Read With Me: Summer 2025
Greetings, Takes & Typos readers—and a special welcome to the new subscribers from the Class of 2025. Because our school runs on a schedule catering to IB exams, our seniors finish much earlier than you’re likely accustomed to. I had my last class with them on Tuesday. On that final day, I shared the podcast and newsletter with them, so I want to extend a warm welcome to those who’ve joined the readership.
First, let’s start with our Indicator of the Week: 63. Sixty-three percent, that’s how much of the container traffic into the Port of Long Beach in California normally comes from China, according to CNN. However, this week, for the first time since the pandemic began, there are currently zero ships from China bound for Long Beach or any of California’s other top ports.
The just-in-time-near-zero-inventory-logistics of modern US capitalism is heading full speed into summer supply shocks, and the result will be shortages and soaring prices for consumers.
As an aside, if you want more on the tariffs, please see: here and here.
There was no newsletter last week because—hoping for a quick reset—we took a weekend trip to Kuwait. We’re trying to get the most bang for our travel buck here in the Gulf and visit all of the GCC states. I’ve been reflecting for a while now on how, for most of my life, I saw these countries as all the same. But I’m learning that each has its own charm. Oil was discovered in Kuwait a couple of decades earlier than it was in the rest of the Gulf, so its infrastructure and seeming heyday feel a bit more dated. Hope and I are working on a piece about the trip for BowlingAbroad that should be up at some point this week.
This Sunday I want to assign you some homework.
As a teacher, my days are busy and my evenings are sometimes busier. Given the hustle-and-bustle nature of the school year, I don’t read nearly as much as I’d like to, and I try to play catch-up during the summer.
Long-time subscribers may recall that I shared my planned reading list last summer, which sparked some great conversations over email and in person when I met up with friends. I want to do the same this year and invite you to check out any of these books—and if you’ve already read one, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
I.
John Green is perhaps my favorite Internet nerd. During the pandemic, I had the pleasure of interviewing him virtually for the OER Project’s summer conference. He’s a genuinely empathetic person, and his nerd proclivities overlap with mine in all the best ways. He has an irrational allegiance to (and now a minority ownership stake in) League Two football side AFC Wimbledon. In cooperation with PBS, he produced the CrashCourse video series, which are a mainstay in many social studies classrooms. He’s also arguably the most successful young adult author of my generation, with books like Turtles All the Way Down, The Fault in Our Stars, and Looking for Alaska.
For the last three years, he has written ceaselessly online about the disease tuberculosis. Prior to this particular rabbit hole of his, my knowledge of TB was limited to it being a plot detail in Tombstone and the video game Red Dead Redemption 2. He’s turned that research into a new book, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, which I started over the weekend. It explores the history of TB and its persistence as one of the world’s leading killers, despite cures and treatments being readily available since at least the 1950s.
I’m still early in the book, but it quickly sparks moral outrage. Learning how many people are needlessly dying because of profiteering by pharmaceutical companies and the failure of governments to rein them in, is yet another reminder of the gross oligarchic reality we live in.
II.
In October 2024, a bit of a scandal broke out over Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book The Message. The book has three sections: one on the Occupation, one on the legacy of mass kidnapping and slavery in Senegal, and one on the campaign to ban one of his books in the US.
Coates had a controversial appearance on CBS News where the reporter accused him of sharing sentiments with Hamas. See the video below. In his writing and advocacy, he has compared the treatment of people in occupied Palestine to both Jim Crow segregation and apartheid in South Africa. This has drawn criticism from many, but I reckon the analogy gets more right than it gets wrong.
I’ve long admired Coates’ curiosity, going back to his days blogging at The Atlantic about the Civil War and X-Men comics. He’s a writer whose childhood and young adult interests overlap with mine, and I always enjoy his prose. I tried the book earlier this year but wasn’t in the right headspace. I’ll be picking it back up this summer.
III.
The title of “public intellectual” has fallen out of favor in our times, but in the age of the internet influencer, I reckon it’s a term worth reclaiming. Sarah Kendzior is a public intellectual with one foot firmly planted in academia and the other in journalism.
Before I left the US, I facilitated a student book club around her book The View from Flyover Country, and Sarah was generous enough to join us on Zoom, talk about the book, and take questions from my students. More recently, she was the guest on the 200th episode of the Nerd Farmer Podcast, where she discussed her writing and the throughlines in her work.
Her newest book is a memoir called The Last American Road Trip.
She’s done deep research on the rise of authoritarianism in the Central Asian states following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and she draws on that work to understand and explain the authoritarian movements and practices gaining ground in the West. I find that with each new outrage from the administration, journalists and commentators are quick to say, “No one could have seen this coming!” but if you go back and read Sarah’s bibliography, you’ll see she’s been seeing it coming all along.
IV.
Naomi Klein is a leftist author probably best known for her book No Logo. That book had a transformative impact on me and my approach to consumerism.
More recently, she wrote Doppelganger, which I discussed in the newsletter. But in between, she published The Shock Doctrine, a book about the ways in which aspiring authoritarians, particularly of the fascist and neoliberal variety, exploit political and economic crises to implement policies that would otherwise be dead on arrival. I read it the summer after I finished graduate school. My goodness, was that really 2006??? Based on recent events, I’ve decided it merits a re-reading.
Being the oldest of the books I’m sharing with you on this list, it’s very likely available for free from your public library. For instance, the Abu Dhabi Public Library has both the audiobook and the ebook on Libby.
V.
S.A. Cosby is one of the modern masters of the Elmore Leonard–inspired Southern noir crime genre. He first came on the scene in 2021 with his breakout novel Razorblade Tears, an interracial buddy crime story. Newsletter reader JM calls it Lethal Weapon but about the crooks rather than the cops.
For my money, each of his books is better than the last. His next novel, King of Ashes, is set for release later this summer. I can't tell you much about it because I've avoided all of the pre-press—I want to go into it fresh. But his writing is deeply cinematic. His characters are vibrant and avoid slipping into caricatures. His plots are propulsive, keeping you turning pages (or scrolling, or listening, depending on how you consume your fiction).
Again, if any of these piqued your interest, grab a copy. Or if you’ve read one already, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
I’m going to close this email with something different. For those of you in Abu Dhabi or elsewhere in the Gulf region: my man Ramy is a travel consultant and DJ (he spins as DJ Amen Ra). He made the amazing trip Hope and I took to Egypt in December possible. He’s now offering private DJ lessons—so if you’ve ever wanted to learn, hit him up.
I hope you and yours are well, and I’ll see you next week.
As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback about the newsletter, I welcome it, and I really appreciate it when folks share the newsletter with their friends.