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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 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 videos taken 27 seconds before a tsunami washes over a small town in Japan. I sit on the subway in New York and look across at human beings and then up at all the advertisements hawking human irrelevance. What will these people — me, you, and everyone else — do? What happens to people who are not needed? When the richest people in the world are beginning to call for tax relief for poor people, you sense we may be on the cusp of a world without work for most people — an apocalypse with the unusual characterstic of being totally optional. We should call it “A. Why?”, perhaps.

We’re going to be thinking more and more about the social and political and cultural questions raised by A.I. in this newsletter. And as we do, I wanted to begin with you.

Here launches a reader forum in which we want to hear your thoughts about A.I. — your fears, your optimism, your experiences.

In the spirit of all our subscriber forums, I expect this to be a place of genuine inquiry and exchange, no meanness, only curiosity.

How have you encountered A.I. up close in recent years, and how has it shaped your point of view?

What questions do you most wonder about — perhaps questions we can pursue here?

Are you more like me on the days when you think this, too, will be just another thing? Or are you persuaded of the this-changes-everything-forever story?

Do you have unusual use cases — medical needs, eldercare — that perhaps give you a different perspective from the mainstream?

What do you think is missing from the larger national conversation based on what you see where you are?

This is not a story that can trickle down from on high. It’s a story about a collective choice — many collective choices — we are making and will continue to make.

Tell us how you’re thinking about it all:

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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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Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, once had a long dinner with his then fellow Senator (and still fellow beard haver) J.D. Vance, now the vice president. Murphy told me that he and Vance, coming from different parties and ideologies, agreed that the country could see a dramatic realignment of the parties, depending on which party was more willing to kill sacred cows and reorient its approach:

There is a realignment available in American politics. That there are a whole bunch of people on the right who actually know the economy is fundamentally unfair, think the culture is empty, and understand that it can’t be fixed without a government that steps in and tries to solve for some of these problems. And that the race is between the Republican Party trying to become more friendly to those government interventions — a higher minimum wage, more support for unions, breakups of corporate power — versus a Democratic Party becoming less judgmental of Trump’s base, who is often economically populist-curious, but still socially conservative.

And that if the Democrats said, You know what, if you don’t agree with us on all of our social and cultural issues, but you agree with us on unrigging the economy, we want you in. And whether we’re going to do that before Republicans become real economic populists is kind of, maybe the defining question — the defining race — of the next 20 years. And right now we have an advantage, because Trump clearly is not ready to do anything to help regular people. But are we ready to grow our coalition?

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I also spoke to The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos about China, America, and how what each country wants for itself and fears in the other will define the coming decades. When I asked Osnos what kind of global influence China wants, this was his answer:

I don’t think it’s a simple matter of them saying, OK, now we want to be the new United States. We kind of want to take over…superintending the world, that that’s somehow going to be kind of our natural position now. They don’t want to do that strategically. That doesn’t accord with their understanding of how the world should be organized. They think that’s like an overstretch, an overreach. They think that’s going to lead you into trouble.

They would rather have a version of leadership that is — this is their kind of language for it — more of a tributary arrangement, meaning that a big country is going to have this position and other countries will kind of live within the ecosystem of that big country…

But they are interested in in overtaking the United States in in some respects, in technical terms, in economic terms…partly because they think that’s good for them in self-protective terms. They don’t want to live in a world in which the United States is, in their mind and Xi Jinping’s telling, at the risk of constantly encircling and limiting their capacity.

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And I asked Lindsey Tramuta, an expatriate writer based in Paris, about what living abroad has helped her see about America:

I think it shows a sense of humanity that I haven’t felt Americans offered each other in a long, long time. I think there’s a sense of community that we’ve seen in certain very local communities coming out of the U.S. since the beginning of the year — Minneapolis, among others.

Those moments show me something that I have felt and seen in France for the last 20 years…

That’s really what living abroad is about, too, is realizing that if we could take a little bit from here and take a little bit from there and realize that that doesn’t make us less than because we’re borrowing and adopting from other cultures.

We try to bring you ideas and insights and connections you won’t find elsewhere. If you value this kind of work, don’t be a bystander. Be a supporting subscriber. Or perhaps give a gift or group subscription.

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Photo: Evan Vucci/Getty

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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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Few people are more qualified to understand the inner life of this vital relationship as Evan Osnos. Osnos is a staff writer for The New Yorker (it’s like a Substack but printed out), a longtime China-based correspondent, and now someone who reports deeply about American life in this age of tempests.

From Osnos’s book “Age of Ambition,” on China, to his more recent work digging into the roots of American rage and the lives of America’s oligarchs, Osnos has always concerned himself with the individual-, human-level happenings that are the stuff of any nation’s rise, fall, or muddling through.

It’s a perspective I found sorely lacking when absorbing much of the recent commentary about President Trump’s visit to China. So many commentators on foreign policy are focused on the question of who will be more powerful — the dominance frame. But this frame, while useful in certain ways, misses so much of what is really going inside China — and, therefore, of what drives its behavior.

So I was thrilled to be able to have this extended conversation with Osnos about China, America, and their ties — and to discuss with him the kinds of things you can’t always explore in a three-minute cable hit:

— How does China view Trump and the era of American chaos he presides over?

— What does the dominance frame miss about what China as a government and the Chinese people as a people aspire to?

— What kinds of world power is China indeed interested in — and which less so? Is China interested in American-style policing of the world and unrivaled hegemony, or rather in the removal of constraints on it?

— What does the Chinese socioeconomic experience of the last generation prove or disprove about democracy and prosperity? And is a successful run now curdling?

— Why does China not listen to its billionaires the way the United States does? And what does that tell us about our democracy?

— What do public aspirations to “freedom” look like in China today? Electoral democracy? The elimination of want? Accountability? Unfettered speech?

