I must have realized that this was a particularly powerful constellation of people for me — three of the deepest witnesses to my life. I felt it was a good time to share some confusion I was feeling. I had some years earlier returned from India, where I covered the country for The New York Times. Now I was back in America and had a biweekly column. It was allowed to be about whatever I wanted. And the freedom was proving a challenge. What should I write about? Beneath that question: What was I about?

Dan has a brilliant mind, and he is the kind of friend who really tracks you, who can say to you, despite the separation of time and distance, “It’s funny that you’re thinking X now, because you used to say Y when we talked about this at Colin’s party.” As in, the party we were at together fifteen years ago.

So we’re walking, and I’m confessing my existential confusion, and Dan, friendship archivist that he is, says: I know what your thing is.

I was skeptical. What’s that, Dan?

Simple, he said. Ideas through people.

At that monent, I was in such a state of confusion about what I was doing, should be doing, did best, should no longer be doing. And from the moment I heard his three-word offhand observation, I thought: This!

It was a real act of friendship, because Dan had hoovered up a vast pile of life data of the things I had written, the things we had bullshitted about late at night in college, the things we had read and discussed — and, wading through all of that muck, he had pulled out something simple and clarifying.

Ideas through people. I didn’t need to be sold on it at all. It felt so true from the moment he said it. I just hadn’t thought of it.

A few days later, I sent him my next New York Times column, written with this new focus in mind. “You really shook me into sense with what you said that day,” I said.

The ideas-through-people rubric helped me out of a dilemma I had long felt. I was obsessed with newspapers and journalism from my teenage years; all I had ever wanted was to write for The New York Times. But when I found my way into that work, I sometimes found it too fast, too reactive, too devoted to the update from yesterday to today, without the space and time to put things in their context. Others were far better than I was at getting the scoop, ferreting out the nugget, beating the competition. I was sometimes told I was too big-picture. On the other hand, whenever I had spent time in or near academia, I felt alienated by the abstraction of ideas for their own sake, divorced from real living. In journalism, I felt like the theory guy; among scholar types, I felt like the tabloid guy.

“Ideas through people” put it all together for me. That was what I had already been doing when I was at my best, but all too often buried in lots of other stuff. In India, I had investigated what happens to a small town when radical new ideas — natural human equality; the right and duty to make your own life, not just inherit your parents’ fate — start to take hold. In Texas, I had investigated the differences between a native-born patriotism that was akin to loving your mother whom you didn’t choose and an immigrant patriotism that was akin to loving your wife whom you did. In China, I had reported on the phenomenon of young people who didn’t associate being free with voting (which they couldn’t) so much as with openly dating and pursuing dynamic work opportunities and being able start ventures (which they could).

What Dan said clarified my sense of what I was supposed to be doing: Locate big ideas as they show up in people, as people grapple with them, argue with themselves and others over them, suffer their effects. It was a particular angle of attack, a way of working, that I embraced as my way. It meant there were many kinds of work I wouldn’t do, wouldn’t try. And that was helpful. I even began to teach a course at New York University’s journalism school. It was called, you guessed it, “Ideas Through People.” We read Katherine Boo and Adrian Nicole Leblanc and V.S. Naipaul and Svetlana​ ​Alexievich and Jimmy Breslin and Isabel Wilkerson; it was a good time.

In the books I have written since, Dan’s catchphrase has been a guiding light. Winners Take All is often summarized by others as a “takedown” of billionaires or philanthropy or Silicon Valley types or whatever. But really, in the methodology you find on the page, it’s ideas through people: it gets at those themes by getting inside people in whom contending ideas about democracy, wealth, and the common good are jousting. Same with The Persuaders, where it was less me making a case than me taking you inside the causes and minds of activists and organizers who were concerned about progressive movements more interested in finding heretics than winning converts.

In my forthcoming Man in the Mirror, the Dan Honig mandate has its fullest airing yet. When I first started reporting on the tragic case of Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny and their encounter on a New York subway, I was drawn in by the narrative of it all, by the story of these two lives, by the intricate details of the other people who began to enter the book’s telling. But, me being me, I found myself telescoping back and forth between the granularity of the project — for example, itemizing and writing a list of all the possessions of a homeless man being swept away by the New York Police Department — and the bigger human dilemmas at play here. The gritty detail, the colors and smells, mattered, as did the giant existential questions: What does it mean for a person suffering from severe mental illness to possess autonomy? What is the boundary of a city’s, a country’s, compassion? Who gets to define what is sick and what is healthy? Can constructive long-term public policy be made by short-termist elected leaders? How does a death grow into a movement? Who is granted the assumption of humanity? And, ultimately, what do we owe each other?

Yet for me, the way to answer these questions is to find them at work within people. The street is where doctrines are actually lived. In Man in the Mirror, in a hundred different human moments, the questions of our age are capsulized in a stray remark, a tense hug, a hasty decision, an act of care, an act of rage, an act of desperation.

I have never worked so hard on something, never poured so much of my heart and artistry and love of this country into something. I truly cannot wait to share it with you this fall. It’s a story of a tragedy below ground that is really a story about whether we can all find a way to live together. It’s a true crime story in which America itself is on trial. But really, I hope, it’s a story about our common humanity, and what brings us closer to it and what pulls us further way.

