Covid's origins, Vance's lies, animal crackers: Weekend reads for September 21, 2024

What we've been reading

Hey everyone! Anand here. Happy Saturday!

As always, we’re excited to bring you this weekend roundup of things we’ve been reading and thinking about this week — some of the best writing on the internet that we could find.

But before we send you away to others, we wanted to pull up this essay right here at The Ink, in case you missed it, making the case for immigrants making America great.

As we do each weekend for The Ink’s paid subscribers, below we present a few of the most interesting, challenging, and surprising pieces we’ve found in the course of our reading and research over the week. We’ve got an incredibly thorough account in Cell of Covid-19’s undoubtedly zoonotic origins that would — in a less misinformed world — finally set the record straight, a brutal condemnation of J.D. Vance’s racist lies from a very unexpected source in the conservative movement, a debunking of the supposedly sacrificial origins of animal crackers, and more. We hope these inspire, inform, and even entertain you this weekend.

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Readings

A condemnation of Vance’s lies, from an unlikely source

​​Vance has turned Solzhenitsyn’s maxim on its head: “Let the lie come into the world, but only through me, and only if I get something good out of it.” A man who is not suffering from whatever disease of the soul with which Vance is afflicted would have a hard time even imagining wanting to be vice president—of all petty things!—that bad. A different and better sort of man would understand that bearing false witness against 15,000 poor and vulnerable people in the pursuit of political power is the same as bearing false witness against anybody else. [The Dispatch]

What should be the last word on Covid-19 origins

Multiple lines of evidence are consistent with the infection of wildlife animals with SARS-CoV-2 in the Huanan market. Animal carts, a cage, a garbage cart, and a hair/feather removal machine from a wildlife stall