Executive disorder

Weekend reads for January 25, 2025

Hey, everyone! Anand here. I hope you’re hanging in there after this dizzying week. Thank you for all of your thoughtful sharing and holding of each other this week. Community is the bulwark against this high-powered hooliganism. We have an outstanding collection of readings below. Dive in, and thank you for being part of what we do. And if you like what we’re doing here, consider supporting independent media by becoming a full subscriber today and spreading the news. — AG

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A week into the Trump 2.0 administration, the first cabinet confirmations have delivered the hardly qualified to power with the barest of margins, while a barrage of executive orders looks unsurprisingly like what was promised in Project 2025.

President Trump has pardoned all of the January 6, 2021, rioters (even those convicted of violence against police officers), shuttered scientific communication and grantmaking to derail public health programs, deployed ICE against the undocumented while shutting down refugee resettlement efforts, threatened Denmark over Greenland, and launched direct attacks on birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. It’s a lot to take in, and the onslaught demands that we balance our need to keep informed with the sensibility to tune out the noise that prevents us from understanding and even functioning.

Rather than just take in the firehose of Trumpism, it’s important to find the resources that actually illuminate, and we’ll do our best to keep recommending those in this space called Weekend Reads, our weekly compilation of readings from other publications which are worth your time.

Before we get to our collection of links across the internet, closer to home this week we talked to author and MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes this week about his new book, which dives into the long battle for our attention and time, and in which he formulates some strategies for taking back these essential parts of ourselves — together.

This fight between the part of us that wants to direct our will to what we want to focus on — my daughter — and then the part that is always scanning in the background for some interruption, some danger, something we need to know about in the moment that is pre-conscious — it’s the war between those two things that we have that our current version of attention capitalism is exploiting, is sort of en masse and on scale attempting to monetize.

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Readings

Among the werewolves

For the fascist, it frankly and simply was your mother's duty to fulfill those needs, she had to and if you didn't get everything you needed it is her fault, the bitch, but luckily your father taught you how to take it like a man, how to toughen up and not worry about all that shit, and now as adults when you feel a lingering emptiness a terrifying void an unfillable need it isn't because the child still hurts, it's because the women and servants and employees and Blacks in this world don't know their place, aren't working hard enough, aren't giving you your birthright, those lazy ungrateful swine. Fascism means you never have to admit that you need support, or love, or care, or anything at all, and simultaneously, the fact that you're not getting what you want is the fault of everyone else not doing their duty. [All Cats Are Beautiful]

Keeping up with the executive orders