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Even by Trump’s basement standards, it is an appalling, lawless, barbaric statement — launched by that chilling first sentence. But it is also a profoundly revealing text.

Start at the beginning. Trump has chosen the word “civilization.” Not regime, not government, not reign, not even country. A civilization. And not just “a civilization” but “a whole civilization,” every last shred of it. It is almost as if Trump heard critics of the Israeli and American-backed assault on Gaza, heard the charges of genocide, and decided to lean into that idea with Iran. It is as if he is striving to become what his critics have accused him of being.

The United Nations, in its account of the law of genocide, notes that it is a crime that is famously hard to prove. The missing element is very often intent. This, it says,

is the most difficult element to determine. To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group. It is this special intent, or dolus specialis, that makes the crime of genocide so unique.

But here Trump has eliminated the issue. In the future, intent will not be hard to prove — it will not even be as demanding as it was in Gaza — because Trump just posted it online, with the world as witness.

The second half of the sentence is important, too. We are told this civilization, to be buried by Trump, will never rise again. “Again,” we should note, is one of the most important words in the Trump dictionary (available online for $19.99 if you act now!). Trump’s entire politics is that of Again-ism. What was great can be restored. What was lost can be reclaimed. What was ours and now is shared can be made ours again. So to insist not only that a civilization will be genocided and removed from the living, but also that it will have no “agains,” is to transcend the longstanding and bipartisan hostility to this specific regime in Iran and to suggest that the problem is not simply this government, these ayatollahs, but all the blood of all these people in this place, that there is nothing in this civilization that is worthy of restoration, that there is no germ of value beneath the regime. In this story, Iran is no longer a great old civilization of the world hijacked by a bad regime. It is a culture rotten to the core. This is a dramatic departure in U.S. policy.

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Now, in the second sentence, Trump pivots. First he is the genocidaire, proudly so. Now he is the abusive ex-husband at the door. He doesn’t want to hurt you, he really doesn’t, it’s really you who is bringing this upon yourself, he is not acting, he’s just reacting to you, you are the one doing this. He isn’t hurting Iran; Iran is hurting Iran.

From there he moves into total delusion. Having failed at his goal of regime change, by replacing an old ayatollah who was close to death’s door with his considerably younger son, Trump claims to have achieved “Complete and Total Regime Change.” So first he was the cold-blooded whole-people killer. Then he was the abusive ex insisting that Iran is bringing this on itself. And now he is the gaslighter-in-chief, telling us he has done the opposite of what he has done. In fact, he replaced one ayatollah with another who may have decades ahead to pursue a bottomless grudge.

Then: “We will find out tonight.” What he is doing — what he is actively committing — becomes passive. We’re going to find out! Let’s see. The president seems determined to make the United States true to an anti-imperialist shitposter’s most reductive idea of it: a republic founded on genocide threatening genocide unless you free up oil. However much truth may have lurked in phrases like the above, American presidents past have tried to disprove or conceal it. Trump is making this vision of America his foreign policy legacy: oil, or else genocide.

And there is the reality-TV element. The deadline is even in prime time. The man still knows how to make a show. It’s all he knows.

There is something potent in the closing swipe at 47 years of “extortion, corruption, and death,” because while he means the Iranian regime, he is of course the 47th president, and it won’t be lost on many that extortion, corruption, and death have been some of the hallmarks of this wannabe American ayatollah, among whose ambitions have been enabling the spread of religious nationalism, sending women back in time to an age of second-class status, and consolidating absolute control.

There is a ring of truth in there somewhere. Forty-seven will finally end. It will. It is hard to see now, but there is life on the other side of this. Life on the other side of this barbarism, this abuse, this delusion and manipulation, this awful reality show, this corruption and mendacity and selfishness.

Whatever bombs are dropped, Iran’s magnificent civilization will not die. The present uncivilized incarnation of the government of the United States of America will.

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Happy Saturday, Ink Readers!

This week saw the Supreme Court give Donald Trump his hearing (and a chilly reception) on birthright citizenship, American astronauts returned to (or around) the moon, and the war in Iran continued, as Trump struggled (visibly) to explain it. We’d forgive you if you missed out on everything else that’s going on, but it’s the weekend once again (and a long one, for Easter), and a perfect time to catch up. And we hope, as we do every Saturday, that you’ll read along with us. Among the great writing you’ll find in today’s edition of Weekend Reads:

• Why did the Court even bother to hear Trump out on birthright citizenship?

• Can anyone afford the writing life?

• Why does returning to the moon give us such big feelings?

• These days, can you still post through it?

• What’s at stake in high-stakes war games?

• What does a general strike look like — and can it work?

• And silly music for serious times from Gelli Haha

We do what we do at The Ink to help you understand these times. If this community keeps you sane, join us today. It’s your support that makes this happen.

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Citizenship fights back

Why is this stupid case even here in the first place? Trump’s arguments bear almost no relation to the law or how the law has been interpreted for over 100 years. Trump repeatedly lost this case in lower courts, meaning the Supreme Court didn’t even have to grant him a hearing. Why are we being dragged through this spectacle to fight the facially unconstitutional proposition that Trump can change the meaning of the Constitution through executive order? [The Nation]

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We talked to Williamson late last year, but given the season, we’re making the interview available to all. We hope you’ll support our work — consider joining us today.

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In The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History, author Vanessa Williamson explores how the story of American democracy is a story about taxes, from the Revolutionary fight against taxation without representation, to Progressive efforts to make the consolidation of extreme wealth impossible, to the conservative argument that taxation is theft. Williamson told us about:

• How the Boston Tea Party wasn’t a revolt against taxation, but an Occupy-style protest against the bailout of a too-big-to-fail company

• Why high-tax countries are more democratic than low-tax countries

• What’s truly radical about a progressive tax

• Why American citizens identify as “taxpayers”

• What happened to the funds the Trump White House impounded

• And how to get Americans to embrace the idea of paying their share

If you pay taxes and want to know more about why, you won’t want to miss this one. Just click on the video player above to watch the conversation.

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Just click on the video player above to watch the conversation now.

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How to participate in the Book Club

Each week, we’ll post questions — our discussion guide — on Sunday, and on alternate Wednesdays we’ll meet for a discussion with the Club or a visit from an author or other special guest (occasionally we’ll schedule special events on alternate days or times, but we will let you know). Look out for posts with further details.

In between meetings, we invite you to chat or comment on our posts with your insights and questions. The Book Club will meet again with Ibram Kendi on Wednesday, April 22, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern.

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, but you won’t be able to join the live video discussion. Make sure you enable notifications, and when our meetings begin, you should receive an email alert; if you can’t find the message, just 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.

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Chain of Ideas: The Origins of our Authoritarian Age is the How to Be An Antiracist author Ibram X. Kendi’s groundbreaking new book — and it’s already a New York Times bestseller. As Trump and other would-be autocrats around the world move to turn back the clock on progress so many have worked long and hard to achieve, Chain of Ideas traces the spread of our current xenophobia to the promulgation of “great replacement theory,” popularized by French novelist and immigration conspiracist Renaud Camus in his 2011 book The Great Replacement.

