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I’m out today and next Friday, which means you’re getting a short note now and nothing next week because I believe in the sanctity of days off. But maybe brevity is alright anyway: It’s been a disorienting end to a chaotic month.
Jacob Blake, shot seven times in the back by a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is recovering though may never walk again. Anthony Huber, who was 26 and part of the cascading protests against racist police violence in the city, is dead. He was killed along with another, unnamed, man, trying to protect others as a 17-year-old white counterprotester named Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire on a crowd. In stills from a video I can’t bring myself to watch, you can see Huber using his skateboard in an attempt to disarm Rittenhouse. In another video filmed earlier that night, Rittenhouse can be seen interacting with Kenosha police. He wore a backward baseball cap and carried a rifle. The officers thanked him and a group of militiamen for being there. Gave him a bottle of water. |
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Due South, a hurricane barreled through the Gulf Coast, causing a chemical fire in Louisiana. Out West, California burned. Everywhere, the pandemic claimed more lives, and more people lost access to their benefits. Nightly broadcasts of the Republican National Convention served as a fittingly obscene backdrop to these days of extreme violence and overlapping crisis. It’s a lot happening at once.
Trying to keep up, one moves from a sense of extreme despair to extreme possibility, often in rapid succession, over and over again, which is maybe just what it feels like to be alive right now.
I’ll see you in September for more disorientation. Take care of yourselves and others until then.
—Katie McDonough, deputy editor |
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Don’t Call It a Boycott
On that feeling of extreme possibility, Nick wrote about the Milwaukee Bucks rejecting the theatrical solidarity of the league in a bubble by going on strike, which spread across other teams. In the piece, there’s an urgent question from Raptors guard Fred VanVleet: “What are we willing to give up? Do we actually give a fuck about what’s going on, or is it just cool to wear Black Lives Matter on a backdrop or wear a T-shirt? Like, what does that really mean? Is it really doing anything?” |
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The Real, Paranoid Housewives of the Republican Convention
And back to extreme despair as Melissa offers a tour through the Trump-era iteration of violently aggrieved white womanhood. “Like older cults of white innocence, it recasts the violence as self-defense, the aggressor as the victim,” she writes. “Trump has perfected it, even as it is lightly greased with macho posturing; he plays a fantasy of a white woman well.” |
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Private Equity Is Cannibalizing the Post-Pandemic Recovery
And deeper into despair, Jen takes a look at how vulture firms helped create the conditions of economic collapse before the pandemic, and how they are now cleaning up. |
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| Jen was on The Politics of Everything this week, which is TNR’s very good podcast. Listen as she explains how much of the coverage of the pandemic collapses distinctions among women workers, leaving us with a wildly imprecise, flattened image of the fallout of our economic collapse. (You can also hear her struggle to bring herself to say the word “shecession.”) |
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