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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The truth is, I haven’t been speaking as much because I’m in a reflective moment, planning to bring a new book to this community and the world this fall. As I’ve grown as a writer, I have come to learn that you can’t inhale and exhale at the same time.

When it came to writing “Man in the Mirror,” there was a long period of inhaling in the form of reporting: taking in the stories of homeless people I was writing about, sitting for eight hours a day in a fluorescent-lit courtroom covering the criminal trial of Daniel Penny for the killing of Jordan Neely, shadowing Marines during trainings at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Sometimes I would come home from a few hours out in the field and feel like I should get back to work, write up my notes, write a scene even, and it just wouldn’t come out. I sometimes treat myself like a robot when I work, assuming endless reserves limited only by time. But it’s not how I, or it, works. I began to realize that I was coming home affected, haunted, changed by what I saw. I allowed myself simply to do the inhaling. There would time to write and time to speak.

And ultimately I wrote — wrote and wrote and wrote. I wrote so much that more than half of what I wrote would eventually be cut. Having been altered by what I saw, now I set about to distill it, in the hope that encountering what moved me might move you. This was a time of exhalation, and in that time I stopped breathing in — I stopped reading books and academic studies related to the issues I was writing about; I stopped following my characters around.

And now again I find myself in the time of breathing in. When the fall comes and the book lives in the world (September 29), the air will once again be flowing outward. In this between-time, what I’ve been thinking about is how deeply I was changed by the act of reporting and then of writing this book. “Man in the Mirror” is my fifth book, but I think it upended my life and shook my foundations more than anything I’ve ever done. And a lot of that has to do with the genre of book it is, a genre that has been my obsession since I was a very young man, but one that took me time and life to get to.

The formal name for this genre is “narrative nonfiction.” Now, if folks in The Ink community are like others I meet, some of you will completely know what this term means; others will have no idea. We journalists and writers are often bad at explaining what we do and how we do it. When I talk about “narrative nonfiction,” I’m using shorthand for a very specific kind of work.

It’s a form of journalism, on one level: reported, documented, evidence-based truth, drawn less from preexisting files or other books than from facts the author has gathered to move from private to public. At the same time, it’s narrative, which is to say, a story, hopefully it reads like a novel, it moves, it hooks, it has propulsion. There is a further element, in my mind at least, of interiority. In the work I most admire in this genre, we are not only encountering reported reality, and not only being offered that reality in a great yarn, but also getting a glimpse into other people’s minds. As in the best fiction, we are looking at life not only from the outside in, but from the inside out — how the world seems to others.

Now, I’m not here to throw any shade at fiction writers. They are rightly heroes of literature and of our culture generally. But the narrative nonfiction I grew up reading dazzled me because it had to do much of what fiction was doing — this cockpit view from inside of people’s heads; this page-turning drama — while making it all be true. The writer of narrative nonfiction has to have the imaginative confectioner on one shoulder and the nagging fact checker on the other. This is harder than it appears.

In our time, this peculiar hybrid undertaking has become all the more important, I would argue, for the following reason: I think most of you would agree that we have a crisis of trust — in institutions, in each other, in basic factual reality — that is perilous for our society. We also have a crisis of distraction, attention spans, scrolling addiction. I am biased here, but I believe that narrative nonfiction confronts this moment with a great deal to offer — and that is why I’m so attracted to it as a form for right now. Its rigor, its basis in fact and reporting and the vital civic labor of ferreting out what exactly is true, is an answer to the trust crisis. When I meet people who probably don’t hold very high regard for my opinions or worldview, but then they hear of where I took the trouble to go, whom I took the trouble to talk to, what documents I took the trouble to find, I notice that it always changes the air. At the same time, the best narrative nonfiction doesn’t simply dump facts on you. It doesn’t rest on the laurels of offering truth. It respects that you are some combination of busy, tired, stressed, bored, distracted, overworked, underpaid, and in a dozen pieces. It doesn’t judge you for not wanting to take on Serious Topics That Matter. It assumes the burden of hiding the broccoli in the mac and cheese. All you need to want is to be entertained; leave your edification to us.

Now, even the best narrative nonfiction writers out there are never going to be able to compete with, say, Jonathan Franzen. But think about it: these are people who craft narratives that read like a Franzen novel, except everything in them actually happened! (Stay tuned: In a future post, I’m going to share with you some of the writers in this genre who have had the most impact on me over the years.)

What I learned making “Man in the Mirror” is that narrative nonfiction of this kind is a transformative experience for the writer even before it reaches the reader. It goes so much deeper than other reporting I have done. You aren’t just reporting the facts; you are drinking people in, inhaling their beings, their ways of speech, how they see, what hurts them, what upsets them, what they fear. And you are not simply recording that this happened and then that happened. No, you are taking in enough of all of this stuff that you can recreate them as if from the inside. What it’s like to hear that police officer yell at you. What training instructions might have flashed through your mind as you initiated a chokehold. What it feels like to live on the street, down to the wet socks in October. What it’s like to be a powerful public servant who seems to have tremendous responsibility but in fact is thwarted from acting in all these ways.

I have learned the hard way that this kind of reporting and writing take more out of you, perhaps because you are making space for the beings of these others in your own mind and heart. In the years of writing this book, I was sometimes shorter-tempered, more hopeless, quicker to anger, more depressed. It took time to realize that it might be the intensity of the work I was doing, as opposed to general middle-age stuff. But then at the end of it all, you have these human beings you have studied up close to share with the world. And the hope is that their stories will be an invitation to people, that their lives will be engrossing, and that, through encounter with them, people will, as you did as the writer, be altered, be moved, be enlarged in what they are able to see.

I don’t think I’ve ever been as confident about something I’ve made as I am about “Man in the Mirror.” But I also don’t think I’ve ever been so raw about a piece of work. I aspire to be one of those artists who make the art only for themselves, who are able, as Rebecca Mead recently wrote of Ana Mendieta, “to hide herself away and make work that might only ever please or satisfy herself.” I of course did make this book for myself, but I also made it for you.

And I cannot wait to share it with you. Today I want to invite members of this community to be early champions of this book, evangelists who might help bring it to everyone who needs it. I want to discuss it with you, I want to think together about the questions that it raises, I want your help in making sure it finds its people.

And so I’m learning to say without embarrassment that I would love for you to preorder it — you can find your preferred retailer here. For those who like their books signed, there’s a special link I can share with you from the McNally Jackson bookstore: if you order from here, I will make sure you get a copy signed by me.

For now, know that I am deeply grateful for the support this community gives me — to write what I want to write, to step forward when I have something to say, and to hang back when it’s time to take a breath.

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

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

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

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

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

Meantime, below are some questions to contemplate:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cleveland? You want me to go back to Cleveland?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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My family learned this lesson the difficile way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photo: The author

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

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

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

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

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

Strout also shared:

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

• Why she doesn’t do social media

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

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How to participate in the Book Club:

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

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

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

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

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

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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 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