Weekend Smart Reads: Friday, June 13
The best reads to make you feel smarter this weekend
Sunday Best Reads is a regular weekly feature rounding up the things you won’t regret spending time with online, because we always have our phones with us and the powers of doomscrolling can be used for good. Side Quests heard your feedback and we’re experimenting with sending this out on Friday, rather than Sunday, and I’ve added a breakout of the Top Five reads at the top. Please add your comments below and let me know what you think.
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It’s Friday the 13th, and not to trigger your triskaidekophobia, but everything does seem a wee little bit cursed.
The week ahead: Trump’s military parade (more on that below) is on Saturday June 14, and the FIFA Club World Cup starts in Los Angeles on Sunday June 15, with ICE and Border Patrol agents in the stands ready to demand “proof of legal status” from any spectator who looks suspicious — which means, of course, too brown.
The Top 5
Five things you should read this weekend if you read nothing else…accessorized with context
Here at Side Quests, we will read anything Hanif Abdurraqib writes. (His piece on summer crushes is one charming example.) In the Texas Monthly, Abdurraqib has a great profile of the grandmother of Juneteenth, Opal Lee, who says her work isn’t done yet.
Our current moment in history seems to be described with one word: Overwhelm. That can be handled through direct confrontation of the sources of exhaustion (potentially, itself, exhausting) or through the easier option of escapism. In Dirt, Kyle Tam looks at escapism through the prism of Japanese isekai stories, which are cozy tales of a more relaxed life, or, as Tam puts it, “narratives for the overworked.”
Related: “The world has always been on fire; what now?”
Related: We all need ways to calm down. Please enjoy the viral stylings of Doctor Waffle, who will soothe your inner child (or your actual child) and renew you with his Axolotl Song.
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Edmund White passed away. He was one of the most brilliant authors for our time, known primarily for his strong, wry, astute voice on gay culture; I also loved him for his nonfiction book on strolling through Paris, The Flaneur, about sauntering through a city of paradoxes. The Paris Review unlocked its Art of Fiction interview with White, and McNally Editions featured one of his last public conversations, with author Garth Greenwell.
Related: Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys also passed away, before he was to make an appearance on fellow Beach Boy Al Jardine’s tour. Wilson’s 20 best songs are listed here; how many musicians can say they have 20 best songs? Also gone this week: Sly Stone, and you can’t understand Black music without understanding Sly Stone, as The Nation accurately points out.
Related: In New York , Craig Jenkins compares the popular images of Wilson and Stone and writes about the double standards of creative genius for white and Black artists.
Animals including dogs and horses should not be forced to be weapons for the police, Alex Skopic writes in Current Affairs.
An Isaac Chotiner Q&A with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who said in a Haaretz editorial last month that current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government are a “criminal gang” committing war crimes.
Related: In 2020, Olmert warned “Israel is becoming a fascist country”
Related: In the Guardian this week, 21 Jewish scholars including genocide scholar Raz Segal denounced Harvard for expecting all Jewish people to be supportive of Israel: “We reject Harvard’s troubling assumption that being Jewish necessitates supporting Israel, or that criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza constitutes antisemitism.”
Related: Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy called for full economic sanctions on Israel for committing genocide in Gaza.
Related: In the New York Review of Books, a piece on the “Shame of Israeli Medicine” discussing the lack of condemnation among Israeli doctors for their country’s genocide in Gaza.
Leisure
It’s a crisis for cutie patooties: It’s becoming harder and more expensive to fly with your pet, the WSJ reports, and pet owners are fighting with airlines including Delta and Alaska Airlines about it.
Living longer — but at what cost? Very helpful and extremely upsetting hyper-disciplined advice obtained at a vaunted Austrian spa on how to optimize your gut health, skin, hair and nails: Chew your food thoroughly, no phones during meals, and most chilling of all, you must drink your water still and warm. Steph Robinson brings you the grim tips that will bring you longer life.
Related: Some people are using a class of diabetes drugs called SGLT2 inhibitors — even though they don’t have diabetes — to try to live longer. Recently a study showed that the most popular class of diabetes drugs, GLP-1s, hastened age-related blindness, so let’s see how it goes!
Lessons from 2025’s best lessons from graduation speeches, including Kermit the Frog and Donald Trump, per the Guardian.
Related: Previously, Side Quests rounded up the best graduation speeches — the brave ones about ending the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Finance and Media
Several members of Congress bought defense stocks just before Israel struck Iran.
How does a woman writer make her own money? Sandra Cisneros looks at Jane Austen and the perpetual poverty of creative women.
Side Quests noted in last week’s digest that the luxury market is softening. In Puck, Lauren Sherman reports that Mayhoola, the Qatari royal investment fund that once aspired to challenge luxury conglomerates Kering and LVMH, is pulling back from the high-end market.
Private equity billionaires are ruining the American dream, Megan Greenwell’s new book says.
CNN’s cost-cutting is happening under an austerity-minded German with a background at McKinsey and a long working relationship with greedy, bumbling CEO David Zaslav (who recently claimed a $51 million pay package against the wishes of shareholders), all of which bodes badly.
