Seven-month-old Elle Doherty suffered a fatal head injury after she brushed against the family's 31kg dog.

Death was in the discourse leading up to Friday night’s boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson. Marketing the fight, the two combatants repeatedly threatened to kill each other; a Netflix promo documentary referenced the bitten and bloodied ear Tyson left Evander Holyfield with in a 1997 match; social-media chatter reveled in the possibility that Paul, one of the internet’s favorite villains, would be murdered on air.

But once the match began, streamed from a packed arena to 60 million households, it felt morbid in an unexpected way—in the way of a retirement home, not a slasher movie. Paul, a 27-year-old YouTube star, jabbed and jabbed with the precision of a piston. Tyson, the 58-year-old heavyweight legend who retired nearly two decades ago, hobbled around the ring and gnawed his glove anxiously, only occasionally returning fire. He looked his age, and at times quite a bit older. Six rounds into the eight-round match—which ended in a unanimous decision for Paul—the commentator Rosie Perez, a longtime friend of Tyson’s, dropped any pretense of being entertained. This was, she said, “a hard story to watch.”

As I took that story in, I thought not only about how old Tyson is, but about how old the internet is—how far we are into the process of reality being hollowed-out by digital forces. The ropes advertised tech products: Meta Quest, the VR headset; DraftKings, the gambling network repopularizing one of humankind’s oldest addictions. Paul cut an imposing figure, his neck as thick as a ship’s mast, his tattooed legs swathed in diamond-draped shorts. It was breathtaking to remember that, a little more than decade ago, he became famous as a happy-go-lucky teen goofing around online with his brother, Logan. Now he’s an emblem of a generation of men—and a wider culture—starving for purpose while gorging on spectacle.

To trace the Paul brothers’ career is to trace a few epochs of the internet. They got famous on Vine in 2013 by doing boys-will-be-boys stuff: tasing each other, jumping on strangers’ backs, talking to pineapples in the supermarket. These hijinks were like a last flare of the internet’s OMG-so-random era, when logging on felt like an escape to a fantasy world of cat videos and violent stick-figure cartoons. But soon, the Paul brothers came to represent a new paradigm, in which distinctions between the online world and the offline world became more blurred. They were some of the first influencers, leveraging their lives into clickbait.

Which means that, suddenly, they needed to figure out what to do with the eyeballs they’d attracted. They began to augment their antics with charity efforts and self-help content. Jake joined a Disney Channel show as an actor but left halfway through its second season, then rebranded as a rapper. Logan founded a podcast that now has more than 4 million subscribers on YouTube. The continual search for the next gimmick also subjected the Pauls to plenty of internet outrage. They earned backlash for offenses as varied as insulting Kazakhstanis, publicizing shady cryptocurrency ventures, and filming a dead body. Their cockiness grew with each attempted cancellation; they tended to apologize and then bounce onward.

Yet to call these guys pure trolls isn’t quite right. Every time I see Jake speak, I discern something searching and sad within his boastfulness. In a video endorsing Donald Trump before the 2024 election, he delivered familiar MAGA talking points in a tone of puppy-eyed desperation. “I don’t come to you to make this video to create more division,” he said. “I believe love is the key to the universe and that we should all love each other more and more and more.” The video made me think less about his politics than about his soul. He seemed like a man looking for a cause, and finding it—as so many others have—in Trump’s promise to transform everything.

At first, boxing appeared to be just another stunt. In 2018, Logan booked a match against another YouTuber, and Jake fought on the undercard. In the years after that, Logan—whose intense, reptilian demeanor belies presidential aspirations—moved into the scripted battling of WWE. Jake, who has more of a crazy-fox kind of personality, stuck with boxing. In both cases, picking up an athletic side hustle was savvy. Combat sports have experienced a renaissance of cultural relevance over the past decade, driven by legalized betting and the popularity of MMA. Trump has deep links to the world of wrestling; just this past weekend he went to a UFC match. If you’re a man making entertainment for other men these days, chances are you have some sort of relationship to combat sports.

[Read: Can a boxer return to the ring after killing?]

