Powerful elites have made it clear that they want the Epstein story buried — dead like him. But the story won’t die, nor should it, because justice has not been done, and because the lessons to be learned still need learning. In that spirit, we are republishing our Epstein Class series here in the coming days. Share it far and wide with anyone who believes this story continues to merit our attention, regardless of what some powerful men prefer us to focus on.

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This is the second 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

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By Anand Giridharadas

Where did the women and girls go when Jeffrey Epstein and his friends were eating?

As I browsed through the Epstein files, including thousands of photographs released to the public, I couldn’t help but notice a recurring, conspicuous absence. The archives are full of pictures of women and girls — naturally, as these files were compiled as part of an investigation into sex crimes. For the most part, the faces of these women and girls are redacted, little black squares abstracting the bodies sitting on laps, posing nude, standing beside powerful men whose arms are frequently tentacled around the women’s and girls’ waists. But while the faces of the victims are blacked out, preventing us from fully seeing them as people, many of the men wear a delusional grin, a fearless conviction that this is the natural order of things.

But there is an exception: photographs of people around a table. In these photos, we see the gesticulation and focused intensity of conversation. There is often food and/or drink in front of the speaker and his attentive listeners, but the vibe is less cocktail party chitchat than weighty intellectual exchange, important people talking about important things. In this genre of Epstein file photos, there are almost never women and girls to be seen — no wives, no female colleagues, and certainly not the women and girls Epstein kept around him.

At first blush, it doesn’t make sense. Wasn’t the whole point of the Epstein hangouts to spend time around women and girls — in some cases, to abuse and rape them? Wasn’t this what he was always promising when he wrote to powerful men about introducing them to friends who were “cute”? Wasn’t that the whole draw of an Epstein invitation? Then why the mealtime sausage fests?

Here is my theory of an answer. Yes, many of the men in Epstein’s network coveted contact with women and girls — but not all forms of contact. This is their general delineation as far as I can make it out: You would swim with women and girls, but you wouldn’t attend a lecture with or by one. You would sit across from women and girls at a private jet table, but you would avoid a sit-down dinner with them. You might pose for smiling photos with women and girls, but you were unlikely to be photographed getting lost in an idea with them. A woman or girl might sit on your lap, but you wouldn’t want her sitting to your left.

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To browse through the Epstein photos is to identify, through its absence, what must be most terrifying to men in this circle: a forty-something woman with thoughts. Opinions, a voice, and the sense of safety to deploy them were plainly so threatening to this little society that great care might have been taken to avoid them. Perhaps no one was more terrified of intellectual and emotional maturity than Epstein, whose taste ran to girls too young to have been offered Algebra II in school.

It is revealing that this female absence appears to be most pronounced during meals, a time for conversation. Conversation has the problem of being two-way. Women and girls in this world were for receiving — for doing things to, not with.

More than deferential, women and girls were expected to be unquestioningly acquiescent. In the Epstein photos, it is clear: the time for women and girls was bedtime, massage-room time, frolicking time, pool time, when the real talk ended. Epstein, the late survivor Virginia Giuffre wrote in her book Nobody’s Girl, “liked to tell friends that women were merely ‘a life-support system for a vagina.’” Perhaps some of his friends agreed. “My impression of many of these men is that they didn’t know how to pursue women,” Giuffre wrote. “Awkward and socially immature, it was as if their big brains were missing the ability to interact with other people.” She wrote that “[b]y giving them obedient girls, Epstein eliminated their need to persuade or entice potential sexual partners.”

For some of these men, the fear of being caught out in a debate with an adult woman must have been greater than the fear of being caught in bed with an underage one. These are the kind of men who, even when they are not creeps, will often leave women with the impression that the last thing they wanted was a response. These are men who are uninterested in engaging at more than a superficial level with those not of immediate, obvious use, which in their mind often seems to encompass most women. The tiny handful of women who made it onto the dais at an Epstein-funded event did so not as respected equals but as resented alibi, a public to be bitterly checked before boarding the private jet to Rape Island.

