Devils in the details, loopholes and exits, against the broligarchs

Weekend Reads for September 6, 2025

Happy Saturday, Ink readers!

As we do each weekend for our supporting subscribers, we’ve collected below some of the best writing and most interesting thinking we’ve come across as we’ve read and researched this week. Among the links you’ll find in today’s edition of Weekend Reads:

• Why looking back to the ‘60s — or to Goethe’s Faust — can shed new light on the abundance debate

• Hatred is human. Does A.I. deserve it?

• Is anything that costs a billion dollars worth buying?

• How to paint your way out of a corner

• Do loopholes in the law really point the way out?

• Ignorance aspires to authority — and why we ignore it at our peril

• And new takes on cool jazz, from the last of the hepcats and a few young lions

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?

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In The Ink this week

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And now, your Weekend Reads

The devil in the details

I do want to suggest that tragedies of development form the deepest core of modern experience; they are not ours alone. It is crucial for us to come to terms with the demonic potentialities of human growth, both individual and social, psychosexual and economic. But although we have to learn to accept responsibility, it is pointless to paralyze ourselves with cynicism or mutilate ourselves with blame. Indeed, if we repress our Faustian vision and energy and will, and recoil from action—as plenty of us have learned to do surprisingly fast—even then we will be to blame. We will be guilty of perpetuating the only alternative to the tragedy of development: the tragedy of underdevelopment—a story that most of our parents, and those who grew old in the silent night of the ’50s, and the 40 million Americans still stuck below the poverty line, and millions more in the undeveloped Third World, know all too well. [Dissent]