by Heather Shayne Blakeslee

EXCERPT //

Because I am trying to make sense of the world and pass that information on to you, my own personal sensemaking apparatus is reading, first and foremost, a ton of books. I add magazines such as Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Economist, and The Spectator, as well as newspapers such as The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer. I follow individual reporters and pundits such as Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, John McWhorter, and Jesse Singal. I listen to podcasts such as The Unspeakable, Rebel Wisdom, The Fifth Column, The Dishcast, Making Sense, and DarkHorse. I talk to people throughout my state, including my large family in the Lehigh Valley and the Poconos.

I try to understand what the best critiques of these sensemakers are, from both within that community (many of these people are friends and associates of one another), and from without. Because two of those individuals, Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein of the DarkHorse podcast, have a book on evolutionary biology that is featured in this edition of the magazine, our ideas editor, Walter Foley, and myself have been following closely the controversy surrounding them for their advocacy of using and studying ivermectin as a Covid-19 prophylactic and treatment. If you’ve not yet heard of this debate, I invite you to do your own research—very, very carefully, by which I mean: You can’t trust the politicized reporting in a host of mainstream news outlets.

I’m not going to follow every plot twist in this story, and will check back in maybe six months when more studies are available. I am vaccinated, something I didn’t hesitate to do, and so for my own health, it’s irrelevant. What others do is beyond my control. I’m letting this one go.

However, I’d like to relate that on the Saturday before we went to print, Walter and I discussed at length two things: the ivermectin controversy, and the growing power of cryptocurrency and the blockchain technology that supports it. In the morning, I woke and did exactly what you’re not supposed to do—I reached for my phone and scrolled through The New York Times.

For full text and images, consider reading RQ in print, on a Sunday afternoon, sun streaming through your window, coffee in hand, and nary a phone alert within sight or in earshot… just fine words, fine design, and the opportunity to make a stitch in time. // Subscribe or buy a single issue today. // Print is dead. Long live print. //

OPENING SALVO // The Ghost of Tom Paine