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For those unfamiliar with the idea, great replacement theory proponents hold that “powerful elites are enabling disadvantaged groups to steal the lives, livelihoods, cultures, and electoral power and freedoms of privileged groups, who now need authoritarian protection.” Under this view, “One’s life, one’s job, one’s status, one’s way of living, one’s freedoms, one’s nation — all can be perceived as lost, slipping away, in need of authoritarian protection and restoration.” Democracy becomes collateral damage in this worldview, as white privilege is prioritized over all else.

Obviously, this rings a lot of bells. Trump’s entire playbook vis-à-vis his opposition to immigration, diversity, abortion, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights; his suppression of the history of slavery; and countless other policies can be understood as growing out of the embrace of great replacement theory.

Later today, Wednesday, April 1, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, the Ink Book Club will sit down live with Ibram Kendi to learn more about his eye-opening, perspective-shifting work. This time around, Kendi will introduce us to the book’s concepts, and then — since the book runs more than 500 pages — he’ll join us for a second live conversation later on Wednesday, April 22, once we’ve all had the chance to dig in. And while you’re reading, you can consult Kendi’s extensive notes at chainofideasbook.com.

Ibram X. Kendi is an author, activist, historian, and Howard University Professor. He won the National Book Award for 2016’s Stamped From the Beginning, which Kendi’s production company made into an Emmy-nominated documentary. Join the Ink Book Club today to learn more about why we are where we are, and how to curb the further spread of this dangerous theory, and call it out when we see it.

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Below, you’ll find some thoughts to consider in advance of Friday’s conversation. The Ink Book Club’s events are open to all paid subscribers to The Ink. If you haven’t yet become part of our community, join today. And if you’re already a member, consider giving a gift or group subscription.

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In the midst of the longest government shutdown in American history, lots of Americans are wondering why Congress doesn’t work anymore.

That question isn’t new. For decades — long before the power grab by the executive branch under Donald Trump relegated the House of Representatives to a rubber stamp — new members have come in promising to get Congress legislating again. Yet the problem has gotten worse.

In her new book, Stuck: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress, congressional scholar and author Maya Kornberg looks to explain why. She examines three incoming classes of reformers: the 1974 “Watergate Babies” elected after Richard Nixon left office; the Republican revolutionaries of 1994 who enacted Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America; and the 2018 Democratic class elected in the backlash to Donald Trump’s first term. In all three cases, Kornberg finds a cautionary tale of how the struggle to build and hold power in a political world shaped by money and media coverage has further immobilized Congress — and also finds clues for how the House might take back its power, and lead the way out of our current crisis.

We talked to Kornberg about where things went wrong, how even the best-intentioned reformers have ended up exacerbating the problems they set out to solve, why social media has made matters so much worse, and what solutions might look like — if voters and the next incoming class of House freshmen decide governing is worth doing.

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The House of Representatives has more or less given up governing, beyond providing a backstop for the executive branch. But this is not new. You’ve written about past cycles the House has gone through: Congress gets stuck, people come in, sweep out the incumbents, decide they’re going to change the institution, and often make things worse. Is the current crisis more of the same, or are we seeing something new?

We have a perfect storm right now in terms of disempowering Congress.

You have Supreme Court decisions — in 1976, Buckley v. Vallejo, in 2010, Citizens United — allowing money to flood campaigns and remaking the way members think about seeking power within the chamber. And you have what one journalist called Congress self-lobotomizing in the 1990s. One of the key periods I talk about in the book is the Republican Revolution. Newt Gingrich comes in and defunds entire congressional support agencies, like the Office of Technology Assessment, which used to help Congress understand science. He cuts staff of key agencies, like the Congressional Research Service, by about a third, cuts the committee system, and does so many other things.

He was sort of a precursor to DOGE.

Yeah, definitely in terms of the spirit of it, the dynamic of making government smaller. You have a Congress that is just not investing in itself, in which Congress isn’t figuring out how to retool its structures. I mean, it hasn’t redrawn its committee jurisdiction since the 70s, before the internet existed, so it’s just completely ill-equipped now to deal with such tremendous problems, as executive abuse of power and the complexity of policy issues we face.

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Happy Saturday, Ink Readers!

Today, March 28, 2026, is the third No Kings day of action — a perfect day to get out there and make it clear, once again, that America has and wants no king (well, with one purely symbolic exception). Details on that below. But before you head out today to make your voice heard, we invite you to read along with us as we catch up on some of the great writing of the week that was, as we do every Saturday. Among the questions, answers, and provocations you’ll find in today’s edition of Weekend Reads:

• Joyce Carol Oates on Marlon Brando — and what’s wrong with hero worship

• What is Donald Trump trying to accomplish in Cuba?

• Rebecca Solnit on the peril and promise of this moment

• Does the quest to buy control of our lives…control us?

• What Frank Sinatra’s voice still has to teach us

• And timeless music for the moment from the Kronos Quartet

We do what we do at The Ink to help you understand these times. If this community keeps you sane, join us today. It’s your support that makes this happen.

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To Marlon, in hell

Because your love was carelessly sown, debris tossed from a speeding vehicle.

And because you loved both men and women, except not enough.

Because the slow suicide of self-disgust is horrible to us, and fascinating

as the collapse of tragedy into farce is fascinating

and the monstrousness of festered beauty.

Because you lured a girl of 15 to deceive her parents on a wintry-dark December school day, 1953. [Joyce Carol Oates: A Writer’s Journal]

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Anderson talked to us about the breakdowns of intelligence under Jimmy Carter’s administration that shaped U.S. policy in the region, how the Ronald Reagan campaign exploited the hostage crisis to win the 1980 election, Donald Trump’s apparent lack of even the concept of a plan for the current war, and why he thinks Ayatollah Khomeini’s brutal Iranian Revolution was a transformational moment — the event that laid the groundwork for our authoritarian era.

If you’re looking for real insight into what’s actually happening in America’s latest war, click on the video player above to watch now.

And catch up on our previous conversation with Anderson at the link below:

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We’re making a preview of this conversation open to all. If you want to watch the whole thing, we invite you to become a supporting subscriber, which includes membership in the Book Club and access to our discussion guides, group chats, and live discussions.

Your support is how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.

Join us today, or if you are already a member, give a gift or group subscription.

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Give a gift subscription

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How to participate in the Book Club

Each week, we’ll post questions — our discussion guide — on Sunday, and on alternate Wednesdays we’ll meet for a discussion with the Club or a visit from an author or other special guest (occasionally we’ll schedule special events on alternate days or times, but we will let you know). Look out for posts with further details.

In between meetings, we invite you to chat or comment on our posts with your insights and questions. The Book Club will meet next on Wednesday, April 1, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, with Ibram X. Kendi, for the first of two conversations on his new book, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of our Authoritarian Age.

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, but you won’t be able to join the live video discussion. Make sure you enable notifications, and when our meetings begin, you should receive an email alert; if you can’t find the message, just 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!