Looking through the photos, I couldn’t help but think of the many highly traditional societies I’ve visited around the world where the women make the food and sit silently as men eat and talk Great Big Things. With exaggerated pomposity, braided with a sense of solemn duty to opine on the prime minister’s latest move or stock market churn, the men declaim and “solve”; the women later quietly forage for leftovers.

What we are seeing in the Epstein circle is a strange hybrid of patriarchies new and old: There is, as Kate Manne has brilliantly articulated, a new-world commodification and fungibility and trading of women and girls, on one hand; and, on the other, a persistent old-world sense of where women belong and don’t belong. A hybrid of women as crypto and women as servile daughters-in-law. What women are not, in this view, is beings to negotiate with, trade ideas with, study the world with. They are vessels for what men put out. They nod at ideas, don’t make them. They don’t eat with the menfolk. They are, one supposes, meant to lie in bed while food and fat are being chewed. The ones who are around are never going to be the age of the men, if at all possible. They will be younger, poorer, on more precarious footing, with less power.

Women and girls in this world function as the bonding agent of those who see themselves as beyond borders, even as they hide their victims’ passports.

“I was trafficked to other billionaires,” Giuffre recalled. “I was trafficked to politicians, professors, even royalty. So the circles that Jeffrey Epstein ran in weren’t your typical setting of human trafficking. It was the elite of the world. It was the people who run the world. It was the most powerful people in the world. And those are our leaders. Those are the people that we are supposed to look up to. It’s corrupt. It’s corrupt to the core.”

What is most egregious about the Epstein files — that these eminent people could stoop so low in their conduct or, at a minimum, their associations — is also an analytical boon. Rarely do we get to make the connections between what people do in the hot tub and what they do in the conference rooms of banks and treasury departments and foundations. This connection-making is complicated and fraught, because, for example, hurting people through enabling a mortgage crisis that throws millions on the street is obviously a universe away from raping someone. And yet, done with care, there is value in identifying the common themes of dehumanization, insulation, indifference, and attitude that make possible the extreme things and the less extreme things, the economic pain and the trafficking pain, the acute cruelty visited on one person at a time and the chronic cruelty thrust upon millions.

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This was a group of men whose ideas of what made women and girls valuable, whose sense of where they belonged and where they didn’t, whose comfort with women and girls only in the context of a power distance so extreme as to be cruel — whose ideas about these things were not altogether unrelated to their other ideas.

These are men who do not like resistance. Friction. Pushback. Any obstacle to the sprawl of their ideas and needs. The most extreme manifestation of this tendency is the pedophilia at the heart of the story, in which Epstein and some of the men around him participated. There can be no more acute expression of the desire simply to act on the world without countervailing force than child rape. But as with so many behavioral habits revealed by the Epstein files, this allergy to pushback lies on a spectrum, and the same basic avoidance of friction can be found in men not associated with sex crimes, and in rituals as innocent as dinner. A woman your own age opposite you at dinner is, evidently, for these men, hindrance in its own right.

In some corners of traditional media, you will hear a view that it is inappropriate to put the sexual depravity and criminality at the heart of this case in conversation with other behavior. But I continue to think — and many women survivors have continued to insist — that, in fact, it is more inappropriate to refuse to make these connections.

Travel for a moment to the most benign end of this spectrum — the well-documented desire in this elite network to avoid life friction. On the private ski mountains where these elites buy houses, on the yachts they acquire, in the realm of private jet travel where they spend so much time, everything is designed to minimize what is known in the catering-to-billionaires industry as “touch points.” Jeff Wise, a private pilot and science journalist, describes the ethos thus:

Given their escape from the confines of mundane reality, many high-net-worth individuals prefer to avoid unnecessary contact with unknown humans. A big selling point is the ability to minimize what are known as “touch points”: the individual micro-interactions that take place as we move through the world, like saying hello to a gate agent or asking a fellow passenger to switch seats. “When you fly commercial, there are more than 700 touch points,” says Alexandra Price, brand communications manager at the jet-charter company VistaJet. “When you fly private, it’s just 20.”