US Politics
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani stood up to disgraced sexual assaulter and bully Andrew Cuomo on a debate stage on Thursday: “I have never had to resign in disgrace, I have never cut Medicaid, I have never stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the MTA ... Because I am not you, Mr. Cuomo." Mamdani is leading Cuomo in the polls for the Democratic primary, as Cuomo has distributed digitally manipulated, racist and Islamophobic pamphlets about Mamdani’s candidacy.
Reductress, always pithy, on the Trump-Musk hostilities: Aw! These Billionaires are fighting over how much money to steal from poor people!
When Trump spoke at Fort Bragg this week, his team made sure there were “no fat soldiers” behind him, Rolling Stone reports.
Miranda Priestley took a chance on the “smart, fat girl” and Donald Trump is not going to make that same mistake with his soldiers. Screenshot from The Devil Wears Prada. Related: Side Quests has noted before (on Twitter) that Trump is obsessed with people’s looks in a way that makes him highly manipulatable…
…for instance, he chose JD Vance as vice president for his bright blue eyes and neatly trimmed beard — “'He's one handsome son of a bitch,' Trump told his inner circle” — and he recently couldn’t stop raving about how attractive he found the formerly ISIS-affiliated leader of Syria. Side Quests thinks — unironically — that if Hamas or Iran chooses an extremely attractive leader or negotiator, they could possibly turn this whole thing around for themselves.
Related: On Sunday, June 14, Trump will celebrate his birthday with a $25 million military parade in Washington DC. Most US adults think this is a massive waste of money, according to a new poll.
Related: Republicans are RSVPing that have other plans, notes Bess Levin in Vanity Fair.
Related: Trump’s current approval rating is at a scant 38%, with 54% of Americans disapproving of the job he’s doing including his involvement in multiple global conflicts despite promising to end US wars.
In a deeply alarming spectacle, US Senator Alex Padilla was handcuffed and roughed up by security at a press conference for puppy-killer Kristi Noem, who is currently leading the Department of Homeland Security.
The University of Michigan paid $800,000 to private investigators to surveil students, who then confronted the PIs, who then (reprehensibly) pretended to be disabled to avoid detection. After a lot of public embarrassment, the university has cancelled the contracts.
They never thought the leopards would eat their faces: The WSJ reports that the DOGE team fears they may get DOGE’d themselves now that their champion, Elon Musk, no longer works in the Trump Administration.
Mo’ money, Waymo problems: (Sorry). At the Los Angeles protests against a wave of ICE abductions, protesters called five Waymo driverless cars and set them on fire to slow down the advance of riot police. “They slashed tires, broke windows, and spray-painted anti-ICE messages. Three cars were set on fire, and at one point, ‘the besieged Waymos began honking their horns in coordinated cacophony,’ the LA Times wrote. Protesters also found Lime scooters and hoisted them on police cars gathered below.
Related: At anti-ICE demonstrations in Seattle, protesters used scooters as barricades.
Related: Waymo is a subsidiary of Alphabet, better known as Google; were Waymo to be broken out as a separate company, Wall Street analysts estimate it could be worth $60 billion.
Related: This week at Side Quests: Yes, you should protest Trump’s ICE raids.
Related: If you’re overwhelmed by where to start in thinking about the vast scope of US politics, start with choosing one issue as a “major” and another issue as a “minor” to follow, suggests writer Rachel Miller.
Geopolitics
Israel has assassinated at least 231 journalists in Gaza, and Al Jazeera published the full list of their names this week.
Every year, far-right ultranationalists — essentially Nazis — march in Paris, breaking laws created for public demonstrations, with the blessing of Macron’s government.
You’ve probably heard that Israel attacked Iran unprovoked (yet another violation of international law, but the world seems to have lost count), killing two leaders of the Iranian army as well as a nuclear scientist among hundreds of civilians living in the residential buildings that Israel targeted. Israel is currently bombing Lebanon, Syria and now Iran in addition to committing genocide in Gaza.
Side Quests must note: Apartheid South Africa pursued a similar strategy — wars on several fronts against Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Botswana — with a similar excuse of defending its own racist apartheid system against its exasperated neighbors, and the cost and effort of those conflicts led to its collapse. That collapse, in turn, also contributed to the decolonization of Africa, as Apartheid South Africa’s neighbors established sovereignty in their own independent states. Will Israel’s warmongering (and war crimes) similarly lead it to its own collapse and kick off the decolonization of the Middle East?
Related: Israel’s attack on Iran came the same day the Knesset was set to vote to dissolve the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, setting the stage for kicking him out of power. Members of the Knesset are not frustrated with the fact that he is leading a genocide, but with the fact that he insists on drafting ultra-Orthodox citizens who have said they will not serve in the army. Netanyahu’s administration survives another day.
The Cradle has a look at Trump adviser Tom Barrack and his mandate to redraw the borders of West Asia, largely for the benefit of Israel. Barrack, who is a real estate investor like other Trump advisers including Stephen Witkoff and Jared Kushner, is, like both of those colleagues, unqualified for a job in government. But that has never stopped anyone from working for Trump.