Rebels, dissenters, strikers, and weirdos
WEEKEND READS for December 6, 2025
Happy Saturday, Ink readers!
As we do every weekend, we invite you, our supporting subscribers, to spend some time reading along with us, so below we’ve collected some of the most interesting writing and thinking we’ve come across as we’ve done our research this week.
Welcome to today’s edition of Weekend Reads.
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Keep it weird
I’ve spent a long time studying people’s complaints from the past, and while I’ve seen plenty of gripes about how culture has become stupid, I haven’t seen many people complaining that it’s become stagnant. In fact, you can find lots of people in the past worrying that there’s too much new stuff. As Derek Thompson relates, one hundred years ago, people were having nervous breakdowns about the pace of technological change. They were rioting at Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and decrying the new approaches of artists like Kandinsky and Picasso. In 1965, Susan Sontag wrote that new forms of art “succeed one another so rapidly as to seem to give their audiences no breathing space to prepare”. Is there anyone who feels that way now? [Experimental history]