It is a different experience of life never to have to wait for your turn on the ski lift. Never to have to contend for space in the overhead locker with another person. Never to have to be charming to get into a restaurant. After a time, one imagines, all the not-having-to-dos will change you. You will become less capable of exerting yourself in ways you once did without a care. And one can even dig deep and muster the empathy to appreciate that, the smoother and easier and more frictionless many parts of your life become, the more intolerable is whatever continues to resist you. It may be no accident that the time of gaining access to this more resistance-free ecosystem often correlates with the time of second and third wives. (When no one talks back to you but your wife, you upgrade — although these “upgrades” are never complimentary.)

I don’t believe it’s an accident that this promise of seamlessness, of a touch-point-free existence, of the removal of anything indifferent to one’s wishes, of the outer world rendered as an extension of the self — it simply cannot be an accident that sometimes, for perhaps a small subset of these men, this expectation goes beyond skipping the line at Newark, and beyond even having the 25-year-old girlfriend who is simply grateful to be kept around.

Sometimes, it seems in reading the Epstein files, this expectation of a pliant world extended into the realm of public policy — and sometimes into the massage room. In this worldview, which is worth understanding because it still holds great sway over us, various unlike things are smushed into likeness: regulations and laws and critics and law enforcement and antitrust scrutiny and the #MeToo movement and women demanding equality on the job or sitting across from you at the table talking.

What these things have in common is being hindrance. These men won’t be hindered.

Lina Khan is more qualified than most to think about this spectrum, these connections between the most extreme acts and the culture and structures and incentives surrounding them. She is a law professor. She was chair of the Federal Trade Commission under President Biden, enforcing competition policy and pursuing antitrust cases. Having taken that job more seriously than anyone in a generation, she earned the wrath of very powerful men in Silicon Valley and beyond. Even Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and one of the only big-time Democratic Party donors left in the tech world, declared that he wanted her replaced if Kamala Harris won the White House. Like everyone else, Khan has been reading the revelations of the Epstein files, and it has not been lost on her that, as she put it to me, “there has been a really interesting Venn diagram and kind of an overlap of the people who, it seems, were part of this really horrendous pedophilia ring and the kind of people who have been opposing working-class policies in the last Democratic administration.”

To be clear, Khan’s argument here is not that being against certain kinds of economic policies makes you a pedophile. It is, rather, that the kinds of well-heeled critics she acquired seem to have an expectation of deference that extends to many spheres of their lives — an expectation she violated:

One of the things that was most striking during my tenure at the FTC was the just level of pushback and, honestly, sometimes even just hysteria that we saw from elites when you had a government agency holding them accountable and applying the law to them and their companies just in the same way that we do to some fly-by-night fraudster or scammer…When put against now the Epstein file revelations, it just does underscore how there does seem to be a class of people in this country that have for too long enjoyed a level of elite impunity. And no matter what the domain of their wrongdoing, they have enjoyed protection. They have protected one another.

And she spoke incisively of the touch-point-free existence and the cost of the expectations it sows:

For a lot of these individuals, they have come to occupy positions of power that really do surround them with people who are constantly enabling every whim and desire, be it in their personal lives, be it in their businesses. And so to actually have to reckon with law enforcement or people holding them accountable — it’s a very foreign and offensive experience for them.

It is difficult to make sense of “The Wrath at Khan,” as The Atlantic once put it in a headline, without entering the mind space of a network of overwhelmingly white men who identify as swashbuckling builders in a chattering, do-nothing world who were shocked to learn that the federal government has longstanding powers to block monopolies, and that those powers, until President Trump retook office, were vested in a woman who, even more offensively, was young and brown. If you’ve spent time with these men on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, you know their lingo is…revealing. “Seed rounds” of investment. “Incubators” where startups are born. Project “gestation.” There is endless talk of “market penetration” and “dominating the category” and “founder DNA.” Those with concerns are “pussies” and lack “balls.” And there is a common tendency to associate all forms of pushback a company gets with a feminine archetype of resistance. Every nonbeliever is an annoying nag.

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The wrath at Khan transcended mere policy. It was wrath about the very existence of resistance to these men’s world-historical designs. It was wrath about needing to ask for consent to consummate a business acquisition. It was wrath about being told “No” by people who are almost never told “No.”

