Weekend Reads for January 20

Reclaiming populism, democratizing machines, understanding rising costs, and observations on the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade

Heading into the weekend, we’re taking a step back and thinking about the larger forces — economic, legal, and algorithmic — that shape our personal and political experiences.

We’re reading about efforts to democratize artificial intelligence, and about how machine decisions shape what we see. We turn also to thinkers making some sense of the contradictions of populism, how we can build a more humane economy and systems of participation that really serve democracy, and the ways national borders and wartime violence bend and break politics and bodies.

For our subscribers, we’ve collected some links on those topics that we think are well worth your time this weekend. Thanks as always for reading The Ink and continuing to support us.

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Can the left reimagine populism?

“At moments like the 2020 racial justice uprising, we’ve seen glimmers of it. Or in this year’s strikes by autoworkers, healthcare workers, screenwriters, actors and so many others. Or in the campaigns to save abortion rights in states like Kansas and Ohio. These give shape to the kind of populism we need to win. We are the majority, and those who seek to take away our rights are the elite minority. And we need to express ourselves as a majoritarian project in order to win.” [In These Times]