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    Usha Vance is a closed book – but her Goodreads account is surprisingly revealing | Arwa Mahdawi

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    From Roman-era political potboilers to stories of Catholic priests struggling to impose their authority, what could the reading list of vice-president JD Vance’s wife be trying to tell us?Usha Vance, a very clever woman with dubious taste in men, likes to keep herself busy. While lesser mortals (me) waste their one wild and precious life watching Love Is Blind, the second lady has various self-improvement projects on the go. She’s brushing up on her German! She’s hosting a literacy podcast! She’s rereading the classics! And, of course, she’s juggling four young children and the demands of being the vice-president’s spouse.How does she do it all? With the help of taxpayer dollars, I suspect. Easier to get some reading done when you’re being helicoptered everywhere and, as JD Vance has boasted: “People go to the grocery store for me.” Continue reading… More

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      How to escape our collective paralysis in ‘these uncertain times’

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      Author Natasha Lennard discusses how to disrupt the ‘certainties’ that don’t serve us and how to fight backAt the onset of the Covid pandemic in 2020, journalist Natasha Lennard started noticing a constant thrum of collective apprehension, epitomized in the phrase “in these uncertain times”. The expression acknowledged we didn’t have solutions for many of society’s problems: a globally spreading virus, the rise of the far right and stark “haves v have-nots” inequalities. In the years since, that “uncertainty” hasn’t gone anywhere, risking enabling paralysis – not knowing where to start to fix things and therefore giving up before trying.In her new book, On Un/Certainty: The Uses of Doubt in Dangerous Times, Lennard, who also was an organizer in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, deconstructs the problematic nature of giving in to uncertainty. She also uses the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 1969 book On Certainty to question what is held as “certain” in today’s world, and who gets to make those calls. Continue reading… More

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      in US Politics

      When is the right time to compare US politics to the Nazi era? This expert on Christian nationalism says: now

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      Robert P Jones argues that declining white Christian influence has fuelled an alliance with Trump, and warns it is reshaping US democracyThe lawyer Mike Godwin famously came up with the “law” that, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one (or 100%).Robert P Jones thought long and hard about whether to go there in his latest book. But the more he studied US demographic numbers, considered the rise of Christian nationalism and heard Donald Trump use the language of racial purity, he found the conclusion inescapable. “This is our 1933,” he writes. Continue reading… More