Happy Saturday, Ink readers!
As we do each weekend for our supporting subscribers, we’ve collected the most intriguing, challenging writing and thinking we’ve come across in our reading and research this week. Among the links you’ll find in today’s edition of Weekend Reads:
The real story behind America’s most notorious blood feud — and the country’s history of violence
What do jobs mean anymore? Should they mean anything?
Can we understand the universe?
If we lose our ability to describe nature, do we still know ourselves?
How do we make peace with a broken world?
And as always, more music you need to add to your playlist
You won’t want to miss any of it. Thank you so much to our supporting subscribers for making this newsletter possible. If you haven’t yet joined our community, why not become part of this and help us build the future of independent media today?
In The Ink this week
And now, your Weekend Reads
Blood feud
Despite the glut of media, folks generally know the names Hatfield and McCoy in the same way they know Paul Bunyan, John Henry, or Johnny Appleseed: through the osmotic absorption of American folklore. It is via such stories that the past becomes real to us denizens of the present, and how places like Appalachia take sorry, stereotypical shape in the eyes of city slickers who refuse to leave New York. In the mainstream account, the feud is a fable about the backwardness of the backcountry: a fight over a stolen hog that resulted in a decade of bumblefuck warfare until the government intervened to restore peace to the Tug River Valley. But history rarely bequeaths us so straightforward a story. [The Baffler]
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