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This is the fourth chapter of The Ink’s series The Epstein Class — our investigation into the inner workings of Jeffrey Epstein’s world and the operating system of power today. For more:

• The series introduction

• The first chapter: Epstein’s network of bystanders, on courage in an age of networks

• The second chapter: Never eat with women, on how Epstein’s circle avoided what it feared most

• The third chapter: Rich Brain, on the mundanities that preoccupy the ultrawealthy

To support independent journalism like this, become a subscriber:

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By Anand Giridharadas

For friends and associates and collaborators of Jeffrey Epstein, the go-to plea has been the “slice of life” defense. I knew him only as the Wall Street Guy, not the Rape Island Guy. I knew him only as a party boor, not a child trafficker. I knew him only as a donor, not a convicted pedophile...

In some cases, the Epstein files undercut this defense. Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Harvard president, tried to minimize what he knew, but he is found in the files emailing Epstein about press reports about his crimes. The longevity expert Peter Attia may have denied visiting Epstein’s island or ranch, but in one email he bro-coos to Epstein that “the biggest problem with becoming friends with you” is that “the life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul.”

In the main, though, the hodgepodge, context-free nature of the Epstein files is frustratingly helpful to the “slice of life” petitioners. This guy only talks to Epstein about philanthropy. This guy only talks to him about changing his reputation online. Another guy only talks to him about cognitive science. It is not exactly straightforward to assemble all these threads to weave a tapestry of the complicity not merely of individuals but of a whole network.

Then, four months into reading through the files, I found an email that stunned me.

It is not the most salacious email I’ve seen, nor the one with the most boldface names. But it’s the only one in which Epstein, who in that same thread professed an inability to decipher how others saw him, seemed to be interested in just that: both the conventional wisdom in the ether, and what people really knew. And, for once, someone in his network did what no one around Epstein ever did: told him the truth.

This may be the single-most-overlooked email in the whole trove. When I have Googled phrases from it, only one link comes up — a lonely Reddit thread. But here is testimony to the thing so many in the network prefer to deny existed: a common sense of who Epstein was and what he had done and how and why, a 1,500-word, 360-degree assessment of his character, his criminality, his manipulations, his gifts, his network cultivation — written by someone who wasn’t especially close to him, but seemed to believe that this is how others saw him, this is what many people knew about him.

Long before the “affordability crisis” was a top-tier issue in American politics, Joscha Bach was having one of his own.

In late October 2013, emails show Bach, a German cognitive scientist and AI researcher (and philosopher), contemplating a move from Berlin to Boston, to take a fellowship at the MIT Media Lab. There was an issue, though: Joi Ito, then the head of the Media Lab, had offered Bach just $60,000 a year. “We are a family of four,” Bach wrote, “with a need to rebuild a household, send a kid into daycare and even visit the relatives sometimes. I imagine that survival in Boston will be hard on 60K; it would not be easy for a family even in Berlin.” The family’s “burn rate,” Bach wrote, using a startup term for family life, was €5,000 a month (about $82,000 a year then), and Boston was pricier than Berlin. How was Bach going to make it all work?

Epstein.

Ito wrote to Bach, telling him that “Jeffrey said that he’ll figure out a way to cover the difference outside of the MIT relationship. Can you talk to him directly about that?”

Bach did just that, telling Epstein that $100,000 a year was necessary “to keep the family fed.” Epstein responded, “no problem.”

According to the law firm Goodwin Procter, which compiled an extensive report on Epstein’s relationship with MIT, new Epstein donations began to flow to MIT the very next month. These $300,000 in gifts “were made to support research by Joscha Bach,” the report said, taking care to note that the “Media Lab hired Bach in large part because Epstein subsidized the cost.”

In the coming years, Bach would grow so comfortable as the beneficiary of a convicted sex offender that he would simply email his desired Lufthansa or JetBlue flights to Epstein’s office or travel agent when he wanted to take a family trip to Germany or speak at a conference somewhere. Others might have shuddered at the idea of Epstein having any connection to their children, but Bach got in the habit of forwarding school tuition bills to Epstein, who ostensibly paid them. He even began to forward his rent bills of $6,500 a month.

What was Epstein getting out of this deal? Seemingly, what he sought from many big thinkers: adjacency to the intellectual edge, the ability to send rando musings and get speedy responses, access to a kind of mind concierge to go with the credit card concierges, hotel concierges, and spa concierges he was used to pinging. Epstein thought of thinkers the way people now think of ChatGPT: as a high-quality source against which to bounce low-quality prompts.

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In a recent statement on his Substack, Bach described Epstein’s use of intellectuals:

Epstein was not a scientist himself, and regarded the consensus mechanism of peer-reviewed science with skepticism. Instead, he generated his own models of the world, and bounced them against the best minds he could find….

During some of my time in Cambridge, Epstein sent frequently short, dyslexic emails with random thoughts in my direction. I tried to probe and understand his world view, which was highly unusual and often darker and more radical than anyone else I’ve ever talked to.

“have not heard from you . what are you up to . new thoughts?” Thus began an email from Epstein to Bach in October 2017. (Well, “began” is not the right word, because that is the whole message.)

No academic could get away with writing this way to a respected colleague. But for the thinkers indentured by Epstein into service as mind concierges, the customer was always right, and every query should be answered, swiftly and at length.

At the moment I am writing an article to explain the likely relationship between conscious attention and credit assignment, i.e. to figure out which parts in our control architecture contributed to success or failure in a learning task…

Actually, I refuse to keep typing whatever this is, but this was how it went between them — and between Epstein and other thinkers. Epstein would burp a little question that was more of a comment, and his obedient servant (in this case, Bach) would write a long reply performing smartness in just the way rich guys like Epstein liked it done:

a lot of people are coherentists instead of foundationalists….

I wonder if it is possible to simulate the adversarial evolution of emotional expression in a game theoretic setting….

While the hope construct can be used to model rational investments, it often does not approximate the actual distribution of expectations….

Personally, I would donate to MIT to be removed from emails like these.

Sometimes in the Bach-Epstein emails, there is a glide from intellectual peacocking to money that reminds one of the bargain at work here. “PS: Our account is emptied,” Bach writes. “Could you please pitch in?”

In February 2019, with Epstein increasingly a household name thanks to the explosive reporting of Julie Brown in The Miami Herald the previous year, Bach wrote to his academic sugar daddy with concern — for Epstein: “I hope you are well, and the current turmoils don’t provide worries to you!”

There is no mention of the survivors, nor questions about the sweetheart deal exposed by Brown that let Epstein slip out of real accountability for his crimes, nor any sense of betrayal over new revelations in the reporting that Bach had not known about.

Why, even now, does Bach not feel moved to speak up? If you jump a paragraph or two down, there is a possible answer: “Our funds are currently down to 11000…” The philosopher is a seeker of truth, in theory. In practice, telling the truth can cost you.

It may seem striking enough that the Miami Herald revelations, which exploded around the world, did not end Bach’s relationship with Epstein. But there is evidence, in Bach’s own words, that the Herald findings were hardly the first he had heard of Epstein’s ways and transgressions. And on one occasion, he played all of this back to Epstein with a frankness otherwise largely absent from the ocean of released files.

