Why this war? Why now? What comes next?
Your weekend reads for March 7, 2026
Happy Saturday, Ink Readers!
It’s been an all-consuming week of news in a world shaped, it seems, by those who don’t seem to care. It’s been a week at lets-call-it-anything-else-but-war, begun for reasons our leaders seem barely able to explain to us, conducted without a plan for the people living under bombardment now. Meanwhile, the revelations from the Epstein files continue to reverberate. The face of mass deportation, Kristi Noem, is this cabinet’s first casualty, perhaps for her transgressions against the people, perhaps for having committed the unpardonable sin of making a fool of Donald Trump in public. It’s hard to pay attention to much else but the machinations of the powerful — but there’s more out there (and some good thinking about those machinations too), and we hope you’ll read along with us this weekend.
Among the questions today’s Weekend Reads attempt to answer:
Was a musical pirate the real thing?
Will we ever understand why we’re at war in Iran?
What did Jeffrey Epstein and the world’s most maladjusted scientists see in one another?
How do you insure against disaster in a world with too much risk?
What is a soul, anyway?
Are men really lonelier? Or have they been sold a cure worse than the disease?
The frustrated poets in Epstein’s circle
Who decides Iran’s future?
And musical adventures from Flying Lotus
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Piracy in C minor
Then one night, Guzmán gathered the entire band in a circle for what Ordóñez called “a sailor’s tribunal.” According to band members who were present, it was essentially a shaming exercise dressed up as old-school maritime justice, hearkening back to a time when captains were judge and jury over the men under their command. [The Atavist]