Politics

Yale professor Timothy Snyder announced this week that he and his wife Marci Shore (also a Yale prof) are leaving America and moving to Canada to teach at the University of Toronto. This is significant because Snyder is an expert on tyranny. His book On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the Twentieth Century is a succinct and vital read on the subject. It was one of the best books I read while living in Vanuatu during Trump's first term. I highly recommend it.

The first "rule," Do Not Obey In Advance, is being broken by countless individuals and corporations under Trump's second term. Once you're aware of this pithy statement, you'll start to see it happening everywhere, and it's frightening.

Here's John Lithgow reading from the book:

Asterisk interviews David Skarbek (Professor of Political Economy at Brown) about Why We Have Prison Gangs.

After his wife and two of his children were killed in Gaza, Al Jazeera journalist Wael al-Dahdouh became famous around the world for his decision to keep reporting. But this was just the start of his heartbreaking journey

A long-read for this week: The Tragedy of Palestinian Journalist Wael al-Dahdouh by Nasrine Malik for The Guardian.

Apparently, I'm "more resilient to misinformation than 89% of the US population!"

Or so says The University of Cambridge's Misinformation Susceptibility Test. How about you? I did the 20-question test and it took me just a couple minutes.

In May, Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti wrote The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel (gift link). It's an excellent read.

If you prefer to learn by listening, today, the NYTimes podcast The Daily, did an interview with Bergman that breaks it all down into an easily-understood timeline. It is a great primer on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and I encourage you to listen to it.

If you're done with that and looking for more, check out The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917--2017 by Rashid Khalidi.