So then you decide how surprising or not surprising it is that Hoffman had no problem associating with Epstein, who in his infinitely more extreme criminal ways pursued the ideal of zero resistance, of not needing consent. Yes, yes, it must be said again and again: antitrust violations and sex crimes are fundamentally different. But there are rhymes between what these men thought reasonable, or not unreasonable, to expect in private life and in public life. That common expectation is partly how one can explain the more law-abiding friends of Epstein, like Hoffman, not having a problem with a monster like Epstein: on one level, they lived completely differently; on another, they shared an attitude, a contempt for resistance that was visceral.

It may be no less coincidental that Peter Thiel, another Valley stalwart, shows up in the Epstein files and that he, too, has articulated a vision of monopoly as an ideal — of the absence of competition not as a policy problem but a nirvana. Thiel had no interest in the women Epstein provided, but perhaps there was a mutual sympathy of Übermenschen.

Thiel is often, and erroneously, maligned for suggesting that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. He never said that. But what he did say may be even more revealing:

Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” an oxymoron.

He is saying that letting women vote added a source of regrettable electoral friction to the political prospects of his preferred ideology, which itself is an ideology premised on removing friction from the creative spawning of Promethean creators like himself. Underlying it all is the sense of a desire to be unbound, and a hostile world of governments and ladies standing athwart you.

And, of course, there is Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury secretary, Harvard president, and Epstein friend, who famously came to the convicted pedophile for advice on wooing one of his own mentees. (Suffice it to say, there are few positions that so allow one to avoid contact with non-elites as being the president of Harvard.)

Summers isn’t one of those Epstein friends who can claim he had no idea who the guy was. On November 29, 2018, he wrote Epstein: “U have returned to the press.” One day earlier, The Miami Herald had published a bombshell report by the investigative journalist Julie Brown, titled “Perversion of Justice,” detailing how “a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime,” and how “Epstein, 54, was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day.”

“short lived , no worry,” Epstein wrote back. (Among the rules Epstein and many of his confederates had no respect for were grammatical.)

Now, one can try to ring-fence this willful blindness, this indifference to women’s suffering, or one can pursue connections. Is it irrelevant, for example, that Summers had eventually resigned from the Harvard presidency in 2006 (though he remained as faculty until his resignation this year due to his Epstein connections) in part because of his comments about the inferior natural aptitude of women in science and engineering?

More to the point, Summers has been, for as long as he has been in policy debates, part of that great blob of men of stature who are contemptuous of all resistance. As The American Prospect once wrote in a retrospective on his career, “Applying free-market theory where it didn’t fit, Summers’s record on financial deregulation, Russia policy, Third World capital market liberalization, trade, and labor policy was marked by one avoidable disaster after another.” (Among them was his suggestion when chief economist at the World Bank that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that” — a comment he later claimed was “sarcastic” when the memo was leaked.) Here, again, are connections needing to be drawn among the tolerance of Epstein, the more general views of women, and the policy prescriptions for the world. Those are many different domains, and they were all visited by the same underlying instinct: to remove the nettlesome constraints that let alpha actors in the economy act.

In a figure like Elon Musk, another eager correspondent of Epstein, this instinct can become a chainsaw rampage through the agencies of the federal government itself, and it can become the dream of artificial intelligence (shared by many in this circle) in which prosperity for the few can be assured without having to rely any longer on dealing with actual human beings, who have always been the greatest source of resistance to the Promethean creator. A.I. offers so many of the men in this network their fantasy: economic heaven without the sublunary friction of humans.

“The world lives by the prime movers, hates them for it, exploits them and always feels it has not exploited them enough,” Ayn Rand wrote in her journal in 1945, articulating a philosophy that would become an inspiration for many of these men. “They have to fight a terrible battle and suffer every possible torture that society can impose order to create things from which society benefits immeasurably and by which alone society can exist.”

These men give us so much, at least as they see it. Is being left alone, at dinner and in the economy and after crimes, too much to ask?

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Photos: House Oversight Committee

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 the sense that doing all the right things doesn’t get you any of the things you were promised.

Scheiber is the author of the new book “Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class.”

