a child who will belong first to it, and not to the country of their own certainties. To have a child is to begin to lose control from the moment of physical separation. They never go back in; eventually, they acquire minds of their own. But the loss of control is greater, the faith deeper, when you are one thing, and you engender a child who is another.

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My father used to introduce my sister and me as “the original Cleveland Indians.” The joke killed before the team’s name change.

But really we were just Americans. Americans with masala, maybe, but Americans. Baseball and Hot Wheels and hot dogs and a big Oldsmobile and a yard and, more than anything else, a sense that history didn’t have to be some big drag, that here, eyes to the horizon, standing atop the old, not under it, you become, become, become.

President Trump wants to end birthright citizenship. Because he is inelegant, his way of going about it would inevitably imperil much of the legal infrastructure that pulled America out of slavery, brought down segregation, and laid the foundation for women’s rights and equality and the freedoms of many other populations.

Legal writers more knowledgeable than I have explained why Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship is both perilous and, legally speaking, hogwash. I want to make a different point, borne of my experiences in America and outside of it. Birthright citizenship is not only a profound legal foundation of the United States. It is a cultural idea that does as much to make America feel like America as any other thing.

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My family learned this lesson the difficile way.

A dozen years after my father first touched down in America as a graduate student, a decade after my mother joined him, they decided to take their now-family of four on an adventure. We were moving to France!

Now, France is a very captivating country. Don’t get me wrong. But even though I was merely seven years old when we moved there, I remember watching my parents daily confront a reality that they would have had no way of understanding from the other side of the Atlantic: in France, there is something called Frenchness, and the only way to access it or participate in it fully is to have the luck of already being French.

This poses a challenge to outsiders. If the only way to become French is to have already been French, then how do you become French? The short answer is you don’t. You can live there; there are ways to finagle citizenship. But at the heart of French law and culture is the idea that Frenchness is a specific culture, French people have a specific blood, and the barriers to entry are high. You can be there. But you can never be of there. You can enjoy the place. But the place will never truly belong to you.

That is changing slightly even in France, as I have seen on recent trips. But those who would open up the definition of Frenchness are, and always will be, playing defense.

Many countries around the world function in this same way, with a cultural and legal idea of citizenship rooted in blood and soil and lineage. Basically, in one form or another, to be a citizen requires your parents or even grandparents to have been citizens. What this means at a philosophical level is that a citizen is something you are because they were, not something you become as you, because you were born here.

I always think of something my friend Eric Liu, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, said (and I paraphrase). His family came from China to the U.S. They became American, like so many before. And, Liu notes, having been rooted in China’s soil for thousands of years and uprooted into America’s for only a few decades, Eric could never “become Chinese” by moving back. One severed link: the chain ends.

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This is why, for all of the dangerous things President Trump has proposed in his first days, the assault on birthright citizenship strikes me as so fundamental. Because it’s an attack not just on a policy question of how and when passports are given out. It’s an attack on the idea that anyone can be part of this, that this is a nation of becoming.

So fundamental is this culture of becoming that even Trump cannot escape it. He can slap 10 percent tariffs on foreign goods, but nothing will change the fact that 67 percent of his own wives were imports. And I want to say for the record that I will never use the fact that Melania Trump was not born in the United States against her. I believe she is every bit as American as I am.

I used to live in the Boston area. One day, several friends and I went down to the river and laid out contiguous picnic blankets and waited hours for the Fourth of July fireworks. The bank grew more crowded by the hour. There were minor arguments about space and the obstruction of views. Most of it was totally peaceful. But at some point, our group, a large and diverse crew, came into the focus of a man who did not like how many blankets we had laid out.

“Go back to your country!” the man barked at me. I remember being taken aback. Cleveland? “Why did you even come to this country?” the man persisted. His tone suggested he wasn’t thinking of Cleveland.

As the situation escalated, another man came forward. He was white, in a sleeveless shirt, with a bald head, full of tattoos, and with a generous belly. He looked like he might be a Hell’s Angel or some type of biker dude. Given the argument we were in about whether we belonged, he didn’t necessarily look like he would fall on our side.

But he turned to the man barking at us and said five words I will never forget — five words so simple and profound that Trump will live and die without grasping them: The man said, “These are my people, too.”

