Hello, and happy Saturday! This correspondence is arriving a day later than usual because, frankly, it has been a week. Like a lot of Londoners, I’ve been cautiously re-engaging with the world since COVID-19 restrictions were lifted: seeing friends, going to events, and enjoying all the fun things this city has to offer. This, as it turns out, is exhausting. It can also, unfortunately, result in getting pinged.
Don’t worry, I’m fine (and, by the grace of Pfizer, fully vaccinated)! But if anyone has recommendations for films or TV shows to help ride out the next few days of isolation, please do get in touch:
Speaking of fun things: The Bunker is hosting a live podclash with its sister podcast, OH GOD, WHAT NOW?, at the Leicester Square Theatre on Tuesday at 7pm. I was meant to be on Team Bunker before I got hit by the pingdemic, but there are still a handful of tickets available if you fancy going in my stead. You can also tune in via Zoom (more details here).
What I’ve written
When Tokyo bids farewell to the Olympics tomorrow, few people there will be sad to see it go. The Japanese public overwhelmingly opposed hosting the postponed Summer Games, fearing that it could exacerbate the country’s COVID-19 outbreak. In the final week of the competition, Japan broke a record no one wanted, reporting more than 14,000 cases a day—its highest since the pandemic began.
Whether staging the Games was worth the public-health risk or the staggering price tag that came with it will ultimately be for Japan to decide. But as the world looks ahead to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, I wrote about whether the modern Olympics—an international spectacle that has becoming increasingly synonymous with overspending, corruption, and autocratic regimes—are worth having at all. Keep reading here
What I’ve read
This thought-provoking long read about the creative class and the crisis of America’s modern-day class structures (The Atlantic)
The bobos didn’t set out to be an elite, dominating class. We just fit ourselves into a system that rewarded a certain type of achievement, and then gave our children the resources that would allow them to prosper in that system too. But, blind to our own power, we have created enormous inequalities—financial inequalities and more painful inequalities of respect. The task before us is to dismantle the system that raised us.
This important dispatch from Israel’s “mixed cities” about how May’s communal violence shattered the veneer of co-existence (The New York Times)
Precariousness, a sense that their homes could always be taken, is a perennial condition of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Aside from seven Bedouin towns established in the Negev desert, no new Arab towns or villages have been built since 1948. Education remains intricately segregated: Arabs overwhelmingly attend Arab schools and Jews Jewish schools, themselves split into secular and religious categories.
This fascinating piece about the emergence of the anti-American right (Vox)
Conservative anti-Americanism still pays lip service to love of country: Its proponents declare themselves the true patriots, describing their enemies as the nation’s betrayers. But when the cadre of traitors includes everyone from election administrators to Olympians to the Capitol Police, it becomes clear that the only America they love is the one that exists in their heads. When they contemplate the actual United States — real America, if you will — they are filled with scorn.
What I’m thinking about
Olympic race walking, and how I may have missed my true calling.
Until next time,
Yasmeen