The queen of America

Weekend Reads for March 22, 2025

Hello, friends and readers! And happy Saturday to all.

Here, as we do each weekend, we’ve gathered some of the most interesting, challenging, and moving pieces from around the internet — the very best things we’ve come across as we’ve researched our articles and interviews this week, along with some music to keep you moving forward. Among the links you’ll find in today’s edition of Weekend Reads:

• How Dolly Parton embodies and transcends America, at its worst and best

• What Earth stands to lose in the quest for Mars

• Righting wrongs (and rewriting history) in town-gown tensions

• New rules for resistance

• Who gets to be creative — and who decides?

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?

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A programming note: More Live conversations next week!

Come back Monday, March 24, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern for a live call-in show with Anand. Then join us on Wednesday, March 26, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern for a conversation with journalist and legal analyst Elie Mystal. And on Thursday, March 27, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll talk to New York State Representative and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, the progressive who hopes to succeed Eric Adams. We hope to see you there!

To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.

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Live for tomorrow, today

This week has been a difficult one, with the Trump regime self-dealing in broad daylight, the beginning of the end of public education, the horrible spectacle of extraordinary renditions of migrants to a foreign gulag, the capitulation of the universities and law firms to fascist pressure tactics, and the ceaseless drumbeat of bad news.

But people are on the march everywhere, and even more critically, they’re refusing to accept the joyless, diminished life that our would-be totalitarian rulers would impose as they do their worst to steal away the things we’ve all built together. And that’s been our theme this week at The Ink: Live fully, live well. Refuse despair, and start making the beautiful tomorrow right now.

The best revenge is to refuse their values. To embody the kind of living — free, colorful, open — they want to snuff out.

So when they dehumanize, you humanize.

When they try to fracture and divide people, you connect with people.

When they try to curtail the freedom to associate, you gather.

When they try to make it harder to speak your mind, you find your voice.

When they try to make you cynical, you double down on hope.

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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.

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And now, your weekend reads

The real Dolly

As important as her songwriting is to her success, Dolly’s most important writing is the monomyth she stitched from Southern crises and American exceptionalism. She is a working class warrior who got rich, but no one hates her for it. She turned herself into a feminine ideal that trades in the most grotesque ideas of eugenic whiteness — pale skin, blonde hair, thin body, big breasts. Yet no one calls her out for being sizeist or ageist. And, she has remained Southern in affect and performance, while pursuing a non-Southern audience from the outset of her career. That she has held our interest so long and could still be relatively unblemished enough to ascend to an unproblematic fave in the sixth decade of her career is owed to Dolly’s craft — and to something more. Her performance of blondeness is a very particular thread of race and gender and class. How Dolly has gotten away with performing so many challenged identities while completely escaping critique resonates with audiences that consume the South precisely for the hope that whiteness still matters. As for the rest of us, well, we are here for the blonde ambitions. [essaying]

Be bold