It's a Wednesday Friday roundup!

This week in the podcast, I talked a little about May Day protests, so I wanted to get this out the door in time to inspire you to hit the streets on Thursday and reclaim democracy for the country. So this is your official one-time Wednesday Friday post! (You can find more than 1,000 May Day actions here.)

This week’s episode of “Next Comes What” focuses on what I call the concentration camp tendency, which is a government embracing the exclusion of whole groups of people, literally (by deporting them or putting them in camps, or both) and metaphorically (by controlling what people read and what they’re allowed to talk about). You can watch it on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you want to explore links to different parts of the history mentioned in the episode, you can read this week’s Tuesday post. (Apologies for the grainy video this week! We had a technical glitch and were forced to punt.)

In other news, I wrote a piece for New York magazine about deportations to CECOT in El Salvador, which are bound up with a tradition of US extrajudicial actions in the Americas and further the long arc of concentration camps in some pretty awful ways. The essay came out today, and you can read it here.

Today, I also spent the day out on the Patuxent River for the third and final time before I go to Norway in the second half of May to crew a sailing ship. These trips to Maryland came about because I mentioned to a Ukrainian friend in March that I hadn’t been on the water all last summer, and I wanted a chance to get my sailing chops back before being at the wheel crossing the North Sea. I’d planned on renting a boat on the Potomac, but my Ukrainian friend reminded me of a friend of hers who lives about an hour and a half away.

This is Vlad. I’d met him before through my friend, but only briefly. When he heard I wanted to get out on the water, he invited me to his place on the river where we could try out a couple vessels and work on different skills.

He lived aboard one of his boats for several years at one point and still does a lot of racing, and some coaching, too. He was the perfect companion, often letting me try to figure out how to proceed in a complicated situation, stepping in when I was about to make a particularly bad choice.

His generosity reminded me how often people do step up to help each other in unexpected ways. These are grim times, but lovely things will still happen in them. Don’t forget to pay attention to the good parts of what’s going on around you.

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