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I am really proud of this book, and I would love to get it into your hands. If you want to pre-order it now, it helps the cause greatly, because it sends a signal to the world, which means more people find out about it.

It’s a book written with all of my love, and I want that love to reach far and wide.

You can find it via these links:

Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Target | Walmart | Hudson Booksellers | Powell’s | Books-a-Million

And once it’s in the world, we will have many chances to read it together, talk about it together, here in the Ink community. Thank you for everything this community is.

In our Substack Live with Strout, she shared how she brought Artie to life, layering him with complexity, creating a character who embodies the intricacy and mystery of being a human in this crazy, wondrous world.

Strout also shared:

• How she began writing at age four, prompted by her mother’s suggestion that every day she jot down everything she’d seen and done

• Why she doesn’t do social media

• Why she begins writing a new book even before she’s finished with the one she’s currently working on

• How her mother’s observations about passersby—“Oh, she doesn’t look very happy to be getting home to her husband”—inflamed her young imagination and propelled her to write

• Why she didn’t publish her first book, Amy and Isabelle, until age 42, and how she credits one editor—Daniel Menaker—with launching her career. He was an editor at the New Yorker, rejecting her short story submissions, but each time encouraging her that her work was 80%, then 90% better than the other material crossing his desk. When he took a job as an editor at Random House, he acquired and published her fiction debut.

  

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Today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, author Elizabeth Strout will join us live right here for our meeting of The Ink Book Club. Strout won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for Olive Kitteridge, whose eponymous protagonist may have launched the burgeoning fiction category labeled “female rage.” In its citation, the Pulitzer committee noted that Olive is “blunt, flawed and fascinating,” which is true but perhaps understates the sting of the character’s radical candor and rejection of social niceties.

For her new book, Strout has devised a nicer yet equally memorable hero, Artie Dam, whose jovial exterior is at odds with the churn within, a discontent so deep it’s a death wish. He fixates on methods of suicide, though his wife notices nothing amiss. Strout’s portrait is of a man and his wife who harbor secrets from one another, as well as from their own conscious minds. Moreover, she asserts that these secrets are protective mechanisms: if we were totally honest all the time, life might be intolerable.

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In a recent Time piece entitled “How Elizabeth Strout Gets Inside People’s Minds,” writer Belinda Luscombe observed that “Strout’s novels are just like the Marvel Cinematic Universe except nothing happens and the multiverse is Maine” (though for this novel, Strout has relocated an entirely new cast of characters to the Massachusetts coast). Luscombe very much means that as a compliment, also noting that Strout breathes life into “non-superheroes to create recognizable, flawed, sympathetic, interesting humans.” Ann Patchett, whose latest novel, Whistler, is currently a major bestseller, recently remarked that Elizabeth Strout is her literary “north star,” that with “every book she publishes, you just think, ‘Oh well, she can’t possibly do that again.’ And then she comes out with another book and it’s even better.”

So join us for a chance to hear how Elizabeth Strout has remained at the top of her game for decades—and if you have questions ahead of the conversation, please post them here in comments.

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How to participate in the Book Club:

To participate in our meetings and author talks on Substack Live, join from your phone or tablet with the Substack app. You can also watch from your computer at The Ink, and comment and ask questions in our chat. Make sure you enable notifications, and when our meetings begin, you should receive an email alert; if you can’t find the message, check the notifications tab (the small bell-shaped icon to the upper right of the website or lower right of the app) at the time of the event to find a link.

Book Club meetings are open to paid subscribers to The Ink, so if you haven’t become part of our community, join us today!

(Photo of Elizabeth Strout by Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images)

And below are some questions for Ink subscribers to consider in connection with “The Things We Never Say”:

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The sudden universality of Knicks fandom has old-timers tskingly gatekeeping. They prowled the photos of the celebrities at games and asked: When did she become a Knicks fan? There are sneers about “transplants” from other parts of the country becoming fans right as victory neared, seeming to resent that the newcomers have cut the line of patient, long-suffering true fans.

I will confess to being perhaps the most recent Knicks fan of all. I am so recent a Knicks fan that I was surprised to learn about the silent “K.” I am so recent a Knicks fan that I thought Timothée Chalamet was the point guard. And, to be clear, it’s not specific to the Knicks. Though I’ve lived in New York most of my adult life and both of my children were born in the city, my relationship to basketball was forever marred by being picked last on school teams. If this sport doesn’t want me, then I don’t want it!

But then this whole thing happened. On the night of the finals, I found myself in Puerto Rico of all places, in a sports bar that was split 80-20 in favor of the Knicks, and I had become so possessed by fandom that I was directing most of my cheers to this couple nearby that was loudly whistling for the Spurs, and I kept screaming at them to “Remember Game 4,” as though I were some kind of keeper of the scrolls. And then last night I was somehow in a blue-and-orange jersey I fished out of my closet, and my children had Knicks-coded glitter smeared on their faces, and my son even painted one arm blue and the other orange, which made him look less like a basketball fan than someone staging a covert military advance in an artificially colored jungle.

New York fans losing their minds at the sports bar in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

So where do we fit in this frenzied fandom, we the non-fan fans, the fannies-come-lately? Why are we so moved? What are we cheering for, those of us who think a “pick and roll” is a kind of sandwich, a “lay-up” is a short nap, and an “alley-oop” is a sex act more commonly undertaken in Europe?