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I must have realized that this was a particularly powerful constellation of people for me — three of the deepest witnesses to my life. I felt it was a good time to share some confusion I was feeling. I had some years earlier returned from India, where I covered the country for The New York Times. Now I was back in America and had a biweekly column. It was allowed to be about whatever I wanted. And the freedom was proving a challenge. What should I write about? Beneath that question: What was I about?

Dan has a brilliant mind, and he is the kind of friend who really tracks you, who can say to you, despite the separation of time and distance, “It’s funny that you’re thinking X now, because you used to say Y when we talked about this at Colin’s party.” As in, the party we were at together fifteen years ago.

So we’re walking, and I’m confessing my existential confusion, and Dan, friendship archivist that he is, says: I know what your thing is.

I was skeptical. What’s that, Dan?

Simple, he said. Ideas through people.

At that monent, I was in such a state of confusion about what I was doing, should be doing, did best, should no longer be doing. And from the moment I heard his three-word offhand observation, I thought: This!

It was a real act of friendship, because Dan had hoovered up a vast pile of life data of the things I had written, the things we had bullshitted about late at night in college, the things we had read and discussed — and, wading through all of that muck, he had pulled out something simple and clarifying.

Ideas through people. I didn’t need to be sold on it at all. It felt so true from the moment he said it. I just hadn’t thought of it.

A few days later, I sent him my next New York Times column, written with this new focus in mind. “You really shook me into sense with what you said that day,” I said.

The ideas-through-people rubric helped me out of a dilemma I had long felt. I was obsessed with newspapers and journalism from my teenage years; all I had ever wanted was to write for The New York Times. But when I found my way into that work, I sometimes found it too fast, too reactive, too devoted to the update from yesterday to today, without the space and time to put things in their context. Others were far better than I was at getting the scoop, ferreting out the nugget, beating the competition. I was sometimes told I was too big-picture. On the other hand, whenever I had spent time in or near academia, I felt alienated by the abstraction of ideas for their own sake, divorced from real living. In journalism, I felt like the theory guy; among scholar types, I felt like the tabloid guy.

“Ideas through people” put it all together for me. That was what I had already been doing when I was at my best, but all too often buried in lots of other stuff. In India, I had investigated what happens to a small town when radical new ideas — natural human equality; the right and duty to make your own life, not just inherit your parents’ fate — start to take hold. In Texas, I had investigated the differences between a native-born patriotism that was akin to loving your mother whom you didn’t choose and an immigrant patriotism that was akin to loving your wife whom you did. In China, I had reported on the phenomenon of young people who didn’t associate being free with voting (which they couldn’t) so much as with openly dating and pursuing dynamic work opportunities and being able start ventures (which they could).

What Dan said clarified my sense of what I was supposed to be doing: Locate big ideas as they show up in people, as people grapple with them, argue with themselves and others over them, suffer their effects. It was a particular angle of attack, a way of working, that I embraced as my way. It meant there were many kinds of work I wouldn’t do, wouldn’t try. And that was helpful. I even began to teach a course at New York University’s journalism school. It was called, you guessed it, “Ideas Through People.” We read Katherine Boo and Adrian Nicole Leblanc and V.S. Naipaul and Svetlana​ ​Alexievich and Jimmy Breslin and Isabel Wilkerson; it was a good time.

In the books I have written since, Dan’s catchphrase has been a guiding light. Winners Take All is often summarized by others as a “takedown” of billionaires or philanthropy or Silicon Valley types or whatever. But really, in the methodology you find on the page, it’s ideas through people: it gets at those themes by getting inside people in whom contending ideas about democracy, wealth, and the common good are jousting. Same with The Persuaders, where it was less me making a case than me taking you inside the causes and minds of activists and organizers who were concerned about progressive movements more interested in finding heretics than winning converts.

In my forthcoming Man in the Mirror, the Dan Honig mandate has its fullest airing yet. When I first started reporting on the tragic case of Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny and their encounter on a New York subway, I was drawn in by the narrative of it all, by the story of these two lives, by the intricate details of the other people who began to enter the book’s telling. But, me being me, I found myself telescoping back and forth between the granularity of the project — for example, itemizing and writing a list of all the possessions of a homeless man being swept away by the New York Police Department — and the bigger human dilemmas at play here. The gritty detail, the colors and smells, mattered, as did the giant existential questions: What does it mean for a person suffering from severe mental illness to possess autonomy? What is the boundary of a city’s, a country’s, compassion? Who gets to define what is sick and what is healthy? Can constructive long-term public policy be made by short-termist elected leaders? How does a death grow into a movement? Who is granted the assumption of humanity? And, ultimately, what do we owe each other?

