Casino republic
Weekend Reads for March 29, 2025
Hello, friends and readers! And happy Saturday to all.
As we do each weekend for our supporting subscribers, we’ve gathered below some of the very best essays, interviews, analyses, and podcast discussions we’ve come across this week in the course of our research for our writing, along with some music to keep you moving forward. Among the links you’ll find in today’s edition of Weekend Reads:
Why everything is Las Vegas now
What mice have to teach us about humane behavior
A defense of bureaucracy — from Francis Fukuyama
Visiting a spa that not just tones your skin, but might melt your face
How we come to understand ourselves through haggling
What we lose if we tune out public radio
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?
A programming note: More Live conversations next week!
Come back Monday, March 31, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern for our regular conversation with scholar of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Then join us on Thursday, April 3, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when we talk again with messaging guru and political sage Anat Shenker-Osorio. We hope to see you all there!
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Can the city strike back?
As its leading institutions — from Columbia University to the mayor’s office — collaborate with or capitulate to the Trump regime, New York City is set to choose new leadership this year. With nearly a dozen candidates vying to replace Eric Adams, Zohran Mamdani has jumped up the leaderboard with a mix of social media savvy, fundraising skill, fighting spirit, and just plain good progressive ideas.
This week, journalist Nate Schweber checked in with the Mamdani campaign as part of our ongoing coverage of the mayoral race, and then Mamdani himself dropped in for a live conversation with Anand — and offered a truly inspiring vision for what a city can be in the Trump years, and beyond.
Mamdani, a state assemblyman in New York, is interesting, because, like his Queens neighbor Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, he has actively sought to understand why many of his own constituents voted for Donald Trump last year. As he explained in our conservation, it makes sense to him even though it might seem to make no sense: many immigrants and people of color in Queens and elsewhere in New York were simply desperate for answers, and didn’t feel like life changed enough under Joe Biden, and were up for trying shit.
Mamdani is trying to offer a different path, and it’s one worth paying attention to: free buses, rent freezes, accessible childcare, and more. It is a progressive policy vision that, as he explained to me, is animated by something more philosophical — a desire to have life in New York feel less cruel, miserly, mean. To allow dreams to breathe.
The curated list of links below is one of the perks of being a paying subscriber to The Ink. But today we are opening these to everyone. If you haven’t yet, join us and stand up for independent, tell-it-like-it-is media that bends to no billionaire or tyrant.
And now, your weekend reads
The casino economy
For years, many people have harbored a secret question: What actually is cryptocurrency? Maybe they understood it in some sense—money that existed via some unhackable code?—but they didn’t really get it. Some of us at Slate didn’t get it, frankly! Perhaps you didn’t really get it either. The thing was, for a long time, you could get by in society without really understanding crypto.
Now, in America, that’s no longer true. Crypto is in ascendance—and to understand what it is, and how it works, is foundational to understanding the great American scam that’s currently playing out right in front of all of us in the White House and beyond. You can’t grasp the reality of the second Trump presidency if you don’t start here. [Slate]
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