Here is one theory. In cheering for New York’s Knicks, we were also cheering for the Knicks’ New York. Rooting for a team that staged jaw-dropping comebacks is also rooting for a city whose raison d’etre is comebacks — second chances in a new nation, reinventions of the self, overcomings of odds. In relishing a team whose superpower is instinctual mutual knowledge, who know each other like kin even though they are not, we saw a reflection of the chosen families so many of us forge in New York. And in celebrating a team built not on the superstar model but that of the orchestra, we were standing up for the power of what emerges spontaneously from diverse groups, no matter what the autocrats will tell you.

To cheer for the Knicks’ New York is to stand up not only for New York but for the city in general, the idea of the city, an idea under threat in Donald Trump’s America. Cities like this, we are told, are not meant to work. Too much ethnic mixing, too much freedom, too much chaos, too much disorder, too many immigrants, too many genders, too many people on the edge’s edge.

And you have to admit, if you want to be fairminded, that there is no reason this should work. Let’s have eight million people jammed together in the smallest space possible, and let’s deprive most of them of amenities that people elsewhere take for granted, and let’s make it so expensive that even rich people feel poor, and let’s make people work at their edge so that everyone else has to work at their edge to keep up — if someone pitched you this idea as on “Shark Tank,” you might tell them it was nice of them to come in, you’ll call if interested.

And yet it works. Oh, how it works. You don’t end up with a housing crisis if no one wants to live there, after all. People want in on this place they can’t possibly afford. They are willing to submit to a poverty they could avoid elsewhere — for what, exactly? The intangible magic of these eight million other people, this assemblage of all the dreams from all the places, the thrill of living surrounded by so much trying. There is something incandescent about living around so many people who didn’t take the advice to do the easier, safer, known thing, who said no to the family occupation, said no to Iowa, said no to conversion therapy, said no to accounting as a backup.

Cities like this are also supposed to not work because of all the difference. You’ve got every race under the sun here, every country of origin, every religion that thinks the people who do not subscribe to it are going to hell or at least out of their mind, you’ve got your capitalists in their fleece vests, you’ve got your socialist mayor, you’ve got roots of many generations and transplants, you’ve got people whose people in other places would kill each other if they met each other, but here they will split a cab.

To scream and dance for the Knicks’ New York is to scream and dance for this, too — for the shouldn’t-work-but-does of it all. For the ennobling experience of sharing earth with those not your blood, for the faith in strangers that makes you choose them over your native village in Pakistan even before you purchase the flight ticket, for the knowledge that the helter-skelter, emergent brilliance of diverse people sharing space will always outshine and outlast those who declaim that they and only they can fix it.

Cities are facts. Countries are fictions. This I will defend to the death. I have walked the time-chewed ruins of Rome, the teeming riverbank of Istanbul, the shoulder-width lanes of Old Delhi. So many pretentious countries around each of them came and went. They were this empire, that empire, this totalism, that totalism, this national self-conception and that one. One day you’re the Roman Empire, overlording all. The next day, you’re a bunch of regions struggling to add up to something as big as mere Italy. Life comes at nation-states fast.

But cities endure. They endure because the people who are there are there for the other people, and this somehow lasts. They continue to congregate and pollinate and make shit and dance in the streets even as the countries around them cycle through follies and regimes and disastrous devaluations and ideological purges and pivots. Cities generally don’t declare thousand-year reiches or claim a century will be theirs. They don’t need to fake it till they make it. They know they will outlast so much of what surrounds them, because they have what nations can only envy: people who do not need a flag or a song or a recited pledge to feel they have need for each other.

But now New York has these Knicks. And so do I. And part of what we’re all cheering is the knowledge that what is happening here, what always has, will outlast the madness, the cruelty, the lack of imagination of those who fear the magic.

[UPDATE: An hour after posting this, I ran into Spike Lee on the street. We fist-bumped, the oldest fan and the newest fan united in joy.]

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Last photo: Adam Gray/Getty

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First things first: Join us live today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern for an exclusive conversation with acclaimed novelist Rebecca Makkai about chairing this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction jury. She promises to spill some tea about what goes on behind the scenes. We’ll also ask the "I Have Some Questions for You” author what else she’s reading now.

Our Ink Book Club selection for June is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say. (We will sit down for a live conversation with the author on Wednesday, June 17 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern.) Somehow in our snark-infested, virality-obsessed culture, a novel whose drama is contained mainly inside the head of a New England schoolteacher is one of the bestselling books in the country.

On the outside, Artie Dam is viewed variously by his family and friends as a decent, amiable man, though perhaps slightly “dopey.” To his son Rob, “he was an enigma…his father had always been Jolly Artie, and Rob felt there had to be more to him. But he could not really find it.” None of those around him are aware of how much feeling churns within--that Artie is a tortured soul obsessed with suicide. Strout writes that Artie’s wife Evie “was unaware–even after their thirty-four years of married life–of the deep pockets of sensitivity that Artie had.”

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Strout’s eleventh novel subtly, expertly captures our fractious times, and the toll its accompanying divisiveness has wrought on our emotional health. She identifies the dissonance between the way the world perceives us — and what we choose to signal — and what’s really transpiring within the whirling dervishes of our brains.

