Greetings! After a long while, I’m on vacation this week, basking in the love and chaos and cooking and blood feuds of multi-generational family being able to cohabit again.

So I thought I’d give you a little “in case you missed it” roundup of some of The Ink’s recent fare while taking some time off.

Do you wonder where courage in crisis comes from? What about a conversation with a New York mayoral candidate who was happier being behind the scenes until she decided she needed to step up and out front? Fame is complicated, and sometimes it lands on you suddenly, as happened to this guy, who made the most of his moment.

Are you interested in activism and the question of whether to stay outside, agitating, or go inside to finish the job advocated on the outside? What happens when the stealthy activism you thought you were doing as an “anti-war photographer” actually helps build support for war? How do you reset? How do we all reset based on the lessons the pandemic taught us? Do you feel you have properly processed how the year-plus gone by has changed you? Do you even want to process it? Should you?

Speaking of the pandemic as a receding thing of course ignores its persistence across much of the world. So why is Bill Gates wary of breaking the vaccine patents so that developing countries can manufacture their own? Why, according to one activist I spoke to, are donations of vaccine doses “charity” while patent-waiving is “justice”?

Speaking of justice, what do empty swimming pools have to teach us about race in America and why we can’t have nice things? Has this California congressman figured out a way for progressives to speak that would widen the audience for the kind of justice they’re proposing? Does Joe Biden now live in Stephanie Kelton’s world, governed by Modern Monetary Theory, or does she still dwell in his world?

Some may remember these posts; others may have missed them or forgotten. Adam Serwer tells us, channeling his mentor David Corn, that the news is what people have forgotten. So dig into what you may have forgotten, and I will be back soon, rested!

And, as always, if this newsletter has been meaningful to you, it would help what we do so much to have you sign up to subscribe.

Anand