It began with a stray musing on email. On July 2, 2017, Bach wrote to Epstein that he

would be curious to learn how you think that other people perceive you, and how much they can glimpse behind your curtain.

Bach explained his interest in the question as a function of his own growing journey toward seeing himself from the outside in:

In the last three years, I have developed a lot more self-awareness, not least thanks to you. (It does not mean that I now perfectly understand how others see me, but that I notice that my self model and the perspective of others, and the more importantly, my model of how others model me, have serious discrepancies.)

This kind of invitation to self-awareness from Epstein was unusual. Frankly, asking Epstein to do anything was unusual. How often does the concierge ask something of you? But here was an opening.

Epstein responded with some blather about not caring about how people see him, which segued into a story about Epstein making a move on a college student:

I dont spend much time thinking about how people perceive me. I try to maintain my own compass. I dont admit an age or power difference in my intereactions . In the past if i did things in order to satisfy someones perceptions ( within bounds) . I often ended with an unintended result. ex. I recently met very smart college student . very cute. . I told her I would help her getting grants. she was insulted . and when pressed said she couldnt be bought.

Then, strangely, there was an invitation. Epstein, seemingly referring to social limitations he shared with Bach, asked his supplicant/friend to assess him:

Joscha. .both you and I have lived the consequences of not being aware of others motivations. Perceptions etc. So I am happy to explore your views. I rarely get insulted. so if you would like to give me some of yours , feel free. -- your funding is intact:). No matter what

And this is what occasioned a rare dose of real talk, in an email longer than the Declaration of Independence. At the top:

I can only extrapolate over the things I get to hear and rationalize over the distribution, and I am not actively trying to solicit opinions about you.

If you remove the performative smart-speak, Bach is prefacing with something important: What he is about to say is based on what others were saying. He wasn’t looking for it. He wasn’t privy to lots of private information. It was just floating in the air; as a mortal, he breathed some in.

Bach now makes clear that he knew that Epstein was a sex offender, but Bach offers that the problem might lie elsewhere, in the culture that judges sex offenders:

The first sentence of your Wikipedia entry introduces you as a sex offender, which due to contemporary America’s fascinating difficulty of dealing with all things sex related establishes a strong prior on you being a pariah. It is also pretty much the only thing that people outside of your circles know you for.

The prevailing assumption about Epstein, Bach continues, is that “you combine the apparently suspicious trait of being wealthy with the apparently horrible trait of being too much interested in too young girls.”

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Now Bach explains, with more self-awareness than most Epstein associates, how those in Epstein’s orbit rationalize their ties:

Once people get to know you in person and are interested in you, they tend to either compartementalize the topic (as a somehow difficult to accept aspect of an important friend), or treat it as somehow interestingly dark and edgy. It seemed to never have been met with outright approval, and very rarely not been an issue at all, even when it is balanced against your sharp, original and interesting mind.

Then Bach, still the dependent that he is, throws in more softeners. The college student who rejected Epstein’s help is hypocritical, because “[w]hile she might be happy to accept any amount of nepotism from a female benefactor as laudable mentorship and empowering feminism, accepting your support would have meant to join into the corruption of the darkest imaginable notions of patriarchy.” Bach even goes so far as to utter a talking point that has become a favorite of Epstein defenders: that he is not a pedophile pedophile so much as an “almost adult” pedophile, since the girls were basically adults, right — 16, 17, come on, right? These defenders even have a special word for it, one Bach now leans on:

If people are able to think outside of moralistic terms, they may simply mark you down as an ephebophile but are bound to notice a few quirks.

No pedophile to see here, folks, just a garden-variety ephebophile! A man drawn not to children but to practically geriatric teens.

Back in diagnostic mode, Bach asks: Why did Epstein, so savvy about risk, take such giant ones?

A power trip? What does that recklessness mean for your relationships to others? Or is it simply due to having grown up in a different time and culture, and having not noticed how the culture has changed?

And why did Epstein so flagrantly flaunt his relationships with young women and girls? Bach mentions the physicist and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram refusing to meet with Epstein because he’d gained awareness of the sort of company Epstein kept. And here Bach gets to something even more profound, burrowing into the heart of patriarchal thought and practice in Epstein’s circle: Epstein wanted to be around women and girls, but didn’t actually like them. What he liked was to dominate them:

your relationships to young women appear not to be on equal footing but dominant-submissive, with little apparent regard for hurt feelings. While you are brutally honest and direct with men, too, you don’t come across as reveling in the power difference when interacting with men, or making an example of their intellectual and personal limitations in front of others.

It is as if you are attracted to women (as long as they are not too womanly), but you don’t like them very much. While individual women gain your respect, it seems to be much harder for them than for men, and it is as if they are inherently less trustworthy.

What follows is a strange twisting of reality that offers a useful insight into this Ivory Tower annex of the manosphere. Bach suggests to Epstein that he tends to “mismodel” women as “intrinsically dangerous,” but then Bach makes an aside that takes the breath away: “Obviously, you are at much greater risk of exploitation by women than me, of course. In many women I wake somewhat motherly instincts.” While others might have emphasized the risk Epstein posed to women, Bach here was speaking of the risk women posed to Epstein. Perhaps because sometimes women summon the nerve to press charges for rape.

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Now Bach seemingly pivots to advice, sketching out “probably the only plausible path to possible redemption in the eyes of the circles of the US intelligentsia.”

The easiest explanation for your unusual choice of partners and the nature of your public relationships to them is obviously childhood abuse. If most of these people suspected that you suffered something unspeakable at the hands of an adult female caregiver, and it just took you decades to work through it (understanding that someone likely abused her, so she turned against you etc.), they would be able to feel that they understand you, and many more would feel acceptance. Some people might even realize that you paid a much higher price than your purported victims.

It is unclear here if Bach is simply speculating about narratives that would work or is referring to a story Epstein told him. In either case, the strategy is clear: make women the real perpetrators, and Epstein the real victim.

Bach continues:

while such a story could probably be planted, I cannot imagine what that would mean for you and your relationship to yourself.

Bach concludes with a 30,000-foot-view summary of his patron’s life and reputation and ways of interacting with people:

What people see of you is that you are effective, reliable, ruthless, provocative, twisted, sometimes utterly crass, unconventional, likely not vain, and completely unafraid. You incentivize the people in our shared circle extremely well for cooperation, by being generous, loyal, curious, intellectually interesting and benevolent. But to regain your place as a socially accepted cultural force you cannot present an image as an unrepentant and unevolving connoisseur of immature girls.

Bach deserves credit for this candor. Few in the Epstein circle had the courage to call Epstein “an unrepentant and unevolving connoisseur of immature girls.” Yet, curiously, a few months ago, when Bach released his statement on his Substack, the narrative of their relationship read like this:

While Epstein’s public reputation was forever destroyed, many people whose judgement I trusted assured me that he had reformed himself and was committed to staying on the good side of the law. I have not met a single person from his network of academics who was aware of any instance of him breaking the law after his conviction, or who witnessed or condoned any illegal or questionable activity by Epstein.

