Welcome to this week’s edition of “Stuff You Should Consume.” I would be derelict in my duty as an increasingly desperate author if I didn’t point out that “Battling the Big Lie” comes out in 5 days!!!. For those who have not yet preordered, the world famous Strand Bookstore is offering a discount on signed copies from now until midnight on June 7th. You can access that offer HERE.

A portion of the proceeds for every preorder of Battling the Big Lie will be donated to the Texas Library Association’s Whitten Intellectual Freedom Fund which is fighting efforts to ban books. Texas is ground zero in this fight and they need all the help we can muster.

“The Atrocity of American Gun Culture” by Jelani Cobb, New Yorker

O’Rourke did not politicize the shooting. The circumstances that make a mass murder of fourth graders possible are inherently political. The legal access to the weaponry involved is political. The most visible people refusing to see these things as political happen to be elected to political office. But O’Rourke was only partially right. Some of this is on Second Amendment fundamentalists and the politicians who translate their zealotry into law—the rest is on every one of us who has yet to find the courage, the creativity, or the resolve to stop it. 

“Why the press will never have another Watergate moment” by Margaret Sullivan, Washington Post

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection will hold hearings beginning early next month, some of which will be televised during prime-time hours. Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a prominent member, predicts that the revelations will “blow the roof off the House” — offering evidence, he promises, of an organized coup attempt involving Donald Trump, his closest allies and the supporters who attacked the Capitol as they tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

I’m willing to believe that the hearings will be dramatic. They might even change some people’s minds. But the amount of public attention they get will be minuscule compared with what happened when the folksy Sen. Sam Ervin (D-N.C.) presided over the Senate Watergate Committee.