On listening, remembering, and democracy: Weekend reads for May 25, 2024

Some writing worth your attention for Memorial Day

Speaking your mind is simple enough. Listening is the hard part.

Democracy doesn’t just happen. To make it work, people need to make the effort and take the time to listen — not just hear or react, but consider and understand. Faced with everything from demagoguery to algorithmic feeds to deepfakes, we’re in challenging times for paying attention. How do you maintain the balance of openness and critical perspective that lets you experience the world, and what your neighbors, potential allies, adversaries, and fellow citizens have to say?

We’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past week, especially so since our conversation with Mehdi Hasan about the difficulty of arguing when people can’t agree on basic truths. And this week we’ve turned our efforts to making it easier for you to listen, launching our podcast so we can bring you the full conversations we have with the writers, thinkers, and doers who join us each week. Look for more audio from us in the weeks and months ahead. And let us know what we can do better — we’re listening.

In case you missed it

• Legal scholar David Kaye explained the meaning and likely impact of the ICC arrest warrant applications for Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, and other leaders in the war in Gaza accused of crimes against humanity.

• Journalist and anti-monopolist campaigner Matt Stoller talked to us about why trustbusting is as American as apple pie — and how recapturing our historical opposition to corporate consolidation can point the way to a freer future.

• We checked back in with Wesleyan University president Michael S. Roth, who shared with us his letter on the successful negotiations between student antiwar activists and university officials that ended the encampment at Wesleyan — and what it means for the future of political discourse.

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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 essays 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.

And for Memorial Day we’re offering new paying subscribers a special discount of 20 percent. You will lock in this lower price forever if you join us now!

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On listening

Are you willing to listen, even when it’s hard?

Put simply, we need more people. What do we mean by this? We are not talking about launching search parties to find an undiscovered army of people with already-perfected politics with whom we will easily and naturally align. Instead, organizing on the scale that our struggles demand means finding common ground with a broad spectrum of people, many of whom we would never otherwise interact with, and building a shared practice of politics in the pursuit of more just outcomes. [Boston Review]