I am not as brilliant or credentialed as Joscha Bach, so maybe there are levels of understanding I don’t have that would bridge this gap. I reached out to him, asking to hear his perspective. I told him I read his statement and “was struck by the idea that we don’t always understand context from these documents. I would like to give you the chance to speak with us directly, so that it’s not looking from afar, but giving you the chance you deserve to answer questions.”

He responded by thanking me for my “friendly message,” before pivoting to an assessment of the work I do, seeming to find it beneath his dignity: “I am generally not interested in partisan culture war topics or in judging people from near or afar, which seems to be the main area of your reporting.” (This is a common move in the Epstein Class: casting criticism or even scrutiny as belonging to a world of tribalism and conflict, a world that the high sages and masters of the universe endeavor to transcend.) But he asked me to send questions, which I did. I haven’t heard back.

One of my questions was: “You describe how people around Epstein compartmentalized or rationalized their relationship with him. In what ways did you yourself participate in that pattern? If a young researcher today were in your exact position — financially supported by a wealthy figure known to have abused young women — what would you advise them to do differently than you did?” I hope he will consider answering in the public interest.

In his Substack statement, Bach did write about the survivors — well, to be more precise, he wrote that “I understand why targets of this sort of media maelstrom do not always survive, and need a long time to heal.” This is the only use of any word beginning with “surviv-” that appears in his statement; the survivor that he was writing about appears to be himself.

The experience of standing in the middle of this storm is traumatic. It is hard to feel my body. At times, I find it nearly impossible to breathe….

At the same time, my family and friends need me to go on, and my work is too important to give up on it. It has just gotten harder for a while.

I feel pain and despair, but I don’t feel any anger. Not at myself, because I know that I tried to do the right thing. I am not angry at the people who hound me, because this is just how public discourse works today.

In his honest appraisal of Epstein, Bach said one other thing that stuck with me. For all his own, just-stated concerns about Epstein, this was far from a breakup letter:

On a personal level: I cannot say how grateful I am for your unwavering support. I have gone through a pretty bad year (nothing like what happened to you, of course). If there is ever anything I can do to help you, please let me know.

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Photo illustration: Jeffrey Epstein by Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images; Joscha Bach by Rama/Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr; Email courtesy House Oversight Committee, jmail.world

• Our mutual love of Tayari Jones’ novel Kin, and that time on the Oprah cruise…

• Two debuts Charles is particularly excited about;

• Charles’ enduring passion for Anne Tyler;

• The pleasures and challenges of reviewing without a net;

• Some of the spring/summer books we are looking forward to reading, like Ann Patchett’s Whistler and Douglas Stuart’s John of Johns.

You won’t want to miss any of it. Just click on the video player above to watch our conversation.

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We are thrilled to announce that our April Ink Book Club selection is Chain of Ideas: The Origins of our Authoritarian Age, by Ibram X. Kendi. This monumental new work from the National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning looks at “great replacement theory” and what we can do to defend our democracy from further erosion by this insidious threat.

Dr. Kendi is a prominent historian and also author of the international bestseller How To Be an Antiracist. He will join us for the first of two live conversations next Wednesday, April 1, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern here on Substack.

And this Friday, March 27, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, join the Ink Book Club and King of Kings author Scott Anderson as we do another deep dive into how we got into the mess with Iran, and where things stand now.

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In between meetings, we invite you to chat or comment on our posts with your insights and questions. The Book Club will meet next on Friday, March 27, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, with Scott Anderson, author of our March pick, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution—A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation.

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This is the fourth chapter of The Ink’s series The Epstein Class — our investigation into the inner workings of Jeffrey Epstein’s world and the operating system of power today. For more:

• The series introduction

• The first chapter: Epstein’s network of bystanders, on courage in an age of networks

• The second chapter: Never eat with women, on how Epstein’s circle avoided what it feared most

• The third chapter: Rich Brain, on the mundanities that preoccupy the ultrawealthy

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By Anand Giridharadas

For friends and associates and collaborators of Jeffrey Epstein, the go-to plea has been the “slice of life” defense. I knew him only as the Wall Street Guy, not the Rape Island Guy. I knew him only as a party boor, not a child trafficker. I knew him only as a donor, not a convicted pedophile...

In some cases, the Epstein files undercut this defense. Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Harvard president, tried to minimize what he knew, but he is found in the files emailing Epstein about press reports about his crimes. The longevity expert Peter Attia may have denied visiting Epstein’s island or ranch, but in one email he bro-coos to Epstein that “the biggest problem with becoming friends with you” is that “the life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul.”

In the main, though, the hodgepodge, context-free nature of the Epstein files is frustratingly helpful to the “slice of life” petitioners. This guy only talks to Epstein about philanthropy. This guy only talks to him about changing his reputation online. Another guy only talks to him about cognitive science. It is not exactly straightforward to assemble all these threads to weave a tapestry of the complicity not merely of individuals but of a whole network.

Then, four months into reading through the files, I found an email that stunned me.

It is not the most salacious email I’ve seen, nor the one with the most boldface names. But it’s the only one in which Epstein, who in that same thread professed an inability to decipher how others saw him, seemed to be interested in just that: both the conventional wisdom in the ether, and what people really knew. And, for once, someone in his network did what no one around Epstein ever did: told him the truth.

This may be the single-most-overlooked email in the whole trove. When I have Googled phrases from it, only one link comes up — a lonely Reddit thread. But here is testimony to the thing so many in the network prefer to deny existed: a common sense of who Epstein was and what he had done and how and why, a 1,500-word, 360-degree assessment of his character, his criminality, his manipulations, his gifts, his network cultivation — written by someone who wasn’t especially close to him, but seemed to believe that this is how others saw him, this is what many people knew about him.

Long before the “affordability crisis” was a top-tier issue in American politics, Joscha Bach was having one of his own.

In late October 2013, emails show Bach, a German cognitive scientist and AI researcher (and philosopher), contemplating a move from Berlin to Boston, to take a fellowship at the MIT Media Lab. There was an issue, though: Joi Ito, then the head of the Media Lab, had offered Bach just $60,000 a year. “We are a family of four,” Bach wrote, “with a need to rebuild a household, send a kid into daycare and even visit the relatives sometimes. I imagine that survival in Boston will be hard on 60K; it would not be easy for a family even in Berlin.” The family’s “burn rate,” Bach wrote, using a startup term for family life, was €5,000 a month (about $82,000 a year then), and Boston was pricier than Berlin. How was Bach going to make it all work?

Epstein.

Ito wrote to Bach, telling him that “Jeffrey said that he’ll figure out a way to cover the difference outside of the MIT relationship. Can you talk to him directly about that?”

Bach did just that, telling Epstein that $100,000 a year was necessary “to keep the family fed.” Epstein responded, “no problem.”

According to the law firm Goodwin Procter, which compiled an extensive report on Epstein’s relationship with MIT, new Epstein donations began to flow to MIT the very next month. These $300,000 in gifts “were made to support research by Joscha Bach,” the report said, taking care to note that the “Media Lab hired Bach in large part because Epstein subsidized the cost.”

