When an empire falls, what blooms?
Weekend Reads for August 9, 2025
Happy Saturday, Ink readers! Today’s Weekend Reads is open to all, thanks to the ongoing support of our subscribers. Take a look at this rich collection we send out every weekend, and subscribe to be a part of this. Enjoy! — AG
Each weekend, for our supporting subscribers, we collect some of the best writing we’ve come across in our reading and research this week. Among the links you’ll find in today’s edition of Weekend Reads:
Is the end of empire such a bad thing, really?
What was shared truth? And how does one murder reflect its collapse?
Can science survive Trump 2.0?
Why do we see villains as heroes?
Can we imagine a world without nukes?
How’s your rizz doing?
And music, from the incomparable Eddie Palmieri
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?
In The Ink this week
And now, your Weekend Reads
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine
As a researcher who studies the causes of civilisation collapse to inform policy in the present, I believe this matters. In textbooks, museums and popular culture, history is often told as a tale of rise and fall. It is a story of human progress during the reign of empires and kingdoms, followed by regression and barbarism when these fade away. This is why we have the idea of imperial ‘golden ages’ of wealth, peace and cultural advances, followed by a descent into ‘dark ages’ marked by violence, poverty and stagnation. Yet this is history through the eyes of elites. Not only does this skew our understanding of the past, but it also shapes how we think about collapse in the present and future. [Aeon]
Blurred lines
I suspect that history will record 2025 as an inflection point in American (if not world) history, the point at which the promise of a future rooted in universal access to knowledge collapsed under the weight of infinitely accessible fictions. And if a debate emerges over the moment that embodies that collapse, I would like to offer as a contender the murder of Melissa Hortman. [Philip Bump]
Yassified
Coinages, I’d say, occupy a spectrum from essential (“regift” and “selfie,” for instance, and more recently the superb “doomscrolling”) to close-to-pointless-and-destined-to-be-discarded-and-forgotten-almost-as-soon-as-they’re-spawned, like, for instance, “goblin mode,” which I suspect most God-fearing people had never encountered before it was inexplicably named a word of the year, to the egregious “rizz,” which ditto, a word that’s useful, I suppose, if you’re so bereft of life expectancy that you don’t have enough time to say “charisma.” [A word about…]
Fusion cooking
Viral food trends don’t seem as organic now, according to Allyson Reedy, author of The Phone Eats First Cookbook, a compilation of “social media’s best recipes” published earlier this year. Unlike 2013, when foods like the ramen burger could make the news basically unintentionally, viral food is now more clearly “a manipulation,” Reedy says. “It’s more strategic and intentional.” [Eater]
Where is the global resistance?
Finding common purpose is perhaps the bigger challenge. If Trump “wins,” it will be because other large economies were unable (or unwilling) to articulate an alternative framework for the global economy. Pining after traditional multilateralism and global cooperation – as many targets of Trump’s ire have done – is of little use and merely signals weakness. [Project Syndicate]
Are we (destined to remain) alone?
We have a golden road laid out before us for taking the next great scientific leap forward into the Universe. The 20th century was the one that saw us discover what rules governed the Universe, what it was made of, where it came from, and how it got to be the way it is today. The 21st century could be the one where we first find life beyond our own Solar System, answering the question of “are we alone?” with an emphatic “no” for the first time in history. But the great concern is that it instead becomes the century where we abandon fundamental science and basic research, leading instead to stagnation and a regression into ignorance and darkness as never before. [Big Think]
Solidarity now, solidarity forever
Last year, I had hope that we would make progress. This year I hope we won’t devolve into an autocratic police state. I hope I have healthcare in January after the subsidies dry up. I hope my kids can afford to buy groceries and pay their rent. I hope my grandkids’ schools are funded. I hope my neighbor isn’t deported. I hope concentration camps don’t become a normal experience. [The View from Rural Missouri]
Villains
In June 2022 Diddy was granted BET’s Lifetime Achievement Award and thanked, among others, Cassie Ventura, his on-and-off girlfriend between 2011 and 2018, for holding him down in the dark times. That same year, he dressed as the Joker for Halloween. He was so creepy and persuasive in his white face and sleaze that many didn’t know it was him in the costume; it felt like a mimed confession of his true attributes. In 2023, New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, presented Diddy with the coveted key to the city. The key was returned the following summer, after news began circulating that Combs had abused Ventura. In September of 2024, Combs was taken into custody by the Southern District of New York and held without bail on RICO charges of sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion and transportation to engage in prostitution. He was considered a flight risk and a threat to potential witnesses. His loyalists formed a hush harbor. This month, he was acquitted of the most serious charges and cheered on by many who seem to feel vicariously acquitted themselves ready to get back to a White Party or freak-off; when he’s released from prison, it seems likely he’ll be offered a hero’s reentry, a new lease on cultural domination and indiscriminate sexcapades, a new deal, as if he’s some kind of New Age abolitionist. Villainy was good for business. [The Paris Review]
The road not taken
It’s hard to know what’s worse: the moral presumption that would inflict major birth defects on children for gaining military power; the actual multigenerational health and environmental harm of the US nuclear program; or the determination to control the world, despite the risk of a civilization-ending nuclear arms race if the bomb were used on Japan without informing the Soviet wartime ally. What we do know, however, is that there was a fork in the road in December 1944. We will never know if a post-WWII world without nuclear weapons could have been realized. Rotblat’s was the road not taken. [Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists]
La libertad
Legendary pianist, composer, and bandleader Eddie Palmieri, a major innovator who shaped the sound of modern salsa and Latin jazz, passed away this week at the age of 88. The Maestro is captured here in a 1989 set, backed by a typically incredible lineup, blazing through his standard, “La Libertad.”
Join us for Live conversations this coming week!
Monday, August 11, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll talk about redistricting with Texas State Representative James Talarico and about the Trump administration’s war on labor with American Federation of Government Employees president Everett Kelley. On Tuesday, August 12, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be speaking with writer and actress Amber Tamblyn about stardom, politics, and survival. On Wednesday, August 13, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, journalist Jon Lee Anderson will talk to us about his latest project. And on Thursday, August 14, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio will return. We hope to see you for all of these conversations!
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert once we’re live, and you can watch and chat from your iOS or Android mobile device. If you’re using a computer, you can also watch on our homepage.
Perfect selections, as always. Thank you, Anand.
Thanks Anand - terrific selection - shared on FB highlighting the NASA Big Think article, restacked and shared