Myths and the paleo diet, money on fire in a burning world, and ambient revolutionaries: Weekend reads for May 18, 2024

Some writing worth your attention this week

We talked to Mehdi Hasan this week about context — it’s what all too often gets left out of the news, though it’s vital if we have any hope of understanding what’s happening to the world and us. This week, however, we got a whole lot of it. Reporters brought us valuable insight into the culture of impunity within Israel’s settlement movement that brought the country to the brink — and to the current war in Gaza. New evidence came to light about outside agitators turning up the temperature of the student protests  — billionaires, that is, pressuring New York City mayor Eric Adams to call in the police. And Samuel Alito’s neighbors finally revealed that he’d flown an inverted American flag in the weeks following the January 6 insurrection — apparently showing public support for the rioters and calling the Supreme Court justice’s neutrality into question (in case you had any questions about it). 

Meanwhile, the presidential candidates agreed to debate. Biden imposed new tariffs on Chinese imports, continuing the dismantling of the neoliberal order. And the Trump criminal trial carried on, with former fixer Michael Cohen on the stand as Republican luminaries gathered outside to provide support (or deflect contempt charges).

We’ve been tracking these issues and more, and, as we do every weekend, we’ve put together some great readings that we think are worth your time and reflection, that will help you step back and take the bigger view.

In case you missed it

• First, we’ve begun posting audio again, and we’ll be working to make more audio versions of our interviews available over the coming weeks and months. We’re kicking things off with a great in-depth interview with journalist and Zeteo co-founder Mehdi Hasan, who talked to us about the state of the media, the state of democracy — and, of course, about how to win arguments. You can also read an edited transcript.

• We talked — and many of you did as well — about what we want to see in the upcoming presidential debates, and whether such a debate can possibly be meaningful these days.

• We talked to author, pundit, and Princeton scholar Eddie Glaude, Jr. about what Gen Z — the “catastrophic generation” — can achieve, what advice he gave Joe Biden, and why this moment of crisis is also a moment of possibility.

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We hope the articles we’ve collected below for our subscribers to read challenge you to see the world in new ways. Thanks, as always, for reading The Ink and continuing to support us.

A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and posts that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.

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The Village Voice of the future

Per one friend I spoke to who has been considering what a modern-day Voice might look like, you’d also need to have the vision to see what issues or powers define our lives today, forces or subjects rarely written about or even described today. This, too, is what the paper did, lending the imprimatur of “newsworthiness” to the basic stuff of life: experiences with discrimination, the sturm und drang of countercultural scenes, new experiments in living and their challenges. And could you pull off print runs, the paper as an object one might come across on the street, rather than just a website? [Jacobin]

Burning money on a burning planet