Let America be America, breaking up with empire, freedoms and constraints
Weekend reads for July 5, 2025
Happy Saturday, Ink readers! For this July 4 weekend, we’ve collected some great writing on independence, the end of empire, and the promises America makes, breaks, and could someday keep. It’s writing that we hope will challenge and inspire — the kind of work we assemble each week for our supporting subscribers.
Among the links you’ll find in today’s edition of Weekend Reads:
Is America a melting pot — or a barbecue pit?
What do we learn when we write it all down?
If becoming a star is the only way to make it, where does that leave the rest of us?
When art is the truth, can fiction be a crime?
Does meditation provide an escape, or entangle us in the world?
Can America be America — and who would it be for?
And in music, jazz stars take on a rock classic
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?
In The Ink this week:
The Chief Justice is my friend. He's presiding over the end of the rule of law: Conservative jurist J. Michael Luttig
Sometimes, it’s not what someone says that matters, but who says it.
ESSAY: Billionaire do-gooding is out. Naked oligarchy is in
Like bottomless mimosas and a mother’s unsolicited advice, eras don’t just end. The new thing elbows its way in, the old thing lingers like a houseguest, and they compete for primacy. Only eventually — sometimes long after — do you notice the eclipse.
And now, your Weekend Reads
A taste of freedom
A Native American foodway, embraced by white colonialists, passed to and perfected by enslaved populations influenced by the roasting traditions of Africa, modernized now in a world of glistening corporate individualism and the bone-wearying individual work of surviving hypercapitalism. Barbecue, when you strip away the jingoism and the boosterish narratives sweeter than Sweet Baby Ray’s, is not a bad metonym for America as a whole: not a melting pot, but a pit, a place where courage and art and genius flourish despite the forces that burn and burn them, and fill bellies with the strength to fight the great and terrible forces that shape our lives: a little respite, a little smoke and hope and sweetness, in a sauce-drenched bun. [The Sword and the Sandwich]
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