In the coming years, Bach would grow so comfortable as the beneficiary of a convicted sex offender that he would simply email his desired Lufthansa or JetBlue flights to Epstein’s office or travel agent when he wanted to take a family trip to Germany or speak at a conference somewhere. Others might have shuddered at the idea of Epstein having any connection to their children, but Bach got in the habit of forwarding school tuition bills to Epstein, who ostensibly paid them. He even began to forward his rent bills of $6,500 a month.

What was Epstein getting out of this deal? Seemingly, what he sought from many big thinkers: adjacency to the intellectual edge, the ability to send rando musings and get speedy responses, access to a kind of mind concierge to go with the credit card concierges, hotel concierges, and spa concierges he was used to pinging. Epstein thought of thinkers the way people now think of ChatGPT: as a high-quality source against which to bounce low-quality prompts.

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In a recent statement on his Substack, Bach described Epstein’s use of intellectuals:

Epstein was not a scientist himself, and regarded the consensus mechanism of peer-reviewed science with skepticism. Instead, he generated his own models of the world, and bounced them against the best minds he could find….

During some of my time in Cambridge, Epstein sent frequently short, dyslexic emails with random thoughts in my direction. I tried to probe and understand his world view, which was highly unusual and often darker and more radical than anyone else I’ve ever talked to.

“have not heard from you . what are you up to . new thoughts?” Thus began an email from Epstein to Bach in October 2017. (Well, “began” is not the right word, because that is the whole message.)

No academic could get away with writing this way to a respected colleague. But for the thinkers indentured by Epstein into service as mind concierges, the customer was always right, and every query should be answered, swiftly and at length.

At the moment I am writing an article to explain the likely relationship between conscious attention and credit assignment, i.e. to figure out which parts in our control architecture contributed to success or failure in a learning task…

Actually, I refuse to keep typing whatever this is, but this was how it went between them — and between Epstein and other thinkers. Epstein would burp a little question that was more of a comment, and his obedient servant (in this case, Bach) would write a long reply performing smartness in just the way rich guys like Epstein liked it done:

a lot of people are coherentists instead of foundationalists….

I wonder if it is possible to simulate the adversarial evolution of emotional expression in a game theoretic setting….

While the hope construct can be used to model rational investments, it often does not approximate the actual distribution of expectations….

Personally, I would donate to MIT to be removed from emails like these.

Sometimes in the Bach-Epstein emails, there is a glide from intellectual peacocking to money that reminds one of the bargain at work here. “PS: Our account is emptied,” Bach writes. “Could you please pitch in?”

In February 2019, with Epstein increasingly a household name thanks to the explosive reporting of Julie Brown in The Miami Herald the previous year, Bach wrote to his academic sugar daddy with concern — for Epstein: “I hope you are well, and the current turmoils don’t provide worries to you!”

There is no mention of the survivors, nor questions about the sweetheart deal exposed by Brown that let Epstein slip out of real accountability for his crimes, nor any sense of betrayal over new revelations in the reporting that Bach had not known about.

Why, even now, does Bach not feel moved to speak up? If you jump a paragraph or two down, there is a possible answer: “Our funds are currently down to 11000…” The philosopher is a seeker of truth, in theory. In practice, telling the truth can cost you.

It may seem striking enough that the Miami Herald revelations, which exploded around the world, did not end Bach’s relationship with Epstein. But there is evidence, in Bach’s own words, that the Herald findings were hardly the first he had heard of Epstein’s ways and transgressions. And on one occasion, he played all of this back to Epstein with a frankness otherwise largely absent from the ocean of released files.

It began with a stray musing on email. On July 2, 2017, Bach wrote to Epstein that he

would be curious to learn how you think that other people perceive you, and how much they can glimpse behind your curtain.

Bach explained his interest in the question as a function of his own growing journey toward seeing himself from the outside in:

In the last three years, I have developed a lot more self-awareness, not least thanks to you. (It does not mean that I now perfectly understand how others see me, but that I notice that my self model and the perspective of others, and the more importantly, my model of how others model me, have serious discrepancies.)

This kind of invitation to self-awareness from Epstein was unusual. Frankly, asking Epstein to do anything was unusual. How often does the concierge ask something of you? But here was an opening.

Epstein responded with some blather about not caring about how people see him, which segued into a story about Epstein making a move on a college student:

I dont spend much time thinking about how people perceive me. I try to maintain my own compass. I dont admit an age or power difference in my intereactions . In the past if i did things in order to satisfy someones perceptions ( within bounds) . I often ended with an unintended result. ex. I recently met very smart college student . very cute. . I told her I would help her getting grants. she was insulted . and when pressed said she couldnt be bought.

Then, strangely, there was an invitation. Epstein, seemingly referring to social limitations he shared with Bach, asked his supplicant/friend to assess him:

Joscha. .both you and I have lived the consequences of not being aware of others motivations. Perceptions etc. So I am happy to explore your views. I rarely get insulted. so if you would like to give me some of yours , feel free. -- your funding is intact:). No matter what

And this is what occasioned a rare dose of real talk, in an email longer than the Declaration of Independence. At the top:

I can only extrapolate over the things I get to hear and rationalize over the distribution, and I am not actively trying to solicit opinions about you.

If you remove the performative smart-speak, Bach is prefacing with something important: What he is about to say is based on what others were saying. He wasn’t looking for it. He wasn’t privy to lots of private information. It was just floating in the air; as a mortal, he breathed some in.

Bach now makes clear that he knew that Epstein was a sex offender, but Bach offers that the problem might lie elsewhere, in the culture that judges sex offenders:

The first sentence of your Wikipedia entry introduces you as a sex offender, which due to contemporary America’s fascinating difficulty of dealing with all things sex related establishes a strong prior on you being a pariah. It is also pretty much the only thing that people outside of your circles know you for.

The prevailing assumption about Epstein, Bach continues, is that “you combine the apparently suspicious trait of being wealthy with the apparently horrible trait of being too much interested in too young girls.”

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Now Bach explains, with more self-awareness than most Epstein associates, how those in Epstein’s orbit rationalize their ties:

Once people get to know you in person and are interested in you, they tend to either compartementalize the topic (as a somehow difficult to accept aspect of an important friend), or treat it as somehow interestingly dark and edgy. It seemed to never have been met with outright approval, and very rarely not been an issue at all, even when it is balanced against your sharp, original and interesting mind.

Then Bach, still the dependent that he is, throws in more softeners. The college student who rejected Epstein’s help is hypocritical, because “[w]hile she might be happy to accept any amount of nepotism from a female benefactor as laudable mentorship and empowering feminism, accepting your support would have meant to join into the corruption of the darkest imaginable notions of patriarchy.” Bach even goes so far as to utter a talking point that has become a favorite of Epstein defenders: that he is not a pedophile pedophile so much as an “almost adult” pedophile, since the girls were basically adults, right — 16, 17, come on, right? These defenders even have a special word for it, one Bach now leans on:

If people are able to think outside of moralistic terms, they may simply mark you down as an ephebophile but are bound to notice a few quirks.

No pedophile to see here, folks, just a garden-variety ephebophile! A man drawn not to children but to practically geriatric teens.

Back in diagnostic mode, Bach asks: Why did Epstein, so savvy about risk, take such giant ones?

