A Havana mystery, engineers of loneliness, kids and phones, Insta towns, and "great American bitches" -- Weekend reads for April 6

Some things worth your attention this weekend

Happy weekend to all who celebrate! This was a special week here at The Ink, with our two-part interview with Rebecca Solnit stirring a lot of reflection far and wide.

If you haven’t yet dug in, now is a time to fire it up and sit back and learn from her — and disagree generatively in the comments!

Rebecca Solnit wants a joyous, inviting left — not an angry, Puritanical one

How to summon hope when everything is terrible

And now on to what you’ve grown to love — or so we hope — on these Saturday mornings: your collection of weekend reads. This week, we have for you some indefatigable reporting solving a great mystery of modern diplomacy; a brilliant essay on why the loneliness so many of us experience in modern life isn’t actually our fault but the result of deliberate choices made by powerful actors; a dispatch on how Instagram is remaking towns in the name of a fraudulent aesthetic of “authenticity”; a rich essay on what the political rise of Indian-Americans is actually all about; and a preview of the Broadway show “Suffs.”

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A Havana mystery unraveled

Joy, an American nurse and the wife of a U.S. Embassy official, had been taking her laundry out of the dryer when she was completely consumed by an acute ringing sound that reminded her of what someone in the movies experiences after a bomb has gone off…A black Mercedes crossover was parked just beyond the gate of her property, directly opposite her laundry room. Joy went outside, and that’s when she saw the tall, thin man. She raised her phone to photograph him.

“It was like he locked eyes with me. He knew what I was doing.”…She says she didn’t see the man again until three years later, when she was shown a photograph of Albert Averyanov, a Russian operative attached to Unit 29155, a notorious assassination and sabotage squad of the GRU, Moscow’s military intelligence service. [The Insider]

Your loneliness was engineered by others