When we look back from a distance, what will we see?

In our first Live discussion of "One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This" by Omar El Akkad, let's talk about what we've gleaned so far.

Join us today, Wednesday, June 4, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern for our first Book Club discussion of Omar El Akkad’s breathtaking—and heartbreaking—One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Watch on desktop at The Ink or join us from your phone or tablet with the Substack app.

Many of you have already weighed in on El Akkad’s masterful melange of reportage, memoir, and outcry, which becomes more urgent with each news cycle. This line from chapter one haunts me: “But for now, it’s so much safer to look away, to keep one’s head down, periodically checking on the balance of polite society to see if it is not too troublesome yet to state what to the conscience was never unclear.” There are any number of other thoughts and sentences that also beg to be underlined.

Book Club member Susan Miville has begun reading and observes that the book “speaks with exacting precision and challenges many assumptions.” Terence Green offers that El-Akkad’s work is “tremendously deep... asking me to keep learning to strive to understand history better… to live in better harmony in this world.” And that’s why we’ve launched this book club!

If you missed Sunday’s post (or you’ve thought more about the book since), drop your ideas for what you want to discuss today in the comments below (click on the link below to revisit our discussion guide for our first round of questions). And we’ll see you today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, on Substack Live.

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Thanks for entering our One Day drawing!

Our drawing for 50 copies of Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This has ended. Thanks for entering, and if you’ve scored a free copy you’ve gotten an email from us by now letting you know. If you haven’t yet received your copy, rest assured, it’s on the way. If you’d like to buy a copy (or get one sooner), we encourage you to purchase through your local bookseller or click on the button below to buy from Bookshop.org.

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