Cuba in the dark, culture wars, political science: Weekend reads for October 26, 2024

What we've been reading this week

Happy Saturday, readers!

We’re back again, as we are each weekend, with a collection of the most interesting writing we’ve come across in the course of our research and writing this week. These are the articles that have really gotten us thinking — and we’re happy to have the opportunity to share these observations, ideas, and insights with you.

If you didn’t get a chance during the week, we invite you to read Anand’s piece on what it means that so many American men don’t find fascism a dealbreaker — and what  kind of closing arguments Kamala Harris might deliver to invite them into a story of progress that can counter our “dude-bro-ing our way into democratic death.”

Yes, change is scary. Yes, it sometimes feels like you don’t know how to be these days. Don’t know what to say. Yes, it’s tempting to shake things up when you’re scared. When you feel attacked by the future itself.

But don’t. Because men worthy of the word don’t outsource the care and protection of their families to dictators. Men worthy of the word don’t depend for their self-esteem on the crushing and marginalizing of Others. Men worthy of the word don’t need women to be locked in the fourteenth century legally to feel whole. Men worthy of the word don’t hand over the keys to the future to billionaires who pull the strings.

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Readings

The last round in Cuba

I watched her grapple with the disorientation many first-time American visitors to Cuba experience upon arrival: in this alternate reality are you Dorothy in Oz or Alice through the looking glass? Unfortunately, Dorothy’s role is far more complicated and fraught in Cuba’s Oz, because whatever Kansas you come from doubles as almost any Cuban’s overblown fantasy of an American Emerald City. The fantasies you bring to whatever Cuba represents for you collide with the desperate fantasies Cubans entertain about what where you come from represents to them. Unlike the 1939 classic film, in L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, visitors to the Emerald City are required to wear green spectacles literally locked onto their heads to ostensibly protect them from going blind from the glare of “brightness and glory.” But the spectacles' actual function is to make sure you don’t realize the Emerald City is far less green in actuality than you’ve been led to believe. [Journal of the Plague Years]