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Early on in the book, Strout suggests a reversal of the idea that “no man is an island.” What her characters represent is that while we may be interconnected in various ways, at a fundamental level, we are actually isolated beings, alone on our individual islands. In other words, our present collective loneliness should come as no surprise.

Despite its sense of quiet despair, why does The Things We Never Say leave the reader with a sense of life’s beauty, of optimism? Novelist Maggie Shipstead put her finger on it in her New York Times review of the book: “A loss of innocence is possible at any age, but the pain of disillusionment can have a silver lining: the opportunity to live with a deeper understanding of reality.”

We’d love to hear your thoughts on Artie and The Things We Never Say. We’ll sit down with the author herself later this month to discuss her process, where she finds inspiration, and why she felt compelled to attribute much of Artie’s discontent to the era of Trump.

And don’t forget to join us for a behind-the-scenes chat with Rebecca Makkai, chair of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction jury. We may even get a sense of how Angel Down, by Daniel Kraus — a WW I novel with elements of horror and magical realism narrated in one endless sentence — beat out a fan favorite, Audition, by Katie Kitamura, to win the Pulitzer. Please join us! Here’s Makkai’s Substack piece “Book Prizes Don’t Work How You Think.”

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Below, you’ll find some discussion and reflection prompts to consider. The Ink Book Club’s events are open to all paid subscribers to The Ink. If you haven’t yet become part of our community, join today. And if you’re already a member, consider giving a gift or group subscription.

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As the Democratic primary contest for an open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan heats up, we’re revisiting my conversation with, and reflections on, one of the top contenders, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. What struck me most in this conversation was El-Sayed’s idea of his political project as not simply to win the war against Trumpism, but to “win the peace” — which is to say, eliminate the conditions that made Trumpism possible. Let us know what you think.

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Here is a strange thing about politics. It’s a competitive arena in which people win by distinguishing themselves from others. And it’s an arena so lacking in originality. How often do you hear a political leader say something truly inspired, or even just slightly fresh? How often do you notice them actually thinking out loud, the mind still active, still with questions, not answers given to them on Post-It notes by an aide?

It is rare enough that, when it happens, it sometimes takes me a second to realize it. But that’s what happened when I interviewed Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. He is a doctor and public health professional in Michigan who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018 and is now running for the U.S. Senate.

What took me time to register was that El-Sayed was doing something more interesting than explaining why he should win his primary. He was laying out a vision for how America can finally be done with Trumpism. Like, actually done.

I don’t think I’ve heard these ideas put together like this in a package before. Each one will have its share of critics. But I think the whole package is worth a look.

The bottom line is this. A lot of what Democrats have ended up offering is contempt for Trump voters and moderate policy ideas. Dr El-Sayed is suggesting a reversal on both counts: radical empathy for Trump voters (which will rankle progressives) and radical change to eradicate the social conditions that enabled Trump (which will rankle moderates). Let them be rankled.

1. The bully and the posse

Growing up with the name Abdul, the son of immigrants from Egypt, El-Sayed knew a thing or two about bullying.

What he sees in Trump is a bully par excellence. But bullies are often secretly weak, El-Sayed observed. What props them up is their posse. Trump’s posse is millions of voters. Without their allegiance, he is a childhood-scarred, semi-literate, narcissistic bully halfwit. With their allegiance, he has a path to making himself Caesar.

El-Sayed argues, therefore, that the pro-democracy movement must obsessively seek to separate the posse from the bully. Which means adopting a posture that some fellow Democrats may not like: showing what he calls “radical empathy” for Trump voters, and viewing the choice millions made as an expression of desperation in an unresponsive system, a shout into the void.

That means not lapsing into the condescension toward lay voters that feels so satisfying and, oftentimes, so justified. It means not calling them Magats and brainwashed and irredeemable racists all. It means strategically biting your tongue and opening your arms. For winning’s sake.

Confront the bully. But woo the posse.

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2. Don’t prove them wrong. Get them to right

Winning movements don’t humiliate potential followers. They fix them a drink.

Trump’s chaotic and economy-quaking opening months are already causing lots of pain for his own supporters, let alone all the other people in his policy crosshairs.

Open any social media site, and what do you see these days? Gleeful Democrats sharing stories of MAGA types now being hurt by the policies they voted for.

Understandable psychologically? Yes. Smart politically? No. Not even a little bit.

Dr. El-Sayed framed the approach he favors instead succinctly: “We’ve got to get folks to being right, not prove them wrong.”

What’s the difference? It’s about creating, he says, “a space within which you felt safe enough…to say, you know what?, I made a mistake.”

So next time you hear a veteran who voted for Trump complaining about benefit cuts, or a shopkeeper complaining about tariffs, or a CEO complaining about the stock market, resist the temptation to gloat. If you want to save your country from hell, invite these potential newcomers to the pro-democracy cause in. Pour them a drink.

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3. America is good, actually

In some of the progressive circles Dr. El-Sayed travels in, well-earned critiques of American policy and history can sometimes devolve into contempt for America.

Progressives have a patriotism problem, often conceding the flag to those who would break the country rather than share it. They become so consumed with what is wrong with the country that they forget to say whether there is anything they love about it, and they leave the impression, sometimes true, sometimes not, that they think it irredeemably flawed, rotten at the root.