Yet for me, the way to answer these questions is to find them at work within people. The street is where doctrines are actually lived. In Man in the Mirror, in a hundred different human moments, the questions of our age are capsulized in a stray remark, a tense hug, a hasty decision, an act of care, an act of rage, an act of desperation.

I have never worked so hard on something, never poured so much of my heart and artistry and love of this country into something. I truly cannot wait to share it with you this fall. It’s a story of a tragedy below ground that is really a story about whether we can all find a way to live together. It’s a true crime story in which America itself is on trial. But really, I hope, it’s a story about our common humanity, and what brings us closer to it and what pulls us further way.

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I am really proud of this book, and I would love to get it into your hands. If you want to pre-order it now, it helps the cause greatly, because it sends a signal to the world, which means more people find out about it.

It’s a book written with all of my love, and I want that love to reach far and wide.

You can find it via these links:

Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Target | Walmart | Hudson Booksellers | Powell’s | Books-a-Million

And once it’s in the world, we will have many chances to read it together, talk about it together, here in the Ink community. Thank you for everything this community is.

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.

  

  Our live videos are open to all. To watch the full replay, become a paid subscriber and stand up for real thought, reporting, and interviews in an age of artificial everything.

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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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First things first: Join us live today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern for an exclusive conversation with acclaimed novelist Rebecca Makkai about chairing this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction jury. She promises to spill some tea about what goes on behind the scenes. We’ll also ask the "I Have Some Questions for You” author what else she’s reading now.

Our Ink Book Club selection for June is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say. (We will sit down for a live conversation with the author on Wednesday, June 17 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern.) Somehow in our snark-infested, virality-obsessed culture, a novel whose drama is contained mainly inside the head of a New England schoolteacher is one of the bestselling books in the country.

On the outside, Artie Dam is viewed variously by his family and friends as a decent, amiable man, though perhaps slightly “dopey.” To his son Rob, “he was an enigma…his father had always been Jolly Artie, and Rob felt there had to be more to him. But he could not really find it.” None of those around him are aware of how much feeling churns within--that Artie is a tortured soul obsessed with suicide. Strout writes that Artie’s wife Evie “was unaware–even after their thirty-four years of married life–of the deep pockets of sensitivity that Artie had.”

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Strout’s eleventh novel subtly, expertly captures our fractious times, and the toll its accompanying divisiveness has wrought on our emotional health. She identifies the dissonance between the way the world perceives us — and what we choose to signal — and what’s really transpiring within the whirling dervishes of our brains.

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Early on in the book, Strout suggests a reversal of the idea that “no man is an island.” What her characters represent is that while we may be interconnected in various ways, at a fundamental level, we are actually isolated beings, alone on our individual islands. In other words, our present collective loneliness should come as no surprise.

Despite its sense of quiet despair, why does The Things We Never Say leave the reader with a sense of life’s beauty, of optimism? Novelist Maggie Shipstead put her finger on it in her New York Times review of the book: “A loss of innocence is possible at any age, but the pain of disillusionment can have a silver lining: the opportunity to live with a deeper understanding of reality.”

We’d love to hear your thoughts on Artie and The Things We Never Say. We’ll sit down with the author herself later this month to discuss her process, where she finds inspiration, and why she felt compelled to attribute much of Artie’s discontent to the era of Trump.

And don’t forget to join us for a behind-the-scenes chat with Rebecca Makkai, chair of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction jury. We may even get a sense of how Angel Down, by Daniel Kraus — a WW I novel with elements of horror and magical realism narrated in one endless sentence — beat out a fan favorite, Audition, by Katie Kitamura, to win the Pulitzer. Please join us! Here’s Makkai’s Substack piece “Book Prizes Don’t Work How You Think.”