Even so, Jake’s boxing career has been more durable and significant than anyone would have predicted in 2018. His fight with Tyson produced his 11th win out of 12 bouts. He says he wants to become a bona fide champion, and followers have been treated to footage of him sparring, ice-bathing, and scarfing hamburgers to bulk up. He started his own promotion company; he even tried (unsuccessfully so far) to get fighters to unionize. Why is he doing all of this? Aren’t there easier ways to make money? In a 2023 Netflix documentary about Jake, Logan explained, “He definitely found something with boxing that I think gave him worth”—worth that he didn’t get from “making stupid little insignificant vlogs on YouTube.”

Those stupid vlogs were, in some ways, quite significant, helping rewire the aspirations of an entire culture. A Morning Consult survey last year found that a majority of Gen Z—and 41 percent of all American adults—want to be influencers. Trump waged his presidential campaign by enlisting online entertainers in the Paul brothers’ model, such as the prank-pulling Nelk Boys. (He also joined Logan on his podcast.) Yet for all the growth of the influencer economy, the career path can be hellish, involving constant hustle, relentless criticism, and existential meaninglessness. Mugging to the camera for views certainly doesn’t fit neatly with old ideals of masculinity. In that 2023 documentary, Logan remarked, proudly and disgustedly, “We’re fucking media whores.” Jake explained his turn to boxing like this: “I was sick of not being respected.”

In this context, the popularity of combat sports is more than just a fad. Today’s American dream tends to involve virtual pursuits—influencing, making a killer app, getting lucky with crypto—but the gladiatorial ring is a macho, meat-space proving ground. No wonder Elon Musk challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match. In the case of the Paul brothers, winning substantiates their right to do what they’ve always done: peacock. As Norman Mailer wrote of Muhammad Ali, reflecting on his tendency for trash talk, “The closer a heavyweight comes to the championship, the more natural it is for him to be a little bit insane, secretly insane, for the heavyweight champion of the world is either the toughest man in the world or he is not, but there is a real possibility he is. It is like being the big toe of God.”

The problem for Jake Paul is that he really doesn’t have anywhere near a claim to “toughest man in the world.” He’s widely seen as an interloper, a clown, disrupting and degrading a sport that’s supposed to be meritocratic. His fights have almost all been novelty bouts against influencers and stars from other sports (his only loss was to the most qualified professional boxer he’s previously fought). The respect he’s seeking still hasn’t been found. In publicity leading up to Friday’s fight, he played up the idea that defeating the legendary Mike Tyson would shut up his doubters forever. “I want him to be that old savage Mike,” Jake said at a press conference. “I want the hardest match possible Friday night, and I want there to be no excuses from everyone at home when I knock him out.”

But as probably could have been predicted, Tyson turned out to be a 58-year-old man whose body has taken a lifetime of abuse, facing a wealthy 27-year-old who’s devoted his past few years to training. Jake set out to prove he was something realer than a media whore, but he showed only that he had the clout to overhype a terribly unfair fight. Coming so soon after an election partly decided by highly online men who feel their status to be under threat, this outcome seems like an omen: Old systems may soon be torn down, with little to replace them but bluster spun as redemption.

“There’s a shift in the world, and good is rising,” Jake said, sweating and panting, in the after-match interview. “The truth is rising. I’m just honored to be a part of America. It feels like we’re back, baby.”

A close friend—someone whom I’ve always thought of as an optimist—recently shared his theory that, no matter what time you’re living in, it’s generally a bad one. In each era, he posited, quality of life improves in some ways and depreciates in others; the overall quotient of suffering in the world stays the same.

Whether this is nihilistic or comforting depends on your worldview. For instance, plenty of Americans are currently celebrating the outcome of the recent presidential election; many are indifferent to national politics; many others are overwhelmed with anger and despair over it. Looking at the bigger picture, I think the upsides of contemporary life—antibiotics, LGBTQ acceptance, transcontinental FaceTime—outweigh the horrors more often than not. I’ll also concede that this decade comes with a continuous drip of bad news about ghastly acts of violence, erosion of human rights, and climate disaster. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a 2023 Gallup poll found that rates of depression in the United States have hit a record high.

