Your Mid-Week Experiment for 1/28

Welcome to your always free, reader-supported edition of The Experiment where we share great things to read, cook, listen to, and watch. As always, this bugga free.

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Let’s get right to it:

“We’ve been lucky through a golden age of peace and prosperity but as he so clearly articulates, that age is gone. Ahead lies dragons.” —Carole Cadwalladr (free link) h/t Elyse Yates

“We must maintain a careful distinction between what feels powerful and what actually is powerful, especially because protest has a way of being so emotionally captivating that marching in a demonstration can make us feel like we’ve been excellent citizens — that we’ve fulfilled our ‘civic engagement’ quota — when we haven’t done the thing we intended.” —Siddhu Pachipala, on the limits of protesting (free link)

“The atmosphere was strange and unstable for a street protest, missing some important steps of the usual choreography, and it took me a moment to realize why: I saw no police officers.”—Charles Homans, an NYT writer from Minneapolis who spent 10 days back home getting good perspective (gift link)

“Recent events have brought Trump’s governing style into sharper focus. Fascist best describes it, and reluctance to use the term has now become perverse.” —Jonathan Rauch (free link)

“On Kinopoisk, the Russian equivalent of Rotten Tomatoes, Heated Rivalry has a rating of 8.6; Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad, listed as the two most popular series on the platform, both have ratings of 8.3. In other words, a self-selected group of Russian viewers think Heated Rivalry is the best show they’ve ever watched.” —Mikhail Zygar (free link)

His Russian was really good, people. Cannot believe Connor Storrie is from Odessa, Texas, and not Odessa, Ukraine.

This might be one of the most important speeches about America in decades. “Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”

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Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House.