The things to read this weekend
Scroll through these as a mind-improving alternative to playing Candy Crush on your phone
Click on what you like, ignore what you don’t find interesting. Is there anything good you read this week? Add it in the comments so we can all enjoy it.
This week was Juneteenth, the federal holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the United States.
The peacock chair is a staple of home decor in many Black people’s homes in the United States. The New York Times looks at the history. Hat tip to Phil Lewis’s weekly roundup at What I’m Reading, where I saw the story.
Harvard was holding on to two 175-year-old daguerrotypes of enslaved Americans “Papa Renty” and his daughter Delia, which it obtained without consent. The descendants of the people in the photos successfully wrested the prints out of Harvard’s hands so they could be displayed at the International African-American Museum in South Carolina.
Leisure
It’s open season on Ocean Vuong in the book-reviewing world, for some reason. Why? If you have theories, please comment below.
The Louvre had to close for a day so its staff could have a quiet nervous breakdown and get a break from the crush of tourists. I’ll write about this more next week, but don’t go to the Louvre; every one of Paris’s other museums is so much better. The Centre Pompidou, which focuses on modern art, has an exhibit on Black artists in Paris right now, which I really wish I could see.
A Brooklyn judge ruled that pets are legally family members.
Leisure is more rare these days because remote work has made the workday infinite, observes Axios. The Wall Street Journal points out that work meetings are going as late as 8 pm now. My personal ax to grind is that we have to stop making everything a Zoom meeting. Go back to conference calls so we don’t have to get dressed to stare with existential dread into a camera for 55 minutes.
As an early adopter of matcha lattes back in 2019, and lavender (and rose) syrups for coffee in 2020, I take pride in being a Fancy Coffee Hipster. My newest recommendation: You should try my new favorite caffeinated drink, an iced orange bianco. It’s made from coffee or espresso, milk and orange juice, and it tastes like a delicious coffee mimosa.
From Around Substack
Dalia Al-Dujaili, whose family moved from Iraq to the UK, writes for Service 95 that in a dismal historical moment of racist and anti-immigrant sentiment, she’s proud to be an immigrant daughter.
Jonathan Larsen, who has a great Substack about the influence of far-right Christian movements in US politics, reports that Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro has been soliciting private payments through his Substack.
G. Elliott Morris crunched the numbers and found that because of the liberal “No Kings” marches, anti-Trump protests in Trump’s second term far outpace his opposition in the first term. Morris concluded that “Trump is not a strongman. He’s weak.” In the immortal words of Chuck Schumer, the people are aroused.
Emily Sundberg at Feed Me writes, accurately, that the business model of Influencing means we cannot take personal recommendations, especially for luxury hospitality, at face value any more. (I do promise that I’m not in the pocket of Big Orange Bianco.)
Substack itself is becoming a hot topic of discussion again with the arrival of big names like ABC News’ Terry Moran last week as part of what Vanity Fair calls the TV news-to-Substack pipeline. Also, newly, Substack welcomed former Atlantic writer Derek Thompson, a co-author of the new book Abundance that has captivated the center right and Silicon Valley tech millionaires — and the politicians who want to kiss up to them.
Related: Substack is also looking to raise another round of financing reports Eric Newcomer from his Substack. Dylan Byers at Puck questions whether investors will buy into Substack as a (more richly valued) tech company rather than a media company since the media industry is a bit down on its luck these days.
Related: Writer Teddy Brown questions whether the arrival of big political names means all the subscription income at Substack will funnel away from the indie-blogging community to already well-funded institutional writers at the top with book deals and Personal Brands.
Related: Now that I’m publishing at least twice a week, please consider upgrading Side Quests to a paid subscription.
This is Penny, a pygmy falcon born at the San Antonio Zoo. It is also me asking you to consider upgrading your subscription for a mere 20 quarters a month, because it would show me that this content is useful to you and that I should keep it going. Media, Finance and Tech
U.S. Steel has somehow both been sold to Japan’s Nippon Steel and effectively nationalized by the Trump Administration. When I was at the WSJ, this kind of deal would have been Defcon 1, but it seems that almost no one cares now.
Tech oligarchs have a messianic and grandiose view of their own importance, Rolling Stone reports.
Laleh Khalili on the connections between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon.
The US Supreme Court declined to hear a copyright case alleging that Ed Sheeran’s hit “Thinking Out Loud” violated the intellectual property of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” I love both songs (unironically) so I just hope both teams have fun.
My favorite genre of cultural writing occurs when established writers dip into social media platforms and write about it as if they are 19th century European travelers who have just witnessed the exotic souks of Marrakech. I wish I could think about social media algorithms with this same childlike wonder, but alas, my heart is hardened and full of ash because of 30 years of exposure to Online. This week’s concerned offering comes from the London Review of Books, which examines TikTok, marvels at the For You Page as if it has just seen Sufi whirling dervishes and snake charmers instead of bog-standard influencers, and (incorrectly) concludes that the platform is radicalizing and “Faragist." It’s a particularly bizarre conclusion because a minimum of TikTok users are even in the UK, much less familiar with Nigel Farage.
Related: Trump delayed the TikTok ban for the third time, by another 90 days.
Wall Street bros are reporting pelvic floor problems, penile issues and lack of bladder control because of spending hours at their desks in front of their computers urgently yelling things like “Buy! Sell! Merge!” This is what happens when you phase out the NYSE open-outcry trading floor and turn perfectly good traders into Patagonia-clad desk jockeys. Men used to go to financial war, etc etc etc.