A power trip? What does that recklessness mean for your relationships to others? Or is it simply due to having grown up in a different time and culture, and having not noticed how the culture has changed?

And why did Epstein so flagrantly flaunt his relationships with young women and girls? Bach mentions the physicist and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram refusing to meet with Epstein because he’d gained awareness of the sort of company Epstein kept. And here Bach gets to something even more profound, burrowing into the heart of patriarchal thought and practice in Epstein’s circle: Epstein wanted to be around women and girls, but didn’t actually like them. What he liked was to dominate them:

your relationships to young women appear not to be on equal footing but dominant-submissive, with little apparent regard for hurt feelings. While you are brutally honest and direct with men, too, you don’t come across as reveling in the power difference when interacting with men, or making an example of their intellectual and personal limitations in front of others.

It is as if you are attracted to women (as long as they are not too womanly), but you don’t like them very much. While individual women gain your respect, it seems to be much harder for them than for men, and it is as if they are inherently less trustworthy.

What follows is a strange twisting of reality that offers a useful insight into this Ivory Tower annex of the manosphere. Bach suggests to Epstein that he tends to “mismodel” women as “intrinsically dangerous,” but then Bach makes an aside that takes the breath away: “Obviously, you are at much greater risk of exploitation by women than me, of course. In many women I wake somewhat motherly instincts.” While others might have emphasized the risk Epstein posed to women, Bach here was speaking of the risk women posed to Epstein. Perhaps because sometimes women summon the nerve to press charges for rape.

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Now Bach seemingly pivots to advice, sketching out “probably the only plausible path to possible redemption in the eyes of the circles of the US intelligentsia.”

The easiest explanation for your unusual choice of partners and the nature of your public relationships to them is obviously childhood abuse. If most of these people suspected that you suffered something unspeakable at the hands of an adult female caregiver, and it just took you decades to work through it (understanding that someone likely abused her, so she turned against you etc.), they would be able to feel that they understand you, and many more would feel acceptance. Some people might even realize that you paid a much higher price than your purported victims.

It is unclear here if Bach is simply speculating about narratives that would work or is referring to a story Epstein told him. In either case, the strategy is clear: make women the real perpetrators, and Epstein the real victim.

Bach continues:

while such a story could probably be planted, I cannot imagine what that would mean for you and your relationship to yourself.

Bach concludes with a 30,000-foot-view summary of his patron’s life and reputation and ways of interacting with people:

What people see of you is that you are effective, reliable, ruthless, provocative, twisted, sometimes utterly crass, unconventional, likely not vain, and completely unafraid. You incentivize the people in our shared circle extremely well for cooperation, by being generous, loyal, curious, intellectually interesting and benevolent. But to regain your place as a socially accepted cultural force you cannot present an image as an unrepentant and unevolving connoisseur of immature girls.

Bach deserves credit for this candor. Few in the Epstein circle had the courage to call Epstein “an unrepentant and unevolving connoisseur of immature girls.” Yet, curiously, a few months ago, when Bach released his statement on his Substack, the narrative of their relationship read like this:

While Epstein’s public reputation was forever destroyed, many people whose judgement I trusted assured me that he had reformed himself and was committed to staying on the good side of the law. I have not met a single person from his network of academics who was aware of any instance of him breaking the law after his conviction, or who witnessed or condoned any illegal or questionable activity by Epstein.

I am not as brilliant or credentialed as Joscha Bach, so maybe there are levels of understanding I don’t have that would bridge this gap. I reached out to him, asking to hear his perspective. I told him I read his statement and “was struck by the idea that we don’t always understand context from these documents. I would like to give you the chance to speak with us directly, so that it’s not looking from afar, but giving you the chance you deserve to answer questions.”

He responded by thanking me for my “friendly message,” before pivoting to an assessment of the work I do, seeming to find it beneath his dignity: “I am generally not interested in partisan culture war topics or in judging people from near or afar, which seems to be the main area of your reporting.” (This is a common move in the Epstein Class: casting criticism or even scrutiny as belonging to a world of tribalism and conflict, a world that the high sages and masters of the universe endeavor to transcend.) But he asked me to send questions, which I did. I haven’t heard back.

One of my questions was: “You describe how people around Epstein compartmentalized or rationalized their relationship with him. In what ways did you yourself participate in that pattern? If a young researcher today were in your exact position — financially supported by a wealthy figure known to have abused young women — what would you advise them to do differently than you did?” I hope he will consider answering in the public interest.

In his Substack statement, Bach did write about the survivors — well, to be more precise, he wrote that “I understand why targets of this sort of media maelstrom do not always survive, and need a long time to heal.” This is the only use of any word beginning with “surviv-” that appears in his statement; the survivor that he was writing about appears to be himself.

The experience of standing in the middle of this storm is traumatic. It is hard to feel my body. At times, I find it nearly impossible to breathe….

At the same time, my family and friends need me to go on, and my work is too important to give up on it. It has just gotten harder for a while.

I feel pain and despair, but I don’t feel any anger. Not at myself, because I know that I tried to do the right thing. I am not angry at the people who hound me, because this is just how public discourse works today.

In his honest appraisal of Epstein, Bach said one other thing that stuck with me. For all his own, just-stated concerns about Epstein, this was far from a breakup letter:

On a personal level: I cannot say how grateful I am for your unwavering support. I have gone through a pretty bad year (nothing like what happened to you, of course). If there is ever anything I can do to help you, please let me know.

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Photo illustration: Jeffrey Epstein by Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images; Joscha Bach by Rama/Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr; Email courtesy House Oversight Committee, jmail.world

Friends,

I’m thrilled to be able to share this conversation I had last night with the brilliant Rebecca Solnit. She has a new book out, “The Beginning Comes After the End,” and I couldn’t recommend it to you more highly.

The book is a loving intervention with Solnit’s progressive allies. She reframes the moment we’re in as one not of rightist ascendancy so much as backlash. The backlash, she argues, is because of a huge amount of progress that has been made by progressives. That progress is often forgotten by progressives themselves because of deep-seated mental habits and the laudable desire to fight the next battle.

But we shouldn’t concede to Donald Trump power he doesn’t now have. We shouldn’t build up a weak man into a strongman through our fear. And, Solnit argues, there are abundant answers to how to rebuild from darkness in nature. Those were some of the most powerful parts of the book for me.

Check out our conversation above at YouTube. And I’m attaching some older chats we’ve had for The Ink below that.

We ran this essay a year ago this week, and it struck a nerve with many of you. I was re-reading it myself lately, and it helped me process my own choices over this past year.

I wonder how it strikes you. In a time of terrors, how have you chosen to live, how have you chosen to fight, how have you chosen to care? Thank you for being the community you are.

It’s tempting to think that the opposite of authoritarianism, of this nightmare we are living through, is an opposite politics.

And, indeed, the ongoing hijacking of the United States by broligarchs and MAGA minions requires a ferocious political response.

But everyone I talk to is drained by this responding, drained by the burden of constant vigilance, drained by the always-on coup, drained by the ping-ping-ping of executive actions and court orders and protests and town halls and threats and disappearances.