— How can everyday Americans educate themselves to understand the real China and the aspirations of the people who make it up, and not be limited by the international-relations types’ obsession with who will run the world in the twenty-first century?

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The America-China relationship is as mystifying as it is important, and few people are better placed to help us understand it. Osnos has reported extensively from both countries, and I think …

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“As I look back at my work,” novelist Elizabeth Strout observed in a recent interview, I realize that I’ve been increasingly interested in the idea that not only do we not understand other people, we probably don’t know who we are in reference to other people.” And for coach and high school teacher Artie Dam, the protagonist of Strout’s profoundly tender and perceptive latest, The Things We Never Say, that realization has produced an existential despair that leads him to contemplate various ways of killing himself without letting on to his wife and son that he’s died by his own hand. He quietly obsesses over the options, while outwardly maintaining a cheerfulness many view as bordering on dim-witted.

This is a novel about Trump-era instability and angst—a simmering panic about to boil over—and a loneliness felt more deeply when loved but not truly seen. In Artie’s case, he is beloved by his family and entire community of students, colleagues, and friends, yet he shares his suffering with no one. The author has referred to what she is getting at here as “the singularity and mystery of each person,” who “held within themselves a vast, unknowable universe.” (Anyone wondering why Belle Burden’s Strangers has been such a success can stop on that observation.) Miraculously, Strout’s fictional lens nurtures comprehension and compassion—for ourselves and others—a kind of new-born empathy that great novels often produce in a reader. I think this is Strout’s best book since Olive Kitteridge, for which she won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It’s also her most political book. While past novels have made passing references to the cruelty of the Trumpian universe, there’s a whole new level of internalized chaos that Artie, for one, inhabits, as he frantically combs history books for parallels to the rising tide of fascism he sees emerging. Sadly, his state of mind rings as familiar. That Strout also manages to inject humor into these scenarios is another measure of her subtle brilliance.

The Things We Never Say is the Ink Book Club’s June selection, and Elizabeth Strout will be our guest later this month, after she returns from the European leg of her promotional tour. We will announce that date shortly.

Meantime, on Wednesday, May 27 at 12:30 p.m. EDT, we will host a special Ink Book Club Live with Courtney Maum, author of Alan Opts Out, which hits bookstores on June 2. In its starred review, Publishers Weekly called Maum’s satiric novel “a fierce and funny portrait of late-stage capitalism and its limited supply of happiness.”

Maum will also talk to us about her Substack, “Before and After the Book Deal,” and exchange notes on what we’ll be reading this summer. Please join us, and let us know what’s on your TBR pile this season!

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And here are a few of the books I’m taking with me to the Jersey shore to celebrate the long weekend, a mix of advance galleys and finished books.

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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America, it is often said, is a nation of immigrants. But is it becoming a nation of emigrants — a country that drives people away in search of greener pastures?

Today I talked with the expat American writer about that question.

In Tramuta’s insightful essay in Bitter Southerner, she reports:

A recent Gallup poll found that 40 percent of women aged 15 to 44 would leave the U.S. if they could — a figure that has quadrupled in the last decade. This slice of the population also has the lowest confidence in American institutions.

That frustration is inspiring many to take action. Ireland’s Central Statistics Office reported a 96 percent jump in American emigration between April 2024 and April 2025. France has likewise reported an increase in long-stay visa requests from Americans, and in the United Kingdom, 6,618 U.S. citizens applied for British citizenship in the 12 months leading up to March 2025 — the highest number since records began in 2004. Germany, which allows descendants of Nazi-era victims to apply for and reclaim citizenship, processed 48 percent more applications from U.S. citizens at consulates across the U.S. in 2025 after Trump’s inauguration than in 2024.

Watch our conversation above. And three requests:

Let us know what you think.

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The prophets of Silicon Valley say jobs are going away. We disagree. Today we’re doubling down on human creativity, for which there will never be a substitute.

Never has the news been more mystifying. Never have so many mainstream news organizations been so afraid to tell it like it is. Never has it been more important to make real sense of what is going…

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America, it is often said, is a nation of immigrants. But is it becoming a nation of emigrants — a country that drives people away in search of greener pastures?

The expat American writer Lindsey Tramuta explores this question in a powerful new essay in Bitter Southerner. She will be my guest for a live today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern.

Join the live at 12:30 pm ET

And check out Tramuta’s…

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Recently, the man says, he went home depressed. This is not the kind of man who radiates emotion, so one takes note. What made him depressed was the acceleration of A.I.’s capabilities,…

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“If America is the most powerful country on earth, and Silicon Valley the most powerful place in that country, and St…

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This, more than anything, is the question I hear around me. The despair — about creeping authoritarianism, environmental ruin, AI run amok, algorithmic tyranny — is everywhere. But what can be done?

The stock answers are well known to you: Join a movement. Call Congress. March.

But Gal Beckerman, of The Atlantic, has a provocative intervention on the subject that points toward a different answer — even, in fact, a different starting question.

Before you ask what you can do, ask how you should be. The art of being a dissident, he suggests in his new book, involves a certain kind of being as much as doing.

“How to Be a Dissident” is a powerful book with lessons not intuitive. Beckerman, a subtle thinker, knows subtlety doesn’t always work when attention spans are short. So he gives us ten simple-to-remember lessons, for the kind of being that fights back.

Be alone.

Be pessimistic.

Be funny.

Be rational.

Be watchful.

Be reckless.

Be loyal.

Be presumptuous.

Be human.

In our conversation above, we dig into each of these ten lessons. Don’t miss it.

And we’re going to experiment with keeping this post open to all, in the hope that some of you will step up and become supporting subscribers anyway. We are proud dissenters here at The Ink, and we invite you to stand up for dissent by joining us.

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