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Below, you’ll find some discussion and reflection prompts to consider. 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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As the Democratic primary contest for an open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan heats up, we’re revisiting my conversation with, and reflections on, one of the top contenders, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. What struck me most in this conversation 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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What exactly is the country being celebrated for 250 years of independence this July?

What is really about? What is its essential character? Or should we stop asking such annoying questions and just do fireworks?

This is the challenge Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., the Princeton University professor and author, poses to us with his new book, “America, U.S.A.” What does it mean to celebrate America, he asks, at a moment of what he calls a “second lost cause,” a moment of backsliding away from everything Americans profess to believe?

Has America, Glaude asks, become a country of “freedom snatchers,” rather than “freedom seekers”?

We sat down with him to discuss that and other questions. Some of what we discussed:

• How big anniversaries like the coming Semiquincentennial are sometimes used to make us disremember more than remember

• How 2026 resembles a national anniversary we celebrated in 1926, which Glaude calls “the decade of the Ku Klux Klan”

• Why, despite the wave of white grievance and hatred, and the demolition of legislation like the Voting Rights Act, in the words of one of the professor’s students, “We should live by love but carry the anger.”

• Why Glaude thinks of teaching as a subversive activity

Note: You might want to listen to this book on audio, to hear the original music commissioned just for Glaude text.

Our live videos are open to all. To watch the full replay, become a paid subscriber and stand up for real thought, reporting, and interviews in an age of artificial everything.

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And join us this Friday, June 5 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern for a conversation with novelist and fellow Substacker Rebecca Makkai about helming the Pulitzer Prize fiction committee this year, and what she looks forward to reading over the summer.

And three requests: Let us know what you think.

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And subscribe if you haven’t yet, to support the work of independent media. And check out Eddie Glaude, Jr’s Substack.

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And then there are other days I look around and have the feeling of watching one of those video…

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Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. opens his harrowing new work, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, with this declaration: “I do not love America, and never have, especially now.” And yet the emotion and scholarship with which he pokes and prods his subject suggests a deep caring.

In advance of America’s 250th this July 4th, Glaude interrogates the meaning of “this supposed day of freedom,” what it might mean to “those who bore the brunt of the country’s refusal to live up to its promise.” He invokes Frederick Douglass: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?...To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license.” The words of W.E.B. DuBois, John Dos Passos, James Baldwin, Herman Melville also enrich throughout.

The book’s thesis is that “Like the celebrations before it, the Semiquincentennial reaches back to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.” He observes that there is a “doubleness,” a “paradox” that rests at our nation’s heart, and taints its founding. Glaude doesn’t mince words: The backlash to “wokeness,” DEI, and Black Lives Matter “has been swift and harsh…Mirrors shattered, people who claimed to be allies now worried about the overreach…the celebration of 250 years since founding hides the broken glass beneath our feet.” And: “The ugliness of what white people believe about color—that somehow, in some inscrutable way, the color of one’s skin determines your value.” For those who proclaimed the death of racism: “The country has given us Donald Trump, and we have to deal with the madness again. The pounding in the skull returns as we struggle to beat back the ‘intolerable bitterness of spirit,’ because these people have done this shit again.”

There is an electricity, a visceral quality to this work that discomfits, provokes, disturbs. And yet there is a musicality to the prose, which is amplified by the bars of original music written for the book by classical composer Joel Thompson.

We hope you’ll join the Ink Book Club for a Substack live conversation with Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. Monday, June 1 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern. The bestselling author of Begin Again—a James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton—will be with us to discuss his “elegy that mourns the country we thought we knew,” and how we can reclaim hope, which is “shadowed by ambivalence at the crossroads.”

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In the book’s acknowledgments, the author writes: “This has been one of the most difficult books I have ever written…thinking about Donald Trump and this perilous moment in the nation’s 250th year has brought me to the brink of madness.”

And yet Glaude concludes that “America is possible if we imagine it so, if we tell ourselves better stories and follow the signs, like those on the quilts of the enslaved, that direct us to the path of freedom.” He warns against letting Trump and his supporters achieve their aim—to “occupy our imaginations.”

