What protest can achieve, Stormy faces Trump, and hip-hop's greatest beef: Weekend reads for May 11, 2024

Some writing worth your attention

This week, Joe Biden finally exercised his leverage over Benjamin Netanyahu and temporarily paused some arms shipments to Israel in an attempt to head off a full-on invasion of Rafah. Netanyahu and the rest of the Israeli hard right have dismissed the gesture, but there’s no question that public sentiment around the world is changing. Whether that has to do with the ongoing wave of student protests is unclear, but new polling data shows that support for a ceasefire is building, across party lines. Meanwhile, across the U.S. and the world, students continue to protest, to be arrested, and even to come to agreements on divestment.

Meanwhile, Stormy Daniels gave damning testimony in the Trump criminal trial, tech overplayed its hand and possibly revealed its intentions towards humanity, and the greatest rap beef of all drew to an apparent close, leaving a lot of unanswered questions about where hip-hop goes from here.

We’ve been tracking these issues and more, and, as we do every weekend, we’ve put together some great readings that we think are worth your time and reflection, that will help you step back and take the bigger view.

In case you missed it

• Organizer Ai-jen Poo talked to us about her vision of why care is the ultimate unifying issue, how it could transform the American economy, and what it means that Biden has made care an essential part of his campaign. 

• Wesleyan University president Michael Roth talked about why the best response to campus protests over Gaza recognizes everyone’s rights and responsibilities — and understands what “antisemitism” really is. 

• Ink readers talked about what Apple seems to have missed in its latest iPad ad campaign — and what the misstep reveals about how tech firms see human beings.

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The war in Gaza and its global political impact

Rashid Khalidi on protest, political goals, and Gaza

The other thing I would say to student activists is you have to understand what your political objectives are. If you believe that this is a settler colonial project, then you are in the metropole of that colony, here in the United States or in Western Europe, and national liberation movements have won not only — sometimes not primarily — by winning on the battlefield in the colony. The Vietnamese were at a stalemate with the Americans. The Algerians were actually losing on the battlefield. The IRA was almost at the end of its tether, militarily, in 1921. They won, in part, because they won over the metropole. [The Drift]