US Politics
One-time hedge fund manager and now persistently wrong tweeter Bill Ackman threatened on Twitter that if New York City taxes billionaires (like, coincidentally, Ackman himself), all the billionaires will move away. Cool story, bro. Where? Do you think oligarchs are going to abandon a city that’s been the US center of money and finance for all 250 years of the country’s existence? Are they going to have meetings about real estate development in Peoria? Anyway, billionaires are masters at avoiding taxes, as the New Yorker, ProPublica and Bloomberg have previously reported.
Billionaires, represented here by Don Draper, refusing to thank their richly compensated accountants for helping them to avoid paying taxes When politicians like Zohran Mamdani propose solutions that work elsewhere, liberals always call them unrealistic, writes Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs.
Related: I wrote earlier this week about the Democratic Party’s dismal, anti-woman habit of rehabilitating sexual harassers like Andrew Cuomo, which blocks progress and good policy.
Related: An Ipsos poll this week found that 62% of Democratic voters said that Democratic leaders should change. (The people! are! canonically! aroused!). Curtis Fric wrote in May about the party’s desperate need to change.
Related: With Cuomo campaigning, Bill de Blasio has been resurfacing to grind some axes against his old enemy. In this interview, de Blasio dismisses The New York Times’ view of New York politics as “ageist” and “out of touch” with the reality of the city.
There is apparently a liberal drumbeat to get billionaire Mark Cuban to run for president, Bloomberg reports. Is this how hard up Democrats are? Running their own donors for office? Chilling. Just chilling.
Chesterfield County, Virginia found that rehabilitating people struggling with addiction resulted in a dramatic drop in crime compared to punitive policing methods of throwing those people in jail repeatedly. Other cities are examining their program for tips. Compassion rather than guns and violence! Imagine that.
Global Politics
How the structural racism of apartheid South Africa became a model for the far-right.
The brilliant cover of New York Magazine this week calls Israel’s genocide in Gaza “crimes of the century.” It’s a must-read.
The United Nations chief of human rights begged world leaders to wake up to the “horrific suffering in Gaza.”
The Centre for Media Monitoring found that the BBC has been systematically biased against Palestinians in its reporting on Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Israel’s missile strikes on Tehran killed the beautiful, promising young poet Parnia Abbasi. Her poetry is here, including the moving “Extinguished Star.”
The American Prospect reports that AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, has been stalking members of Congress with hundreds of phone calls — sometimes each — and giving them specific scripts to repeat about “standing with Israel” to start a US war with Iran. Scripts! Like a little puppet show, but all the puppets are in Congress and they’re demanding death and violence.
The US is on the brink of war with Iran to support Israel. Israel lacks enough missiles and interceptors (at a cost of $20 million to $40 million each interceptor) to fend off Iran’s relentless response to Israel’s aggression in launching missiles at Tehran last week to assassinate Iran’s military and diplomatic negotiators. Iran’s missiles allegedly hit Israel’s Knesset (Parliament) and its Interior Ministry, according to Israeli posts on social media. Trump, trying to delay the inevitable because he specifically campaigned on ending all American wars, is unconvincingly insisting that the decision is in his hands and he will make a decision in two weeks.
Tucker Carlson clowned Ted Cruz for not knowing anything about Iran but still wanting to bomb it, then clowned him again about his knowledge of the Bible. The whole measuring contest between them is really more an intraparty Republican power struggle about Carlson establishing far-right “America First” dominance over a wishy-washy globalist pro-Israel centrist like Cruz, but it is still brutal and funny. Let them fight.
Related: It’s very funny that Carlson corrected Cruz on the specifics of the Bible. No one remembers this but me (but I think about it enough for both of us): Rupert Murdoch’s sketchy former fiancee — a dental hygienist who rebranded as a conservative radio host— was obsessed with Tucker Carlson and thought he had messianic powers, Michael Wolff reported in his book about Murdoch. The day after Carlson came to dinner, Murdoch mysteriously called off the engagement. You can guess why, however, from the riveting Succession-like description of the evening in Wolff’s book:
At the vineyard, it was just the three of them, and Murdoch’s dog. A social and convivial evening. Drinks first in the living room. But from the get-go there was a discordant note. “I feel like I’m going to faint,” said Smith upon meeting Carlson, grasping her hands together. Her rapt focus didn’t let up. Carlson was a TV star and used to undue reactions, but this felt over the top. Given that this was the boss’s future wife seemed to make it significantly more awkward, with Carlson unable to deflect what he thought was quickly going beyond basic starstruckness. The general political talk was continually interrupted by Smith’s praise of Carlson at random moments. Murdoch, pro-vax in all regards, chided Carlson, wondering if he was still crazy on the subject, with Smith jumping in to support Carlson and to express incredulity that anyone — in this instance, Murdoch — could defend “the kill shot.”
As dinner was served, Smith put her hand on Carlson’s and said, “I believe you’re a prophet from God.”
“Obviously a wise woman,” said Carlson, trying to joke. “No, it’s true,” she insisted. She would prove it, she said, and got up from the table and returned with a Bible. She then read passages she had previously noted presaging Carlson’s arrival in this world, his Christian purpose, and the message he would bring mankind.
Who better to correct Ted Cruz on the specifics of Genesis than a literal prophet from the Bible?
Sounds
These are stressful times, so listening to soothing music at night is practically required to calm down. My personal favorite is this guy who plays singing bowls while his large orange cat Perseus snoozes blissfully on a chic little cat-sized sofa.