August 28 Friday roundup

In the latest podcast episode, I talked about not letting the complexity of the political challenge before us get in the way of the moral clarity of our moment. There's no need to compromise with people who support the current terror. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

On Wednesday, the very sharp Asha Rangappa was kind enough to talk to me for her book club—a.k.a. The Freedom Academy. Ostensibly, we were talking about One Long Night, my global history of concentration camps. But of course the reason we were talking about it was because of events from the last decade in the United States, and how clearly the country is currently following the arc of previous concentration camp regimes.

At one point, I mentioned that the book arrived in the world in 2017 and went mostly unnoticed until the following year, when Trump’s family separation policy became the public face of a larger push toward stigmatizing and punishing immigrants. She said something along the lines of hoping that people understood the book’s relevance after that.

I told her that yes, people did, but not necessarily in the way I’d expected. In the last half of Trump’s first term, I got a number of requests to do interviews on national television. The book didn’t sell more, but dozens of magazines and newspapers requested that I write something for them about the administration’s horrifying tactics and what light history might shed on the moment. It was those pieces that seemed to start a real conversation.

In the second Trump administration, I’ve heard less frequently from news outlets seeking opinion pieces on the detention system Republicans have thrown tens of billions of dollars at. But I’ve heard so often from people who’ve read my writing online and are more familiar with the ideas from my book than they are with the printed book itself. I constantly get asked to help with local education projects, to give advice on books others are writing, or to address current events around ICE detention and the collapse of democracy in the United States.

I’m grateful that the history and concepts in my book are turning out to be useful for organizers on the ground, giving them a global framework to be able to talk publicly about the terror that’s been unleashed in ways both new and familiar in the U.S. One of the things I told Asha on Wednesday was that as I was in the middle of it, I never for a moment doubted that a history of concentration camps would be the most important book I would ever write. (In fact, the weight of its importance was so clear to me, long before Trump even announced his candidacy for president mid-2015, that I sometimes felt almost paralyzed by the responsibility of writing it.)

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All this reminded me of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a nonfiction book about an African American woman whose cells were taken and used in research without her family’s knowledge. As many of you already know, those cells have since played a role in countless breakthroughs and cures.

I interviewed Skloot about her book in 2010, a few months after it came out, neither of us realizing at that point quite how big it would become. After our conversation, she sent me a photo of the system of index cards she’d used to break down narratives in other stories and plot the complicated structure of her book. They covered the surface of her bed entirely.

This will probably sound strange, but over the years I have, at times, felt a little bad for Skloot. She wrote a blockbuster book that was made into a movie, and addressed an issue of longstanding ethical and scientific importance—which is more than most of us will ever accomplish. The book was so big, however, that it became its own industry, with years on the bestseller list, additional talks to be given, and ongoing relevance that had to be addressed. I occasionally wondered whether she had another book she wanted to write but perhaps couldn’t, because the ongoing importance of the mission animating the first one meant there was no remaining bandwidth for another.

It was only in the last year or so that I realized that Skloot definitely didn’t need my pity. After the return of Trump, it struck me that I’d wound up writing a book that turned out to be historically relevant, too. The ideas from it seemed to have been useful to people seeking to understand the pain of those vulnerable to institutional or governmental abuse—past and present. Long after Skloot’s book appeared, I’d written an account that had made it necessary to speak and write about critical issues involved year after year in the wake of its publication. The ideas in the book had turned out to be meaningful. But the book itself had been largely ignored.

Don’t feel sorry for me, though! I’ve had other adventures and gotten to write other books that got more attention, and I’m beyond grateful for the opportunities I’ve had. And for the last two years, this newsletter has been a way to share directly with readers the ways in which history is repeating. Given the chaos and instability of the current era, I’m grateful to know what to do to help.

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Earlier today, I posted on Bluesky that “you can't call the moment when the tide will turn, but their hopes and legacy will fall to nothing in the end, because ruin is all they are capable of.” That’s another understanding that comes from having looked at the long view of concentration camps and their history. Whether through war, invasion, popular resistance, or simple collapse, this model of oppression rarely continues indefinitely (looking at you, North Korea—but I would say that it’s the exception that proves the example for too many reasons to include in this post).

Those in charge today have done so much harm. People are already looking at gargantuan efforts to repair the damage. Three former Centers for Disease Control employees who resigned in 2025 proposed the broad outlines a plan today for securing public health in the United States. They prioritized shielding science from political agendas and administering funding as directed by Congress, among other things, giving specific examples of the dysfunction underway at present.

There will be more death and ruin before we can make things right. And when it comes to fixing the world, it’s often helpful to be strategic, like the former CDC employees—or like Skloot in planning her story. Take one issue and break it down into manageable pieces. Find one problem you know how to solve, one thing you want to exist in the world after all this is over.

You can’t fix the whole crisis, but you can take up a single cause, and find some aspect of it for which you have enough skills, qualifications, time, or resources to make a difference. If you really don’t feel you have anything to offer, then look to organizations that will begin to train you for a role that would matter to you. Let what you care about set the path you take. It’s a gift when you know what matters to you, because that is your best guide to what you can be doing right now—today.

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