Hello, and happy Friday! There has been a lot of seismic news in recent weeks (looking at you, SCOTUS), but I wanted to start this correspondence with a smaller news item that you may have missed.
But first, a recap: Last summer, Ben & Jerry’s announced that it would stop selling its ice cream in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, including the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, on the grounds that it was inconsistent with the company’s values. The decision triggered a political meltdown in Israel, prompting a number of politicians to call for boycotts of the the “anti-Israel ice cream.” Yair Lapid, who became the 14th prime minister of Israel yesterday, even went so far as to declare the move a “shameful surrender to anti-Semitism.”
But Ben & Jerry’s wasn’t ending its business in Israel. Rather, it was simply opting to conduct its business within Israel’s internationally-recognized borders. As I wrote at the time, most countries, including the United States, distinguish between Israel and the territories it occupies. The reaction to the Ben & Jerry’s decision has shown that, as far as many Israeli politicians are concerned, that distinction no longer exists.
This week, Ben & Jerry’s parent company Unilever announced that it has sold its Israeli Ben & Jerry's operation to a local supplier, paving the way for ice cream sales in the West Bank to resume. No word yet on whether they’ll announce any new flavors to mark the occasion. The best suggestions I’ve seen so far: choc-upation or settle-mint.
In podcast news: I joined the Intelligence Squared podcast to speak with Nury Turkel, the chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, about his new book No Escape: The True Story of China’s Genocide of the Uyghurs. You can tune into our conversation below:
I also joined this week’s Bunker roundtable to discuss Boris Johnson’s premiership, the SCOTUS decision to overturn Roe, and more. You can tune in via all good podcasting apps (find yours here).
What I’ve written
When COVID-19 forced hundreds of millions of office workers around the world out of their workplaces and into their living rooms, kitchens, and home offices, it kicked off the great remote-work experiment that nobody asked for. That experiment is still going on for many workers, myself included (I’m writing this from my kitchen table). Only now, it’s largely by choice and habit. I wrote about what the return to office looks like around the world and the one clear trend that has emerged:
Around the world, office workers prefer a hybrid model that allows them to split their time between home and the office by having an option to work remotely at least two days a week, according to a WFH Research survey of nearly 33,000 workers across 25 countries. So valuable did those surveyed consider this flexibility that, on average, they’d trade a 5 percent pay raise to have it. Keep reading here
What I’ve read
This piece on the necessity of hope in a post-Roe world (The Cut)
But despair is poison. It deadens people when the most important thing they can do is proceed with more drive and force and openness than they have before. Which is why the work ahead is insisting on hope, behaving as if there is reason for hope, even if you feel, based on the ample available evidence, that there is not.
This masterful essay on cocaine and class in British society (The Guardian)
This is the other thing about this town. Everyone takes drugs, all the time. They’re part of the civic culture. On certain estates, there are whole streets that stink of weed; not a faint whiff, but a pungent fug that sticks to clothes and hair. At weekends, dealers send marketing texts, boasting about the purity of their packages, or offering cut-price deals. I lose count of the number of curly notes I’ve been handed at the till. Some are flecked with blood. Others shed white flakes as I unfurl them. The town is so deprived it hurts, but people find the money for cocaine.
This dispatch from the only American journalist who managed to get into CPAC Hungary (The New Yorker)
There was no single moment when the democratic backsliding began in Hungary. There were no shots fired, no tanks in the streets. “Orbán doesn’t need to kill us, he doesn’t need to jail us,” Tibor Dessewffy, a sociology professor at Eötvös Loránd University, told me. “He just keeps narrowing the space of public life. It’s what’s happening in your country, too—the frog isn’t boiling yet, but the water is getting hotter.” He acknowledged that the U.S. has safeguards that Hungary does not: the two-party system, which might forestall a slide into perennial single-party rule; the American Constitution, which is far more difficult to amend. Still, it wasn’t hard for him to imagine Americans a decade hence being, in some respects, roughly where the Hungarians are today.
What I’m thinking about
This surreal exchange between Marjorie Taylor Greene and British journalist Siobhan Kennedy:
Until next time,
Yasmeen