My Recommendations This Week
My Recommendations This Week
Catch up on The Preamble and see what I'm reading and listening to!
Sunday is a great day to curl up and catch up on all the reading (and listening) you didn’t get a chance to do during the week.
Here’s what is on my list this weekend:
Catching up on The Preamble…
I am gutted anytime I hear about a school shooting, and this week was no different. What always adds salt to the wound is how so many people’s knee jerk reaction is not, “We have to keep kids from being shot in schools,” it’s to lash out about how people want to come and take their guns. (They don’t.)
My dad was a gun owning former Marine who not only served his country, but died for it. And there is not one child he would have pointed to and said, “My weapon is worth more to me than their life.”
It’s time we repent from the sin of the idol worship of weaponry.
Want to know the truth about after-birth abortion, and Anne Frank being removed from school libraries? Did the communist party infiltrate the New York state government, and does Amazon’s Alexa want Harris to win? All that and more in this article for paid subscribers.
This is the first installment in our new Supreme Court justice biography series. Thomas is the longest serving member of the court, but did you know that he started out as an activist who spent hours marching and protesting? I examine how Clarence Thomas became one of the most conservative members of our highest court.
Learning from the Stories of the Formerly Enslaved
I invited Jasmine L. Holmes, a writer and educator on Black history in America, to share an excerpt of Yonder Come Day: Exploring the Collective Witness of the Formerly Enslaved, which highlights stories from more than three thousand interviews.
One of my takeaways: Just because something was misused in the past, doesn’t mean it has no use.
The government should not just avoid impropriety, it should avoid the appearance of impropriety. And frankly, we’re failing in this regard.
What I’m Reading…
The 12 Books to Fire Up Your Brain This Fall
I was honored to be on Adam Grant's list of favorite new idea books for the fall, and among such inspiring company. His full list has some great selections!
The Electoral College bias has returned with a vengeance
by Nate Silver
A deep dive into polling and what the Electoral College looks like for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
$10 Million and a Fake Investor: How the Kremlin Allegedly Built a Conservative U.S. Media Startup
by Dustin Volz and C. Ryan Barber, The Wall Street Journal
How did the Russian government build and maintain a conservative US media organization that allegedly paid creators to make pro-Kremlin content? The Wall Street Journal investigates the Justice Department’s new allegations.
Living for the Unremarkable Moments
by Anne Lamott
Anne says, “The people I’ve spent significant time with at the end of their lives do not talk about their degrees, promotions or having successfully kept their weight down. They talk about the times and places of love. Loving memories are the fields in which we walk with them near the end.”
A quick watch…
Why Harris and Trump’s ‘No Tax on Tips’ Policy is So Controversial | WSJ
A lot of you have been asking me about Harris and Trump’s “no tax on tips” policy suggestions. This report breaks down how this policy could play out in a Trump or Harris presidency and why many economists are skeptical of its success.
Something to listen to…
My conversation with Mike Cosper on The Bulletin. If you’re an avid podcast listener, you might remember Mike’s viral podcast, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. I loved this conversation about what’s missing in today’s political conversations.
Listen to One-on-One with Sharon McMahon here.
What I am looking forward to…
I can’t believe I am saying this, but my very first book is going to be released in 16 days, and I am very in my feelings about it. <cue Sharon crying on the internet>
My hope is that this book will mean something to you. That you will close the last page feeling a sense of wonder, inspiration, and encouragement. That you will learn many new things, as I did while researching this, but that you’ll also laugh and cry. I let my husband Chris read it, and he did both.
Here is a review from Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author one of my personal heroes:
And one from David Grann: maybe you’ve heard of Killers of the Flower Moon or The Wager? Yeah, he wrote those.
If you preorder, I also created an amazing set of free bonuses you can sign up for.
The Small and the Mighty will be an amazing holiday gift (I know, I know, it’s only September), and preordering helps me so much — all of the books that are preordered are tallied up and sent to groups that create bestseller lists, like The New York Times. If you want to land on the list or be seen in airports and indie bookstores nationwide, preorders are how that happens. (And specifically, hardcover preorders — I don’t know why they don’t count audio and ebooks, but they don’t.)
I can’t even express how grateful I am for your support. If you’ve been meaning to snag a copy, now is a great time to do it. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.
And I would love to see you live this fall! There are still book tour tickets available in these cities:
Austin (there are only a few tickets left!)
Yes! Sunday rainy day catchup!!! The best!! ✅ ☕️
Thanks for sharing the report on "No Tax on Tips" policy, it has had my wheels spinning ‼️ It seems clear that making tips tax free creates a lot of unintended problems.
The well intentioned purpose of this policy seems to be to increase take home for paid workers on the lowest end of the income spectrum and attract more workers to hospitality jobs.
I'm that case, wouldn't policies like increasing the tax-free income bracket or increasing the Federal minimum wage accomplish those goals without discriminating against hourly workers without tips (like delivery workers), without reducing payroll taxes (for social security and Medicare), without encouraging higher wage industries to move to a tipping system, without shifting the wage burden directly to consumers, and without increasing tax enforcement issues? (All of these being potential consequences of the "no tax on tips" policy.)
Also, I am curious why individuals in favor of a "no tax on tips" policy would not support raising the tax-free income bracket or raising the Federal minimum wage. It confuses me when I see politicians currently supporting the "no tax on tips" policy that have historically not been supportive of increasing the minimum wage or reducing the tax burden on the lowest income brackets. So I'm left wondering what I am not understanding...