Free America!

Your weekend reads for March 8, 2025

Hello, friends and readers! And happy Saturday to all.

We have gathered below a collection of the most challenging, intriguing, and thought-provoking pieces we’ve come across during our research this week. And as usual, we close with some music — because everyone could use a deep breath. Among the links you’ll find in today’s edition of Weekend Reads:

• How Memphis made soul — and gave Martin Luther King, Jr. his music

• The political case for paying attention to celebrity lawsuits

• Where does health end — and illness begin?

• When cats became pets

• How money ate A.I.

• Why squirrels don’t need Social Security — and you do

• What we see when we see color, in painting or in life

You won’t want to miss any of it. And thank you so much to our supporting subscribers for making this newsletter possible.

These Weekend Reads are typically for our supporting subscribers only, but today we’re opening it up to everyone so that you can see what we do around here. If you’d like to support our work, please subscribe.

Help us build the future of independent media today!

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A programming note: We’re going Live again!

Come back and join us this coming week for three more great Live conversations: Monday, March 10 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll have our weekly conversation with scholar of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Tuesday, March 11, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern we’ll be joined by Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin. And Thursday, March 13, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern we’ll be speaking with writer and activist Rebecca Solnit. You won’t want to miss any of them.

To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.

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Good trouble

Yesterday, March 7, was the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when civil rights marchers led by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chair and future congressman John Lewis (this is why you associate his name with the very idea of “good trouble”) were beaten, whipped, and tear-gassed by police as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. The march — and the two larger marches from Selma to Montgomery that followed it that month — marked a key turning point in national understanding of the violence of the segregated South and the goals of the civil rights movement, and the public outcry over the violence led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In this very different era, with the Voting Rights Act restricted beyond recognition, the Trump-Musk administration seemingly bent on resegregating the country, and Democrats unable to mount a coherent opposition, it’s easy to forget that the civil rights movement was a civil society movement.

The folks who set out to Montgomery to fight for voting rights were working without much support from elected officials of either party or any expectation of it, and in a political environment of outright homegrown fascism in the Jim Crow South. And that small, committed group of activists built on the work of countless others, over time and through dedicated, slow effort — millions of small steps — to mobilize enough support to change minds and the country itself.

So if you feel hopeless, powerless, and undefended in the face of the MAGA assault on the multiracial democracy that the civil rights movement brought into being, we get it. It’s a big part of what drives us to publish this newsletter. But keep Bloody Sunday in mind and look at change as a series of small steps — steps that anyone can take. As messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio has been telling us, that’s how we start demanding — and building — a Free America, a country made of the world.

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And now…your Weekend Reads

Memphis soul

Before traveling to Memphis recently, I listened to “Mountaintop” again and again. I was repeatedly struck—or maybe a little awestruck—by the sheer musicality of the words and declamation, how often King alludes to spirituals and hymns, and especially how the tone shifts so dramatically in the final sentences. The evening of April 3 was stormy, and King was fighting a cold and exhaustion; he hadn’t originally even been scheduled to speak that night. But with the words, “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now…,” his world-weary voice suddenly tingles with an otherworldly crackle. It’s the Prophetic Voice, the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking through him. His final words quote a line from a beloved hymn, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Mine eyes have seen the glory!” Those who were in attendance that night must have remarked, even then, that something had happened. This was not King’s standard “stump” sermon—his entire demeanor changed. In Mason Temple, the Holy Ghost yet again suffused the man and the moment.

Memphis has, it seems to me, an uncanny ability to do that. [Oxford American]

I read the news today, oh boy

Current trends point, at best, to a continued retreat, as the press serves fewer and fewer people, ultimately ending up with a role akin to contemporary art or classical music: highly valued by a privileged few, regarded with indifference by the many. At worst, the lack of substantial innovation leaves a growing number of historically independent news media vulnerable to takeover by proprietors who, as we have seen in the past, and will probably see even more in the future, put politics ahead of their commitment to publishing. [Prospect Magazine]

State of the culture

In all fairness, let me say that the corporations didn’t intend to make the culture stagnant and boring. They didn’t intend to cause teen depression, suicidal impulses, anxiety, self-harm, and all the rest.

