Greetings from Read Max HQ! A bonus newsletter this week containing a podcast with John Ganz of Unpopular Front and Quinn Slobodian, Professor of International History at Boston University and author of the forthcoming Hayek’s B******s: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Among the topics discussed: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, cryptocurrency, Las Vegas, and Jensen Huang’s leather jacket.

A reminder: Read Max is funded almost wholly by paying subscribers. I’m able to spend reading, thinking, researching, and yapping with John and Quinn thanks to the generosity of people who find this newsletter and its intermittent podcast component compelling enough to cough up $5/month or $50/year. If you find Read Max at all enlightening or entertaining--if you borrow some of these riffs and opinions to impress potential employers or romantic/sexual partners, say--please consider supporting my work for the price of about one beer a month.

Links

* Quinn’s piece on Musk can be found here.

* His book Hayek’s B******s: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right can be preordered here.

* I also recommend his previous books, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, and Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy.

* John’s newsletter Unpopular Front.

* John’s book When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, recently nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award, can be found here.

* Ryan S. Jeffery’s piece on Jensen Huang and leather, discussed in the podcast, is at Do Not Research.

**Note that if you buy or pre-order any books through the Bookshop links found on this page I will receive a small payment.

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