This is fine for your academic seminar. But please keep this pose out of politics. Because it’s risking the republic itself and plays right into Donald Trump’s hands.

Dr. El-Sayed, as a child of Egyptian immigrants, has a way into this issue that is compelling and worth listening to. He knows all the critiques leveled at America; he levels many of them himself. But his dualness — being from here and being from there — gives him another way of seeing.

He spoke in our conversation about going back to Egypt in his youth. He would sit with his grandmother who, he said, half-jokingly (or maybe not?), would sit with him and tell him that this cousin of his was better looking than Abdul, and this one more athletic, and this one smarter. But you know what Abdul had, his greatest gift that would matter more than any of these others? He would soon be leaving Egypt.

It’s a bittersweet truth that many of us with similar experiences of dualness know from childhood. And many of us who, like El-Sayed, would grow up to have criticisms of how America functions would also, like El-Sayed, never forget that America has real and profound gifts, that it offers many, many people — not enough, but more than most places — life chances and an opportunity to flourish and create and speak and become the fullest version of yourself. That this is a great country, which is, sadly, language many progressives would find way too cringe. Enjoy autocracy, guys!

What El-Sayed reminds us is that to be a progressive who comes partly from somewhere else can be to hold two competing ideas in tension: that America is flawed, and is built on ideals and ways rare in history and worth defending.

“America sucks” is a lazy shrug too often heard in progressive organizing spaces, and it is weirdly provincial in its obliviousness to how life is in other places around the world, and what El-Sayed is pointing toward instead is a progressive patriotism.

“I love America because I know exactly what my life would have ended up as if I didn’t, but for the accident of history, get to grow up here,” he told me. And: “My critiques about America are about the difference between what she gave me…and what she has not given too many kids.”

His advice to Democrats and progressives: “Wrap yourself in the flag as you demand the flag represent the things that you believe are best about this country.”

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4. Fighting Trump isn’t enough. Win the peace

Since Inauguration Day, I, like so many of you and so many across the country, have argued that Democrats need to show fight.

Boneless and skinless is fine for chicken thighs. It’s not adequate for a party that purports to be interested in beating back an attempted authoritarian breakthrough.

But El-Sayed challenged my thinking on the fight point. A former team captain in school sports before he became a Rhodes Scholar and a medical doctor, he pointed to scars on his face and spoke obliquely about not being afraid to fight when needed.

But he argued Democrats need to be more interested in winning the peace than the war: “Nobody fights the war to just win the war. You fight the war to win the peace.”

What he means is remaining focused on healing the causes of the pain that made Trump possible, instead of over-fixating on Trump as the sum total of the ill.

The mantra to fight more and fight harder, which I have touted as much as anyone, risks fetishizing fight for its own sake. The real goal, El-Sayed says, must be creating conditions where the fighting is unnecessary.

And how do you win the peace?

5. The age of insecurity

There are a lot of ways to frame the times we live in. But El-Sayed offered one that stuck with me: this is an age of insecurity.

What’s powerful about insecurity as a grand unified theory is that it encompasses all manner of sentiments, from all sections of the political spectrum, some based in reality, others more in fantasy, but all with emotive, often explosive political effect.

Brutal hyper-capitalism creates insecurity. Not being able to afford things creates insecurity. Feeling vulnerable to crime creates insecurity. Feeling deluged across a poorly managed border creates insecurity. Racial and gender progress, when you are not well prepared for your own new role and standing, creates insecurity. New and unfamiliar ideas about history and the meaning of your country create insecurity. New technology and the threat of obsolescence create insecurity. The loss of control over one’s children and their vulnerability to outside influences creates insecurity.

You will no doubt identify with some forms of insecurity listed above, and not with others. El-Sayed’s point is that insecurity in general has been roiling our hearts and politics, and has achieved what he, a public health doctor, calls “epidemic” status.

“The thing about insecurity is that you may have what you need right now, but you’re constantly at risk of losing it.”

So part of winning the peace beyond Trumpism, rather than just making war with Trump, is addressing the roots of insecurity.

And how bold should Democrats be in doing that?

6. Abolish vanilla

Some of El-Sayed’s arguments above — the radical empathy part of his solution — might strike some Democrats as too solicitous of Trump voters, too eager to make accommodations. But El-Sayed is not a mushy moderate. Rather, I think of him as being in the mold of many of the organizers I wrote about in my book The Persuaders: advocating more flexibility on how you reach out to and court moderates and MAGA voters, but more stridency in policymaking.

A lot of what you see from Democrats right now is the opposite: Snideness and condescension toward MAGA types, but mushy moderate policies. El-Sayed wants to flip that script: Gentle, openhearted outreach and aggressive, even radical, policy.

“You can't beat something with nothing,” he told me. “And, love him or hate him, when it comes to Donald Trump, he's always saying something. And the problem that folks have with Democrats is that we say nothing, but we say it with a lot of enthusiasm. It’s like somebody screaming ‘Vanilla!’ at you. You're like, Well, I don't know, what if I like cookie dough? What if I like cookies and cream? What if I like Rocky Road? The folks are like, ‘Vanilla! vanilla!’”