It was a big idea; it is a big idea. But to him, it was also no big deal. He didn’t want to make a big fuss about it. It was just what he knew to be true. Whether or not he had ever spent much time ruminating about “birthright citizenship,” he had internalized the culture of it. These are my people. Anyone can become my people. We become.

And where that story leaves me is this: I don’t think of Trump as being in a contest with me over my citizenship, or in a contest with legal scholars and the courts over the proper reading of the Fourteenth Amendment. Fundamentally, I think of Trump as being in a contest with that biker dude. With the deep and abiding culture he spoke for. With the lifeblood of a nation of becoming. I believe the biker dude will prevail.

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Photo: The author

I will ask these questions and more to Noam Scheiber, who covers the white-collar workforce for The New York Times — a group of workers that, despite their collar color, are increasingly under pressure — from AI, rising costs, and th…

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If you’ve been reading The Ink all along, you won’t have been the last to know.

Read and watch this space, and you’ll always be one step ahead! Thank you for being part of what we’re building at The Ink.

And tell us your thoughts about Election …

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I must have realized that this was a particularly powerful constellation of people for me — three of the deepest w…

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In our Substack Live with Strout, she shared how she brought Artie to life, layering him with complexity, creating a character who embodies the intricacy and mystery of being a human in this crazy, wondrous world.

Strout also shared:

• How she began writing at age four, prompted by her mother’s suggestion that every day she jot down everything she’d seen and done

• Why she doesn’t do social media

• Why she begins writing a new book even before she’s finished with the one she’s currently working on

• How her mother’s observations about passersby—“Oh, she doesn’t look very happy to be getting home to her husband”—inflamed her young imagination and propelled her to write

• Why she didn’t publish her first book, Amy and Isabelle, until age 42, and how she credits one editor—Daniel Menaker—with launching her career. He was an editor at the New Yorker, rejecting her short story submissions, but each time encouraging her that her work was 80%, then 90% better than the other material crossing his desk. When he took a job as an editor at Random House, he acquired and published her fiction debut.

  

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Today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, author Elizabeth Strout will join us live right here for our meeting of The Ink Book Club. Strout won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for Olive Kitteridge, whose eponymous protagonist may have launched the burgeoning fiction category labeled “female rage.” In its citation, the Pulitzer committee noted that Olive is “blunt, flawed and fascinating,” which is true but perhaps understates the sting of the character’s radical candor and rejection of social niceties.

For her new book, Strout has devised a nicer yet equally memorable hero, Artie Dam, whose jovial exterior is at odds with the churn within, a discontent so deep it’s a death wish. He fixates on methods of suicide, though his wife notices nothing amiss. Strout’s portrait is of a man and his wife who harbor secrets from one another, as well as from their own conscious minds. Moreover, she asserts that these secrets are protective mechanisms: if we were totally honest all the time, life might be intolerable.

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In a recent Time piece entitled “How Elizabeth Strout Gets Inside People’s Minds,” writer Belinda Luscombe observed that “Strout’s novels are just like the Marvel Cinematic Universe except nothing happens and the multiverse is Maine” (though for this novel, Strout has relocated an entirely new cast of characters to the Massachusetts coast). Luscombe very much means that as a compliment, also noting that Strout breathes life into “non-superheroes to create recognizable, flawed, sympathetic, interesting humans.” Ann Patchett, whose latest novel, Whistler, is currently a major bestseller, recently remarked that Elizabeth Strout is her literary “north star,” that with “every book she publishes, you just think, ‘Oh well, she can’t possibly do that again.’ And then she comes out with another book and it’s even better.”

So join us for a chance to hear how Elizabeth Strout has remained at the top of her game for decades—and if you have questions ahead of the conversation, please post them here in comments.

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How to participate in the Book Club:

To participate in our meetings and author talks on Substack Live, join from your phone or tablet with the Substack app. You can also watch from your computer at The Ink, and comment and ask questions in our chat. Make sure you enable notifications, and when our meetings begin, you should receive an email alert; if you can’t find the message, check the notifications tab (the small bell-shaped icon to the upper right of the website or lower right of the app) at the time of the event to find a link.

Book Club meetings are open to paid subscribers to The Ink, so if you haven’t become part of our community, join us today!

(Photo of Elizabeth Strout by Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images)

And below are some questions for Ink subscribers to consider in connection with “The Things We Never Say”:

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