Hello, and happy Friday! It’s November 5th (aka Bonfire Night) here in Britain, so I’m obligated to remind you to remember, remember. For the uninitiated, Bonfire Night, or Guy Fawkes Night, centers around the failed 17th-century plot by a group of English Catholics (including the eponymous Guy Fawkes) to blow up the Houses of Parliament with the country’s entire political class, including the reigning Protestant monarch King James I, inside.
So how do Brits choose to commemorate what could have been the biggest terrorist act in British history? By building bonfires, setting off fireworks, and burning effigies, of course! (Yes, really.) If you’d like to learn more, I really enjoyed writing this piece about the misunderstood legacy of Guy Fawkes and what turning people into symbols does to the way we remember them. Read it here
In podcast news: In honor of COP26, I interviewed author and climate campaigner Alice Bell about Greenwashing for The Bunker. I learned a lot from our conversation (including the fact that carbon offsetting “is basically cheating”), and I guarantee you will too. You can tune in via your favorite podcast app—find yours here.
What I’ve written
Éric Zemmour hasn't formally entered the race to become France's next president, though that hasn’t stopped the French press from giving him disproportionate levels of coverage compared to the other potential candidates. I wrote about how, in doing so, French journalists risk of repeating the mistakes that their American colleagues made in their coverage of Donald Trump:
By rewarding Zemmour’s extremism with more airtime, as the U.S. press did with Trump ahead of the 2016 election, they send the implicit, if unintentional, message that only the most radical rhetoric is worthy of being reported on. The consequences of this when Trump ran were twofold: Not only did it overrepresent more extreme views in the public debate, but it also encouraged politicians to be more outlandish. Keep reading here
Brazil’s next presidential election is a year away, but Donald Trump already knows whom he is supporting. “President Jair Bolsonaro and I have become great friends over the past few years,” the former president said in a statement on Tuesday. “He fights hard for, and loves, the people of Brazil—Just like I do for the people of the United States.”
The endorsement wasn’t rooted in just their shared politics or leadership style. By endorsing the Brazilian president, Trump is endorsing his own legacy.
By following in Trump’s footsteps, world leaders might not be able to retain power, but they can at the very least create a new wave of grievance—one that they and their allies can ride into the next election, and the next, and the next. Keep reading here
What I’ve read
This beautifully-illustrated piece that captures Israel in all of its divisions, complexity, and contradictions (The New York Times)
Israel’s founders hoped to create a melting pot, a society that blended diverse communities into a single Jewish state. But we encountered an Israel that at times felt more like an unsolvable jigsaw puzzle — a collection of incompatible factions, each with its own priorities, grievances and history.
This long-read on the American right’s fascination with Orbán’s Hungary (The New York Times Magazine)
For American conservatives, the appeal of Orban lies not so much in the details of his laws or policies as in his tactics and his advocacy, at least publicly, for Christianity. He invokes regularly, if vaguely, the “Christian values” of Europe. Hungary is predominantly Catholic, though Orban himself is not, and it isn’t incidental that many of the American conservatives most interested in Orban’s government are themselves part of an increasingly muscular Catholic wing of postliberal conservatives.
This surprisingly uplifting piece about … root canals (The Atlantic)
When a tooth cracks, the oft-recommended treatment is one of the most commonly feared procedures in modern medicine: a root canal, so famously terrible that its name has long been a popular metaphor for a lengthy tour through agony itself. That’s what I was in the chair for that day—to have my tooth drilled open and its nerves and vasculature scooped out. After the CT scan, I’d pleaded with the specialist to root-canal me right then and there, while I was feeling the bravery of absolute desperation, instead of making me come back the next day. That’s when things got weird. The procedure was fast, and it was painless enough for me to make noises of surprised approval upon sight of the newly removed chunk of my face. When the endodontist told me we were all finished, I thought he might be joking—pop culture had spent years steeling me for an experience that apparently no longer existed. A few hours later, once the local anesthetic had worn off, I ate dinner like nothing had happened.
What I’m thinking about
This lovely bit of culinary diplomacy, which features my fellow compatriots sampling Scottish classics such as Irn Bru (objectively bad) and deep-fried Mars bar (objectively delicious):
Until next time,
Yasmeen