El-Sayed has advocated aggressive policy responses to America’s overlapping crises — including Medicare for All, which he wrote an entire book about. Whatever you think about individual policy questions, the larger point is worth grappling with: that the proper place for moderation is in the stance one shows to potentially politically adrift Americans. The place for unbending passion is on substantive policy ideas that would drastically change the country, drain some of the insecurity, and therefore heal the conditions that enabled Trump, so that we don’t keep returning to square one.

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7. Reclaim common sense

Listening to El-Sayed, it struck me that he was pushing against both his fellow progressives and the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party, in distinct ways.

His message to progressives is to ditch the label. I am referring to him as a progressive, but he didn’t call himself that, although his policy vision lines up with any conventional definition. But he seemed determined to frame ideas like clean air and water, healthcare for all, ending wasteful wars, and such as basic common sense, not radical or out of the mainstream. (Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been making similar arguments on her “Fighting Oligarchy” tour stops.)

But he also has a bracing message for those moderates so singularly fixated on Trump that they think the goal of political struggle should be to return America to the day before the golden escalator ride in 2015. “That’s our own version of Make America Great Again. It just happens to be 2015 instead of 1930-something,” he told me.

America wasn’t working for most people in 2015. The way to move past Trumpism is to champion drastically, boldly upending what wasn’t working, and to do so with an openhearted posture toward converts who will have many reasons to seek a new political home in the days that are coming.

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What exactly is the country being celebrated for 250 years of independence this July?

What is really about? What is its essential character? Or should we stop asking such annoying questions and just do fireworks?

This is the challenge Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., the Princeton University professor and author, poses to us with his new book, “America, U.S.A.” What does it mean to celebrate America, he asks, at a moment of what he calls a “second lost cause,” a moment of backsliding away from everything Americans profess to believe?

Has America, Glaude asks, become a country of “freedom snatchers,” rather than “freedom seekers”?

We sat down with him to discuss that and other questions. Some of what we discussed:

• How big anniversaries like the coming Semiquincentennial are sometimes used to make us disremember more than remember

• How 2026 resembles a national anniversary we celebrated in 1926, which Glaude calls “the decade of the Ku Klux Klan”

• Why, despite the wave of white grievance and hatred, and the demolition of legislation like the Voting Rights Act, in the words of one of the professor’s students, “We should live by love but carry the anger.”

• Why Glaude thinks of teaching as a subversive activity

Note: You might want to listen to this book on audio, to hear the original music commissioned just for Glaude text.

Our live videos are open to all. To watch the full replay, become a paid subscriber and stand up for real thought, reporting, and interviews in an age of artificial everything.

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And join us this Friday, June 5 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern for a conversation with novelist and fellow Substacker Rebecca Makkai about helming the Pulitzer Prize fiction committee this year, and what she looks forward to reading over the summer.

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Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. opens his harrowing new work, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, with this declaration: “I do not love America, and never have, especially now.” And yet the emotion and scholarship with which he pokes and prods his subject suggests a deep caring.

In advance of America’s 250th this July 4th, Glaude interrogates the meaning of “this supposed day of freedom,” what it might mean to “those who bore the brunt of the country’s refusal to live up to its promise.” He invokes Frederick Douglass: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?...To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license.” The words of W.E.B. DuBois, John Dos Passos, James Baldwin, Herman Melville also enrich throughout.

The book’s thesis is that “Like the celebrations before it, the Semiquincentennial reaches back to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.” He observes that there is a “doubleness,” a “paradox” that rests at our nation’s heart, and taints its founding. Glaude doesn’t mince words: The backlash to “wokeness,” DEI, and Black Lives Matter “has been swift and harsh…Mirrors shattered, people who claimed to be allies now worried about the overreach…the celebration of 250 years since founding hides the broken glass beneath our feet.” And: “The ugliness of what white people believe about color—that somehow, in some inscrutable way, the color of one’s skin determines your value.” For those who proclaimed the death of racism: “The country has given us Donald Trump, and we have to deal with the madness again. The pounding in the skull returns as we struggle to beat back the ‘intolerable bitterness of spirit,’ because these people have done this shit again.”

There is an electricity, a visceral quality to this work that discomfits, provokes, disturbs. And yet there is a musicality to the prose, which is amplified by the bars of original music written for the book by classical composer Joel Thompson.

We hope you’ll join the Ink Book Club for a Substack live conversation with Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. Monday, June 1 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern. The bestselling author of Begin Again—a James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton—will be with us to discuss his “elegy that mourns the country we thought we knew,” and how we can reclaim hope, which is “shadowed by ambivalence at the crossroads.”

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In the book’s acknowledgments, the author writes: “This has been one of the most difficult books I have ever written…thinking about Donald Trump and this perilous moment in the nation’s 250th year has brought me to the brink of madness.”

And yet Glaude concludes that “America is possible if we imagine it so, if we tell ourselves better stories and follow the signs, like those on the quilts of the enslaved, that direct us to the path of freedom.” He warns against letting Trump and his supporters achieve their aim—to “occupy our imaginations.”

In this deeply felt, deeply researched book, Glaude leaves it all on the page. Join us for what will no doubt be an enlightening, engaged conversation.

And if you’re not already a subscriber to Glaude’s Substack, “A Native Son,” check it out!

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Below, you’ll find some discussion and reflection prompts to consider. The Ink Book Club’s events are open to all paid subscribers to The Ink. If you haven’t yet become part of our community, join today. And if you’re already a member, consider giving a gift or group subscription.