What can people turn to when the itch to burn everything down, or to surrender to hopelessness, feels barely suppressible? I agree with the novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge that there is power in “naming reality”—in telling, and writing, the truth about what’s happening around us. For those who are despondent about Donald Trump’s victory and feel unable to make a difference, reading might be a place to start. This doesn’t necessitate cracking open textbooks or dense political tracts: All kinds of books can provide solace, and the past few decades have given us no shortage of clear-eyed works of fiction, memoir, history, and poetry about how to survive and organize in—and ultimately improve—a broken world.

Reading isn’t a panacea. It’s a place to begin and return to: a road map for where to go from here, regardless of where “here” is. Granted, I am perhaps more comfortable than the average person with imperfect solutions. As a clinical pharmacist, I can’t cure diabetes, for example, but I can help control it, make the medications more affordable sometimes, and agitate for a better health-care system. Similarly, these seven books aren’t a cure for rage and despair. Think of them instead as a prescription.

Which Side Are You On, by Ryan Lee Wong

Wong’s novel opens with a mother picking up her son from the airport in a Toyota Prius, her hands clutching the wheel in a death grip. Wry, funny moments like this one animate Wong’s book about the dilemma of trying to correct systemic problems with individual solutions. It’s 2016, and spurred by the real-life police shooting of Akai Gurley, 21-year-old Reed is considering dropping out of Columbia University to dedicate himself to the Black Lives Matter movement. Reed wants nothing more than to usher in a revolution, but unfortunately, he’s a lot better at spouting leftist talking points than at connecting with other people. Like many children, Reed believes that his family is problematic and out of touch. His parents, one a co-leader in the 1980s of South Central’s Black-Korean Coalition, the other a union organizer, push back on his self-righteous idealism. During a brief trip home to see his dying grandmother, Reed wrestles with thorny questions about what makes a good activist and person. Later, in the Prius, Reed’s mother teaches him about the Korean concept of hwabyung, or “burning sickness”—an intense, suppressed rage that will destroy him if he’s not careful—and Reed learns what he really needs: not sound bites but true connection. Wong’s enthralling novel is a reminder that every fight for justice is, at heart, a fight for one another.

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, by Rebecca Solnit

Solnit’s short manifesto about the revolutionary power of hope is a rallying cry against defeatism. She begins by critiquing the progressive tendency to harp on the bleakness of societal conditions, insisting that despair keeps oppressive systems afloat. Hope and joy, by contrast, are essential elements of political change, and celebrating wins is a worthy act of defiance against those who would prefer that the average person feel powerless. Originally published in 2004 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and updated in 2005 and 2016, Hope in the Dark provides modern examples of gains on race, class, environment, and queer rights. That said, this is not a feel-good book. It does not sugarcoat, for instance, the fact that we are headed toward ecological disaster. And if you look up the latest figures on the gender wage gap, you’ll find that they’ve hardly budged from those cited by Solnit years ago. Still, her deft logic and kooky aphorisms (“Don’t mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don’t believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it”) have convinced me that to give up hope is to surrender the future. Fighting for progress can be exhausting and revelatory, full of both pain and pleasure. Solnit insists that doing so is never a waste.

[Read: Trump won. Now what?]

Women Talking, by Miriam Toews

The inspired-by-true-events premise of Toews’s seventh novel is literally the stuff of nightmares. In a remote Mennonite colony, women who have suffered mysterious attacks in the night learn that they’ve been drugged and raped by several men from their community. One woman is pregnant with her rapist’s child; another’s 3-year-old has a sexually transmitted infection. The novel takes place in the aftermath of the discovery, just after the men have been temporarily jailed. They are set to be bailed out in two days, and the colony’s bishop demands that the victims forgive them—or else face excommunication and be denied a spot in heaven. The women meet in secret to decide what to do: Comply? Fight back? Leave for an outside world they’ve never experienced? Even against this harrowing backdrop, Toews’s signature humor and eye for small moments of grace make Women Talking an enjoyable and healing read. The women’s discussions are both philosophical (they cannot read, so how can they trust that the Bible requires them to forgive the men?) and practical (if they leave, do they bring their male children?). Any direction they choose will lead to a kind of wilderness: “When we have liberated ourselves,” one woman says in a particularly stirring moment, “we will have to ask ourselves who we are.”