And often people confess guilt.

Guilt for doing anything but this civic duty they feel.

Guilt for having a good time out of doors.

Guilt for being with friends.

Guilt for saying they are doing fine, thank you, in fact great, actually, if they’re being honest, except for the whole world thing.

I want to suggest to you that you don’t need to feel this guilt. The best revenge against these grifters and bigots and billionaires and bullies is to live well, richly, together.

The best revenge is to refuse their values. To embody the kind of living — free, colorful, open — they want to snuff out.

So when they dehumanize, you humanize.

When they try to fracture and divide people, you connect with people.

When they try to curtail the freedom to associate, you gather.

When they try to make it harder to speak your mind, you find your voice.

When they try to make you cynical, you double down on hope.

When they try to drown you in reacting to each little thing, you remember the far-off “beautiful tomorrow” you are fighting for.

When they try to consume you night and day, you reserve time for your garden or cooking or the feeling of your kid’s breath on your cheek as you cuddle.

They want all of all of us, and they want to saturate our beings only for them and their purposes — as fodder for their machines. They want politics to eat your dreams.

And so living well, and living in community, and living with others, and taking care of your people, and even not your people, is not just self-care in order to keep fighting. That was the 2016 idea. It is actually inseparable from resisting their big project.

Because having, and nurturing, in your life a sphere for joy and connection and community and love and food and music and human difference and living and letting live is everything they are not and is everything they are trying to take away.

Be what scares them. Live lives in colors their eyes can’t even see. Cook food they want to deport. Test the fire code with your parties. Form a scene that meets every Wednesday. Call someone you haven’t in a while. Fight with a smile. Fail and come back. Be weird. Be welcoming. Kiss converts. Refuse despair. Be disobedient. Laugh loudly. Hide someone. Call out. Root down.

They are waging a war on living. The more fully you live, the harder their job will be.

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Photos: Ryan J Lane/Getty Images; Jon Cherry/Getty Images; Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images

Happy Saturday, Ink Readers!

A world at war, climate out of control, a federal government continuing its downward spiral into chaos — it might have escaped your attention that yesterday was the spring equinox. But winter’s over in the Northern Hemisphere, and we’re at the season of renewal, with Nowruz, Passover, Easter, a springtime Eid, and countless other festivals offering a reminder that after the worst the year has to offer has passed, it’s time again for growth. Plus, the fact that people around the world are unified in recognizing this as a time to look with hope at the future is something worth taking seriously in these times. It’s a perfect time to catch up on other things you may have missed, so we hope, as we do every Saturday, that you’ll read along with us. Among the great writing and thinking you’ll find in today’s edition of Weekend Reads:

• Can saying goodbye let us understand one another?

• How did big tech deny us the future we deserved?

• Was it ever worth being cool?

• How did song competitions become a new Cold War?

• What do religious scholars make of Peter Thiel’s obsession with the Antichrist?

• Did cultural cannibalism finally win the Civil War — for the South?

• As people wake once again, what was “woke”?

• And an ice-melting improvising set from Weird of Mouth

We do what we do at The Ink to help you understand these times. If this community keeps you sane, join us today. It’s your support that makes this happen.

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The long goodbye

I knew that you would grow up and out and away from me. By now, you must have seen how unequiped I am for separation.

As you say, one’s past, one’s childhood, one’s growing up is always there to be revived, is always there to be made apparent in one’s current life. There is no “de-experiencing” as it were, there is only “cover-up”. How well we do it, and how well we camouflage what we don’t want to live with in ourselves, is our way of going on with life. [The Paris Review]

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Whether you’ve been joining us as we reread 1984 or you haven’t looked into it since high school, you won’t want to miss this conversation. Just click on the video player above to watch now.

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How to participate in the Book Club

Each week, we’ll post questions — our discussion guide — on Sunday, and on alternate Wednesdays we’ll meet for a discussion with the Club or a visit from an author or other special guest (occasionally we’ll schedule on alternate days or times, but we will let you know). Look out for posts with further details.

In between meetings, we invite you to chat or comment on our posts with your insights and questions. The Book Club will meet next on Wednesday, March 25, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, with former Washington Post book critic Ron Charles. And on Friday, March 27, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll have our second conversation with Scott Anderson, author of King of Kings.

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, but you won’t be able to join the live video discussion. Make sure you enable notifications, and when our meetings begin, you should receive an email alert; if you can’t find the message, just 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.

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Catch up on The Epstein Class series:

In an afterword to the 75th anniversary edition of George Orwell’s 1984, novelist Sandra Newman writes that Orwell’s classic dystopian saga is actually an expression of “negative utopia,” a response to the traumas of the world wars, the prospect of nuclear destruction, and the ensuing “mood of hopelessness which pervades our age.” Would dehumanization — the mechanism by which “the Party” maintains absolute power — win the day, or could people throw off despair and the erosion of integrity and spirit, and reclaim their empathy, their ability to freely think, create, and love? Those are Orwell’s central questions in 1984 and in much of his other writings, which today feel urgent and prescient.

As I reread 1984, I was reminded of how many terms he coined that continue to pervade our culture: “thought police,” “doublethink,” “Big Brother is watching you,” “Ministry of Truth,” “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” There is also the “Two Minutes Hate,” the daily ritual during which Party members are required to gather around a screen and watch a film depicting the “Enemy of the People,” programmed to incite “compulsory rage” in its audience. Orwell apparently envisioned the rise of certain podcasts and the likes of Fox News.

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Later today, Friday, March 20, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, the Ink Book Club will sit down with American University professor Laura Beers, the author of Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century and a leading expert on the subject of what Orwell has to teach us. If you’ve felt as I have these last weeks, perhaps you, too, need that lifeline.

Beers writes that “many of the core problems that Orwell identified in his own time continue to haunt us in the twenty-first century. Most crucially, the tension between individual liberty and social solidarity… 1984 was, in a sense, an exercise in truth-telling, in that it was an effort to open the readers’ eyes to the existential threats to truth, and thereby to freedom, posed by all-powerful states.” Those threats have materialized in the Trump era.

In the course of rereading 1984, there were a few times when I had the TV news playing in the background. Our own “Ministry of Truth” had leader Trump contradicting his own statements about the status of the war in Iran, if, indeed, he could admit that the assaults underway constitute a war. Trump lackeys parrot and parse his words, and tell us what we are seeing and hearing with our own eyes and ears isn’t what is actually happening. Our institutions are being decimated, often gleefully. The mysteries of the Epstein files deepen, redactions spreading like oil spills. Heroes we thought were above reproach turn out to be monsters.

It’s all positively Orwellian.

Though it’s startling to remember that George Orwell was really Eric Arthur Blair, lifelong anti-fascist, and 1984 a warning. And, perhaps, that these are also Blairian times?

There will be much to unpack with Professor Beers tomorrow. Hope you’ll join us for some “Thoughtcrime.”

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Below, you’ll find some thoughts to consider in advance of Friday’s conversation. The Ink Book Club’s events are open to all paid subscribers to The Ink. If you haven’t yet become part of our community, join today. And if you’re already a member, consider giving a gift or group subscription.

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