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Join us right here at 11 a.m. Eastern, to talk with bestselling novelist Courtney Maum about the hoops she’s jumping through—and the opportunities she’s carving out—to launch her sixth novel, Alan Opts Out, to be published June 2. For one, the bestselling fiction writer and author of the popular Substack “Before and After the Book Deal” will share tidbits about the making of her latest, a light-hearted satirical novel in which uber-ambitious ad executive Alan Anderson’s pitch to represent the dairy industry totally flops, bringing his wife Vivian’s gradiose social aspirations to a crashing halt. Alan’s epic fail also prompts him to rethink his single-minded devotion to capitalism and its excesses, and vow to discard the consumerist trappings with which he and his family have surrounded themselves. Amid the billionaire oligarchs swarming our country, Maum’s fantasy of a return to a Waldenesque existence is thought-provoking summer fun.

We’ll also get an insider’s take from Maum on what happens after an author turns in her manuscript to her editor. There are all the revisions and decisions about everything from cover art to who will narrate the audio version of your book. Will you reach out for blurbs? Use the old author photo or spring for a new one? If you want to eschew airplane travel for your 15-city publicity tour, how will you get from city to city? In Maum’s case, by the way, she’s decided to turn it into cross-country road adventure. We’ll also chat about other books coming out in the next few months that we’re especially excited about, as it is the season for summer reading.

We hope you’ll come to today’s conversation at 11 a.m. Eastern with any questions you have about what goes on behind the scenes of a book launch. Is Maum nervous about how the novel will resonate? What is she taking with her on her road trip? Did our current politics inform her storyline? Do you harbor fantasies of checking out? Join us!

And let us know how you’re enjoying our June Ink Book Club selection, The Things We Never Say, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout, with whom we’ll sit down next month for a live conversation.

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How to participate in the Book Club:

To participate in our meetings and author talks on Substack Live, join from your phone or tablet with the Substack app. You can also watch from your computer at The Ink, and comment and ask questions in our chat, but you won’t be able to join the live video discussion. Make sure you enable notifications, and when our meetings begin, you should receive an email alert; if you can’t find the message, check the notifications tab (the small bell-shaped icon to the upper right of the website or lower right of the app) at the time of the event to find a link.

Book Club meetings are open to paid subscribers to The Ink, so if you haven’t become part of our community, join us today!

1. What is on your TBR pile now?

2. Are you an aspiring writer? If so, are you in a writers’ group or enrolled in any writing programs or ever hired a writing coach?

3. Do you dream, as Maum’s protagonist Alan does, of downsizing and living a simpler life?

4. Have you had experienced any recent crises that, like Alan, that led you to make some major lifestyle changes? Share with us.

5. While you won’t had the opportunity yet to read Maum’s latest, will you join in anyway to hear Courtney’s thoughts on the current publishing landscape? Let us know!

   photo of Courtney Maum by Michelle Gevint

Politicians are paid to enact policies. So typically when they describe what’s wrong, they speak of policies that got us into our messes and policies to get us out.

Murphy’s inquiry took him somewhere else — beyond the familiar territory of prescription-drug prices and block-grant funding, into the substrate of our inner life.

What he found in his interactions with constituents and conversations with scholars and reading was a spiritual rot, a death of relationship, a connection recession.

To be clear, in his analysis and that of others, the causes of much of this affliction are very much political, very much in the realm of policy. But what Murphy’s thinking and now writing make clear is that what happens in politics and policy doesn’t stay there. It ultimately trickles down into our relationships, our marriages, our stress hormones, our childhoods, our neighborhood vibes, our hangouts, our conversations with the barista, our block parties, our friendships.

This week Senator Murphy pushed “Crisis of the Common Good,” a book-length investigation of how capitalism and other forces in American life have cut into our civic dance with each other and wormed their way into every last fiber of our culture.

It is a project I’m fascinated by, because it involves someone in a position of political power widening the scope of inquiry to ask how the things he works on affect other things not typically regarded as political.

So I was thrilled to have this conversation with the senator today. We talked about:

— Why he thinks America’s real problem is much deeper than Trump

— How private equity is coming between married couples

— Whether Republicans or Democrats will be first to pull off a potential political realignment that is there for the taking

— Whether Bernie Sanders was right all along (and where he fell short)

— Why the Democratic Party refuses to introspect

— And whether he will run for president (cameo: the other presidential contenders who have been texting him this week)

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Few people are more qualified to understand the inner life of this vital relationship as Evan Osnos. Osnos is a staff writer for The New Yorker (it’s like a Substack but printed out), a longtime China-based correspondent, and now someone who reports deeply about American life in this age of tempests.

From Osnos’s book “Age of Ambition,” on China, to his more recent work digging into the roots of American rage and the lives of America’s oligarchs, Osnos has always concerned himself with the individual-, human-level happenings that are the stuff of any nation’s rise, fall, or muddling through.

It’s a perspective I found sorely lacking when absorbing much of the recent commentary about President Trump’s visit to China. So many commentators on foreign policy are focused on the question of who will be more powerful — the dominance frame. But this frame, while useful in certain ways, misses so much of what is really going inside China — and, therefore, of what drives its behavior.

