WATCH: Bonfire of affordability

We just had our first live Book Club discussion of Karim Dimechkie’s The Uproar, the “stressful social novel” that encapsulates the tensions of a city in distress at the dawn of the Zohran Mamdani era. Thanks so much to the more than 300 of you who participated! We talked about:

• How Dimechkie drew on his own experience of precarity and unaffordability as a New Yorker and a social worker.

• The book’s portrait of how money becomes an all-consuming thought for city dwellers and the interpersonal tensions that emerge from that obsession

• The book’s negotiation of the nuances and layers of privilege — how the boundaries of class, race, and national origin don’t overlap neatly, and how that helps explain the contradictions and complexities of American politics

• How we are losing our capacity for relationality — and turning to pets, chatbots, and other companions without real agency instead of our fellow human beings

• Has false, aspiring do-gooding receded with the rise of the oligarchs, and is this book marking the end of an earlier era?

• The questions around who has the right to speak for or write about whom, and how that’s bound up with identity and how we understand or misunderstand it

• How our vision of others can be clouded by our preconceptions and how incomplete our engagement with their lives can be — and what Little Richard’s life story (via the 500 Songs podcast) can teach us about that

• Why it’s not just the other side politically that might miss things — blue cities have poverty and problems that seem intractable, and some of the genius of the book is in illuminating that

• And how taking a social novelist’s perspective can help us understand politics, whether we’re trying to understand the rise of Mamdani — or the election of Donald Trump

If you missed it, watch the full conversation by clicking on the video player above.

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How to participate in the Book Club

We’ll post questions — our discussion guide — every Sunday, and every other Wednesday we’ll meet for a discussion with the Club or a visit from an author or other special guest. Look out for posts with further details. We’ll also host chat threads to get your insight on key questions in advance of our meetings. For our next meeting, on Wednesday, July 23, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be hosting Karim Dimechkie, author of The Uproar.

To participate in our meetings and author talks on Substack Live, join from your phone or tablet with the Substack app. You can watch on desktop at The Ink, and comment and ask questions in our chat, but you won’t be able to join the live video discussion. Book Club meetings are open to paid subscribers to The Ink, so if you haven’t become part of our community, please join us today.

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