Good Talk, by Mira Jacob

Jacob’s graphic-memoir-in-conversations took major guts to write. It begins like this: The author’s white in-laws throw their support behind Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and her otherwise loving family toes the edge of collapse. Good Talk is a funny and painful book-length answer to questions from Jacob’s 6-year-old son, who is half Jewish and half Indian, about race, family, and identity. Jacob, who was raised in the United States by parents who emigrated from India, gorgeously illustrates her formative experiences, touching on respectability politics, colorism within the Indian community, her bisexuality, and her place in America. She refuses to caricaturize the book’s less savory characters—for example, a rich white woman who hires Jacob to ghostwrite her family’s biography and ends up questioning her integrity and oversharing the grisly details of her 2-year-old’s death from cancer. Jacob’s ability to so humanely render the people who cause her grief is powerful. My daughter is too young to ask questions, but one day, when she begins inquiring about the world she’s inheriting, I can tell her, as Jacob told her son, “If you still have hope, my love, then so do I.”

[Read: Hope and the historian]

The Twenty-Ninth Year, by Hala Alyan

Startling, sexy, and chaotic, The Twenty-Ninth Year is a collection of poems narrated by a woman on the verge—of a lot of things. She’s standing at the edge of maturity, of belonging as a Palestinian American, of recovery from anorexia and alcoholism. It’s a tender and violent place, evoked with images that catch in the throat. The first poem, “Truth,” takes the form of a litany of confessions: “I broke / into the bodies of men like a cartoon burglar”; “I’ve seen women eat cotton balls so they wouldn’t eat bread.” That Alyan is a clinical psychologist makes sense—her poems have a clarity that can’t be faked. Dark humor softens the blow of lines such as “I starved myself to starve my mother” and “Define in, I say when anyone asks if I’ve ever been in a war.” She reckons with the loneliness of living in exile and the danger of romanticizing the youthful conviction that there is something incurably wrong with you. A shallow read of the collection might be: I burned my life down so you don’t have to. But I return to the last line of the book: “Marry or burn; either way, you’re transfiguring.” There is always something to set aflame; more optimistically, there is always something left to salvage. The Twenty-Ninth Year is, in the end, a monument to endurance.

Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi

If you’re sick of books described as “healing” or “hopeful,” look no further than Riot Baby. Onyebuchi’s thrilling 2020 novella asks just how far sci-fi dystopias are from real life. Kev, a Black man born during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, California, spends much of his 20s in prison after a botched armed robbery. His sister, Ella, has more supernatural problems: She sees the past and the future and, when fury takes over, can raze cities to the ground—yet she could not protect her brother from the violence of incarceration. When Kev is paroled and a new form of policing via implantable chips and pharmaceutical infusions brings “safety” to the streets of Watts, Ella understands that the subjugation of her community is not a symptom of a broken system; rather, it is evidence of one “working just as designed,” as Onyebuchi put it in an interview. Ella must make a wrenching choice: fight for a defanged kind of freedom within such a system or usher in a new world order no matter the cost. In real life, too often, you cannot control your circumstances, only your actions. But you may find relief in reading a book that reaches a different conclusion.

[Read: When national turmoil becomes personal anxiety]

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993, by Sarah Schulman

This 700-plus-page history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power’s New York chapter is, I promise you, a page-turner. Schulman and the filmmaker Jim Hubbard, who were both in ACT UP New York, interviewed 188 members over the course of 17 years about the organization’s work on behalf of those living with HIV/AIDS—“a despised group of people, with no rights, facing a terminal disease for which there were no treatments,” Schulman writes. Part memoir and part oral history, Let the Record Show is a master class on the utility of anger and a historical corrective to chronicles that depict straight white men as the main heroes of the AIDS crisis. In reality, a diverse coalition of activists helped transform HIV into a highly manageable condition. “People who are desperate are much more effective than people who have time to waste,” Schulman argues. ACT UP was known for its brash public actions, and Schulman covers not just what the group accomplished but also how it did it, with electrifying detail. There can be no balm for the fact that many ACT UP members did not survive long enough to be interviewed. There is only awe at the way a group of people “unable to sit out a historic cataclysm” were determined to “force our country to change against its will,” and did.