So I was thrilled to be able to have this extended conversation with Osnos about China, America, and their ties — and to discuss with him the kinds of things you can’t always explore in a three-minute cable hit:

— How does China view Trump and the era of American chaos he presides over?

— What does the dominance frame miss about what China as a government and the Chinese people as a people aspire to?

— What kinds of world power is China indeed interested in — and which less so? Is China interested in American-style policing of the world and unrivaled hegemony, or rather in the removal of constraints on it?

— What does the Chinese socioeconomic experience of the last generation prove or disprove about democracy and prosperity? And is a successful run now curdling?

— Why does China not listen to its billionaires the way the United States does? And what does that tell us about our democracy?

— What do public aspirations to “freedom” look like in China today? Electoral democracy? The elimination of want? Accountability? Unfettered speech?

— How can everyday Americans educate themselves to understand the real China and the aspirations of the people who make it up, and not be limited by the international-relations types’ obsession with who will run the world in the twenty-first century?

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The America-China relationship is as mystifying as it is important, and few people are better placed to help us understand it. Osnos has reported extensively from both countries, and I think …

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“As I look back at my work,” novelist Elizabeth Strout observed in a recent interview, I realize that I’ve been increasingly interested in the idea that not only do we not understand other people, we probably don’t know who we are in reference to other people.” And for coach and high school teacher Artie Dam, the protagonist of Strout’s profoundly tender and perceptive latest, The Things We Never Say, that realization has produced an existential despair that leads him to contemplate various ways of killing himself without letting on to his wife and son that he’s died by his own hand. He quietly obsesses over the options, while outwardly maintaining a cheerfulness many view as bordering on dim-witted.

This is a novel about Trump-era instability and angst—a simmering panic about to boil over—and a loneliness felt more deeply when loved but not truly seen. In Artie’s case, he is beloved by his family and entire community of students, colleagues, and friends, yet he shares his suffering with no one. The author has referred to what she is getting at here as “the singularity and mystery of each person,” who “held within themselves a vast, unknowable universe.” (Anyone wondering why Belle Burden’s Strangers has been such a success can stop on that observation.) Miraculously, Strout’s fictional lens nurtures comprehension and compassion—for ourselves and others—a kind of new-born empathy that great novels often produce in a reader. I think this is Strout’s best book since Olive Kitteridge, for which she won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It’s also her most political book. While past novels have made passing references to the cruelty of the Trumpian universe, there’s a whole new level of internalized chaos that Artie, for one, inhabits, as he frantically combs history books for parallels to the rising tide of fascism he sees emerging. Sadly, his state of mind rings as familiar. That Strout also manages to inject humor into these scenarios is another measure of her subtle brilliance.

The Things We Never Say is the Ink Book Club’s June selection, and Elizabeth Strout will be our guest later this month, after she returns from the European leg of her promotional tour. We will announce that date shortly.

Meantime, on Wednesday, May 27 at 12:30 p.m. EDT, we will host a special Ink Book Club Live with Courtney Maum, author of Alan Opts Out, which hits bookstores on June 2. In its starred review, Publishers Weekly called Maum’s satiric novel “a fierce and funny portrait of late-stage capitalism and its limited supply of happiness.”

Maum will also talk to us about her Substack, “Before and After the Book Deal,” and exchange notes on what we’ll be reading this summer. Please join us, and let us know what’s on your TBR pile this season!

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And here are a few of the books I’m taking with me to the Jersey shore to celebrate the long weekend, a mix of advance galleys and finished books.

Below, you’ll find some discussion and reflection prompts to consider. The Ink Book Club’s events are open to all paid subscribers to The Ink. If you haven’t yet become part of our community, join today. And if you’re already a member, consider giving a gift or group subscription.

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America, it is often said, is a nation of immigrants. But is it becoming a nation of emigrants — a country that drives people away in search of greener pastures?

Today I talked with the expat American writer about that question.

In Tramuta’s insightful essay in Bitter Southerner, she reports:

A recent Gallup poll found that 40 percent of women aged 15 to 44 would leave the U.S. if they could — a figure that has quadrupled in the last decade. This slice of the population also has the lowest confidence in American institutions.

That frustration is inspiring many to take action. Ireland’s Central Statistics Office reported a 96 percent jump in American emigration between April 2024 and April 2025. France has likewise reported an increase in long-stay visa requests from Americans, and in the United Kingdom, 6,618 U.S. citizens applied for British citizenship in the 12 months leading up to March 2025 — the highest number since records began in 2004. Germany, which allows descendants of Nazi-era victims to apply for and reclaim citizenship, processed 48 percent more applications from U.S. citizens at consulates across the U.S. in 2025 after Trump’s inauguration than in 2024.

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The prophets of Silicon Valley say jobs are going away. We disagree. Today we’re doubling down on human creativity, for which there will never be a substitute.

Never has the news been more mystifying. Never have so many mainstream news organizations been so afraid to tell it like it is. Never has it been more important to make real sense of what is going…

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America, it is often said, is a nation of immigrants. But is it becoming a nation of emigrants — a country that drives people away in search of greener pastures?

The expat American writer Lindsey Tramuta explores this question in a powerful new essay in Bitter Southerner. She will be my guest for a live today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern.

Join the live at 12:30 pm ET

And check out Tramuta’s…

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