In this deeply felt, deeply researched book, Glaude leaves it all on the page. Join us for what will no doubt be an enlightening, engaged conversation.

And if you’re not already a subscriber to Glaude’s Substack, “A Native Son,” check it out!

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Below, you’ll find some discussion and reflection prompts to consider. 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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Join us right here at 11 a.m. Eastern, to talk with bestselling novelist Courtney Maum about the hoops she’s jumping through—and the opportunities she’s carving out—to launch her sixth novel, Alan Opts Out, to be published June 2. For one, the bestselling fiction writer and author of the popular Substack “Before and After the Book Deal” will share tidbits about the making of her latest, a light-hearted satirical novel in which uber-ambitious ad executive Alan Anderson’s pitch to represent the dairy industry totally flops, bringing his wife Vivian’s gradiose social aspirations to a crashing halt. Alan’s epic fail also prompts him to rethink his single-minded devotion to capitalism and its excesses, and vow to discard the consumerist trappings with which he and his family have surrounded themselves. Amid the billionaire oligarchs swarming our country, Maum’s fantasy of a return to a Waldenesque existence is thought-provoking summer fun.

We’ll also get an insider’s take from Maum on what happens after an author turns in her manuscript to her editor. There are all the revisions and decisions about everything from cover art to who will narrate the audio version of your book. Will you reach out for blurbs? Use the old author photo or spring for a new one? If you want to eschew airplane travel for your 15-city publicity tour, how will you get from city to city? In Maum’s case, by the way, she’s decided to turn it into cross-country road adventure. We’ll also chat about other books coming out in the next few months that we’re especially excited about, as it is the season for summer reading.

We hope you’ll come to today’s conversation at 11 a.m. Eastern with any questions you have about what goes on behind the scenes of a book launch. Is Maum nervous about how the novel will resonate? What is she taking with her on her road trip? Did our current politics inform her storyline? Do you harbor fantasies of checking out? Join us!

And let us know how you’re enjoying our June Ink Book Club selection, The Things We Never Say, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout, with whom we’ll sit down next month for a live conversation.

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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, 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, 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!

1. What is on your TBR pile now?

2. Are you an aspiring writer? If so, are you in a writers’ group or enrolled in any writing programs or ever hired a writing coach?

3. Do you dream, as Maum’s protagonist Alan does, of downsizing and living a simpler life?

4. Have you had experienced any recent crises that, like Alan, that led you to make some major lifestyle changes? Share with us.

5. While you won’t had the opportunity yet to read Maum’s latest, will you join in anyway to hear Courtney’s thoughts on the current publishing landscape? Let us know!

   photo of Courtney Maum by Michelle Gevint

Politicians are paid to enact policies. So typically when they describe what’s wrong, they speak of policies that got us into our messes and policies to get us out.

Murphy’s inquiry took him somewhere else — beyond the familiar territory of prescription-drug prices and block-grant funding, into the substrate of our inner life.

What he found in his interactions with constituents and conversations with scholars and reading was a spiritual rot, a death of relationship, a connection recession.

To be clear, in his analysis and that of others, the causes of much of this affliction are very much political, very much in the realm of policy. But what Murphy’s thinking and now writing make clear is that what happens in politics and policy doesn’t stay there. It ultimately trickles down into our relationships, our marriages, our stress hormones, our childhoods, our neighborhood vibes, our hangouts, our conversations with the barista, our block parties, our friendships.

This week Senator Murphy pushed “Crisis of the Common Good,” a book-length investigation of how capitalism and other forces in American life have cut into our civic dance with each other and wormed their way into every last fiber of our culture.

It is a project I’m fascinated by, because it involves someone in a position of political power widening the scope of inquiry to ask how the things he works on affect other things not typically regarded as political.

So I was thrilled to have this conversation with the senator today. We talked about:

— Why he thinks America’s real problem is much deeper than Trump

— How private equity is coming between married couples

— Whether Republicans or Democrats will be first to pull off a potential political realignment that is there for the taking

— Whether Bernie Sanders was right all along (and where he fell short)

— Why the Democratic Party refuses to introspect

— And whether he will run for president (cameo: the other presidential contenders who have been texting him this week)

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