All they really wanted was to impose standardization and predictability. That’s what businesses always want—because it’s more profitable.

But corporate standardization always brings negative unintended effects. [The Honest Broker]

How MAGA influencers co-opted #MeToo

"They think that they're surprised that they agree with Candace Owens," Ophie said, "but what they actually need to be surprised by is that Candace Owens picked out the things that they believe for them." [User Mag]

Squirreling it away

A worker could try to ensure future consumption by setting aside part of his/her current production for future use, like a squirrel storing nuts for the winter. This human squirrel could theoretically have a storeroom and add to its contents each year, building up a supply of food, clothing, medication, etc. That approach, however, has obvious and major deficiencies. [LSE Public Policy Review]

Ways of seeing

In the time it took to write this sentence, somebody died, somebody was born, a language disappeared, a forest fire began, an insect was crushed, an idea inched forward. When I am dying, I want to think of the bounty of an orchard, a tree laden with one thousand apples, rosso corsa, and bees abounding.

Earlier this year, in a discussion about my work, a friend told me I had dedicated my life to something that doesn’t exist. He said, “Color isn’t real; it’s just our brains’ interpretation of light wavelengths.”

I have been annoyed ever since. [Virginia Quarterly Review]

Where does cancer come from?

Did a mutation occur the summer Before, when my gallbladder inexplicably started to act up, when I got a surprisingly terrible case of hand-foot-mouth virus for an adult? Perhaps one occurred in college, silently changing my future while I took my first organic chemistry lab, casually flirting with my graduate TA and being careless with a solvent. Maybe the first mutation occurred when I was 2 years old, wearing footie pajamas soaked in flame retardant, as was the norm in the mid 1970s. Is it possible, even, that the mutation happened generations before I was even born, perhaps when my grandmother worked in her family’s dry-cleaning shop, the chemicals triggering a change deep in one of her cells that eventually lead to her death, my father’s, and nearly mine? Buried in these questions is, of course, the deeper question of why. It is even more unknowable than when. [Nautilus]

Cat people

Although there were plenty of grim jokes circulating about how cat’s meat men supplied the toughest meat they could get away with, the fact was that many of these rough diamonds were known for their tender hearts. It was not unusual to spot a cat’s meat man slipping scraps to the hopeful strays that wound around his ankles. He was their guardian, their special friend. Sometimes he could even bring about fairy-tale transformations: no less a lady than the Duchess of Bedford had recently adopted a stray that had been rescued by her local London cat’s meat man. [Public Domain Review]

Follow the money

When you say “A.G.I. is coming soon,” do you mean a we’re about to flip the switch and birth a super-intelligence? Or do you mean that computer is going to do email jobs? Or do you just mean that pretty soon A.I. companies will stop losing money?

I’m not even joking about that, by the way—among the only verifiable definitions of “A.G.I.” out there is a contractual one between Microsoft and OpenAI, currently bound in a close partnership legally breakable upon development of A.G.I. [Max Read]

Come together, right now

I was on a panel with Joe Holt, who was one of the Bandcamp founders in 2020, and after that, I had a one-on-one call with him, and I tried to convince him to transition Bandcamp into a worker co-op. I started the conversation by asking, “Do you have a succession plan?” I was trying to convince him that this is a viable path for a graceful exit, that you could find a financial partner to fund a leverage buyout and transition ownership to the workers. I saw that idea as a way to put an exclamation point on a legacy. What we've seen is a fulfillment of its obvious conclusion. It's like the community goodwill didn't matter at all. [Dirt Magazine]

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Doing it all in the service of the groove

Guitar wizard Charlie Hunter is the kind of virtuoso who’s got no interest in showing off. Rather, he’s focused his prodigious talents on creating and exploring a groove. Watching him create simultaneous bass, chordal, and melody parts, it can be difficult to reconcile what you’re hearing with what you’re seeing — but there’s never any question that his goal is making the music move along. That’s what gets him the calls from R&B and jazz heavyweights like D’Angelo, Christian McBride, and Kurt Elling, but there’s nothing like seeing and hearing him on his own terms, as in this life-affirming duo outing with drummer Carter McLean.

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Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images