Tara Westover’s Passage to India
In today’s newsletter, a new essay about seeking family, by the best-selling author of “Educated,” from this week’s 100th Anniversary Issue. Plus:
A Visit to Madam Bedi
I was estranged from my own mother, so a friend tried to lend me his.
By Tara Westover
Illustration by Tara Anand
My friend Sukrit invited me to India.
His mother lived in Delhi. He said I should get out of England and give my eyes something new to look at. He wouldn’t be there—he was trapped in a biology lab at Stanford—but his mother would look after me. I could stay as long as I liked.
The invitation confused me. I could not imagine why I would go to a country that was not my country, to live with a mother who was not my mother. I pawed at the idea, then dismissed it. I did not want to go east; I wanted to go west. I was waiting for my family to reclaim me.
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Kyle Chayka
Illustration by Ariel Davis
Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency
The tech billionaire’s plans go well beyond conservative cost-cutting measures. Musk “wants not only to reduce the U.S. government,” Kyle Chakya argues, “but to install his own technological vision of the future at its heart.” What would living with “techno-fascism by chatbot” look like? Read the column »
The Briefing Room
Source photograph by Graeme Sloan / Sipa USA / AP
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What happens if Trump defies the courts? Isaac Chotiner speaks to a professor at Yale Law School about what makes this moment so dangerous, whether courts have any capacity to enforce their own orders, and why Congress has not yet exercised its constitutional powers. Read the interview »
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J. D. Vance brawls with the Catholic Church. The Vice-President, a high-profile convert to Catholicism, finds himself publicly at odds with the Pope himself. Paul Elie on the battle over immigration, charity, and family. Read the story »
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Will Lori Chavez-DeRemer fight for workers? Trump’s nominee to lead the Labor Department reflects MAGA’s working-class contradictions. “She may look good on paper,” one employee at the department tells E. Tammy Kim, “but that might be switched around once she gets her marching orders.” Read the story »
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Daily Cartoon
Cartoon by Sarah Kempa
More Fun & Games
P.S. David Remnick joined Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” on Monday night to talk about the 100th Anniversary Issue (or, as Stewart called it, the “swimsuit issue”), as well as Trump, political opposition, and the role of a free press in this American moment. (“Sack up,” one of the two instructed the Democrats.) 📺
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