Blind justice, ballot-box terror, undecided hobbits: Weekend reads for October 19, 2024
What we've been reading this week
Happy weekend, readers of The Ink!
As we do each weekend, we’ve collected some of the most intriguing writing we’ve read during the week — the pieces that have challenged and inspired us, or have just gotten us thinking — so we can share these great ideas and insights with you.
But first, if you didn’t get a chance during the week, we invite you to read our reflections on what Kamala Harris still can — and must — accomplish in these last weeks of the campaign. Even after Harris entered the lion’s den to face Bret Baier, even as Trump ducks interview after interview, there remains a better story to tell.
She needs to summon the distrusting back into belief. Doing so will require more than telling the usual story of being a middle-class kid, just like you. She needs to show people who have lost faith that she sees why. That both parties have failed them, one more than the other, but both, really.
A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.
Readings
Blind justice, blind ambition
Perhaps the most dangerous implication of such a decision is what will inevitably follow. The conservative legal movement has already shown that there is no stopping point at which they will decide they’ve won enough. The fight to overturn Roe was ostensibly about returning abortion policy to the states, until the justices actually overturned Roe; now, it is about enacting a nationwide abortion ban as soon as Republicans have the votes. The effort to ban affirmative action was about fulfilling the Fourteenth Amendment’s supposed grand vision of a color-blind society, until the justices actually decided Students For Fair Admissions; now, it is about chasing people of color from positions of power until there are none left. [Balls and Strikes]
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